Yeager's Law

by Scott Bell

  Nita nodded in Charlie’s direction. “Not here. Let’s go outside for a minute.”

  Harlan shrugged and gestured for her to walk out. He swung the cooler door closed behind her and relocked it. Charlie listened as their footsteps faded and another door squealed open and shut.

  For two hours after that, nothing much happened. She’d tried yelling for help but realized her voice would give out long before anyone heard her. She explored her little cage, looking for a weapon or a means of escape, and found a bunch of nothing. The cardboard boxes were just that—cardboard. There was no loose metal, pipes, racks, or shelves she could fashion into a weapon. She eventually gave up and settled as far from the door as she could get, partly to keep all the available distance from anyone coming through it, but also because she’d peed near the threshold. If nothing else, they’d have to step in a pool of urine to get to her. Petty revenge, but it felt better than curling up and crying.

  The cooler was stifling hot. Before long, her shirt stuck to her, and she had to keep wiping sweat from her face. And she was damned thirsty. She couldn’t stop picturing all the bottles of cold Ozarka water in her fridge at home or going to Sam’s Club and seeing cases of the stuff racked floor to ceiling. She tried to swallow, and her throat hurt.

  What was Abel doing right this minute? Was he already making a suicide run to Mexico, trying to get his truck back? Somehow, she had no doubt that he would try it. Even in the short time she’d known him, she was sure of that much.

  All she could do was sit there with her questions: Had David become concerned that his mom hadn’t called or come to pick him up? And what in the world was Nita up to? How did she play into all this? Would the gang of misfit morons let her loose in exchange for the truck? How long would that take?

  More importantly, how long do I have before Skeeter comes?

  CHAPTER 26

  Hacienda Del Norte

  Northern Mexico

  Enrique DaSilva strolled toward the red Peterbilt parked near the converted barn, his shoes clicking across the blacktop behind the main house. The cartel had paved over the clay soil many years ago, when they first took over La Hacienda Del Norte. The parking lot, surrounded by the buildings of the hacienda, was as big as a football field. Light poles were spaced around the perimeter and down the middle of the concrete expanse, giving it the appearance of an empty mall parking lot. Having a panel truck or a semi rig loaded with hundreds of kilos of product get stuck in the mud would not make the bosses very happy.

  Pedro walked up and said, “The men and I are ready to go, boss.”

  “Good.” DaSilva waved a hand in dismissal. Having Oscar Cruz in hand would relieve a lot of his worries.

  Pedro nodded and walked away.

  A servant in a butler uniform emerged from the back door of the hacienda. “Señor Santos, the table is prepared. Would you care to dine?”

  Santos looked a question at DaSilva.

  “Yes, yes, yes.” DaSilva waved again. “By all means, let us eat. I am starving.” He glanced back at the Peterbilt. Its big, steel rims with their enormous lug nuts gleamed, reflecting the beams from the security lights. “Señor Yeager will have to find a new truck, hey? He will never see this one again.”

  Charlie began a third systematic search of her prison. She started at the door, carefully stepping around the puddle she’d made, which had steadfastly refused to dry. The cooler—and what a misnomer that was—seemed to trap all heat and humidity. Her T-shirt and cut-off jean shorts were sodden with sweat, and her thirst had become a living creature, screaming to be soothed. She would have licked condensation off the dirty walls if there was any. Even her urine had soaked into the concrete, taking away that option as well. But as hot and stuffy as the refrigerator was, it wasn’t humid enough to condense the moisture out of the air.

  Dry enough to suck it out of her body, however.

  The door, ceiling, and back wall were made of pressed tin with little diamond shapes stamped into it. The joints were riveted together, and none were loose enough to pull apart or even to allow her to get her fingers into the crack. The door was solid and heavy. She must have jiggled the lock a dozen times, hoping that whatever they’d stuck in it would work loose and fall out.

  She tried it again anyway. Nothing.

  She leaned back against the door. To her left stood row after row of metal drink racks partitioned to hold singles, six packs, and cases of cold drinks. Beer, soda and… water. Picturing how water had once sat there on those racks nearly drove her crazy. Against all odds, she searched the racks again, in case she’d missed a bottle left behind by some careless employee when they cleaned out the store.

  How many times had she gone into a convenience store and snagged a chilly bottle of Ozarka or Fiji Water and thought nothing of it? She could have cried at the thought of all the times she’d poured out the remainder of those partially consumed bottles.

  “Shit, Charlie,” she rasped, surprised at how hollow her voice sounded. “Get a grip on yourself. Concentrate. Use your brain and find a way out of here.”

  The floor was a concrete slab, clear and smooth from side to side. No loose bits or cracks she could exploit to dig out a rock big enough to clock one of the sons-a-bitches when they came through the door. The racks were sturdy and heavily made, put together with bolts, lock washers and 3/8th-inch nuts. And whoever assembled them had taken pride in his work because each and every nut was tightened as if it had been spot-welded.

  Empty cardboard boxes had been slit open along the tops, flattened, and left on the floor. Charlie dug through the pile—again—moving the chunks of cardboard to search the floor underneath. All she uncovered was a flattened potato-chip bag. Empty.

  Nothing else.

  The light outside had grown dim, and it was hard to see. C’mon, Charlie. Think, dammit!

  Crunching gravel sounded from outside, along with the sound of a car engine. She froze. Maybe it was the owner coming to check on his property, or a leasing agent, or best of all, a cop.

  A door banged open. “You miss us, sweetie?” Harlan called out. He sounded way too happy.

  Charlie’s heart squeezed and threatened to stop altogether. A droplet of sweat fell from one eyelash when she hung her head. More moisture gone, she thought.

  Footsteps.

  Coming toward the cooler door.

  Charlie hustled to the far side of her prison, rustling the cardboard strewn across the floor and nearly tripping in the dark. She huddled in the corner.

  And waited.

  Reynosa, Mexico

  Mexico-Texas border

  Yeager crossed the border into Reynosa without a fuss. The border guards on the Mexican side barely glanced at his passport. He could have carried an arsenal in-country, and they wouldn’t have noticed.

  He pushed through the crowded streets, vying with drivers who defied death to get a few feet ahead of each other. The buildings were a random mix of primary colors and pastels, no two alike. Reynosa was a city of exhaust fumes and frying food, overlaid by Tejano music blaring from shops and cars.

  He found Highway 40 without a problem, and once outside the city limits, he was able to build up some speed on the arrow-straight four-lane divided road.

  Scrub brush and sand lined both sides. Without city lights, the night was dark as six feet up a miner’s ass. The Ford’s headlights were slightly crooked, with the right beam shooting a little farther ahead and lighting up a narrow tunnel of road. The terrain remained invisible outside the cone of light provided by his pickup or the occasional passing car. Yeager’s eyes drooped. He yawned again and again from nerves and the aftereffects of three nights with little sleep.

  Charlie. He couldn’t go a minute without thinking about her. Mental images of her tied up in a dark basement, scared and alone, twisted at his nerves. Or worse, she could be raped by those guys. Or maybe she was already dead, her body lying in a drainage ditch somewhere. The parade of morbid pictures wouldn’t stop.

  He�
��d thought about running a bluff and trying to take the kidnappers with a fake truck, but if they examined the load before telling him where they’d hidden the women, everything could go bad in a hurry. If he and Victor could take one of the kidnappers alive… All right, that’s Plan B.

  An hour and a half out of Reynosa, Yeager passed the entrance to the target ranch. A rail fence marked the property on either side of a tall gate. The drive up to the modern, electrically operated, wrought-iron entrance was wide enough to accommodate an eighteen-wheeler. Mercury vapor lamps mounted on either side of the gate lit the approach. He spotted a CCTV camera and a speaker-box interface. The arch over the gate read La Hacienda del Norte in wrought-iron script.

  A second later, he was past the place and swallowed up by the night again. He put on his blinker at the next crossroad and turned right. Sparse traffic became non-existent traffic. Following his GPS, he drove until he found a turn-off onto a rutted farm road, more of a goat track than a road. Easing the pickup off the shoulder and into the tracks, he jounced and rattled his way into the brush, high beams alternately stabbing the sky or wallowing across the ground.

  He came to an abandoned farm after exactly three-point-four miles and pulled into the yard. When Yeager shut off the engine and the lights, it was like he’d turned off the world. There was no moon, and the wash of the Milky Way lent barely enough light to make out shapes in the darkness.

  The door creaked when he clambered out of the truck. Yeager stretched his back, unzipped his fly, and watered a cholla cactus. The desert air had cooled, making him glad for his long-sleeved shirt and the T-shirt underneath.

  The honking call of a long-eared owl came from his right, somewhere behind the broken-down farm building. Only three walls still stood, leaving the inside open to the sky. Not a single pane of unbroken glass remained in the entire structure. As far as he could tell, there was no human within miles of the place.

  Inside the Ford, he stretched out and propped his head on the armrest. Straightening out his legs as much as possible, he plugged the tactical radio in his ear, adjusted the boom microphone, and turned on the belt unit. He fiddled with the volume and adjusted squelch until the static disappeared. Closing his eyes, he tried to clear his mind. If possible, he wanted to catnap before Victor showed up with the Huey.

  After that, there wouldn’t be another chance to sleep for some time to come. Or so he hoped.

  CHAPTER 27

  “Lucy! I’m hooome.” Harlan pushed open the door, one hand on the butt of his pistol tucked in his waistband. The woman huddled in the far corner, a small shape in the darkness. Her eyes glittered in the reflected light.

  “I brought you something, sweetie,” Harlan said. He picked up the plastic grocery sack that he’d set by the door and tossed it inside.

  One of the water bottles popped free of the bag and rolled toward her. He grinned to see her fixate on the spinning plastic bottle as it came to rest a fingertip out of her reach.

  “See? Don’t say I never gave you anything.” He closed the door and relocked it with a wire peg-wall hook that he stuck through the latch.

  Harlan found Skeeter by the store’s checkout counter, rooting through the other plastic sacks. A shiny new Coleman lantern sat on the floor by the counter, turned down low. Skeeter opened a can of vienna sausages and dumped them on a paper plate with some saltines.

  “See?” Harlan said. “Like campin’.”

  “You think the bitch was lying to Stone? About knowing where Buchanan kept all his money?”

  “Who knows? Stone has her now. Up to him to find out what’s up with all that. We stay here and keep an eye on Red there and await developments.”

  Skeeter grunted. “Await developments. Shit.” He drew the last word into two syllables, shee-it. The lantern hissed, painting his face in a monochrome glare.

  Harlan cracked open a can of Diet Pepsi and took a swig. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “So what happens now?” Skeeter asked.

  “Now we take some turns getting some sleep. I’ll set us up a camp in the house next door. I’ll grab some shuteye then come and relieve you about midnight or so.”

  “I get first watch?”

  Something coiled and dangerous in Skeeter’s voice caught Harlan’s attention. He stared at the leathery face of the older man for a beat then grinned. “Why sure, partner, you can take first watch. Remember: we need her alive for the switch.”

  “Oh, she’ll stay alive. Fer a lot longer than she wants to, that’s a shore thang, that is.”

  “I guess that means I won’t get a wink of sleep over here for the next little while or so, huh?”

  Charlie had the bottle of water open before the door closed. She drank half of it before she could stop herself. Breathing heavily, she scooted over to the plastic sack and checked out the contents: candy bars, beef jerky, snack crackers, and three more bottles of water.

  The haul looked as though Harlan had raided a convenience store and picked things at random. Nothing weapon-like, however. He hadn’t accidentally stuck in a bazooka or even a knife.

  Taking another mouthful of water, she held it as long as she could before swallowing. Capping the bottle was like closing the lid on Ali Baba’s treasure. But there was no telling how long this ordeal might last. She needed to conserve her resources.

  The men were talking, the murmur of their voices humming through the walls. A flickering glow gave her enough light to make out the bare outlines of her prison, but not much more. Like shadows on the back of a cave wall, shapes moved and shifted at the front of the store, where the pair of thugs huddled.

  So what kind of deal did Nita make? What else did she know that would prove valuable to the kidnappers? Charlie hated herself for not finding out what her so-called friend had been up to when she had the chance.

  She picked up her sack of supplies, intending to move it to her favorite corner away from the door. In the dark, she stumbled on the pile of flattened cardboard boxes, sending them skidding away.

  She froze.

  Something metallic had jangled across the concrete floor.

  Deserted farmhouse

  Northern Mexico

  “Red Ball One, Red Ball Two. Copy?”

  Yeager jerked awake, banged his wrist on the steering wheel, and cursed. Blinking, he shook off the dream—something with lots of snakes and a supermarket—and tried to orient himself.

  Truck.

  Mexico. Dark outside.

  “Red Ball One, Red Ball Two. Copy?”

  Yeager keyed his mic. “Go for One.”

  “Thought I lost you, home boy,” Por Que squawked. “You fall asleep?”

  “No.” Yeager struggled upright and switched on the Ford’s headlights. “Wide awake.”

  The thump of rotors came from the east.

  “Any trouble?” Yeager dug four road flares from a cardboard box on the floorboard.

  “Negative. Smooth as a cheerleader’s ass.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Funny guy.”

  Yeager lit the flares and set them at the four points of the compass, spaced across the open lot of the farmhouse. They marked out a landing area of about fifty square yards square.

  “Got your lights,” Por Que said.

  “All clear,” Yeager reported. “No breeze.”

  “Roger that.”

  The whop-whop of rotors transformed from distant sound to physical pressure, thumping in Yeager’s chest. The Vietnam-era chopper came in low over the scrub, running lights off, and settled in the center of the landing zone without a pause. Yeager shielded his eyes from the dust and sand kicked up by the rotors.

  Victor cut the power, and the big engine wound down. Moments later, the short, muscular pilot pulled back the sliding door of the cargo bay and hopped down, carrying a heavy duffel. The flight helmet with the attached night vision goggles made him look like a bug-eyed monster from a bad sci-fi flick. He trotted over to Yeager, not bothering to duck under th
e rotors.

  They shook hands and slapped shoulders. The first part of the mission had come together without a hitch. Some of the tension left Yeager’s shoulders.

  Victor pulled off the NVGs and blinked. “You ready, dude?”

  “You bet. Let’s get this party started.”

  They moved around the truck, and Yeager dropped the tailgate. Victor gently settled the heavy nylon duffel in the bed and unzipped the bag. Polymer and blue-steel gleamed in the weak starlight.

  They unloaded the bags in silence, removing weapons, flak vests, harnesses, magazines, flashlights, ropes, and other gear. When they were finished, enough armaments to start a small war covered the bed of the old Ford.

  Yeager’s mouth thinned in a feral smile. Start a war. Exactly what I plan to do.

  Hacienda Del Norte

  Northern Mexico

  Luis Cordoña stared at the monitors in the security office of La Hacienda Del Norte. The view had not changed in the past hour, and his eyes had long since glazed over. Missing something big enough to be a problem wasn’t a concern, anyway. The video analytic software was programmed to detect movement and send an alert to the call-up screen directly in front of him.

  So instead of paying rigid attention to a total lack of activity, Luis turned his thoughts to Serena, one of the workers in the processing room. At a few days over sixteen, she had developed some nice curves. The seat of her jeans had begun to fill out, and her boobs bounced a little when she walked. Luis followed her with the pan/tilt/zoom camera in the warehouse whenever she was on duty at the same time he was.

  So far, he had spoken to her only a couple of times. The workers lived in a small dorm adjacent to the main barn, for easy access to the processing facilities. Cameras in the hallways ensured that the workers didn’t roam at night and go anywhere they shouldn’t. Serena remained in her room after lights out, leaving Luis very little opportunity to run into her when he worked the night shift.