Spectre Black (26 page)

Chapter
35

Landry stepped back—almost as if he’d been pushed back by the blast of warm air.

He had the sensation of something big rushing past—

Then it was gone.

He knew what it was.

He’d recognized the sound of the big rig’s engine, if not the intensity.

They must have found a way to muffle the noise.

He squinted in the direction the truck had gone and thought he saw a tall oblong that could have been the landscape but was slightly out of kilter, moving independently from the grassland and road around it—defined by negative space.

Like a mirror made of old wavy glass walking itself down the road.

It receded into the red haze as if it wasn’t there at all.

By the time the second semi blew through, Landry was lying flat on the dirt by the side of the road, sheltered by a clump of burro brush. This time he had already been looking north, but saw nothing—

And then, mud flaps, slapping in the wind of the semi’s passing, right past his ear. The high-pitched drill of big tires on the pavement, chains rattling and swaying on the chain-hangers.

He did not move, remained prone. Waited for the third rig.

And waited.

Ten seconds.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

The third one was late.

This was good.

He went around the restrooms and started up the Dodge Challenger. He patted the steering wheel and said to the car, “I hate to do this.”

It was hard to see, but his binocs locked on something. Coming. Like wind pushing down the highway. Impossible to see from this distance, but the runner cars were back—a dune buggy driving the desert on one side, and another car opposite. He could see the dust billowing up behind them.

Running interference.

He had to go by the runner cars. They would be his signal. But they weren’t here yet.

Landry had to time it perfectly.

He measured the distance between the cars and where he was. They would be abreast of the invisible semi truck.

If he went too soon, they would be able to stop the truck.

If he went too late, the semi would bulldoze into him and turn the Challenger into a crushed tin can.

He revved the engine. Drove onto the verge. Waited. And waited some more. They had reached the place where the road bent toward the west, into the eye of the sun.

This wouldn’t work if they saw him.

Landry had utilized the knowledge more than once during his time in Iraq: It takes a loaded semi truck driving sixty-five miles per hour under ideal conditions approximately 316 feet to stop completely. Nearly the entire length of a football field.

As the runner cars and the virtually invisible truck approached, Landry counted down in his head. One-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, three-one-hundred.

The runner cars keeping apace. Landry had to get past them, and hope they were still abreast of the thing he could not see.

The smallest mistake, and he was a dead man.

Now!

His foot jammed the gas pedal hard to the floor and the Challenger slewed onto the road. Slammed on the brakes, dead center, the grille on one side and back bumper on the other. Pulled on the door handle, shoved the heavy door open, and dove out of the car.

A little bit of a slope on the other side—

Rolled.

Right into a bush. Skidded down past it and lay on the ground like a lizard flat to a screen door.

He heard the hiss of air brakes, the stuttering screech of rubber as the semi stood on its tires, the cars out in the desert driving diagonally in the road’s direction, slewing through the dirt, fountains of dust shooting from under their tires—

Destruction in slow motion.

Landry’s mind ticked through the phases.

The truck would skid. The truck box would torque sideways, arresting forward motion. It would try to topple on its side.

Landry peered through the brush. He was right about that. The truck, barely visible, seemed to tremble in the air like a rectangular heat wave, canting to the right, the mesh of screaming metal and crunching truck body sounding like the death throes of a dinosaur. It was monumental.

The box toppled and slid, skidded the few feet to smack right into the cab, ramming into the back, crushing the life out of whoever was within.

Landry didn’t wait to see the leviathan come to rest. He was already halfway
up the low rise on the other side, keeping low and to the bushes, rifle slung over his back and his H&K in his hand.

By the time he reached his new hiding place among the burro brush, he could look back at the chaos.

More cars slewed to a stop near the big rig. Landry watched them through his rifle scope. Recognized the chase cars: a jacked-up four-wheel-drive truck with KC roof lights.

And a souped-up primer-gray car.

The car was a 1960s-era Chevy Malibu complete with a yellow-painted front panel.

Landry watched as the driver got out and walked over to survey the damage along with the rest of them.

Slim figure. T-shirt, jeans, running shoes. Attractive.

Long brown hair in a ponytail.

Jeri.

It all clicked into place: the temporary pipe fencing in a barn that in retrospect seemed way too big for its function; the concrete pad covered over with a thick layer of dirt; the primer-gray car with the yellow fender panel.

The horse farm.

The semis had been hidden right under their feet. If he’d paid more attention, if he’d kicked up the layer of dirt from the cement floor . . .

Regrets never got you anywhere.

He called in to Jolie and to Eric.

“We’re down to two trucks now,” he said.

“Two trucks,” Jolie said to Eric.

They were sitting in the Dodge Ram truck, one among a handful of cars parked in the Columbus Port of Entry lot.

This side of the border was virtually deserted. There was a small neighborhood north of the port of entry farther north on Highway 11, but the area on the US side of the border was sparse. No way they would miss any vehicles coming their way. The trucks might be invisible—it was dusk now and hard to see—but the runner cars around them would soon have to use their headlights, or at least their parking lights. They were counting on that.

Every second that ticked by brought them closer to darkness. In this case, darkness was better.

Their theory was that the trucks would turn west on the road bordering the north end of the port of entry parking lot.

“See any Border Patrol?” Eric asked.

“Just those two in the parking lot.” Most of the Border Patrol cars had peeled out twenty minutes before, after the collision on the highway. Landry was keeping them informed.

It hadn’t just been Border Patrol. It had been Luna County Sheriff’s. It had been Columbus PD municipal cars and emergency vehicles of every stripe—

Although they were few enough down here.

“Their attention will be on the truck,” Eric the Red said. “Every emergency vehicle for miles will be drawn to the scene.”

“Leaves it to us,” Jolie said.

He made a noise in his throat—agreement.

“Except for whoever’s patrolling the border,” Jolie added. Border Patrol trucks patrolled the border area every thirty minutes. You could set your watch by them. One Border Patrol agent to a car, Jolie thought, although it was getting too dark to see.

It was
some
thing.

But for real dependability, she had the man beside her and Landry up on the roof of the water facility, covering them.

The place was quiet. Dead. The sky had gone from red to purple, and now it was near dark. Sodium arc lights came on in the parking
lot, first glowing a pale sapphire blue, and then orange and finally, gold.

Cars went through on the main road into Mexico, but not many. Jolie could see their taillights as they stopped and then were waved through. Fewer cars came up from Palomas, and took longer to come through and past them.

There had been a lull, though. No vehicles other than a Border Patrol truck had appeared going either way for at least twenty minutes. The border was dead tonight.

Eric straightened, looking at the rearview mirror. “Cars coming,” he said. “From the north.”

One car drove straight to the port of entry. But the two cars after that turned right on the road behind them.

When they did, their lights went out.

“Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

In the last light of day they could see the cars, although they were indistinct in the gloom. Between the first car and the second, there was negative space.

The negative space wasn’t really negative. Something was passing by, but it was impossible to tell what, because no light reflected off its surface. It was like a blank space, only Jolie could see the ground scrolling through it, just a shadow of the ground, the dry grass, the weeds. And way in the distance, the pinprick lights of Columbus—the larger part of Columbus to the north.
Something
sliding past, virtually invisible.

More cars turned onto the road. Followed by another space that wasn’t a space.

The faintest growl of an engine.

A semi’s engine.

“That is some kind of spooky,” Eric said. He donned his night-vision goggles, and handed Jolie her pair.
Then
she saw the driver of the semi truck. A flare of color.

Two of them. Two semis.

Two, because the third one had been wrecked on the highway.

A half hour earlier, before the sun went down, they’d driven this road, little more than a dirt track for Border Patrol trucks. There were two places where Denboer’s trucks could go through. The first was very close to the border crossing. Neither of them thought Denboer would risk it, even if the vehicles went stealth. The road, a sixteenth of a mile from where they sat in their truck, looped into a turnaround for big trucks. On the Mexican side of the border fence, the ground in that spot was hardpan, solid as concrete, and could support a truck of that size. And near that was an east-west road on the Mexican side that ran along the border. A couple of north-south streets intersected with the road. Since the fence was built, those roads had no place to go. Still, it was the best possible place to cross—if you didn’t take into account its proximity to the border crossing.

But there was another place, virtually identical, approximately four miles farther to the west.

“If it was me, that’s where I’d go,” Eric said, as the runner car in the lead turned on the road parallel to the border and the others followed. They watched through binocs, following their slow progress as they bumped along the road. Lights out for everyone, but there was still some ambient illumination.

“Twenty bucks they’ll go straight,” Eric said.

“I’m not taking that bet.”

But she should have, because Eric was wrong.

It was getting hard to see, darker by the minute, the cars running lights-off, jouncing slowly along the rutted road, but they could see the taillights when the vehicles braked. They could see them turning.

Then they heard a truck starting up.

Jolie recalled seeing a truck parked beside a building across the short expanse of desert to the north. Now it drove in the direction of the caravan.

“Shit! What’s
that
?
”

“Jace.” Jolie recognized the engine noise. She heard it peel out and go. Definitely a muscle car, that deep-throated grumble, the sound she’d heard the night she had hidden outside the Circle K about a thousand years ago.

“So much for stealth,” Eric said.