winds came from. He sensed something but never saw us. And we could hear and see everything White and Chapmann said and did in their plane.”
“That’s amazing. How fast will it go?”
“I don’t know, but the night we tailed White and Chapmann we flew around their Cessna Two-Ten like it stood still. And I am convinced that the pilot didn’t have it opened up,” Lockney said.
“I didn’t know they had solved the problem of speed on helicopters,” Wade said. “Heretofore one-hundred-fifty knots was tops.”
“Oh, this baby far exceeded that. I don’t know how it works. The crew wouldn’t tell me. But it seemed to be using jet propulsion somehow. It sure puts the Longbow Apache in the shade.”
“Is it like the new Osprey?” asked Wade.
“No. I couldn’t even tell if there were blades moving. In fact, when it was over I couldn’t remember seeing any blades. The body looked like a ‘copter and that’s what I assumed we were in, so I didn’t look too hard upon entering the craft. But when we took off we just quietly went swoosh,” said Lockney, as his right hand rose and cut through the air. “I never heard any of the sounds we’re used to hearing when flying. It felt like we had just cut gravity and were floating.”
“God, I can’t imagine,” Wade exclaimed. “Do you think the Russians can keep up with it?” Wade asked, as the two men walked to the building’s entrance deeply engrossed in their discussion unaware that, once again, the life of every American was about to be radically altered once again.
6
DAVIS MOUNTAINS, WEST TEXAS
Sunday, February 16
Onward Christian Soldiers. Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!
Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe; forward into
battle, See His banner go!
The hymn faintly echoed from the little pre-fab church nestled against the mountainside, thirty or so yards off a narrow, rocky road in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. At 7:00 a.m. on this cold still dark Sunday morning in February, events transpiring in Odessa and Washington D.C. were light years away. Snow fell softly, adding to the four to five inches that had fallen during the night. The faint singing broke the quiet of the mountains. The little Davis Mountain church had a simple, glossy black cross nailed over the entrance. If not for that cross the church would have been lost among the jumble of other khaki colored prefab structures scattered indiscriminately over some twenty acres. Each had been etched into the Davis Mountains at six thousand feet. Some housed the fifty families comprising John Chudders’ little band. Others served as meeting halls or work areas.
The little community nestled precariously into the sides of two large V-shaped canyons. Visitors feared to stay overnight in case a small earthquake or strong wind would send the whole community to the bottom of the canyon. The sides of each canyon had been terraced for five or six hundred feet in order to make room for the various buildings. Rock-layered paths and well-engineered gravel-covered roads provided access to the buildings. Revetments prevented landslides by buttressing the embankments along each terrace. Four ponds maintained a water supply for the compound.
A complex of rooms, chiseled into the mountains over the last twenty-five years, provided the most notable, but disguised, feature of the compound. This included living accommodations for all families, well-stocked medical and dining facilities, and workrooms and storage facilities sufficient to maintain the community in case of an emergency. The new five-thousand-square-foot weapons storage facility, located several hundred yards west of the caverns main entrance, currently stored about $3.2 million in weapons. Only family members were aware of its presence.
Reverend Chudders, a self-styled minister of an off-shoot variety brought his little band from Michigan to Fort Davis County, Texas, twenty-five years ago. He called his hideaway Yahweh City, or City of God.
In addition, Chudders’ group housed ten to fifteen illegal Mexican workers a mile down the canyon. Chudders paid the workers an adequate wage and had even converted some to his fundamentalist Christian views over the years. The laborers worked a month or more and then returned to Mexico to be replaced by close friends or family members. They had early learned to keep the mountain compound a secret. The U.S. Border Patrol knew of the illegal immigrant workers, but they had their hands full. The illegal aliens working for Chudders were effectively out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Rumors did abound among West Texas law enforcement officers that Chudders had spawned a revolutionary group in Mexico, but no one could prove it. The state’s attorney general laid recent conflicts in the southern Mexican State of Chiapas at Chudders’ feet on several public occasions, but he couldn’t prove it either.
Only about five miles of FM Road 17 between Yahweh City and the nearby town of Toyahvale had a hard-topped surface. Toyahvale lies within the southern boundary of Reeves County on West Texas’s high desert plateau at approximately 3,000 feet above sea level.
The whole region is lucky to see eighteen inches of rain during any given year. The county seat is Pecos, located forty miles north of Toyahvale.
The mayor of Toyahvale claimed Yahweh City as part of the DeLaney Ranch, while other town people insisted Chudders squatted on government land. A few miles south of Toyahvale, on FM Road 17, one turned right onto a gravel road numbered 1832. It ended in eleven miles. Six strands of barbed wire protected the land on either side. Locked gates guarded the numerous roads leading off into the vast prairie. An unmarked gate on the right, located one hundred yards beyond the Stevenson Ranch gate led to Yahweh City. The road’s sign kept disappearing, making the gate difficult to find. People in Toyahvale believed Chudders group kept taking it off so outsiders couldn’t find them. It was true.
If one managed to find the road to Yahweh City there followed a rugged, tortuous and mountainous drive, which took almost two hours to drive in good weather. Only 4-wheeled vehicles could make it on rainy or snowy days so all Yahweh City families had 4-wheelers.
Toyahvale claimed a population of sixty. It was supported by one gas pump at a new mini mart out on U.S. 290 east, one IGA grocery, a post office, one mechanic and a dozen or so abandoned old buildings, all reminiscent of more prosperous days. One ancient amber blinking light hung as a lone vigil at the intersection of FM Road 17 and U.S. 290, which in turn looped down from Interstate 10. In addition to the ranching economy, the town drew some sportsmen and sportswomen who came to fish and boat on Lake Balmorhea, five miles northeast of town.
People of Toyahvale toiled hard to wrest a living from the West Texas environment. They talked little and were suspicious of strangers asking questions about “those folks up in the mountains.” When asked about the Chudders group, people generally begged off by insisting “we don’t want no trouble ‘round here.”
The First National Bank stood forlornly at the southwest corner of Main Street. The bank’s old sign hung at an angle so traffic coming from the south and traffic going east and west on Main Street could see it. Martinez’s IGA store abutted the bank’s west side and faced Main Street.
The IGA store lacked air-conditioning, so two heavy glass-paned double doors always stood open, and people came and went through beat-up screen doors. The metal plates on the screen doors had originally advertised Rainbow bread, but now shone brightly from the touch of thousands of hands over the decades.
The
