Spy (23 page)

Conch smiled back at her, but both smiles soon faded in the growing silence.

“Pippa,” Conch said.

“She’s my aide,” Hawke finally said, the pathetic word sounding as if it had been strangled up from the depths of his damnable soul.

No one seemed to have any idea what to say next.

Then Conch broke the spell.

“You call him Alex?” Conch said.

T
he robot tank tore through the jungle like a wounded animal. It was all Harry could do just to hold on. Low-hanging creeper vines whipped at his face and shoulders. He was on the vehicle’s right rear, one hand on the grab-rail, one leg wrapped around one of the tank’s aft-facing machine guns. Caparina was up front on the left. She was bouncing around, looking back at him, plainly terrified. Hassan was holding on to the right front grab-rail with both hands. Every time the speeding tank hit a deep rut, or strayed from the narrow jungle pathway, the three of them were sure they’d be flung off.

The pint-sized Troll was doing about thirty miles an hour. Because of overhanging vegetation on either side, the passengers felt like they were doing a hundred or more. Dangling creepers constantly lashed their uplifted faces. You had to constantly duck and bob to keep a vine from lassoing you around the neck.

Now they splashed through a shallow brown river and disturbed a number of sleeping caimans. The South American alligators were not happy at the noisy intrusion and everyone aboard struggled to keep their flailing feet away from the snapping jaws.

Harry was glad of their speed and the fact that submersion in the river had not stalled the engine. The amphibious vehicle slowed, but kept moving forward, throwing off a bow wave of white water on either side. Soon enough they were dry and plunging back into the deep green stuff.

The lens remained pointed straight ahead. The human controller, wherever he was located, only wanted to keep the thing on the path. Harry sensed the robot was returning to home base. Speed increased and you got the feeling of riding a bucking bronco with a bad case of stable fever.

A half-hour later, it was tough on the bones. Harry was beginning to think the tank didn’t know where the hell it was going. They were still deep in the jungle but the path was angling upward and had been doing so for some time now. He figured they must have climbed about a thousand feet in the last twenty minutes or so. The air was slightly cooler and very damp at this elevation.

Suddenly, the damn thing slowed to a crawl. The trail had become muddy and deeply rutted.

They were going so slowly Harry was able to get up onto his knees and take a look at the road ahead.

“Big ravine up ahead,” Saladin Hassan called back. “More of a deep gorge.”

“I see that,” Harry yelled. “Are we going to stop, or get off, or what?”

“I don’t think I see any bridge!” Caparina cried. The chasm was looming and she looked like she might jump off. “Do we stay on, Harry?”

It was clearly poop or get off the pot time, Harry saw. The ravine was wide and deep. Hundreds of yards across. Mist was rising out of it so there was probably a river at the bottom. Yeah, he could hear it thundering down there. Rapids.

“Bridge directly ahead!” Saladin shouted. “I’m not sure it will take our weight!”

Harry could see it now. There was a suspension bridge stretching across the chasm. The bridge reached five hundred yards across the ravine and was ten feet wide. A metal grating ran right up the middle of the thing. On the far side, a sheer cliff descended a thousand feet to the river. The bridge angled slightly upward. There was some kind of structure over there on the opposite cliff, barely visible at the edge of the forest. For a second, Harry dared to hope that they had discovered an entry point into Top’s military compound.

“Harry? Jump, or not? Make the call!”

Tough call to make. The cabled bridge looked wide enough to accommodate their stubby vehicle, but could it hold the weight of the one-ton “Troll” plus three
pasajeros
? That was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, and they were rapidly coming up on a drop-dead decision. Think, Harry.

Whoever was driving this thing obviously knew where he was going. If he was taking the bridge route home now, he’d clearly done it before. It had to hold.

Harry said, “We’ve got a better chance on this damn thing than we do on foot. We stay on.”

Both of them looked at him for a second and then turned their attention back to the looming bridge. They were twenty yards away. Harry used the moment to ready his weapon, as did Saladin and Caparina. You could feel the nervous tension aboard. Good nervous, the kind that gave you an edge.

They rolled into a narrow clearing. Clouds of mist were rising from the river gorge, and Harry watched a flock of snowy egrets slowly winging their way across the chasm. A forest of stunted trees grew from the cliff face. The trees were so smothered with the white birds, they gave the appearance of heavy snowfall. His eye picked up movement on the far side. When he looked again, he saw nothing over there but the squat cliff-top structure he’d seen a minute earlier.

“See that building over there?” Saladin asked.

“Yeah. Doesn’t look good,” Harry warned, keeping his voice low for some strange reason. “Everybody be ready.”

“Think we’re expected?” Saladin asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Harry said. “All we can do is ride the tiger.”

“I’m not liking this,” Caparina said, when they were but a few yards from the bridge. Harry wished like hell she was on the back and he was up front with Saladin, but it was too late to manage anything like that now.

“It’s adventure,” Harry said to her. “Think how dull life would be without it.”

“Yeah,” she said, unconvinced.

They rolled onto the bridge.

It swayed and sagged perceptibly under the weight of the one-ton tank. Harry racked the slide on his PP-19 Bizon, chambering a round. The gun felt good in his hands, and he was certainly glad of it now. So far, the bridge seemed to be holding their weight, no problem. They were already a couple of hundred yards across, nearing the center of the damn thing. The point of no return.

There was some kind of low white building at the far end of the bridge. But no visible human activity so far.

That was the last happy thought Harry had on the bridge.

“Shit, another Troll,” Hassan said.

Caparina said, “What the hell do we do now, Harry?”

Harry looked at the tank coming fast from the other bank. It was a good question. He turned the options over rapidly. The oncoming tank could be on routine patrol. No. That wouldn’t make sense because this new one was sending back a live feed of them right now. Surely the operator on the other side had seen them? If they jumped and retreated, they’d just have to take their chances on foot later.

“Sit tight,” Harry said. Better to stay aboard and try to take out the oncoming enemy vehicle. It was the only prayer they had of ever getting across. Harry needed to find out what was on the other side.

“Go for the camera,” Harry said. “Blind it. Give it another twenty seconds to get in range and open up.”

“What if it shoots first?” Caparina said, reasonably enough.

“We shoot back.”

When the opposing tank was one hundred yards away, the twin barrels of its forward machine guns opened fire.

“Here we go!” Caparina said, loosing a long burst at the tank.

Saladin braced himself and started returning fire. He loosed a long sustained burst and saw rounds ricochet off the Troll. None of this fire seemed to have any effect on the armored tank. Caparina kept firing. She stayed low behind the steel mud-guard which afforded her a little protection. Harry was having a hard time getting a line of sight with Saladin directly in front of him. Then Hassan fell back. He was hit. He’d let go of the grab rail. A leg wound was spraying blood into Harry’s face.

“Grab the rail!” Harry shouted.

Too late, Harry tried scrambled forward to grab the man. But the tank lurched and Saladin pitched sideways, sliding from the tank. Caparina screamed. Her ex would have fallen into the chasm, too, but he caught the suspension cable and hung on somehow, his feet dangling in air. How long could he hold on like that?

Riding the tank up front was now clearly suicide. “Jump!” Harry yelled at Caparina. “Jump, damn it!” But she didn’t. She stayed with it, riding the damn Troll, leveling ferocious fire at the oncoming tank.

“Last chance!” Harry cried, squeezing his Bizon’s trigger and trying desperately to blind the damn robot.

“Only chance!” she shouted back. “I’m going to knock out that camera!”

“Suit yourself, I’m going back to get Saladin!” Harry screamed at her just before he leapt off the tank. What were you going to do with a girl like that?

He landed hard on the metal grating and scrambled to his feet, bringing his gun up as he whirled around. The tank carrying Caparina now seemed to be accelerating toward the oncoming Troll. It was as if the controllers of both vehicles had finally wised up and wanted to bring this firefight to a speedy conclusion.

Harry raced toward Saladin, saw his white-knuckled grip on the bridge cable. A thousand feet below his dangling feet, the thunderous river waited.

“Saladin! Hold on! I’m coming,” Harry said, looking back once more at the girl. Shit. She was still aboard the tank.

Harry shouted, “Are you crazy? Get the hell off that thing!”

She turned briefly and shouted something to him but her voice was lost in the loud crack of gunfire. He ran for Saladin.

At that moment, an explosion rocked the bridge. Caparina’s fuel tank had blown. Had she jumped? Christ. He’d been concentrating on Saladin and hadn’t seen her. Was she blown off the bridge by the explosion? He couldn’t see anything, just a fiery wreck dangling half off the bridge with black smoke billowing up. He stared into the smoke with disbelieving eyes, the intense heat burning his cheeks. No scent of roast pig in his nostrils, no visible trace of a girl’s charred corpse.

He waded into the black clouds determined to find her or what was left of her. He saw winking muzzles and heard rounds whistle overhead. The second Troll, blinded by smoke, had ridden right up and over the flaming wreck and was bearing down on him.

Harry had no choice in this matter. He turned around and started running back for Hassan. He ran like a madman, which he probably was, dodging this way and that on the swinging bridge; and he kept waiting for the stitch of rounds across his back.

Saladin only had one hand on the cable. But he was still clinging for his life when Brock reached down and grabbed Saladin’s trembling forearm with both hands. He managed to haul him up onto the bridge, the adrenalin doing most of the work for both of them. He got him up. Saladin took a few deep breaths and managed to get to his knees.

“The tank,” Saladin gasped.

“Yeah. We gotta go. Can you walk?” Harry asked, getting an arm around him.

“Why walk when you can run?” Saladin said, ignoring the blood pumping from his torn right thigh.

They ran for the underbrush, back where they’d come from.

Behind them, their wrecked tank was still burning at the center of the bridge. The little one-eyed bastard that had finished them kept coming and they could both feel the lens on them and see the barrels swivel in their direction as they dodged this way and that, summoning one last ounce of energy for the final sprint. Shit. It was going to be close.

“Go left!” Harry said when they reached the end. “I’ll go right. And stay the hell down. The camera won’t be able to pick us up.”

Both men dove into the brush and crabbed away from the bridge. Rounds were splintering the trees above and behind him, but it was pretty clear the robot had lost them and was firing blind. The operator controlling the thing was just trying to get lucky. Harry managed to slither right to the edge of the cliff and peer through the undergrowth at the smoldering tank they’d abandoned.

Somehow, he and Saladin would get through this. If the girl were still alive—doubtful—he and Hassan would somehow manage to get back across that bridge and find her. They had to find this bastard Top. Had to pop this fucking Top.

Harry had always known his strengths and weaknesses. He probably drank too much. Screwed around too much, even now that he wasn’t married anymore. And, as he privately admitted to himself, he knew he probably wasn’t the brightest bulb on Broadway. But Harry was as tough as they come, goddamnit. Hard, his Marine buddies would call it. His whole life, the crazy American from Los Angeles, California, had known one true and good thing about himself.

Harry Brock could take a licking and keep on ticking.

H
omer Prudhomme never did quite recover from how shook up he’d been that godawful night they found the lost posse. It had been three weeks since all his friends had come back without their heads attached. God knows how he tried to shake that image. But, you know, how was he supposed to forget those boys riding across the plains in the moonlight? Or the look in the sheriff’s eyes when he’d seen them coming toward him, still tied upright in their saddles? He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t, ever, forget.

Hell, nobody should ever forget.

And he couldn’t seem to run away from dreams about that ghost rider either. The man who was (or, wasn’t) behind the wheel of that semi they’d pulled. The “Yankee Slugger” going 140 with no driver behind the wheel. The way that big rig had just got itself in gear and took off down the highway all by itself. If that didn’t beat all he had no idea what did.

Even if the sheriff was right, and there was a driver, where had he gone? Thin air? Nobody in the cab. No tracks leading off into the sand. Nothing. Didn’t make any sense at all.

And don’t you know he’d gone over every last inch of that cab. Stuck his nose in the ashtray. Buried his face in the foam-rubber pillow lying back there on the bunk. Felt for gum up under the seats. He would have known it if there’d been anybody, anybody at all, recently riding up in that cab. He would have felt it, smelt it, and he hadn’t. It was enough to make you crazy. Nobody believed in the ghost rider except the sheriff, but his opinion was the only one that counted anyway.

He took another bite of his Mr. Krispy doughnut and stared at the black ribbon of highway unwinding through the desert below. He was well hidden, about a hundred yards off the road, parked up among some boulders and scrub at the top of a ridge. He hadn’t seen a car in two hours and didn’t much expect to see another one before the sun came up.

It was now three something o’clock in the morning. Even the coyotes had stopped complaining and gone to sleep. He was cold and sleepy, and the Crown Vic’s heater was acting up. Had to be down in the mid-forties tonight he guessed, looking out at the empty stretch of desert. He popped another couple of Vivarin and cranked up the radio, singing along with his dream girl, Patsy Cline.

Sheriff Dixon had been down in Florida for a few days, one more lawman making the case for stopping the chaos on the southwest Texas borderline. Homer hoped Dixon could show the folks from Washington just how bad things really were on the border. The thousands of illegals trashing the ranches on their way through, the pollos and the coyotes, the gunrunners and the drug smugglers, too many to count, all being chased around by far too few Border Patrol guys flying helicopters and driving dune-buggies. Add to that, now you had corrupt Mexican Army troops threatening to come across the river to protect the damn narcos!

It was starting to feel like a war.

Mercifully, it had been a very quiet few days in town. He looked both ways down the empty road, then put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. He said a silent prayer for Dixon down in Key West. That he would give a good speech. That the brass would understand the truth of what he was telling them. Texas needed help down here on the border. And they needed it some kind of bad.

Homer had been lucky this week, though. Nothing much going on since that bunch of Mexican terrorists on motorcycles had rolled through, shooting up the town. All he’d had to deal with was a drunken Rawls, weaving all over the highway one night in one of his million-dollar custom Chevy Suburbans. Homer threatened to lock him up again and he’d been on good behavior ever since. He’d had a crazy visit from the bikers Zorro and Hambone, wanting to be deputized. And a lady teacher he knew had a baby at the Laundromat.

He’d decided to spend his free nights out here in the desert. The same stretch of highway where they’d pulled the Yankee Slugger guy the first time. Had his radar aimed at the top of the hill and he’d turned the warning buzz way up in case he dozed off. A truck with no driver didn’t make any sense. But it made a whole lot more sense at night on a deserted road than it did in broad daylight on Main Street.

He must have drifted off ’cause the alarm sounded and he sat up so fast he banged his head on the roof. What? Where? He looked at the digital speed bounce back. Well, well, well. He almost couldn’t believe his own eyes.

His radar showed a vehicle approaching a mile south doing over a 135 miles an hour! Hot damn, he thought, reaching for the ignition key, if this ain’t some rich prick from Houston in an Italian sports job, this could be our ghost rider.

He watched the horizon, waiting for the speeder to crest the next hill, silently praying to see a big red, white, and blue semi roar up into view. Once the truck was well past, he’d get on his tail and stay there. He’d planned the whole thing. Stay back, out of sight, follow the ghost rider wherever he went. However long it took, just stay with him and see where the truck took him. Whatever happened, happened was all. It was, he considered, his first case as a full-fledged lawman.

He was disappointed at what came over the hill.

No big eighteen-wheeler like he’d been hoping for these last couple of nights. No, not a trailer rig, just a four-wheeler going like a bat out of Hades. He sat up straight and gripped the steering wheel as the thing roared past him. The vehicle was light-colored. Maybe even red, white, and blue. Hard to tell in the moonlight. Still. Even in that flash of passing by, he had a hunch of what it was, all right. It could be, maybe it was, the “Yankee Slugger”!

The truck cab, anyway, it just didn’t have the trailer hooked up behind it tonight.

He automatically reached for the headlights and then caught himself, letting out a low whistle as he put the cruiser in gear and mashed the accelerator. No lights turning up on the rack tonight. He fishtailed crazily onto the highway and put his right foot through the floorboard, standing on it, watching the needle creep over a hundred. One ten. One twenty. Up ahead, he saw red brake lights flash on and off, disappearing over a dip in the road. He was half-mile, maybe less, behind the phantom trucker. Keep his own lights out, keep the phantom’s taillights visible. Maintain about this distance and he should be okay.

The phantom took a left off of Route 53 and now he was smoking west. Looked like he might be headed for a little ghost town about thirty miles outside Laredo. It was called Gunbarrel. It was situated at a bend in the Rio Grande about a half-mile or less north of the Mexican border.

Gunbarrel used to be thriving community in Texas oil boom times, round about the early 1900s. Did pretty good until about fifty years ago when they come to find out the oil business had all dried up and took its business elsewhere. Other than the little cemetery, which was full, Gunbarrel now had a population of maybe two, and both of them were prairie dogs.

The police radio was hopping. The chatter he was picking up tonight was nonstop reports of illegal crossings. You get down here on the border, the law speaks with a different tongue. Here they start calling the illegal crossers “bodies.” You hear a lot of chitter-chatter and then someone starts saying, “Okay, look alive! I got six bodies moving northwest toward the radio antenna!”

That kind of stuff makes a lawman uneasy on a night like this. ’Cause now the bodies are carrying heavy machine guns and they’re not afraid to use them on anybody in their way.

“Base of the tower! Base of the tower!” somebody on the radio shouted. The desert around Gunbarrel is spider-webbed with irrigation ditches and deeply rutted farm lanes. The only way you can pinpoint any location for another agent is to use some landmark like a water tower or a radio antenna or whatever. Homer didn’t see any tower, nor any bodies crossing the highway.

He saw the truck cab slowing down now and he did the same. They were both doing under thirty at this point, and it was a lot easier to keep track of what was under your four tires. He still kept a good half-mile between the Vic and the ghost rider, As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been spotted. He hadn’t made positive ID yet, either, but he was sure hopeful it was the Slugger.

Couple of minutes later, there was a faded black and white track-side railroad sign, a wooden rectangle with the word GUNBARREL painted on it in block letters. Sure enough, a hundred yards farther on he came to the old brick railway station house, looking pretty decrepit but still standing anyway. He saw some old abandoned oil tanks, overgrown with weeds, and a falling down building that had once housed something called the Shell Peanut Company. Now he passed a cotton gin, a flour mill, and even a few dilapidated mansions with gingerbread trim. All of them long ago abandoned to the rats and spiders and tumbleweeds.

Up ahead, he saw the phantom’s brake lights flash and he hit his own, mashing down on the pedal. There were no side streets so the trucker couldn’t be fixing to make a turn. He was going to stop right here in the middle of a ghost town.

Stop? For what? There was nothing here.

But the trucker was pulling up out front of a big old two-story brick building up ahead on the left. An old factory maybe, covering an entire square block. And with black holes upstairs where all the windows used to be and a wide arched entrance of some kind on the far end, like you might see at a fire station.

He swerved the Vic off the road and nipped in behind an abandoned Texaco gas station that was half burned down, almost hitting the one remaining pump with a busted gumball light on top. The Vic rolled silently over to the empty repair bay and came to a stop right under an old Hires Root Beer sign that had made it through the fire.

Homer shut the Vic down and quickly pocketed the keys, thinking:
You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.

Homer wore a star, and, over his head, a faded red Texaco star was swinging in the breeze, making a creaky noise. It was shot through with rusty bullet holes. Time to go. He checked his sidearm. He checked his mini-flashlight, too, just to make sure the batteries hadn’t wore out.

He eased his car door open (even new, it tended to squeak) and climbed out of the Vic. Then he ran quickly toward the street, keeping the crumbling station building between him and the trucker’s cab. He stopped short, and peered around the edge of the building.

The Yankee Slugger was parked just outside the building. Blacked-out windows gleaming in the moonlight.

Damn. He’d been right. The Slugger had turned all its exterior lights off and pulled up outside the arched entrance to the building. Homer figured the guy (or the spook anyway) couldn’t see him now and he started moving along the deserted road beside the burned-out gas station.

Suddenly, there was a loud hiss of air brakes and then a big diesel engine growled and he saw that the wide factory door was going up. There still was not a single light shining in that building. But clearly someone was home to open the big old wooden door. Homer couldn’t hardly believe it, this was after all, a
ghost
town, but now the red, white, and blue cab was backing inside, was through the door, and now the door was coming down again. In the wink of an eye, the ghost rider was gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth.

Homer ran across the street, right up to the heavy door that had just slammed shut. He reached out and touched it, and it wasn’t wood at all. Solid steel. Somebody had painted it to look like old wood. Not only that, made it look like it was fading and the paint was peeling off, too. Now, why go to all that trouble? So no one passing through the ghost town would pay it any mind. That was why.

He ran quickly around the far side of the building, sidearm still holstered, but he had the Mossburg. There was a rusted out fire escape going up to the second floor. Windows up there, open. Maybe the stairs were still strong enough to hold him. No lights showing anywhere in the building. He scanned the building a second and then he saw it.

What looked like a tiny red eye up there in one of the darkened windows.

Somebody was standing up there, having a smoke. You couldn’t see anything but the cigarette’s burning coal floating in the blackness.

Another damn ghost?

A ghost didn’t worry too much about cancer sticks, Homer reckoned.