The Investigator, page 25
One of her El Paso women shouted, “The Hawk is out,” and Hawkes smiled and climbed down from the truck.
As she came down, Low climbed up and took the microphone. A big man with shoulder-length black hair, he was dressed in a black T-shirt under a black sport coat, black jeans, and black combat boots. He was carrying a black AR-15 with a thirty-round mag banged onto the bottom of it. As the crowd tightened around the truck, he peeled off the jacket to reveal a tan leather shoulder holster with his Beretta. Hawkes had calculated the effect, and she’d been correct: a ripple of ooo rolled through the crowd. Low flashed his smile and picked up the microphone.
“I’ve been asked to coordinate our action tomorrow. In your invitation to the party, we noted that Texas has open carry of long guns, but you need a license to carry a handgun, either open or concealed. That’s not really here nor there tomorrow—carry whatever you have—but we don’t want anybody recklessly shooting them off…”
He went on about guns for a while, answered a couple of shouted questions, spoke about the media—“They’re gonna be all over us, calling us Nazis and all that bullcrap…”—and then began to preach.
* * *
“This country should be a paradise. There should be a job for every working man, and how long the liberals been talking about that, and what have we got? Sold out to the Chinese and the Mexicans and everybody else we could be sold out to. The Vietnamese, who killed fifty thousand American boys back in the sixties and seventies… We got any veterans here?”
Hawkes marveled. When she was sitting in a McDonald’s with him, Low came off as a Texas hick, white trash, gobbling fries with oil-stained fingers, chewing with his mouth open, spitting pieces of Quarter Pounder around the table, dribbling ketchup on his shirt…
On a rifle range, he was a dangerous man, to himself and everyone around him. He never seemed to know quite where his gun was pointed, whether it was a rifle or a pistol, and if you sat next to him long enough, the muzzle would inevitably track across your nose, with his finger on the trigger…
But.
Get him to talk at a meeting, and he came alive. He couldn’t write his speeches, but he could deliver them, working into a kind of controlled frenzy that animated crowds and made even the skeptical pay close attention.
“…goddamned wetbacks taking over our country? I don’t think so, that ain’t gonna happen, as we say up in Crocket County…”
* * *
When he climbed down from the truck to continuing applause, Crain cut the generators, and the lights snapped out. Overhead, the stars were tiny suns, pouring their light over the gathering, bringing out another long sustained ooooo…
Hawkes wrapped an arm around Low’s waist and said, “You did it. You got them. Now, tomorrow morning, we got to keep them.”
“I’m worried about the first part of that, where you tell them we’ve been lying to them…”
“It’ll grab their attention…”
“It might be better if you started off sayin’ we’re worried that there are spies among us. Even one would be too many. So I lied to you a little last night.”
Hawkes considered, and said, “You could be right. I think either way is okay. I’ll sleep on it. You worry about what you’re gonna say. I’ll take care of mine.”
Low nodded and, looking out over the encampment, where people were crawling into their truck beds, or standing around talking, or smoking, random laughs and giggles, and said, “I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life.”
“We all will.”
* * *
Hawkes lay awake for a long time, lying on a yoga mat next to Crain, in the back of Crain’s truck, both of them wrapped in lightweight sleeping bags. Crain, from long practice in prison, was asleep almost immediately, and snoring. Hawkes ran through the whole scheme for the next day.
She remembered a quotation she’d seen in one of her history books, from a German general: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
She was thinking about that when she dozed off; hours later, she heard her phone beep at her, opened her eyes, and saw the night sky, and down to the horizon, Orion’s Belt, pointing down at the town of Pershing, Texas. Her mouth was dry and tasted bad; she sat up, kicked out of her sleeping bag, looked again at Orion’s Belt. An omen, she thought, and it gave her confidence.
Pershing was named after Black Jack Pershing, an American general who chased Pancho Villa all over northern Mexico, and never did catch him.
* * *
By dawn, the encampment was awake, eating breakfast. There wasn’t enough cereal to go around, though she’d bought fifty boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and twenty gallons of milk that had been kept cool in a stock watering tank full of ice. There was a little early-morning grouching and bitching, the group winding up for the action in El Paso, though it wouldn’t exactly be in El Paso.
The militias rekindled a couple of fires, burning the last of the pinewood, people spitting toothpaste into the sand and scuffing more sand over it, and there was a line at the latrines for a while.
Hawkes let that go on for forty-five minutes, then climbed up on top of the truck with the microphone and amp. “If we could crowd in around here, we’ve got some important stuff to talk about this morning. I’m going to start things off and I’m going to tell you three shocking things. First thing. I would not be totally surprised if there was an FBI informant among us. Or, maybe, an out-and-out FBI agent, a spy. That is just the way it is. That’s life. Because of that possibility, that we have a flea in our ear, here’s the second shocking thing. We lied to you last night, getting you whipped up for an action in El Paso. We’re not going to El Paso. We’re going to a town called Pershing, Texas.
“You remember Pershing. A year and a half ago, a caravan from Central America, more than a thousand people, came up here, like it was headed for El Paso, planning to rush the border. At the last minute, the whole caravan swerved down a side highway, used mostly by trucks headed for the eastern part of the States. That highway runs through the town of Ochoa, Mexico, on the Rio Grande, and across the bridge to Pershing, here in the States.
“The whole thing was stopped on the Mexican side, all those illegals packed into a parking lot. The mayor of Pershing declared a human disaster and invited them across the bridge, and the gutless men at the Customs and Border Protection station allowed them through. We have word that the same thing will happen again today, this evening—a caravan has already turned off the main Mexican highway and is headed for Pershing. We’re gonna go down there and we’re gonna stop them. I can promise you, this will be a great day for our kind of people. I’ll tell you something else: we’re not gonna get arrested, we’re not going to jail. Some of our El Paso people are walking around right now, putting duct tape on your license plates, covering up the numbers.
“We’re not far from the highway that runs from I-10 to Pershing, which is why we chose this place, which I know some of you thought was too far from El Paso… We picked it because we’re not going to El Paso.”
She spoke for ten more minutes, outlining the detailed plan for invading Pershing, holding it, and then…
“We’ll talk more about the details this afternoon. Each of you will get a small file folder with an informational packet, which you should look at when you have a break. We think we have things fixed so nobody gets busted. Again, because there might be an FBI agent here—hello there, wherever you are, you fuckin’ rat, if you’re really out there—we don’t want to talk about it right now,” she said. “Okay, next thing. How many of you guys have used chain saws? Raise your hands…”
A lot of them had. Hawkes got them working on sign-up lists, organized by her El Paso faithful, depending on what they could do, and what they were willing to do.
* * *
When she was done, Low talked for ten more minutes, winding up the crowd. There were doubters, but not many.
When he had them shouting, the El Paso people passed out clip-on American flags that could be attached to truck windows.
Hawkes took the microphone back.
“I know most of you hadn’t counted on what we’re doing. You’ve got families you’re worried about, you’re worried about getting arrested, and all of that. Even if we were arrested, I don’t think there’s a jury in Texas that would convict us. Nevertheless, it would be tough,” she said. “If you don’t feel right about this, here’s what you do. Get in our convoy, go on down to I-10 with us. We’ll be going under the bridge and turning left. You turn right on this side of the bridge, and it’ll take you straight into El Paso. We’d suggest you keep going, scatter back to wherever you’re from. We won’t hold it against you: but I’ll tell you what, you’ll be missing the greatest day that ever came to people like us. You’ll miss the beginning of the revolution. You’ll miss being genuine American heroes.”
* * *
There was some stirring around, after she got off the truck, and Low shouted, “Load ’em up! Load ’em up! We’re going down the hill as a convoy, no matter which way you turn at I-10.”
They spent twenty minutes loading up and lining up, the pickups spaced so they wouldn’t be bumping into one another in the dust they’d be kicking up. Two El Paso women ran down the line of trucks, telling the drivers to close up once they were on the highway. “Lights on! If a highway patrol should try to pull us over, we ain’t pulling over. We think we know where they’re at, and they’re not where we’re going. But we’re a convoy. We keep rolling on no matter what!”
Hawkes rode with Low. When they were set, Low hit his horn a half-dozen times, and led the way down the mountain.
“Think we’ll lose many?” he asked Hawkes. “Guys turning right?”
“Bet it’s not ten,” Hawkes said. “Most of these guys are hot to trot.”
She looked up at the sky: Orion’s Belt had faded away with the dawn.
TWENTY
Stepping back:
After talking to Greet, Letty got ready for bed but couldn’t sleep. If Hawkes was the leader of an El Paso area militia and she’d gone on the run before being pressured by any authority, then she must be considering some action that would require her to run.
An action that would happen soon. But what?
Though she was tired from the day, Letty began looking at online satellite maps of El Paso and the surrounding areas, picking out possible targets. The militia was believed to have been patrolling east of the city, in the rough country on the American side of the Rio Grande; there wasn’t much out there. Once you got past the agricultural strip fed by the Rio Grande, there was nothing but dry mountains and desert.
El Paso had the usual federal buildings of any big city, but an attack on a building didn’t feel right. The amount of money collected from the oil thefts suggested a large operation involving a number of people. A bomb designed to blow up a building took one man, one truck, one timer, and one detonator… and C-4 would be the wrong way to go about it.
She thought about the C-4. The stuff was a powerful explosive, all right, and Hawkes and her friends had been testing it on an I-beam. Not enough to bring down a skyscraper, she’d been told, but she wasn’t sure she believed that. Say you had a huge heavy building and blew out all the supports on one side… wouldn’t that bring the whole thing down?
She didn’t know. She dug around on Google and found an ArcelorMittal site that made her feel foolish, with its models of building structures. Of course buildings weren’t supported only around their perimeter. They were supported by beams that rose up all through the building, and some of those beams were far heavier and thicker than the I-beam that Hawkes and her friends had cut in the test explosion.
And she found an image of the federal building in Oklahoma City after the terrorist bombing. The truck bomb had taken off the building’s façade and a chunk of the interior, but the rest of the structure remained standing. That bomb was far more powerful than a hundred pounds of C-4.
So: not a building?
She shut down the computer and turned to the nightstand clock: almost midnight. She turned off the lights and tried to sleep, and failed. Bored in the dark, bereft of ideas, she got the remote, turned on the television, piled pillows under her head, and began clicking around through the cable channels.
Got caught by an old movie called High Fidelity, a rom-com about a guy who ran a Chicago record store. She missed the first part of it, but watched it right to the happy ending, yawned, clicked through the available channels.
She caught a repeat tape of a local news channel. A weary-looking brunette with unsubtle makeup was saying, “…may not be coming to El Paso after all. Reports from Mexico say that at least part of the caravan broke off the main highway and are headed toward the border crossing at Pershing. How much of the caravan is continuing to El Paso and how much is going to Pershing is uncertain, but the caravans should arrive in either place late tomorrow, if their progress continues as it has the last few weeks. Pershing, if you will remember, was the site of a controversial crossing nineteen months ago…”
* * *
Letty remembered.
A Central American caravan of men, women, and children, apparently headed north to El Paso, had turned east at a small Mexican town instead of continuing north, and had arrived at a crossing at Ochoa, Mexico, linked across the Rio Grande with the town of Pershing.
There was almost nothing at Ochoa except a Mexican border station, a couple dozen houses mostly inhabited by the border guards, a gas station/convenience store, and a huge parking lot for Mexican eighteen-wheelers headed for the U.S.
Pershing was larger, although Letty wasn’t certain how much larger. If she remembered correctly—she climbed out of bed and fired up her computer and found that she did remember correctly—it was also a small town.
Pershing’s main claim to fame occurred when the Central American caravan, including large numbers of children, showed up at the Mexican side of the bridge with almost nothing in the way of food, water, or shelter. The mayor of Pershing, Harold Lopez, with support from all the city commissioners, had become a hero to a segment of the American political community when he invited the refugees to cross the bridge, and shouted down the Border Patrol when patrolmen tried to stop them.
“Food and water for babies,” Lopez had shouted at the El Paso news crew that had shown up to record the confrontation. The Border Patrol cracked when the news crew reported that a baby had died, possibly of dehydration, and the caravan crossed the bridge. Once inside the U.S., members of the caravan had to be processed through the American legal system. That could take months, and might well result in many of the refugees remaining in the country.
* * *
Letty reviewed the whole story in the Google links, then checked the mileage to Pershing. Kaiser had already told her that nothing in Texas was close to anything else, and he was right. Pershing was the only crossing between El Paso and Presidio, Texas, and was about sixty miles southwest of the I-10 town of Van Horn. The last stretch, between Van Horn and Pershing, was on a two-lane highway through the mountains, apparently designed expressly for truck traffic. Altogether, Pershing was about three road hours southeast of El Paso.
And she thought, Hawkes—Jael—is already running.
At two o’clock in the morning, she called Kaiser, who answered with a groan and, “Aw, what happened?”
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Letty asked.
“Yeah, I finished the book at ten, I was sleeping like a baby until eight seconds ago,” he said.
“Get up, pack up, we need to hit the road.”
Kaiser’s voice sharpened up: “What happened?”
“Nothing, yet, as far as I know. I’ll meet you in the lobby in half an hour, we’re checking out. You’re driving. I haven’t slept at all, and I need some. Half-hour.”
She clicked off and went to get dressed and pack her clothes.
* * *
In the lobby, Kaiser asked, “Can you tell me now?”
“After we get checked out and we’re in the car,” Letty said. “This might not make you happy.”
“I’m already not happy,” Kaiser said.
Outside, the air was cool and felt a bit damp, compared to the afternoon’s blow-dryer heat. Stars were bright overhead, and while waiting for Kaiser to catch up, Letty twisted in circles, face turned to the sky. More stars than she’d seen even in deep rural Minnesota; but on the other hand, in deep rural Minnesota, in the winter, you had the rippling yellow, purple, and blue-gray curtains of the northern lights.
“So tell me,” Kaiser said, throwing his duffel and shotgun case in the back of the Explorer.
“Let’s get on I-10,” Letty said. She walked around to the passenger side, dropped the seat back so she might possibly get some sleep. “We’re going east.”
When they were moving, she laid it out for him: an anti-immigrant militia with the leader on the run for no good reason they could yet see, a town celebrated for allowing an entire immigrant caravan to cross the border, and now another caravan on the way to the same place.
“The only thing I could think of is that the caravan is triggering them. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but there’s a good chance they’ll do it in Pershing. That’s what I think.”
“How would they know that this caravan is going to turn toward Pershing?” Kaiser asked.
“If you weren’t a dumbass, and you were steering a caravan, where would you go?”
“But what if they are dumbasses, and they really are going to El Paso?”
“Late-night news channel says the caravan split last night. I think Hawkes, or Low, or whoever is running this thing, knew this was going to happen. I think they’re going down there to block the caravan. If they’re not, well, El Paso doesn’t need the two of us. They’ve got city cops, FBI, ATF, Texas Rangers, sheriff’s deputies… The Pershing website says they have four part-time cops.”
