The Terrified Little Girl In The Diner And The Biker Shield
CHAPTER 5: THE MOJAVE HIGHWAY AMBUSH
Garrett carried Lily out to his Road Glide, wrapping her securely in a soft fleece blanket before seating her inside a heavy custom leather forward chest harness that locked directly into the reinforced shoulder straps of his buffalo cut. The child was snug against his chest, shielded by twelve pounds of ballistic cowhide and Garrett’s own muscular body.
“We don’t wait at the diner,” Garrett said to Jax and the four brothers assembled on the tarmac. “Delgado was the advance scout. If Bradley has cartel muscle tracking that burner signal, they’ll converge on this oasis with heavy rifles. We move north along the old pipeline service road toward Barstow to meet Special Agent Reed halfway.”
The five Harleys roared to life in an earth-shaking chorus of heavy V-twin power that shook the dusty diner windowpanes and sent desert sparrows fluttering from the eaves. The convoy rolled out of the Sunburst Oasis in tight, synchronized formation, leaving Deputy Delgado securely zip-tied to a heavy steel storage bench inside the locked manager’s office with the diner waitress standing guard over the door with a broom handle and a phone line open to county dispatch.
The convoy crested the first volcanic ridge, following the cracked asphalt of Old Route 66 that paralleled the transcontinental railroad tracks. The desert heat was brutal, the asphalt radiating 120-degree thermals that shimmered like water on the horizon. Garrett rode in the center of the formation, his left arm constantly bracing the little girl against his chest, feeling her steady, rhythmic heartbeat against his ribs.
Ten miles west of the diner, near the jagged volcanic formations of Amboy Crater, the crackle of gunfire suddenly chopped through the engine rumble.
From behind a row of abandoned railway maintenance sheds, two dark charcoal Chevrolet Tahoes with heavily tinted windows and reinforced steel brush guards accelerated onto the blacktop, closing the distance at ninety miles per hour.
The passenger window of the lead Tahoe slid down, revealing the black barrel of a suppressed semiautomatic carbine.
Crack-crack-crack!
Heavy rifle rounds tore into the asphalt around Garrett’s rear tire, kicking up sharp fragments of tar and gravel.
“Break formation! Box them out!” Jax roared over the tactical radio channel.
Lyle and Dutch banked their heavy cruisers hard to the left and right, dropping back behind Garrett’s bike to form an impenetrable rolling wedge of steel and chrome. Moving with disciplined military precision, the two bikers drew heavy steel tire thumper clubs from their fork sheaths, positioning their machines on either flank of the charging SUV.
As the lead Tahoe surged forward to ram Garrett’s rear wheel, Lyle swerved sharply toward the driver’s side, hurling a five-pound steel axle wrench directly through the SUV’s windshield.
The tempered safety glass exploded into a spiderweb of opaque white cracks, blinding the cartel driver. The driver panicked, jerking the steering wheel violently to the right.
The Tahoe’s tires caught the soft, unpaved sand shoulder at seventy miles an hour. The heavy SUV rolled three times in a violent explosion of dust, sheet metal, and luggage, tumbling down a forty-foot volcanic embankment into the dry ravine.
The second Tahoe slammed on its anti-lock brakes, the heavy tires smoking as the vehicle fishtailed across both lanes of the narrow blacktop, attempting an emergency three-point turn to retreat back toward the interstate. But Jax Bennett and Dutch were already executing a practiced flanking maneuver. Jax threw his twelve-hundred-pound cruiser into a controlled, tire-screeching slide, planting his machine squarely across the front bumper of the SUV while leveling his blued-steel twelve-gauge pump shotgun straight through the driver’s side windshield.
Dutch pulled alongside the passenger door, unholstering a heavy forty-five caliber service pistol and pointing the muzzle directly at the enforcer in the front seat.
“Kill the ignition and throw the keys out the window!” Jax bellowed over the howl of the desert wind. “Right now, or we peel this roof off!”
The two cartel enforcers inside saw the unblinking eyes of combat veterans who had survived firefights in Fallujah and the Mekong Delta. Their arrogance dissolved into sheer, paralyzed terror. The driver killed the engine, tossed the key fob out into the sagebrush, and both men threw their hands against the safety glass in total surrender.
Garrett did not slow down by a single mile per hour. With Lily tucked securely against his chest, his protective left arm shielding her from the wind buffeting his fairing, he pinned the throttle of the Road Glide to the stops. The heavy Milwaukee-Eight engine screamed as the speedometer needle climbed past eighty-five miles per hour, carving through the shimmering desert thermals along the abandoned railroad tracks.
Beneath the leather cut, Lily held Garrett’s shirt tightly, her small face buried in the warm wool lining, completely shielded from the gunfire and chaos behind them. Garrett checked the digital navigation clock mounted on his chrome handlebars:
01:15 PM.
Special Agent Marcus Reed’s federal convoy was fifteen miles out on Interstate 40, sirens wailing as they raced across the desert. But ahead, rising like jagged rusted teeth from the shimmering salt flats, the abandoned water towers and dilapidated freight sheds of the Barstow rail siding appeared on the horizon. Tucked deep within those sun-bleached Cold War boxcars, Troy Bradley was desperately pacing the rusted tracks, clutching his burner phone and waiting for his extraction freight train to roll through the crossing.
