But the custom rifle came with an integrated tripod, an adjustable elevation turret, and a muzzle brake, which cut the recoil in half. With that setup, even Purdy could reach out and kill a man at close to a mile if need be.
He’d left her with orders to shoot whenever she felt she had one of the cartel men in her sights. And she’d play mop-up in case Cross and Sampson somehow managed to get past Butler, Vincente, and Big DD, who was working his way up the bridle path on the opposite side of the river.
“How are you making out there, Cap?” Dawkins whispered in Butler’s earbud a few minutes later.
“They’ve got to be right here ahead of us,” Butler said.
“Same on this side. I can’t be more than four-fifty out from the rapids.”
“Any thermal reads?”
“Negative, but there are ravines and folds where a man could hide without... we have a raft in the river bend!”
“I see them too,” Purdy whispered.
“Vincente, flank to the outside and advance,” Butler said. “I’m river-bound. If the cartel is here, they’ll start shooting any second.”
“Roger that,” Vincente said.
Purdy said, “Wait, there’s four in the raft.”
“Four?” Butler said, moving fast to where he could see more of the river. He trained his binoculars on the narrows and saw four people in a dark green raft coming into the whitewater, bouncing off one rock, hanging up a moment on another, spilling down a chute that threw a wave of water up and over two kids in the bow.
“Don’t shoot!” he warned. “It’s not Cross. Repeat, not Cross. Let them go by.”
Chapter 94
Upriver several hundred yards, Raphael Durango did not hear the shrieking family of four, but he’d caught glimpses of them before they floated around the river bend fully into his view and plunged into the rapids.
He’d given no signal to his two men on the east side of the South Fork and told the man with him to stay put until the family was well past their position. Cross and Sampson were still somewhere upstream. But they couldn’t be far. Emmanuella was right. The transmitter in Cross’s belt had started moving more than an hour ago. They should have been here by—
Durango shifted the binoculars, trained them farther south, and caught a glimpse of a blue raft and two figures in it, hooded and hunched over in the rain. “Here we go,” he said to the man with him. “Move up, find a place you can shoot down on them as they go past.”
The man nodded, scrambled out of their dry ambush spot to the bridle trail, and began to run south. Durango picked up his AR rifle and walked a few feet into a large opening in the trees. He set the gun down and started waving an orange handkerchief with his left hand while training his binoculars at the bend above the whitewater.
“C’mon, Cross; c’mon, Sampson,” he muttered, his stomach fluttering in anticipation of action. “It’s going to be a fiesta just for two.” The second he saw the raft’s blue nose enter the rapids, Durango dropped the orange scarf and snatched up his rifle.
This will be over in seconds and we’ll get the hell out of here and go back to Mexico where we belong.
Chapter 95
Upriver on the west side of the canyon, Sampson watched and heard the family of four screaming with delight as the raft bounced off a rock at the top of the whitewater section, then slid off and down into a steep chute that threw a wave over the boy and the girl in the front.
Sampson knew that as rapids went, the one below him was relatively mild. At least when compared to the big, dangerous, rolling ones on the Salmon River in Idaho. And the dad appeared capable and comfortable with his oars. After that first jarring hit off the rock and the bounce and spray at the bottom of the chute, he expertly piloted the raft through the rest of the rapids, and within minutes they were out of it and floating a little slower across deeper water. Sampson could hear their laughter fading when he spotted their blue raft coming downriver with Alex’s dummies, looking for all the world like two fishermen with their hoods up in the rain.
What amazed Sampson was how, after a spin or two upriver, the raft had stabilized and floated nose-first in the quickening current down the last straight before that right-hand bend into the rapids. But the raft got sideways coming around the turn, smashed off the far bank, and went right up on top of the rock in the tight spot, where it hesitated and shuddered.
Sampson was sure the raft was going to take on water and capsize, but it slid off and careened into the chute. Water sprayed up over the bow, and John took off, running north along the trail and over that gap in the ridgeline.
Now he could see almost a mile to the north, with a commanding view of the burned slopes and pockets of live trees ahead of him, the canyon and river below, and the mountain ledges, steep pitches, and benches above it.
Sampson moved through the rain another fifteen yards and threw the .375 Ruger over the top of a downed tree trunk. Once he had the bear gun solidly in position, he glanced back down at the rapids and saw the raft and the dummies still bouncing and careening through the churning whitewater. He picked up his binoculars to scan the hillsides on both sides downriver and almost immediately saw a man high on the west side, four hundred yards away. The man waved an orange cloth, dropped it, and picked up an AR rifle.
That looks like Durango! Sampson let go of the binoculars and started to get behind the .375, knowing it was a long shot for a bear gun shooting a heavy bullet. But then he caught movement some two hundred yards straight north of his position on his side of the river.
A second man with an assault rifle emerged from the woods there and ran out toward a drop-off in the terrain. Then a third man with an AR appeared on the opposite side of the river, a good hundred yards closer than Durango. That man started shooting down at the raft. So did the guy on Sampson’s side of the South Fork. Snugging the stock of the Ruger into his shoulder, he moved the scope onto that gunman.
He thumbed off the safety and got the crosshairs on the cartel man’s chest a split second before the gunman jerked and arched as a well-placed bullet blew through him. It exploded out the cartel man’s left side, throwing a heavy blood spray into the air before the sound of the shot finally carried from far downriver.
The dead narco tumbled down the slope toward the river.
Chapter 96
I had been moving cautiously north ever since the family went into the narrows, praying to God I’d see one of the cartel men instead of the monster grizzly bear that was stalking in the forest somewhere ahead of me.
The beast’s tracks were no longer on the trail, but I’d seen where it’d left it, pressing down grass and snapping brush and branches as it headed diagonally northeast toward the river. It wasn’t until I stopped to watch our raft go around the bend and into the narrows that I saw movement that became a man carrying an AR rifle about a hundred and fifty yards ahead of me.
His attention was off the trail toward the river and for a second, I thought for sure he’d seen the bear. But then he darted into the trees where he’d been looking.
I took a few more steps and picked him up again, moving through the woods toward a ledge high above the South Fork. He walked out onto the ledge, aimed toward the river bottom, and let go a burst of gunfire.
Someone across the river on the east side opened fire with another automatic weapon. I’d just found the second shooter in my binoculars when a shot from way downriver buckled him.
The narco on my side seemed puzzled by that shot but fired at the raft again. Thanking God for the rain, the green khaki clothes I wore, and the gunman still shooting, I stooped over and ran at him.