The Wizards 1: Combat Wizard

by Jack L Knapp

  Many find the process difficult, forging a new identity and gaining documentation. The process becomes easier when you can sense emotions, even thoughts, to an extent; when you know, with no doubt at all, that the person selling the documents is confident of their quality and not simply running a scam. You also realize very quickly whether the seller is a police informer on the side.

  The paperwork they acquired first would stand up to casual scrutiny but not an in-depth examination. It was a beginning. CWO Tagliaferro and LTC Schmidt vanished. Two chopped-up US Army ID cards became pieces dropped one at a time into trash bins. The temporary identities would serve while they looked for a source of better documents.

  Both had let their hair grow out, and T now had a scruffy beard. It didn’t make him look particularly handsome, but he was only one of many young men with such; the beard didn’t draw a second glance, and neither did he. As a couple, they appeared quite ordinary despite the age difference. That too wasn’t unheard of. The two found means of acquiring money...it's not difficult when you can sense thoughts, and Shezzie had become much more adept at TP than T was. If their attempts sometimes fell outside the law, T found no difficulty in accepting that; after a year in combat, seeing people killed and killing men himself, he was willing to ignore standards of behavior. Nonetheless, his peculiar ethic excluded violence, and in any case, he had no need for it. Short-term jobs in the underground economy worked just as well. If taxes weren't paid and licensing was ignored, such things barely crossed his mind.

  Better documents were acquired, including American passports, and these were reserved for the attempt to leave Britain.

  They departed from Heathrow three months later without incident and landed at New York's JFK airport. Once again, their documents attracted no attention, and the two took a cab into the city.

  #

  Another set of documents was acquired in New York, and this one would stand up to anything short of an in-person physical effort to break the fake identities they’d assumed. The documents include birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and legitimate Social Security numbers for each of them; the former owners wouldn’t need the identities. Short of contacting the few remaining relatives of the man and woman the documents described and doing a DNA comparison, there would be no questions asked. Fingerprints would not match, but neither of them expected their fingerprints to be taken. Should this happen, there were still ways of hampering a search; papers can vanish, electronic scanners suddenly stop working. Talent can be turned in a number of strange directions.

  Not even bodies remained of the persons who’d owned the identities the two had bought. Two fringe members of a crime organization had been found wanting, and when one of the organization’s associates owns a crematorium, making a body vanish is simple. Two such bodies had done so, piecemeal, the parts being slipped in with legitimate cremations.

  Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Berry took the Amtrak Crescent from New York to New Orleans.

  They’d tarried there and established an on-line banking account. A few days later, credit cards arrived and soon they bought a used car from a private citizen. He was truly sorry to see it go, but really did need the money. A pre-purchase inspection from a garage confirmed that this was indeed a car that would likely give good service. There were no major problems the seller hadn’t known about. The cash purchase meant that there would be no dealership records available should their latest identities ever be questioned. The vehicle was duly registered to Samuel Berry of New York, who presented a driver's license from that state when he paid the tax and transfer fee.

  The two intended to keep their current identities, but as a precaution they purchased others from different sellers. These would be kept in reserve, not used unless the first pair became compromised. When you're a fugitive, a healthy amount of paranoia is justified. The identities they'd used in Germany and in England had been destroyed; there was no paper trail remaining that linked them to two missing soldiers who'd vanished from a compound in Afghanistan.

  #

  From New Orleans they headed west. Two anonymous people took I-10 westward, through Houston, then through the empty high-desert of West Texas.

  T rented an apartment on El Paso’s west side, which gave them the chance to stop and look around. The funds they'd acquired in London and New York had become depleted, but short day trips put them into casinos in New Mexico. The casinos were owned by various tribes but managed by professionals; this made no difference. T played roulette, shot craps, and occasionally played poker. Their dwindling bank account was slowly restocked. Good citizens that they now were, they scrupulously ensured that taxes were paid on their winnings...at least on the larger ones. Smaller winnings got pocketed without a thought.

  T didn’t feel that he owed the government, the one represented by Henderson, any favors. The devices planted in his and Surfer’s necks, the casual assassination of the School’s graduates, the government’s attitude as expressed by treatment of soldiers and veterans of the Middle East wars, these things had not instilled loyalty; if anything, they had leached away what he'd felt before ever attending the School.

  They lost small amounts on some visits, won more than they’d lost on other visits. The money supply grew.

  The first bank account became a second one in a local credit union when the balance on deposit became large enough to possibly invite scrutiny; scrutiny from someone who might wonder where the money had come from. Reported winnings accounted for most of the money, but there was no sense taking chances.

  The two began looking for a place to use some of the money to acquire a more-permanent home. Shezzie now drove a used Subaru and T had swapped that first purchase in on a new Chevy pickup truck.

  #

  Surfer had maintained contact with the two of them while systematically eliminating his own trail of records and establishing a new identity. The three shared information as they learned to navigate among the sources that supplied easy money and illegal identities.

  California has a counterculture and it’s quite easy to disappear in it. Surfer bought a used van and simply failed to register the purchase. If the current driver of the van wasn’t the owner of record, no one in Surfer’s circle of acquaintances cared. Nor would officialdom, unless he somehow became a person of interest to the police, and he had no intention of doing that.

  From the suburbs of Los Angeles he’d gone south, acquiring pieces of camping gear here and there and living in the van. Fast food and an occasional meal at any of the variety of restaurant chains abounding in southern California provided for his needs. A stop at the bathroom before buying breakfast gave him a chance to clean up, even wash himself. Beachfront communities see many such young people drifting through, and Surfer was not remarkable. He met people, was friendly and gregarious, remained with small groups for a while, then moved on. He’d become known to the groups by a variety of names and nicknames and hadn’t needed papers of any kind; no one cared.

  He was scrupulous about not attracting attention, even though he still had his own set of original identity documents. But those papers would provide a trail if he used them, and he didn’t intend to leave one. By now, people from the agency would be looking for him, if for no other reason than the security clearance he'd had while working. Many of the communications that he'd handled were highly sensitive; should they become public, a number of things that the federal government hoped would remain secret would be compromised.

  The three, T, Shezzie, and himself, consulted with each other at least daily and swapped suggestions and guidance as needed. Surfer drove an anonymous van eastward from San Diego at the speed limit and paid cash for everything. He'd gotten the money in California, courtesy of some overconfident poker players. Playing poker, when one of the players can read minds, is no way to become rich...unless you’re the mind reader.

  He acquired a new identity in Phoenix, from a man who specialized in creating such for the document-less people who flooded through the state. />
  The man’s customers came from various countries throughout South and Central America. They passed through Mexico first, where a number of Mexicans joined the illegal flood, and from there they crossed the border into Arizona. The document provider had a network of trusted people who steered potential customers his way; they too found the extra income welcome.

  From that initial crossing point, the newly-documented spread throughout the US. Some of them now had paper identities that might not stand a close scrutiny, but would suffice to get a driver's license in New Mexico or Colorado. For those with sufficient money, better documents were available. For some, the journey ended in the border states, but others continued all the way to Canada. The Canadians, they had heard, had a much more relaxed attitude about people who'd entered the country in an irregular fashion.

  One more member of this human mass, Surfer’s old identity vanished and a new one appeared. The event attracted no notice.

  Only three people knew what had happened. The purveyors of illegal documentation knew they’d sold identities, just a few more among the thousands they’d provided to many other people. They were thoughtful people, the sellers, who’d seen what happened to careless vendors, and they soon erased any evidence that there’d been a transaction. So long as none of the buyers came to the attention of officialdom, they could live out their lives in anonymity.

  The van was still a problem, and it might lead authorities back to California and eventually to Surfer's original identity, the one that authorities would like very much to track down. But there was as solution to that.

  Surfer turned south at Deming and a few miles later crossed the border into Mexico, at the Palomas crossing, passing through the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, on the way. He parked the van on the main street a few blocks after entering Palomas and left the keys in the ignition when he went into a store for a few minutes. Unsurprisingly, the van was gone when he emerged. It would soon have different license plates and would become the possession of someone in Mexico, perhaps a smuggler. Smugglers like vans...and so do border patrol agents; they know that smugglers like vans.

  Surfer walked back across the border and waited until a middle-aged Hispanic couple emerged from the Palomas-Columbus checkpoint. Many such visit Mexico for healthcare and dental work. The trade has taken the place of tourism for some of the small towns, so seeing American citizens cross at Palomas is unremarkable. He simply asked the couple if they could give him a ride to Deming. The first ones had refused, but the second couple he’d asked had replied, “Sure, no problem. We’re going there.”

  They’d dropped him at the McDonald’s in Deming, and after a burger and soda he’d walked to the bus depot. A Greyhound bus took him to El Paso, and T met him at the bus station on the south side of the city.

  The duo, soon a trio when Shezzie joined them, merged into the population.

  Many transients pass through El Paso, a few remain behind, and soon three more joined the stream.

  No one noticed.

  Part Two: Fugitive

  Chapter Eleven

  Ray Wilson sorted out his books and the written material he’d been working on and put them into the daypack. Shouldering the small pack, he locked the doors of his XC 70, then folded the key into its slot; Volvo includes the fold-in key as a part of the remote control unit. He pocketed the remote and headed off to class.

  The Volvo had been a gift he made to himself after retiring. It was luxurious by his standards but not outrageously expensive, and Volvo had a reputation for durability and safety. It was easy on gas if you didn’t push the pedal through the floor. It was also peppy, very peppy when he felt a need for speed. Turbo lag? He’d never noticed it, if indeed it was there at all.

  Spring was Ray’s favorite time of year. The weather was warm, not yet the full heat of summer, but still warm enough for the girls to begin stripping off the heavy clothes of winter. Shorts and T-shirts were common on campus, and Ray had an eye for legs; boobs, too, if they weren’t overly large. The observing was good, even very good, from time to time.

  He often got lunch from the cafeteria in the Student Union Building. The lunches were OK, and the other students in the SUB improved the atmosphere quite a bit. Like the judicious dash of Tabasco that he’d learned to appreciate eating field rations, the people in the SUB made eating less of a chore, more of a pleasure.

  Ray was something of a loner, more observer than participant socially. He had made no close friends despite the fact that there was a large group of veterans attending classes. They were outwardly like Ray in many ways and some of them shared his own experiences, at least in part. Others had been infantrymen or cavalry troopers and had come back to Fort Bliss to leave the service after their term of active duty was finished, or to retire. El Paso had a large community of military retirees. Many of them enrolled at the University of Texas at El Paso, using their GI Bill entitlements, as Ray himself had done.

  Once, they might have been air defense soldiers, but not now. Fort Bliss had changed. The desert ranges that had provided the necessary open space to fire Nike Ajax, Nike Hercules, Hawk, and later Patriot missiles, had proved to be good training grounds for warriors who would fight in the Middle East.

  #

  The ranges had seen considerable history.

  Explorers had arrived and taken up land in the time when the native Navajos and Apaches raided the valleys from mountain strongholds. Spanish settlers had arrived first and farmed the lands along the streams; later had come the prospectors and drifting Texans to establish their mines and ranches. Regardless of their origin or motivation, the newcomers had fought for what they had taken. They’d defended their possession of the harsh land they had grown to love, some of the time by legal methods, occasionally by means that didn’t quite fit that narrow definition.

  Billy the Kid had ridden those historic ranges. Pat Garrett had pursued him across the empty landscape and finally killed him just a few miles away. Garrett had himself been killed in turn, while riding back from a ranch he’d taken up.

  That happening, among others, had never been satisfactorily explained. People even today didn’t like to talk about it; memories are old, and families of the participants still live in the nearby towns. It was all part of the history of west Texas and the Tularosa Basin.

  The land had in turn been taken from the owners during the Second World War. Some of their descendants had been trying to reclaim it ever since, but the government still needed a place where airplanes could practice bombing and strafing without worrying about cows grazing. Or cowboys herding the cows, for that matter.

  The ranges now extended across enough territory to be considered states in the Northeast. White Sands Missile Range and the nearby Albuquerque bombing range were there too, not adjoining Fort Bliss’ ranges, but nearby. The first atomic bomb had been detonated in a deserted part of what was now the White Sands Missile Range.

  Fort Bliss, home to horse cavalrymen, then to air defense missilemen, had now become home to desert warriors. Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Stryker armored vehicles, all roamed the vast ranges of West Texas and New Mexico as their operators acquired the specialized knowledge for using and maintaining armored vehicles in the desert. Crews learned how to use the sparsely-vegetated terrain for concealment; the knowledge would serve them well in the deserts of the Middle East.

  Many of those desert-war veterans now wanted nothing so much as a chance to forget those past deployments. Certainly they didn’t feel the urge to talk about their time in service. They tended to be quiet, and like Ray himself, loners. Now they worked at school, just as they’d learned to work at soldiering in a harsh environment. Most were excellent students, more dedicated to learning than those who’d come directly to college from high school.

  #

  El Paso was a military-friendly city, bustling with energy and development. It had long been a contact point for trade with Mexico, and the cross-border trade was booming now.

 
; Some of the trade was even legitimate. There were a number of warehouses along the south side of the city that stored goods under bond and held them for eventual transshipment around the country. NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, had opened up Ciudad Juarez to manufacturing, and a number of multinational companies had taken advantage of the cheap labor available in Mexico.

  Some of the trade was less legal. Drugs and people without documentation also flowed across the border here, as well as across the borders of California, New Mexico, and Arizona. The international border was better sealed now than had been the porous fiction of a few years ago; the improvements slowed, but never stopped, the illegal crossings.

  Ray had crossed the border once, only once, after returning from his final overseas posting. Once was enough. He had left one war zone; he didn’t need to go visit another one, even if the war in Juarez was between drug gangs and Mexican troops. Or drug gang and drug gang, or drug gangsters and the gangs from south El Paso who had begun working with the wealthier, better-organized gangs in Mexico.

  Some of the gangsters were getting rich, but some were getting dead. Ray had decided they could do that without his help, and without him, perhaps, getting caught up in the gunfights. Mexican cops and courts were notoriously harsh on gringos who got caught carrying a gun across the border. The drug gangsters already had guns, plenty of them. The guns used by the narco gangs were of heavy caliber and were often military-grade, but Mexico didn’t want foreigners carrying guns, even small ones intended for personal defense.

  Ray sometimes thought that perhaps the tourists were the only ones unarmed over there. So no, it was not a place for him to visit. Being the unarmed bystander when a gunfight broke out was a poor plan for maintaining one’s future health.

  He had found that a few of the professors he’d met were people he could talk to. Students, the ones who were fresh high school graduates, had little in common with Ray or the other former soldiers. The soldiers didn’t want to make friends, and most were married people who left class and went home. But many of the professors and instructors were interested in students, especially students who participated in class and really worked at learning. The professors watched for people like Ray and encouraged them.