A state of disobedience (9 page)

"In a ditch, was he?" Jack mused.

The helicopters had radioed for friends, then proceeded to do whatever they could themselves to help Montoya and Schmidt with their own door guns. It helped, but it wasn't quite enough. 
 

Montoya recited "Ave Maria" as he poked his head and rifle over the wall of the ditch in which he and Jack sheltered. Blam, blam, blam, went the rifle and two of the pair's assailants fell into bleeding, choking, shrieking ruin not fifteen meters from the ditch. A burst of fire drove Jorge's head down again. 
 

Overhead one helicopter made a low pass from Montoya's right. Its left side gunner fired a long burst into the tree line before the pilot pulled his nose up and around to line up for another pass. Jorge saw tracers outline the helicopter even in the bright morning light. 
 

It all seemed futile to the barely conscious, bleeding Schmidt. With a radio between them and the helicopters, the choppers could have cooperated with Montoya, and vice versa. As it was, the shot-up radio being long abandoned, they were each guessing at what the other would do or had seen. 
 

"Jorge!" Schmidt cried as three Viet Cong leapt into the ditch, not far from where he lay. 
 

Montoya turned, attempted to fire only to have his magazine run dry after the first, missed, round. With an inarticulate shout he drew a knife and charged the VC. 
 

Whatever the guerillas had been expecting to greet them in the ditch, it apparently was not a hundred and fifty pounds of shrieking Mexican fury. They turned and clambered back out again, shouting for help. All except the last got away. That one's escape was halted by Montoya's knife, buried eight inches in his back. He slid face against the earth to the foul dirt below. 
 

Jack reached a sudden decision—sudden, although its nature and implications had been torturing him for days. "Juani, let me roll my division. I've got over three hundred tanks and a like number of other armored vehicles. And they're manned by Texans, Juani. They won't let your brother go down."

Spanish eyes flared. "You want to start a civil war, Jack? We
lost
the last one, remember?"

Schmidt smiled. His multi great-grandfather, the captain, and the governor's, the sergeant, had fought side by side in that lost cause, members of Hood's Texas Brigade. His eyes turned and looked over the governor's bookshelves. He walked over to one and selected from it an old, red leather-bound volume. He checked the index and then opened to a page.

A nod; it was the right page. Schmidt's eyes scanned briefly before he began to read aloud. " 'There is no retreat but in submission and slavery. Our chains are forged . . . The war is inevitable—and let it come. I repeat it, sir, let it come.'

"Patrick Henry said that, Governor." Schmidt closed the book slowly, reluctantly.

"Jack, I just don't know."

"Juani," Schmidt persisted, "we
won
the civil war we had before the one we lost. Maybe you should remember that. Come to think of it, Americans won the civil war before the Texas revolution, too . . . if you'll remember
that
."

He didn't need to open the book again to say, " 'The battle is not to the strong alone. It is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.' "

The children had kept vigil over the dead; all but Elpidia. She, bandaged, alone and doped to deaden horrifying pain both physical and mental, lay in the mission's tiny infirmary.

Slowly, reluctantly, Father Montoya closed the Bible on the last Mass he ever expected to say on mission grounds. It was a combination Mass and funeral service for Miguel, who lay, eyes closed in eternal slumber, on a table in the chapel. Miguel's body and ruined cranium lay under a black shroud.

Next to Miguel, Sister Sofia slept as soundly.

Father gestured to the corpses. "Why did these two good people die?" he asked rhetorically.

Looking at his charges, Montoya said, "Children, I want to tell you a story. It is of a place that once was and could be again. There was a time when we, here in the United States, did not murder unborn babies. There was a time when people took care of other people—well—and didn't ask the government to spend nearly half the wealth of the country every year in order to take care of people . . . badly.

"There was a time when we were not afraid of the truth here in this country, a time when words meant something real, when they were not just things to be twisted to suit a particular set of politics.

"There was a time when our people were brave and free and strong . . . and honest too, most of them. There was even a time when the faith of our fathers was not considered to be an 'enemy of the state' . . ."

The breeze rifling the priest's hair was warm, unseasonably so for the lateness of the season on the flat Texas prairie. The old, starched jungle fatigue jacket Montoya had removed for mass was again covering his torso, though it was itself covered by an armored vest courtesy of Schmidt.

The priest disdained wearing a helmet.

An even half dozen of the boys sat with Montoya under cover of a low shed. He didn't know if the thermal imagers Jack had told him of would see through the sheet metal roof. Even if they could, he reasoned, they were unlikely to be able to tell the difference between the priest and the boys and the eight or so animals that usually slept here.

Best I could think to do.  
 

Not for the first time the priest wondered, and worried, about the morrow. Am I doing the right thing? Have I put the kids in the safest place? Can we hold them? Will Jack come riding over the hill to the rescue? Do I want a war? 

On the last point the priest was really rather sure; he did not want a war. Yet, so it seemed to him, sometimes a fight was the best way to avoid a war. And, looking down the road a few years, he saw a war coming.

"Think the old man in there knows we're coming, sir?" asked his driver of Sawyers.

"Doesn't much matter, does it Ricky? We could walk in armed with rocks and still beat the crap out of them."

"Yes,
sir
," the driver grinned.

"Not much longer now," Sawyers muttered to no one in particular.

Although not directed to him, the driver answered anyway, "We're ready when you are, sir."

We're not, you know. We might have been. If it were not more important to propagandize you kids into the party line than to train you to fight, we might have been.

Sawyers sighed for lost—stolen—opportunities.

"You wanted me, padre?" the boy Julio asked.

"I . . ." the priest hesitated, "I just wanted a few words with you Julio. About Miguel."

"He was my friend, Father; my best friend. They murdered him. In a few hours they will attack and I will have the chance to shoot the people who shot him."

"Julio . . . you will likely never get the man who shot Miguel and Elpidia. That one . . . he was an expert, very special. Not to be risked on something like us. The people who are coming in tomorrow morning are not too different from you. Boys, most of them. Maybe a little older. Just boys like you though, doing a job they believe in."

Julio raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Are you telling me I shouldn't shoot them then, father?"

"No, son. You'll have to fight; same as me. But when you fight . . . Julio . . . 
hijo mio
 . . . remember, good men sometimes fight for bad causes. Try not to hate."

The assault came from the east. With the newly risen sun shining brightly into the eyes of the defenders, Sawyers confirmed his orders and gave the command, "Roll."

The two loaned tanks led the way, driven and manned by hastily familiarized agents of the BATF. Behind the tanks came Sawyers' own two companies, riding safe in their Light Armored Vehicles.

To the south, a crane converted to a tower was raised to provide the Hostage Rescue Team's snipers a clear field of fire down into the Dei Gloria mission compound. Only very close to the south wall—and north and east of some of the buildings—was the team's line of sight blocked.

The team's spotter radioed to headquarters that there was no movement inside the compound.

Montoya felt his heart race as it had not raced in four decades. The tanks made little sound themselves, just the ominous inhuman squeaking of their churning treads. In a way, that was worse than the throatier roar of the tanks in his experience.

There were roars too, those from the LAVs used by the PGSS. Montoya ignored those.

The squeaking of the treads grew in intensity, closer, closer . . . 

Chips of adobe and brick flew away from the mission walls in two places as they bulged inward, buckled and crumbled. The tanks had struck them to create a pair of breaches in the adobe for the infantry to pour through.

In further aid of the assault, the tanks had been slightly modified. Their main cannon were partially plugged to allow the projection of CS gas from high pressure dispensers. Fanning back and forth, the tanks spewed a cloud of lachrymatory gas to subdue the defenders.

Montoya already had his mask on, one of those provided by Schmidt in his care package. Montoya's boys likewise had donned theirs with a speed that would have done credit to a regular as soon as they had seen the first white clouds spew from the tanks' muzzles.

With a shout of "follow me," the shout distorted by the mask's "voicemitter," Montoya led a team of three boys forward a few short steps and on to the southernmost of the two breaches. To his left charged four more boys under Miguel's successor, Ramon. All sprinted in a low crouch to avoid possible sniper fire.

The teams reached the undamaged wall between the breaches, then split north and south. Reaching the tanks, the boys threw clear glass bottles full of liquid to impact on the rear hulls and turrets.

"What's that, chief?" sniffed the driver of Montoya's target as the first faint whiff of ammonia passed easily through the filtration system and on into the crew and driver compartments.

Before the commander of the vehicle could make an answer the ammonia hit him full strength. It was sudden as an unexpected blow. Eyes streaming, throat closing and choking, gorge rising, he clawed at the hatch over his head, one thought on his mind:
Escape!
 

He might have made it out quicker had his gunner not also been trying to crawl through him to escape the overpowering chemical stench.

Montoya calmly shot the driver whose easy escape had been blocked by the tank's cannon, directly overhead. Then the emerging loader took two rounds through the belly before flopping bonelessly back downwards into the tank's bowels. When two heads appeared simultaneously in the commander's hatch he shot them as well, bone and brains and blood flying away.
Father forgive me.
 

"Padre, here!" shouted a boy as he passed over a homemade satchel charge. The priest took it with a muttered "thanks," pulled the igniter and leaning around a corner tossed the charge under the tank's right tread. The burning fuse left a curly cue arc of narrow but dense smoke as it corkscrewed through the air.

"Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! FIRE IN THE HOOOLLE!" shouted the priest as he led and herded his boys back to cover. Even as he himself leapt to safety the charge went off like a kick in the pants, knocking him head over heels to go tumbling along the ground.

"That's my boy, Jorge," muttered Schmidt as he, the governor, and her "war cabinet" listened in to reports coming uncensored from the scene. Half the words used were expletives and obscenities.

"Fucking gas isn't working. Motherfuckers took out both tanks . . . Jesus-Fucking-Christ they shot down the crews like dogs . . . Where the fuck are those goddamned helicopters? . . . What in the fuck are the snipers doing? . . . My God . . . they've got guns . . . machine guns . . . Explosives . . . Jesus . . ."

Juanita looked piercingly at Schmidt. "Where . . . where, General, did my brother get machine guns? Where did he get explosives?"

A tiny flicker of a smile. "Jorge always was a resourceful sort, Governor. You know that." Then Schmidt's face lit again in his broadest, brightest flash. "You really want to know? Fine. I gave them to him. I'll be damned if my best friend and your brother was going to be taken without a good fight. They . . . you . . . can do what the hell you want with me. But Jorge Montoya was
not
going to lack the tools he needed! And can you hear, Juani? Can you hear?" Schmidt pointed at the radio, still sputtering with federal outrage. "He's holding them; beating them."

Softly, "I wish I were there. I wish I were there.

"Do you know why I am not, Governor? Because I still hope to talk some sense into you. I still think that the girl I . . . voted for . . . hasn't got it in her to see her brother cut down by wolves in suits and ties."

Fiercely now, "Let me roll my division, Juani. Send Nagy there to arrest them, too. Save your brother Juani . . . save those children,
Governor
."

Juanita's mouth set as if concrete, hard, unyielding. "Do it."

With a triumphant shout, Schmidt headed for the door. "You coming with me, Nagy? We can take my helicopter."

The press of numbers was too great. It had always been too great. Yet Montoya had hoped that, if he put up a good fight, the feds might just back off to reconsider.

"Dumb bastards don't even know enough to know we're a losing proposition."

"What was that, Father?"

The priest shook his head. "Nothing, Ramon."

The defenders, what were left of them, had been forced back to the chapel. Only Elpidia, wounded and helpless in the small infirmary, the children cowering in the storm shelter, and Julio, waiting for that perfect shot, remained outside of this last ditch. A baker's dozen of the boys and girls of the Mission lay sprawled in death outside, victims of the sniper in his tower, the helicopters overhead, or the near random fire of the PGSS now swarming through the grounds.