“No, it sure doesn’t. I don’t like it, either.” Barry’s gaze was fixed intently on the SUV in front of them. “That’s why we’re going to make them pay for what they did.”
CHAPTER 22
Bandar al-Saddiq lifted his hand and looked at it.
Not a single tremor.
That was what believing in the rightness of his cause did for a man. It brought him peace and strength.
And righteous anger, as well. Saddiq closed his hand into a fist, and in his mind, he visualized crushing the life out of the infidels who pursued him. He could see their blood oozing between his fingers . . .
Beside him, Enrique Valdez twisted around on the seat and peered through the SUV’s rear window. He banged his fist against the seat as a burst of Spanish profanity erupted from him.
“Still back there!” he said. “What does it take to get rid of these gringos?”
“I thought perhaps shooting those people in the town would make them stop,” Saddiq said. “Obviously, they care nothing for innocent lives. But then, we already knew that. Consider how many millions of innocents the Americans have slaughtered in my homeland and in other countries on the other side of the world.”
“You attacked them in their home,” Galvez said. “Did you think they have no pride?”
Saddiq sneered. “I think most Americans are gutless sheep, soft and easy to kill. Has your experience been any different, Galvez?”
The Mexican shrugged and said, “Many Americans are sheep to the slaughter, I agree.” He glanced behind them again. “But some are wolves.”
“This vehicle will go faster than that truck, will it not?”
“As you said earlier, señor . . . we will find out. In twenty minutes, if we live that long, we will reach the interstate, and another vehicle will be waiting there to pick you up. I promise you, the gringos will not be able to catch that one.”
* * *
Barry and Jake knew from the drive down here into New Mexico’s Bootheel that there wasn’t much of anything between Interstate 10 and Hachita. As the road signs often warned out here in this part of the country, No Services for However-Many Miles.
So there was nothing to slow down the SUV as it fled north. Just open road, bordered on one side by telephone and power poles.
“If I remember the map right, this stretch runs almost straight as a string except for a couple of easy bends,” Barry said.
Jake was already at work on the computer, calling up a map. As it appeared on the screen, he saw that Barry was right and said as much.
“Maybe we should call in the New Mexico highway patrol, get them to set up a roadblock at the interstate,” he suggested.
“Neither of us have any official standing in this case,” Barry pointed out. “I don’t carry any credentials, and you’re taking time off from the FBI, remember?”
“Yeah, but I can get in touch with the bureau and request assistance anyway. And I know good and well you can make calls to people high up and get just about anything you want.”
Barry laughed. “Things like that take time, though, and we don’t have that luxury right now. Stopping whoever or whatever that is in front of us, that’s up to us. The Zaragosas wouldn’t be shooting RPGs all over the place and slaughtering civilians if it wasn’t important.”
That reminder of what had happened back in Hachita put grim looks on the faces of both men. Jake stared through the windshield at the black SUV, visible half a mile ahead of them.
“How fast can this truck go, anyway?”
“With the special modifications to the engine, top speed is 125 mph. We can’t maintain that for more than an hour or so, but if we can catch them before they get to I-10, we won’t have to.”
“If that SUV belongs to the Zaragosa cartel, it’s probably been souped up, too,” Jake said. “The question is how much.”
He leaned over slightly, enough to see that the needle on the speedometer was hovering just above 120. Barry had said he could coax a few more miles per hour out of the Kenworth if he needed to, and it was starting to look as if that was going to be necessary.
“Maybe it’s just wishful thinking,” Barry said after a few moments of taut silence, “but I believe we’re getting closer to them.”
“Maybe,” Jake replied. “I mean, maybe closing in on them, not about it being wishful thinking.”
The miles flashed by and the minutes crept along, and little by little, the truck drew closer to the SUV.
Then Jake said, “Isn’t that the highway up there?”
Out here in this pancake-flat country, any elevation was easy to see from a good distance. That was why the humpbacked mountain ranges scattered around the vicinity looked almost close enough to reach out and touch when they were still miles away.
What Jake saw in the distance was the overpass where Interstate 10 went over New Mexico State Road 146, the highway they were on at the moment. There were no businesses at that intersection, Jake recalled, nor did the state road continue north of the interstate. It ended right there.
“They’ll have to go either right or left,” he said.
“Yeah.” Barry’s eyes narrowed. “What’re they doing up there?”
The SUV swung out from the northbound lane into the southbound, revealing a motor home that the SUV’s driver intended to pass.
A horrible thought occurred to Jake. He said, “You don’t think they would—”
That was all he got out before a couple of the men inside the SUV opened fire on the motor home, hammering bullets all along its left-hand side and shattering the driver’s window.
CHAPTER 23
Jake yelled in incoherent rage as the motor home began weaving back and forth across the road. The SUV had already spurted ahead of it, so the people in it didn’t have to worry about the motor home blocking them.
Barry did have to worry about that, however, which was exactly why the murderous scum inside the SUV had opened fire. Barry had to brake as the motor home slowed but continued lurching unpredictably from side to side.
Jake was sure the driver was riddled with bullets and no longer in control of the vehicle. He had no way of knowing who else was in the motor home or how badly injured they were.
Then the motor home veered too far to the right and went off the pavement. There wasn’t much of a drop-off, but enough of one that the top-heavy vehicle began to lean, then went over and began to roll. It made two revolutions before coming to a stop on its side.
Barry kept slowing down. “Can you see if anybody was thrown clear?”
Jake peered at the wreck, which they were rapidly approaching. He said, “I don’t see anybody—”
That was as far as he got before the motor home exploded. The blast swallowed it completely. There was no chance that anyone still inside had survived, and since it didn’t appear that any of the passengers—if there were any—had been thrown clear, he said, “We can’t do anything here. Keep going!”
Grimly, Barry nodded. As he pressed down on the gas again and the truck surged forward, he said in a bleak voice, “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
The SUV had picked up more ground. As Jake leaned forward to peer after it, the vehicle suddenly veered to the right, taking an exit on a paved road that curved back to the east.
“That’s the access road!” Jake exclaimed. He glanced at the map display on the computer screen to confirm his memory. “They can’t get onto the highway from there without going through a rest area a couple of miles east of the intersection. That might slow them down.”
“Or give them a bunch more innocent people to kill to slow us down,” Barry said.
He had the gas pedal all the way to the floor, but he had to let up on it as he approached the turnoff. He didn’t want to slow down, but he couldn’t make the exit onto the access road at this speed.
Even braking, the turn wasn’t easy to accomplish. If the angle had been sharper, the truck probably would have gone off the road or jackknifed.
&nb
sp; Barry kept it under control, though, and started speeding up again. The black SUV was visible up ahead, as were the buildings and covered picnic tables of the rest area Jake had mentioned.
The frontage road ran close to the actual lanes of the interstate in places. It looked like the SUV could have made it across that narrow median onto the highway without much trouble if the driver had wanted to, even though it would mean busting through a flimsy-looking wire fence.
Jake thought about that and said, “They’re heading for some kind of meet at that rest area. Otherwise, they’d be on the highway by now.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right. Wonder if they’re passing the package off to somebody else. That might give us a chance to grab it.”
“Right now, I’ll take any chance we can get.” At the thought of all the wanton killing their quarry had carried out, deep trenches marred Jake’s cheeks.
The frontage road was a narrow blacktop with no shoulder and a dotted white line down the middle. A dirt lane leading to a trailer house several hundred yards off the highway flashed past.
Jake wasn’t sure why anybody would want to live in a place like that, out here in the middle of nowhere. The solitude would drive most people crazy.
On the other hand, if you didn’t like people, southern New Mexico was the place for you.
The SUV’s brake lights flared as it reached the rest area. Jake and Barry were close enough now that Jake could see the low, brick building that likely housed restrooms and vending machines. A parking lot for cars was in front of it, and a lane where trucks could park was farther out, closer to the interstate. Picnic tables were scattered around the outer edge of a large open area behind the building. A few scrubby trees grew back there, but it wasn’t exactly parklike in its vegetation.
A couple of big rigs were parked in the truck lane. Half a dozen cars had pulled up to the curb on the other side of the parking lot. One of them, a low-slung, dark blue sports car, backed out quickly as the SUV entered the lot, still going pretty fast.
Barry didn’t veer to the left toward the truck lane. He kept going straight ahead, aimed at the parking area for passenger vehicles. As the SUV skidded to a stop, Jake leaned forward and said, “A couple of guys just jumped out of the SUV. They’re going for that sports car!”
“I see ’em,” Barry said. “One of them must be the package.”
That would be the sleek, dark-haired man in an expensive-looking, light-colored suit and an incongruous straw cowboy hat he held one-handed on his head, Jake thought. The man hustling him along was a burly Mexican, probably one of the Zaragosa lieutenants charged with delivering the other man to the next stop on his journey.
Three more men piled out of the SUV and opened fire on the Kenworth with machine pistols as Barry sent the truck barreling toward them. The slugs rebounded off the heavily armored front end and didn’t even star the windshield.
A few people had been wandering around the rest area. When the shooting started, they scrambled for the cover of the brick building.
Jake worried that the cartel soldiers might open fire on those innocents as a distraction, as they had done twice previously, but this time it looked like a stand-up, face-to-face fight. The smugglers were done running.
Barry slowed down, but not by much. When the gunners realized that he was still coming at them and their bullets weren’t doing any good, they tried to dive out of the way.
Two of them weren’t fast enough. Jake caught a glimpse of them throwing their arms up in front of them, as if that would somehow protect them from the rushing steel behemoth. Their mouths were open in screams, inaudible over the roar of the Kenworth’s engine. He barely felt the thud as they went down under the front bumper and the tires turned them into gory pulp.
The third man managed to dart out of the way. He tried to circle the front end of the SUV, which was parked crossways in the lot to take up as much room as possible.
Barry angled a little to the left so the right front of the truck struck the front end of the SUV, crumpling its fender and spinning it out of the way. The vehicle clipped the fleeing man and knocked him off his feet. A split second later, the Z1000 thundered over him as well.
Up ahead, the man they were after was climbing into the passenger seat of the sports car. He paused just long enough to gaze over the vehicle’s roof at the truck coming toward him.
Then he finished leaping inside and slammed the door. The sports car took off, its tires smoking as they left rubber on the pavement.
The last of the cartel soldiers, the one who’d probably been in charge of this leg of the operation, turned to face Barry and Jake. He pulled a small revolver from his pocket, leveled it, and fired at them. He had to know those puny bullets weren’t going to stop them, but he was defiant to the last.
The truck steamrollered over him.
Barry pushed the gas pedal to the floor again as he gave chase to the sports car, which by now had pulled out onto the interstate itself. Traffic wasn’t very heavy, so Jake had a good view of the fleeing vehicle as it weaved around the few cars on the road.
“Holy cow! He’s taking off like a jet.”
“I know,” Barry said tersely. “And I can tell just by looking at how fast he’s going that we can’t catch him. We can’t even keep up with him. That little jackrabbit can probably do a hundred and fifty, at least.”
“You mean he’s going to get away?”
“I mean we can’t catch him,” Barry said again.
“After they killed Mr. Taylor and shot up all those people in Hachita . . . after they wrecked the motor home and killed everybody in it . . . they delivered the guy they were supposed to deliver and he’s going to get away.”
Jake’s voice was as flat as the bleak, lunar landscape around them.
“For now,” Barry said as he began slowing the truck. “He’s going to get away for now. That doesn’t mean we won’t catch up to him later.”
“How do you figure that?” Jake asked in obvious disbelief.
“Because I got a good look at his face,” Barry said, “and I know who he is. That’s the first step in figuring out why he’s here and where to look for him next.”
CHAPTER 24
“Bandar al-Saddiq,” Barry said as he nodded toward the screen of the open laptop on the desk.
Jake studied the lean, handsome, fashionably beard-stubbled face and said, “Are you sure it was him?”
“I got a good look at him at that rest area,” Barry said with a nod. “The ‘package’ the Zaragosa cartel was delivering was Saddiq, all right.”
They were in a motel room on the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, having driven through most of the afternoon to get there after leaving the rest area. The motel wasn’t the best in the world—but it was the sort where nobody asked too many questions, either.
The big Kenworth was parked out back, where it wouldn’t be as noticeable. After everything that had happened today, it was entirely possible that BOLOs had been issued for it.
Jake had made an anonymous call—Barry always had several burners available—to the New Mexico state police to alert them to a dark blue sports car (make, model, and license number unknown) that was traveling east at a high rate of speed on Interstate 10.
Jake had informed the cops that the car had been involved in several fatal shootings and crashes, and that whoever was in it should be considered heavily armed and highly dangerous.
Of course, the same thing could be said of him and his uncle. He was sure that law enforcement had gotten numerous reports today about a pair of maniacs in a big truck rampaging through that isolated corner of New Mexico. The people who had seen them wouldn’t have any way of knowing they were the good guys.
Neither of them really expected Jake’s call to the law to do much good as far as locating the man they were after. The driver of the sports car might have even slowed down to a normal speed once he judged he was so far ahead the truck wouldn’t be able to catch him.
Chance
s were that the car had gone on through Deming and at least as far as Las Cruces. It was entirely possible the “package” could be in El Paso by now, or even farther along toward his ultimate destination—wherever that might be.
“So tell me about him,” Jake said with a nod toward the face on the screen. “Have the two of you tangled before now?”
“No, I’ve just seen his name and picture before, that’s all.”
Barry had a near-photographic memory. If he actually studied something, he knew it forever. Jake had something of the same skill, but not as highly developed.
“He’s from Afghanistan and has operated a lot there, also in Pakistan. He’s a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist organization that’s been behind a number of attacks on the Indian military.” Barry frowned in thought. “Haven’t heard much from them lately.”
“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “Lashkar-e-Taiba . . . that sounds familiar, somehow.”
“It means Army of the Righteous.”
“No, I was thinking I’d heard something about it recently . . .” Abruptly, Jake shook his head. “Oh, it wasn’t Lashkar-e-Taiba. It was Lashkar-e-Islami.”
“The Army of Islam,” Barry said. “The group that claimed responsibility for that train derailment in Nevada the other day.” He nodded. “That’s where we heard it, all right. Over the past forty years, there have been several Islamic terrorist organizations calling themselves the Army of Something or Other. Makes me wonder if a bunch of offshoots from them have gotten together and dubbed themselves the Army of Islam.”
“Maybe they thought they weren’t getting enough press,” Jake suggested. “So they formed their own group of murderers and terrorists.”
Barry chuckled. “Actually, you could be on to something. Saddiq was rumored to be involved in several of those attacks Lashkar-e-Taiba pulled off, but he was never the top dog in any of them. He could have figured he’d never get to be the boss if he stayed where he was.”
“You make it sound kind of . . . corporate.”
“Well, what’s more cutthroat than corporate politics?”
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