Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (25 page)

How long did I have before Perez showed up with his pearl-handled unpleasantness? This time I had my hands cuff-locked together, and a chain around my ankles. The cell was no more lavishly appointed than the last one I was in – four obscenity-covered walls painted brown, and two plastic buckets, one filled with tepid water. It wasn’t built for extended incarceration, which made me figure on having a day here, maybe two. However, through a small steel-mesh-covered opening about six inches square, this cell did have a view across a narrow path to another cinderblock building a yard or so away. Somewhere reasonably close, I could hear Matheson yelling to be let out, calling for the Saint. I heard a door rattle open and the muffled sounds of a beating with something that rang like a bell when it struck the floor, presumably after missing the mark. Matheson stopped shouting after that.

I checked the mesh. It was welded to a frame and concreted into the cinderblock wall. Moving to the door, a quick inspection revealed it to be quarter-inch plate steel, the hinges inconveniently on the outside. A small gap between the ceiling and the walls to let air circulate and keep the temperature down briefly caught my interest. I pulled myself up to have a look and found that the ceiling was pressed steel and the pillars that kept it raised off the walls were short square-section steel posts. I let myself back down, stood in the middle of the ten-foot-square space, feeling trapped. And if by some miracle I did manage to get out, I told myself, what then? Juárez was at least 30 miles away across the open desert.

Shit.

It occurred to me that it was getting noisy outside. Small four-stroke engines and lots of them were milling about. I went back to the mesh. Pressing a cheek against it and peering off to the side, I could see a twenty-foot-wide corridor across what was some kind of parade ground. Dirt-bike riders in camos were motoring slowly across my field of view. The riders kept coming. And coming. Eventually, two phalanxes of these riders were lined up in the corridor, their engines turned off. And then, driving through this view, kicking up palls of billowing dust clouds, came a couple of trucks fitted with what appeared to be large scoops angled diagonally across them, low on one side near the area of the rear wheels and angled up over the cabin where the driver sat. What the hell were they all about?

Engines were all turned off and someone began speaking through a megaphone. It squawked with feedback a couple of times and I couldn’t hear what was being said, but the riders all seemed to be listening intently. Suddenly, all the guys I could see raised a gloved fist and cheered. The voice kept speaking. Another cheer. And then I caught a glimpse of the speaker. It was Apostles, dressed in sombrero and crossed bandoliers, mounted on a horse. He cantered into view, turned and trotted out of it. I heard him say,
“Estás cerca, ahora …”
or in English, “You are close, now …” before he rode out of earshot in a burst of feedback.

Close to what?

The riders on the dirt bikes that I could see were all armed, assault rifles held in scabbards mounted on the front suspension forks. Apostles had himself a mobile army. I wondered about numbers. From the sound of all those engines, they weren’t insignificant. The storm that seemed to move independent of the wind – it was all these dirt bikes maneuvering out there in the desert.

I took a seat on the floor and rested my back against the wall. Arlen suggested that the attack on Horizon Airport might be a trial run for something bigger. The strength of the assault force on the airport that killed twenty-seven people was estimated at between fifteen to twenty gunmen. What kind of hell could Apostles and Perez unleash with an army?

And then it came to me. Columbus, New Mexico, the town raided by Pancho Villa. Was it possible? The town was pretty close to this encampment – maybe only fifty miles to the north. Surely not …

But there was Apostles’ fancy-dress outfit, the photos of the
Generale
and his horse in his lounge room – maybe
El Santo
 was nuts after all. Did he really believe he was Pancho Villa? Was he seriously going to recreate Villa’s attack on US soil? A modern, fast-moving cavalry; soldiers on dirt bikes. I got up and took another look through the mesh but there was nothing to see other than dust settling.

*

I heard nothing more from Matheson during the day. A guard came in during the afternoon, holding a pistol in one hand and a plate of rice and refried beans in the other. Did he think I was gonna criticize the menu? He told me to step back against the far wall while he put the plate on the ground. I asked him to change the poo bucket but he ignored the request and backed out of the cell. I was hungry so I ate and, yeah, if he brought that shit to me again he’d better bring the damn gun.

Sometime before sunset the riders came back from the desert and the place livened up a little until around 10 pm. I even heard music, Mexican-style folk – two guitars and two voices – floating through the night. My stomach was churning, partly because of the water, partly because of those beans, but mostly because I couldn’t get the image of Bambi and the remains beside her out of my head. I’d seen Perez at his work, completely oblivious to the agony he was inflicting. He could have been spreading peanut butter on toast.

Around midnight a drunk was brought into the cellblock. He sang and shouted and called out from his cell. This went on for less than two minutes before a guard went into his cell and beat some quiet into him. Maybe noise made the guard nervous. Or maybe the neighbors made the guard nervous. That gave me an idea. I sat in the middle of the floor where I could be easily seen through the spy-hole and started murdering “The Star-Spangled Banner”. The hard walls, floor and ceiling amplified the racket. By the time I got to, “perilous fight”, the guard was banging on the door with some kind of bar, yelling,
“
¡Callese! ¡Callese!
”
 At the “rocket’s red glare” the guard came in and, from the look on his face, he was scared.

I got up and backed against the wall and wailed about the star-spangled banner yet waving and the guard’s pal entered the cell, gun in hand. The guy with the baton raised it and swung it down on my head. It was now or never. I caught it between my wrists with the cuff locks, jumped up onto his chest, wrapped the chain from between my legs around his throat and pulled him down onto the floor. That hurt my back, but it hurt his face far more as it smashed into the cinderblock wall. It happened fast. The guy with the gun hesitated, not knowing where to shoot. But when he finally got a reasonably clear shot, pointed the weapon and pulled the trigger, nothing happened. The safety. It was still engaged. The baton was on the floor. I picked it up and swung it into the guy’s knees and one of them made a noise like a mouth chomping on potato chips. He’d forgotten about the pistol by then and was protecting his face from the concrete floor rushing toward it. I was over him before he realized how bad the situation was and bounced his forehead against the concrete a couple of times until I was sure he wasn’t going to remember enough to complain.

The blood roaring past my ears was louder than my appalling singing. Other than that, the cellblock was quiet. The two guards on the floor were too badly injured to even groan. I bent down and picked up the gun, a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. I checked the safety. Yep – stuck. I
tsk
ed at the poorly maintained weapon but kept it in my hand because I felt safer that way, and patted down pockets for keys. None.

I poked my head out the door and checked the narrow corridor. The place was dead. My chains rattled and clinked as I part hopped, part shuffled down to the guards’ security station, an alcove just inside the main entrance door. A bunch of keys hung from a desk lamp illuminating half a bag of corn chips, half a bottle of cheap tequila and assorted slutty hot-rod magazines. Among a litter of papers, I also found a flashlight and a pair of snips. I sat on the chair behind the desk and used the snips to cut off the cuff locks, then took a swig of tequila and stuffed a handful of corn chips down my throat while I went through the keys. Dammit, none of them fit the locks on the leg chains. I took another belt of tequila, finished off the corn chips and went through the desk drawers. In the top one I found another set of keys, assorted locks, pens, batteries and other junk. I took the keys and left the junk. Opening the second drawer I found my old pal, the Sig. I exchanged it for the S&W, hunted around in the other drawers and found my concealment holster and spare mags. I rewarded myself with a final mouthful of tequila.

Key number three fit the leg chain locks but didn’t turn them. Key number five set me free. My boots, socks, belt and other personal effects were mixed in with Matheson’s in a pile on the floor. I separated mine, finished dressing and put my watch back on my wrist. The tequila was working its magic, making me believe that being reckless was a good strategy, so I had one last belt to make sure. Maybe this stuff wasn’t so bad after all.

There was a desert camo cap on top of an empty filing cabinet. I put it on, along with a military-pattern jacket hanging on the back of the chair. There had to be sentries posted throughout the encampment so it was important to fit in. The jacket was a tight fit, the cap loose. Maybe that said something about me. Maybe I should read more and pump iron less. Lastly, I took the keys on the chain as well as the flashlight. I figured if the keys didn’t open the leg chains, perhaps they’d fit something else useful around here. And the flashlight would come in handy – it was dark outside, a dirty moon low in the sky, and almost none of the encampment was lit.

I weighed up the best course of action: steal something and leave right away or reconnoiter the place first. There were questions about numbers. And maybe I could find some intel on timings, plans of attack and so forth. In fact, the more I’d been thinking about it, the more I couldn’t believe the audacity of Apostles and Perez. Attacking a United States township and slaughtering its inhabitants? That would send the US Army into Mexico, just like it did the first time Columbus was hit. Maybe they’d touch off that border war no one wanted. And just maybe that was exactly the intention.

I buried my hands in the jacket pockets and found a half-empty packet of
Faros
, a crumpled book of matches from some bar in Juárez and a couple of loose pellets of gum. Having fresh minty breath was not high on my list of priorities. I tossed the gum. Sticking to the shadows, I made my way across to one of the hangars whose internals I hadn’t seen. The sentries took some of the risk of discovery out of this for me by occasionally turning their flashlights on and sweeping a door or a generator or some other piece of infrastructure, letting me know where they were. I arrived at the hangar without incident and tried the side access door. Locked. On the off chance the hunch about the keys was on the money, I found two that looked like they might do the job.

“Hey,” said a voice close by that made me jump.

I pocketed the keys, turned and got ready to reach for the Sig. It was a sentry. He turned on his flashlight briefly so that I could see where he was.

“
Es una noche cálida noche,”
he said. It’s a warm night tonight.

“
Sí, muy caliente,”
I replied. Yeah, real warm. I for one was sweating bullets.

As he approached, he asked if I was having problems with the door, because this one often stuck. The key in the lock turned.

He knew something was wrong when he saw how short the sleeves on the jacket were.
“Hey, ¿quién …”

I pulled the door open hard, bashing him in the face with it and the question of who I was never got completed. I hit him a second time with the door, just to make sure of it, then dragged him inside the hangar and closed the blunt object behind me.

With no windows, the building’s interior presented a thick, impenetrable blackness and the air smelled of gasoline, dirt and rubber. The numerals on my watch glowed as bright as deep-sea fish. I fired up the flashlight and dragged the unconscious sentry to a clear space on the floor, away from the door. He groaned and moved his head so I hit him again with the base of the flashlight. The guy was gonna end up with a hell of a headache. I straightened up and swept the flashlight beam over the hangar floor, revealing row after row of 250cc motorcycles – Hondas and Yamahas. There had to be over five hundred of the things, all lined up like they were on parade. I took the cap off one of the tanks. Full. The key was in the ignition. I checked a few more bikes. All of them were gassed and rarin’ to go. There were three other hangars identical to this one from the outside, not including the hangar where the aircraft were housed. How many of these were full of motorcycles? How many dragoons did Apostles and Perez have?

Reconnoitering the rest of the space, I made a rough count of over six hundred bikes. Down one entire wall was an area dedicated to maintenance where over thirty machines were having chains replaced, punctures fixed, engines serviced and so forth. I picked up a roll of duct tape and some rags.

Going back to check on the sentry, I found that he was still counting canaries, but for how long? Tidying things up there, I taped his hands behind his back, stuffed a rag in his mouth and taped it shut. I wondered about the guards at the cellblock. They wouldn’t be waking up any time soon, but unconscious, bruised and battered people discovered lying around military installations tended to make everyone else nervous. And there were plenty of guards with flashlights checking on things. Sooner or later the alarm would be raised and, of course, dawn was just around the corner.

I found the access door on the hangar’s opposite wall and slipped out. All was quiet so I moved quickly to the next hangar, found the key and opened the door. The flashlight revealed more bikes, maybe another five hundred or so. Also housed in this space were half a dozen mobile vehicles with mounted .50 caliber machine guns. Further back in the building were more of those odd-looking trucks I’d seen earlier with the offset scoops, except that a closer inspection revealed the scoops to be ramps. There were also half a dozen horse floats. Mobile ramps, a thousand motorcycles and horse floats. WTF?