Highway to Vengeance: A Thomas Highway Thriller (11 page)

A short time later I arrived at the
rendezvous point and took up a position behind the bathroom
adjacent to the basketball court. It was 12:20 AM.

At precisely 12:30, Willis’s Ford Ranger
pulled into the empty lot in front of the court and parked in one
of the spots. He flashed the high-beams three times, signaling that
the coast was clear.

I walked over to his truck and climbed in
the passenger’s side.

“Did you make sure you weren’t followed?” I
said as we pulled out of the lot.

Willis nodded. “I’m clean. Are you?”

“I sure as hell hope so.”

Willis shook his head, started laughing.
“Damn, Highway. You sure had me fooled there at the Pads game.
Right up until you handed me that little note, I really thought you
were going to give up on this thing.”

“That was the whole point,” I said.
“Hopefully it fooled whoever was watching me, too.”

“Oh, I’m sure it did,” Willis said. “It was
quite an acting job. So where to now? The warehouse?”

“Yeah.”

“You think it’s still safe with all that’s
been going on”

“It should be,” I said. “As far as I can
tell, I just popped onto Homeland Security’s radar this afternoon,
after they saw me following Alvarez home from work. They don’t know
about anything that happened before today.”

“Good,” Willis said. “So have you thought
about how you’re going to go after Alvarez now that the feds are
onto you?”

“Not really,” I said. “Why? Have you?”

“A little bit.”

“Somehow, I’m not surprised. So what did you
come up with?”

“Something a little crazy.”

“You? Come up with a crazy plan? I don’t
believe it. Shocked, I tell you. Shocked.”

Willis offered a little smile. “And not only
that, but risky too.”

“What isn’t at this point?”

“True enough,” Willis said. “But this one
will get you into some real deep shit if it doesn’t work out. And
maybe even if it does.”

“Sounds intriguing,” I said. “Tell me about
it.”

“It’s pretty simple, actually. You can use
the number you got from Russo to contact Alvarez. Set up a meeting
with him, face-to-face.”

“You don’t really think there’s any way that
would work, do you?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because there’s no way in hell Alvarez
would take the bait.”

“He might if you told him the truth.”

“What truth is that?” I said. “That I’m
hunting him down because I think he had something to do with my
wife’s murder?”

Willis shook his head. “Not that truth. The
other one.”

“What other one? That he’s the focus of a
federal operation and that The Department of Homeland Security has
been following him around 24/7 for eighteen months now?”

Willis nodded.

I stared at him for a moment, then started
laughing.

Willis stared back, his eyebrows raised but
not joining in on the merriment.

I stopped laughing. “Holy shit. You’re
serious, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s not crazy. That’s fucking
insane.”

“No more insane than you continuing your
hunt after Homeland Security ordered you to shut it down,” Willis
said. “It’s not like you’re going to get yourself in more trouble
for doing this as opposed to doing something else.”

“I don’t know. I think your plan might get
me into a little more trouble.”

“Not really,” Willis said. “Think of it this
way. No matter how you decide to go after Alvarez, one of two
things is going to happen after you’re done with him. Either the
feds catch up with you, and they put your balls in a vise for a
very long time, or they don’t catch up with you, and you have to
run from them for the rest of your life. If you cross them, these
are the only two possible outcomes, regardless of the method you
use to go after Alvarez. So I figure you might as well do what
gives you the best chance to actually get to him.”

I thought about this for a moment and had to
admit, Willis had a point. If I continued down this path, I was
going to be in deep shit, no matter how it turned out. But still,
it was one thing to go behind the backs of the feds, but quite
another to deliberately fuck with their operation. Quite another
indeed.

“I agree with you on one thing,” I said. “I
need to do what gives me the best chance to get to Alvarez. But the
real question is; does telling him the feds are after him do
that?”

“Right now it looks like the only chance you
have.”

“Right now, you might be right,” I said.
“But it still seems a little too crazy, even for me. It would be a
tough sell even without the feds already involved, but with them
listening and watching both of our every moves? I just don’t see it
happening.”

Willis shrugged. “Do you have any better
ideas?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Then I think you should at least consider
it.”

“Oh, I’ll consider it. And it might just be
insane enough to work. But it also might just be insane. Right now,
I’m too tired to know for sure.”

“It’ll work,” Willis said. “We can make it
work.”

“Then figure out the details. I’ll look for
something on my end, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

We arrived at the warehouse right around
1:00 AM. After thanking Willis again, I stepped out of his truck
and entered the building. I made my way to the living quarters and
immediately started looking over Alvarez’s files.

Two hours later, after poring over every
last detail for the third time that night, I was ready to give up.
There was nothing I’d missed, no detail that was going to come out
of the woodwork to give me any sudden insight into how I was going
to get my hands on Alvarez. No smoking gun.

Perhaps Willis’s idea was the best way.
Certainly he was better at planning operations than I was; he had
always excelled at that type of thing. My SEAL training had done an
incredible job preparing me for action but that was about it. I was
an attack dog. Wind me up, point me in the right direction and set
me loose and I’ll have no problem. Figuring out a plan of attack?
Not my strongest suit.

I decided the best way to approach the
situation was to get some sleep and deal with it in the
morning.

I was out before my head hit the pillow.

BUD/S TRAINING: DIVE
PHASE

The next training phase takes place almost
entirely in the water. Eight hours a day, every day, spent either
in the pool or the ocean, learning the mechanics of combat diving.
For some, this poses no problem. For others, it wreaks havoc.

The first two weeks are spent mostly in the
classroom, learning the basics of diving. Learning the gear. The
medicine. The physics. And most importantly the decompression
tables. How painful it can be if you don’t follow the rules
explicitly. How decompression can kill, even in as little as nine
feet of water. Once everyone passes the written test, it’s over to
the dive tower.

The next few days are spent here, in a
50-foot cylinder, practicing what is called free swimming ascent.
You breathe air at 25 feet, and head up to the surface, exhaling
continuously, never moving faster than your bubbles. Then 50 feet.
Then back to 25. Up to 50. Practicing proper surfacing
techniques.

Near the end of the first week is a 50 meter
underwater swim. You jump in the pool feet first, turn, and start
for the other end. Once there, you push off the wall and swim back.
Only half the class makes it on the first try. One man has to be
dragged up from the depths of the pool by the instructor swimming
above them as he passes out from the lack of oxygen. He is pulled
out of the water and dragged to the cement next to the pool. CPR is
administered. One of the instructors tells the unconscious man to
go towards the light. Or away from the light. He’s not sure which.
The same instructor turns to us and tells us not to worry; our
fellow student hasn’t breathed in 45 seconds, but it takes upwards
of 120 seconds before there is any chance of brain damage.
Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t make us feel any better.

And then he’s breathing again. He is told to
thank the instructor that saved his life. He does so. Five minutes
later, he is back in the pool, trying again to pass the swim. This
time he makes it.

Two other men pass out. The same protocols
are followed. They too pass the test on the second try. The
instructors gather us together, tell us congratulations, you just
passed a threshold that your body thought you couldn’t. Get used to
it. This is only the beginning. We cheer, yell out hooyah. Then
it’s back in the pool.

The next evolution is treading water. With
full gear on. For thirty minutes. While keeping your hands above
the surface. Then you go underwater with your partner, learn to
share mouthpieces, sucking air from the scuba tanks. For twenty
minutes. Then you and your partner exchange scuba gear. Underwater.
Which is harder than it sounds. Then back to treading water as the
cycle restarts. You quickly learn how little you like water.

A couple weeks in and you’re ready for the
first of two major tests for Dive Phase. Pool competency.

First you get fully loaded in your scuba
gear. Then you jump into the water. You sink to the bottom. Down on
two knees. Here comes the instructor from behind. He grabs onto
you, shakes you, flips you head over heels three times. Then he
rips off your straps. Removes your regulator. Tears your mask off.
You have to put yourself back together. Without coming up for
air.

You succeed. He harasses you again. This
time he turns your air off. Ties a knot in your hose. Forcibly
removes your mouthpiece. Spins you around.

You put yourself together again. Once fixed,
the instructor starts in on you for the third time. The process is
repeated. Four, sometimes five times. Around twenty minutes in
all.

Finally you’re done. You pass. You come up
for air, report to one of the other instructors. Only twenty
percent of the class passes on the first try. They will get up to
six tries before being rolled back to the next class or dropped for
performance. If you don’t pass pool competency, you don’t move
on.

The next six weeks are spent mostly in
Coronado Bay, learning how to navigate underwater, use heavy
machinery underwater, where to plant explosives to do maximum
damage to a ship and other fun stuff. Like open circuit ocean
dives. And then closed circuit ocean dives. And more dives. Always
more dives, more practice, more training. It never seems to
end.

But then it does. You come to the final
evolution of the nine-week Dive Phase. The Final Training Exercise.
You take everything that you’ve learned over the past nine weeks
and put it to use. It’s as close to a combat dive as you’ll
experience short of an actual SEAL operation.

The FTX isn’t difficult, but it demands an
extremely high level of precision. You and your partner enter the
water half a mile away. You navigate the area, locate your target,
set the explosives, then swim to the extraction point, arriving
safely and on time. And that’s it.

Hooyah. On to the final phase.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

I awoke to the brain-piercing screech of the
attention alarm. I jumped out of bed and ran over to the
laptop.

The top two sections of the split screen
immediately caught my attention. In each screen was a three-man
team of heavily-armed soldiers, one team at each of the doors
leading into the warehouse. Two of the soldiers in each group were
lined up right behind the other, in classic narrow-entry formation.
At the front of each line was a man on a knee, affixing something
to the door, undoubtedly a shape charge to blow it in.

I’d been in their position enough times to
know what was coming next.

Cursing under my breath, I grabbed the
backpack from the floor, shoved into it the handgun, suppressor,
two boxes of ammo, both holsters and Alvarez’s folder then zipped
it shut. I slipped it over my back and ran into the walk-in
pantry.

I had just yanked on the fishing line that
raised the trapdoor when I heard a pair of muffled explosions rack
the warehouse. Moving methodically despite my body screaming at me
to hurry, I made sure the door was set in place, then grabbed the
flashlight off the shelf, turned it on, and stuck it in my mouth to
keep my hands free for climbing down the ladder.

I stepped into the hole, descending two
rungs, reached up, closed the door above me, and finished my
descent into the drain tunnel below.

After reaching the concrete floor, I pulled
the flashlight from my mouth and scanned the area. I immediately
saw the ladder against the opposite wall and jogged towards it,
jumping over the tiny stream of water running through the center of
the drain. The tunnel was designed to transport tons of water under
the city to the ocean beyond, giving me plenty of room to move
unhindered.

I came to the base of the ladder and shined
the flashlight to see where it led. At the top was a
not-too-sturdy-looking door made of rotting wood. I again stuck the
flashlight in my mouth and started up the rungs.

I climbed until my head brushed up against
the door, then reached up with my right hand and gave it a
push.

Nothing happened. Not even the slightest bit
of give in the door.

I pushed again, harder this time. Still
nothing.

Voices echoed about the chamber. I whipped
my head around towards the other ladder. A narrow shaft of light
was shining down from above it, through the open trapdoor. As I
watched, a concussion grenade—better known as a flashbang—fell
through the hole and clattered against the concrete. The door
closed.

Still holding the ladder with only my left
hand, I turned my head away from the flashbang, closed my eyes, and
covered my face as best I could with the crook of my right
elbow.