by Nick Thacker
It had all been an unlucky coincidence that they’d ended up together, but they’d forged a friendship with the woman that had lasted well past their terrifying encounter here.
“Let’s get started then,” Beale said. The group — five Green Berets and the four CSO teammates — all sat down and waited for Beale to begin. He started by retrieving a stack of papers from a case on the chair in front of him, and he took one packet off the stack and handed the rest to Jeffers, who began passing them out.
Ben received his and saw that the top page was nothing but a cover page, with little detail as to what was inside. The packet was four pages total, with a map and legend on page two and more information about the mission beyond that. He was about to flip through and begin reading when Beale called their attention to the front of the room.
25
Ben
“Inside of this packet, you’ll find details of the mission. Locations, rendezvous points, timing. Everything’s there, and I won’t insult your intelligence by reading it all to you. But I will give you the overview and breakdown of essential mission parameters.
“First,” he continued, “we are Green Berets. ‘Force multipliers.’ That means we can fight, and we can do it well. But if we’re called in, it’s because there is a diplomatic reason for us not to fight. That’s why you all are here.” He looked up and made eye contact with Ben and his team. “We want to equip you to do the task required. We’re here for your support.”
Ben nodded. So far, so good.
“Second, we do not know this Ravenshadow group. We’ve heard of them, but none of us have experience engaging them. Again, you do. That’s why you’re here. We provide support, you interact with Vicente Garza and his men.”
Reggie frowned, and Ben looked at him as Beale continued.
“On page two you will see a map. This region, the Chachapoyas, is somewhat familiar to the CSO crew. Much of this valley is owned by the same order of Jesuits your friend, Archibald Quinones, is a part of, which works in our benefit as well. Therefore, the CSO will act as guides for us, though we will of course have GPS and satellite triangulation to help us navigate the dense jungle. Once we get there, we expect to find a large valley that stretches generally north to south, and some ancient structures dotting the landscape that were believed to have been built by the original inhabitants of the region.”
He looked up and met Ben’s eyes. Ben knew he wasn’t going to add, and we believe those original inhabitants were giants, even though that’s exactly what Ben and Reggie had put in their report. The ‘giants,’ they had discovered, were really just descendants of the ancient biblical tribe of Anakim — cousins of the Nephilim — and the same race of people that had given rise to the descendants of another famous biblical giant: Goliath.
Their history lesson of the area suggested that the original Chachapoyas, described by the Spanish conquistadors and the local Inca population as ‘light-skinned and reclusive,’ had come from somewhere in Europe, at some time after worldwide flooding had decimated their homeland. They sought refuge in the unknown lands to the west, ending up in South America.
And their relatives had been sprinkled throughout the postdiluvian world as well: the Aztecs had Quetzalcoatl, the ‘fair-skinned, bearded man of the sea,’ the Sumerians had Enki, and the Native Americans had their own versions of the flood legend and creation stories.
Ben and his team had found proof of these lost civilizations, both in Egypt and in Greece, and they had reason to believe that the reason the Chachapoyas had settled in Peru was to protect an ancient secret, one that had been nearly wiped out by the flood: their history, the history of the antediluvian world, kept in the ancient Hall of Records.
Beale, predictably, didn’t care about any of that.
Ben looked at the page, and he saw a contour map showing the elevations and geologic features of the area nearby. He immediately recognized the valley, stretching from one end of the side of a massive mountain to the other. That mountain was ground zero — where Garza’s team would be hiding.
“What I want to call your attention to, however, is this dark line that encircles the top half of the mountain at the center of your map. It’s a river, and it’s navigable. The mine that was built into the mountain used this river, as well as a natural spring emanating from the interior of the mountain, as its main water source.”
“So it’s an access point?”
“It could be,” Beale said. “We won’t know for sure until we’re staring it in the face, but if this Ravenshadow group is as equipped and well-trained as we believe them to be, shooting out the front door and walking in doesn’t seem to be in the cards.”
“Right,” Jeffers said. “So we need scuba gear.”
“Already taken care of,” one of the other men said.
Jeffers nodded, then looked up at the group. “Any questions so far?”
Reggie’s hand shot up.
“Mr. Red.”
“Yeah, uh, earlier you said interact. Not engage. I’m assuming that’s purposeful, but —”
“It is absolutely purposeful. As I said, our job is not to fight. It is to reach a compromise and a conclusion agreeable to all parties that ensures the —”
“Bullshit,” Ben said.
Beale looked visibly shocked. Apparently the soldier hadn’t had much experience with his team interrupting him in the middle of a presentation. “You got something to say, Bennett?”
Ben stood up. “I didn’t come down here to make a compromise, unless that compromise is you killing Garza instead of us.”
“Mr. Bennett, I understand your frustration —”
“You don’t understand crap. This guy — this egomaniac — he’s not just a crazy psychopath who wants power. He’s a crazy psychopath with an army.”
“We are planning to infiltrate their compound and take him by surprise, so we can have a one-on-one conversation with him that will —”
“He’s not going to like that very much, I suspect,” Ben said. “He tends to be of the “shoot first, ask questions later” sort of guy.”
“Mr. Bennett,” Beale said. “You will not interrupt me again.”
“Or what?”
Beale raised an eyebrow, and Ben thought he just might have to fight off a well-trained Green Beret. Probably not the best way to start the day.
“Or we will be transferring control of this situation back to the Peruvian government and escorting you and your team home. In handcuffs.”
“Got it,” Ben said. “So you’re advocating we all run in there with our assault rifles, not shooting at them, and hoping Garza will just sit down and have a chat with us?”
“No,” Beale said. “I’m not advocating anything. I’m mandating it. This is my mission, and these are my rules. Further, I’m not at all suggesting that we will be armed.”
“We won’t?” Reggie asked.
“That is correct,” Beale said. “You won’t be armed. My men will be. If you turn to page three, you will see the load out for this mission. You and your team, Mr. Bennett, will be carrying communications equipment and tracking devices, as well as emergency kits, should we need them.”
“And no guns,” Ben said through clenched teeth.
“And no guns. I’m not in the business of arming civilians.”
Jeffers shifted in his chair, and the other Green Beret who’d spoken earlier seemed to smirk for a split-second.
This is not good, Ben thought. This is not good at all.
26
Julie
The last two days had been a whirlwind for Julie. Rather than catching plenty of sleep during the ridiculously long flights, she’d been awake, thinking about Ben. Wondering if she’d made the right call, and feeling as though she’d made a horrible mistake.
Victoria had duped her, using the CSO to fund her flight to Peru just so she could ditch them and run after her father. There was no question in Julie’s mind that Victoria wanted vengeance, and she felt the same way, but th
e woman had proven to be a loose cannon.
And it had all felt like Julie’s fault. She’d wanted to force the issue, to force action. The plan had worked, as she knew it would, and now the CSO team was in Peru, nearly ready to face off against their long-time opponent. But she had been disappointed and dismayed to find out that the Green Beret contingent was relegating her team to the back seat. They were civilians, and they were now going to be forced to act like it.
She wanted to take it all back, to make it all go away, but the issue remained: Vicente Garza was here, and he was alive. She knew she couldn’t turn her back on that opportunity. She, like the man’s own daughter, wanted vengeance for what he’d done to her.
She saw Joshua Jefferson’s face in her mind. His handsome, youthful face, dimples and all. His brown, medium-length hair falling over his right eye. He was talking, saying something she couldn’t hear. She wanted to reach out and touch his hand, to grab it and pull him closer and tell him she was sorry.
But she couldn’t bring back the dead.
And she wanted Garza to experience that exact feeling.
Ben had followed her out of the room, into the decimated gas station, then waited for the rest of the Green Berets and CSO teams to exit. They were on a five-minute break, both to use the disheveled restroom and to cool down, which seemed ironic, considering it was nearing one-hundred degrees outside.
She met his eyes, and she walked over, ready to talk. Before she could open her mouth to apologize again, Sergeant Jeffers walked over. Ben introduced them, and Jeffers smiled down at them from his massive, tall frame.
“Sorry for that.”
“For what?” Ben asked.
“For Beale. He’s a good soldier, and a great leader. Been with him for years, actually. He just gets a little hot, is all.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Ben said. “I wasn’t really pissed at him, but with the situation. I know he’s just doing his job. We’re the odd-man out, I get it. He doesn’t want to worry about us shooting you all in the backs.”
“It’s not that,” Jeffers said.
Ben frowned.
“He said ‘I won’t arm civilians,’ didn’t he?”
“Something like that,” Julie said.
“Right. So that means he won’t arm you. The US Military won’t have anything to do with it.”
“But…”
“But that means he won’t bat an eye if you were to, uh, somehow procure your own. We got about half a day before we hit the road toward Bad Guy Mountain, and I’m assuming not all of you need the sleep.”
“Are you saying he won’t care if we bring our own weapons?”
Jeffers sniffed, then looked both ways, as if he were about to offer a drug deal. “He’s a good leader, like I said. A bit ‘by the book,’ if you ask me, but no one’s asking me.”
“He won’t be upset?” Julie asked.
Jeffers laughed. “Oh, I’m not saying that at all. He’ll be pretty pissed you didn’t obey his orders. But guess what? You don’t work for him.”
“We still need his help. Your help.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. Thing is, our mission is Garza, not keeping you folks out of trouble. And with your history — your background — and with guys like Red working with you, I know he trusts you all a hell of a lot more than he’d trust many other no-names in the force. So he feels the same way, really. We need your help just as much. His hands are tied, though. Mine aren’t, so I’m telling you how it is.”
Julie watched Ben as he considered it for a second. “You know anywhere we can get, uh, stuff?”
Jeffers took a step back and raised his arms, palm-up. “Whoa, whoa, what do I look like, an arms dealer?”
Ben smiled.
“I’m not telling you how to do it, I’m just telling you that you should. My opinion. Take it or leave it.”
Julie smiled as well, and stuck out her hand for Jeffers to shake. “I think I can speak for all of us when I say we’ll definitely take it. And I have a feeling our friend Gareth Red knows someone out here who’s miscreant enough to hook us up for a few days.”
Jeffers faked a hat-tip to the pair and turned on a heel, his feet pounding loudly as he left the store. Julie could feel the ground shake with each of his massive footfalls.
27
Ben
The jeeps they’d hired had come with drivers, and now their convoy sped through the dense forest of the Chachapoyas region in Peru. Ben sat in the front seat next to the Peruvian driver, a man who called himself simply, “Nacho.” Julie and Mrs. E were in the back, while Reggie had decided to travel in the jeep just in front of theirs with two of the Green Berets. The first jeep in the line held Beale, Jeffers, and another soldier, while the jeep at the back of the line carried gear.
Scuba equipment, weapons, and communications equipment had been piled high in the seats of the jeep, and the team had strapped everything in and tested it for shock before embarking on the three-hour trip. They would drive through a small town called Mendoza, heading deeper into the Peruvian Amazon, then turn southwest and head toward the mountain range and valley where they’d fought a month before.
Ben gripped the handle above his door as he looked out the window. Monkeys crowed into the misty air, the heavy humidity penetrating even the waterproof vinyl of the jeep’s walls. He didn’t recognize the road they were on, nor did he see any buildings or signs he knew, but it all seemed somehow familiar.
Now they were heading back to the hellscape, hoping to find Garza and his army and bring them to justice.
And this time, Ben knew, that justice would be coming in the form of a bullet to the head. He wasn’t a killer — or at least he would never describe himself as one — but he had come to understand that there were problems that needed to be solved in the world, problems that could only be solved by rooting them out and destroying them.
Vicente Garza was one of those problems.
He tightened his other hand around the grip of a massive pistol Reggie had handed him earlier. During their downtime, Reggie, having lived in South America for years prior to meeting Ben and Julie, had called around to some of his friends who might have a lead in the area.
It didn’t take him long to find a man who owned an army surplus store, and legally sold used Peruvian military weaponry that he had acquired over the years. But the story Reggie told Ben was that the man also collected the sorts of things that were a bit harder to find — more modern weapons, from Brazil to Venezuela. In the shipping and delivery industry, Reggie explained, every logistics technician calculates for a thing called “shrinkage,” which is the uncanny ability of a certain percentage of a driver’s delivery to mysteriously “walk off” and disappear.
The man Reggie went to meet was the type of man who often “found” these disappeared items. In translation: he had plenty of modern military weaponry available for sale.
So when Reggie had returned to the gas station before their departure with a duffel bag full of M16s, Glock handguns, and ammunition, Beale nearly lost his mind.
He shouted for a full minute at Reggie, who simply smiled back at him through the threats. Eventually Beale realized what had happened, understood that he had no ground to stand on, and fumed away. Ben, Julie, and Mrs. E waited patiently at the side of the room until Beale left, when Reggie walked over and showed Ben and Julie how to use the weaponry.
Ben wasn’t sure if the episode would cause any lasting fallout between the soldiers and the civilians, but he knew Jeffers was right — the CSO was more help if they were armed and prepared for an engagement. They’d follow the soldiers’ lead, but Ben wanted to be useful if things got out of hand.
Beale’s voice sounded over the jeep’s radio. “Listen up, both teams. Let’s go over the plan while we’re still out of radio interception range. We’ve still got some details to iron out.”
Ben fiddled with the knob on the old stereo that they’d retrofitted. The cable hanging from the front of it crackled noisily with stat
ic electricity, then turned to a cleaner, louder signal. “We’ve got the data back from our satellite scans. There has in fact been activity in the valley area over the past week, so we believe this is the correct location. Scans also show two fortified locations — likely some sort of bunkers or turrets — on the roads that lead in and out of the mountain. These mining roads have always been there, but the bunkers appear to be newer. So that means we’re not going to chance a frontal or flanked approach from the roads.”
Another voice joined in. “Sir, we don’t have another way in — I thought we decided the best approach was via the river, until we can get close enough to look for some sort of access shaft?”
“It was, but we just don’t know what’s down there. We thought the spring would be a shot, the one that starts in the mountain. It may have been expanded and used by the original miners as direct access to the river, for a trash chute or something, or it may be that the spring simply seeps out into the river. Meaning that’s not a reliable way in.”
All the soldiers had throat-mounted microphones that picked up their words without needing to manually start and end the transmission, but Beale had given one old-fashioned handheld radio to Ben’s jeep. Ben grabbed the walkie-talkie and pressed the button on the side. “Bennet here. When we were in Antarctica I crawled through the vent and ducting system — this place has to breathe, right? So there have to be access shafts cut into the side of the mountain?”
Beale’s voice returned. “We checked, and there are. But they’re too small for us, and we don’t have any schematics — we’re not sure which ones are still in use and which ones will just get us stuck inside a collapsed mineshaft.”
Ben shuddered just thinking about it.