They wouldn’t continue east, she told herself. Soon they would turn south, and then eventually west again, and somewhere downriver from Laredo they would cross the border. It was only a guess, but she felt confident in it. After doing what they had done, these men couldn’t afford to stay on the American side of the river.
They—and their prisoners—were headed to Mexico.
Four
Little Tucson, Arizona—twenty miles from the border
Tom Brannon wheeled the dolly through the open back door of Brannon Auto Parts in downtown Little Tucson. Four cases of assorted spark plugs were stacked up on the dolly. Tom put a hand on the top one to steady the stack, and let the dolly tip forward so that the cases rested on the tile floor of the storeroom. He pulled the dolly out from under them and in a habitual gesture, ran a hand over his graying, close-cropped sandy hair.
It felt good to be working again.
It felt good to be normal again.
Long months had passed since the horrific battle that had brought an orgy of death and destruction to Little Tucson. Shattered glass had been replaced, bullet-pocked walls has been patched and repainted, bloodstains had been scrubbed up off the sidewalks and the street. People didn’t even talk much about the time when Mara Salva-trucha, the vicious gang of drug smugglers and criminals composed mostly of Central Americans, had crossed the border and declared war on one sleepy little American town. All that was in the past. Better to forget about it.
But Tom Brannon couldn’t forget. He had spearheaded the effort to defeat the brutal and quite possibly insane Ernesto Luiz Montoya and his bloodthirsty M-15 com-pañeros. He had seen loved ones die, including his own parents, and he had dealt out death with his own hands. A man couldn’t just put that behind him, even if he wanted to.
Tom didn’t want to forget. He didn’t want to blind himself to the fact that there was evil loose in the world, and that sometimes, for the sake of all that was good and right, decent men had to stand up to that evil and do their best to defeat it. That might not be convenient. It might not be expedient. It might not even be, God help us all, the politically correct thing to do.
But it had to be done, and if people forgot that fact, they ran the risk of forgetting how to stand up to evil in the first place.
So, no, Tom would never forget the battle of Little Tucson and everything that had come before it ... but sometimes it was mighty nice to put all those memories aside for a while and just be a husband and a father and a businessman again.
Louly Parker, who managed the auto-parts store for him, came into the storeroom, looked at the cases of spark plugs, and said, “Good. I was afraid we were going to run out before we could restock.”
“Nobody gets in too big a hurry to buy spark plugs,” Tom said.
Louly gave him a skeptical look. “Are you kidding? These days everybody’s in a hurry for everything. Even if it’s one of your regular customers who comes in here and you’re out of something, you know where he’s going to head ... straight to the edge of town.”
“SavMart.”
“That’s right. And when he sees the prices they’ve got there, he’s never going to come back here.”
Tom didn’t bother arguing with her. He knew she was right. Loyalty only went so far, especially when folks had to work so hard just to make ends meet. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the average American citizen had to work almost half the year just to pay all of his or her various tax bills, SavMart might not have ever gotten such a stranglehold on the nation’s economy.
On the other hand, Tom had definite mixed emotions about the retail giant. Old Hiram Stackhouse, the founder of SavMart himself and one of the richest men in the country, had come to Little Tucson to help out in the town’s time of trouble. And Tom liked him. Stackhouse was free enterprise and the American dream personified.
“Well, we’ll keep the doors open as long as we can. Might just surprise you.”
“I could use a pleasant surprise,” Louly said.
She was in her mid-twenties, a tall, pretty young woman with red hair that came halfway down her back. Tom, who was old enough to be her daddy, thought of her as a sort of surrogate daughter, which always made him feel a little guilty because he already had a daughter of his own whom he loved dearly. But Lisa didn’t live in Little Tucson anymore, and he saw Louly just about every day. They were friends as much as they were boss and employee.
The bell over the front door jangled. Tom motioned toward the front of the store and told Louly, “Maybe there’s your surprise now. You go see about it and I’ll stock these spark plugs.”
“Okay.” She vanished into the front of the store.
Tom cut open one of the boxes, picked it up, and carried it to the long, heavy-duty metal shelves behind the counter where inventory was kept. Brannon Auto Parts was old-fashioned. Customers came to the counter and asked for what they needed, and the clerk got it from the shelves and rang it up. The system meant that folks had to actually speak to each other, and often they would slow down and talk about other things, gossip mostly, and for that amount of time everybody involved escaped, at least temporarily, from the exhausting pace of modern life.
But only temporarily. Little Tucson wasn’t Mayberry, after all. Hell, Mayberry probably had its own SavMart by now. Probably a SuperSavMart.
Louly fetched a set of brake shoes for the customer and rang them up on the old cash register that was really just a glorified money drawer. The fellow had just left the store when the cell phone in the pocket of Tom’s faded blue work shirt buzzed. He walked over to the counter, set down the half-empty case of spark plugs, and pulled out the phone.
“Hello?”
“Tom.” He heard his wife Bonnie’s voice, sounding flat and strained. Something was wrong. “Turn on the TV.”
A portable television sat at the end of the counter next to the wall. It didn’t get used much; mostly it was on for college football games on Saturday afternoons during the fall and baseball games during the summer. Tom had teased Louly once about using it sometimes to watch her “stories”—but only once. Now he said to Bonnie, “Hang on,” and then clicked the TV on. The sound was off, but as the picture came up he saw a shot of what looked like desert country somewhere. In the distance something was burning, with a column of black smoke rising from it. He couldn’t make out what it was.
Louly came over, looked at the TV screen, and said, “Is it the Middle East?”
Tom didn’t answer her. He flipped the channel twice but got the same shot each time, telling him that all three networks were using the same video feed. One of the channels had a graphic superimposed on the screen underneath the blazing whatever-it-was, though. The graphic read LIVE—LAREDO, TEXAS.
“What is it you wanted me to see?” he asked Bonnie. “Whatever this is is going on in Texas.”
Louly leaned toward the screen suddenly and said, “My God! Is that a school bus that’s on fire?”
It was indeed a school bus, Tom saw as his eyes narrowed. He could make it out, now that he knew what he was looking for. That must have been a terrible accident.
“It’s Laura,” Bonnie said into his ear.
“Laura?” he repeated, as for a second he couldn’t think of who Bonnie was talking about.
“Kelly’s girl.”
Tom felt his heart lurch. Kelly was Bonnie’s sister, and Laura was Kelly’s daughter, and they lived in—
Laredo, Texas.
“Oh, no,” Tom said in a hushed voice. “Was she in that wreck?” The way the bus was burning like an inferno, he didn’t see how anyone could have survived such a terrible crash.
Although, he suddenly wondered, how had the bus crashed? It looked like it was out in the middle of some open ground somewhere, with nothing around it.
“It’s not a wreck,” Bonnie said, her voice trembling. “Laura’s been kidnapped.”
“Turn it up,” he snapped at Louly. “Turn the sound up.”
Louly turned the knob,
and a female newscaster’s well-modulated voice said, “... some details starting to come in now. Jeremy Hernandez works for our affiliate in Laredo and is on the scene. Jeremy, what can you tell us about this terrible attack?”
The scene stayed the same, but a man’s voice picked up the report. “Paulette, the Webb County Sheriff’s Office hasn’t provided an official statement yet, but sources tell us that it appears this school bus, which you can see burning, was forced off the road as it was carrying some students from Saint Anne’s Catholic School to a picnic today at Lake Casa Blanca State Park. As the bus was being attacked, several other vehicles passing by on the highway were attacked as well, and blown up by what appears to have been some sort of rockets.”
“Then this attack was carried out by terrorists, Jeremy?” the woman asked.
“Not the sort that you’re thinking of, Paulette. From what I’m hearing, one of the gangs from Nuevo Laredo was responsible for this atrocity.”
A different man’s voice said, “This is Kevin Webster, Jeremy. What about the students on the bus?”
“We, ah, don’t know yet, Kevin, but I’ve been told unofficially that none of them were on the bus when it blew up. Evidently, they were taken off and something was done with them before the bus was destroyed. Only one body was found with the bus, and it was tentatively thought to be that of the driver, one of the nuns from Saint Anne’s School. And while this hasn’t been confirmed either, I’ve been told that there were at least nine fatalities on the highway, in the other vehicles that were attacked.”
“So we have at least ten people killed and a busload of students missing?”
“That’s right, Kevin.”
“Jeremy,” the female newscaster said, “these students ... boys or girls? Or both?”
“Girls, Paulette. I’m told that they were all juniors and seniors.”
Louly looked shocked as she watched the news coverage. Tom supposed that he did, too, but somehow, there was a part of him that wasn’t all that surprised. To the people of Laredo, and to those newscasters sitting safe somewhere in a network news bureau in New York or Los Angeles, it was hard to believe that a band of criminals would be daring enough to invade the United States and carry out such an atrocity.
They had already forgotten what had happened in Little Tucson.
He reached out and changed the channel, getting the same picture but a different set of talking heads, in this case superimposed in a small box in a corner of the screen. These newscasters evidently had better sources than Jeremy Hernandez.
“—the work of a notorious Mexican gang known as Los Lobos de la Noche. An e-mail supposedly from the leader of the gang claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and murders stated that the missing students were all right and would not be harmed. The motive for the kidnapping is not known, but it’s assumed that ransom will be demanded for the safe return of the students, many of whom come from well-to-do families. We’ve had no word about actual ransom demands being made as of yet—”
Tom turned the sound down and brought the cell phone back to his ear. “Bonnie, are you there?”
“I’m here, Tom,” she said, and he could tell that she had been crying. She would be watching the same thing on TV that he was.
“I’m sure Laura’s okay,” he said, trying to sound as reassuring and comforting as he could. “If ... if those girls have been taken for ransom, the kidnappers won’t hurt them—”
“You heard what they said on TV,” Bonnie cut in. “It’s a gang that took them. A gang like M-15. You saw what they did here, Tom. You know what ... animals like that are capable of ...”
Bonnie’s voice trailed off in a series of wracking sobs.
“I’m coming home,” Tom said into the phone. “I’ll be there in just a little while.” He broke the connection and looked at Louly.
She nodded and waved him toward the door. “I’ll take care of the store.”
“Thanks. One of Bonnie’s nieces was on that bus.”
“My God.” She touched Tom’s arm. “I’m sure she’ll be all right.”
“That’s what I tried to tell Bonnie,” he said grimly, “but all she can think about is what happened here. She knows that men like that ... they’ll do anything.”
“They’re not men,” Louly said. “They’re monsters.”
And remembering what had happened when Little Tucson was invaded by the same sort of gang, Tom couldn’t argue with her about that.
Five
The middle-aged black man held out his hand and said, “John Holland.”
Sheriff Phil Garza shook Holland’s hand. “Are you from the FBI, Mr. Holland?”
“State Department.”
Garza’s pale eyebrows rose a little in surprise.
Holland saw the reaction and went on. “This matter impacts the relationship between the United States and Mexico, so the secretary thought it would be a good idea to have someone on the scene.”
“You got here in a hurry,” Garza commented. “It’s only been a couple of hours.”
“I was at a trade conference in Houston,” Holland explained. “I choppered over.” He took a deep breath. “What have you got?”
The other man in the office, Saul Jimenes, said, “Maybe it would be better if we waited, so we only have to go over everything once.”
Holland turned and looked at him coolly. “And you are, sir ... ?”
“Jimenes. Chief of Police in Laredo.”
It was Holland’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “I thought this incident occurred outside of the city limits.”
“It did,” the stocky Jimenes replied. “But all the local law-enforcement agencies are cooperating and pooling our intelligence concerning these so-called Night Wolves.”
“Ah, yes,” Holland said with a slight smile. “Los Lobos de la Noche. A rather melodramatic name, don’t you think?”
“There’s nothing melodramatic about their actions,” Sheriff Garza said. “They’re probably the most dangerous group in northern Mexico.”
“They’re a gang?”
Garza tried not to sigh. Holland was determined to go ahead and get his briefing one way or the other, whether the FBI and the Texas Rangers were on hand yet or not.
“They’re not a gang in the sense that you’re using the word, Mr. Holland. They’re not one of the drug cartels. They work for the largest of the drug cartels.”
“Doing what? Smuggling heroin and cocaine?”
“No. They protect the drug smugglers. They wage war against other cartels. They assassinate law enforcement and military officials who represent a threat to the cartel they work for.” Garza took a deep breath. “In other words, the Night Wolves are like a gun, Mr. Holland. The cartel points them at whoever gets in their way ... and pulls the trigger.”
Holland’s forehead beneath his thinning hair creased in a frown. “But that doesn’t really make any sense. A bunch of teenage girls couldn’t have done anything to cause trouble for a drug cartel ... could they?”
Garza shook his head. “Not that we’ve been able to figure.”
Jimenes spoke up again. “The Night Wolves are mercenaries. Money is always their primary objective. Their actions could have been motivated by something as simple as holding the girls for ransom. Ransom kidnappings happen all the time in Nuevo Laredo ... throughout all of Mexico, for that matter. And Americans are always prime targets.” The chief of police gave a short, humorless bark of laughter. “It seems there’s a feeling below the border that all Americans are rich.”
Holland pursed his lips. “What about these particular girls? Are their families wealthy?”
“We’re still working on getting information about all of them,” Garza said. “Right now we have mostly just their names. We’ve contacted their families, and officers from my department and from the Laredo Police Department will be interviewing them. But all that’s just getting started.”
A knock sounded on the door of Garza’s office. He called for whoever it was to c
ome in, and a man and a woman entered. The man wore the uniform of the Texas Rangers, including the neatly shaped straw Stetson, which he took off as he came into the room. He was about thirty, slender, with close-cropped dark hair.
The woman’s hair was short, too, but it was the color of fresh honey. She wore a dark blue conservative skirt and blazer. She spoke first, saying, “Sheriff Garza? I’m Sharon Morgan, from the San Antonio office of the FBI.”
Garza tried not to frown. “I was expecting Special Agent in Charge Willis. We spoke on the phone—”
“SAC Willis was unavoidably detained in San Antonio,” Morgan said, breaking in. “He asked me to take his place and do whatever I can to assist you until he arrives later.”
Garza nodded. “All right. I’m pleased to meet you, Agent Morgan.” He looked at the Ranger. “And it’s good to see you again, Roy. Wish it was under better circumstances.”
Before the Ranger could respond, Morgan turned to him and said, “Wait a minute. When we introduced ourselves out in the hall, you said you were Sergeant Rogers. Your name is Roy Rogers?”
The lawman smiled tolerantly. “Rodgers, with a D in the middle of it. Old family name. There were Roy Rodgerses in Texas a long time before Leonard Slye ever took the name.”
“Okay,” Morgan said. “When they sent me down here from Quantico, I should have figured that I’d wind up working with a cowboy.”
Rodgers’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he didn’t say anything and the polite smile remained on his lips.
Garza tried to ignore the instinctive dislike he felt for the woman. “We’ve got approximately forty missing girls to find,” he said. “Everybody sit down and let’s figure out how to do it.”
Morgan frowned in annoyance at the sharp tone in the sheriff’s voice, but she took one of the empty chairs. Rodgers looked down at the floor to hide the grin that flashed briefly over his boyish face. Holland and Jimenes just looked worried.
Invasion Usa: Border War Page 3