Verdugo Dawn

by Blake Banner

  Either there had been recent rain or they had recently drenched the field, because I landed in mud. It knocked the wind clean out of me and I lay for a moment in the cloying sludge, struggling to get up, gasping painfully, then staggered to my feet.

  I blinked, staggered and shaded my eyes. The thudding, whining roar and the downdraft were overwhelming. I was standing in the full glare of three spotlights, and two of them started to descend. The blast of air threw me back. I staggered and ran.

  Running through mud is hard. My back was screaming with pain and my legs felt like sacks of wet sand. I kept telling myself, if I could make the tree line, if I could make the trees, I could disappear into the undergrowth and the wilderness, and I might find a way to make the border.

  But I knew it was a vain hope. The border was two hundred and fifty miles away, and compared with the speed and power of three Sikorsky Hawks, I might as well be motionless.

  I was running and staggering practically at walking pace, dragging my legs forward every step. I was aware that I was running and staggering in a circle of brilliant light. Whatever I did, if I dodged left or right, or fell and rolled, I was moving so slowly by now that they were simply keeping pace with me while the troops caught up. The spot seemed to be nailed to me. I couldn’t shake it and over the thud of the rotors, I was beginning to hear voices, men’s voices, shouting and calling, closing on me.

  I realized then that I had been running on sand. I had circled back to the beach. I came to a steep bank and saw down below me the vast, moonlit sweep of the sea, and over to the left, the burning beacon of Mendez’s house. I leaned forward and let myself fall into the darkness.

  For a few blessed moments, I had lost the spotlight, and I tumbled and rolled through darkness, struggling and scrambling to find my feet. I hit the bottom in a sprawling mess thirty feet from the sighing surf. With no clear idea of what I was doing, I staggered to my feet and started a limping half-run toward the sea. My throat was raw with panting and gasping for air. My heart was pounding and my muscles were screaming for rest.

  I could hear the thud of the Hawks above and behind me. I knew the three glaring spots were probing the dark beach, searching for me. I could hear the voices shouting, calling instructions, encircling me. But I didn’t care, I kept hobbling, trying to run toward the turquoise ocean under the moon, where the flames from Mendez’s house slipped molten among the waves. And there was another light, a light that was winking red and gold, coming in low and fast.

  I waded into the surf as the rattle of automatic fire erupted behind me. Showers of spray exploded right and left, and I fell into the sea, remembering somehow that high velocity slugs disintegrate on contact with water. I plunged into the blessed silence under the waves and swam a few strokes. When my lungs could take no more, I surfaced, spluttering. I heard shouts, a chopper thundering overhead, playing its spot over the waves, and ahead the lights growing brighter, about to hit the surface of the water.

  I plunged again, swimming erratically, but heading ever out, into the depths. When I surfaced again, the sea plane was cruising in my general direction, its props idling. The choppers were circling overhead with their spots searching the sand and the sea. I plunged again and swam toward the plane. I had no clear plan. I just knew I could fly the damn thing if I could kill the pilot. And in my present state, that was a big if. Vaguely, I wondered what had happened to Sole, but the question was too complex, and the possible answer too dangerous to contemplate. I left my mind blank and swam in the cold, blessed silence of the sea.

  When I surfaced again, I was thirty feet from the plane. The door opened and the pilot stepped out onto the float. I swam slowly, trying to make a minimum of noise, not disturbing the surface of the water. But he was looking right at me. He hunkered down and reached out with his hand.

  “Move your ass, will you? They’re radioing me and I can’t answer. It won’t take them long to put two and two together.”

  “Sole?”

  “Shift your ass, for crying out loud!”

  A few seconds later, she was dragging me out of the water and I was clambering from the float into the copilot’s seat. Next thing, the airscrews were roaring and we were turning, hurtling away from the beach with the three choppers thundering after us. But by then, it was too late. They couldn’t match our speed or our ceiling, and pretty soon, they had fallen behind us and disappeared, and we were high above the pitch darkness of the Sonora Desert, flying into a sly moon who was trying to turn the deep blue sky turquoise among winking stars.

  Twenty-Three

  We dropped low to avoid radar, skimmed over Baja and out over the Pacific Ocean. Then, once we were out of Mexican airspace, we climbed to ten thousand feet and banked east toward San Diego, waiting for somebody to notice we were there.

  The ocean below us was absolute black. Above us, the sky was translucent, but the moon, starting its slow descent behind us, was bright enough to blot out most of the stars. We traveled in silence for a long while, watching the sky and the ocean beneath us. But finally, as we began to see the soft twinkling of the lights on the coast of Southern California, I began to relax and give in to the aches and bruises that wracked my body. I slid down in my seat and turned slightly to look at her.

  “You’re a good pilot. You stayed cool under pressure.”

  She didn’t look at me, but she gave a small smile that had more patience than amusement in it.

  “Is that patronizing? Would you make the same observation if I was a man? Did you comment on…” She trailed off.

  I sighed heavily. “No, it’s not patronizing, it’s a compliment. And coming from me, it’s a compliment you can be damn proud of. Yes, I would say the same thing to a man if all I knew about him was that he ran a restaurant. So don’t give me a hard time with your gender sensibilities. I’m not interested. Life’s too damn short to waste it on that kind of crap. And who? Did I comment on who?”

  She shook her head. “Forget it.”

  “Now that,” I said, “was both patronizing and deeply insensitive.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

  “I may need counseling. I’m not sure who I am anymore.”

  “Stop it.”

  I went quiet, and for the next fifteen minutes, there was only the drone of the engines and the occasional creak of the ancient fuselage. Finally, I sighed again and said, “Are you going to tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Sole. You know who I am. You told Mendez that we served together.” I gestured at her where she sat, flying the plane. “You have skills, similar skills to mine…”

  “Not in the same class.”

  “So you have to tell me, Sole. What history do we have together? Who am I? What’s my name?”

  She didn’t say anything. She flew the plane, staring out at the lights on the coast of California, as though I hadn’t said a word.

  Finally, I said, “You going to answer me or are you going to treat me like I don’t exist? For somebody who is sensitive about being patronized, you sure find it easy to be patronizing.”

  She took a deep breath, puffed out her cheeks and blew.

  “I don’t mean to be patronizing. I just…” Another pause and another deep breath. “I don’t know what to say, or what to tell you.”

  I frowned at her. “You could start with my name. Maybe I could get my social security number and start rebuilding my life…”

  She turned to look at me for the first time in maybe an hour. “I’m not going to tell you your name.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  She looked back at the lights on the coast. “Because I don’t want you to remember who you are. I want you to forget, forever. And I want you to forget about El Verdugo, too. Forget it all. Get a job. I can find you a job—hell, I can give you a job. Start over.”

  I stared at her for a long time. Finally, I said, “I don’t know who I am. I need to find out who I am.”

  She
glanced at me again for a moment. “You’re the person asking. And what you’ve forgotten is not who you are, because you never knew that in the first place. What you have forgotten is what you did. And believe me, you are better off with that forgotten.”

  “You’re not doing much to kill my curiosity.”

  She didn’t answer.

  I said, “Were you in the SEALs?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That means no.”

  “Does it? OK.”

  “Sole, I need to know who I am. If you know, you should tell me.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me and offered me a smile that was not hostile. “What is that, in the Constitution? I don’t have to do shit, Mr. Badass, except obey my own conscience. And that is what I am doing. You want to know who you are, go to DC and demand to see Senator McFarlane. Maybe she’ll tell you. But if I were you? If I were you, I’d go and find a Buddhist monk and start meditating.”

  I didn’t answer. I sat sucking my teeth and thinking about what she’d said. I started to say, “That’s actually not bad adv…” when the radio crackled.

  “This is the US Coast Guard…” He cited our position, our bearing and our speed. “You are in United States airspace without proper authorization, please identify yourself immediately.”

  “Good morning, US Coast Guard. This is the unidentified flight approaching San Diego on your stated bearing. Be advised we are in distress. We are in flight from Mexico, where we were abducted and attempts were made on our lives. You may want to advise the FBI we are carrying some forty million dollars’ worth of drugs, and we have information that will be of great value to the Bureau. We are unarmed, but we have one injured passenger and we are both suffering from exhaustion and shock. Do you copy…”

  There was a long silence, then, “Copy. Two Coast Guard aircraft will meet with you and escort you to your nearest airbase. Stand by.”

  * * *

  The Feds and the Coast Guard were not as pleased as you might have expected them to be. Sole’s story, once it had been repeated often enough, got through to them and they eventually accepted that she had been the unfortunate victim of her own good looks, and fallen prey to a drugs trafficker.

  My story was harder for them to swallow, particularly when they took my prints and DNA swabs and found that any reference to me in their databases was listed as classified. And any questions they asked me, all I could tell them was that I had no recollection of who I was.

  They didn’t seem to be too interested in the Verdugo, and I managed to imply that Hunter and Lovejoy were using the fiction of the Verdugo to run some kind of protection racket among drug dealers.

  In the end, they had nothing on me, and they were faced with the inescapable fact that I had helped rescue a US citizen and bring in fifty million bucks’ worth of dope, so they reluctantly let me go with the promise that they would be keeping an eye on me.

  I asked them about getting a new social security number and starting over. They told me that wasn’t their problem, and after three weeks, they let me go. I called Sole and asked her if she was still willing to give me a job. She said she might need someone to sweep up and clear tables, and maybe warm her feet at night. I told her I had special skills in that department and she told me she’d expect me for dinner.

  A couple of days after that, I took my Jeep and drove down past the Cabrito Veloz and down the dirt track to Olaf’s house.

  The sun was already high above the western horizon by the time I arrived. I found the front door open and Olaf sitting at a large oak table in the shade of a eucalyptus grove within the large, exotic garden at the back of his house. He smiled as I approached, but didn’t say anything. I saw he had a bucket of ice beside the table, stuffed with bottles of beer. The smell of rosemary and thyme was strong on the air.

  I sat and cracked a bottle. I took a swig and said, “You’ve been messing with my head. I don’t know how you do it, but you’ve been making me hallucinate.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me and snorted. “Your arrogance is exceeded only by your vanity. Why would I bother doing something like that?”

  “I had…” I shook my head and shrugged. “Trips! Hallucinations. You were in them, in the form of an eagle. But sometimes I was the eagle. They were like the one I had when I went to Dell City. You were there. You know it. Don’t bullshit me.”

  “I don’t bullshit, as you call it. I am all about truth. But your understanding of the mind, of the very nature of reality, is so feeble that you could not begin to understand the nature of the tricks your mind has been playing on you.”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  He shrugged. “You are searching for power. You believe that by knowing who you are, you will somehow have more control over your life, more power over events. But you have never stopped to ask yourself what it means to know who you are. You are like a man racing through a huge house with hundreds of rooms, searching in each room hoping to find himself, never stopping to think that he is the one searching.”

  I sighed. “I had a name, a driving license, a life, a social security number…”

  “And these things defined who you were?”

  I thought about it and sighed again. “No, of course not…”

  “But you are now thinking that you were a killer, a violent, highly trained killer, and now you are thinking that this is who you are, without pausing to think that this is simply what you do.”

  “I am a killer. I know that!”

  He threw back his head and laughed out loud. “Tell me something. When you go to the john for a crap, is that who you are? When you drive a car, have a conversation, pick your nose or fart—is that who you are? Or is it simply what you are doing?”

  “You’re being deliberately awkward. You know what I am driving at.”

  Olaf nodded, with his eyebrows raised, watching me. “Oh yes, I know what you’re driving at. But you haven’t a clue. There is no right or wrong. There is nothing wrong with pursuing power. There is nothing right with it, either. Or knowledge for that matter. But I don’t think you are very clear in your mind about where you want this power and this knowledge to take you. You could be trapped in this search for your identity forever. And I do mean for ever!”

  I felt suddenly irritated with this old man. I had come to him hoping to find some wisdom, and all I was getting was a lot of verbal bullshit.

  “So what are you saying? I should just give up and say, ‘Oh well, I have massive amnesia, I’ll just dig the scene and be in the moment, man.’ Maybe I should open a tree-hugging farm.”

  He laughed again. “Please, never think you are going to find good advice with me. Even if I were able, I wouldn’t give it. I am just asking you to examine what you hope to achieve by finding out what your name is on your birth certificate, and what your social security number is. I can’t help feeling the real issue here is a little deeper.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like what made you lose your memory in the first place.”

  A cool air whispered out of the tall shades and a powerful smell of resin emanated from the bed of brown pine needles that carpeted the forest floor nearby. I grunted. There was in fact a deal of wisdom and truth in what he said.

  He sighed. “What people tend not to do, even people as clever as you, is to question the fundamentals. Like this tree…” He stood and moved to an ancient pine some fifteen feet from the table. He thumped its purple-gray trunk with his fist. “It’s a lovely, huge, ancient pine, isn’t it? No doubt about it. And you, you are an ace, ninja killer who does not know who he is. No question about that. And you, as I said, are in pursuit of knowledge, and power for the purpose of knowing who you are, not in the philosophical sense, but in the no-bullshit sense. All good, solid stuff.”

  I waited, watching him, feeling the dry texture of the table with my fingertips. He turned and looked at me, gave a short laugh and shook his head. “But it isn
’t a tree, and you aren’t an ace, ninja killer.”

  I sighed and groaned. “More bullshit, Olaf. But this is undergraduate philosophy bullshit. We’ve all read Camus and Nietzsche. They are ideas. Just ideas. They won’t cure my amnesia.”

  “The fact that you cannot see connections does not mean that they are not there.” Olaf directed his steps slowly back toward the bench. “In fact,” he added, “most often, the more obvious a thing is, the less likely people are to see it. Sit on this bench with me.”

  “Are you sure it’s a bench?”

  Olaf ignored me. He looked around him for a bit, piercing the deep, cool shadows. Finally, he pointed at the massive, Mediterranean pine he had thumped earlier.

  “Now,” he said. “Look at that tree. Consider it. In considering it, there are two sets of questions that you need to ask. The first set relates to the nature of the tree itself. The second, and perhaps most important, relates to your subjective experience of the tree.”

  I smiled at Olaf, but made no secret of the sigh I let out and my mind drifted to what Sole might be cooking for dinner, and whether we should go out or stay in.

  Olaf ignored me and went on. “Look at the tree. It is solid, massive, hard. If you struck it with your fist, you would skin your knuckles and it would hurt.”

  I shrugged. “So what?”

  “The tree is immensely hard, immensely solid and heavy, and yet, what is it made of?”

  “Come on, Olaf! I am not four! It is made of wood!”

  He shook his head. “No, it is not. It is made of an immense variety of cells, which, in turn, are made of molecules, which are, in turn, made of atoms…”

  “Fine, the tree is made of atoms.”