The President was not alone when, a few minutes later the two academics entered his office, a cool, sparsely decorated large room with tall windows along its southern and western aspects.
General of the Army of New Spain, Felipe de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón, rose from an armchair as the two University of Cuernavaca men came in.
Santa Anna, the man who had used his position as Chief of Staff of the Mexican Armed Forces – the ‘Army of New Spain’ title was a meaningless honorific these days and had been for a century – to cement the hold of the National Democrats on power in the pre-de Soto era, was wearing a plain Army dress uniform with no badges of rank other than, on his left breast pocket a small tab which read: Gen. Santa Anna.
It was a standing joke that all of Santa Anna’s predecessors had eventually expired of exhaustion under the weight of the multiplicity of the medals they wore, ‘all the time!’ But then, of course, unlike most of his predecessors, Santa Anna did not pretend to, or for a moment plan to be, the dictator of México.
He was a man of average height, fifty-six now, still trim with a relatively full head of hair, a man to whom a uniform seemed like a second skin. Only a lieutenant colonel at the time of the last war with the English, he had been the man whose troops had stemmed the rout and later, as revolution threatened, ordered the troops under his command to interpose themselves between the rioters in México City and the trigger-happy para-militaries of the old, sham-government coalition which had sent so many of the nation’s sons to their death untrained, under-armed and disgracefully badly led in the borderlands with New England.
Back in those days the country had been teetering on the verge of civil war and he, Santa Anna, had stepped briefly onto the political stage and given the old regime a chance to peacefully step aside, to avoid a bloodbath. After that, his promotion to the top job had been axiomatic, and for the last nine years he had worked tirelessly to re-build and to re-equip, and to instil a wholly new esprit de corps in the Mexican Army, Air Force and to his enduring chagrin, only to a lesser extent, in the Navy, whose officer corps still doggedly fought to remain the preserve of the old, conquistador aristocracy. That said, he and Vice Admiral Count Carlos Federico Gravina y Vera Cruz, the Chief Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Armada de Nuevo Granada, and he, generally ‘knocked along’ well enough, and Santa Anna was only too well aware that at sea, he was, well, all at sea…
Besides, all revolutions had their price.
That México’s most recent revolution had been largely peaceful, and that the country had reaped the rewards of that these last ten years as never before, was a price worth paying if its only cost, albeit a substantial one, was that the Navy had retained much of its former independence. Moreover, while Gravina rightly basked in the glory of being the High Admiral of the Fleets of the Triple Alliance, he – and more importantly, his quarrelsome admirals and captains – were going to be far too busy to meddle in the affairs of the state at home, or attempt to interfere with the able men entrusted with prosecuting the war in New England.
Arturo Ortiz Mena was staring wide-eyed at Santa Anna.
“We meet at last, Professor,” the soldier half-smiled, shaking the academic’s hand and making eye contact. He turned to the dishevelled younger man’s companion. “We meet again, old friend,” he said wryly, his grip dry, hard.
“The honour is all mine, General,” Rodrigo re-joined.
“Don Rodrigo commanded the rear guard in the retreat from the Rio Grande Country,” Santa Anna informed Ortiz Mena, “he and his men fought like lions. They saved what was left of the Army. But for Don Rodrigo there would have been no Army left to stop the Republic descending into another civil war.”
It took Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena some minutes to get over what was probably a partial anxiety attack and to find a voice that was not a half-choked, gasping whisper.
Hernando de Soto, in academic life as in the Presidency of the Republic, had always made allowances for nervous students, or for visitors initially being more than somewhat over-awed in his presence. Strong coffee was brought in by Margarita, who swiftly scurried out again, leaving the great men to their deliberations.
The four men were sitting, informally in arm chairs around a low wooden table, very much as if they had been invited to Hernando de Soto’s tutorial room at Cuernavaca, or to his hacienda in the hills overlooking the campus.
“General Santa Anna and I have read your reports, gentlemen,” the President prefaced, his expression contemplative as if he was parsing some arcane philosophical proposition.
Rodrigo had only got back from northern Sonora six days ago, having despatched a provisional field survey report marked MOST CONFIDENTIAL AND SECRET – PRESIDENTIAL EYES ONLY under seal, by air as soon as his expedition passed through the lines.
He had been unwilling to trust the hundreds of soil, rock, vegetation and water samples he had collected to a small courier aircraft, and needed to warn Arturo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, to prepare his laboratory in advance.
Those samples had been delivered to Cuernavaca by a Carlos Pérez de Guzmán escorted by a small guard detachment, while he had taken a train to the capital to brief Hernando de Soto and Santa Anna five days ago.
“Er,” the younger academic murmured, “my report was hurried, very provisional, lacking in the rigor normally expected by the University…”
The President of México smiled indulgently.
“You will have plenty of time to apply your customary rigor to subsequent papers, Professor,” he assured him, every inch the nation’s favourite grandfather. “It may be that you have already done your country a great service.”
Santa Anna nodded.
“Don Rodrigo will have briefed you on the findings of his field survey in the Colorado Country and the deserts of Sonora, Professor?” He checked, not a man to take anything for granted.
“Yes, General.”
“Forgive me, my University background was in mechanical engineering and ballistics,” Santa Anna continued, self-effacingly – a frequently demonstrated character trait that people who did not know him very well invariably found disconcerting in such a ‘great man’ – “and security considerations have prevented me from sharing the contents of your paper with specialists on my Staff who are better informed than I on these matters. Might I ask you, and Don Rodrigo to brief me anew on your findings.” He spread his hands. “In layman’s terms, perhaps?”
Understanding that his University colleague was still a bag of nerves, Rodrigo took the lead, giving Ortiz Mena a little more time to collect his thoughts. He began to recount his expedition’s trek north, climbing onto the great plateau bisected by the Colorado River and its tributaries, and what they had discovered beyond El Ojo del Diablo.
“We surveyed eleven separate sites where devices of varying explosive potential, and possibly, different types and configurations had probably been tested above and below ground. Common to each of the above ground sites were the remnants of a what may have been very tall towers or scaffolds of extremely robust steel construction. We also came upon several ‘crater sites’, the largest of which was six-hundred-and-twenty feet across and some sixty feet deep, with a rim of about fifteen feet in height above the surrounding desert. In two places we came across depressions of similar proportions, except, obviously, absent the elevated rims of the other craters. These, we assumed must have been the result of tests conducted underground…”