In a way, this was actually good news—it meant I was a hell of a lot closer to the border than I thought. Extremely close—less than a thousand yards in fact. But I wasn’t in a position to celebrate.
Between the snipers and the machine-gunning soldiers, I was having a hell of a time driving the truck. I cranked right to get away from the snipers, only to be hit by a barrage of automatic weapons fire from the trucks. One or two of the back tires went out, and I felt the truck pulling to the left.
There’s nothing better than the pitter-patter of bullets to contract the sphincter and focus the mind. But what really came into focus as I raised my head just barely above the dashboard was the large fence ahead.
The border.
I decided that’s where I was going. Foot pressed to the floor, I held on to the steering wheel as the truck bounced over the washboardlike terrain. Suddenly, the front end dipped beneath me like a horse trying to buck a rider. Before I could react, the front bumper hit hard against the steep incline of the ditch and the wheel wrenched out of my grip. We hit the fence sideways, wire mesh draping across the truck as it swerved to a stop after twenty or thirty yards.
The people in the back piled out, funneling around the broken chain-link sections and running to the north. The Mexican army trucks stopped about fifty yards away; the troops piled out and began taking potshots at the escaped prisoners.
The fence blocked the door and most of the windshield; the only way out was on the side nearest the Mexican army. I crawled over to the door, kicked it open, and fell down to the ground, crawling beneath the truck and scrambling to my feet on the other side. Fortunately, the Mexicans couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, which is what my butt felt like as I pushed it under the truck.
Eventually, one of them did hit the vehicle in exactly the right place with a tracer and it caught fire. By then, though, I was back with the rest of the escaped kidnap victims, saved by the reluctance of the Mexican army commander to cross the border.
This was somewhat less than characteristic, and I wasn’t sure what we owed our good fortune to until my head started vibrating. I was so banged up that it took a few moments before I realized it wasn’t some new and esoteric form of pain—a helicopter was overhead.
The cavalry had finally arrived.
IV
The helo belonged to an Air National Guard unit assigned to help Customs stem the flow of drugs over the border. They had been scrambled by a call from Doc, who decided the proceedings were getting a little out of hand. It had taken the National Guard unit less than five minutes to get their bird in the air and down to our site. I criticize Air Farcers all the time, so let me now give them a big wet kiss for saving my ass. Whether they can live that down or not remains to be seen.
The Mexicans stopped shooting as soon as the helicopter tucked toward them. I heard later that he said over the radio that he had been pursuing a drug ring, and was requesting permission from his headquarters to round up the criminals who had escaped across the border—very likely a first. He didn’t push things when the National Guard pilot told him he had things under control. On the contrary: the Mexicans double-timed back to their trucks and vamoosed.
Shotgun and Mongoose showed up a few minutes later, barreling across the desert as if they were in the Baja 500.
They were coming from the Mexican side, obviously, and as it happened, they spotted the wedge of the sniper blind as they approached.
While they didn’t know the sniper had shot at us earlier, they had seen the hides earlier in the week and developed a certain attitude about them.
“Looks like a road hazard to me,” said Shotgun, pointing out the position. It was a squat, long triangle, barely aboveground.
“Yeah.” Mongoose snapped the wheel, aiming the truck. “I’m betting it’ll squish.”
“I got a bag of Doritos says the sides are built up and we just fly right over it. No squish.”
“A big bag or a little bag?”
“Who would bet a small bag of Doritos on something important like this?”
Mongoose barreled into the wedge, which was a canvas tent piece folded down over a very shallow ditch. Something thumped beneath the truck.
“You cheated,” protested Shotgun. “You slowed down.”
“Didn’t want to miss it. That’s allowed.”
“I don’t think that qualifies as squished,” said Shotgun, leaning out the side window. “It just looks run over.”
“I ain’t done,” said Mongoose, putting the truck into reverse.
He backed over the hide four or five times before he was satisfied that it had, in fact, been squished.
* * *
No longer in danger, the freed hostages gathered in a knot about a hundred yards into the U.S., huddling away from the black smoke curling from the truck. I began interviewing them, looking for information on Melissa, along with anything else that might be useful. I was soon joined by Trace, Tex, and Stoneman; done with their joy riding, Shotgun and Mongoose rolled up a few minutes later. The freed victims were all grateful for being rescued, but they didn’t seem to know much that I hadn’t already figured out. They answered our questions as best they could, between gulps of water from our thermoses and whatever snacks Shotgun passed out.
It took a while for the Border Patrol to reach us. There were only two agents on duty in the vicinity, and they were both handling a more conventional mess several miles away. Border agents catch a lot of crap for the country’s messed-up immigration policies and especially our lax border security, if “security” is ever the right word to use. I’m sure there are lousy Border Patrol agents, just as there are lousy everything, but the men and women I met during my Mexican holiday were professional and motivated to do their job, as impossible as it sometimes seems.
The Border Patrol is part of the Homeland Insecurity Department. Because of that, their first responsibility is to stop terrorism. Now while that’s a good idea, you have (a very few) border agents who’ll occasionally tell you that illegal immigrants and drugs aren’t even their responsibility. That’s ridiculous: the problems are absolutely connected.
And besides check 8 U.S.C. 1103, 1182, 1225, 1226, 1251, 1252, 1357; Homeland Security Act of 2002, Pub. L. 107 – 296 (6 U.S.C. 1, et seq.); 8 CFR part 2; all lay out tasks that are a lot more extensive than watching for men with towels wrapped around their heads.
Excuse me? You in the back of the room?
Sure, go ahead and read the section. We’ll wait.
For various reasons, morale among Border Patrol agents was very low at the time I was there. That’s not just my opinion. The service was considered the least desirable of thirty-six government agencies to work for during a survey in July 2006. Manpower shortages, crappy training, bitchy work conditions, and mandatory overtime were all cited as factors.
Then there’s the case of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, two Border Patrol officers who were railroaded to jail for shooting a pot-smuggling scumbag in the butt to keep him from escaping after they caught him trying to smuggle a few hundred pounds of pot across the border into Texas in a cargo van. The numb nut American prosecutor claimed that they could not absolutely conclude that he had a weapon, and therefore had no right to shoot him. Because everybody knows that drug smugglers are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who always comply with the orders of Border Patrol officers, and would never think of harming them.
The two officers were actually convicted in 2005. (Clearly, none of my readers were on the jury.) After considerable publicity and teeth gnashing, they were pardoned by George Bush when he left the presidency.
Myself, I’m curious about who’s going to give them their reputations back, but I suppose that’s an impertinent question. What is pertinent is that the Border Patrol is undermanned and shit on from above and below. I don’t doubt that it could be doing a much better job, but I think the bulk of the problem is the bureaucracy around them and the government decisions that handcuff them, not the people themse
lves.
But you knew that, I’m sure.
* * *
The agents weren’t surprised that the Mexican army had gotten involved.
“There are good units and bad units,” one of the officers told me. “We have yet to see one of the good ones around these parts.”
The officer unleashed a litany of problems, including a few I’ve just mentioned. He did make one point that I hadn’t heard from a fed before: if the federal government wouldn’t take care of the problem, he said, then they should get out of the way and let the States do it.
“I don’t think it’s entirely practical,” he added. “The federal level is where the coordination belongs. Hell, I’m a federal employee myself. But someone has to do the job.”
In case you’re wondering, I haven’t included his name because a federal employee making such statements has no right of free speech, according to the Supreme Court. That’s right: he could be bounced for criticizing his dumb-as-shit bosses.
“Say, you know there’s a ditch under the fence deep enough that you barely have to duck to get under?” asked Shotgun, pointing about a half mile away. The desert was worn out with the tracks of people sneaking through there.
“We know about it,” said the officer. “We’ve asked it be closed up. They say they’ll get to it eventually. Like maybe next century.”
“To be honest, having the ditch there helps a little,” added the other officer. “Kind of funnels them into us.”
He had a point—the ditch was not only an obvious place for illegals to come across, it was an obvious place to catch them. Which didn’t bother the coyotes, or people responsible for guiding the illegals—they would send a few people across there as decoys and then bring the rest across a mile or so away.
“There’s only so many we can catch,” said the first officer when I pointed this out. He held out his hands. “It’s not like we don’t know all their tricks.”
We talked a little more, this time about Hezbollah and the potentials for a camp on the other side of the border. Both officers thought it was very much a possibility, though they admitted that they hadn’t seen any direct evidence of it.
I won’t mention their opinion of the State Department.
* * *
I went back to questioning my fellow captives, getting nowhere until I came to a thin, white-haired woman named Mrs. Snowpeck who was eating a Drake’s fruit pocket Shotgun had given her. They shared a common affection for flakey yet sugary crust.
“I know the girl you’re talking about,” she told me. “We talked, but she never gave me her name. Melissa? It fits her.”
I wasn’t sure about that—Attila the Hun would have been more appropriate from what I’d seen. But I nodded anyway.
“She was chained inside some ruins out in the countryside somewhere,” continued Mrs. Snowpeck. “An old couple looked in on her every day. They brought her food. She swore she’d go back as soon as she got out.”
“Go back and do what?” Trace asked.
“Thank them, I guess.”
“More like kill them,” I said. “Tell me everything you know.”
Everything wasn’t much. Melissa had described her jail as a ruined stone building; there must be thousands if not millions in Mexico. But she seemed to know at least the general vicinity of where she had been kept: near a place called DeLucas. There was an old church not far from her makeshift jail, but very few houses.
“She tried to escape one night to the church but was caught. That’s why she was brought here.”
“Did they beat her?” Shotgun asked.
“A little,” said Mrs. Snowpeck. “She didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”
That sounded even more ominous than if they’d broken her bones. But while I believed her guards deserved whatever reward Ms. Reynolds might bestow, I also realized that if she killed them, things could get immensely complicated. The Mexican government wasn’t much on catching Mexican criminals, but give them an American suspect—even one who was a victim herself of a crime—and they would undoubtedly throw the book at her.
“No Deluca,” said Doc after I filled him in. “No town with that name. Got a Lucadia, a Fugado, a…”
Look for a little town with a Catholic church, I told him.
“Dick, the country is wall to wall with Catholic churches.” Doc cleared his throat. He was so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear.
“It would be a tiny town, with some ruins and that church, maybe a little house or a few houses,” I told him. “It should be no more than a couple of hours from where we are now.”
“Oh, that narrows it way down,” griped Doc.
“Somebody didn’t have his happy pills this morning,” said Shotgun, who was nearby and couldn’t help overhearing.
But Doc does some of his best work when he’s grumpy. With Junior’s help, and the mapping system provided by our satellite imagery contractor,12 he quickly located two likely candidates, a place called Mesa las Dos and Ojo de la Casa. They were both spits of towns, and both roughly thirty minutes from where we had been brought in the warehouse. They weren’t particularly close to one another—Ojo de la Casa was due south of El Paso, while Mesa las Dos—or a Mess of Twos as I called it—was much farther west, above la Ascension.
When I’d last seen Ms. Reynolds, she’d been on foot. Thirty miles was a good distance in the desert. It wasn’t killer hot, but it wasn’t particularly cold either.
“Probably stole a car,” offered Mongoose.
“I wouldn’t put anything past her,” I said.
“She could just as easily have headed north,” said Trace. “She could be across the border by now.”
“Yeah, but then she’s not our problem anymore is she?” said Mongoose.
“It is if she doesn’t make it back alive,” she answered.
V
The scrubland around the border area was filled with coyotes, banditos, and various species of snakes, most of them warm-blooded. I saw quite a lot of them over the next few hours, touring the environs trying to make sure that Ms. Reynolds had not, in fact, gone north.
I was flying with a friend who flew helicopters out of El Paso. Chester “Chet” Arthur—no relation to the president of the same name—flew for the army back in the day, and played an extremely minor role in the Panama invasion. We reached an understanding soon after meeting back in the late 1990s: I don’t hold his service affiliation against him, and he doesn’t tell people how we met.
Chet and I were in a Robinson R22, also known as the Beta II. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the R22. You’ve undoubtedly seen it. The helicopter has been around for years and is considered one of the best light helos in the world. It’s cheap to operate, and so stable and dependable that a lot of flight schools use them to train newbies.
But it is small. I’ve seen phone booths—remember those?—with more elbow room. My svelte, girlish figure just barely fit in the seat. Chet’s pretty much overwhelmed his.
It was a close encounter of the personal kind. Fortunately, he had showered in the recent past.
The helicopter was the only one he could spring on short notice. He assured me that there was enough room for Melissa if we found her.
“Where?” I asked.
“She’ll sit on your lap. Any objection?”
Not in the least.
We flew a series of boxes ten miles deep on the north side of the border, covering about twice as much ground as I figured she could walk in the time since she’d escaped.
Nada.
“Let’s try south,” I told him after we’d gone over the boxes several times.
“Roger that.” He was a big guy, but he had a high voice, almost like a girl’s. It was very loud in the headset, and something in it rattled the hard shell of the earphones. “You know, Dick, anybody who’s on foot out here is either loco or nuts.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Someone who’s nuts has a skewed view of the world;
they don’t look at reality the same way you and I do. But they do see it. Someone who’s loco has no clue what the world is.
“Of course, odds are now that we’re over the border, anyone we see down there is going to be illegal. Or nuts,” added Chet, considering. “Or most likely both.”
We had only been over Mexican territory for a few minutes when something binged behind us. I’d heard that kind of bing before. So had Chet.
“Somebody’s shooting at us,” he said nonchalantly.
“Who?”
He tilted the aircraft and pointed to the right, beyond his side window. By the time I spotted the pickup tucked down in the ditch, two more bullets had hit the fuselage.
“Better shot than most.” Chet gunned the engine, skittering away. “I thought maybe that might be your girl, but I don’t think she’d be shooting at us, right?”
“I can’t really say.”
“Same old Rogue,” Chet said with a laugh. “Always in trouble with the ladies.”
I picked up a pair of binoculars as Chet took another pass, this time at low altitude. He skittered back and forth to make it difficult for the shooter to aim.
“Probably a cartel goon, thinking we’re honing in on his territory. I doubt he thinks we’re Border Patrol.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah. He’d be firing a lot more bullets if he did. They get a good bounty for every officer they take.” Chet banked hard to avoid yet another shot. “You like being shot at, Dick?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
He reached to the holster on the side of his door and handed over a Smith & Wesson Model 28 .356 Magnum. The Model 28, known as the “Highway patrolman gun,” was very old school, a no-monkey-business weapon. Based on the Model 27—itself a classic—it lacked the fancy polish but none of the precision of the earlier Magnum. (The Model 27, with a three-and-a-half-inch barrel and an ivory handle, was Georgie Patton’s weapon of choice.) I’m told it came in four, six, and eight 3⁄8 inch models; the one Chet gave me was six.
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