High Desert Vengeance (Brannigan's Blackhearts Book 5)

by Peter Nealen

  In other ways, he wondered just how broken they were. And, by extension, how broken he was.

  But questions like that were for another time, preferably drinking beer around a TV or a gaming table. Right at the moment, he needed to concentrate on following Acosta.

  As they’d expected, Acosta headed south, straight out of town. Just before leaving the outskirts of Lordsburg, Bianco pulled onto a side street and killed his headlights. Then he circled the block and headed out into the desert, following the red sparks of Acosta’s taillights.

  “He’s heading south,” he said. “What’s the bet that he’s going to Mexico?”

  “No bet,” Wade said. “I’m not stupid. Of course he’s going to Mexico. And we’re gonna follow him there. Either he meets with these Espino-Gallo fucks, or he meets with somebody who will lead us to ‘em. Mark my words.”

  “Unless he’s working with somebody else, and using the Espino-Gallo gang as patsies,” Bianco offered. Wade swiveled his head to look at him, with those unnervingly bright, pale blue eyes of his.

  “You really think any of these yokels are that sophisticated?” he asked.

  Bianco shrugged as he pulled the skullcap mount down over his head and adjusted the PVS-14 with one hand as he drove with the other. “It’s possible. I’m pretty sure that he really is working with them; I don’t think there are enough people around here for another faction to be involved, at least not without somebody noticing.” He thought for a moment. “I might use that in a game, though.”

  Anyone else would have been shaking their head, but Wade was rubbing his chin. “That’s an interesting idea,” he said. “Which game?”

  “Some friends and I have a hard-boiled detective game we’ve been running for a few months,” Bianco said.

  “I’m more of a comic book guy,” Wade said, “but that sounds kinda interesting.”

  “You should join us,” Bianco said. “We don’t get together all that regularly, but I can send you an invite.”

  “I might,” Wade said. “Tell me more about it.”

  The two of them descended into a detailed discussion of role-playing games and comics as they followed Acosta’s taillights through the desert night, heading south.

  Chapter 18

  Acosta didn’t cross the border near the Gomez ranch. In fact, Bianco had started to doubt just what was going on, as he veered aside from the scene of the Gomez massacre, heading farther west, passing through the tiny town of Cotton City, barely lit in the wee hours of the morning, the streets empty. Bianco hated to admit it, but he was getting nervous, driving the main roads with the headlights off, on NVGs. It had been a long time since he’d done that, and that had been in another place, where the US military had owned the night and no one had dared to cross them except with gunfire and IEDs.

  Needless to say, this was an entirely different situation, and it was fueling his paranoia. He kept checking the rearview mirror, looking a little wildly from side to side as they rolled through Cotton City after Acosta, but no sheriff’s vehicles appeared out of the dark, strobes flashing.

  “They’re probably all up in Lordsburg, investigating Joe’s and Kevin’s work,” Wade pointed out, even though Bianco hadn’t said anything about law enforcement. He’d seen Bianco looking around more than before, though, and figured it out.

  “It’s still weird,” Bianco said, glancing in the rearview again. Nothing but darkness and a few lights from farmhouses and Cotton City itself. “This is Iraq and Afghanistan shit. And we’re doing it at home.”

  “That’s what happens when you let cartels run roughshod over the border,” Wade said. “Society breaks down. And then we get to do what we do.”

  He didn’t sound all that upset about it, and if he really thought about it, Bianco didn’t feel that upset about it, either. He was still pissed that it was necessary, on some level, but the fact that he didn’t have to travel halfway around the world to see some action was kind of cool.

  Animas was even more of a ghost town at that hour than Cotton City had been. They were through it almost so fast that Bianco hardly noticed. From there, there was nothing but a couple ranches and a lot of empty, wild, dry country between them and the border.

  And Acosta was still going south, his lights glowing sullenly in the darkness of the desert.

  About thirty-five miles south of Animas, Acosta turned off the road and headed into what looked like a wide, flat expanse of white in Bianco’s NVGs. With his off eye, he could just see a pale patch in the darkness of the desert floor. There was no moon; starlight and Acosta’s headlights and running lights were the only illumination.

  “Alkali flat,” Wade said. “Gotta be.”

  “Hell,” Bianco replied. “Aren’t some of those supposed to be lake beds? Couldn’t there be, like, sinkholes and quicksand and shit under there?”

  “You know, when I was a kid, movies and TV made me think that quicksand was going to be much more of a concern than it has really turned out to be,” Wade said offhandedly. “But yeah, it can get real soft under there, if I’m remembering right. Never have tried driving across one.”

  “At night,” Bianco added. “On NVGs.”

  “That too,” Wade allowed. “I’d say follow him. If he knows where he’s going, he shouldn’t get stuck. If he doesn’t…well, stop before we sink, and we’ll pull him out and work him over.” He looked around at the stillness of the desert. “Nobody’s going to hear him screaming out here.”

  “And if they do, they’ll probably think it’s animals, or spooks or something,” Bianco said. “I’ve heard stories about the desert down here.”

  “Ah, I don’t believe that shit,” Wade said. “Campfire stories.” He grinned wolfishly. “We’re a lot scarier than any desert haunts, that’s for damned sure.”

  Bianco was still a little reluctant, even as Acosta headed out onto the flat, his taillights quickly becoming semi-obscured by the dust he was kicking up. “We’re going to kick up a dust cloud just like that,” he said.

  “And he can’t see shit through that, especially since we don’t have our lights on,” Wade pointed out.

  Bianco had to nod at that. True enough. He started onto the alkali flat.

  It was too dark and there was too much fine, white dust to see tracks. In a short time, Bianco wasn’t even sure if he was in Acosta’s tracks, or about to drive into a sinkhole. He just kept driving, though, trying to keep the dim glow of Acosta’s taillights centered in his windshield. Wade reached over and turned the heater to “interior circulation,” but it was too late; there was already a faint haze of dust inside the SUV’s cab, and Bianco could taste salt and grit on his lips.

  The dust was almost their undoing. It got so thick that he was almost on top of Acosta before he realized that the truck had stopped ahead of them. Close to panic, he stomped on the brake, threw the SUV in park, and quickly killed the engine, even as Wade pulled his OBR up onto his lap. They might be made. In which case, it was about time to go loud.

  But Acosta wasn’t paying attention to his back trail. Even as the dust started to settle, he got out of his truck, which was still running and lit up like a Christmas tree, and walked in front, getting lit up by his own headlights.

  That was when Bianco noticed that they were right at the border road, which crossed the alkali flat, along with the same wire fence that had been flattened near the Gomez place.

  Acosta wasn’t facing a similar breach. No one had driven a vehicle through the fence here. But he stepped closer to the fence itself, and then was pulling it aside, dragging the wire and part of the fence post away from the road, opening a breach.

  “Somebody cut themselves a gate,” Wade whispered. They were close enough that neither man wanted to be too loud. It was a miracle that Acosta hadn’t spotted them, but then, Bianco reflected, a lot of people went through life that way. Oblivious to everything but what they were interested in, just drifting along. That Acosta was apparently engaged in some heavy criminal activity, and s
till was wrapped up in that kind of complacency was still stunning to him.

  Acosta returned to his truck and rolled through the opening. Coming back, he pulled a broom out of his truck bed and started to sweep the roadway.

  “Is he trying to wipe out his tire tracks?” Bianco whispered.

  “Looks like it.”

  “Amateur,” Bianco opined.

  “Not everybody got to go to some fancy tracking class, Vinnie,” Wade pointed out. “He probably only knows what he’s seen in movies.”

  Acosta finished sweeping the road, perhaps obscuring his tire tracks but simultaneously making marks that a trained tracker was going to be able to see, not to mention the footprints that he was going to be leaving walking back to his truck, then pulled the “gate” shut again and returned to his truck. More slowly, he started trundling toward the far side of the alkali flat.

  Bianco and Wade waited. The Ascensciòn Mountains loomed ahead, ever so slightly darker than the night, eclipsing the stars in a jagged line along the horizon, but there were still several miles of flats between the border and the mountains. They were already too close to their quarry.

  Finally, once they both agreed that Acosta had made about a half mile, Wade got out and started toward the makeshift gate.

  It was a simple matter to get the truck through, and then Wade was pulling the gate shut. He wasn’t worried about trying to wipe out tracks; if the Border Patrol went looking, they wouldn’t find much on the US side of the line, and neither man had any intention of going back over the border by the same route.

  Wade climbed back in and they kept moving, following the faint glow of Acosta’s lights. Even out there in the desert, having just crossed into Mexico, he was running with all his lights on.

  “Just noticed that our brake lights are still showing,” Wade said. “Probably should have taped those over.”

  “There’s some tape in my go bag,” Bianco said. “But I don’t know if we want to stop just now.”

  Wade didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking it over. “Let’s get some distance from the border first,” he said. “But then I think we should, real quick. Acosta might not be able to see farther than his damn nose, but there might be other people down here who are more observant.”

  Bianco just nodded, continuing the rest of the way across the alkali flat. There was some low ground right at the edge, and he stopped there, digging in his bag for the tape. Wade held his hand out, and he slapped the roll into it. Wade rolled quickly out of the SUV and disappeared behind the vehicle.

  In less than a minute he was back. “Quick and dirty, but they shouldn’t show more than a few yards now,” he said.

  “Well, we’ve still got eyes on,” Bianco replied, pointing. Sure enough, the lights of Acosta’s truck were glowing ahead, diffused through a small cloud of dust. “Looks like he had to cross a highway, though. We’re going to have to be careful.” He’d barely spoken when another pair of headlights appeared in the west, heading toward them.

  “Hold what you’ve got until that one’s past,” Wade said. “Let’s not take chances. Not when Acosta’s broadcasting his presence like he’s sending up flares.”

  Bianco didn’t say anything, but just watched the oncoming headlights, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

  It took a few minutes for the vehicle to get abreast of them. It was a semi, the trailer lit at the corners by orange running lights, and it was quickly past and heading for the pass through the Ascensiòn Mountains. Double-checking that there weren’t any other surprise vehicles coming from either direction, Bianco applied the gas and started toward the highway.

  There was a barbed-wire fence on either side of the road, but the gates had been opened and left open. It was a quick and easy matter to get across the two-lane highway, and then they were back out in the desert. As dark as the night was, the ground to either side was a pale green in the NVGs, dotted with the dark shapes of scattered trees, with Acosta’s taillights like a beacon ahead of them.

  Acosta wasn’t just four-wheeling it cross-country at this point; he was following a dirt road through the desert, which was starting to show more bunchgrass and sagebrush as they moved away from the alkali flat. It was all grainy, vaguely impressionistic shapes to Bianco through his NVGs, but he could see enough.

  Acosta abruptly turned hard left, heading toward the dark spine of the main crest of the Ascensiòn Mountains. Bianco slowed. There was a chance, however slim, that they might be spotted now that they weren’t directly behind Acosta, and obscured by his own dust cloud. He didn’t stop, but he let some distance open up.

  “If he’s going up in there…” Wade started to say, but Bianco cut him off.

  “You see that?” he asked, pointing.

  “What?” Wade was looking, trying to follow Bianco’s pointing finger.

  “Lights, up in the hills,” he said. “A good distance from the highway, too.”

  Wade peered up into the cleft in the mountains. Sure enough, there were glimmering lights up there, probably about three and a half or four miles away. “We’ve got some clear ground,” he said. “Let’s sit tight for a bit and see if that’s where he’s going.”

  Bianco didn’t object. He pulled the SUV slightly off the road and sat in the field, putting it in park so that he didn’t have to hold down the brake, risking letting some light leak from under the tape that Wade had hastily affixed to the taillights.

  The two of them sat there in silence for a while, watching the points of Acosta’s taillights recede. There weren’t many places he could go, judging by what they could see, but neither man was going to jump to any conclusions just yet. They’d both spent enough time out in the desert at night to know that unless you knew the ground intimately, there were always side routes, hidden canyons and draws, and any number of terrain features that a vehicle could unexpectedly turn down or vanish into. There was a chance that they were about to lose Acosta at any moment, but the risk that they’d give themselves away by following too close was equally high. They’d already flirted with that possibility once that night.

  Twice, Acosta’s truck dipped down into low ground and all but disappeared, only the glow of the headlights splashing off the ground indicating where it was. And it was still heading up toward the lights in that draw in the mountains.

  The more he looked, the more Bianco thought he could see a glow from near the lights, coming from somewhere around the shoulder of the mountain. There might have been something else back there, but he couldn’t see it directly. At that distance, even with night vision, he couldn’t tell just what the source of the glimmering lights up there was; all he could see were the lights themselves.

  “That’s where he’s going,” Wade said finally. Bianco nodded. Acosta was definitely going up that slope, heading straight for the lights. There was no doubt of it, now.

  “Only question is what’s up there,” Bianco said. “Might be our target, might not.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Wade said, checking his watch. “We’ve got about four hours of night left. You think we can cover four miles uphill in that time?”

  “Are you thinking of ditching the vehicle and going up on foot?” Bianco asked, suddenly not sure how he felt about that. The SUV itself would be a big target indicator if they just left it out in the open like this.

  “I sure as hell don’t feel like rolling right up to the gate if that is the Espino-Gallo house,” Wade said. “But we can hide the vic somewhere first.” He pointed ahead. “There should be some draws back in there where we can stash it. Even if they’ve got patrols out, they can’t look everywhere.”

  “I’d prefer it if we had some kind of camo netting,” Bianco said, reluctantly putting the SUV in gear and starting forward again. “Even if we find a nice, sheltered arroyo, it’s going to stand out once the sun comes up.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t,” Wade said. “We’ll have to make do. Maybe we can cut some sagebrush and pile it around it before we leave.
”

  “It’ll take time,” Bianco pointed out. “And we’ve only got four hours, like you said. More like three and a half before it starts getting light.”

  “So get us a little closer,” Wade said. “Cut some of the distance down.” He rubbed his chin. “We might have to lay up for the day, though.” He might not have been a recon guy, strictly speaking, but that didn’t mean that Wade didn’t understand the principles of it.

  “I’ll try to get us closer,” Bianco said.

  ***

  In the end, Bianco found a steep-sided, brush-choked draw about two miles from the lights. It took some doing to force the SUV, even in four-wheel drive, into the draw, much less get the doors open. The brush was thick and stiff, and both men had to push hard to get their doors open far enough to get out, branches and thorns tearing at them as they forced their way to the back to get their gear.

  They had to change quickly into camouflage fatigues, donning their rucks and slinging their rifles over chest rigs. Wade, sheltering the light of the screen with his hand and his body, was bending over his phone, trying to send a message to Brannigan with their location and what they were doing.

  He shoved it back in his chest rig. “No signal,” he said. “Shit. They’re not going to know what we’re doing, and either going to come after us, or be stuck.”

  “No worries,” Bianco said, reaching back to tap his rucksack. “I’ve got a little toy that should fix that problem.”

  “What?” Wade asked, as he straightened and turned to the brush they’d crushed to get the vehicle into the narrow draw. “You’ve got a satphone in there?”

  “Not quite,” Bianco answered, joining him in trying to lever some of the brush back into a somewhat natural-looking thicket around the SUV. “Though it’s almost as expensive. It’s more of a satcom antenna that works with a smartphone.”

  “Can you set it up down here?” Wade asked.