Admittedly, his friend Santa Anna’s new model army lacked the bloody-minded esprit de corps of the best British regular units – tradition took scores, hundreds of years to build – but otherwise, the comparison was… unavoidable.
Rodrigo’s thoughts wandered a while longer, then slowly began to coalesce as he stared inscrutably at the half-melted stumps of what had, presumably, been at one time a steel tower. Judging by what remained, less than ten feet of twisted, still substantial rusting metal, it might once have been as much as a hundred feet, or more, high. He kicked at the dust and sand underfoot.
Beneath his feet the ground glinted dully.
Like glass…
Only one thing turned sand to glass: intense heat.
He remembered the younger man’s question.
“Something burned very hot here, son,” Rodrigo said, very nearly lost in rumination.
The native tribes, mainly Navajo but also roaming bands of Apache, had new camp fire legends of lights brighter than the son flashing momentarily in the night, of fireballs rising into the heavens like messengers to the gods of the skies, and of new stars briefly winking in the distance through the mountains.
There was one tale of a village on the ridges overlooking the Verde – Green – River over seventy miles to the south west awakening one morning to discover their tepees caked in the dust of the desert and within days, of men and women and children falling ill with some terrible, killing fever, their bodies wracked with agony as they bled from every orifice.
Rodrigo had consulted the School of Tropical Medicine at Toluca, which had been a magnet for the finest minds in the field of disease control for half-a-century.
The experts he had spoken to had postulated the stories might be explained by an outbreak of a viral haemorrhagic fever of some kind but if that was the case; where had it come from?
What was the infection nexus?
Of course, if one went far enough back into the post-conquest period common European pathogens, viruses and bacterial infections, small pox, measles, diphtheria and all manner of other plagues brought to the New World by the original Conquistadores, and by successive waves of Spanish and Portuguese migration, and then by the unfortunates carried from Africa in slave ships, had run riot among ‘American’ populations with little or no natural resistance to the new contagions. But that ‘infection and transmission’ phase had ended in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Thus, while there were regular outbreaks of haemorrhagic illnesses, like Lassa and Yellow fever, and other local variants in the tropics, indeed, even in the Central Americas, it was unusual to encounter such outbreaks in the north of México, and virtually unknown in the ‘contested lands’ above the 1964 border.
Perhaps, Rodrigo, had thought initially, the story was just a distorted echo of the post-conquest plague years?
Then, he had spoken to his middle son, Hernan, a newly qualified surgical registrar at the Hospital of the Holy Cross at Churubusco, in the southern suburbs of the capital.
His son was already studying for a degree in molecular biology – he planned to go into research once he had served his ‘sentence’ at Churubusco – and he had, in a moment, altered Rodrigo’s entire mindset.
‘I’ve been thinking about that story you told me about the village where everybody got sick overnight,” Hernan had said, on one of his visits to the old family home in Cuernavaca, as he sat down with his father and mother, and two younger sisters. “It put me in mind of the accounts of early investigators looking into the properties of exotic radioactive isotopes. Particularly, the experience of the first researchers began exploring the properties of radium and the possibilities of x-rays. In the beginning they had a poor understanding of the dangers of the radioactive source materials they were routinely handling, and only a very generic feel for the appropriate exposure times of the photographic plates they were using. To cut a long, rather painful story short, as a result, the world found out about the consequences of biological contamination by ionising radiation. Most of the risks seem to centre around long-term cancers but,” Hernan had speculated, “if, say, for the sake of argument, a person or an animal was, for whatever reason, to be subjected to a very large, short-term dose of radiation, it might well result in general spontaneous tissue breakdown, in which case bleeding might occur from the eyes, the ears, gums and every other orifice…”
That was when Hernan’s mother had peremptorily decided that the subject of people bleeding to death, or logically, drowning in their own blood was not a suitable subject for conversation at the dinner table!
“There are other places like this, Don Rodrigo,” one of the Navajo scouts murmured.
Rodrigo stood up.
He had pored over the aerial photographs of those ‘other’ sites; at least five more of them in a line towards the north east spaced about a mile apart, and to the west, at least two, albeit much smaller craters uncannily similar in configuration to El Ojo del Diablo.
The Navajo had told him about the big camp to the north which, above ground had been systematically dismantled about eighteen months ago. It seemed that the gringos had dug deep ‘caves’ beneath the desert, and blown these up before they left. However, the broad, arrow-straight concrete roads from the east and the north still criss-crossed the plateau, in the aerial photographs ghostly signposts going nowhere, disappearing into the desert, rapidly being swallowed by the shifting sands.
Rodrigo had never been an overly spiritual man. Notwithstanding, he considered himself to be a good Catholic and had always supported his wife in her determination that their children should be brought up as dutiful adherents to the teachings of the Mother Church.
However, right then he had to fight to suppress the urge to genuflect in front of his men; suddenly, it felt as if ants were crawling over his soul.
His men were gathering around him.
Perhaps, they too sensed the innate evil of this… place.
That the Devil’s hand was upon this desolate landscape.
Rodrigo thought he knew what had happened here and it chilled him to his marrow, yet the scientist in him wanted, craved to know more before he took his terrors back to the High Command of the Army of New Spain.
He watched the men of the survey team – all students from the University at Cuernavaca, on what for them was probably going to be the field trip of their lives – going about their business, oblivious to the soldiers and native scouts grouped around the expedition leader.
Every site had to be photographed, measured, samples taken, and in this case, hacked out of the heat-fused earth; tasks that needed to be accomplished in a screaming hurry because, despite the otherwise generally relaxed atmosphere of the incursion into the contested lands thus far, this was still a war zone.
Rodrigo looked to the ridiculously young lieutenant of horse, commanding the fifteen men of the 103rd Republican Reconnaissance Troop, around the circle of dusty soldiers, and at the poker faces of his faithful Navajo scouts.
“Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendam,” he said, quirking a grimly rueful smile. “So said Cato the Censor over two thousand years ago, to the Senate of the Roman Republic after Rome had been defeated by the Carthaginians in two wars.”
“What does it mean, Don Rodrigo?”
Another man, one of the surveyor students stepped into the circle of faces.
“It is Latin,” he explained before he reconsidered the wisdom of speaking without his professor’s leave.
Rodrigo nodded to him to continue.
“It translates, I think to something like: ‘Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed.’”