The Wagon Wheel Affair

By Gary L Bridges

Unknown by most, forgotten by many, a fifty-year-old secret buried beneath the Wagon Wheel Lodge in bucolic Cuchara, Colorado, threatens to erupt in a cloud of terror with unspeakable consequences for the United States. Ray Vernon, a WWII Medal of Honor recipient, literally holds the key to the secret. When Ray is murdered, his grandson, Stan, comes face-to-face with ISIS in an international race for the secret of the Wagon Wheel Lodge. Retired US federal agent Maggie Bell and her spouse, Steve Curry, a US Forest Service officer, are commissioned by the CIA and the DEA to investigate how a Mexican drug cartel and a large marijuana farm near the Purgatoire campground fit into the potentially deadly puzzle. Steve Curry goes undercover and is kidnapped by the Angel, a notorious Mexican drug lord. While being held at the Angels Mexican ranch, Steve and the Angel forge an unusual partnership to try to counter the terror that ISIS threatens to unleash on the United States. Meanwhile, Maggie deals with a young orphan girl who was abandoned in Cuchara, along with several other orphans when the cartel pulls up stakes. How does the community of Cuchara respond to a sudden influx of orphan children? Maggie has to make a heartrending decision that will affect her and Steves marriage for the rest of their lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524524227

Gary L Bridges

Gary Bridges’s previous novels (The Cuchara Chronicles, Out of Purgatory, The Wahatoya, The Footprint in the Lake, Los Huerfanos, and Sangre de Cristo) set the stage for his most recent adventure story about international intrigue and potential international disaster radiating from Cuchara, Colorado. Gary and his family first moved to Cuchara in 1985. He and his wife, Shawn, owned and operated three small businesses at the ski resort. Gary also served as controller of the resort and taught at the University of Southern Colorado, where he also served as dean of the School of Business. Shawn, a well-known artist, covered many Colorado walls with her paintings. The Bridges family moved back to San Antonio, Texas, in the year 2000 when Gary accepted a teaching position at the University of Texas–San Antonio. Gary retired from UTSA in 2014 and, once again, moved to Cuchara—this time, to be permanent residents. Shawn’s paintings now adorn the Timbers Restaurant, which serves as her gallery as well as her favorite eatery. Read about Gary’s previous novels at garylbridges.com, and peruse some of Shawn’s artworks at shawnkbridges.com.

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The WagonWheel Affair

Gary L Bridges

Copyright © 2016 by Gary Bridges.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016911139

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5245-2420-3

                Softcover        978-1-5245-2421-0

                eBook             978-1-5245-2422-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/08/2016

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Steve Curry placed the phone back into its cradle.

Dear god! He exhaled.

He then made four frantic calls: to the Huerfano County Search and Rescue Team, to the county sheriff in Walsenburg, to the LaVeta Volunteer Fire Department, and to his boss, the U.S. Forest Service. At the last moment, he called the LaVeta High School and instructed them to activate the LV Junior Search and Rescue Team. Other than a call for Officer Down, nothing energized and moved law enforcement and fire department personnel more quickly and more resolutely than a call for Child Missing.

Maggie, we’ve got a bad one, Steve called to his wife, Maggie. He put a few extras in his action bag and headed for the front door. Maggie came through the bedroom door. Being a former federal law enforcement officer herself, she was used to sudden and dramatic calls and rushing out the door as the adrenaline surged. Steve stopped on the porch to let Maggie catch up with him.

Doris Mullins just reported her two boys missing. Most of these calls are false alarms. The boys are probably in the woods with their dog Crockett. But you might… Maggie brushed him off and grabbed her jacket. I’ll go with you. Darren, her husband, is in Pueblo, so she’s alone. Steve nodded and pulled out of the driveway as Maggie slammed her door. Steve had instructed all the rescue forces to gather at the Wagon Wheel cabins. That was the last reported sighting of the two boys and their dog.

The cabins had been unoccupied for as long as Steve could remember and had always been considered an eyesore. Steve and Maggie lived close to the Wagon Wheel and were the first responders to arrive. A few neighbors were standing around, attracted by Steve’s flashing red light on his truck. Steve walked briskly over to the confab. Doris half walked and half ran to him. Steve could see Crockett, the big Chesapeake Bay retriever, sniffing around one of the cabins.

Something’s wrong. He would never leave them. She choked back the hysteria that surged through her veins. A LaVeta fire truck pulled into the neighborhood with the deputy sheriff close behind. Arliss, one of the deputies, reported that he had activated County Search and Rescue. Steve rushed off to start organizing the search. He had done many of these for lost hikers over the years. Maggie began picking Doris’s brain: When was the last time you saw them? Exactly where were they the last time you saw them? What were they wearing? Where was their favorite place to hike? Who did they usually play with?

Maggie made notes and gave a copy to Steve as he began briefing the growing force of search and rescue personnel. Every father, every grandfather, every mother, every grandmother felt the agonizing gut wrenching panic that had virtually paralyzed Doris. They jointly decided not to call the boys’ dad, Darren, since he was on the way already. The rescuers didn’t want to be pulling him out of a wrecked and burning car.

The roar of the river, which flowed near the Wagon Wheel cabins, caught Steve’s attention. He didn’t express what he was thinking. That the river hasn’t run this deep and hard in ten or twenty years. Steve walked away from the earshot of the crowd, notably Doris, and called John Beecham, leader of the LaVeta HS Junior Search and Rescue, on his cell phone.

Hi, Steve, we’re headed up the road right now. I’ve got six students with me.

That’s good news, John. I need for you to deploy your folks at the Bright and Early ranch and have them walk the river all the way to the Wagon Wheel cabins.

Oh, jeez. You don’t suspect they’re in the river, do you?

I sure hope not, but we need to cover the river on both sides. One of the boys is wearing a bright yellow hoodie. The other is wearing a blue jeans jacket. Have your guys look sharp. The older boy is Drew. He’s twelve. Billy is the younger one, and he’s eight.

John Beecham, outdoorsman par excellence, was also a part-time teacher at LaVeta High School. He had taken a particular interest in a young boy who had been arrested by the local marshal and was one day away from being sentenced to juvenile detention. The boy’s mother had pleaded with John to intervene on her son’s behalf. After some anxious deliberation and a conversation with her son, Devon, John took a step into foreign territory. And it grabbed him. He conferred with the municipal judge and the marshal. They both agreed to place the miscreant under John’s care in a quasi-parole situation with John assuming responsibility for Devon for six months. John emphasized to Devon that if he screwed up again, he (John) would probably lose his teaching license and could possibly go to jail also (he may have exaggerated that a tiny bit). John was not a sociologist, but he could see the dramatic effects of assigning responsibility to Devon, paying attention to him whatever the subject, setting and communicating high expectations, and making clear the consequences for failing. At that time, John didn’t know that he had opened a floodgate. During the following six months, John had seven more students/parolees under his welcoming wing. It was Steve Curry who suggested the LaVeta Junior Search and Rescue might be a good place for all of John’s charges.

What better way to get them out in the woods and exercising? Steve wondered to John, since they were not allowed to participate in school sports. So John took them hiking and climbing almost every weekend. They cleared widely used hiking trails. John taught them basic rock climbing techniques and basic first-responder first aid. He showed them how to fashion makeshift stretchers and how to tie all the important knots when climbing and also when trying to move injured hikers or climbers. For the last two years, John had not had a single student relapse and be sent to juvenile detention.

When John briefed his junior rescue crew for the lost boys’ assignment, he could feel the tension. So far the team had been called out to help a hiker down from West Peak, help a Texas family locate their lost dog at the Blue Lake campground, and extract a fishing hook from a seven-year-old boy’s earlobe. But this was different. Two little boys were seriously lost with a host of bad things that could have or might have already happened to them. They had a quiet seriousness about them as they piled into John’s pickup truck. John would be overall in charge of this section of the search.

Dan, I want you to be in charge of this side of the river. I’ll be in charge of the other side. Lonnie, Ralph, and Ed, you come with me. John had been waiting for a situation where he could assign student Dan Klas some honest-to-goodness head-on responsibility. Dan was the classic tough guy. The judge barely allowed him to join John’s program because of his belligerence and his tendency to bully everybody, even the teachers. The other teachers gave John the evil eye when he accepted Dan into the search and rescue group. Their trepidation was well founded, but John took a chance, and Dan responded to John’s laid-back demeanor and his genuine interest in helping Dan. As hoped, Dan stepped to the plate, as they say, and executed his first leadership assignment with a spark of pride and with a determined commitment. Dan immediately deployed his student team and circulated among them as they trekked along the river. He helped clear the brush that impeded their progress and spoke words of encouragement to his team. John had requested the fire chief take a few minutes to observe and evaluate Dan’s and the entire team of junior rescuers’ performances. When John later passed along the chief’s positive comments about their assistance, Dan was visibly moved.

Steve was worried about the river because Cuchara residents were used to a lazy and relaxed river. This year, the river was running deep and wild because of the record snowfalls in the winter plus the early summer snowfalls, which were playing havoc with the swollen river. If the boys had tried to cross the river, they may have been swept downstream.

The county sheriff took Steve aside. Have you considered that someone may have snatched those boys? A chill ran up Steve’s spine.

Not yet. It’s too soon to speculate in that direction. Let’s spread out and cover the neighborhood, including the village. They may have gone there to spend their allowance. We’ve also got searchers walking the river.

Will do. The sheriff briefed his deputies, and they set out on foot with the latest photos that Doris had provided. Sheriff Wilson had worked with Steve on numerous searches and on much more deadly events over the years and trusted his judgment.

Steve Curry had slowly morphed into Cuchara’s law enforcement go-to guy even though his official position was with the U.S. Forest Service. He ended up passing along at least 50 percent of citizens’ calls either to Ronnie White, the game warden, or to the Huerfano County sheriff. Often either Steve or some other law enforcement officer crossed over their respective line of jurisdiction. They all knew the risks, but their mutual attitudes were to get the job done then to argue with the bureaucrats later. There were no lines of jurisdiction for missing children.

For the first time, Drew Mullins found himself regretting that he had set up his little brother, Billy, for a hideous trick purposefully meant to scare Billy into peeing his pants and/or make him cry. The old Wagon Wheel Lodge cabins looked harmless enough. They had been empty and unused for years. The nice lady who lived across the road from the derelict cabins and the storage shed had given Drew and Billy permission to play in and around them. She had even inspected the interiors of the aging cabins to ensure that there were no sharp objects or other pieces or parcels of wood, glass, or wiring that could cause injury. The boys had immediately begun a serious game of hide-and-seek. Naturally, Drew always found his little brother, and Billy never found his big brother. It must be written in the Bible.

Billy, come, look here what I found. Drew’s excitement naturally attracted Billy, and he came running.

Drew was standing inside a small closet holding a trapdoor open and peering into the darkness below the cabin. The trapdoor was the entry point to the space below the cabin. Billy cautiously stuck his head in the closet.

Wow. What is it, Drew?

It’s a tunnel.

A set of steps extended into the darkness beneath the cabin. A cool breeze wafted up from below.

Let’s go down and just look for a minute, Drew urged.

Not me. No way. Billy stepped back as if the darkness might reach up and snatch him. Aw, don’t be a scaredy-cat. Look. Drew walked down the ten steps and stood at the bottom peering into the darkness. There was a shaft of sunlight shining through the front window and squirming its way into the open closet and down the stairs. It lit up a circle about three feet in diameter on the floor of the tunnel.

Look, the ground’s solid, and there’s nothing dangerous or that could hurt us. Okay?

What Drew failed to disclose to his ever-trusting little brother was that he planned to take a few steps out of the circle of sunlight and pretend to be lost in the dark and scare the holy bejesus out of Billy. Billy stopped on each step and verified that Drew was still in sight. But for each step that Billy took, Drew stepped back a step further away from the light but not enough so that Billy couldn’t still see him. Billy timorously stepped away from the bottom step. He could barely see Drew in the dimming light.

The minute that Billy stepped away from the stairs, Drew took four giant steps backward. He could see Billy, but Billy could not see him.

Where are you, Drew?

Dark silence.

"Okay, Drew. You