Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Noah literally scratched his head, vexed by the question. The thought of running from his ranch because of the collapse had never crossed his mind. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was more American or Mexican. Living a few miles from the border muddied those waters.

  It made him think about the big, wide world as it ate itself, tail-first. The strangely-quiet roads implied a coming apocalypse, but the wind carried no such menace.

  Noah turned on the Land Cruiser’s radio—something he hadn’t done in years. Truth be told, he only liked music when he was drinking. Plus, all his favorite music was on an iPod Leah had given him many Christmases ago. The Land Cruiser didn’t have a CD player, much less a USB port. The ’94 FJ40 scarcely had a cassette deck, and even then, the old speakers barely overcame the road noise.

  Leah had pre-loaded the iPod with music before she gave it to him, otherwise Noah would’ve never waded through the bullshit required to get it set up. Leah knew her man and she’d taken the time to upload every song recorded by Johnny Cash onto the little, plastic brick of music. The next year, Leah had given him a speaker box for Christmas so he could stick the iPod into the speaker and play classic country while he sat at the kitchen table. It was a good thing, too, because by the next Christmas, Leah was six feet underground and Noah was doing a LOT of drinking at that kitchen table.

  But the sun on the Mexican pavement and the fall leaves glinting on the pecan trees shouted against all that sadness. It challenged Noah to get his ass back to the real world where people mattered to other people. As of yesterday, his list of people who mattered to him had dropped by one hundred percent. Rather than dwell on it, he turned on the radio, hoping for a little news.

  What he got was nothing. The radio didn’t make a sound. Not even static.

  Noah pounded the dashboard—his go-to response for trouble with electronic devices. Still the radio sulked, the howling of his tires against the road his only companion.

  He stared at the radio, trying to figure out the inscrutable black buttons, four on one side of the cassette and four on the other. He twisted the left knob and stabbed his finger at the buttons in random sequence.

  The radio yelped to life and the cabin of the old Land Cruiser roared with music. A gravelly-voiced man belted out half-a-verse and continued into a chorus.

  When I am worn and I’ve been unmade,

  your love is like a fire that will light my way.

  When darkness comes and dreamland fades,

  your love is like a fire that will light my way.

  It’s always burning and warming my soul;

  calling me forward, fanning the coal.

  I may be lost, but never betrayed,

  your love is like a fire that will light my way.

  Like warm water pouring down the inside of his skin, tenderness overtook Noah. Vast oceans of tears sprang from his eyes. Endless waves of warmth flooded down his throat and into his hardened heart. He gasped for air, choked on a massive sob and broke into a cry he had never before heard himself make, not even after Leah and Katya were killed.

  He swerved to the side of the road but couldn’t find a shoulder wide enough for the Cruiser, so he stopped in the middle of the blacktop, weeping and swimming in such a profound sense of grace that he could hardly locate himself on the planet. The tsunami of emotion had come from nowhere, unlike anything he’d ever felt.

  Startled, afraid and oh-so-hopeful, Noah, bawled into his T-shirt. Maybe for ten seconds. Maybe for ten minutes. The next thing he knew, a semi-truck was behind him honking it’s earth-shaking horn.

  Flooded in emotional molasses and half out of his mind, Noah laughed like an idiot. He put the Land Cruiser in gear and crept along the highway until he found a place to pull over, barely able to see the road through his tears. The semi truck roared past.

  Noah remained there on the shoulder of the Hermosillo-Guaymas Highway for a long time, sniffling and running his fingers through his hair. He had no fucking clue what had just happened.

  The wind jostled the Cruiser and a white grocery sack sailed past his windshield, caught a draft, and lifted straight into the air. It danced in front of Noah’s wet gaze for a full three seconds before another gust inflated the sack and spun it away off toward the horizon.

  The music was still playing, filling the Land Cruiser with God-breathed honey. The gravelly-voiced crooner had begun another song while Noah had been losing his shit.

  Don't give up hope.

  Don't give up now.

  There's always something noble,

  Waiting around the corner.

  As Noah returned to Planet Earth, the sense of well-being abided. It was as though the world had refilled with hope and purpose in the space of one song. One damn song. And with that one song, the very color of the air had changed.

  Noah shook his head and laughed, squinting at the radio. He found the eject button and the old stereo spat out the cassette tape—but not a store-bought tape. It was a homemade mix tape, like girls used to make in high school of Journey, Chicago and Bon Jovi. This homemade cassette tape had two words on the sticker in the handwriting of his dead wife.

  It read, “The Crusader.”

  Noah slid the tape back into the player, fearful that it had all been an illusion—a standard-issue break in sanity, entirely explainable due to the fact that he’d just lost his father.

  The music resumed, and Noah found that he didn’t care if it was insane or even a break in sanity. He could feast on this feeling for the remainder of a lifetime. It felt like Leah and Katya and Bill were right there in his Cruiser, laughing and enjoying some soft-serve ice cream, together again, the world profoundly right. The day excruciatingly perfect.

  He had never heard any of these songs before. He had no idea what “The Crusader” even was. Leah had gone through a born-again Christian phase back in the year she was pregnant with Katya—the third year after they were married. Maybe it was that. Or, maybe the band was an artifact from Leah’s grunge music phase her senior year of high school.

  How an ancient cassette tape had ended up in his car would forever be a mystery. He couldn’t even look the band up on Google now that the internet was hashed.

  All Noah could say for sure was that his heart—an internal organ long-forgotten—had been frayed, splayed and filleted.

  Noah pounded on his dashboard with a fist, flush with joy, attempting to sing along to words he didn’t know. Instead, he yowled with the music, making himself laugh. Being the fool had never felt so right.

  Well I've been fighting the long fight,

  swinging hard for the big prize,

  Doing all that I can

  just to stay alive.

  But I'm never gonna let go,

  even if I’m alone.

  And you’ll find me fighting,

  until the Lord takes me home.

  Maybe he had heard these songs before. Yes, maybe during Leah’s Christian phase. She’d never pushed her religion on him and, now that he thought about it, maybe she’d never moved on from it. His wildflower wife had probably died as the girl who would belt out the cheesy, Jesus-freaking lyrics of “The Crusader” in her husband’s car.

  Noah had just tuned it all out.

  He laughed out loud thinking about how big of an dipshit he’d been. In that softened moment, tilting half on and half off a Mexican highway, Noah knew three things, and he knew them like he knew the sun shone in the autumn sky.

  One.

  He was okay. The truth had always been there—this okay-ness despite his many failings—but he’d never been willing to accept it. He was a dirty-assed, good-for-nothing drunken gunslinger but something out in the blanched-blue sky loved him. Down to the marrow of his bones, Noah knew that life, death and the whole-damn-shooting-match was all right. More than all right.

  Two.

  He would be with Leah, Katya and old man Bill soon enough, and it would be entirely okay when he rejoined them.

  Three.

  He
had something important to do first.

  If he had to describe it, he would say that Leah had reached out to him across time and space and slipped a cassette tape into the radio in his Cruiser to call him out of his self-involved funk to do something that mattered—something that Noah had been born to do. It was something that his birth father—that closed-minded, polygamist bastard—would never have understood, but that his real father—Bill McCallister—understood through gut instinct. This whole fucking life of Noah’s had been a giant setup. It’d been a play perfectly orchestrated and timed to reach this place at this moment.

  Even as he thought it, Noah felt a lurch in his gut.

  (Yes!)

  With that, he drew his Glock, press-checked the chamber, saw brass and slid it back into its holster.

  “I’m ready,” Noah said, to whatever ghosts were listening.

  Chapter 15

  Tavo Castillo

  Hermosillo-Guaymas Highway, Km 247, Sonora, Mexico

  The column of Jeeps, trucks and buses drove into the ambush like cattle toward a water trough. Tavo clacked off the IED himself, bursting one of the dark green buses nearly in half like a fat caterpillar in the midday sun. The surviving men spilled out onto the sizzling asphalt.

  Tavo didn’t really want to kill them. On the contrary, he wanted the same thing that they did: peace in Hermosillo and a reliable supply of food and water. He just wanted the soldiers in that bus to need him for a moment. It would allow him to talk with the officers without having to overcome their egos. Nothing humbles a man quite like being blown up.

  Two days prior, Tavo and his three lieutenants had planned this operation down to the minute. The only surprise had been the extra day it’d taken the base commander to gather the nerve to attack them. He assumed the army had taken the extra day to get over the confusion caused by their air base going offline. His commandos at the airbase had knabbed three messengers from the army base trying to make contact.

  Tavo had gunmen surrounding the ambush site, but he didn’t think they’d be necessary. With the single IED, the company of soldiers had been thrown into total confusion. Their initial reaction demonstrated at least some training; the troops formed a sloppy, defensive cordon around the damaged column. Once it became clear that a follow-on attack wasn’t imminent, the screams of the injured overwhelmed discipline and nearly everyone in the column fell into rendering aid to the wounded and dying. The Mexican army hadn’t had much experience with IEDs.

  While Tavo waited for the “mass casualty event” to settle down, he counted the soldiers that’d been sent to assault his own commandos and their base of operations. As Tavo had suspected, General Parras—the commander of the Hermosillo army base—had sent pretty much everyone.

  Hey Diddle Diddle. Everybody up the middle.

  Mexican fighting forces had never been accused of being overly-nuanced when it came to battlefield strategy. In the coming days, Tavo would change that.

  At this moment, his lieutenant, Alejandro, would be hitting the near-empty Zona Cuatro army base with a team of commandos who’d arrived the night before from San Diego. Another team under Beto would roll up the television and radio stations in Hermosillo. Saúl would assault and kill off the last pockets of Zeta cartel in Hermosillo with fifty drug soldiers from Texas and the American Midwest.

  If everything went as planned, Tavo would control the City of Hermosillo by nightfall. After that, he’d complete the roll-up of the Catholic archdiocese.

  Throughout history, killing people had always been an inefficient means of owning battle space. The hardiest empires bought their way into a position of control, then they used culture and faith to consolidate gains.

  Tavo wanted these two hundred Mexican army infantrymen alive and willing. Saúl would lose trained commandos taking down the remnants of the Zetas in Hermosillo and each of his commandos fought like the equivalent of a hundred infantrymen. They would be mourned as expensive losses, indeed.

  Tavo’s three lieutenants had spent the last few years carefully and secretly training their best foot soldiers in the U.S., turning them into top-notch commandos, and leaders of their Templario units. Through layered holding companies, they’d paid cash for discrete land, out of sight of the public. Then they’d sent their top twenty most intelligent and credible drug runners to U.S. shooting schools run by former special operations forces veterans. Those twenty were then trained and vetted by Beto, Alejandro and Saúl themselves—forging their own hybrid operating style. Those twenty trained men went on to train thousands more in their home regions and inculcated all of them in the Caballero Templario creed.

  By some miracle, Beto, Alejandro and Saúl had worked up this training package without ever being penetrated by U.S. state or federal law enforcement. Lucky for them, the hubbub about “militia groups” had died in the U.S. with the election of a Republican to the presidency. Federal surveillance of militia activity had dropped away to nothing, and Tavo’s organization had slipped through that crack.

  Every beating heart in his commando teams cost Tavo and his partners around fifty thousand dollars. When one of those guys died, that investment vanished into dust: fifty grand in pre-laundered dollars. It represented an irreplaceable asset, especially given the end of the United States and its appetite for drugs. If Tavo could get these Mexican infantrymen out in front of his trained commandos—absorbing most of the losses—the only thing in the region that could stop them would be the American military.

  Through his binos, Tavo watched the last of the Mexican army perimeter melt back into the wailing caravan of drab green trucks and buses. He gave a nod to his communications guy who then sent out a call.

  Tavo stood and stretched, giving the area of operation a once-over. He’d placed his tactical operations center on top of a mini-mart at the foot of the Cerro de la Virgen. Red and green painted stairs climbed the mountainside to a thirty-foot tall image of the Mother of Jesus painted on the cliff face. He had no idea how the giant altar had come to be. Undoubtedly, someone had seen Mother Mary appear on that spot, but Tavo didn’t know the story. Divine appearances by the Mother of Jesus were common in Mexico.

  He made the sign of the cross and continued his scan of the AO. He’d placed the ambush in the narrowest canyon he could find, which happened to be a location with religious significance.

  A plume of dust rose from a side road five miles south of the ambush, then vanished in the wind as a string of vehicles climbed onto the highway. Those would be Tavo’s pre-positioned ambulances coming to save the day.

  The communications man stepped up to Tavo and saluted. “General Castillo. Colonel Alejandro called to say they’ve taken the army base. No word yet from Colonels Saúl or Beto.”

  Tavo and his lieutenants had awarded themselves military rank just to keep things clear for the subordinates.

  “Bueno. Let’s go talk to the fat man.” Tavo slung his HK416 and climbed down the ladder on the side of the mini-mart. He drove down the dirt road, parked a couple hundred yards back, then walked into the broken army caravan. He timed his arrival to coincide with the ambulances. Tavo waved them toward the twisted bus, as though he was part of the medical team. Tavo’s men poured out of the ambulances, rifles slung and in full combat kit, each man carrying a medical kit.

  Tavo cut a beeline for the commander, who had stopped giving orders to the men around him and now gaped at the twenty medics rendering aid.

  “Who are these men?” the heavyset army major asked, holding his hands palms up.

  “I can explain, Major,” Tavo called out as he walked toward the officer. “We were just down the road when we heard the bomb. We were sent from Tucson by the diocese to help the Hermosillo archdiocese. We heard they had problems with local gangs, so we came as fast as we could.” Tavo leaned over and rested his hands on his thighs, pretending to be winded.

  “But why are you in Mexican ambulances? And why are your men armed with rifles?”

  Tavo ignored the questions an
d pulled a small radio from his plate carrier vest. The cell phones in Hermosillo had stopped working the night before. “Commander Prieto Ruíz can explain.” He handed the radio to the army major.

  Tavo leaned back on the fender of a truck and let his rifle slip around to the front, pulling the slide on his sling loose to give him more room to work with his rifle, if need be. His men, now rendering aid to the wounded, monitored the interaction out of the corner of their eyes. They sat down their med kits on the asphalt and inconspicuously prepared their rifles for battle.

  As the major turned away with the radio to talk to the air force commander, Tavo rehearsed in his mind what he’d do next if things went sideways. Tavo and his men had done a physical rehearsal the night before at the ranch, but there had been little they could do to predict the size of the force and the precise disposition of the vehicles.

  If things went apeshit, Tavo would shoot the major and all other officers or senior NCOs standing nearby, then he’d get behind the giant tire of the truck and kill anyone in Mexican army uniform who picked up his rifle. It wasn’t much of a plan, but he and his twenty men had the element of surprise. Plus, they had another twenty riflemen in the surrounding hills with FN/FAL scoped rifles providing cover fire. They would prevail one way or the other. Unfortunately, Tavo would be at the center of the chaos.

  Maybe it would’ve been better if he’d just ripped the army column to pieces with IEDs. Tavo had plenty of anfo—the diesel fuel explosive they’d used for the bomb. He could’ve brought the mountain down on the column, gigantic Virgin Mary and all. But he wanted the soldiers. He needed them.

  Tavo waited while the air force commander explained over the radio to his army counterpart how screwed they were if they didn’t cooperate with this so-and-so narcotraficante. Hopefully that was the gist of the conversation.