Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  Tavo inhaled and forced his shoulders to relax. His daughter’s arrogance would be a fight for another day. Today, he had everything he needed. He never allowed himself to act on principal or pride. He acted on cold, hard reason—considering the implications and calculating the ramifications. He would return to Arizona with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel. It wasn’t enough to reach Salt Lake City, but it was enough to make his next play. Whether he would return to Monterrey and obliterate these pretenders or continue north and gobble up the Americans, he could decide in the coming days.

  “Very well. General, if you would be so kind as to order the trucks filled. The longer we wait, the more the American refugees move south. They were already walking en masse from Tucson toward the border,” he lied. “Also, we could use a protective detail for our convoy, preferably one of your LAVs to head the column.”

  “Of course, Señor Castillo,” the general replied.

  Perhaps this man wouldn’t need to be killed. The general had read the new reality quickly enough and had adapted without hesitation. His daughter might actually have handed him someone useful.

  Sofía, though, was another matter. Even with the issue of the gas settled, she remained erect, her hands still on her hips, apparently seething over the general’s capitulation.

  Tavo had done the math very quickly, not pausing to double-check his fuel consumption and range calculations. He would certainly need more than these hundred thousand gallons of gas, but one way or another, he would get all the gas he needed. One petulant girl stood before his serpent, which wasn’t much considering all he had overcome.

  Flagstaff to Salt Lake City was about five hundred miles. His tanks burned a gallon of gas every one-half mile. He would require at least a thousand gallons per Abrams to reach Salt Lake City, times a hundred tanks plus the fuel for his Humvees and technicals. The math seemed easy enough—mostly round numbers. What the math didn’t take into consideration was maneuvering in a fight, something Tavo hoped to avoid given the overwhelming power of the M1 Abrams. The “X Factor” would be the grimy Americans themselves. Tavo couldn’t afford even the slightest weak link in his supply chain or the insurgents would exploit that weakness with hunting rifles and Molotov cocktails. They were nothing if not resourceful, and they had a hound dog’s nose for vulnerability.

  When Sofía finally discovered that he had taken the Pemex tanker trucks all the way to Flagstaff, she would rally against him. But that hardly mattered. Tavo could do what he pleased once the tanker trucks left this refinery.

  Several days prior, he had sent a recon element forward on motorcycles to check the refineries in Salt Lake City, and yesterday they’d called in. At least two of the refineries north of Salt Lake were intact. He ordered his recon men to burrow in and observe. They had seen some coordinated military action against one refinery, which corporate security forces repelled.

  Just that report put Tavo’s stomach on edge. If men were already assaulting the Salt Lake refineries, how much time would he have before they were taken or destroyed? The Salt Lake refineries would not stay safe forever. Those stockpiles of gasoline were like crystal stemware on a picnic table near a pack of dogs tearing one another to shreds. If that gasoline hadn’t been torched inside of a week, it’d be a miracle. According to his recon team, Salt Lake City and the surrounding suburbs had been seized by chaos just like everywhere else. A Latino gang, one of the Zeta allies, had rolled up most of the city and had raided out most of the rich neighborhoods. The gangbanger captain styled himself the next Pancho Villa. Tavo would bring him to heel as soon as he could, but in the meantime, Salt Lake City was a flaming war zone. A thousand fires burned in the valley, and if just one of those fires wormed its way into his refineries, all would be lost.

  Tavo had dispatched another recon team to check out the refinery north of Las Vegas, and their report didn’t make him feel much better: Vegas had totally succumbed to depravity. It wasn’t anything his tanks couldn’t crush, but Tavo considered that second refinery in Las Vegas his Plan B. The Vegas refinery was safe for the time being, but violence was spreading out from the Las Vegas Strip like a plague that jumped between the weak. It’d follow the freeways, where refugees awaited the predations of the strong and the violent.

  He had no desire to pacify more desert. He wanted farmlands—potato crops and corn harvests. Livestock and alfalfa. Rich carbohydrates and animal fats would be his weapons of pacification once the anti-personnel shells and machine guns of his Abrams tanks softened the insurgency.

  Conquering more blighted desert would buy him no joy. Salt Lake City, and the rich band of farmland extending through Idaho and eastern Washington would be his vein of human gold. God willing, he would follow that vein up to the snowfields of Canada.

  Chapter 33

  Tavo Castillo

  Camp Navajo, Outside Bellemont, Arizona

  For almost two miles before he reached Camp Navajo, Tavo passed his one hundred main battle tanks, technicals and tanker trucks sitting in the westbound lane, spanning the American highway like a conquering army at parade rest.

  Beto met him in the parking lot in front of Camp Navajo. The day waned and their Humvees were parked nose-to-nose. Tavo had just arrived from Monterrey and Beto greeted his boss at the gate. He immediately delivered the bad news.

  “There’s nothing here. We’ve searched all seven hundred and seventy-seven concrete bunkers and they’re mostly empty. We did find a couple million rounds of 5.56, a hundred hand grenades and several dozen 40 millimeter grenades for the vehicle-mounted grenade launchers, but most of our guys shoot AK-47s and the 5.56 ammunition isn’t going to help us. We need to switch the men over to AR-15 rifles, or we’re going to run out of ammo after one or two engagements.”

  Tavo flushed with anger. In the last twenty-four hours, he’d come face-to-face with four gross miscalculations—and he had been the one to make them. He couldn’t remember ever feeling this way before. His calculations had always been accurate, so prescient. Now, with the stakes sky-high, he was screwing up. Before the stock market crash, he hadn’t really thought that society could collapse until he saw it actually collapsing. His preparations had been a bit ambiguous—like planning a child’s life before she was born. Now, with the collapse a deadly reality, he was relying on decisions his past-self had made while living in an entirely different universe.

  Failure One: he hadn’t prepared to take and hold refineries. He could’ve ordered his street soldiers to capture the refineries in Tucson and Salt Lake City ahead of an invasion. That one bit of planning would’ve smoothed penetration of the intermountain region. He would be sitting pretty in Salt Lake right now if he’d secured the Tucson refinery as soon as the stock market tanked. Tavo had suspected a collapse might happen and that fuel reserves would be the stepping-stones of conquest. He hadn’t properly weighed the crucial role fuel would play, not until he saw a hundred M1 Abrams tanks slamming gasoline like a vaquero slams Sunday cerveza. All of this chasing gasoline around the American Southwest could’ve been avoided with one phone call to his lieutenants, one day prior to the collapse.

  “Secure both the Salt Lake and Tucson refineries if the stock market closes.”

  But he hadn’t seen the problem in all its horrific dimensions until the riots began. He had been prepared, but he hadn’t been prepared enough.

  Failure Two: he hadn’t planned to acquire the weapons he’d need.

  Case in point: they now stood inside the wire of the region’s largest munitions depot. But it had been emptied of major munitions by bureaucrats, for some godforsaken reason, sometime in the hazy past. He had known the depot existed, but he hadn’t known what was inside. He had assumed that a munitions depot would contain actual munitions.

  The Arizona National Guard would keep their munitions somewhere. Tavo never considered the possibility that they would keep them outside of Arizona. This information had probably been on the internet, but Tavo hadn’t dug deep enough to find out. He’d a
ssumed that Americans would keep bullets near their weapons. For some unfathomable reason, they had decided to keep their bullets fuck-all faraway from the weapons that fired them.

  Failure Three: he compounded Failure Two by ordering that all his soldiers train with the AK-47. No matter how many munitions depots they knocked over, he would never find stockpiles of 7.62 x 39 ammunition in America. He remembered clearly why he had decided to use the AK-47: it’d been because his street soldiers were idiots. He knew the AK to be the perfect weapon for idiots—easy to learn and easy to employ. The rifle functioned even when poorly maintained. He didn’t plan on training marksmen, so the differences in accuracy between the AK and the AR-15 meant nothing to him. The AK seemed the perfect fit, unless one hoped to collect ammunition from the dying body of the United States Army. In that case, the 7.62 x 39 cartridge would indeed become a problem. Soon, he would have no choice but to issue the M4 carbine—the rifles they had found by the hundreds at the Arizona National Guard armory—and he would have to re-issue that rifle in the middle of a war in the middle of a foreign land infested with insurgents.

  Failure Four, and this was a failure he could barely face: he had misjudged his own daughter. Tavo’s Plan B for fuel now became Plan A because the damned Navajo Weapons Depot had turned out to actually be the Navajo Summer Camp for Girls. Tavo would now have to seek more ammunition before they could move to Salt Lake City, and that would force a detour into Nevada. Detours required fuel.

  He would be forced to attack the Hawthorne Army Depot, three hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas, and that shift would add a massive dogleg to his route. He would be forced to turn west, capture the Dry River refinery north of Las Vegas, then capture the Hawthorne Munitions Depot. He couldn’t push straight through to Salt Lake City with the Abrams tanks—they simply didn’t have enough gas to do it. Tavo could send a few tanks, tanker trucks and the forty Humvees to take and hold the refineries in Salt Lake ahead of his main force, but there were tremendous risks going into Utah at partial strength, particularly with insufficient ammunition of the wrong caliber. If they came up against any kind of organized resistance, like the resistance that had appeared out of the smoke in Tucson or the desert rats who had hit him in Artesia, he would have a divided force relying on a long, vulnerable supply chain stretched out over five hundred miles—under-fueled, under-manned and under-supplied with ammunition. He’d studied World War Two enough to know that Adolf Hitler had placed a similar bet against Russia and had eaten a bullet as a result.

  The one source of gasoline Tavo could absolutely count on was Monterrey, Mexico and that refinery had been rendered uncertain by his daughter and her bureaucrat boyfriend. Tavo would’ve dearly loved to send tanks to seize that refinery, but it would burn at least three days and would force him to roll through Texas with an armored column. God only knew what the Texans would have in store for him when he returned north after that.

  More importantly, based on reports from his recon element in Utah, the Salt Lake refineries there were still under siege. He could lose them at any moment. As he’d learned in Tucson, a single match could make the difference between millions of gallons of glittering fuel and a charred heap of slag.

  The entire enterprise seemed hung on the whimsy of a college girl. Not only had his daughter set him up to take a fall in Guatemala, but she stood between him and the conquest of the Western United States. Thousands of men, a hundred thousand metric tons of armament and the fate of a starving nation—all waited with a Sword of Damocles dangling over it. And that sword had a name: Sofía Castillo.

  Tavo felt reasonably certain that he could manage General Bautista with Sofía out of the way. He had no idea who else in the Mexican army she had swayed, but Tavo had seen it in the general’s eyes; he was a man who could be managed. But the removal of Sofía from the equation would have to be swift and complete.

  Tavo had tremendous military power north of the border, with thousands of 105 millimeter explosive rounds and unbeatable armor, but in Sonora and Sinaloa, he’d held nothing in reserve. The Monterrey refinery was his ace in the hole, his fallback position. Sofía might already know that he had advanced beyond Tucson, and she could be hard at work turning the Mexican army against him. He needed to get home and settle this issue as soon as possible, but he needed an intact refinery in the United States even more.

  Tavo walked to his command Humvee, reached in the window and pulled out a map. He spread it on the still-warm hood and motioned for Beto to join him. The dark inched in around them in the parking lot and Tavo flicked on the headlamp he’d been wearing around his neck since crossing the border into the United States.

  “How many men do we have?” he asked. Foot soldiers from his drug operation had continued to filter in from the four corners of dying America.

  “With Alejandro’s group, the Mexican army guys and the last of the guys from Hermosillo that showed up today, we’re at a little over three thousand men.”

  “Out of the 250,000 street soldiers before the collapse, only three thousand followed orders and showed up?” Tavo had hoped for ten times that number.

  “Most of our guys were only affiliated—we didn’t have much of a hold on the affiliated gangbangers. Their loyalty was to their original colors. We had 20,000 men combat trained. Those guys should’ve made it. I figure the situation in the cities is far worse than here in the desert and that our commandos got stuck. Their initial orders were to soften the cities by fighting cops and national guardsmen. Once they engaged, maybe they had trouble cutting loose from those fights. I don’t know, Tavo. Whatever killed the U.S. military definitely took a toll on us too.”

  Tavo waved away the issue. Three thousand men would be plenty now that they had the Abrams. Alejandro’s crew had figured out how to run the M1 Abrams, which turned out to be easier than he had expected. They’d even fired a few shots from the big guns. Turns out, the M1 Abrams main gun wasn’t that different from a regular gun.

  Tavo angled his flashlight down on the map. “Nevermind the number of men. The three thousand will do fine. We will leave ten tanks here at the Navajo Depot, along with a half-dozen Humvees, and we’ll move west toward Las Vegas tomorrow with everything else. We cross the river south of Lake Mead at Hoover Dam. Then we secure the refinery north of Las Vegas and send a contingent to take Hawthorne.”

  Beto went wide-eyed. “We’re going to Hawthorne, as in Hawthorne Army Depot? That’s a long, damn way from here.”

  “It’s six hundred miles, give or take,” Tavo guessed.

  “Two or three tanks of gas…” Beto pointed out, apparently hesitant to weigh in too heavily.

  “We’ll move on the refinery north of Las Vegas first. That’s only one tank of gas from here and we can go with the entire column; everything except a small force to hold the forward operating base here at Navajo Depot.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t just head straight for Salt Lake City with half our tanks and all the gas?” Beto studied the map.

  “If we get into a fight in Salt Lake like we did at the Artesia refinery, we could run out of gas maneuvering. We could lose tanks. We would definitely run out of AK-47 ammo. Also, the tanks can’t make the return trip to Arizona unless we send tanker trucks with them, and the tanker trucks are easy to kill. If we run out of gas and have to walk away from fifty Abrams tanks in the middle of the I-15 corridor, we would be handing those fifty tanks to any Utahn who can figure out how to fuel them. Utah and Wyoming are full of gas. Right now, we’re the only kids on the block with baseball bats. We’ll win any fight so long as we don’t lose any of our Abrams. If we climb out on a limb without the gas to get back, and we’re forced to leave the tanks behind, we can expect a much harder fight when we return. We might as well go back to Mexico if that happens. The Utahns have an army depot outside of Salt Lake. They have everything they need to make war, except these tanks.”

  Beto stood quietly, leaning on the warm hood. He seemed to struggle to take it all in, a former SEAL now
planning set piece battle strategy.

  “So we don’t want to split our force because the halves would be vulnerable? Even fifty of these tanks don’t seem vulnerable to me,” Beto said without conviction.

  “The tanks aren’t vulnerable. The gasoline is vulnerable. We could run fifty or a hundred tanks up to Salt Lake City, but then we wouldn’t have the gas to get back if the refineries are destroyed. Las Vegas is half as far, and the refinery is located in the middle of nowhere. There are no population centers anywhere nearby. We have the gas to hit that refinery and return,” Tavo took the time to explain. Whether he liked it or not, he might eventually have to leave Beto in command of his army while he went home to handle his daughter.

  Beto nodded, still trying to do the math in his head. Tavo forced himself to be patient. Not everyone was a genius.

  Tavo interrupted Beto’s mental struggle. “Put it this way: if we capture the Dry Lake refinery north of Vegas, then we’re set to launch straight up the middle of Utah with a limitless source of gasoline at our back and all the ammo we’ll ever need from Hawthorne. We’d also be a hundred and fifty miles closer to Salt Lake City. If we fail to take the Dry Lake refinery for some reason, we can still come back here and refuel from Monterrey.”

  “Okay, Canoso. I think I get it. We get two bites at the apple going for Vegas where we only get one bite at the apple going for Salt Lake City.” The haze in Beto’s eyes made it clear that he didn’t really get it.

  Tavo didn’t feel like belaboring the point. Pretty much everything he had said was bullshit anyway. In truth, he no longer had access to the refinery at Monterrey unless he took the refinery by force, quite possibly burning it down in the process. Tavo needed to take the Dry Lake refinery north of Las Vegas so that he wouldn’t have to negotiate with his daughter for Mexican gas. But that wasn’t information Beto needed to know. There was no reason to make himself look weak in his lieutenant’s eyes by bringing up his problems with Sofía.