En El Medio
EN EL MEDIO
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A LANCE PRIEST / PREACHER EPISODE
CHRISTOPHER METCALF
TT Tree Tunnel Publishing
Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Metcalf
Kindle Version
Published by
Tree Tunnel Publishing, LLC
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Cover and back cover photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons: Public Domain - provided to Wikimedia Commons by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA-533140.tif).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9886016-2-8
www.treetunnelpublishing.com
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For Chris & Derrick
Boys to men
It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
- Emiliano Zapata
Chapter 1
A muffled pop, like a knuckle cracking or bare foot slapping the floor above. But it was neither. Severing of the spine took place between the C6 and C7 vertebra. The head wrenched to the left while the shoulders were held in place. A deadly vise.
The guard, a paid henchman and killer, would have died of suffocation within the half hour. But gloved fingers squeezing his nose and covering his mouth sped merciful death. Preacher let the lifeless body ease to the ground as he peered into the darkness. Floodlights a hundred yards away pointed the other direction into the black. His next target stood smoking a cigarette 90-feet to the east. He had watched through binoculars seven hours earlier as these two gentlemen killed a drug courier with a baseball bat. Gruesome.
Preacher crouched and slithered and crept up behind this second guard. He rose in the half second before delivering an arcing elbow into the base of the man's skull. The blow brought immediate unconsciousness. When the poor fella awoke three minutes later, he was on his side with hands bound behind his back and his ankles crossed and bound as well. A ripped piece of shirt filled the guy's mouth.
Preacher sat cross-legged on the sand smiling down at him. He then gazed up at the cloudless night sky. "That's Taurus there," he spoke Spanish as if it were his native tongue. Preacher had always loved the language, the feel of the words, from his earliest childhood days in Florida and then in Texas. He pointed to the north and then drew a "v" connecting the constellation's horns. "It is always in the north sky. To the south and a little east is Orion. Can you see them?" Preacher traced the constellation between the distant pinprick stars and looked down at the guard who stared up with wild frightened eyes.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot about that rag in your mouth." Preacher pulled out the fabric, but immediately replaced it with the silencer at the end of the barrel of his gun. "You probably know what will happen if you scream. But I just want you to be sure." He shoved the weapon deeper into the man's throat and then pulled it out.
The guy gagged and coughed and almost hurled. "Como te llames, mi amigo?" Preacher asked for his name.
"Julio." The guard sputtered.
"Julio. In Latin, Julius. The seventh month. Did you know it means youthful?" Preacher ran through a collage of facts he'd collected from reading a book on names back when he was 15. He had re-read the book a couple more times and cataloged a vast array of seemingly useless data about human names. "Julio is derived from Spanish and Portuguese heritage. One of the most popular Spanish first names year after year."
The guard just looked up at him and finally whispered, "It is my uncle's name. And my cousin."
"Good. Family is the heart of love, don't you think? You know, I watched you and your dead friend over there kill that poor dude earlier today. Watched as you smashed that guy's head in with your bat. I wonder what that man's family will do without him? It will be sad when he doesn't return home. But he knew the risks of carrying your products over the border didn't he?" The smile from the infinite wonder of the night sky and the billions of stars above fell from Preacher's face. An evil glint filled his eyes as he looked down at the waste of a human lying before him. "What did he do to deserve such a pleasant death Julio?"
"He..." The guard lifted his head and then laid it back on the dirt.
"He had to ditch his baggage didn't he? He probably had to run from la policia and returned here empty handed with no product and no cash." Preacher shook his head. "Too bad for him." He leaned down close to the guard's ear and whispered, "The way you swung that bat, did you play baseball in school?"
Julio did not reply.
"Julio, you can choose not to answer me. But that will merely force me to ask you in a more forceful manner." Preacher switched to English. "Did you play baseball in school?"
"Yes."
"Were you good? Any chance of going pro?"
"Yes. A small chance. But,"
"I see. Baseball was a possibility with little prospect and very little pay in the minors, especially in Mexico. While drugs offered a guaranteed payday for someone willing to be like you, willing to swing that bat like you do. I understand."
Preacher rolled the man over onto his back and shoved the silenced barrel under Julio's upper neck, the soft area between the Adam's apple and the chin, the submaxillary triangle. He returned to Spanish, "I am only going to ask you three questions Julio. As I mentioned a few moments ago, you may choose not to answer. I will simply choose my actions based on your responses. Ready?"
The next few unpleasant minutes were Julio's last alive. He tried valiantly to keep some of the secrets he held in his cranial repository. Alas, Julio is, or was, only human. He was a bad man and had killed several humans during his life as a drug-running hoodlum enforcer working for the Juarez Cartel. But Julio was only a man. He did not possess within him the extensive and vast knowledge of human anatomy and physiology that Preacher maintained in his messed up head. Pain, inflicting pain, inspiring a desire for the sweet relief of death at the end of brief bout of nearly silent torture is a skill.
With the information garnered from Julio in hand, Preacher moved silently through the night and dark and scrub bushes and gentle breeze bringing the smells of a sleeping Juarez 11 miles to the north. As he advanced, he hummed along to the Rush song playing in his jukebox of a brain. He was using the 15 minutes and 45 seconds of the live version of this classic jam by the Canadian trio as his stopwatch. The song had started just after he entered the compound. Some serious guitar work was about to get under way. In other circumstances, he might pause and air-guitar along. But no time.
He stepped up to one of the four outbuildings he had surveyed during the day. From his position on a hill to the north of the compound, he had seen upwards of 40 men and a few women moving about the place during daylight hours. Some loaded trucks. Others loaded themselves onto trucks. And others stood around with guns in their hands or slung over shoulders, like Julio.
The compound was large, maybe 15 acres. Barbed razor wire fence lined the perimeter. Guards were stationed along each fence line. But security is only as tight as those running it. Attention, too much attention, was given to the vehicles that pulled up to the main gate. Preacher had watched as eyes and ears and guns focused on incoming cars and trucks and not on the spreading desert landscape around.
He had simply, easily snuck down to about 40 yards from the fence and then jogged up to it, snipped several pieces of wire mesh down low and ducked inside as the two guards stationed near the main gate interacte
d with the driver and passenger of a Ford pickup truck with Texas plates. Preacher slipped into the darkness away from the flood of lights like a shadow. He was at home in the darkness, any darkness.
His survey of the sprawling facility during the day and into the evening gave him the educated impression that it was a distribution hub, not a repository, not a factory. People, drugs and cash moved in and out and didn't stay long. The security around the exterior of the compound was puzzling yesterday morning when he first started watching the action below. With the fence and razor wire and the two friggin' 50-cal machine guns mounted on roof-top towers on the east and west sides, the place looked like it was designed to repel an attacking force. And that was just it. The facility could be turned into a defensive nightmare for any large-scale assault.
But that was also the place's weakness. It was not designed to defend against one lone deadly, super cold, ghost-like invader. Preacher deduced this flaw after only a few hours of surveillance. By the afternoon, he had his plan worked out. Now, he just needed to find the human target of this little off the books mission.
From a squatting position, he raised up enough to peek through a window into the first building. Nothing. It was dark inside. He stayed crouched while making his way behind this first structure to the second and then to the third. It was inside this third of four outer buildings that Preacher saw what he came for, who he came for.
But.
Preacher turned away from the window, put his back to the wall and slid his butt down to the sand.
He looked out into the night and up. His eyes settled on a point he knew Meadows was lying on his stomach watching him through the high-powered scope mounted on a high-powered rifle. Preacher shook his head ever so slightly. The gig had just changed.
He'd been lied to. Maybe not all of it, but the most important parts. He was here on the southern desert outskirts of Juarez, Mexico under false pretences. Warnings had gone off along the way a few times over the past four days, but he'd ignored them. He stayed true to his word. He'd promised Lt. Meadows repayment for a debt owed. No questions asked. The pilot had once transported a nameless passenger across the Atlantic and let him slip away into the night without documentation, legal processing or any official action. Highly illegal.
But. The scene Preacher had just witnessed through the window altered the entire story. Not cool.
The kid hadn't been kidnapped and brought here to this little slice of hell to be ransomed like Meadows had described it multiple times during the previous days. The kid had come here of his own volition. That was evident by what Preacher had just seen through the window. And if the kid was here voluntarily, then a good bit of the initial story Meadows had told him four and a half days ago in Telluride, Colorado was fabrication as well. Preacher shook his head a little more. He was usually the one doing the lying.
"Good one," Preacher raised his eyebrows and spoke into the darkness. He resigned himself to the news and pulled the walkie-talkie out of his pocket. "Uh, you have some splainin' to do Lieutenant." He whispered. They didn't have time to acquire high-end communications devices and had to settle for a cheap set purchased at a Juarez department store.
"Did you find him? Is he there?" Meadows replied in a whisper.
"He's here. He's in this building with what looks like five or six men. And he's playing poker and drinking tequila with them. The kid doesn't look much like a hostage."
"You're sure it's him." A statement; not a question.
Preacher heard the change in Meadows' vocal tone. He knew what was coming and he was immediately and seriously pissed. He'd walked right into a shit storm. And even better, he'd set the table for what was about to happen. "Meadows. Don't do it. You will probably kill me and," Too late.
The first explosion was massive, awesome and impressive. It took out the fence corner and floodlight pole 150 yards from Preacher. Three seconds later, a similar explosion, took out another section of fence and floodlight at the east end of the complex. Each explosion preceded by a shot fired a fraction of a second earlier.
Preacher had hastily built the explosives day before yesterday after purchasing a dozen propane tanks, gasoline tanks, black spray paint, dynamite and a dozen rolls of cellophane wrap. By pouring gasoline on the tanks and wrapping them and a stick of dynamite within the plastic wrap, it created a nifty little toy that went boom big time when punctured by a supersonic bullet. Preacher had learned this little explosive trick at Harvey Point six years ago on one of his first visits to the secret CIA spook training facility.
He had placed these first two bombs a couple of hours earlier. He now also had an answer to his question of whether Meadows could shoot. Two shots. Two big booms. Good shooting. Great shooting. Gaps in the profile Preacher had been building for the Naval Reserve pilot were filling in. And you spell it CIA.
The compound was now 20% darker without the floodlights at those corners. But that wasn't really going to help Preacher. He needed to move and move quickly into the dark. He was up and on his feet and running before thinking. Meadows had totally blown the timing and the microscopic element of surprise Preacher had working for him. The Rush live jam was still blasting in Preacher's head. More than five minutes of song left. Too late.
Around the corner came two men. They were firing their automatic weapons before they even spotted Preacher. He dove behind a small sand berm and turned back to face them. He had his silenced Beretta and Julio's AK-47. He was going to be outnumbered and out-gunned quickly. "Meadows, you seriously screwed me over here. How the hell am I supposed to get out of here?"
"You will need to do what you do best Preacher."
"Lie, cheat? Look good while doing it?" Preacher had to yell into the walkie-talkie over the gunfire.
"Kill. You'll have to kill them all." Meadows fired three shots and hit one of the men shooting at Preacher. "There's one less you have to execute."
"Gracias." Preacher closed his eyes and shot 600 feet up. He looked down on the desert complex from the composite views his brain had created while surveying the facility from multiple angles over the previous 20 hours. By his estimation, there were somewhere on the order of 35 humans in the drug-trafficking complex when night fell. He'd taken out two and Meadows had just felled one more. That left 30 or so. Great.
He looked down on the main building near the center of the sprawling compound. It was a large warehouse. The other buildings surrounding it were smaller human warehouses of sorts. People slept in these and worked in the warehouse or hopped on trucks and transported product into Juarez and then to points north in Estados Unidos. The security detail for the complex was not large. But there were more than likely a good many guns in those buildings that people good grab and use if an attack came.
But then, who the hell was stupid enough to attack this facility? It belonged to and was operated by the rapidly expanding and incredibly ruthless Juarez Cartel. With the Cali and Medellin Columbian cartels fading under relentless pressure by the D.E.A, Mexican drug trafficking networks were stepping up and filling in the gaps left by the vacuum. And these guys were gaining a very nice, extremely pleasant reputation as a bunch of murderous enforcers. Decapitation was their calling card. Their ranks were evidently beginning to be filled with former Special Forces Mexican military seeking better pay.
So basically, all of this added up to a serious screwing of the pooch by Stan Meadows up there on the hill. Why the hell had he blown those two tanks? A sweet little plan that involved a super stealthy and supremely lethal former black ops CIA operative sneaking into the complex to rescue a 19-year-old kid kidnapped by the Cartel, had now become a shoot em' up special with a guaranteed body count and little chance of survival.
Man, Marta was going to be pissed if she learned any of the details of this scenario. This is exactly, literally exactly, the type of scene he had promised her he would avoid when she kissed him and he left her up there on that mountain four days ago.
Preacher stopped. He came back down to h
is head and looked around. Right there, that thought he just had, that is what is going to get him killed. Keep him from getting back to her. Focus
But focus was not always easy to attain; not like it used to be. Before the heroin, the days and nights and months of addiction. Only when he was high as a freaked out and barely tethered kite could he be with her. The pull, the attraction of that feeling and those black nights spent talking with her ghost tugged at him, always. Heroin's sweet addiction never leaves. Never.
Some nights up on the mountain, the only thing that calms the shaking is her hand running across his sweaty but freezing skin. Marta, the real one, not the ghost, knew how to talk him through these black moments. But the want for that warm feeling and severing of the cord connecting us to reality is always there. Always.
He'd said goodbye to this super secret agent life. They both had. It was really a 'so long' though. No way, no friggin' way he and she could put this existence completely behind them. It would always come back. They would always come back for them, like Meadows had done. Unique skills they each possess are coveted, necessary in this clandestine world.
In the next second, Preacher was up on his feet and running toward the dark corner blown apart by the first blast. "Cover me Meadows. Heading back to you."
He zigged and zagged. Meadows increased his firing, pinning down shooters at each end of the outbuilding. Preacher reached the gathering dark and dove for cover behind a slight rise. Only a few bullets had been fired his way. But the pace had picked up in the last couple of seconds. He lay prone and peered back at the location the shots were coming his way. It was the next building he had not made it to a few minutes earlier. He was mostly hidden from view now so he turned to look from this spot to the building he had just been peeking into and then the one before that one. People were taking positions on the sides of each of the buildings. Should be any second now...