by Tom Lowe
His eyes opened wider, his head rotating back to me similar to a lizard. He stepped forward and boasted, “When I kill you, O’Brien, I’ll be close enough to spit in your eyes. Like a fuckin’ cobra! Blind you with speed. You and your Indian brother are about to be dead brothers.”
He came toward us and raised the .45. I could smell the burnt odor of smoked marijuana on his clothes, nostrils red from coke. Billie touched the hilt of his knife. Gonzalez taunted, “Pull on that blade. You won’t get it outta the leather before I take your head off.”
His eyes were on Billie long enough. I dropped to the ground, at the same instant using my left foot to trip the stretched twine. Gonzales moved his gun toward me. A half second too late. Billie jumped to his right. The shotgun blast deafening. The impact tore through Gonzales’ neck and face. Other shots fired. One ripped into my backpack. Billie’s right arm was a blur. His knife hit the giant in the sternum. I rolled up with my Glock in my hands and tried to aim through the shotgun smoke at Soto. I fired two shots in Soto’s direction. A man wielding a machete charged me. I shot him in the chest, his body falling hard two feet in front of my head. I heard running, shots firing.
When the smoke cleared, Soto was gone.
EIGHTY-TWO
Soto and the rest of the Mexican workers had vanished in the mix of smoke and dirt kicked up from the gunshots. I slowly stood and looked at Joe Billie who was still sprawled on the ground. “You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, but you’ve been hit.”
I felt the warmth of my own blood seeping inside my shirt and flowing through the hair on my chest. A burning pain radiated from my shoulder into my upper chest and right arm. One of Soto’s bullets had gone completely through my shoulder. I moved my hand and arm, and then rotated the injured shoulder. It was painful but functional. I didn’t think the round hit a bone. I was lucky. Not so for Izzy Gonzales.
The body lay on its back. One of the buckshot had entered Gonzales’ left eye spraying brain matter across the blooming white and yellow honeysuckle.
I glanced up at the surveillance camera mounted on the pine tree and wondered if the most ruthless drug lord on the planet had just watched me kill his only nephew. I knelt by the body, kept my back to the camera, slipped the small GPS transmitter from my pocket, lifted Gonzales’s belt and shoved the transmitter into his underwear, the smell of feces and urine hitting me in the face. My head pounded, the pain now coming in waves. I knew I would go into shock if I didn’t stop the loss of blood.
I said, “We need to get to the Jeep. I’ll try to call for help.” Billie nodded and ran to the dead man who lay on his back, the knife buried to the hilt in his chest. Billie leaned over, pulled the knife out of the body and wiped the blade clean on the man’s shirt.
I fought back nausea. “Let’s get out of here before they come back.”
“They never left.”
“What do you mean?”
“Looks like more arrived.” Billie pointed toward the far end of the field, barely visible through the marijuana. I could see two black pickup trucks pull to a stop, a black SUV Escalade and another SUV that I recognized. It was Ed Crews’ official park service vehicle. He stood next to Soto who seemed to be yelling into a hand-held radio, his arms flailing. I counted three more men in addition to the laborers who’d been swinging machetes. The other recruits were biker or gang types with lots of hair, leather, the inflated swagger of the hunt, and the arsenal of machine guns in their hands.
I used my teeth to tear a piece from my shirt, folded the cloth and pressed it against the bullet hole in my shoulder. I knew blood was flowing from the exit wound. But at the moment there was nothing I could do. “Let’s go!” I said. Grabbing my shotgun, Billie and I ran toward the east, the direction we’d left the Jeep. I hoped I wouldn’t bleed out before we got there.
After about a half mile, I had to stop. I took off my belt, used what was left of my shirt to make a bandage for the exit wound. “Joe, take this shirt, press it against the wound in my back, then tighten my belt around both bandages. I held the blood-soaked piece of shirt to the entrance wound. Then he tightened the belt around my shoulder, covering both the entrance and exit wound. Sweat rolled from my face and down my chest, mixing with the streaking blood. “Think they’re following us?”
Billie looked back in the direction we’d come. “I can’t see any of them, but I think we’d better keep moving. The Jeep is close. Let me help you.” He slung my left arm over his shoulder, gripped it with his left hand, and held my side with his right. We walked as fast as we could through the darkening forest.
EIGHTY-THREE
Someone, maybe Ed Crews, had come across my Jeep before we did. The front tires were cut and flattened. I found my cell phone, pushed the on button: roaming — no signal. “Get in, Joe. Even with two flat tires, we might put some distance behind us and them.” I started the Jeep, put it in gear and pulled out of the sand, the flat tires sounding like flags ripping in a hurricane.
Within a few minutes, we found a spur road. A golden moon rose through the pines, reminiscent of a medieval platter. I figured the rough, unmarked road was used by the Gonzales gang to move in and out of the forest, courtesy of a senior ranger who looked the other way, or diverted attention the other way for another, more lucrative cash flow. Bastard!
The road was pocketed with large holes, ruts and an occasional fallen log. The Jeep felt more like a sled. Each gopher tortoise hole sent a booming shock through the frame and into our bones. “You want me to drive?” Billie asked.
“I’ve never seen you in a car.”
“Now’s a good time to learn.”
I wanted to smile, but I felt like it would require more energy than I could spare. I tried to focus on my hand-held GPS. The road we were on wasn’t found on the satellite. “Where the hell are we?”
“About three miles northeast of the river,” Billie said.
“It feels like we’re driving on the moon, craters and all.’’ The pain was so severe over my left eye I had to close it to see where I was driving. My mouth tasted like metal, and I could smell my blood and sweat coalescing across my chest and down my back.
Lights in the rearview mirror caught my attention. “They’re coming! We can’t outrun them with two flat tires.” I gunned the Jeep, swerved around a hole that looked more like the opening to a cave, and pushed the speed to thirty-five miles an hour. We bounced so hard the moon shot over a tall pine, and our heads hit the roll bar.
I touched the .12 gauge between the seats. “As good as you are at throwing a knife, it won’t mean shit now. They have machine guns. They can take us out before we can return fire with a shotgun. My Glock won’t match their firepower. We need to get off this cattle trail, maybe lose them in the woods.”
Billie looked in his side mirror and said nothing.
I rounded a curve, almost sliding into a pine tree and floored the gas pedal. The noise was similar to a mule-drawn plow breaking hardpan soil. We drove on for another mile, the lights gaining on us around each turn in the primitive road.
I caught the muzzle flash on the side of the car about one hundred feet behind us. A bullet came through the seats between us and shattered the front windshield. “Next curve I’m pulling off in the woods! I gotta kill the lights!” The instant I came around another turn, I turned between two large pine trees, killed the headlights and drove under the light from the moon. We moved wildly through the forest, dodging trees, plowing over fallen logs and crossing shallow creeks, the engine finally stopping in water almost up to the floorboard.
We sat there for a moment looking to see if lights were following us. All we could hear were sounds from the motor ticking and water sluicing against the tailpipe, hissing. The smell of decayed leaves and sulfur mixed in the steam coming up under us made me nauseous. “C’mon, Joe. Looks like this is where we walk.” I grabbed the shotgun and my Glock as Billie picked up his backpack, and we both stepped out into water that came above our knees.
> We sloshed to dry land on the other side of the swamp, wet leaves and vines clinging to our legs and arms. We saw something moving at a blistering speed before we heard it. A fighter jet flew over us, two hundred yards above our heads. The roar of its engines followed three seconds behind it. “Hope that’s part of the search party.”
Billie said, “A nice, fast helicopter would do better.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that jet has anything to do with us escaping from a band of drug runners who would laugh and take turns slitting our throats.”
I saw flashlights moving in the direction of the road. “They found where we left the road. They’re following us on foot.”
EIGHTY-FOUR
We ran the opposite direction from where the flashlights zigzagged through the trees. Buttery radiance from the full moon drifted down through the branches, illuminating moths and mosquitoes, creating a trapped and eerie image around us like dust caught in a cone of light over the dark felt of a pool table.
“I see ‘em!” one man bellowed out.
I could hear the men running, snapping branches and saplings as they closed the distance behind us.
They stopped.
We stopped. I tried to hold my breath, blood trickling out of my wound. Mosquitoes whined and orbited our heads. I saw the white burst of a machine gun. The rounds tore through limbs above our heads, raining down leaves and shattered branches.
“This way,” Billie said, as he ducked under a huge moss-covered tree that must have fallen years ago from high winds in a hurricane. I followed him, the blood again seeping out from my crude bandages.
We sprinted through an ankle-deep slough and around huge cypress trees. Moonlight reflected off the dark water. The smell of moss and muck erupted as the swamp gripped our shoes and made sucking sounds each time we lifted our feet. Then we hit dry land.
I could hear the men gaining on us, breathing and snorting equivalent to horses racing, shouting to each other. A reckless abandonment on their part of a stealth attack took over their small gang as the taste of blood blossomed in their mouths. They tore through limbs, vines, anything that stood in their way. It was beyond a posse. It was a pack of wolves running down injured prey. I looked back in the distance, under the light of the moon.
They were coming fast. The alpha wolf, Frank Soto, led the gang, eyes wide with fervor of a kill. “O’Brien’s mine!” he shouted.
“I’m taking a scalp!” I heard one of the bikers boast. “Payback for Custer!”
Billie seemed to pay no attention to their taunts. I wasn’t sure he even noticed a large white sign with black lettering. It was big, but unremarkable in the dark. However, its warning was anything but ordinary.
It was frightening.
It was a forewarning.
Any second I expected we’d hit a deep ditch. Maybe we’d run smack into a cinderblock wall, the kind that came with towers, gun turrets and men who had the first paragraph of the Patriot Act tattooed on their strapping forearms. We might be stopped by a soaring chain-link fence with razor wire in the top half dozen strands. Or we’d be hit in the face with powerful searchlights, and either be gunned down by Special Forces guards, or we’d be shot to death by our advancing lynch mob.
I was growing more light-headed by the second. I wondered if I was simply hallucinating from blood loss. THINK. I blinked hard, worked my lower jaw, and applied pressure to the wound I could reach. I felt like we were running in slow motion.
Then I heard Soto barking orders. He cursed and laughed at the same time.
My lungs ached. “Can’t go much farther,” I said to Billie. He stopped and turned toward me. A machine gun discharge exploded the leaves and sand in front of him. One bullet tore through his upper arm. He went down.
I positioned myself behind a pine tree and leveled my Glock, firing one shot at the open machine gunner to the far right. I saw him fall. I fired three more shots at the silhouettes stooping behind trees under the moonlight. Adrenaline burst through my system. “You okay?” I asked Billie, lifting him to his feet.
“I’ll live.”
“Damn straight!” I said. “One down, six to go.”
I knew we’d just run into a Navy bombing range.
In the distance, I could hear the fighter jet circling back toward us.
EIGHTY-FIVE
The moon was straight above us. It created an illusion of a surreal world, a place right out of a war zone with bombed tanks, broken buildings, and the smell of C-4 and burnt gunpowder in the night air. One rusted Abrams tank was flipped over on its side resembling a great leviathan with a bent snout. The main gun barrel bowed upward, the turret unscrewed as if someone had twisted the lid off a jar. There were fractured cinderblock buildings set among retired, broken airplanes and a helicopter missing its tail rotor.
I looked across the field, scarred and barren of plants. There were gaping holes left from the concussions of dropped bombs. It felt as if we had been dropped into a large painting of the lunar surface. A stark, lonely canvas textured in shades of black and white, of abject desolation, a still-life picture of rehearsed war.
Billie and I stood under a small lean-to and listened for our pursuers. We heard a whippoorwill in an oak and frogs by a pond. Water bugs skidded over the moon’s face reflecting from the dark water. There was a visible quiet in an isolated land full of moving shadows, potholed fields, and the pond bouncing moonlight back up into halos of gnats.
“Maybe we can take refuge in one of those block buildings,” I said. “If the buildings are still standing in the middle of a training field for Navy bombers, maybe they’ll withstand machine gun bullets. Joe, you’re going to have to use the shotgun. Just point and shoot.”
He nodded and said, “We may not have another option. Let’s do it.”
“How’s your arm?”
“I need medicine on it, and on you, too, on that wound of yours.”
“Where are we going to get medicine out here?”
“Many places.”
I saw the glow of flashlights bouncing between trees on the northeast side of the property. “They’re coming,” I said. “Let’s go.” We crisscrossed between bombed-out artillery until we came to a concrete block structure no larger than a small garage. It had no door, only open windows. No glass. Stacks of sandbags, at least four feet high, lined the exterior walls.
I walked over rubble and grit, spider webs clinging to my face as I stepped through the window into the dark of the building. Billie followed. A bat fluttered around our heads, its wing grazing across my hair. I saw it fly out the window. The single room reeked of bat shit and mold. I looked out a hole in the wall and saw a line of men approaching us.
“Here,” I handed the shotgun to Billie. “You’ll have to wait until they’re about eighty feet from us. At the rate they’re coming, shouldn’t be too long.” I ignored the pain in my chest, the numbness in my arm, and watched the men come closer. “They must have night scopes to have seen us come in here. Let’s wait for—”
A burst of machine gun fire hammered the block structure. Concrete turning to gravel, bullets plowing deep into the solid walls. “You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
Billie held the shotgun with both hands, the ruddy bloodstain now the size of a pie plate on his shirt. “They’re coming,” he said in a whisper.
Under the moonlight I could see them, each man separated at least fifteen feet from the next. I had no idea which one was Soto. I felt my mind drift, as if it was separating from my body. NO! Not now. I blinked hard, fighting back vertigo from loss of blood, shaking away illusions that wouldn’t retreat. I looked out the hole and saw Iraqi troops approaching. I felt the muscles knot across my chest, my palm sweaty as I readied my Glock.
I could hear the quick orders, commands to kill. I could see the stealth flanking as men raised machine guns to charge us. I knew they would try to fire a barrage of lead in such force that we couldn’t return fire. And then one of them could make his way in
from the side and empty his M4 into the window Billie and I had crawled through.
The F/A 18 Hornet fighter jet gave no advance warning. The Navy pilot’s computer had calculated the strike down to within a few meters of the target. I could see the exterior lights from the fighter more than a mile away in the eastern horizon. I didn’t know if he was circling toward us to practice night bombings. And, if so, was the target our bunker or something else? Right now I simply wasn’t sure if what I saw was real or an illusionist’s prop, a morbid one-act play from a theater of war I still fought during night sweats. I turned to Billie. “Listen! Tell me, do you see lights from a fighter jet banking and coming our way?”
“Yes, and coming damn fast.”
He scarcely said the words when we both peered through the hole like two rabbits looking out to see if the fox was coming.
It was. The Navy Hornet was coming fast and low — three hundred yards out. Two hundred feet above the ground.
Three seconds away.
The bomb exploded maybe eighty yards from us. Not far in front of the advancing men. The shock wave hit our bunker with the force of an off-center strike, a wrecking ball. Not hard enough for damage, but hard enough to shake the walls and kick up dried bat shit off the floor. I couldn’t tell if any of the enemy had been killed. The fire was a roaring hellhole. “Let’s get out of here!” I yelled to Billie. The sound from the jet caught up with its awesome destruction.
We crawled back out the window and ran for the darkest section of the bombing range. I felt the fire and heat penetrate the back of my neck, and smelled the odor of burning flesh and hair. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder. I didn’t want to see if the nightmare could catch me.