Chapter 9.
Our camping weekend arrived, hooray! We left work early Friday afternoon to pack and drive north into New Mexico. We were supposed to meet Mike and Trina at a gas station in Alamogordo (75 miles north). He said they'd be parked near the big coffee cup sign.
When we left home it was sunny, we got cloudy skies outside of El Paso, the sky looked like it might rain. In Alamogordo we drove through the business district and next door to Pizza Hut was the gas station with the big coffee cup sign, we saw it from a distance so we parked beside another large truck, a Chevrolet and inside it were Mike and Trina Bonham! David did the greetings while I bought another bag of ice. We left northbound on White Sands Boulevard, he said it was almost 40 miles to Three Rivers.
North of Tularosa US-54 was a two lane road across the desert, there was nothing to see except mountains, rocks, and weeds in almost every direction. There were no power lines, no signs, no nothing, just the big empty.
North of Alamogordo the clouds disappeared and we were back in sunshine again. US-54 straightened out and became a lonesome two lane road as far as we could see. The entire valley looked like a black and white travel postcard from the Great Depression. The word "desolate" was created to describe the basin between the mountains. It looked like nobody had set foot out here since the road was paved in the 1940s to connect some ghost towns.
Like around El Paso, the desert up here was lumpy too, sand mounds with desert plants on top. It's actually very green seen from ground level, but from the air it looked spotted.
Back in the 1970s US-54 used to connect a border bridge in El Paso all the way to downtown Chicago at Michigan Avenue, but now it ends somewhere in rural western Illinois.
About twenty miles north of Tularosa the highway went past a building that looked like it was a 'last chance' shop decades ago, and we saw a sign for the campground and a nearby Native American rock carving historical site. I liked to call it: `allegedly ancient art.' They're impossible to date, the eggheads assumed since they looked like the others they must be authentic. In my mind I pictured long haired teens getting stoned and carving them in 1969 because they couldn't get a free ride to Woodstock. David wondered how many rock carvings around the USA were actually fraudulent, done to create income from tourism.
The entire area used to be private property until fairly recently so who knows who actually carved the shapes, or when. But like so much modern `science' it relied on faith as much as religion. So much science could be boiled down to an expert that said, "Because I said so, that's the proof."
We didn't stop to see their rock carvings but kept driving east towards the mountains. It was a long gradual uphill slog towards the base of the mountains. The widespread southwest drought killed off much of the water flow in the rivers (all three rivers were dry). On the plus side it meant there were a lot less flying insects. And fewer flying insects translated into less snakes, scorpions, and hopefully spiders too. The Sacramento Mountains were the eighth tallest in New Mexico and were volcanic in origin, as evidenced by the nearby lava flows.
We all signed into one campsite, dropped cash inside the locked payment box and set-up our gear, but not too close to theirs. The volume of gear the Bonhams set up told me they were way more serious about camping than us. For us it was a break from the routines of life and spending time away from the noise and traffic in the big city.
She was a fitness coach and physical therapist somewhere and seemed just a bit hyper-animated to me, like maybe she took testosterone to maintain her figure, but that was just a theory.
We had a silent discussion over Whispernet about how much Mike knew about our work and what level of clearance he had. We couldn't discuss certain things with his wife present, but we probably should have asked our commander to investigate them before we scheduled our camping trip. At first we assumed everyone working at WSMR was totally safe but found out that wasn't true, you always had to ask.
The constant need to know who had clearance and what level turned WSMR into a place that was somewhat segregated. They still had low clearance enlisted men all over the place at WSMR. After all, what's the sense in being an officer if you don't have anyone to salute you? We loved walking around WSMR and not saluting army officers, you could tell it bothered some of them. Our best way of being annoying to certain officers was to buy surplus army uniforms and wear them on WSMR!
That reminded us of the original (1970) MASH movie where Hawkeye Pierce was rarely called Captain Pierce, and referred to the some of the other officers (Majors Houlihan and Burns) as `Army Clowns.'
David asked Mike quietly if he went for training at the DOD facility in far southern Nevada and he said, `...yes, I go every year to recertify at Bug-U.' He was one of the guys at WSMR qualified on the screw-on rocket motors we used on weapons in our pelican case. He'd had his hands inside our case before in a room with other rocket engineers. But we didn't know how many other weapons used the exact same motors. They're like the size of a small can of Sterno built inside a section of two inch steel pipe. You added sections depending on how long it needed to fly, more sections equaled longer/faster powered flight.
A joke we heard at WSMR was if you screwed twenty rocket motors together you could launch a rocket that could hit the moon. They called it the `Saturn-XX Rocket,' it could put a warhead the size of a Pringles tube somewhere on the moon. Supposedly, someone did the calculation and said it might work if the warhead survived the radiation in the Van Allen Belt. But the guidance system was designed for use in the atmosphere, not in outer space where steering fins had no effect.
Our camp was set-up and ready at 6:50pm, tree shadows on the ground were getting long. Mike immediately lit his smoker for our big dinner tomorrow, Saturday evening. We offered to cook brats tonight and they agreed but also wanted to prepare their own stuff too. Neither of us cared because they'd never go to waste at our house! Both of us loved meat in tube form as long as they didn't contain pink slime, which was found in cheap hotdogs but most were clearly labeled.
The same thing was true with some no-name ground beef in stores, pink slime was added. I read that the cylinders of ground beef in the store were the most likely ones to contain `finely textured beef protein,' but not disclosed on the wrapper. The fact that it is added but not disclosed was all the proof we needed to never buy them.
The difference between our campsites was big, like comparing a kid with a walkie talkie to an AM radio station.
I sat in a chair and watched Mike and David handle large zipper bags loaded with racks of ribs. After seasoning he set them on shelves inside the smoker, his hands gradually looked more and more like the ribs! Even raw, they smelled wonderful all the way over at our campsite.
Back at our site David stacked charcoal in a pyramid over a wad of oil soaked newspaper while I sat watching everyone work, inflating the mattresses, and hanging our party light strings and camp chairs.
We had two large ice chests, one was full of beer, wine, and water. The other cooler had food and clean ice. I watched Trina set out bottles of booze, shot glasses, and bowls of munchies. They really rolled out the red carpet for our first trip together.
I noticed David stuffed a folding knife in his pocket but he never said why, but I suspected one of them triggered some kind of instinct in his Indian brain. All four of us looked like we were no strangers to camping. After seeing him pocket a knife I considered pocketing a pistol but soon forgot.
By 5:30pm both campfires were going, ours was smaller. Even though the sign said not to we cleaned up the ground of all fallen limbs. We cooked brats over charcoal and wood, they cooked chili over a propane stove. Their smoker burned pellets and was powered by a large battery pack with a solar panel. Their ribs smelled wonderful, or maybe it was the barbecue sauce and melting pig fat in the air.
David grew a hardon for Mike's smoker, I thought it was a fantastic design too. He spent 45 minutes with Mike prepping and loading the smoker, but I never saw one like it before. When David came back he said it was a Pit Boss vertical cabinet pellet smoker with an optional camping power supply; they were running post oak pellets made in Alabama. It was a $1,300 toy. I almost commented about our Honda Goldwing toy but decided I didn't have to, he could see it on my face! We just smiled without speaking.
We all started cooking dinner about the same time and shouted comments across the campsite then Trina kept inviting us to join them by the fire pit. I quietly -- kiddingly accused my husband of flirting with their smoker, but he just flipped me off.
Once the brats were off the grille we carried a large bowl of delicious looking bratwursts and buns over by their site and set the stuff on their truck tailgate. I carried the sectioned platter of diced toppings, pretty much the same as people put on a Chicago style hot dog (yellow relish, Bertman's Ballpark Mustard, celery salt, diced yellow onion, tomato, sport peppers, kosher pickle spears, and we added milder pickled red peppers from Thailand). We diced them and they added a nice bright red color. Our brats came from a really nice butcher down in Sparks Texas.
Then came the sound of beer cans popping open. After the beer started to flow the entire atmosphere turned from work to party time, it was the first time we saw Trina smile and relax her shoulders. At first it made her even louder.
She wore tight exercise suit pants that showed her camel toe sometimes. He wore shorts and a baggy tank top but his body did nothing for me. Her breasts were obviously fake and it looked like she had botox shots near the corners of her eyes and maybe her forehead too, which gave it a paralyzed look that I pointed out to David over Whispernet. David was totally unprepared for my comment in his ears and suddenly dropped his beer and started coughing violently, it looked like he inhaled his beer, but I think some of his dramatic show was to stop himself from suddenly laughing at her. When he tried to get me back during a huge bite of my 2nd brat, I reached into my pocket and turned on the Whispernet jammer! There was a slight chip we both heard when a jammer first came on and broke our Whispernet connection.
We sat around the fire drinking and slowly eating. Both of us ate three brats on dog buns with all the good stuff piled on top. They ate one brat each. They brought a vegetarian chili-stew and offered to share, we got one bowl and spoon and passed it between us and carefully ate around the chunks of Tofu. To me it had way too much sugar, or some kind of sweetener. Neither of us were fans of sugary foods and rarely ate cake or desserts. And when she said it had Tofu instead of meat I admitted out loud that I didn't care for Tofu. I whispered to David that if she put tofu in her chili she probably didn't give head either, we both had to fight giggling in front of them. We were not sure if Mike knew about Whispernet.
And speaking of `come,' in old movies from the 1930s when actors used the word Come, did it commonly mean semen or orgasms in 1939 too? I've seen that in old movies and it would have been correct in context and wondered if that was allowed in movies back then?
We talked about WSMR and he turned out to be an expert on the history of the range which went back to 1941 as a place to develop artillery shells, which eventually became rockets. He said rockets were artillery, which I'd never heard anyone say before.
Mike said he was born in Oakland California, whereas she grew up in San Diego, and we confessed to both being from southern Texas, near Houston. Trina said with our accents we should have worked in radio or something like that. We chuckled at that.
Mike's Masters degree was in Aerospace Engineering, we said ours were EE, or as they called it at UTA, The Cheesburger. She said she had a bachelor's in physical therapy and worked part time at a clinic in town and another up in Cloudcroft.
He said they met when he was injured playing soccer and she was the PT trainer and then they started dating; they'd been married for eighteen years and had a 17 year old daughter at home.
During our few hours of drinking and talking another car drove up and slowed to a stop then slowly drove past our campsite, there was something about it that looked wrong in this setting. I slipped my hand in my pocket and gently held onto my small .22 pistol just in case.
Most of the campsites at Three Rivers were in one small area along the riverbed. Further up hill was a network of hiking trails and a parking area for day hikers. I guessed one trail went to the top of the mountain and on the other side were the ski resorts in Ruidoso but it would be one helluva climb because that mountain (Sierra Blanca) was huge.
When the full moon was overhead they sort of turned into a horny couple and replaced the camping chairs with a large sleeping bag on the ground beside the fire. We stayed for a while and enjoyed the warmth and lack of flies and mosquitoes.
She lay against him and we saw the movement of her hand under the blanket. Around 10pm we said good night and went into our tent, occasionally we heard soft moaning for about half an hour.
While that was going on we were on our backs on the sleeping bags quietly discussing if she shaved the beave and decided they both had a full bush and he wasn't very big. I think David secretly sort of disliked almost any girl with obvious breast implants. He said they always looked fake and freakish. Why would anyone spend that much money to look freakish? He said he could tell from fifty feet away if they were fake because they were totally disproportionate to the rest of her body. And when she was on her back on the sleeping bag they didn't flatten out like real breasts. David was also solidly against belly button piercing (and nose rings), he said no matter what you did, the natural thing always looked nicer and I agreed.
He didn't avoid women with fake breasts because of that but because of the type of personality that believed freakish fake DD-cup breasts looked nicer than A-cup breasts. Those ladies usually had other unpleasant personality traits, maybe bipolar disorder or borderline personality.
I said I thought for a bunch of breast implants that looked fake at a distance the goal was to advertise they had money, it wasn't about the breasts at all.
David reminded me there were probably more guys with three inch boners than eight inch boners, so we should never make small dick wisecracks around strangers. I replied with my sarcastic, `yes mother,' which was a respectful way of telling him to shove it gently up his ass. At five and a half inches (across the top) I was by no means a dick monster, just average.
The next morning I cooked breakfast, we had scrambled eggs with diced veggies (left over from brats last night) with Cholula drizzled over the top; we each ate two but they weren't large. After clean-up we went for a hike. We'd never seen the trails here and wanted to see if they looked like the ones in Mexico, just rocks, cactus, and more rocks.
We saw a car, probably the one that slowly drove past us last night was parked there, it was a Lincoln Town car with NY license plates. We stopped to look at the trail map sign that also had terrain information. If you got hurt on those trails you'd be in a world of trouble because there were no emergency services, no cell service, and no help buttons; you were on your own up here.
We proceeded past the sign after picking `C-Trail,' the one with the least altitude gain and circled around and returned to the starting point, degree of difficulty-2, distance 1.8 miles, elevation gained 120 feet.
At first we walked through short trees, weeds, and rocks, grass and sand but as we got higher it turned into mostly boulders and rocks. The trail was well marked by short concrete pillars so it was easy to follow. After maybe half a mile it went downhill into an area that trapped lots of huge boulders that probably eroded out of the mountain; I suggested this was where the three rivers started.
We smelled cigarette smoke as we got close and saw three guys, oddly dressed hanging out on the rocks. One of them (with a sideways cap) walked up by David and blocked the trail. He wanted to know if we had a lighter, David was in the lead and said no, just water. The guy nodded then another one walked up with sort of a gangster strut (he was taller than the other two) and wanted to know why we were walking around in the mountains but David was silent. I whispered to him to keep moving these guys were trouble. When David tried to leave the guy with the cap on moved and held out his arm to block our way. Then the third guy walked over behind me (he was thin and short and wore a very tight white undershirt over plain denim shorts).
"Leave your wallets here and you can go." The tall guy said with a serious look on his face.
"We got nothing and we don't want any trouble." David held up his hands holding nothing but a bottle of water.
He said, "handoveryawallets," the first guy (with the sideways cap) said as he stepped closer to David and sort of rocked his head side to side as he spoke in his face. I wanted to laugh at the obvious TV show gangster cliche.
David sighed and looked over his shoulder at me and whispered, Chop em as hard as you can in the throat.'
He reached behind and pulled out his four pockets to show he had nothing but a bottle of water in his hand. David glanced back at me, so I did the same: empty pockets, just water.
But he was wearing cargo pants and had lower pockets that everyone could see and the cap guy told him, "Last time, gimmeyou wallet den you kin go."
The guy standing beside him added, "Don't make my man here mad, we don't like no liars." As they said that they all inched closer and the guy by me moved and stood on the trail behind me. I decided it was time to start, so I acted like something caught my attention on the ground behind his feet.
"What the?" was what I said then started looking closely at the prickly pear cactus behind him.
I bent over a little and then recoiled slightly (like I was startled) and looked him in the eyes, then back at the ground to his left, "Whut kinda snake izat?" I asked him softly and bent way over like I was looking at something he couldn't see very close behind his left shoe. He quickly turned around and bent over too. I mumbled to him that I hated snakes. But he said he `dint see nuthin.' "Right there!" I pointed at the prickly pear cactus by his shoes and when he moved so his back faced his buddies I stood up and chopped him with the side of my hand as hard as I could in his throat. He stumbled backward into me with his hands at his neck, bent over unable to speak or breathe making weird choking-gagging sounds.
I stepped back, looked at David and shouted "It bit him! Holy fuck! Ain't snakes with red stripes poisonous?"
The guy stood up with his hands at his throat silently struggling to inhale even a tiny gasp of air.
When you suddenly can't breathe it occupied 100% of your brain activity. There was nothing else he could do but fight hard to inhale.
The tall dude quickly walked over to see what happened, the guy dropped to his knees with his hands at his neck, unable to make the slightest sound, he was fully panicked but completely unable to breathe.
When the tall guy stood beside him and kept asking what happened, I told him, "That fuckin snake bit him when he bent over, look!"
The cap guy by David was totally frozen with fear and David bent over like he was looking at something in the weeds too, and he pointed down, the cap guy turned and looked around, "What the fuck?"
With the other two focused on breathing I saw David suddenly punch the cap guy in his throat and he instantly dropped to his knees and grabbed his neck too. I walked over by David and we acted like we were helping the cap guy. We both stood nearby, he was bent over with his hands on his neck. I put my hand on his back and gently patted it.
Now the only one left standing was the leader, the tall guy. While he was consoling his friend I reached into my leg pocket and grabbed my knife and carefully unfolded the blade. David saw what I was doing, I whispered to him the knife was ready.
David loudly yelled, "Its right here! Same color as the sand, it's a venomous snake." The leader spun around and for the first time saw us standing by the cap guy, now on his knees clutching his throat. We backed away from him as if he was the snake, or it was in his clothes. We stepped towards the leader and he walked past us to check his buddy.
The asshole shoved David off the trail so he could get by and David grabbed him from behind in a neck hold and pulled his head back hard, lifted his feet off the trail. At first I thought he was going to snap his neck like we learned in Seals. David had his head tilted way back so all he could see was the sky.
I quickly moved in and jammed my knife into his groin beside his dick as hard and deep as I could, his legs rose up in pain but David had his neck in a crushing grip from behind. He even tried kicking us but missed.
As I pulled the knife out hot red blood literally sprayed out, it was a lucky shot but I hit it perfectly. He felt pain then suddenly it felt like he was uncontrollably shitting hot diarrhea down his leg. David let him go after a few seconds and the guy stood there briefly staring at us like he was furious. Within seconds blood start to puddle between his feet. "Mother fuckers I'm gonna kill both of you." He shouted with a look of total fear and panic on his face from the denial that he only had only seconds left.
He raised his hand and pointed at us as if he could actually do something to us. David raised his arms and folded them across his chest and smiled at him knowing the three of them would be dead within thirty seconds.
I walked over to the first guy who was blue faced on his hands and knees on the foot path, I got to him as he collapsed face down and got that dead-empty expression on his face. I reached down and slit his external jugular then felt his pockets and pulled out a wallet and I opened it and took out his license and some cash and dropped it on his back. I wiped the blood off the blade on his shirt and moved back by David.
David went to the cap guy and grabbed his wallet and emptied it too, I walked over and sliced his external jugular too.
And by then the main guy was on his knees and started to cry and totally changed character from gang leader to someone that was willing to apologize and give up crime forever. 'Sorry, too late asshole!'
His face was already pale but the puddle of blood around him was visibly larger. He lowered himself to sitting on the trail, his last act was to lie down gently on the path, then he became silent like his friends. His eyes stared blankly off in the distance but his expression of panic was gone. His blank look reminded me of the arms dealer Marco we off'd down by Juarez.
I checked a few of his pockets but he was a bloody mess. I grabbed something from his pocket, it was car keys, then I wiped my hands on his shirt.
David opened his bottled water, he poured while I rinsed my hands and then we drank the rest of his bottle and left. He tossed the empty bottle into the weeds.
Before we left we slit their shirts and jeans to promote the buzzards feasting on them, then we left. Total time from first encounter until all of them were nearly naked and dead was about five minutes.
A few feet down the trail I noticed the swarm of buzzards overhead was even bigger now and they had huge wingspans. It gave me the creeps knowing they were watching us so we started jogging to get away faster.
I remembered the scene in the 1963 movie The Birds when gulls attacked an outdoor child's birthday party, but these were buzzards with six foot wingspans. I wanted David to move faster but didn't want to alarm him even more.
About twenty minutes later we jogged up to their car. The doors were unlocked but aside from fast food wrapper trash and cigarette butts the car was empty. David slipped the key in the ignition and turned it one click and the buzzers came on but the gauge said the tank was almost empty. He closed the door and we walked back to camp. I looked at their NY window sticker, it expired half a year ago, the car was probably stolen.
As we walked down the driveway back to our campsite I whispered, `Traditional Tibetan Sky Burial, they're not worthy.'
It could be months til someone finds the remains.'
`I'm good with that. It's not our fault their stupidity got them dead.'
The park rangers will run the plate and tow the car before they found any remains. David whispered that we should stash their car somewhere.
We returned to the camp site but never mentioned what happened, they never asked how the trails looked. After we got back we took sponge baths with baby wipes in our tent and made lunch. I took time to really scrub my hands. Tonight the main attraction was smoked pork ribs and I was hungry and eager to taste them.
For a while I was obsessed with getting the dried blood off my fingers, we were going to be eating ribs soon with our fingers. Then David tried using some alcohol preps to clean the edges of my fingernails and got all remaining specs of dried blood off my hands.
He set a tub of soapy water on the tailgate and a wash cloth and told me to scrub my hands until it hurt, then he drizzled alcohol over my hands and let them air dry.
Saturday night we shared our wine and scooped ourselves two large servings of homemade coleslaw. We ate their smoked pork ribs and had a wonderful evening. I didn't realize they cooked as much as they did. They smoked twelve racks of ribs for four people, so they must have planned on taking leftovers home! David and I split one, I think they ate the same amount.
They also set out homemade baked navy beans and homemade cornbread with lots of butter and several rolls of paper towels too.
Mike explained how their neighbors complained about the smoker smoke so any time they went camping they always made tons extra and took `em home. Then she admitted sometimes they went camping just to cook ribs, we all laughed at that.
Their ribs were wonderful, juicy, tender, and the sauce was spicy and sweet. I think that meant they were Kansas City style. He said that meant the bones were cut square and the rub and sauces were sweeter, more like the store brand called Sweet Baby Ray's. But his had pepper heat added, he said he added Thai hot red peppers (dried) ground into powder in the sauce and a few other secret ingredients.
David interrupted him and told him the sauce and ribs were excellent and Mike looked embarrassed briefly.
We sat there telling stories and drinking too much and had a good time talking across the fire pit. Trina admitted they sold the racks of ribs to neighbors and friends, it was a hobby and tiny source of income too. They said they'd camped here about a dozen times and only once saw water in the river, the best time to come here was when a heavy snow was melting up in the mountains. We declined to share a joint with them but they smoked it themselves. David whispered to me after she was obviously high and that her voice changed and was no longer annoyingly guyish. When he whispered that I slapped my hand over my mouth to stop from laughing, Trina asked if I was alright and I said I nearly bit my tongue, but I was okay. David snickered at me over Whispernet again.
I got out the jammer in my right hand and tossed it in the air and caught it several times so David saw I was threatening him playfully.
We had this running fake battle over Whispernet trying to embarrass each other around other people, but it was all meant in fun.
Eventually the subject of us came up and we admitted we were married in Chicago years ago. David told the short version of meeting at UTA and coming from crappy families and never going home and only sending them Christmas cards. We never mentioned Seal school or DOD school in Nevada.
"So what do you guys do? You guys work together, right?" Trina asked.
"We are problem solvers in the western half of the USA so we fly around and fix shit, it's a new government program and we're really not allowed to discuss it much, sorry about that and I don't mean to sound disrespectful."
"Oh no, that's fine. Mike said you guys were into something with weapons but he didn't know and the guys in his department were curious." She explained while Mike was gone pissing in the trees.
Then I told her, "We're sort of in the anti-terror and anti-major crime business but we can't discuss specifics other than to say that if you watched the news and saw stories of big crimes or attacks on the USA that failed we might have been the fly in their ointment."
"That sounds like fun." She added with a smile.
"Sometimes it's pretty dangerous. We've pissed off some really really bad people."
"Well, I wish you two the best luck and I guess I'll say thanks for protecting us." David said `thanks,' then Mike returned to the campsite still trying to zip up his jeans. In the dark sky above us we kept hearing the sound of vultures squawking at each other.
Trina asked, "So how many small attacks are there inside the USA every year by real terrorists?"
"I don't know the number," David stated, "It's not that big but we only cover the western states so we've never heard about half the country. Something to keep in mind is the definition of terror has changed, one of these days you might be charged just for posting something not allowed online."
David told her this story trying to explain to her what we did for a living: "Say you're in a group of guys in New York planning on hijacking an airliner and flying it into a skyscraper. The night before all of you decide to go out to eat, and while you're waiting for your food one of your guys gets up to use the bathroom but never returns. Then another guy leaves to find out where he went and he never comes back. That's sort of what we do. Someone fucked up their plans before they got to carry them out, that's what our service does. There are teams like us around the country."
While we were eating I whispered to David that I wondered how long it would take the vultures to strip the visitors from the east coast to the bare bones, and he said it could take days. He said the insects would do the detail work and that would take a long time, especially their brains, if they had any.
When I got up to pee I saw a vulture fly off with a chunk of leg in his claws. When I saw that it actually startled me.
After I got back from the trees David took his turn, we whispered while he was watering the tree and agreed to only piss on tree trunks. I thought he'd comment on vultures eating human remains during dinner but he never did. I had the jammer in my pocket just in case.
Around 8:15pm I went to get our last bottle of cold wine and David asked Mike about making his barbecue sauce but he said he usually competed in White Sands competitions so his blend was a secret but the base was a gallon can of Kraft BBQ sauce then he added brown sugar, coffee, chocolate, oregano, crushed red pepper, garlic juice, jalapeno bits, salt, pepper, and other small ingredients. He said it was actually rather expensive to make a batch and the competition was sometimes not very friendly but it was always fun.
They had an annual chili and smoked meat competition on the base at the mess hall every year on the weekend before the 4th of July. He said he had two ribbons and that this would be his fourth year.
Out of nowhere David asked if White Sands was involved in Five Eyes and Mike said he couldn't comment, but we already saw the satellite dish antennas and knew it was part of Five Eyes, but the big ones were for the TDRS network.
David told them about when he was a kid and his father showed him something really weird on their home satellite dish system.
"We lived outside of town and we had an eight foot satellite dish because there was no cable TV in our area. One day my dad showed me two channels on a Westar satellite where all the TV showed was areas of black and grey snow that jiggled and moved with no apparent pattern, but the sound was like listening to 200 people talking on the phone."
"He took his shortwave radio and connected a cable from its antenna jack to the composite video output on the satellite receiver and started to tune across shortwave and showed me it could receive individual phone calls, but only one side.
That was back before all the long distance was moved to fiber optic, and it all went by satellite, but you could only listen to one side of the conversation, and all the calls we heard on that one channel all seemed to be coming from Hawaii to the southwest USA. David said that was one of the reasons why he decided he was going to college for electronics. He said his dad also showed him some of the little secret radio stations on satellite, most were about technology. He said he remembered hearing names like Gary Bourgois, Bill Cooper, Chuck Dawson, and Dean Spratt.
Mike said different versions of that still happened today, to some extent but not like it was in the 1980s and 90s. He said anywhere you saw a huge satellite dish sending or receiving signals to a satellite, somewhere nearby you'll usually find one owned by the CIA listening too, but lots of them were hidden, especially in hostile countries like Saudi Arabia and the former Soviet bloc countries.
David said, "I hate those people."
Mike replied with, "Welcome to the club." Then we all laughed. I started to feel tired and drunk so I whispered that I'd like to go to bed. We excused ourselves and left for our tent after thanking them for a wonderful evening and a fantastic meal, David said we'd love to do this again. Mike said it was too bad we lived so far away.
As we put away our stuff and got ready to turn in we saw them putting stuff away too and getting ready to hit the sack.
We all went to bed drunk around 10pm and shared sloppy beer and BBQ sauce flavored deep tongue kisses for a while. We both thought Mike reminded us of a movie character and agreed he looked a lot like a character in Crocodile Dundee-1, when Mick met Sue in the bar a guy seated at a table tried to pick a fight with Mick by saying he was a crock poacher and smacked him on the butt and asked where to poach a few crocks, then later in the outback a truck with drunk guys was chasing kangaroos, he was the one that got out to pee and told the others to shine the light in the brush. We could not think of any female actors that looked like Trina.
David fell asleep quickly, but I was half on top of him for a while to gently kiss his lips and finger and lick his beer can size flat nipples for a while but his eyes closed and he was gone so I wiggled down with my head in his arm pit and fell asleep pressed against him.
Sleeping pressed into David like I was a puppy was something I found very relaxing and helped me sleep all night. Sometimes when I snuggled against him when we went to bed it felt like the loving mother attention I never at home. He never objected to it.
At 1:45 AM my cell vibrated, I woke David and we silently tiptoed outside with one flashlight (off) and walked up the road (about 1400 feet) to the stolen car and rolled it to the petroglyph site parking area (downhill all the way) and left it there then walked back to the tent, it was 3:30am by the time we got back in bed. By moving their car we gave the vultures, rats, and the coyotes more time to eat the evidence and carry the bones away.
The next morning at breakfast we found out Mike and Trina were discussing getting a highway style motorcycle too, so we spoke about taking trips together around southern New Mexico, which if you were from western Texas usually meant riding up there.
"You guys notice all the vultures?" Mike asked at breakfast.
"Dead deer, they feed a lot of critters up in the hills. Nothing goes to waste out here." David replied.
We all stopped and saw what looked like a swarm of about forty of them circling above the hiking trails.
"They're huge." I mumbled.
"Yes, and they seem to appear out of nowhere too." Mike added.
David said he wondered if they smelled our ribs and wanted their bones.
"Yeah, I saw that on TV once, they take bones up in the air and drop them on the rocks so they shattered so they can land and eat the marrow."
"You gonna leave them the bones?" David asked.
"I might, but I don't think there is any marrow in pork ribs." Mike replied still watching the six foot wide birds soar in large circles above us, huge ugly black birds. But Trina was grossed out and said she was done eating, she told him she wanted to leave before we ended up on the menu. Everyone laughed and we broke camp and all of us started packing our gear.
David whispered to me more about highway bike riding out here,
"There ain't a lot of stuff to go see in western Texas. Maybe Big Bend National Park and the Marfa Lights, but otherwise there wasn't much else in the Chihuahuan desert. They had river raft trips on the Rio Grande that looked a lot like the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon except the walls weren't 1,000 feet tall vertical reddish brown sandstone. Anyone that thought a border wall could be built between Texas and Mexico had never seen the Rio Grande in the national park!"
I packed our stuff inside the tent, rolled up the sleeping bags and deflated the air mats and put stuff in the back of his truck. It never packed as quickly as it got set-up. David added, "In New Mexico there's tons of stuff to see and places to explore." We discussed (out loud) riding around New Mexico and places to go see.
Everyone was packed and around 11am we pulled out first. We stopped to shake hands and thanked them for being wonderful campers; we'd love to do it again. I knew David wouldn't have said that unless he really meant it.
On the way home we argued the advantages of tent camping versus a small pop-up camper pulled behind our new motorcycle but it was hard to be unbiased about it. We already decided to have a hitch installed and the wiring harness for trailer lights.
We got home at 2:45pm and unpacked and cleaned our gear. We never heard anything about the three dead criminals we gave to the buzzards. My guess was their car was stolen and they were on the run, final destination probably East LA.
I guessed after their sky burials there still might be enough evidence from dental x-rays to identify the bodies. The buzzards flew off with big chunks, they could relocate an entire human body that way in a short amount of time, its possible there would be no remains at the scene, just bones scattered around the desert. That's why it's called Sky Burial in Tibet.
In Tibet they cut up the dead into buzzard size chunks and hand fed it to the birds that knew the routine and waited for their cut.
Eventually the coyotes would get involved and carry off chunks, maybe a hand with half a forearm. A mountain lion would take the skull and carry it back to its den to share with the cubs. In less than 12 hours there'd probably be nothing left at the scene but shreds of clothing and dried blood stains. The hunters became the hunted was how they paid for their criminality. Even if they had asked nicely we still didn't have wallets or money with us.
It was sad but also somewhat funny how their situation went from a crime routine that probably worked in NYC but cost them their lives in New Mexico, I bet they never saw it coming.