Before I could come to a decision, it was too late. The dad was hauling on his oars, sweeping them hard toward the west bank of the South Fork, then let the nose of the raft drift into the bend. The kids started screaming like roller-coaster riders.
I watched the family and the raft vanish from sight into the rapids far below me and felt like I’d just seen them go to their doom.
Chapter
93
Five hundred yards downriver and on the same west side of the South Fork, Matthew Butler and J. P. Vincente were separated by fifty yards and moving steadily south, keeping the muddy bridle trail between them.
They wore camo. Thermal-imaging goggles hung around their necks.
Even though it was daylight, every ten yards or so, Butler would lift the goggles and peer through them, looking for the heat signatures of men in the trees ahead of him. If Durango and the cartel men were waiting in ambush for Cross and Sampson, Butler felt in his bones that they would be up ahead, between him and Vincente and those rapids.
They’d stashed their e-bikes and Alison Purdy’s off the trail a mile back. She’d limped with them up the path until fifteen minutes ago, when Butler had sent her out on a point above the river, roughly seven hundred yards downstream of the narrows.
Seven hundred yards is a long shot for anyone, but Purdy carried a soft case for a .28 Nosler sniper rifle that Butler had stashed in the Land Cruiser along with several other weapons. The thief was a small woman and the Nosler a hard, flat-shooting weapon.
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.