by D. J. Molles
“They just ID’d a Humvee in Fort Bragg, doing God-knows-what, and flying the fucking maple leaf.”
Lineberger stiffened. “Please tell me they didn’t shoot the bastards.”
Daniels felt another bolt of irritation. “No, colonel,” he ground out. “I told them to stand down. Obviously.”
Lineberger’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows cinched down over his sunken eyes. “What the hell are they doing in Fort Bragg?”
Daniels raised his palms up. “What a fantastic question. That’s what I’m asking you.”
Predictably, Lineberger bristled.
He couldn’t stand that Daniels was on equal footing with him.
And Daniels loved making it oh-so-apparent.
“Sounds like you’re about as in-the-know as I am at this juncture,” Daniels continued. “The question is, do we ask the envoys about it?”
“That sounds decidedly un-diplomatic.”
“They’re trying to play both sides,” Daniels finally asserted. Getting the suspicion off his chest felt relieving, but saying it out loud only served to make him more suspicious. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re not even sure who they want to support—us or the UES.”
“You don’t know that.”
Daniels snorted. “Please. Of course I do. That’s what any reasonable person would do. You’ve got two geopolitical entities where there used to be one. Both claim they’re legitimate. Naturally, you send teams to both. Try to ascertain who’s the better bet.”
There was a knock at the office door.
“Christ,” Lineberger snapped. “What?”
“Sir,” a hesitant voice spoke on the other side. “I have Captain Griffin on the line from ETOC.”
Lineberger looked skyward as though wishing for intercession from the heavens. “Come on.”
The door opened and a lieutenant walked in, holding a satphone.
But he didn’t bring it to Lineberger. He stepped up to Daniels. He cast an apologetic glance in the colonel’s direction, and mumbled, “He asked to speak to Mr. Daniels.”
Lineberger looked like he’d just smelled shit.
Daniels plucked the satphone from the lieutenant’s hands. Griffin was technically a Project Hometown operator. And Daniels was technically the new head of Project Hometown.
“Daniels here,” he said into the satphone.
Griffin’s voice came over the line, sounding ruffled. “You got something you need to tell me?”
“Yes,” Daniels replied. “Two days ago, we received a small contingent of Canadian and British troops that were sent as an envoy to Greeley. We had no prior warning of this. They just showed up. They didn’t tell us that they had any other forces anywhere else in the States. But, as I just learned about ten minutes ago, it looks like they sent some down to Fort Bragg. Does that cover the bases?”
Silence on the line for a moment. “They’re driving away. They captured, or possibly rescued, someone that was sneaking around Fort Bragg. Possibly a leftover civilian. Possibly a UES scout.”
Daniels nodded to himself. “I understand. Thank you. Do nothing.”
“Do nothing,” Griffin echoed.
“For now, captain,” Daniels sighed. “I’m getting my own feet underneath me. When the footing’s more solid, I’ll let you know. But for now, do nothing. Understood?”
“Understood. And if they engage us?”
“Then engage back. Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
Daniels didn’t say a goodbye. He turned the phone off and handed it back to the lieutenant, then shooed him out of the office and closed the door again. He turned back to Lineberger. “Diplomatically speaking, wouldn’t it reflect poorly on us if we didn’t notice their forces in North Carolina?”
Lineberger considered this. “If they really are testing our competence. Then yes.” He leaned forward and pointed at Daniels. “But you need to get the fuel flowing again.”
Daniels expression darkened. “You don’t think that Canada has oil flowing? With the Yukon pipeline running right through their backyard?”
“We don’t know what they have,” Lineberger growled. “And whatever they do have is theirs, not ours. Until we make an alliance. And if they’re looking to make an alliance with the stronger player, then it all comes down to the Gulf, and that asshole Ibarra.”
Daniels let out a lengthy, disgruntled sigh. “He made it pretty clear that we were on the outs.”
Lineberger smirked. “That was your doing. Your mistake. Now it’s your mess to clean up. Our limited access to oil makes us weak. If you can’t make peace with Nuevas Fronteras and get them shipping fuel to us again, then our alliance with Canada might be dead before it starts.”
“I’m working on it,” Daniels grumbled.
“Well, whatever you have working, work it faster. Our time table is shrinking.”
“Maybe.” Daniels folded his arms over his chest. “Are you going to talk to Briggs and our guests, or should I?”
That gave Lineberger pause, as Daniels knew it would. Here was a sticky situation. And no one wanted to get the stickiness on their hands. If Lineberger left it to Daniels then Daniels might end up screwing himself. Which would make Lineberger look good.
Then again, Daniels was pretty savvy, and Lineberger knew it. He might pull it off and come out looking clean on the other side. Which would only encourage Briggs to give him that official officer’s commission that he’d been gunning for.
Daniels knew the dilemma he was putting Lineberger in. And he enjoyed it.
“I’ll talk to them,” the colonel finally decided, erring on the side of political caution.
Daniels smiled, for no other reason than to make Lineberger feel that he’d done what Daniels wanted. “Sounds great.” He turned to the office door and shot over his shoulder, “I’ll work on soothing Ibarra’s hurt feelings. I’ll figure out how to get some oil flowing again.”
FIVE
─▬▬▬─
TRIPROCK
“What you did was stupid,” Abe grumbled into the silence of the baking Texas afternoon.
Lee pulled his head up from the scoped .30-06. Propped himself up on his elbows and relaxed his neck. He sighed.
“I just want to make sure,” Abe continued. “That we both understand that.”
Lee kept his irritation in check by pretending that he was an unassociated third party, letting Abe vent. Because that’s all this was about. Abe needed to get it off his chest. Lee’s best option was to let him get it out so that they could move on with business.
“What part, exactly?” Lee asked, his voice devoid of inflection.
“The part where you decided you were going to try to kill both of them without my help.”
“You helped. You shot the guy that was about to shoot me.”
“I was supposed to shoot him first. And then you were going to kill the other guy. It should’ve been over in two seconds, not turn into a damned brawl.”
Lee smacked his lips a few time. God, but he was thirsty right now. He settled back down onto the rifle and peered through the scope. In the distance lay their target: Triple Rocker Ranch.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said.
“You don’t sound very sorry.”
“What do you want me to say, Abe?”
“I want you to tell me that you don’t have a death wish.”
Lee took a long time to answer, staring out through the shimmering mirage of the Texas plains. Should he care more about staying alive? Was he taking risks that he normally wouldn’t take? Was he being reckless?
To a third party, maybe that’s what it looked like.
But it wasn’t recklessness. It was just…
I thought I’d be dead by now.
“Lee.”
“I don’t have a death wish.”
“That took you a long time to answer.”
“I don’t have a death wish,” Lee repeated. “I’ve got too many people to kill to want to die, Abe.”
Lee’s vision was focused through the scope, but he thought he could still feel Abe studying him, as though his gaze might peel back layers of deception and get to the truth. Lee let him stare. If there was another truth hiding inside of him, he wasn’t aware of it himself.
Eventually Abe grumbled something under his breath, and Lee felt him settle down into the dirt beside him, refocusing on their objective.
The Triple Rocker Ranch—known locally as “Triprock”—was a smaller ranch, as far as Texas ranches went, and nowadays it housed more people than cattle.
It was too hard to keep the primals from eating the cattle anyways.
As far as Lee could estimate, it housed roughly two hundred people.
About fifty of them were cartel.
And one of those cartel was Joaquin Lozcano Leyva.
Down inside the barbed wire fences of Triprock, the people milled about in the hot sun, doing what needed to be done to survive. Taking care of what livestock they could manage to protect from the primals—smaller things like goats and chickens. A few, skinny cows that had to be guarded constantly while at pasture.
They also grew whatever they could pry out of the dry ground.
Those people not involved in the growing of food still had plenty of other tasks to get done. Survival was labor, and the labor was hard, and you had to keep long days if you hoped to see more of them.
As these peons scurried about, the cartel watched them from shady spots on the porches of the ranch houses. Or from the machine gun nest built into the hayloft of the barn. They ate their fair share, but they didn’t work. Unless you considered it a legitimate vocation to keep a population tamed through the explicit threat of violence.
From twelve hundred yards away, Lee watched this through his riflescope. The dappled sunlight that reached him beneath the mesquite tree he was using as shade was still hot enough to make him sweat, but he blinked that sweat out of his eyes, and watched the reticle jitter as it hovered over the heat-shimmering image of a cartel man in a white cowboy hat with an AK-47 in his hands.
Lee placed the reticle over the man’s heart and imagined easing slowly back on the trigger, feeling the gun buck, and then settling back into his sights during the three second flight time of that bullet, so that he could watch the hit. The splash. The body crumpling.
But he didn’t.
Couldn’t have done it, even if he’d wanted to.
Their current range was a little too much for a .30-06 projectile.
Besides, they weren’t there to shoot anyone.
Not yet anyways.
“How much longer you wanna watch?” Abe mumbled, watching through a set of binoculars.
“Just wanna confirm that Joaquin is there.”
“He’s there,” Abe asserted. “He never leaves without a dozen of his soldiers guarding him.”
“You counted them, did you? They’re all there?” Lee was being sarcastic. It would be hard to confirm whether a dozen out of fifty people were missing.
“No,” Abe grunted. “But all their cars are here. The two technicals, the Humvee, the deuce-and-a-half, and the Mercedes. And Joaquin never goes anywhere without at least one technical. And he favors the Mercedes.”
Lee panned his view over to where the cartel vehicles were all parked in what used to be a corral. “Yeah, I counted the vehicles up earlier,” Lee sighed. “But I still wanna put eyes on.”
“I’m surprised. Usually you’re all hellfire to go and snap necks.”
“Well. We only have a small chance of making this work. And all the ordnance we stole from that last cartel convoy is tied up—once we blow through it, we don’t have any more left. So, you’ll have to pardon me if I want to make absolutely sure Joaquin is there before we shoot our load. Figuratively speaking.”
“Fine by me,” Abe said. “You spotted any fuel trucks?”
Not this again.
Lee sighed through his nose, but kept his eyes in his sights, scanning Triprock for any sign of Joaquin. “If we see a fuel truck, we will commandeer it. And then you can drive it back to Georgia.”
At the mention of the United Eastern States, Lee’s brain did a strange little jig. It twirled through a series of images and feelings, and none of it was good, and all of it left him feeling hollow inside, like bad memories from another life.
Angela, who loved you once, and who you…what?
Marie, who doesn’t even know that her sister is dead.
All those people, looking for a hero.
There’s no heroes out here.
I can’t go back.
I can never go back.
“Ranch house,” Abe said.
For a second, Lee didn’t compute. Then realized Abe had spotted something at the main ranch house. Lee panned steadily over, the image blurring as he shifted his hips and realigned his body…
There, stepping out onto the front porch of the ranch house.
Loose, light gray button up. Charcoal dress slacks. Short-cropped hair.
Joaquin Lozcano Leyva.
He stopped at the edge of the porch, one hand on the weathered railing, one hand holding a cheroot in his mouth. A puff of gray smoke from it caught in the hot breeze and carried away. His reflective sunglasses hid his eyes, but he seemed like he was looking out at the people as they scurried on their way, and Lee thought he saw the people scurrying a little faster.
Lee wanted to kill him. He wanted it bad enough to make his stomach tremble and his breath catch in his throat.
But they didn’t have a rifle capable of shooting twelve hundred yards.
So this was going to get a little more personal.
“Target marked,” Lee said, his voice all business now. “PID confirmed.”
“Roger that,” Abe replied, and his voice too had lost its conversational tone. “Let’s get it done.”
***
Lee faced six guards, all of them armed.
He stopped their stolen pickup truck at the main gate to Triprock, and he and Abe scanned across the cartel men that stood around it.
One had an old M60 machine gun that sat casually upon a sandbag nest. The others had a mix of rifles. A couple AKs. A couple ARs. One FAL.
Lee’s heart knocked steadily on the inside of his chest. Fast, but more than anything, it knocked hard. But he kept his face relaxed. His body loose, though it jittered to move. To squirm under the weight of secrecy.
Behind the guards were the gates, which were just simple stamped metal—Lee could easily drive through them if he wanted to. But that would just turn the whole thing into a gunfight. And that would be counterproductive at the moment.
Beyond the gates, lay Triprock. Four houses, three barns, and a few large sheds. All lined by a cedar post and barbed wire fence. The cedar paling and deteriorating, and the barbed wire dark and rusty red.
Guards patrolled the inner perimeter, and stood watch from several key vantage points.
Lee and Abe, against fifty hostiles.
Not great odds.
Directly in front of them, the gate guards separated, and began to approach. Two hung back—the guy with the machine gun, and one other. The remaining four split into pairs, one pair going to Lee’s side of the vehicle, the other going to Abe’s side.
They did this without coordinating. They were practiced.
Probably decently trained.
Lee already had his window down.
The first man to reach him—the one with the FAL—was Hispanic. His partner looked white, and hung back, near the front tire.
“Who’re you?” the leader with the FAL asked, blunt and aggressive.
“I’m Hank. This is Brody. We’re from La Casa.”
The leader remained suspicious. Lee noticed that, though the FAL was tucked under the man’s armpit, the muzzle pointed right at Lee. If things went south, Lee was a dead man. He already knew what it was like to have a bullet penetrate his chest. This time it would be several bullets, and Julia wouldn’t be there to bring him back to life�
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The thought of her squeezed something painful in a deeply buried part of him.
Some of the fear left him. Displaced by hatred.
The leader traded a quick glance through the cab of the truck to the guards on the other side, who were eyeballing Abe. Lee and Abe remained relaxed, and focused on the leader. Just another day working for the cartel.
“Gimme the password,” the leader demanded.
Lee’s heart took a pause, and then started hitting harder than before. The adrenaline spiking his blood pressure. The blood pressure reshaping his cornea. Flattening it. Causing tunnel vision. He wanted to try to blink it away, but that would only make him look unsure of himself.
The relaxed expression remained fixed on his face with massive effort.
“Blue Moon,” Lee said. Knowing, acknowledging, accepting, that his life hung on two words, and whether or not they were the truth or a lie.
The leader frowned, then took a step back and pointed at the front tire well. “You got a bullet hole, my man.”
The bullet hole. From where Abe had shot the cartel man earlier. It had penetrated the man’s head and gone through the sheet metal.
They’d cleaned the blood and brains off, but they couldn’t do anything about the hole.
Lee nodded, hoping this meant that the password had worked. “Yeah, it’s been there a while now.”
He immediately regretted saying that.
The man could very easily inspect the bullet hole, where the paint had been ripped away and the metal exposed. If it had been there a long time, the metal would have begun to rust.
Shit. He should’ve kept his mouth shut.
The leader shrugged. “Alright. So what do you want at Triprock?”
Lee swallowed on a dry throat, but he tried to make it as natural as possible. “Hermanco sent me. Private message for Señor Leyva.”
The leader pointed his chin towards Abe. “And what about him?”
“He’s my backup. In case anything happened on the road.”
The leader seemed to be weighing how many more questions he wanted to ask, but he also seemed to be getting bored. His initial suspicion now allayed, he was fast losing interest.