Black Canyon Conspiracy Read online

  Marco lashed out, striking the captain square on the jaw. Peterson reeled, then reached for his pistol. But Carroll was quicker. He struck Marco on the back of the head with something heavy. The last thing Marco saw before he slid into blackness was Lauren’s horrified expression as she stared at him, her mouth open in a scream he couldn’t hear.

  * * *

  LAUREN HUGGED HER arms across her chest and paced the length of the small office—five steps across, five steps back. The too-big boots Marco had taken from the dead soldier slapped against the tile floor with a muffled thud, like a rubber mallet hitting a spike.

  She clenched her teeth together to keep from chattering and blinked rapidly to clear her eyes of tears she willed not to fall. She’d been alone in this room for fifteen minutes, according to the clock on the otherwise empty metal desk. Where was Marco? Had they decided to shoot him after all? She’d listened, but had heard no gunfire. She told herself this was a good thing, though she knew they might have dragged him far away, out of hearing range.

  Though she heard no gunfire, sounds of activity were everywhere—marching feet, shouting voices, the roar of engines. This interior room had no windows, so she couldn’t see what was going on, but she imagined men taking down tents, gathering weapons and supplies and mobilizing to spread out across the state to wreak destruction. In the past, terrorists had blown up bridges and power plants and threatened water supplies and communication centers. From what Prentice had said, his organization, the True Patriots—the name made her gag—planned to do all of this and more.

  Scuffling in the hallway outside made her jump. She ran toward the door, and narrowly avoided being struck when it burst open and Marco stumbled into the room. He landed on his hands and knees in the middle of the floor, his shirt torn, one eye black, blood dripping from a busted lip. “Stay quiet in here,” Peterson ordered. “I’ll deal with you later.” Then he slammed the door shut, his boot heels making sharp, staccato beats on the tile as he marched away.

  Lauren knelt beside Marco and gingerly touched his shoulder. “What happened?” she asked.

  “Peterson thought it would be fun to get a little rough,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” But he winced as he stood, and his breath caught as he straightened. He looked at her. “What about you?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Sick with worry and fear, but physically, she was untouched. “What are we going to do?” she asked. “How are we going to stop them?”

  “The Rangers know we’re here now. They’ll do what they can to rescue us.”

  “But they’ll never get here in time,” she said. “Prentice was right about that. It will take hours to mobilize the officers and the equipment they’ll need. From the sounds of all the activity out there, by then everyone will be gone.”

  Marco leaned against the desk. “We’ll have to find a way to get out,” he said. “We can’t do much locked in this room.”

  “There’s a guard outside the door,” she said.

  Marco nodded. “I saw him. A big, beefy guy with an AK-47.”

  “I could try to distract him with my feminine wiles,” she said. “Though frankly, after two days in the wilderness, I don’t look or smell very sexy.” As soon as she was back in the land of indoor plumbing, she wanted a long, hot shower and a shampoo.

  “You still look gorgeous,” Marco said. “But I don’t want you getting near any of these punks.” He straightened and began to prowl the room. “There’s no window, and no way to cut through the walls.”

  “Is there just the one guard?” she asked.

  He nodded. “They need everyone else to help dismantle the camp and distribute the weapons and explosives necessary for their ‘mission.’”

  “Then, if you could get him in here, maybe the two of us could overpower him.”

  He stopped. “That’s not a bad idea.” He looked around him, then picked up the desk chair, turned it over and pulled off the bottom half, with its five rollers. “I can knock him out with this. But how do we get him in here?”

  “I’ve got an idea I think will work,” she said. “Are you ready?”

  “What’s the idea?” he asked.

  “Trust me, this will work better if you’re surprised, too. Just stand over there behind the door and when he comes in, hit him hard.”

  He moved into position then nodded. Lauren stood up straight, took a deep breath, then let out a loud, blood-chilling scream.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lauren’s throat was raw and her voice was fading by the time the door opened and the guard looked in. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  “He’s bleeding to death!” She channeled all the fear and panic of the past twenty-four hours into her voice, and pointed a shaking finger across the room to a spot out of the guard’s line of sight. “Help!” Then she began to scream again, loud and incessant and, she hoped, annoying enough to make the guard want to do anything to stop it.

  He stepped farther into the room, the rifle cradled across his chest. As soon as he fully cleared the door, Marco stepped out and brought the heavy wheels of the office chair down on his skull. With a single low groan, the guard sank to his knees and toppled over, shaking the floor with the impact of his landing.

  Marco grabbed the rifle, then ripped the sleeve from his torn shirt and handed it to Lauren. “Gag him with this,” he said. He began tearing the other sleeve to use to tie the man’s hands.

  By the time he’d trussed the guard’s hands and feet and Lauren had tied on the gag, the man was awake. He glared at them, unmoving. “Just lie still,” Marco said. “Probably the best thing for you is to pretend you were out the whole time.” He patted the man’s shoulder, then nodded to Lauren. “Let’s go.”

  “Where to?” she asked, falling into step behind him.

  “Thanks to the guys who beat me up, I know where the back door is,” Marco said, even as they reached the closed portal. He pulled it open and she found herself standing in a small, quiet courtyard containing a picnic table, a few chairs and a can of sand studded with cigarette butts. But the space was deserted.

  “Now we need to get to the mess,” he said.

  She stopped and stared at him, hands on her hips. “Marco, I know we haven’t had much to eat, but now isn’t the time,” she protested.

  “Not for food,” he said. “For explosives.”

  She blinked. “What are you going to do with explosives?”

  “We’ve got to find a way to keep these guys from leaving this canyon.” He took her hand and pulled her across the compound. Half a dozen men raced past, carrying packs and weapons. None glanced their way. In other parts of the compound, soldiers loaded trucks or dismantled tents and Quonset huts. “We need to hurry,” Marco said. “If we block their exit with an explosion, they’ll be trapped and waiting when the Rangers show up.”

  * * *

  THEY RACED TOWARD the mess hall, weaving through marching lines of men headed away from the camp. The Quonset hut that had served as kitchen, mess hall and commissary was deserted, the door standing open. Inside, the pile of half-peeled potatoes and the paring knife still waited on the counter, but the shelves had been ransacked, a trash can overturned, a refrigerator left half-open in the haste to depart.

  A door at the back of the building opened onto a large pantry and he led the way there. When Marco had been here earlier, the shelves had been lined with canned goods and cases of MREs, the “meals ready to eat” rations the modern military relied on in the field. But in addition to food, the shelves had also held boxes of blasting caps and bins full of plastic explosives.

  Those boxes and bins were gone now, as were most of the canned goods. He felt along the shelves until he came to one that was fitted behind the water heater that supplied the kitchen. Something hard met his fingertips. He pulled out a single box of explosives.

  He ripped open the top of the box and they stared at a row of off-white bricks of puttylike material. Lauren took a step back. “Is t
hat safe to handle?” she asked.

  “It’s harmless until you insert the detonator.” He closed the box and searched the shelves for the detonator he’d need. Not finding it, he shoved the box into Lauren’s arms and dropped to the floor, feeling under the shelves. As he’d hoped, a single detonator had fallen behind there when they’d swept the shelves clean. He examined the four-inch plastic tube attached to a coil of wire, then tucked it into his pocket.

  “Do you really know how to build a bomb?” she asked.

  “In theory, yes.” He took the box of C-4 from her.

  “But in reality?”

  “I’ve never actually done it, no. Maybe you could help.”

  She clearly didn’t appreciate his joke. She crossed her arms over her chest and took a step back. “I can’t even make cake from a boxed mix,” she said. “If you don’t know the recipe for this particular main dish, then I can’t help you.”

  He found an empty backpack in the debris scattered around the room and stuffed the explosives inside.

  “It makes me nervous, thinking of you carrying that stuff around,” Lauren said.

  “We don’t have time to be nervous.” He added a couple of bottles of water to the pack. “We can’t afford to waste a second.” Some vehicles had probably already left the canyon, though these would have most likely contained scouts and other people whose job it was to do the advance work and get everything ready for the men who would set the bombs or booby traps or whatever destructive plans the terrorist operatives had made. But the foot soldiers—the demolitions experts and shooters and lookouts—would soon follow, spreading out to their targets, which, from what Prentice and others had indicated, included multiple sites throughout the state.

  “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to have to run.” He slung the pack onto his back and they hurried from the kitchen. Outside, the chaos had died down. Whole rows of tents had vanished and two of the Quonset huts had already been dismantled, the pieces loaded into waiting trucks. Only a few people worked dismantling a third hut.

  “Where is everybody?” Lauren asked.

  “Let’s hope they haven’t already been deployed on their mission,” he said. He broke into a trot, moving quickly across the camp. Again, no one paid them any particular attention; they were just two more soldiers hurrying to put their training into action.

  “Where...where are we going?” Lauren asked, a little breathless as she ran after him.

  “They must have a way of getting all these vehicles in here.” He pointed to three rows of Jeeps and ATVs parked near the command center. “They must have built some kind of ramp into the canyon. If we can find it and destroy it, they won’t be able to drive out. That should slow them down enough to allow the Rangers time to get here.”

  “How are we going to find it?” she asked.

  “We follow the vehicles.” He pointed to a line of loaded trucks making their way out of camp. Most of them were smaller trucks, high-clearance and four-wheel drive to handle the rough terrain, but incapable of carrying more than a half dozen men or a few thousand pounds of cargo at a time. They rumbled along in a slow-moving line, men sitting on the sides of the beds or hanging out of the cabs, staring ahead impatiently, anxious to be on their way.

  At first, Marco and Lauren raced alongside the trucks, quickly outpacing the lumbering vehicles. But as the canyon narrowed, they were forced to move to the sides, moving up the incline, weaving their way among cactus and knots of brush that slowed their progress. He kept an eye on the line of slowly moving trucks, both to gauge their progress, and in case anyone noticed them and tried to take them out.

  But everyone was focused on clearing the area as quickly as possible. Most of the men would have no idea command had captured two prisoners or that those prisoners had escaped. Lauren and Marco were merely two more soldiers, hurrying to accomplish a mission they had all somehow been brainwashed into believing was the good and right thing to do.

  “There are so many trucks ahead of us,” Lauren said. She’d moved up beside him, doing a good job of keeping up. “We’ll never be able to stop them all.”

  “We can stop most of them.” He hefted the backpack higher on his shoulders. “The ones we can’t stop, the Rangers can.” One of the first things Graham would have done would have been to set up roadblocks throughout the area to stop anyone who looked suspicious. Even if Marco and Lauren didn’t stop every vehicle, they could prevent most of the destruction Prentice had planned.

  The trucks in line beside them had stopped altogether now. Lauren touched his shoulder and pointed up ahead. “Look!”

  A single vehicle was making its way up a narrow earthen ramp, big, knobby tires biting into the loose soil and rock. Ten feet wide, with at least a seven percent grade, the exit route was treacherous enough that the trucks could only navigate it one at a time, and slowly. One carefully placed charge would be enough to block the exit completely.

  He removed the backpack and opened it, and took out a single brick of C-4. After a moment’s thought, he added a second brick. He would only have one chance, so he had to get it right the first time.

  “How are you going to get down there to plant the bomb?” Lauren asked. “Someone will see you right away and kill you.”

  She was right. Even if he had someone—and Lauren was the only other person on his side at the moment—lay down covering fire, he’d never have time to move into position and set the explosives up properly, especially given his unfamiliarity with their operation. He frowned at the ascending truck, trying to think of a way—any way—to get to the ramp unseen. The sun was up now, and though shadows still engulfed much of the canyon, sun poured into this eastern end, lighting the ramp like a spotlight.

  He slipped the C-4 into the pack and carefully slid it beneath a clump of scrub oak. “You’re right,” he said. “Time for plan B.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “And what’s plan B?”

  He slipped the rifle off his shoulder and checked to see that it was loaded. “If I can disable one of the trucks while it’s on the ramp, it will block the exit. It will take some time for them to move it out of the way. If I can, I’ll disable several vehicles.”

  “And the minute you start firing, you’ll have two dozen guns just like that one shooting this way,” she said. “Fired by men who have had nothing better to do with their time for weeks than practice shooting.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “But I wasn’t planning to shoot from here.” He looked up the slope ahead of them. “We need to take a sniper’s position, concealed in good cover, probably up on the rim and a little ahead of most of the men, shooting down. And we move before anyone can reach us.”

  “So we’ve got to climb,” she said.

  “Yes, and we need to hurry.”

  He put her ahead of him and took up a position behind her, his weapon at the ready, aware that if anyone in the line of waiting trucks noticed them, they might think it suspicious that they were taking this difficult route out. At the top, she stopped, bent over at the waist, hands on her knees, breathing hard, her face flushed. He handed her a bottle of water and after a moment she straightened and drank deeply.

  From this angle, they could no longer see the trucks and troops below, though he could hear the idling engines and muffled voices. Lauren looked out across the prairie as she drank, squinting into the sun. “It’s so tempting to just walk away,” she said. “To leave the danger and go back to trying to find help.”

  “Doing that might mean a lot of innocent people die,” he said.

  “I said it was tempting, not that I’d do it.” She handed him the water bottle. “Come on. Let’s find a good place to hide and do this.”

  He led the way along the rim, keeping low as they approached the ramp. They had to descend a couple of feet to have a good view of the vehicles crawling up the slope. The first truck had almost made it to the top, in perfect position to block all of those waiting to exit behind it. Silently, Marco indicated
a boulder amid a clump of scrub. Lauren nodded and moved to crouch behind it. Marco slid alongside her, stretched out with the rifle propped on the boulder. He sighted on the truck, trying to decide whether to aim for the tires or the engine block.

  “It’s going to be loud,” he said softly. “You might want to cover your ears.”

  She clapped her hands over her ears, and shut her eyes as well, her lips pressed tightly together as if to bite back screams.

  The first shot took out the nearside rear tire. The second round of fire peppered the front quarter-panel and hood with holes and exploded one of the front tires. Men shouted and poured out of the surrounding vehicles like ants. Several looked up the slope in their direction and pointed, and raised their rifles.

  “We’ve got to run,” Marco said. He leaped to his feet and pulled her up beside him, then retreated up and back along the rim, out of sight of the soldiers, but not out of hearing range of their shouts.

  “Are they going to come after us?” Lauren asked, when they stopped in the deep shade of an overhanging rock to catch their breath.

  “They’ll send someone,” he said. “But we’ll make sure they don’t find us.” He slid down a couple of feet to study the activity below. Lauren moved in behind him, her hands at his waist, her chin on his shoulder. He found himself matching the rhythm of his breathing to her own, calmed by her steadfast presence. He’d worked with many partners on various missions, men he admired and respected, some he hadn’t much liked but had learned to trust with his life, a few, like Rand, for whom he felt a deep friendship, But he’d never had a partner like Lauren, someone he felt compelled to protect, yet whom he depended on to prop him up emotionally. He’d gotten through tough missions before by setting all emotion aside, becoming a robot who relied on instinct and training. Lauren made him feel everything from fear to triumph more intently; he wouldn’t give up the pleasure she brought him in order to avoid the pain.

  “No!” Lauren’s cry, the single word half-smothered in his back, startled him.