“How did you get here? Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know! I’m lost! I didn’t know this road was here until I stumbled onto it from down there.” Eric nodded in the direction of the brush-covered valley to the east. “I just need water. And a ride to the nearest town, if you can take me, so I can get home!”
“This is a private road, and you’re trespassing on private property! We’re going to give you a ride all right, but first, you need to get face down on the road, and then put your hands behind your back!”
Eric didn’t argue with him and complied immediately. He wanted both of these men to keep their full attention focused on him, trusting that his new-found warrior brothers would take care of the rest before the one walking over to him managed to get the zip tie he’d pulled from his pocket into place around his wrists.
Twelve
ERIC FELT THE SHARP pressure and the weight of a knee in his back as the man who’d approached him circled around behind him to secure his hands while the other covered him from near the front of the truck. He pretended to be confused as to why they were detaining him, still asking for water and a ride to keep their attention centered on him and away from their surroundings. As the one on top of him worked to pull his wrists together, Eric saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and then the weight was suddenly gone as Nantan’s body slammed into the man from one side, carrying him hard into the loose gravel of the road. Eric sprang to his feet in time to see that Red had taken care of the driver, who was now disarmed and in a choke hold from behind. He glanced back to see Nantan on top of the other man, his knife already at the man’s throat. The situation seemed to be under control and Eric was about to collect both of the pistols when gunshots rang out from the direction of the pickup. He saw Red and the man he was restraining both go down as bullets punched through the windshield.
Eric dove for the ground as he reached for his Glock. There was someone else in the truck, probably in the back seat, firing at them through the glass! But before Eric could get into position to return fire, multiple rifle shots erupted from the hillside and incoming bullets tore through sheet metal and glass, putting an end to the gunfire from the truck. The shooter inside was neutralized, so Eric turned his attention back to Red and the other man just as he saw that Nantan had subdued his adversary with a heavy blow of his fist.
The shooter inside the truck had been using a pistol, Eric knew that from the sound of the reports. He had gotten off several rounds before Tommy and Luke took him out, and Eric now saw that Red was hit; sitting on the ground and holding pressure on his upper arm, where a dark stain was spreading in the fabric of his coat sleeve beneath his fingers. The man he’d been restraining was less fortunate. He’d taken friendly fire from his buddy in the truck who tried to rescue him, and the round that went through the back of his head was lights out for him.
Tommy and Luke had ceased firing by the time Eric made this assessment, but they were still covering the truck with their rifles. Eric crawled to the front passenger’s side fender and waited until Luke gave him the thumbs up signal from his side of the road, as he could apparently see from his position that the shooter was no longer a threat. Eric verified this with a quick check of the back seat, finding a dead man there dressed in the same BDUs as his two companions, and a 9mm Beretta on the floorboard under him, where it had fallen. Eric grabbed the weapon, furious at himself for making such a dumb mistake. This third guy they didn’t anticipate could have killed Red as well as Nantan and himself. He hadn’t seen anyone in the back seat when the truck passed before, but Eric figured the man must have been there all along, maybe napping or ducking down out of sight as soon as the driver and the other guy up front saw Eric standing in the road. He missed getting a fatal hit on Red, probably because he was too hasty when he began firing, and he’d killed one of his on instead because Red had unwittingly pulled the man into the line of fire when he got hit. Now they had two dead men of unknown association on their hands, and only one left alive that might be able to give them the answers they sought. They needed to get the bodies and the truck off the road, but when Eric walked around to the driver’s side, he saw that Tommy had shot holes in both the front and rear tires.
“What’d you do that for?” Eric asked him, when he and Luke made their way down to the road.
“Just making sure no one got away, you know. I wasn’t sure how many were in the truck. I just shot the shit out of it as soon as that guy started firing.”
Eric figured it didn’t really matter. There was no place in the immediate vicinity to get it off the road and hide it anyway. They would just have to hope another vehicle didn’t come along before they were done here. Tommy helped him put the two bodies in the bed of the truck though, at least getting them out of sight, while Luke went to assist Red with his wound. There were three mil-spec select-fire M4s in the vehicle in addition to the handguns the men had been carrying, and Eric put them across the hood and then went through the glove box to see what he could find. The truck was registered to a consulting firm in Texas he’d never heard of, and there was nothing to indicate any government or military affiliation. He’d seen enough by now to know though, that these men were professionals, and not some loosely organized civilian militia group. Further digging through the center console revealed that he was right, and Eric cursed under his breath as he stared at the I.D. badges he found in there among the papers and cigarette packs. He’d suspected the men were contractors, but he had not expected to find this outfit working here in the U.S. C.R.I. was one of the more notorious private contractor companies he’d ever run across, and their operators had been involved in atrocities in certain countries that made even ISIS terrorists look like the good guys. Eric had been contacted by them on more than one occasion, and though their offers exceeded anything he’d ever earned in his life, he hadn’t entertained the idea of accepting one even for a minute. What they were doing here he had no idea, but he knew that if they had men working here, it had to be at least as lucrative as the abundant work available to them in Europe and elsewhere.
“You got any idea who they are?” Tommy asked, as he came back over to see what Eric had found, admiring the nice rifles. “Are they working for the cartels?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say so, yes, because it would take that kind of money to hire them. C.R.I. is a contracting company that’s known for dirty work; willing to do most anything if the price is right.”
“Too bad we had to kill those two before you could question them.”
“Don’t worry about it. We got one of them alive. That’s all we need if we can make him talk.”
“Oh, we can make him talk, brother. Leave that part to us if you like.”
Eric followed Tommy over to where Luke and Nantan were talking to Red, his arm now bandaged, and the bleeding stopped.
“It didn’t hit any bones,” Luke said. “And it went all the way through.”
“Yeah, just a flesh wound, man,” Red agreed. “I won’t say it doesn’t hurt like hell, but I’m lucky, I guess. A lot luckier than the dude I was choking out.”
“What about him? Has he said anything yet?” Eric looked at Nantan and nodded at the prisoner. He was standing with his back against a small tree, his hands restrained behind it with one of his own zip ties he’d intended to use on Eric.
“Nothing other than calling us a bunch of murderers and bandits for killing his buddies.”
“They are C.R.I. contractors if the I.D. badges I found in the truck are legit.”
Like Tommy, Nantan had never heard of the company. None of these men had worked in the business after leaving the active military, so they were unaware of what went on in that world.
“I’ll fill you in later, and we’ll find out who’s paying them to be here, but I think Luke’s right about the tire tread match. Knowing their standard operating procedure, burning the cabin and taking civilian hostages is about what I would expect. Now, we just have to find out what they did w
ith Shauna.”
The prisoner refused to give his name, tell them who he was with, or acknowledge that he’d ever seen Shauna or knew anything of her. He was being a real tough guy, despite Nantan’s warning that holding out on them was going to cause him severe pain.
“We want to know if you’re using the forest service work center at the end of this road for your base of operations,” Eric said. “We’re quite certain that you are, and I want you to tell me how many civilian captives you’re holding there and how many men are manning that post.”
“The only thing I’m telling you is that you can go straight to hell!”
Eric turned to Nantan. “I’ll leave this to you. We don’t have time to waste though. They’re probably expecting that truck back any minute.”
Nantan turned to the prisoner. “My people were at war with almost everyone who wasn’t Apache for hundreds of years; other Indian tribes, the Mexicans, and the white settlers and their soldiers. In that time, they learned interesting ways to punish their enemies and make them suffer and die slowly. Sometimes, they would hang you upside down and build a small fire under your head and roast you alive… or strip you naked while the women used their knives to peel the skin from your body, inch-by-inch while you are still alive… But we don’t have time for games such as those right now, and there are faster ways to die that are almost as painful too. “Tommy! Bring your horse and your rope!”
Eric was standing off to one side, letting Nantan handle this, but he could see in the hapless man’s eyes that he was getting nervous. There was something serious in the hard lines of Nantan’s rugged face that offered no illusions that he was joking or that he would be merciful. When Tommy returned, leading his horse and carrying a lasso in his other hand, he passed the noose to Nantan while Luke sliced away the strap that held the man to the tree. Before he could react, Nantan threw him to the ground and had a loop of rope around his ankles that Tommy quickly pulled tight, before climbing into the saddle and wrapping the other end around the horn. At Nantan’s nod, he urged his mount forward until the rope went taut when the horse was about fifteen feet away.
“Why don’t we take a shortcut to that work center, Tommy? Maybe across those rocks over there:” Nantan began walking that way, and Tommy kept pace with the horse, dragging the man behind him by his feet. He was going slow, and for the first few yards, they were still on the gravel road that was fairly smooth. But the area Nantan pointed to was covered in broken rocks of all sizes and shapes, many of them with sharp edges or abrasive, rough surfaces. When Tommy reached this area on his horse, he maintained the steady walking pace, ignoring the curses of the man he was pulling behind him. Seeing that this technique was likely to be quite effective, Eric followed close behind them, watching as the man’s body bounced over the irregular surface and his jacket and shirt rode up from the waist, exposing his flesh to whatever it came into contact with.
“We can go for miles like this,” Nantan said, as he walked alongside the unfortunate captive. But pretty soon, there will be little bits of you all over the ground behind us. You’ll bleed to death eventually, but it will take a long time, maybe even longer than it will take for the coyotes to follow the blood after we cut you loose.”
Eric smiled. His Apache friend’s method was brutal and savage but proved quite effective. They’d only gone a few more yards before the man began begging Nantan to stop, saying that he would tell them everything he knew. Nantan told Tommy to stop his horse, but he made no move to untie the man’s feet or let him up.
“What is your name and who do you work for?”
“Wilson! My name’s Dwight Wilson. I work for C.R.I. It’s a security contracting company.”
Eric stepped in at this point, squatting down next to the man and grabbing him by the collar. “Okay, Wilson! You and your crew burned a cabin and barn about 20 miles southeast of here. And you took the woman that was there. Why did you do it, and where is she?”
“I don’t know man! I wasn’t there when they did that. I’ve been on guard detail at our camp.”
Eric looked up at Nantan and Tommy. “Maybe we didn’t drag him far enough yet… or maybe not fast enough?”
Tommy nudged his horse forward until the rope went taunt again and the man began sliding slowly across the rocks. When he sped up to a trot, it was only seconds before Wilson was screaming for him to stop.
“Okay! Okay! I wasn’t with them on the patrol, but I do know about the woman! They brought her back with them along with a big stash of weapons and supplies. Chief locked her up in the supply room, but she’s gone now.”
“Gone where, Wilson?” Eric grabbed him again, jerking him up to a sitting position. “Where did they take her?”
“I don’t know! I saw them put her in one of the vehicles that just left. I don’t know why.”
“You mean one of those two black SUVs that you and your buddies were following out of here earlier?”
“Yes. It’s our standard protocol. Our job was to follow the convoy out to the pavement and return to base, mainly to report back that the road in here is clear. Our guys in the other pickup truck are escorting them to their destination, I think to another post of ours about a hundred miles south of here, in New Mexico.”
Eric couldn’t believe what he was hearing. If the woman the man had seen get into one of those vehicles was Shauna, then she’d had passed within mere yards of him less than a half hour prior. If only he’d known, he and Nantan’s men could have stopped the entire convoy. Now, they had a huge head start and the one vehicle they had stopped was disabled, with two flat tires.
“Who are the people in the black SUVs? Why do they need an escort?”
“Because they’re here, man! Nobody moves on the roads in this area without our permission. We’re working to lock down this entire sector and move all civilians out. That’s what we’re here for. We’re doing the work the military can’t do—like always!”
Eric wasn’t sure he believed this. The Army had established checkpoints on many of the highways to the east and north of here, he already knew that. Their operations might be limited in the remote mountain areas for now, but if they were hiring private contracting companies to help reestablish law and order, it would seem that the more populated areas would be a higher priority.
“Okay, but I’m asking you again. Who were the people in the black SUVs and why did they take the woman with them?”
“I would tell you if I knew man, but that’s way over my pay grade. All I know is that they were speaking Spanish to each other. They may have been Mexicans, I don’t know. Chief was the one dealing with them. I just keep my mouth shut and follow orders, like everyone else here.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you do! So, it’s like I’ve heard. You and your fellow C.R.I. mercs are the hired guns on this side of the border for the drug cartels that are moving north, right? And those guys were some of your clients! So why did they take the woman with them?”
“I really don’t know! Chief would have to tell you that. We don’t keep prisoners though, because we’re not set up for that. Most of the civilians we’ve relocated have been sent to the government refugee centers! Maybe that’s where they were taking her too. But I really don’t know man!”
“We’re not set up for keeping prisoners either,” Eric said, leaning close to glare into the man’s eyes. “You’re going to tell me everything I want to know about this outpost of yours at the end of the road, and this ‘chief’ who is in charge of it. Either that, or we finish this now and leave you in the back of that truck with your two partners. First, I want to know how many men are present there, and what the security detail consists of and what weapons they have at that post.”
“I am part of the security detail! Me and the two guys that were with me. There’s a gate near the end of the road, with a guard watching it while we were away. We were supposed to go right back there after we turned around. Normally two guys are assigned to watch the entrance and the other two patrol the perimeter
every couple of hours. But it’s been quiet here, so Chief has cut us some slack. It’s not like anyone ever comes down this road, at least not until today. They’re going to wonder now though. We should have been back by now.”
“Why don’t you have comms? A radio in your truck? Or a handheld?” Eric had noticed a tall whip antenna mounted on the top of the cab of the other pickup, but there wasn’t a two-way in the one Tommy had shot up, and Eric had found no handheld units on the dead men or Wilson either. “I saw an antenna on the other truck.”
“Yes, there’s a radio in most of our trucks, but not the Dodge. It wasn’t part of our regular fleet. We didn’t need comms anyway, because we were only going out to the road and back, like I told you.”
“Is there a base station and tower at the compound?” Eric was thinking fast. If there was a commercial-band radio system in place, gaining control of it might be Shauna’s best hope.
“Yes. It was already there from when the forest service used the place. Our technician converted it to our secure frequency. We’ve established contact with all our posts out here via repeaters that we’ve brought back online.”
“So, it’s possible to reach the crew of the other truck from that base station even out of normal range.” Eric smiled. “What about direct contact with the nearest military post?”
“The truck maybe, but the nearest Army post is on the other side of the Continental Divide. We have other stations of our own that are closer when we have something to report to them, but from here, no.”
“Because they’re not really who you’re working for anyway are they? All of that is just a facade to give your outfit a reason to be here, and a reason to be left alone to do whatever in the hell you want.”
“I’m just paid to do my job, man. Like everybody else.”
“Like your two coworkers down there in the back of that truck with holes in them,” Eric said. “I wonder what they’d tell you, if you could ask them if the pay was worth it? I’m not going to shoot you right now, Wilson, but if the information you’ve given me isn’t the truth, I will when I come back.”
Feral Nation - Convergence (Feral Nation Series Book 6) Page 12
