“Jicarilla Apache!” Nantan said. “We work for no one!”
“And I’m officially retired,” Eric said. “I’d suggest you do the same after today. Your illicit operations with the drug cartels are about to come to an end.”
Eric made the chief show him where he’d been keeping Shauna detained, and when he saw the room, Eric shoved the man inside. “Put the other one in here too, and lock the door,” he told Luke. “They can work out their differences in private while we’re away.”
“We have to come back for the horses, you know.”
“Of course. In the meantime, they’ll be fine with the run of the compound. I don’t expect that we’ll be gone all that long.”
They drove the Land Rover and a pickup out of the compound and Tommy locked the gate behind them. Eric was at the wheel of the Land Rover with Nantan riding with him, while Luke, Tommy and Red followed in the truck. Since the chief had believed at the time that he was going with them as a hostage, Eric was confident that the route he’d sketched out for them was the correct one, and there had been no real need to bring him once he had that. His other three men in the escort truck thought their boss was coming to meet them where they stopped the Mexicans, so they would have their guard down when they saw the familiar Land Rover and pickup roll up to where they were waiting. Eric hoped the element of surprise would enable him and the Apaches to take control of the situation without a fight, because the last thing he wanted was to have bullets flying while Shauna was in one of the vehicles.
They sped down the gravel road past the shot-up truck they’d ambushed earlier, leaving behind them a cloud of dust. Once on the pavement, Eric pushed it harder, knowing that like the chief said, the cartel guys that had Shauna weren’t going to be happy about the unexpected delay, and were likely to get nervous if too much time passed. There hadn’t been time to ask many questions, but Eric learned enough to know that the two SUVs had come there to make a delivery of cartel merchandise they were stockpiling for later when they expected the market to return. The chief was sending Shauna back with them because it was a convenient way to get her off his hands, and the Mexicans had agreed to it, saying their boss in Sonora had a thing for American blondes. Eric could only hope the men didn’t try anything with her while they had her in the truck, which was another reason to intercept them with as little delay as possible.
The route led west winding through more mountains before it entered the more open country of lower elevations. Much of the landscape along the roadway was uninhabited rangeland, but here and there they passed the rubble of burned down ranch houses, and Eric figured that was the work of the C.R.I. contractors or the cartels. They really had taken control of the region and he was sure that the chief’s operation was just a small part of the big picture. Eric was just wondering whether or not they might encounter other members of either group when he and Nantan spotted an approaching vehicle in the distance on the road ahead, coming their way at high speed.
“I’m pulling over to the shoulder,” Eric said. “We’ll see if they recognize the trucks and stop. It could be another C.R.I. patrol, so get ready!” Eric pressed the buttons to open both front windows of the Land Rover and waved back at Luke to follow him as he brought it to a stop. The oncoming truck was closing fast, and Eric knew the driver had seen them.
“It looks like the other truck we saw this morning,” Nantan said. “The gray Ford.”
“I think you’re right, and if it is, they didn’t wait like the chief told them to. Shauna may be with them, so we’ve got to keep our cool. There’s no telling what they’ll do when they see we’re not who they think we are.”
“I’ll cover you from the rear,” Nantan said, as he slipped out the door and closed it behind him.
“Tell the other guys to be ready!”
The approaching truck slowed as it came straight towards Eric, and he could see two men in the front. He was sure now that it was indeed the truck they’d seen escorting the black SUVs that morning, and the driver was pulling up to the Land Rover now, probably expecting to find the chief sitting there waiting. Eric saw the surprise on his face when he saw it was a stranger behind the wheel instead, and by then Nantan had stepped out from behind the vehicle with his rifle leveled on them. The man at the wheel threw the truck into reverse immediately and stomped the accelerator, backing away in an erratic weave as he tried to escape. Nantan opened fire, aiming at the tires, and when the truck came to a stop again with its front tires flattened, the guy in the passenger’s seat began firing back at them, forcing Nantan back into cover and Eric to get down to the floorboards and crawl out the opposite door. Dammit! He cursed under his breath. He hadn’t expected those idiots to try something like that with Nantan’s rifle on them. Now they were under fire and couldn’t really shoot back with purpose because they didn’t know if Shauna was in that truck or not.
“We’re going to have to flank them!” Eric said. “That truck’s not going anywhere. If we can keep them focused on the Land Rover, it shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Let me and Luke do it. We’ll go from either side of the road. Just keep shooting in their general direction so they don’t get suspicious. Give us ten minutes.”
“Tell Red to get that pickup back up the road, out of rifle range. If they disable both of our vehicles out here, we’re screwed! If Tommy wants to help me keep them busy, that’s up to him.”
Nantan said he would, and Eric fired several more rounds in the direction of the two in the other truck. If it weren’t for Shauna likely being in there, it would be a simple matter to take them out. As it was, it would still be simple, but it was going to take time for Nantan and Luke to get into place. In the meantime, Eric expected to take a lot of fire on the Land Rover, and he was correct in assuming it would be disabled when the two shooters directed their fire at the tires and the radiator, even as Red hurried out of range with the pickup. Tommy came into position alongside Eric by keeping low in the roadside ditch, and Eric made a dive for it to join him, deciding there was too much incoming fire to risk relying on just the vehicle for cover.
“They apparently aren’t short on ammo, are they?” Eric said, as he took up position in the ditch near Tommy. Eric couldn’t imagine what Shauna must be going through, if she were indeed in the back seat of that truck. She would have no idea who her captors were engaging, and she certainly would never imagine it was him. He knew she would know to keep down and stay put if at all possible, but it would still be a hair-raising situation for her, trapped there in the middle of a hot firefight. Eric and Tommy kept up their sporadic shooting to keep the two guys focused, but he knew they were experienced operators and that they would have to know they couldn’t hold their position long against several armed men. If they suspected they were being flanked though, there was little they could do about it, because Nantan and Luke were so stealthy in their approach that neither was detected until it was too late. Eric heard their rifles as the two of them unleashed a simultaneous crossfire on the men behind the truck, and when the echoes faded away, there were no more sounds of resistance from that direction. Eric saw Nantan move in while Luke waited in place to cover him. A few seconds later, Nantan waved the all-clear signal, and Eric sprang to his feet and ran to the truck, hoping that Shauna was unhurt. But when he opened the back door and looked inside, there was no one there!
“Well crap! She’s not here! Are both of those guys dead?”
Nantan nodded.
“Then we’ve got to get to the place where they turned around. Maybe they were unable to stop the Mexicans!” Eric said, as he waved frantically for Red to come forward with the other pickup. When he did, Eric took the wheel and they all piled into the truck. He drove as fast as the road would permit, his mind racing even faster as he thought of all the reasons why Shauna wasn’t in that truck. The most likely one of all was the one he feared most—that the contractors escorting the Mexicans had been unable to stop them and even now they were driving away with her to no t
elling where. Eric knew there were originally three men in the truck, and he wondered if the other one had been killed when they tried to follow the chief’s orders. He was so convinced that he was right about this that it came as quite a shock to find the two black SUVs stopped in the middle of the road, bodies sprawled all around them. Eric skidded to a stop from a safe distance and he and the Apaches got out, their rifles at ready. Nothing was moving in the vicinity, however, so they cautiously closed in on the bullet-riddled vehicles and checked the bodies, finding five Hispanic-looking men in total, all of them dead from bullet wounds. Some of their weapons were still laying there on the ground where they dropped them, and the men began picking them up while Eric examined the interiors of the SUVs, dreading what he might find there. There were no more bodies inside though, and the only evidence he found that Shauna had been there was a cut zip tie on one of the rear floorboards. Eric took it to Luke and asked him what he made of it.
“Well, she wasn’t in the pickup with the two contractors, and she’s not here, but one of those guys is missing too, so they must be nearby.”
“I wonder why the other two would have headed back, when they’d already taken these cartel guys out and they thought the chief was coming here to meet them?”
“Your wife may have escaped. Maybe the other guy even helped her? Who knows? If they went on foot though, I’ll find them. I’ll start looking for their trail right now!”
Eric had full faith in Luke’s tracking abilities after seeing them in action, and he wasn’t let down now. Luke found the place where Shauna left the road, almost directly adjacent to the SUV in which Eric found the cut restraint. There was nothing else at the scene of the shootout to investigate, so Nantan asked Tommy and Red to stay behind and guard the truck while he and Eric followed Luke into the bush.
“She went through here. Three men went this way too,” Luke pointed out the footprints where they crossed a sandy area among the rocks. “Two of them turned around and came back. The other one must be the third man who is missing.”
Eric looked at the confusing jumble of tracks in the sand, many of them obscured by the newer ones on top of them. “So, they all went after her at first. Can you tell how far ahead she was?”
“Not exactly, but she was running faster than them, making longer strides. They were in a hurry too, but they stopped several times, probably trying to figure out where she was. But then, when the two of them came back this way, they were only walking. See their boot prints over the top of the others? Those two had to be the two in the truck we met on the road. But the other one may be still following her. We need to move quickly, but with caution too, because he is out there somewhere.”
Eric was impressed that Luke could tell all that, but not really surprised. He knew the basics of how to read sign, but what separated his elemental knowledge from a master like Luke was that Luke could follow a trail through places where most people couldn’t tell it even existed. That was a skill that took years of study and Eric hadn’t had the patience or the time, but he was glad that Luke did. Without him, Eric would be mostly guessing, perhaps finding a foot print here and there, but stumbling around blind trying to figure out where Shauna went until it was possibly too late to help her.
It seemed strange to Eric that the other two would turn back and leave just the one guy in pursuit, but he thought that maybe it was because they realized by the way she was running that catching her wasn’t going to be quick and easy. Perhaps they left their most skilled tracker to it while the others went back to get help. But that theory proved wrong when Luke had followed the trail but another quarter mile. The third man was face down and unmoving on the blood-stained rocks beneath him, and a closer look revealed two bullet exit wounds in the middle of his back.
“That is why only two of them went back,” Luke smiled.
“Your wife must have grabbed a weapon before she ran,” Nantan said. “The other two must have decided she wasn’t worth the bother.”
Eric agreed that might be right. They’d just survived a major firefight with the men who they were supposed to be working for, killing them all, and this woman the chief had already traded off or given to those men as a gift had then killed one of their own while escaping into the wilderness. Eric could see why they’d have little motivation to continue pursuit. They were hired killers when killing was the job, but no one was paying them any extra to risk their lives going after some crazy bitch they had no use for anyway, so they’d collected their dead buddy’s weapon and headed back to their truck.
Luke pointed out where Shauna’s trail was headed, and Eric scanned the slopes in that direction and easily picked out the logical spot from which she would have set up her ambush. When the three of them reached the jumble of boulders, Luke found several 7.62 x 39mm shell casings on the ground there. “Looks like she’s got an AK,” he grinned. “That’s good shooting, considering the weapon and the distance.”
“She knows how to handle a rifle,” Eric agreed. He felt much better now, knowing Shauna was armed, but when Luke picked up her trail where she’d continued on after firing her weapon, her footprints indicated she left at a fast run. There was no telling how many miles that woman would cover before dark if she thought for a minute she was still being pursued. Eric was no slouch at distance running himself, but even if he knew her exact route, Shauna had a good head start. Since he didn’t know though, there was no way he’d ever catch up without Luke’s help. “You may as well go back and tell Tommy and Red we’re going to be awhile,” Eric told Nantan. “My ex-wife is a freakin’ triathlete and may run all night. If Luke is willing, the two of us will go after her until we catch up.”
Sixteen
WHEN SHE REACHED THE top of the ridge above the place where she’d stopped to fire at her pursuers, Shauna saw that the only way ahead was across a wide plain that stretched to another range of hazy blue peaks in the far distance. Bisecting the flatlands ahead of her though was what appeared to be a deep canyon. She couldn’t tell from where she stood if there was a way across it or not, but she picked a spot where it looked like a shallow arroyo on her side intersected it. If she could make it down there, she knew she might find a way into the canyon, which she hoped would offer better places to shelter and hide and maybe even a source of water.
Aside from getting shot or captured by her pursuers, finding water was right up there in importance with finding shelter from the cold. Shauna was confident in her endurance and ability to run for miles and miles without stopping, but without water the dry climate here would do her in after all that exertion. She was putting all her faith in being able to find some in the deep rift ahead of her, because to remain where she was would surely result in her capture. Dodging rocks and picking her way through the brush, Shauna made her way down to the plain at a fast lope. The land there wasn’t as open as it appeared from a distance, and she felt better as she ran among the stunted cedars and other semi-desert vegetation that hid her from view of the ridge behind. She only stopped to look back once, and that was when she’d finally reached the edge of the arroyo. What she saw back there kept her from pausing more than a few seconds though. Silhouetted in the late afternoon sun at the crest of the distant ridge, were the tiny figures of two men! They weren’t giving up! The remaining two contractors were apparently tracking her even though she’d left them that far behind!
Shauna still had no idea why those men had stopped the convoy out there in the middle of nowhere. Was it some kind of trick the chief’s men had pulled on the Mexicans, handing her over to them and then having his men turn on them and kill them once they were out on the road? It didn’t make a lot of sense, because she figured they could have done the same in the compound, had they wanted, but whatever the reason, it had happened, and now those men apparently wanted her back. She’d thought that taking out one of them with the AK had changed their minds, but now she knew she was wrong. The other two were still in pursuit, even though they were traveling far slower. She figured s
he must have wounded, rather than killed the one she shot, and that maybe getting him back to the road and tending his wounds had cost them sufficient time for her to gain such a good lead on them. Whatever the reason, she intended to keep her distance, and that meant she couldn’t slack up now. Shauna climbed down into the shallow arroyo and followed its winding course that she hoped would take her to the big canyon she’d seen from the ridge. The men behind her would have seen it too, but Shauna was counting on the vastness of the landscape to enable her to disappear. It was only a short time until dark, and if she could just stay ahead until then, she was confident she could elude them.
As she worked her way down the dry stream bed, Shauna was conscientious about where she placed her steps. If they were tracking her, they would look for the obvious, so she avoided the sand whenever possible and walked on the smooth surfaces of the rocks, taking care not to overturn them or leave other obvious signs of her passage. She’d hoped to find standing water somewhere in the bottom of the arroyo, but there was none so far. This area was far drier than any she’d seen in Colorado since she and Jason had reached the Front Range, and Shauna figured the weather systems that had already brought snow to the high mountains didn’t affect this particular region. If there was water in the vicinity, it would be farther down, probably in the bottom of the main canyon. Shauna’s hopes of getting some soon faded though when she came to the end of the arroyo and found herself on a precipice that dropped more than a hundred feet to the canyon floor below. She crept as close to the edge of the cliff as she dared and looked over. There was water there all right, big pools of it in the bends of the canyon in the shadows of its near-vertical walls. But there was no way down there from where she stood without a climbing rope with which to rappel, so Shauna turned back to find a way out of the arroyo and then make her way along the rim of the canyon to search for another route.
Feral Nation - Convergence (Feral Nation Series Book 6) Page 15
