by Mark Parragh
The cartel radio lit up in a storm of voices, some demanding to know what Tate was doing on the channel, others reporting that the fuel truck was moving.
“Clear the channel!” someone snapped. “I see the fucking truck! Where are you, Jason Tate?”
“I’m in the truck!” Tate shouted back. “Crane has me! We’re in the fuel truck!”
The channel suddenly went quiet.
“Come help me!” Tate was shouting. “You need me! We’re in the fuel truck! Can you hear me?”
“They’ve switched channels,” Crane said. “That one’s compromised. Don’t worry, they know where you are.”
“You goddamn son of a bitch,” Tate snapped. “I’m going to fuck you up so bad. You’re going to beg me to kill you.”
Well, that’s original, Crane thought. He shifted up as the truck picked up speed.
Jessie’s voice came through his earpiece. “They’re peeling off. It’s working.”
“Get your people aboard and get out of here,” he said. “While you can.”
“You hang tight,” she said. “I’ll be back for you.”
At the end of the airstrip, the runway gave way to an unpaved track of a fire road that twisted its way down a slope. Crane steered down it, and the truck threw back loose dirt. He downshifted and gave it gas. Behind him, he could see headlights following him. They weren’t trucks, he realized after a moment; they were four-wheel ATVs bouncing over the rough ground and coming up fast.
The truck bumped and groaned over rocks and erosion gullies. If he could somehow lose his pursuers, he might have a chance at getting down the mountain and finding a place where Jessie could land and pick him up. But he didn’t like his chances of outrunning ATVs on this mountainside in a twenty-year-old fuel tanker.
As if it had heard his thoughts, the truck bottomed out on a rock and skewed sideways into sand. They lurched to a stop, canted a little to one side. Crane gunned it, and the wheel just spun, digging the truck in deeper.
He sighed and cut the engine.
“You are so screwed.” Tate laughed.
Crane got out. Someone shouted at him in Spanish. He got down on his knees, laced his hands behind his head, and waited. Through the sound of the ATV engines, he heard another sound. He looked back over his shoulder to see the Short lumber into the air and climb away toward the north. He’d managed that much, anyway.
As the plane receded into the distance and men circled him with guns aimed at his chest, Crane looked ahead into the rising sun. By all indications, it was going to be a beautiful day. But Crane guessed it was going to be a pretty bad one nonetheless.
Then something hit him hard in the back of the skull, and he fell forward into the dirt, which he took as confirmation for a moment before everything went dark.
CHAPTER 37
Josh sat in his office, looking out the windows at the rising sun and idly clicking through random Wikipedia articles on his laptop. He could have gone to the war room, but there were no windows there, and he wanted to watch the dawn break. Besides, very few people were around Myria this time of morning, and Josh didn’t see much of a security issue.
The sound system was playing downtempo electronica. It was chill-out music from a compilation named after a bar in Ibiza. Josh leaned back in his chair, idly clicking links, trying to find odd Wikipedia rabbit holes to descend into. Somehow he’d gotten stuck in a series of articles on the Yugoslavian civil war.
Click euros. That will get you back out. Euros. Click it.
Fine.
Scroll, scroll … oh! Esperantist. Awesome. That has to lead somewhere interesting. William Shatner did a horror movie in the sixties that was entirely in Esperanto. That gets you to Star Trek, and from there the world’s your oyster.
Then the speakers sounded an alert tone and a dialog box popped up that read “Handshake Protocol Initiated.”
His secure communications program was setting up a link between here, Sawyer Cottrell in Texas, and Jessie Diamond’s plane. Josh sat up and waited for the tone that meant the scramblers were in place and he could speak.
It came a moment later, and he heard Jessie say, “Sawyer? Josh? Can you hear me? Sound off.”
“I’m here, Jessie,” he said.
A moment later, he heard Sawyer. “I’m here. Talk to me, Jessie. Talk to me.”
“We’re airborne,” Jessie said, “approaching US airspace. We’ve got six civilians rescued.”
“My son! Is Martin there? Tell me you got him!”
Jessie paused. Josh could hear the drone of the engines behind her. He had a sinking feeling.
“I don’t have good news, Sawyer.”
Sawyer’s voice fell. “He wasn’t there.”
“He was. There’s someone aboard who roomed with him. He says Martin tried to escape a couple months ago. I’m sorry, Sawyer. He didn’t make it.”
It was almost as if he heard Sawyer take the punch to the gut. He let out a breath and then want quiet.
“Thank you for trying,” he finally said.
“I’m sorry, Sawyer,” said Josh.
“There’s more,” said Jessie. “It’s Crane.”
Now it was Josh who felt a cold chill grasp him and squeeze.
Crane’s dead. You got him killed. How are you going to live with that?
“He didn’t make the plane,” Jessie was saying. “He cleared the runway so we could get out, but he couldn’t make it back to the plane. He said he was going to try to make it out on his own, but there’s no way.”
“Don’t sell Crane short,” he said a little quicker than he’d intended.
“It was rough down there. The cartel had more people than we thought.”
So damn cocky, aren’t you? You’re richer than God, so you think you can do anything. Nothing can touch you. Well, how’d that work out for you? They got to your driver, and now they’ve probably killed Crane.
We don’t know that.
Uh huh. Sure.
Until we know, we have to do everything we can to get him out.
Whatever, dude. Whatever.
“Too late,” Sawyer groaned. “Wasted. All of it. For nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” Jessie told him. “We got six men out. That’s six families who won’t have to go through what you’re going through now. That’s worth something, Sawyer. Martin would be proud of you.”
Sawyer said nothing. After a moment, Josh heard him quietly sobbing.
Josh let out a slow breath. This wasn’t the morning he’d been expecting. He’d convinced himself that Crane could do anything. He expected to hear him on the radio with Jessie, telling him they’d rescued everyone and Jason Tate was aboard.
“Jessie,” he said quietly, “when do you land?”
“A little under an hour,” she said. “It’ll be another couple hours at least before I can get airborne again.”
“What’s the plan? What do we do?”
“I gave Crane another radio frequency,” she said. “Sending it to you now. I told him we’d be monitoring it.”
His laptop pinged as a new channel was added to his favorites list.
“Got it. So we monitor it. Then what?”
“Not much we can do,” Jessie said. “We’ve got no idea what’s going on back there. If Crane can get himself someplace safe, he calls in, and we figure out where to pick him up.”
But she doesn’t think that’s going to happen.
“We just sit and wait? That won’t cut it, Jessie. There’s got to be something we can do.”
“If you’ve got an idea, let’s hear it. Until we know what’s happening …”
He sighed. She was right, of course. The odds were that Crane was going to die soon, if he wasn’t dead already. If they were waiting for him to get in touch on this new radio frequency, they might be waiting a long time.
“There’s an airstrip about fifty minutes’ flight time from the compound,” she said after a few moments. “I can stage there and be ready to go. T
hat’s the best I can do. I don’t have the fuel capacity to orbit over the compound for very long.”
“Okay,” he said with resignation. “Okay. Do what you can, Jessie. Drop off Sawyer’s people and head down there. Then I guess we’ll wait.”
He stood up and walked around his desk and looked out across the Myria campus. The sun was up, and people were starting to arrive for work. They walked along the paths that curved through the campus to gleaming glass-and-steel buildings. They would do their jobs and go home. Today would be like any other day for most of them, but not for him. He wasn’t sure if his days would ever feel normal again.
“Jessie,” he said. “What else can I do to help you?”
“Nothing,” she answered. “Just stand by. I’ll keep you in the loop if I hear anything.”
“Thank you.” He sat down again, sighed, and leaned back in his chair.
There has to be something. Come on. What can I do?
You can pray it was quick.
CHAPTER 38
Crane awakened to the sound of dripping water and ripples of pale light on a cement wall. It was cool and damp. Crane hurt.
He was seated, zip tied to a metal chair. The chair was bolted into the cement floor, and plastic sheets had been rolled out all around it. He was in the middle of some underground room full of pipes and machinery. He guessed this was where the hacienda pumped in its water.
Three men lounged against the walls and the machines, calmly watching him. He suspected a fourth behind him, where he couldn’t see. There were ties at his wrists and elbows, at his ankles, and some kind of leather strap around his midsection that went all the way around the back of the chair. He was almost completely immobilized. He couldn’t even flex his fingers off the end of the chair’s arms.
Crane knew his situation was grim. This was something he knew he might face someday; they’d even trained him for it. It seemed as though the Hurricane Group had trained him for everything. He would look for a chance to act, but it was unlikely they’d make a mistake big enough for him to work his way out of this. Failing that, all that was left was to die as well as he could.
After a bit of waiting, he heard a metal door creak open, and then footsteps. Jason Tate appeared, looking freshly showered and groomed. He stopped in front of Crane and looked down with a leering grin.
“That didn’t turn out like you planned, did it?” he said. Then Tate slowly circled around him, looking down with that same leering grin. The second time around, when Tate disappeared from his field of view, Crane steeled himself for the blow. And it came just as he expected it—a hard punch to the base of his skull.
“Told you not to mess with me,” Tate said. “Seriously, what is your damage? The fuck did I ever do to you?” He reached out and slapped Crane’s temple, and then repeated the question.
“You get in my face out of nowhere, and you make an ass of yourself. You sink my boat!” He paced away a few steps, fists balled, as his anger overcame him. Then he whirled back, and his face was red, distorted with rage. “You sank my fucking boat, you son of a bitch!”
He charged in and threw an uppercut that caught Crane under the jaw and snapped his head back.
“And then this bullshit,” Tate was saying. “The fuck is all this even about? A handful of Mexican radio geeks? I don’t even want to know. Doesn’t matter. Your ass was dead the moment you blew up my boat.”
Crane spat out the blood collecting in his mouth. Tate looked down at it with a snorting laugh.
“We’re just getting started, asshole.”
Tate walked over to a metal locker and pulled out a Tyvek jumpsuit and a pair of elastic booties.
“What can I do to you to demonstrate the scale of how pissed off I am, huh?” Tate said as he unzipped the coverall and began to pull it on over his clothes. “People are some sick motherfucking animals, you know? We’ve come up with some shit to do to each other. You ever hear of the boats? That’d be appropriate under the circumstances, wouldn’t it? You know what I’m talking about?”
Crane ignored him.
“They’d lay a guy down in a little boat, maybe a canoe or just a hollowed-out log. Then they’d put another one over top of him so they fit together real well.” He demonstrated with his cupped hands.
“Seal him in there. Just his feet sticking out one end, and his head and hands at the other end. Then they’d force-feed him a whole bunch of honey and milk so he’d get massive diarrhea in there, smear more honey over his face, and float him out on a pond or something and leave him there. Let him draw flies. They’d feed him more milk and honey from time to time. Watch him sit out there baking in the hot sun, floating in milk and honey and his own wet shit. Let him feel the bugs eating him alive, burrowing into his rotting flesh. Gangrene. The smell of it. Just let him rot and get eaten up by maggots. They’d mostly go mad after a few days of this and just lay there screaming until they died. Not always, though. One guy supposedly lasted two weeks.”
He finished pulling on the booties over his shoes and turned to show himself off to Crane. “Pretty fucked up, huh?”
Then he rolled a metal tool cart over beside the chair. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t have that kind of patience. But it’ll feel like days before I’m done with you.” He cocked his head toward the cartel guards. “I learned some tricks watching these guys. You wouldn’t believe the kind of shit they come up with. Animals. Savages. Yeah, you’re going to feel it, asshole.”
Tate bent down to open it and sorted through the tools. He came up with a ratchet brace, considered it, and then set it down on the shelf. Next out was a draw knife, a jab saw, and a pinpoint acetylene torch.
“Fun with this one,” he said as he set it down beside the others. Then he removed a pair of pliers. “This will do to start.”
Crane remembered his training. He slowed his breathing, focused on his heartbeat, and went somewhere else.
He was sixteen, at a summer camp in the mountains. He’d snuck out of his cabin at night and met Suzanne Ahlborn by the lake. There was an old graveyard farther around the lakeshore, a family plot from some old farm abandoned years before. They’d dared each other to go, both knowing the dare wasn’t about braving ghosts.
It had been his first time, there among the graves. It had been awkward and tentative and glorious. He went there now and held on to it, ignoring what was happening in the present. This was real. The pain was the distant memory.
But he had to admit it was a strong one.
How long it went on, he wasn’t sure. But eventually he realized something was happening. He lost his grip on the night in the graveyard, the feel of her skin against his, the sound of the night birds. He was slumped against the cold metal chair. There was blood in his mouth and dripping sounds, small taps against the plastic sheet to go with the water in the background.
Tate looked irritated. One of his cartel minions was standing at his side with a phone. Tate turned away and took the phone.
“Hello?”
Crane spat blood and listened.
“Of course we’re expecting you. You …”
He listened for a long time, only occasionally saying “yes” or “that’s right.” Then he turned to look down at Crane in surprise.
“No, he’s roughed up a bit, but he’s alive. Are you absolutely certain … ? Of course … That’s very generous. I understand. We’ll have him ready when you arrive.”
He handed the phone back and knelt beside Crane.
“I don’t believe this shit.”
He grabbed his bloody pliers from the cart, held Crane’s head in place with one hand, and with the other, he seized Crane’s earlobe with the pliers and twisted, hard. Crane cried out despite himself.
“Apparently you’re worth a lot of money to someone,” Tate said. “So we’re going to have to cut this short. I admit I’m disappointed. I was looking forward to hearing you scream while you pissed yourself. But these aren’t people you say no to. And she must want you real bad. So I
think maybe you’re going from the frying pan into the fire, my friend.”
He gave Crane’s earlobe a final tug with the pliers and then tossed them back into the toolbox. “Get his ass upstairs and clean him up.”
Tate began stripping off the bloodstained coverall and muttering to himself.
“Hey,” Crane said weakly. “Jason.”
Tate stopped and whirled on him. “What?”
“Scaphism,” Crane mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“The thing with the boats. It’s called scaphism.” He laughed. “Amateur.”
Tate backhanded him again, but Crane was chuckling as they cut him free of the chair.
CHAPTER 39
The household staff cleaned Crane up, bandaged his wounds, dressed him in clean clothes, and took him to a plain guest bedroom on the hacienda’s second floor. It was hot and the air was stuffy. They tied him to a wooden chair and left him alone there. This was definitely what he would remember about this place, he thought. Whether the room was damp and cool, or warm and dry, whatever the décor, there was always a chair to be tied to. At the moment, though, he preferred this chair to the metal one downstairs.
Crane sat with his arms tied behind the stiff, wooden back of the chair and his wrists zip tied together. He sat watching the sunlight play through the gauzy curtains and listening to muffled voices outside.
He spent his time trying to figure out what was going on. It had sounded like someone had called Tate and literally bought him. Who would do that? Josh might try to ransom him if it was possible. But Tate wouldn’t have taken that deal even if Josh had been able to get in touch to offer it. And Tate seemed intimidated by whoever was on the phone. It was possible, he reflected gloomily, that Tate was right about this chair being worse in the long run.
Several more minutes went by, and then the door opened, and a woman walked in and closed the door. She studied him for a moment. She wore an olive T-shirt with a large, red, five-pointed star on it, black BDU pants, and black boots with silver buckles. She was average height and slender, but her arms were muscled, and as she came closer, she moved with a grace and power Crane associated with martial arts training. Her hair was cut short and dyed an electric blue beneath a black beret.