Caesar the War Dog 4

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  ‘Copy that, Captain,’ Ben responded. ‘Just get me down there. I’ll do the rest.’

  Ben was on his way to the University of Texas accommodation when his mobile phone rang.

  ‘Hi, it’s Amanda,’ said a familiar voice.

  The worried look on Ben’s face was replaced with a smile. ‘Amanda!’ He had immediately recognised the voice of his good friend Amanda Ritchie, an Australian newspaper journalist who had helped him the last time Caesar had gone missing. ‘How are you going?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks, Ben. Your mum just told me that Caesar was kidnapped in Texas. I’m really worried for you all. The kids must be so upset.’

  A frown dented Ben’s brow. ‘My mother shouldn’t have told you that. Caesar’s disappearance is not for publication. It’s classified information.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not just any reporter,’ Amanda replied, sounding offended. ‘I thought we were friends. Your mother told me about Caesar in confidence, and of course I’ll respect that confidence.’

  ‘Sorry, Amanda, I’m under a lot of stress,’ said Ben, feeling foolish. ‘I know you’ll keep it to yourself.’

  ‘Maybe I can help.’

  ‘I don’t know how you could help at this point. We’re still not entirely sure where Caesar is.’

  ‘But you have an idea?’ said Amanda. ‘Mexico, right?’

  ‘Could be. How’d you know? My mother again?’

  Amanda laughed. ‘No, I used my powers of deduction. Any connection with the car bombs in San Antonio last week?’

  ‘There could be a connection, yes.’

  ‘Do you think one of the crime cartels could have taken Caesar?’

  Ben smiled again. Amanda had always impressed him with how quick she put two and two together. ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Okay. Well, keep me posted. I’ll do whatever I can to help. I love Caesar too, you know.’

  ‘Will do. Thanks, Amanda. I appreciate the offer. Caesar would, too, if he knew.’

  After he hung up, Ben sat on the back seat of the cab as it sped along a San Antonio freeway, a faint smile lingering on his lips. He thought about how much Amanda, a feisty, independent woman, reminded him of his late wife, Marie. She also had the same kind heart as Marie. Twice, in Australia and Afghanistan, Amanda had been involved in his and Caesar’s lives. How she could help them now, Ben could not imagine, but he was comforted by the offer.

  ‘Come, César, we are going to visit with someone who can understand a dog like you,’ called Vargas. He traipsed over to the other side of the garage. When he reached Caesar, he let out a gasp. ‘What have you done?’

  Caesar came to his feet.

  ‘You have pooped on the floor of El Loro’s garage!’

  Caesar couldn’t help it. He had to relieve himself somewhere, and Vargas had kept him chained up in the garage.

  ‘You stupid, stupid dog!’ Vargas raged, staring at the mess.

  Caesar couldn’t understand Spanish, but he understood perfectly well from Vargas’s tone that he was in trouble. Backing away, he dropped his eyes to the floor.

  ‘I thought you were well-trained,’ Vargas growled as he fetched a spade. ‘El Loro Verde would kill me if he found your poop right beside his Ferrari!’

  Caesar watched him as Vargas scooped up the poop and dropped it in a rubbish bin.

  ‘Come, poopy dog,’ said Vargas. ‘Come earn your keep.’

  He unhitched Caesar’s leash and led him from the garage via a side door. A black Volkswagen van stood waiting in the forecourt outside, its engine running. Vargas opened the rear doors and urged Caesar to jump inside. When the labrador hesitated, Vargas impatiently kicked him in the rump.

  ‘Get in, poopy dog!’ he yelled.

  With a pained yelp, Caesar leapt into the van. Vargas let go of the leash and slammed the doors shut, then climbed into the cab beside the driver. The driver, an Árbol pistolero, had a pistol in his belt and a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun under his seat.

  ‘Go, go, go!’ Vargas urged.

  As the van edged forward, the gate clattered to one side. From an unseen control room, an Árbol guard was keeping watch. The van nosed onto the road, and the boys playing soccer immediately stopped what they were doing and respectfully stood back.

  One of the boys, no more than ten years old, called out, ‘Viva El Loro Verde!’

  Vargas smiled and waved. ‘That kid José is eager to work for El Loro,’ he remarked to the driver. Vargas guessed that, before many years had passed, José would be running errands for Árbol on his first step to becoming one of their thousands of operatives. Another ten years from now, Vargas surmised, José would probably be killed in a shootout with rivals or the police, or spend the rest of his life serving time behind bars. There was a one-in-ten chance José would survive to make more money from crime than his hardworking labourer parents had seen in their lives.

  The gate slid back to seal El Loro in his suburban fortress once more. That was the price he paid for his life of crime; he had become a prisoner in his own home.

  The van made its way across town to an abandoned factory in the east. As it passed through a roller door, Vargas spied Diego waiting for him. On the far side of the deserted building stood a dark-blue pick-up truck. Tommy was hauling Sergeant Juanita Del Ray from the back of it as the van pulled up alongside them.

  ‘Take the blindfold off her,’ Vargas commanded, climbing out of the van.

  Tommy tugged at the piece of cloth circling the sergeant’s head. Juanita squinted as her eyes readjusted to the light.

  ‘Look at you in your police uniform,’ said Vargas. ‘This is no job for a woman.’

  ‘You are pistoleros?’ Juanita demanded, standing tall. ‘If you intend to kill me, do it now. Tell my children that I died bravely.’

  ‘Such dramatics!’ Vargas returned with a laugh in his voice. ‘We are not going to kill you. Not if you help us.’

  ‘I do not help the cartels.’ Juanita eyed them carefully. ‘You are with one of the cartels, are you not?’

  Vargas grinned. ‘Amiga, we are just employees of a dog-sitting service that is in need of your great skills with one of our four-legged friends.’ This brought cackles of laughter from Diego and Tommy. Vargas walked to the van and opened the back doors. ‘Out, poopy dog. Out!’ he snarled.

  In an instant, Caesar launched himself at the man. Vargas had made the mistake of failing to secure Caesar’s leash to the van’s interior. With an alarmed cry, Vargas staggered backwards while Caesar bounded away, intent on escaping his captors.

  ‘Mother Maria!’ exclaimed Vargas. ‘Infernal, dog-pooping devil! Get that dog, you idiots! He cannot get away!’ Diego and Tommy both set off at the run in pursuit of the labrador, but Vargas called one of them back. ‘No, not you, Tommy. You keep an eye on the cop!’ He turned to the VW driver, who was still behind the wheel. ‘Rodriguez! Cut the dog off with the van.’

  With a squeal of rubber on concrete, Rodriguez drove the van to a ramp on the left that Caesar was heading for. He slew to a halt and blocked it with the vehicle. Jumping out, he stood ready to intercept the dog. Seeing the man up ahead standing in his path, Caesar darted right to avoid Rodriguez. Diego, running behind him, lunged for the leash trailing behind the labrador. He sprawled across the factory floor, missing the leash by centimetres.

  ‘You idiot!’ cried Vargas, running up to him and panting hard. ‘Get him! Get him!’

  Grimacing, Diego pulled himself to his feet to set off after Caesar. From the other end of the factory, Tommy watched the chase unfold. With a Glock pistol in one hand, he had pushed Juanita up against the side of the pick-up.

  ‘You could not catch a cold if you tried, Diego!’ Tommy yelled derisively. Shaking his head, he raised his Glock and took aim as Caesar searched for a new escape route. Closing one eye, Tommy squinted along the barrel. Shifting his aim to be slightly ahead of the running dog, he fired. The gun coughed, and a bullet chipped into the concrete floor immediately in front of
the labrador, sending dust and concrete chips flying up into Caesar’s face. Caesar leapt away to the left.

  ‘Tommy, what are you doing?’ called Vargas. He came to a halt, puffing hard. He put his hands on his hips and bent double as he tried to catch his breath. ‘You cannot shoot the dog. El Loro will shoot you if you harm it!’

  ‘I am not shooting the dog,’ Tommy returned. ‘I am too good a shot to miss. I am trying to make the dog stop.’ He squeezed off another round, which flew past Caesar and ploughed into the end wall. ‘Fool of a dog!’

  Caesar stopped at a large rectangular opening in the floor. A goods lift the size of a suburban garage had once stood there. Glancing around, Caesar saw Diego bearing down on him. Tommy fired at him a third time. Another bullet chipped the floor, this time beside Caesar. Instinctively, the labrador reeled back.

  Just as Diego was making another dive for his leash, Caesar leapt into the yawning chasm in front of him. Diego’s hand grabbed for the end of the leash, but it slipped through his fingers. Caesar fell the long distance to the floor below and landed awkwardly on his side.

  Vargas reached the opening, panting. He looked down anxiously at Caesar lying still on the floor below. ‘You idiots!’ Vargas raged. ‘If that dog is dead, you are dead! Tommy, bring the cop. She knows about dogs.’

  The men ran down the fire stairs and clustered around Caesar. Sergeant Del Ray knelt beside him, carefully feeling his body for broken bones.

  ‘Is the dog dead?’ asked Rodriguez.

  ‘He’s alive,’ said Juanita. ‘I think he was winded by the fall. And his ribs …’ As she spoke, Caesar turned his head and growled at her. ‘Now, now, César,’ she said soothingly, ‘Juanita will not harm you.’ She looked up at Vargas. ‘Here, he is sore.’ She indicated the labrador’s side. ‘Perhaps broken ribs. Perhaps they are only bruised. It was a brave thing he did, jumping from such a height.’

  ‘A stupid thing, if you ask me,’ Tommy remarked.

  ‘You must make César well,’ Vargas commanded.

  ‘Is this why you abducted me?’ said Juanita. ‘What is so special about this dog?’

  ‘The American television says that he is the best exploding dog in the world,’ Vargas replied. ‘You and César will protect our boss from bombs.’

  Juanita had overheard Vargas mention the name of El Loro Verde, and had deduced that her abductors were from the Árbol crime cartel. ‘You need a handler for this dog?’ she said. It occurred to her that as long as the dog was useful to these thugs, her safety was guaranteed.

  ‘You will look after the dog,’ said Vargas, ‘and you will tell us when the dog sniffs a bomb.’

  ‘Okay, I understand,’ she replied, stroking Caesar’s head. Her own dog, Toltec, was a Belgian malinois trained to sniff out illegal drugs. She had no experience with the detection of explosives and she had no idea what Caesar’s ‘signature’ might be. Toltec, like all police and military sniffer dogs, had his own signature for indicating that he had located contraband. It was possible that she would recognise Caesar’s signature, but it was just as likely that she wouldn’t. To stay alive, Juanita decided she would have to pretend to these Árbol cretins that she knew exactly what she was doing until an opportunity to escape came along.

  ‘You can read this dog?’ said Diego. ‘You will know when he smells a bomb?’

  ‘Of course,’ Juanita lied. ‘Am I not an expert with sniffer dogs? Am I not the chief of the Police Dog Unit? I am the best dog handler in all of Mexico!’ She hoped her bravado worked and that they wouldn’t ask her to do a bomb-sniffing demonstration with this foreign labrador. ‘But for the moment, this dog needs rest. That fall could have killed him.’ She looked up at the gaping hole through which Caesar had fallen. ‘Such a long drop.’

  ‘All right,’ said Vargas, sounding relieved.

  ‘What do we do with them now?’ Diego asked.

  ‘We take them back to the house,’ replied Vargas. ‘Near El Loro Verde.’

  ‘You sure about that?’ Tommy queried. ‘A cop under el padrino’s roof? Shouldn’t we keep them someplace else? At one of our safe houses, maybe.’

  ‘How can they protect el padrino from bombs when they’re halfway across town?’ Vargas shook his head. ‘Idiot! They must be where he is at all times. Blindfold the cop. We’re going back to the house; all of us.’

  In dawn’s early light, a small Mexican Army MD 500 Defender helicopter eased down onto the helipad on the roof of the Monterrey Police Headquarters. The chopper’s right side door opened and, after thanking the crew for the ride from San Antonio, Ben Fulton climbed out lugging his kitbag. Bending low beneath the heelo’s spinning rotors, Ben ran to a Federal Police lieutenant waiting alone at the rooftop door. Behind him, the helicopter took to the sky again.

  ‘Welcome to Mexico, Sergeant Fulton,’ said the lieutenant, shaking Ben by the hand and smiling. ‘I’m Pedro Peters.’ Of average height, he had blond hair and blue eyes. His cheeks dimpled when he smiled and he spoke English with only the faintest of foreign accents, as if he had spent time in America.

  Ben smiled in return. ‘Captain De Silva of the SAPD said that you might be able to help me find my EDD, sir. I’m working on a hunch that he’s been brought here.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Peters, guiding Ben through the door and down a flight of stairs. ‘We had a development overnight that could suggest that your EDD is indeed here in Monterrey.’

  ‘Really?’ Ben responded with a mixture of surprise and delight. ‘What kind of development, sir?’

  ‘The head of Monterrey’s dog squad, Sergeant Juanita Del Ray, was taken from a local restaurant last night. Her abductors posed as officers from the Ministry of Justice.’

  ‘And the Ministry of Justice has confirmed that they are not holding the sergeant?’

  Lieutenant Peters nodded. ‘The restaurant’s owner was suspicious. He rang the police after Sergeant Del Ray was taken away. Unfortunately, it was too late to trace her and her abductors.’

  He led the way through a fire escape to a floor filled with desks. Some, even at this early hour, were occupied by police officers. It struck Ben how few of these desks were equipped with computers. Back in Texas, every single desk in the San Antonio Police Department had a computer on it, and every possible electronic aid was available to the San Antonio Police. Here, the Monterrey Police looked like they were fighting crime on a shoestring budget.

  ‘So, have the bad guys made a ransom demand for the release of Sergeant Del Ray?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Peters replied, ‘and, if you ask me, Sergeant Fulton, there will be no ransom demand for Juanita. The question we have all been asking ourselves is this: What does a crime cartel want with a police dog handler? My colleagues have come up with a variety of possible motives, some of them not pleasant to think about. On the other hand, they may just want her talents as a dog handler. Logical, huh?’

  ‘Very,’ Ben agreed.

  ‘More than that, they need Juanita to handle a particular dog. Maybe a bomb-sniffing dog that has just been kidnapped across the border in Texas by the very same pistoleros. What do you think?’

  Ben nodded. ‘It adds up, Lieutenant.’ He didn’t want to get his hopes up in case this all turned out to be a red herring. If Caesar wasn’t here in Mexico, Ben had no idea where else to look for him. Such a scenario didn’t even bear thinking about. As far as Ben was concerned, this lead had to be genuine.

  On his computer screen Lieutenant Peters brought up a group photo of Juanita Del Ray with her sniffer dog, Toltec, and the rest of the dogs and handlers of the Monterrey Police Dog Unit. ‘That’s Juanita,’ he said, pointing to her in the picture.

  Ben studied the photograph. ‘If she and Caesar are being held together,’ he mused, ‘at least Caesar will have some company from someone who knows dogs.’

  He would take comfort from that.

  Gingerly, Caesar came to his feet. His leather collar had been returned to his neck and, once again, his leash traile
d from it. Though his ribs had been bruised when he dropped through the floor of the deserted factory, none were broken. Since returning to the Green Parrot’s mansion, Caesar and Sergeant Del Ray were being kept prisoner in a shed in the property’s small backyard.

  ‘Are you okay now, César?’ Juanita asked, reaching out and patting his head.

  Caesar’s tail began to wag. Not only did Caesar possess a phenomenal sense of smell, he could sense that, unlike the others, Juanita was kind and could be trusted. It was true that Caesar could pick up traces of explosive chemical on the likes of Vargas, Diego and Tommy, from the weapons they carried. But Ben and Charlie and the other soldiers that Caesar worked with in the Australian Army and GRRR routinely carried weapons and explosives, yet Caesar knew they were the good guys. And it wasn’t simply that Vargas and the others smelled different as a result of their Mexican diet, because Sergeant Del Ray had a similar diet to the gangsters. Caesar could nevertheless sense that she was one of the good guys. With his tail still wagging, he nestled in beside her.

  Juanita pulled his head in close and gave him a gentle cuddle, knowing how sore he must be after his tumble. ‘We are prisoners together, you and I,’ she said. ‘You made a heroic attempt to escape, my friend.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And we will succeed in escaping from these people, you and I both. Just you wait and see.’

  Suddenly, there came a scratching sound from one side of the wooden shed. Caesar heard it first. His ears pricked up and he pulled back from Juanita.

  ‘What is it?’ Juanita whispered to Caesar. ‘Do you hear something?’

  Caesar cocked his head to one side. There was the scratching noise again. Lowering his head, he followed the noise to the wall. As the scratching continued, Caesar let out a little whimper, then began to paw at the earth floor. Soon, he was dragging dirt away from the bottom of the wall.