The Traveler 01-03 Home, Canyon, Wall Page 22

He looked at the glazed, vacant stare frozen into the eyes of one of the grunts, a cheating card shark named Hedgepath, and remembered he hadn’t prayed before pulling the trigger. There hadn’t been time.

  Battle stepped over to the dead man and knelt down, pulled his cowboy hat from his head, and held it to his chest.

  “As far as the east is from the west,” he whispered to himself, “so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” He repeated the brief offering at each of the three remaining bodies.

  “Seriously?” Lola called out. “You’re praying for them?”

  Lola was on the arena floor between the card table and the motor pool.

  “I was praying for myself,” he said. “It’s too late to pray for them.” He put his hat back on his head and reached down to take the weapons the dead men wouldn’t need anymore.

  Lola looked past him at the bodies and then refocused on Battle. She folded her arms across her chest, rubbing her arms with her hands.

  “You cold?” Battle took the last of the grunts’ weapons and walked past her to toss them into the back of the Humvee.

  She shook her head. “No. Just wondering.”

  “What?” He reached the Humvee, placed the weapon inside it, and slammed the driver’s side door of the Humvee shut.

  “How did you do this?”

  “What?”

  Her eyes widened with incredulity and she opened her arms to reference the carnage on the arena floor. “This. How did you kill four men like that? How did you do everything you did at your home?”

  “I dunno.” He shrugged. “I just did.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of bad things,” she said, lowering her voice. “I’ve seen a lot of bad people. They did horrible things. They were horrible people. None of them could do what you do.”

  “I was in the Army,” he answered. “I was—”

  Salomon Pico emerged from a wide vehicle entrance at the far end of the arena, behind the motor pool. “I found the loading exit,” he said. We can get out of here pretty quick. Get our bags from the horses and do what we need to do.”

  “Good,” Battle said. “Let’s go.”

  “Why are we taking this one?” asked Pico. “Why not the box truck? We could carry more. Lola and I could hide.”

  Battle rolled his eyes. “This isn’t a democracy. We’re taking the Humvee because that’s what we’re taking.”

  Pico frowned. “I was just asking. I thought the truck was—”

  Battle waved him silent. “The Humvee is armored. The box truck isn’t. The Humvee is a four-speed automatic. The box truck is a stick. The Humvee has all-terrain, cross-country tires on it. They can go for thirty miles with a flat. The box truck doesn’t and can’t.”

  Pico raised his hands in surrender. “Okay. Okay. Fine,” he huffed. “The Humvee’s better. I get it.”

  “Lola, hop in,” said Battle. “Pico, you guide me out. I’m driving. Once we clear the building and get to the horses, you’ll drive and I’ll ride in the back. Got it?” Battle climbed into the driver’s seat as Lola buckled herself into the front passenger seat of the desert tan vehicle.

  The Humvee, nicknamed for its High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle designation, was the Army’s workhorse in Syria. For close to fifty years, the United States military and some of its allies had deployed the HMMWV into the worst places on Earth. If he’d attempted to add them up, Battle figured he’d probably spent more hours in a Humvee than he had in any car he’d owned. They were as safe as any personnel carrier available, they were reconfigurable based on the mission, and they could move at a pretty good clip for something that weighed anywhere from six to eight thousand pounds. The official top speed was seventy miles per hour. Battle knew they could exceed that in the right conditions. He hoped he wouldn’t need those conditions.

  He reached to the left side of the dash to the rotary start switch and looked at the three-position switch, turning the key to “run”. A “wait-to-start” lamp above the switch blinked off, and Battle turned the switch to the “start” position. He released the switch lever and it popped back to the “run” position automatically. He waited for the glow plugs to activate, and the six-and-a-half-liter, eight-cylinder turbo engine rumbled to life.

  He looked at Lola. “You ready?”

  “As I’m going to be.”

  Battle shifted into drive and rolled the Humvee toward Pico, who started back toward the wide loading entrance.

  The Humvee was utilitarian and not built for comfort. Despite its wide front compartment, Battle shifted as he would in the worst coach seat in a commuter plane.

  He rode the brake, slowly trailing Pico through the loading entrance and down a slight decline to a concrete ramp. Pico raised his hands, stopping the Humvee short of a large rolling galvanized door. He reached up and tugged on a chain at the side of the door, raising the door as it coiled upward.

  Once Pico had the door fully raised, he waved Battle through the opening. Battle let his foot off the brake and accelerated out of the arena and up an incline onto a gravel road that ran along the loading side of the arena.

  “We’ve still got a couple of hours until daylight,” said Battle. He spun the wheel to the left, driving around the southern side of the complex to avoid driving near Highway 36. “I think sunrise is around oh-seven-thirty.”

  “So we’re hitting them before sunrise?” Lola asked.

  “That’s the plan,” said Battle. “We’ll have the advantage.”

  “How so?”

  “They won’t see us coming. It’s always best to initiate a direct action under the relative protection of darkness.”

  “Direct action?”

  “A quick operation in hostile territory.”

  “So this will be quick? We’ll have Sawyer back quick?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Battle admitted. “We don’t know exactly where they have your son.”

  Lola blinked back tears and turned away from him to stare out the window.

  The Humvee, rumbling with its lights off, crossed over a narrow strip of parallel roads and rolled to a stop a few feet from the trio of horses tied to the exterior fence near the airport’s runway.

  The horses grunted against the noise of the Humvee and pulled against their reins. Their discomfort strained the already weakened fence. Battle quickly turned off the engine to calm them and slid out of the vehicle.

  Pico walked across the road and trudged to the horses. “Load everything?”

  “Yep.” Battle loosened the saddlebags on his Appaloosa. “Everything can go in the back.”

  Lola joined the men and began working on her bags. “What do we do with the horses?” asked Lola. “Are we leaving them here?”

  “No,” Battle said. He rubbed his hand along the horse’s mane. It nickered. “We’re letting them go.”

  “What? Why?”

  “We don’t have a need for them,” Battle said, running his fingers through the animal’s coarse black hair. “We don’t know where we’re headed or how long we’ll be gone. We keep them tied up here and they could die.”

  Pico waved his hands in the air. “So we just free ’em?”

  Battle pulled his hand from the horse and swung around to face the dissenters. “Is this going to be a repeated issue?” He pointed at Lola and then moved his aim to Pico. “The two of you?”

  Lola and Pico exchanged glances. Neither answered the question.

  “Because I’m not putting up with it.” Battle’s hands were at his sides. He was flexing his fingers in and out of a tight ball. “Salomon Pico, I know you took a risk riding with me. I appreciate that. You really had no choice. And Lola, I know you’re desperate. You want your son back, I got it. However, you both have to understand that you need me. It’s not the other way around. I’ll survive out here without either of you.”

  Battle released the saddlebags from his horse. He carried one of them over to the Humvee and dropped it into the open bed in the back. “So I’m not having t
his conversation again. You both do what I say, you live by my rules, you follow my plan. Otherwise we’ll part ways.”

  Lola’s eyes hawked him as he walked back to the horse for the second bag. Pico was looking at the ground, mumbling to himself, kicking at the weeds.

  Battle grabbed the bag and heaved it over his shoulder. “We good?”

  Lola nodded. Pico did the same.

  “I need verbal confirmation,” Battle insisted. “Yes or no?”

  Lola ran her fingers through her hair and rolled her eyes. “Yes.”

  Pico shrugged. “Yes?”

  “That a question, Salomon Pico?”

  “No,” he replied. “It’s a yes. Yes.”

  “All right then,” Battle said. “Let’s load up, let the horses loose, and hit the HQ. We’re running out of time.”

  CHAPTER 3

  JANUARY 3, 2020, 3:44 PM

  SCOURGE -12 YEARS, 9 MONTHS

  ALEPPO, SYRIA

  No fewer than twenty factions controlled varying parts of Aleppo, the most dangerous city in Syria, if not the entirety of the Middle East.

  The one hundred and fifty thousand American soldiers, Marines, and sailors fighting the war were never quite sure who was on their side and who wasn’t. It seemed to change from week to week.

  One of the factions, the Asala wa al-Tanmiya Front, was reportedly in control of Western Aleppo near the university and the hospital. It was one of the largest sections of the city controlled by a singular group. They called for help patrolling the zone between their checkpoint and one controlled by the hardline Syrian Islamic Front, a coalition of smaller factions that kept assimilating like-minded groups to increase its reach and power.

  Battle and his men were the last of three teams tasked with a daylong, triple-shift effort to check weaknesses along the sector’s boundaries. They’d unwittingly found one when the IED exploded under their feet.

  Now, Battle was burdened with carrying the lone surviving member of the patrol more than four miles back to the friendly checkpoint. The wheelbarrow had lasted exactly seven minutes before the front brace collapsed, the axle broke, and the wheel fell off. It was nice while it lasted.

  While Buck wasn’t a small man, Battle wasn’t either. He held Buck over his shoulders like a fireman, one armed draped around the backs of Buck’s thighs and the other around the injured soldier’s back. The slog was slow and Battle took a break every ten minutes, resting in the relative protection of abandoned cars or behind the remnants of decimated structures.

  “We’re exposed,” Buck said in between sips of water from Battle’s canteen. “We run into any opposition, we’re both dead. Every time I see a burka or a kid carrying a backpack, I freak.”

  Battle adjusted a makeshift splint on Buck’s leg that ran from his ankle halfway up his calf. He looked up at the sergeant. “How’s the pain?”

  “Bad. I feel like I’m gonna puke.”

  “I can’t give you more morphine. I’ve got Phenergan. It might help the nausea and amplify the morphine.”

  “Where’d you get it?” Buck accepted the circular orange pill Battle held out and tongued it into his mouth, finishing it off with another swig of water. “The medic kit was obliterated.”

  “I have my own stash,” Battle said. “I like to stay ahead of the game.”

  Buck laughed and then coughed. “It’s a game, is it?”

  “Everything is a game one way or the other, Sergeant.” Battle stood and scanned the surrounding area. “You stay here for a minute. I’m gonna check the path forward.”

  Battle picked up his HK and stepped over a rusting wheel frame, walking north. It was late afternoon, he was drenched in sweat, and they were maybe halfway to the checkpoint. He pulled out a handheld GPS and tried to orient himself. The sun set early in Aleppo; he had maybe forty minutes of sunlight.

  They were near the intersection of Handaseh Street and Kher Eddin Al Asadi. Behind him was what was left of the university’s civil engineering faculty building. A block north was a bank building and the Alrazi Hospital.

  He knew the hospital was on the edge of Asala wa al-Tanmiya Front control. The latest intelligence was a month old. It could have flipped hands. He couldn’t risk showing up there for help and being shot on sight or, worse yet, taken prisoner.

  The checkpoint was between the old Aleppo Railway station and Aziziya Square on the eastern side of the narrow Queiq River near an amusement park. It was about two and a half kilometers. In the best conditions it would take him twenty-five to thirty minutes to walk it. He had two options. He could walk north and skirt a public park. Though it would be faster, it would leave them exposed all the way to the checkpoint.

  He was better off taking a straight line route east along Al Bohtory Street and then jogging north at Saadallah Al Jabri Square. If he took fire, he had places to hide. Either way, it probably was a crapshoot.

  Battle turned back south toward Buck when he heard the familiar zip of a semiautomatic rifle coming from the east near the railroad track.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  A pair of shots whizzed past his head, and he dove behind the corner of a building for cover. He was maybe fifty yards from Buck.

  “Buck! I’ve got incoming. Are you good?”

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  “I’m good!”

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Battle adjusted his grip on his rifle. His butt was resting on his heels, his weight on the balls of his feet as he leaned against the building in a narrow alleyway leading onto the main street. He couldn’t pinpoint the location of the rifle fire. Another volley zipped past him, a pair of bullets crumbling the clay brick a foot above his head.

  Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

  Battle backed further into the alley. He knew somebody was spotting him and relaying location information to the shooter. The shots were too accurate for the random sniper fire they encountered.

  Battle stayed low, moving back to Buck’s position. Once he’d disappeared from the alley, the gunfire stopped.

  “We’re pinned?” Buck asked, the color gone from his face. His skin looked almost translucent.

  Battle nodded. “Yeah. And we’re about to lose daylight. I’ve got to find another way out of here.”

  CHAPTER 4

  OCTOBER 15, 2037, 5:09 AM

  SCOURGE + 5 YEARS

  ABILENE, TEXAS

  Cyrus Skinner blinked his eyes open. His leg was dangling off the edge of his bed and his toes were cold. A nightlight he kept plugged into the outlet closest to the bed was dark. The power was out again.

  Skinner slid his leg back under the sheet and rolled onto his back. He stared into the dark at the ceiling and sighed, rolling back onto his stomach. It was more than twenty-four hours since he’d sent Queho southeast to take care of the rancher he knew as Mad Max.

  The reclusive rancher had already killed at least three of his men. He knew that for sure. There was a good chance the posse boss Rudabaugh and his posse were buzzard food. And now, Queho hadn’t come back.

  Skinner grunted and reached over to a nightstand, dragging his lighter and cigarettes into bed with him. He turned onto his back and scooted up on his elbows. With a half-empty feather pillow propped between his back and the headboard, he shook a cigarette free of its package and lit it with a couple of puffs. He drew in a deep breath and held it. The familiar buzz filtered into his bloodstream and he exhaled through his nose. Smoke plumed around him. He sucked in another drag; the bright orange glow hanging from his lips intensified. It was the only light in the room.

  Skinner rubbed his jaw, scratching the three-day-old growth. He had a decision to make.

  Clearly Mad Max, and the woman he was keeping from them, was far more of a problem than he’d anticipated.

  Skinner was an area captain, a job which came with certain privileges and responsibilities. Being a captain meant all of the bosses in his area, which stretched from east of Abilene, west to Midland, and
then north to Lubbock and Amarillo, reported to him. It was a triangular territory that had as many roadrunners as people, strategically important to the Cartel’s hold on power.

  In the months after the Scourge, a coalition of previously warring criminal organizations had seen the mutual benefit of joining forces. They’d inflicted heavy casualties on a less-than-inspired US military.

  Rather than engage in a bloody war with its own people during a time when there was no appetite for more death, what was left of the United States military and border patrol had retreated. It had given up control to the coalition of gangs, drug traffickers, and ex-cons, abdicating its claim to roughly two hundred and seventy thousand miles between Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The Cartel had been quick to establish a wide area of influence, forming a paramilitary hierarchy to control and oppress those who lived within their staked claim.

  The Cartel’s highest levels of leadership, who called themselves generals, chose the nastiest of the nasty to lead four key areas. They were called captains. Those captains then chose their bosses. Bosses recruited grunts. Grunts harassed, robbed, beat, tortured, raped, or killed whoever didn’t submit to their will. Sometimes they did those things regardless.

  Among a mean lot of captains, Skinner was the meanest. He was the least likely to suffer fools. He was the perfect man to tame what his superiors called the Wild West. As long as he kept his bosses in line, his people under his thumb, and made sure the spoils made it to the generals in Dallas and Houston, the leadership left him alone.

  With a rogue killer on land he didn’t control, Skinner was restless. He slid out of bed, his feet slapping on the cold wood floors of his bedroom as the nightlight flickered to life. He crushed the cigarette into a full ashtray and tapped out a replacement from the box.

  He lit it, the paper sizzling, and took another healthy drag. Skinner stretched and walked across his room to a large monitor on the wall opposite his bed.

  He cleared his throat. “Computer on,” he said. The screen blinked to life and the operating system cycled. He squinted against the bright light of the display.