Highway to Vengeance: A Thomas Highway Thriller (16 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY

We drove down the coast for another thirty
miles or so then turned onto an unmarked dirt road. Another few
minutes of bumpy traveling brought us to a squat, dumpy old
building—nothing more than a shack, really—within shouting distance
of the shore. Parked alongside the shack was an old Toyota pickup
truck with California plates. Chris stopped alongside the truck,
shut off the engine and pushed a button on the console, releasing
the trunk latch.

“Grab the duffel bag,” Chris said as she
climbed out of the car. “I’m going to do a quick check of the
premises.”

I climbed out, walked to the back of the car
and opened the trunk. I lifted the false bottom and grabbed the
duffel bag that held all my gear. It was a large bag, and heavy
enough that I had to carry it with two hands.

“Everything looks good,” Chris said. “Let’s
head on in.”

I followed her to a door on the east side of
the building, opposite the ocean. Chris opened the door and I led
the way in. The room was dark. I flipped the light switch near the
door but nothing happened.

“Yeah, those don’t work,” Chris said. “But
there’s a battery-powered lantern in the duffel bag that does.”

I opened the bag and pulled out the lantern
and turned it on, bathing the room in soft light.

The inside was littered with food wrappers
and empty soda cans, the wood floor was moldy and torn up, and the
smell of dead animals hung heavy. I set the lantern on a table to
my right.

“Not exactly the Ritz Carlton,” Chris said.
“But it’ll serve its purpose.”

“That it will,” I said. “How far away from
the edge of Montoya’s property are we?”

Chris nodded. “About five miles.”

“How am I going to get there?”

“There’s a small boat tied to the dock on
the other side of the building,” Chris said. “The frame is pretty
old but it’s got a good engine that’s covered in sound-absorbent
housing and a specially rigged anchor that you can release from in
about two seconds. Hop in the boat and head south. About four and
half miles out, you’ll see a lighthouse on the top of a bluff. It
marks the northern edge of the cove that shields Montoya’s little
personal bay. You can anchor the boat on the north side of the
rocks without worrying about it being seen by Montoya’s guards.
From there you can swim the rest of the way in to the dock without
a problem. And the rest is up to you.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“Anything else?” Chris said.

I shook my head.

“Then I’ll leave you alone to do your
thing,” Chris said. She pulled a set of keys from her pocket, slid
one off the ring, and handed it to me. “This is for the car we came
in. I’ll take the truck out of here.”

I grabbed the key.

Chris wished me luck and started for the
door. But she stopped before she got there.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

She nodded, then turned towards me. Her
entire demeanor had changed. Gone was the ram-rod straight, tough,
no-nonsense, ex-FBI agent I’d been dealing with for the last four
hours. Her posture was softer, more vulnerable.

A seed of apprehension blossomed in my
stomach.

“Remember earlier, when you asked me why the
risk of being found out by the cartels was worth it to me?” she
said.

“Of course I remember.”

“I risk it because I owe them,” she
said.

“Owe them for what?”

“For killing my husband.”

I waited for her to continue, knowing that
if she wanted to talk more about it, she would do so without my
prompting. The silence was short-lived.

“He was a DEA agent working deep undercover
with the Medellin Cartel, back in the late nineties, when Columbia
was still the center of the drug world,” she said. “Somehow they
got wind of his real identity. They picked him up off the street
and took him to a shack in the middle of the jungle and tortured
him for three days before cutting off his head and hands and
leaving the rest of his body to rot in the streets.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” I said, the words
sounding as hollow coming out of my mouth as they had sounded when
directed towards me. But still, I felt the need to say
something.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” she
said. “Not after what you’ve been through. Your actions here
tonight speak far louder than words ever could.”

I took a moment to let her know I
appreciated the comment, then said, “Did they at least get the
assholes who did it?”

“Yeah, they got them,” she said, her voice
laced with venom. “And then they let them go.”

“Are you serious?”

She nodded.

“What happened?”

“A colossal clusterfuck is what happened,”
she said. “The government was afraid of stepping on toes in
Columbia, plus the individuals involved were a part of a larger
operation, and all other sorts of bullshit excuses.”

“So they didn’t do anything to the men
responsible?”

“Nothing at all,” Chris said. “Our
government let three confessed murderers walk free without so much
as a slap on the wrist. Three men who spent 48 hours torturing my
husband; electrocuting him, burning him with a blowtorch, pulling
out his fingernails, cutting off his eyelids—”

She closed her eyes and dropped her head.
Her body start to shake and I could hear her fighting back
tears.

Without thinking I walked over and embraced
her. This time I realized how useless words were and didn’t say
anything. I just held her. She didn’t fight it.

She eventually pulled away from my embrace.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and tried to smile.
“Sorry about that.”

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

“Yeah, well just don’t mention this to
anyone, all right? I don’t want the news of my breakdown leaving
this room. It wouldn’t go over well with my superiors.”

“It never happened.”

This time her smile was genuine. “Thanks,”
she said.

“My pleasure.”

“And just remember, what you’re doing here
tonight isn’t just for you,” she said. “It’s for everyone else
who’s ever been in your situation, too. All those people who don’t
possess the means or the ability to take action. You are their
voice. Speak for them. And speak loudly.”

“I will.”

She leaned forward, planted a kiss on my
cheek, then turned and walked out of the building. I waited until
the taillights of the truck had disappeared into the night, then
opened the duffel bag and started putting myself together.

Thirty minutes later I was dressed in a
black wetsuit, with grease-paint covering my face, a diving mask
around my neck, and a waterproof backpack filled with every piece
of hardware necessary for the job on my back. The duffel bag was on
the floor at my feet, holding my old clothes and the key to the
car. It would stay here and await my return.

I shut the lantern off and walked out the
door into the night beyond.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

The lighthouse was located at the edge of a
natural jetty, on a bluff overlooking the ocean. It was over a
hundred feet high, and emitted a series of four white flashes at
twenty-second intervals. Needless to say I had no trouble spotting
it.

I cut the motor well ahead of my
destination, scanning the shore beyond as I drifted in. All was
clear. I dropped anchor near the rocks, double-checked the backpack
to make sure it was still snug around my waist and chest, then
slipped into the water.

According to Chris, it was a little less
than a half-mile swim from the tip of the jetty to Montoya’s
private beach.

Piece of cake.

During BUD/S training, I’d routinely swam
two miles at a time in much colder water, usually without a
wetsuit. And even though I wasn’t in nearly the same shape I’d been
in back then, I knew from experience that the activity was more
mental than physical.

I ducked under the water and started to
swim.

My feet touched the sandy bottom of the
shore a little more than twenty minutes later. I crept forward
slowly, crouching lower the further inland I went, keeping only my
head above the water. I wasn’t worried about being seen; between
the hood on the wetsuit and the black grease-paint covering my
face, I would be all but invisible to anyone onshore.

Everything looked exactly as it did in the
surveillance photos; two large boats tied on opposite sides of a
fifty-foot long dock that led to a well-lit boathouse set thirty
feet back from the shoreline. Inside the boathouse two guards sat
across from each other at a table perched directly in front of a
large window. They were playing cards, seemingly relaxed, their
voices carrying over the soft rustle of the benign ocean,
fragmented phrases in Spanish that were not quite loud enough for
me to make out completely.

I watched them play cards for almost a full
minute before I was convinced everything was as it seemed. I ducked
underwater and started to swim beneath the surface towards the
dock.

I resurfaced at the rear of the yacht tied
off on the north side of the dock, the considerable size of the
craft easily blocking me from view of the two guards in the
boathouse. I used the hull to push myself towards the ladder, then
quietly started to climb towards the bottom deck.

Once aboard, I slipped out of the backpack
and set it down. Working quietly but efficiently, I opened the pack
and pulled out one of the two six-pound blocks of C4. After setting
the timer attached to the explosive to twenty minutes, I slid the
face-cover off my diving watch, set it’s timer to twenty minutes,
and started them both simultaneously. I then slid the C4 into a
small space between two storage containers to hide it from
view.

One boat down, one to go.

I resealed the backpack, carefully climbed
back down the ladder, and slipped back into the water.

I drifted until I was able to catch another
glance at the two guards—they were still playing cards, completely
unaware of what was going on just a couple hundred yards from where
they sat—then continued over towards the speedboat tied to the
other side of the dock.

After successfully planting the second C4
charge on the speedboat and setting the timer to go off a mere
fifteen seconds after the first, I slipped back into the water and
headed towards the shore.

I emerged from the ocean a couple hundred
yards to the south of the boathouse, at an angle making me all but
invisible to the guards sitting near the front window.

After clearing the waves completely, I knelt
down, set the backpack on the sand, and opened it. The first thing
I pulled out was a tactical vest with multiple pockets, which
carried the flashbangs, the extra magazines of ammunition, the
zip-ties and the single-use lancets. I put on the vest and dove
into the pack again. This time, I extracted the MP5/10 (already
locked and loaded) and slid into the straps so that the firearm was
hanging in front of my chest. The MP5/10 was more weapon than I
needed to take care of the two guards, but my goal was to subdue
them without firing a round, and I figured the machine pistol would
serve as a better deterrent than one of the handguns. Finally, I
pulled a black baklava from the pack and slipped it over my head,
concealing my face.

Leaving the rest of the supplies inside, I
closed the backpack and slipped it back over my shoulders. I rose
into a semi-crouch and started towards the boathouse, moving
quickly but unhurriedly, the rust I’d accrued over the years of
relative inactivity wearing off with every step. My water socks
barely left an impression in the wet sand.

I nestled up against the side of the
boathouse less than a minute later. I took a moment to do nothing
but listen to the guards. One of them cursed the other, apparently
upset over losing a hand. The other one laughed. Someone started
shuffling the cards. All was well.

Time to formulate a plan of action.

A few paces to my right were three steps
that led to a wooden deck. Just past the top of the stairs and to
the left, the side door of the boathouse was open. I figured it
would take me about three seconds to get up the steps and into the
building from my current position. From what I had observed
earlier, I knew that the card table was set up along the front
window, so that both the guards could see out, which meant that the
guard nearest to me would have his back to the open door, and the
one at the far end of the table would be facing it. The guard with
his back to the door was approximately twenty feet inside the
building, a space that could be covered in about a second and a
half.

I calculated it would take me no more than
four seconds total from the time I started moving until I could
incapacitate the first guard. Far too little time for the other
guard to pose a threat, no matter how quickly he reacted.

Confident my plan was sound, I made my final
preparations. I pulled one of the lancets from my vest, prepped it,
and gripped it in my left hand, the needle sticking down. With my
right hand, I flipped the safety off the MP5/10 and brought it up
into a firing position, resting the butt of the weapon into the
hollow of my right shoulder.

Inside the boathouse the two guards
continued to play cards, oblivious to the heavily-armed, black-clad
engine of retribution standing just outside the door.

I exhaled quickly three times, then turned
and bound up the stairs, taking the steps two at a time. I pivoted
at the door and rushed into the building.

The guard facing me looked up and dropped
the cards on the table. His mouth was open but he was too shocked
to utter a sound.

The guard with his back to the door had just
started to turn around when I stuck the lancet into the left side
of his neck, near the shoulder. His body jerked violently and he
tried to stand, but his legs gave out from under him and he slid
back into the chair and then to the ground.