PRECIPICE

by Leland Davis

  He stepped out of the shower and dried off then pulled on his skinny Mexican jeans. They were tighter than he liked and so dark blue they were almost black. They were also uncomfortably rigid from being brand new. He walked stiffly back into the tiny hotel room, where Sam had taken his place on the bed and was watching another American rerun dubbed into Spanish. He propped up the other pillow and sat down next to her on the narrow bed. As they watched TV to the ridiculous Spanish voiceover, Sam slowly leaned over against him until the bare skin of their shoulders touched. Slightly startled, he turned to meet her eyes, and his tension dissolved into her gaze as they slowly, tentatively kissed. The momentary impulse stretched into minutes. As he gently slid the Mexican peasant’s dress up and over her head, all his thoughts of retribution vanished into a swirl of desire; and when their skin pressed together, he felt his guilt and hate dissolve into the smooth sanctuary of her warm embrace.

  *

  Harris could see the twin glows of two burning cigarettes through the dark desert night. He put on his night vision goggles and powered them up. Two Mexicans in fatigues were standing guard outside the metal barn. He could see them clearly in the monochrome display. Each had an assault rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. They were the only ones left around. Harris had watched the ponytailed cowboy leave first in his Chevy Avalanche only minutes after they had arrived. He’d felt a pang of regret that he might not get to kill that son of a bitch, but he was thankful that he’d finally had an opportunity to escape from the back of the truck. He was also wondering if he was actually better off here in the remote desert than he’d been in the jungle. At least he felt more at home here, but he was still wounded and stranded in the middle of nowhere with no one but hostile soldiers around.

  About two hours after ponytail had left, the work behind the building had wrapped up. He’d seen a wooden walled flatbed truck full of men leave just before dark followed closely by an empty bus and a Dodge Charger with the markings of the Mexican Federal Police. He hoped there was another vehicle inside the building that he could use to get out of here. He needed medical attention soon. He was worried he might lose the leg if the infection was allowed to go too long. For someone as physically oriented as Harris, losing a leg would be a death sentence. He’d known other guys from the SEAL teams who were taken out of action by debilitating injuries, and he’d seen the look of quiet despair in their eyes. Mentally those men were the toughest he’d ever known, but he’d still seen it break a few of them down. He feared that fate more than death.

  Harris watched as the two men dropped their cigarette butts and ground them out in the dust with the soles of their combat boots. He checked his watch. They had been averaging a cigarette every twenty minutes for the hour he’d been surveilling them. He carefully worked his way around the building, keeping his distance so that he could remain concealed in the sparse brush and behind gentle rises in the undulating landscape. Once he was around the corner and out of sight of the guards, he hurried to the building. He leaned against the corrugated sheet metal of the outer wall to rest his wounded leg for a moment and get his mind back ahead of the pain. Although he was still clammy and soaked in feverish sweat, the adrenaline was starting to flow, pushing back the disorientation that had plagued him and clearing the cobwebs from his mind. He focused on the fire that lived deep inside him—the primal part of him that survived and killed, and the calculating human brain that transformed that brutal animal energy into an elegant form of art. This was what he did, and he was the best.

  He worked his way silently back toward the end of the building where the two guards stood and waited concealed behind the corner of the structure. He could hear them talking in Spanish. He leaned against the wall for support and gently pulled back the slide on his silenced 9mm Sig, double-checking that a hollowpoint round was in the pipe. He already knew that a round was chambered because he’d checked it several times throughout the day, but the action of looking had become a ritual to him, a pause for thought and calm before he moved. Satisfied that he was ready, he patiently waited, a lion’s spirit in a man’s body, tightly coiled and ready to pounce.

  When he heard one of the men tapping the package of cigarettes against his palm, Harris shifted his weight onto both feet. He fiercely shoved the screams of protest from his injured leg into the back corner of his mind. He heard the lighter flick once and saw a hint of orange illumination flash into the night around the corner. There went their night vision. Two seconds later, the lighter flicked again and Harris sprang.

  He whipped around the corner just as the lighter’s fire went out and put a bullet between the eyes of the man on the left. The other man dropped the lighter and reached for his rifle, but he joined his companion in death before the lighter hit the ground. Harris put two bullets in his chest and another into his head.

  He wasted no time in celebration. Before the second body had toppled, Harris darted forward and rolled through the open door of the building, scanning the darkened space through the eerie night vision display. Nothing was moving. Harris cautiously worked his way around the cavernous space until he had cleared the entire room. He was alone. He hobbled back to the front entrance of the building and dragged the two bodies inside where they wouldn’t be seen if someone drove up. Then he began a more thorough search.

  There wasn’t much to find. The first major disappointment was that there were no vehicles parked inside. There was a tractor parked out back, but Harris had little hope that he could make it to safety on that clumsy thing without being discovered, if it even held enough fuel to get him anywhere useful. He also didn’t relish the possibility of being chased by a truck while he was trying to escape on a tractor. He was pleased to acquire some heavier weapons. One of the men he’d killed carried a Bushmaster .223 AR-15, and the other had an AK-47. Harris took both guns. There were two magazines of ammo for the more accurate semi-automatic Bushmaster, and three magazines of heavier 7.62mm rounds for the full-auto Kalashnikov. He felt much more prepared. If he was going to have to take on a group of heavily armed men in order to get out of here, he would much rather do it with these weapons than with only his 9mm pistol.

  The best find in the building was a good amount of food, obviously supplies for the men standing guard. Harris feasted on the bread, beans, and snack foods that he found stashed on a table in the corner to the left of the open front door. It was the first food he’d had in two days, and he could feel his strength returning only minutes after he ate. He was also relieved to find a small med kit. He used the rudimentary supplies to clean his oozing leg wound and change the dressing.

  When he was finished he wandered out behind the building to examine the work that the men had been doing all day. It was nothing but a pit dug into the ground maybe fifteen feet on a side and six feet deep. He had no idea what they might be up to. Perhaps it was a foundation for something they were building, or maybe a mass grave. It didn’t matter. He was focused on finding a way out of here, and if he was lucky maybe taking some of these fuckers down before he went.

  He returned to the building and carried the bodies of the men he’d killed about two hundred yards into the desert. If others arrived and discovered them it would give away his presence. He thought he was going to pass out several times from the pain of carrying the men. He gritted his teeth and refused to relent and drag them because he didn’t want to leave tracks in the dirt. When he’d finished the odious task of hiding the bodies, he removed all traces that he’d been in the building and concealed himself once more in the desert to wait out the night. Hopefully an opportunity would arise to get out of here tomorrow. If it didn’t, he would have to create one.

  20

  Thursday, November 24th

  CHIP WAS RELUCTANT to get up, but he knew they had to get moving. The military-style G-Shock watch they’d given him for the mission said 7 o’clock. He gently untangled himself from Sam and sat up on the edge of the bed, then impulsively leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. His head
hurt a little bit as he sat back upright, and he tried to remember how many beers they’d had the night before at the pizza place. He picked up a bottle of water from the bedside table and took a long drink. Then he shook Sam’s shoulder gently to wake her before he wandered into the bathroom to brush his teeth, bringing the bottled water with him. The lack of potable tap water was one of his least favorite things about Mexico. There was nothing like five minutes in a Mexican bathroom to make him glad that he was headed back to the US.

  Twenty minutes later they had packed their meager supply of things into the small backpack and made it downstairs to the hotel’s restaurant. Chip ordered them a huge platter of chilaquiles—his favorite traditional Mexican breakfast. In a few minutes the waitress brought them a steaming pile of homemade corn tortilla chips simmered in zesty green and red chile sauces and then topped with two fried eggs, beans, and soft white cheese. If this was going to be their last meal in Mexico, Chip was going to make the most of it. The love/hate relationship he felt for this country had been amplified by the beauty of the river he’d traversed on this trip and the tragedy of the events that had transpired there. As usual he couldn’t wait to leave Mexico, but he also couldn’t wait to come back. He and Sam both dug into the chilaquiles with gusto and were soon washing down the last of the meal with fresh-squeezed juice.

  Although Chip had no idea what the future would hold, the perfection of this moment after all that they had been through enveloped him in a bubble of contentment that he wished could last forever. He knew it was totally irrational. It could never work. She was a senator’s daughter, a sorority girl from Stanford—someone so totally remote from his carefree lifestyle that she might as well be from the moon. She was nine years his junior, and her experiences were so divergent from his own that it was a wonder they had anything to talk about at all. But after all they had been through, being together felt like the easiest thing in the world. All of his instincts told him not to let down his guard. But they had survived. They had done it together. If they could make it through this, maybe there was a chance.

  They reluctantly paid their tab and headed back onto the streets where the two were faced with an unusual puzzle. Several bus companies operated out of the city, so finding the right bus stop proved to be a challenge. After a fruitless forty minutes of combing the streets trying to figure out which bus was headed to Matamoros, Chip hailed a cab and had it drop them at a bus stop on the highway on the outskirts of town. They waited in the bright morning sunshine until a bus finally trundled by at 9:30, its placard indicating that it was bound for Matamoros.

  Chip and Sam stepped aboard and paid the driver from Chip’s rapidly dwindling supply of cash, then they took their usual seats at the back of the bus and settled in for the last leg of their journey. He put his arm around her and held her close, and she looked up at him for a moment, smiled, and snuggled against his side.

  Unbidden, the words sprang from Chip’s mouth.

  “You wanna go to South America with me this winter?” What the hell, he thought. He’d made a pile of money training the team and had fifty grand more coming to him when he got home. She’d told him she was failing out of Stanford anyway. The idea wasn’t any crazier than the events they’d been through in the last week. It almost seemed like the next logical step. They could put all of this behind them, take some good from it, and get away. Years of experience told him that having this work out was about as likely as any relationship he was going to find with his current lifestyle.

  Sam turned in surprise and looked into Chip’s eyes.

  “Yeah,” she said, a smile splitting her face. “Let’s go.”

  They sat back on the bus and whiled away the drive excitedly talking about the places they could visit in South America as Chip regaled her with stories from his past adventures below the Equator. As the bus barreled down the desert highway, the jungle camp seemed to fade to insubstantiality behind them and disappear into the glow of the road that lay ahead. It was nice to be looking forward.

  *

  Harris lay in the desert with the sun’s relentless rays pounding against his back like a blacksmith’s hardened steel hammer. He could feel sweat oozing through his pores, but at least the oppressive heat helped lessen the fever chills that racked his weary body. He hunkered in the brush, his camouflage fatigues blending seamlessly into the tiny green leaves of the scrubby bushes that littered the area. He had been lying prone behind one all morning watching the activity at the metal barn.

  The place had been deserted until almost 11, then a large truck loaded with armed men had bounced down the road and into the building. The men had come out and scattered this way and that, calling out for their lost friends who were supposed to be on guard. No one seemed overly concerned, however; and more importantly, nobody walked very far into the scrub to search. A few of the men took shovels out back to put some finishing touches on the pit they’d dug the day before while the rest loitered around and talked or smoked. Harris was pleased to see that even though the men were well armed, none of them had the demeanor of professional soldiers. There were fourteen of them, though, which still meant that he’d face long odds if there was no other choice but for him to attack. The idea of facing fourteen men and then trying to escape in an ungainly truck still didn’t feel like a reasonable plan. He would wait and see what else developed.

  *

  Chip and Sam’s conversation had moved from the beaches of Ecuador to the Volcanoes of Chile; they were excitedly planning the trip of a lifetime. Chip had been around long enough to know they had crossed the line into youthful fantasy, but he was committed to the indulgence. The conversation made Sam happier than he’d seen her yet. After what she had just been through, she deserved it. Sam’s eyes were shining with life as her mind’s horizons spread wider than she’d dreamed possible only days before. They were interrupted when the bus slowly rolled to a stop on the side of the highway. They’d been driving for three and half hours, and it was almost noon.

  Chip could see the flashing lights of a Mexican Federal Police car through the window behind them. He’d been through plenty of stops and searches on past trips to Mexico, but he’d no idea that they searched bus travelers as well. With only two hours left to go, the delay was more annoying than anything else. Hopefully this wouldn’t take too long.

  A young man in police garb with an automatic rifle climbed aboard the bus. Sam gave Chip a worried look, but he reassured her that the police carried such weapons at all of the checkpoints down here. It was nothing to fear. When the door closed and the bus lurched into motion with the man still inside, Chip became slightly uneasy as well. Over his shoulder through the window behind them he could see the police car pull out and follow the bus down the road. After about two hundred yards the bus made a left turn onto a dirt track leading into the desert, and Chip’s gut finally twisted into a tight knot of fear. This wasn’t right. This couldn’t be normal. The other people on the bus were disturbed as well, and Sam’s eyes grew wild with panic as the ungainly bus jostled down the rugged road. Chip tried to stay calm and figure out what to do. He still had the silenced Sig in his pants, but maybe he was overreacting. Maybe everything would be OK.

  When the bus drove into a large metal barn in the desert and parked in the shade inside, the last of Chip’s hope faded away. The policeman at the front of the bus raised his rifle and began barking commands in Spanish that the two Americans couldn’t understand. The other passengers panicked. Some of them began crying or praying hysterically while others stoically awaited their fate. Chip’s mind was spinning, and he gripped the handle of his 9mm. Should he shoot this guy now? Could they still get away? Through the tinted windows he could see a row of men in fatigues outside all training assault rifles at the bus. The police car pulled into the building as well and parked along the opposite wall, and a man in full police uniform stepped out.

  Chip dolefully realized that he was completely outgunned. Sam was crying softly and clinging to him, and he pu
t an arm around her and held her close to his side. He slid the Sig from the front of his pants and moved it to the small of his back where it would be better concealed. Hopefully it would escape notice and he could use it to help them escape if the opportunity arose.

  The passengers were herded off the bus in a line. As Chip and Sam shuffled to the front of the vehicle, Chip protectively shielded Sam behind him. Through the windows he could see the passengers being sorted into three groups. Some clung to each other in panic until they were roughly torn apart by the armed men and prodded with gun barrels to join their assigned bunches. All of the old or feeble passengers were lined up along the wall in front of the bus. Women were herded to the other side of the room. Once there, a pair of jeering guards prodded them as if surveying horses they were considering buying. Any male passengers who looked relatively fit were moved to the middle of the open barn where they were surrounded by a group of alert guards with guns held ready.

  As Chip reached the steps leading from the bus, he impulsively pulled the pistol from the back of his pants and pressed its grip into Sam’s stomach, hiding the motion behind his body. She wordlessly took the gun and concealed it in the front of her own jeans.

  All of the men turned their heads to look when the tall blonde girl stepped from the bus, and a raucous cacophony of hoots and jeers rang through the barn. Sam clung desperately to Chip as men converged to pull them apart. An armed man wrestled Sam from Chip’s grasp and lasciviously pawed one of her breasts. She yelled and kicked hysterically as she was forcibly carried away. Chip glared balefully into the eyes of another man who held the barrel of his rifle against Chip’s chest. He tried to shut out Sam’s increasingly desperate cries, to shut out his fear, and to shut out the fact that his heart was breaking over what was surely about to occur. He never let his gaze waver from the guard’s eyes as he was slowly pushed backward across the dirt floor to join the other men in the center of the barn.