She snorted.
Carwyn squeezed the men’s necks, just a little. “It’s okay, you can tell me. Even with the NDA.”
The off-balance man managed to raise his head. “Really. Can’t.”
“I’m sure you can.” He pushed more amnis into them and saw their eyes cross. “Now boys, who are the children you’re guarding here?”
“Cargo,” one man muttered. “Selling… They’re picking them up in two days.”
“What day?” He shook them a little. “Friday?”
“Friday morning. They brought those girls in, the older ones. Whooooole group of them three nights ago. That’s what they were waiting for.”
“Waiting for what? Girls?” Carwyn’s stomach turned.
“There’s an agent. He grabs… I mean, you get what you get, right?”
“Oh, of course.” Carwyn had no idea what they were talking about, but the dizzy one appeared to be ready to talk. “You get what you get.”
“So we had the kids. ’Cause the ones… the illegals he caught, they had the little kids. That was all. And the guy…” The one man drifted off, closing his eyes.
Carwyn let up on the amnis a little. “What guy?”
“Buys the kids,” the blinking man said. “The guy who buys the kids? He wanted some girls who were ready to work. You know, older ones but not too old. That kind.”
“And that’s what came in two nights ago? Some teenage girls?” Carwyn felt bile rising. He wanted to bash both the men’s heads in, but that would be messy. And probably not the best idea.
“Crossing by themselves,” Blinky said. “No parents at all. No one… They can’t even trace them.”
“What a find, you brave big men.” He could crush their skulls in his hand, bury them in the canyon, and not a single soul would know what happened to them save him and Brigid.
If he did it, she’d forgive him. If he did it, she’d understand.
Not the job, Father.
The discipline of a thousand years steeled him. Carwyn leaned close to the men and whispered in their ears. “This is a dream. You had a dream. Your dinner made you sick. You threw up and you passed out. You and your friend both.”
He dropped them on the ground, leaving them both tossing their guts. When they came back to awareness, they’d feel unwell, dizzy, and nauseated. That would give them enough cover for why they had a hole in their memory.
As for Carwyn and Brigid? He walked back toward the tunnel, holding his hand out for Brigid to grasp. “We don’t have two nights,” he said. “We have to move tomorrow.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Carwyn and Brigid stood around the pool table in front of Jitters’s trailer with the map of Miller’s Range spread in front of them. Carwyn had drawn in the tunnel, and Brigid had marked where each of the guard stations was.
Wash, Oso, and Daniel were all leaning eagerly over the map, nodding and murmuring to each other. Jitters stood in the corner with Lupe and Didi, who was chewing on her lip nervously.
“I don’t want nothing to do with this.” Her eyes were bloodshot, and she held a large cup of coffee between her wrinkled hands. “Jitters, I ain’t got nothing to do with this.”
Lupe put her hand on Didi’s shoulder. “Please, Didi. You heard what Brigid said. There are twenty-three kids there, and they need us.”
“Twenty-three kids I don’t know nothin’ about,” she muttered. “I ain’t got no cause to be messing with the government, girl. I steer clear of all that kind of business. I don’t bother no one and no one bothers me.”
“You helped me,” Lupe said. “When I needed help, you helped me. And now Carwyn and Brigid can help these kids. They don’t deserve to be lost. They need to get back to their families.”
“Can’t we just report all these people to the police?” Didi asked. “I mean, if what they’re doing is illegal, the police should help, right?”
Carwyn said, “Unfortunately, Didi, I think the first whiff of the government sniffing around and these kids will disappear.”
“I thought these people was from the Army,” Didi said. “Or immigration or something.”
“No. At least not officially,” Carwyn said. “Two days ago I called the attorney Lupe’s family had contacted for her mother’s case, and she called me back today. There is no mention of this detention center in government records. Whoever is here, they are not on the public payroll, though they obviously have some connections that are allowing them to kidnap children whose parents are detained by immigration authorities.”
“Agents take bribes,” Oso said. “Trust me, some of them are pretty cheap, and a lot of them have no morals at all. For the right amount of money, they won’t ask any questions.”
“They’re able to use this base,” Brigid added. “So they have some kind of federal official in their pocket or a federal connection, but these people are not from the government. We have a feeling that this operation is completely off the books. Which means that when we disrupt them, they’re not going to call for backup. They don’t have any.”
Wash frowned. “Didn’t you say they were Canyon Security or something like that?”
“We just found that out tonight,” Brigid said. “We’ve already left a message at the attorney’s office and have people looking into the company, but we don’t have time to wait. According to the source we have inside, the kids are getting moved out Friday morning.”
“That’s like two days away,” Daniel said. “I’m supposed to get a crowd at that gate in a day? I don’t have time to—”
“You’ll have to work with what you have because we don’t have any options at this point,” Brigid said. “You’re going to have to get very creative very quickly because we need a big enough distraction at that gate to get twenty-three kids of various ages half a mile to this tunnel.” She pointed at the corner past the boneyard where the wrecks of various military vehicles sat rusting.
Wash started nodding. “We can do it. We’ll figure something out.”
Oso was rubbing his chin. “I got some ideas, man. But aren’t you gonna need some more people inside the fence?”
“Lupe and Didi are going with us,” Carwyn and Brigid said. “We’re a little bit afraid that the children won’t react to men well.”
Wash scowled. “Fucking assholes. I got a few other friends—female ones—who already said they’re willing to help. Couple of them live in the Springs even.” Wash looked at Didi. “Miss Didi, if Ronnie and Crystal said they’d come with you, would you be less nervous?”
The names seemed to relax Didi. “I guess a little.” She looked at Lupe. “They’re good girls. A little rough, but they’re good people.”
“I think I remember them.” Lupe rubbed Didi’s back, keeping her arm around the nervous woman.
“We don’t know how many little legs we’re going to be carrying,” Brigid said. “We only know there are twenty-three children being held. According to the girl Lupe spoke to in Los Angeles, around six of them are older teenagers, and the new arrivals are likely to be older girls as well.” She pointed to the road that Carwyn had drawn in. “Jitters will be waiting with his big truck, and we can pile everyone in the back. From there, we come back to the Springs and load the children into various vehicles. We don’t want them all together.”
“And after that?” Jitters asked. “What are you going to do with all those kids?”
“That’s a question for another night,” Carwyn said. “For tonight” —he clapped his hands together and looked at Wash and Oso— “let’s talk about explosives, shall we?”
* * *
“This would all be so much easier if everyone knew we were vampires,” Carwyn muttered under his breath. “We wouldn’t have to worry about the guards or the little ones or—”
“I keep telling you we can’t let that secret out.” Brigid was tucked under Carwyn’s outstretched arm, examining the haphazard team they’d thrown together in a matter of hours. “It spoils our air of mystery, and also,
do you really want to have to wipe the memories of two dozen children?”
“I suppose not.”
They were sitting on an old couch in a corner of Didi’s yard as Jitters went over a few of the finer points of dynamite with three wide-eyed young men. Lupe was sitting around a firepit with Didi and the two women Wash had recommended, Ronnie and Crystal.
Ronnie was tall, painfully thin, and looked like she’d had a rough life judging by the scars Brigid had spotted on her arms. Crystal was a salt-of-the-earth type, sturdy-built and square-faced. Her short hair was buzz-cut, and she wore faded jeans and flannel.
The couple couldn’t have been more opposite, but Brigid saw what Wash did. They were gentle and thoughtful with Didi, but both had steel in their eyes when Jitters filled them in on what was going on at Miller’s Range. They’d volunteered to follow Brigid and Carwyn without question.
“This is all a bit mad,” Brigid said. “We’re going into a paramilitary situation with a team of amateurs to extract twenty-three children we know nothing about.”
“We know many of them have been taken from their parents,” Carwyn said. “We know they’re children and some bastard is planning to sell them to God-knows-who.” A dark expression settled over his face. “There are some nights, darling girl, that I question the God I serve. I do not understand why he lets evildoers live.”
She turned to him and nudged his face down so she could kiss his cheek. “We don’t know the whys, but you and I can be the ones who end them.”
He met her eyes. “You are the greatest gift of my eternity.”
Brigid couldn’t speak. If she did, he would think she was being dramatic.
He was the reason she stayed alive.
* * *
Later that night, Brigid sat in the passenger seat of Jitters’s reclaimed military transport truck, complete with an army-green tarp tied over the back, as he drove south past Miller’s Range.
“There’s a turnoff about a mile south of the place,” he said. “Then this baby should be able to get over the brush and all that. It’s fairly level.”
“Level enough that they’ll be able to spot this equipment?” There were several crates of TNT in the back of the truck along with barrels and other junk they’d use to hide it.
“Well, I’m guessing that’ll depend on how closely they’ve surveyed that section of the desert,” Jitters said. “If they haven’t paid too close attention, they’re not going to notice a few rusted old barrels that look like they got tossed out the back of a truck fifty years ago. If they’ve swept it clean, they’ll find it.”
“Here’s hoping they’re negligent.”
The idea was to set up the improvised explosive devices that night and set them off just after dusk to create a distraction. The combination of the explosions and the people Daniel was trying to drum up from his activist connections in Los Angeles should be enough to keep the company’s attention focused at the gate instead of the back dormitories where the children were kept. If the backup was diverted to the front to keep order, Carwyn and Lupe would have an easier time getting the kids out.
Brigid had decided that as much as she wanted to protect the children, the best place for her was in the gate operation, causing as much chaos as possible and keeping an eye on the armed men at the gate. She would have to trust the kids to her husband’s enormous heart and simply pray he didn’t reveal that he was an earth vampire to anyone who happened across him.
Trusting, trusting man.
“Have you used dynamite before?” Brigid asked.
“I used to work for a mining company,” he said. “Along with some other stuff. I know the basics.”
And the basics would be all they needed. Dynamite in barrels goes boom. Pesky civilians shouting through megaphones and honking horns. Brigid was confident that for these men, that would be enough to distract them.
Daniel was squeezed in the back, furiously texting on his phone.
“How many people so far?” Brigid asked.
“I have two organizers I’m waiting to hear back from. One was adamant that their group was nonviolent only. I’m a little worried they’ll take off when the dynamite goes.”
“So tell them ten minutes after the hour,” Brigid said. “By the time they show up, it’ll just be chaos and shouting, no more boom.”
Jitters said, “Well, there will be that last—”
“We don’t need to tell Daniel’s friends all our plans, Jitters. Let some things be a surprise.”
Daniel looked up from his phone. “Wait, what?”
“Nothing,” Brigid said. “How many people so far?”
“I think about thirty?”
“That’s a good start.” Brigid wanted utter and complete chaos. “Keep calling people.”
“It’s three in the morning.”
“It’s an emergency. Keep calling.”
* * *
They set the barrels up at quarter-mile intervals zigzagged across the landscape. The idea was to have the explosions timed five minutes apart, slowly coming closer to the front gate to cause the most confusion and hopefully draw the attention of the front guards out of the compound. The last barrel was the riskiest and the one Brigid questioned the most. It would be easily visible from the front gate.
“Maybe this is too close.” She could see the lights of the front gate in the distance. “If they have night vision cameras or scopes, they can see us easily.”
Jitters and Wash rolled the most rusted barrel from the back of the blacked-out truck.
“If they had night vision scopes, they’d have probably shot at us already,” Jitters said. “We can’t do anything about it now. If they find ’em, they find ’em. Either way, they’re gonna be thinking in this direction and not the other one, especially once Daniel’s friends show up.”
“If Daniel’s friends show up,” she muttered.
Wash grinned. “Oh, they will. Nothing a bunch of Los Angeles and Orange County do-gooders love more than a noisy protest in front of a bunch of quasigovernment agents dressed in black. Hell, these assholes won’t know what hit them. Daniel knows people who make themselves official nuisances professionally.”
“Here’s hoping they come through.” Brigid watched Wash and Jitters wiring up the detonator and carefully covering it with sand. “Wash, yer goin’ to camp out here for the day?”
He nodded toward a low hill covered in grey boulders. “I got a spot out there I’ve actually camped at before. I’ll stay out here, keep an eye on all this stuff, and make sure no one gets curious.”
“Good man.” Brigid was actually beginning to like these odd desert dwellers even if they did believe in government conspiracies and faked moon landings. They were surprisingly resourceful and didn’t seem to mind hard work.
For the front operation, Wash and Daniel would be the primary operatives. And in the back, Carwyn had recruited Oso and Lupe—who really needed to avoid any police—to be his liaisons with the children. Didi, Crystal, and Ronnie would be along to provide support and carry any children who couldn’t run.
Brigid would be in front, keeping her eyes out for the unexpected spoiler in the operation. If there was anything she knew about this kind of plan, there was always, always a spoiler.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Carwyn stood at the mouth of the tunnel with Lupe, Oso, Ronnie, Crystal, and Didi.
“You made this in two nights?” Crystal was examining the walls. “How?”
He debated what to tell her. “It’s technology out of Wales actually. Lots of coal mining. Historically speaking.”
“Wow.”
Didi and Ronnie appeared to be the most nervous. “What time do we go through?”
“We can go through whenever you want, but I don’t know how comfortable you are in tunnels.” He glanced at Lupe. “Time?”
“It’s six thirty-seven.”
“We’ve got at least twenty-three minutes before anything happens.”
Didi stared at the tunnel
opening. “How far is it?”
“A quarter mile through the tunnel, then a quarter mile across the compound to the dormitories.”
Crystal was standing next to Didi. “How you feeling, Miz Dee? You feeling up for this?”
Carwyn was starting to have his doubts. With Ronnie, Crystal, and Oso, they had five adults to help with the little ones. He could carry three children easily.
“Maybe you should stay here with Jitters,” Carwyn said. “Keep the truck going and arrange everything in the back there. You could be a welcoming face when we return. The little ones are likely to be a bit scared.”
Crystal was nodding silently behind Didi’s back. “I think that’s a good idea, Miz Dee.”
The old woman firmed her jaw. “I told Lupe I’d help. You all think I’m too old now?”
“Hardly,” Carwyn said. “But we don’t want you to do anything you’re nervous…”
Didi stepped forward, flicked on her flashlight, and started walking into the tunnel.
Carwyn watched as her old denim jacket disappeared into the darkness. “Okay then.”
Lupe smiled. “I told you. She’s tough.”
He held out his hand. “After you, my dear.”
Lupe looked at her watch again. “Six forty-two.”
Carwyn nodded. “We better get walking. We don’t want to miss our window.”
One by one, they disappeared into the earth, a mismatched troop of rescuers operating on faith and good intentions.
Carwyn looked at the sky and saw the first stars start to peek through scattered clouds. “Are you ready, darling girl?”
* * *
Brigid was perched in Wash’s hideout, watching through binoculars as a crowd of demonstrators started to gather at the gates of Miller’s Range. There were signs and a wild collection of mismatched cars, trucks, and vans. Many of the vehicles were painted with slogans like Families Belong Together and End Illegal Detention Now. Others had messages as varied as End the Alien Cover-Up and Area 51 is REAL!
Saint’s Passage: Elemental Covenant Book One Page 17
