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  “You saw the blood. Plenty bad enough. But the bullet must have missed his heart or he would be dead by now. I’ll keep up covering fire while you check.”

  Being careful to keep his head down, Jake slid over closer to Taylor and snaked an arm out to unbutton the man’s shirt and pull it aside. That revealed the bullet hole in Taylor’s chest. Jake heard the faint whistling sound as Taylor struggled to pull in feeble breaths.

  “Got a lung,” he told Barry. He wriggled around so he could take off his pack without exposing himself to the sniper on the ridge. The first aid kit inside the pack held several sterile dressings. He fished it out, dumped a little packet of antiseptic powder into the wound, then tore open one of the dressings and stuffed it into the bullet hole. Taylor immediately started to breathe a little easier.

  Jake put a pressure bandage over the wound and the makeshift plug. He used his teeth to pull the cap off an ampule of painkiller and pushed that into Taylor’s neck.

  “He might pull through . . . if we can get him some medical attention in a hurry,” he said to Barry.

  “That might be a problem,” Barry said as he dropped the empty magazine from the rifle and snapped a new one into place. “That fella over there doesn’t want us to go anywhere.”

  A rattle of rocks from somewhere back to Jake’s right made him twist his head in that direction. Two men were coming up the trail toward them, each carrying a Heckler & Koch MP5K machine pistol. When they realized that Jake had seen them, they jerked the weapons up and opened fire.

  Unfortunately for them, they rushed their shots. One man’s bullets sprayed well above the rocks where Jake, Barry, and Taylor had taken cover, while the other put his rounds into the trail well short of them. Some of those bullets ricocheted in their direction but missed.

  Jake didn’t miss. He pulled the Browning Hi-Power from the holster on his belt and put two 9mm rounds into the chest of the man closest to the edge of the trail. Only an inch separated the bullet holes that appeared on the man’s shirt pocket. He didn’t even yell as he went backward off the trail and tumbled over and over down the steep slope.

  The second gunner had controlled the recoil of his HK and brought it back down, but before he could squeeze off another burst, a shot from Jake’s Browning shattered his right kneecap. The man screamed as that leg folded up under him and pitched him toward the brink. He let go of the machine pistol to catch himself. The HK skittered over the edge and clattered away.

  The man clutched his ruined knee with his left hand while trying to fish out a handgun with his right. Jake shot him in that shoulder, then drilled the left shoulder for good measure. The man slumped back, helpless to do anything except lie there and whimper.

  Barry paused in his shots aimed at the ridge and asked, “Any more bogies in that direction?”

  “Negative,” Jake said, “but I’m keeping an eye out for them.”

  “How’s Chet?”

  Jake glanced at the unconscious Taylor. “Breathing.”

  “Probably the best we can hope for right now.” Barry raised himself up and opened fire again. He squeezed off two rounds and said, “Ha!”

  “What?” Jake asked. “Don’t tell me you hit him! At that range, with no scope?”

  “Not all of us grew up shooting with a scope . . . Some of us needed to be good enough without one to stay alive sometimes.”

  Jake had field glasses in his pack. He found them, held them to his eyes, and searched for a moment before finding a narrow view of part of a man’s body stretched out between two boulders.

  “He’s not moving, that’s for sure,” Jake said after a minute or so. “Are there any more of them over there?”

  “I haven’t seen anybody move—Wait! There he goes! To the left!”

  Jake moved the glasses in that direction. He picked up the running figure of a man who was angling away from the ridge crest. Barry fired twice. Both bullets kicked up dust right behind the fleeing man.

  “Lead him a little more!” Jake called.

  Barry fired again, but just as his rifle cracked, the man on the ridge dipped down out of sight.

  “He’s gone,” Jake said. “Must’ve made it to a trail on the far side.”

  “I didn’t wing him with that last shot?”

  “Didn’t look like it.”

  Barry muttered something disappointed sounding, then said, “Are both of yours dead?”

  “I don’t think so.” The second man Jake had shot had stopped wailing, but he moved a little now and then, as if in too much pain to stay still. “One fell off the trail, but the other’s alive.”

  “Good. I’ve got some questions for him.”

  “What about Taylor?”

  “He’s not going to make it,” Barry said flatly. “Look at him.”

  Jake looked, saw how gray Taylor’s face had become, and knew his uncle was right. There had been no exit wound on Taylor’s back; Jake had seen that when Barry was helping him to cover. Taylor might have been better off with a through-and-through, even if it nicked a lung. More than likely, the slug had bounced around in there, doing who knows how much damage. Chances were, Taylor was bleeding to death internally—and quickly.

  “Go get him and drag him up here,” Barry went on.

  “You don’t have to be gentle about it, either.”

  “You sure all those snipers are gone over there?”

  “Well, if they’re not,” Barry replied with a grim little chuckle, “when they take a shot at you, it’ll give me something to aim at.”

  Jake grunted, then allowed himself a slight smile. He supposed it was a little funny.

  Then he was up, moving quickly down the trail toward the man he had shot. The man had bled quite a bit. He was twitching in pain and let out a low moan as Jake approached him. His eyelids fluttered in fear as he recognized the man who had shot him full of holes.

  Jake reached down, got hold of the man’s ankle on the uninjured left leg, and dragged him up the trail. As Barry had suggested, he wasn’t gentle about it. The wounded man grunted every time his head bounced on the hard ground of the trail.

  Nobody had taken any more shots at Jake from the ridge on the other side of the canyon while he was carrying out this grim errand. That made it seem likely only four men had been bent on this mission of murder, two over here on the trail and two on the ridge.

  And one of them had fled, which meant whoever had sent them out to kill would soon know they had failed, at least partially. Jake thought it very unlikely that Chet Taylor was going to survive his wound.

  Barry got to his feet as Jake hauled the prisoner behind the rocks. Barry’s rifle was ready to open fire on the ridge again if need be, but an echoing silence continued to hang over the mountain landscape.

  “Taylor?” Jake asked.

  “Still breathing, but I don’t know for how much longer.” Barry’s mouth twisted. “At least he’s as comfortable as he can be in this situation.” He turned toward the prisoner. “Let’s have a look at this fella.”

  The wounded man was Hispanic, stocky, in his thirties. His features were coarse. If he hadn’t been in such pain, they probably would have had a brutal cast to them. Now he just looked like he was hurting. His eyes were almost closed, and he seemed only semiconscious.

  Those eyes opened all the way, and a wide-awake scream ripped from him as Barry rested a boot on his shattered kneecap. He tried to jackknife into a sitting position but couldn’t manage it with his wounded shoulders. Instead, he slumped back and whimpered.

  “I don’t take any pleasure in hurting people,” Barry said as he pointed the rifle in his hands at the man’s face. “But you just tried to kill us, and I’m not inclined to feel merciful right now. So you’re going to tell me who sent you after us and whether there are any more like you out there. Otherwise, you’re no use to me.” He rested the rifle’s muzzle on the man’s forehead. “And I think you know what that means.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The man started speaking ag
itatedly in Spanish. Barry bore down on his ruined knee again and prompted another scream.

  “Don’t start telling me about how you don’t dare talk,” Barry said in an icy voice. “You really think anybody else can do anything worse to you than what I’m about to do?”

  The prisoner subsided into incoherent whining again. Barry looked over at his nephew, saw the troubled frown on Jake’s face, and asked, “Does this bother you?”

  Jake grimaced. “No, not really. Like you said, he tried to kill us. His friends shot Mr. Taylor. It just takes a little getting used to, that’s all.”

  “Maybe you had better go check on Chet,” Barry suggested, motioning toward Taylor with his head.

  Jake considered that for a second, then shrugged and turned away.

  He stopped, though, and turned right back. Barry asked, “Change your mind?”

  “Mr. Taylor’s not breathing anymore,” Jake said. He stepped closer to the prisoner, pulled the knife from the sheath on his belt, and rested the blade on the man’s left shoulder where the bullet had gone in. As he began to put pressure on it and the prisoner shrieked, Jake said, “Talk.”

  Barry looked over his shoulder, saw that Jake was right about Taylor, and muttered a curse under his breath.

  “He went out in the country he loved, but not the way he would have wanted. I can give you a hand there, Jake.”

  “I got this,” Jake said over the fading sobs of the prisoner as he let up on the knife.

  Then, after letting the man catch his breath for a moment, he bore down on it again.

  Five minutes later, they knew that the man and his companions had worked for Francisco Zaragosa, head of the Zaragosa cartel, just as Barry and Jake had supposed. The men had been with a larger party that was supposed to meet and escort a special shipment crossing the border from Colonia el Camello in Chihuahua.

  That speculation on Barry’s part had been right. Once the cartel soldiers had the shipment, they would take it through the Big Hatchets and rendezvous with a convoy of SUVs on the highway to the west.

  “What kind of shipment are we talking about?” Jake asked. “Goods . . . or people?”

  “Blessed Mother,” the prisoner gasped. “I do not know. I think . . . I think it must be . . . a man . . . a very important man. We have been watching these trails . . . for weeks now . . . Watching everyone . . . who comes and goes . . . The old gringo . . . he is too nosy . . . He thought we did not . . . know he was there . . . but the Zaragosas . . . know everything . . .”

  That jibed with what Barry had speculated after talking to Pancho Gonzalez Gutierrez, too.

  “This VIP, they’re bringing him in today?”

  “They should be . . . on the way . . . now.” The prisoner sobbed. His face was wet with tears and sweat and pale under its olive tint. “Please . . . Mother of Mercy, please . . . help me. I need . . . a doctor.”

  “What you need,” Barry said in fluent Spanish, “is to tell us exactly where that rendezvous will be.”

  “If . . . if I tell . . . you will help me?” The wide, pain-filled dark eyes flicked toward Jake. “You will not let this one . . . hurt me again?”

  Jake moved his bloody knife closer to the shoulder wound again. “That man you and your friends killed was an old friend of my uncle’s. I met him yesterday. Who do you think is more likely to hurt you? I can let him finish this job—”

  “No! Madre Dios, no! They will meet the convoy . . . eighteen miles south of... Hachita. Our men . . . delivering the package . . . have the coordinates . . .”

  Jake and Barry glanced at each other. “What time is the meet set for?” Jake asked.

  “Between noon . . . and one . . . Please, señores . . . this is all I know—”

  “Who’s in charge?” Barry broke in. “Who’s running the operation for Zaragosa?”

  “D-Daniel . . . Daniel Colón.”

  Barry nodded. “I know the name. One of Francisco’s top men. If he’s taking charge of this personally, it’s got to be somebody important who’s coming over the border.”

  “And we’re losing time now,” Jake said as he straightened. “If we’re going to find them, we need to get moving.”

  “We’re not going to find them,” Barry said. “These mountains cover too big an area for that, and we don’t know the terrain. We don’t have any idea which trail they’re going to use, and we wouldn’t know where it was if we did.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” Jake asked, frustration and anger creeping into his voice.

  “If we can get back to my truck in time, we can intercept them . . . and stop them . . . in Hachita. That’s our best bet of finding out what this is all about.”

  Jake thought about it and nodded. “All right. We need to take Mr. Taylor back with us, though.”

  “Never figured on doing any different.”

  “Señores!” the prisoner said. “You must help me! You promised!”

  “I don’t believe we actually ever did promise that,” Jake said.

  “But we won’t hurt you any more, since you told us what we need to know,” Barry added. “Jake, you mind carrying Chet’s body?”

  “Of course not.”

  Jake went to Taylor’s side, got down on one knee, and got his arms around the man. He lifted Taylor as carefully as possible and got to his feet, grunting a little from the strain. Carrying Taylor back down the mountain to the pickups would be quite a chore, but Jake was massively strong.

  “Señor,” the prisoner said, “you will carry me? I . . . I do not think I can walk.”

  “Don’t believe we ever said that, either,” Barry replied.

  He picked up Jake’s rifle and Taylor’s Thompson submachine gun and carried both those weapons as well as his own as he started along the trail behind his nephew.

  “Señor!” the man screeched.

  He continued yelling as Jake and Barry headed down the trail. Curses spewed from his lips in English and Spanish. As badly wounded as he was, there was no way he could survive out here in this wilderness, dozens of miles from anywhere.

  Buzzards were already starting to circle in the sky overhead, swooping lazily but ominously through the hot, dry air.

  Barry glanced back when the yelling stopped. The wounded man couldn’t use either arm. They flopped around limply as he dug at the ground with his one good leg, grunting with the effort as he pushed himself toward the edge of the trail.

  Barry paused to watch. The cartel soldier used his leg to lever himself into another roll, then another. He was very near the edge now. One more good push sent him over it, and he cried out involuntarily as he began to slide, bounce, and roll down the steep, rock-studded slope.

  By the time he reached the bottom, a couple of hundred yards later, his brains would be bashed out several times over—but Barry supposed the guy preferred that to waiting for the buzzards to get brave enough to come down and start pecking at his eyes while he was still alive.

  “Down you go,” Barry muttered as he turned away. His long legs allowed him to catch up quickly with Jake.

  “What happened back there? You didn’t go back to help him, did you?”

  “No, he helped himself,” Barry said.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Are you certain you know where you’re going?” Bandar al-Saddiq asked irritably as he used his handkerchief to mop sweat off his face for what seemed like the thousandth time since he had started tramping through these ugly mountains.

  Burly, bullet-headed Daniel Colón replied, “Of course. I know exactly where we are and what our route should be.”

  “How can you possibly know that, here in the middle of this”—he waved a hand at their bleak surroundings—“this absolute wilderness?”

  “’S’okay,” Colón said with what was meant to be a reassuring shrug of his shoulders. “I got GPS.”

  He showed Saddiq the handheld unit and waggled it back and forth.

  They had been trudging through the mountains for more than an hour since
crossing the border just west of Colonia el Camello. There was no fence or any other kind of barrier, and honestly, unless you knew where you were, no way of knowing when you entered the United States. The white SUVs had driven to a particular spot and then stopped. Saddiq assumed Zaragosa’s drivers knew where they were going.

  Once there, they had waited—inside the vehicles, with the engines running for the air-conditioning—until four all-terrain vehicles had roared up from the west.

  “Your ride,” Francisco Zaragosa had said dryly, and his idiot brother giggled at that. Saddiq found both of them repulsive, as well as the rest of the men who worked for the cartel. They were all infidels.

  Sometimes, though, in order to do the will of Allah, a warrior had to associate with lesser men. Part of the holy task was to use those men to further the aims of the Prophet without being dragged down to their degenerate level.

  They had climbed out of the SUVs. Zaragosa introduced him to Daniel Colón, one of the men on the ATVs. There were two on each all-terrain vehicle, all of them bristling with weapons. That was good to see, anyway.

  Zaragosa and Colón talked briefly in low voices that Saddiq couldn’t make out. Zaragosa looked unhappy. Clearly, Colón was trying to convince him that all would be well.

  Finally, Zaragosa turned to Saddiq and said, “The operation will proceed.”

  “There is trouble in the mountains?”

  “No, no trouble,” Zaragosa said quickly, shaking his head. “Some potential witnesses to be taken care of.”

  “You mean killed?”

  “The death of some gringos bothers you?”

  Saddiq laughed. “Hardly. The more dead Americans, the better.”

  “Just leave enough of them alive to buy our cocaine and heroin, eh?” Zaragosa joined in the laughter, and so did the feebleminded one.

  After that, Saddiq climbed onto one of the ATVs with Colón, and they set off toward the mountains that lay within the boundaries of the United States.

  The Americans were fools to leave their borders so unprotected, Saddiq thought. Some of their politicians had tried mightily to improve the nation’s security. But with a political system that allowed just about anybody to vote and politicians who traded giveaways for support, no one managed to make any conclusive decisions. All to Saddiq’s benefit.