The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (21 page)

Augustine turns back towards Ditka and gives him a thumbs-up. His partner returns the signal and drives away with his lights off. Ditka will not be far, watching and waiting on Augustine’s signal to pick him up. Koenig enters the building and the door slides close behind him. He makes his way through the dark to the elevators. The ‘American Ayatollah’s’ office is on the top floor of the twelve story building. Augustine slips his 45 from its holster and taps the
elevator’s call button with the second knuckle of his left forefinger. The mirrored bronze doors in front of him open with a ding!

Koenig slips into the elevator. He taps another icon on his PalmPal and zings another string of code at the panel of clear, plastic, crescent-shaped buttons. The top sliver of a moon glows green with the number 12. A moment later, the elevator lurches upward. The ride up is smooth and silent but for Augustine Koenig’s recitation of Saint Michael’s prayer.

“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May GOD rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do Thou, O Prince of the heavenly host – by the Divine Power of GOD – cast into hell, Satan and all the evil spirits which roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

Austin, Texas

20:45:33

Paul Trevor is the Republican nominee for the Presidency. Having recently won the party’s nomination, Trevor is home, resting up before launching his national campaign to unseat his rival, William O’Neill. It is a challenge he is looking forward to. Trevor feels he has a better than fair chance of winning. The Democrats are pushing the economy precariously near another collapse and a further financial implosion would be catastrophic, perhaps fatal for the nation. The country is in its tenth straight year of depression. Runaway inflation and a 29% unemployment rate are draining what little life remains in the economy. Trevor never misses an opportunity to point out that the jobless figure is actually closer to 40% when you factor those who stopped looking for a job and settled for living off the ever expanding public dole. Taxes in America are the highest in the world as the government seeks to pay for a growing list of public services. Many fear they will go even higher if President O’Neill agrees to help bail out Western Europe again. The President publicly denies that he will agree to a new round of bail outs for Europe, but Trevor doesn’t believe him. Paul has ads running nation-wide saying so, depicting O’Neill as the UN’s lap dog and ‘yes man.’ The ads remind Americans that foreign troops are, for the first time in the nation’s history, on their soil thanks to William O’Neill’s work at the Department of Peace.

The ads are having their effect, eroding the President’s numbers, but Paul knows that the economy is what really concerns the people. Trevor’s two terms
as Governor of Texas has proven to the country that he knows how to generate jobs. The Lone Star State’s unemployment rate is only half that of the nation’s. Sure, his critics say they are mostly minimum wage jobs; but, as he retorted to the MSNBC host who last brought it up, “Those who quibble about the kinds of jobs I have produced, do so in the hopes no one notices they have done nothing but lose us jobs.”

Trevor feels that the economic situation, the unabated scourge of terrorism and the general resentment of the Federal government offers his party its first chance since George W Bush to win the White House. The base is not just excited, they’re angry. They consider themselves cheated by the Alien Resident Enfranchisement Act that robbed them of the last election. In response to the legislation, the registration of voters in the Republican Party is at an all-time high and the GOP, not wanting to waste time or treasure in a protracted primary fight, handed Paul the nomination in record time. Base and party are spoiling for a fight. And so is he. Trevor feels more than up to the task of leading the charge. He has to win the Presidency, Trevor told his hometown paper, because he fears, “The country won’t survive another four years of Democratic party rule.”

When the reporter suggested that he was being dramatic, Paul Trevor insisted that he was “As serious as a heart attack.”

Things will change when he becomes President.

When one of his dinner guests arrived with news of the President’s kidnapping, Paul Trevor realized that change was already afoot. He excused himself from the party and secluded himself in his study. Trevor was disturbed to find that he was cut off from the world. His cell phone’s network and the Internet were down and television could offer him nothing but five hundred channels of static. The situation was intolerable. He sat behind his desk and rocked nervously in the squeaking chair for a while.

At length Paul Trevor decided that he had only one option. He sprung off his chair and got to work!

Trevor’s seventeen year old son, Paul Jr. came up to check on him as he started throwing clothes in a suitcase.

“What are you doing, dad?”

“I’m fixing to go to DC.”

“But they’ve grounded all flights,” his son says. “Uncle Ned just came from the airport where they...”

“I can still drive,” Trevor senior responds. “Why don’t you go pack yourself a bag as well. It’s a long trip. I would love a co-pilot.”

“Sure dad,” his son says after a moment’s hesitation. “If you think it’s important.”

“Someone kidnapped the President, son,” says Paul senior over his shoulder. “And our satellites have been shut down. I just don’t see how it could get any more important.”

Fortuna Mountain Foothills, Arizona

20:22:01

Milagros Delatorre looks south across miles of empty desert. Standing atop the hood of the US Border Patrol Hummer she stares out, silent and still. In the soft focus of her large brown eyes, the horizon becomes a prism for the young woman. At the hazy seam between sand and sky, time and space fold in on themselves. Through the trembling, translucent membrane she sees beyond the horizon before her to a day, ten years past, when she was last in the same lifeless wasteland, staring north through the same shimmering curtain of heat, dust and dying light. Through the veil at the end of the vast and dusty vista, Delatorre looks back through time and into her own eyes, the long ago eyes of a battered and bloodied thirteen year old girl on her knees, swooning on a threadbare line between life and death.

Milagros’ oldest memory is a nightmare. She was born into it in a burst of fear. It began on a crowded, overheated bus stopped on a lonely stretch of dessert road. At first there was a roar of noise, shouting gunmen and passengers screaming and crying. Loud, clapping explosions rattled the air through all the shrieking. And then the pain began. She was pulled by the hair out of her seat, dragged to the door of the bus and tossed outside into a ring of men. They all wore uniforms. And they were all laughing.

There were a handful of other young girls in the circle with her. Milagros can remember every one of them and what they all endured together. Torturous flashbacks of the beatings and gang rape still find themselves into her dreams from time to time. The one memory of that experience that returns nearly nightly, and always vividly, is of kneeling by the side of the road with the other girls, their bodies raw with pain and trembling with terror as the soldiers executed their fellow passengers. One by one, the skulls of the adults were
crushed by vicious blows of a mallet and their bodies dumped into the roadside ditch that would become their shared and shallow grave. The hellish scene of twisted limbs, some still twitching with the last protest of life, of bloody, contorted faces and dark, lifeless eyes staring out in all directions was nailed into Milagros’ consciousness, never to be pried loose.

The soldiers who stopped the bus were a band of Los Zetas, vicious killers who began their ruthless climb to power by putting their American, specialforces training to work for Mexican drug cartels in the latter decades of the last century. They terrorized both sides of the border for years, killing indiscriminately in the service of the drug kingpins. They dug their bloodied hands into every illicit operation on the border, including the sex-slave trade into which they sold Milagros and the other girls when they were done with them. All the while they wreaked their terror on the border, Los Zetas also infiltrated the Mexican military. When the presidents of Mexico and America were instantly incinerated in Panama, Los Zetas sensed and seized their opportunity. In short order the mercenaries wrested control of the military from the generals. They turned it, first on their former masters, and then aimed their expanded military might northward. While the ensuing border war did not win them any American territory, it did solidify their control of Mexico. They were now the nation’s de facto rulers; President Vargas, their most pliant puppet.

The United Nations bases on the border were also under their control. There were six bases, three on the north and three on the south. They were erected in 2016 to secure the UN-brokered cease-fire between Mexico and America. Los Zetas wasted no time bringing them into their sphere of influence with the usual mix of bribes and threats. Through the bases, Los Zetas continued the work of their former masters, pushing drugs, arms, illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists across the border.

Milagros Delatorre raises binoculars to her eyes. Through them, she pierces the horizon and focuses on the UN base shrouded in the haze. There are only a few men walking about the large, fence-enclosed square. There are two sentries atop two thirty-foot towers, one on the northeast corner and the other on the southwest. The blue-helmet on the latter tower is standing still, looking south from his perch. The other smokes a cigarette as he paces the small, twelve foot square of his post. There are two barracks, one each along the south and west fences. They house the fifty soldiers garrisoned at the camp. A vehicle hanger
and workshop runs the length of the north side. A two-story, squat and square building erected along the east wall serves as officer’s quarters, mess hall and administrative office. A flag pole rises fifty feet in the air from the center of the compound. The blue and white UN flag flutters weakly in the slight breeze.

In a few hours, Milagros past, present and future will collide at that UN base. In a few hours bright, yellow school buses laden with gifts from Los Zetas to their loyal allies are scheduled to arrive. The buses will be full of children, none beyond their teenage years. They are being sent to entertain the soldiers during their Winter Fest celebration. Delatorre knows what those kids can expect. Milagros had ridden in those very same buses and had like-wise been ‘gifted’ to loyal allies of Los Zetas. She knows the young girls and boys aboard the buses are nothing more than sacrifices, offerings to sate the sexual depravities of the soldiers. Their young bodies and their innocence are to be thrown, like so much meat, for the animals, caged behind the wire fence, to maul.

“What do you think?”

It is Manuel Morales, her squad captain. He approaches from behind the Hummer. Delatorre lowers the binoculars and turns her head to see the large, muscled frame of her fellow Crusader. Like her, he is in a ‘borrowed’ US Border Patrol uniform. His outfit is bookended by cowboy boots and black Stetson. The Fortuna Foothills rise behind him in wavy bands of purple, pink and gray.

“Can we take them?” he asks.

“Piece of pie,” Milagros answers.

Morales laughs. He tips his Stetson back to his hair line.

“The expression is, piece of cake,” he says.

“Cake?” she asks.

Morales nods.

“No pie?”

The Captain shakes his head.

“Why not pie?”

Captain Morales purses his lips in thought. He shakes his head again and finally shrugs.

“You’ll have to ask a gringo. It’s their expression.”

“A pie is easier to make, is just as good to eat as a cake,” Milagros says. “It makes no sense. For you and me it will always be, easy as pie. Okay?”

Manuel Morales concedes with a grin and a shy lowering of his head.

“A piece of pie, it is,” he says.

Milagros smiles down on her Captain from her position on top of the Hummer’s hood. She loves Manuel. His gentleness, she has come to learn, is the product of a heart made fearless by his faith in and his love of God. And so is the power of the man. It was Manuel who led the raiding party that rescued her. She was eighteen years old at the time, malnourished and strung-out by the heroin her brothel keepers used to keep their stable of slaves docile. After her rescue, Morales visited her often during her recovery. He encouraged her return to health with just his smiling presence and his many prayers at her bedside. His help with the language made learning English enjoyable. What Milagros is most grateful for, however, is Manuel’s help in bringing her to Christ. More than anything else it helped to heal the wounds her enslavement opened in her soul.

Morales offers her a hand down. “Cormier sends word, the truck has left Yuma.”

She looks at his wide, long-fingered hand and remembers the first time he offered it to her. It was at the brothel after the raid, when the shooting and the screaming had finally ceased. She recalls flinching at the sight of his open, reaching hand. She retreated from his offer in fear, crawling backward into the corner of the room. She was glad that she did. Had she not, Milagros might never have seen the tender pity that her fear evoked from Manuel’s eyes; she might have missed that first sweet, glimmering inkling that there were other kinds of human beings in the world, beings different than those who made a nightmare of her young life.

Milagros Delatorre takes Manuel Morales’ hand. She hops off the Hummer and lands beside her Captain. The strength of the man is readily readable even in the soft cupping of her fingers in his palm. Manuel’s hands, his arms and every muscled inch of his six foot tall frame were chiseled into Herculean shape by twenty years of bull riding. His body radiates a power every bit as brutish as the beasts he rode, but the light in Manuel’s soft-brown eyes attests to an intelligence that saddles his animal self with an iron discipline. However, as formidable as the mass and the mind of the man appear to others, Milagros believes Manuel’s most powerful feature is his easy, ear-to-ear smile. It was that open-hearted smile of his that helped her climb out of hell.