Джеймс Филип - George Washington's Ghost

In fact, Rodrigo had been hard-pressed to explain to his wife, Magdalena, why he felt he had to return to the colours. In the end he had had to tell her exactly why he seemed to have ‘gone loco’. Only then had she understood; afterwards, she had spoken of it no more.

Other, that was than to observe, tartly: ‘If you go and get yourself killed, I will never forgive you!’

Which, all things considered, was fair enough.

However, once Rodrigo had learned of the fragmented. frightening stories coming out of the Colorado country, far to the north of the 1964 ‘border’, and beyond the twenty to thirty mile-wide DMZ, in reality a skirmishing zone for raiders and bandits from both sides, he had been inexorably drawn back to the harsh landscapes in which he had made his academic name, prospecting and studying, in his rebellious younger years.

His now famous paper about El Ojo del Diablo – the Eye of the Devil – a massive meteoritic impact crater, had eventually established him as Nuevo Granada’s, México’s, leading geologist. Located at an elevation of over five thousand feet on the great sandstone plateau of the northern Sonora badlands, although eroded by wind and rain for countless millennia and partly filled by drifting sand, El Ojo del Diablo was still three-quarters of a mile across and over five-hundred-feet deep, and its rim still reared, in places some one-hundred-and-fifty feet above the surrounding desert. If ever a man needed to be reminded that his life was but a miniscule mote in the eye of a greater god, he could do no better than stand on the edge of the Eye of the Devil and look down into the void.

Rodrigo had been only twenty-six when he first trekked north into the then ‘disputed lands’ – turned into ‘borderlands’ and then ‘buffer zones’ and finally incorporated into the Commonwealth of New England by the victorious gringos in treaties signed after each successively more humiliating war – in search of adventure, knowledge and yes, if he was being honest about it, fame.

Those were halcyon, free-wheeling days before he had settled down with Magdalena, found academic respectability with his seminal published papers on the stratigraphy of the rocks of the middle and lower grandes acantilados – great cliffs – carved down through over a mile of rock over untold millennia by the Colorado River. As a young man he had been bewitched by the Eye of the Devil, assumed until then by generations of Granadan geologists to be a well-preserved, caldera-like feature associated with ancient volcanism because of its relative proximity to the San Franciscan ridges, themselves thought to be the remnants of ancient volcanoes, some forty miles to the west.

Had he known that day he first looked down into the great impact caldera that the great men in his field would go to almost any lengths to guard their complacent orthodoxy, and that before they finally surrendered would have attempted, in desperation, to have him declared heretic, perhaps, he would have never returned home.

Other than, of course, for Magdalena…

In the end everything had changed, text books had had to be re-written and every aspect of his field rigorously, critically re-evaluated. Eventually, evidence had won the day. The day he found the first fragments of nickel-iron, many of which must have been molten, viscose when they fell to earth, calving from a celestial body probably well over one-hundred-and-fifty feet in diameter with a mass of hundreds of thousands of tons as it plummeted through the Earth’s atmosphere at a velocity in excess of thirty thousand miles-an-hour, before exploding on impact with the limestone plateau with a force equivalent to millions of tons of high explosive, had been the moment that Rodrigo’s former life had ended.

Another man might have dwelt upon the long years in the wilderness labelled a ‘young maverick’, when he had been castigated and decried by his elders and every last one of his contemporaries on account of his supposedly ‘unscientific ramblings’. Some of the old fogeys, men who claimed to be scientists but invariably trusted the literal letter of Biblical text over ‘the scientific method’ they claimed to adhere to, had never forgiven him.

Accepting a commission in the Ejército de Nueva España in 1949, had been a blessed relief from the hothouse feuding of Cuernavaca in the old days.

Serendipitously, assigned to an artillery regiment he had persuaded the Army’s Office of Ballistics to conduct trials, ostensibly studying the destructive potential of high-powered rounds against sloping cemented plate, and shown the most craven of doubters the conclusive proof of his thesis on the mechanics of crater creation. Those grainy slow-motion sequences of bullets and armour-piercing rounds being fired by experimental high-velocity rifles crashing into sand tray targets had, virtually overnight, made his reputation. Within weeks, he had been the University of Cuernavaca’s poster boy.

That was a long time ago, of course.

War and the consequences of the uneasy peace along the Border had denied him access to the high plateau of the Colorado Country for over a quarter-of-a-century. For much of that time only the Navajo and their sometime Apache enemies, and gringo adventurers and bandits had roamed the high plains of the old nineteenth century northern province of Sonora.

Farther back in time these lands had been part of ‘the Comancheria’ – a huge swath of the South West under the brutal rule of the ‘horse people’, roving Comanche tribes, the masters of the Southern Plains – not finally vanquished until the 1860s, when Spanish suzerainty had again been bloodily re-established. Mexico, or New Granada as it was in the early years of the nineteenth century, had always claimed Sonora. History, like the desert winds, had slowly eroded its title, long before the ‘border wars’ with the English had moved the lines on the maps. Even now, hardly anybody lived high on the plateau; and yet so much blood had been spilled over where the lines ought to be drawn on those ancient maps of the 1820s.

It had been so long since Rodrigo’s last expedition to El Ojo del Diablo , that his old Navajo friends and guides had stopped sending him specimens – rocks and fossils – and he had got on with his career, and with raising his family. And then, a couple of years ago, realising that there was going to be a new war; this time not a series of brave, futile ‘demonstrations’ but a ‘war to the knife’ to reclaim all that had been lost since the New Englanders stole the Delta lands, West Texas and the historic, post-conquest borderlands of Nuevo México from the old Empire of New Spain, he had tentatively sought permission to ride deep into the enemy’s country, and to return to the Sonoran deserts.

Ostensibly, to all bar a select group of very senior Army officers his mission had been mooted as a long-range reconnaissance, a patrol behind enemy lines but by the time he had crossed in to what had been enemy territory, the gringo lines had splintered so fast, nothing except the harshness of the terrain had slowed his passage north.

It was a surreal contrast to his experiences in the last war. Fifteen years ago, he had been stationed in faraway Alta California, a cavalryman posted to the Modoc Country, a backwater of the war until the English Navy had landed troops to seize the heights guarding San Francisco Bay.

Rodrigo still awakened some nights in a cold sweat, his nightmares turning around the scene that day when those two leviathans – he had since learned they were the battlecruiser Invincible and the battleship Hercules – had duelled with the batteries guarding the Golden Gate while a tide of Marines had swept ashore…

The ‘Battle of the Bay’ had shaken the Junta in México City, and ended the real fighting inside a month. The politicians had taken fright; terrified that the English would invade the west coast south of Baha California and invade the heartland.