Hawke's Fury

Book 4: Sonny Hawke Thriller

by Reavis Z. Wortham

Genres: Westerns; Thrillers

Synopsis

Border patrol agents are being ambushed along the Big Bend region of West Texas, a notorious drug corridor running east and west across the Lone Star State. Theyre not the only targets. A film production depicting human trafficking in the area has been attacked by a brutal drug cartel.

Into this lawless frontier steps Texas Ranger Sonny Hawke, ready and willing to dispense his own brand of justice. Its an all-out war with the thinnest line separating the good from the bad. Sonny knows the only way out is to aim straight and stand your ground . . .

Release date: May 26, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

My position overlooking a two-track pasture road cutting through the rough West Texas rangeland gave me a clear view of three late model charcoal-gray Expeditions speeding in my direction across the hot Chihuahuan desert. Thick rooster-tails of dust boiled behind the vehicles that looked like matchbox cars from where I sat.

The late evening sun stretched across the sage and ocotillo-covered pasture in the Big Bend region of the state, fifty miles north of where we live in Ballard, Texas. Harsh and dry, the claw cactus, sage, and creosote-dotted landscape stretched into the distance.

Buzzards rode the thermals, winding high above the landscape in endless spirals. It was wide-open country, once home to the Jumano Indians until around 1700 when the Apaches pushed them out and held the area until they too were finally driven almost to extinction.

White thunderheads towered to 50,000 feet, supported by dark gray foundations almost resting on the ragged, thin line of the blue Davis Mountains to the northwest. I was hoping the closest storm would collapse, pushing welcoming waves of blessedly cool air across the flat valley floor.

It was hot, harsh country as addictive as cocaine to those who found beauty in the rocky, thorn-covered landscape.

Beside me, my runnin’ buddy since high school, Presidio County Sheriff Ethan Armstrong adjusted his straw hat and used a thumb to wipe a trickle of sweat from his temple. With two fingers, he smoothed a brush-pile mustache big enough to cover a good piece of his lower face and watched the rooster-tails of dust rise behind the vehicles. “Those two behind the lead car can’t be seeing a stinkin’ thing in all that dust.”

We spoke barely above a whisper. “I’d be following a little farther behind, that’s for sure.”

Directly in front of us, I could see the backs of two dark Suburbans parked facing a wide clearing where the pasture road split to flow around the rocky little ridge to our rear. Eight men dressed in baggy clothes with white bandanas around their heads were spread out in a skirmish line with their backs to us. All held automatic weapons.

“I’d be standing closer to those cars.” Ethan cut his eyes toward me and absently pulled at the tender gray leaves of a West Texas sage in full bloom. “When the shooting starts, everybody hunts a hole and I doubt thornbrush and cactus’ll be much cover.”

Trying not to move too much and attract attention, I used my hat brim to nod toward the scenario unfolding only sixty feet away. “El Norte there’ll be the first to go. Why’s he standing right out in front of the car? He’d just as well have a big red target painted on that blazer he’s wearing. I’m burning up, and the least he could do is take it off and roll up his sleeves.”

Ethan snorted. “El Norte. What kinda name is that for a cartel leader?”

“How do I know? I didn’t name the guy.” The SUVs approaching from the distance grew closer, but my attention went back to the parked Suburbans. The three more large SUVs parked off to our right sped up and raced past a dozen Angus-Hereford steers licking up soy hulls scattered on the hardpan. The dusty vehicles shot past two horses not far from the cattle, heads drooping in the heat.

When they reached the waiting vehicles, they split up, and slid to a stop like gunfighters spreading out in a dirt street. The men inside waited as the boils of dust caught up and billowed around the cars.

“Dumb move.”

Ethan nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. I’d’ve parked sideways to those guys for more cover and to get away if things go bad.”

“Bad guys aren’t usually the sharpest crayons in the box.”

The worst of the dust was gone when the doors on the new arrivals flew open. The men waiting with their backs to us tensed as armed gangsters poured out with a variety of military-style weapons in their hands.

I watched the men face off. “I still think they should be using the SUVs for cover.”

“Amateurs.” Ethan cut his eyes at me from under the brim of his hat. “I wish I had the SUV concession for all this. Somebody’s making money somewhere. Which one’s Gabe?”

I pointed at one of the men facing in our general direction. All but Gabe wore white T-shirts under unbuttoned plaid shirts. “That’s him in the priest collar who just got out of the Expedition, beside Tortuga.”

“What’s with that?”

I shrugged. “He’s getting paid.”

“Which one’s Tortuga?”

“The only guy who doesn’t have a gun in his hand.”

“He looks like somebody’s grandpa.”

Hollywood’s version of a Mexican bad guy, the squatty man with thick rolled shoulders wore a gray mustache, a loose-fitting off-white frontera guayabera shirt, and baggy khakis.

Beside him was Gabe Nakai, my dad’s ranch manager and a close friend. The hair rose on the back of my neck, watching an old buddy in the company of armed gangsters from Ojinaga, across the Rio Grande.

Ethan must have sensed how I felt. “It ain’t right, seeing him down there, is it?”

“That and the priest collar around his neck.”

“I’m still working on that one, too.” He tilted his head like a dog, as if looking at the scene from a different angle would help evaluate the situation. “That’s something else that doesn’t make sense in all this.”

“Ours is not to reason why.” Even I was surprised at my quote.

“Tennyson.”

“You did listen in Miss Adams’ English class.”

“Naw, just memorized those lines for a test, and for some reason they stuck with me.”

El Norte still had his back to us, but his voice came loud and clear, a trick of the acoustics from the horseshoe bowl of rocks surrounding our position. His hair was so black and slicked back that it looked to be oiled. The side of his whisker-stubbled face looked to be chiseled granite. “Tortuga! Did you bring my money?”

The Mexican national standing beside Gabe spread his hands. “My coke?”

El Norte flicked a command with his fingers. A gangster holding an AK-47 reached inside the open door of his SUV and withdrew a leather briefcase. He flipped the latches and dumped a pile of taped packets onto the hood. The cartel leader waved his hand toward the drugs. “As promised.”

“Who uses brand-new English leather briefcases these days? It’s backpacks, mostly, from what I’ve seen.” Ethan sighed. “This is making my head hurt.”

I pointed at the dust clouds roaring down the dirt track, directly toward the scenario unfolding at an achingly slow pace. “Who are those guys? I’ve been watching ’em coming for a good long while.”

“Don’t know. I’ve been wondering the same thing, but they’re about to make somebody down there pretty mad.”

Tortuga snapped his fingers, and one of his men appeared with still another briefcase. Holding it awkwardly in one hand, he clicked the latches and it opened, revealing the interior packed with hundred-dollar bills.

“They must have gotten a deal on briefcases at Costco.” Ethan cut his eyes to see if I’d take the bait and continue our evaluation, but I concentrated on their conversation to hear what the gangsters were saying.

“Bueno,” El Norte waved. “Make the deal.”

Trouble started when the gangster tried to close the briefcase. Losing his grip, it flipped out of his hand, dumping the contents onto the ground. White paper cut to the size of U.S. currency exploded in a cloud, fluttering like snow and revealing that the authentic bills were only a thin layer on top.

El Norte shouted and retreated for cover behind an open car door. “Mátalos!”

Kill them!

The clear crack of a single gunshot opened the ball. To a man, the cartel soldiers on both sides raised their weapons, and the world filled with automatic gunfire. I found myself looking down the muzzle of a rifle pointed at one of the gangsters standing in front of me. My skin crawled at the flashes.

The three vehicles racing toward us grew larger, and the sound of rocks and gravel under the tires became clearly audible even over the exchange of gunfire.

Reacting to the situation, Gabe grabbed Tortuga by his collar and threw him into the back seat of their SUV.

The gangster who fumbled the briefcase struggled with the rifle slung over his shoulder, fighting to bring it to bear. Half a dozen bloody explosions erupted from his light gray and blue silk shirt. He wilted to the ground, face contorted in agony.

Men on both sides dropped like falling leaves while those who survived the initial exchange scrambled for cover. The hammering sounds of battle filled the air, echoing off the rocks and boulders behind our position.

The approaching vehicles we’d been watching rolled into the scene, sliding to a stop in one wide boil of dust. The lead car angled toward Tortuga’s parked SUV and sheared off the open driver’s door, crushing a gangster who’d taken cover there.

His yelp of terror and pain rose high and shrill, cutting through the air like a knife. Screams of shock and terror rose from dozens of men and women.

“Shit!” I charged toward the car, waving my arms. “Stop! Everybody stop!”

Ethan matched my pace, rushing past one of several movie cameras filming the scene.

“Cut!” The director James Madigan rose from under the umbrella beside his canvas chair. “Cut!” He turned to a woman holding a sheaf of papers. “Who the hell are these guys?”

Hard-looking, heavily armed Hispanic men poured from the newly arrived vehicles. Dressed in everything from torn jeans, T-shirts, track pants, and even an Adidas pullover, each one had the cold, rigid look of cartel members who killed for a living. Some faces were covered from their eyes down by tangles of tattoos; others wore bandanas like old west outlaws.

An individual stepped out of the lead Expedition’s front passenger seat and pointed at the director. The red number 1518 centered in a web of tattoos on his bare chest, he was the only one without a bandana or facial tattoos. “Eso es Madigan. Mátalo!”

Those words for “kill him” sent an icy knife through my stomach. They’d targeted the movie director by name. It was a cartel hit.

“Ethan! No! This is real!” The smooth Sweetheart Grips of my 1911 Colt .45 filled my hand. I waved at the confused production team and uncertain actors. “Down! Down! Everyone down!”

You’ve heard of that old saw that in times of stress time slows down. People say it seems they’re moving through molasses, and they’re right. Even more frustrating, the people I was warning simply looked at me without understanding. It wasn’t their fault. Most civilians go through life without experiencing trauma and aren’t trained to deal with life-threatening situations. They also expect nothing bad to happen and aren’t prepared.

Most law enforcement officers are on the other end of that spectrum. We’re constantly evaluating the world around us, thinking, “what if?” and planning for any and every event that might occur. But there was no training for what was unfolding on that hot desert floor.

Even Gabe, who’d been in more than his share of fights and gunfights was startled at the sudden change from make-believe to reality. I could tell he was bum-fuzzled for a couple of seconds before he made sense of what was happening around us and shifted from a guy trying to earn a few bucks as a movie extra, to a potential victim.

I waved him back and drew my Colt, the .45’s Sweetheart Grip smooth in my hand. “Gabe, get down! It’s real!”

A real gangster leveled an AK-47 and held the trigger down, shredding the director who went backward to land in the dust. The cuerno de chivo, or goat’s horn, as they nicknamed the rifle because of the distinctive curved magazine, sprayed a stream of hot lead that punched holes in anything and everyone around Madigan as he died.

Ethan and I were on the set of The Mexican Pipeline, a controversial movie targeted by the Coahuila Hidalgo Cartel who threatened to kill everyone involved in filming a fictionalized version of their illegal activities.

They were also known as 1518, or Quience Die-chiocho, the numbers signifying the year before Cortes landed on the shores of Mexico to conquer the Aztecs. It was the last year of their power before the destruction of an entire civilization.

Even though we’d been hired to provide security for the movie, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do right then to stop the well-organized assault. A hard-looking tattooed gangster squeezed the trigger of what I took to be a Bushmaster, spraying indiscriminate .223 rounds left and right.

More men than I could have imagined streamed from the dusty, newly arrived SUVs and strolled casually through the movie set, firing indiscriminately at the terrified actors who scattered like quail. The guns in their hands belched fire, and the assistant director tangled his feet and went down as rounds blew out his chest.

Actors and crew members screamed, scrambling for cover in the chaos. Ethan and I charged into the melee, not by design, but because the only cover in the area was behind all the equipment used to film the movie. Ethan dropped to one knee behind a stack of thick blue metal cases, using the only concealment he could find.

The words “thank God, thank God” repeated over and over in my mind, a chant of relief that my wife Kelly and our teenage twins Mary and Jerry weren’t on the set. Since high school was out for the summer, they’d been pestering me to come out and watch one day’s shoot. I’d almost relented that morning.

Sharing the same cover with Ethan didn’t sound like a good idea, and I was headed for one of the movie SUVs when I saw one of the real masked gangsters pointing his weapon at me. My .45 came up and the guy holding a Bushmaster disappeared behind the front sight. I squeezed the trigger and he went straight down.

Before I could swing the muzzle to a second guy crouched not far away, he dropped from a round that didn’t come from either me or Ethan. We weren’t the only ones fighting back. My dad, Herman Hawke was thirty feet away, making a few extra bucks acting as the set’s wrangler of two dozen head of cattle and horses he brought in as backdrop stock.

A retired Texas Ranger, he was always armed. The Old Man sighted from behind his pickup parked just off camera. His own Colt .45 barked. It bucked in his hand, and he shifted targets, firing again and again as if he were on a live-fire range.

His presence and demeanor in the suddenly real shootout was as calming to me as a Xanax. Cameras exploded from the impact of high-velocity bullets, bodies fell, and the roar of gunfire filled my ears.

I squeezed the trigger, heeling a gangster when the bullet’s impact knocked one foot out from under him. I never said I was a good shot. A firm believer in the anchor shot, the Old Man drilled the wounded gangster twice more to keep him down.

The cartel members continued to hose the area, spraying at random. Everything snapped back into real time as I juked behind a large metal box full of electronics, using the shoulder-high container as cover.

Panicked movie people ran for cover in all directions. One of the only things on our side was that most of the bad guys weren’t certain who was sending in return gunfire. Incongruously, I saw two of the actors return fire with their weapons loaded with blanks. Maybe they thought the new arrivals were also actors. In shock, they might have thought it was some ad lib scene thought up by the director. Their response caused some of the cartel gangsters to take cover behind their own vehicles, but others zoned in and murdered the terrified extras.

A hard-edged young gangster swung his cuerno de chivo in my direction. He was standing in the open, probably the way he’d seen it done on television or in movies. I shot him twice and he crumpled. I caught a glimpse of Ethan dropping the empty magazine on his Glock and slapping in a fresh one.

A string of explosions stitched the dirt around me. The guy who popped up slightly behind me would’ve had us both had his own mag not run dry. He was close enough for me to see the surprise and fear in his eyes as he fumbled to reload.

Together, Ethan and I shot him bone dead.

As his surviving men continued to hose the area, their tattooed leader struck a pose beside the car, fists on his hips, and shouted above the gunfire. “La Mujer del Diablo de Coahuila, the Devil Woman of Coahuila says that this movie will not be completed. Next time we will kill everyone here! I am Incincio, and I am not afraid to tell you my name, because I am protected by La Jefa, who owns Coahuila and all this land as far as we can see.” He waved. “Vamos chicos!”

Doors slammed seconds later, and the three SUVs filled with their surviving gangsters spun in tight circles, speeding away back down the same dry pasture road they rolled in on. I rose and punched holes in the windows and sheet metal of every car I could hit until they were out of range.

As soon as they were gone, the air was filled with dust, cries, and screams. In the chaos that followed, I slapped in a fresh magazine as shocked crew members rushed in all directions. Ethan and the Old Man moved through the chaos, kicking weapons away from the real cartel members on the ground, just in case they weren’t as dead as they looked.

Ethan joined me beside the first young man I’d shot, the one aiming his rifle at me. “I think I’m gonna go back to smoking again.”

Before I could answer, the wounded man’s arm rose, beckoned, then fell.

“This guy’s still alive.” I knelt beside him, patting the kid down to make sure he didn’t have any other weapons. Finding none, I pulled the bandana with a skeleton’s face down to reveal a smooth, unlined face.

Gabe slid to a stop on one knee and ripped the boy’s blood-soaked shirt open to reveal a dark puckered hole in his upper chest. He covered the wound with the palm of his hand. “This looks bad.”

The Old Man’s voice came from behind me. “It is. There’s two more holes down lower.”

Blood welled from between Gabe’s fingers, his eyes filled with sadness. “He looks like he’s not much older than Angie.”

I understood how he felt. Angie was his high school-age daughter, and my twins were the same age. I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “Those wrinkles at the corners of his eyes tell me he’d older than he looks.”

The man’s eyes flicked open. He raised one hand in a faint plea of agony and whispered. “Padre.” It took a second to realize he was looking at the priest collar on Gabe’s costume. “Quiero confesion.”

Gabe shook his head and answered in Spanish. “No soy un sacerdote.”

I’m not a priest.

“Confesion.” The man turned his pleading gaze to me. He must have recognized the cinco peso Ranger badge on my shirt. “Guardebosque, to lo ruego. Pidele que me confesion.”

Guardebosque is what some Mexicans call us Texas Rangers, when they’re trying to be nice, while some of the really old folks remember the past and call us rinches, a derogatory term that arose way back around 1916.

“It won’t hurt to hear him, Gabe.” The Old Man’s voice was soft.

Just as I’d hoped, a blast of air pushed across the valley floor from a collapsed thunderhead, much like the pressure-wave from an explosion. Sage and greasewood bent when the massive wave finally reached us. Hot only moments earlier, I turned my face to the wind, letting the dry coolness wash my face clean of the evil I couldn’t see.

My eyes burned at the thought of this young man dying from my gunshots. I know, he’d been trying to kill me, but I also saw an older version of my son Jerry lying there, asking for absolution.

Blood trickled from the dying man’s mouth. He coughed, deep and wet as his lungs hemorrhaged, then switched to unaccented English. “I need to say something. I need to tell you something important.”

The back of my neck prickled.

Gabe met my eyes, then leaned down to better hear. “Adelante.”

The young man held Gabe’s hand and whispered in his ear for a moment, as the ranch hand, cum actor, cum priest, listened intently. The mere breath of a voice weakened then drifted off. The gangster’s eyes lost focus and drifted off to the side as he gasped, convulsed, and went limp.

His death brought me completely back into the noisy world of panicked victims, crying men and women, and unheard orders issued to people who simply wandered among the bloody carnage with vacant expressions.

Licking his dry lips, Gabe straightened. “Oh my god.”

I saw fear in his eyes and leaned in. “What’d he say?”

“He’s a federal agent, undercover, and says there’s another agent that’s, come se dice infiltrado, with this cartel, too.”

“Infiltrated,” I translated. “Undercover.”

Stomach clenched, my head reeled at the thought of shooting a brother in arms. He was firing his weapon. I’d looked directly down the muzzle of the rifle when it was aimed at me and remembered the bright muzzle flashes. But I hadn’t seen anyone fall. Was he shooting over my head? I struggled to recall if I heard the crack of rounds passing close, but there was so much rolling gunfire I couldn’t pin down a specific sound.

“Is that what he confessed?”

“No. Worse. He says the 1518 is sending more hit teams between here and Van Horn. They plan to clear a path through the Border Patrol for the traffickers coming across the river. He said something else to watch out for, but I couldn’t understand him. His last words were ‘more people are going to die.’ ”

My blood went cold. An organized cartel hit team targeting the Border Patrol was in my country, and I wasn’t going to stand for it.

Highway 1776 just south of the West Texas community of Coyanosa isn’t much on scenery. It’s a harsh, sunburned landscape full of scrub, tumbleweeds, mesquite, and low-growing cactus. The two-lane divides desolate rangeland so poor it takes a hundred acres to feed one cow. Visitors are mystified to think cattle can live in the desert. Even in the wintertime, the sunbaked landscape looks dry as a gourd.

The scenic quality doesn’t get any better at night. When the headlights and the soft glow from the heavens light the lonesome road linking the east and westbound Interstates 10 and I-20, it’s worse . . . stark.

Cattle ranching wasn’t always the primary source of income. In the 1950s, farmers drilled deep water wells to irrigate cotton, but by the 1970s, the price of fuel made cotton farming unprofitable. Times changed when drilling technology finally found a way to bring oil to the surface, and most ranchers immediately shifted to a much more lucrative income.

Once they signed on the bottom line, a vast network of caliche roads cut through the ranches, allowing an army of white company trucks to prowl the dusty roads between bobbing pump jacks and back out onto the two-lane highway.

No matter what the land produced, it was still wide and lonesome country.

The highway traffic was never heavy, mostly pickups and oil tankers driven by pipeline and oil company workers, with a few tourists and locals thrown in for good measure.

It was a beautifully sharp night lit by a full moon bright enough to read by, when Incencio Aguierre and Geronimo Manzano cruised northward on the empty ribbon of concrete in a four-year-old black Mercedes C-Class sedan. Incencio, the Hidalgo cartel soldier responsible for the massacre on the set of The Mexican Pipeline, chose the high-end automobile for the pair in the hopes that it wouldn’t attract the attention of law enforcement officers or the highway patrol. Expensive cars driving a couple of miles over the speed limit usually weren’t the targets for law enforcement officers.

Incencio was a Regio, short for Regionales, which means regal or royal in the Spanish language, a regional officer overseeing his specific drug and trafficking route into what he considered his territory, the Big Bend region of the Lone Star state.

The two men in the Mercedes who looked like tourists were in fact mid-level soldiers who’d proven their loyalty across the Rio Grande over and over again to la Mujer del Diablo de Coahuila, the Devil Woman of Coahuila. At first to encompass most of the Mexican state of Coahuila, they murdered anyone she targeted to expand her drug and human trafficking cartel.

It didn’t matter who they were, people scratching out a living in small communities, travelers, police, military, and especially rival gangs, or anyone she deemed a threat. Sometimes they died clean, with nothing more than a bullet through the head.

Other murders sent a message with beheadings, mutilations, or worse. A favorite calling card for the Devil Woman was the presentation of an individual’s hands or feet to family members, rival regios, or law enforcement officials.

Once they had Coahuila under their thumb, her dream expanded.

Born of dirt-poor parents in the poorest section of El Paso, Chihuahuita, she hit the ground running as Tish Villarreal. Now confident in her abilities and people, she was pushing long fingers from across the border back into her home state of Texas.

The Mercedes’ tires clacked on the highways expansion joints as mariache static hissed from the Burmester sound system. A cheap, plastic walkie-talkie on the console between the men squawked to life. Brake lights flashed in the darkness as Incencio steered the car onto the shoulder and turned the radio down.

Startled by the sudden appearance of the sedan, a jackrabbit darted across the highway in the headlights as Geronimo picked up the low-tech communication device and thumbed the talk button on the side. “Que?”

The voice on the other end spoke in faint Spanish. “La patrulla frontier iza is on the way.”

Instead of utilizing modern technology and basic drop phones, they used old school walkie-talkies that had baffled law enforcement techs for months. The crackling low-tech signals between the hand-held units bounced through a vast covert network of signal repeaters on existing microwave towers, the tops of mountains,. . .