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Page 29.

Scene 10. Herding Trucks

Jack was a sturdy, dark-haired man with intense but twinkling dark-blue eyes. Discerning women found his craggy features attractive, especially when he turned on that certain mercenary charm that went with his job. Janet liked to say that her brother was a loveable if frustrating nuisance, and who else would look after him if she didn't—when and if he did show up, once in a while, for dinner and a rest. Was she trying her social engineering again, matching him with some new friend from her social club or some of her town hall busy bodies? The irreverent always surfaced in Jack at moments when most people became earnest.

A pleasant mountain breeze, wafting through the maple and pine crafted interior, stirred curtains along its path through upstairs corridors—curtains whose pattern was neither too feminine, nor too masculine, but strong, sky-blue blocks, crisscrossed with fine white lines resembling jet contrails. The curtains represented a marriage of personalities. Janet was a work-hardened brunette who could break a horse, ride the rugged back country, and kill a rattlesnake in one quick rifle shot from the saddle if snake and horse surprised each other, and if said panicking snake seemed unstoppably coiled to strike at said snorting horse.

Jack's brother-in-law, Mark Barger, was a Ph.D. oil man and field trouble-shooter covering SoCal and Arizona. Janet and Mark were raising Jack's girls almost as their own, freeing Jack up (in a sometimes heartsick way) for his all-consuming work. On visits home like this, he tried to make it up to the girls. Luckily, Gail, 15, and Marcia, 13, were mature and well-adjusted for their ages. Sometimes Jack feared that they didn't miss him or need him at all. All four kids were, for the moment, still away at school, but due home any moment.

Jack relished both his work and his play—but this was neither. This was family. As the saying went, he left his work at the office. Each time, on arriving from the City, he'd lock away his gun in a steel safe amid shirts, underwear, socks, and electronic gadgets.

Here, at the D (Dorsey, also Dandelion) Ranch, he always came home to rediscover himself and to become whole again, often from bloody and terrible experiences, for a little time anyway, between what Sigma 2020 called—what were known in the business as—Events.

Down along the gravel road approaching uphill, all five Malinois Belgian shepherd dogs barked hoarsely. Their calls knifed through the balmy air. Jack knew them. The dogs were happy. He'd heard them in genuine fighting rage, on rare occasions over the years, as they ganged up on the occasional stray mountain lion or solo-hunting coyote under cover of night. You did not want to meet them in a dark alley in that mode. They were a wolfish combat unit of perfectly evolved, lethal savagery in that state. They hunted together and killed like one mind united by a murderous synchronicity dating to Old Stone Age times. They were three animals melded into one refined tool, like an axe twirling toward its victim. And yet, a few hours after a coyote kill—as Jack had experienced on at least one occasion a few years back—having restored law and order, they could cuddle around your legs by the fire—still licking blood and gore from between their claws, or off of one another's muzzles. One of Jack's operating philosophies was: if you didn't appreciate nature on its own terms, you didn't really live. Above all, keep smiling.

The dogs' barking and yelping at this moment was a happy sound—not quite the same as when the mailman drove by the bottom of the property around noon each day in his boxy red, white, and blue van. It was a sound Jack welcomed—just one more factor keeping his family safe. He'd resisted the urge to buy a beautiful pair of gold wolf-cufflinks one day at an expensive boutique in Las Vegas' McCarran Airport. Wolves were pack animals, like dogs. When Jack was on assignment, he preferred to hunt alone, and come back alive. Being a team player was, of course, essential—but you were still on your own at all times, and the rest was all cover. To the stalking hunter-killer, all life is just camouflage.

None of Jack's family knew what he really did for a living, and he planned to keep it that way. Uncle Jack (Daddy to the girls) simply came and went between the D Ranch and the City—a vague term for Los Angeles, with its sea of impersonal glass buildings and global wealth sifting through anonymous corporate fingers. They didn't know that his travels took him around the world. As with the Malinois of D Ranch, there were wrongs to right on his territory (the world). Agents like Jack Gray were whom you sent when all else failed. Von Clausewitz had written that warfare is diplomacy continued by other means. In the new world of low-key national governments and powerful international corporations, Jack's profession was the continuation of lawyer crap by physical means. The money wasn't bad either. Along the way, in twenty years of military and intelligence work, Jack had amassed his own small fortune, in addition to having inherited the 200 acres in common trust with Janet. His assets were sprinkled amid banking centers in Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and places in Asia.

Jack resisted the urge to pour himself a double shot of generation-old scotch from a square bottle. He did not smoke, and he drank carefully. Like wildfire, booze could get out of hand. He drank moderately, for pleasure, not from need, and aimed to keep it that way.

He felt better now. He finished dressing. He toweled his hair once more, quickly. He glanced out of his open window. On the nearby reservation, tribal police hourly drove along their electrified chain link reservation perimeter. They passed at carefully random intervals, in white and blue HummVees with shotgun racks—with good reason: three major gambling casinos reared their corporate towers on the mesas below the crags, down their other side, with archways of flashing lights advertising tens of millions of dollars to be gambled back and forth inside.

Among the patrols was a commando unit with shoot-to-kill orders if sirens and verbal warning from a loudspeaker did not suffice to deter an intruder. There were millions upon millions in cash in them thar hills, and these folks took their money seriously. Warning signs to that effect were sprinkled about. The warning signs did not mention that there was a secret bank processing facility for coins and precious metals high on a hillside above the casinos, behind thousands of feet of coiled razor wire on tall electric fences, with Dobermans racing on gravel paths. As a good neighbor, Jack had once been given a helicopter tour of the reservation, courtesy the sovereign tribal government. Chief Juan Domingo and his council had over a billion dollars' cash in the bank from combined casino operations, and counting. On a hill farther away, also, was a murky sort of corponational hive of satellite dishes, golf ball radar globes, and microwave cubes. These were guarded by Air Force and Sigma 2020 personnel, likewise with orders to shoot to kill. Good fences make for good neighbors, went the proverb.

Civilian families living in the area, whether Anglo, Other, or Native American, were possessive of their mutual privacy. Many of the homes belonged to wealthy, critical corporate chiefs, whose protection was in itself a government and corporate asset. A few famous film actors and rock stars had secret getaway ranches in these parts, as well. Most were fathers and mothers with children in school, and lives to live, who craved normalcy and privacy. Jack was not the only one who came and went here on the dodge.

For some residents, it was a suburb of Los Angeles, with private jets tethered at Lindbergh Field in San Diego, or Palomar Airport in northern San Diego County. Folks here knew each other, and watched each other's backs. That appealed to Jack for the safety of his own family. People here were always prepared to challenge strangers, even at gunpoint, and to call for armed backup. Units of sheriff's deputies, tribal police, and uniformed federal police would appear in minutes via range vehicle, horseback, or helicopter.

Knowing that, Jack could travel easily on his adventures, except for airport ghosts.

Hearing the dogs barking, Jack remembered what was coming.

He finished dressing in the clean, upscale clothing Janet had laid out for him—jeans, soft brick-and-wheat checkered long-sleeved shirt, and leather deck shoes. All Janet knew, or needed to know, was that her brother was often away on mysterious corponational assignments. He sometimes came home with bruises, black eyes, a broken rib, but no questions were to be asked. Once or twice he'd even recuperated from a gunshot wound after being patched up at a federal military hospital somewhere, always on the corponational dime.

He and Janet had grown up together. They owned the ranch in common, which had been passed down through seven generations. They maintained an amicable if sometimes tempestuous companionship of over 30 years. She knew better than to waste her time asking questions when Jack got 'that look.'

Despite the D Ranch's handle, the family's ancestral name had never been Dandelion. It was Dorsey on his five time-great-grandfather's side, and Leon on his five time-great-grandmother's side. In 1899 had come a marriage between two banking families, representing North and South America. In the north there was old Russ Dorsey, of Tipperary and New England vintage, transplanted to California's central mountain and desert interior during the 1849 Gold Rush, and south to the Mexican border during San Diego's financial boom in the 1880s.

From the south came Mariana de Leon of Santiago de Chile, whose extended family had owned banks in Chile and Argentina, mines in Patagonia, and shipping interests with ties to Spanish and Moroccan wealth.

Dandelion—the Taraxacum flower, from the French Dent-de-Lion, Tooth of the Lion—had on that long-ago wedding day covered the newly purchased mountain ranch in a wind-blown yellow carpet. The romantics at the three day bash loved it—young Dorsey's hard-fisted Irish brothers and cousins, and young Mariana Leon's rowdy part-Castilian, part-Basque, part-Gypsy menfolk. A Gitana card reader among them had said the flowers were a positive omen, a play on the Leon family name, and were therefore forever enshrined in the ranch's symbols.

Descendants of those flowers still covered the mountain meadows to this day. High among the dandelion fields, near the highest crest of Paawik Mountain, was an old cemetery containing family bones and ashes from before this area had become unincorporated sheriff's range, and modern times as well. The oldest tombstones were of mossy stone, including those of Russell Dorsey and Mariana Leon. Among those graves lay the urn containing the ashes of Catherine Dorsey, mother of Marcia and Gail.

As he he'd done this morning, Jack had spent many a morning and early afternoon cutting firewood in the oak groves along the dry creek on the north side, with the Pacific Ocean barely a puffy cumulus streak along the horizon. It was always special to be close to her. Jack allowed nobody but himself to cut his precious oak wood, and he only harvested newly fallen or about to fall as needed. He used a medium duty industrial chainsaw, while wearing heavy leather gloves and mechanic's glasses. He brought his wood back to the barn on a flat wagon pulled by a tractor he drove. He stacked the cut logs along a breeze ridge overlooking the apple and pear orchards below. It was work for a second day, leisurely paced: cutting the logs down to foot-long tranches, clipping each in half with the nudge end of a fire axe, and stacking them in a wall to be cured by the wind and sun over a year or two. It was part of the cycle of life that kept him anchored. It was medicine to tame his inner storms.

nty borders on San Diego County, rumbled and swayed a large, dark furniture truck. The dogs chased it, barking, through the mountain meadows. As the keen ears of Jack Gray perceived, the dogs were exuberant. Maybe they understood this was a happy day, and the cargo one to bring joy to young people.

These shepherds were a type of working dog known as fenders. They were just doing what came natural to them—herding the truck along to the house, as if it would get lost if they didn't, which, but for the bumpy road, would have been quite possible. The children, and Janet for that matter, had no idea about the truck's contents. All the better.

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