by J C Ryan
Rex had never used that command before, didn’t know how he’d remembered it in the moment. It must have lodged in his subconscious from when he’d watched Trevor practicing with Digger so long ago. For a moment, he stared at Digger, astonished at the incredible volume of the sound he’d unleashed. But it had the effect he’d hoped.
“We may have made a mistake in believing Alexandro ran away because he was guilty. Maybe he was frightened. If he comes back, we will give him a chance to explain himself. Will that satisfy everyone?”
Murmurs of assent rose, and then everyone fell silent. Rex judged that most of them agreed, so he asked, “Can we count on your silence and cooperation when Junior comes back?”
A few shouts of yes and none of no assured him that his gamble had paid off. Now he asked Pidro to come and stand next to him, and then suggested they choose a new leader.
If this is not subtle influence, then I don’t know what is. He subdued a smile.
Not surprisingly, they chose Pidro, but not as Inka Mallku. He refused that title, because he said he was not a healer. His title would simply be leader, and he would step down when Alexandro returned and proved to be innocent or a new Inka Mallku took Alexandro’s place.
***
A FEW HOURS later, Rex, Luciana, and the Markses were relaxing after dinner and discussing the meeting when a commotion outside set Digger to barking in alarming tones. Rex immediately recognized the agitation in Digger’s bark, sprang up, and rushed out to see what was going on.
The others were only a step behind him, and they found themselves staring at the business end of the automatic weapons in the hands of four mean-looking strangers. The men shouted in Spanish, but Rex had already raised his hands. Now the others followed his lead.
Rex immediately saw this was an explosive situation, and the only way to not escalate it was to be nice and submissive. Unarmed people seldom win aggressive arguments with people who had guns pointed at them. The most important thing to do now was to not piss these guys off—try everything he could to defuse the situation, keep everyone calm, and protect Digger who was all tensed up, growling and restless. One wrong move from the dog, and these bastards would shoot him. And if they did that, Rex knew he would not be able to control himself. He snapped his fingers to get Digger’s attention and said softly, “Quiet boy. Stand down. Relax. I’ll handle this.”
Then he turned to the four men and said, “Good evening gentlemen. To what do we owe the honor?”
“Shut up and listen,” said one of them. “We know you have discovered treasure. It belongs to our people. We’re here to collect payment. You pay us money, you can keep the artifacts.”
Rex could hardly believe it. A protection racket. Peruvian mafia? All the way up here in the Andes. I would not have believed it if anyone told me before tonight.
“We don’t have a problem to pay you. The problem we have is we don’t have money with us. You’ll have to give us time to get it for you.”
He felt Luciana stir beside him, grabbed her hand, and gave it a slight squeeze, hoping she would get the urgent mental message to go along with whatever he said. Apparently, she did, because she kept quiet.
“Listen gringo, we will be back in three days. You’d better have ten-thousand dollars ready when we come, or you will die without illness.”
“All right. We will try.”
“Well, if you know what’s good for you, you won’t try, you’ll make sure.”
The men melted into the darkness, and the last thing Rex saw was the shine of the quarter-moon’s light on the barrel of one of the men’s rifles. He sighed in relief and turned to the others.
“That went fairly well, I reckon.”
“What are we going to do?” Flo asked.
Rex could hear her effort to say it calmly, not quite succeeding. He gave her props for not wailing the question.
When he answered, his voice had taken on a self-assured tone none of them had heard before. “We’re going to prepare for their return…”
“What! Are you out of your mind? We must get out of here. That’s what we should be doing right now!” Barry snapped.
Rex held his hand up and stopped Barry from launching into a tirade. “As I said, we’re going to prepare for their return, and what I was about to say was, and then we are going to kick their asses for them. Those that are fortunate enough to survive what I have in mind will never want to get within a hundred miles of this place ever again.”
Into the stunned silence that followed, Luciana said, “I should have seen that coming.”
“What?” Barry asked.
“They were probably Shining Path,” she answered. “An insurgent group you three would have no reason to know about. When I approved Ray’s plan, I should have known the publicity would bring them out. I blame myself. Maybe we should just pay them off.”
“I don’t pay extortionists, never have and never will.” Rex spoke measuredly.
Luciana stared at Rex, puzzled. The Markses stared at him, bewildered.
“If any of you want to pay them, you’re welcome. I suggest you pack your stuff, go to Santa Teresa, and get the money. I’m not doing anything of the kind. I’m going to teach these hooligans a very painful lesson. And when I’m done with them, if you still feel like paying them, then you can do so to those who you can find and who still want money.”
The three of them were silent for a while. Then Barry spoke. “I guess you’re right, they have to be stopped from doing this, not encouraged to continue by paying them. Pay them once, and they’ll be back for more.”
“Yes, dear, that’s all nice and dandy, but how are you—we—going to do it? We only saw four of them. How many more are there? If they’re terrorists, as Lucania said, they’ll be armed. How exactly are the four of us going to take on an army of revolutionaries?” Her gaze moved between Barry and Rex while she talked.
Barry looked at Rex and said, “How?”
“I’ll tell you in the morning. Let’s turn in. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow. Those of you who want to go and get money will need an early start. It’s a long way there and back. Those of you who’ll stay and help me sort this out will also need an early start.”
Rex was in a foul mood. There was nothing in this world that could put him in a bad mood as quickly as terrorists, drug dealers, human traffickers, arms dealers—in short, all scum had that effect on him. He didn’t have time or mental energy to comfort his three friends—he had a war to plan.
He was wakeful all night, cataloguing what resources he had and how he could deploy them under several different scenarios.
To the best of his knowledge, there were just two firearms in the village – his Sig Sauer P226, and the hunting rifle he’d brought with him. It wasn’t much against automatic weapons. But in his line of work, he’d learned that necessity is the mother of invention. He’d seen no weapons of any kind in the village, but there’d been no reason he would. Maybe they had something. He’d ask in the morning.
How many of the insurgents would come? Did his apparent cooperation buy them enough trust that the same four would come, or would they come with a larger force?
As far as troops were concerned, Rex had the villagers and his companions. He doubted Flo and Barry would be any help. Although Barry’s mettle had surprised him over the last few weeks. Luciana was an unknown, but he had watched her closely and suspected she had some useful skills. Maybe even a firearm. Of the hundred or so villagers, excluding the children, more than half were women. He’d need some of them to herd the children to safety before the shooting broke out. That there was going to be a shootout he didn't doubt.
In the absence of weapons, there were a few tricks up his sleeves, but some required material he wasn’t sure was available. The rest, he could teach the villagers to prepare.
He’d been right. They’d have a busy day tomorrow. Before the first light of approaching dawn pinked the sky, Rex closed his eyes and went to sleep with a final comforting tho
ught when his secret weapon, Digger, sighed and snuggled up to him seemingly sensing that Rex had worked through the plan and he could also get some rest now.
Rex and Digger rose only two hours later as the noise in the room indicated Flo was at work fixing breakfast. But when he opened his eyes, he discovered it wasn’t Flo but Barry bustling around to get the fire in the stove going.
“Hey, Barry. How did you sleep?” he asked, wriggling into his pants inside the sleeping bag.
“Not a wink. I’m thinking we should pack up and hightail it back to civilization. We’re in over our heads.”
Rex nodded thoughtfully. “You know, that might be a good idea for you and Flo. Luciana, too. I’m sure she could guide you back.”
“We wouldn’t go without you,” Barry answered. “We got you into this.”
“Not really. I asked to join you, remember? And I already told you, I have a different idea about how to handle this.” Rex kept his tone neutral, but Barry took issue with his statement anyway.
“You reckon just because you’re forty years younger you can handle this kind of danger, and we can't?” He bristled like a wet hen.
“Yes, there's that, and the fact that I've had military training, as Flo probably would've told you.”
“Yeah, she told me. But that doesn’t mean you can take on an insurgent group by yourself.”
Rex was out of the sleeping bag by then, pulling on a shirt. He padded over to the stove in his stocking feet and set a kettle of water over the fire to start some coffee.
“I wouldn’t be by myself. And I can’t leave the villagers to face the threat alone. It’s our fault – my fault – they’re in the middle of the situation.”
“How is it your fault?” Barry asked.
“My cockamamie plan to reverse the sting – my fault.”
“Okay, I can see I won't change your mind. What's your plan now?”
Rex was still explaining his plans for fortifying and arming the village, with Barry loudly scoffing at some parts of it, when Flo came in, her hair awry from not having been brushed yet. “Why are you two making all this racket?”
As soon as she’d heard Barry’s case for leaving the village and Rex’s for not leaving, she made her pronouncement. “I’m staying right here. Rex is right, honey. We can’t leave the villagers.”
Rex and Barry answered hotly at the same time.
“I never said we,” Rex said.
At the same time, Barry said, “I don’t want you in danger, woman. Can’t you understand that?”
Flo looked at them, each in turn, put her fists on her hipbones, arms akimbo, and said, “Which one of you thinks you can make me do or not do anything? I’m not leaving. Deal with it.”
Luciana poked her head through the door hangings just in time to hear Flo’s announcement. She started laughing.
“What did I miss? Sounds entertaining.”
Later, after they’d eaten and cleared away the dishes, with Digger helping take care of the leftovers, Rex had to repeat his litany of makeshift weaponry and booby traps. Luciana confirmed she had a sidearm, with a spare clip, thirty bullets in total. They finally came to the consensus that Rex should enlist the villagers to set up what they could, and that it wasn’t any safer for Flo or anyone else to leave the village before the insurgents came back.
Luciana summed it up. “They’ll just kill you on the trail. They probably have the place surrounded.”
With that decided, Rex and Luciana, who also spoke Quechuan, divided the town between them and went to speak to the villagers. They met again for a noon meal and to report their findings.
Rex had turned up two ancient rifles in his half of the village, but there wasn’t much ammunition for either, and they weren’t the same caliber. Luciana’s half yielded three more with the same issues. The villagers used them for hunting when the alpaca herd wasn’t adequate for their needs.
Despite their haste to get ready, both had been subjected to lengthy explanations about the reason there were guns in the village. To Rex’s annoyance, Luciana decided to explain it to the Markses. Baby alpaca, or cria, were carried for eleven to eleven and a half months, so the hembras, or females, were off-limits. Every year, most of the males born that year were wethered, leaving only a handful of the strongest for breeding purposes. If more females than males were born, the harvestable males of the herd became too few to support the village for a few months in late summer. In that case, the owners of the rifles went out to hunt the wild camelids, such as guanacos and vicunas, along with the rarer taruca, a species of deer, to supply them all with meat. And as if the villagers' and Luciana’s insistence to repeat the explanation was not enough irritation for Rex, who understood the urgency here, Flo started her own thread. She was appalled to learn that their presence had put more pressure on the alpaca herd, since it was only late spring, and spring-born alpacas were less hardy than those born in the fall. The hopes of the village were pinned on the almost-yearlings from the previous fall and the cria that would be born in a few months.
At another time, Rex would've been very interested to learn all about it, but now was not the time. He was only interested in how much firepower they had, and after pooling their information, he and Luciana concluded it wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough.
They’d have to get creative.
Because the village was above the tree line, there was no cover to speak of, other than the stone houses and occasional boulders deposited in the valley by ancient glaciers now played out. Rex’s usual traps – tripwires, underground pit blinds, and shooting holes – would be spotted instantly unless the attack came at night. He had none of the ambush-type munitions that he and a team would usually rely on. To defend this village, he’d have to resort to his knowledge of methods that were used in the Middle Ages and whatever the oldsters could remember of Inca warfare. Getting it all ready would be a mammoth undertaking.
After their meal, Rex went to talk to the old men about Inca weapons and methods of war, while Luciana inquired of the women where they could find ingredients for some of the thermal devices Rex had described, and to solicit volunteers to construct methods of deployment.
When Shining Path returned, it was as Rex had feared, though he didn’t know it yet. They came in numbers. However, one of his scenarios, and the one he and Luciana thought most likely, and the one Rex preferred, if he had a choice, was that they would attack at night.
The bandits didn't disappoint - they arrived at night.
Their first indication they were there came from Digger, who gave one sharp bark that was answered by gunfire. Rex, who’d been sleeping in his clothes since the morning after the first Shining Path visit, rolled out of the sleeping bag, instantly alert.
“Get Luciana,” he whispered to Digger. The black dog would be impossible to see, since the moon hadn’t risen yet. Digger left his side, and Rex did a quick mental review of his plan.
The villagers had helped to dig a few trenches just outside the village, where the trail ended, and the well-worn paths of the village began. If the insurgents had approached from that side, he’d see and hear the evidence any minute, as the oncoming insurgents fell into the trenches filled with brush and pine resin they’d collected from the forest below them. One match, lit by an insurgent to see what he was up against, or thrown into the trench by a villager who would be creeping toward the trench for that purpose, would ignite the brush as if it was soaked in gasoline.
If they’d come from another direction, the trenches would be a liability, because once the designated villager lit it, it would backlight the entire village and anyone moving within it.
Rex barely had time to think through all of it before the flames erupted on the other side of the village from his location, and inhuman screams confirmed a few of the insurgents had fallen in and been trapped by the fire.
Digger was back, with Luciana in tow, her sidearm in hand. “How many?” she said.
“Not sure, but there are definitely alr
eady a few less than they came with,” he said grimly.
“Where are Flo and Barry?”
If they’d done as planned, they would’ve belly-crawled to the nearest houses and begun alerting people. The whole village should be alert by now. “They’re telling the villagers to light the torches. We’ll soon be able to see what we’re up against.”
The torches they’d prepared with scraps of wool, fat from the Peruvian chinchilla known locally as vizcacha, and aged deadfall from the forest, were a double-edged sword. They’d reveal the insurgents, but they’d also reveal the villagers. Rex had taught the villagers to stay low as they made their way to their assigned torches, already set up in holes in the ground to support them upright, and then drop low again after lighting them with the matches he provided.
Those who had guns were to use the oil lamps inside their homes to adjust to the light, then rush outside and surprise the insurgents caught unawares when the torches lit them up and blinded them at the same time. There’d be a few seconds at most when it would give the riflemen an advantage. Right on cue, Rex watched as torches all over the village flamed into life, followed by gunfire.
Okay, so far so good.
Now it was time for the surprise Rex had arranged, something that ought to strike terror into any insurgents that hadn’t already been wounded or killed. Before he resorted to his rifle or his Sig, which would be useless against a charging enemy once he ran out of ammo, he’d use a cross-bow one of the villagers had produced during the weapons inventory.
It had six bolts, and Rex intended to make each one count.
He’d prepared the bolts like fire-arrows, but instead of merely tipping them with ordinary flammable material, he’d collected the limestone and guano he needed to fabricate quicklime and calcium phosphide. He’d added pine resin to hold the mixture together and ignite it. And voila! Greek fire. Any insurgent hit by the bolt would die horribly as the unquenchable fire burned right through him. Rex would aim for center mass, the torso and belly.
