The Devil's Highway (11 page)

Ira and I were both dressed in Blue coveralls, and I wore a matching cap, pulled low over my eyes. I pretended to doze, arms across my chest as we drove up to the gate, my heart pounding in my chest, but luckily there was only one man on the gate, and it was neither of the two heroes who had gotten a good look at me on my previous visit.
 

The place had a military look and feel to it, most of it was for show, though.

There was even a patrol on the inside of the fence. The men carried rifles and wore desert camouflage and boonie hats. Some of these guys may have been ex-military, but most were Civvies. The patrol was just walking a path they’d walked before, eyes on the ground in front of them. Amateurs.

The two men on post were little better; they were texting or reading magazines instead of scanning the horizon with binoculars. Standing post properly was a full-time job, and if you hadn’t had post discipline drilled into you in the military, odds were that you wouldn’t take the job as seriously as you needed to. On your average quiet day, I was betting, these militia wannabes wouldn’t be doing too sterling a job on their lookout duties.

One man from the guard shack came directly to the window and told Ira, “You’ll need to go around to that large warehouse. Park in the rear. The trouble’s in a bathroom back there.”

Ira nodded and saluted, for whatever reason, and we were in. I looked behind me; neither of the guards in the shack were visible. I couldn’t see anyone up in the guard tower, either. I reached back and flipped the lid off of Andrea’s hiding place in one of the two 55-gallon drums in the back of the van. “About damned time, it’s stifling in here!” I heard her gasp.

Ira drove slow and easy to the building the guard had indicated. It was behind the infirmary, and that was good, but there was a pretty wide paved space between them, which was not so good.

“So how do we do this?” Ira asked without looking at me.

“We let Andrea out here. She waits while we cause our little diversion, and everyone comes running. Then she goes into the infirmary for Brad.”

Andrea climbed out of the drum and went to the back. “I just hope that Garrett is as good a shot as he says he is,” she said, before she stepped out the back. She ran over and hid behind the hedges beside the Infirmary’s side door. She’d wait there until Ira and I did our part.

Ira’s job was to keep the van running, while I rolled the other 55-gallon drum out and set up our diversion in the warehouse behind the Infirmary. Deputy Hughes had put together a fertilizer bomb that was designed to make a lot of noise, and a lot of black smoke, but minimal actual damage. We wanted everyone in the compound to come running this way, while we were going the other way, hopefully with Brad Caldwell in tow.

I rolled the drum on its bottom edge until I got it into the warehouse, then pulled the lid off. The drum was three-quarters full of fertilizer, tar, and powdered aluminum, with a thick fuse sticking out of the center, like some overgrown firecracker, which, indeed, it was. Hughes had found the plans on how to make the thing on the Internet. I wondered absently if he was buddies with DesertWolf419. Maybe not.

I pulled a lighter from my coveralls and lit the fuse. According to Hughes, the thick twist of coated material was a sixty to seventy second fuse. I hoped he was right. I walked back out to the van and got in.
 

“Let’s go,” I said to Ira.

We pulled up behind the infirmary. Andrea had already gone in, and had wedged the double doors open for good measure.

“Stay here and keep her running,” I told Ira. I got out and raced to the building. I ran down the hallway and took the turn, just in time to meet Andrea doing a tug of war with the stern woman I’d met on my previous visit. Brad Caldwell was between them. Each had hold of one of his arms.

“Brad, my name’s Roland Longville, I’ve been hired by your parents to get you out of here.” He heard me, all right, but he only nodded vaguely, his head rolling.

“They’ve got him shot up with some kind of sedative.”

“You’re not taking him anywhere!” The woman yelled, holding on to Brad’s arm, following us down the hall. We came to the double doors. The woman opened her mouth to admonish us anew, but just then Deputy Hughes’ bomb went off. It was like the end of the world.

The shock from the blast nearly knocked us down. Then for a full second, everyone was bathed in an orange glow. The woman, mouth still open, turned and went back down the hall on a dead run. I turned in time to see thick, evil-looking black smoke start boiling out of the stricken warehouse. Considerable pieces of the front paneling were hanging off the side near where I’d placed the bomb.

“Let’s get the hell of here!” Ira yelled.

I couldn’t have agreed more. I opened the rear doors and helped Brad and Andrea inside, then got in, myself. Ira stomped the gas and we shot towards the gate. People were running past us toward the source of the explosion. I looked back. The thick smoke was expanding; it was impenetrable around the warehouse and the infirmary.

“I sure hope those bastards have some firefighting equipment,” Ira quipped.

We were coming up fast on the gate. I could see that one of the men was out of the guard shack, heading towards us. I saw his eyes widen as he saw us coming, perhaps suspecting the explosion and our presence here were related. He lifted his hands, palms outward. He obviously wanted us to stop, but he wasn’t armed.
 

The gate was down, but it was one of those yellow and black striped wooden gates. “Run through it.” I told Ira. He grinned and let out a war whoop worthy of his ancestors. The gate shattered with a mighty crack, and we were through.
 

I looked into my passenger-side mirror and watched the guard shack rapidly receding in the distance. Inside, the rattled young soldier-wannabe was fumbling to get his AK-47 shouldered, but Sheriff Garrett was on the job. Old Betsy spoke from the bluff two hundred yards away, and the glass in the guard shack blew to bits. A second later, the windows shattered in the nearby guard tower. The sheriff’s barrage kept the compound’s automatic weapons silent.

Ira put the pedal to the floor, and we were off and running. Just fifteen miles of open desert highway between us and the safety of Delgado.

Chapter 14

Ira drove, and Andrea and I scanned the horizon behind us for pursuers. The bomb had worked better than I could have hoped for; the reduced visibility had effectively confused most of the people in the compound.
 

As if reading my thoughts, Ira cracked, “All of that damned smoke, I pretty near lost my way to the gate.” He cackled at his own joke.

“Hughes did a hell of a job on that bomb, all right,” Andrea commented from the back.

“How’s Brad doing?” I asked Andrea, who held a very groggy Brad Caldwell in her arms.

“My guess is they have him shot up with some kind of sedative. Looks like they’ve been keeping him doped up, probably to prevent him from escaping. We need to get him to a doctor and find out what they did to him.”

“Garrett’s pulling out onto the highway up ahead,” Ira informed us.
 

That was good, at least. Garrett put the lights and the siren on, leading us back towards Delgado. Ira closed in behind him, and we were speeding along, an end to the whole sorry ordeal perhaps close at hand, when we saw the white van coming rapidly at us from the other direction.
 

“Those are Redemption Army boys!” Ira yelled.

The van shot past us at such a high speed that it took the driver thirty seconds to slow, stop, and start to turn around. I looked ahead. Garrett was also slowing. He slid to a stop and got out of his four-wheel drive.

“Ira, pull over behind the Sheriff!” Andrea told the old man, who was looking at both of us with worry in his eyes.
 

“What are they going to do?” Ira asked me.
 

I grimaced and pulled out my Colt .45 automatic. “Stay here!” I shouted to everyone, and got out, and walked towards the oncoming van. I halted and stood in the road, gun up, braced and ready.

The van came slowly towards us, then stopped on the road, fifty feet from where I stood. I cast a glance behind me. Garrett was out of his vehicle, walking slowly down the road, holding his .30-06. He was already sighted in on the van. The people in the van could clearly see him, and were probably heatedly discussing their options. Suddenly, the side door slid back, and two men leapt out, carrying automatic weapons. One of them immediately developed a large red hole in his chest, an instant before the sullen
thump
of the .30-06 whined past me. The man never heard the shot that killed him.

I pointed my Colt .45 at the other man, from a steady two-handed stance, and shook my head. He brought his gun up, anyway, and I sent three rounds his way, aiming carefully, not willing to risk being on the receiving end of a burst from that automatic. One round caught him in the left arm, not bad shooting with a pistol at that range, but not a killing shot, either. He yowled and dropped the weapon, and someone dragged him back inside the van.
 

They’d had enough, apparently; two men were down, and Garrett and I were still standing. The driver started backing away, slowly, zigging and zagging, then whipped the van around and headed back towards the compound. Behind me I heard the bolt of the Sheriff’s rifle slam home. Garrett was thinking of disabling the van. I was thinking we had no time to take prisoners.

“There’s no time!” I turned and called out to Garrett. “We have Brad, but he’s been given some kind of drug. Let them go!”

“All right! Then let’s get the hell out of here, and back to Delgado!” Garrett called back, already running toward his vehicle. I ran back and pulled the Redemption Army man’s body from the road, and collected the two submachine guns. As I crawled back into the van I caught Ira’s eye.

“Quite a bit of excitement for these parts. Just your average day, back in ‘Nam,” he said to me, and chuckled. He started the engine and we got moving.

“What was it like?” I asked him. “Your service in Vietnam?”

Ira shrugged. “Was sitting in the living room with my dad when they called out my draft number. It was the Marines for me. That was the middle of 1967. By late 1968, I ended up in a place called Khe Sanh. Ever heard of it?”

I nodded. I’d heard of it, all right.

“Surrounded by Viet Cong, man. There I am, just a snot-nosed kid off the reservation. Me and some other Marines are squatted down, listening to the lieutenant give us a briefing during some shelling, when suddenly a mortar shell comes down right in the middle of our huddle. Blew everybody to kingdom come, except me. Turns out my outfit was fresh out of junior officers. Next thing I know,
I’m
the lieutenant in our platoon. Not exactly what I was asking for. No one wants to be the next Ninety-Day Wonder. Those guys didn’t last long.”

“You made it, though.”

Ira nodded. After a second, he said, “Yeah, I guess I did. Sometimes I wished I hadn’t, though.” After that he fell silent.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d been in a combat zone or two in my time, both as an M.P. and as a civilian policeman and detective, and now, here in West Texas. Every hell is different, but the same.

I glanced back at Brad. He still looked pretty out of it. Suddenly it all felt absurd. I wanted to laugh at the futility of what I did every day, trying to find people lost in the chaos, trying to reach down to those who willingly plunged into the abyss, and pull them back to safety and light and sanity.
 

Sometimes I really wondered just what in the hell I was trying to prove, and to whom. But then, as always, I took a deep breath and pulled myself together. I wouldn’t quit, couldn’t quit, because what I was doing was the right thing, after all. More than that, though, it was because I was just Roland Longville, private detective, and that is all that I really knew how to do.

Chapter 15

Garrett had a doctor waiting on us by the time we got back into Delgado. He was an old country doctor, Ira’s age or better. He fussed and grumbled, but eventually pronounced that Brad would be all right in short order. He gave him a stimulant shot and ambled away. Brad started coming out of his daze a little while later.

Brad groaned and rocked himself, and asked us all what had happened. I gave him a brief rundown on the events of the past two hours. He was rather disoriented at first, but once he realized he was no longer at the compound, his spirits and disposition became markedly improved. After I had finished speaking, he looked around, taking in the array of new faces and names.

“Thanks to you all for what you did. I thought they were going to kill me, this time.”

“You joined them willingly. Why would they kill you?” I asked. I knew, all right, but I wanted to see what Brad would say.

“I read Tolbert’s book in college, and I really agreed with a lot of what he had to say. But once I got out here, it wasn’t what I expected. Colonel Tolbert was dead, and the ‘movement’ was no longer what he had created when he was alive. Colonel Cushman had taken over, after Tolbert died, and he’d made a lot of changes. There were whispers around the compound that he’d sold out Tolbert’s vision. I learned some of the most senior members had left. Eventually, Cushman turned everything Tolbert stood for into a lie.”