Hell To Pay

by Andrik Rovson

  The blaze spread to cover the modest guard house, tongues of flame licked inside, seeking out the small propane heater and it's flat, dish sized catalytic element Alcazar had authorized herself. She kept the glowing metal catalyst array pointed at her legs, a luxury and rank's privilege as the men stood and stamped their boots to ward off the desert night's frigid air. It kept her comfortable on the long cold nights of the winter that was coming soon. The black desert night air quickly sank to freezing as the moon arched up high in the pure velvet, starry sky from November to late February.

  The small steel cylinder heated up as the little building's interior caught fire. The metal can full of propane rapidly exploded in a secondary that made the narrow frame building swell outward then disintegrate. It had been built expensively like the arched steel roof above it, overly strong, made with steel framing instead of wood two by fours, able to survive near hurricane winds but not the sudden over pressure from the expanding explosion created by the compressed gas cylinder when it reached ignition temperature. The small building's strong walls made it build up even more pressure before it flew apart. The shattered pieces should have shredded all three women but most missed Alcazar who'd been spared most of the initial gasoline fireball as well, This was all purely accidental. The unconscious Patrol officer lay in the turbulent, protective shadow of the pickup bed and big dual back wheels beside her body. She'd seen soldiers who'd survived explosions a few feet from their bodies while everyone else nearby was killed by concussion or shrapnel. This was the beginning of her miracle.

  Instead of burning her like it had the other two females, the initial fiery gasoline vapor explosion produced a shock wave that rolled her away – her unconscious body pushed by a swirling wave of hot air that had mixed with the relatively cooler, still desert air eighteen inches above her.

  The mixed tempest of the explosion made a roiling, boiling hand of God that pushed her away from the gasoline flames expanding out from underneath the pickup, and seconds later deflected the flying parts of the building that elsewhere, embedded themselves in the two females near the pickup, then reached out to pepper the three neatly parked SUV's, parked fifty feet away from the cover once provided by the steep, steel framed roof.

  Created by complex interactions and reflections. the pressure waves generated by the blooming gasoline fireball on the cathedral structure the rigid steel roof made, worked around the boxy shape of the pickup truck and guard shack beside it. Only a physicist who found it child's play to perform the calculations required to predict atomic bomb implosions or global weather patterns would have understood why her mystical envelope of survival appeared for a few seconds, a little Eden that protected Alacazar from the hell happening inches above her unconscious body, immolating everything else around her.

  Alcazar's body kept rolling away from the pickup truck that protected her from almost all the shrapnel from the shack's secondary explosion shock wave. Luckily her upper torso took the brunt, putting a single inch thick wood splinter in her arm while everything else banged or spiked futilely into her bullet proof vest that saved her life. But this was unknown to her.

  The new blast of hotter air from her gas heater, coming from her guard shack as it exploded, made her still unconscious, limp body into an efficient cylinder. Kicking her into motion, she rolled like a log going down a steep hill, moving her away from the blazing checkpoint, tumbling past the edge of its broad concrete apron. Her body kept rolling, smashing through a few small desert shrubs that had grown up along the margin. She kept going for nearly ten feet until she fell over the steep wall of the small dry creek bed that ran alongside the checkpoint. She ended up completely hidden, like she'd thrown herself over fifteen feet in a wild, reckless leap to disappear into the natural safety the walls the dry stream provided. . Alcazar had often glanced at the small narrow channel gouged out by the annual rains that came on fast to explode in floods of water that gushed across the desert to disappear as fast as they rose up. It's narrow profile reminded her of the many slit trenches she'd dug in the army, never thinking it would someday save her life.

  She landed on the side of her face, in the sand, as soft as a foam mattress. It ended her miraculous salvation, a present from a higher being or the random luck that some people enjoy – in the snarling free for all of combat's massive, random explosions and flying bullets – for no reason at all, pure luck. Above her, a dry desert bush crackled and curled, burning slowly into a black filigree.

  Her body kept breathing as her mind remained blank and empty, unaware and entering a deep, protective coma, the sole survivor, the other two females long since dead, which stopped their twisted, eerie wailing.

  Five long minutes elapsed. The man in the black western shirt wore yellow shooting glasses to enhance his vision in the dusky, darkening light, nearly two hours after sunset – the best and the worst light for snipers like him. The expensive, precision yellow glass lenses were what he preferred to high tech night vision scopes he'd used then discarded because of their bulk and weight, as well as the danger their failure would produce in the heat of battle. He swung his rifle side to side slowly, looking for someone else to emerge, from a bathroom in the two room station house next to the inspection station, or some unseen location outside the cold halogen light that still blazed into the inferno made by the burning pickup and small, shattered building under the steel canopy. The heavy, roaring fire created an almost invisible column of thick, black, turbulent smoke rising up in the inky night sky – the devil's signature. It made a smile of satisfaction curl his thin, dry lips.

  Certain there were no survivors he laid his rifle in the convenient back seat of the bulky pickup and drove slowly to the burning station, happy no other vehicles had appeared on the highway, making him kill randomly to cover his tracks. It was enough the officers in the small outpost had died along with the old man who'd picked up the young girl who'd slipped out of his truck when he stopped to open an old gate, then relieved himself. Naked, tied up and laying on the floorboard in front of the back seat, she'd somehow snuck out of the truck and fled into the night – without any help – which merited some respect, though after the fact. She was the first eight year old that had bested him, one of a very select group who'd lived longer than he wanted, but never that long.

  Taking his time,Vladimir walked around the raging fire at the Border Control station, still burning intensely. It smelled and looked like a battlefield, something he'd avoided after his required induction into the Russian army after high school. He'd been assigned to a special school soon after they'd found out about his talents, all based on his lack of human compassion and intense, animal intelligence that made him into a merciless, human shark. 'Akula', the Russian word for shark, was his nickname, something he'd hated at first, then liked for it's ability to intimidate and keep people at a distance. People like him didn't have friends. He was unable to feel normal emotions or understand the need to share anything with another person, with no use for casual relationships. He viewed the human race with utter utility, as tools or trouble.

  Keeping his distance from the roaring flames consuming the checkpoint, he counted the bodies outside the truck. There were two on one side, and two in the truck, one big, the old man he'd killed first, then the second, far smaller, the little girl, his plaything who'd gotten away from him.

  The old woman on the far side was unrecognizable, her skin and gray hair burned up completely, a blackened husk, smaller than she'd been in life, almost child size – twisted up in her final agonies, a transformation he was well aware of. He thought it was the third officer he'd shot, the one with a ponytail – hit when she tried to pull out the young girl who'd gone berserk in the cab, fighting back. He hadn't been able to see inside the pickup cab, not noticing the old woman with the old man, thinking the two heads he had seen were the old man and the annoying girl he'd been chasing.

  After Mary had escaped he'd driven slowly up the road, following her path indicated by the small footprints in
the thick dust of the gravel road where it ended, joining the paved highway. Using a flashlight from his kit, he'd followed her tracks, obvious on the freshly paved surface, driving up a few hundred feet at a time until he'd come over the rise to see Jonah pull over and exit his pickup. A quick look with his binoculars let him spot the same line of spilled clothes on the highway Jonah had seen, a minute before Vladimir. A speeding car or truck would have scattered them, to end up alongside the road, confirming they were hers and recently lost.

  Vlad had stopped, there was no need to continue after seeing Jonah's parked truck, its headlights pointing at the ditch. He was enraged someone else had found his quarry. Deciding to stay out of sight, he'd pulled off the road a few hundred meters away. Leaving his truck running, jogging fifty feet to flop down on a low rise, he'd watched the old man do his exploration, tracking him with his binoculars, forcing himself to observe and gather information. It was easier to let the old man hunt for the girl, if she was still there. If she was, he'd have a better chance than Vladimir. Hopefully she'd respond to him, older and less threatening, grandfatherly, and give herself up without a fight.

  When the other man had brought her back to his truck it would be simple to follow, or take a shot, taking him out so he could recapture her and complete his job. It was only a delay. He'd fully intended to kill her after he restarted his little game with her in the desert. That was the only reason he'd watched it play out, pleased when he'd been rewarded by the sight of Jonah bringing her out of the brush where she'd hidden.

  He should have extracted his rifle and taken them out there, but by the time he'd returned to his truck, rushing back with his gun to kill the old man and reclaim his prize, they were gone, their tail lights smaller in the distance as the old man raced for town or the border patrol outpost a few miles up the road for help. Vladimir had jogged back to his truck, letting his mind settle, dealing with his anger at the missed opportunity, filing it away, like he did all mistakes, something to learn from, not ruminate over, wasting brain power, creating a distraction. This girl was causing him a lot of trouble, ruining his usually perfect job execution, making his stomach fill with acid.

  Observing the sign that warned him to slow down for the border checkpoint a half mile ahead, Vladimir had pulled up and stopped on the crest of the hill overlooking the outpost just as the other pickup turned in to stop, easy to recognize because of its peculiar double back wheels. Taking his time and it had been his chance to fix his mistake by killing the girl and anyone around her. He'd quickly checked the clip in his semi automatic sniper rifle and snapped it back in, slipping on his yellow shooting glasses as he pulled off the road and got out, spying a useful overlook and shooting position on the low hill.

  He'd glassed the outpost quickly, getting a raw range he clicked into his scope and started shooting seconds after he'd laid out on the ground, having made the decision to kill them all to clean up the mess his old perversion had created. He didn't regret taking the opportunity the young girl had presented to enjoy an old, rare delight he'd repeated a few times in his life, usually at great expense and trouble. It was his only vice, a chink in his superior mental armor that never flinched when killing like he had shooting each of the men standing around the checkpoint, hitting them in the head like targets on a shooting range, which it resembled. Three hundred yards in the still night air presented no challenge at all.

  His heavy rifle with its long match grade barrel and huge light gobbling scope had made it a video game, moving the cross hairs from head to head, then applying the trigger pressure automatically until it bucked and flipped out a shell into the bag attached to the breech. Leave no footprint was job one in his work, like you were never there.

  He loved the much reworked, long barrel Dragunov that fired a Winchester .308, hand loaded on his bench so he could produce a .23 MOA when it was clamped down, shooting at a target 300 meters away. That produced an ideal he tried to emulate, shooting .32 MOA at the same distance, the 9 hundredths of a degree the price he paid for being human.

  Why the Americans used a single shot bolt action sniper rifle never made sense to him. This wasn't hunting, it was killing pure and simple. Most assassination shots were well within the 'easy' range for him and most other highly practiced snipers, from two hundred to five hundred meters. For longer range he'd switch to a larger rifle and bullet akin to the fifty caliber anti-tank rifles in the memorial museums of his country, from the Big War, as they called WW2 in mother Russia.

  With those a mile was doable, with care and calculation. But how often was that called for outside of battlefield conditions? The semiautomatic fire of the Dragunov had let him move from target to target as fast as he could find them in the scope. The damned woman officer had ducked down as she'd called in, grabbing her mike as she fell from sight, making him curse under his breath. He was certain it was the first official alarm going out, what he'd hoped wouldn't happen until late the next morning, long after he'd gotten away. He should have punched the rest of his clip through the small building immediately after killing the three men, killing her before she fell out, then rushed for the pickup and safety. Shit! This entire job was going into the 'fucked up beyond all recognition' file, a phrase he'd learned from the Americans who'd come over to Russia when the short defrost of Perestroika had blossomed for a few years under the rule of that drunk Yeltsin.

  Instead of honeycombing the building with heavy rounds he'd waited for another clear head shot then everything went to shit, all because he'd gambled again. She'd been hiding behind the truck, impossible to hit. He knew his heavy round would break apart if it hit anything hard, so he'd skipped a round under the truck. With luck it would have taken out her lower legs with the shotgun-like blast from the shattered bullet, peppering her flesh as she crouched behind the pickup cab.

  The resulting explosion was a complication he didn't want, as much as he'd enjoyed the apocalyptic fireball it had produced from leaking gasoline. The one flash of return fire as the second officer had fallen over his dead comrade must have done it, punching through the truck's gas tank, since his rounds were precisely aimed and no where near the truck body or the tank, which would have been difficult to hit, protected by the steel of the pickup bed and the cab. He hated to waste ammo merely shooting. Every bullet was intentional.

  Soon the surrounding area would be flooded with onlookers drawn by the recognizable yellow and orange hues of a large fire glowing on the horizon, lighting up a few low clouds. Fire and police would be alerted, along with fellow Border Patrol officers the last survivor had been calling with her microphone.

  He had a ten or fifteen minutes, given the remote location and the time of day, a weekday long after five PM, when most people had already driven home from work. The two men hadn't moved, along with the old man, still half hanging from the cab. They'd all lit up as the fire had licked at their clothing, burning it off their exposed surfaces. They were clearly dead, along with the two women, one on the ground by the pickup and the small girl's body inside the cab, all the bodies he could find, matching what he'd expected, the only thing that had gone right in this screwed up job. In a full blown fiasco like this, he welcomed success where it popped up.

  “What a waste.” he muttered as he drove off, the young girl's memory stuck in his mind. He worked out the navigation to his exit point, a small unused drug airport another hundred miles further inside the porous border. It had been graded and laid out during the 1980's when small planes hopped the border with their cargoes of cocaine, the first money making illicit drug, one of many, joined by meth which was easier to manufacture and cheaper, as well as crude heroin, making a comeback – the oldies, and still the goodies degenerates desire.

  Current radar tracking and the expensive border control activities, backed up by local law enforcement with the assistance of military jets and helicopters, made flying into the US, to drop a load of drugs, virtually impossible. But his plane would be coming from inside the country, not a threat or issue. W
hen he ran his escape route he never used the GPS maps on phones everyone else depended on, sure it could be traced and was probably recorded by the big tech companies even if people told them they didn't want to be tracked. The high tech companies freely offer all local navigation requests to the police or FBI, to see who was going where in the time frame of the crime. His GPS path to the Missange house wouldn't matter, it was obvious someone had found them and their bodies would provide a time of death, as would the ones at the border station, but to get away Vladimir always used a paper map. Trace that asshole!

  He smiled. It was so easy to evade the high tech resources of the Americans if you kept yourself low tech and on a schedule, with all your moves planned far ahead. The sign he'd found on the way down, that heralded his turn off showed up, right on time and he slowed to stop and open the gate, recalling the loss of the girl one more time. It sent an icy wave through his body, pure rage at his failure – unacceptable. Vladimir was incapable of regret or despair.

  His reverie passed as he stood at the open gate, then quick movement drew his eye. A small animal ran off down the dirt road and he drew his large automatic impulsively, shooting at the dodging rodent, missing to extend it's utility as a practice target until he tired of his ad hoc game and made it vanish in an explosion of tissue and bone. It gave him no satisfaction. He drove through the open gate, leaving it ajar behind him, too distracted to care, going over his escape plan. Inside, another, elemental part of him, was back in Moscow, on the hunt, an addict needing his fix. Setting up near the dirt strip, he shut off the engine and stared out the windshield, his mind a blank, an idling computer awaiting the next command.