by Jeff Kirkham
The vagaries of human emotion…such a delightful puzzle, Tavo mused.
A handful of Tavo’s men collected the weapons and laid them on the front apron of the closest tank.
“Flex cuff them,” Tavo ordered.
As he watched the American tank crews being restrained, Tavo marveled at his new power, bestowed on him by the United States Army. Throughout history, the largest force almost always won. In just a few, famed battles, boldness, connivance and good luck rushed into the gap and handed off-center victories to the brave and the clever.
As Tavo stood before his prize—a hundred of the deadliest ground machines in history—he gave himself the credit he was due. He’d successfully invaded the United States, overrun an armory, and forced the surrender of the most-potent fighting force in the southwest. And he’d done it all with the loss of just a few “borrowed” men from the Mexican army.
He touched the wound on his forehead and remembered that it hadn’t been without challenges and setbacks, but he had achieved something utterly remarkable. Now that God had seen fit to provide him with these weapons of war, he would be invincible.
The first sliver of sun broke the plane of the desertscape. Tavo imagined he could feel the warmth of it speeding across a hundred million kilometers—a bolt of incandescence sent from a God who sometimes looked up from his labors to notice men of focus and power.
History was the Hand of God written in the annals of man, and Tavo had placed his handprint on history this morning. He felt a solid conviction that even this conquest would shrink against a backdrop of what he would soon accomplish. History was on the move with Tavo, and God with it.
His daughter’s words sounded in his ears—about Tavo’s soul being in danger of hell. Given the sun at his front and the behemoths of war at his back, her warning rang petty and false. How could she understand God, given the slightness of her own works? How could she understand her father when all she’d ever done was enjoy the scraps from his table?
The small people in the audience would never understand the greatness of the playwright. They would be carried by the play, and deposited neatly outside the door after the denouement, taken on a journey they could never comprehend.
But Tavo didn’t require their understanding—or his daughter’s admiration. God’s approving glance, and history’s assent, would be enough.
Chapter 28
Tavo Castillo
US 285, 75 miles North of Roswell, New Mexico
Tavo hammered the console of his Humvee with the ball of his hand like a jackhammer trying to kill a mosquito. The driver stared straight ahead, as though searching for something in the distance. The Humvee stood in the middle of a lonely highway in the middle of nowhere. Tavo had just gotten off the radio and had ordered the convoy to stop.
There were few other places in the southwest where, horizon-to-horizon, not a single mountain could be seen. The convoy of Abrams tanks, trucks, Jeeps and Humvees had stopped on the dirty, orange moonscape while Tavo figured out what to do next.
Go forward or go back.
Alejandro had just radioed to tell him that the Pecos River Refinery was under steady attack. Tavo felt like an Olympic sprinter with paracord tied around his waist. He could run as fast as he like, but at some point the rope would go taut. If he was running full-tilt in that moment, he could be torn in half. If he ran out of fuel, and lost tanks, he would never be able to return. The tanks would become an impossible defense for the cowboys and townsfolk of the Southwest. Gasoline was the rope, and Tavo was the runner. He needed that rope to free spool all the way to the Great Salt Lake. Salt Lake City held billions of gallons of gasoline, and once he seized it, anything would be possible.
Tavo exhaled and released his irritation with Alejandro. The locals had magically agreed—in the middle of starvation—that their top priority would be to harass Tavo’s little army. Two days before, only a couple dozen shooters had been sniping at the refinery. Since he left with all hundred Abrams tanks and most of the men, the vultures had descended upon the refinery in force. Somehow those dirty-ass rednecks knew that the refinery mattered to him. Or maybe, like yipping hyenas, they just attacked targets wherever they seemed weakest. He had no idea who or what had raised such a deliberate defense of the town of Artesia. Why would they shoot the refinery? It was as though some malignant son of a bitch was reading his mind.
Tavo had a decision to make: keep driving toward the Navajo Army Depot and then move on to Salt Lake City, or go back to the refinery in Artesia to destroy the insurgents. At the army depot, he would pick up dozens more Humvees, a few Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a lifetime supply of ammunition and top-notch bang-bang. But he wouldn’t get much farther north than the depot without more gas—a lot more gas. The next big refinery wasn’t until Salt Lake City.
Tavo had learned a few things about tanks, and they weren’t good things. For starters, even after using every drop of fuel from the fleet of 20 HEMTT fuel trucks that’d accompanied the tanks from Fort Bliss, the Abrams barely reached the refinery in Artesia. These juggernauts of land battle only had a 200 mile operating range, which explained why he’d seen so many tanks loaded on rail cars in the past. It was stupid to drive them anywhere. Moving overland was a logistical nightmare. Since Tavo hoped to eventually ride them to victory all the way to the Pacific Ocean and the Canadian border, this shortcoming mattered a hell of a lot.
The tanks were like heavyweight prize fighters only capable of going two rounds before having dizzy spells and fainting in the ring. Tavo would have to consider a new layer of strategy into his plans of conquest. Fuel and supply lines would become his primary focus. He couldn’t just pillage his way to Salt Lake City. The gaps between refineries were two and three times the operating range of his armor, and the small gas stations and regional suppliers wouldn’t have enough fuel to do the trick, even assuming they hadn’t been drained by local scavengers.
His tanks could defeat any insurgent force. The millions of weapons in the hands of American gun owners would fold like wet sawdust before the mighty Abrams. But the tanks required an ironclad supply chain. Tavo had been born to grasp complex networks of logistics and to build elegant solutions for entropic problems. This was his jam, he reminded himself, quoting something Alejandro had said to him earlier on the sat phone.
“This is your jam, Canoso. You make the plan and I’ll kick some ass,”
Tavo had terminated the call with Alejandro in order to think through the web of logistics. He needed his big map, but he didn’t want to dig through the back of the Humvee to find it. The logistical problem was clear enough in his head, anyway.
At least learning to operate the tanks hadn’t been a problem. Three of the American tank drivers had given his men instruction on how to drive, running them through the ignition sequence, the controls and the idiosyncrasies of the machine. Surprisingly, not one soldier would teach his men how to operate the weapon systems even after executing a few of them in front of the others. Apparently, it was less unpatriotic to teach tank driving than to teach tank shooting. In the end, he’d kept the five tank crew who’d been most cooperative and shot the rest. Two dozen dead, zip-tied soldiers lay on the tarmac at Cannon Air Force Base, a feast for the flies. The last thing Tavo wanted was more American partisans plinking at his oil refinery.
What really hung Tavo up was a leadership shortage. He had four assets: Alejandro, Beto, Saúl and himself. Beto had the most maturity and experience; five years older than the other men and a former Navy SEAL, so his training went deeper than anyone. He knew America, and the American military. His English was perfect. But Beto was never more than halfway to grasping the big picture.
If he could trust Beto to be competent, Tavo could split his force of tanks, send fifty of them to the National Guard armory in Phoenix and order Beto to capture the ammunition depot in northern Arizona. Beto would have to take a serpentine path around Phoenix, Flagstaff and any city bigger than a watering hole. Southwestern American
s were like dogs that’d been hit by a car. If you tried to handle them, you would end up with stitches for your trouble.
As much as he hated trusting Beto with his new weapons, Tavo would have to send him with half the tanks to take the munitions depot. He would go back to the refinery himself. Saúl was with Beto, and that made Tavo feel a little better. At least Beto, would have someone looking over his shoulder. He didn’t think much of Saúl’s ability to lead, or even to think, but at least Tavo trusted him to help Beto avoid the biggest mistakes.
In the end, he still didn’t trust Alejandro to protect the big asset. The ammunition depot was a luxury. The refinery was a necessity. He would personally see to the pacification of the town of Artesia and delegate the munitions depot to Beto and Saúl.
Tavo went to work splitting his company of tanks in half. Even that would take hours.
After sending half the tanks and all the fuel trucks ahead to Beto, Tavo and his half-column rumbled east. They arrived at the Pecos River Refinery after nightfall. A vicious night battle raged across a twenty-mile front around the facility.
Rounds pinged off Tavo’s Humvee as the column passed through the refinery gates. Gunfire sparkled from every direction at the edge of the night. Other than the sparkle of headlights and muzzle flashes, the desert closed in like a shroud.
Tavo did the math in his head as he climbed out of his Humvee: the refinery was a square about a half-kilometer across. The partisans were able to hit the storage tanks from about two miles out from the fence. That made a diameter of about seven-point-two kilometers…times pi—three-and-change…It penciled out to a circular perimeter of over twenty-two kilometers.
With fifty tanks, he would be able to place one tank every half kilometer. Even with fifty tanks, partisans were going to slip between them and take shots. He could set up intermediate LP/OPs between the tanks, but even then, his men would be stretched thin and would be easy to kill in the night. If the insurgents found a way to shoot the storage tanks from farther—Tavo didn’t think the 7.62 x 51 round could fly more than two or two and a half miles—then his whole perimeter would have to be moved out even farther still, and the size of the gaps would make perimeter defense untenable. To make matters worse, the refinery was tucked-up against Artesia, putting almost the whole town inside the two mile perimeter. Tavo could see the occasional muzzle flash from snipers on the roofs of buildings. He’d have to fight street-by-street.
If he didn’t want a protracted battle, there would be only one way: he would eradicate the town and go “scorched earth” against the insurgents. It was either that or give up the refinery, and he hadn’t returned hundreds of miles to give up the refinery. Like rats in the corn, he’d burn it all down and drive them into the open.
“What’s the status of the fuel?” Tavo barked at Alejandro the moment he saw him.
“We have seventy-two storage tanks. Half hold unleaded. Fifteen of them hold crude. Ten are kerosene, which must be a byproduct or something. Twelve of the tanks are empty or mostly empty. All of the storage tanks on the outside of the facility are full of holes—they’re a lost cause. We’re out of proper patches and we’re pounding wood pegs into the holes with sledgehammers as you suggested, which cuts the leakage down, but they still leak.”
“Bottom line it for me, Alejandro,” Tavo ordered.
“We have fifteen storage tanks, of various sizes, that still hold unleaded.”
“Ammunition and men?”
“We’re still good on ammunition. We’ve lost eleven men on patrols to round up snipers. One guy took an unlucky bullet to the melon just walking around the refinery.” Alejandro chuckled until he noticed Tavo glaring at him in the light of his red headlamp. “We’re good, Boss. We need to counter-attack in the morning at the latest.”
“Quit fucking around and kill them all,” Tavo said. “Without this refinery, we’ll be forced to haul fuel from Monterrey and every American gun-toting asshole between here and there will be winging bullets at us as we drive by. You think this is bad? Imagine a supply chain a thousand kilometers long that passes through scores of Texan towns. I told you to level the Artesia, you didn’t, and now we’re getting our asses kicked. What did you think would happen?”
Alejandro shuffled his feet. Even in the dark, Tavo could tell his harsh words had stung. He and Alejandro had been friends for many years, and he had tended his ego like a tulip farmer. Now the gloves were off. This fight was not for slightly-larger drug territories or healthier margins on crack cocaine. This fight was for conquest. Real world, history-making, ruling-with-an-iron-fist conquest. They didn’t have time for egos. They needed results. They needed fuel for the Abrams tanks.
“Alejandro.” Tavo's voice softened, “This is for all the marbles, hermano. We’ll never fight for profit again. We fight for conquest—for Mexico and the church. For every one of these cowboys we kill, we save a thousand lives. This is Big War and it all comes down to this refinery. Every moment we spend dicking around with pissed off hillbillies, Utah gets farther and farther away—gas reserves are being burned up by crazies. I shouldn’t be here talking to you. I should be taking down an ammunition depot, so that day after tomorrow, we roll into Salt Lake City and nail down the refineries there. So let’s quit prancing around and let’s make war. They are bringing the fight and they won’t stop until we crush them. Do you understand me, hermano?” Tavo couldn’t keep the knife-edge out of his tone. “We must make war on these assholes with hatred. We must murder them without mercy. We need to stop fighting like indios and start fighting like conquistadors. We do that or we die here… you die here.”
Tavo couldn’t read Alejandro’s face in the dark, but his next words sealed their mad brotherhood, and forged together their deathless sin.
“Si, Canoso. I get it. Tomorrow, we burn them all.”
Chapter 29
Noah Miller
Texas Precision Rifle Club, West Range, Brownfield, Texas
“Sin and shame
Remorse and pain
Your damned credibility.
Here and now,
Lay them down,
At the Big Man’s feet.”
The Crusader
Noah had been staring at the mural, painted on the side of the big barn, for probably ten minutes. He felt a kinship with the mural—as though the bizarre scene depicted in brushstrokes had a lot in common with his own mission. Both seemed like acts of insanity in a world turned upside down.
He leaned up against the fender of his Cruiser while five men drew down on him with AR-15 rifles, silent as stone. He was being held at the entrance to the Texas Precision Rifle Club while the “brass” figured out what to do with him. Apparently, this part of Texas didn’t cotton much to strangers.
The title of the mural made sense. The painting made sense. But the action in the mural—and why anyone would paint it in the first place—eluded Noah entirely.
Ranchers of the Panhandle Fighting Prairie Fire with Skinned Steer.
The mural showed two ranchers dragging a half-skinned steer behind their horses trying to put out a prairie fire on the ground with its blood and body. Apparently, at some point in history, dragging a half-dead cow behind a horse had been the most effective method of putting out a fire. Noah scratched his head.
I’ll be damned.
Three older men stepped out of a ranch house down the dirt driveway, and walked toward Noah, red puffs of dust curling up behind them. Each man carried a revolver on his hip and a rifle over his shoulder.
These are the sons of the sons of the sons of the men who put out brush fires with bloody steer carcasses, Noah reminded himself. These were the very definition of men “not to be fucked with.”
The thought sat well with Noah. In fact, it made him feel at home.
“What’s your name and who are your kin?” one man barked as they drew near. He carried a huge octagon-barreled rifle over his shoulder. Given the man’s age, Noah wondered if he could still shoot it. The gun had to we
igh fifteen pounds.
“I’m Noah Miller was raised by Bill McCallister over in the borderlands of Arizona, but my kin are the Millers of Santa Cruz County.” Noah didn’t make a move to shake hands yet. He knew better than to jump the gun on a handshake in Texas.
Another of the old men, this one with fancy AR-15 slung over his shoulder, spoke. “I knew Joel Miller down around Ciudad Juarez back in the seventies. Any relation?”
“Joel Miller was my uncle, but I left Ciudad Juarez as a young man.”
The three men nodded, knowing what it meant to leave the Mormon settlement in Juarez “as a young man.” It meant Noah wasn’t a Mormon, which was a mark in Noah’s favor. These men would be old school Protestants, without much affection for Mormons.
The three old men stood quiet for a moment, apparently working on a judgment of the “young man” before them.
On his way into Brownfield that morning, Noah had been stopped at a roadblock on Highway 380, disarmed, interrogated and finally allowed to drive on to the Texas Precision Rifle Club. A Terry County deputy had followed him and blocked him in with his police cruiser. The deputy now waited patiently, leaning across the cab of his cruiser with a shotgun pointed in Noah’s general direction.
Noah sincerely hoped he’d get his 30-30 Winchester back from the deputy. It hadn’t proven to be a very good battle rifle, given the eternal deserts and tremendous distances of southern Arizona and New Mexico. But he loved that gun. Old Bill had given it to him on his seventeenth birthday.
