An Eye for Gold Read online

As I stared out across the parched expanse, I was, as always, amazed by the determination of those pioneers, men and women and children who had walked across this barren wilderness beside their oxen, sparing their weights from the exhausted animals’ loads. They had passed with painful slowness, taking six months to cross these landscapes. Twenty years later, a railroad would have carried them the entire distance in a matter of days. Now, a century and a half later, I looked down at four lanes of blacktop which carried bored motorists at seventy-five miles per hour in air-conditioned comfort, and at long snakes of freight trains hurrying as quickly on steel rails; I touched die earth with nothing but a shadow, and manned spacecraft overhead saw these longitudes roll past several times a day. My world was contracting.

  I lifted my gaze from the whiteness of the salt flats to the staggering challenge that had met the emigrants further west: four hundred more miles of desert cut north to south by rugged mountain ranges. Every fifteen to twenty miles, they had climbed long grades toward a pass, or added leagues to keep their passage close to the life-giving waters of the Humboldt River which rose in the valleys of northeast Nevada. This river they had followed westward for several more weeks to the place where it vanished under the desert sun. There, already pushed to the edge of survival, the wayfarers had set out parched and hungry across a final forty miles of cruel, waterless heat, lured on by the heartless dance of mirages. The lucky ones had found life and hope at the banks of die Carson and Truckee Rivers, which flowed east to meet them from the final, towering challenge of the Sierra.

  The waves of mountains and valleys that rose before me may have seemed a wasteland to most emigrants, but to my geologist’s eye, it was heaven. I found the sweeping emptiness and frank rhythms of the brown topography infinitely soothing. Out of the soft dryness of the high desert basins before me rose long fins of bald mountain rock, ramparts tens of miles long and thousands of feet high, naked crests of eroding earth. Each range lay collared by a ramp of its own discarded sediment, alluvial fans fed by laceworks of arroyos which spread outward into sagebrush-studded barrens or phantom seas of brilliant white salt The mountain ranges marched toward us like massive swells in an ocean made of rock, wave after cresting wave as far as the haze-laden atmosphere could disclose. I coughed. “Smoke,” I said, to no one in particular, speaking into the microphone on my headset.

  “Pretty bad visibility,” the pilot said, her voice seeming to originate just inside my ears thanks to the excellent noise-attenuating headphones I was wearing. “I can usually see clear across the state.”

  “Where’s the smoke coming from?” I asked.

  “Another range fire. Been a lot of them already this year. Lightning starts them, or some tenderfoot playing with matches again. They rise up from their Barcaloungers, buy themselves a thirty-five-thousand-dollar four-by-four, load it up with beer and tortilla chips, and think they’re Davy Crockett. There ought to be a law.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but somehow you just can’t legislate common sense.”

  The dark pall hung in the air like a dingy smudge of poorly-erased graphite.

  “Word has it you’re a geologist,” the pilot said.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “So how were all these mountain ranges formed?” She asked.

  “Word has it that Nevada is being stretched on a rack. Or at least, that’s the theory that most people currently agree on.”

  “Could you enlarge on that?” she asked, smiling wryly.

  “Well, you see, Nevada hasn’t always been this wide. Fifteen or twenty million years ago, it was one-third narrower. It’s been stretched, kind of like an accordion.”

  “Oh, sure,” the pilot said doubtfully.

  “No, really,” I said. ‘The process happens so slowly you wouldn’t hardly notice it, except for the earthquakes, but they’re far enough apart that you’d feel few of them in your lifetime.”

  “What luck. Because I hate accordion music. So who’s playing this accordion?”

  “Giants,” I said, “and they have perfect pitch. No, seriously, there are several theories about that, but they all have to do with plate tectonics.”

  “Which is?”

  “The earth is made up of concentric spheres of differing materials. It has an inner core of very hot, solid iron, an outer core of—”

  “Simplify it for me. I’m trying to fly an airplane here.”

  “Okay, imagine a peach. You have your pit, the earth’s core. It’s solid. You have your flesh, or mantle. And you have your skin, the earth’s crust. Okay, now the theory is that the insides of your peach is made of molten rock that is dispelling heat, which sets up convection currents in the flesh. These currents drag on the skin. Your skin is rigid and brittle relative to the flesh, so it fractures into sections, called plates. Okay, now there are places where you have upweiling convection, lots of hot flesh rising to the surface. The plates slide apart, and flesh from below fills in as new peach skin. This is called a spreading center. Got me so far?”

  “I’ll never eat another peach.”

  “Good. Well, if one part of the skin is being spread apart, then it follows that in another place it’s being compressed, because you only have so much peach. In the case of the earth’s crust, sometimes that results in a pressure ridge, like the Himalayas, but in other places one plate is sliding under the other, like Peru sliding over the Pacific Ocean floor.”

  “Peach. You were talking about a peach.”

  “Keep flying the plane. Okay, the evidence in the chunk of the peach we’re flying over says that North America slid right up over a spreading center, just like a Buick going over a speed bump, and that hot upwelling place is now right under Nevada.”

  “Should I turn around?”

  “No. There are hot springs around here, but you’re not likely to land in one. Anyway, so the theory is that all that upwelling heat is forming a bulge, which is heaving the middle of the state upwards. The crust is being stretched east and west, so it fractures north and south, splitting into parallel chunks which slide east and west away from each other. Voilà, mountains and valleys.”

  “How’d the gold get there?” she asked.

  “That’s also there because of the heat,” I said. Gold is—at least initially—a hydrothermal deposit. I have oversimplified these faults. There is a network of fractures. Chunks move up and down, back and forward, and there are many pulses of movement and heating. As these rocks crack and move apart, hydrothermal fluids—superheated water with dissolved minerals—move through them. As the waters cool, minerals fall below their freezing points one by one, and solidify, filling the fractures.”

  “Voilà,” said the pilot. “Gold deposits.”

  “In essence,” I said. “But not all will have gold. Most have other minerals. Sometimes the vein—the filled fracture—will have been fractured again, cross-cutting, and a section will drop down. That’s why the old sourdoughs finally had to just take their best guess and dig. Even today, the miners sometimes stop digging inches away from the gold. It’s all a crap-shoot,” I said.

  The pilot nodded appreciatively, but changed the subject. “Want to fly her for a while?” she asked, lifting her hands from the yoke. “Word has it you’re also a pilot”

  “Just try to hold me back,” I said, gingerly taking the controls. I had never flown anything as fancy as this. The Cheyenne had dual controls and a panel encrusted with aeronautical dials and widgets including GPS, radar, and a radar altimeter. It was long and sleek and had twin four-blade props, wing-tip auxiliary fuel tanks, and full de-icing equipment.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Behind us, the FBI agent lounged in one of four beige leather seats, his long legs up on the opposite seat in front of him and his coffee forgotten in its walnut burl cup holder. His eyes were closed, and his chest rose and fell in a deep, slow rhythm. But an odd tension in the muscles of his face told me he wasn’t really asleep.

  Had he sat back there specifically so I could sit up front? Was
this further seduction in whatever game it was he was playing with me? Should I fly the plane and play along, or pass up the offer and see what happened next?

  Still uncertain, I turned back toward the pilot. What had she said her name was? Franci? No, Faye. Faye Carter. She was the kind of woman I wished I was; tall, confident, and amused by life. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but she had a vigor that outshone anything a whole box full of cosmetics could do for anyone who lacked it. She had rich hazel eyes, a splattering of freckles on milky skin, and a thick brush of auburn hair that curved nicely toward the nape of her neck. I wondered how she fit into the picture. The embroidered patch on her breast pocket read SPECIAL DELIVERIES FLYING SERVICES, which meant that she wasn’t an employee of the FBI, and I knew that pilots worked for years before they made a halfway decent wage. Yet her pilot’s uniform—a light blue shirt with epaulets, and navy slacks—fitted her extraordinarily well, as if they’d been custom-made. The twill of the slack were of summer-weight wool gabardine, very fine and fancy for a lowly charter pilot. And she seemed quite at ease with her client; no trace of the obsequiousness that comes with normal levels of dependency. I speculated that she had a second source of income, and wondered what that meant.

  “I’d love to fly it, Faye,” I answered finally.” But I’ve just got the basic license. Single-engine only. Never flown a twin. Is it much different from a single?”

  Faye’s laughter filled my ears. “I wasn’t suggesting that you should try anything fancy. Just keep her straight and level and keep your hands off the throttles.”

  I nodded and put my feet on the pedals in front of me. They felt stiff. I moved the yoke a fraction of an inch clockwise as a test. Not much happened. I moved it back. “This thing has more guts than the machine I trained in,” I said. “Not so quick to turn.”

  “She’s pretty stable,” Faye said. “A little heavy on the left rudder. I’ll put her on autopilot for a minute so you can feel the size of the corrections you’ll need to make.”

  I felt the yoke and pedals shift slightly as we met lifting air beyond the crest of the first range inside Nevada. After a moment I said, “Shall I maintain this bearing?”

  “Yeah, until we pass the next beacon.” Faye showed me the instruments she was using to track our position relative to nearby navigational beacons. She unclipped the air chart from her knee board so I could spot their positions.

  I unfolded the chart and ran a finger over the route she had penciled onto it We were following a narrow slot defined by a daisy chain of small airports that served small towns along Interstate 80. Our route was further constrained by the requirement that we dodge between a series of military munitions test and practice ranges which lay to the north and south. I smiled. Just like the emigrants of the 1840’s and 1850’s, the railroad builders of the 1860’s, and the highway builders of the twentieth century, we would follow the Humboldt River.

  “I’ll switch off the autopilot now,” Faye said.

  “Okay, Cisco.”

  “You got her, Pancho.”

  I tried the controls again, and this time I began to feel the movements of the plane match my intentions. I flew along for a while in peaceful rapture, feeling the sleek plane and the power of flight as an extension of my own body. The thickening haze offered further detachment from the earth below, and I began to dream an eagle’s dreams.

  A few minutes later, I was distracted by the sight of an enormous hole in the ground off to the north of our track. It was so big that it stopped my breath in my throat It was clearly man-made, and at least half a mile wide and a thousand feet deep. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing it out to Faye.

  “Doesn’t that just fry your mind?” she said. “They’re supposed to put all recognizable features on the air charts, but somehow they left that one off. I’ll bet you can see that puppy from space. The faintest little road gets marked, but a big, honking mine like that . . . nothing, or at best they give you this little pick and hammer symbol which just means ‘mine.’ ”

  “I know it’s an open-pit mine,” I said, “Meteor craters don’t have access roads and tailings ponds. But what are they mining?”

  The FBI agent’s voice suddenly came through the headphones. “That, my dear Em, is the source of what brings us here today.”

  I whipped around in my seat and looked at him, startled, even though I had known that he was awake. His eyes were still closed. “They’re ripping a scar like that for gold?” I asked, covering my surprise with my annoyance over the view. “The stuff’s worth hardly anything these days. And all that just to make pretty stuff to hang around peoples’ necks and fingers?” I felt almost sick. My beautiful desert symphony of sweeping curves and dust-brown vistas, all gone thunk so a few people could decorate their clavicles and metacarpals.

  “Sure, jewelry still uses up seventy percent,” the agent said, “but there’s also gold crowns for your teeth, and of course the little matter of corrosion-free electrical contacts in computers and cell phones and lovely little widgets like that.”

  “Bah!”

  The agent opened his eyes and looked at me. “That’s my Em,” he cooed. “Get that moral outrage up! Take sides!” He ran a hand through his short salt-and-pepper hair and yawned. “But while you’re at it, please keep in mind that part of your nation’s might and stability resides in a nice, big pile of gold bars stored at a quaint old fort called Knox.”

  “I thought we’d gone off the gold standard,” Faye said.

  “Yes, that’s true,” he replied. “And you can no longer turn in your greenbacks in exchange for silver from the U.S. Treasury. But there’s still a mountain of gold in reserve, and while it might not back all of our currency, it acts like a sea anchor for the nation’s economy.”

  “How?” I asked. I knew there was a stack of gold in a vault at Fort Knox, but I had no idea how it linked to the value of a dollar, or, for that matter, where Fort Knox was. Kentucky? Tennessee? Somewhere back there in one of those states I had never seen.

  “Consider the fate of a banana republic with no bullion,” he replied. “They have a military dictatorship. They start a war with their neighbor, or an uprising of some kind. It costs the government to wage that war. They have no natural resources, so instead they buy their weapons from us, or from China. They don’t really have the money to pay for those weapons, so they just print some. Galloping inflation follows, people rolling wheelbarrows full of paper money down the street to buy a bag of flour. We don’t get that here in the U. S. of A., because we enjoy a stable society, both because we have a strong Constitution, but also because we have true wealth in minerals and productive land.”

  “That’s quite a little speech,” I said.

  He opened one eye and looked at me. “Germany tried to mine gold from sea water to pay off its debt after the First World War.”

  “We had a little trouble after that war, too, as I recall. A little thing called the Great Depression,” Faye countered.

  He smiled. “Yes, and things got tough for a while. But Roosevelt got us through it by putting us to work on the land we had, rather than by starting another war to try to grab the wealth next door.”

  “But he didn’t keep us out of that war, now did he?’ Faye said. “And that was what really dragged our economy out of the Depression. The old military-industrial complex saves the day.”

  His smile spread into a grin. “Touche. But my point is that, overall, we’ve enjoyed a relatively stable economy with no runs of hyperinflation. In part because we have gold reserves.”

  I was following little of what was being said, so I switched to something I did understand. “So back to that hole in the ground. You said we were out here to look into an endangered species thing. Are you saying that the species lives in an open pit gold mine?”

  “Not an existing mine, not yet,” he answered. “Just one that exists in the hearts of investors and the imaginations of geologists like you.” His clear eyes rested on mine for a while, measuring my re
action.

  “Okay . . .” I said, not quite certain to what I was agreeing. Was he pointing out the conundrum geologists try to live with—that the resources we are paid to locate are sometimes ripped from the ground in ways we’d find both amazing or horrifying—or was he inviting me once again to forsake my profession for his?

  He nodded, apparently satisfied. “Good. Because we have work to do.”

  6

  STEPHEN GILES GAVE THE CLASPS ON HIS BLACK leather suitcase a buff with the heel of his right hand. The clasps were fashioned of a lustrous bronze, which stood out to good effect against the richness of the leather/But it wasn’t just the appropriateness of the metal that pleased him: even their shapes were perfect. Quality, they said. The owner of this bag has style and class.

  But today even the perfection of the clasps could not save him from the sea of frustration that engulfed him. He was going to have to postpone his trip, and the use of this splendid suitcase, and . . . It was fine that the FBI had started their investigation; it was their timing that was a problem. But he would do his job, and then he would go. Be gone, at last, into his real life. Release. Freedom to be who he was, if only for a while

  Sighing, he flicked the clasps open one more time and again lifted the lid. Inside lay his summer-weight gabardine slacks. They would look excellent on him, draped like silk over the leg muscles he had developed to just the right balance of strength and sleekness at the gym. Beside the slacks, the perfect hundred-and-fifty-dollar boat shoes winked through the little plastic windows in their protective flannel sleeves. The sleeves had been a good investment. They would keep everything else in the case neat and clean once he’d actually walked in those shoes. The sleeves had been an extra expense, yes, but expense had no meaning when it came to quality. He understood quality. It was wasted on so many, but not on him.

  He ran a hand over the smooth fabric of the slacks, touched the nubbly knit of the deep burgundy sweater beside it that would so exquisitely set off the ruddy tones of his skin. Cashmere. Beneath that, more slacks, pristine white leather running shoes in another set of sleeves, a stack of perfectly folded shirts—all silk—his leather toilet kit, and underwear—all brand new, but pre-laundered, so they would hang just right. Boxers, not jockey shorts. Jockeys were for boys, and for men with no class.