Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista

by Matthew Bracken

  She didn’t need a telescope to see her son riding his chestnut gelding down by the new gate, with her daughter-in-law Carly on her palomino mare beside him. Max was almost fifty, but despite his age he cut a fine figure astride a horse, a modern day cowboy, and still the handsomest man in Monterey County. Carly was just as tough as Max, in her own way. Dolores had never questioned Max’s decision to marry the pretty blue-eyed blond Carly Drake. They had met at the University of New Mexico, but she was not even a New Mexican. Worse, she was a city girl, from Denver! At least she was a Catholic, gracias a Dios. Carly had made them all proud, she truly became a Parada, and she bore Max four wonderful children, all grown up and moved away…

  The horses stood quietly now, on either side of the ring of whitewashed stones around the base of the flagpole, halfway down to the new galvanized gate. The pole was over seventy years old, hand-hewn and arrow-straight, cut from a single pine by Dolores’s own father. An American flag flew just below the level of her third floor window, rolling and tossing on the breeze as it did every morning. The wind blew much harder in the afternoons, and the frayed flags with their tattered stripes had to be replaced almost every other month. The Paradas bought their American flags by the case.

  The squatters were all on the driveway now, less than a mile away, signs and banners in front. Many of them were carrying those bastardized New Mexico flags, with the red star inside of the Zia’s circle. Others carried red communist flags of one sort or another, as well as the rainbow flags preferred by the homosexuals, the black flags of the anarchists, and the baby-blue U.N. flags of the one-worlders. After five weeks of eighty-power telescopic observation, she knew all of their subtypes, and could almost read their tattoos. A sound truck was behind them, mounting loudspeakers that could be heard clearly from a mile away. She had heard them for weeks and she knew what they were saying. They were saying leave now. Flee. Run. Give up the “stolen land.” Hand it over to “the people of Aztlan,” whoever they were, and whatever “Aztlan” was...

  Never. These thieving socialists, these Mexican illegal alien squatters, they were never going to put their dirty communist feet on the hundred year old pinewood floors of Lomalinda, they would never sit on the leather-covered oak chairs her father had built with his own hands, they would never eat a meal from Dolores Parada’s kitchen!

  Never!

  Then shots rang out, slow fire from booming center-fire rifles Dolores guessed, and she put her eye back to the telescope. Max frequently sighted-in his own elk rifles behind the house, and she knew the sound well. Pandemonium engulfed the column of marchers, who were at that moment scattering off of the driveway and diving onto the ground!

  ***

  The two Blackhawks flared out and made rapid landings only a hundred yards from the side of the house, inside a small line of trees, sending twirling eddies of dust in all directions. As they came in Basilio Ramos saw two cowboys mounted on horses, just like in an old movie, wheeling and rearing as the helicopters roared overhead. Through the open gunner’s port of the chopper, Ramos clearly glimpsed one of the cowboys on a dark horse raising a rifle.

  The first dozen troops hopped down from both sides of his helicopter even before its wheels hit the ground, the other chopper had landed fifty yards away to the side. The squads immediately formed up in a line abreast for the assault. Both mounted cowboys were immediately taken under fire, but not before one of his Falcons fell to the ground beside him, his face a crimson ruin beneath his helmet. There was a flagpole just downhill from the front of the house, where the two horses staggered and fell. Both cowboys were riddled with volleys of well-aimed bullets from the Falcons’ M-16s, dead even before their mounts ceased twitching.

  Another bullet snapped past his head and thudded into the helicopter behind him. Someone was firing from the ranch house, even as the assault platoon dashed for the stone front steps and the wide covered porch.

  ***

  Dolores Parada heard the helicopters before she saw them, and then they were landing right over there on the side of the house, just inside of their apple trees, blowing them around like a tornado! Max and Carly were firing at the helicopters even before they landed, so Dolores picked up her own Winchester from the table and did the same, the heavy rifle’s blast deafening her the first time she squeezed the trigger. And then Max and Carly were somehow both on the ground, their horses too, rolling and crawling, but then they were so very still, and all in the blink of an eye, even as camouflaged soldiers in full battle dress dashed for the house!

  She had already decided what she must do in the event of this ultimate calamity, but the shock of seeing her son and daughter-in-law shot down before her very eyes kept her at the open window, working the lever and blasting away through angry tears while the soldiers swarmed toward the house. When at last she dropped the rifle’s hammer on an empty chamber, with a start she remembered her final responsibility. Earlier she had brought a one gallon metal can of lamp oil and a box of kitchen matches to the sitting room, “just in case.”

  If the invaders and thieves and communists were going to come up the varnished pinewood steps to the third floor, to drag her away from her beloved ranch house, they were going to have to run through fire.

  Dolores Parada wasn’t leaving Lomalinda.

  ***

  By Friday, Ranya had lost her fear of doing exactly as she wished in Basilio Ramos’s house. The Falcons were off on an operation, and once again she had been left to her own devices. She dressed in one of her new outfits: a green silk blouse, black designer jeans and Gucci sandals.

  There was a full-length mirror on one bedroom closet door, in which she briefly checked her appearance. Curious, she opened the closet, which turned out to be a large walk-in. A Spartan wardrobe of men’s suits and starched camouflage uniforms lined each side. In the back of this small room was a black Liberty gun safe the size of a double refrigerator, with an electronic combination number pad in the center. She was familiar with these heavy steel vaults from her youth as a gunsmith’s daughter, and she wondered what types of firearms Ramos had stashed inside this one. She guessed that the safe had been the property of the mansion’s previous owner, and it probably contained hunting rifles, and perhaps some expensive pistols. If she could open it, she thought she would be able to obtain a carbine or other weapons to help her during her escape.

  While considering various stratagems for cracking the safe, she walked downstairs to the spacious and ultra-modern kitchen. The cook, a small dark Mayan woman of fifty or more years, sat at a side table reading a colorful tabloid. Ranya matter-of-factly asked for a breakfast of coffee, juice, fruit and cereal. Then she turned and let herself out, and waited imperiously at the patio table by the swimming pool, nonchalantly observing the up-slope guards with their M-16s, as they observed her. In five minutes, the meal was brought out to her on a silver tray.

  It certainly wasn’t the case that Ranya Bardiwell was used to dominating servants in this way. It was simply her calculated take on what was expected of her as the new “lady of the house.” She decided that slinking around like a kept woman would not win her any respect in the eyes of the house staff or guards. Only by dressing well and demanding service could she do that. If they were going to consider her their exalted Comandante’s lady, she would have to live up to that high status.

  After breakfast by the pool, she spent some time in the master bedroom at Basilio’s computer, cautiously surfing the internet. Not only was she interested in news from outside of New Mexico, more importantly she wanted to try to reestablish contact with Phil Carson, her old friend from their time together as fugitives on Brad’s sailboat. She had not heard from him or about him since she had stepped off Guajira in Santa Marta Colombia, seven months pregnant with Brad’s child. A week after leaving the boat, she had been arrested by the U.S. Marshals after landing at Phoenix Sky Harbor.

  Now, sitting at Basilio’s computer, she considered risking a search for Phil Carson. She worried that any dir
ect internet search for his name would immediately ring alarm bells deep within some federal alphabet agency, and this would in turn lead them straight to her again.

  Before leaving Colombia, they had agreed upon a system to reestablish communications via new and unused free email addresses. Messages could be posted to these free internet accounts, with only the two of them knowing the exact email addresses and account login passwords. She checked Yahoo and Hotmail to see if the email accounts had already been created by Phil Carson, but she only received generic notices indicating that no such accounts existed. Further messages told her that due to unspecified reasons pertaining to national security, creating a new email account would require going through an extensive process of proving her identity. A small section of frequently asked questions told her that due to various unstated abuses, free email accounts could no longer be created anonymously, outside of official supervision.

  National security. There it was. Once again, she had been tripped up by changes occurring during her five years in captivity. She wondered what the latest rendition of the Patriot Act was called. She could well imagine the articles she would read, if she wanted to risk searching for such security-related material. Free anonymous email accounts were too helpful to criminals and even to terrorists, to let them skulk in secret on the information superhighway. Big Brother had to know who was texting away on the internet, and to whom. So much for reestablishing contact with Phil Carson the easy way, via email, she thought.

  Ranya gave up on the computer, and switched on the enormous flat screen television, which dominated a wall on the other side of the four-poster bed. Clicking around with the remote, she discovered that the same cable news channels were still in business, along with a few new ones.

  After recognizing some familiar talking heads, she paused to hear a panel discussion. The subject on the table was the impending Constitutional Convention, scheduled for September in Philadelphia. The bow-tied conservative was whining that the entire process was a fraud and a sham, and that any resulting Constitutional Amendments would have no legitimacy. He said that four of the states that had originally voted for the “con-con” (as they were calling it) had rescinded their votes, after the original purpose of the convention had been “hijacked” by Congress.

  The fat and pasty-faced liberal was shouting back that the four “insurgent” states in question could not withdraw their decisions to call the convention. Their state convention delegates were already in Philadelphia, and the convention would proceed as scheduled. The necessary total of 34 state legislatures had voted to call the con-con, and by God, that was that! There was no stopping the train: it had already left the station!

  Mr. Bow Tie retorted that the renegade convention delegates would have to stay here on the East Coast forever, because if they returned to their Western states, there might be ropes awaiting them, tied to trees! He said that these so-called state convention delegates were simply Congressional patsies and paid front-men, without any valid authority to vote in the names of their states. Indeed, Bow Tie said, these fraudulent delegates were now too afraid to even step foot back in their nominal states of origin!

  The fat liberal snarled back that the conservatives were obviously afraid of the “Economic Democracy Amendment,” which Ranya mentally translated to mean the forced socialist redistribution of wealth.

  The heated debate broke for a commercial, the angry demeanors of the panelists immediately changed to amicable bonhomie, and she switched channels. It was coming up on twelve noon. Basilio had advised her not to miss the local Spanish language television news, because the Falcon Battalion promised to be featured in it.

  She sat barefoot and Indian-style on the bed, and skipped between Albuquerque channels. She stopped when she saw the male and female co-anchors of a Spanish language station touting the “liberation” of a large ranch, the Hacienda Lomalinda in Monterey County, east of Albuquerque. The hacienda, the pretty female reporter said, was on a Spanish Land Grant territory, and was therefore subject to the Land Reform Act. The female anchor breathlessly described how the current occupiers of the ranch had rejected every offer by the new state government to negotiate a settlement.

  Despite the lack of cooperation from the occupiers of the disputed territory, the state government had given permission for several hundred landless pobladores to settle on unused portions of the 14,000-acre ranch, under the terms and conditions of the Idle Lands Act. These valiant settlers had been harassed and harried by the ranchers, but had stood fast at every turn. File television footage showed a colorful tent city spread beneath a line of trees, with a rocky escarpment in the background.

  The male news anchor said that the settlers had run their own water hoses from the ranch’s irrigation system to the tent city, but the ranchers had retaliated by cutting off the pipes they had tapped, leaving them without a source of water in the hundred-degree heat.

  Finally, today, the settlers had reached the limit of their patience, and had marched in a body toward the main ranch house to demand that the water flow be restored. Television cameramen must have been just in front of the procession. The in-studio reporters were silent as they played the video. The view cut back and forth between the colorful line of singing, drumming and flag-waving marchers, and the distant ranch house atop a prominent hill. Without warning, there was a series of cracks, and the marchers scrambled in confusion and then fell to the ground, as the camera swung wildly amidst shouting and screaming. There were chaotic camera shots of people wailing and crying over a pair of bodies lying on the road, face down and still, blood flowing from them in dark rivulets.

  In the footage aired by the television station, the next scene showed a pair of helicopters swooping down beside the ranch house. The male anchor reported that after the unprovoked shooting into the column of unarmed settlers, Milicia forces had been flown in aboard state guard helicopters to regain control of the situation, and arrest the snipers who had apparently fired on the peaceful marchers. The news anchor mentioned that last Monday’s notorious bus matanza had happened only a few miles from the Hacienda Lomalinda, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions about the identity of today’s shooters. The reporters didn’t question the amazing coincidence of the Milicia helicopters being only minutes away when the marchers were shot, supposedly by the obstinate ranchers.

  The Milicia troops were seen only at extreme range, and there was no way to tell from the blurry television images if they were the Falcon Battalion. Ranya had no doubt that they were, just as she had no doubt who had actually fired on the squatters to trigger the swift helicopter assault. Her experience in Virginia six years earlier had taught her to question the publicly announced version of any event involving the use of violence by the government. She assumed that the Lomalinda ranch attack was in reality nothing like it had been portrayed on the news. She had no doubt that a massive injustice had just been perpetrated and innocent blood shed on both sides, in the name of “Land Reform.”

  Well, Chairman Mao—who certainly knew about these things—had said that to make an omelet, one needed to break some eggs. He also said that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Unquestionably the same held true today, even in New Mexico’s simmering slow motion revolution.

  Nevertheless, it just wasn’t her problem. As long as she was able to rescue her child and escape from this casa de locos called Nuevo Mexico, it was not her business how they redistributed the land. Not when the land was taken from the Indians by the Spanish conquistadors, nor when it went to the carpetbagger Anglos after 1848, and certainly not when it went to well-connected Comandantes like Basilio Ramos today. As she saw it, this was no more and no less than the rusty iron wheel of history, breaking loose and turning once again—lifting some, and crushing others.

  From a long distance, shaky video footage showed the ranch house sky-lined on a hill, engulfed in flames. Black smoke was streaming away on a stiff breeze. The newscaster solemnly announced that the owners had burned their mansi
on, rather than hand it over to “the people.” In front of the blazing house, an American flag could be seen falling away from a pole. The television camera’s lens zoomed in on this movement, suddenly blurry at its extreme magnification. A few seconds later, the red-on-yellow flag of Nuevo Mexico ascended in a series of quick tugs. There was a single red star filling the circle in the center of the Zia design, as the new flag whipped straight out on the wind, framed in fire.

  17

  Saturday June 28

  Early Saturday morning, the Falcons mustered in a local restaurant across Central Avenue from the university. The restaurant, a popular student and faculty hangout, had wisely changed its name from the Country Kitchen to La Cocina del Campo in compliance with the Español Solamente law. After their arrival, the Falcons proceeded to commandeer the establishment by not permitting any new guests to enter. By nine AM they were the only customers—and non-paying customers at that.

  The management of La Cocina made no outward objection to the unexpected presence of the elite Milicia unit, and retreated to their office. The predominantly Hispanic kitchen staff was delighted, apparently regarding the undercover pistoleros as some kind of folk heroes. This morning’s breakfast was on the house, no questions asked.

  Most of the Falcons were wearing jeans or solid-color BDU fatigue-style pants, and a wide assortment of civilian shirts. The shirts were left untucked, to cover the pistols jammed into concealment holsters inside their belts. Some of them wore brown Milicia t-shirts, with the modified New Mexico Zia design on the front. Their brown berets went into personal daypacks, or were rolled up and tucked away in pants cargo pockets.

  Sergeants passed out special items for today’s march and rally. The men were handed plain white baseball caps, gorras blancas, without logos or markings. The hats would allow the Falcons to recognize one another among the crowds, and enable them to help one another in the event of trouble. Along with their own sunglasses (which they had been instructed to bring) the ball cap visors would help to conceal their faces in the bright sunshine’s glare.