PRECIPICE

by Leland Davis

  Two men walked out of the woods carrying a third body and heaved it carelessly into the back of the Ford with the other two. They closed the back doors of the truck, climbed into the front, and drove away down the road. Harris wondered for a moment why they had only loaded three of the bodies, but he didn’t have time to puzzle over that now. The other vehicles might be leaving soon.

  There was no way he could conceal himself in the open beds of the Toyota or the flatbed truck. His best bet was the covered bed of the Avalanche. With all of the men working far from the parking area, he saw his window of opportunity and hobbled over to the Chevy, wincing at every step on his wounded and inflamed leg. He was grateful to lean his weight on the bed of the truck as he opened the tailgate, then he crawled under the bed cover and pulled the tailgate shut behind him. He scooted as far forward as he could in the darkened space and lay on his side with his back against the truck’s cab, with his injured right leg perched awkwardly on top of his left. He pulled out his silenced pistol and held it ready in case someone opened the truck bed before they left. He knew it wouldn’t do much good, but he didn’t plan to go out without a fight.

  He’d been in the truck for less than sixty seconds when the tailgate popped open again revealing a rectangle of light as if seen from the back of a cave. The light was almost immediately eclipsed by something large that was swung up onto the tailgate and then shoved into the opening. Harris had to fight not to gag as he was beset by the smell of death. As his mind processed the fact that he was about to be entombed in the bed of the truck with a dead body, the tailgate slammed closed and sealed his fate.

  He was horrified by the presence of this new companion, but he had to know which of his friends it was. He slipped on his night vision goggles and powered them up, waiting a moment for them to come alive. Then he gingerly lifted the sheet from the corpse’s head, fearing the worst. He was shocked when the face revealed was not one of his own companions but the lifeless face of Cardenas.

  How could that be? Had one of his men managed to kill the drug lord before they had been killed? Based on his recollection of the attack, he highly doubted that. He pulled the sheet back more to examine the man’s wounds, finding only a single bullet hole in the center of Cardenas’ chest. Then it hit him. It had to have been Chip. Before he’d kayaked over the falls, he must have gotten the job done. Harris was shocked at first, but the more he thought about it, the less it surprised him. Chip had been rock solid through the whole training and mission. He was as calm as anybody Harris had ever seen when things on the river had seemed insane. He’d showed great potential in his own element, but this was absolute proof of his cool under pressure in any situation. Harris experienced a moment of quiet pride. He had suggested including Chip on this mission, and he had trained him.

  His reverie was broken by the sound of the Avalanche’s door opening and the creak of the suspension as someone climbed into the driver’s seat. The motor roared to life, and Harris settled in for what promised to be a very uncomfortable ride.

  *

  Chip awoke around mid-morning, and for a blissful moment he convinced himself that it had all been a bad dream. He was curled up under a warm sleeping bag with a wonderful feeling woman. He imagined that he was back at the raft outpost and savored the sensation for a moment. Then he realized that he’d been awakened by Sam’s quiet crying.

  He had watched her shake and writhe throughout the late afternoon and evening yesterday. When the rain had started, he’d turned the raft upside down and propped one side of it up with two of the paddles to form a makeshift shelter over her. He’d huddled there with her until she’d finally stopped shaking and fallen into a deep sleep some time well after midnight.

  “Oh Daddy, I’m so sorry,” she cried now. The sobs were coming harder.

  Chip had no idea what to do. He suddenly felt extremely awkward cuddled up with a girl he didn’t really know, but he didn’t want to pull away and leave her crying either. For some reason he found it even more unsettling than waking up with someone after a one-night-stand. At least they usually didn’t cry.

  During their frantic flight down the river the day before, he’d been urgently calling out paddle strokes; there had been no time for conversation before she became unresponsive. He knew her name but nothing else—nothing except that here, in the middle of the Mexican wilderness with armed men searching for him, it was awfully nice to have someone warm and soft to cling to. He wished there was something he could do to make her feel better. He wished he had any idea what to do next.

  Eventually she stopped crying, and the spell was broken. Chip reluctantly sat up. He searched around in the cramped space under the raft and found a bottle of water.

  “Something to drink?” he offered.

  “Yeah,” she answered meekly, sitting up then taking the bottle and having a long drink.

  “You hungry?” Chip asked. She had to be. She had gone the entire day yesterday without anything to eat.

  “Yeah.”

  Chip rummaged through one of the drybags and found a few packaged MREs. He passed them over to her, and she selected pasta with vegetables over chicken parmesan or pork sausages in gravy.

  “How are we gonna cook it?” She wanted to know.

  “We can’t risk building a fire. Just open it and eat it.”

  Sam tore open the package and wrinkled her nose at the smell, then she took the spoon that Chip offered and resignedly dug in. She didn’t look up until she’d finished the entire package. Chip opened the chicken meal for himself and ate quietly.

  There was another awkward silence after they both finished their meals.

  “So, first time in Mexico?” Chip tried to break the ice. His poor attempt at humor sounded bad to him as soon as it came out of his mouth.

  “Is that where we are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah…uhhh, no. I mean, I went to Cancun for spring break my senior year.”

  There was another period of silence. Even with her torn white dress smudged with dirt, her hair a tangled mess, the shiner, and the dark circles under her eyes, Chip couldn’t help but notice again that she was very attractive. What was a beautiful girl who had spent spring break in Cancun doing at a drug lord’s hideout in Mexico?

  “Who’s your dad?” he asked. Cardenas had been screaming at her father on video when Chip had shot him. He’d been dying to know how this girl fit into what had happened.

  “Senator Moore,” she said as if it was common knowledge.

  Then it dawned on her. “You mean he didn’t send you to rescue me?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know who sent us. But we weren’t sent to rescue anybody. We were sent to kill Cardenas.”

  From her crestfallen look Chip could tell the information disappointed her. She was holding out hope that her daddy had saved her. Chip hated to disillusion her further, but he needed to get to the bottom of what was going on here.

  “What does your dad have to do with this?” He asked next.

  “I don’t know. That drug guy said something about a deal they had together—something about Dad taking money. He said I had to stay with him until my father voted and passed a bill. But there’s no way my dad would ever make a deal with someone like that.” She sounded less sure of herself as she said it.

  They both sat with their wheels turning, trying to figure out how things had unfolded to leave them here in the jungle. He wasn’t going to say it, but Chip knew there was a better than even chance that her senator father was one of the bad guys.

  Suddenly a thought saddened Sam, and she quietly spoke, “They killed your friends.”

  “Yeah.” He said it with stark hardness as more dots finally connected in his mind. They had killed his friends, and her father was mixed up in it somehow. He didn’t know how Sam fit in, but he was wary of liking her too much.

  “And I killed him,” he said.

  The words just sat between them. For Chip, telling someone finally made it feel real, but the s
ensations that went along with that confused him. There was no sadness or regret, no moral reprehension. There was surprisingly little emotion at all. It was the lack of feeling that concerned him the most, and it felt like that emptiness was spilling into the recesses of his psyche to douse any fire of passion or fear that might linger within him. It was the loneliest he’d ever felt. The only thing he had left was the desire for righteous vengeance, to make it right, to find out who had betrayed his partners and make them pay. It was unlike any previous feeling he’d had, and the coldness of it made him lonelier still.

  “Thank you,” Sam said sincerely, her voice almost a whisper. “You saved my life.”

  “Not yet.” He shook his head once as he said it frankly. He could see his words crash into her like a blow.

  She swallowed once, then her face hardened with a bit of resolve and she looked him squarely in the eye.

  “So what next?”

  That was the question, Chip thought. He’d been contemplating it throughout the afternoon and night before. They had passed his planned exit spot, and he had no idea how far it was down the river to the next road.

  “When you feel up to it, we should pack up and keep moving downstream. This river dumps into a bigger river that I’ve paddled parts of before. We can float down there and try to figure some way out of the jungle.” There were a lot of holes in the plan, but it was all that he could come up with.

  Sam nodded, happy to have some direction.

  Chip looked through his pack and pulled out a pair of knee-length blue plaid board shorts and a lightweight paddling jacket to loan to Sam. She could hardly keep paddling in the white dress – it was poorly made and starting to fall apart from heavy wear. He wandered down near the river to give her time to change.

  It was about thirty minutes before they had the raft loaded up and ready to go. They climbed aboard and headed down the river into the unknown.

  *

  Harris was overcome with relief when the truck finally slowed and began working its way through the streets of a town. He could hear a cacophony of people and cars outside, and the stop-and-go pace definitely indicated an urban setting. He could feel the sun baking the truck until it was almost unbearably hot inside, cooking his dead traveling companion into a gruesomely fetid bouquet. He glanced at his watch in the dark and saw that he’d been hidden in the truck bed for almost nine hours. The first hour had been a torture of bumpy back roads during which he’d felt like he was riding inside a paint-shaking machine. Although he had gotten somewhat used to the stench of the dead man crammed in the small space with him, he had larger problems. The bandage on his leg wound was soaked through and oozing thick liquid, and he could feel the weakness and chills of an increasing fever from the infection. He wouldn’t last much longer unless he figured out some way to escape and find a doctor—or at least some antibiotics.

  The truck stopped moving and he could hear the creaking of what sounded like a large metal gate or door moving on squealing hinges. Then the truck pulled forward again briefly and came to a final stop. He heard the engine shut off while the hinges creaked again. From the artificial light creeping through the cracks around the tailgate and the echoing sounds outside the truck, Harris could tell they were parked indoors. He pulled out his pistol and trained it on the tailgate, as ready as he could be if he were discovered.

  After a moment he could hear several voices around the truck. One was giving orders in Spanish. The tailgate dropped, and he could see the hips and thighs of two men in fatigues with the butts of assault rifles also visible hanging from their shoulders. Without looking deeply into the bed, they pulled Cardenas’ corpse to the edge of the tailgate and lifted it out. Then he heard all of the voices recede followed by the slamming of a heavy metal door. The lights went out, and he was left alone in the darkness.

  He slipped his night vision goggles back on and slowly crawled from the cramped truck bed. It seemed to take forever for him to unwind his stiff body and get it moving. The combination of his wounds, the dehydration, and the long ride had cramped his muscles into tight knots, and he kneaded them with his free hand to try and get some blood moving. When he was finally able to stand he swayed with one hand against the truck for stability, feeling spinny and faint. He was in rough shape.

  Once he’d gained his composure he began searching the room. He was in some sort of garage. The space was entirely walled with bare concrete blocks. On one wall were two sets of enormous steel doors, one of which they had obviously driven in through. A tricked-out Mercedes with thick, tinted windows which Harris thought looked bulletproof occupied the other parking space.

  He walked to one set of the large metal gate-style garage doors and peeked out through the sliver of daylight between them. He could see that they were secured with heavy chains and locked. It looked like they opened onto a city street. Harris carefully poked the short antenna of his GPS unit through the crack until it acquired a signal from the satellites, then he marked his location as a waypoint. The display told him he was in northern Mexico in the city of Monterrey. The only other exit from the garage was a heavy steel door that must lead into the rest of the house. It was deadbolted from the other side. He was trapped.

  Staying alert lest someone come back and discover him, Harris took stock of what else was stored in the space. He was in luck—one corner was piled with cases of bottled water. He helped himself to several bottles and slowly tried to rehydrate and get back some strength. He could find little else of use. A few tools were scattered here and there which might be used as weapons—a length of heavy chain, a crowbar, and various lawn implements—but none were as effective as the silenced Sig Sauer 9mm that he already carried.

  He decided the best course of action was to wait and try to ambush someone coming into the garage and then try to escape. His only fear was that they would enter the garage with an overwhelming force. His pistol would be no match for several men armed with assault rifles, but there was nothing he could do about that. At least he would have the element of surprise. He crouched down behind the stack of bottled water and settled in to await his fate.

  *

  Héctor Ortiz Fernandez strode down the hallway of the palatial house flanked by four men carrying the silenced Heckler and Koch assault rifles that he’d recovered from the dead NorteAmericano commandos at the camp in the jungle. He was pleased to have his troops carrying such beautiful weapons. Someone had even been kind enough to file the serial numbers off the guns. The footsteps of his cowboy boots against the marble floor echoed off the elegantly decorated walls, their staccato claps keeping sharp rhythm over the muddled clumping of the other men’s military style boots. The house was located in the affluent San Pedro Garza Garcia neighborhood, a few miles west of the center of the city of Monterrey. The house and everything in it would soon be his.

  His unpleasant first duty upon arrival had been the delivery of her husband’s body to Estella Cardenas. The woman had taken it nobly and well, chastely kissing her dead patron’s cheek and shedding a quiet tear for the fate of her children. Héctor’s respect for the beautiful young wife of his former boss had risen considerably upon seeing her reaction to his passing. He hoped that perhaps one day soon she would make a fine woman for him as well. He had offered his polite condolences and then left her to her grief.

  Héctor turned into a doorway and entered a large, second floor room that contained little besides a bar and a conference table. As he stepped into the room, the four soldiers entered and spread into a line along the wall behind him, facing the table. The sun’s light streaming into the room was oddly muted through the enormous bulletproof plexiglass picture window that looked out onto the manicured grounds. Eight men were seated around the table. They were Cardenas’ chief lieutenants who ran various outposts of his narcotics empire. Héctor had contacted them on his way here and requested a meeting to form a plan for the cartel now that their leader was gone. The men were loudly arguing as he entered the room. Upon seeing him enter,
two of them angrily slid their chairs back and leapt to their feet.

  In the face of the men’s anger, Héctor only smiled and took a step backward out the door. The four soldiers opened fire, three with HK416s and the other with an MP7. The clacking of the guns’ actions echoed in the bare room, the noise strangely louder than the busy putting of sub-sonic rounds springing from the suppressors’ ends. The eight men withered under the quiet rain of lead, and there was a muted clatter as several of them toppled to the bloody marble floor.

  Héctor ordered his men to clean up the mess. Tomorrow he would check on the rest of his operation to make sure everything was in place, and then his control would be complete. Until then, he thought he might look in on Estella Cardenas to see if she was still grieving, and perhaps to offer some consolation.

  19

  Wednesday, November 23rd

  CHIP PEEKED FROM the cover of the woods at the open grassy parking area on the wide river’s bank. It was around 8 AM and nobody was there yet. He hoped this was going to work.

  Yesterday had actually been sort of fun. He and Sam had paddled several miles down the river until it dumped into the larger Rio Santa Maria. The Santa Maria was a popular whitewater destination, although most people paddled sections of the river that were farther downstream. Chip and Sam had enjoyed rafting on the easy whitewater, with Sam taking to it well and actually smiling and laughing as they moved along. They had stopped to swim and cool off several times, and had even seen a bunch of strange creatures on the bank that looked like a cross between cats and monkeys with long pointed snouts. They had fascinated Sam, and Chip felt a little bit lacking as a tour guide because he hadn’t been able to identify the exotic animals for her.