On an old dirt mining road in the rugged hills northeast of Susanville, in a place called the Tunnison Mountain Wilderness Study Area, a boxy Land Rover Defender with a whip antenna attached to its roof suddenly stopped as Vida Gomez put a hand to the driver’s chest.
She adjusted away the static on the radio monitor she held just in time to hear Bennett answer the nanny loud and clear in her earbud.
“That sounds good. I’m on my way back. I’ll meet you there.”
“My God! It’s him!” Vida said. “It’s Bennett himself. Tell me you’re getting this!”
In the seat behind her, Eduardo checked the frequency on her radio monitor, then rapidly clicked at a laptop that was attached to the antenna. The screen showing their present GPS location locked for a moment, and then a pin appeared, showing the estimated position of the transmission.
The pin began to pulse strongly as the nanny said good night to Bennett.
Eduardo checked the screen against his compass and the geological survey map spread out on the seat beside him. He had worked in the signal corps of the Colombian government catching narcoterrorists before he had met Perrine and switched sides. There was no one better in the cartel at radio tracking than he.
He pointed to the juniper-covered hill beside them, toward a stand of trees.
“The nanny and Bennett’s kids are less than a mile up there somewhere,” he said.
Vida got on the radio, and after a minute, another 4x4, an FJ Cruiser, rolled down the steep incline of the mining road from the opposite direction.
“You have a hit?” Estefan said from behind the FJ’s wheel.
“We just heard Bennett and the nanny,” Vida said excitedly. “The software is saying we are within a mile, that they’re up in those trees.”
“Good,” Estefan said. “About two hundred feet back up the road, I saw a tire track going that way.”
Vida smiled. She knew that the play after finding the Bennett safe house empty was to come up here to Northern California and conduct the search herself. Their contacts in town had put them onto an old, half-mad hippie doper who lived somewhere around here. His name was McMurphy, and not only had he given the cartel trouble in the past, but he’d actually been seen talking to the Bennetts at church.
She had tried to contact Perrine several times for running orders, but he wasn’t answering. It was his party, she knew. She could picture him in his tux, presiding over the events.
She felt a tug of envy at not being invited. No matter. In the back of the Rover were twelve air-shipment boxes with dry ice. Twelve little boxes that would be packed with twelve Bennett heads and would be on their way to Real del Monte by morning. Manuel would know soon enough her devotion to him.
Around Vida’s neck, on a gold chain, was the emerald ring Perrine had given her after she’d finally broken him down and they’d made love the last day of his stay. They didn’t use protection, and it was the middle of her cycle. She hadn’t taken a test, but she knew she was pregnant with his baby. It would be a boy, as handsome as his father.
Everyone had said what a charming man he was, but he was far better than just that. In their time together, he had been so kind to her, asked about her daughters, her life. He was like a father to her, or at least what she thought a father might be like, having never actually had one.
She sighed as a full-body tingle glowed all around her. Her, Vida. A simple farm girl. She’d always known she was special. That things would change for the better. And they would be getting better beyond her wildest dreams. For now, inside her, growing, was the Sun Prince.
“Vida!” said Estefan.
“Yes?” she said, shaking off the daydream.
“Shall we drive a little farther in or leave the cars here and walk?”
Vida grabbed her machine pistol and opened the door.
“Let’s walk, but quickly,” she said. “I want out of this shithole before the sun comes up.”
CHAPTER 100
McMurphy came in and placed a cup of tea in front of Mary Catherine as she hung up the CB.
“Did you get in contact with Mike?” he asked, plopping down in a camp chair.
“Yes, I did,” Mary Catherine said, taking a sip. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him where we are. I wouldn’t want you or your, eh, farm to get into trouble with the law or anyone else, after all you’ve done for us. Actually, I couldn’t have told him if I’d wanted to. I don’t know where we are.”
McMurphy laughed.
“Heck, sometimes even I get lost out here,” the burly sixty-year-old said. “But I figured remote is what the doctor ordered, with those bad old Mexican cowboys after you. This is the safest place I thought to bring you to.”
The McMurphy Mountain Compound was actually pretty incredible. Instead of the run-down shack and marijuana fields she was expecting, his home was a sophisticated and elaborate underground bunker. Built almost directly into the side of a hill, his hobbit hole, as he called it, consisted of twenty old school-bus frames welded together in a long corridor with rooms T-ing off to the right and left.
Convinced of an impending nuclear attack, he’d built the complex in the eighties with some friends. Over a few months, they’d brought up the old buses one by one on a 4x4 flatbed, dug out the hill, welded them all together, and then buried them again.
He told her that when the nuclear winter didn’t materialize, he slowly started to move his already flourishing marijuana farm underground, out of sight from the nosy feds. Most of the rooms were currently being used as hydroponic marijuana grow rooms, but there was also a kitchen, a gun room, a workshop, and several bedrooms stacked with bunk beds, where the kids now slept.
It had heat, ventilation, electricity run off propane, fresh water. Even two neat and clean bathrooms with showers and working toilets.
It wasn’t just the compound that was surprising. McMurphy, despite his frazzled, nutty appearance, had been so nice and gentle with the children. Before he had brought the children in, he had closed and securely locked the doors to all the grow rooms. Like any gracious host, he made sure that everyone was comfortable and well fed. He didn’t have any video games, but he had Monopoly and Scrabble and cards and a dartboard.
He’d shown the children the collections on the mantelpiece of rocks that he had found on his wanderings, pointing out the petrified sea creatures in them, put there millions of years in the past when the Sierra Madre had been the floor of an ancient sea.
The bus room in which they were now sitting McMurphy called the library. It was actually quite cozy. A mounted bull’s head hung above a chess set. On the walls were shelves bursting with books, mechanical engineering tomes and leather-bound geology texts beside precarious columns of yellowed paperbacks.
There were also hundreds of framed photographs. McMurphy in wrestling tights, McMurphy in a Green Beret army uniform with his arm around a couple of other soldiers. A lot of them were of hippie people from the sixties. There was a shot of an absolutely beautiful blond woman in a top hat under a tree, playing the flute. One of a young, bearded McMurphy with some other long-haired and bearded blond men wearing Jesus shirts, sitting around a campfire. There was even a shot of some long-haired children in their bathing suits on the shore of a lake, playing with ponies and goats and dogs.
Mary Catherine gestured at the photographs.
“What’s your story, Mr. McMurphy?” she said. “How’d you do all this?”
“Didn’t I already tell you we dug out the side of the hill with a bulldozer and buried the buses one by one and welded them together like Legos?”
“I meant more like why,” Mary Catherine said. “Why are you here in this place? How’d you get here, if you don’t mind me prying?”
McMurphy sighed and leaned back as he crossed his legs.
“You want my story, huh? Hmmm. Let’s see. I grew up outside San Fran. Five kids in the family. Dad was a plumber. My mom was a night-shift nurse at a mental hospital. I wrestled in high school and got good enough to get a
scholarship to Berkeley. I was just about to get my mechanical engineering degree when a fit of conscience made me drop out and hitch up with the army.
“When I returned to the States, I somehow found myself hanging out in Berkeley with a group of writers and artists and drug addicts that would end up being called the Merry Pranksters. I actually stayed at Ken Kesey’s house for a while. I really admired the wild and free, independent way he was living. The parties were a true goof.”
“I can imagine,” Mary Catherine said.
“Wanna bet?” McMurphy said, winking at her. “Anyway, one day in late ’sixty-eight, instead of relaxing and just having some innocent fun, these new people came to the house and started talking about the masses and the classes and starting a political movement, and I got straight right the heck out of there. I eventually ended up here with some friends, living off the grid, off the land.”
“Who’s the pretty lady with the flute?”
“She was my woman for a while. We had three kids. They’re gone now, obviously. Took off in the early eighties, when I started building this bomb shelter. Everybody’s gone. Just me now. The last of the Mohicans. Bilbo McMurphy, the last hobbit, at your service.”
He looked around the room, wincing.
“I know how I must look to you. Like some weird old hippie survivalist, right? You’re thinking this mole-like freak is off his rocker to be living in a hole in the ground.”
“You saved all our lives, Mr. McMurphy,” Mary Catherine said. “What I think of you is that your home is incredible, and that you’re a very good man.”
McMurphy smiled, genuinely surprised.
“You do? Really?”
“Yes, of course,” Mary Catherine said.
“In that case,” McMurphy said, retrieving a Zippo and a pot pipe from his pocket, “do you want to smoke some dope with me?”
Mary Catherine shook her head, disappointed.
“No, Mr. McMurphy,” she said. “Remember our deal with the children here. Unfortunately, your home will have to remain a dope-free zone until we leave.”
McMurphy sighed as he put the pipe away.
“Oh, well. Different strokes and all that,” he said, standing and yawning. “Good night, now. Get the kiddies up early, and we’ll leave at first light.”
CHAPTER 101
Mary Catherine had just laid her head down on one of the bomb shelter’s bunk beds when the beeping sound started.
She went out into the hall area to find McMurphy running like mad toward the front of the compound.
“What is it?”
“Motion detector!” he yelled, more animated than Mary Catherine had ever seen him. “Outside perimeter’s been breached! I knew it. Sector B. It was the CB. They must have picked it up. Dammit! Just like the damn cops. These freaks must have ways of scanning for radio signals.”
She followed him as he ran into the gun room and spun the combo on the green locker’s Master lock. Inside, shining with gun oil, was an arsenal. Tactical shotguns, scoped hunting rifles, several M-16s. McMurphy pulled out one of the automatic rifles and slipped in a magazine with a loud clacking sound. He threw ten or so other magazines into a bag and tossed the bag and rifle over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” Mary Catherine asked.
“If they find one of the ventilation shafts, they could do anything. Plug it up, smoke us out. Didn’t I see on the news that they’re using some sort of poison-gas chemical weapon? They’ll kill us in a heartbeat. I’m going outside to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
McMurphy started going toward the back of the bus complex.
“Isn’t the front door the other way?” Mary Catherine said.
“I can’t go out the front. Are you crazy? I need to go out through the tunnels.”
“The tunnels?”
“I forgot to tell you about them,” he said as he pulled up the handle of a door at the rear of the main corridor. On its other side was a dirt tunnel about four feet tall, strung with lightbulbs.
“I’ve been digging tunnels for years and years. Out the back of the complex, all through this hill. It’s actually what I did in Vietnam. Cleared the tunnels. They called us tunnel rats. The ones I built are just like the ones I saw in Cu Chi. Hell, better. Just shut the back door behind me. No, wait. Dammit, almost forgot.”
He suddenly ran back toward the gun room, where he began flipping through a CD-filled shoe box.
“Give me five,” he said, suddenly handing Mary Catherine a disk, “and then put this on the CD setup there and crank it!”
“What? Why?”
“I got speakers strung up in the trees all along the slope, strobe lights. We used to use it for parties, drop a couple of tabs and go on nature walks. We were really into mind expansion for a few years. Anyway, we can use it now. It’ll wake these murdering bastards right up! Ha, damn right this’ll teach them!
“Remember, lock the door behind me, now,” the merry prankster called as he ran off and disappeared around a corner of the tunnel.
Mary Catherine closed the bus door behind him before she looked at the CD case.
AC/DC.
Highway to Hell.
CHAPTER 102
It took them twenty minutes to find the clearing with the double-wide trailer. Looking down at it from the rim of a ridge, Vida found the pale, low structure, sitting there all by itself in the center of the flattened hillside clearing, strangely iconic. Like a temple. Like a tomb.
It’s a tomb, all right, she thought, going down the pitch-black slope on the rocky, narrow trail behind Eduardo, Estefan, and Jorge. The Bennett Tomb.
It was when they neared the bottom of the trail that she felt it. There was something subtle and subliminal, like a kind of ground hum in the air. Or is it me? she thought. Some kind of pressure change on her eardrum from the altitude?
When the sound came a moment later out of the dead silence, she fell immediately to her knees, thinking she’d literally been hit with something, a rocket or a bolt of lightning. Then, from all around her, the buzz-saw electric guitar chord repeated again, speeding faster as drums kicked in.
Living easy, living free, season ticket on a one-way ride, shrieked a rough, joyously unhinged voice.
Rock music? But from where? she wondered, trying to think. She scanned around. Were there speakers in the trees? In the ground?
The first “Highway to Hell” refrain had just started when the lights came on. Floodlighting from the trees beside the trailer suddenly bathed the entire slope they were standing on, completely exposing them. Then the lights started to strobe. It was like the whole desert hill had suddenly been moved to the middle of a dance-hall club. What the hell was this?
She was flipping up the now-useless night-vision goggles when the gunfire erupted. Estefan, in a crouch at the front of the line, suddenly dropped forward and slid down the trail face-first. Eduardo, behind him, starting to backpedal, suddenly sat down and began rolling after him.
“Back! Back!” Vida screamed, pushing Jorge behind her.
She could feel heavy slugs slam into the dirt at her heels and off the rocks beside where she’d just been standing as she retreated back up the hill. As gunfire popped up dust on the trail, she looked around for muzzle flashes to return fire at, but she couldn’t make out a damn thing because of the strobing lights.
She dove over some rocks at the top of the trail and lay flat, gasping, her heart trembling. The hard-rock music chomped on like a chain saw carving at the night. She knew it was just a tactic, but it put a chill through her just the same. This was no pushover they were going up against!
She cursed herself as she crawled through dirt toward the grass berm where her last man was hugging the ground. She’d gotten sloppy, and two of her best soldiers had paid for it with their lives. It was just her now, and Jorge, the young up-and-comer in the group. Just great.
She had to think. The trailer sitting there in the middle of the clearing with only one way down to it had obviously
been a decoy, some kind of trap. There would be others.
She scanned the ridge above the clearing for the next logical point at which to take up a firing position on the trailer. She found it thirty seconds later. Off the trail to the left, about twenty-five yards through the brush, was an outcropping of rock that one could lie on and from which one could fire down on the trailer with pretty good cover.
She grabbed Jorge and pointed at the flat rock.
“Crawl over to that ledge and lay fire on that trailer and keep position until I tell you otherwise!” she screamed over the music.
Vida watched him go over the sights of her machine pistol. Jorge had emptied a magazine out of his AK-47 and was putting in another when it happened.
A clump of grass on the hill behind him suddenly, incredibly disappeared. From where the grass had been, a silhouetted figure rose up. He bobbed straight up out of the ground, silently, like a carnival-game Whac-A-Mole.
Only this mole was holding a rifle.
CHAPTER 103
The shadowed figure and Vida fired simultaneously. Jorge pitched forward and off the outcropping as the figure disappeared.
Vida arrived out of breath at the spot where she’d seen the figure and looked down and stood there, gaping. She clicked on her flashlight. There was a hole in the ground with some kind of trapdoor attached to a chimneylike passageway with a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder lay a squat, gray-haired man, staring up at her with the side of his head shot open.
Vida laughed. The hippie! How do you like that? She’d done it! She’d truly whacked the mole!
Vida let out a breath as “Highway to Hell” ended. So that was where they were. The hippie had hidden the Bennetts literally underground.
No matter. She’d grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. Even with her two friends dead, she could still pull this off and get back to Mexico with her twelve little boxed presents.
Vida changed the magazine in her pistol and slung it over her shoulder as she grabbed the ladder’s first rung and lowered herself. Slowly, ever so slowly, Vida made her way along the low-ceilinged corridor. It was strung with lights and had wooden loading skids for a floor. It looked just like the tunnel under the border at San Diego that had brought her into the country.
Gone mb-6 Page 23
