We raced on, apparently up county road 162, according to Tara—who had scrambled to see where we were heading on the map. Danny stuck his head inside the jeep and yelled, “What the hell is going on?”
No one had a good answer for Danny’s question. Either someone was missing us with all these explosions, or we were being directed somewhere in particular. It felt like someone was trying to help us. But who? And where were they? As we approached a giant wall blocking the road with yet another hole blown through it, we became more convinced that we were being assisted. Without someone blowing a hole through the Great Wall of Colorado, this would have been a dead end. This was crazy! It had to be more Americans.
Tara yelled back to Danny that, based on the map, we were heading towards a place called Twin Rocks Trading Post, and beyond that Goosenecks State Park. There were no roads past it, but there was a river. The San Juan River. If we could get there, maybe we could get the rafts in the water. We hadn’t seen a helicopter yet, and they probably weren’t pulling boats behind them at these speeds. I nodded at Tara with an impressed look. I hadn’t even thought of our two inflatable rafts. It was worth a shot.
Danny seemed to agree. He yelled back, “Okay. Get us there.”
We were coming up on a major intersection at the Twin Rocks Trading Post, Highway 191 according to the map, and we could see a jeep parked on it, blocking us from turning right. We raced past it, staring at it, but it didn’t move. As the four jeeps behind us closed on that jeep there were four giant explosions, and three of the pursuing jeeps were destroyed. The fourth pursuer remained stranded behind the three burning vehicles. This time there was no way around. From the back of the second jeep, Blake saw the parked jeep turn its lights on and pull in behind us. It raced up on us quickly but didn’t fire at us. It stayed about a quarter mile back, out of Blake’s range. To say we were bewildered would have been another colossal understatement. As Highway 191 was about to break to the left we saw another jeep parked ahead, and a long trail of lights coming north towards us. “Go straight, Sam,” Tara yelled.
“I don’t have a flipping choice, dude!” Sam yelled back. We swerved past the second parked jeep, and it too pulled in behind us as we raced down the county road into Goosenecks State Park. The road split about ten miles later, and Tara directed Sam to take a sharp left. The two jeeps that had been blocking the roads, and apparently blowing the other jeeps up, were tucked in about a half-mile back, side by side. There was a trail of about thirty sets of lights behind them.
We came up on a trailer park before the river, and Tara yelled to pull into it. We drove to the main lodge beside the water and were shocked to see about a dozen solid whitewater rafts stacked on top of each other next to the building.
“Forget everything else,” Danny yelled at us. “Get two of those rafts in the water and get going.”
Just then an explosion rocked us, then another. The two jeeps behind us were on this side of a giant fire, and there was a huge blaze immediately beyond their position. They’d blown up the road again. Seriously. Who were these people? We shoved two of the rafts in the water and as many guns and packs as we could carry in one run. Blake smashed in the door on the small building adjacent to the lodge and came out with an armful of life vests and paddles, tossing them quickly into the boats, and we all pushed off into the darkness. We left everything else in the jeeps.
We were moving down the river already by the time Danny got his rifle up to see what was going on behind us. The long procession of lights had caught up to the flames and the hole in the road, and men were scrambling out of the vehicles and firing their weapons into the trailer park. Danny scanned around frantically through his rifle scope to see what they were firing at, and he saw three men sprinting towards the boathouse. With the night vision it only took seconds for Danny to recognize them, and the reality of who they were took his breath away. “Holy—”
Before we could ask “What?” he’d jumped out of the boat with his gun, into the river. “Danny!” I yelled. “What the—”
He turned his head towards us and screamed, “Keep going. Just keep going.” Then we lost sight of him in the darkness. We could still hear the gunfire as we rounded the first bend and continued down the San Juan River, on an eventual collision course with the Colorado River and beyond that, the Grand Canyon.
SEVENTY-SEVEN: (Eddie) “The Bitter Truth”
At first he had missed it. Well, he heard it, but it didn’t register. Not to the extent it should have, for sure. Eddie was exhausted but trying to remain attentive in Delta, listening to the Mexican commander tell the general about a man he’d had to kill. He’d explained how defiant the man had been, how he’d refused to command his troop anymore, and how he’d demanded that the commanders needed to tell the truth to all the men. The general had laughed. They made a few jokes, and then the commander told the general how he had to set the man up again and how easy it had been to get the other commanders to agree to execute him. The general laughed along and at some point asked him how many that was now. The commander told him it was well over a hundred. Eddie was dwelling on the “executed a hundred men who didn’t deserve to die” part when the general said, “What difference does it make who started this war? We won. This land is our land now. It’s the soldiers’ land. These men could all be rich. They can have whatever they want!”
Somehow the significance of the conversation hadn’t yet grabbed Eddie. Had the general not continued talking, it probably never would have. “If they were better soldiers, they wouldn’t have been so easy to manipulate. Stupid cowards.”
Wait a minute. Eddie froze. Manipulate? Why would they have to manipulate them into war? Manipulate was a strong word. That made Eddie stop to think and rehash what he had heard in the last ten minutes. Wait. What if America didn’t start the fight? Son of a camel humper… The truth couldn’t have hit Eddie harder if it had been fired directly into him from a cannon five feet away.
These hundred men that had been killed—they’d found out about what the commanders had done. They’d somehow found out about the actual sequencing and intent of this Qi Jia movement. But how? How had they? Eddie cursed his own naivety. The “how” didn’t matter right now. The point was these men who had been executed had learned they’d been fooled and decided to stand up for what they believed in, even in the face of certain death. They weren’t stupid cowards. They were men of principle—heroes. So what the hell does that make me? Eddie preferred stupidity over a lack of principles. Yes, he was stupid.
He thought back to his meeting with the officers when he’d been informed of his family’s death. There had been a man in that room taking notes. He had done it with every single officer who had been brought in. Why? If it was the same story every time, why did they need that man there to take notes? That act alone wouldn’t have been enough to make him question it now, but the questions he’d been asked to prove his value to the cause, those were starting to click back through his head. Those questions—and so many little things he’d seen and heard since his arrival in Mexico—started to deal Eddie emotional body blows. This entire time he’d been a fool. He’d fallen for it all!