Manhunt, page 31
Brentwood’s optimism turned out to be well-founded. The JO-TEV had been so well packed that, though broken Styrofoam buffers and other packing littered the area about the boulder like rectangular bits of snow, the vehicle was intact. Neither its “midships”-mounted electric motor, tucked away behind the driver’s seat, nor its diesel, forward of the driver, nor the eight-hundred-pound battery pack beneath the driver’s seat, seemed damaged. The JO-TEV vehicle, as Aussie Lewis had already told Montoya, didn’t look at all sexy, but like an open, cut-down four-by-four, with room for only driver, co-driver, and machine gunner in the back; the .50 caliber gun on a swivel mount was well above the two front riders, the gun mount’s steel post protruding above the crisscross roll-bar assembly.
Since the box around the JO-TEV had literally come apart at the seams, the extraction of the vehicle was almost immediate. Within a few minutes Brentwood had engaged the 2.1 Peugeot turbodiesel and, in effect, driven out of the crate.
“You tinny bastard!” Lewis said, tinny being his word for someone who was extraordinarily lucky, a lottery winner. “Here poor Sal has to unload this fucker, and you tootle out like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”
“Tough tit,” Thomas joked. “Time you did some work.”
“Oh, I don’t work,” Lewis said, affecting a condescending British upper-crust tone. “My man Sal will unpack.”
“And fuck you too,” Salvini said.
It was the only light moment that morning for the ALERTs as they buckled up—Brentwood and Montoya in JO-TEV Alpha, with Thomas manning the machine gun; Lewis and Salvini in JO-TEV Bravo, Lewis claiming driving privileges till noon, Salvini on the fifty-caliber. They donned goggles and disposable surgical masks against the dust, preferring the discomfort of traveling one behind the other, thus confining the dust trail they’d kick up to one wake rather than two when they headed for Eliot’s column, which, if the GPS was correct, should be in sight as soon as they were out of the gully. But before they began, Thomas held up his hand for silence, the sound of a vehicle approaching beyond the rise.
Three of the men, including Montoya, scattered, taking cover behind the nearby boulders. Thomas and Salvini remained, cocking the machine guns. Suddenly there was no sound, just the ear-ringing silence of the desert. Thomas and Salvini intuitively, and from force of habit, had divided the field of fire, Thomas’s gun pointing east, Salvini’s west, though he could not swing the gun to cover the full 180-degree arc because of the JO-TEV’s crisscrossing roll bars. As insurance, Salvini cocked his I-COW, selecting the 25mm “air-burst” mag. Then, just as unexpectedly, the noise of a bullhorn filled the air.
“This is FEDFOR National Guard, Albuquerque. Identify yourselves.”
Eliot’s men?
None of the ALERTs or Montoya responded. If it was militia aboard the unseen vehicle, that’s exactly what they would say to trap you—tell you they were federals.
“Identify yourselves,” the voice repeated.
Thomas had his heavy machine gun pointed in the direction of the voice, but out of the corner of his eye he spotted Brentwood working his way forward from boulder to boulder on the northern flank. Thomas assumed that Lewis, perhaps with Montoya, was doing the same on the southern flank.
The ALERTs and Montoya positioned themselves as best they could against attack and waited. The hailer sounded again. “What is your recognition word?”
Brentwood could see Lewis across from him on the southern side of Thomas’s machine gun, and he raised his arms in a questioning gesture.
Lewis gave him the same signal back. Brentwood, with one more glance to see that every ALERT was ready to go, answered, “We are FEDFOR but we have no recognition code. Send one of your men forward unarmed.”
“Negative. Put down your arms.”
“Fuck you!” It was Lewis’s voice bouncing off the boulders.
Finally the hailer agreed: “One man from us. One from you.”
“All right, send your man forward.”
“Send yours!”
Brentwood, the other three ALERTs and Montoya, with his Colt, covering him, put down his weapon and walked out from the boulders, arms fully extended, palms open to the front. After a few uneasy seconds, another figure in desert fatigues appeared at the top of the rise fifty yards away, arms also extended, palms open, looking down at Brentwood.
“You should have a recognition code if you’re FEDFOR,” the other said.
“Well, I don’t,” Brentwood replied, his manner sharp, impatient, un-Brentwood-like.
It would be argued later that Salvini had taken an enormous risk, the risk of a “blue on blue,” a so-called “friendly fire” incident, which was never “friendly” to those being shot at. But Salvini would tell them that it was his knowing about the “Israeli fighters’ side mirror” that had made him recognize the incongruity of a federal force having a mechanical cherry picker arm—the kind used by electric companies to hoist men high up to power poles—peeking, rising above the crest of the hill, an M-60 barrel extending from it. As he put it to Lewis afterward, it was the extended arm of the cherry picker that had “alerted this ALERT.”
“Oh, very droll,” Lewis would answer laconically, but he nevertheless admitted to Thomas that Salvini’s instant assumption had been “one hell of a smart move.”
“How’d you know about the Israeli stuff?” he asked Salvini.
“One of Freeman’s lectures. He told us about how the Israeli fighter pilots discovered they had a blind spot—you know, like when you check your rearview mirror to change lanes and miss seeing anyone who’s at about seven o’clock.”
“Yeah,” Lewis said. “So?”
“So you need a side mirror. Israeli pilots told their ground crews, who went out immediately and bought a bunch of auto side mirrors and stuck ’em outside the cockpit. Problem solved. It wasn’t part of standard equipment. It was innovative, something that would take our Pentagon bureaucracy about a year if not longer to investigate and approve. When did you ever hear of a goddamned cherry picker as standard FEDFOR for the National Guard or the Army?”
“Never heard of it,” Thomas had to admit.
“So you guessed it was militia trying to con us,” Lewis told Salvini. “You clever little bastard.”
Salvini had been watching the man in the FEDFOR uniform when he spotted the edge of a beige fiberglass bucket at the end of the cherry picker arm. He fired a long burst from his .50 caliber machine gun, and saucer-sized pieces of fiberglass flew into the air like errant Frisbees, one of the pieces making a distinctive, wobbly whoop! whoop! noise, like someone flexing a thin piece of particle board. The militiaman from Purdy’s column in the cherry-picker bucket took Salvini’s full burst in the chest, literally disintegrating inside the disintegrating bucket.
Brentwood was down, hugging the dry red desert dirt as a fusillade of small and medium-sized arms opened up, the gully reverberating with the crack and crackle of gunfire as Salvini, Thomas, and Lewis let fly. Brentwood, Montoya closest to him and covering him, performed what Montoya would describe as the best crab scuttle he’d ever seen, quickly finding refuge, his militia counterpart on the ground also, arms out imploringly, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed.”
Salvini shot him anyway—the bastard might have his battle smock pockets full of grenades, he thought, and the story of how the militia had suckered the Bradley at Ship Rock was by then well known to all the federal soldiers.
Their bluff having failed, the militia pickup, on whose flatbed the cherry picker was attached, started up with a roar, followed by a screech of brakes as it went into reverse before making a dust-churning U-turn, not heading back east, from where it had come, but north on a stone-strewn stretch of sagebrush desert. However, before it traveled more than a hundred yards, Lewis and Salvini’s JO-TEV had gained the rise, and Thomas, in the other JO-TEV, was laying down heavy machine-gun fire at the pickup’s rear tires. One of them blew, the vehicle’s driver losing control. Three militiamen fell off the flatbed like rag dolls, two of them already dead, raked by fire from Thomas’s fifty-caliber. The remaining militiaman, who’d been momentarily airborne during the pickup’s slide, rolled over, still stubbornly grasping his M-16 and getting off a three-round burst before he too was felled by Brentwood, who delivered a fatal shot from his I-COW’s 25mm.
As the dust cleared, the pickup’s driver could be seen hung upside down by his seat harness. The four ALERTs and Montoya approached in the two JO-TEVs. Surprisingly, the militiaman, having shaken his head like a boxer intent on regaining full consciousness after a hard hit, released himself, fell into the passenger seat, drew the handgun from his shoulder holster, and started shooting. Brentwood squeezed off three 5.6mm rounds, the man’s body flexing into a spastic arch before it crumpled.
Montoya had never seen anything like the ferocity of the short militia/ALERT engagement, and recollected the words of Thomas Hobbes, whom he’d studied in college and who had talked about the life of man in the natural state as being “nasty, brutish, and short.” No quarter had been asked or given by either side. Most impressive, he thought—or shocking, depending on how you looked at it—was the all-but-palpable hatred of the militia for the federals, the militia driver’s refusal to surrender in what was clearly a no-win situation for him. It was an augury, Montoya feared, of what might happen should the two columns, each eagerly looking for the other, clash.
“Better bury them,” Montoya said, his tone conveying respect for the dead, even if they were the enemy.
“No,” Brentwood said calmly; almost regretfully, Montoya thought. “We haven’t got time,” he explained. “Keep an eye open for any more militia while we right the truck.”
“What for?” Lewis challenged. “Leave the fucking thing where it is. We’ve got the transport we need.”
But Salvini was on to it right away, answering, “Because, you dork, we can use the cherry picker. When you put that arm up vertical, you’ll be able to see another couple of miles.”
“Oh,” Lewis said, embarrassed and at an unusual loss for words.
“What you think they were using it for, Aussie?” Thomas joked. “Pickin’ cherries?”
“Fuck the lot of you,” Lewis said. “So what are we gonna use for a basket, now that the other one’s shot to rat shit?”
“Aw,” Salvini said, “we’re gonna stick it up your ass, Aussie, ’fore we hoist you up.”
“Yeah, yeah,” intoned Aussie. “Very funny, you wop!”
Montoya had thought he was a hard man, but these guys had just killed six men, and were now joking with each other.
“All right, you know-it-alls,” Lewis said, walking over to the cherry picker. “Get the friggin’ thing up. I’ll stand on the frame. Dollars to doughnuts we see fuck all.”
“I dunno, Aussie,” Brentwood said, topping up his 5.6mm round mag. “How do you think they saw us and sent out a reception committee?”
“Because,” Lewis began, pausing to sling his I-COW and Brentwood’s binoculars over his right shoulder as he stood on the bottom rung of what had been the basket, and grabbing the top of the frame with his right hand, “they saw the JO-TEVs’ drogue chutes coming down. Those things are big enough!”
“Maybe they spotted the chutes from the picker,” Brentwood said.
Lewis shrugged and worked the cherry picker’s control toggle with his left hand. He was about eleven feet off the flat, stony desert, gazing north to south, when he saw a faint scratch of dust against the southwest horizon. It might be nothing more than a wind swirl whipping up loose soil into a spiral, he thought. Adjusting the focus on the binoculars, he leaned forward against the frame of what had been the cherry picker’s fiberglass bucket. Now he could see at least three other plumes adjacent to the first one. “Son of a bitch!”
“What’s up?” Brentwood asked.
“Something’s on the move,” Lewis said.
“What?”
“Can’t tell, but whatever it is, it’s churning up the dirt.”
“How far?”
“Four, maybe five miles.”
Brentwood was a decisive leader, but he was also a team player, as all the ALERTs had to be, in addition to being highly self-reliant, and he was never afraid to seek the others’ counsel. “What do you think, guys? We take a ride out there for a closer look before we make for Eliot’s column, which should be east of us?”
“Eliot’s probably got scouts out already,” Thomas said.
“Can’t see anything eastward yet,” Lewis said. “Enemy or FEDFOR.”
“Let’s take a run out for a couple of miles,” Thomas pressed.
“Well, if it is Purdy’s outfit,” Salvini opined, “we can’t take the whole two hundred of ’em on. We’ll need Eliot’s boys for that.”
“Agreed,” Brentwood said, “but if we can pick out where Purdy’s guns are, that’s going to help Eliot’s column.”
“Let’s go,” Lewis said, shifting the toggle into the down position. “Pity we can’t take this cherry picker with us.”
“Why can’t we?” Montoya asked.
“Because,” Lewis explained, pointing to Thomas, “that fucker shot the shit out of its tires, and we’re not gonna get far driving over this rocky ground on fucking rims.”
“Well, smartass,” Thomas replied, “somebody had to stop the mother while you were there pickin’ your nose!”
“All right,” Brentwood said. “Saddle up. Let’s go!” Then, as an afterthought, he told Montoya, “You don’t have to come along, Sheriff. If you want you can stay here and—”
“I’m in,” Montoya said.
Brentwood nodded at one of the dead militiamen. “Guy over there has a three-ought rifle. Maybe you’d rather pack that, along with your Colt—just in case.”
“Good idea,” Montoya said. He walked over and pried the rifle from the militiaman’s hand, sincerely hoping he’d have no call to use it. Maybe, he told himself, the militia, confronted by the sight of Eliot’s big field guns, would throw in the towel.
Chapter Fifty-One
“Hey, my man, you lookin’ to make some cash?” Wesley Knox’s face was the picture of beneficence, ready to help the two brothers hanging out by the steps of a Harlem tenement.
“Who we gotta kill?” the shorter of the two asked.
“Don’t have to kill nobody. Just make a delivery. I got twenty bucks for each o’ you if you deliver right now. A hundred each when I know you delivered it.”
“How you gonna know that?”
“Man is waitin’ for it. Certain place. He tells me it’s there, it’s there. You just made yourselves a hundred. Each.”
“Uh…” It was the shorter man again. “What’s in the fuckin’ bag, man? Head shit?”
“No drugs, man. Absolutely.”
“Fuckin’ bomb!” the taller one piped up.
“No bomb,” Knox said. “You have a look.”
He unzipped the bag. Both of the men craned their necks to see without actually getting closer to the bag. The taller one lost interest when he saw it wasn’t a bomb. The other one was still looking at it, his pride doing battle with curiosity. He saw what looked like two glass bowls, some kind of small fan attached, and a small claw hammer. “This ain’t no fuckin’ bomb,” he said.
“I told you,” Knox replied. “Hey, you guys ain’t interested, that’s cool.” He zipped up the bag and started walking off.
“Hey, man, I didn’t say no.”
“You didn’t say yes. Other brothers can use the cash.”
“Hey, hold on, man. You goin’ too fast.”
“Fuck I am. I got business.”
“Where you wan’ us to take it?”
“Underground parking lot. World Trade Center.”
“Uh-huh, so we take it in just like that, huh? Just carry the fuckin’ bag past the eyes, man. Right through the front door. That right?”
“Hell, no. You park the car. Get out, go up to the lobby, walk out. Nobody gonna ask you what you doin’ comin’ out.”
“Where’s this fuckin’ car comin’ from?”
“That’s not your business.”
The short one laughed derisively. “Fo’ a hundred an’ change? You jerkin’ us off, man.”
Fuck it, Knox thought. ’T ain’t no help these days without crossin’ the palms with silver. You think they were all Jewboys ’stead of the Brothers of Farrakhan. Shit, he’d do it himself. Besides, the newspapers were jerkin’ him around. They published the Unabomber’s shit but not his. So you had to show ’em you were serious, that you meant business. He kept walking down the sidewalk, careful not to step on any cracks and counting his footsteps between the pavement blocks, because if you stepped on too many cracks, it was a sign.
“Wes, my man!” It was a brother coming down onto the sidewalk, where he stood unsteadily, smiling at Knox.
Knox acknowledged him with a wave of his hand, then went to the nearest drugstore, where he bought a tear-off pair of transparent plastic gloves.
Purdy, as Brentwood surmised, had seen the big drogue chutes and decided it was time to start coat-tailing, an old trick of Douglas Freeman’s. His militiamen had deployed ropes attached to fishing nets containing the rocks, cacti, and sagebrush he’d ordered collected earlier. The thick dust trails raised by dragging the weighted nets behind thirty militia-equipped pickups now proceeding abreast rather than in column were enormous, convincing the ALERTs that there were at least four times as many militia as they’d assumed now moving fast, eastward, to attack Eliot.
The four ALERT commandos came to a conclusion that struck Montoya as singularly impressive, though it wasn’t the stuff of Hollywood movies: five of them could make little or no difference against what seemed a broad and large conventional force whose dust trails they could see over a front a mile wide; particularly since they’d lost their most valuable weapon—the element of surprise. Besides, Brentwood reminded his comrades, their mission was to rescue the hostages, not to fight a full mobile infantry column head-on.
