Walking quickly, Tom went back to the porch and up the steps. He turned toward the distant dust cloud and lifted the glasses to his eyes. After focusing in on the dust, he lowered his gaze along the column until he came to the base of it.
That was when he saw the dozens of flashing lights.
“Son of a bitch,” he breathed. His worst fear had come true. Somehow the authorities had found out what was going on—and they were coming to put a stop to the rescue effort before it had a chance to really begin.
“Trouble coming!” he bellowed as he leaped down from the porch and ran toward the barn. “The Feds are on the way!”
Instantly the place was a beehive of activity. The day had been spent in going over not only the main plan, but also several contingency plans. Premature discovery by local, state, and/or federal authorities was definitely one of the contingencies they had prepared for. Everyone knew the rendezvous point on the edge of Nuevo Laredo. Now they had to scatter and clear out before the badge-toting bureaucrats arrived to shut them down.
Jennings leaped out of the little chopper’s cockpit and ran toward the larger helicopters, waving a hand over his head in the revolving motion that meant “Crank ’em up!” Sonia already had the smaller chopper’s blade turning.
Tom saw Wayne Van Sant, Craig Lambert, and Wild Bill Elliott running toward the helicopter from different directions. Like him, they wore kevlar vests and carried assault rifles and had pistols holstered on their hips. They were ready to go, and unlike the others who would have to make the rendezvous and then launch the attack on the old mission, these four men would fly out of here. Sonia would head across the border, set the chopper down in some isolated location, and wait there for H-hour. The other helicopters would also be hidden in the desert, waiting for the signal to move in.
Tom, Van Sant, Lambert, and Elliott piled into the chopper. Tom took the seat beside Sonia while the other three men filled up the small area in the rear. The aircraft lifted off so abruptly that Tom felt his stomach bottoming out.
“What the hell happened?” Elliott shouted over the beating of the rotor. “Did somebody sell us out?”
“Don’t know!” Tom replied with a shake of his head. “But I’ll bet that was the FBI on the way to the ranch!”
As the chopper banked, he got a good look at the scene unfolding below. A dozen or more cars and SUVs with flashing lights on their roofs were approaching the ranch, but they were still more than a mile away. Meanwhile, the other three choppers were lifting off, and dozens of cars and pickups shot away from the ranch buildings at high speed, scattering in different directions across country. Tom bit back a curse. Not all the members of the rescue force would get away. The authorities would probably corral some of them. All he could do was hope that enough made it across and were able to form up again in Nuevo Laredo to make the attack on the old mission possible. If they lost half of their numbers, the odds against them would be well-nigh overwhelming.
But the strike would go ahead anyway, he thought. They had come too far to abandon their plan now, and any chance those girls had, no matter how slim, was better than none.
The ranch was deserted by the time the caravan of law-enforcement vehicles rolled in and stopped. Special Agent Sharon Morgan got out of the lead SUV and cursed as she looked around and saw that everyone was gone. A dozen or more columns of dust in the distance all around the place told her that the people she was after had scattered to the four winds. She turned and screamed, “Get after them!” at the U.S. marshal who was emerging from the second vehicle in the long line of cars and SUVs. “Spread out and catch as many of them as you can!”
Then she took a cell phone from the pocket of her blazer and thumbed in a number. When it was answered, she told the person on the other end, “Get on the horn to Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio and have them scramble interceptors! Those bastards have helicopters! We’ve got to stop them from getting across the border!”
She snapped the phone closed and turned toward the vehicle from which she had emerged. She stalked over to it and jerked the rear door open.
“Damn you,” she said to the man inside. “You didn’t tell me they had helicopters!”
Texas Ranger Captain Roy Rodgers looked down at the handcuffs on his wrists and said, “I didn’t tell you much of anything, Agent Morgan, except to go to hell. If you hadn’t been able to trace some of those cell phone calls Brannon made to me, you wouldn’t be here now.”
Morgan leaned closer to him and snarled, “When I get through with you, Rodgers, you’ll never work in law enforcement again. You won’t even be able to get a job as dogcatcher!”
Rodgers smiled thinly. “It’s been a long time since I heard that one. Everything comes back around sooner or later, I guess.”
“Except your career,” Morgan snapped. “That’s over.”
Rodgers shrugged. “Some things are worth the risk,” he said. “A friend of mine told me that, and I understand now that he was right.”
Tom had to give Sonia Alvarez credit for one thing—she could flat out fly a helicopter. The chopper rose high into the sky and took off like a shot toward the border. The larger, somewhat slower choppers followed as quickly as possible, but Sonia soon left them far behind.
Leaning over in his seat toward her, Tom asked, “Do you think they’ll have aircraft try to stop us?”
“You know more about the Feds than I do,” Sonia replied. “I wouldn’t put much of anything past that bitch of an FBI agent, though.”
Tom wouldn’t, either. He didn’t know if Morgan’s animosity was personal, or if she was just so caught up in doing everything in the politically correct, by-the-book way that any deviation from normal procedure made her furious. Morgan should have stayed a lawyer and not joined the Bureau. Her thinking had been molded too rigidly by her time in Washington.
He saw the Rio Grande ahead of them and far below as they approached the border. Another couple of minutes and they would be across it, safe for the moment.
That was when Elliott drawled, “Bogie at nine o’clock, Alvarez.”
Sonia muttered a curse. So did Tom as he looked past her and saw the jet fighter streaking toward them. The chopper’s radio crackled as a voice said, “Unidentified helicopter, turn away from the border and land immediately. Repeat, turn away from the border and land immediately.”
“Screw you, flyboy,” Sonia said as she sent the chopper diving toward the ground. The jet roared past, a good distance overhead.
Tom felt a little sick by the time Sonia pulled out of the dive. As she leveled out, he saw that the helicopter was flying barely twenty feet off the ground. He said, “I didn’t know a helicopter would do that.”
“Yeah, well, if the rotor doesn’t come off, it’s usually fine.”
“Okay,” Tom said slowly.
The jet pilot said angrily over the radio, “Chopper, I don’t want to fire on you—”
“Of course you don’t want to fire on us,” Sonia broke in as she keyed the mike on her headset. “We’re Americans, just like you.” The Rio Grande flashed past below. “And anyway, we’re in Mexican airspace now, amigo.”
The jet pilot didn’t say anything else. He circled away, heading back to his base in San Antonio.
“I’m surprised he didn’t hang around and try to stop the other choppers,” Van Sant commented.
“Maybe what Sonia said got through to him,” Tom said. “Maybe he realized that if he stayed, he might wind up having to shoot down his own countrymen.”
Elliott rumbled, “It’s a hell of a note when it comes to such a thing. Americans shootin’ at Americans. It just ain’t right.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t have to worry about that anymore,” Sonia said with a taut smile on her face. “Now all we’ve got to worry about is the Mexicans shooting down our asses.”
Colonel Guerrero sat in his plush, luxurious office, complete with all its high-tech gadgetry, and wondered just how things had gone so wrong. Why had Angelina not
been able or even willing to understand? Everything he had done, he had done for her. Could she not see that?
And why, in a moment of anger, had he turned his back on her and given her to his men? Had he been insane?
It was not too late, of course. He could have her brought back to him at any time. But perhaps it would be better to wait a while. He was confident that his men would not touch her, no matter where she was held. Let her worry about her fate. Perhaps he would even let her be a part of the auction. He would stop things before anyone could bid on her, of course. But such an experience would open her eyes and make her realize that she would be better off to just accept everything he wanted to give her.
As for her whorish behavior ... that was in the past. From now on, things would be different. Very different.
He had decided that his Angelina would become a nun.
Major Cortez came into the room and said, “The visitors are beginning to arrive.”
That shook Guerrero out of his reverie. He looked up and said, “Make them comfortable in the old chapel.”
Cortez nodded, but frowned a little and hesitated before turning away.
“Something wrong, Eli?” Guerrero asked.
“Since you brought it up, Alfonso ... it seems to me that having the auction of those girls in what was once the chapel is, well, sacrilegious.”
Guerrero snorted contemptuously. “What should I fear, amigo? That El Señor Dios will smite me with a lightning bolt? Once this may have been a house of God, but that old man has been driven out. Now it is the lair of the Night Wolves!”
Cortez muttered something and started to lift a hand as if to cross himself, but he stopped the gesture before it could begin. “As you command, Colonel,” he said.
The phone on the desk rang as Cortez started toward the door. Guerrero scooped it up and said sharply, “What is it? ... Ah, General Montero, it is good to hear from you, as always.” Even though the man he spoke to was a general in the Mexican Army, there was no hint of subservience in Guerrero’s voice. Rank meant nothing anymore. Both men knew which one was truly superior to the other. That was why Montero had a habit of tipping off Guerrero any time anything was going on that might have an effect on Los Lobos de la Noche.
As he listened, Guerrero’s face hardened. “Are you sure?” he asked gutturally. When Montero answered in the affirmative, Guerrero slammed the phone down.
Cortez had waited at the door. “What is it, Colonel?” he asked.
Guerrero looked up with a snarl on his face. “The Americans have alerted the Mexican authorities that a group of civilians and renegade law-enforcement personnel plan to raid this mission tonight and attempt to free the prisoners. In fact, some of them may already be on their way here now!”
“I will alert the guards,” Cortez said crisply. “The foolish Americans will never make it past the wall.”
“Excellent. And Eli ...”
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Make sure that they all die,” Guerrero said. “Every last one of them. No survivors. No quarter.”
He wondered if anywhere in the old mission he might find a recording of “El Deguello.” He had a sudden desire to listen to the old song that Santa Anna’s musicians had played outside the Alamo... .
Thirty-five
From the air, Tom had no trouble seeing the Sierra Madre Oriental, the mountain range that lay to the west. East of the Sierra Madres, all the way to the Rio Grande, was nothing but flat, semiarid landscape that stopped just short of being a desert. That was going to make it difficult to find a place to hide for the next couple of hours until it was time to launch the raid on the old mission. If the Mexican authorities were looking for them—and it seemed likely that Morgan would have alerted her counterparts south of the border about what was going on—then an aerial search might come along at any time.
Sonia spotted a dry arroyo and banked the chopper toward it. “That wash is wide enough we can set down on its bed,” she told Tom. “It won’t keep us from being spotted from the air, but it ought to hide us pretty well from anybody on the ground. They’d have to be right on top of us to see us.”
Tom nodded agreement, and Sonia took the bird down, setting it deftly and gently on the dry bed of the arroyo.
Everyone got out to stretch their legs. Tom wondered what had happened to the other helicopters and all the members of the rescue force who had been forced to flee from the ranch. The squad leaders were all carrying portable radios, but they had to maintain radio silence for now, since they couldn’t afford to let anyone who was looking for them home in on their signal.
Sonia asked, “What do we do when the time for the attack comes if we haven’t heard from any of the others?”
“We carry on as planned,” Tom said. “That was the agreement. If everybody split up, anybody who made it to the mission at the right time would go ahead with the attack.”
“But what if we’re the only ones who are left?” Lambert asked. “We won’t have a chance.”
Elliott said, “You can be outnumbered a whole hell of a lot and still do considerable damage if you hit the enemy hard enough and fast enough. Maybe we won’t be able to take those girls out of there, but even if we don’t, we might raise enough hell so they can escape on their own. Not all of ’em would get away, more than likely, but at least they’d have a fightin’ chance that way.”
Tom looked at the flaming, reddish-orange ball of the sun as it touched the peaks of the Sierra Madres. “If a fighting chance is the best we can do,” he said, “it’s a lot better than the prospects they’re facing now. We carry on, even if it’s just the five of us.”
He looked around at the others and got grim nods of agreement from every one.
All evening, as the sun set and the shadows of dusk gathered, Ricardo saw them arriving at the mission, these laughing, well-dressed, obviously wealthy men who thought nothing of buying an innocent young girl to use for their own filthy pleasures or to put more money in their own pockets. As the slender, expensively dressed Englishman called Willingham climbed out of a limousine, Ricardo had to fight down the urge to lift his rifle and put a bullet through the bastard’s diseased brain.
Ever since this situation had developed, the young undercover agent had been at war with himself. He had argued that preserving his cover identity might save many, many more lives in the long run if he could help to bring down Guerrero and the Night Wolves. But at the same time, his inaction doomed those girls to short, brutal lives of degradation and terror. Could he live with that on his conscience?
He was coming to realize at last that the answer was no. He couldn’t live with that.
Bare lightbulbs glowed in their fixtures on the ceiling as Ricardo entered the long corridor lined with cell doors on both sides. He nodded to the guard at the near end, a man named Ortega. Two other guards were posted in the hall, one halfway along it and the other at the far end where the door led out into the rear courtyard.
“Major Cortez sent me to relieve you,” he said to Ortega. “You’re wanted in the barracks.”
Ortega frowned. “What for?”
Ricardo just shrugged his shoulders eloquently, conveying the information that not only did he not know, he didn’t care, either. Muttering curses, Ortega left to go to the barracks, which was on the far side of the compound.
When he got there, he wouldn’t find Major Cortez. The major was in the chapel with Colonel Guerrero, greeting the men who had come for the auction. The barracks were empty because all the Night Wolves were prowling tonight, forming a strong perimeter around the old mission. Ricardo had heard the rumors—the authorities might try to attack the place tonight. He didn’t believe for a second that such a thing would ever happen. The Mexican government made all the appropriate noises about curbing the drug traffic and the violence along the border, but the military and the police never actually did anything about it.
He was equally certain that the Americans weren’t going to try a raid of some sort. If th
at were the case, he would have gotten a heads-up from his DEA handler, even though it was risky making contact. He was convinced that he was the last hope those girls had.
Finally, at long last, he had decided that he wasn’t going to let them down.
He looked into the cell where the blond girl, Laura, waited with several of the others. She was on her feet, gazing back at him with those soulful, hopeful eyes. He smiled faintly.
For once, Laura wasn’t going to be disappointed in him. That knowledge made him feel surprisingly good.
He took a sudden step toward the barred door and called out sharply to the other two guards. “Come quickly!” he told them. “Dios mío! I think one of these stupid girls has slit her wrists!”
The possibility of the merchandise damaging itself brought the others on the run. They had been warned by Major Cortez to be especially watchful for such things. And as they pounded along the corridor, Ricardo looked at Laura Simms and closed one eye in an encouraging wink.
He was going to do it, she thought with a sudden surge of hope. He was really going to help them at last.
None of the girls in the cell had slit her wrists, of course. That was just to lure the other guards into the trap. Laura played it up, though, yelling, “Help! Oh, please, help her!”
She sure hoped she was guessing right about Ricardo.
The other two men rushed up to the cell door. One of them slung his rifle over his shoulder and began fumbling with his keys, trying to get the door unlocked. He hadn’t really looked inside the cell yet, so he didn’t know that Ricardo’s yell of alarm was false.
While that guard tried to get the door unlocked, Ricardo suddenly struck at the other one.
He lifted his rifle and drove the butt of it into the side of the man’s head. Standing only a couple of feet away, Laura saw the guard’s eyes go wide with pain and shock and heard the crunch of bone as the rifle butt shattered his skull. His body stiffened but his knees unhinged. He dropped to the concrete floor.
Invasion Usa: Border War Page 23
