PRECIPICE (29 page)

Sam emerged about twenty minutes later. She had switched back into the light blue peasant dress and was drying her hair with one of the scratchy hotel towels. Now that she was clean, Chip thought she looked amazing. She stood and brushed out her long blonde hair, straightening it over her shoulders and down the back of the simple dress. She was smiling contentedly as she worked out the tangles. Aside from the slight yellowing of the fading shiner beneath one of her eyes, it was hard to believe all that she had been through over the last few days. Chip stole another furtive glance at her as he made his way into the bathroom for his turn in the shower.

When he stepped into the streaming water it was icy cold. The shock of the chilly shower took his breath away even as it took him two weeks back in time. As he scrubbed off the dirt and sweat of the last few days, his mind was filled with memories from The Woods. His training and the weeks of travel with the team came flooding back to him in a welter of images of the faces of his friends. They were all gone. He shivered as he scrubbed, wishing that the bracing water could wash away his sadness and his guilt. How had he survived when they had not? Why did they have to die? Should he have gone back and looked for Harris? He knew in the back of his mind that Harris would have come back to look for him, and that knowledge made him feel small. Was there more he could have done to save his friend? It was the very same question he had been asking himself every day since Daniel’s death back in the spring, only this time amplified because unlike with an accident in his familiar whitewater environment, the answers were much harder for him to ascertain.

Chip had lost several friends to whitewater rivers over the sixteen years that he’d been paddling. Most, like Daniel, had taken calculated risks and come up on the wrong side of the invisible line that separated adventure from calamity, skill from luck, and life from death. That was the nature of the beast; there was no use being angry, and nobody to be angry with. In time he was slowly coming to terms with that kind of loss, but this was something else. These men had been betrayed. Their deaths weren’t due to their own misjudgments or lack of skills. Someone, somewhere had held power over them the through knowledge of the mission’s very existence, and that person had exercised the power with devastating results. This time there was plenty for Chip to hate. The death of his teammates was not the consequence of missteps in the delicate dance with a force of nature greater than themselves. Men had done this, and the feeling that he must find those men and make them pay twisted in his gut and lit a fire deep inside him. It warmed him until all of his muscles clenched into tight balls of rage, and the cold drops of shower water bounced off of him before cycling down the drain.

He stepped out of the shower and dried off then pulled on his skinny Mexican jeans. They were tighter than he liked and so dark blue they were almost black. They were also uncomfortably rigid from being brand new. He walked stiffly back into the tiny hotel room, where Sam had taken his place on the bed and was watching another American rerun dubbed into Spanish. He propped up the other pillow and sat down next to her on the narrow bed. As they watched TV to the ridiculous Spanish voiceover, Sam slowly leaned over against him until the bare skin of their shoulders touched. Slightly startled, he turned to meet her eyes, and his tension dissolved into her gaze as they slowly, tentatively kissed. The momentary impulse stretched into minutes. As he gently slid the Mexican peasant’s dress up and over her head, all his thoughts of retribution vanished into a swirl of desire; and when their skin pressed together, he felt his guilt and hate dissolve into the smooth sanctuary of her warm embrace.

*

Harris could see the twin glows of two burning cigarettes through the dark desert night. He put on his night vision goggles and powered them up. Two Mexicans in fatigues were standing guard outside the metal barn. He could see them clearly in the monochrome display. Each had an assault rifle slung carelessly over his shoulder. They were the only ones left around. Harris had watched the ponytailed cowboy leave first in his Chevy Avalanche only minutes after they had arrived. He’d felt a pang of regret that he might not get to kill that son of a bitch, but he was thankful that he’d finally had an opportunity to escape from the back of the truck. He was also wondering if he was actually better off here in the remote desert than he’d been in the jungle. At least he felt more at home here, but he was still wounded and stranded in the middle of nowhere with no one but hostile soldiers around.

About two hours after ponytail had left, the work behind the building had wrapped up. He’d seen a wooden walled flatbed truck full of men leave just before dark followed closely by an empty bus and a Dodge Charger with the markings of the Mexican Federal Police. He hoped there was another vehicle inside the building that he could use to get out of here. He needed medical attention soon. He was worried he might lose the leg if the infection was allowed to go too long. For someone as physically oriented as Harris, losing a leg would be a death sentence. He’d known other guys from the SEAL teams who were taken out of action by debilitating injuries, and he’d seen the look of quiet despair in their eyes. Mentally those men were the toughest he’d ever known, but he’d still seen it break a few of them down. He feared that fate more than death.

Harris watched as the two men dropped their cigarette butts and ground them out in the dust with the soles of their combat boots. He checked his watch. They had been averaging a cigarette every twenty minutes for the hour he’d been surveilling them. He carefully worked his way around the building, keeping his distance so that he could remain concealed in the sparse brush and behind gentle rises in the undulating landscape. Once he was around the corner and out of sight of the guards, he hurried to the building. He leaned against the corrugated sheet metal of the outer wall to rest his wounded leg for a moment and get his mind back ahead of the pain. Although he was still clammy and soaked in feverish sweat, the adrenaline was starting to flow, pushing back the disorientation that had plagued him and clearing the cobwebs from his mind. He focused on the fire that lived deep inside him—the primal part of him that survived and killed, and the calculating human brain that transformed that brutal animal energy into an elegant form of art. This was what he did, and he was the best.

He worked his way silently back toward the end of the building where the two guards stood and waited concealed behind the corner of the structure. He could hear them talking in Spanish. He leaned against the wall for support and gently pulled back the slide on his silenced 9mm Sig, double-checking that a hollowpoint round was in the pipe. He already knew that a round was chambered because he’d checked it several times throughout the day, but the action of looking had become a ritual to him, a pause for thought and calm before he moved. Satisfied that he was ready, he patiently waited, a lion’s spirit in a man’s body, tightly coiled and ready to pounce.

When he heard one of the men tapping the package of cigarettes against his palm, Harris shifted his weight onto both feet. He fiercely shoved the screams of protest from his injured leg into the back corner of his mind. He heard the lighter flick once and saw a hint of orange illumination flash into the night around the corner. There went their night vision. Two seconds later, the lighter flicked again and Harris sprang.

He whipped around the corner just as the lighter’s fire went out and put a bullet between the eyes of the man on the left. The other man dropped the lighter and reached for his rifle, but he joined his companion in death before the lighter hit the ground. Harris put two bullets in his chest and another into his head.

He wasted no time in celebration. Before the second body had toppled, Harris darted forward and rolled through the open door of the building, scanning the darkened space through the eerie night vision display. Nothing was moving. Harris cautiously worked his way around the cavernous space until he had cleared the entire room. He was alone. He hobbled back to the front entrance of the building and dragged the two bodies inside where they wouldn’t be seen if someone drove up. Then he began a more thorough search.

There wasn’t much to find. The first major disappointment was that there were no vehicles parked inside. There was a tractor parked out back, but Harris had little hope that he could make it to safety on that clumsy thing without being discovered, if it even held enough fuel to get him anywhere useful. He also didn’t relish the possibility of being chased by a truck while he was trying to escape on a tractor. He was pleased to acquire some heavier weapons. One of the men he’d killed carried a Bushmaster .223 AR-15, and the other had an AK-47. Harris took both guns. There were two magazines of ammo for the more accurate semi-automatic Bushmaster, and three magazines of heavier 7.62mm rounds for the full-auto Kalashnikov. He felt much more prepared. If he was going to have to take on a group of heavily armed men in order to get out of here, he would much rather do it with these weapons than with only his 9mm pistol.

The best find in the building was a good amount of food, obviously supplies for the men standing guard. Harris feasted on the bread, beans, and snack foods that he found stashed on a table in the corner to the left of the open front door. It was the first food he’d had in two days, and he could feel his strength returning only minutes after he ate. He was also relieved to find a small med kit. He used the rudimentary supplies to clean his oozing leg wound and change the dressing.

When he was finished he wandered out behind the building to examine the work that the men had been doing all day. It was nothing but a pit dug into the ground maybe fifteen feet on a side and six feet deep. He had no idea what they might be up to. Perhaps it was a foundation for something they were building, or maybe a mass grave. It didn’t matter. He was focused on finding a way out of here, and if he was lucky maybe taking some of these fuckers down before he went.

He returned to the building and carried the bodies of the men he’d killed about two hundred yards into the desert. If others arrived and discovered them it would give away his presence. He thought he was going to pass out several times from the pain of carrying the men. He gritted his teeth and refused to relent and drag them because he didn’t want to leave tracks in the dirt. When he’d finished the odious task of hiding the bodies, he removed all traces that he’d been in the building and concealed himself once more in the desert to wait out the night. Hopefully an opportunity would arise to get out of here tomorrow. If it didn’t, he would have to create one.

20

Thursday, November 24th

CHIP WAS RELUCTANT to get up, but he knew they had to get moving. The military-style G-Shock watch they’d given him for the mission said 7 o’clock. He gently untangled himself from Sam and sat up on the edge of the bed, then impulsively leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. His head hurt a little bit as he sat back upright, and he tried to remember how many beers they’d had the night before at the pizza place. He picked up a bottle of water from the bedside table and took a long drink. Then he shook Sam’s shoulder gently to wake her before he wandered into the bathroom to brush his teeth, bringing the bottled water with him. The lack of potable tap water was one of his least favorite things about Mexico. There was nothing like five minutes in a Mexican bathroom to make him glad that he was headed back to the US.

Twenty minutes later they had packed their meager supply of things into the small backpack and made it downstairs to the hotel’s restaurant. Chip ordered them a huge platter of chilaquiles—his favorite traditional Mexican breakfast. In a few minutes the waitress brought them a steaming pile of homemade corn tortilla chips simmered in zesty green and red chile sauces and then topped with two fried eggs, beans, and soft white cheese. If this was going to be their last meal in Mexico, Chip was going to make the most of it. The love/hate relationship he felt for this country had been amplified by the beauty of the river he’d traversed on this trip and the tragedy of the events that had transpired there. As usual he couldn’t wait to leave Mexico, but he also couldn’t wait to come back. He and Sam both dug into the chilaquiles with gusto and were soon washing down the last of the meal with fresh-squeezed juice.

Although Chip had no idea what the future would hold, the perfection of this moment after all that they had been through enveloped him in a bubble of contentment that he wished could last forever. He knew it was totally irrational. It could never work. She was a senator’s daughter, a sorority girl from Stanford—someone so totally remote from his carefree lifestyle that she might as well be from the moon. She was nine years his junior, and her experiences were so divergent from his own that it was a wonder they had anything to talk about at all. But after all they had been through, being together felt like the easiest thing in the world. All of his instincts told him not to let down his guard. But they had survived. They had done it together. If they could make it through this, maybe there was a chance.

They reluctantly paid their tab and headed back onto the streets where the two were faced with an unusual puzzle. Several bus companies operated out of the city, so finding the right bus stop proved to be a challenge. After a fruitless forty minutes of combing the streets trying to figure out which bus was headed to Matamoros, Chip hailed a cab and had it drop them at a bus stop on the highway on the outskirts of town. They waited in the bright morning sunshine until a bus finally trundled by at 9:30, its placard indicating that it was bound for Matamoros.

Chip and Sam stepped aboard and paid the driver from Chip’s rapidly dwindling supply of cash, then they took their usual seats at the back of the bus and settled in for the last leg of their journey. He put his arm around her and held her close, and she looked up at him for a moment, smiled, and snuggled against his side.