Amadi planted a bottle of whiskey in Eddie’s room in a corner of the closet. Amadi then went to the general and told him he’d snuck into Eddie and Lazzo’s room while they were out and looked for anything they might have hidden. He found a few pieces of paper with notes on them—which Eddie had provided Amadi to give the general—some cigarettes, and a bottle of whiskey.
Since the general forbid alcohol consumption except by his own officers, he had their room searched the next morning. Two of his men went through Eddie’s closet, without bothering to search the rest of their room, and found the alcohol and cigarettes. Eddie and Lazzo were taken outside and whipped a dozen times each in front of the entire camp. The other soldiers were allowed to “buy” lashes and took their turns whipping the brothers. Amadi even whipped both of them once at Eddie’s prior insistence. Eddie watched as Amadi celebrated with the other men and didn’t miss the apologetic glance he offered at the first opportunity. Amadi did what he had to do.
The general then threatened Eddie and Lazzo with more beatings if they were ever discovered hiding anything else. He told them he would be checking regularly. Eddie and Lazzo dragged themselves back to their room, where they listened to the general radio Denver and report the morning’s events to the Mexican commander. Their plan had worked to perfection.
Over the course of the last week, Eddie had listened with a great deal of interest to the military strategy being discussed on the radio. The general was privy to everything the Mexican commander knew. There didn’t appear to be any secrets between them. He kept waiting for any word of the Americans in Estes Park, but none came. Amadi kept playing his spy role to perfection. He asked for permission to plant a bug in the bathroom, and the general granted his request. While picking up the bug for the bathroom, Amadi also grabbed a blocking chip for the one in the bedroom, essentially reversing the places it was safe for them to talk and listen to the radio. From time to time Eddie and Lazzo would enter the bathroom and talk to each other about fake private matters and then return to their main room to listen to the radio. Eddie and Lazzo were each whipped a few more times for various things that came up in those conversations. Amadi was praised. The general was happy. And he kept right on talking on the radio.
Finally, the day Eddie had been hoping for came. It was before 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 26. Eddie had returned from cleaning out the camp trash, and Lazzo had left to go work in the kitchen. (They tried to make sure one of them was always by the radio so they wouldn’t miss anything.) Eddie was lying on the lower bunk with his ear to the radio, almost falling asleep, when he heard the words Estes Park. He sat up with a jolt, slamming his head on the steel frame of the upper bunk. He winced, but strained to make sure he didn’t miss a word… particularly since the Mexican Commander sounded so furious.
Apparently, two jeeps had been stolen from the cabin on Old Fall River Road. Nothing had been suspected at first, but when one of the two men remaining at the cabin went out for a smoke, he found a great deal of blood behind the cabin and even more partially buried off the front porch. Further inspection of the cabin area revealed no footprints, apparently washed out by a torrential downpour, but they did find three trucks over the side of the road about half a mile closer to Estes Park. They clearly hadn’t been there long, and one of the trucks contained the bodies of the three missing soldiers—without their uniforms. Clever.
The intelligence consensus was that there had been at least eight people in those three trucks, and they’d dumped those trucks to take the jeeps. Several soldiers at the alpine base had seen two jeeps pull up from the Old Fall River Road early that morning in the middle of the crazy thunderstorm, and one of the soldiers had even hitched a ride down to Grand Lake in one of the jeeps. They hadn’t yet been able to track down that soldier. He could even be dead.
The Mexican commander told the general he’d update him when he had more information, and a little less than two hours later Eddie heard him call in again. Two jeeps had been stopped at a patrol station in Delta. The drivers of the jeeps were wearing Qi Jia uniforms, and the African soldiers who stopped them said the drivers were black. But they didn’t seem to be African. Unfortunately, they hadn’t searched the vehicles and had let them go on. At least they had called it in, and given that Denver had sent out a nationwide report of two missing jeeps, they were connected directly to the Intelligence Division.
Intelligence figured they had to be Americans and could even be the same ones who had taken the jeeps up in the mountains. If so, they had killed three—and maybe even four—Qi Jia men and were making a run for it. They told the soldiers in Delta to sit tight. More soldiers would soon be on their way to Durango to capture the Americans.
The Mexican commander requested the general take this hunt on personally. The general was to take his four officers and his forty best men and go directly to Durango. He was to call back in as soon as he arrived there.
Eddie was convinced these were his Americans. His lions. He scrambled to find Lazzo and filled him in on what was going on. They dressed in uniform and headed down to the main lobby, where the entire company had been called together. When the general entered the room, everyone stood at attention. As soon as the general saw Eddie and Lazzo there he smiled. “Not you two,” he said. He commanded them to go clean the trash out of the rooms. Eddie pleaded to stay and hear what was going on, but—as anticipated—the general would hear nothing of it.
He and Lazzo were escorted to the other lodge building. A week earlier Amadi had inserted a tracking device—with a twenty-mile range—into each of the four officers’ combat packs—knowing they would never be scanned. Amadi had brought Eddie the tracker for those four coded chips a few nights ago, in case they were ever needed, and Eddie had packed it away back in their room. As the soldiers came in, grabbed their gear, and left, Eddie and Lazzo headed back to their room. That tracker would come in most useful now.
General Roja was so insistent on rubbing his power in Eddie’s face that he took eighty soldiers with him instead of the forty the Mexican commander had requested. He made a point of walking smugly by Eddie’s room before he left to make sure he was there.
“Make sure you clean all toilets before we get back,” he ordered Eddie. “All 160.” He smiled with contempt.
Eddie saluted weakly in reply, intentionally allowing his dejection to be evident. One of the general’s officers, stuck his head into Eddie’s room as the general walked away and smiled. “Sit. Stay,” he said. “Good boy.” That drew a laugh from the other officers and a mock sad shake of the head from Eddie. They had it coming.
After all the turnover at the camp the past few weeks, this massive troop movement was going to leave only a dozen soldiers there with Eddie and Lazzo. As a demonstration of how little the General actually thought of Amadi, he was making him stay behind as well. That was just as well for Eddie. He and Lazzo could use another man.
The general, his four officers, and the other eighty soldiers left an hour later on the four-hour drive to Durango. It took Eddie, Lazzo, and Amadi less than fifteen minutes to kill the remaining eleven men at the camp, and then they quickly packed and got in a jeep themselves, tracking the chips in the officers’ backpacks. It was a big risk leaving the camp, knowing orders were to kill him if he ever left. Or if he killed eleven of the general’s men! Eddie smiled. The general’s orders had been crystal clear. Eddie simply had no intention of following them. He’d been waiting half a year for this day.