The adoption records were sealed, that’s what Galatea had said, and so there was no particular concern. Still, perhaps it would be better to err on the side of caution, and shoot an email out to Garabanda’s ex-wife. Wasn’t she marrying the female IRS agent who had struck Alex Garabanda with a baseball bat?
Gretchen Bosch—that was the woman. A nasty piece of work, yet still, she was a fellow federal law enforcement officer. Bosch had a standard federal government email address: first initial, last name, at cid.irs.gov. This fugitive Ranya Bardiwell could somehow have stumbled onto the adoption record—anything was possible. She might conceivably even be searching for her child. It couldn’t hurt to warn them of the possible danger. A quick note and a link to the BOLO notice was all that it would take. There. Done, sent, and on to the next email in her in-box.
34
The laptop computer was set up in the middle of a varnished pinewood table. The three stranded aviators and the deputies were in the back room of Charlie’s Steakhouse on Main Street in Ripley. There was only one long table in this rectangular room, which was evidently used to accommodate private parties. The three self-described refugees and the Sheriff sat at the table in front of the computer’s screen. Most of the dozen deputies from the road dragged over more of the room’s oak and leather chairs, and clustered closely behind them.
Ranya sat next to Logan on the right side of the computer, sipping a cold Coca Cola from the can, savoring the crisp, sweet flavor. Once again she was the only woman in a room full of men, only this time they were gringos, speaking English with a peculiar accent she couldn’t quite place. She decided that these Southwestern cowboys had created their own unique twang.
The Sheriff of Cantrell County had met the deputies at the restaurant, and arranged for the private meeting. The room was paneled in honey-colored knotty pine. A brass ceiling fan circled quietly above them. The walls were decorated with antique rifles, and some very impressive racks of elk antlers. A massive stone fireplace dominated the end of the room opposite the entrance door. The rest of the wall space not holding up historical Old West firearms or antlers was filled by framed photographs. The pictures showed camouflage-wearing hunters cradling rifles, crouching over or kneeling by freshly shot elk, enormous beasts with wickedly tined antlers to shame any deer or moose. Ranya thought it was almost inconceivable that there could have ever been so many elk in the entire state of New Mexico, and these were just the ones that had been shot, photographed, and hung on the walls in one room of Charlie’s Steakhouse!
The deputies’ rifles were left leaning against the wall by the door. There was an assortment of FALs, M-1s, M-1 Garands, AR-15s, AR-10s, and bolt-action hunting rifles topped with scopes. Ranya noted that this could not have been an unusual occurrence, because there was a slotted rifle rack screwed to the wall to hold their barrels. The men had stripped off their bulky body armor, and were mostly dressed in jeans, hiking boots, and a variety of shirts. Some of them were wearing mix-and-match camouflage shirts or pants from the last half dozen of America’s wars, but none in complete sets. Judging by their work clothes and coveralls, there was a welder and a mechanic among the deputies who had come to investigate the downed airplane.
Unlike his deputies, the Sheriff wasn’t wearing civvies or cammies, but instead a tan police uniform complete with shoulder patches and a silver badge. He was an average-looking man in his forties, with short brown hair, and a cop’s trimmed mustache. A laminated nametag above his right pocket identified him as Sheriff Leander McNally. A five-pointed star adorned his chest above the opposite pocket. He sat front and center between Logan and Alex, watching the view of the jet runway as the film began.
“So this is Vedado Ranch, Wayne Parker’s place?”
“That’s right, up in Torcido County, near the Colorado line,” Logan answered.
“I’ve heard of it. Biggest private ranch in the state. And you just made this movie a few hours ago? That time stamp is correct?”
“Yep, that’s the right date and time. 07-02, that’s today.” The screen showed the first shots around the Vedado Ranch airstrip, with the color picture zooming in to capture images of the tail numbers of the assembled private and corporate jets.
“You shot this from your Cessna, and they never saw you?”
“Oh no, we took it from a UAV,” replied Logan. “A drone.”
“A drone?” The Sheriff was visibly impressed. “So, where’s the drone? How’d that work out?”
“Just watch,” said Logan. “See these four Blackhawks parked by the hangar? We shot one down, and another one shot up our airplane. They were carrying Milicia troops from the Falcon Battalion.”
“You shot down a Blackhawk?” asked Sheriff McNally. “No kidding? How’d you manage that?”
“That was later,” said Alex, who was sitting on the left side of the Sheriff. “Actually, she shot it down, with a Russian Dragunov rifle.” Alex gestured to Ranya, who was sitting on the other side of the Sheriff and Logan. The rest of the ‘welcoming committee’ had pulled their chairs up close behind them, or were standing and leaning over the chair backs to see the show.
Logan stopped the video, freezing it on a frame showing the four Blackhawks parked on the tarmac, with their tails toward the largest hangar. “We were controlling the drone from fifteen miles away. Our Cessna was hidden under some trees. They spotted the drone, and the helicopters came searching for us. I guess they RDF’d us. You know, radio direction finding. Maybe they found our signal—I thought it was secure. Anyway, one of these Blackhawks was landing in an LZ a couple of hundred yards from us, and she hit it with a rifle. Nailed the pilot, I guess. Down it went.” Logan used his left hand, held out flat, to indicate how the helicopter had been descending when it suddenly rolled over and dropped to the ground. He struck the edge of his hand on the table like a karate chop.
The deputies who were sitting and standing behind them nodded to one other, murmuring. Alex said, “Let’s watch the whole video, and take it all in sequence, okay? It’ll make more sense that way.”
“Okay, sounds reasonable,” replied the Sheriff.
Alex narrated, with some comments added by Logan, but the video itself made their case. When they saw the VIP reception on the giant terrace in front of Wayne Parker’s imported Italian castle, the deputies began to recognize faces, and they became agitated and then angry. Besides Parker, the two senators, the next president of Mexico, the American ambassador to Mexico and Peter Kosimos, they identified several other notable billionaires and politicians.
There was even a famous blow-dried “conservative” media figure, who had once been a Presidential spokesman. His incongruent appearance was greeted by the deputies with curses and swearing. One older deputy offered the unconfirmed but adamant opinion that all of the American participants at the Vedado conference were senior members of the Council on Foreign Relations. This charge sparked a heated discussion about that private group’s inordinate influence on United States foreign policy, concerning their relentless drive to merge Canada, America and Mexico into the North American Community, with no internal borders.
Then they watched the wheelchair-bound Peter Kosimos leave the luncheon in his white van, and they saw the Gulfstream jet land on the runway, and the deputies grew silent again. In astonishment, they saw Dave Whitman step down onto the tarmac, and ride in a black SUV to his impromptu lakeside rendezvous with Kosimos. The deputies were muttering to one another and bitterly cursing, watching the ex-President and the billionaire currency speculator conferring in private by the lake.
Alex said, “We brought the UAV down 2,000 feet to get a good look at these two, so the resolution and the angle are pretty good. We might be able to use lip readers to catch some of what they’re saying. Anyway, I don’t think they just met to discuss the weather. Okay, this is when they spotted the drone. We started to pick up radio chatter from their security men. See the bodyguard coming over?”
“So this is the end of the video?” ask
ed the sheriff.
“Not quite. Logan did some fancy remote-control flying here.” The camera view tilted up and zoomed out to show a wide-angle picture of a mountain range. Then the brief view of the sky and the horizon disappeared and the screen again showed only forests, meadows and lakes, turning and spinning. The view swirled and blurred, and finally steadied again, rushing across treetops and a meadow, and then across a sparkling blue lake. Pine trees beyond the lake began to come into focus, as the distant shore rushed closer. Two shapes at the lake’s edge became men, two faces expanded to fill the entire screen, and then the image flashed and went white.
The sheriff spoke for them all. “What in the HELL was that? Who? Uhh, can you back that up, and play it again, but slower?”
This was also the first time that Ranya had seen the UAV’s film, and she was also studying it intently.
“No problem,” said Logan, jabbing commands on the laptop’s keyboard. The images began moving again, the drone’s camera eye rushing across the lake waters. He slowed the forward progress until the video was moving frame by frame, and when the men’s faces were clearly visible, he froze the picture.
The sheriff exclaimed, “Hell yeah, that’s Weasel Dave Whitman and Peter Kosimos! Ho—ly crap! Did you kill ‘em?”
“We don’t know,” responded Alex. “Maybe. We heard them mention a fatality on the radio, but not who.”
The Sheriff was quiet, his brow furrowed, stroking his chin. “Hmmm. Now don’t this just beat all? Don’t this just beat all...”
“Sheriff,” asked Ranya, “Are you going to turn us in? Arrest us?” She was an escaped federal fugitive, and here she was in a closed room, surrounded by local law enforcement officers—although they were like no other cops that she had ever seen before. Except for the Sheriff, they were wearing no police uniforms, beyond their tan DEPUTY ball caps. She hadn’t even been frisked back on the road, and she was still carrying her barely concealed pistol—as were all of the deputies as well.
“Huh? What?” responded the Sheriff, confused. “You? Turn you in? To who? The Milicia? The communists up in Santa Fe? Naw, don’t worry about that, we don’t deal with them—we don’t deal with them at all. Hell, it seems to me the only thing ya’ll are guilty of is crashing a leadership party of the New World Order. If you ask me, you should get a medal for that! Naw, I’m not worried about it—Vedado Ranch sure ain’t in my jurisdiction. But just to be safe, I guess we ought to get your airplane off the road. Can it fly a few miles, if we put some gas in it?”
“Sure, it’ll fly,” said Logan. “No problem.”
The Sheriff turned around in his chair to address his deputies, who were huddled close around him. “Gentlemen, can we join you at the bar in a little while?” This was apparently his polite way of asking them to depart, and they rose to file out. “Not you, Halsey.” This was his Chief Deputy, the bearded squad leader from the road. He returned to the opposite side of the table, and took an open seat. He was wearing an old-style desert camouflage BDU blouse.
When the room was cleared out and the door was closed again, Sheriff McNally asked Alex, “So, where were you planning on flying from here?”
“California. San Diego,” he replied.
“What the hell for?” responded the Sheriff, surprised. “Cali’s even worse than Santa Fe! You ought to be heading north, to the free states.”
“We would be,” said Alex, “but we’ve got a personal situation to take care of out there. After that, we probably will.”
Logan said, “Alex…I’ve got a problem. I’ve got until tomorrow to get the Cessna back to Tucson. After that, it’s going to be radioactive. But I can’t return it all shot up, so that’s out the window now. And since I can’t turn it in all shot up, well…I’ve got a real big problem. Alex…we need to talk about California.”
“What do you mean?”
Logan was distraught, obviously pained to be backing out. “I mean, we can’t fly the Cessna tonight, not to California anyway, not with the fuel tank the way it is. Plus, the Pelican crashed up there at Vedado, and it won’t take ‘em long to put the pieces together, and find out where it came from. Maybe they already have. So I can’t just go back to Albuquerque now, and pretend like nothing happened. And I can’t leave Trudy back there either. I just can’t.”
“Okay…so what’re you thinking?”
“Well, I’ve got until tomorrow before that plane’s red hot. I’d like to get the plane patched up tonight, and fly back to Albuquerque. I’ll pick up Trudy on a road, just like I picked you guys up, and we’ll head north to the free states. I can just swing that, if I get it done tomorrow before the Cessna’s posted as missing overdue. Ranya, I’ll give you back what you paid me. I’m sorry, but I can’t take you guys to California.”
Alex thought about this. “Okay, we understand. Your wife comes first. But she needs dialysis, doesn’t she?”
“Right, she does…but Alex, I burned all my bridges in New Mexico today. They’re going to put the pieces of that Pelican back together, and then…”
“Yeah, I get the picture. You have to look after Trudy. You have to get her out of there.”
“Thanks…”
“Don’t worry about the refund,” offered Ranya.
The sheriff cut in. “So, you two are needing a ride to San Diego? Is that all?”
“Well...yes,” said Alex. “You can do that?”
“No, not me, not personally, but I can find you a plane and pilot. You might say that general aviation is one of our fortes around here—it’s almost up there with horses and hunting. It’s damn sure safer than driving
any distance these days! How soon do you want to leave?”
“How soon can we leave?” asked Ranya.
Sheriff McNally told his Chief Deputy, “Go get Flint.” The bearded man left the room and returned a minute later with another one of the “reception committee” from the road.
“Hey Flint,” the Sheriff said, smiling, “How soon can you be ready to fly a pair of desperados to San Diego?”
The skinny pilot was holding a fresh bottle of Dos Equis beer. His face and neck were ruined by livid red pockmarks, but he carried himself with cocky assuredness. He sported a dirty-blonde mullet haircut: short in front and long in the back. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, and was wearing his deputy’s ball cap on backwards, pushed far back on his head. He was wearing faded blue jeans, and a USMC digital desert camouflage shirt. Ranya could see the subtle swell on his hip where he carried his pistol beneath the untucked shirt. Most of the other deputies had been open-carrying holstered pistols in plain sight. He sat down next to the Chief Deputy, across from the Sheriff and the three strangers.
“San Diego? We can go right now, almost. But it’ll cost—aviation gas ain’t cheap, or easy to come by.” He asked, “Can you pay for the gas?” and Alex nodded assent. “I’ll need to fill up at both ends, so call it 120 gallons, at seventy-five blue bucks a gallon, or whatever I have to pay for it. And I don’t think you’ll want to land anywhere they’re going to give you the old biometric rectal exam, am I right?” He pulled off his ball cap, set it on the table, and ran his fingers back through his hair, glancing at each of them, but lingering on Ranya.
By his Southern accent, she thought that Flint was a transplant to New Mexico, maybe from Georgia or the Carolinas. She pegged him for Appalachian hillbilly stock. Scots-Irish, maybe. Skinny and as hard as flint, like his forebears. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps he’d survived the “monkey pox” she’d heard of since her escape. So that’s what it looks like…the scars were indeed dreadful.
“Yeah, you’re right about that,” answered Alex. “We had somewhere a little more discreet in mind.”
“Then I know just the place, but it’ll cost extra. It’s an Indian casino in eastern San Diego County. I’ve flown in there a couple of times. If you can pay, you can get anything you need there, and I mean anything. No questions asked, and no cops.” Flint said this with his official sh
eriff’s deputy ball cap resting on the table in front of him, yet with no evident sense of irony. If Sheriff McNally had noted the paradox, he didn’t let on either.
“Great, that sounds perfect,” responded Alex.
“All right then, call it…” He paused, considering. “Call it a hundred thousand blue bucks, all up. That’s for the gas, the plane and my risk— and you’ve got yourself an air charter. Half now, and half in San Diego.” His eyes flitted between them, as if he expected his price to be challenged, and he was prepared to negotiate.
Ranya coolly asked him, “Would you prefer that in paper dollars, or gold coins?”
Their new pilot’s blue eyes lit up. “Do you really have to ask?”
“Just being polite. I’ll pay you fifteen Krugerrands. One-ouncers.” Ranya reckoned Flint thought he was getting the best of her…well, let him. He’d be a motivated flier.
“Okay then, you’ve got yourself a charter.” He reached across the table to Ranya, and she shook his hand, while trying to look him in his eyes without cringing at his pitted face. After letting go and sitting back, Flint took a drink from his beer and said, “But first, we’ll pour a little go-juice into your Cessna, and then I can fly it off the road for you. I’ve—”
“Oh, I think I can handle it,” Logan quickly responded, chuckling.
“You should have seen the last road he took off from,” said Ranya, sticking up for him. “A hundred yards, and off a cliff.” She made a steep diving motion with her hand.
“With people shooting machine guns at us,” added Alex, grinning.
They were all laughing now, and Ranya continued the banter. “That Blackhawk would have caught us too, if Logan hadn’t of flown straight into that hailstorm.”
Flint looked at the old Border Patrol pilot with new respect, leaned across the table again and shook his hand. “Well Logan, sounds like you’re my kind of aviator. You fly in Afghanistan? Iraq? Iran?”
Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista Page 58