When they were all seated, Morgan looked over at Holland and said, “I didn’t catch your name.”
“John Holland. State Department.”
She looked a little impressed by that. Garza got the feeling it was the first time she had been impressed by anything here in Texas.
Saul Jimenes introduced himself as well and then said, “We were just talking about Los Lobos de la Noche.”
“What’s that?”
Quickly, Garza went over the same explanation he and Jimenes had given Holland concerning the Night Wolves. He concluded by asking, “No offense, Agent Morgan, but how long have you been working in the San Antonio office?”
“Since last week,” Morgan snapped. “If that’s your way of telling me that I’m not up to speed, Sheriff, I promise you, I’m well aware of it.”
“It’s just that we’ve had a combined federal and state task force working in this area for quite a while now, trying to interdict the drug traffic—”
“The Rio Grande Ambush,” Morgan said. “I’ve heard of it, of course. How many men were killed?”
“All of them but one,” Holland said grimly.
The repercussions of that terrible night three months earlier had been felt all the way to Washington, D.C. Heads had rolled, figuratively, in the DEA, which had had the primary responsibility for setting up the operation that had backfired and gotten several dozen men killed. It had been one of the darkest times for law enforcement in recent years, and the whole thing was made even worse by the knowledge that someone connected with the task force—someone who was supposed to be one of the good guys—had to have betrayed them and tipped off the cartel about what was supposed to go down.
Cross and double cross, Garza thought, and in the end good men had died. Some of them, he knew, had been friends of Rodgers from the Rangers. The youthful-looking lawman’s face had grown grim at the reminder.
“So this Night Wolf gang was connected with that debacle?” Morgan asked.
Garza didn’t correct her about the status of the Night Wolves. He said, “The lone survivor of the ambush reported that the leader of the Night Wolves, Colonel Alfonso Guerrero, was there that night.”
“Colonel?” Holland repeated. “Am I to understand that this is a military unit of some sort?”
“That’s how they started out,” Jimenes said.
“What’s really bad,” Rodgers said quietly, “is that we trained a lot of them right here on American soil ... including Guerrero.”
Morgan frowned and said, “You’re going to have to explain that.”
“Some years ago, the Mexican army decided to form a special unit to deal with drug smuggling and gang violence along the border,” Garza said. “They recruited some of the best men from within their ranks and put together ... I guess you could call it a commando group. And they made arrangements with our military and the Drug Enforcement Agency to bring them over to the States and give them the special training they needed.”
“But these men worked against the drug trade, you said.”
Garza nodded. “For a while. They even did some damage to the cartels. Then some of the drug lords got the bright idea that it would be easier to buy the commandos off, rather than fighting them.”
“They deserted from the Mexican Army?” Morgan asked.
“That’s right. This Colonel Guerrero was in charge of the unit. The largest cartel got to him first, and when he went over to their side, his junior officers went, too, and then the rest of the group. They deserted en masse about five years ago. Since then they’ve recruited other members from the cartel and have trained them in the commando tactics they use.”
“It sounds like you know a lot about them, Sheriff.”
Holland spoke up. “It’s my understanding that the DEA has been able to infiltrate agents into the cartels to provide intelligence.”
“That’s right,” Garza said. “As a matter of fact, we know quite a bit about the Night Wolves. But knowing what they do and being able to stop it are two different things.”
“You had no idea they were going to attack that school bus and kidnap those girls?”
Garza shook his head. “None at all.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I have all my available manpower searching throughout the county for any sign of them,” Garza said.
Jimenes added, “And my men are sweeping Laredo.”
“And the Rangers are standing by to help in the search,” Rodgers said.
Morgan looked around at the men. “But what if they’re not on this side of the border anymore? What if they’ve crossed into Mexico?”
Garza felt a little sick to his stomach as he said, “Then we’ll have to rely on the Mexican police and military to find them.”
“We can’t intrude on their jurisdiction or interfere with their internal affairs,” Holland said quickly. “The secretary made that quite clear when I spoke to him on the phone from the helicopter.”
“Can the Mexican authorities be trusted?” Morgan asked.
Garza, Jimenes, and Rodgers exchanged uneasy looks. After an awkward moment of silence, Garza said, “Some of them are honest. But they’ve got their work cut out for them. There have been five different chiefs of police in Nuevo Laredo in the past eighteen months.”
“What, they keep quitting because the job’s so hard?”
“They keep getting killed,” Jimenes said. “The cartels place bounties on the heads of honest policemen, and the Night Wolves are happy to collect.” He grunted. “I’ve been told by informants that Phil and I both have targets on our backs, too, but nobody’s come after us yet.”
“They want to assassinate American officers, too?” Morgan sounded as if she could hardly believe that. “What is this, a goddamn war zone?”
“I think you’re beginning to understand the problem, Agent Morgan,” Garza said softly.
Six
That ride in the back of the pickup was the most hellish experience so far in Laura’s young life. Crowded in so that there was no room to move, no light except that which filtered in around the edges of the tarp, incredible heat and not enough air. Most of the girls were crying, too. Laura felt like some sort of animal that had been herded into a truck to be carried off to the slaughterhouse.
She could only pray that wouldn’t wind up being her fate.
Every time she closed her eyes she saw again that horrible moment when the man called Guerrero had lifted his rifle and fired almost point-blank at Sister Katherine. His face had held no emotion at all when he pulled the trigger. It was as hard and cold as stone. Laura could barely believe that he was Angelina Salinas’s father.
And yet Angelina had called him “Daddy,” and Guerrero had acted toward her with a certain solicitousness that could be regarded as paternal. Even though Laura had gone to school with Angelina for five years—Angelina had started at Saint Anne’s during sixth grade—she didn’t know that much about the other girl’s family life. She had seen Angelina’s mother, an attractive, somewhat tense woman, at numerous school functions, but now that she thought about it, Laura couldn’t remember ever seeing Angelina’s dad.
Evidently, there had been a good reason for his absence from Angelina’s life. One of her comments had made it sound like her mother had a restraining order against him, or something like that.
But as Guerrero had put it, what did gringo law mean to him?
To keep her mind off the physical ordeal, Laura forced herself to think. If the kidnappers demanded ransom, could her mother pay? Kelly Simms made a decent, upper-middle-class living as a lawyer, but she wasn’t filthy rich by any means. And the medical bills from her late husband’s illness had been significant, even with insurance covering some of them. If the kidnappers demanded some ungodly amount for Laura’s safe return—a million dollars, say, or even half a million—Kelly probably wouldn’t be able to come up with it.
And would it matter even if she did? A lot of times, Laura recalled, kidnappers killed
their victims almost right away, even before ransom demands were made, just to simplify things for themselves. It was entirely possible that Guerrero and his men would take the girls out somewhere in the Mexican desert and murder all of them, then leave their bodies there for the buzzards and the coyotes. The thought made her shudder.
Somebody clutched at her, and instinctively Laura tensed to fight back if she was attacked. But it was only Shannon. The redhead pressed her face against Laura’s shoulder and sobbed. “Oh, Laura, what’s going to happen to us? What are they going to do to us?”
Probably kill us all, Laura thought, but she didn’t say that because she didn’t want Shannon wailing in her ear. Instead, she said, “We’ll be fine. They wouldn’t dare hurt us.”
“They ... they killed Sister Katherine! They’d do anything! They’re evil bastards!”
Laura couldn’t argue with that, and it wouldn’t do any good to point out that Shannon hadn’t thought the young men were so bad when she was waving and flashing her tits at them.
It was hard to tell time under such miserable conditions, but Laura thought at least an hour had passed since the attack on the school bus. The pickup had turned several times and she had no idea what direction they were going now. Sometimes from the sound of the tires, it seemed like they were on rough gravel roads. At other times, the pickup bounced across open ground and brush scraped against the side. Finally, the truck turned again and the ride grew smoother, and from the hum of the tires Laura could tell that they were on a paved road again.
The ride was fairly short from there. The pickup turned and rattled across something that Laura tentatively identified as a cattle guard. The road was no longer paved, but it wasn’t too rough, either. A dirt road, then, instead of gravel. The dust that rose from the wheels and seeped into the pickup bed through small openings, making some of the girls cough, confirmed the guess.
With a squeal of brakes, the pickup rocked to a halt. Most of the girls who were crying sniffled, wiped the backs of their hands across their noses, and swallowed any further sobs. An air of tension and dread spread swiftly through the prisoners. The long ride had been miserable enough, but now that they had stopped, there was no telling what their captors would do next.
Laura heard the men moving around at the side of the pickup and squeezed her eyes shut. Sure enough, the bungee cords were unfastened and the tarp thrown back, and blinding sunlight hammered down, bringing gasps from a few of the girls.
The light that came through her eyelids had been bright enough to force her eyes to start adjusting, so she was able to see a little. The pickup was parked inside some sort of courtyard with high adobe walls around it. The sound of an electric motor caught her attention, and she looked around to see a heavy wooden gate sliding shut. Men who held automatic rifles stood next to the gate. There was a guard post on top of the wall where several other men were stationed, and what looked to Laura’s inexperienced eyes like a heavy machine gun was mounted there.
They were in a fortress of some sort.
Four pickups were parked in the courtyard, the two containing the prisoners and two more full of the men who had captured them. They had taken their hoods off and didn’t seem to care that their faces were exposed to the prisoners. Laura didn’t know if that was a good sign—or a bad one.
A couple of men unlatched the tailgates and lowered them, then stepped back and brandished their weapons. “Get out,” one of the men ordered in Spanish.
Slowly, shakily, the girls began to climb out of the pickups. They had been crowded in so tightly that some of them had trouble standing now on legs that had gone to sleep. The girls around them had to grasp their arms and hold them up.
Laura slid out of the truck and stood with Shannon, Billie Sue, Aubrey, Carmen Hinajosa, and Stacy Wells. None of them were what could be called good friends with each other, Laura thought. Shannon was a slut, Billie Sue and Aubrey were obsessed with clothes and makeup and things like that, Carmen hung with the other Latinas and played soccer, and Stacy was black and usually kept to herself, pretty much like Laura did. The fact that they were grouped together now was pure chance. Most of the girls were huddled together in bunches of six or eight.
Some of the gun-wielding men lined up facing each other, forming a path of sorts that led to a wooden door in the far wall of the courtyard. One of the men opened the door while another man gestured with his rifle and said gutturally, “In there.”
The girls closest to the door hesitated, and Laura couldn’t blame them. The opening was dark and scary and there was no way of knowing where it led. It wouldn’t be someplace good, though, that was pretty sure. But when their captors scowled and raised the guns a little, the girls marched forward reluctantly, between the two rows of men and through the dark door.
When it came time for Laura and the girls with her, they had no choice but to go.
Actually, getting out of the blazing sun was a relief of sorts, she discovered as she moved into a corridor with arched doorways on both sides. Those openings had doors with iron bars on them, and the men herded the girls into the cells on the other side of the barred doors, one group of six or eight into each chamber.
Laura sensed an air of antiquity about this place, as if it had been here for a couple of hundred years or more. The thick adobe walls kept the air cool inside. The only windows were narrow and also blocked by iron bars. As they moved into their cell, Laura realized that the room reminded her of the small chambers in old missions she had visited, the rooms where priests had once lived.
There were no men of God here in this place today. Men of the Devil, more likely.
They slammed the barred doors shut. Laura could look across the corridor and see some of the other girls in an identical cell. The room where she and her companions were measured about twelve by twelve feet. One wall had a barred window in it, but it was too high to reach. Six rolled-up sleeping bags were propped in a corner. The only other furnishing was a large wooden bucket, and Laura felt queasy as she realized what it was there for.
Shannon went to the door, clutched the bars, and called, “Hey! Hey, you can’t keep us locked up like this!” Laura wasn’t sure where she found the courage to do something like that. Maybe anger was finally overcoming her fear.
Laura was mad, too, but she didn’t have the nerve to challenge their captors like that.“You guys better let us out of here,” Shannon went on. “You’re gonna be in a shitload of trouble.”
“Shannon,” Laura said, “maybe you’d better be quiet... .”
Too late. One of the men sauntered over to the door, smiled through the bars at Shannon, and then pointed his rifle at her. She recoiled, backing away from the door so fast that she lost her balance, tripped, and sat down hard on the concrete floor.
“Stop your chirping, little redbird,” he said to Shannon in English. “A bird that sings too much becomes annoying.” He held up his left hand, loosely clenched. “A bird in the hand is soon silenced.”
He closed his hand into a hard fist. Shannon gulped. The man’s meaning was unmistakable.
He laughed and stepped away from the door. The men moved off down the corridor, talking quietly among themselves and occasionally laughing. Laura could make out some of the words, but not enough to get any real sense of the conversation.
Anyway, they were probably talking about what was going to happen to the prisoners, and Laura wasn’t sure she wanted to know. They would find out soon enough.
Shannon climbed to her feet and rubbed both hands on her butt, which was probably bruised from sitting down so hard on the concrete. “What the hell is this place, anyway?” she muttered.
“It looks like part of an old mission,” Carmen said, echoing the same thought that had occurred to Laura earlier. “At one time these were probably the priests’ cells.”
Shannon frowned. “The old priests were kept locked up?”
“That’s just what they called them,” Laura said. “Those barred doors were probably added la
ter.” Carmen nodded in agreement.
“What are they going to do to us?” Billie Sue Cahill suddenly asked in a voice that shook with hysteria. “Are they going to rape us?”
None of the other girls answered her. That fear of being raped had been there all along in each of them, right along with the fear of being killed.
Into the tense silence, Laura finally said, “I don’t think they’re going to do anything to us right now except keep us prisoner. They put sleeping bags in here for us. That means we’ll be here for a while.”
“They could still rape us,” Billie Sue said.
“They could, but it might make it more difficult for them to collect ransom for us.”
“Is that why they grabbed us?” Shannon asked.
Laura shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. But there are kidnappings for ransom all the time in Nuevo Laredo. They’re in the paper nearly every day.”
“We weren’t in Nuevo Laredo,” Stacy said, speaking up for the first time since they had been put in here. “We were on our way to the park!”
“I know,” Laura said. “I guess those men don’t care which side of the border they’re on.”
“My family can’t pay a big ransom,” Carmen said. “My dad works two jobs just to pay my tuition to the school!”
Laura had no answer for that. She didn’t even know for sure yet if ransom was the goal of their captors.
All she knew for sure was that she was locked up and scared half out of her wits and that she wanted to go home.
Home, she thought.
She had never known that the word could sound so good.
Seven
By the time he reached his house about a mile outside Little Tucson, Tom Brannon was already thinking about what to do next. His wife Bonnie and her younger sister Kelly were very close. They traded e-mails just about every day and spoke on the phone at least once a week. During all the trouble with M-15, Kelly had offered to come out to Arizona, but Bonnie had persuaded her to stay home. It would have been dangerous, for one thing, and for another, Kelly had her daughter Laura to take care of.
Invasion Usa: Border War Page 4
