Hawke's War

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  The gun was clear, and I was as satisfied as I was gonna get.

  I waited and hoped they’d give up and move on to search somewhere else.

  Chapter 9

  They’d been searching for the Ranger’s body for over an hour and Abdullah’s frustration grew as dark as the night around them. He directed the tactical light on his weapon at the steep canyon wall rising into the darkness, trying to guess where the Ranger had been when he fell. From that angle, everything looked different.

  The entire operation had been bad luck all around and he blamed the two idiot gangsters, Yooko and Javier, for the whole thing. They’d been a constant source of irritation from the moment he joined up with the gang down in Paso La Carmen, a ghost town southeast of the National Park, on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande. He recalled that his brother Kahn had no patience for men who weren’t good at their jobs.

  If he’d still been alive, Kahn would have already shot them both and left their bodies to the buzzards.

  But he’d been killed months before, and that’s why Abdullah was there that frustrating night. He was to kill the Ranger who’d disrupted the terrorists’ plan and shot Kahn. Now Abdullah was the leader of Chavez’s special cell and planned to exact his revenge, get paid, and use that money to fund their next act of jihad, an attack on a Kansas shopping mall in the heart of America to prove that no one was safe.

  Oh sure, he’d told Chavez something completely different, but he didn’t like or trust the al ferengi or creepy man with bizarre mental issues.

  Abdullah whispered into the darkness. “Javier.”

  “Yes.” His flashlight beam lit the brush and cactus thirty feet above the canyon floor.

  “Any sign?”

  “Nothing yet. We should wait . . .”

  “Yooko?” Something stirred in the darkness farther down the canyon, but Abdullah ignored it. “Yooko!” He paused when the dimming beam of Yooko’s light pointed in his direction. “Anything?”

  Yooko spoke in a disgusted voice. “No. I think Javier may be right. We’ll never find the body tonight.”

  The cold seeped into Abdullah’s bones and his spirits sagged. “Keep looking until I say we stop. I told you to find a way up to that ledge.”

  Yooko continued upward, playing his beam over the ground and scant cover, as if he were afraid the Ranger was going to pop up at any moment. He swept the vertical wall before probing the wide, cactus-covered slope. “I found a trail.” It was obvious that the shelf wasn’t a dead end. Deer wouldn’t establish trails unless the shelf led to other access points.

  Javier took a step to the side to gain a better viewpoint, and a jackrabbit exploded from its hiding place only three feet away. The gangster jumped and squeezed the trigger on his Cobra, sending a string of bullets after the fleeting rabbit.

  Shouting and cursing, the other two gangsters in the line of fire ducked for cover in the bright flashes of light as the rounds came dangerously close. Calaka dropped behind a boulder until the shooting stopped. He leaned out and aimed his own machine pistol at his friend, the flashlight beam picking out Javier’s shocked face. “No me dispares, hijo de puta mudo!”

  Javier froze in the light and lowered his weapon while at the same time raising his left hand to block the light in his eyes. “I wasn’t shooting at you! I thought it was that damned Ranger. And don’t talk about my mother like that again or I will shoot you!”

  Yooko’s voice rose over the confrontation, cursing at the harsh desert vegetation on the rising slant leading to the ledge. “Condenados cactus!” The light in his hand jittered along the rocks and scrub as he plucked a needle from his leg. He straightened and steadied the beam toward a large boulder near the edge of the shelf. “Que es eso?”

  Holding the Cobra across his belly, Pepito raised his bulldog face toward the wavering light above. “What’s what?”

  Yooko paused for a long moment, then reverted to his native language in excitement that turned to terror. “Detenerse! Aquí está él . . . y él no está muerto!”

  The Syrian cursed in his language, then switched to Spanish. “What? What did he say?”

  Javier quickly translated for Abdullah.

  The Syrian jerked his rifle’s muzzle back to the shelf. “You see him? He’s not dead?! Shoot him now! Shoot him!”

  Strobes flashed overhead as automatic gunfire hammered throughout the canyon to echo across the cold, dark desert. Two distinct shots followed and there was momentary silence before the men below threw a fusillade toward the ledge overhead.

  Chapter 10

  The meal was long over. Two empty wine bottles and glasses were the only things left on the farmhouse table. The clock read 11:00 and cool night air flowed through the screens on the open windows.

  Mary Hawke draped herself across a stuffed chair in the living room while the adults talked. She’d cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. Jerry had done his part washing the pots and pans and was in his room.

  The iPhone in her hand came alive and she punched the Snapchat icon, scrolling through the latest posts. Her thumbs flew across the screen and when she was finished, she hit Post to enter still another photo of her and Yolanda cheesing for the camera.

  She snuck a quick shot of Perry Hale reclining on the couch. She sent the snap to her best friend Gillian, expecting it to vanish ten seconds later after she had a chance to see the guy who unconsciously suffered Mary’s huge crush. “This guy!”

  Mary also posted a photo she’d shot earlier of the table full of dirty dishes and glasses. “Finished for the day after another meal without Dad. Good news! School is almost out!”

  The mood had turned sour. Kelly chewed her lip and sat her empty wineglass on the coffee table. “Now I’m getting worried.”

  “You and me both.” Yolanda crossed her blue-jeaned legs and wiggled her boot, a nervous habit she’d had all her life. “Doesn’t he have a radio in his truck?”

  “He does. Ethan talked to him this morning, but Sonny tried to call in about an hour before sunset and the static was so bad Ethan couldn’t understand anything he was saying.”

  Sheriff Ethan Armstrong and Sonny were childhood friends. They met not long after Sonny and his dad moved to Ballard. The boys had been there for each other ever since.

  Perry Hale reclined on the couch in his sock feet, making himself at home on Kelly’s orders. “We probably need to do something, but I don’t know what.”

  “I sent a text to Major Parker a few minutes ago.” He was Sonny’s superior in the Texas Rangers. “He hasn’t heard anything from Sonny in a couple of days, either. He said he was going to be here in the morning. He’s worried, too.”

  “I guess I can try Ethan again.” Country folks tend to avoid phoning each other after it gets late, and by nine, a call in the night usually spelled a disaster of some kind. Kelly sent a text. She laid the phone on the table only seconds before it vibrated with a response. She read it aloud. “I tried about an hour ago. No answer on the radio or his cell.”

  She started to reply when the phone’s noir tone told her it was Ethan calling back. She answered without the usual pleasantries, grateful that he’d called so they could talk instead of text. “We’re getting worried. There’s more?”

  “So am I, and no, but I’m all thumbs when it comes to texting. He should have checked in long ago, and you know that, but there’s not a stinkin’ thing we can do tonight. What’s worrying you more about this time than the others? He comes in late all the time.”

  “This is the second night he’s been out. We had dinner plans and he’d been looking forward to it. He always checks in if he’s going to be late, but I haven’t heard a word in almost twenty-four hours. Hang on.” Kelly laid the phone on the table and punched an icon. “You’re on speaker. Yolanda and Perry Hale are here. They haven’t heard anything, either.”

  “Hey, guys. We can’t do anything tonight, even if we wanted to, other than to drive into the park, but I don’t know where he went.”

/>   “Knowing Sonny, he’s back at the murder scene.” Perry Hale leaned toward the phone and scratched his short beard. “I’m going out there tomorrow morning at first light. If nothing else, I’ll find his tracks.”

  Ethan was silent for a moment. “I figured you’d say that.”

  Ethan saw Perry Hale in action back in November and knew the man was solid as a rock. Any time anyone went missing in Big Bend, the National Park Service used their team of experienced rangers to locate and rescue the individuals. In cases where the search took more than a few hours, or even stretched into days, the Park Service often contracted other federal resources from nearby parks such as Big Bend State Park to send auxiliary personnel.

  Local law enforcement or sheriffs had little or no experience in wilderness locations, but Perry Hale’s military history had proven valuable in a Search and Rescue, or SAR, mission and was instrumental in finding a missing Galveston man who’d gotten off the Mule Ears Trail and wandered for two days in the desert without water. Perry Hale caught a glimpse of a faint footprint near a creosote bush. He and two other park rangers followed tiny signs until they located the severely dehydrated hiker curled up in the shade of a boulder.

  “I’ll pack the truck and be ready to go at first light.” Perry Hale swung his feet to the floor and pulled on his boots.

  “I’m going with you.” Yolanda rose lithe as a cat and stood as if they were leaving right then.

  Ethan continued to talk as if ticking off a check sheet. “You’ll have to drive your own vehicles as volunteers. I can’t officially take y’all with me.”

  “We’ll come together.” Yolanda glanced toward Perry Hale, who nodded. “Is there anything else we can do before you leave in the morning?”

  The tone in his voice told them Ethan was shrugging. “Not that I can think of right now. He’s probably asleep in the back of his truck. I’ll see y’all in the morning.”

  Never one to mince words, Perry Hale sighed. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this all of a sudden.”

  Kelly took a long, shuddering sigh. “I wish I had the training to go with you.”

  Yolanda, ever the optimist, the corner of her mouth rose. “We’ll find him tomorrow, and then you’re gonna have to cook supper for all of us again.”

  “Okay.” Kelly ticked her fingers on the table. “Call me if you hear anything.”

  “Will do.”

  Ethan was gone, and Kelly opened her laptop. “You guys can stay here if you want.”

  Yolanda returned to her chair. “That’s probably a good idea. Perry?”

  Torn, he shrugged. “May as well. That way we won’t be trying to do all this on a phone, but we leave early.”

  Relieved that they were going to stay, Kelly logged into her computer and pulled up her Facebook page. At least she could reach out to her friends and see if any of them had any information on Sonny’s whereabouts. “I’m going to check here and then try to get some sleep.”

  She was startled when her Facebook page loaded with a new comment to her announcement two weeks earlier that she was looking forward to an upcoming hike she and Sonny were going to take with Harmony, Vince, Blue, and Chloe. Her stomach tightened and she deleted the post.

  No longer tired, she swallowed the lump in her throat. “I’ll get some coffee going in a little while. I think we’re gonna need it.”

  Chapter 11

  I thought the Yooko guy was going to miss me with his flashlight. The beam was bright and narrow, and he didn’t seem really interested in his job, waving the light around in the air so much it looked like one of those searchlights they used when I was a kid to attract folks to a grand opening.

  I almost pulled the trigger on the Colt when everything broke loose down below. Somebody must have thought he saw something, because a machine gun opened up with a nasty ripping sound. Men shouted and angry voices rose up as soon as the shooting stopped. I caught part of it again and realized they were as amped up as me.

  Then when the guy approaching stepped smack in the middle of a big clump of cactus, it looked like I was home free. He yelped and danced sideways, brushing several pads of prickly pear on the way. He started cussin’, too, and his beam cut the air like a light saber, finally catching the steep slope of fallen rocks behind me. It skittered there while he plucked the biggest spines out of his leg.

  If there’d been a bobcat within two miles, it would have had a field day chasing that point of light across the rocks and sand. Dumbass pulled a few more spines out, cussing everything he could think of. The pain must’ve sharpened his mind a little bit so he could focus on why he was up there in the first place.

  He probed the dark, looking under a catclaw bush, and the odds finally caught up with me when he saw my boot. It would have been comical to watch on television as he locked in on my scuffed Lucchese ostrich skins, then followed it up my leg, torso, and finally blinded me.

  There was a sharp intake of breath when he saw me squint my eyes and realized I was alive. “What’s that” in Spanish and it reminded me of Billy the Kid’s last words, “Who is it?” before Pat Garrett allegedly shot him.

  Truthfully, it doesn’t matter what he said, or how he said it. I should have put him down the minute his light found my foot, hell, I should have shot him when they opened up down below and my rounds would have been lost in the blasts and echoes, but it was that niggling thought most law-enforcement officers have that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t going to really shoot me.

  Fine then, I’d already been shot, but maybe it wasn’t him that did it and he was there to help. See, that’s how your mind can get warped when you’re shot off the side of a mountain and roll two hundred feet like a snowball to find yourself lying on the edge of still another cliff while people with machine guns look for you.

  All doubt fled when Ahab down below hollered up for Yooko to shoot me. And he didn’t say it just once, he said it twice. Kinda like when a mom hollers “no, no, no!” three times to make a point to keep a little kid from doing something bad or dangerous. Emphasis by repetition.

  He dropped the flashlight and yanked the trigger on a nasty-looking little machine pistol instead of squeezing it at the same time a tactical light came on his rifle. The rounds shredded a creosote bush. The .45 was already in my hand, and I pulled the trigger twice, feeling the big Colt buck.

  Partially blinded by both lights, I aimed a little low and to his left, hoping the guy was right-handed. He hollered “oh!” and the tactical light went out. At the same time, all hell broke loose down below as more beams crisscrossed the darkness.

  They weren’t interested in conserving ammo when they opened up on full auto. They must have bought it by the truckload. Muzzle flashes down there were strobe-light-fast, flickering off the canyon walls and freeze-framing what little I could see.

  I’m not sure what they were shooting at, because I was still low to the ground and out of sight, but goddlemighty did they cut loose for a good long while. Bullets whanged on rocks lining the ledge’s lip and much higher on the wall due to their angle. I might could’ve crawled to the edge and shot at the muzzle flashes, but I had something else on my mind.

  I wanted whatever automatic weapon Dumbass Yooko had around his neck.

  While gunshots echoed off the canyon wall and ricochets screamed into the darkness, I snatched up the little flashlight and scuttled toward the dying man like a crab. Every movement sent lances of pain though my shoulder and side, but the time for curling up and whining was in the far distant future.

  If I had one.

  There was a lot of hollerin’ going on down below, and Ahab was issuing orders. Dumbass was on his back, making wet, gurgling sounds when I reached him, but he was limp as a dishrag. Cupping the little flashlight in my left hand, I passed it over the solid mass of tattoos covering the man’s face.

  I’d seen guys like him in wanted posters and they all looked scary as hell. This one was no different. Though his black hair was long, unlike a lot of those guys in th
e posters, he was as tatted up as any gangster I’d ever seen. Both pupils were dilated in the light, so I knew he was gone before he did.

  The first thing I did was check out the weapon lying on his chest. I’m not that gun guy, and don’t know squat about most firearms and tactical accessories. I pulled it away from his body and something that felt like a wire slapped my forearm when I twisted the weapon. It wasn’t hard to figure out it was a pressure switch that activated the tactical light. Hoping to have time later to figure out how it worked, I went to work on the hard part, getting the gun free. I’d had experience with getting a slung rifle off a dead body, but it didn’t help much.

  The shooting was over by the time I gave up and fished the lockblade out of my back pocket to cut the nylon strap free. There was no way to wrestle it off, and I figured my time was limited before they came charging up that same skinny slope, guns blazing again.

  Sticking my .45 back in the holster, I yanked the unfamiliar weapon free. Dumbass’ chest hitched one more time, and then he was gone. That was fine by me. I’d already helped several felons get through the gates of Hell, and one more wouldn’t add much more time to the guilt I wrestled with on most nights.

  I patted his pockets and located four extra magazines heavy with stacked rounds while keeping an eye on the beams darting every which way. Flipping him over wasn’t easy with one hand, but I rolled him enough to drag the daypack off his shoulders.

  I figured I was out of time. The sound of footsteps scuffling on the slope told me someone else was on the way. Ahab was shouting at people down below, ordering them to take up positions . . . like I was gonna come charging down at ’em.

  Crab-crawling back to my boulder, I had a decision to make. I could stay right where I was to make my stand and wait for help to come. I could hold them off for a while from my position, but they were loaded for bear, and five mags of ammo for the automatic weapon, and my three for the .45, didn’t seem like enough