G Hopf - The Long Road

“Please, I can help,” Hunter pleaded.

“No way, I need you here; plus your mother would skin me alive,” Gordon said lightheartedly. He tussled his son’s hair and finished by saying, “Let’s go eat, we all have a big night ahead of us.”

Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

Julia’s heart was pounding hard in her chest. She felt almost faint after hearing the news that one of the search teams had returned and had information about Brad.

When she awoke that morning she’d been greeted with her first bout of morning sickness. She had laughed to herself earlier that all the discomforts of pregnancy are wiped from your memory after you have a baby. The nausea she was experiencing was not unlike her first time, almost twenty years before. After spending most of her morning lying down, she remembered how much she disliked the pregnancy part. She recalled the conversations with her mommy friends then and how she’d said, “Never again.” Her pregnancy with Bobby had been tough for her; the first trimester had been one day after another of horrible nausea and a total feeling of malaise. The second trimester gave her some reprieve, but it soon was replaced with constant back pain and overall discomfort.

One other thing she lost during pregnancy was the concern for what others thought of her. She quickly put on a robe, pulled her hair back, slipped on her slippers, and exited her room. The vacant hallways would soon welcome more men and women from bases around the country, and she looked forward to it. The base itself could handle thousands more. It was currently understaffed at less than a thousand, which was only 5 percent of capacity. Brad had often told her how wasteful the government was with its money, but now she was happy they spent lavishly. She was now the beneficiary of that government spending.

She didn’t know what to expect when she reached the briefing room door. When she touched the door handle, she said a little prayer and took a deep breath, then opened the door. Sitting around a small table in this stale gray room were Cruz, Dylan, Baxter, and two men she’d never seen before. They were young men; stubble and dirt covered their faces.

It was apparent to her that these men had just arrived. They hadn’t even been given the chance to take a shower. The one man she was hoping to see when she opened the door was not sitting there. The expression on each person’s face told her the answer to a question she had been asking since she first heard of Brad’s disappearance.

“Hi, Julia, please sit down,” Cruz said in a relaxed tone. He stood and pulled out a chair next to his.

She just stared at them all and said, “No, no. This is how you do it? This is how you tell me? You bring me down here? I thought that you wouldn’t be so cruel. I thought that when you wanted me to come down here it was good news because no one with a heart would bring someone down to a dark, small room to be told her husband is dead.”

“Please sit,” Cruz said again. He stepped toward her, but she recoiled.

“How dare you, Andrew? If you wanted to tell me my husband was dead, you should have come to my room!” Julia said loudly, tears starting to well up in her eyes.

“Mrs. Conner, we don’t know if the president is dead,” Baxter blurted out.

Cruz snapped his head in the general’s direction in surprise.

“What do you mean, General?” Julia said. Her hands were shaking as she dabbed the tears around her eyes.

“These two men here found what they think was his body, but they didn’t bring anything back with them to verify it was his.”

“Yes, ma’am, we found several charred bodies,” one of the special operations men said, but Julia interrupted him.

“So why do you think he was one of them?” she asked, then slowly walked to the chair and sat down. The combination of the pregnancy and the stressful news made her feel weak.

“Ma’am, we discovered a pile of clothes in the same room, and this was in the jacket pocket,” the man said, tossing a wallet on the table.

Julia recognized it as Brad’s. She grabbed it and opened it just to make sure.

“We examined the corpses, but it was impossible to ID any of them. That was all we could get before we were forced to vacate the area under threat of force,” one of the men said, pointing to the wallet in Julia’s hands.

Taking a series of deep breaths to calm herself, Julia felt relieved by the news in some way. The wallet only proved he had been there, it didn’t prove that one of the bodies was his.

“So what happens next, gentlemen? We send more teams back in?”

“This is something else we needed to talk with you about,” Cruz said as he sat back down.

Not letting Cruz finish, Baxter interjected, “Yes, we send more teams.”

Cruz again craned his head in Baxter’s direction; this was the second time he’d just blurted out something.

“Actually…”

“Actually, what, Andrew?” Julia asked.

“What I’m going to say is that we are beefing up the searches while simultaneously we will start executing the president’s plan of setting up the government in Portland.”

“And we’ll have the manpower to do both?” Julia asked, looking a bit concerned that the search for Brad could be jeopardized by going to Portland.

“Julia, Brad would want it this way. We need to start executing his plan for Portland. We have the manpower and will continue looking for him while I go to Portland and get the government established there for his return.”

Julia looked deeply into Cruz’s eyes, then brought her attention to Baxter. She was seeking to be reassured. She understood what Cruz was doing and knew that what he said about Brad wanting him to move forward with the Portland plan was correct.

“Who will be in charge of Brad’s search party?”

“Mrs. Conner, I will be in charge here and in overseeing the operation for the president,” Baxter said.

“Good. I’m glad to hear that the search will continue and that Brad’s plans are still going forward. You are right, Andrew, he would want that. Now, if there is nothing more, I will excuse myself. I don’t feel all that well,” she said. She then slowly lifted herself from her chair. Cruz stood quickly and assisted her.

After the door closed behind her, she felt the tears coming. She dabbed her eyes again and began her walk back to her room. She walked slowly and deliberately through the hallways, stopping frequently to take breaks. She started to experience cramping in her lower abdomen, so painful that it took her breath away. Grimacing in pain, she felt a sensation of vertigo. She attempted to steady herself by placing both hands on the wall, but the vertigo and the light-headedness that followed were too much to bear. She looked down the hall hoping to see someone, but, as usual, the hall was vacant. The vertigo intensified in tandem with the pain. She tried to take a step, but her legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor with a thud, unconscious.

Tijuana, Mexico

The exhaust from the trucks was too much for Pablo. He handed the clipboard to a man next to him and left the warehouse. The cool night air felt good. He looked up at the stars and was impressed how bright they were now that the city lights were not there to mask them. He thought of the days his father would take him to Loreto Bay. They’d lie on the beach at night and his father would show him all the constellations. Those years were innocent for him; he knew nothing about what his father or family did.

His father hadn’t always been a cartel boss, but he had been involved in crime from a young age. His father grew up like many in Mexico, in a poor but proud family. His grandfather worked one labor job after another. Lacking a real education or any connections, which are important in Mexico, he never could get a job that could elevate him or his family. Alfredo was smart and wise at even a young age and saw his father’s failings. He swore to himself that he would never be poor; he would rise out of the squalor of poverty. This opportunity presented itself when a thug not much older than Alfredo at the time needed someone to “run” something. Alfredo never looked back, and within two years he had his own runners. Heroin was the drug of choice, and the buyers were mainly American. Alfredo’s operation grew beyond drugs and into smuggling anything that could make money. He soon became the go-to person for anything in Tijuana.