Conquistadors

by Jeff Kirkham

  “The guy in the Land Cruiser,” Tavo guessed. “He got out ahead of us.”

  Tavo hadn’t quite finished weighing the consequences of that mistake. He thought of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the American Revolution. A couple revolutionaries had run out ahead of the British regulars and American partisans had mauled the British as a result. Tavo didn’t like being on the shit side of history. Even so, they’d cleared the refinery without losing a single one of his commandos.

  “At least that mistake’s behind us,” Beto said. “We own the refinery. Now all we’ve got to do is keep it.”

  Tavo wasn’t so sure. “Let’s stick to the plan,” he contradicted his lieutenant. “We set a three kilometer perimeter, bring armor into the refinery, then close the circle. If anyone’s skulking around the desert, I want them run under a tank. We do this one, careful step at a time.”

  Beto shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Better safe than sorry.” He used a patently American saying, which irked Tavo. Something about Beto seriously grated on him—something bone-deep. But with his ruined toe throbbing like an hijo de puta, everything grated on him.

  One of the soldiers they’d trained in combat medicine had stitched Tavo’s new toe stump closed and dressed it in gauze. Sliding his foot into a new boot had hurt even more than getting the toe blown off. Walking on it proved to be its own sort of hell. But walking on it with hardly a limp sent a message to his men: Tavo was not only smarter, he was tougher. He could see the legend growing in the eyes of the commandos. He was a leader who took the fight to the enemy personally and he was a leader who could take a bullet and walk it off like a stubbed toe.

  I’d trade a toe for that, Tavo thought. Regardless of the training his lieutenants had received as SOF operators, Tavo had finally risen to their level. Having never served in the armed forces and even at fifty years-old, nobody could deny it: Tavo had become an operator—a gunfighter of the highest order.

  “That’s it then,” Beto wrapped the after-action review. “Assaulters, set up your squads around the outer fence. We’ll bring the armor in and spread it evenly around the perimeter. Make the spacing a hundred meters between tanks.”

  Beto finished the briefing. “Don’t shoot until you triple-confirm targets. Any bullet you cut loose is going to rip through our own guys. Shoot only with a clear backstop or let the tanks run the peckerwoods down. Anyone who shoots is going to answer to me later. Got it?”

  The men nodded in unison, but the slack expressions on their faces inspired little confidence. If anything touched off during this “Polish ambush,” they’d lose men to friendly fire. The knowledge didn’t bother Tavo overmuch.

  As the Abrams tanks growled through the refinery gate, the heartless sun burned directly overhead. The stink of the roadside dead had begun to blow the other way now that the sun beat down on the desert floor, reversing the winds toward the south. All Tavo could smell was the creosote that the tanks had smashed. It came as a welcome reprieve from the relentless smell of decay.

  With the tanks occupying the refinery, optimism took root in his army. The scorching pain in Tavo’s foot even retreated a little, subsiding to a dull thunder beneath the pain meds. So long as he kept standing upright, nothing but a bullet to the brain would entirely erase the discomfort. But even the pulsing of his blood in his foot made Tavo smile, a reminder of his invincibility.

  “Cuidado!” someone shouted overhead. Tavo searched the refinery, shielding his eyes, and they came to rest on a man scurrying down one of the ladders attached to a big fuel storage tank. “There’s something up here. ¡Mira!”

  “What?” Tavo yelled and hobbled toward the fuel tank. A cold fear poured down his spine. “What the chingada madre is it?”

  “I don’t know, but it could be like…a bomb or something,” the man dropped to the ground, garbling the last.

  Tavo shoved him against the steel of the tank and put a hand to the man’s throat. “Tell me, you useless pendejo…”

  “I don’t know what it is. Maybe a bomb,” the man shrugged, but his eyes darted about, seeking escape. “I don’t know anything about bombs. There are two bricks of clay and some wires…”

  “Dios mio!” Tavo let the man drop and both of them lurched away from the gasoline storage tank, racing toward open ground. “Get out! Get the Abrams out! Get them outside!”

  Tavo called Saúl on the radio as he ran. Saúl had been placed in charge of the armor. “Saúl,” Tavo screamed into the radio. “Get the fucking tanks out of the refinery.”

  “The tanks? The gasoline?” Saúl replied in a panic.

  “No, you idiot. The Abrams! Get them outside the fence. Go! There’s a bomb!”

  Tavo shambled clear of the pipes and storage tanks. The Abrams began the slow process of turning. Men sprinted toward the gates.

  KA-WHUMP!

  WHUMP…THUNK-WHUMP!!

  Compression squeezed Tavo like a fist. His ears thundered. His brain reeled.

  He looked up from the ground with no clue how he’d gotten there. The back of his head raged in jagged pain. He flipped onto his stomach and worked his knees under him. He heard only bass undertones, no treble. Someone grabbed his arm and tried to drag him upright. Then the man dropped him and kept running.

  “Tavo. Tavo…Tavo.” The radio broke through his deafness. “Tavo. Come in.”

  “Go for Actual,” Tavo croaked as he lifted himself up and struggled to his feet.

  “Are you alive?”

  “Of course, asshole. What happened?”

  “They blew the refinery. Get away!”

  Tavo turned toward the wall of heat and took two steps backward. Three of the biggest storage tanks were ripped in half, their fuel dumping in flaming gouts into the trenches around their base. Millions of gallons had blown clear of the big tanks and almost everything burned, the flames worming into seams and cooking through valves, bolts, rivets…

  “Get everyone out,” Tavo screamed, not thinking to press the button on the radio.

  KA-WHUMP!

  Another blast threw Tavo to the ground on his back. The ground bucked and he kneed himself in the face. He crawled away from the thunder, scrambled to his knees and ran.

  Pop-pop-pop, pop, pop, pop…

  Gunfire opened up, but a million miles away. Tavo ran toward the gate as his mind hunted to find itself. The pain in his toe had vanished. His mouth swam with blood. His tongue dragged against the inside of his teeth.

  As he passed through the gate, he rounded on the flames and took in the refinery. Hell had sprung up in place of the rust-speckled towers and whitewashed pipes. Lucifer stalked the ground where Tavo had killed two men the night before. Fire burned, unchecked, everywhere.

  From where he stood, at least a dozen Abrams tanks were in flames. A charred form emerged from a hatch on the top of a tank, bent over at the waist and slid to the ground where the form went still; a knot of flaming meat.

  “Tavo. Tavo. Answer me, Tavo.”

  “Go,” Tavo answered his radio.

  “The tanker trucks are being attacked. They’re hitting our supply chain. We need armor over here now.”

  That’s Alejandro, Tavo explained to himself. Alejandro had been left with the rear of the column. The gasoline trucks were under attack.

  “Copy. Sending tanks.”

  Tavo hunted around in his chest rig, trying to remember how to switch to his command frequency. Somehow, his hands remembered on their own.

  “Beto, come in.” He couldn’t remember Beto’s callsign.

  “Go for Fox,” Beto answered.

  “Get tanks over to the fuel trucks. Alejandro’s under attack.”

  “Roger. Sending armor.”

  Tavo held his head in his hands, trying to stop the spinning world. He looked around, then forgot what he was looking for. He shuffled over to a concrete barrier by the gate and sat down. The shooting in the distance had elevated, the roaring of belt-fed machine guns rising fortissimo in the orchestral movement of a dist
ant battle. As quickly as the belt-feds joined the percussion, they abated. The decrescendo tapered to an arrhythmic tinkling of small arms. The tanks hadn’t had time to join the battle before the field went silent. The percussion hadn’t had time to join the orchestra.

  Guerrilla attack. Hit and run.

  Tavo slumped on a concrete barrier, confused. Wounded. His head swam. His window to the world went dim. Then, it winked out.

  Chapter 38

  Noah Miller

  Nellis AFB, Area 2, Thirteen miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada

  Noah’s back burned like a sonofabitch. Something flaming hot had landed on him as he took cover from the blast that ripped the refinery to pieces. Still, he counted himself fortunate. Captain Sparks had been next to him in the dry wash, and whatever had hit Noah’s back had splashed on Sparks head and chest. Within seconds, it’d cooked the airman’s guts and brains. It’d happened so fast, the man was dead before Noah could tamp out the petroleum-fueled gouts of flame.

  The inside of Noah’s head sounded like a million sparrows chirping at once—like the big ficus tree at his dad’s ranch in the summer, right at dusk. The massive overpressure of the explosions had jacked his brain and he couldn’t string together two thoughts. While he prayed it’d get better, Noah still felt like the luckiest man alive. He’d just watched eight men die and another man get his brains fried inside his skull. The fact that he walked away from the explosion he’d just triggered seemed like a profound joke. If anyone should’ve had his head burned to a cinder, it should’ve been him. He’d been the man most ready to die in this whole fiasco.

  Noah didn’t know how many others had been killed in the blast and in the ambush on the cartel convoy, but as he neared the back forty of Nellis Air Force Base, he began to see other stragglers stumbling their way back to the base. They’d hit the cartel hard—even killed a few Abrams tanks—but the fight could be far from over. Pretty much every American on the field would fight to the death to keep the nukes out of the hands of the narcos. Blown up and torn up, it still wasn’t Miller Time.

  “Where’s the captain,” a fresh-faced lieutenant asked Noah as he passed through the Area Two gate of Nellis Air Force Base on foot.

  “He’s dead. Can I have some water?” Noah had just run/walked ten miles. What water he’d had in his assault pack had been burned through almost an hour before. The lieutenant handed him an old-school metal canteen.

  “How’d he die?” the young officer asked.

  Noah choked on a swig of water. “Doesn’t matter. How many are left? Get ready for a counter-attack.”

  The lieutenant took a deep breath. “I guess I’m in command then…I think we’re at about fifty men right now. More are coming from the convoy strike. I don’t know how many. We lost comms an hour ago. Did you destroy the refinery?”

  Noah grinned despite the horror of it all. Despite the man who had burned to blackened flesh before his eyes. Noah’s blood rose as he dropped the canteen into the man’s hands. A dark grin cut across his face and the lieutenant took a step back.

  Never before had Noah personally killed a man. Now, he’d killed scores, if not hundreds. He’d sent the squad that’d killed the narco reconnaissance team. He’d planted the C4 plastic explosives from in back of the truck at the gypsum mine. He’d wired the detonators, just as his old man had taught him. He’d punched the detonator and blew the entire refinery down upon those evil motherfuckers’ heads.

  He hadn’t spared much thought about how it would feel to kill a man before. But he would’ve never guessed the jet black exhilaration he felt now in the shadow of the wholesale slaughter of his enemy.

  “We murdered those assholes. Hard core. We paid them back for Artesia with interest. A bunch of Abrams went up in flames with them. I don’t know how many. I have no idea how the other detachment did against their tanker trucks. I heard shooting but I haven’t talked to anyone. We need to set up a perimeter defense the best we can and prepare for a full, armored assault.” Noah reached again for the canteen.

  The lieutenant’s eyes went as wide as saucers. “Sir, there is no way to prepare for an armored assault. If they come at us, we’re done.”

  “Well, then we better hope we fried their command, because what we just pulled off at the refinery was ‘best case scenario’ for us. God help us if it wasn’t enough.”

  Chapter 39

  Tavo Castillo

  Interstate 15 and Highway 93, Fifteen miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada

  “Who were they?” Tavo asked. He struggled to his feet. He understood that he could only access a portion of his brain. Nobody ever explained what it felt like to be blown up. Turns out, it busted a man down to being a fraction of what he once was.

  His three lieutenants stood around him in a circle near a shot-up fuel truck. The refinery burned in the distance, a second sun competing for glory with the hazy sun setting on the north horizon.

  “Who gives a fuck?” Beto snapped. “They burned up fifteen Abrams, five Humvees, cooked more than fifty men and they erased the refinery. They were shit-eating American insurgents. Who do you think they were?”

  Tavo would address the disrespect at some future moment. He made a note of it and put a fat, black star beside it in his addled mind.

  You just killed yourself, Beto. Same as if you’d sucked on the barrel of your rifle…

  Tavo’s foot thundered—a sharp drum beat that radiated all the way up to his knee. The pain felt like it lived in his bones, as though termites had begun to work their way up the marrow, chewing on the sensitive, spongy part inside his shin. He wondered if infection might have already set in.

  “Where did they get the Semtex to blow the refinery?”

  Alejandro spoke, probably trying to stop Beto from saying another word. “I’ve been thinking about that. They either got the explosives from a local mine—there are mining operations all around here—or maybe there was some C4 at Nellis. Clearly, the base wasn’t as dead as we thought. We killed eleven men and three women wearing air force cammies.”

  “How many men did we lose?” Tavo looked at Alejandro. He hoped Beto would cool down so he wouldn’t have to shoot him here in front of the others.

  “We lost a hundred and fifty men, give or take in the fire. We only lost a couple on column security. They didn’t seem to be shooting at the men. They focused their fire on the tanker trucks.”

  “Are you going to tell me how much gasoline we lost or do I need to ask?” Tavo exhaled and tongued the back of his teeth for the thousandth time. He’d bitten through his tongue when he’d kneed himself in the face during the explosions.

  “I don’t have an exact inventory,” Alejandro dodged. “Sixty-eight of the fuel trucks took rounds, but we don’t know how much gas we lost. It depends on how high they struck the fuel tanks. But I don’t think we have enough gas to get back to Camp Navajo. I won’t know for sure until I top off the Abrams—until I fill up the ones that didn’t get burned up, I mean.”

  “They meant to leave us stranded.” Tavo turned and stumbled away without explanation and without leaving orders. In the back of his mind, he knew it diminished him in their eyes, but if he didn’t sit down immediately, he was going to fall down.

  The three men watched him go, glancing at one another. Tavo saw their body language out of the corner of his eye, but kept walking—angling toward a lonely, adobe shack where the dirt road met the paved road. He needed to sit down and elevate his foot. He needed to do whatever he could to get the cosmic starburst of pain to recede. He couldn’t stand for another minute.

  Tavo realized he was behaving strangely and that it compromised him. He didn’t care. His hand groped absently for his satellite phone in his chest rig pocket. Wounded and dazed, only one part of him remained: the serpent. The feathered Aztec god who devoured men whole. He pressed forward despite his losses and the maiming of his body; the unstoppable force of will that even a thousand-foot-high pyre of fuel would not turn aside.

  His s
atellite phone in his chest rig seemed perfectly intact.

  “I’ve pre-positioned El Chucho in Hermosillo,” the assassin’s handler repeated.

  The voice over the satellite phone came through warbled and spackled, like a demon reaching across an ice-bound solar system.

  “Sir,” the man on the other end of the phone interrupted his fugue. “Please confirm. El Chucho to prosecute target Sofía Castillo Sausa in Hermosillo, Sonora.”

  The roaring ache in his severed toe rose like boiling water at the mention of her name. Tavo steadied himself with deep breaths and gripped the rotting lawn chair so tightly he feared the brittle armrests might shatter. After an eternity, the pain receded.

  “Sir. I need you to confirm,” the satellite phone chirped.

  “Confirmed.”

  There was nothing else to say. The man on the other end of the call disconnected, as though saying goodbye might be an inappropriate way to end the call.

  The shack where Tavo rolled between pain, malice and regret must’ve been a guard shack in a previous life. The walls were decaying adobe, but someone had recently replaced the roof with gleaming, corrugated metal. It radiated the sun’s relentless heat like a stone pulled from the fire. Whoever had replaced the roof hadn’t bothered to pull down the 1980s porn calendar, hanging on a rust-chewed nail. A big-breasted Latina stared back at Tavo with a vacant smile, her visage yellowing from decades hanging there.

  Such a strange room for an emperor, Tavo brooded. Again, his ruined foot throbbed so powerfully that it made his ears pulse with a dull thrum. Somewhere in Hermosillo, Mexico the daughter he had once lived to serve had now been marked for death. She was likely dressed in white today, like most days—a crisp breeze cutting through the desert heat. At that same moment, her father sweltered in a mud shack, wounded, swooning and spattered in his own blood.