GPS (43 page)

“I’m not gonna wait for you later, by the way,” Josh added, “so promise me you can get back here in the dark, then get out of here without driving off a cliff. Remember your path out of the canyon when you take your position, that’s the most important thing. And don’t panic, and don’t be afraid to get the hell out when you’ve done your part. Get back up here in one piece, then program the GPS for home. You should be able to make the jump either on the main clearing down there or out on the road. But the heat will be coming fast so don’t mess around.”

Within 20 minutes, Jeff was climbing through the rocks alone, worried already that all of the meticulous planning for this night didn’t make it any easier to know what his precise position was supposed to be. He kept his Blackhawk in his hand and his sniper rifle on his back. Josh had disappeared off to the east, and more than a hundred others were also sneaking through the cliffs cloaking Destinoso.

Jeff wondered if he would ever make it to that baseball game with Josh, and Josh wondered how such a goofy guy like Jeff could have caused his first-ever slump. Josh then had a recurring thought about his life after tonight and what it would be like, but this time it got interrupted. He’d spied his shooting perch about 20 yards away and had scaled a smooth rock shelf just below it. As he pulled himself up, he nearly smashed a handheld GPS unit with his knee. It was sitting out there completely at random, and he had to grab it to keep it from tumbling off the ledge.

After sliding back off the shelf and scanning his surroundings for anything that looked like a trap (which was difficult to gauge as more than 100 of his fellow men were invading the cliffs at the same moment), Simmons acted on impulse. He climbed back onto the ledge and rolled onto his stomach. A hiker might have felt triumphant to come across such a breathtaking dusk view of such a beautiful valley, but Simmons didn’t notice. He set his rifle down to his left and turned his attention to the little handheld GPS.

- 57 -

Something was sticking out just a hair from behind the rocks in the distance, partially obscured by swaying branches in its wake. It was little more than a tiny dot in the distance, but it was something so shiny and metallic that just a touch of the setting sun sent out a blinding reflection of it. Simon Charles and the others studied it for a moment.

“Well, gentlemen?” he said quietly.

They were at once struggling to walk instead of run, seething and panting in anticipation as they moved toward it, their guns clicking in their hands. Only Charles, gently strolling along but not making a sound, kept his gun lowered as he approached the car backed underneath a long, flat rock shelf in the side of the mountain.

After he’d been picked up on the roadside, Charles had demanded that his driver attempt to steer their Range Rover through the back end of Chopo Canyon, which was just off the main highway past the ranch to the east. The front end of that canyon connected, through a dry, rocky river bed that caused the Rover to get stuck twice, with the back end of the Rio Vera Canyon the transients were using that very moment to stage their attack.

Despite having the luxury of GPS tracking to bring them to their prey, the terrain made it a difficult chase for Charles and his men. Somewhere in that tangle of peaks was an intruder, a potential assassin, and Charles had just stumbled upon his car, and knew immediately who he was. Because of Rio Vera’s U-shape, however, Charles had no idea of the heavy presence of revolucion troops fanning out at its other end. He only knew there was at least one new fish on the line, and that the GPS showed he was on the southeast rim above the ranch.

Charles and his men had spotted Simmons’ car after climbing out of the river bed on foot and laboring up the other side of the peak with the spiraling path. Had the car not cast such a heavenly glow, it would have gone unnoticed.

The hiding place looked like a garage cut into the side of the mountain. But the intruder who was so sly in finding this hiding place so near the Destinoso canyon must have been in a rush when he got here, because he hadn’t done much of a parking job. Charles grinned at his own reflection as he peered into the giant natural rock compartment and through the car’s windshield at the empty seats of the Lexus. The car was unlocked with the keys in it. The windshield GPS unit that was Simmons’ lifeline was perched in its cradle and still plugged in.

That was that, Charles thought quietly, still grinning. Obviously, the new fishy was Simmons the sniper — this car alone had helped provide the FB some intelligence on Simmons, in addition to some accounts of his battlefield exploits — and he was likely perched somewhere down on the southeast ridge, looking down on Destinoso and studying the FB’s movements. That meant they would have to run along and find him, and at least try to interrupt whatever the revolucion rats were up to this evening.

He pondered the car a moment longer. He never thought Simmons, something of a legend with FB for his many narrow escapes and long-distance kills, would be so easy to catch. Still, he would have loved to have caught the bastard red-handed, sitting in his car, the lure in his mouth. So be it.

“OK, gentlemen. Looks like I’ve got myself a ride home,” he said. “You’ll find our man right down there on that ridge looking over the back of the main house. Go back down the way you came up, and go have your way with him. But do it quietly. Don’t be dickheads about it and get yourselves shot. It’s not like he’s going to be the only one in the cliffs. The clock only winds one way!”

With that, Charles climbed into the Lexus, turned it on and began painstakingly steering the car down the spiraling trail. At the bottom, he slammed on the brakes when he saw in the dying light the long line of revolucion trucks. Then he shrieked and hit the gas. He had been seen by the enemy, surely.

Charles was so unnerved he steered the Lexus to the left instead of the right when he got to the south road entrance, and began speeding inadvertently away from the ranch he now knew was set to be attacked, instead of toward it. He realized he hadn’t brought a two-way with him and was alone in his effort to get back to the house. As he envisioned the fall of the Freemen Brigade headquarters, Charles drove through the completely cleared-off section of the south road without even thinking about it.

Meanwhile, Charles’ five-man crew silently traversed the canyon’s dusty southeast shoulder in search of Simmons. All they knew about the man perched somewhere on top of the plateau looking down on the ranch was the fear he evoked from Simon Charles. That was enough to keep their steps delicate and their eyes peeled. Charles had the instincts of a killer, and killers sensed other killers, like Simmons. Out here, a good killer was a survivor.

But they had Simmons pinned down. Josh’s first-ever careless parking job was his undoing, or at least the start of it. Like Paulo had always teased him about, the Lexus shined like tinfoil in the sun, and it was such a big find for Charles and his crew, none of the men ever thought to look inside a similar rock compartment on the other side of the clearing, the one that contained Jeff’s Celica. When he and Josh had gone their separate ways to take their positions in the dying sunlight, somehow Jeff and his car stayed out of the eye of the FB.

Josh and his car had not.

- 58 -

There was to be no radio contact, no contact of any sort, once the men were dispersed, and certainly none once they were in position. In total, there were several miles of terrain surrounding the ranch. They would wait for the party and then they would wait for the pink flares.

It was understood that once the madness began, everyone would take their shots, play their roles and get the hell out of there, hightailing it for the trucks in the canyon below and roaring off on the south road. Once they were moving away from the ranch, the transients had been promised some real revolucion backup, and plenty of it. Apparently, the army loved the idea of someone doing some of the dirty work and letting them come in and clean it up.

If they could get out alive, they would aim for the stronghold at Estadio Revolucion. According to the plan, the transients would get their cars back along the way. Because they did so much to outfit the revolucion with vehicles, it was agreed there would be a swap in the desert — this time the transients forking over the trucks in exchange for their own cars. They were even promised safe escort from there to the old stadium.

The advantage of already having a car, like Jeff and Josh did on this mission, was being able to vanish whenever necessary, and Josh felt there would be no time to waste in the minutes immediately after the attack. Jeff felt lucky for the first time in a while.

Beyond escaping and getting back to the stronghold, there wasn’t much of a plan for the next two weeks, according to Paulo. Some of the guys in the division planned to flee east to the beaches or south toward Central America, clinging to the coast as they went. But some said they would be GPSing back to the old world, at least for the time being. There was only one hard and fast date on the transient calendar after the attack. No matter where they went after the big hit, everyone who was coming back was supposed to be at Estadio Revolucion by July 1. Although Simmons was leaving for good after the attack, Jeff wasn’t sure the same was true for him. It was impossible to know how he’d feel afterward.

He’d accepted his role in the war, and had no immediate reason to carry on Josh’s legacy of non-stop back-and-forth, but in his newfound sobriety, Jeff also found he was already homesick somehow. The world was crumbling around him when he left, and he’d already started to wish for some closure in the long term.

What would it be like in a year, or 10, if he didn’t go back? Wasn’t it better to face your problems than run from them? The idea of disappearing forever felt a lot different now that he was on this side, and the ever-present knowledge that home was still over there, still available to him, suddenly made it seem desirable again. The pasture’s always greener, he supposed.

Everyone who came over here, almost everyone at least, had to live with their own decisions to disconnect and disappear. He wondered how many people on the other side knew what was going on here, like Josh’s wife. She couldn’t be the only one. And how many people on the other side were coping with the unexplained disappearance of a friend or a family member? Even though he’d given them plenty of reasons to disconnect with him, Jeff realized that Riley and Felix, even Sandy, Mrs. Avery, his brother — everyone he knew — would join that crowd if he stayed here.

He wondered what the percentages were when it came to the number of transients who either went back home and never returned, bounced back and forth like Simmons or decided to stay here forever and never go back home. He couldn’t decide where he would end up in those percentages, which would most likely put him somewhere in the Simmons category. Jeff had an addictive personality, and he understood that for him and perhaps many before him the revolucion wasn’t just an escape hatch. For him, it was a replacement for his real life addiction, and it was proving a damn good one. But just like booze, he knew it would be hard to live without when it wasn’t around.

In some way, Josh had become a slave to his commitment. It couldn’t be fun for him at this point, even if it had been at the beginning. Now it had to be an unbelievable pain to live in both worlds, constantly worrying about what was happening in whichever world he wasn’t in at the time. And he wasn’t just living in both worlds, he was needed in both, relied upon in both.

Perhaps the others who made the permanent leap were hoping to be needed and that was what made Josh different. And maybe that’s why Jeff would end up another one of them and not another Josh. With no job and no family on the other side, what was the point of going back? Sure, he would miss New Orleans, but it wasn’t exactly an alcohol rehab center, and his relationships all seemed irreconcilable. Simmons had every reason to want out.

Jeff found a perfect perch in a fold of rocks along the south rim overlooking the elongating shadows of the eerily calm Destinoso ranch. After all the cram sessions with Paulo and his GPS and his many maps, he felt sure this was at least roughly where he was supposed to set up. The fading daylight had done nothing to quell the raging heat just yet, though Jeff knew he would likely be freezing in an hour. Freezing or dead. He took a long pull off his canteen before lying down and propping the business end of his rifle in the direction of the canyon floor.

Because of the menacing FB presence around Victoria the last couple of weeks, Paulo had gotten his wish. The word to move on Destinoso had come swiftly after that, on Jeff’s second Friday night away. All the vehicles were in the parking lot canyon, the men were dispersing through the cliffs and Jeff replayed over and over in his head the path back down from here and up the spiraling trail to the Celica. According to plan, Paulo and the other transient leaders had sent the troops a dozen at a time scaling their way into position in a huge ring around the ranch. No shots had been fired and the ranch Jeff was seeing below was dead calm.

Jeff rolled onto his back and looked at the sky above, and already it felt like it would be an eternity before those puffy pink comets shot across it, marking the start of the attack. He thought about all the baseball games, from rookie ball to the majors, that were simultaneously happening back home at that exact moment. When Jeff still loved baseball, he thought about that all the time, and it gave him a strange sense of peace. Right now, however, it fast-forwarded his thoughts to his impending, well-deserved termination by the Mets. When that happened, and it might have already, he would be out of the game forever, whether he liked it or not. That was part of the choice he had made.

Now that he was sober, he might actually be able to deliver on his many promises to Sandy, but it had been a couple of weeks now, and all was likely lost on that end. Hell, even Sandy might have been fired by now.