Virtual Virgin

Chapter Thirty

QUICKSILVER SAT, HIS head almost comically tilted, to view the mess. Claw and fang weren’t going to do much against this seething mass.

Following the moonlit reflections to either side, I saw the living floor of crawling insects and reptiles wasn’t confined to just a piddly gravel pit.

My gaze scanned a gash in the earth that ran as far as the eye could see in both directions. The creatures struggling to escape the deep depression seemed unable to get traction on each others’ amassed bodies. Some jointed legs and clawed limbs tried to scale my boot-toes, but they slid back.

With all the teeming nightlife of the desert assembled before me, I dropped my backpack behind me on the ridge and crouched to dig out the binoculars I’d brought. These weren’t the government-issue night-vision binos Ric and Tallgrass had used in Wichita, but they and the almost-full moonlight were good enough to show how far the living line of desert vermin extended. And, maybe, to reveal what had caused them to cluster like this.

I put the binoculars to my eyes, scanning the distance, then was jolted into dropping them.

A solid form knocked me off my precarious balance on my boot-toes and confined me in a bear hug. I sensed as much as saw Quicksilver leaping at a second form clambering up the ridge behind us. Over and over I rolled, trying to dig my boots into shifting sand as sagebrush crackled under the weight of two bodies locked in battle embrace.

I was planning on a knee to the stomach and then the ribs, followed by a boot-toe killer kick in the groin, when I heard the man still atop the crest laughing softly.

“Oh, Ty-ohni, I know you are glad to see me, but enough tongue on my night-vision goggles.”

At the sound of that familiar but foreign word, I tried to twist my head around, but my captor had me rolled up like Cleopatra in a camouflage-patterned rug. Then I realized what this roll in the sand was all about. The bastard was trying to protect me!

I flailed free and turned to look up the slope. Only one man called my dog by a Native American word for wolf. Yup. Quick had led us to Leonard Tallgrass and . . .

“Ric.” I whispered, but harshly, to my recent “rug.”

“Why did you sneak up on me?” I demanded.

He was as pissed as I was. “And you didn’t do the same? I can’t believe you’d do this, Delilah. Be all okay with staying behind and then slip down to Juarez anyway. It’s dangerous and juvenile and it jeopardizes the mission.”

“Maybe you should have confided ‘the mission’ to me. It’s dangerous and juvenile for you to come back here right where El Demonio wants you.”

The chuckles behind us continued. “You hotheaded kids.” Tallgrass used the same forced whisper we had. “The mission will be fine if you quit trying to out-protect the other. Come on. Time to crawl for your country. They need us on the ridge to see if there are any cartel movements around here.”

“You all right?” Ric mumbled in my ear. He was not only wearing camos, but the moonlight illumined a face painted in dark patterns like cracked dry earth.

“Don’t growl at me. I’d be a lot better if I hadn’t have been given the bum’s rush down a desert roller coaster.”

Grabbing the leather jacket that had fallen loose, I struggled into it without lifting too high from the ground, now that I knew this was a scouting party. Tallgrass’s black jeans, boots, and Western shirt faded into the sky. He crouched to dig in his backpack and threw something down at me.

“Camos. Too small for me, and I don’t need ’em any more than Quicksilver does. Fasten your duty belt over them.”

I didn’t argue, but struggled into the equivalent of desert warfare pajamas. By then, Quicksilver had already belly-crawled back to the ridge top. He and Tallgrass kept low enough to blend with the terrain.

I made a face no one could see at the thought of overlooking those millions of roiling spiders and snakes and scorpions as I dug in my knees and elbows and worked back up the slope like a recruit in boot camp.

Ric was still mad, because he got there first and didn’t look back. Fine with me. I planted myself on the other side of Tallgrass with Quicksilver.

Leonard Tallgrass had been friends with Rick when he was a whiz-kid FBI profiler with a knack for finding buried bodies. I wasn’t sure of the guy’s tribe, but he was as pure a Native American you saw these days off a reservation, and pure Kansas cowboy too. Quicksilver had cottoned to him immediately, which had miffed me some. Quick and I were an unofficial K-9 team. Still, Tallgrass was hard not to like, and harder not to trust, which did not come to me naturally.

At least he didn’t treat me as too fragile to go into the field. He passed me a pair of really powerful binoculars without comment while he and Ric lowered their bone-sensing night goggles from their foreheads to perch onto their faces.

Now I saw the reason for the vermin traffic jam. The binoculars showed a plain below pockmarked with mesquite trees and sagebrush and behind any smidgeon of cover sat duffel bags of probable weapons. A secret army was assembling and preparing to dig in.

On the horizon, heat lightning stabbed the dark night sky.

“What’s going on here?” I asked. Only the vermin had ears and they weren’t the enemy.

“Smackdown.” Ric’s voice was still low. “Secret combined US-Mexican government operation. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. This is an official consulting job for Tallgrass and me. The joint military forces have run a sting that will lure all the firepower of the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels into facing off ten miles north of here.”

“What’s the bait?” I asked.

“A juicy set of visiting state department hostages-to-be, worth millions in ransom,” Tallgrass said, “and it’s working. The bastards from both cartels are setting up major operations to grab the visiting honchos and families.”

“It’ll take them another day to muster all their men and weapons to go after the same target,” Ric said. “Then the combined government forces wait until they take each other out and scoop up the survivors.”

“Smart.” I heard the crack of thunder in the distance. “I was afraid Torbellino and his bull whip were involved.”

“They may be,” Ric said. “He’s certainly not falling for wasting his forces against the two warring cartels while they slaughter one another, as Washington hopes. That action is way north of here.”

“You told them,” Tallgrass muttered, “that wouldn’t work.”

I had one question. “If all the action is moving north, who’s going to take on Torbellino’s gang of zombies on speed?”

Ric lifted his bone-seeking night vision goggles and pulled them down to his neck. I could see he wasn’t wearing a concealing contact lens over his single silver iris.

He focused beyond the ridge, facing the dark and the distant lightning.

“Me.”