Starting in the 1960s, ambulatory treatment of tuberculosis outside sanatoria along with one year of isoniazid and p-aminosalicylic acid drug therapy came to be recognized as being as effective for patients and their families as treatment in a sanatorium, but that was after Michaele’s time in Europe. The result was a drastic reduction in surgeries, domiciliary care, the death rate, and the huge burdensome costs which could only be afforded by the rich.
Fortified by the rest and the chicken soup, Michaele insisted on getting his say in before Antoine could interrupt him.
“I have given considerable thought to the doctor’s orders. I intend to comply with them because I want to live. However, Antoine, you know our life’s work is not done, and I don’t mean constructing buildings in Argentina.”
Antoine nodded his understanding.
“The rest did me good. I have confidence that the medication will help. I do think that the surgery doesn’t need to be done right away, and I want us to take a trip to America and to Russia. Of the more than a hundred names still on our list, there are two that I want to be sure are eliminated before I die and while I can still be a part of the missions.”
“I don’t know, Michaele. Wouldn’t it be enough for me to do the heavy work and you just work with me on the planning?”
“Not for those two. The memories are too vivid for me to be left out of any part of the action for those monsters.”
“I understand. Let’s work on the plans, and I’ll do the legwork to get ready. Then I’ll take you to the place we choose; and you can be the avenger for all of our brothers in the Charlemagne Division, at least for those two special cases.”
He did not have to say the names. Their names and faces were inextricably entrenched into the psyches of both Antoine and Michaele. Both of them considered the removal of those two to be the most important missions in their remaining lives’ work.
Michaele improved after a month with the strict regimen of rest, good food, exposure to sunshine, and Dr. Goodefellow’s pills. He was able to get up and walk short distances. Antoine took him on seemingly innocuous and therapeutic excursions to the countryside. There, the two old friends practiced long distance shooting for hours at a time. English gentlemen had taken to the sport and were now entering and faring decently in international matches; so, no one paid Antoine and Michaele any heed. The process and activity were very tiring for Michaele, but he kept at it with determination until he could place three rounds out of four within two inches of dead center at five hundred yards and one out of four near the center at eight hundred yards, and three more into what would be the head or heart and probably would count as kill shots. He grew fond of the fine English Parker Hale C3A1 sniper rifle and facile with the process of loading the 7.62×51mm NATO cartridges while lying prone.
“You’re ready,” Antoine pronounced. “We’ll leave tomorrow for the US state of Texas. I made arrangements for you to be admitted as a Swiss citizen into one of the fine sanatoria in the desert state. Our people have been shadowing our quarry for the past three weeks. He has weaknesses for routine, sweet young Mexican girls, and tequila. Next Friday he will leave Presidio, Texas, and cross the Texas-Mexico border on Federal highway 67 over the Presidio–Ojinaga International Bridge and into Ojinaga, Chihuahua State, Mexico at eleven-forty-five, in time to have his usual lunch at the Cantina Rojas in the center of town. After that, he will walk three blocks to the Chihuahua Caballero’s Club—a whorehouse. That is his usual pattern. However–on this particular Friday–he will not even make it to his lunch. You will be lying on top of a two-story building less than a hundred yards from the sidewalk. You will have a perfectly clear view as he approaches the cantina because there is a vacant lot between your building and the sidewalk.
“Sturmbannführer Hugues Beauchamp will follow him into Mexico in an old pickup truck and will walk ahead of him. You will recognize Hugues easily because he will be wearing a very large touristic straw sombrero. As soon as you see Hugues, get ready. You will only get one shot. Hauptsturmführer Jérôme Christophe Mailhot and I will be parked behind your building. As soon as the mission is accomplished, all you need to do is to walk down the stairs, out the back door, and into our car. We will be back in the United States in less than hour.”
The four old comrades arranged to sit in different seats on different rows of the TransWorld Airlines flight from Heathrow to Dallas Love Field. The Boeing 720 touched down on time, and Michaele Dupont—aka Randolph Bellwether—aka Dennis Cunningham Lord Downfort—checked into the Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium—orginally the Poor Farm, but recently spruced up for more discerning clientele. The reception staff was a bit awed to have an expatriate English lord who now called Switzerland home as a paying patient in the sanatorium. It was a brilliantly sunny and dessicatingly hot day, typical for Fort Worth.
The Elmwood Sanatorium was ideally situated—in the perfect middle of nowhere—between Dallas and Fort Worth with miles and miles of miles and miles between the TB hospital and either city. The locals in Dallas described the distance between Dallas and Fort Worth as thirty-two miles and a century apart.
On Friday morning very early, friends in a partially rusted 1955 Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria with a souped-up V8 took Lord Downfort on a desert excursion and picnic, expecting to be gone the entire day—so they told the Elmwood managers. Overnight, Hugues had staked out the modest tract home of Major Rick Avery Saunders, USA ret—former aide-de-camp of the late WW2 General Glen Gabler—in the eastern Dallas suburb of Mesquite, a plodding hot town with a slowly growing population of about 30,000. True to his rigid and presumably fatal routine, Saunders headed like a homing pigeon for Chihuahua. An hour before Major Saunders left Mesquite, Antoine, Michaele, and Jérôme took the more direct route towards Mexico. All three vehicles traveled the same final, almost dirt, track route into Mexico; but Saunders was the last of the three to reach the little border town of Presidio on the Farm to Market Road 170 and US Route 67, 145 miles northeast of Chihuahua. The assassins were in Ojinaga, Chihuahua state, nearly an hour ahead of the selected victim waiting for him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Empty lot next to Cantina Rojas, Ojinaga, Chihuahua State, Mexico, September 29, 1962
Antoine got Michaele comfortably settled on a backpacker foam mattress on the rooftop of the autobody repair shop which looked out onto the empty lot and the sidewalk. Cantina Rojas was on his left, and an open-front discount women’s clothing store was on the right. Across the street the view was stale view of the slab side of a cinder brick building—a maquiladora [small factory that assembles prefabricated goods—in this case, chimney, venting, and air distribution products]. Ojinaga serves as a support center and market community for the surrounding area. The maquiladora was humble enough to lack even a sign to identify it. Antoine set down two small plastic bottles of Evian water and a cellophane-wrapped egg salad sandwich.
Michaele coughed a small amount of blood into a pile of paper napkins he brought with him to the scene.
“You all right, Michaele?” Antoine asked solicitously with genuine concern on his face. “Think you can pull this off?”
“Jawohl, Bruder,” Michaele said with determination equal to Antoine’s concern.
“You have to suppress that cough until it’s over. That’ll be tough, but you can’t draw attention to yourself.”
“I know, I know. If I have to cough, I’ll bury my face in the pile of napkins. Nobody will hear a thing.”
Antoine looked over the edge of the flat top roof at the scene two stories below and approximately fifty yards away. It was approaching noon. The situation was ideal for a sniper: sun at Michaele’s back, noisy cantina next to the planned kill site, fairly busy rural Mexican road traffic on the pothole ridden street. The ambient noise would muffle almost all the sound Michaele was likely to make, even the actual firing of the rifle to some degree.
One of the more famous famous norteño musical groups from Ojinaga, and one of the loudest—Los D
iamantes de Ojinaga—was already heating up the sound waves on the block; and the crowd inside the cantina and out on the sidewalk was getting drunker and more boisterous as the morning drew closer to noon. Unlike many other regional bands that used only accordions as the lead band instrument, Los Diamantes used saxophones and accordions together to get a richer and louder sound production, and one that reached a hundred yards away from the rowdy beer and tequila joint.
Sidewalk traffic was intermittent and not heavy. Ojinaga retained its rural culture, environment, and poverty. Most of the people walking along the hot sidewalk were peons—hardscrabble farmers-who never saw a surplus enough to turn an actual profit. The dusty border town was a way station for narcotic smuggling and illegal immigration; so, it was not hard to pick out the occasional small band of illegals led by their unfeeling and often thieving coyotes as they made their weary way towards the border and the riches of Los Estados Unidos [USA]. The pedestrians were either too tired, too thirsty and hungry, or too frightened to look up at the building where Michaele lay in wait. Antoine took one last reconnoitering look over the eight-inch high rain gutter border of the autobody shop to be sure there were no federales in view, bade Michaele good hunting, and crawled back to the rooftop enterway into the stairwell which led to the street on the opposite side of the cantina and the maquiladora. He could just make out muffled coughing by his old friend lying outstretched in the sweltering noonday sun as he descended the trash strewn stairs.
Rick Saunders had intentionally skipped breakfast and made the long trip from Dallas on an empty and increasingly noisy stomach. He was looking forward to satiating his appetites—both of them, but food first. He wore a light blue denim shirt, faded blue jeans, and scuffed desert boots, the better to make him fit in with the nondescript flow of people along the sidewalks and streets. He kept a hand on his wallet all the time, fearing pickpockets or brazen bandits. His broad brimmed Stetson shielded his head and eyes from the brilliant sun and from any view of the world above his eyebrows as he sauntered along the uneven pavement of the sidewalk without a care in the world.
Jérôme was waiting a block ahead of Rick. As the Texan rounded the corner and approached the former German POW who had suffered at his hands in an Allied POW camp not so long ago, Jérôme started walking towards Cantina Rojas, making sure to gauge his pace to equal that of Rick. He was wearing a large brimmed straw sombrero which he had intentionally dusted with road and coal dust and a sarape gabán [poncho] typical of the Mexican state of Coahuila in northeastern Mexico. It was old, worn, and dirty, but the bright bands of color were still evident—dark brown base with haphazard bands of yellow, orange, red, blue, green, purple, and chartreuse. Its purpose was to cover the machine pistol he concealed beneath it.
He allowed Rick to get closer—about ten yards now. He passed the discount store and walked purposefully along the sidewalk that faced the empty lot. He stopped for a second, lifted his sombrero, and wiped the sweat off his forehead—the signal to Michaele that the target was close behind him. He then turned and walked across to the other side of the street and back the way he had come. Jérôme never looked back. He met Antoine waiting at the next street in his Ford Fairlane Crown Victoria—now so covered with dust that its colors could not be distinguished with certainty—the engine idling. They moved the large four-seat sedan as swiftly through the gathering crowds on their way to market as they could without drawing attention to themselves and parked in front of the stairway of the autobody shop.
Michaele coughed up a large thick quarter cupful of bloody sputum and wiped his mouth with a napkin which was now nearly soaked with blood. The signal had been given; so, he chambered a 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge into the barrel of the English Parker Hale C3A1 sniper rifle and drew a bead on the head of a passing farmer to approximate the correct angle of his shot. In less than ten seconds, Rick Saunders walked into view. It was eleven-forty; he was five minutes early.
Michaele suppressed a nagging cough and felt the wad of bloody sputum trying to cough its way out. He suppressed the droplets of sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes. He suppressed the almost impossible craving to pull the trigger until Rick walked into a portion of the sidewalk where he was separated by three feet from the nearest other pedestrian on the sidewalk.
Rick never varied his pace or his direction of gaze. He wore an anticipatory smile.
Michaele centered the reticle on a point just above Rick’s cheekbone and directly in front of the upper third of his ear. He took in a breath, fought the need to cough and to blink, and slowly squeezed the fine-tuned trigger.
Rick Saunders, Major, USA, retired, felt nothing as his head exploded. He was dead before his body crumpled to the ground.
At first, the few people on the street and the sidewalk scattered in terror, then slowly they began to gather to get a view of the macabre scene, looking around and finally up to see where the shot came from. It would be foolish for Michaele to look over at his handiwork or to allow anyone on the ground to see him. He thought about gathering up the blood-soaked napkins scattered by his backpacking cushion, but thought better of the idea and crawled on his belly towards the opening to the stairs. He released a mighty exhalation and cough, and sprayed the roof and the upper stairs with a copius blood spatter. He hurried down the stairs heedlessly, stepping in the blood and marking his path with the prints of his desert boots all the way down the stairs, across the sidewalk, and into Antoine and Jérôme’s Ford.
As the crowd gathered on the opposite side of the building where the Ford was parked, the three assassins threaded their way north on backstreets until they left Ojinaga proper. They traveled at a speed between sixty and seventy miles per hour across the nearly 15,000 acres of open farmland with nothing but cattle pasture and plots of soy, cotton, corn, wheat, onions, peanuts, canteloupes, and assorted vegetables, to reach the border station at the Presidio–Ojinaga International Bridge. It was a modestly busy day; so, there was an uneasy wait of half an hour before the US Border and Customs agents finally got to them.
“Identification papers, please,” the Hispanic agent requested politely.
Antoine reached his driver’s license and all of the car’s occupants’ US passports to the woman.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” she said. “I appreciate seeing your passports. Technically your driver licences are sufficient, but the US is soon going to require passports of everyone. Mexico is a foreign country, which seems to be news to lots of American tourists. What was the nature of your visit, gentlemen?”
“Tourism, Officer,” Antoine responded.
“Bringing anything back?” she asked.
“Oh, we certainly hope not,” he answered with a big bad-boy smile.
She laughed, even though it was joke that was getting time and repetition worn. She raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“No, Ma’am,” Antoine answered, serious this time.
“Drive safely, gentlemen. Remember the speed limit is fifty.”
“Thank you, Officer. We’ll be careful.”
As he started to roll down the window, Michaele developed a severe coughing spell. The customs agent looked at him sitting in the backseat and took note of the blood he was coughing up.
“That’s a really nasty cough,” she said. “You okay?”
Michaele could only nod.
“Cancer,” Antoine said with a sad look. “The trip was probably too much for him. We’re headed back to Tucson to get him into the hospital there. Appreciate your concern.”
“I won’t keep you then. My best wishes,” she said, leaning into the open window to say it to Michaele.
They exceeded the speed limit only by a little all the way back to Fort Worth and the Tarrant County Elmwood Sanatorium outside of the city, arriving before dark. Antoine and Jérôme got Michaele settled into bed after receiving a scolding by the evening shift nurse. When she had vented her spleen, she strutted out of the room still angry.
“She’s right, you know, Micha
ele. You have to get rest. Stay here for a month, then get back to London. If that’s a problem, I have left instructions for the staff to call me at the corporation offices. Jérôme and I will come back and get you if we have to.”
“You have more important things to do than to nursemaid me,” Michaele said. “I’ll be fine.”
That bit of unlikely optimism was given the lie by another coughing spell.
“You will, Bruder. You will,” Jérôme lied as they parted.
The word of Rick Saunder’s assassination reached the Texas Rangers office in Presidio the following day. The Mexican federales had been called that morning and hurried into Ojinaga to discover the body of a murdered man whose wallet contained a Texas state driver’s license and a retired Army officer ID card along with a wad of cash. They did not want anything to do with an international incident which would bring a spotlight into the activities into their lucrative region of northern Mexico where the Río Conchos River drains into the Rio Bravo [known as the Rio Grande in the US]—an area called La Junta de los Rios. Their meager Mexican salaries did not support the Federales or their families, and scrutiny on their extracurricular activities would be counterproductive.
Mexican authorities had a grudging respect for the Texas Rangers and regularly worked with them on selected cases. Two rangers—Tom Packer and Eldred Drake—were allowed in and conducted a cursory crime scene evaluation. Intuition led them to the rooftop of the autobody repair shop, where they found a single brass casing and a bushel basket full of very bloody tissues. With the help of the Federales, they measured and photographed the bloody footprints on the roof and the stairs, noting that the prints were not from cowboy boots or any familiar American or Mexican-made boots. They took note of the fact that their Mexican counterparts seemed anxious to get the body back to the States and that the wallet was empty of cash.
The Charlemagne Murders Page 44