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  But if the infidels wanted to pave the way to their own destruction, who was Saddiq to stop them . . . ?

  The ATVs had been able to travel only so far before Saddiq and his escort had to abandon them and proceed on foot. That was when the ordeal truly began.

  Saddiq had brought along a straw hat—like an American cowboy hat—that he thought looked ludicrous, but at least it kept the sun off his head. He felt his suit soaking through and wilting from his sweat, though.

  This discomfort was just one more thing the infidels would pay for, he told himself.

  More cartel men were waiting for them in the mountains. Saddiq expected Colón and the others to turn him over to them and head back to Colonia el Camello, but Colón said, “Francisco told me to stay with you and make sure you are safe until we rendezvous with the men who will take you north.” He waved at the heavily armed men in both groups, who now numbered fifteen. “Nothing will happen to you, Señor al-Saddiq.”

  “Of course not,” Saddiq said. “Allah protects those who wage jihad in his name. We die only when we are ready, and then only in the service of Allah.”

  Colón nodded solemnly, but it was clear he was just an infidel, too.

  A useful idiot, like the incompetent American politicians who were weakening their country.

  Saddiq took frequent drinks from a jug of water carried by one of the men. Finally, just as he thought he would not be able to go on, they reached the western edge of the mountains and walked down a slope to where half a dozen jeeps waited. Saddiq saw a silvery line in the distance, several miles away across the flats that stretched to the west.

  Colón saw what he was looking at and said, “That’s the highway. That’s where more of our men will meet us in SUVs.”

  “Air-conditioned, I hope.”

  “Of course!” Colón laughed. “Only fools would have a car without air-conditioning.”

  They all climbed into the jeeps and set off toward the highway. After the long walk through the mountains, it seemed that they covered the remaining distance in little more than the blink of an eye.

  The jeeps pulled up on the gravel shoulder next to the two-lane highway, pointing north. “Everything is on schedule,” one of the men told Colón after talking quietly on a satellite phone. “The convoy will be here in ten minutes.”

  “I wish you good fortune, my friend,” Colón said to Saddiq.

  “And you as well,” Saddiq replied. He searched for the word he wanted. “Amigo.”

  That brought a smile to Colón’s face. Inwardly, Saddiq shook his head.

  Did these degenerates truly believe that their squalid country, with its filthy, disease-ridden habits, would be allowed a continued existence once the United States was conquered? No, as the holy, divinely ordained caliphate spread worldwide, Mexico would be swallowed up, too. Swallowed up and spit out, remade by the glories of Islam.

  More SUVs—four of them, all gleaming black this time—rolled up precisely ten minutes later, making precise turns so that they were facing back north. Armed men swarmed out of them as they stopped.

  “These hombres will take you to your next destination,” Colón told him. “Welcome to the United States, Señor al-Saddiq.”

  CHAPTER 16

  It seemed sort of disrespectful to Jake for him to sling Chet Taylor’s body over his shoulder like a big bag of potatoes, but even with his massive strength, that was the only way he could carry the man as far as he needed to. A couple of times along the way, he had to have Barry help him shift Taylor from one shoulder to the other to relieve the strain.

  By the time they reached the pickups parked at the edge of the mountains, Jake was red-faced, drenched with sweat, and puffing from the effort of carrying Taylor that far. He was sure Barry would never have left his old friend’s body for the scavengers, though. Jake had known Taylor for less than twenty-four hours, but he felt the same way about the man.

  “Put him in the back of your truck,” Barry said. “We can leave his pickup here and send somebody back for it later. If anything happens to it in the meantime, Chet’s not going to care.”

  “There’s a blanket in the truck box,” Jake said. “If you’ll get it out, we can wrap him in it.”

  Barry did that, and within minutes they had Taylor’s body secured in the back. They piled into the pickup’s cab with Jake taking the wheel.

  He took the rough dirt road leading back to the highway as fast as he could without running the risk of breaking an axle from all the bouncing and jolting. As he held the wheel tightly, he said, “What if that cartel convoy has already picked up whoever or whatever it is and gets to Hachita ahead of us?”

  “The rendezvous was supposed to be eighteen miles south of Hachita between noon and one o’clock.” Barry looked at the watch on his wrist. “It’s 12:09 right now. This trail veered off from the highway fourteen and a half miles south of town.”

  Jake narrowed his eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I pay attention to things,” Barry said. “It’s a good habit to get into.”

  Jake grunted and shook his head. “So you’re saying it’s not likely they’ve picked him up yet.”

  “And if they have . . . if they’re ahead of us . . . we ought to catch up to them before they get to Hachita.”

  “Because once we’re on the highway I’m going to drive like a bat out of hell?”

  “Now you’re getting it.” Barry started putting fresh magazines in each of the semi-automatic rifles. “If we don’t see them on the way, we can be pretty sure they’re behind us.”

  What his uncle said made sense to Jake, but he knew how odd, unexpected things could happen. Still, right now there was no point in borrowing trouble. They would get back to Hachita as quickly as they could and see what happened from there.

  Barry’s idea of blocking the road with his truck seemed workable. The highway was just two lanes plus shoulders, so while the truck wouldn’t stretch all the way across it, it would take up most of the room.

  If Barry was at the wheel and the lead SUV in the convoy tried to swerve around it, he could pull forward or back up to get in the way. Jake would bet on Barry’s reflexes and reactions against those of any drug smuggler out there.

  Out here on the flats, the line of telephone poles that lined the highway were visible from several miles away. Jake supposed the phone line ran south because of that border crossing Chet Taylor had mentioned. There were probably also some isolated ranches down in this area.

  Because of that visibility, they were able to see the vehicles moving swiftly northward along the highway before they got there. Although the distance was still too great to make out details, Jake could tell there were four vehicles in a fairly close group.

  “Don’t know what else you could call that except a convoy,” Barry drawled.

  “Yeah, and they’re speeding up,” Jake said. “They’re bound to see all the dust we’re kicking up. It’s such a big cloud I don’t think they could miss it.”

  “And by now, the one ambusher who got away probably alerted everybody else involved in the operation that he and his friends weren’t able to kill all of us.” Barry’s voice took on a grim note now. “Just one.” He paused, then went on, “So they probably have a pretty good idea who we are, and they won’t want us bothering them.”

  Jake calculated angles and speed in his head. “I don’t think I can make it to the highway ahead of them. We won’t be far behind them when we get there, though.” He didn’t take his eyes off the dirt trail as he added, “You know, they might not be the ones we’re looking for.”

  “My gut says they are.” Barry snapped a fresh magazine into the butt of his 9mm pistol. “I guess what they do next will tell us one way or the other, won’t it?”

  Jake kept a heavy foot on the accelerator as they approached the highway, but he was right—the tight group of SUVs raced past, heading north, before the pickup could get there. By the time Jake hauled the wheel over and the pickup skidded o
nto the asphalt, the convoy was two hundred yards ahead of them.

  No other vehicles were in sight in either direction. To say this wasn’t a heavily traveled highway was an understatement. But that was good, Jake thought, because that way they didn’t have to worry about innocent bystanders.

  Jake had barely gotten the pickup straightened out when the brake lights on the rear vehicle in the convoy suddenly flared bright red. The SUV slewed sideways. Its brakes and tires had to be screaming, but Jake couldn’t hear any of that over the roar of the pickup’s engine.

  The back door on the side of the SUV facing toward the pickup flew open. “Evasive action!” Barry yelled as a man sitting in the SUV’s back seat lifted a heavy automatic rifle and opened fire on them.

  Jake jerked the wheel to the left. The pickup whipped completely into the left lane. Ahead of them, little chunks of asphalt sprayed into the air as the slugs from the automatic rifle chewed up the road.

  Those little explosions allowed Jake to track the burst as it came toward the pickup. He juked the vehicle back hard to the right.

  The crazy thought crossed his mind that he was glad he and Barry had wrapped Chet Taylor’s body in the blanket and then tied it down so that it couldn’t roll around back there.

  Now that the SUV was stopped, Jake’s pickup was closing in on it in a hurry. Barry leaned out the passenger window, snugged the rifle’s stock against his shoulder, and started shooting. The way Jake had the pickup weaving back and forth made it difficult to aim, but Barry had an uncanny knack with firearms, an ability that bordered on the supernatural.

  The man in the SUV’s back seat suddenly slumped. The auto-firer slipped from his hands and fell to the pavement. The gunner doubled over and toppled out after it.

  The driver had rolled his window down. He poked a handgun out and triggered several shots toward the pickup. The other passengers threw open the doors on the far side of the vehicle, jumped out, and split up to hurry to the front and back of the SUV. They opened fire with pistols as well.

  Jake’s pickup wasn’t custom-made like Barry’s rig was, but it was heavy enough to absorb a few hits. The windshield on the passenger side starred from a bullet’s impact but didn’t shatter.

  Barry stopped shooting long enough to shout, “Go around them!”

  Jake responded instantly. He swerved onto the right shoulder, overshooting slightly so that both tires on that side strayed off the gravel and onto the dirt. That made the pickup tilt more, but with four-wheel drive and the left-hand tires still on the road, the truck slowed down a little but kept going.

  Jake tightened the grip of his right hand on the wheel and used his left to pluck the Browning Hi-Power from the holster at his waist. He squeezed off three rounds at the SUV as the pickup roared past.

  The man who’d been standing at the back of the vehicle, using it for cover as he took potshots at Jake and Barry, was now exposed. One of his bullets whined off the pickup’s body somewhere not far from Jake.

  That was the last shot the cartel soldier ever fired, however, because one of Jake’s rounds had caught him in the temple and blown a fist-sized chunk of bone out of his skull.

  The pickup shot past the SUV on the shoulder. With a bump of the tires, all four wheels got back on the pavement and the pickup leaped forward, its speed increasing again. Barry twisted around in the window again and emptied his rifle’s magazine at the vehicle they had just passed.

  The man who had been firing over the hood tried to dive back into the front seat, but a couple of bullets struck him between the shoulder blades and drove him through the open door, all the way against the driver.

  Barry pulled himself back inside the pickup’s cab. “How much did they gain on us?”

  “They’re a quarter of a mile ahead now,” Jake said.

  “Can you catch them?”

  “You’re blasted right I can,” Jake said through gritted teeth as he again tightened his hands on the steering wheel and leaned forward to peer through the dusty windshield.

  CHAPTER 17

  “The package will be in the second vehicle,” Barry mused as the pickup raced after the SUVs. “The other one bringing up the rear will drop off any time now to try to stop us, or at least slow us down.”

  “And the other two will switch places so there’s another vehicle between us and the package,” Jake said. “I’ve been mixed up in a few chases like this. Even if we can fight our way through them, I’m not sure we can catch up before we get to Hachita. And if they beat us there, we won’t be able to block the highway with your truck.”

  “Then we’re gonna have to beat them there.”

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t see how.”

  “We go around them.”

  A frown creased Jake’s forehead as he said, “We can’t. You saw how the pickup slowed down once we got even partway off the shoulder back there. The ground’s just too soft—”

  “Not up ahead, it’s not,” Barry interrupted. “There’s a salt flat off to the west that runs for several miles. It comes pretty close to the highway up here before too much longer. I noticed that earlier, too. If we get out on that stretch, we can go a lot faster. You may not remember this, but guys used to set land speed records at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.”

  “This ain’t Utah!” Jake grinned humorlessly as he spotted the long stretch of white, absolutely level ground up ahead to the left. “But I guess it’ll have to do.”

  He picked out what looked like a feasible route to the salt flats without any gullies or giant holes or sand dunes and twisted the wheel again.

  Despite his still-raging anger at Chet Taylor’s murder and the seriousness of the situation, Jake couldn’t stop himself from letting out an exuberant whoop when the pickup actually left the ground for a second as it charged off the road and headed across the countryside.

  Dust, dirt, and gravel spewed in the air from the pickup’s tires. Jake had to fight the wheel a little, but he kept the vehicle moving in the right direction.

  The slowdown was inevitable, however. He twisted his head to look toward the highway and saw the three SUVs pulling farther ahead.

  “Keep it floored!” Barry said. “You need to get across the outer edge of the salt flat as fast as you can so we don’t break through the crust.”

  “Got it,” Jake said.

  The long, white flat was coming up quickly. He pressed the gas harder, and the pickup shot out onto the smoother surface. It was moving too fast for the salt crust to crack under its weight. Just the opposite of a frozen pond, this dried-up salt lake was thicker and sturdier in the center, rather than along the edges.

  And the farther out onto it the pickup went, the more the vehicle’s speed increased. Jake kept the pickup in top shape. He watched the gauges on the dash, but there were no warning lights, no needles edging too far toward the red. The heavy-duty engine was operating perfectly.

  The speedometer reached 100 mph and continued its steady climb to 110. Jake said, “Can’t get much more speed out of it than that, Barry.”

  “That’s all right,” Barry said. “Unless those SUVs have been modified . . . which is always possible, I suppose . . . they can’t maintain speeds like this for very long. In fact, I think we’ve already closed up the gap some.”

  Jake took his eyes off where they were going for a split second and checked their position relative to their quarry. His uncle was right: They hadn’t drawn even with the convoy yet, but they were getting closer.

  “We’ll lose some ground when this flat runs out and we have to get back onto the highway,” he cautioned.

  “I know. You’ll just have to get far enough ahead of them that it won’t matter before then.”

  “Yeah, that’s all,” Jake muttered. He concentrated on his driving for a few moments, then said, “They’re bound to have seen us over here and figured out what we’re doing by now. Do you think they’ll try to stop us?”

  “Oh, I imagine you can count on that,” Barry said.
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  CHAPTER 18

  The man in charge of the group that had picked up Saddiq had introduced himself as Enrique Galvez. He sat beside Saddiq in the rear seat of what was now the middle SUV in the group of three and spoke over a radio in Spanish too fast for Saddiq to follow. Saddiq could read quite a bit of Spanish and follow along when it wasn’t spoken too quickly, but he had no hope of understanding what was coming out of Galvez’s mouth.

  They both spoke English, though, and that was the language Galvez used as he lowered the handheld radio and grimaced.

  “Only one of the men Colón sent to eliminate those gringos survived,” Galvez reported. “So that must be them chasing us. The gringos, I mean.”

  “Do you know who they are?” Saddiq demanded.

  “We believe one of them is a man named Taylor who lives in Hachita. He guides hunting parties into the Big Hatchets . . . and snoops in things that are none of his business. The other two . . .” Galvez shrugged. “Quién sabe? Who knows? Friends or clients of his, perhaps.”

  Saddiq’s voice was scathing as he said, “So ordinary American hunters, with their beer bellies and small endowments, are capable of disposing of half a dozen or more of your best men, seemingly with little effort?”

  Anger hardened Galvez’s face. “They may not be ordinary,” he admitted. “But they will die like anyone else.”

  He lifted the radio to his mouth, keyed the mike, and snapped an order in Spanish. Saddiq asked, “What are you going to do?”

  Galvez pointed to the vast salt flat stretching across the landscape to the left of the highway. Out there, a quarter of a mile away, was the speeding pickup containing their enemies. It had almost drawn even with the car in which Galvez and Saddiq rose.

  “They will never get off that salt flat alive,” Galvez said confidently.

  * * *

  “Oh, crap!” Barry yelled.