The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

Juan reached the front of the trailer. The road ahead continued straight for nearly a mile before it twisted back on itself through another hairpin. The pickups were just a dust cloud halfway there. To Juan’s right was a two-hundred-foot drop, at the bottom of which ran the next loop of the switchback road.

Looking down over the front of the trailer, he could see the tops of the semi’s eight spinning drive wheels and, through the skeletal frame of the chassis, the graveled blur of the roadbed. A misstep would land him under twenty tons of exotic hardwoods.

Rather than leap, he climbed down the butt ends of the logs and stepped lightly onto the truck’s chassis. He could see the driver’s head through the cab’s rear window, and if the man happened to glance at his rearview mirror he would see the Chairman. Juan stepped right onto a diamond-plate fuel tank as big around as a barrel. He clutched the handhold screwed into the cab directly behind the driver’s door in his right hand and placed his other on the door handle. The driver’s bearded face filled the big wing mirror in front of him.

The Argentine’s eyes drifted left, and in the second it took his brain to register what he was seeing Juan threw open the door and grabbed the man by the collar. The door rebounded into Juan’s arm but didn’t have enough pressure to even slow the Chairman, as he yanked the hapless man from his seat and flung him far enough away from the semi that he wouldn’t be caught under the wheels.

Juan pulled his machine pistol from around his back and leapt into the seat, noting that even with both windows wide open the cab smelled of stale sweat, spicy food, and a hint of cannabis. He had his foot on the gas before the rig had slowed more than a mile or two per hour. He checked his mirror to see the driver slowly getting to his feet. He was dazed, for sure, but didn’t look permanently injured.

Now came the tough part, Cabrillo thought grimly. Glancing up at the road above, he could see a feathery plume that would be his men coming after him in hot pursuit. Down the slope, the road was still clear. The Ninth Brigade soldiers were probably just now entering the next hairpin on the long descent. Juan carefully steered the semi so its outside tires rode closer and closer to the edge of the road and the precipitous drop beyond. The ground was much less firm this far from the main ruts packed down over countless hundreds of passages. Gravel hissed from under the wheels and pattered down the stump-strewn slope.

There!

The height advantage of being on the upper section of the haul road let Juan see the oncoming pickups below. They weren’t going nearly as fast as he expected them to, and he wondered if they had a little trouble negotiating the last corner. The thought gave him a newfound respect for the men who drove up and down the mountain a dozen times a day.

Juan took the truck even closer to the edge. The front tires were digging ruts out of the very lip of the shoulder while the outside drive tires and the outside tires on the right side of the trailer hung in space. At a closing speed of sixty miles per hour, but separated by two hundred vertical feet, the three vehicles raced toward one another.

Without taking his eyes off the road, Juan felt for the door handle and made sure it hadn’t latched. It was all down to the timing. Too soon, they would stop. Too late, and he would miss.

Juan judged it as finely as he could. He cranked the wheel to the right and threw himself from the cab, landing hard on the road but tumbling across his shoulder like an acrobat, and came up on his feet.

The eighteen-wheeler teetered on the brink for another second before rolling off the road. It hit square on its side, its momentum plowing the grille though the churned-up ground until it smashed into the stump of a tree that must have stood for a hundred years before greed sealed its fate. Steam gushed from the ruptured radiator, and the windshield was punched out in two solid sheets that exploded into mounds of glittering glass chips.

At the violent impact, the trailer bucked and threw its load. There were thirty logs on it, most the width and length of telephone poles while others were monsters that weighed three tons apiece. They stayed in a tight bundle for the first few yards as they rolled down the hill, but once they started bouncing off stumps, all semblance of order vanished. Some bounced off stump after stump, changing directions as they fell. A few were upended by the impact and hurtled down the hillside like ballistic projectiles.

The driver of the lead pickup never saw the deliberate accident above his truck, and it wasn’t until he heard cries of alarm from the men in back that he knew something was wrong. He studied the dirt track ahead and saw nothing amiss. The steepness of the hill above them prevented him from having the proper angle to look up and see the avalanche moments away from sweeping the truck off the road.

“Hector!” screamed his passenger, staring wide-eyed up the hill. “Stop! For the love of the Virgin, stop!”

The driver, Hector, stood on the brakes, holding the wheel steady against the truck’s desire to fishtail. Then came a jarring impact as the second truck, driven by Raul Jimenez, slammed into their rear bumper. Hector had been wearing a seat belt, a habit drilled into him as a child, and no amount of macho grandstanding would get him to change.

The passenger—the team’s Sergeant—had never worn a seat belt in his life. He was catapulted through the windshield, leaving a man-sized hole ringed in blood from where the glass sliced his face and arms. He landed a good fifteen feet from the front of the truck. Hector had no idea if the Sarge was alive or dead when a log as thick around as a man’s chest rolled over him, crushing the man’s body into the hard earth.

That’s when Hector felt death touch his shoulder. Another log that had tipped end over end speared through the top of the cab and smashed into his leg. The huge piece of timber continued its journey, ripping off the pickup’s roof as easily as a can opener.

The men not hurt in the crash leapt from the truck and started running downhill, all thoughts of staying with their comrades forgotten in their panicked flight. The truck took a pair of broadsides from the two largest logs and was tossed bodily off the road. The men too stunned or too injured to flee were thrown from the vehicle and crushed as it started barreling down the mountain.

Most of the soldiers on foot had made the mistake of running straight away from the truck and were soon caught up as it tumbled. The lucky ones were knocked aside with broken limbs. The others were killed outright. One soldier had the wherewithal to run down the slope at an angle and avoided being killed by the cartwheeling vehicle. He even managed to leap up in time to have one of the logs roll under him. A second one slammed into his knees, breaking both joints. It bounced and flattened him before his nerves could send the pain signals to his brain.

The second truck fared little better. It was knocked perpendicular to the road by a titanic collision and then shot forward when a trio of logs slammed into the tailgate. The engine had stalled when Raul Jimenez had hit the first pickup, and without power steering he was incapable of controlling the vehicle as it accelerated downward. He mashed his foot to the brake pedal and yanked the emergency handle, but gravity and momentum were too much for a tired machine that had better than two hundred thousand miles on the odometer. It slammed into a stump just off-center enough to kick the rear end around. The tires hooked and the truck flipped. Men were scattered like rag dolls. Raul managed to stay in his seat as his view through the windshield rotated again and again. His side window was smashed, but whatever had punctured the glass had missed him. Impact after impact rattled the truck and threatened to loosen his sanity, but one massive hit and everything turned still. What remained of the pickup was hard against a stump, and the avalanche of logs had ended.

“Nice shootin’, Tex,” Juan heard over his radio.

He looked back to see the truck carrying his team racing for him. If he felt anything for the men he had just killed and injured, he need only think back to the burned-out village and knew he’d done the world a favor.

Mike Trono was behind the wheel with Mark Murphy. Jerry stood in the bed and, as the truck came close, held out an elbow to hook Cabrillo’s arm and lift him into the bed. Juan rapped on the roof of the cab, and Mike hit the gas.

It took two minutes to negotiate the hairpin and return to the site where the Ninth Brigade soldiers had been swept from the road. Moans of anguish rose from the wounded. The dead lay in such unnatural angles it was difficult to believe they had skeletons at all.

None of the real Argentine Special Forces questioned the presence of more unknown men dressed in their uniforms. They were simply relieved that help had arrived so quickly. Juan squatted next to one of them, laying a hand on the man’s uninjured shoulder. The other had been wrenched from its socket.

“What truck had the piece of satellite?” he asked in Spanish.

“It was in back of ours,” the soldier said through gritted teeth and lips so compressed they had gone white.

“The first one?”

“No. The second.”