Hostile Borders

by Dennis Chalker

  “And just where is the O.K. Corral anyway?

  “Right there across the street,” Hausmann said pointing. “That’s it behind that fence. That’s why they call this restaurant the O.K. Cafe, it’s not thirty yards from the corral.”

  There were several tables outside the cafe and sitting at one of them in the shade of a tree was a young man wearing a white Stetson hat and dark sunglasses. He stood up as Hausmann and Reaper approached. He was about medium height and slender, wearing denim jeans and a light-colored shirt.

  “Hey, Pat,” Hausmann said as he extended his hand, “good to see you again.”

  “Same here, Cowboy,” Manors said using Hausmann’s nickname. “So this is your SEAL buddy? A long way from water, guy.”

  “Ted Reaper,” Reaper said as he shook hands with Manors. “As long as there’s ice to cool the beer, I’m close enough to water.”

  Small talk continued as the men sat down and took a look through the menus. When the waitress came out to take their orders, Reaper passed on the famous O.K. buffalo burger and just went with a standard hamburger and fries. He felt he had probably done the right thing when Hausmann and Manors both ordered the same.

  “Nah,” Hausmann said, “I just like their hamburgers.”

  “Their breakfasts are pretty darn good, too,” Manors said.

  They continued to talk about nothing very important until their food had arrived and they ate. There were no other customers at the sidewalk tables and few pedestrians were walking past. The trio had sufficient privacy to talk about more serious subjects while they were leaning over their coffee. Manors sat quietly listening while Hausmann brought him up to speed on the situation. Reaper filled in the detail about what happened the night before, after Hausmann had been injured.

  “So you had a run-in with some kind of armed coyotes the other night?” Manors said.

  “Not quite a run-in,” Hausmann said, “more of an out-and-out ambush. And these guys weren’t like any coyotes I ever heard of. They weren’t guiding a bunch of illegals through the desert, or escorting some drug mules. They were moving in to set up an ambush—specifically for me. And the evidence looks like this might be the same bunch who hit Sam Duran last night.”

  “I sure wouldn’t mind nailing the bastards who took Sam down,” Manors said. “You know the department is writing it off as a drug hit? They figure it was either a falling out among thieves, or a payback for all of the trouble that came down on the border after Langstrom was killed.”

  “There’s not much question the men we’re after were at least involved in Sam’s murder,” Hausmann said, “they were carrying his address as well as mine.”

  “And they had a newspaper picture showing both Hausmann and Duran,” Reaper said as he pulled the clipping from his shirt pocket. “This thing had all the earmarks of a military ambush, including the use of only military weapons and ammunition.”

  “Sounds like you folks ran into some Mexican military types working for the wrong side,” Manors said. “That isn’t all that new, I’m afraid. Rogue Mexican military units have been renting out troops as drug escort guards for years now. It’s really bad along some parts of the border.”

  “This hasn’t been something that’s made the press very much,” Reaper said. “And there has been almost nothing reported about it in DEA and intelligence reports about the border.”

  “No one back in D.C. wants to make this a major diplomatic incident,” Majors said. “Most of the time, any reports about Mexican military units crossing over into the United States seem to get squashed long before anyone important reads them. And the DEA doesn’t want to rock the boat by demanding any action. And they sure as heck don’t saddle up and ride out into the desert where they could meet these guys face-to-face.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of love lost between the DEA and the men on the ground in the Border Patrol,” Reaper said.

  “The DEA? For the most part we hate them,” Manors said. “I don’t know any agents who like them at all. It seems that they mess with us every chance they get. I’ll give you an example. The DEA is supposed to have all of this intel available to them. A Border Patrol agent, a close friend of mine, was driving down the road and saw this horse trailer heading on down the way. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about the trailer just didn’t seem right to him.

  “Something just wasn’t hitting him right about that trailer, and then he finally figured it out. So he pulled over the trailer and went up to talk to the driver. Now, the driver was just sitting there, he had a ball cap on, mustache, looked like he lived in the local area. That was just the wrong combination, this guy should not be driving this truck.

  “When my friend asked the driver if he minded if he looked in the trailer, then the guy got nervous and a little belligerent. So he took the guy out of the truck and cuffed him. In the trailer was 3,800 pounds of marijuana, a whole trailer load, one of the biggest ones we ever had.

  “So here’s this Border Patrol agent, just doing what he’s doing, going by a hunch—and he really did take it seriously, he’s a good agent. The DEA comes in and they wanted to claim the load.”

  “So there’s no love lost between the Border Patrol and the DEA?” Reaper said.

  “I will tell you,” Manors said, “and any Border Patrol agent will say the same thing, a huge percentage of the DEA’s local narcotics seizures are ours. If I was to just pull a number out of my hat, I would say that 80 percent of their numbers belong to us. We do the seizing, and they get the numbers.

  “There was a time when a group of us walked more than 350 pounds of marijuana out of the desert. It took something like ten hours to get all of it out. There was no way to get anything on wheels in there and we didn’t have a helicopter to fly it out. So we packed it out on our backs.

  “After we got in, it was put in the station. All of us were pretty dusty and dirty, but we took the time to take a bunch of hoo-rah pictures standing around the seizure. Then the DEA came down and got out of their air-conditioned trucks. One DEA agent was here, and another in the back. It looked like they were setting up some protective detail for some super-important person, at our station.

  “And they were all wearing their little fag-bags right up front, the fanny packs that go around the waist. Those things just aren’t cool out here. They denote you as someone who just doesn’t know any better, and around here that means FBI or DEA.

  “And they took the marijuana, claimed it for their own right there in our station. And we hadn’t even cleaned up yet after packing it in on our backs. That one pissed off a bunch of us. So you could say there isn’t the best working relationship between most of the agents in the Border Patrol and the DEA.

  “But Sam Duran was never like that,” Hausmann said. “He never became the kind of bureaucrat who looked at just the numbers over the people. That’s why the higher-ups in the DEA always had a case of the ass against him.”

  “I never heard about his career problems in the DEA,” Manors said, “but you’re right about things being a hell of a lot different with how he operated. Duran always made sure that the men who did the work got the credit. It didn’t make him the most popular man with the bean counters back in D.C. Those guys just live to count the numbers, that’s all that means anything to them. Bigger numbers for their agencies meant more money coming their way.

  “No, none of the DEA supervisors were very happy with Sam not making sure that their agency got the credit for all of the seizures that it could. But he was so good at working undercover and pulling in the big busts that they couldn’t do anything to him. His seizure and conviction rates were so high just because of his own work that he didn’t need to steal anything from any of us just to puff himself up. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, knew the area up and down the border as well as anyone, and could ride a horse without falling off—not something a hell of a lot of DEA agents can do. When Sam Duran retired last year, he was on the books as one of the most s
uccessful agents of all time down in Mexico.

  “Then he came out here, back where he grew up on the ranch. Victor Langstrom knew him back in the days when they were kids together climbing around the hills along the border. They both could speak Spanish like a native, that was one of the things that made them both so successful at what they did. But a whole lot of people could never get past Duran’s background as a DEA agent.

  “Some of that was just because of what I told you with the DEA doing what they do. Other law enforcement agents, and quite a few prosecutors, just can’t believe that a man can be as successful an undercover agent as Duran was without some dirt rubbing off on him.

  “Victor Langstrom was my mentor. I loved that man like a father. No one wants to nail his killer more than I do. But he personally vouched for Sam Duran and that was good enough for me. That case they had against Sam never did make any sense to me. And I don’t blame you,” Manors said as he nodded at Hausmann, “for it falling apart.”

  As he leaned back in his seat, Hausmann looked down at his coffee cup in quiet silence for a moment.

  “It strikes me,” Hausmann said, “that if anyone was willing to go through all of the trouble that it took to try and frame a man like Sam Duran, they would still have a serious case of the ass against him after he slipped out of their trap. They killed a federal agent, a Border Patrol agent, and that brought all kinds of hell down on the border.”

  “I know for a fact,” Manors said, “that every Border Patrol agent for a hundred miles in any direction showed up here. It was when they couldn’t find any other suspects that they came down so hard on Sam Duran.”

  “Then those same people,” Reaper said, looking pointedly at Hausmann, “would probably be seriously pissed off at whoever it was that wrecked their frame-up of Duran.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Hausmann agreed.

  “Sounds like you two are thinking along the same lines,” Manors said. “Do you have a plan together yet? And just what part did you have me playing in it?”

  “Just to use some of your skills, really,” Reaper said. “Hausmann told me that you were one of the best trackers he knows.”

  “I don’t know about being the best,” Manors said, “but I’ve had my share of practice. Illegals don’t just walk along the roads around here.”

  “Well,” Reaper said, “it’s not exactly people we need you to help track.”

  Filling Manors in on what they had found earlier that afternoon, Reaper and Hausmann told him about the footprints and the blood trail ending at the tire tracks.

  “And you figure those vehicles were some kind of dune buggies or ATVs?” Manors asked.

  “They definitely had four tires,” Reaper said. “So they weren’t some kind of dirt bikes.”

  “The tire tracks had very deep tread marks,” Hausmann said. “They could have been dune buggies. Why? Is that important?”

  “It could be,” Manors said. “Dirt bikes would be a lot easier to take across the desert and still stay hidden. And crossing the border with them would be easier as well. But injured men would have a real hard time riding one, especially across country.

  “Dune buggies and ATVs are a lot bigger than bikes. That makes them a heck of a lot harder to hide when you cross the open desert, even at night. And Border Patrol agents are keeping a careful eye out for cross-country vehicles this close to the border. Your place is what, twelve miles from the border?”

  “Almost thirteen miles as the crow flies,” Hausmann said.

  “That’s a heck of a long way to travel in any kind of ATV,” Manors said, “especially if you’re traveling at night and trying to hide. That means no lights and a real familiarity with the area. There’s also several roads they would have to cross between your ranch and the border. Roads mean fences on either side so cutting through them would make another obstacle to slow them up, plus it would make an obvious trail to anyone just driving along the road. ATVs and dune buggies are pretty big, so there are relatively few places they could cross over with something that size. And they aren’t big enough to do a drive-through.”

  “A drive-through?” Reaper asked.

  “Yeah, those used to happen all of the time,” Manors said. “They became pretty common after 9/11, that’s when we lost a lot of agents transferring over to other agencies. In a typical drive-through, the Mexican drug cartels would run two to three vehicles right through the fence, just bust right through. We’re talking new GM 2002 Suburbans, white ones with antennas on them. That way they would look like customs vehicles. Most of them were stolen from Phoenix and other places, so the expense wasn’t too bad for the cartels.

  “They would have their own scouts out, looking for us watching for them. I can tell you right now that they have their own sensors on our side of the border. I’ve been told that the cartels have hired Mexican Special Forces soldiers who have been trained in our military schools to go in and find our bugs and map them. Then they would put in their own sensors.

  “When they’re pushing hard drugs, cocaine and such, on a run, they would have as many as fifteen or twenty scouts along the highway. They had their own codes they would use on their cell phones to stay in touch.

  “But the drivers of the vehicles weren’t anything like the kind of people you’re talking about. These guys were all kinds of hopped up on drugs, speed usually. They would drive right through our spike strips along the road. But they usually can’t cross the border both ways. A drive-through is a one-pass deal to bring drugs across.”

  “So you don’t think the guys we ran into came from Mexico?” Reaper said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Manors said. “But I do think they would have to have help on this side of the border to appear and disappear the way you said they did. It would have to be something a lot more organized than your usual coyote running a bunch of illegal migrant workers along the river.”

  “So,” Hausmann said, “do you think you can help us follow those tracks we found?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Manors said. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else right now. Seems that my CO and I have had a bit of a disagreement on the outcome of a certain case a short while back. Now I’m on administrative leave pending the results of a board of inquiry—something about charges of insubordination and whatnot. I’m still a Border Patrol agent, but that may change in the near future. Looks like I won’t have a career or a pension to worry about for much longer, so I would be glad to help you.

  “Besides,” Manors said as a nasty smile spread across his face, “it sounds like whoever is chasing you just may be a good lead to Langstrom’s killers—those are some people I would surely like to meet under the right circumstances.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early that evening Reaper was sitting at the table in the dining room at the ranch, going over topographical maps of the area. He intended to be as familiar as he could be with the place before they went out that night. From where they were lying on the floor, the rottweilers suddenly alerted, both dogs sitting up and turning their heads in the direction of the gate. Getting up, both big black dogs silently trotted off to the pool room. Still lying on the floor, Jarhead lifted his massive head and cocked it, listening for something.

  The sudden noise of the rotts’ barking told Reaper that someone was at the gate. Before he could get up from where he was sitting, Hausmann was already on his way to quiet the dogs down and let the person in. A few minutes later, Hausmann came back into the main area of the house with Pat Manors walking along behind him. Poking their broad muzzles at the new arrival, both dogs’ short stub tails wagging violently, the rottweilers intended that Manors was going to give them their share of attention.

  Dressed in a set of khaki pants and workshirt, Manors had his duty belt secured around his waist. On the belt was a Beretta 92-F 9mm pistol secured in a Bianchi Model 99A holster at his right side. On the left side of his belt, Manors had a double magazine pouch for the Beretta hanging behind a SureFire Z2 comb
at light slipped into a tactical holster.

  Slung from his shoulder, Manors was carrying a 12-gauge Benelli M3 Super 90 pump/auto shotgun set up with a pistol-grip stock and ghost ring sights. The fore end of the shotgun was a SureFire 6V tactical weapon light with a built-in flashlight sticking forward underneath the barrel. On the left side of the shotgun’s receiver was a Tac-Star sidesaddle shell holder with six black-cased rounds of ammunition slipped into the slots.

  The white Stetson he had been wearing at the O.K. Cafe that afternoon was set firmly on his head. Shining on the breast of his shirt was the badge of a Border Patrol agent. Manors looked the picture of a modern Western police officer and Reaper figured that this was just the man’s normal appearance.

  “Looks like you’re about ready to take on anything we could run into out there,” Reaper said.

  “No need going out unprepared,” Manors said. “Those folks you ran into last night are probably long gone, but they may have some friends still hanging around.”

  “We’ll have to lock the dogs in tonight,” Hausmann said as he walked into the room behind Manors. “I don’t particularly want them following us on this trip. Besides, there’s no way of telling how far we’ll have to travel.”

  “So we’ll take the Prowlers?” Reaper said.

  “Those buggies out in the yard?” Manors said. “That sounds good to me, depending on how far we have to go. They look open enough that you could spot sign from them easily enough.”

  “These are small vehicles we’re going to be following,” Reaper said as he got up from the table. “They should leave a trail obvious enough that we won’t have to work too hard to follow it.”

  “So you just asked me to the party for my pretty face,” Manors said with a grin. “Or could it be that you need a Border Patrol agent who can go onto private property to follow a trail and not get charged with trespassing?”