by Jeff Kirkham
He turned back to the map, running through the plan again, looking for anything he might have missed. Complicated plans usually failed. This one had the smell of a complicated plan, but he saw no simple alternatives.
Why did these tanks consume so damned much gasoline?
He felt like a crack addict scouring the countryside for his next fix. He hadn’t even bothered to search for smaller fuel sources—gas stations and fuel trucks. The metal beasts at his command burned gas at the rate of fifty thousand gallons a day. He needed quantities of fuel found only on an enormous scale. A single major refinery would provide enough fuel for a year’s worth of combat operations ranging into the American west, but the western U.S. wasn’t littered with refineries. There were surprisingly few.
“We’ll move through the night and roll directly into the Dry River refinery tomorrow morning. It should take us about twelve hours to cross north of North Las Vegas, assuming we don’t run into problems.”
Beto smiled, probably thinking about how many potential problems the M1 Abrams tank could solve. “Tavo, we have a newcomer,” Beto added before Tavo could end the conversation. “He came in with the last of our soldiers rendezvousing with us from the ranch in Sonora. He’s another American Special Forces guy, but this dude is really and truly old—like old as you.” Beto grinned, probably trying to reawaken some of the camaraderie between them. “I think you should meet him. He’s proven useful already.”
Tavo raised his eyebrows.
Beto continued. “I think you’re going to like this guy. He’s a Norte Americano, but he’s lived on the border of Mexico for twenty years. Our soldiers promised not to hit his local village and that was pretty much all it took for him to come along. He’s a broken down, old cabron looking for a war to fight.”
Beto was rambling and Tavo grew impatient. “I’m sure if you’re good with him, I’m good with him,” Tavo said, trying to end the conversation. He had problems of his own. He didn’t need to vet Beto’s new employees.
“Yeah. Okay. He’s running a hunter/killer team if you need them. I just thought you’d like to know.”
“Great…Let’s move out in four hours.” Tavo shifted the conversation back to what mattered: namely, gasoline and getting more of it.
“Roger that. I’ll get ready to roll.” Beto hurried back to his Humvee and went to work mobilizing the armored column.
Chapter 34
Tavo Castillo
Route 66, Twenty-five miles east of Kingman, Arizona
A hundred gas trucks, ninety tanks, fifty Humvees and fifteen pickups with machine guns drove east on Route 66, lit up like a five kilometer circus train. For the tenth time, Tavo asked himself why he’d brought the whole army for this one, straightforward mission.
Because you don’t trust them anymore.
The thought came unbidden, but on some level Tavo already knew it. He’d changed the rules. He’d dropped the charade with his lieutenants and they no longer thought of themselves as the Big Swinging Dicks, with Tavo as their gray-haired mentor. Now they knew exactly who called the shots and nothing would be the same again. War is not the same as business.
Particularly in the drug game, people needed their egos fed. They needed layers of motivation to stay loyal. They needed their heads patted and their bellies filled. Tavo had worked overtime to keep Beto, Alejandro and Saúl thinking they were brothers-in-arms. Now that they were actually at war, he needed subordinates. Otherwise, they would lose the war, plain and simple. The fact that he was tired of pandering to their egos had nothing to do with it.
They never meant anything to you, anyway.
Sadly, it was true. The brotherhood had been a meticulously-crafted strategy meant to keep his lieutenants out front where they would take the bullets when the FBI or CIA kicked in the doors.
That made him think of the attack on the Hotel Filidelfia which reminded him of Sofía. He wondered if she had colluded with his lieutenants in the same way she appeared to have colluded with his father and his half-brother. She and her cohorts had meant to have Tavo captured and to steal his empire. Somehow, in the desert night, with his window down and the hot air carrying the stink of creosote, it was easier to see the corruption his daughter kept so perfectly hidden. Nobody else could see it, but he could, if only around the edges—if only in the wee hours of the morning, with the oily smell of desert chaparral lubricating his paranoia.
The road clicked by. The broken yellow lines flashed in the headlamps at a maddeningly-slow pace.
Tick…Tick…Tick…Tick.
There was no reason to run dark; they were an indomitable force, bristling with machine guns and cannon, driving across the night-blackened sands of the badlands. So the column ran with headlights blazing. Besides, if he ordered them to drive without lights, his moronic foot soldiers would certainly collide with each other and the whole column would end up delayed. Better to run the lights and avoid complications. They hadn’t seen an aircraft of any kind in seven days—not since the pair of warthogs shot past over Buckeye. They hadn’t even seen the contrails of a passenger jet.
Dead vehicles littered Route 66 like desiccated beetles, their guts spilled on the shoulder and strung out across the road. Strangely, Tavo hadn’t seen a single dead body, though he was certain that the passengers of the cars had wandered off somewhere to die. It wasn’t as though they’d found salvation in the desert. There was no food or water. He wondered where people went to finally die, when all other options for survival shriveled in the sun. Did they crawl under a bush? Tavo scanned beneath the rare, desultory shrub as they rolled past, finding nothing but rocks.
A flicker of red light caught his eye, two kilometers distant. The only thing he could imagine that would make such a light would be another vehicle.
Maybe a rancher fleeing his convoy?
Tavo leaned forward onto the dashboard, causing the Humvee driver to sit up straight. Tavo saw the red light again.
“Break formation and run ahead,” Tavo ordered the driver. Their Humvee swung into the left lane and sped ahead, easily passing the other Humvees and trucks. The column could only sustain forty-five kilometers per hour. The Abrams tank could go faster, but they’d suck even more gas if they pushed it.
Tavo waved the driver forward, urging him into the desert night out from under cover of the guns of the column. The driver gave him a darting glance and Tavo urged him on again. The red light had disappeared, but Tavo thought he saw where the vehicle had been. A slight haze of dust hung over a turnout on the left side of the highway.
The Hummer pulled into the turnout. The dusty haze was unmistakable in the Humvee’s headlamps. He ordered the driver to stop and stepped out. His hand drifted to his handgun. He found himself on an elevated rise, the highest point for miles. He didn’t see any indication of a ranch house anywhere in the black folds of the nighttime wasteland and the red lights had disappeared.
What he’d seen had been a vehicle out ahead of their column—probably someone tracking their movement. Seeing the red light in the distance had been sheer luck.
“Actual to Roadrunner.”
“Go for Roadrunner,” Beto replied on the radio.
“Someone’s shadowing our column from in front,” Tavo said. “Looks like one vehicle based on the tracks. Probably a Jeep.” Tavo kicked the dusty ground.
“Don’t see what good it’ll do them,” Beto remarked. “Not unless they have a mechanized infantry unit or an air wing. And if that were the case, they wouldn’t be shadowing us. They would’ve hit us and we’d be hamburger.”
Tavo thought through the implications. He thought about the ambush in Tucson and the devastating sniper fire in Artesia. He couldn’t envision how starving American refugees could screw with a column of tanks and fifty armed Humvees. But then again, he’d underestimated them before.
“Roadrunner. Send your hunter/killer team ahead to my position at the top of the rise. Actual out.”
They finally arrived at Hoover Dam. As da
wn colored the eastern sky milky grey, Tavo took in the massive, two-prong traffic jam that blocked their way across the Colorado River. Thousands of vehicles packed the roads and the shoulder as far as the eye could see, trailing back toward Las Vegas.
Even with the light barely coloring the dam, the scale of it astounded Tavo. The cool morning air mixed with the booming mist more than two hundred meters down on the bottom of the canyon, churned up by relentless gravity and giant turbines. He considered the millions of man hours and billions of dollars in material that had been consumed to build such a concrete monster.
In this moment, Tavo owned it. For the sheer fact that he stood over it with a hundred Abrams tanks, he possessed this hulking wonder and every watt of electricity it produced. In so many ways, military conquest was the most productive endeavor of man. Tavo’s net worth had doubled just by standing on this spot with the tanks to his back. No wonder war had been so common throughout history.
“Push the cars out of the way,” Tavo ordered Beto, standing beside him.
“Roger. A few of the tanks have plows for this situation. I’ve already sent them down to the bridge to clear a path. We should be mobile again within an hour or two.” Beto’s understanding of the American military had been useful in dozens of ways. He knew volumes that Alejandro and Saúl didn’t, due to the fact that he’d been part of the greatest war machine on the planet. Just knowing that a company of tanks would also have mine-clearing attachments was proving a game-changer.
From their vantage high on the canyon wall, the rising light seemed to give up hope as it filtered its way into the maw of the gorge. The white face of Hoover Dam lightened by minuscule degrees. The churning waters at its base were now barely discernible in the dawn. Cars had lined up on the dam, blocked by an abandoned Humvee that the army must’ve positioned there when things collapsed. Another vehicle looked like it had busted through the rock wall and hung precariously over the Lake Mead side of the dam. The two lanes on top of the dam were hemmed in by stone walls and a fifty meter drop on one side, a two hundred meter drop on the other.
A bridge had been built just south of the dam, with two lanes and a robust shoulder on each side. Empty cars jammed every inch of the bridge, but Tavo watched as the plow-equipped tanks began to shovel the dead cars up and over the railing. The vehicles cartwheeled slowly in the air before smashing into the steep sides of the canyon or splashing into the Colorado River. Occasionally, a car would get hung up on the spiky protuberances on the plow edge, and the Abrams would have to shuffle back and forth until the vehicle un-impaled itself. The plows had been designed for mine clearing, not road clearing. In any case, the spikes on the plows were costing them time. The tanks would need every minute of two hours to get the road cleared, probably more.
“We found ‘em,” said an old white man, wearing a tactical vest trudging up the road toward Tavo and Beto. “We found their rig. They crossed the dam on foot,” he reported. Three of Tavo’s combat-trained commandos accompanied the old man.
“Tavo, this is Ben Madison. The American veteran I told you about last night,” Beto introduced the old man to his boss.
“Thank you for joining us.” Tavo slipped back into his habit of charming those who served him.
“I had no previous engagements,” the man answered and accepted Tavo’s outstretched hand. “That Toyota Land Cruiser back there is still warm, so that would be your shadow. Nobody in it, of course. The driver left on foot. His spoor points west across the dam. I estimate he’s about forty-five minutes ahead of us.”
“Thank you. He’ll take up a position somewhere between here and Vegas to observe. We’ll get another shot at him now that we know what we’re looking for.” Tavo stared into the distance, trying to spot the man through the haze of the early morning.
“Oh, we won’t see him again, I’ll wager. I know his type. I’m surprised we saw him in the first place.” The aging warfighter smiled at Tavo, unafraid. The dusty veteran turned around and his gangbanger companions turned with him, walking back toward their place in the waiting column.
Tavo noticed a slight disharmony in the man’s report and he considered the possibility that he was an infiltrator. The odds of that were hardly any greater than the odds that Beto, Saúl or Alejandro were working cross-purpose against him too. At least the old man was a snake in-the-open. He was definitely holding something back. Tavo could keep him where he would do no harm. His thoughts turned to the harm his daughter might be doing back in Mexico in his absence.
None of that would matter after he captured this next refinery. The Vegas facility would be even better than Tucson or Artesia. It put them closer to the heart of the intermountain west. Between the snow-choked passes of the Rocky Mountains and the impenetrable California High Sierras, Tavo would have a full season to take territory before anyone could send troops or mechanized infantry into Utah, Nevada, Idaho, eastern Oregon and eastern Washington. Without snowplows clearing the roads, that vast tract of land would become a forty-five million square kilometer ice fortress. By spring, he’d own a country inside a country. Tavo smiled thinking about it. It would be a nice upgrade from owning a drug cartel. The land and the capital improvements alone were worth trillions of dollars.
Tavo pulled the satellite phone from his vest and stepped away for a moment’s privacy.
“Report,” he ordered as his recon team answered the satellite call from the other side of Las Vegas.
“The Dry Lake refinery is intact, Señor. Nobody coming or going. As far as we can tell, there aren’t even security guards.”
“Kill anyone—and I mean anyone—who comes within a thousand yards of that refinery. We’ll join up with you in three hours. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged. Aguila, out.”
Chapter 35
Noah Miller
Lakeshore Road, Boulder City, Nevada
Noah looked back for a last glance at Hoover Dam as he turned the corner in the canyon. The towering rock on both sides of the carved-out canyon glowed burgundy in the dawn. Two Abrams tanks lumbered down the bridge toward the traffic jam on the opposite side of the Colorado River canyon and began shoveling dead vehicles over the side.
Noah had left his Land Cruiser on the other side of the gorge and hoofed it across the bridge with just his rifle and his “get home bag.” That’d been the easy part. He pushed himself to the limit as he marched up and out of the Colorado River Canyon, feeling every bit of Jack Daniels he’d drunk in the last two years. The roadway was choked with abandon cars, but he didn’t see a soul. The owners of the vehicles must’ve fled toward water. Though the dam was surrounded by a glistening lake, it lay hundreds of feet below the edge and it was surrounded by cliffs for miles. Thirsty people would be forced to loop back toward the town of Boulder and cut north to get to the backside of Lake Mead. He commiserated with them, knowing the half-gallon of water in his backpack wouldn’t last very long once the sun began its relentless toil.
When he was just out of high school, Noah and a few buddies—all of whom had abandoned the borderlands for the big city in the years that followed—had taken to making weekend “fun runs” to Las Vegas. As a result, he knew this road and knew the way into Las Vegas from the east. He also knew that winter, spring, summer or fall, when the sun hit the roadway, this area would be a cast iron bitch. He needed to get clear of the coming heat, but more than that, he needed to figure out where the cartel would go once it cleared the Hoover Dam Bridge. He deduced that they’d be looking for large stores of gasoline, since that had been their focus in New Mexico, but he didn’t know where to find refineries in Las Vegas. He’d only ever gone straight from the dam to the casinos on the Strip. There weren’t any refineries on that road that he could recall.
Weaving through the cars that jammed every inch of roadway, he climbed out of the Colorado River gorge and came upon the Hoover Dam Lodge at the lip. More a casino than a “lodge,” the parking lot marked the upper edge of the traffic jam.
He
didn’t know much about traffic, but there had to be certain physics to the phenomenon. How did a bunch of cars, moving along at the same speed, become gridlocked?
In the case of the Hoover Dam Bridge, the answer had been obvious. Two cars had collided on the way up Highway 93 on the Arizona side. The wrecked cars had probably stopped in the narrow pass and waited for “the authorities” to come to sort out fault and insurance. Of course, no authorities were forthcoming, given the total collapse of civilization. A paralyzing fear of being denied by insurance, or charged with hit and run, had led to a ten thousand car traffic jam. Every car thereafter met the traffic jam unaware of its semi-permanent state and the concrete barrier between the east and westbound lanes offered them no options. By the time they figured out that the car in front of them wasn’t moving at all, there were half-a-dozen cars behind them. When cars began running out of gas and when people began abandoning their cars for water, undoubtedly taking their keys with them, the traffic jam went from semi-permanent to set-in-stone.
But the Hoover Dam Lodge had been where urban idiocy met common sense. Almost two miles upstream from the initial wreck, anyone who stopped at the lodge could plainly see the serpentine traffic jam ahead of them. At the same time, the parking lot of the lodge expanded the two lanes of the interstate into a paved bulge. With the extra room to turn around, even the most foolish motorized moron could find a way out of the trap.