Savages (24 page)

“At this range? Nothing.”

A lot of existential questions will be answered just after the “Fuck.”

As in life itself.

The caravan comes up the twisted road.

Like a coiled snake, the Cajon Pass. Way the fuck out there in the empty desert, miles away from anything that could pass for civilization.

Moonscape on either side of the road.

God threw a temper tantrum and tossed boulders around like marbles on the steep slopes.

Turning red in the dawn light.

The reflection makes it tough on Chon, high up on the opposite slope, sighting the Barrett.

He hopes Ben is cold enough to throw the switches.

Lead car, cash car, follow car.

Escalade, Taurus, Suburban.

The Escalade is far out in front, maybe fifty yards, the Suburban is tight on the Taurus.

Ben crouches in the rocks not far from the road.

Remote controls for toy airplanes in his hand.

Two toggle switches.

They’ve been out there all night, planting the IEDs. Studied this road on Google Earth, looked for the right narrow hairpin curve, close to rocks that will contain and channel the blast.

Non-symmetrical conflict.

It won’t be self-defense this time, it will be out-and-out murder.

The men in the caravan must be fairly relaxed. They came up from the flat desert and could see any car for miles, and saw nothing.

There’s nothing out here.

Ben waits.

Hand trembles.

With adrenaline, or doubt?

The caravan comes into the narrow switchback.

Chon sights in. In his mind’s eye, though, he sees—

—Taliban

moving like scorpions across a similar landscape

     his own caravan blown to shit

          blood streaming from buddies

Now I’m one of
them

He sights in again.

No time for

Lack of PTSD

He only hopes that

Gentle Ben

Increase-the-Peace Ben

is one of them, too, now.

Now
, Ben.

Find your inner Taliban.

Ben peeks above the sheltering boulder and sees the three vehicles come into the pass.

The cars themselves are nothing—assembly-line products of plastic and steel, little Bunsen burners of global warming. Dinosaur carbon prints on the sere landscape. They are
things
, and Ben has no compunctions about things (“we are spirits in the material world”). Tries to tell himself that they are
only
things but he knows the truth—there are people inside the things.

Beings with families, friends, loved ones, hopes, fears.

Capable, unlike the vessels that carry them, of pain and suffering.

Which he is about to inflict.

Index finger and thumb poised on the switch.

A simple muscle fiber twitch but

There is no Undo button.

No Control Alt Delete

Ben thinks about suicide bombers

Murder is the suicide of the soul.

He takes his hand off.

Now, Ben, Chon thinks.

Now or never.

Now or not at all.

Two more seconds and the moment will have passed.

Ben flips the switch.

A blast of flame and the lead car hops sideways.

Shredded.

The cash car speeds up to pull around it but

Chon squeezes the trigger of the Barrett Model 90 and

The driver’s face disappears, red (incarnadine) with the daybreak, then

Its passenger leans in to take the wheel as

Chon slides the bolt back, reloads, sights, and shoots a big ragged
hole into the would-be hero’s chest and then the car rolls into the rocks, stops, and bursts into flame.

Men, rifles in their hands, start to get out of the follow car but

Ben flips the second switch and

fragments of the Escalade become shrapnel, tearing, ripping, killing, and what it doesn’t do

Chon does.

The survivors of the blast—stunned, shocked, and bleeding—look up and around as if to ask the question

where does death come from

it comes from

Chon, sliding the bolt, pulling the trigger, and in seconds

It is quiet except for

The crackling of flames and the

Groans of the wounded.

Chon drops the rifle, it

Clatters on the rocks and he

Scampers down the slope, gets into the work car, pulled off on the side, covered in brush, and he races it down to where

Ben

his face lit by flame

stands among the dead and dying.

“Get the money,” Chon says. He reaches under the dead driver’s legs and releases the trunk.

It opens with a dull pop.

Canvas bags full of cash.

They heft them and carry them to their own car and come back for more and Ben hears the shot and sees Chon whirl and fall and Ben

Head on a swivel, turns and shoots the shooter, dying anyway.

Ben pulls Chon up from the dust, helps him to the work car, sits him in the passenger seat. Starts to get behind the wheel but Chon says, “Get the rest of the cash. And Ben, you know what you have to do.”

Ben grabs the two remaining satchels and tosses them into the car.

Then he walks back.

He does know

What he has to do.

Wounded survivors could identify them

And kill O.

He finds three men still alive.

Fetal, curled in pain.

He shoots each of them in the back of the head.

Fuck that.

Chon’s response to Ben’s “We have to get you to a hospital.”

Chon rips off a piece of his shirt, presses it to his shoulder, down on the wound, and keeps pressing.

“Where’s the nearest hospital?” Ben asks.

“You go to a hospital with a gunshot wound,” Chon says calmly, “the first thing they do is call the cops. Drive to Ocotillo Wells.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Ben answers, his hands trembling on the wheel. There’s no hospital in Ocotillo Wells. It’s a little
desert shit-hole that services the four-wheeler, off-road types.

“Ocotillo Wells,” Chon answers.

“Okay.”

“You’re doing great.”

“Just don’t die,” Ben says. “Stay with me. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say?”

Chon laughs.

Chon is so cool.

Been There Before.

In Stanland. Convoy ambushed. Narrow mountain road. Shit flying, people hurt, you either stay cool or your people die, you die. You don’t do that, you stay cool, you get—

Everybody Out.

Speaking of which—

Ben pulls alongside the Airstream trailer off a dirt road in the Middle of Nowhere.

Tumbleweeds tossing around like they blew off a movie set. Jury-rigged power line jacked from a phone pole to the trailer. An old pickup and a Dodge GT parked under a homemade
remada
built of willow poles.

“Pull it up close,” Chon instructs. “Go knock on the door, tell Doc you got me with you and that I took one.”

Ben gets out.

Legs feel like old rubber, loose and shaky.

He goes up the wooden steps to the trailer door and knocks. Hears,
“Oh-three-thirty, this better be fucking good.”

Door opens, a guy about their age stares at him. Boxer shorts and nothing else on, disheveled, eyes red, he looks at Ben and says, “If you’re some fucking Jehovah’s Witness or something I’m going to kick your ass.”

“It’s Chon. He’s shot.”

“Get him in here.”

Ken “Doc” Lorenzen, former medic on Chon’s SEAL team, is one cool cat.

You don’t believe it, you should have seen him at that ambush scene—dry ice in triple-digit heat—moving from one wounded man to the next with deliberate haste—as if bullets weren’t coming in at him, as if he weren’t a target. If it hadn’t been so serious it would have been comical, Doc out there with his weird body shape—short legs, short trunk, long arms—distributing life-saving medical assistance. What Doc did that day should have earned him the MOH but Doc didn’t care.

Doc did his job.

He got Everyone Out.

Now he lives in this trailer off his pension and disability, pounds beer, eats Hormel chili and Dinty Moore beef stew, watches baseball on his little TV and looks at porn except when he can pull a four-wheeler chick off her dune buggy, one who doesn’t mind a trailer.

It’s a decent life.

He sweeps crushed beer cans, newspapers, porn mags, and a bag of Cheetos off the “kitchen” table. Chon hops up and then lies down.

“Is that sterile?” Ben asks.

“Don’t tell me how to do my job. Go boil some water or something.”

“You need water boiled?”

“No, but if it will keep your piehole shut …”

He finds his kit under a crumpled wet-suit, scissors Chon’s shirt off, and probes the shoulder. “You got a movie wound, brother. Fleshy part of the shoulder. Must have nicked the Kevlar and bounced up.”

“Is it still in there?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Can you get it out?”

“Oh yeah.”

You kidding me? Simple surgery in a (sort of) clean, air-conditioned trailer with no IEDs going off and nobody shooting at him?

Gimme putt.

Tap it in with your foot if you want.

He takes out a wound pad and creates a sterile field. Pours a glass of iso and dips his instruments into it.

Ben sees the scalpel.

“You going to give him some whiskey or something?” he asks.

“Seriously, who are you?” Doc answers. He takes out a vial of morphine. “By the way, what mischief have you children been up to that my boy here isn’t at Scripps?”

Chon answers, “You got any beer left?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Morphine and beer?” Ben asks.

“Is not just for breakfast anymore,” Doc replies.

He fills the syringe and finds a nice vein.

Ben goes out and counts the money.

$3.5 million.

O numbers.

Mission accomplished.

Even in Southern California, even in the middle of the desert, you don’t leave six dead Mexicans among the smoldering ruins of three cars without attracting
some
attention.

SoCal takes its cars very seriously.

Mexicans die in the desert all the time.

It’s not a daily event, but it’s not headline news, either. Mostly these are
mujados
trying to cross the border in the hot wild region between San Diego and El Centro and either they get lost on their own or the coyotes dump them out there and they die of sunstroke or thirst. It’s gotten to the point that the Border Patrol leaves caches of water marked with red flags on high poles because the BP agents don’t want the endless game of hide-and-seek to be actually lethal.

Mexican drug dealers?

That’s another story, literally.

You expect this sort of shit South of the Border—it is a daily event, a tedious
tsk-tsk
headline-cum-photos of dead and or decapitated bodies, shot-up, bombed-out vehicles with a confusing enchilada plate of Spanish names and words like “cartel” and “war on drugs” and usually
a comment from a DEA official.

You expect it down there, that’s what you expect from those people.

And you expect the occasional gang echo in the barrios of San Diego, Los Angeles, and even certain parts of Orange County. (Certain parts—that is, Santa Ana or Anaheim—you leave it out of Irvine and Newport Beach,
amigos.
Just clean the pools and go home.)

But a full-out Mexican-style firefight—freaking bombs and burned-out cars—on
this
side of the border?

That’s too much, Jack.

That is outrageous.

That’s downright scary is what that is.

This has the radio talk-show hosts so titillated they’re shifting their fat ass cheeks in their chairs because it looks like

La Reconquista

The Mexican Invasion

What Everyone Has Been Warning About All These Years but the Federal Government Just Won’t Listen. (Bush needed the Mexican vote and Obama … well, Obama’s an illegal immigrant, too, isn’t he? An undocumented worker in the White House. Too bad there’s no fucking deserts in Hawaii.)

Suffice it to say

There’s heat on this one.

It even gets Dennis off his butt. His supervisor tells him to get his ass out to East County and find out just what the hell is going on out there because

It is what it looks like.

A
tombe
, in the jargon of the trade.

Dennis is up on developments.

He knows about the BC Civil War.

Not, by the way, the worst thing in the world, if you can get over your squeamishness; Dennis is firmly of the opinion, for instance, that the U.S. was better off when Iran and Iraq were bleeding each other to
death, but the bodies are supposed to be stacked up South of the Border or in Designated Gang Areas, not on a public highway.

Californians take their highways very seriously. It’s where they drive their freaking cars.

Dennis knows of Lado’s new rules and regs, knows that he’s looking at a lead car–cash car–follow car parade that didn’t quite make it to the finish line.

Another agent out there who recently completed an informational tour of Afghanistan recognizes the signs of IED explosions—two of them—which seems to confirm the rumor that the cartels have taken to hiring recently discharged American servicemen.

Dennis fervently hopes the cartels haven’t also taken to hiring recently discharged Taliban, because that would cause a cluster-fuck of monumental proportions with the professional paranoids at Homeland Security.