back in the saddle, and lifted the reins. He was wheeling the big horse around when he heard the slow-building boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOOOOOM! Boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOOOOOM! Boom-boom-boom-boom-BOOOOOOM!
The roan was up on his hocks, spinning around, crow-hopping, whinnying insanely, the mountain’s roar echoing in his ears, each reverberation bouncing and banging off the surrounding mountains, canyon cliffs, and vertiginous chasms, each sound reproducing itself in an infinite progression. Sooty black smoke was billowing and mushrooming out of that hole, while hell itself thundered out of that mine shaft like a portent out of Revelation and detonating death and destruction all across Sonora.
“Well, that’s that,” Slater said softly. “You put it to him coldcock and country-simple, but the man wouldn’t listen. He went in anyway. So, Moreno, you done it to yourself. You brought that whole goddamn mountain down on your ass. I can’t do nothin’ for you now, not nohow. Time to slope on out of here.”
But somehow he couldn’t do it.
He sat there frozen immobile in his saddle.
Goddamn it to hell.
He swung down off his heaving roan and slowly quieted him down. Taking him to a patch of mountain grass under a pine, he staked him out and pulled off the saddle. Putting on an old torn shirt, he attached a canteen to his belt and wrapped his bandanna over his mouth and nose. He roped together a dozen precut shoring timbers, to brace and prop up the collapsed tunnel in front of him. Picking up a two-foot pickax, a half-dozen candles, and matches, he crawled, bent over, into the mine. He dragged the shoring timbers behind him.
He was determined to save his friend.
Chapter 18
Mateo led Richard to a massive three-storied building of immaculately whitewashed adobe, which housed the army’s main headquarters. Heading him down two hallways, he took him into the Military Intelligence Center. In a large bullpen surrounded by filing cabinets, intelligence officers, clad in gray uniforms, manned eight desks. They worked by the light of coal-oil lamps, sifting through mountains of paperwork, occasionally pausing to write down notes on foolscap. Refugees from Sinaloa and Chihuahua provided Sonora’s analysts with endless transcribed interviews and depositions, which the analysts used to assess that countr y’s threat potential. The men at the desks worked relentlessly, heads down, funereal as death. Given that countr y’s propensities for violence, terror, and imperial aggression, the analysts had every incentive to take their work seriously.
“The general and I are old friends, and I asked him for a few minutes of his time,” Mateo said. “He knows more about Díaz, the Señorita, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa than anyone I know.”
Taking Richard into the corner office, he sat him down on the leather couch. In front of them was an oval-shaped oak coffee table and the desk where the chief of army intelligence, Major General Rafael Ortega, sat. Both desk and coffee table were stained oak. Mateo introduced Richard to the general.
“Ricardo will be indispensable in developing our artillery,” Mateo said, “which we sorely need. He is from Arizona in Norteamérica, however, and he’s not pleased at our recruitment and disciplinary procedures. Our world seems harsh to him—perhaps because he does not understand our enemy. I want him to know what we are up against. ¿Uno poco momento, por favor?” [“A small moment, please?”]
The general shrugged. “As you wish, Major. I have something new to show you anyway, which young Ricardo might want to look at as well.”
General Ortega sent a sergeant to get what he’d referred to, and a minute later the sergeant returned with a half-dozen file folders. He laid them out on the coffee table.
“On a regular basis, we receive drawings and even photographs depicting the Señorita’s atrocities. One source of these over the years has been the Señorita Dolorosa’s own staff. Her ladies-in-waiting and everyone else around her hate and fear her with a passion. Every so often one of them will sneak out of her palace and escape to Sonora. They know we are always looking for intelligence, so they will, if possible, steal some of the Señorita’s photos before leaving. Suffering from severe insomnia and nocturnal depression, she amuses herself by studying photographs of different atrocities occurring in her torture chambers and in her countr y’s penal system. She has boxes of them. We’ve collected quite a trove of these photos and drawings over the years.”
“Tell him how these victims end up in the Señorita’s and Díaz’s prisons, slave-labor mines, and torture chambers,” Major Mateo said.
“Méjico, under Díaz, has no system of justice,” General Ortega said simply. “No real courts of law, no real laws, in fact.”
“How are people sentenced?” Richard asked.
“There are no trials as such, and often those who are sentenced aren’t criminals at all but people whom someone in authority has a grudge against. Such people are often sent to Díaz’s and the Señorita’s stone quarries, slave-labor mines, and ranchos. There is no real parole in those places, and the prisioneros are worked to death in them.”
The major handed Richard a folder filled with photographs of men in huge dust-choked quarries, breaking rocks with sledgehammers. Some of the quarries held thousands of men.
“Many victims, however, never make it to a prison mine, a quarry, or a slave-labor hacienda,” Major Mateo said. “Some people they simply torture and execute.”
He got out a folder filled with pictures of torture chambers. The first picture Mateo showed Richard in the general’s office was of a large dark dungeon, which contained a variety of torture instruments. A black-robed Inquisitor stood beside each one.
“Recently,” Mateo said, “one of the court ladies escaped Sinaloa and made her way here to Sonora. When we debriefed her, she told us how Señorita Dolorosa had given her ladies and a prospective lover a tour of her Inquisitor’s dungeons and her Aztec-style ceremonies atop her pyramid. The Señorita frequently brings the court photographer along to photograph the atrocities. The Señorita keeps boxes of them in her bedroom for late-night viewings. Recently, a young woman smuggled out some of the photographs and gave them to us. She later reconstructed notes on Lady D’s monologues in her torture chambers and atop the pyramid, and the woman gave these notes to us. I have the transcript here.”
The major handed Richard a photograph—a closeup of a thick oak bench. Beside it was a huge pile of heavy stones. The major then showed them the photo of a man on a thick wood rack, groaning under a high pile of stones, his face, a red twisted mask of pain.
The major read to Richard and Mateo from the transcript.
“Margarite, the lady-in-waiting, wrote, ‘Our Lady seemed especially fond of the peine forte et dure, depicted in these photographs. The victim’s body, neck, arms, and legs are lashed to a rack. Boards are placed on top of him, and stones are piled one at a time on them. The person is eventually crushed under a small mountain of rocks. The Inquisitor may want the person to confess to a crime . . . or not, since there’s frequently no crime to confess to.
“‘Our Lady liked the fact that each stone, as it was piled on top of the man, increased his agony. The Señorita laughingly called it agony on the installment plan.’”
The major produced a photo from the folder of another man, who was being waterboarded.
“‘Our Lady lovingly regaled us on the theory and practice of waterboarding, explaining: It’s simulated drowning,
