Highway to Vengeance: A Thomas Highway Thriller (14 page)

I walked through Revolucion Square—avoiding
the swarming crowds of kids selling chicle and various other
trinkets as though they carried the plague—and headed over to the
first street vendor I saw.

I bought a local phone cards from the small,
smiling vendor, then crossed the pedestrian bridge over the Tijuana
River. From there I found a pay phone and dialed the number of my
contact.

The line rang three times before it was
picked up. A computer-generated voice prompt instructed me to enter
a six-digit code to access a mailbox. I did so.

There was a series of three short beeps,
then a female voice said: “You are already checked into the Hotel
Real Del Mar under the name Philip Crawford. Your key is waiting
for you at the desk. You will be contacted exactly three hours
after you make this phone call.”

There was a click and the line went
dead.

Laughing at what I considered to be
unnecessary spy shit, I hung up the phone, climbed into the nearest
cab, and told the driver to take me to the Hotel Real Del Mar.

Thirty minutes later, we came to a stop. I
stepped out of the cab, paid the driver, and walked towards the
front entrance of the hotel.

In all the numerous times I’d been to
Tijuana, I’d never ventured very far beyond the bars on Avenida
Revolucion. I’d always just figured that the whole city mirrored
that peculiar strip of neon and grime. Now I knew otherwise.

Although it was technically still part of
Tijuana, the Hotel Real Del Mar was the exact opposite of Avenida
Revolucion, the equivalent of Hollywood Hills compared to the
Sunset Strip. Contrary to my expectations, it was a quaint,
beautiful little hotel set above a golf course in the rolling hills
overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The air was clear, the lobby was
spotless, and the employees were constantly smiling. Needless to
say, I was pleasantly surprised.

I approached the check-in desk with a smile,
only slightly concerned with my lack of identification bearing the
name Philip Crawford. I figured the situation must have been taken
care of already, otherwise why would they have set it up this way
in the first place?

“Hello,” said the young woman behind the
front desk. “How may I help you?”

As I came closer, I saw that her nametag
read CARMEN and below that, ASSISTANT MANAGER. Her smile was wide
and genuine, her brilliant white teeth contrasting with her light
brown skin. She appeared to be a Mexican national but her voice
held only a slight trace of an accent. From the look of the lobby,
it was apparent that the hotel catered to Americans.

“I’m here to pick up a key,” I said. “My
name is Philip Crawford.”

Carmen looked down at her screen and hit the
keys with practiced rapidity. “Ah, yes,” she said after a pause
just long enough to give my heart a chance to start racing. “Here
you are. The room is already paid in full. Did you want to use the
credit card we have on file to take care of any incidentals?”

“That would be great.”

Carmen plucked an envelope out of a file
organizer next to the keyboard and handed it to me. Still smiling,
she said, “Your room number is 1408. It’s on the first floor, on
the east end of the hotel, right next to the east exit. Just go
through the doors behind you and take a right at the hallway.
Follow it all the way down. Your room is at the end.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“De nada,” she replied with a smile.

I grabbed the key, turned and started down
the hall.

It wasn’t until I actually walked into my
room that I realized how exhausted I was.

I’d been asleep for less than an hour when
Pittman’s men had rousted me back at the warehouse earlier that
morning, and I’d been running on anticipation and adrenaline ever
since. But now that I was situated in Mexico, with all my
preparations taken care of and knowing that I still had another
couple of hours before my contact was going to get in touch with
me, the anticipation and adrenaline melted away and I was ready to
sleep.

I ambled over to the bed and climbed on top
with all my clothes still on, not even bothering to get under the
covers. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

BUD/S TRAINING: THE HOME
STRETCH

The third and final phase of BUD/S is the
most dangerous of all the training phases. Tons of live ammunition.
Live explosives. Live fire exercises. As close to real warfare as
humanly possible.

The first few weeks are spent firing
thousands of rounds. From all types of weapons. M-4’s. M203/M60
grenade launchers. Handguns. Shooting, shooting, and more shooting.
Timed weapons assembly test. Accuracy tests. Speed tests. Combined
tests. Standing position. Prone position. Kneeling position. From
varying distances. Twenty-five yards. Fifty yards. One hundred.
Three hundred. With all the different weapons.

The standards are stringent; you must become
a great shooter if you wish to continue on. Most men do. A couple
don’t. They are rolled back to try again in the next class.

Next we move on to Close Quarter Defense
training. As the name implies, CQD is a series of tactics on how to
react to threats within a limited space. How to portray strength
using a loud voice, deliberate movements, and other various subtle
and unsubtle methods. Using wax bullets, you practice different
situations over and over, taking on one, two, three hostiles at a
time. Simulating firefights. Learning to identify threat levels and
apply the necessary amount of force. Being trained to pull the
trigger first if it’s a shooting threat.

The training is intense and draining, the
pace relentless. To simulate combat conditions, you train seven
days a week, upwards of eighteen hours a day. You sleep whenever
you can; five minutes here, thirty minutes there, an hour or two at
night if you’re lucky.

Lack of sleep clouds your brain, makes
decision-making extremely difficult. But this is no excuse.
Mistakes are punished mercilessly. Minor ones earn you a run up
Frog Hill. Maybe a couple hundred pushups. Serious ones earn you a
couple of nights at Camp Stupid, a tent near the beach. Repeated
mistakes result in the lugging around of fifty pounds of sand on
your back for a day. Or two days. Or three. There are complaints,
but the instructors have none of it. They are constantly reminding
you that this is just training. War is exponentially more
stressful. A mistake in training results in some extra pain. A
mistake in war results in death. For you or one of your brothers.
Suck it up and deal with it, or go back home. The choice is
yours.

Once a week you embark on a ruck-sack hump,
consisting of a ten-mile run while lugging around forty pounds of
sand on your back and taking turns pretending to be wounded and
carried by your classmates. At the end, there is a good-faith test,
where your pack is weighed. God help you if it comes in under the
40-pound minimum.

In between the running and firing of
weapons, there is demolition work. Simulated UDT beach clearings,
using almost 1000 pounds of C4. Packing it in. Setting the timers.
Sneaking back out. Watching from a safe distance as the explosives
go off, rocking the beach, sending water upwards of 200 feet.

Towards the end of the nine-week period, you
prepare for the Live Fire IAD. It consists of rehearsed movements
meant to prepare you for an extended firefight.

You go to the range, line up side-by-side
with your fellow classmates, and prepare yourself to fire live
rounds from your M4. On the instructor’s prompts, you stand, walk,
drop to the ground, and empty your clip. Stand, turn, walk, turn
downrange, drop to the ground, fire. Repeat. Again. And again. And
again. Until your body responds automatically to the prompts. After
six weeks of irregular and erratic sleep, your mind is mush, but
you push on, fighting through the exhaustion, knowing that a
mistake could get you bumped from BUD/S with the finish line in
sight.

The training starts off sloppy, but after
ten straight hours of practice, you and your classmates finally
have it down. The instructors are pleased. The next morning you
pass the test with flying colors.

Three more weeks of running, shooting,
blowing things up, running, shooting, CQD training, running,
shooting, navigating the land, running, shooting some more and
occasionally getting some sleep, and then the end of BUD/S is less
than a week away. Only one hurdle remains; a nighttime, live-fire,
full mission profile attack against a simulated enemy base.

The final training mission begins at
midnight. With only the full moon above to guide your way, you and
your fellow SEAL/s converge upon a group of buildings standing in
as a communications center that needs to be infiltrated and
secured. You situate yourselves into the proper cross-fire position
and commence firing.

Thousands of rounds are released; the night
sky is riddled with red streaks from the tracer ammo. After a full
two minutes of nonstop shooting, the cease-fire is given. You and
your team infiltrate the buildings, search the buildings and seize
any important materials, then set explosive charges, and withdraw
to the extraction point. Once gathered there, you watch as the
ensuing explosion destroys the buildings. You let out a collective
cheer and retire for the night.

Hooyah. BUD/S training is officially
over.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

I was jerked out of sleep by the three-shot
burst of a machine gun. My head snapped up. After a moment of
dislocation, I remembered where I was. Mexico. On the hunt for my
wife’s killer. The machine gun I’d heard was nothing more than
someone knocking on the door.

I looked at the clock next to the bed.
Precisely three hours had elapsed since I’d called my contact. That
must be him.

Stifling a yawn, I climbed out of bed and
went to the door. I took a look through the peephole but couldn’t
see anyone.

What the hell?

There was another knock, coming from the
other side of the room. I turned towards the sound and saw the door
that connected my room with the next room over.

I laughed under my breath, shook my head.
More spy shit. I walked over to the door and opened it.

Standing there was a tall, lanky female
dressed in a business suit. Her dark hair was cut short and a
two-inch scar ran down the side of her harsh yet not unattractive
face, from temple to jaw. She was holding a briefcase in her right
hand.

“Glad to see you made it,” she said. The
voice matched the one on the recording I’d called earlier.

“Glad to be here,” I said. “I assume you’re
my contact?”

“Yes I am. Why? Surprised I’m a woman?”

“A little,” I said. “But it doesn’t make any
difference to me what sex you are.”

“You sure about that?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She shrugged. “Some people don’t deal with
it very well.”

“Well, I’m not one of those people.”

“That’s good to know.”

“So, do you have a name?” I said. “Or should
I just call you ma’am.”

“You can call me Chris,” she said. “Of
course, Chris is no more my real name than Philip Crawford is
yours, but it will serve its purpose.”

“Then Chris it is.”

We stood there for another couple seconds,
me waiting for her to take the lead.

“So are you going to invite me in or just
leave me standing here in limbo?” she said.

I stood aside and held my hand out, ever the
gentlemen. She sat down on the bed, opened the briefcase, pulled
out a laptop and turned it on.

I hesitated for a moment. Although I knew it
was stupid and irrational, I felt uncomfortable sharing a bed with
another woman so soon after becoming a widower, so I pulled a chair
over and sat down next to the bed.

She considered me with a half-smile. “Afraid
I’ll bite?”

“Nope. I’m just a bit shy with the ladies,
that’s all.”

“Somehow, I doubt that.”

I didn’t know how to respond, feeling some
bewilderment about how unconcerned the world was about my recent
loss. She acted as if nothing had happened. And, of course, as far
as she was concerned, what had happened, hadn’t.

Luckily she didn’t press the issue. She
simply turned her attention to the laptop, tapped away on the
keyboard for a couple of seconds then spun it so I could see it
more easily. On the screen was a crystal clear overhead view of a
large house and the area immediately surrounding it.

“This is some pretty damn good quality
stuff,” I said. “What are these? Spy satellite photos or some shit
like that?”

Chris smiled but didn’t answer.

I took the hint and squashed my curiosity.
On to business.

“I assume this is Montoya’s ranch?” I
said.

“That’s right.”

I studied the picture. Three sides of the
ranch were surrounded by bare land, while the fourth was nestled up
against the ocean. Chris pressed a button and the screen shifted to
another picture, this one from a different angle. I studied it. She
showed me yet another angle, and another, and another.

We went through about 30 pictures before we
were finished, giving me a pretty good idea of what I had to work
with. I figured from the general layout that I’d be starting my
approach from the sea, but decided to wait and see what Chris’s
plan of attack was.

“What the pictures don’t tell you is that
the house sits on top of a softly-graded hill,” she said. “The land
around the property is completely bare for nearly a mile in all
directions, and cleared out every couple of months. No cover
whatsoever. And there are guards at every corner of the property,
whose only job is to watch the landscape.”

“What about physical deterrents?”

“There’s a ten-foot tall electrified fence
surrounding the perimeter of the yard,” Chris said. “And motion
detectors set into the earth every couple hundred yards as far as
the property stretches.”