Chapter 6
Saturday, April 14
Lieutenant Andrew Tobin squinted against the harsh afternoon light of Riyadh Air Base, Saudi Arabia. The temperature was hovering around 100, a harsh blast after the cool interior of the C-17 transport for the last 17 hours. He’d been lucky enough to catch a nonstop out of Fort Hood, which had refueled over the Atlantic Ocean. It made for a quicker transit time, but also a grueling trip in the notoriously uncomfortable seats of the C-17 Globemaster.
The military had configured the plane for troops and cargo, and the interior was so noisy at 35,000 feet that most of the passengers stuck in earbuds and tried to zone out. As soon as they hit the runway and began taxiing toward the huge military hangars, the soldiers were on their feet and gathering their gear, despite regulations to the contrary. Andrew went right along with them, if a bit slower. After sitting for so long, his stump felt like ground beef.
As the ramp of the plane lowered, hot air flooded through the fuselage like a blast furnace. Many of the soldiers wore BDUs, combat armor, and were shouldering huge packs complete with M-4 rifles. Even in his Air Force BDUs, he felt sweat burst out under his arms and start to drip down his back. How the hell the Army boys tolerated it, he had no idea.
Andrew shouldered his duffel after most of the others had filed down the ramp to the lower deck, and he followed them out. Below, loadmasters were swarming over the six Humvees on the cargo deck. He nodded to the airman in charge and headed outside into the full heat.
He lost a half hour finding a ride to the airbase headquarters, then sat outside his CO’s office for another hour waiting to meet his new boss. When the squadron’s commanding colonel waved him in, he was still on a conference call. Andrew did his best not to listen, and failed.
“…the over-flights are still pending authorization, Rick,” a voice from the phone said.
“I understand that contingency,” Andrew’s new CO replied as he nodded the pilot into a waiting chair. The desk was tidy and had a name plaque that read “Col. Richard ‘Tight End’ Sommers.” “We need additional details on the nature of the disturbance, and those flights can provide it, Ted.”
“I’ll see if we can push the SecDef on this, Rick, but the POTUS is reluctant.”
“He’s reluctant to do anything except play golf. Get back to me,” he said and pushed the button to end the call. “Lieutenant Tobin, good to have you aboard.”
“Thank you, Colonel Sommers,” Andrew said. “Sounds like something’s heating up over here. Iran?”
“No, actually, this is a lot closer to home.” Andrew raised an eyebrow. The colonel glanced over Andrew’s shoulder to be sure no one was in the hallway before continuing. “There may be an armed coup underway in Mexico as we speak.”
“No shit?! I mean, really? Sorry, sir.”
“No shit, indeed. Official communication channels with Washington fell silent 48 hours ago, and at the same time, Mexican air traffic control began refusing entrance to their country to all but a few of the western and eastern resort destinations—Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlán, and a few others.”
Andrew absorbed it all in stunned silence. Mexico had suffered from internal corruption and drug wars for years, but no one ever thought the country would succumb to internal conflict. It was widely considered one of the strongest democracies in the hemisphere, behind the USA and Canada.
“We’ve seen some reports from people coming out of Mexico via ground transportation,” the colonel continued, “and those reports talk about crazy gun battles in more than a few of the larger cities, and government compounds on lock down. An hour before you landed, they closed the Brownsville and El Paso border crossings.” Andrew’s eyes got even bigger. “And there are troops arriving in Tijuana.”
“Sounds like things are spiraling out of control.”
“That’s exactly what the boys in intel said to the President in a briefing this morning. Problem is, he doesn’t agree; he says it’s just a hiccup down there. We tried asking if he had some diplomatic contacts we’re not aware of, but the President’s staff are playing it close to the cuff. We requested permission to do reconnaissance over-flights. It’s being considered.”
Andrew nodded in understanding. It wasn’t by accident the colonel allowed him to listen in on the conference call after all. He knew what was coming next. “Have you flown with a Litening pod?” the colonel asked.
“Yes sir, I have, but it’s been a while.” He’d carried the pod—a high-resolution, forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensor combined with a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera—on some of his F-15 missions. He’d used it fairly frequently…but that had been years ago.
“We are not being given the go-ahead for a flyover of Mexico from stateside.” He glanced at a file on his desk and shook his head. “It’s a shame to put you to work so soon after landing here, Andrew, but we have an F-15 with a Litening pod on it and…let’s just say we need to rotate it back to the States. For in-depth maintenance, you know? We need to run it through Sao Paulo so a specialist there can look at it, then up to Ft. Hood for final routing. You up for a long run after a little sleep?”
“No problem,” Andrew nodded and smiled. “Anything you want, sir.”
“Good, get some sleep. Your orders will be waiting. You’ve got pre-flight in six hours.”
* * *
Vance pecked away on his ancient computer, typing with his aging index fingers at a plodding but steady pace. He spent more than a few hours every day blogging and updating Facebook, his preferred combat venue in the patriot movement. With thousands of followers on his Facebook page and thousands more on the blog he ran on Wordsmith, whenever Vance posted, more than twenty thousand people read his words from reposts and shares. He had never gotten the hang of the Twitterverse as Ann called it. In truth, he really didn’t have the time to be a twit. Or whatever they called it.
Ann had left that morning for an OB appointment. In the days since he’d found out he was going to become a dad, Vance had made some progress toward accepting the inevitable. The problem was his age, of course. Fifteen years’ difference between him and Ann was not insurmountable in the modern era. It would, however, turn heads, especially her father’s head, and that was bad. Bad enough that he’d never approve of his darling daughter taking up with an aging divorcé. Add to that the fact that her father owned about half of San Antonio and was a Congressman, and it went from bad to worse. He’d have to tell the man he’d gotten his daughter pregnant.
He turned to an update from a page called Truth_Underground.net. Vance hoped it would be interesting enough to make him forget the situation he’d gotten himself into. It was. The story from Mexico had been simmering for a few days. The news was treating the situation as a drug-fueled attempt to pull off a coup, thereby making the drug lords the legitimate government and giving them the ability to terminate the Americans’ war on drugs.
“War on drugs,” Vance snorted as he followed the story, “more like a war on liberty and freedom.” He didn’t agree with some of his more radical Libertarian friends that all drugs should be legal, but he did agree the drug war was a straw man to erode patriotic Americans’ freedoms.
This story was a first-hand account of a man stuck in Matamoros, Mexico, who was trying to get back into the United States. The government had locked down the border crossing, and he was sending streaming video through a hacked connection every few hours. He uploaded a new video, and it was going viral in a big way—over a million views in less than an hour. It took Vance three tries before he even got the page to load!
At first it was just a POV shot from a crummy little hotel room as a man complained the Mexican army was not allowing them to leave the building. Then there were shots outside, and he carried the camera out onto the room’s tiny balcony and aimed it down at the street.
Troops had established a checkpoint less than a block from the hotel. Two armored cars were parked nose-to-nose, effectively blocking the street. In addition, they had piled up sand bags to create a pair of improvised firing positions, and machine guns had been set up in each. Vance watched intently. This looked more like Somalia than Mexico!
It was not clear where the shots were coming from, and the camera kept erratically pointing here and there, trying to locate the source. Then the camera captured a group running toward the blockade. The soldiers issued challenges, but the men and women showed no signs of slowing. The image was poor quality, and Vance couldn’t tell if they were attacking or fleeing something. It didn’t matter to the troops, who opened fired at 50 yards.
Vance jerked violently upon hearing the chatter of an M16 in three-round burst mode. Bullets smacked flesh and bone with impacts even the tiny camera picked up. Two people went down, and the crowd staggered to a stop. Screams of pain and protest rose in the evening. He hadn’t realized it was night, until then. He didn’t understand Spanish, but he picked out the word “No” as the troops yelled it over and over.
Several people knelt to help the wounded as the crowd continued to grow; more and more people rushed into the street. Vance guessed the crowd swelled to 100 in just 10 seconds, and still more came, pushing the others from behind, forcing them to creep forward. The soldiers were getting nervous and fired into the air over the crowd’s heads. There were more screams of confusion, but whatever had driven the crowd this far had them more scared than the soldiers’ guns.
Then there were new screams. These came from around the corner, behind the crowd, and they were like nothing Vance had ever heard. They were visceral and primal guttural bellows that were barely human. A hellish grinding of rage and horrible, unspeakable need combined to make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The troops fell silent, and the crowd roiled like a bucket of worms. Some kicked at locked doors, and a few piled into alleyways jammed with overfull dumpsters. Another hideous scream sounded, and the crowd responded like a bomb, exploding toward the troops.
A few small arms spoke immediately, and people fell, but only a few. The camera focused on the roadblock; the machine gunners were looking back at their commanding officer and screaming, their faces a mixture of fear and confusion. The commanding officer shouted more orders, and one machine gun roared to life, but by then, the crowd had already reached them.
“I don’t know what kind of riot this is,” the camera holder said, pulling back in shaky movements as the crowd enveloped the soldiers and their guns fell silent. “Everything just went crazy a few days ago. I’ve been getting second- and third-hand reports of riots all over Matamoros and other border cities. With the fighting in Mexico City, we think the legitimate government is hanging on by a thread. A friend thinks it’s Islamist fanatics, but there are no demands, and the Islamic hate sites are all silent. No one knows what to do; no one knows what the rioters want!” It was a plea for answers to the unanswerable.
The camera focused on the checkpoint again. Some of the soldiers were fighting with the rioters, but most of the civilians were racing past them down the avenue. The border crossing was only three miles that way, and there were more shots from that direction.
The horrendous screams sounded again, this time carried by many more voices. Vance turned the sound down a little—it was inhuman and gruesome. Most of the crowd was past the troops, who were trying to reorganize and treat their wounded. Vance was surprised to see the men appeared alive and mostly uninjured. A few guns were missing, including one of the heavy machine guns the crowd had carted off. In fact, the mass of civilian wounded far outnumbered the military, who had organized again and were stopping the crowd. Using batons and tear gas grenades, the soldiers finally regained control.
The screams were closer now, and the camera moved to the end of the block where the crowd had first appeared. One young woman staggered around the corner clasping an infant to her chest. Blood covered her left side, and she was having trouble standing. No sooner did she round the corner than a pair of bloody hands followed her and lunged for the infant. She screamed “No, por favor, no!” and tried to hold on. The child’s tiny cries reached the microphone, but only for a second before the hands snatched the child away from her.
“No!” she yelled again, before a man tackled her. Vance watched, unable to look away. He suspected he was about to witness a rape as the man tore at her clothes, exposing one breast and part of her wounded side. Instead the man fell onto her and bit the exposed breast, tearing away a huge flap of bloody flesh.
“Oh,” Vance choked, “oh God…what is happening?”
The woman shrieked and tried to pull free, rolling under the man and clawing at the sidewalk. Vance could see her fingernails tear away and leave bloody streaks on the cement. The man pulled her back and sank his teeth into her flesh yet again, this time finding the back of her neck. Vance imagined he could hear the bone crunching as she spasmodically jerked and lay still.
Two other men appeared, racing around the corner. They paused for half a second to observe the man and his grisly meal before racing up the street toward the stalled mob. They looked like a business man and a waiter, both dressed for work. Both had injuries, and both appeared insane. Then they screamed that mind-wrecking sound from hell. In a moment they fell upon the rear of the crowd, tearing into people with fingernails and teeth like…like…zombies?!
“No fucking way,” Vance whispered, then looked around as if someone was witnessing his insane thought. He was alone, and that bothered him. Was this some sort of elaborate hoax? Was that even possible? It would take a Hollywood special effects company weeks to do this.
“They’re…they’re…” the camera man stammered, looking for words, “they’re eating people,” he whispered. The camera panned back to the corner once more where the woman’s killer was back on his feet, blood running down his chin as he chewed a mouthful of flesh and looked around with wild eyes. Vance found himself wishing he had a clearer view of the man’s face, then instantly changed his mind. He didn’t think he could survive that look if he were to encounter it in person. It felt as if just looking at such malevolent evil would forever destroy what little innocence he still had left.
From around the corner came another man, holding something small in his arms. He was taking big ripping mouthfuls of flesh from it. Vance tried to comprehend what he was seeing, then recognized a tiny hand as the monster took another bite. This time, he screamed.
Vance slammed the lid closed on the laptop and stood with a shudder, backing away from the computer desk. His feet caught on the desk chair, and he crashed backwards to the floor, smashing his tailbone painfully and smacking his head hard on the linoleum tile. He took no notice, but crab-walked backwards to get as far away as he could from that unspeakable abomination he’d just witnessed. He came up against the opposite wall, tears pouring down his face and shaking his head in utter disbelief. And that was how Ann found him an hour later, knees tucked up under his chin, rocking back and forth, shaking his head and saying “No,” over and over again.
* * * * *