Eric didn’t like this suggestion at all, as it would leave the two of them with few options if those two riflemen remained in position where they were, but he also knew there was little choice but to comply. What happened next would depend on Luke’s skill at negotiation and the veracity of Carmen’s story. Eric would put himself in that vulnerable position, but as long as the men didn’t frisk him first, he still had his Glock. He followed Luke’s lead and joined his friend where he was kneeling in front of the propeller. Both of them had their hands up to show that they were empty, and now all four of the men were moving forward together, no doubt feeling confident now that the gringos in the airplane were complying. None of them spoke again as they approached, so like Luke, Eric remained upright in the kneeling position and would stay that way until ordered otherwise, knowing that as long as he could keep an eye on them, he might have a fighting chance.
What followed next was a rapid exchange between the first man who’d spoken to them and Luke. Eric made out bits and pieces of the conversation as this man and the other who’d been driving stood a few paces away, in front of them, while the two with the rifles watched from either side. Eric heard Luke mention Don Carlos and ‘Nuevo Día’ and there was an immediate reaction and a complete change in the attitude of the two men asking the questions. What came next was a heated exchange between them and Luke that Eric couldn’t follow until one of them stepped closer and struck Luke across the face with a backhanded slap that knocked him over. Then his companion drew a polished stainless-steel pistol from the back of his waistband and pointed it in Eric’s face as he demanded something of him that Eric couldn’t understand, other than the words Nuevo Día Cartel that seemed to upset both of them so much.
Luke had recovered from the blow and was trying to explain something, but Eric could tell that it wasn’t working. There was something about the whole thing that made him suspect that these men were no friends of Don Carlos or the cartel with which he was associated. When the one who’d struck Luke gave an order to the two with rifles that spurred them into action, Eric didn’t need a translation to understand that he’d just told them to search the plane. The only good thing about that was that for the moment, their rifles weren’t pointed at him and Luke. But the bad thing was that they were about to discover Carmen inside it, and if these men were no friends of Los Nuevos, finding the missing daughter of one of the cartel’s main kingpins would be like receiving a gift that had literally dropped in on them from the heavens. Eric was aware of the weight of the hidden Glock pressed tight against him under his shirt in the appendix position, and he knew that if he had any intention of using it, the last opportunity was probably right now, while only the attention of the man with the pistol was upon him. But could he pull it off without getting Luke or himself killed?
Eric didn’t get a chance to ponder the odds. A short burst of automatic rifle fire erupted behind him and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the gunman on the starboard side of the plane go down. The man with the pistol was just as startled as Eric, and both he and his companion were now staring in the direction of the airplane. Before either of them could comprehend what they were seeing, Eric drew the Glock and dropped both of them, even as Luke rolled off to one side and back onto his feet in one smooth motion, bringing his own weapon to bear on the other rifleman, who was now diving for cover under the wing as another burst of full auto rounds ricocheted off the pavement around him. Luke shot him dead before he could find the non-existent cover he sought, and then the two of them looked to the open door of the plane where Carmen was still pointing the muzzle of Eric’s M4 through the gap. It was Carmen who saved their asses! She had taken it upon herself to turn the tables on these guys as soon as they were ordered to look inside the plane!
“Good shooting!” Eric called out to her, incredulous at her quick thinking and decisive action.
Luke was stunned. Eric walked over with him as he questioned her about what she’d just done.
“She says these men weren’t Los Nuevos at all. She knew that as soon as I mentioned her father’s name to them. She realized her mistake when it was almost too late, and realized these guys were probably with the rival Fronteras Cartel and would have killed you and me and taken her for the ransom she heard one of them mention. She knew it as soon as she heard the one man tell his guys to look inside the plane. She knew too that she had only one chance, and she was counting on us to back her up.
“As if she needed it!” Eric said. “Ask her where she learned to handle an M4!”
Luke did and after she answered he explained to Eric that Carmen’s father had insisted that she get some basic firearms training from his head bodyguard starting when she was thirteen. They lived in a dangerous world, and played a dangerous game, and even young girls needed to know how to take care of themselves.
“Good thing there wasn’t an extra weapon handy in that plane after we took out that Antonio fellow and the pilot, huh? She might have wasted us the same way.”
It was true, but the difference then was that Carmen had been both terrified at the sudden ambush and already traumatized by her experience of being taken to that place against her will. And the man responsible had been shot dead. Today, however, she was acting in defense of two men who had proven their good will to her, putting their own lives at risk to help her get home. Eric knew from the emotion in her voice now as she was talking to Luke that she was feeling terrible about directing them to land here, in a place where the people she sought to contact were the enemy. She said she should have known her father would have put out word of a huge reward for her return and that they couldn’t trust anybody that she didn’t know personally, because even members of Los Nuevos would do most anything for that kind of money. It was an innocent mistake, and when Luke made a comment that maybe her father wasn’t so well liked in Mexico after all, Eric reminded him that the dynamics of conflicts were ever changing, and that while this may have recently been Los Nuevos territory, the neighboring Fronteras Cartel from Chihuahua could have seized control here quite recently. What was obvious though, was that the stop had proven nearly fatal and also fruitless. They weren’t getting any fuel here, and when Eric glanced back in the direction of the village, he saw there was no more time to waste. More vehicles were headed their way.
“Let’s go, Luke. We’ve got to get this plane off the ground ASAP!”
Seven
BY THE TIME THE three of them were back in the Cessna and Luke had it pointed down the runway, accelerating to takeoff speed, two more trucks and an SUV reached the edge of the airstrip. Eric knew the occupants couldn’t miss seeing the bodies of the four dead men sprawled in front of their trucks, but they were too late to intercept the airplane and prevent it from taking off. When he saw rifles appear out of the windows of the vehicles, he knew they’d be taking incoming fire whether he could hear it or not over the roar of the engine.
“Keep your head down!” He yelled at Carmen, using his hands for emphasis even though she was already doing just that without being told.
Eric knew it would make little difference what position any of them assumed inside the aluminum fuselage. Rifle bullets would cut right through, and whether or not anyone got hit was largely a matter of luck. The one thing they had in their favor was that the distance was considerable, and their pursuers were shooting wildly from moving vehicles. Eric heard a few pinging impacts of bullets striking metal, but at the same time, he felt the lift off as Luke brought the plane up as fast as it could climb and then banked hard to starboard, peeling away from the airstrip and the village behind it and heading for the nearest gap between the hills to the west.
“Anybody hit?” Luke asked Eric as soon as it seemed likely they were out of range of the shooters.
Eric checked Carmen and saw that she was fine. “No, but the plane took quite a few rounds. Is everything okay with the controls?”
“Seems to be, but I’ve got my hands full until we gain some altitude, and then I’ll give it
a full check.”
Eric glanced back one more time at the thwarted gunmen on the airstrip. It had been a close call, and they had really screwed up by landing there. He knew Carmen felt bad about it, from what she’d told Luke, but they couldn’t blame her for not knowing this place was no longer under Los Nuevos control, or if it had ever been. Carmen hadn’t been here before of course, as there were countless small villages and settlements scattered throughout these mountains that few outsiders visited, and besides, she was a city girl who probably had little reason to go to such places at all. But despite all that, the one thing she had done was to take the initiative to turn a dicey situation around, giving Eric and Luke the opportunity they needed to finish what she started. Things could have turned out far worse, Eric was all too aware. If Carmen had simply cowered in the plane as Eric had expected she would do, the men would have pulled her out forcefully, intent on cashing in on the no doubt generous ransom offered by her wealthy father. They would have had no use for Eric and Luke at that point, and he imagined the two of them would have been executed then and there. Lately, it seemed that everyone he met was out to kill him, and Eric wondered how much longer his luck would hold out. Maybe it had been a mistake to come to Mexico after all, if the first locals they’d encountered were that hostile? Could he really expect the members of the Nuevo Día Cartel to be any different? Eric doubted it. The best he could hope for was a chance to talk to them before they started shooting.
They had put the village safely behind them and Luke was making a slow turn back to the south when Carmen suddenly shouted in alarm to Luke. Eric turned to see what was the matter and she pointed to the window beside her.
“She says there’s water spraying on the window,” Luke said. “Can you see anything coming from under the wing on that side?”
Eric twisted around in his seat and sure enough, there were bullet holes in the bottom of the starboard wing. A small, but steady drip of clear liquid was coming out of one of the holes, turning into spray in the 150 mph airstream beneath the wing.
“Yes! It’s coming from a bullet hole! Is that a fuel tank?”
“Yep, I’m afraid so. That’s all it could be,” Luke said. “The tanks are in each wing, port and starboard. I thought the gauge was just being erratic, but now I can see that it’s not. The bullet must have just nicked the edge of the tank, or it would already be empty, but even with a tiny hole, it won’t last long.”
“Is there a fire danger? It looks to me like most of it is getting dissipated into the air behind the wing. It was your sharp turn that put it on the window and caused Carmen to notice it.”
“We should be okay since there’s nothing hot enough to ignite it that far behind the engine. The biggest issue is that we were already low and now we’re going to lose half of what we had. We’ll run out of options fast if we don’t find a safe place to put her down soon, so I need you to take the controls and keep it steady while I go over the maps again. Wherever we set her down this time, that’s going to be it, because we can’t take off again on what we’ll have left by then!”
Luke had already given him the controls a couple of times earlier, so Eric was confident he could hold the plane steady while Luke turned his attention to navigation. A bullet hole in one of the two fuel tanks was going to alter their plans even if they did manage to put the plane down in a friendly town or village, because simply refueling and then setting out on a heading for Texas wasn’t going to work now. They either had to find a way to repair the leak or depend on Carmen’s father to supply alternate transportation—if they could even find the man to arrange returning her to him. This unfortunate event certainly introduced more variables, but Eric knew it could be far worse. At least none of them were hit and none of the bullets that struck the airplane had compromised its ability to fly as long as the fuel held out.
The rugged mountain landscape beneath them offered few options for an emergency landing that Eric could see, as it was sparsely populated and crossed only by a winding gravel road that he could see snaking up and down the ridges and through the canyons from west to east. Luke and Carmen were yelling back and forth at each other to be heard over the sound of the engine while Eric glanced between the map, the view below and the gauges and controls in front of him. The one he kept fixating on, of course, was the needle on the analog fuel gauge that now seemed to be falling at a faster rate than before. Eric figured that like many such gauges, it couldn’t be trusted entirely, and it was better to err on the conservative side than chance the other alternative. Running completely dry over terrain like this would be a disaster—and maybe one none of them would survive.
“The fuel’s falling fast, Luke! We need to forget about finding a landing strip and just look for a straight place in that road down there!
“Yeah, let me have it back! We’ll keep the road in sight and follow it over that next pass ahead and hope it’s a little better in the valley on the other side. We may have to walk out, but at least we’ll have the option if we don’t bust ourselves up putting it on the ground.”
Eric studied the narrow road below as Luke made for the pass. He told Eric that Carmen’s input was no real help here, as she had no idea where they were now that they were so far out in the campo where there were no towns or settlements big enough to show up on the map. The only good side of going down in such a place, Eric thought, was that due to the lack of anyone being there to see them land, they might not end up in another firefight as soon as they got out of the plane. But the bad side was that they might be a long way from anyone that could put them in touch with Don Carlos, and once again, Eric knew he was facing a potentially long delay in getting back to his family. Looking for a smooth stretch in the rock-strewn and rutted road that had become their only option now kept his attention focused mainly in the moment, however. What came next after they were down there would be a problem to solve if they got to the ground in one piece.
It didn’t look promising when they cleared the pass and saw yet another series of sharp switchbacks twisting down the other side, but Luke said that it was a good sign that the road continued on at all. There had to be something in the valley ahead, so rather than try to follow the unusable road turn-by-turn, Luke banked the plane to parallel the main drainage, and soon enough, just as he’d hoped, the terrain began to level out somewhat. A few miles farther along, they could see the reflection of the sun on a creek or river in the bottom of the canyon, and there they picked up the same gravel road that now followed that watercourse along the north rim.
“That road looks a lot better here! Help me watch out for big rocks!” Luke said, as he dropped under 500 feet to have a closer look at a straight stretch that appeared relatively smooth.
“It looks pretty good to me, but you’re the pilot!” Eric said.
Luke pulled up and banked into a big circle to come back around, agreeing with Eric that he thought the road there was good enough. But as he made the final approach and the details became clearer just before touchdown, Eric saw that it was going to be anything but a smooth landing.
“Keep your head down and hang on!” Luke ordered, first in English to Eric and then in Spanish to Carmen.
The first contact with the ground felt more like a crash impact than a landing. The wheels hit a rut or a bump or something and bounced the little Cessna several feet back up in the air, throwing it sideways so that when it touched the ground again, it was at nearly a forty-five degree angle to the road and Eric was certain that it was going to flip end over end and kill them all. But through some magic combination of applied power and finesse of the controls, Luke saved it and the plane just skidded into a sandy ditch beside the road and came to a stop before hitting anything solid.
“I thought you said you weren’t really a pilot; that you just had a few flight lessons in one of these birds!” Eric said to Luke, as he unbuckled his seatbelt and glanced back to check that Carmen was okay.
“I’m not! That landing would have gotten me flunked if
it were a test. I mean, we’re on the ground in one piece, but even if we had fuel, we’d have hell ever getting out of here again, jammed up in deep sand like we are.”
“Then it’s time to make a Plan B, because I doubt we’ll be flying. I hope Carmen’s up for a long walk, because I think that’s what we’ll be doing. It doesn’t look like this road gets much traffic.”
“I’ll have a look around; check it for sign.”
“Yeah, I somehow forgot that you’re an expert tracker too, in addition to our pilot and interpreter!”
“Hey, I’ve got to earn my keep or why would you want me around?”
“Good point, but I imagine you’re second-guessing your decision to get involved in all this right about now, aren’t you, Luke?”
Eric knew he wasn’t, he was just ragging him a bit. Luke wouldn’t be here if he didn’t think it was worthwhile. Sure, he was anxious to get home, but for him that wasn’t the same as it was for Eric. Luke knew his people were all safe, and while the families of Nantan, Red and Wolf needed to be notified, nothing about bringing them the bad news was urgent, nor was his thirst for revenge, that he would satisfy in good time.
Eric readied their weapons and sorted through the other gear they could carry on foot while Luke scoured the nearby road for tire tracks and footprints. Since Eric had included extra weapons and magazines in their stash before they left the compound, there was a spare M4 for Carmen, who had so recently proven her capabilities with it. Eric didn’t want to overburden her for what could be a long trek, so he handed her the rifle with just the one magazine that was in it, knowing that he and Luke would stick as close to her as possible for the duration, and could supply her with more if indeed they ended up in a firefight and she needed more than thirty rounds.
Feral Nation Series (Book 7): Feral Nation [Sabotage] Page 7
