“Mateo,” she warned the officer, “keep it up and Antonio will break a shotgun butt on your thick skull.”
Major Mateo Cardozo grinned widely. Under his black, downward-sweeping horseshoe mustache, his white even teeth shone brilliantly. Mateo and Eléna were both playing a favorite game.
“A thousand pardons, señorita,” Mateo implored, “and a compliment on your belleza [beauty]. Also a bottle of tequila for my men and myself, por favor.”
“I can see you hombres have already had a bottle somewhere else.”
“Two bottles,” Mateo said.
“You have to make five a.m. roll call, not me.”
She gave him a bottle and six glasses. He gave her the money.
“Who knows, señorita?” Corporal Rinaldi said. He pulled himself up to his full five feet, six inches of height, his forehead furrowed but his dark eyes glittering. “Tomorrow, we may not even be in the army.”
“That is a fact,” Mateo concurred.
“What’s wrong?” Eléna asked, polishing a glass.
“We have to figure out those goddamn howitzer trajectories,” Sergeant Enriqué—the big, bearded guy—muttered under his breath, “and until we do, those damn guns won’t hit shit.”
“General Ortega is madder than hell at me,” Mateo admitted. “Díaz and the Señorita are planning another attack, and if we can’t get our artillery up and running, we’re screwed.”
“We’re all screwed,” Eléna said softly, nodding.
Rachel gave Richard a quick hard look. “I’m going to the excusada [the restroom],” she said, “then let’s slope on out of here. I’ve had it with Méjico Lindo. This whole trip was a bust. As much as I hate to admit it, Mom was right. We’ll figure out how to find our way back to Arizona tomorrow.”
Richard nodded his agreement.“Verdad.” [“Truth.”]
Mateo was still complaining about his cannons. “That’s ’cause those cannons are old Napoleons, and no one has fired them in a decade. The generals can’t 14 Jackson Cain expect us to learn this shit overnight. We don’t even know how to aim the damn guns.”
“I don’t even know how much powder to use,” Rinaldi said.
“Or how to make the right kind of hideputa [son-ofa-whore] powder,” Mateo said.
“We’re using the same mix of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter that we use to load rifles,” Enriqué said.
“Except those howitzers aren’t saddle rifles,” Mateo said.
“They aren’t handguns either,” Enriqué said.
“Why’d the general give us the job anyway?” Enriqué asked. “We’re cavalry. We ain’t no artillery.”
“Someone has it in for us,” Rinaldi said.
“He gave the job to me,” Mateo said, “not to you hombres. You won’t get blamed. I will, and Ortega will be right. I was supposed to figure out how to make those guns work. I let him down.”
“It’s not our fault that Sonora doesn’t have real artillery officers,” Rinaldi said.
Richard had just graduated at the top of his class from West Point as an artillery officer. He was so young though, only nineteen, that they asked him to take a year off before the army gave him a field commission. Emboldened by three shots of tequila, Richard tore a sheet of writing paper from his knapsack pad and began filling it with ballistics equations. He then tapped Mateo on the shoulder.
“You have three basic problems,” Richard said. “You need someone from your university who knows integral calculus to compute your trajectories. He’ll understand these equations here.” Richard wrote out a glossary, defining the symbols. “He then has to find a good book on the chemistry of explosives. He will then be able to tell you how to mix the cordite you need to power your shells.”
“Cordite?” Mateo asked.
“None of the European Great Powers are using black powder for their artillery and their other high-powered weapons,” Richard said. “Not anymore. America is phasing it out too. You’ll need nitroglycerin, if you want to manufacture nitrocellulose and nitro-guanidine, both of which you really need if you want to produce the cordite necessary for really high-quality howitzer powder. It’s not easy to make though.”
“I can’t even make a shell go a hundred yards,” Mateo grunted, eyes downcast.
“Aim the guns at a forty-five-degree angle for maximum range,” Richard said, “and then—”
Stopping in midsentence, he looked up from his paper full of equations and saw the troopers were all circling around him, staring at him, fixedly, fascinated—a little too fascinated. Mateo was suddenly putting his arm around his shoulders.
You had to show off, didn’t you ? Richard cursed silently. How in living hell do you get out of this one?
Rachel came back. Hearing Richard’s last remarks and seeing the paper full of equations, she instantly realized how badly Richard had screwed up. She removed Mateo’s arm from Richard’s shoulders.
“Richard, we are out of here.”
Chapter 2
A woman in a black robe stood with a youthful captain of the guard on the third step of the Great Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. The widowed stepmother to the governor of the Sinaloa, she was that state’s true ruler and now ran Chihuahua as well. She was also the wealthiest woman in all of Central America. She had made countless enemies over the years, and if she truly wanted to go out in public, she was wise to do it incognito. The black robe effectively disguised her appearance. With the hood up, most people mistook her for a priest.
She wanted to stand next to the young capitán during the next few minutes and watch his reaction when the enormity of his fate finally and irrevocably sank in.
* * *
She had commissioned this particular pyramid almost fifteen years before. She had overseen its construction and had visited it countless times. Still it never failed to impress her. Close up, it was so vast that no one could fathom its dimensions. It was as if it encompassed the entire universe.
Its square base was three hundred yards along the edges. Its sloping sides were lined with hundreds of steps—so numerous they seemed to reach the sun. At its top, off to one side, was the sanctuary of Quetzalcoatl—the god-king. Many mejicanos viewed him as the Aztec Jesus Christ. Quetzalcoatl was the only god in their firmament who had once lived and walked among them and who actually liked the mejicano people. Hanging on the sanctuary wall atop the temple was a stunning representation of Quetzalcoatl, an immense mosaic rendered in gold, silver, and turquoise.
* * *
But on the flat summit also stood several gesticulating priests, brandishing machetes and obsidian carving knives. Before them was a limestone altar, four feet high and six feet long—the infamous stone on which countless victims had been, as the Lady Dolorosa liked to mockingly put it with a sly sneer curling her upper lip, “heartlessly sacrificed.”
Shrouded in human skins, crowned with gleaming headdresses of elaborately woven eagle plumes, gemstones, and glittering strands of finely spun silver and gold, the bloodstained holy men harangued the roaring throng, shaking their big gore-dripping obsidian knives at the howling masses below.
The pyramid was cordoned off and federales kept the surrounding mob approximately a hundred feet from