Before we reached another hill, he led me around a lush palo verde tree. Beyond was a well-concealed cut that was obviously man-made. It led down until it was below ground level and zigzagged. It reminded me of the way trenches had been constructed on the Western Front in World War I. They zigzagged so an enemy soldier couldn’t stand above the trench and take out an entire company with his rifle. We were on the verge of the hundred-year mark of that cataclysm that changed the world, but few Americans paid any attention to the past.
Cartwright broke my reverie. “Peralta and I were in ‘Nam together. The sheriff’s a good man in a shitty situation.”
I agreed that he was.
We zagged to a stop. Cartwright hefted away a tumbleweed and unlocked a door that blended perfectly with the tan soil.
“This was an old mine,” he said. “There’s probably hundreds of them out here.”
Now I was really worried about rattlers. But beyond the door, I could see only bright lights and a clean concrete floor.
Getting inside required another sharp turn beyond the entrance. Nobody could open the door and start shooting at the occupant of Cartwright’s keep. We walked down a long flight of concrete stairs and made an abrupt turn into a short hall. He unlocked another door, metal and heavy, and closed it behind us.
We entered a space that looked about twenty feet long and wide enough for two men to stand comfortably. The ceiling was a foot above my head. On both sides, shelves rose six feet high holding meals-ready-to-eat, canned food, water, first-aid supplies, and ammunition. Boxes and boxes of ammunition for several calibers of firearms.
Beyond this supply area, the shelter opened up and held a bed, two chairs, and a desk with exotic radio equipment and other electronics. A well-stocked gun cabinet took up one wall. An American flag was posted to another. It was a forty-eight-star flag, the way it would have looked after Arizona was admitted to the union in 1912. Beside it were highly detailed U.S. Geological Survey maps of the area. The map fiend in me wanted to study them, but I felt mildly claustrophobic and unsure of my host.
“Ventilates to the outside,” he said. “But I’ve got filters against fallout and biological attacks. I can air-condition it, if I need to. Got two generators and plenty of fuel farther back into the mine. Redundancy on everything. There’s an emergency exit that comes out half a mile on the other side. I built it all myself.”
He was plainly proud of it and I suppose there were worse retirement hobbies as long as he didn’t wander down Tegner Street in Wickenburg and start mowing people down with one of the M-16s in that gun cabinet. The place was surprisingly free of dust and noticeably cooler than the outside, but I could feel myself only a few internal degrees from heat exhaustion.
I tried to be convivial, in an end-of-the world way, complementing his bunker. He seemed amiable enough, for an armed survivalist vet who might suddenly snap and kill me, stuffing my remains somewhere back in the old mine as varmint treats.
“Were you military, son?”
“No.”
I could have let him judge me in silence, but I made an effort to keep the conversation going. Get people to talk about themselves, as Grandmother always advised.
“So this is where you ride out doomsday?”
“You bet your life. We came within an ass-hair of blowing up the world in 1983. The Soviets picked up a launch signal from the continental U.S. Their computer system said it was an incoming American missile. It was a glitch, but they didn’t know this. They always expected an American first strike, and their strategy was launch on warning, so our missiles would hit empty silos.”
He jabbed a finger my way. “If it hadn’t been for a Russian colonel who suspected it was a false alarm and refused to send on the alert, they would have fired every ICBM they had over the pole at us and adios, baby. Hardly anybody knows how close we came.”
“Stanislav Petrov,” I said. That was the Soviet lieutenant colonel who perhaps saved us all.
“Very good. Don’t think it won’t happen again. All those missiles are still sitting there, waiting to be used. Damned Russians are building an underground city that’s as big as Washington. You look on the Internet. Israel and Iran. North Korea. China’s got miles of tunnels to hold their nuclear forces. Hell, we’re even allies with Hanoi now against China. Makes you wonder why anybody even wants to live.”
His agitation grew as he talked and he paced over to the gun cabinet and I placed a hand on the butt of my Python. My spinal cord was filling with ice.
“We got seven billion people on the planet, climate change, ebola and diseases we don’t even know about that can’t be killed by antibiotics. Your people did this.” His expression was accusing, his voice angry. “Couldn’t leave well enough alone. Had to conquer nature, but she won’t be conquered, kid.”
He sighed. “Anyway, it might not even go down that way. You take away the power and gasoline from five million people in Phoenix in high summer, and watch what happens. I’ll be fine.”
I had no doubt.
18
After fifteen minutes of this cheery conversation, we arrived back at the adobe, where Peralta was standing under the shade of the porch, smoking a cigar, and surveying the jagged treeless mountains on the horizon.
“You got another Cuban, Sheriff?”
Peralta produced a cigar and Cartwright ran it under his nose, inhaling like a connoisseur. “You people wouldn’t even have tobacco if it wasn’t for us.”
“Apaches didn’t have tobacco,” Peralta said.
“Well, then we would have killed the Indians that did and taken it. Thanks for the cigar. Now I don’t have to kill you.” He carefully slipped the stogie into his front pocket. “I see the kid here is a revolver man.” He pointed to the Colt Python in the Galco high-ride holster on my belt.
“He doesn’t trust semi-autos, thinks they might jam.” Peralta raised an eyebrow, an act of raucous comedy coming from that face.
“It can happen,” Cartwright said. “May I?”
Every instinct told me to decline, yet I handed the heavy revolver over, butt-first. He opened the cylinder, dropped out the six rounds in his left palm, and dry-fired it against the walclass="underline" click, click, click.
“The Combat Magnum. Listen how clean that action is.” His tone was that of a wine connoisseur. “It was the first gun to be bore-sighted with a laser, you know. Finest mechanism you’ll ever find in a revolver. Tight cylinder. Highly accurate.” He handed the gun and ammo back. My pulse pulled off the fast lane. I was fortunate that the house was air conditioned and dark inside, to cool me down and conceal my apprehension.
The living room was furnished with handsome leather chairs and sofas. Books were everywhere: in floor-to-ceiling shelves, on tabletops, and sitting in stacks on the hardwood floor. They were not of the Anarchist’s Cookbook genre. Instead, literature, philosophy, poetry, political science, and, of course, history filled the room. Classics and new, important works. I’ll admit it: I took stock of a person by the presence of books and their titles, and I almost started to let down my guard. I could see no television or newspapers. He might not even know that Peralta was no longer sheriff.