“In the old days, it would be to drive it across the border—head for open land. The fence is pretty much everywhere now, though, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get through. All you need is the right kind of saw and someone who knows what he’s doing.”
It was a sophisticated operation. The bad guys would load the trucks, preset the GPS travel point and meet up at the rendezvous point.
“Border Patrol goes through every thirty minutes. Trucks are turned off, lights off. They saw their way through the fence, wait for the next patrol to pass by, and the truck goes through. You can set your watch by it.”
“You know a lot.”
“I went out with a DEA agent a couple of times. He told me a ton of stories. He gave me a primer on cartels. One of the biggest in this part of the world is Alacran, headed up by Felix Alcala. Bad guy. His lieutenant is a guy named Hector Zuniga. Rumor has it Hector collects heads.”
“Heads.”
“On the plus side, if there is a plus side, one of Felix Alcala’s horses won the All American Futurity. Looks like you two have something in common. So how much stuff do you think these guys are moving?”
“There are two theories about that.”
“Oh?”
“One, they’re not moving anything. It’s a shakedown cruise. And two, they’re moving something else—guns, maybe? To make the trip profitable?”
“What do you think?”
“That’s what I’d do.”
“So Miko’s running guns?”
“I think so, but that’s not the primary reason.”
“You mean he’s shipping the technology. Cloaking technology, like the kid’s car?”
“And stealth. The semi trucks could be cloaked.” But Landry didn’t know if he was even close. He had never seen the big trucks. Now he thought the trucks he had seen go by the motel the night before were just your average, run-of-the-mill semis. He doubted they were related to this situation at all. But seeing them had informed his subconscious. He took revelations where he found them.
Denboer had cleared out the farm, except for the hydroponics and the fields. Whatever he was planning, it looked to be a big score.
Jolie said, “Maybe they could smuggle those trucks past, but it would be taking a big chance. If they’re invisible at night, then they’re extremely valuable. So why are we targeting Columbus, New Mexico, and the other two instead of the miles and miles of empty land in between?”
“Because they’re towns. If you look at the map of New Mexico and the border, you’ll see there are no roads outside the populated areas—not across the border. The fence blocked them. Most of them were farm roads, dirt roads. There’s not a hell of a lot outside the towns, except for farm roads. Now you see them peter off on the satellite map. But there are a few blacktop roads here and there. Near the towns. They just stop at the fence. They’re cut off.”
“Or,” Jolie said, “they’re shunted onto the cross street that runs alongside the border fence. That’s what I recall, the few times I’ve been to these border towns.”
“What we need is a good graded road or, better yet, a paved road, that goes up to the border on both sides. It doesn’t matter if they’re cut off by the fence. It would only be . . .” He did the math in his head.
“Thirty, forty yards?” Jolie said. “Less than thirty yards?”
“Fewer,” Landry said.
“What? Oh for fuck’s sake, you’ve really got to stop doing that. It’s like Tourette’s syndrome. It wouldn’t be a pleasure cruise but it’s doable. Old asphalt, or maybe the asphalt’s been torn up and it’s dirt. Potholes, maybe. But not impossible. What about the sound, though? People would hear a semi driving by.”
“Sure they would. But if it’s an area where there are trucks—and there are plenty of trucks going from the US to Mexico and vice versa—people would be used to the sound.”
“The sound of commerce.” She sighed. “So when do you want me?”
“I told you. Get out here, ASAP.”
“You get Tom to fly me out and let me know where to reconnoiter.” She added, “Damn it, I’m going to miss my animals.”
At the motel, Landry watched Eric give his Dodge Ram a bath. Eric asked him to look in the glove compartment for the tire gauge, and Landry complied. He leaned into the truck, pulled out the tire gauge, slipped the recorder Eric had used to record the conversation the Army guys had received at the satellite van into his pocket.
Back in Landry’s room, they listened.
One voice was definitely Miko Denboer’s. The other voice was male, ranging in age between twenty and forty. Anglo. The guy said, “I got the tickets.”
Denboer’s voice: “You know I want us to get there in one piece. None of these short hops, right?”
“No worries. It’s nonstop all the way.”
“So the flight’s full? I was hoping to bring a friend of—”
“Sorry, no can do. It’s tourist season, remember? You’ll have to wait for the next one if you want to bring somebody.”
“All right with me. We’ve got a choice, right? Two other flights?”
“That we do.”
“Three choices. Anything else?”
“Arrival time in Spain is three a.m. That would be Monday.”
“And the reservations? You sure you verified them?”
“What do you think? Of course I did. We’re good. You worry too much.”
“Hey, thanks for helping me out with this.”
“No problem. That’s what I get paid the big bucks for.”
“Yeah, right!” Laughter. They disconnected.
Eric burped. “I ate too much, gonna walk it off. You wanna come along?”
“Sure.”
They took a walk. No one would be able to hear them.
“So,” Eric said. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Code?”
“Yeah, a simple one. Three a.m. in Spain translates to eight p.m. Sunday, here.”
Landry said, “Early.”
“Just after dark. On a Sunday. Maybe it’s the best move. It’s unexpected. They’ve got Stealth. You think it’s legit?”
“Sunday. Eight p.m. New Mexico time. The flight is full.”
“Yeah. About that ‘the flight is full.’ I thought they would be empty. A dry run.”
“Why would they do that?” Landry said.
“If they’re caught—”
“If they’re caught going dark they’re in deep shit anyway. Might as well make the ride down pay for itself. Besides, whoever’s driving will be expendable.”
“Greedy motherfuckers.”
“What other kind of motherfuckers are there?”
“So what do you think they’re moving on the run down?” Eric said. “Arms?”
“Semiautomatic rifles are very popular down there.”
“Wish they’d mentioned which part of Spain they were going to,” Eric said.
“We’re going to have to cover all three.”
“If they’re going Sunday, we have three days. We’ll need someone on each entry point.”
“They’d probably send their crew down the day before. Maybe two days.”
Eric said, “It’s a long way between the three crossing points.”
“Maybe the satellite van will pinpoint the place.”
“Maybe.”
Toward evening, Landry picked up Jolie at the Las Cruces airport. The drive back started contentiously.
“You notified the authorities?” she asked him.
“It’s too late for that.”
“The DEA—”
“It’s not up to me to do that—it wouldn’t work. They’d write me off as a nutcase.”
“What about the Army? The guys in the satellite van? They’ve been listening in, just as w
e have.”
“So?”
“What do you mean, ‘So?’”
“They’re not going to help us.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re not going to help us.”
“It’s just us? That’s crazy.”
Landry glanced at her. “They can’t help us even if they wanted to.”
“They’re the US Army.”
“The US Army can’t initiate a military action on American soil.”
“Contact the ATF then. Or the DEA.”
“You can try. How do you think that will go over?”
Jolie opened her mouth, then closed it again. She knew how things worked. She was a cop. She’d encountered red tape and stonewalling as much as the next guy. More than the next guy.
Actually, she wasn’t even a cop anymore. Jolie was a former cop. She had no standing. And even if she had standing, the DEA would not mobilize on her say-so. The DEA was like every other bureaucratic agency in the modern world. It took a while for the machinery to get moving, and that was dependent on the notion that they even wanted to act on the intelligence.
Denboer had friends in the DEA. But he was playing both ends against the middle, so he wouldn’t be communicating with them.
“If it’s El Paso,” Jolie said, “there’s the Army base right there. The guys in the surveillance van are Army.”
Landry could tell that Jolie knew, the minute the words left her mouth, that her theory wouldn’t fly. “The police are a paramilitary organization,” he said. “And you know how the military is.
“These are good men, but the guy in the surveillance van is still Army. In that way the armed forces—any branch you want to name—aren’t so different. You know what he’d say. This is not their mission. I can hear him now. It would go like this. One of his guys says, ‘Hey, we’ve got to help.’ And the sergeant says, ‘We can’t without proper authorization.’ And the gung-ho guy, he’ll say, ‘They could mobilize from the Army base in El Paso.’ And the sergeant would say, ‘By the time it went up the chain of command, it would be all over anyway.’”
“But—”
“And the gung-ho guy would say, ‘But there are three American citizens putting their lives in danger.’ And the sergeant would say, ‘Son, do you want to be the soldier who executes a military action on American soil?’ He’d say, ‘Do you want to be on TV for that? You know that we aren’t authorized for that kind of operation. We can’t, anyway. It’s impossible.’ And that’s the Army.”
Landry added, “And then he’s saying that the US Army is not a law enforcement agency, that all they can do is pass along what they know. By then, it’s going to be too late. Even if they notified the proper authorities—and they’d have to contact a commanding officer with some pull, somewhere on some military base—you think they’re going to flood the Mexican border with military and start an international incident?”
“No,” Jolie said. “I don’t.”
“And the last thing the satellite van guy would say is this: ‘We can’t do anything. We’re not even supposed to be here in the first place.’”
Jolie had checked into the Holiday Inn in Las Cruces. Eric and Landry checked in as well, all three of them at different times of day and using different aliases. Eric’s room was across the common area, closer to the pool. Landry was on the other side. Jolie got a room halfway between. There were a lot of people staying there, which provided them cover.
Their first bull session was in Landry’s room.
They had done their homework. They’d studied physical maps but mostly relied on Google Earth for terrain and ease of use.
They needed to anticipate what Denboer and his crew would do. Fortunately, they had the timeline, thanks to the coded language Landry and Eric had intercepted. They knew when they would transport the trucks, but not where they would cross the border.
Since Denboer had cleared out of the farm and put the trucks on the road, there must be another hiding place. It would stand to reason that it would be somewhere fairly close to the Mexican border. There were three border entry stations, and the land in between was vast and inhospitable. But somewhere they would find a barn or a structure large enough to house the three trucks.
If there were three trucks.
“This is all supposition,” Landry said. “The best we can do is put ourselves into their shoes and imagine what they would do.”
They looked at the three ports of entry.
Antelope Wells, New Mexico, was a long way down over rough roads. Pro: there were places to pass through the fence without being seen. Con: it was a very long drive through the interior of Mexico on inferior roads. The closest town in Mexico was almost ninety miles away. Antelope Wells just wasn’t doable. It wasn’t cost-effective.
There could be access to an airstrip long enough to accommodate a cargo plane, deep in the interior of Sonora. A few years ago, they would have taken that into consideration. But now they had Google Maps. There were no airstrips of that size. There were hardly any airstrips at all.
They did not have access to the latest satellite photos, however. All things were possible. But were they probable?
Columbus, New Mexico was a small town with a sleepy crossing. The official Point of Entry was staffed. Columbus might be small but several roads on the US side fed into roads opposite them on the border, even though the border fence had cut them off. Most of the corresponding roads in Mexico were dirt, but there were a number of places to hide the trucks in plain sight; plenty of businesses required semi trucks. Produce, for one. And all sorts of goods that came through the border area.
Santa Theresa, near Sunland Park and off to the side of El Paso, was the biggest. Once through the border crossing, there were many feeder roads into Mexico. It was the fastest way, freeways all the way down, and many places to cross. There were also plenty of industrial areas there, which would require semi trucks. But this was the major artery and port of entry, and it was policed heavily.
Landry thought the wise move would be to take the middle road. In addition to having all the desirable qualities for moving trucks through, Columbus was the closest border crossing, and it was reached by an empty highway: a straight line between two points. Even the highway, State Route 1, no longer held the designation of a state route. It was now Highway 11. There was access to dead-end roads on the other side of the Mexican border; plenty of semis passed through legitimately.
Columbus was Goldilocks – just right.
“They had to leave earlier than they expected to,” Jolie said. “The way they packed up the farm. I’ve heard of that before—some of these big organizations can be packed up within fifteen minutes, like they were never there. The first thing we need to do is find out if the trucks are still hidden there. Something spooked Denboer. Otherwise, they would have kept the semis hidden inside the hangar.”
“So we look for structures,” Eric said. “Something big enough to hide three semis. Some place remote.”
“It’s remote down there.”
They went to Google Maps again.
There were a few farms on Highway 11. Two of them had large barns. One looked abandoned. They focused first on the abandoned farm.
Jolie said, “We know the time and date they’re planning to go—unless that’s changed. How far is the farm from the port of entry?”
“Thirty-five miles,” Eric said.
“I think it’s this place. It’s the best guess we have. We have infrared scopes—we can tell if there are people there. We need to take turns watching.”
It was decided that Jolie would go early, set up, and watch the barn. The other barn was farther away from the border and looked new. “We should check that place, too,” Landry said.
“I can do that,” Eric said. “If they’re there, we should blow them up. End problem.”
“Th
e technology,” Landry said. “Good or bad, the technology is cutting-edge. I want to see them for myself.”
“If we blow ’em up there, it’s the endgame. It’s over.”
“I’d rather neutralize whoever’s guarding them and see what these things are like.” He looked at Jolie.
“I want to see them, too.”
“Neutralize, or kill?” Eric said.
“Depends, as it always does. We can’t take any chances. We can’t take prisoners, either. So we’d have to secure them.”
“Secure them,” Jolie said.
Eric looked from one to the other. “Okay. It’s your funeral.”
Added under his breath, “And probably mine.”
Chapter 33
Landry and Jolie went car shopping in the want ads. They bought a 2008 Dodge Challenger that had been souped up. The owner was happy to sell it for cash.
Eric took the truck, and Landry and Jolie followed in the dark gray Challenger. Eric kept going, but Landry and Jolie turned off at the first of the two farms they’d spotted on Google Earth. Both of them had barns big enough to conceal a semi truck or two. And both of the farms were not far from the border with Mexico.
The first was a stud farm, “OAK TREE QUARTER HORSES: Racing, Breeding, Pleasure Horses.” Landry and his “wife” Jolie rumbled the Challenger over the cattle guard to inquire within.
The owner was a woman in her late forties. A good-looking woman who would have been spectacular if she hadn’t spent the majority of her natural life in the New Mexico sun. Landry could tell she didn’t give a rat’s ass about her complexion—she was having too much fun following her dream. Her long, dark brown hair was pulled into a ponytail. She wore a pistol in a paddle holster clipped to the belt of her jeans. As they parked, she walked out to greet them. Friendly, but all business. Sizing them up for riding horses.
Landry asked if she had any off-track thoroughbreds, and nodded to Jolie, who slid out of the passenger’s seat and walked over.
The woman, Jeri, said she had a couple, and offered them a tour of the farm.
Landry thought the horses were pretty good. He’d heard the names of the forebears of the two stallions in residence. Well known in quarter horse circles. And the thoroughbred stallion, Archangelico, was a looker.
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