Ground Truth (20 page)

Chapter 35

July 7

9:00 a.m.

BUSTED.
THE AIR conditioning in the F-150 pickup truck Jack had rented in El Paso didn’t work. He felt like a lobster boiling under the blazing Texas sun as he inched toward the border crossing into Juarez. Damn that Rent-a-Wreck.

Without Ana-Maria at the plant to let him know when the injection wells would be operational, he was flying blind. And when Ana-Maria didn’t show up for work and didn’t call, Montana might sense she wasn’t coming back. He’d wonder why—and in about ten seconds he’d wonder whether it had something to do with Jack Strider. He’d worry about what secrets she might have revealed. Knowing by now that his ambush near Casa Lupo had failed, Montana would be as berserk as a rodeo bull.

That reminded him that the
coyote
still hadn’t called to collect his $500 bonus. He needed to go back to the man’s house and check on Ana-Maria.

He drove past the Palmer plant and then doubled back to be sure of what he thought he’d seen. Yes, they were there, a row of black trucks parked in a line on one side of the yard. When they leave the Palmer gate they have to turn left to return to Juarez. When they get there, they could turn north to head across one of the bridges to the States. Or they might turn south to pick up Highway 45, the fastest route toward Chihuahua City. Either way, he had to follow them.

As he drove, he looked around for a place where he could park and wait for the trucks without being seen. The skeletal vegetation within a half mile of the plant wouldn’t provide cover for a colony of fire ants, much less his pickup truck. Finally, he parked mostly out of sight in the shelter of a ramshackle fruit stand, able to see a stretch of road. They’d have to go by his hiding place.

Sweat soaked his shirt as he scrunched down in the seat and squinted against the glare. Jack Strider, law professor and Supreme Court wannabe. Okay, ex-wannabe at this point. What was he doing acting like a one-man posse? He checked his watch. Too much time had passed. They must have turned to the right out of the plant and headed for God knows where.

His pickup’s engine cranked over and over but wouldn’t catch.
Damn it.
Then it caught, and he jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The Ford bounced onto the road heading to the right, back toward the plant.

No sooner had he gotten up speed than the lead truck of the convoy came barreling in his direction, the others right behind. They thundered past, six of them, like Brinks armored trucks on steroids. They sped past, but he had no difficulty reading the large yellow signs: “Danger—Hazardous Waste.”

He whipped off onto the sandy shoulder and swerved back on the asphalt behind them. He knew better than to tailgate, but, except for what he’d seen in movies, had no idea how to trail them without being spotted. There was plenty of traffic, and that gave him some cover. That also raised the risk of being trapped and losing the trucks.

After about fifteen minutes, they turned south onto Highway 45 for Chihuahua City, the nose of each of the five trailing trucks within a few feet of the tail of the one ahead of it. They appeared identical except that the last in line had a short crane mounted on a heavy frame on the roof of the cab. Mysteriously, the presence of the massive black convoy brought order to the highway. Speeders suddenly slowed down.

He settled into a rhythm, staying alert, keeping several cars between him and the last truck. An hour passed, then another.

Who was in the trucks? Were they drivers-for-hire who’d run away if challenged? More likely,
pistoleros
hired to fight.

Because of the secrecy, he assumed they were doing something illegal. But he also knew that trucks from the U.S. loaded with hazardous waste were permitted to deliver it to selected places for treatment and disposal, places like the Palmer site.

But Ana-Maria had said these mystery trucks never unloaded at Palmer, just fueled up and switched crews, so they had to be dumping their cargoes somewhere else in Mexico. So why go out of the way to stop at Palmer just for fuel? Palmer Industries had to be getting more out of this than a few bucks at their gas pumps. And why did they switch drivers?

Heat and monotony must have dulled his brain because he hadn’t seen the other possibility until this moment. What if these trucks were actually empty and on their way to pick up a cargo to smuggle
into
the U.S., maybe drugs, immigrants, even terrorists?

His mental focal length had been too short in concentrating on Montana. Organizing an operation this big was above Montana’s pay grade. Somewhere there had to be a puppeteer pulling his strings. He remembered Arthur Palmer’s scornful eyes and sharp tongue.

He was so absorbed in trying to figure out what was going on that all at once he was too close to the rear truck. He cut sharply behind a Coca-Cola 18-wheeler for cover. It looked like the convoy was heading into Chihuahua City, famous as the hangout for Pancho Villa and Benito Juarez, but near the big city the trucks veered southwest onto Highway 16. He followed. The convoy rolled on for an hour and a half, climbing high into the Sierra Madre Mountains. Pinto beans and prickly pears were replaced by Ponderosa pines and
vaqueros
on horseback herding cattle.

He’d been watching the fuel gauge on his gas hog slide toward empty, expecting to see a gas station where he could slam in a few quick gallons. Mile after mile there had been none. Now, with the pointer hard on empty, he nursed the Ford up every climb and coasted the few downhill stretches. He wasn’t going to make it. His hot pursuit was about to end with a whimper, leaving him to shake his fist after them. They’d never even know he’d been there.

When he cut his speed to fifty to conserve fuel, he lost sight of the convoy, spotting it once far across a side canyon, then not again. He finally passed a roadside sign: “Town of Creel.” Under that, “Entrance to Copper Canyon, Deeper and Longer than the Grand Canyon.” He limped into Creel at twenty miles an hour. It had the feeling of the kind of place where loggers come out of the pine forests on Friday night to get drunk and fight with chainsaws.

The town was falling apart, but its two-pump gas station looked beautiful to him. He got out and stretched—and immediately felt a sting across his lower back where the knife slice was only partially closed.

He was filling up when a metallic silver coupe making a growling sound pulled up to the other side of the pump. It was a Mercedes SLS. That meant 550 horsepower, 7-speed transmission, and a price tag above $200,000. The gull wing doors flipped up. Two men got out and glared at him, as if they expected their mere attention would make him evaporate. His gas tank was close to full so he cut the flow and paid the man who’d quickly appeared to serve the Mercedes.

They must be
narcotraficantes.
Copper Canyon was probably a haven for men like these twenty-something, stone-cold killers.

Talk about out of the frying pan, into the fire.
He was in country where anyone he didn’t know might be a danger to him. And he was chasing people he knew damned sure were.

Back on the road he pushed the old Ford faster than it could handle safely. If he was gaining on the convoy, it wasn’t by much. The truckers were better drivers, and they knew the road. Deep inside the Barrancas del Cobre National Park a sign pointed to a turnoff to the town of Batopilas, but the dirt and gravel road looked too puny for the convoy. Nevertheless, he pulled over and walked back to the turnoff.

Within a dozen steps he saw marks that could have been left by giant tires. Logic told him the convoy would stay on the faster asphalt road, and these marks might belong to logging trucks. He was about to go with logic when he saw a plume of dust in the distance in the direction taken by the gravel road. He sprinted back to the pickup.

The gravel road immediately dropped off the high ground, descending in a series of switchbacks scratched into the steep slopes of the mountains. No shoulders, no guardrail. He drove too fast, trying to keep the wisps of swirling dust in sight. One mistake, a moment of distraction, would send him plummeting down a thousand feet. The crisp atmosphere of higher altitude was replaced by air as humid and hot as the tropics. Pines gave way to bushy acacias, papayas, and mangos.

On a steep downhill stretch, he wrestled the Ford around a blind corner and was almost on top of several scrawny cattle straggling uphill. He jerked the wheel left, banging the front fender on the rock face. The truck rebounded back into the center, fishtailing, heading straight over the edge of the cliff. He forced himself to cut the wheels opposite from the way his instinct screamed for him to do, but the pickup couldn’t straighten out fast enough.

A spooked cow bolted in front of him. No chance to avoid it. The Ford rammed it, sending the flailing animal over the edge. The collision stopped the truck cold, front bumper hanging over space.
Damn, that was close.
He sucked in a deep breath, checked twice to be sure the Ford was in reverse, and punched the accelerator. Back on the road, he continued downhill after the vanished convoy.

When he finally reached the valley floor, the field to his left was lush with low-lying cannabis. In the distance was a boarded-up entrance to an abandoned mine.

“Batopilas,” the wooden sign read, “Silver Center of Mexico.” The gravel road became the main street of a town wedged between a cliff and a river. Batopilas appeared to be a wealthy mining town that had decayed into poverty. Several stately old Spanish-style homes had obviously been vacant for a long time. A huge theater was a statement made by suddenly-wealthy mine owners, like the grand opera house erected in Manaus, halfway up the Amazon, during the rubber boom.

The rest of the town looked like a set for a low-budget western. On shaded porches, men leaned back in hard chairs, watching and judging from under tilted
sombreros
. Batopilas was the kind of place where no one showed up without a reason.

The haze in the air showed he was only minutes behind the convoy. Driving along the valley floor, he saw the telltale plume turn right, continue a few hundred meters and disappear. Now he had to be much more wary. If they were close to their destination, they’d be more on guard.

He turned off the road, following the tread tracks until he reached the mouth of the side canyon. A steel pole gate barred the road. Boulders prevented him from driving around it. He backed up until his pickup was out of sight behind another boulder, and sat there for a few moments, breathing air so humid it made his lungs feel like wet sponges.

He knew he was pathetically unprepared for what was coming up. He also knew he couldn’t stop now, so he climbed out of the truck.

When he got back to the gate and ducked under the bar, he crossed the line into a much more dangerous world. After a few hundred yards, the side canyon broadened to become an oval bowl a half-mile across and two miles long, a
cul de sac.
He bent low and dodged from one scrap of cover to the next. At each stop, he scanned the landscape for a guard posted to pick off intruders. He knew that in the Sierra Madre, where some of the most esteemed citizens run international drug cartels, trespassers are not tolerated.

Piles of rocks that had fallen from the canyon walls blocked his view, so he clawed up a slab of stone and crouched just below its crest. Peering over the top, he saw mine shafts running into both side walls of the canyon. He counted ten. The enormous mounds of tailings around the entrances looked like the work of giant moles from the age of dinosaurs.

Shading his eyes, he scrutinized the rest of the bowl. The trucks had vanished. He saw enough of the valley floor to know they couldn’t be sheltered by boulders or brush. The only other possibility was the mine shafts, but the entrances he could see were too small to admit even one black truck. The group of men sitting in a patch of sparse shade must be the truck crews, but where were the damn trucks?

If he tried to get closer, his movements would give him away. No need to take the risk. He already knew the trucks would be going back to Palmer Industries. He could pick them up there and follow them to the other end of their run.

He worked slowly back toward the narrow exit, crouching, watching the canyon floor to see if he was being followed. As soon as he was out of sight of the truck crews, he stood upright to ease his back. Before he took his first step, he spotted a man standing on a ledge ahead to his right, work clothes almost blending into the rock. The sentry was so close it was too late to find cover. At this range, if the guard looked his way, his shot wouldn’t miss. Then the man bent his head lighting a cigarette, clumsy because of the rifle crooked under his arm.

Jack moved quickly and quietly until he ducked under the gate bar, sweating and tense, and ran to his pickup.

RETRACING HIS route, he demanded more from the pickup than it had to give, imagining that the black trucks were behind him, catching up. After seventy-five or eighty miles of careening around curves and skidding across corrugated sections of road, he was approaching the town of Creel when he saw a sign that pointed to Chihuahua City to the right and Divisadero to the left. Past the intersection was a tiny grass airstrip, the kind used by drug smugglers and bush pilots for hire. He’d read about
gringo
hunters flying around in the Copper Canyon and leaning out of the window to take pot shots at jaguars. Or maybe this was some drug cartel’s private strip.

He looked back at the sign again. Divisadero. The name jogged his memory. The pilot who’d sat at his table in Bar Nueva Leon in Mexico City was from Divisadero. And that solved a problem that must have been bouncing around in his subconscious. A pilot was exactly the man he needed now. But how could he find this one? The guy had said he had a permanent seat at the bar of some hotel on the canyon rim. Jack didn’t remember the name of the hotel, but how many could there be?

He burned up the thirty miles to Divisadero and went on the hunt for a cliff-side hotel. The first one he found, Posada on the Rim, full of German tourists, was a dry hole. His only other shot was the Hotel Divisadero Tarahumara, some distance out of town. It was a rustic place of stucco, stone, wood beams, and red roofs.

Gano LeMoyne lounged in a hand-carved chair on a deck that had a panoramic view of Urique canyon. He wore a black T-shirt, faded Levis, and had his cowboy boots crossed on the railing. The forward tilt of his head made him look asleep behind dark aviator glasses.