The Ridge

By Tom Blenk

Mike Sullivan and company are at Kennedy Airport to pick up a shipment of cocaine. Sullivan soon realises he has been set up and must find a way out! Millionare businesman Calvin Mitchell and family are traveling by private plane to bound for a wedding in Arizona. Sullivan's gang hijacks the family and plane!
The next twenty-four hours take the reader from New York to Tucson to Midland Texas and Las Cruces, New Mexico.
The Ridge is a novel where crime and evil clash with family, freindship and love.
It becomes a struggle between two men sperated by upbinging and moral values but drawn together in a final showdown of revenge and hate!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665574310

Tom Blenk

Tom Blenk is a retired postal worker from New Hampshire currently living in North Carolina. "The Ridge" is the first of two novels by Mr. Blenk, the second being "The King's Gambit" written in 2006. He lives with his wife of 52 years. He makes fudge part time at a friend's beach shop in Surf City North Carolina. In his spare time he runs a weekly trivia game at a local resturaunt, plays golf, and likes nothing better then spending time with friends and a little Captain Morgan by the firepit. Tom is a big sports and spends spare time watching and reading historical novels and documentries

Book preview

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Epilogue

CHAPTER 1

Mike Sullivan glanced at the revolving sign over carousel B.

—Flight 1175—

"Let the crowd gather, then move in," he said.

Sully glanced at the rest of his party. They could have been any group of friends returning from a vacation, but they had not been on flight 1175. The four men and two women were here for a pick-up.

A buzzer sounded and the bags started out of the chute.

Four golf bags and two duffel bags, Mike thought. Get the bags, get the van, and hit the road.

Sully stood 6’1" and weighed 225 pounds. Normally he dressed in jeans, sweatshirt and a baseball cap, but not today. Today he was playing the part of a golfer, wearing a polo shirt, shorts, and a straw hat to hide his shoulder length hair.

He had been in and out of jail since the age of thirteen, but if they could pull this off, he would be set for life. The payoff would be almost two million dollars. Just get the stuff to New Mexico and make the exchange.

The cocaine they were picking up was loaded in Columbia, South America. Despite intense screening in most cities around the world, cocaine is big business in Columbia and where there is big business, there is big money. And where there is big money people can be bought. Baggage handlers in Columbia are no different. Bribes are a way of life.

In the world of baggage claim, there are three distinctive groups of people. The first consists of one or more people who go directly to the opening where the bags originate and stay there until their bags pop out. They are in a hurry. Somehow, they believe proximity to the opening will hasten the arrival of their luggage. This of course is never happens.

The second scenario can also involve more than one person. This group arrives at any spot on the carousel to wait patiently until each bag comes around. This also is a flawed approach because patience disappears the moment the desired item or items appear. The subject immediately moves to the closest spot where they can elbow through their fellow travelers and grab the first item. This frantic action continues until all bags are secure.

The third group includes more than one traveler and they split the duties. In most cases, they are practical and in no particular hurry. They know the bags will arrive. They know they cannot hurry the process and they are content to wait. One or more people will stay with the group’s belongings while others travel back and forth until all bags can be retrieved.

Sully’s group fell into the third category, but they were not content and they were in a hurry. Sully stood off to one side with Donna and his sister, Caitlin while the other three men made trips back and forth to the revolving belt.

Come on. Let’s go, Sully muttered to himself. Why did it seem when you stood at one of these things your bags always came out last?

Caitlin walked around in front of her brother and sighed loudly momentarily distracting him. What the fuck is up with her?

Caitlin Sullivan, a slightly overweight, plain looking brunette, seemed older than her years. She stood wringing her hands and shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Her eyes darted from Sully, to Donna, to the baggage belt and back again. She had worked with him a dozen times before, but today she was driving him nuts. He stepped close and whispered.

What the hell is wrong with you? Will you take it easy?

Caitlin forced a smile. Ok! Ok! I’m just nervous, Sully.

They were not your ordinary brother and sister act.

Mike and Caitlin grew up in a two room walk up over a Chinese laundry on 115th Street in East Harlem. It was a family filled with poverty, alcoholism, drugs and abuse. Every early memory involved screaming matches between Rory and Angela Sullivan usually leaving Angela bowed and bloodied. The abuse did not end with their mother. Punishments were brutal for Mike Sullivan as a child and turned into evil enjoyment at the hands of his sadistic father into his teen years. For Caitlin, it was just as brutal but even more demeaning. The beatings started early on and the sexual abuse soon followed. Long before the young girl reached puberty Rory Sullivan had tired of his wife and on nights that he was too drunk to find a local street whore he dragged his young daughter to his bed. Angela Sullivan never dared say a word of protest. She much preferred the warm juice she stuck in her arm most nights which sent her to another world where the real world did not exist.

At the age of thirteen and eleven they finally caught a break. It was no great loss when Rory Sullivan drove his truck head-on into a telephone pole on New Year’s Eve, 1993. The cops said he was traveling at least eighty miles an hour, and his blood alcohol level was 2.1. They did not morn his passing but to say life improved would be a stretch. Angela Sullivan’s answer to her husband’s death was prostitution and more heroin. Selling her body was old news to Angela but now the money went directly to feed her addiction and not to her scumbag husband. Soon the state did her a huge favor. They took her children and put them in the system. Brother and sister moved from foster home to foster home and never saw their mother again. Caitlin took two things from her mother, she learned to use her body to get what she needed to survive and she learned to hide her pain in a haze of marijuana and cocaine. By the age of thirteen she was hooked on both, seemingly for life.

Mike Sullivan turned out much tougher, but not much better off. A series of petty crimes led to a juvenile felony conviction soon after his father’s death. He broke into a package store for a couple of bottles of booze long after closing time but as fate would have it the store manager was in the back office doing the books for the previous week. When he heard breaking glass, he came out to investigate armed with his favorite Louisville slugger. Sully might have fared better if he had not beaten the store manager half to death with the man’s own bat.

You can learn a lot in juvenile detention, and Sully paid attention. The Bergen county Juvenile detention facility in Teterboro, NJ is no different than most juvenile centers in this country. Abuse is rampant by both staff and prisoners. One thing he learned at the brutal hands of his father is that the strong survive and rule. He had no intention to ever be dominated by any man again. Sully was bigger and stronger than most and he soon had his own crew. His group of six or seven tough hard city kids answered to him and he kept them protected. His group traded protection for favors with other cliques to insure no interference from guards or inmates. They were young sex starved men with no women to satisfy them so they used the weaker boys. Sully had no interest but did nothing to stop the nightly carnage. If the others were too weak so be it.

Sully’s tribe included Robert Bo Boston. They were both inner city kids and hit it off right away. For whatever reason, Bo was the one person in the world that Sully trusted.

The three years passed quickly and Sully wasted little time resuming his life’s work. He quickly set up a new crew on the outside and spent the next few years selling drugs, pimping whores, and fronting one robbery after another. Car theft was a specialty and Sully’s chop shop was just starting to thrive when it all came crashing down. The drugged-out Puerto Rican with the stolen Mercedes turned out to be undercover and when Sully’s most reliable street lookout led the cop straight to the garage, followed by half the Upper East Side police force, he was back inside. Only this time it was not juvey it was a five-year stint in federal prison. He never finished that sentence. Some of the boys who had been there awhile decided to make Sully part of their stable of bitches He objected and when the dust cleared two were in the prison infirmary and one was dead. Sully was never bothered again but now he had a manslaughter charge and a fifteen to twenty stretch to pull.

He served the full fifteen and was hard as nails in every way when he got out. He had lived his young life in misery at his father’s hands and eighteen more incarcerated. He had educated himself in the prison library. He never missed a day in the weight room. And he got to know every prisoner who had certain criminal expertise. He had no intention of going back to prison. And he had no intention of going straight. He would seek out the best crew and wait. That’s when the call came from Richie.

Sully met Richie Gomez in 2005. Richie was in for armed robbery. He and his brother, Ron, robbed a deli on Seventy-Eighth Street. They got away with two hundred thirty bucks and some change. The cops were after them within hours. Ron Gomez slipped out of the city and headed for his uncle’s place in New Mexico. Richie was not so lucky. The cops showed up while he was still packing.

Six years later after being released from prison, he left New York to join his brother.

When Richie Gomez called, he had the deal Sully had been waiting all his life for. A deal worth millions. Gomez’s bosses needed someone to pick up drugs in New York and deliver them to New Mexico.

This is a good deal, Sully. You always talked about the big score. Well, this is it. What do you say? Richie said.

Sully said yes and called in his handpicked crew.

Bo was the best wheelman Sully knew. He could drive or fly anything that had a motor, and he loved the action. Bo had to be in.

Larry Webster, a tall, slightly built man, met Sully on Sully’s last trip to prison. Webster’s gambling habit kept him on the wrong side of the law. He took any bet offered, even the flip of a coin. He bet on college and pro sports, frequenting Vegas, Tahoe, and Atlantic City. Craps, poker, blackjack—it didn’t matter to Webster if there was a bet involved. Like most gamblers, he lost more than he won. He needed money to pay his debts and money to feed his addiction, leading to various run-ins with the law.

To Sully, it only mattered that Webster knew firearms. An expert marksman who could assemble and dismantle almost any weapon would be a good man to have on any job.

Jimmy Kann was big, scary, dangerous, and not too bright, but he was loyal. He would do what he was told while on the job. The problem with Jimmy was his penchant for women. Twice charged with rape and three times with assault, his lawyers had somehow kept him out of prison. Sully knew Kann had to be watched but he needed muscle and Kann was all of that.

Donna, Bo’s girlfriend, would be the other female in the group. They needed a second woman, and Bo wanted Donna. Donna was excited. She had been in plenty of tight spots in her call girl days, but this would be different. This, she decided, would be fun.

Sully glanced one more time around the baggage claim area of Kennedy Airport. There were three carousels: A, B, and C. Each one was surrounded by an assortment of people—families with kids, couples returning from vacation, and business travelers moving from one transaction to another.

He saw nothing out of the ordinary. Sully was not expecting any trouble, but over the years, he had become a very careful man.

Bo caught his attention. The bags were up.

Detective Collins looked like every other businessman in the baggage claim area. He wore a navy-blue suit with a laptop computer slung over his shoulder. Anyone watching him would see a man who was late and frustrated. He was talking loudly into his I-phone and the gist of the conversation made it obvious that he was late for an important meeting downtown. In reality, Collins was there solely to keep an eye on the four men and two women at carousel B.

When Sullivan and his crew had retrieved the golf bags and suitcases they headed straight for the elevators. Collins waited until they were out of sight and spoke one more time into his phone.

Frank, they’ve got the stuff and are headed your way. I’ll stay with them to the elevators, and then call you again, he said.

Collins pocketed his phone and started after the six suspects.

CHAPTER 2

Cal Mitchell wondered how he had gotten so old. He watched from the far side of the hangar as Jan, Chris, and Amy loaded the plane from the cargo hold door.

Jan can’t really be fifty, he thought. She doesn’t look a day over thirty. If she’s fifty then I’m forty-nine, and that can’t be! Of course, it is true both kids are over twenty-five, and we’ve been married for thirty years.

He was on his way to take a shower when he paused to watch Jan. A lot of men stopped to watch Jan Mitchell.

She wore jeans and a short-sleeved chamois shirt cut to her waist, accentuating her toned, athletic body. Her shoulder-length reddish brown hair was done up in a ponytail, making her look even younger.

Cal sighed and reached for his gym bag. He and Jan had certainly come a long way together.

He first saw her thirty-two years earlier at a high school football game in Connecticut. She caught his eye as he jogged off the field at the end of the game. Jan was beautiful in the red, white, and blue colors of the opposing team, and Cal knew he was in love. They met two days later, when he applied for a job as a busboy at a local restaurant where Jan was a waitress. That June they went to her senior prom, and as they say, The rest is history.

They were married right out of high school, in the summer of 1969, and decided that Jan would finish school first. Two things changed their plans and the rest of their lives. Cal was drafted in January of 1970, and two months later, Jan announced that she was pregnant. He shipped out in August, and the baby was born in December. Jan finished school and started to raise their daughter while he went to fight a war he knew nothing about in a place he had never heard of.

In February of 1973 he returned home—Captain Mitchell, commander of the most decorated Special Forces unit of the war. He led seventeen missions behind enemy lines, and he killed to stay alive and protect his men. He was awarded five combat citations, including the Medal of Honor. Like most men who have tasted the horrors of combat, Cal had no desire to relive it. He never talked about Vietnam, even to Jan. After a while, the nightmares went away.

Six months after his return, Cal got a call from Richard Ireland. Ireland, an Assistant Director with the CIA, was putting together an elite group of six men who