2020: Emergency Exit (45 page)

“I don’t have a flipping choice, dude!” Sam yelled back. We swerved past the second parked jeep, and it too pulled in behind us as we raced down the county road into Goosenecks State Park. The road split about ten miles later, and Tara directed Sam to take a sharp left. The two jeeps that had been blocking the roads, and apparently blowing the other jeeps up, were tucked in about a half-mile back, side by side. There was a trail of about thirty sets of lights behind them.

We came up on a trailer park before the river, and Tara yelled to pull into it. We drove to the main lodge beside the water and were shocked to see about a dozen solid whitewater rafts stacked on top of each other next to the building.

“Forget everything else,” Danny yelled at us. “Get two of those rafts in the water and get going.”

Just then an explosion rocked us, then another. The two jeeps behind us were on this side of a giant fire, and there was a huge blaze immediately beyond their position.
They’d blown up the road again. Seriously. Who were these people?
We shoved two of the rafts in the water and as many guns and packs as we could carry in one run. Blake smashed in the door on the small building adjacent to the lodge and came out with an armful of life vests and paddles, tossing them quickly into the boats, and we all pushed off into the darkness. We left everything else in the jeeps.

We were moving down the river already by the time Danny got his rifle up to see what was going on behind us. The long procession of lights had caught up to the flames and the hole in the road, and men were scrambling out of the vehicles and firing their weapons into the trailer park. Danny scanned around frantically through his rifle scope to see what they were firing at, and he saw three men sprinting towards the boathouse. With the night vision it only took seconds for Danny to recognize them, and the reality of who they were took his breath away. “Holy—”

Before we could ask “What?” he’d jumped out of the boat with his gun, into the river. “Danny!” I yelled. “What the—”

He turned his head towards us and screamed, “Keep going. Just keep going.” Then we lost sight of him in the darkness. We could still hear the gunfire as we rounded the first bend and continued down the San Juan River, on an eventual collision course with the Colorado River and beyond that, the Grand Canyon.

SEVENTY-SEVEN: (Eddie) “The Bitter Truth”

At first he had missed it. Well, he heard it, but it didn’t register. Not to the extent it should have, for sure. Eddie was exhausted but trying to remain attentive in Delta, listening to the Mexican commander tell the general about a man he’d had to kill. He’d explained how defiant the man had been, how he’d refused to command his troop anymore, and how he’d demanded that the commanders needed to tell the truth to all the men. The general had laughed. They made a few jokes, and then the commander told the general how he had to set the man up again and how easy it had been to get the other commanders to agree to execute him. The general laughed along and at some point asked him how many that was now. The commander told him it was well over a hundred. Eddie was dwelling on the “executed a hundred men who didn’t deserve to die” part when the general said, “What difference does it make who started this war? We won. This land is our land now. It’s the soldiers’ land. These men could all be rich. They can have whatever they want!”

Somehow the significance of the conversation hadn’t yet grabbed Eddie. Had the general not continued talking, it probably never would have. “If they were better soldiers, they wouldn’t have been so easy to manipulate. Stupid cowards.”

Wait a minute
. Eddie froze.
Manipulate? Why would they have to manipulate them into war?
Manipulate was a strong word. That made Eddie stop to think and rehash what he had heard in the last ten minutes.
Wait. What if America didn’t start the fight? Son of a camel humper…
The truth couldn’t have hit Eddie harder if it had been fired directly into him from a cannon five feet away.

These hundred men that had been killed—they’d found out about what the commanders had done. They’d somehow found out about the actual sequencing and intent of this Qi Jia movement.
But how? How had they?
Eddie cursed his own naivety. The “how” didn’t matter right now. The point was these men who had been executed had learned they’d been fooled and decided to stand up for what they believed in, even in the face of certain death. They weren’t stupid cowards. They were men of principle—heroes.
So what the hell does that make me?
Eddie preferred stupidity over a lack of principles.
Yes, he was stupid.

He thought back to his meeting with the officers when he’d been informed of his family’s death. There had been a man in that room taking notes. He had done it with every single officer who had been brought in.
Why? If it was the same story every time, why did they need that man there to take notes?
That act alone wouldn’t have been enough to make him question it now, but the questions he’d been asked to prove his value to the cause, those were starting to click back through his head. Those questions—and so many little things he’d seen and heard since his arrival in Mexico—started to deal Eddie emotional body blows. This entire time he’d been a fool.
He’d fallen for it all!

The Libyan Commander had interviewed Eddie a year ago—in his own home, no less—prior to his troop being sent to Mexico. They’d been sent to Mexico in advance of the attacks, along with hundreds of other leaders and their men. Then they all sat and waited, completing basic drills they could have done anywhere.
Not because someone got wind of an impending American attack. America wasn’t going to attack. Not the innocent anyway. The commanders knew what was going to happen to America because THEY were going to be the ones to do it. They knew, somehow, Mexico was a safe zone…that Mexico would never be suspected. These people built an army of who knows how many million and prepared them to move when THEY started it all. When America was attacked, America retaliated. That’s why their defenses were down. That’s why there was so little left. America NEVER SAW IT COMING.

The evidence was swarming Eddie’s mind, burning through his veins, boiling his blood. Eddie wanted to scream. How could he have been
so
stupid? Of course he’d been manipulated.

The Libyan commander was sitting in that room in Denver right now. The casualties of this war meant nothing to him. It was no different than any other civil war, where thousands lost their lives for a cause they would never get to live for. It was the ultimate worthless sacrifice. But this Libyan commander had handpicked Eddie and a dozen or so Libyan officers and their troops. He knew where every one of Eddie’s weaknesses were.

As the highest ranked officer in the Libyan military, the commander had direct access to all his files, to everything that made Eddie who he was. He knew what would make Eddie cave. They took the thing he loved the most—his family—and made sure he lost them, because they knew that would permanently secure his allegiance. They knew, because of who Eddie was, exactly how much that allegiance would be worth. Eddie was a powerful man. Fueling him with vengeance only made him more so.

That was going to backfire on The Seven commanders now.

They had to figure he’d never find out the truth, and even if he did, it probably wouldn’t matter anymore. His eagerness to prove himself to the Libyan commander in Libya, and then likewise to the Qi Jia commanders in Mexico, assured his violent vigilance for the first stage of this war, and that was really all they had needed him for. It had worked…until Danny had thrown him for a loop. The commanders, like Eddie, wouldn’t have counted on an American potentially sacrificing his own life to save one of the people sent there to kill him. Only a truly noble man would consider such foolishness. That nobility, that same belief in what was right, was what had led Eddie to do the right thing by that river in Colorado, saving that girl. That man—that was the Eddie he always thought he was. Not this one.

Eddie pounded his fist over and over again on the steering wheel. Everything he’d ever stood for he had thrown away in an instant at the news of his family’s death. He had been so gullible, so fueled by revenge. When these Americans attacked his men, he took the entire fight personally, too personally. He had made it his personal mission to kill the Americans, especially these lions. He had played right into The Seven commanders’ hands, even far more specifically than they’d ever intended. He now had to figure out a way to reverse, or at least stop, the damage he’d done.

Everything changed for Eddie in that instant.
No more! His own people had killed his family to get him to kill Americans. This family he was chasing didn’t deserve to die. They had done nothing wrong. They had done nothing to him or his family. They had only killed to stay alive—to keep their own family alive. But the general and his men—they deserved to die. They killed his family
.
Over a hundred men were smart enough and honorable enough to figure it out before him. Shame on him!

It wasn’t enough now to turn his guns on the general and his men. There was truly only one way he could adequately pay them back. He needed to help these Americans escape. If the general and his men died in the process…so be it.

SEVENTY-EIGHT: “The Package”

Eddie rounded up Lazzo and Amadi and they left the Delta base, cruising for Ridgeway. He filled them in on his realizations, and they were as shocked as he was—equally as determined to reverse their course. They came upon a roadblock in Ridgeway with three soldiers, and given the heavy traffic in the area, they left those men alone. Lazzo used his Intelligence Division badges one more time to get them through that roadblock, and they continued on to Telluride.

In Telluride they came upon a roadblock with four jeeps and eight men. They parked their jeeps and casually got out, walking towards the guards. Amadi was in front, and he waved at them and asked if they needed any food. Given that Eddie, Lazzo, and Amadi clearly weren’t Americans, the soldiers “let their guard down,” and over the next ten minutes the three of them managed to take out all eight guards. They put the bodies in the back of their jeep and dumped them off the side of the road about halfway down to Dolores. “Coyote food,” Eddie said, without the slightest hint of remorse.

In Dolores they came upon another roadblock. Eddie knew from the radio conversation back in Delta that this town was being watched by the general, via a radar post in Mancos. Their one jeep, entering town on its own, wouldn’t be enough to cause alarm, but they were going to need more than one jeep from here on. They pulled up to the roadblock, killed the six guards, and then Eddie and Lazzo went ahead to set the explosives on the road by Cortez.

Eddie told Amadi to stay at the roadblock in case anyone called in, and to explicitly say, “The colonel had ordered us to come down to help.” Then as soon as Amadi saw any jeeps coming into town from Telluride, he was to drive south to the fork heading to Teec Nos Pos. Eddie handed him a detonator and told him to wait until he saw two jeeps approaching the fork, then blow the explosives. Amadi was then to continue towards Teec Nos Pos, where he’d find Eddie and Lazzo.

One of the general’s officers did radio in, and Amadi gave the explanation he was supposed to. It worked. Amadi followed the rest of Eddie’s instructions, and with their two jeeps they played out a relay race of sorts. They were setting, overlapping, and blowing explosives in front of the Americans directing them away from the path of the general and his men. Then they set other explosives behind to take out the jeeps pursuing the Americans.

Eddie, Lazzo, and Amadi successfully kept the Americans alive and guided them to the road leading to Goosenecks State Park. Eddie had hoped to be able to lead them south on 191 ahead of the general, but somehow the explosives must not have blown back in Shiprock. The general was way ahead of schedule and coming north on 191 as the Americans were approaching it from the east.

This was going to come to a head soon.
Too soon.

Eddie directed the Americans onto the road heading into Goosenecks State Park as the general’s men caught up to them. The Americans only had about a three-mile lead. As Eddie and Lazzo approached the park in their jeep, Eddie noticed the Americans had stopped by the river. He could only hope they had some kind of boat, or this was going to be the end. Knowing time was going to be critical, Eddie had wired both jeeps full of explosives while they waited for Amadi. He activated them now, and they parked the vehicles about a quarter mile from the park, in the middle of the road. They ran away from the jeeps, across the park, and blew them up as the caravan pulled up.

The explosion was so huge it took out a couple of the lead vehicles and created a crater the other vehicles couldn’t pass through. The general’s troops quickly jumped out of their vehicles and pursued Eddie, Lazzo, and Amadi on foot towards the river. Gunfire broke out behind them as the troops closed in. At the same time Eddie saw the boats ahead of him, he also saw a man kneeling in front of him firing toward them. He hesitated a second until he noticed the bullets were coming nowhere near him. He looked behind him long enough to see a couple men go down; then, seeing Lazzo raise his gun at the man by the boats, Eddie yelled out, “No. Lazzo, don’t.” But it was too late. Lazzo had already fired off a shot, and the kneeling man spun to the ground.

Eddie reached Danny and helped him get up as Lazzo grabbed a boat, and Amadi grabbed two paddles. Eddie lifted Danny into the boat, and Amadi was pushing them off when he took two bullets in the back. He disappeared into the water as Eddie, Lazzo, and Danny drifted quietly down the San Juan River escaping, for the moment, into the cold dark night.

--------------------

As the general and his men raced west from Aztec towards Shiprock, he continued to receive updates from various soldiers about explosions and blocked roads, apparently preventing the Americans from coming south to him. It was making him more and more furious, and he increased his speed. Driving through the roadblock in Shiprock, the lead jeep was demolished in an explosion. Given the amount of explosives they saw that hadn’t gone off as they drove past, the general realized they’d been lucky.
He should have been dead too.