GPS (41 page)

Before Jeff could collect himself, Paulo was spinning the truck back around and heading toward the point of contact. Jeff’s heart was pounding in anticipation of his next gunfight. He’d been here three hours and already he was in a fight for his life. Again. The front end of the truck was smashed, but only Jeff seemed to notice.

“Keep your seatbelts on, Hermanos,” Paulo said to the three squirming men in a steady, almost conversational tone. The two men in the middle — one of whom was basically forced to sit in the other’s lap — had been lucky enough to be able to stretch the middle seatbelt around themselves and get it locked in place prior to the initial impact. “Get ready for another jolt.”

When a break in the dust showed Paulo a black Range Rover sitting on its side in the distance, he hit the gas again. The Toyota’s steering was off after sideswiping the Rover, so he had to keep steering it back on course as he roared ever closer to the overturned SUV.

“Jesus, man, are we gonna just plow right into them?” Jeff asked, putting his free left hand up on the dashboard like a nervous mom.

“Yes,” Paulo said. “Take your arm off the dash or you’ll break it.”

- 53 -

It went on that way for two weeks. Jeff and the transients successfully looped around the ancient city in a giant circle, a traveling smash-up derby that thankfully never involved Jeff’s Celica, and which introduced him to levels of fear and excitement he never dreamed possible. Paulo’s crew never once dared to plunge inward into the disease-ridden guts of Victoria, where the only life left was waiting to die, according to Paulo.

While they went, Simon Charles kept an eye on them from the Destinoso ranch through the eyes of his thousands of scouts, who followed a standing order to butt heads with the revolucion’s men whenever and wherever they could. Charles spent those same afternoons in a stupor in his bedroom, listening to the nonstop radio jabber from across the country, his men doing his work. He hoped his view was about to improve now that he had one of the enemy on the hook. He would reel in the little one in hopes of finding a much bigger one.

Charles, in fact, had a detailed scouting report on many of the revolucion’s leading men by the time the big attack on Destinoso was approaching, a scouting report deeper and more detailed than most Jeff Delaney had ever compiled. Through his nonstop surveillance, Charles had gotten plenty of rough details on all of the revolucion’s big players, and even on some of smaller ones like Paulo’s division and the other three transient outfits. But Charles still lacked a direct link to them and to their plans.

He’d sensed a change in the overall tactics — Paulo’s band and the other three spy divisions seemed to be stuck mostly in the eastern parts of the country while most of the revolucion’s regular forces slugged it out with the Freemen in the north central regions. His gut instinct told him it was very likely more of a strategic positioning plan than any sort of attack ploy, but his paranoia told him something different.

He knew his men were being spied on, too, and the movements of the revolucion, he thought, were focused on creating a stronger presence on the east coast as the FB drove south.

In reality, the looming revolucion attack had been nothing more than a random idea, a chance to use expendable bodies in an attempt to take a surprise shot at the FB’s head honcho. The Freemen troops had successfully driven their wedge down the middle of the country, but Charles’ drive to conquer the unknown had been softened greatly in the last six months by his almost constant intoxication.

He had reached a point at which the men around him were following his mystique much more than they were his actual knowledge or his blueprint for taking over. In fact, there was no plan anymore, only a knowledge that the fight he had picked was far beyond his control or his orders now.

He spent more and more days in total seclusion, dreading the moment when he got the call that somewhere out there his boys were taking it on the chin, were being overrun by an opposition much greater in size and strength than they could handle. He’d won the dare with his old college pals, and now most of his afternoons were consumed with wishing it had never been made. The constant radio voice cascading across the room made the reality of the thing inescapable, and as much as the distorted, rambling voices haunted him, he refused to ever be out of touch with them. Charles even had a speaker on the window sill in his shower. He had to know what was happening.

The only one of his friends still alive from the group that had initially invaded the desert together was now a rogue leader, still representing the Freemen Brigade with unrelenting rage but having cut off almost all contact with the home base at Destinoso. The last time he checked in, his crew had rambled all the way down to the southwest coast, something Charles had challenged him to do yet never dreamed to be possible. His men had proven him wrong, and with every drop of blood spilled, Charles knew there was a greater price to be paid in the end.

The other high-ranking members of the Freemen had been given long leashes in recent months as well. Though he knew he could never withdraw now, Charles wanted his men to start making their own calls out there. In his afternoon solitude, he accepted that he would always be the man who’d started the war, but now he lived in fear of its outcome, and wanted less and less of a direct hand in the violence.

But those were his days.

At night, the much darker side of Charles took over. His afternoons of paranoia led to nightly cocaine binges and increasingly outrageous behavior. The parties he spent the day dreading never really got kicking until Charles himself emerged from the main house and began dancing wildly in the seas of drunken people.

And as he swayed and darted among them, he found the worth in it all again. He was a modern-day conquistador, a landlocked pirate who could stagger unarmed through thousands of machine-gun wielding hooligans and never have to worry about even the slightest measure of dissent. He could snap his finger and have every one of them standing at attention and ready to kill for him.

In fact, on the same night the transients rode to Victoria, that was exactly what Charles did. After partying in the crowd for better than an hour, a sweaty, inebriated Charles demanded the public address system be switched on at the house. Through giant speakers wheeled onto the front porch for such occasions, Charles wailed orders to a stunned crowd, many of them unarmed, drunk women. He ordered the women to be taken home by the bus drivers, and he sent all of the men at the ranch that night, no matter their rank, into the pitch-black desert on foot, telling them to find out something they didn’t already know about the revolucion.

The following morning, men from all sorts of divisions began to arrive back at the ranch. Destinoso had become the principal stopover for all the FB men who were taking leaves from the fighting, or who were crossing that part of the desert and looking for a guaranteed good time.

So there were always big crowds for the parties even though most of the boys and all the girls had to take their business elsewhere when the orgy ended.

Many of the men had gotten lost out there that night, in part because many of them were too high or drunk to know where they were when they left, but also because many of them had never been in this part of the country before. The ranch rested in one of the most secluded canyons in the country, cloaked by a ring of treacherous peaks and passes. That meant dozens of vague distress calls had to be answered by Charles’ henchmen at the ranch well into the following day to get everyone accounted for and returned.

When Charles woke to the sounds of trucks moving around outside late that morning, his first thought was that they were being invaded. He didn’t remember much of the previous night until he was told the troops at the ranch were coming back from their all-night missions, and that they had not found much of anything the FB didn’t already know in terms of the whereabouts or the intentions of the revolucion.

Though he had grown to fear and regret the war, Charles never relented in his pursuit of power and respect, so the man who barely remembered issuing such an order in the first place issued it again the following night.

- 54 -

Hawkins was lying flat on his back in the rough grass of a clearing when he opened his eyes. It had taken him quite a while to become fully aware that he was awake, that he was alive and that he had even been sleeping.

The sounds of birds and the insects had lulled him in and out of what seemed a very long slumber until slowly his brain began to process information again. When it did, Hawkins became aware of some very important things: 1. He was alone. 2. He didn’t know where he was. 3. He was stark naked. 4. He had fresh, cold water sitting next to him (his arm had been resting on it), but nothing else. 5. The back of his neck had been bitten by something and it felt inflamed and itchy.

He stood slowly to his feet and touched his right hand to the back of his neck. A bolt of pain shot down his back and he reared. Whatever it was, it had gotten him good. He wanted to dump some of his cold water, wherever that had come from, down his neck, but he knew what it felt like to use your water for anything other than drinking out here. When it was all gone, your first thought was that you’d still have some left to drink if you hadn’t wasted it on something else. So he didn’t.

He pulled himself up and began walking, not sure what had happened but promising himself not to be surprised by anything. Maybe this was the part where a bunch of directors would come running out of the brush, he thought, and they would tell him that he had unwittingly been the winner of a hidden-camera survival television show. Hawkins had wished that wish a million times since he got here. It would seem more fitting for it to come true now than ever, when he could accept the prize wearing nothing but the things he was born with.

“This last year has been a real pain in the neck, Don!” he imagined himself telling the show host, rubbing his bitten neck with a delirious smile. Hawkins had started dreaming about the card game back at Vinnie’s in Newcastle in the seconds before he’d become fully awake.

It was a blurry version of those times before the cards got permanently whisked off the table in lieu of blow and crushed pills. But Hawkins wasn’t even sure he had been sleeping, so he wasn’t sure if he had actually been dreaming or not. But he had been about to play a big hand, it seemed.

His wits came back to him completely when he recognized the rock in the clearing. He remembered walking up on the GPS unit, which had now vanished along with his clothes, remembered using it to scale up the mountainside and look for camps. But then there was nothing, no recollection until waking up naked in the very same clearing.

Scared and seemingly unarmed, Hawkins crept back in the direction from which he had originally come, waiting for something to leap out and kill him. He wondered if there was any chance he could find his way back to camp now, but also wondered if maybe Paulo’s men had come and found him, drugged him and played some sort of trick on him. Was he being watched? The idea of making it to camp carried with it the image of him walking into the clearing completely nude amid howls of laughter.

He pictured the little GPS map the last time he had seen it. He remembered thinking if he was unable to scale the mountain directly in front of him, there were some other plateaus off to the west that looked reachable. With that, he steered off his original path and began scaling the wall of rock to his right, trying to pin his canteen in the pit of his left arm as he went. He made many futile attempts to forget the itching and burning that tingled the back of his neck.

After surgically implanting a tracking device at the base of Hawkins’ skull, Charles’ men had stripped Hawkins of his clothes, rifle, handgun and other belongings and dragged him right back to the place he’d taken the bait earlier that day and left him — with a full canteen of fresh water — to awake in a confused panic, and hopefully begin a mad scramble back to the camp from which he came.

All the while Charles had sat tensely in his room alone, watching with the grin of a jackal the movement of the idiot kid on his monitor. As long as the boy didn’t scratch that itch on the back of his neck too much, he could lead to the fall of the dogged little revolucion spy regiment that had been nipping at Charles’ heels all these years.

In the meantime, he wanted to keep fishing, and the handheld GPS was his most reliable lure.

- 55 -

Charles sent the word. He’d already changed his mind about the man on the run. He wanted someone else, someone stronger and more important who wouldn’t run off screaming into the cliffs like this kid seemed to be doing. Hawkins was too unpredictable, and Charles already doubted if the boy’s current course would lead them to a camp. The boy might have been driven right out of his mind by being captured and released in such a rough manner.

A stubborn repeater of failed ideas, Charles grabbed his two-way and spoke in a cartoonish, radio announcer’s voice as he began to move about the main bedroom at Destinoso, opening the curtains for the first time in weeks, rearing back and squinting into the sun.

“Rebait the hook boys! Rebait the hook! That was a great catch, a real fighter on the hook but a real letdown once we got him in the boat. Keep him on the stringer! But now that we’ve got our favorite lure back, if we were to cast right back out, maybe a little closer to home this time, fellas? Boy, do you ever just throw your line out there and
know
you’re gonna catch one? We’re gonna catch one. Keep me posted, and I mean don’t waste my goddamn time with anything other than a result. Over and out.”

Hawkins had taken the bait, alright, but Charles sensed he was a loner now, even if he wasn’t before. No way he was still running with the pack. The kid was out there alone that day. But Charles still sensed revolucion movement, and had actually been told about it by his scouts. Loner or not, this kid was too dumb to have made it this far and stayed alive completely on his own. Others couldn’t be far.