Oath to Defend

by Scott Matthews

  “It began as a training game for mounted warriors in fifth century-B.C. Persia,” she told him. “They played it with as many as a hundred men on each side. It was a miniature running battle. My dad took me to polo matches in San Diego when I was a kid and wanted a horse. They didn’t have women playing polo then, so after I studied the sport for awhile, I lost interest. It’s a dangerous sport and an expensive one.”

  “Expensive because of the horses?”

  “That and the training the top polo ponies require. A top polo pony sells for two hundred thousand dollars or more, and the best players will bring as many as a dozen ponies to a match. My dad was very successful in real estate, but you know what? I couldn’t get him to buy me a polo pony.”

  “Smart man. So are these polo players all rich boys?” he asked as he slowed to hand the ticket taker his ticket and a ten dollar bill for his passenger.

  “Some are,” she said, “but most of them ride for teams that have a patron, a sponsor. I think most of the players we’ll see today do this as a hobby. They’re not professional polo players.”

  Drake followed the line of cars, SUVs and pickups to the parking lot, which was a field on the west end of the long polo field. On the south side of the full-size polo field, three hundred yards long and one hundred and sixty yards wide, white party tents had been set up for spectators who wanted to be out of the sun and for vendors offering beverages. On the north side of the field, the horse trailers were parked parallel to the field, with each player’s polo ponies tethered to the side of his trailer. At the ends of the polo field, collapsible white goal posts, set eight yards apart, marked the ends of the playing field.

  After helping Liz out of the Porsche, Drake studied the horse trailers. “I see Vazquez’s trailer,” he said after a minute, “but I don’t see him there with his ponies.” They stood beside the car for a minute, deciding what to do. “Let’s wait for Mike and Larry and then wander through the crowd,” he said. “Our boy’s probably signing autographs. We need to get him somewhere with a little privacy.”

  Liz decided this was a good time to continue her tutorial. “The match is divided into six chukkers, each seven minutes long,” she said. “There’s a little time between chukkers, maybe three or four minutes, and five minutes or more at halftime. We won’t have a lot of time once the match gets started.”

  When Casey and Green walked up, Drake said, “Okay, let’s find Vazquez and follow him over to his trailer before the match gets started. That should give us some privacy and the time we need to talk with him.”

  ‘It doesn’t look like they’re letting spectators over near the polo ponies,” Casey said. “Liz, did you bring your badge?”

  “Right here,” she said, taking the black leather federal badge case with her ID in it out of the back pocket of her jeans. “I think I can get us over there to talk with him.”

  “All right!” said Drake. “Let’s go find our guy.” The four team members started walking down the line of vehicles toward the white tents and the crowd gathering along the south side of the polo field.

  “Looks like this polo club allows people to bring their own food and drinks,” Casey observed. “I see a lot of picnic baskets and tailgating going on over behind the tents over there.”

  “Help us find Vazquez first,” Drake said. “He’s the only lead we have right now. When we’re finished, maybe someone will take pity on a guy that just had breakfast an hour ago.”

  Drake led the way through the clusters of spectators along the south side of the polo field until they reached the first white tent that was open on the side facing the polo field. The people standing under the tent were drinking champagne in plastic flutes they had purchased from a bar in the rear of the tent. A banner over the bar and an adjoining table covered with silver buffet warming pans announced the area as the domain of the High Desert Polo Club.

  “Larry,” Drake said, “why don’t you see if Mrs. Rebecca Harsh is here. She’s the lady who took the call saying Vazquez couldn’t make the dinner last night. She’s the organizer of the Invitational, so maybe she knows where he is.”

  On the other side of the polo field, polo ponies were being saddled and readied for the match. Polo mallets were laid out next to folding armchairs for the riders, along with their helmets, kneepads, and gloves.

  As Drake surveyed the field, Green walked up to him. “I found Mrs. Harsh,” he reported. “She said Vazquez is in the clubhouse with the club’s officers. They auctioned off a private session with him to make up for the dinner he missed last night. She said as soon as they finish there, they’ll come directly here and get the match started. We won’t get a chance to talk with him before then.”

  “Well,” Drake said, “then it looks like we get to watch a little polo. Where’s Mike?”

  “Mrs. Harsh saw him looking at the food and told him to help himself.” Green nodded his head as Drake grinned. “He said he’d find you in a minute.”

  “Adam,” Liz began waving her hand in the air, “there’s Margo and Paul.”

  Drake’s secretary was walking smartly toward them, her husband in tow. She was wearing a floppy black hat, a black and white polka dot sundress, and white sandals. After giving Liz a warm hug and commenting on her outfit, she turned to Drake. “Boss, I hope you like my dress,” she said. “Liz said you owed me for taking up so much of my husband’s time this week, so I bought myself a new outfit and put it on the office account.”

  Drake looked from one woman to the other. “This friendship you two are developing is beginning to worry me,” he said. “But I’ll have to say you do the office proud in your new attire, Margo. You drug Paul here for the weekend, so I guess I did owe you.”

  “Actually,” Margo confessed, “when I learned why you were coming to Bend, I Googled this Marco Vazquez and decided I had to come and see what a genuine international playboy looks like. Has he made an appearance yet?”

  Drake looked toward the clubhouse and saw a small crowd exiting the building with Vazquez in its center. When they reached the edge of the polo field, he continued on alone to his trailer, waving at the crowd along the sideline.

  “He’s doing that right now.” Drake pointed as the buzz around the polo field grew noticeably louder.

  53

  After the two four-man teams were introduced and Vazquez was enthusiastically welcomed as the only ten-goal polo player appearing in America at the time, the match began. Polo players rank each other, based on each player’s importance to his team, and it was easy for the spectators to see why Marco Vazquez was a star. From the moment the umpire rolled the ball down the line between the two teams as they faced off in the center of the field, Vazquez and his light gray pony dominated the action.

  He rode aggressively, checking opposing players with abandon and wielding his whippy mallet with deadly accuracy. By the end of the first seven-minute chukker, his team was leading 2-0, and he had scored both goals.

  After a change of ponies between the first and second chukker, Vazquez scaled down his aggressiveness in recognition of the skill level of the amateurs he was schooling, but he appeared to be enjoying the match. If he was riding close to the edge of the boarded field after a score, he smiled at his admirers, especially the beautiful women. He also took time to compliment his amateur opponents when they played well, and joked with his new teammates.

  By halftime, Vazquez’s team was ahead by five goals, 6-1. He rode his pony to his trailer and dismounted. Spectators immediately stepped over the twelve-inch sideboards and began the traditional divot stomp to replace the turf torn up by the thundering horses.

  Drake and Liz walked behind the main group of stompers, who were eager to get across the field and as close to the polo players and their ponies as possible. Some had their programs in hand to get Vazquez’s autograph. He was checking the saddle on his fourth pony as Drake and Liz approached with the other spectators.

  Drake kept his eyes on Vazquez in case he decided to slip away to av
oid meeting with his fans. Instead of fleeing, however, the polo star finished cinching the saddle, then stepped around his pony to greet the closest stomper.

  That step would be his last.

  An explosion blasted through the chatter on the field. It was followed by a moment of shocked silence before the cries of the injured and dying began.

  At the sound of the blast, Drake had instinctively thrown his arm around Liz’s waist and pulled her to the ground. The explosion had sounded familiar to him, like roadside IEDs he’d heard in Afghanistan. As he looked at the carnage around him, he saw blood flowing from wounds in people directly ahead of him. The blast wave and the shrapnel that had cut through the divot stompers on the polo field seemed to have come from a location somewhere near Vazquez’s trailer.

  “Are you hit?” he yelled at Liz, his ears still ringing from the blast.

  She shook her head and started to get up, but Drake pulled her back down. He could see she was disoriented, but he also knew terrorists liked to use a second blast to kill anyone surviving the first one.

  To his left, he could see Casey searching the perimeter of the polo field for a threat assessment. He didn’t appear to have been hit and cautiously got to his feet, along with Green. A quick look over his shoulder to his secretary, Margo, and her husband, who were also getting up, told Drake they had all survived without suffering any major injuries.

  Carefully rising to his feet, Drake looked toward where Marco Vazquez had been standing. The divot stompers nearest his trailer weren’t moving. They were probably dead. The kill zone, vectoring outward from Vazquez’s trailer, appeared to have reached almost half way across the polo field. Drake couldn’t see the polo star, but the pony he’d been readying for the next chukker had been cut down by the blast.

  “I’m going to find Vazquez,” he shouted to Liz. “Make sure help is on the way.”

  He ran wide of the bodies of the dead and wounded, seeing mangled bodies and missing body parts as he got closer, until he reached Vazquez’s dead pony. It was lying on its side with a massive wound the length of its body. Blood was flowing into a widening pool that darkened the green grass around the animal.

  Vazquez was trapped under his pony, lying face down and struggling to breathe.

  Drake knelt down. He could see that the young man’s eyes were open.

  “Vazquez, can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” came the response through clinched teeth.

  “I’ll get help. Hold on.”

  “Don’t…go,” Vazquez gasped. “Bomb…ranch.”

  “What?” Drake leaned closer to hear over the cries and noise around them.

  “Bomb…ranch.” He groaned, then pink bubbles slipped through his lips. “Dam…in mountains.”

  “Who has a bomb?” Drake shouted.

  Vazquez’s eyes fluttered, then fixed in a stare.

  When there was no response to his question, Drake reached down. He couldn’t find a pulse.

  Standing up again, he looked for Casey and Liz across the field where he left them. Liz was kneeling beside a body near the middle of the field, waving for help from the growing number of surviving volunteers rushing to help. He saw Casey on his cell phone. He was standing in the worst of the destruction. Drake knew he was taking command and directing the responders who were needed so badly.

  As he looked over the familiar scene of innocents suffering, Drake felt sickened by the waste. Those who survived would be scarred for life by their memory of this day, and if they lost loved ones or friends, the wounds might never heal. The dead were dead. But some had been so gruesomely cut down that those who mourned them would forever have nightmares after seeing what little remained of them.

  Drake ran to Casey and waited for him to finish his call.

  “Vazquez is dead,” he said when Casey took the phone from his ear. “He was crushed when his pony fell on him.”

  “He must have been right at the blast’s ground zero,” Casey said. “I’m surprised there was anything left of him.”

  “His pony shielded him. But he was alive long enough to say there’s a bomb at the ranch and something about a dam in the mountains.”

  Casey stared at his friend. “So he was involved in smuggling the thing here. I’ll be damned. You were right.”

  “We need to get to the ranch before the road is blocked by emergency responders and ambulances. Have Larry see if he can learn anything from Vazquez’s trailer. I’ll tell Liz what we’re doing and meet you at my car.”

  Liz was still helping a young woman lying on her back with a partially severed right arm. She was being examined by a volunteer who must have had medical training, judging by the way he was working to stop her bleeding. The woman’s eyes were fixed and looking up at the sky, as if she were trying to ignore looking at what the doctor was doing for her. She’d be lucky, Drake knew, if losing her arm was the worst that happened to her. He’d seen soldiers die in shock with that look on their faces.

  “Liz,” he said, kneeling down beside her, “I’m leaving with Mike. Vazquez’s dead, but he told me there’s a bomb at the ranch and something about a dam in the mountains. We may have found it.”

  Liz pounded the turf. “Yes! I’ll call and get the place surrounded.”

  “Hold on,” Drake said. “I said we may have found it. Let me check with Ricardo and Billy. They’re out there. Maybe they’ve seen something. We can’t send in the cavalry on a wild goose chase. I’m meeting Mike at my car. I’ll call Ricardo from there. You find Paul and Margo and tell them to help Larry.”

  As he sprinted to his car he heard the approaching sound of sirens in the distance.

  54

  Saleem was watching the chaos from the safety of his black Escalade, which was parked near the west end of the polo field. He had arrived early so he would have a clear view of Vazquez’s trailer when the time came. Then, when the polo match was half over, and the silly divot stompers were marching around stomping divots (as if the horses really cared if there were divots), he waited until Vazquez was standing beside his horse trailer. He had placed the C4 charge in an outside storage compartment under the recessed D rings where Vazquez tied his polo ponies. The charge had been shaped to maximize its shock wave in the area where Vazquez was likely to be standing and to carry on from there, shooting out enough shrapnel to kill as many people as possible.

  All Saleem had to do was wait for the right moment to enter the three-digit code on his cell phone. Good riddance, pampered playboy.

  His only regret was that no one would ever know that his group had carried out this attack. It was not yet time to announce that Hezbollah was poised and ready to strike. That time would come, however, when there were bigger issues involved, when the leaders decided to show the America just how vulnerable it was. This was a joint operation with Barak and the Brotherhood, he told himself, so let them take the credit, and the blowback if their plan with the nuclear device was carried out. He knew how America had reacted after 9/11. Let Egypt be the next Afghanistan and Barak the next bin Laden. He would like to stick around for awhile.

  When he saw the attorney run to his car in the parking lot, he decided it was time to report to Barak. He could hear the sound of sirens in the distance, so he closed his car window.

  “It’s done,” he reported.

  “Describe the scene for me,” Barak said.

  “Vazquez is dead. He should have been vaporized, but he moved around his horse at the last moment, so he was trapped under it. There are lots of dead and wounded and people are running around trying to help the survivors. I can hear the sirens coming. I expect the first responders will arrive any minute.”

  “Are you sure Vazquez is dead?”

  “That attorney I followed rushed over to him. I watched the whole thing. He left Vazquez when he couldn’t find a pulse.” Saleem waited for Barak to say something.

  “What is the attorney doing now?” Barak finally asked.

  “He just ran to his car. He’s standing besi
de it using his phone.”

  After another pause, Barak gave Saleem his final instructions. “Call your man at the ranch and make sure the team has left. Go meet him as we planned. Abandon the Escalade before you leave for Reno. You have done well, Saleem. This diversion will keep everyone looking north while we strike to the south.”

  “Thank you, Barak. Allah willing, we will work together again. When are you leaving?”

  “Inshallah, my young friend, Inshallah. I will leave as soon as I hear the device has been delivered.”

  Before Saleem left the polo ranch and just before the first of the EMT fire engines pulled in, he made a call to report when Barak would be leaving.

  55

  While Drake was waiting beside his Porsche for Casey, he called Gonzalez.

  “Yes, sir,” the former sergeant answered.

  “Ricardo, Vazquez has been killed. Before he died, he said there was a bomb at the ranch. Have you seen anything that would support that?”

  “We haven’t seen anything that looks like a bomb. Or the nuclear device you’ve been looking for. The only activity here has been those four Muslims taking off on their Harleys twenty minutes ago.”

  “Could they have the bomb?”

  “Only if it would fit in the trailer one of the Harleys was pulling.”

  “Vazquez also said something about a dam in the mountains. You’re familiar with demolition work. Could they have a demolition device in that trailer that would take out a dam?”

  “If they had a Special Atomic Demolition Munition, a SADM,” Gonzalez said, “like the ones the army developed in the 1960s, it might fit in that trailer. The army used to train troops to parachute into Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe to take out power plants, bridges, and dams. But there’s no way these guys could get their hands on a SADM.”

  “It doesn’t have to be one of ours,” Drake said. “Something set off our nuclear detection system in San Diego, and I’ll bet that’s what they have in that trailer. How long ago did you say the bikers left?”