2020: Emergency Exit (43 page)

Amadi was boiling mad and immediately sought out Lazzo. Privately the two of them had almost become friends the past week or so. Amadi wouldn’t say the same for himself and Eddie—he stayed as far away from the giant as possible—but the brothers roomed together, so going to one, took him to both. Eddie and Lazzo had their own room in the lodge. Amadi’s room was right next to theirs, but being linked to the brothers by the color of his skin, no one wanted to room with him either. So he had a room to himself. He tapped on the wall after he was sure the brothers were in bed. When they tapped back, Amadi opened the door to his room and slipped quietly to their door. He tapped twice again, and the door opened enough to let him slip in. Because Eddie suspected his room was bugged, they went into the bathroom and turned on the fan. Then Amadi told Eddie and Lazzo about everything the general was doing.

Amadi was clearly afraid Eddie wouldn’t understand, but Eddie understood perfectly. He wasn’t sure he could trust Amadi, but he figured he would give the man a chance. Eddie gave him a dangerous assignment and told him if he wanted to prove his loyalty, he’d have to complete it. Lazzo objected to putting their one ally at risk, but Eddie insisted, and Eddie typically got his way. Amadi needed to get Eddie a radio tuned into the same frequency as the general’s. There was only one that wouldn’t be in the general’s possession, and that was the one the former base commander had left where he always kept it, behind a false wall in the liquor cabinet…in the general’s sleeping quarters.

Two nights later Amadi brought the radio to him. He’d gone in to clean the general’s toilet, and the general had needed to use the bathroom. It only took Amadi a minute to find the radio and tuck it away while the general’s dogs barked at him and the general yelled from the bathroom at them to shut up. Amadi finished the job and returned to his room.

He had been searched entering the general’s quarters, but not leaving them. He still had his gloves on when he came out of the bathroom into the main room, and they were dripping wet. He wiped them on his shirt and raised his arms for the two guards at the door, but they wanted nothing to do with him.
Perfect
. When the hallway quieted down for the night, he tapped on the wall again, but instead of entering Eddie’s room this time, he just handed him the radio. In case the radio ended up being discovered in Eddie’s possession, Amadi was to stay far away. Eddie claimed he didn’t want Amadi to risk his life for them, manipulating the man’s loyalty even more. He then gave Amadi instructions on how to cover his tracks.

Amadi planted a bottle of whiskey in Eddie’s room in a corner of the closet. Amadi then went to the general and told him he’d snuck into Eddie and Lazzo’s room while they were out and looked for anything they might have hidden. He found a few pieces of paper with notes on them—which Eddie had provided Amadi to give the general—some cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey.

Since the general forbid alcohol consumption except by his own officers, he had their room searched the next morning. Two of his men went through Eddie’s closet, without bothering to search the rest of their room, and found the alcohol and cigarettes. Eddie and Lazzo were taken outside and whipped a dozen times each in front of the entire camp. The other soldiers were allowed to “buy” lashes and took their turns whipping the brothers. Amadi even whipped both of them once at Eddie’s prior insistence. Eddie watched as Amadi celebrated with the other men and didn’t miss the apologetic glance he offered at the first opportunity. Amadi did what he had to do.

The general then threatened Eddie and Lazzo with more beatings if they were ever discovered hiding anything else. He told them he would be checking regularly. Eddie and Lazzo dragged themselves back to their room, where they listened to the general radio Denver and report the morning’s events to the Mexican commander. Their plan had worked to perfection.

Over the course of the last week, Eddie had listened with a great deal of interest to the military strategy being discussed on the radio. The general was privy to everything the Mexican commander knew. There didn’t appear to be any secrets between them. He kept waiting for any word of the Americans in Estes Park, but none came. Amadi kept playing his spy role to perfection. He asked for permission to plant a bug in the bathroom, and the general granted his request. While picking up the bug for the bathroom, Amadi also grabbed a blocking chip for the one in the bedroom, essentially reversing the places it was safe for them to talk and listen to the radio. From time to time Eddie and Lazzo would enter the bathroom and talk to each other about fake private matters and then return to their main room to listen to the radio. Eddie and Lazzo were each whipped a few more times for various things that came up in those conversations. Amadi was praised. The general was happy. And he kept right on talking on the radio.

Finally, the day Eddie had been hoping for came. It was before 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 26. Eddie had returned from cleaning out the camp trash, and Lazzo had left to go work in the kitchen. (They tried to make sure one of them was always by the radio so they wouldn’t miss anything.) Eddie was lying on the lower bunk with his ear to the radio, almost falling asleep, when he heard the words Estes Park. He sat up with a jolt, slamming his head on the steel frame of the upper bunk. He winced, but strained to make sure he didn’t miss a word…particularly since the Mexican Commander sounded so furious.

Apparently, two jeeps had been stolen from the cabin on Old Fall River Road. Nothing had been suspected at first, but when one of the two men remaining at the cabin went out for a smoke, he found a great deal of blood behind the cabin and even more partially buried off the front porch. Further inspection of the cabin area revealed no footprints, apparently washed out by a torrential downpour, but they did find three trucks over the side of the road about half a mile closer to Estes Park. They clearly hadn’t been there long, and one of the trucks contained the bodies of the three missing soldiers—without their uniforms.
Clever.

The intelligence consensus was that there had been at least eight people in those three trucks, and they’d dumped those trucks to take the jeeps. Several soldiers at the alpine base had seen two jeeps pull up from the Old Fall River Road early that morning in the middle of the crazy thunderstorm, and one of the soldiers had even hitched a ride down to Grand Lake in one of the jeeps. They hadn’t yet been able to track down that soldier. He could even be dead.

The Mexican commander told the general he’d update him when he had more information, and a little less than two hours later Eddie heard him call in again. Two jeeps had been stopped at a patrol station in Delta. The drivers of the jeeps were wearing Qi Jia uniforms, and the African soldiers who stopped them said the drivers were black. But they didn’t seem to be African. Unfortunately, they hadn’t searched the vehicles and had let them go on. At least they had called it in, and given that Denver had sent out a nationwide report of two missing jeeps, they were connected directly to the Intelligence Division.

Intelligence figured they had to be Americans and could even be the same ones who had taken the jeeps up in the mountains. If so, they had killed three—and maybe even four—Qi Jia men and were making a run for it. They told the soldiers in Delta to sit tight. More soldiers would soon be on their way to Durango to capture the Americans.

The Mexican commander requested the general take this hunt on personally. The general was to take his four officers and his forty best men and go directly to Durango. He was to call back in as soon as he arrived there.

Eddie was convinced these were
his
Americans.
His
lions. He scrambled to find Lazzo and filled him in on what was going on. They dressed in uniform and headed down to the main lobby, where the entire company had been called together. When the general entered the room, everyone stood at attention. As soon as the general saw Eddie and Lazzo there he smiled. “Not you two,” he said. He commanded them to go clean the trash out of the rooms. Eddie pleaded to stay and hear what was going on, but—as anticipated—the general would hear nothing of it.

He and Lazzo were escorted to the other lodge building. A week earlier Amadi had inserted a tracking device—with a twenty-mile range—into each of the four officers’ combat packs—knowing they would never be scanned. Amadi had brought Eddie the tracker for those four coded chips a few nights ago, in case they were ever needed, and Eddie had packed it away back in their room. As the soldiers came in, grabbed their gear, and left, Eddie and Lazzo headed back to their room. That tracker would come in most useful now.

General Roja was so insistent on rubbing his power in Eddie’s face that he took eighty soldiers with him instead of the forty the Mexican commander had requested. He made a point of walking smugly by Eddie’s room before he left to make sure he was there.

“Make sure you clean all toilets before we get back,” he ordered Eddie. “All 160.” He smiled with contempt.

 Eddie saluted weakly in reply, intentionally allowing his dejection to be evident. One of the general’s officers, stuck his head into Eddie’s room as the general walked away and smiled. “Sit. Stay,” he said. “Good boy.” That drew a laugh from the other officers and a mock sad shake of the head from Eddie.
They had it coming
.

After all the turnover at the camp the past few weeks, this massive troop movement was going to leave only a dozen soldiers there with Eddie and Lazzo. As a demonstration of how little the General actually thought of Amadi, he was making him stay behind as well. That was just as well for Eddie. He and Lazzo could use another man.

The general, his four officers, and the other eighty soldiers left an hour later on the four-hour drive to Durango. It took Eddie, Lazzo, and Amadi less than fifteen minutes to kill the remaining eleven men at the camp, and then they quickly packed and got in a jeep themselves, tracking the chips in the officers’ backpacks. It was a big risk leaving the camp, knowing orders were to kill him if he ever left.
Or if he killed eleven of the general’s men!
Eddie smiled. The general’s orders had been crystal clear. Eddie simply had no intention of following them. He’d been waiting half a year for this day.

Sit? Stay? Ha!
Eddie seethed, shaking his head and gripping the steering wheel, a cunning smile curving the corners of his lips.
You’re not poaching my Americans!

SEVENTY-THREE: “Learning From Experience”

It bothered Eddie a little the Americans hadn’t gone the way he’d expected them to. He felt certain they would come out of the mountains and head directly south towards Mexico. He considered himself fortunate he’d been tuned in to the radio and caught the deviation, and had been prepared to alter his own course and plans as necessary. In that regard, all the whippings had been worth it.

Part of him was unsure whether these were the same Americans. It had given him a moment’s pause before he and Lazzo killed the eleven soldiers. But their moves were a little too strategic, too military, to be random chance. These had to be his lions. Sure, it was possible there were more Americans hidden in Estes Park over the winter, but it wasn’t too far to Durango from Buena Vista to go check. If he went there and it wasn’t them, he’d improvise again. He still had the radio, and it was on the same frequency as the Mexican commander’s. As long as he was near any of their communication towers, he would be able to get the same feed as the general. The only soldier who knew he and Lazzo had the radio was in the back seat with them. The radio and the tracking chips were advantages you usually didn’t get in a hunt. This was almost going to be too easy.

The general and his men had gone straight south, presumably a hundred miles down to Monte Vista, where they’d then turn west towards Durango. It was the shorter route, but not how Eddie wanted to go. He wanted to go directly west to Montrose and then south. He didn’t trust the Americans would do as they’d told the guards in Delta. If these were the same Americans, they didn’t tend to show their cards like that.

Eddie pulled into a gas station in Montrose just after 4 p.m. As Lazzo filled their jeep up, Eddie looked over his maps. Delta was a short ways north, and there was a small station with a radio tower there. Eddie decided to head up there.

When they arrived in Delta, he stayed in the jeep with the radio while Lazzo and Amadi went in to talk to the guards and congratulate them on their good work. Lazzo claimed he’d come straight from Central Command in Denver and since he still had his Intelligence Division badges, he made sure they were visible for the troops at the post. Lazzo took down some information from each of the guys and told them they should expect to receive commendations in the near future. They were thrilled.
Anything to keep them from calling us in
. Eddie laughed to himself in the jeep.

Lazzo and Amadi sat down for a lengthy celebratory late lunch/early dinner with the other soldiers while Eddie listened to the radio chatter. There was a lot of it. The Mexican commander, fortunately, loved to talk. The drones had been flying back and forth between Montrose and Durango all afternoon and had yet to pick up the stolen jeeps. Either the Americans were hiding somewhere waiting for darkness, or they had gone a different route. Eddie anticipated it was the latter. They never seemed to follow the main roads. That meant they had to have headed through the mountains, through Telluride. A few drones had flown that pass as well, but nothing was seen there either. Still, that made more sense to Eddie.

Between 6:30 and 7, as Lazzo and Amadi sat around having tea with the guards, Eddie heard the general radio the Mexican commander. They talked back and forth for a while. The general had set up a wide net around the Durango area. There was no way the Americans would get past him. The military base at Grand Junction had sent two hundred more men. Half of the men swept through the mountains down to Durango and, not having found the Americans on their sweep, had joined the general’s forces there. The other half remained posted ten miles south of Ridgeway State Park, at the entrance to a place called Rotary Park. They would stay there to block the Americans if they decided to turn back.