Blood of the Innocent (Harry Bauer Book 12)

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  One

  04:26 PM Wednesday 12-01-2021, New Mexico

  The truck appeared first as a single light glowing in the blackness of the desert, under the immense expanse of stars in the moonless sky. It moved in a slow zigzag, then slowly morphed and split in two, like a luminous amoeba. Gradually it resolved itself into a pair of headlamps whining and grinding along a desert track. They halted and paused where the anonymous dirt track joined State Route 375, in Lincoln County, Nevada. They paused for a couple of seconds, then lumbered right and headed at a steady fifty miles per hour toward Crystal Springs. The truck was a dull red with no markings, and towed a medium-sized trailer. The bill of lading stated the name of the consignor as Edwards Air Force Base, though that was two hundred and fifty miles to the south and west of where the cargo had been collected, at Homey Airport, otherwise known as Groom Lake, or Area 51.

  The consignee was listed as the United States Navy, at the Norfolk Navy Yard, 4701 Intrepid Avenue, Norfolk, Virginia. The quantity of cargo was one, the weight was seven tons, the measurements were twelve feet by nine by nine and the volume was nine hundred and seventy-two cubic feet. The description of the cargo was simply, “Sub-aquatic exploration equipment.”

  At Crystal Springs the truck picked up US Route 93 headed east, and at Panacea, it turned east again to enter Utah, where it finally connected with the I-15 at Cedar City, almost six hours after it had left the base at Groom Lake.

  There were four men in the truck, and all were Delta Force operators. They did not wear uniform, nor did they refer to each other by rank. If you weren’t fit to lead, they wouldn’t follow you, whatever rank you had. Behind the wheel was Black George, six foot six of solid muscle. In the passenger seat was the man they called NY, not because he was from New York, but because he could group thirty-six rounds into a two-inch bull at ninety yards. He had a black beard like a bramble bush and shoulders like two hams.

  Traveling in back with the cargo were Scott, who was small, wiry, freckled and rumored to be indestructible, and Twofer, who practiced Zen meditation and was said to have shot two Taliban with a single round, not once but three times.

  None of the operators knew what was contained in the metal box in the trailer, though amongst themselves they had concluded it was either EBEs—Extraterrestrial Biological Entities—parts of a captured UAP destined to be reverse engineered at Norfolk, or, least likely according to their assessment, it was an experimental AACC: an Aerial Aquatic Combat Craft, shaped like a giant tic-tac.

  From Cedar City the driving became easier, but they didn’t pick up the pace much, averaging fifty to sixty miles an hour, and swapping drivers every six hours. At Sulphurdale they turned onto the I-70, went north as far as Salina and then east. They had been driving for some nine hours; it was one thirty AM. NY was at the wheel and they had left the Colorado state line eight miles behind them. They were three miles short of exit 11, for the town of Mack, coming around a broad bend in the road, when they saw the flashing red lights up ahead.

  Their orders were strict: stop for nothing and no one until you reach Norfolk. NY didn’t slow. Black George pulled his Sig Sauer P226 from under his arm and spoke into the microphone on his collar.

  “We got some kind of barrier in the road up ahead. Red lights, there’s a guy in a reflective jacket waving a signal lamp.”

  The answer came back in his earpiece: “Copy that.”

  NY said, “There’s a truck across the road. I can’t get through.”

  “Shit.”

  He began to slow. “I either got to ram them or turn around and go back to Utah, pick up the Old US Highway.”

  “Stop.” The two men looked at each other. Black George repeated, “Stop before we get any closer. We need distance if it’s a highjack.”

  NY brought the truck to a halt and reached under his seat for his M4A1 assault rifle. The sixteen-wheeler was fifty or sixty yards up ahead. The cab was facing forward, but the container was angled at forty-five degrees across the road. The guy with the signal lamp had turned his back on them and was facing the distressed truck, where four more men were standing around the cab talking. One of the men appeared to be the sheriff. Black George glanced at the side of the road, by the rear of the sixteen-wheeler. There was a Ford pickup with the Mesa Sheriff’s insignia on it.

  “Ain’t the Mesa Sheriff based at Grand Junction?”

  NY nodded. “Yeah, why?”

  “We ain’t passed Grand Junction yet.” He pointed at the Ford. “So how’d he get his pickup this side of the truck?”

  The sheriff and the guy with the lamp were walking toward them. Black George said, “Back her up.”

  There was a sharp, unpleasant noise, like a spink! NY let out a soft grunt and sagged. He had a red-black dot in the middle of his forehead, like a Hindu cast mark, and his headrest was spattered with gore. Black George swore violently and spoke into the mic on his collar.

  “NY down. We have a hijack.”

  He grabbed NY’s assault rifle, opened the door and dropped to the road. On one knee he double-tapped the guy with the lamp and dropped him. The sheriff was running and the four other guys were training their weapons on him. He double-tapped again and another man went down before a hail of bullets hit the cab. He pulled back and noticed too late the flash of fire from the pickup. Two rounds smacked into him. One into his right eye, the other tore through his chin, ripped open his windpipe and smashed the vertebrae in his neck.

  Now the sixteen-wheeler started to straighten up, while four men ran to the back of the hijacked truck. Two heaved open the doors. Staying well behind them, a third covered the door with an automatic rifle from a forty-five-degree angle. The fourth hurled in a gas grenade. The doors were slammed shut again, shutting out the screams of pain from inside as the invisible, odorless VX gas entered the men’s bodies, causing violent spasms in their muscles, constricting their chests and causing asphyxia and cardiac arrest in seconds.

  Without pause two of the men hauled NY and Black George’s bodies into the back of the pickup, then ran to haul open the rear doors of the sixteen-wheeler, lowering a ramp to the blacktop. Meanwhile two more guys clambered into the cab of the highjacked truck and drove it at speed up the ramp and into the larger container. The Ford pickup followed close behind.

  Four minutes after the hit, the sixteen-wheeler was on her way, and the only sign that anything had happened on the road was a small crystal cube of shattered windshield, and by nine AM that morning it was incrusted in the wheel of a Mercedes Benz on its way to Salt Lake City.

  The sixteen-wheeler followed the same route NY would have followed as far as Denver, but there, where NY would have continued along the I-70 to Kansas, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, and then on the I-76 to Norfolk, the sixteen-wheeler took the Colorado I-76 north and east to merge with the I-80 at Ogallala, on the long, uninterrupted journey to New York.

  At the wheel was the man in the sheriff’s hat. They called him the Cap because he had once been a captain, though he never specified where or of what. He liked to boast that he had lost count of how many people he had killed, and he liked to linger over the word “people,” allowing the full implications of the word to filter through.

  It was true. At first he had remembered each
one of them, and he had wondered what the average was for a special forces operator. It was hard to tell, but he’d figured it was between one and five. So he had strived to achieve six. And along the way he had discovered that it was easier to clock up kills moonlighting in the private sector, especially in Africa, than in the regular army.

  When he’d reached eleven kills he had started to lose track of who they were. The women and the kids tended to linger, stirring a vague, emotional uncertainty in his bowels, but the men just kind of blurred into one. And that was ten years ago.

  Nowadays, sometimes he thought about his immortal soul, whether he had one, and what awaited it on the other side. But not often. Mostly he just cycled through work, violence, drink, violence and work again.

  The truck hummed and the dark road slipped by.

  After a while he looked at the man sitting next to him. They called him Seth. Nobody had a full name. Nobody had a past, except they knew Seth was South African because of his ugly fucking accent. He said he came from Seth Efrika, so they called him Seth. You were what you were in the moment, and that was all. It was kind of Zen in a way. The Cap thought of Zen as the Way of the Warrior. Don’t think, don’t try, don’t even do. Just fucking be!

  Seth returned the glance and they laughed.

  “Fuckin’ sweet! Eh, boy?” and after a moment he asked, “Who bought it?

  “Carlos…”

  “Fuckin’ dago. Carlos no-loss. Who else?”

  “Wolf.”

  “Shame. Wolf was good.”

  “We’re all good. When our time comes, we go. That’s the story.”

  They fell silent for a while, thundering through the dark toward New York. After a while Seth asked, “We got four stiffs onboard. What are we going to do with them?”

  “We send ’em to Cadiz, in Spain.”

  “Yuh, I know where Cadiz is.”

  “The container gets transferred to a smaller ship that belongs to the boss. Somewhere between Ibiza and Sardinia, they stick ’em all in the Ford and dump ’em in the sea.”

  “What about New York customs?”

  The Cap looked at his second in command for a moment. “What’s the matter? You getting nervous in your old age?”

  “Not especially, Cap.” There was an edge of insolence to his voice. “I just like to know where the problems might come from. There is a chance customs will inspect the container at Red Hook before loading it…”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “You ask too many fuckin’ questions.”

  “Yuh, and as long as my life is on the fuckin’ line, I’m going to keep askin’ too many fuckin’ questions.”

  The Cap sighed. “The Brooklyn docks are run by the mob. You work there, you work for the mob. You have a high-value product you need to get in or out of New York by sea, you gotta talk to the mob. They make it happen.”

  Seth nodded and grinned. “See? You learn something every day. My mother used to tell me all the time, Seth, don’t ask so many fuckin’ questions.”

  The Cap frowned at Seth. “I though you just said…”

  “Yeah, but she was an ignorant fuckin’ loser!”

  They both laughed and the tension was dispelled for a while.

  The journey took them thirty-six hours, and at just after one PM Friday afternoon they arrived at Teterboro on the I-80 and merged with the I-95 at the Overpeck County Park interchange. They followed the I-95 across the Bronx as far as Westchester Creek and then turned south through Throgs Neck and into Brooklyn. Finally, at one forty-five in the afternoon they deposited the container at Red Hook Terminal. They paid their dues to the appropriate authorities, paid off the Italian boys and made their way by taxi to the JFK Hilton Garden Inn. There they showered and ate, and Seth retired to sleep for a couple of hours.

  Meanwhile the Cap made a call to Marbella in Spain. It was a secure number that only he had. It rang twice and a large voice said, “Capitan,” grunted softly and went on, “You have good newses for me. You are in New York.”

  “I have good news for you, Mr. Omeya. The transfer of property went ahead without a hitch, and the goods are now on the dock waiting to be loaded aboard the Princess Diana, departing Red Hook, Brooklyn, Saturday at four AM. It will arrive in Cadiz in a week, maybe a little less.”

  “Good, good. What is happen to the other driver and his friends?”

  “We won’t be hearing from them again, sir. They are sleeping.”

  “With the angels?”

  “Yes sir.”

  There was contented laughter on the other end of the line. “Well, well, I am happy. You come back to Spain now. I need you to make some insurance for me before the Princess Diana is arrive. I call the Hesperus now and she will be here in maybe three or four days to transfer the cargo. I don’t want no problem. You must take care of this for me, eh, Capitan?”

  “Don’t you worry about a thing, Mr. Omeya. I will take care of everything. You know you can depend on me.”

  “OK, mi Capitan, is very good. I will see you tomorrow, then.”

  He hung up and the captain allowed himself a couple of hours’ sleep before he called Seth and they headed for the airport, and European departures.

  The Hesperus was a Greek registered, medium-small container ship that Baldomero Omeya owned. Baldomero Omeya was based in Marbella, though his ship operated mainly out of Piraeus, in Greece. The ship, like the man who owned it, was borderline legal and dealt in a couple of billion dollars in a bad year. The captain of the Hesperus knew that at least half of his trade was in arms, and a big chunk of the other half was pure opium and came from Afghanistan, via the Kalat nature reserve in Pakistan.

  In some places, like Pakistan, Russia, Mexico and Italy, you could rely on local mafias to ensure the safe passage of your goods. Other places it was not so easy, and that was where the Cap came in. It was his job, amongst other things, to ensure the safe passage of Don Baldomero Omeya’s products through ports where they might otherwise run into trouble.

  And that was what he was going to have to attend to now. If the Princess Diana had docked in Malaga, a small bribe would have taken care of things. But Cadiz was a different proposition. The Guardia Civil, and in particular the new head of the Andalusian Guardia Civil, General José Ferrer García, had the ports of Cadiz and Algeciras gripped in a steel glove. They had seen how the Russian Mafia, trafficking drugs from Morocco, had turned Marbella and Malaga into cesspits of corruption, and they were determined that the same thing was not going to happen in Cadiz. So it was his task, now, to convince the general that certain ships and certain transactions were best simply ignored.

  As they soared high above the black waters of the Atlantic, the captain looked down at the ocean falling away beneath them and he smiled to himself. The supreme commander of the Andalusian Guardia Civil, the great and good General José Ferrer García, would be sobbing and begging, by the time he had finished with him, just to be allowed to assist Don Baldomero Omeya in any way that he could. He would see to that. This was just another job, like any other.

  Two

  01:14 PM Friday 12-03-2021, Wyoming

  She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Her hair was a rich, opulent brown with flecks of black, her eyes were a deep, golden caramel. Her head was slightly turned to watch me. We remained like that for a timeless moment. There was utter stillness. The only sound was the crystal cold lapping of the brook where she had stopped to drink. I knew that within seconds she would probably lunge at me and tear me to pieces, but at that moment it seemed to me to be a perfect time to die.

  She was big, probably four hundred pounds, three and a half foot at the shoulder and an easy six foot six if she stood upright. She was no more than thirty feet away. I averted my gaze to show I did not want a confrontation. She was too close for me to run, and though she’d be an easy shot, and I had the arrow nocked, there was no way I was going to kill her.

  She hesitated. By the first week of Decembe
r most bears in Wyoming are already hibernating. And this year the snow had been exceptionally heavy, but something had disturbed this grizzly, which meant she was going to be either really mad, or really sleepy. So I stayed in plain view, looked away and licked my lips. I was trying to tell her, with my body language, I didn’t want any trouble. I wasn’t challenging her, I didn’t want to eat her and I wasn’t planning an ambush. All I wanted was a drink, when she was done.

  For a moment it looked like maybe she’d buy it. She turned back to the water. Then her ears went back, her snout curled and she turned and stood. The noise she let out was terrifying, somewhere between the braying of an elephant and the roar of a lion. I figured she wanted me to go away, so I backed up a couple of steps and hooked my fingers on the bowstring. I knew if I ran I was dead. But I also knew I was going to hesitate too long about killing her. So I was probably dead anyway. I backed up another step and looked away. I could feel the branches of the trees prodding at my back. My heart was pounding hard, high up in my chest.

  She didn’t move. She remained standing, staring at me, her snout creased to show huge, yellow, savage teeth. I kept looking away and took another step back. Branches cracked and snapped. Then she roared again, dropped to all fours, lunged forward so she was just fifteen feet from me and I could smell her hot breath. I knew I was dead. It was too late to shoot. She reared up again and my head was full of the terrible noise of her bellowing. I pulled and tried to aim, but my whole vision was filled with her massive form.

  Then she had turned away, on all fours again, and she ran, lumbering, splashing across the stream and bounding in among the trees. And the air was filled with another, louder, deafening noise. The trees were bowing and bending, the air was gusting in powerful eddies and the thud and throb of a chopper invaded the peace of the mountains. I released the bowstring and hunkered down to take several deep breaths and steady the pounding of my heart. There are many ways to die. Being torn apart by a grizzly is not in my top five preferred choices.