Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  A caravan of tiny, black ants streamed toward the carcass and a parallel caravan of black ants streamed away, each ant with a minuscule grain of woodpecker flesh. Tavo followed the ant trail from the kill. The jurassic head of a horned toad lizard bobbed out from beneath the shade of a rock and slurped up a tongue full of ants along with the woodpecker carrion.

  Twofer, Tavo mused.

  Someone would absorb the carcass of America, just like the Spanish absorbed the Aztecs and the Turks absorbed the Roman Empire. Tavo sat on a rock, a mere hundred miles from the U.S. border, with thousands of men awaiting his order.

  Somebody would be the ant, and somebody would be the horned toad, but in a short while, there would be but feathers and bones.

  Tavo looked up from the small kill when he heard the squeak of bouncing suspension and the low hum of an engine.

  His lieutenants had purchased twenty brand new Ford Ranger four door trucks and welded machine gun mounts in the bed of each. With the U.S. on the skids, they’d instructed the ranch hands to arm the trucks with the 240 SAWs and .50 caliber “Ma Deuce” machine guns that’d been tucked away in the ranch’s massive gun vault.

  Tavo shook his head as he watched the white Ranger lurch over the road. One of their street soldiers from Tucson jangled around in the back behind the SAW, trying to keep from being thrown from the vehicle. The driver must’ve seen Tavo because the truck veered off the road and cut a beeline in his direction across the grainy waves of the desert floor. The truck eventually ground to a halt, a cloud of dust enveloping both the truck and Tavo.

  He waited, thinking about how nobody ever raced across a desert with good news.

  Sofía jumped from the passenger seat as the dust cloud settled. “You’ve got a problem, Papi.”

  The worry in her voice sounded real, though Tavo had to wonder.

  “The twenty-fourth infantry battalion out of Zona Cuatro has orders to arrest everyone on this ranch. They’re preparing to come against you tomorrow or the next day. General Bautista called me from Pozo Rica to make sure I wouldn’t get caught up in it.”

  If his daughter had wanted him arrested, why warn him?

  “Why us?” Tavo began with the obvious question.

  “They found two dead Special Forces men in full kit in the state building last night, and the archbishop said that American soldiers freed them from the gangsters. The army knew that wasn’t true, but the town’s bursting with rumors about a narco ranch with helicopters, tanks and machine guns, so the Mexican army put two and two together and, surprise—you win a military seizure.” Sofía held out her hands, her worry cutting lines across her forehead.

  One of the first things Tavo had done after arriving at the ranch had been to send two men to surveil the army bases in Hermosillo. He already knew that he wouldn’t have to face “Mexico’s finest.” The real troops—the mechanized guys with light armor—were all based in Mexico City, 2,000 kilometers away. The local air base—more of a corner of the airport actually— had three Bell 212 helicopters and two prop planes, none of them with heavy ordnance. The local army base boasted about two hundred career soldiers and several hundred local conscripts who came in on weekends. They maintained a dozen Jeeps with machine guns. The Hermosillo base existed to give local conscripts something to do. When the Mexican government fielded troops against Sonoran narcos, they sent soldiers from Mexico City, not Hermosillo.

  Tavo pictured the twenty-forth infantry battalion of the Mexican Army in their dusty corner of Hermosillo. It was really more of a company than a battalion, but Mexicans were nothing if not grandiose about their armed forces. He pictured the helicopters and the Jeeps. He pictured the other weapons Zona Cuatro might have mothballed on their base: heavy machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, MG3s, Ma Deuces, M29 mortars, and maybe even some anti-tank rockets. They’d have a warehouse full of cast-off weapons from the U.S.; it was one of America’s favorite ways to pat Mexico on the head. The U.S. handed down old weapons, like a big brother giving a little brother his old slingshot.

  Only these old weapons weren’t child’s play. Infantry technology hadn’t made major leaps since World War Two. The Browning M2, for example, was still fielded by the U.S. even though it’d been invented at the end of World War One. The U.S. handed these weapons off to Mexico, not because the weapons lacked power and lethality, but because the U.S. preferred more efficient, computerized killing machines. In this new, collapsing world, that fixation on complex systems would probably hit them right in the culo. The old weapons would likely turn out to be the best weapons in a collapse scenario.

  Sofía rocked back and forth from foot to foot in the sand. “Papi. What are you waiting for? We need to leave.”

  Like a bullet sliding into battery, the new world jacked into place for Tavo. He’d been lost in thought, but his future clicked: he needed those old weapons, and he needed those Mexican soldiers.

  He stepped back to the rock and picked up his iPhone, speed dialing Beto. He didn’t bother to step away from Sofía. Let her hear what she would hear.

  “Beto. The Mexican army is coming for us. We will ambush them en route. First, we need to take down the base at the Hermosillo airport. We can’t let those helicopters off the ground. Have your men ready to go in two hours.” Tavo had never given Beto an order before, but Beto accepted it without hesitation.

  “Si, Canoso. Let’s do it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sofía exclaimed. “You can’t ambush troops. We’re cooperating with the Mexican army. They’re our partners. They’re our country!”

  “No, mi hija. They’re your partners,” Tavo’s hard eyes probably betrayed more distrust than he wanted to reveal, but the time for maneuvering had passed. Now was the time for action.

  “Papi. Don’t do this.”

  “Sofi. Things have changed. Without the American government, there is no Mexican government. Our economy will follow their economy right down a corpse-filled hole. But it doesn’t have to be that way in Hermosillo. Or in Sonora. We grow the food for thousands of miles. We have our own gasoline. We aren’t going to fall to pieces when the internet stops working. But we can’t stand around, waiting to see if democracy survives to save us all. The Mexican democracy barely existed here in Sonora in the first place.”

  Sofía shook her head “no” over and over again, like when she was an eight-year-old girl; a stubborn, beautiful creature, her chestnut locks dancing around her head. If the stakes weren’t so high, Tavo might’ve smiled.

  “No, Papi. They are trying. They want to help. That’s why they sent troops to rescue the archbishop, and that’s why they’re coming for the ranch: they want to preserve order.”

  Tavo snorted. “Those are perfect examples of why we can’t wait on government. The army showed up at the cathedral with just six Jeeps, hours late, and now they’re mounting an assault against the wrong guys. They should be putting down the Zeta cartel in Hermosillo. Instead, they’re coming after the men who actually got the job done. Some fat officer is angry that someone else saved the Catholic priests. We saved them, not the army. We have proven ourselves. We are the good guys here.”

  She continued shaking her head. “You can bury me in words, but men will die and their blood will be on my hands. I warned you that they were coming. General Bautista trusted me with that information.”

  Tavo understood the words, but couldn’t fathom her endgame. Why would she pretend to care so much about a few half-baked soldiers?

  “We don’t have time for idealism, Sofi. By the time you figure out that your Ivy League world has crashed, it’ll be too late for us to salvage our means of production and self-defense.”

  Her hands gesticulated wildly, as though chopping onions in the air. “Bullshit! You don’t care about saving ‘our means of production.’ You only care about control. You want weapons. They intoxicate you. Well, you can have your weapons or you can have my help. Pick one!”

  Sofía turned on her heels and stormed off across t
he rolling hills of the ranch, abandoning her ride back in the truck.

  Nobody had spoken to Tavo like that in a long time. Why hadn’t he married a woman like that?

  She could be forgiven her innocence. She hadn’t arrived at this moment with Tavo’s fifty years of experience with the evil lurking in every man, woman and child. Often, all it took to release the demons was a tiny shot of liquid in the arm. He could forgive her for being ignorant of that reality. She had never tasted of the contamination that hung just below the rippled surface of life.

  She would taste it soon. Everyone would.

  How could he channel his daughter’s raw horsepower? How would he make her useful in this new world?

  The answer would come with time.

  Tavo climbed into the truck. The driver had been sitting behind the wheel, pretending not to hear their argument. Tavo didn’t care what he’d heard.

  Chapter 12

  Noah Miller

  McCallister Ranch, Fifteen miles outside Patagonia, Arizona

  Noah knew his father was dead from the moment he saw the tire tracks going south into Mexico. Nobody could steal his dad’s Land Cruiser unless they killed him first.

  A fifty foot section of the border fence had been laid down in the bottom of Geezer Wash, and a dozen tire tracks had crossed over around eleven in the morning. One of those sets of tires had been Yokohama B97s, with all-season tread, set apart sixty-one-point-three inches.

  Noah found the laid down section of fence, and the tire tracks, around one o’clock in the afternoon and he could tell from the slight crumble on the upper lip of the tracks that they’d been imprinted about three hours prior—eleven o’clock in the morning.

  Bill McCallister had once trained the Border Patrol in man tracking, along with search and rescue crews in neighboring New Mexico. But that hadn’t lasted. It didn’t take long for the stink of federal government to ruin it for Bill. After one particularly bad run-in with a Border Patrol bureaucrat, Bill refused to train anyone but Noah. Noah had received double-measure of the old war scout’s intensity; half instruction in man tracking and half bitching about pencil pushers and “robo cops” in law enforcement.

  Bill’s overarching rule of tracking had been take your time and observe small. Bill insisted Noah master both foot and tire tracking and be able to identify the age of the sign up to forty-eight hours after the print. So when Noah spotted the old Land Cruiser’s track, he knew exactly what it looked like fresh and how long the track had been on this dirt road. He’d trained on tracking this exact vehicle.

  As Noah paced off the spread between the Yokohama tire tracks, a pit hardened in his stomach. The other tracks intermingled with Bill’s Land Cruiser had been low profile, front-wheel drive passenger vehicles. They were probably small Hondas and Mazdas from the city; gangbangers with lowered chassis and loud mufflers. Noah vaguely remembered hearing the deep, bass hum of modified exhaust late that morning. It’d been strange, but he couldn’t see the road from his ranch house, so Noah had written it off as something he couldn’t do anything about.

  Along the outer edge of Noah’s boot, he’d drawn inch marks with a Sharpie marker—an old tracker’s trick passed down from Bill’s military unit. The Land Cruiser sat wider and heavier than the rice burners and Noah knew the exact wheelbase of the Land Cruiser because he owned the same rig as his dad—both 1980s model FJ40s. Even though he was ninety-nine percent sure already, he paced off the tread width, not skipping any steps, just like his old man had taught him.

  See everything. Ignore nothing.

  The tracks were the right width to be his dad’s vehicle. Noah packed himself into his own Cruiser and drove back along the tire tracks away from the border fence, fifteen miles north until he arrived at Bill’s place. As he drove up to the gate of his dad’s ranch, the chunk of wood in Noah’s stomach hardened into a lump of granite. Stretched across Bill’s yard, Noah beheld his first battlefield.

  Bill didn’t come out of the house at sound of his engine, which he did almost every time Noah drove up to the ranch. Then the smell hit Noah—a stench like when you light a barbecue and the harrumphing little gas explosion burns off the hair on your arm. Only this smell was a hundred times worse.

  A pile of blackened bodies smoldered admist the gravel and weeds in the front yard. There were at least a dozen, maybe more than twenty. They’d been burned beyond recognition. It wasn’t something Bill would do in his own yard. The smell and the rot would make his ranch house unliveable.

  Noah gathered his emotions like a hen gathers her chicks. He’d need to think straight—not go off half-cocked and contaminate the scene hunting for his dad’s body. The best way to find him would be to do this right.

  A black Honda hatchback lay flipped upside down on the dirt driveway like a dead cockroach. The crater bore witness to the buried shaped charge Bill must have triggered as the gangbangers crashed his yard.

  Noah would give his old man the funeral he would want—the only funeral an old military scout would care about enough to turn back from beyond the grave and smile. From his first step down from his vehicle, Noah would pick through each bit of sign, winnow out facts and divine the story of the battle in his mind’s eye.

  He knew the heart and mind of his father. Winning the battle would’ve been less important to Bill than fighting it well. And fighting the battle well would’ve been less important than his son knowing that he had fought it well. Noah’s search of the battlefield might end with a burial or it might not, but the search would be a testament to the grizzled, old professional, and his nuts and bolts love for his son. Noah had become that professional too, and he would read his father’s death in the dust and detritus.

  Noah took a shuddering inhale, let go of his iron grip on the steering wheel, reached for his tracking pole, opened his car door and stepped down. He hefted his pole and scratched his head with the grip, taking a dispassionate view of the ground. His every cell wanted to rush in and find his dad, but somehow he knew it would be wrong. Like every other manhunt, the best chance at a good outcome was to go slow.

  “Dad?” Noah shouted. “Are you here?” The bodies on the burn pile crackled and popped, but otherwise there was only silence. He weighed possible outcomes. His dad could’ve been left wounded and bleeding in the barn or the ranch house. He could be dead and thrown on the funeral pyre. Or, he could’ve been taken.

  The aggressors had left with Bill’s Land Cruiser and they had time to pile up the dead. It seemed extremely unlikely that they would’ve left Bill alive and wounded, particularly given the number of gangbanger bodies on the burn heap. Likewise, there was almost no chance they would’ve taken the old man with them. He’d killed well over a dozen of them and there was no way they would have let him live.

  “BILL!” Noah yelled at the top of his lungs. Still nothing.

  On the outside chance that Bill was still alive, Noah decided to stick with his plan—to pick the scene apart one bit at a time and to do it right. The most professional thing to do was to hunt down every bit of sign and to track the killers. Indeed, Bill would want it that way.

  The scene spoke of supreme violence, but the blasts had settled and the clatter of bullets had died. Noah didn’t even draw the Glock 17 hanging on his hip. He could feel it: the Grim Reaper had already left this place, and Noah could taste the stale gunpowder and drying blood of the fight on his tongue.

  He took careful steps to the gate—the obvious chokepoint and “sign trap” that would force man sign into a narrow piece of ground. The gate was burst inward by the dead Honda. Blue paint, matching the Honda’s fender, had scraped off on the galvanized pipe.

  Bill must have heard the gangbangers coming, since he would’ve had to trigger the blast under the Honda as it busted into the yard. Bill had long ago buried a blast plate just inside his driveway. It was an upright two-foot length of cast iron sewer pipe, loaded with twenty pounds of ANFO in an old gas can and capped with a five pound disc of AR550 steel. The booby tr
ap probably could’ve killed an armored personnel carrier. It must’ve thrown the Honda fifty feet into the air.

  Hiding what amounted to a massive directional pipe bomb under his gravel driveway wasn’t even the kookiest thing Bill had done to prepare for the end of the world. Between foreign wars and endless disputes with the Border Patrol, obeying the law wasn’t a big concern of Bill McCallister. He didn’t mind planting a huge bomb in his yard even if it was illegal as shit. But the directional charge under the driveway had been the subject of endless ribbing from Noah. He frequently relied upon the buried plate charge as his final piece of evidence when he argued that Bill might be a lunatic.

  Now a gangbanger’s car lay on its back and Noah knew that Bill-up-in-heaven was laughing his ass off. Even standing at the threshold of Saint Peter and the Pearly Gates, the old bastard would do a happy dance and brag about winning one last argument with his son.

  Once Noah stepped inside the gate, he found a fan of footprints. He crouched down and spent ten minutes categorizing them. He didn’t have his pad and pen or he would’ve taken another twenty minutes to draw them too. He counted seventeen distinct sets of prints.

  Most of the prints looked like tennis shoes—some with the Nike logo in the tread. Noah imagined they were black low-top sneakers, but he reminded himself not to jump to conclusions. Assumptions and wild guesses were kryptonite to a professional tracker. Emotional conclusions tended to blind a man to more sensible options later. Given the low profile tires and the complete lack of boot prints, Noah strongly suspected these were city boys on the rampage—and that they’d come a long way to sneak into Mexico. The nearest city was Phoenix and that was over two hours north.

  He glanced up at the dead Honda and noted the Illinois license plate, confirming his suspicion. These guys didn’t drive all this way to rob an old hard case living in a dust and gravel ranch. They were heading somewhere specific. Somewhere south of the border.