The Uvalde Raider

by Ben H. English

  The seed for such a somber epiphany into the shades and shadows of all men’s souls had been planted by his own father, during the time Micah was preparing for his first combat tour to the Republic of South Vietnam. The year was 1966, and the Tonkin Gulf resolution had paved the way for a large-scale Marine Corps involvement into that unhappy land. Micah had come home on leave prior to shipping out and as he stood there waiting for the Greyhound bus, Jeremiah Templar stood with him.

  In the interim they had talked of many of the usual things, of livestock, of family and of the need for rain. Yet it was only at the sight of the bus itself that Jeremiah Templar appeared to become more apprehensive as to what was occurring, and perhaps even vulnerable. The idea of his father being vulnerable in the slightest to anything of mortal man’s hand was something new to his son, and Micah had found it a bit unsettling. Seeing the bus approach, the elder Templar’s countenance darkened with a great sadness mixed with resignation to the bitter remembrances of earlier perilous times.

  With the noise of people bustling about and the odor of spent diesel fumes hanging in the air, Jeremiah Templar took Micah’s hand in a calloused grip that was stronger than any other his son had known before or since. In that strength was not only the barbed wire and rawhide physical toughness of the man, but also an impassioned yearning from the inner spirit to pass along the hardest-won lesson of all. It was at that moment, in front of that terminal, when Jeremiah Templar cautioned about hate and what it could do to a man.

  Peering out from under the brim of his sweat stained, weathered felt hat, his father had said; “Son, you do your duty and stay true to your raising. But whatever you do, try real hard not to hate your enemy. Hate is the mother for most all of the evils in this world. The man you are looking at through rifle sights will probably be fighting for what he believes in, same as you. That don’t make him right but it don’t make him evil, either.

  “There’ll come a time when you will confront an evil, and that is the only thing on this earth that you should hate with all your heart. But when you do, keep in mind there is some sort of evil in us all, just looking for an excuse to up and break out. Keep a tight rein on it and on that hate. Because if you ever let that hate start controlling you, the evil within us all will set itself loose. And it will burn hotter than the fires of hell, and consume most everything else good found inside.”

  With his greenish gray eyes shining with emotion and the gift of hindsight, Jeremiah Templar added, “I know, because I rode that black trail myself for too long. For God’s sake, son, as well as your own, you do better than your old man. You come back home whole and in one piece.”

  As he finished, the bus came to a stop behind them and the door swung open wide. Micah managed to get out a “Yes sir,” and picked up the sea bag at his side. Releasing the elder Templar’s hand, he turned and tossed it into the bin beneath the passenger compartment. Facing his father again, Micah found there was so much he wanted to say but just could not find the words.

  Standing there in his faded blue jeans and long sleeve khaki work shirt, Jeremiah Templar found them for him. “I know son, I know. Now get on that bus.”

  The young Marine clambered aboard the Greyhound and found a window seat. As it sat idling, he watched his dad standing on the sidewalk with his arms folded. When the bus began moving, Jeremiah Templar raised his right hand above his head, palm out. He kept it that way for as long as the bus remained in view.

  Not more than about a year and a half later, Jeremiah Templar breathed his last and passed on into the next world. Weakened and now bereft of his trademark physical toughness, his mind and spirit continued on undaunted to the very end. When the preacher stopped by to pay his respects, by necessity the subject of eternal salvation or damnation came up.

  “I have sinned greatly, Reverend, you can be sure on that. It was kill or be killed and for some unknown reason the Lord saw fit that I should survive. Since then, the two of us have had many a serious conversation about all that.”

  The old man paused, coughing up some of the phlegm that would soon kill him. “I figure myself saved as much as any man can. But if those gates are made of sharpened bamboo and a Jap soldier is standing guard with an Arisaka, I’ll know I figured it wrong.”

  It had taken Micah two tours in Vietnam to fully understand how his father must have felt, fighting his own war against a cunning, implacable and far more numerous enemy. From there, it had taken still longer with a Bible to fully appreciate Tio Zeke's viewpoint. Yet in the end, Micah Templar considered himself a better man for both experiences.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Occupying the other side of the sofa, Max Grephardt considered options and actions from behind his obscuring screen of closed eyelids. The old Luftwaffe hauptmann realized too well the three of them were going to have to try something, anything, before the time for doing so went completely away.

  Thinking upon the potential personal risks involved, there was not one soul among the millions who lived in the city of San Antonio whom he could call friend, or even say they were some sort of close acquaintance. He was nothing more than a brief visitor to this part of the world, some place he came to occasionally because of a desire to spend time with the unlikeliest of old friends and once more be among those of his own kind.

  It did not matter so much if they were German or American or whatever, they shared his passion for flying and he appreciated their same enduring passion in return. More so, he had more in common with some of these men than he did with many of those from his own home land, even if they had been on the other side of a terrible war during an incomparably heartbreaking period of his life.

  Though they had once been enemies he harbored a great admiration for both them and this grand country called America, that had birthed and nurtured such men. With his own eyes he had seen time and again this young, sometimes childlike nation from the New World at its very best, as well at its most formidable.

  When at its most formidable, this upstart country had proven to be an awe inspiring engine of destruction, sweeping away all attempts to stop or deny it from the goal of unconditional surrender on the part of its opponents. Yet when that hard won victory had been realized, he was even more awed in seeing this melting pot of humanity when at its very best.

  He had heard knowledgeable scholars say the military forces of the United States of America has seized more enemy territory than any other armed force that ever existed.

  What made them unique, though, in their martial accomplishments among the great powers of the world was their open discomfort to any notion of empire building. That exceptionalism and singular system of beliefs had, in turn, led them to give back more conquered territory than any other sovereign power in recorded history, often leaving the vanquished land and populace in better circumstance than first found.

  So had it been in his own country and with his own life. Max Grephardt bore personal witness to the astonishing rebirth of what had been little more than an utterly defeated collection of burnt ashes. West Germany had risen from a physical and psychological obliteration to take its place among the major manufacturing and financial forces on the planet. Yet it had not managed to accomplish this miraculous reconstitution alone.

  During this arduous rebuilding process, the people of the United States did not stand idly by and let their struggling former enemy fend for themselves. This remarkable nation had shared in the expenditure of planning, effort and treasure to make Germany’s phenomenal rise from those same pitiful ashes a heretofore unheard-of reality.

  It was the Americans who had developed and employed the Marshall Plan, and it was the Americans who had helped most in standing against the mammoth Soviet menace that loomed over the new Germany. When the Communists tried to choke the life out of a resurging Berlin, it was the Americans who provided the brunt of assistance in the ensuing airlift to keep the Soviets from doing so.

  When the Communists erected their infamous wall and attending death strips, it h
ad been an American president who had stood at that wall and proclaimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” A quarter of a century later, it was another American president who stood at the Brandenburg Gate and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The force and conviction of these two great leaders of a great people made the rest of the world pause and take notice.

  That wall did come down, and Germany at present was becoming one nation again after decades of forced division and immeasurable human miseries. No other one power was more responsible for this long-anticipated achievement than the United States of America.

  In the midst of this decades’ long struggle, Max Grephardt had gone on like so many others to make a new life for himself in his revitalized Vaterland. He had invested everything he had in the future of Germany, including his own heart, mind and backbone.

  Like his father, he and his wife Anna had raised five sons and now were grandparents several times over. His family lived in a free country as a free people in a nation now prosperous, respected, and with the real possibilities of an even brighter future ahead. With the coming reunification, who knew what heights the people of this new Germany might soar to?

  However, such expectant optimism was blunted by a disturbing and equally vital, unanswered question. What human depravities would also be a part of that same future? Because within his lifespan there had already been two great evils, which under the same guise of a brighter future had nearly devoured not only himself, but everything else that he ever cared about.

  Both of these evils corrupted and laid waste to the very best qualities that constitute humankind, and left it with a pried open Pandora’s Box bubbling with a potent brew made of the darkest elements of man’s inner self. Max Grephardt had experienced great personal pain and sorrow due to that pried open box, and walked with the severe knowledge that the most important lessons in life often come at the highest price.

  The first great evil of Nazism had nearly obliterated both family and country. It had been so insidious and deceiving that he and tens of millions of others had blindly followed it without question, at least beyond the point of impending catastrophe. In turn the second one, Communism, had tried to kill him and had taken up where Nazism left off in destroying his home as well as his birthright. Both had only been defeated after a long and difficult contention, documented in near immeasurable quantities of human tears, human sorrows and human blood.

  Now there was a third great evil to be reckoned with and Max had been acutely aware of its exponential growth for some time. He had first watched it wantonly murder innocent people at Munich in 1972, while still in its fitfully malicious infancy. As the years went by and this third evil cast its ominous shadow on the Western world like some mythical monster of darkness, Max Grephardt realized it was destined to join the ranks of both Nazism and Communism.

  Over the intervening decades it had morphed into something superbly cruel and dangerous, an implacable wickedness that hid behind a corrupted religious doctrine to do its filthy business. The result was something intrinsically vile with no real sense of conscience or decency, as it involved deistic fanatics who could explain away any atrocity with a serene sense of divine self-righteousness.

  That one difference, separating it from the prior two great evils, could make this cancerous phenomenon far more ominous than the others put together.

  When Max looked into the eyes of Yahla al-Qassam, the elderly German recognized the obscene promise being fulfilled by the fanatical malevolence shining from within. This aberrant mutation of a seventh century prophet had reached its full maturity, and a world some fourteen centuries later was being forced to deal with the resultant raging beast. If allowed to go unchecked, that beast would continue to procreate in ways the other two great evils never contemplated.

  Max Grephardt had already made his peace with this unsettling conclusion, and the things that must be done to combat it. No one desires to stand in the path of an unrelenting enemy, an enemy who has been driven absolutely insane by the inner demons that permeated a blackened soul. Such a conflict could never end in any real truce, or be allowed to stalemate with the warring factions agreeing to return to their own homes and keep to themselves. By necessity it would be a fight to the death, and on occasion would continue even beyond there.

  Max would always be grateful to America, one only had to be aware of the effects of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe to fully appreciate American idealism and beliefs. Yet in this fight, his desire to be allied with those who had done so much for him and what he held dearest was only part. It went far deeper than that, and carried a rippling effect beyond the individual, the family, the community or the body politic. It even went beyond the continued existence of sovereign powers such as Germany or the United States.

  For this would be a battle for the hearts and minds of humankind itself, wherever they came from and whatever their station in life might be. There would be no neutral countries, no diplomatic resolutions and no safe havens for those who wished to remain uninvolved. Max knew there was no good war, but there were definitely necessary ones. And in a necessary war it was the duty of every person to do what they could to defeat the common enemy, no matter what the cost.

  In Max Grephardt’s mind a decaying airstrip in the vast, arid expanses of West Texas was indeed a long way from that small Lutheran church along the banks of the Werra, but it was where he would make his stand. The enemy was here, the time was now. The silver-haired holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves prepared himself as any good soldier would, steeling both heart and spirit to act when called upon. All that he needed was the slimmest chance and briefest of openings to make the crucial difference.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Micah Templar watched Mustafa through almost closed eyes. Yahla al-Qassam had repeatedly referred to the big Lebanese as his best man, and that his second in command did not need a gun to kill someone. However, the terrorist had one now, a blued Smith & Wesson Model 59 9mm shoved down inside the front of his pants. There appeared to be no extra magazines for it, or evidence of other weapons seen on Mustafa’s person.

  The former Marine sized the terrorist up and tried to recall anything else he might have heard or noticed about Mustafa over the past few hours. From what Qassam had said, the long-haired Hezbollah member was some sort of martial arts fighter and he certainly looked the part. With a broad, hawkish nose that had obviously been broken before, Micah had noted he was appreciably taller than the other Arabs, even more so than himself and with a fine, muscular build.

  Everything about the man, from the way he carried himself to the smoldering disdain displayed for his prisoners, exuded an entrenched confidence that pointed to much more than misplaced arrogance.

  There was something else also, a special kind of essential cruelty that oozed out of every pore of Mustafa’s body. When he looked at Micah, the terrorist’s eyes smoldered with a hate that went beyond what any semi-sane person could convey. Micah had seen that kind of look before, but never in such heaping portions of undisguised intensity and singleness in purpose. From his experiences as a peace officer as well as a combat veteran, he knew all too well what kind of person their lives were presently balanced upon.

  Outside a thin ray of sunshine began peeking through the window facing the airstrip, and one of the Wright Cyclones on The Uvalde Raider began to turn over. The engine rotated slowly, coughing once or twice, and then roared to mechanical life. Looking out of the corner of his eye, Micah saw that neither Max nor Tio Zeke stirred at the sound. Either they were so tired from the drawn out night they had actually dozed off, or they were lost in their own thoughts of how to stop this madness in the critically short time remaining. Whichever it was, Micah’s very being strained ferociously to make the most of those same disappearing minutes.

  Lured by the crescendo of throbbing radial engines starting up one by one, Mustafa moved to the large picture window in an attempt to see what was occurring outside. He tried several posit
ions from different angles but none were evidently to his satisfaction. Plainly aggravated, he turned away and for a long moment suspiciously eyed his three prisoners. Micah stilled everything in his body except for his slow, steady breathing as if asleep.

  Finally, much like the proverbial cat overcome by his own curiosity, the terrorist turned again and made his way to the door. He placed his hand on the knob, took one more look over his shoulder at the three restrained men, and stepped outside on the porch to watch the old bomber warming up.

  This was what Micah had been waiting for, praying for. As Mustafa stepped to the side and away from the open doorway, Micah began fumbling frenetically with the inside of the waistband of his uniform trousers, near the center of his back. The terrorists had searched him thoroughly and removed his pocket knife, wallet, keys, belt, and even the small change in his front pocket. But there was one unusually shaped piece of metal they did not take, because they never found it.

  As his fingers groped and clawed at the hidden enclosure securing the key, he glanced around to see both Max and his uncle fully awake and observing him intently. “Watch the door,” he hissed under his breath, as the key came out and into his hand. Working with swollen, half-numbed digits from the lack of blood flow, he strained blindly to find the tiny lock hole in the right cuff face. By sense of touch Micah finally found what he was looking for, inserted the key and twisted it clumsily. The cuff came loose.

  Quickly he brought his hands to the front and removed the other handcuff, noiselessly placing the devices on a nearby sofa cushion. Coming up to a crouch, he vigorously rubbed his raw and inflamed wrists to bring some kind of life back into them. At the same time, he divided his attention between the door and looking for something to cut the zip ties on the wrists of Tio Zeke and Max, who had meantime struggled to their feet.