Gayne Young - The Tunnel

“What happened was someone tunneled in from the other side,” Miguel theorized. “Thinking they could take control of what we’ve started. Someone from the Gulf or Baja Cartels. They’ve been trying to cut into our territory for years.”

Hunter stood motionless.

Silent.

Miguel took these actions as disagreement on Hunter’s part.

“Baboons? Really?” Miguel ridiculed. “You’re smarter than that.”

“Julio says there’s proof,” Hunter calmly stated. “Me and my team are going to have to go down there regardless to check things out…”

“When?” Miguel demanded.

“Day after tomorrow…”

“Why not today? Or tomorrow?” Miguel continued.

“This is right up my boy Taylor’s alley. He saw more tunnel action in Afghanistan than anyone left alive. I want him in on this. Regardless of what’s down there.”

“Taylor?” Miguel asked in shock. “You’ve been trying to get him onboard for over a year.”

“The trying part’s over.” Hunter smiled. “This morning, we move on to the getting part.”

Jarrett Taylor found it hard not to dwell on the past.

But it was almost impossible not to when you’re reminded of it on a constant basis.

When every day brings letters, emails, phone calls, summons, bills, threats of lawsuits, and more to remind you of that past.

Taylor’s look at his past always began with his divorce.

With visual memories of his wife of more than a decade telling him she was leaving him before he shipped out for his second tour in Afghanistan.

“You love them more than you love us! More than you love me and more than you love Avery,” she’d screamed in the middle of explaining her reasons for wanting out of their marriage and life together.

What them was she talking about , Taylor wondered.

The enemy?

His men?

The people he was supposed to be aiding?

He never got an answer.

Taylor was in the middle of his third and final tour when he got the call to come home.

That his baby girl was sick.

Astrocytomas.

The doctors tried cutting it out of her.

Cut into his baby girl’s brain.

But it didn’t take.

She was dead in under six months.

Five months since Avery’s death and he was still getting notices of failure to pay child support.

Child support.

That was a funny one.

How could you pay child support on a dead child?

And yet the notices kept coming.

So too did the notices from hospitals and collection agencies, the promises of legal action against him from those entities, and the calls from his ex-wife who constantly blamed him for all that had befallen her.

It was never-ending.

And then Hunter called.

Made his way through all the other callers to finally get to Taylor.

To ask him to reconsider his offer.

To promise him financial salvation, the offer of a new life and the return to a tightknit group of friends—no, to the family—that he’d lost.

This time, Taylor agreed.

Why not?

He had nothing else in life.

Nothing that he cared about or that gave him a feeling of belonging.

Or of hope.

It was time to start over.

To begin anew.

Taylor tried to put all this out of his mind and instead focus on the day before him.

He had put what little furniture and few items of value he had in a storage unit outside of Austin then sold his truck to the owner of the facility’s son. The kid was nice enough and even agreed to drive Taylor to the airport in exchange for some gas money.

The kid had tried to get Taylor to buy him some beer as well, but Taylor laughed and said that he didn’t want his last act in the United States for a long time to come to be breaking the law by providing booze to a minor.

“I had to ask,” the 19-year-old explained with a chuckle.

“You did,” Taylor countered.

Taylor was dropped at the Austin Executive Airport at noon.

Hunter arrived in a private jet twenty minutes later.

“Look at you, you sonuva bitch!” Hunter exploded in laughter at the sight of Taylor.

Hunter shook his old friend’s hand then pulled him into a bear hug and slapped him on the back. He pulled back and smiled and gave his friend the once-over.

“Looking pretty good there, Captain.” Hunter laughed.

“Thank you, Colonel.” Taylor smiled for the first time in a very long time.

“A little more around the middle and quite a bit of gray on the sides…”

“I could say the same of you,” Taylor rebuked in jest.

Hunter continued laughing.

“Yep. That’s what happens when you get as old as us.” Hunter looked to the floor next to Taylor. “That all you got? One bag?”

“Do I need more?”

“You will. But we’ll take care of that later. Come on. Let’s get the hell outta here.”

Angel Lòpez thought building a border wall was one of the dumbest ideas he’d ever heard.

He gladly took the job of building it though.

Money was money after all.

His problem with the wall was that it was incomplete.

That it was only going to be built in sections.

Ten miles here.

Two miles there.

A hundred miles of no wall.

Several border lakes with no barrier between Texas and Mexico.

The fact that he and his crew were cutting roads where there had previously been nothing but thousands upon thousands of acres of impenetrable scrub brush was another factor Angel thought stupid. Why give people determined to enter the U.S. at any cost a road through nowhere to do so?

Sorry for the wall you had to climb over or tunnel under.

Here’s a road to civilization to make it easier for you once you overcome that slight obstacle.

The way Angel saw it, he and his crew were providing illegals more opportunities to enter the States than they were doing anything else.

But Angel’s company wasn’t given a contract so Angel could offer advice on border protection.

The company was given a contract to assist in the building of the wall.

The work was dull as hell, hotter than hell, and located out in the middle of hell. Angel and his nine-man crew had to camp in the bush and only rarely drove the 110 miles back into town for supplies. They’d work this way until the 10-mile stretch of wall they were building was complete. So far, they had set only a mile of upright steel posts. It would take them another three months to complete that task alone. Who knew how long it’d take to actually set the wall after that.

Angel walked along the rocky earth that baked under the relentless Texas sun toward the excavator-mounted hydraulic jackhammer that sat idling. He looked to the operator of the machinery for indication of why the hammering had stopped but Carlos offered nothing in the way of visual explanation.

“Why’d you stop?” Angel yelled over the rock-concert-level loudness of the machinery idling in place.

Carlos tapped his ear protection in response.

Angel pulled his hand across his throat in a “cut it” motion and Carlos obliged by powering down the excavator he sat within. Angel climbed onto the treads and leaned into the open cab.

“Why’d you stop?” Angel asked again.

“Feels funny,” Carlos said, gesturing to the ground before him.

“What feels funny? The hammer acting up?”

“No,” Carlos replied, this time pointing at the ground. “The rock. It’s different.”

“So what?” Angel argued. “Punch it out.”

“Telling ya, man, it feels different,” Carlos explained. “Last mile’s been the same hard-ass rock. This hole started the same. Three feet down it’s all… just different. Feels weird.”