Eventually somebody might notice them riding back and forth this way, but the bus driver didn’t pay much attention to his passengers. Bill had smelled the pungent scent of marijuana coming from the man’s threadbare uniform and figured the hombre was high. He could keep the bus on the road all right—the fact that it was flat and straight for the most part helped—but he didn’t care what was going on in the seats behind him.
The highway was narrow and pockmarked with potholes, but they were small ones. It didn’t rain enough in this region to cause large potholes. The countryside was semiarid. The people who lived here scratched out livings on small farms, but they weren’t good livings.
The mountains of the Sierra Madre Oriental loomed to the west of the road. The terrorist training camp was somewhere up there in one of the valleys hidden among the peaks, Bill knew. Finding it would be almost impossible if you didn’t know where you were going.
That was why he and Bailey and Catalina were going to let their enemies take them there.
Bill wore a battered straw Stetson, a faded khaki work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, and boots that showed plenty of wear and tear. With his craggy face, salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, and weathered skin, he looked like an old farm or ranch hand. He sat by the window and Catalina sat beside him, next to the aisle.
She wore a sleeveless white blouse, jeans, and sneakers. Her thick brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She called Bill “Tio” when she spoke to him, reinforcing the pose that they were uncle and niece. They were supposedly on their way to the next town to look for work.
Bailey rode in the seat directly behind them, taking up the whole bench himself. Even if he hadn’t been so big, nobody would have wanted to sit next to the scary-looking gringo. Dark shades covered his eyes. The sleeves were cut off the blue denim work shirt he wore with a metal-studded leather vest over it. His bare arms were covered with elaborate tattoos. They weren’t permanent, but they would last long enough to serve their purpose. He had a revolver stuck in the waistband of his jeans; the vest partially covered the butt, but by design it was visible part of the time, too. He was supposed to look muy malo, so people would leave him alone.
If the cartel was really kidnapping men to use in training the Arab terrorists, Bailey would make an irresistible target. He looked like he could actually put up a fight. The kidnappers wouldn’t want pushovers.
Bill looked tough enough to take with them, too. And Catalina . . . well, Catalina was still beautiful, even in cheap clothes and no makeup. The cartel wouldn’t hesitate to grab her and force her into a life of being a puta for their own men and their Middle Eastern guests.
Before they’d left the base in West Texas to make their way unobtrusively into Mexico with forged passports that said Bill and Catalina were Mexican nationals named Hector and Maria Lopez and Bailey was an American named Pete Ericsson, the GPS chips had been implanted under their skin, right at the hairline on the back of the neck so the tiny incisions wouldn’t be noticeable.
“The chances of them scannin’ us for any sort of signal is pretty small,” Bill had said to Megan, “but what if they do?”
“We’re the only ones in the world with equipment sophisticated enough to pick up the signal from these transmitters,” she had assured him. “The frequency is so narrow and the bursts are so short that anything else will just scan right past it. Our satellite will stay locked in on it, though.”
Bill had looked at Clark and said, “That must’ve been expensive. How’d you manage to get a satellite like that up there when money for the space program would be so much better spent at social engineerin’?”
“What the blowhard-in-chief doesn’t know might just save the country,” Clark had replied. “Besides—and this is so far off the record it can’t even see the record—not all of our funding comes strictly from congressional appropriations anymore. There are individuals in this country who are willing to foot the bill for things that really need to get done that might not otherwise. ’Nuff said?”
“’Nuff said,” Bill had agreed. He suspected that Hiram Stackhouse was one of those individuals Clark was talking about, but he wasn’t going to press the issue. The fewer details he knew about things like that, the better.
Now, even though he couldn’t feel it, Bill knew the chip was there in the back of his neck, and he took comfort in the fact that the rest of his team knew where he was.
Of course, if he got into trouble they were too far away to come and help him right away. He would just have to survive until the cavalry could get there, and that might take hours. Maybe even a day or longer, depending on where they wound up.
Wade Stillman was in Dos Caballos with Megan, Nick Hatcher, Jackie Thornton, and Braden Cole, all of them holed up in the hotel there. Bill worried a little about Wade and Megan having to ride herd on the trio of civilian criminals, but Hatcher and Thornton seemed eager to cooperate and earn their shot at new lives. With Cole it was hard to tell anything about what he was thinking, of course, but Bill knew the man prided himself on his professionalism. Cole had hired on to do a job, and Bill thought he would honor that bargain.
Madigan and Watson were still across the border, being watched over by Henry Dixon and a squadron of guards. When the time came to move, Dixon and the two convicts would be brought in by helicopter. That would mean violating Mexico’s airspace, but nobody really gave a damn about that. Mexico was violating common decency by allowing the drug cartels to basically run the country and inviting in a bunch of Middle Eastern lunatics to help them attack the U.S.
The man taking up space in the Oval Office might not like it, but nobody involved in this mission really gave a damn about him, either.
Too bad they couldn’t just locate the terrorist camp and call in an airstrike on it, Bill mused. A little hellfire raining down from the heavens on the sons of bitches. Something like that took even more juice than Clark had, though. This had to be a surgical strike instead.
And Bill and his team were the surgeons.
Bailey leaned forward and asked Catalina, “Hey, baby, since we got music, you want to dance?”
She turned to look at him and laughed.
“You really should leave me alone, gringo,” she told him. They weren’t supposed to know each other; they had just made each other’s acquaintance on this bus ride. But being slightly obnoxious fit in with the role Bailey was playing, so he kept trying to flirt with her.
Bill wasn’t sure how much of it was acting. Back at the old air base, Bailey and Catalina had spent quite a bit of time together. During the several days of training she had gone through, most of it had been spent working with Bailey and Wade Stillman on hand-to-hand combat and weapons practice, and Bill had a hunch a little romantic triangle had sprung up there. Both young men had checked out Megan Sinclair when she arrived at the base, but her cool exterior might as well have been a neon sign reading HANDS OFF.
Bailey said, “Come on, you can teach me some of those Tejano dances. Isn’t that what you called the music?”
“Where are we going to dance? In the aisle? There’s not enough room for that!”
“Well, you could give me a lap dance,” Bailey suggested.
From the corner of his eye, Bill saw how Catalina’s head snapped around. Bailey had gone too far in his little game. With Catalina’s background, that was the wrong thing to say.
Bailey must have realized it, too, because he went on hastily, “Hey, I didn’t mean—”
Bill had seen something from the corner of his other eye, too. He said, “That’s enough,” cutting in on Bailey’s apology. “Looks like we’ve got company comin’.”
Off to the west, toward the mountains, a plume of dust rose into the air. Either somebody was driving fast along a dirt road over there, or they were coming across open country. Either way, they were going to intercept the bus.
The driver didn’t seem to notice, but some of the passengers did. Frightened cries rang out. All the people who lived
in this area knew about the holdups and the kidnappings, but sometimes they had to get from one place to another and had no choice except to take the bus.
Bill could make out several vehicles at the foot of that dust cloud now. He counted three SUVs and two jeeps. There was no doubt in his mind that Megan’s intel was about to pay off. A caravan like that wouldn’t be speeding toward the highway unless it belonged to the cartel.
The driver saw the onrushing vehicles at last and floored the gas in a futile attempt to get ahead of the attackers. The bus’s engine labored and sputtered and sped up a little, but not nearly enough.
The jeeps bounded ahead of the SUVs, reached the highway first, and whipped into skidding turns that left them blocking both lanes of the narrow road. The bus driver turned the wheel a little, like he was thinking about trying to leave the highway and go around the jeeps, but he swerved back as the wheels touched the sand. It was impossible. If the bus got off the pavement it would either bog down or turn over.
He had no choice but to stand on the brake and bring the bus to a shuddering, shrieking, rubber-burning stop.
One of the jeeps had a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the back of it. The passenger leaped behind the gun and fired a burst that chewed into the asphalt in front of the bus. Hysterical screaming filled the bus now as all the passengers realized what was going on.
Bill looked at the machine gun and knew that his earlier musings had been correct. This was war, all right.
And as armed men leaped from the SUVs and charged toward the bus, he knew that the war was on.
CHAPTER 34
The gun-wielding men surrounded the bus and leveled their automatic weapons at it. One of them let off a burst of slugs that shattered several windows on the right side of the vehicle and sent shards of glass spraying over the screaming passengers. Bill, Catalina, and Bailey were on the other side of the bus, so they weren’t in any immediate danger. Bill felt anger surge inside him, though, as he saw several people bleeding from the cuts inflicted by the flying glass.
Another man stepped up to the door and tapped impatiently on it with the barrel of his gun. The driver took hold of the lever with both shaking hands and pulled it to the side, opening the door. The man bounded into the bus and slashed at the driver with his gun, driving him cringing back into his seat as the barrel opened a cut on his head. The driver threw up his hands and begged for his life in a loud, terrified voice.
“Everyone down!” the intruder shouted in Spanish. He fired a high burst that shattered the window in the door at the back of the bus and sent the sobbing, shrieking passengers diving for the dirty floor between the seats and in the aisle.
Bill and Catalina weren’t crying and screaming, but they got down with the others. Bill twisted his head to look at Bailey and saw that the big man was rising to his feet instead. He kicked Bailey in the ankle. Bailey’s instincts told him to fight, but a gun battle right now wouldn’t accomplish a damn thing.
Grimacing in frustration, Bailey dropped to one knee, then lowered himself onto his belly like the others. He filled up the aisle next to his seat.
“Open the back door!” the man with the gun commanded. He pointed at one of the passengers. “You!”
The man got shakily to his feet and edged past the crates of chickens to push the bar on the emergency door at the rear of the bus. More of the gunmen were waiting outside. They grabbed the door and yanked it open the rest of the way, then started climbing in. They grabbed passengers and dragged them out. Although the wailing continued, the passengers were too afraid to put up any sort of fight. Once they were out of the bus, more men brandishing guns lined them up, as if for execution.
That possibility was not lost on the terrified prisoners.
While that was going on, more men broke into the bus’s luggage compartment and began dragging out everything inside it, going through bags and boxes in search of anything valuable. They were like old-time bandidos, joking and laughing as they searched for loot.
When the men came to Bailey, one of them kicked his foot and ordered him to get up. Bailey pushed himself to his hands and knees. As he did, his vest swung open and the gunman caught a glimpse of the revolver tucked into Bailey’s belt. He let out a startled yell and drove a booted foot down into the middle of Bailey’s back, knocking him to the floor again. Another man came up and pressed the muzzle of his machine pistol to Bailey’s head while the first man slid a hand under the massive torso and retrieved the revolver.
That actually wasn’t a bad thing, Bill thought. Now that he was disarmed, Bailey wouldn’t have any choice but to cooperate with their captors . . . which had been the plan all along.
When their turn came, Bill and Catalina joined the other captives lined up on the side of the highway. There was no paved shoulder, so they were standing in sand that would make running impossible.
Bill had no interest in running, though. So far everything was going just like he wanted it to.
There were no scheduled stops between Villa Guajardo and Dos Caballos, so Megan or whoever was monitoring the GPS chips at the moment would have noticed by now that the signals were no longer moving. That was a clear indication that the bus had either broken down or been forced to halt. Once the signals began moving again, away from the highway, that would be confirmation Bill and his two companions had been taken off the bus.
Once everybody was off the bus, including the shaking, bleeding driver, the gunman who seemed to be in charge walked along the line of prisoners and studied them. He pointed to all the women between the ages of fifteen and forty, and they were dragged toward a truck that had followed the jeeps and the SUVs at a slower pace. The leader picked out several of the men along the way as well, the ones who were relatively young and well-built.
Bill worried that they might not take him because of his age, even though he still appeared to be hale and hearty. If he had to, he would do something to show them that he could put up a fight.
The leader came to Bailey and said, “This one, for sure. But watch him. He’s big like an ox.”
“Probably dumb like an ox, too, Jorge,” one of the other men said.
“I’ll tell you what you can do with your ox,” Bailey grated.
The leader, the one called Jorge, smiled.
“So you speak Spanish,” he said to Bailey. “So many of you Americans don’t. You’ll regret that when it becomes the only language spoken there.”
“That’ll never happen.”
“There are already more of us than there are of you, amigo. Can you hold back the ocean’s tide by wishing it so?” Jorge jerked his head. “Take him.”
Bill wanted to look at Bailey and plead with his eyes for the big man to go along with the plan, but he couldn’t risk their captors realizing that there was a connection between them. He kept his eyes downcast and his arm around Catalina’s shoulders as she pretended to quiver with fear.
Maybe she wasn’t completely pretending, he thought. He wouldn’t blame her a bit if she was really scared.
Being prodded by guns, Bailey stalked toward the truck. Bill managed not to sigh with relief when he glanced up and saw that. Everything was still on track.
Jorge stopped in front of Catalina, put the barrel of his gun under her chin, and tipped her head up. He smiled as he looked at her and said, “Muy bonita.”
A jerk of his head indicated that the others should take her.
Bill tightened his arm around her protectively and shook his head.
“My niece is young, innocent,” he said. “Please, leave her alone.”
His Spanish was flawless, the speech of a man who had spent his entire life south of the border.
“Let her go, you old fool,” Jorge snapped.
“No, take me instead.”
“What we want her for, you would be no help.”
Jorge grabbed Catalina’s arm and jerked her away from Bill, who didn’t hesitate to act.
He swung a punch that cracked sharply against Jorge�
��s jaw and sent the man staggering back a step.
Bill knew he was running a calculated risk. The gunman could fly into a rage and shoot him on the spot. In which case command of the mission would fall to Bailey and he would have to carry on.
But there was a good chance Jorge wouldn’t kill him but would pick him to be taken back to the terrorist camp instead. That was what happened, as Jorge shouted an angry curse and swung his gun, smashing it against the side of Bill’s head and sending the straw Stetson flying.
“Put this old viejo in the truck!” Jorge yelled at his men. “He’ll wish he’d let the girl go! He’ll die long and hard when we get him back to Barranca de la Serpiente!”
Even through the pain in his head, Bill was glad to hear what the man said. It proved that Megan’s intel and the guesses they had made about it were right. When they left here they would be on their way to where they needed to be.
A couple of men grabbed Bill’s arms and jerked him to his feet. As they frog-marched him toward the truck, he heard Catalina pleading with Jorge not to hurt her beloved Tío Hector.
“Treat me nice, little one, and maybe I’ll take it a little easier on him,” Jorge said. “But only a little. The old fool struck me, and for that he has to pay!”
The men forced Bill into the back of the truck, which had an arching canvas cover over it. The cover provided some welcome shade, but it also blocked any moving air, meaning that the back of the truck was hot and stifling, filled with the stink of fear sweat and the reek of urine. Some of the men were so scared they had pissed their pants.
The prisoners were sitting on the floor, crowded together like cattle or sheep. Bill spotted Bailey and sank down beside him. Bailey frowned at the sight of the cut on Bill’s head and the trickle of blood that wormed from it, but he maintained the pose that they didn’t know each other.
Suicide Mission Page 22
