The Orchard

The Orchard Chapter One

Chapter One

1990

The junction of Arizona State Routes 84 and 347. “Peter’s Corner.”

The cicadas buzzed incessantly. The high-pitched, rattling tone didn’t do anything helpful for the nerves of the three men crouched in a dry irrigation ditch that ran alongside 84.

They were waiting for an armored car that was headed north up the 84 towards them from Interstate 8. The truck had come from Mexico.

Dwayne Webber wore a boonie hat to keep the sun off his skull. Mirrored shades cut the glare of the sun, but not enough to keep him from squinting. A bandanna hung loosely around his throat, catching the sweat that ran off him in streams. The other two men with him were outfitted the same way.

Dwayne realized he was gripping his weapon too tightly. It was an M-16 automatic rifle with an M-203 single-shot grenade launcher fitted beneath the barrel. Dwayne removed his hands from the weapon and wiped them down the sides of his fatigues.

To Dwayne’s right, Norman Deakins wore a backpack full of explosives and a .357 revolver on his hip. To his left, Claude Cooper let a Chinese knockoff of an AK-47 swing loose from its sling around his shoulders.

Dwayne wasn’t posturing with the M-16. He’d gone into the Army in ’78 and had trained on the weapons. He’d never been in combat, having spent most of his four-year hitch guarding a helicopter base in West Germany, but he knew how to use the pieces.

Norman and Claude had never been in the service, but they were career criminals and true believers in a race war they knew in their hearts was coming soon. When one of them shot at someone, that someone was usually in bad trouble. They also had a credential Dwayne didn’t: prison.

On a range, at least, Dwayne was a good shot, and he was the only member at his low (i.e. totally expendable) level in his Aryan Front cell experienced with the military-grade weapons necessary for the job. All of the Vietnam-era veterans had at least 10 years on him and positions in the movement commensurate with their ages and experience. They didn’t go get shot at anymore.

A set of impulses lurking within Dwayne’s mind nagged that a LAWS rocket would have been the right tool for this job, but the rational part of his brain knew the 203 was better. He needed to stop the truck, not destroy it. The guards would have to go, of course, and that would have to satisfy him.

They heard a distant rumble under the cicadas. Everyone perked up, but nobody was green enough to bother saying anything. All three men pulled their bandannas up over their faces. Under his, Norman smiled. He liked Westerns, and he’d witnessed this scene in a hundred of them. Only the machines involved were different.

The truck appeared down the road, cresting a rise. The sight was distorted by a curtain of shimmering heat waves rising from the asphalt. Dwayne measured distances with his eyes. The high-explosive round from the 203 would need at least 50 feet of flight to arm itself before impact.

When the truck was 200 or so feet away, Dwayne rose up smoothly and let fly with the 203. No point in running any further than necessary.

The 40mm round hit the truck’s windshield and blew it to pieces.

Dwayne, Norman and Claude scrambled up the bank behind them as the truck cleared the explosion’s smoke cloud. The windshield’s frame was a mass of jagged metal, and the interior of the cab was splashed with blood.

The truck tilted onto two wheels briefly as it twisted sharply left toward the shallow irrigation ditch. It crashed back onto all its tires and slowed. Apparently, the driver had not jammed the pedal to the floor in his last second of life.