Gps, p.32
Gps, page 32
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.
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.
