He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.
Chapter
42
Scenes of brutal death and violence were starting to seem almost mundane, as if they were the new normal. I looked from the three dead men to the four who were still living. The radio man needed medical attention. The reluctant trio needed questioning. Zack was the only one even remotely qualified to help the radio man. I didn’t speak Spanish. That made Matt the de facto interrogator for the trio.
Matt pulled the first away from the group. Unsure of why he was being separated from the other two, the overweight Hispanic resisted with the full force of his being. Matt spoke to the group briefly. His words seemed to reassure the first candidate that he was in no danger. In the end, he allowed Matt to search him for weapons and willingly walked into the radio shack with Matt. Matt exited the shack after only five minutes, the much relieved subject of his interrogation ahead of him. Matt’s methods were obviously more agreeable than the former boss’ had been.
Matt instructed the man to sit against the wall. Once he sat, Matt said something to him and the man stretched his legs out straight and crossed his ankles. Satisfied, Matt approached and took a second man into the shack. This one was tall for a Latino at nearly six feet. He had a muscular build, but his large rimmed glasses suggested that perhaps he was an academic.
While Matt was with the second man, the third attempted to communicate with me. He spoke a mixture of Spanish and unintelligible English. He said the word “scientist” over and over. I couldn’t understand anything else he was trying to get across to me. After nearly ten minutes, Matt exited the shack with the mollified subject ahead of him. He led the man to a different wall and instructed him to sit as the first had done. The third man voluntarily started toward the shack before Matt had spoken to him.
I remained outside, keeping an eye on the two who had already talked with Matt, both of whom now seemed to be completely at ease. Five minutes later, Matt exited the shack and approached me.
“Zack’s buddy over there is named Marcos Chavez. He’s the head honcho from one of the big Mexican cartels. His cartel is the one that put up the capital and manpower to build the lab. These three men are scientists, chemists to be exact. The two with their faces in the dirt are cartel men. The scientists all worked in a big lab in Mexico City. They were kidnapped, along with their families, a week ago. The families are being held back in Mexico to assure their cooperation in the production of methamphetamines here at the lab. They all said the same thing: this was a job they would never return from. When their usefulness was finished, they would be killed. Apparently it’s the cartel way. Leave no witnesses.”
I put my face in my hands and rubbed my eyes as I thought. There was too much happening to take it all in. Obviously, the meth lab was a backburner issue. It was effectively out of commission. “What should we do with the scientists?”
“For now, leave them here. They’re safer here than in town. There must be a pretty good food supply. I assume this is where Curtis brought all the stuff he stole.”
“Okay.” I nodded my head in agreement. “I wish we could reunite them with their families, but that’s beyond our ability. If they want to try to get back on their own, that’s up to them.” I looked over at Zack who seemed to have the radio man nearly put back together, at least to the extent he could. He wouldn’t walk again, but maybe he wouldn’t bleed to death either.
Matt and I joined Zack around the radio man. “I think he’ll live,” Zack said. “I just gave him some morphine which seems to be starting to work.” The pain had locked his upper body in a continuous spasm. As the drug took effect, his muscles began to relax. Zack began speaking in Spanish. The man relayed that his name was Miguel. His loyalty to Chavez had instantly evaporated with the first shot to his knee. If the first shot hadn’t done it, the second shot had turned him into Chavez’s mortal enemy. Miguel told us everything he knew about Chavez and his operation. The information was mostly irrelevant at this point.
When the questioning turned to Curtis, Matt and Zack suddenly became alert. Mere seconds after I picked Curtis’ name from a quagmire of Spanish, Matt quickly stood up and said, “We have to leave! Now!” Zack was on his feet too, the interrogation abandoned.
“What did he say?” I asked, frustrated by my inability to comprehend the vitally important aspect of the conversation I had just witnessed.
“I’ll explain on the way. Where’s Jeb?”
I looked around. He was nowhere in sight.
“Find him, Connor! Find him or we’re leaving him. We don’t have time!” Zack screamed as he gathered his medical supplies from the ground and stuffed them all into the gaping maw of his pack. There was no attempt at orderliness.
I ran searching for Jeb. Zack’s near state of panic had shaken me. His type doesn’t rattle. If Miguel’s revelation had shaken him this badly, I was hesitant to imagine what it had been.
I rounded the corner of the radio shack and found Jeb. He was laying on the ground. “Get up, Jeb. We have to roll!” I started to turn back to Matt and Zack, but stopped short when I realized that Jeb hadn’t moved. I placed my hand on his back and shook him. His back was moist and sticky. Confused, I pulled my flashlight from my belt and shined it on him. It was easier than turning the night vision back on. The body of another Hispanic man was a short distance from Jeb, in what had been deep shadows. His hand was still gripping a silenced pistol. The handle of Jeb’s knife was protruding from the side of the man’s neck, the blade buried to the hilt at a forty-five degree angle. The man was obviously dead.
I turned back to Jeb and rolled him over. Three circles of blood saturated his chest. I felt his neck for a pulse. There wasn’t one. Somehow, after taking three bullets to the chest, he had been able to plant his knife in our would-be assailant before he could turn his gun on us.
Matt rounded the corner, yelling my name. I continued looking at Jeb, grieving the loss of another friend and yet grateful that he had been able to leave life defending us. It would make it easier on Frank.
Matt stopped when he saw the scene. He swore loudly. I stood and looked at Jeb for another second and turned away to Matt.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
Chapte
r
43
In less than a minute, we had piled into an old Jeep we found parked in one of the sheds and were rattling down the overgrown trail that may have been sarcastically referred to as a road if the situation wasn’t so desperate.
As I drove, Matt relayed what they had learned from Miguel. He knew why Curtis and all the guys had left the ranch. They had discovered that the National Guard was holding a perimeter around the town with three roadblocks. Curtis, in his ambition, had decided to procure the Humvees with their heavy guns to solidify his position as the dominant force in the area.
Zack related that the units were not set up in a proper defensive position. They had been deployed to keep people from leaving and were extremely vulnerable to an attack from the rear. They hadn’t been provided with enough men to effectively secure themselves on all sides. The lack of armor made the Humvees very vulnerable to small arms fire. With the two combat veterans we assumed Curtis had at his disposal, the ambush had the potential to be completely overwhelming. Once Curtis obtained the first two Humvees, he could approach the other two positions in a frontal assault without being challenged or he could attack from the rear on foot and reduce the risk of damaging the additional Humvees and other equipment he lusted for.
We were out of radio range. Zack repeatedly tried his radio to no avail. Matt tried over and over to reach Tuttle on the cell phone. The terrain blocked all the signals before they could reach their intended recipients. Before we had gone a quarter mile, I had to stop the jeep and fasten my seat belt. Without it, it was only a matter of time before I was tossed from the vehicle like a rag doll. I was walking a fine line between the required haste of reaching Tuttle before it was too late and pushing the Jeep too hard and breaking it on the rocks, which would force us to cover the distance on foot.
By the time we reached Sager Road, I felt like a bowl full of popcorn that had just erupted from the popper. My head throbbed from the bouncing and jostling. I was going to have bruises across my lap from the seat belt. Somehow, the Jeep was still functioning. I pushed the lower gear knob back into two wheel drive and quickly moved the transmission through first and second gear. I reached third gear and struggled to keep the Jeep pointed forward and upright. I had driven Jeeps extensively as a kid and was thoroughly acquainted with their narrow wheel base and high center of gravity, two key ingredients for a fatal rollover. The moonlight illuminated the smoking road in my mirror. Every corner we rounded ended with the rear wheels losing traction and skidding to the side. Rapid counter steering barely maintained control. Twice, the Jeep exited corners with the wheels on the inside of the turn slamming back onto the gravel surface with tooth jarring force. The Jeep held together.
Zack relentlessly spoke warnings into the radio with no reply. We finally reached the highway. I blew through the stop sign and raced to the nearest road block. I slowed when we reached the spot where the vehicles had parked across the road. They were gone.
“Over there,” Matt yelled, pointing to the drainage ditch. I turned the Jeep to point the lights where he indicated. A camouflage uniform blended into the grass, nearly obscuring the body from sight.
Zack leaped from the back of the Jeep and sprinted to his fallen brother. He knelt briefly and loosed a primal scream from the depths of his bowels. I reached his side and recognized Captain Tuttle, laying face down. His back was riddled with bullets. A brief search of the area turned up the rest of the unit. They were all dead.
Zack was beside himself with grief and rage. He screamed over and over, “I should have been here! I should have been with them!” When we determined the entire unit was beyond help, we piled into the Jeep, clinging to the dismal hope that we would reach the others before Curtis. We still could not raise them on the radio or cell phone.
I buried the pedal in the floor. The Jeep didn’t have a lot of speed, but what it had, it gave willingly. The speed at which I was driving was completely reckless and out of control. The Jeep was on the verge of overturning at every curve. Zack howled in misery, trying in vain to rid himself of the building agony, the agony he knew would be compounded when we reached the next roadblock. Matt continued ineffectually in his attempt to reach the other units. We arrived at the location where Zack said the second group had set up. There were no vehicles. The only thing we found were bodies in the road.
They were all dead.
We raced on to the alfalfa field where Martinez had been when we last saw him. There was no answer to the radio, but it was the most likely of the three locations to be able to spot the attack in time. There was no sage brush to offer cover. Maybe they had seen it coming.
When we arrived, there were no Humvees in the road. They had been replaced with more dead bodies. One was missing. Martinez was not there. We spread out, calling his name. I stopped for a moment at the sound of something I couldn’t decipher. I listened intently and heard a faint, “Help!”
“Over here!” I yelled, shining my flashlight into the dark void ahead. I panned the light back and forth as I stopped to listen again. “Where are you?” I yelled.
“Over here,” the faint voice called back. And then I saw Martinez laying on his stomach in the grass, his rifle still aimed in the direction from which the attack had likely come.
Zack rushed to his side and set to work. He quickly cut his shirt free, examining him for injuries. After several minutes he exclaimed, “He has a head wound. It’s pretty bad, but I think he’s going make it.” He continued to work.
While Zack worked, I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it on to call Katie. After it completed its boot up sequence, a flashing icon notified me of a waiting text message from Katie. I touched the screen to open the message.
It consisted of one word.
HELP!
Chapter
44
I fell to my knees and wept in front of the charred remains of my home, my head bowed forward in anguish.
When I had pulled into the driveway five minutes earlier, I was shocked by the smoking rubble that had been my house. Earlier in the afternoon, everything was fine. There had been no problems.
The sight of my smoldering home added to the steady stream of adrenaline my body had been releasing throughout the previous day and a half. I bolted from the open body Jeep, my legs wobbly from the latest adrenaline dump, and sprinted to the still smoking pile of scorched wood and heat-twisted metal, Matt on my heels. Our flashlights threw separate beams of light that ended in egg shaped spheres of illumination. The two spheres danced randomly across the charred remains of my house as we ran forward. The overwhelming stench of smoke erased every other odor. Together, we combed through the rubble and located five adult corpses.
Heat from the fire had burned the bodies beyond recognition. There was no way of telling whether they were male or female. All that remained were charred masses that roughly resembled the forms of human bodies. Three were congregated in what had been one of the bathrooms. The fourth and fifth were laying close to where the back door had been.
When Matt and I had left the house in the afternoon, five adults, including Katie and Eve, had been there. Toby and Luke were there, too. We searched frantically, looking for the boys’ bodies.
Protruding from the edge of a collapsed pile of rock and brick, which formed the last remembrance of the fire place, Matt located what appeared to be the barrel and action of one of the rifles the boys had been carrying when we last saw them. The fire had reduced the stock of the rifle to ashes. I reached down to pull the barrel free and burned my hands on the sweltering metal.
Looking around, I found one of Toby’s shoes at the edge of the mountain of rubble. It was mostly burned. Somehow, enough remained that it was recognizable. Through bleary eyes, I started trying to move the remnants of the collapsed fireplace, searching for Toby and Luke. The intact pieces were too big to move and besides that, they were still too hot. Matt finally pulled me away, trying to console me. He had lost just as much as I had. His voice was too broken to be understood. His unintelligible consolations did little more than stoke the pain of our loss.
I slowly dragged myself from the house and headed back toward the jeep, leaving Matt alone in the grey and black nightmare. Halfway to the Jeep, I turned back and took in the sight of complete destruction.
That was when I fell to my knees and begged God to let me wake. But I didn’t. You don’t wake up from reality. All I could do was kneel in the dry, powdery dirt, and sob uncontrollably.