GPS (42 page)

Charles gazed at himself in the mirror as giant shafts of sunlight poured into the long-darkened room. He imagined one of the others finding the GPS out there, wondered how long it would take, who it would be.

All they had to do was turn it on and, poof! On the hook. It would be quite a measure of how close they really were, how many were out there and what they were up to. In a war involving the lives of millions of people, Charles was content to play with just a few of them at a time now.

It’s all he’d wanted to begin with, to feel what real power felt like. He just didn’t realize he’d had his fill until it was too late. He pondered his reflection for a long time, and was disgusted at the sight of himself. The beer-and-wing gut of his mid-20s had become more the size of a mini-keg or an oven roaster.

His face was chalky and lined from the brutal life that had become an ugly, unwanted addiction. The whites of his eyes looked more of a dull yellow. With the radio chattering away constantly on the nightstand behind him, Charles dropped his head into his hands and began to sob almost theatrically. Eventually, he drifted to sleep still in his chair and dreamed mostly in nightmares thanks to the frantic chatter and static swirling around the room.

At some point, he wrestled himself to a standing position and threw all of the curtains closed again. He pawed at a pill bottle on the desk, emptied five blue capsules into his hand and swallowed them in one gulp. He collapsed onto his giant oak bed and slept for two days.

…

When Charles awoke again, he sat straight up in bed with a gasp, his heart pounding in his chest. The room had erupted in sudden bright light, and the radio had begun calling out to him, or at least that’s what he had been dreaming. But then it came again, a lonely, distant and calm voice.

He kicked his legs out from under the covers, fully awake and feeling alive and ornery. He’d been trying to revive himself and get out of bed for the better part of the day with no success, waging a war inside his body as he unleashed one drug against another in search of normalcy.

“
Captain, captain, are you out there, captain? Over,”
the radio croaked again in its almost despondent tone.
“Captain, captain, are you out there, captain? We are on the chase, my lord. Repeat. We are on the chase. In pursuit of the villain. Over.”

Charles stood, hurried across the room and pressed his face against the stand-up mirror, his reflection made possible by the sudden illumination of the plasma monitor and the projection screen on the wall. Charles clenched his face in a crazed smile, accentuating his browning teeth and the cocaine residue caked to his nostrils in the reflection. On the screens, a massive satellite image had begun shifting to and fro.

“
Captain, captain, come in captain. Over.”

Charles watched himself watching the giant screen in the mirror. The disappointing little red blip, Hawkins, was now joined by a promising new blue one, indicating someone new powering on the GPS. He looked to be sitting perfectly still along the ridge just southeast of Destinoso, close enough to be on his back porch. Charles tried to scare himself by sneering into the mirror and lapping his tongue at his own reflection. He began a forced giggle the way a bully does after shaking down the same kids at the bus stop day after day for an entire school year. Someone new was on the hook.

“Fish on! Fish on!” Charles howled, grabbing his two-way, leaping up and down and spinning like an overweight ballerina across the room. “This is your captain speaking! What’s your 20? Repeat, what’s your 20? Over!”

“
Captain. Initiating our location onto the satellite directly. We are dispatching east on the main road. We’ll duck into Chopo Canyon and try to pick up his scent from the north. You’ll see us on your screen shortly, sir, the black dot as always. We’ll keep you posted, captain. Over.”

“Copy that, soldier. How many are you, over?”

“
We are six at the moment, sir. Myself, Reynolds, James
—
”

“I don’t need the goddamn roster, soldier, I don’t even know
your
name. Every one of you better goddamn well be able to handle yourselves out there, so it shouldn’t goddamn matter which ones of you are on the chase, should it? Don’t answer. Hit the pause button, soldier. I’ve been sitting too long and my legs are cramped. I’m going to get myself a lift over to the north clearing, climb the trail to the highway and expect to see you boys there and ready to pick me up in, say, a half hour. You copy that, soldier? I’m coming along. I didn’t buy a ticket to the game to watch it from the goddamn men’s room. Cut off all further radio contact with everyone until you see my smiling face hailing you from the breakdown lane. Over and out.”

- 56 -

Thinking about anything other than survival is a good start toward getting killed in war. Simmons had screamed that into the face of more than one person since joining the revolucion army. If you had something other than survival on your mind, he always said, you were in danger of not surviving.

Yet Simmons violated his own golden rule after rejoining the transients on their way to the canyon that Paulo and the others called “the parking lot.” It was a deserted pass just below the backside of the Destinoso ranch to the southeast.

The order had come in from the revolucion heads. The attack on Destinoso was to go forward almost immediately after Paulo had sent word to his superiors that they’d successfully cleared the Victoria region, and told them the amount of resistance they’d encountered from the FB.

Within 24 hours of getting the nod for the big hit, all four transient divisions converged at dawn for one final dress rehearsal at the campsite outside Victoria. By the middle of the afternoon, Paulo’s canaries — men who were sent on test drives to the destination to see if they found trouble — were back, saying everything was clear. At once, the transients began their own treacherous, winding drive west into the mountains. Any drive at any time was a dangerous one here, but driving in daylight was even more so, no matter what the canaries said.

Jeff had gotten quite handy with the sniper rifle since his return to the desert, and had even gotten skilled with his deer rifle. As he trained in the morning on the day of the trek to Destinoso, he felt great. Physically, he was as strong as ever, other than his chronic knee pain. In his post-alcoholism, he proved to have a remarkably steady hand and even better aim. The absence of booze in his body and the revolucion lifestyle made Jeff sleep heavily at night and wake with energy.

He had wondered if or when Josh would rejoin the unit, especially now that he knew what Simmons did for a living on the other side. He wondered what, if anything, Josh the center fielder would have to say to him if he was able to remarkably just skip out on the RockHounds and join the attack. Simmons must have known all along there was a chance he would miss the big night, but must have thought the fight was worth his time even if he did miss it.

Paulo said he was certain Simmons would make it, but had no idea when he would arrive. During the night as Jeff slept soundly in his new tent, Simmons had done his usual check-in, Paulo said, so he could try to estimate where the transients would be at what time. He was very likely home again in the same amount of time it would take to run to the store for milk. Like Jeff, Josh had managed to miss a good deal of the dangerous physical labor over the last several months that made the attack possible.

When the idea of the attack on Destinoso was originally hatched, the first hurdle was determining whether there was any viable approach to the remote ranch other than its main entrance. That’s where the smaller pass below the ranch to the south, properly called Rio Vera Canyon but which Fonseca called the parking lot, came into the plan. There were two ways into the much larger Destinoso canyon, the main highway to the north and a small, windy mountain road that ran directly into the canyon at the southeast corner closest to the main house.

More than a year ago, rock slides had completely blocked the smaller south road which also curled right past the Rio Vera canyon. The FB had simply abandoned the little-used road. The Freemen supply routes all ran to the north anyway, and it was better to leave the mountain road impassable to potential invaders. The Freemen didn’t consider that potential invaders might decide to unblock the road themselves. Thanks to the transients’ efforts, the road had been slowly cleared, and it was being regularly monitored by revolucion men during the buildup to the big night.

If they could make it to the parking lot, Destinoso awaited less than a mile to the northwest. When they reached the flat, gravelly Rio Vera pass and secured the trucks for a quick escape, they would spread out through the cliffs surrounding the ranch and wait. From the larger, open highway to the north would come the masses of FB men and truckloads of women as soon as the sun had set.

Simmons, in his usual manner, had managed to coolly slide between worlds at the perfect moment. When he’d come over the previous night, he found Paulo and a few of the men at the camp outside Victoria putting the finishing touches on packing up all evidence of their stay.

Fonseca told Josh what he already knew. At dawn, when the other three transient divisions arrived, they would go over some final walkthroughs to make sure everyone knew his specific role. In the late afternoon, they would head en masse toward the ranch on the roads to the west, eventually connecting with the one that would carry them to Rio Vera Canyon.

The following evening, Simmons — lucky as ever to have played the last in a series of three 11 a.m. games that morning as part of a kids’ week celebration — managed to estimate the transient journey correctly and came flanking up to their huge convoy in a short clearing a few miles out from its stopping point below Destinoso. The silver car stood out drastically from the trucks, but so did Jeff’s red Toyota, which was what made Simmons certain he was driving up to the right convoy.

The parking lot would serve as the launching pad for the operation, but would undoubtedly be a hellish place about 10 minutes after the attack. Simmons had long known he needed a good parking place away from the action, and so would Delaney. Josh always did his homework, and had scouted the place numerous times with that very thought in mind.

The thing that changed everything on the night of the attack was Simmons’ slump. Until his final night in the war, he had a perfect track record of never dragging any troubles from home — whether it was baseball or family — to this side. His time was almost up here.

When Destinoso fell, Simmons was out for good, and perhaps knowing that also played a role in how his final hours played out in the war. But mostly, it was the slump, and along with it came some pretty serious throw-downs with his wife about when he’d finally be leaving the revolucion behind and getting on with real life.

Since his quick rise as a college player at Long Beach State, Simmons had never had a real slump in his entire baseball life. There had been a major accident to live through and a broken back to overcome his sophomore year, but even his comeback from that had produced more peaks than valleys, and accidents weren’t slumps. After that, he never looked back, rocketing into the minor leagues despite being a late-round draft pick by San Diego. He hadn’t had another hitch until that Sunday a couple of weekends ago.

Ever since he saw Delaney sitting in that stadium, Simmons had been haunted, swinging at bad pitches, looking at good ones and even misjudging some fly balls in the field. Josh rarely paid attention to his day-to-day stats but that was mainly because he never really had to. When he broke into the minors, Simmons played well enough to always know things were going as planned. But Delaney had put the hex on him somehow, and it seemed to be having a residual effect on everything in his life.

The worst thing about slumps, he was learning, was that you couldn’t stop thinking about them. It was weighing on Simmons’ mind when he saw the red Celica rolling along in the middle of the convoy. Delaney had shot a nervous glance over at him when Josh first drove up alongside the long line of trucks.

Within two hours, Simmons and Delaney were steering their cars into a flat clearing at the base of a steep mountainside. Armed guards like those outside the baseball stadium that night eyed them as they drove past. The trucks ahead of them backed slowly up against the edge of the clearing, facing the road back out in anticipation of a frantic escape. Then the silver Lexus zoomed up beside Jeff in his Celica.

“Follow me,” Josh said when Jeff rolled down his window, and the Lexus skidded off to the far edge of the clearing, where a rough but wide trail wound upward into the cliffs. Jeff was terrified as they slowly crawled up the makeshift road which had no guardrails, little traction and a massive drop-off to the right. He kept imagining the front-right tire slipping off the edge of the road and his car sliding into the canyon below. After a five-minute climb, the road opened into another small clearing facing a massive, sheer mountain face. Josh reached his hand out the window and motioned Jeff forward.

“If you pull up through that brush and go about 50 feet, you’ll see a great place to back your car into,” Josh said in a low voice. “Leave the keys in it and the GPS on the windshield. I’m going to park off to the right here. Meet me back here in five minutes.”

Jeff pulled his car into the most obvious place he found, a perfect shelter cut into the rocks, and left it. When he returned on foot to the clearing, his guns and other gear assembled, Josh was ready with instructions for Jeff, who was still surprised nothing had been mentioned about the game in Midland.

“No matter what Paulo tells you, get the hell out of here after this whole thing goes down,” Simmons said, rooting through his backpack as the men descended the spiraling path back down to the other transient troops. “Don’t hang around. I mean it. I’m in this for the whole thing, don’t get me wrong, but we need to haul ass as soon as we can tonight, first chance we get. Maybe you’ll come back and maybe you won’t. I mean, I know Paulo has already told all of you guys you’re supposed to reconvene in a month, and gave you a new date to be there and all that. Just get out of here alive, and who knows? Maybe we’ll go to a baseball game together someday on the other side. One way or the other, don’t get killed tonight. We do this thing, do our part, and then it’s farewell, and maybe I’ll see you on the other side.