Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (12 page)

“Look you dumbass Tennessee hillbilly, I do speak Spanish! I mean, I speak it okay for a gringo cop, right?  But that test was a son of a bitch! No way could a gringo pass it.  It was rigged so only beaners could pass it, I swear to God!”

“Listen…quiet.”

***

Both men were instantly silent.
  Ranya heard it at the same time, the faint buzzing sound of a distant airplane engine.  She opened her eyes, stretched, and stood up, then slung on her pack, her back to the two men in desert camouflage.

It was now last light, and the unlit plane wasn’t visible until it was very near.  It was flying only a hundred feet above the ground, a high-wing single engine prop plane.  The dirt strip was just a designated scrap of flat pasture, identical to any other 500-yard long parcel of dirt and grass.  Only the picnic table, some fifty gallon drums of aviation fuel, and a faded windsock on top of a metal pole identified these 500 yards as an airstrip.  

The plane turned into the wind, tipping a wing, leveled out and landed gently, rolling past them and coming to a halt only a few hundred feet away. The little aircraft was a tail dragger and it maneuvered awkwardly on the ground, swinging around and taxiing back toward them. It seemed to be painted in shades of tan and beige, but this was difficult to determine in the fading light.  It finally came to a stop with its high right wing tip almost over the table.  The big three-bladed prop wound to a halt and the field was suddenly quiet again.  It was clear to Ranya that whoever was flying was intimately familiar with this crude landing strip.

The pilot opened the cockpit door beneath the left wing and hopped down, while the two other men opened another pair of doors on the right side of the fuselage.  These two doors swung to both the front and to the rear, revealing a second bench seat behind the pilot and copilot’s seats, and behind that an open cargo area.  The two-man sniper team ignored Ranya, and loaded their tan packs and rifle bags into the empty space behind the rear seats.  

One of the snipers then took a black hose and clambered up on the angled wing strut, and put the nozzle into the fuel inlet on top of the wing above the cockpit.  The pilot walked to the drum by the picnic table and began manually pumping gas, topping off his tanks.  They worked without words; it was evident that they were well practiced at loading and fueling the airplane in near darkness.  As instructed, she approached him, and he greeted her. He was a lanky forty-something, about her height, with crew cut hair.  He was wearing fatigue-style pants and a dark t-shirt.  Military, or ex-military, she thought.

“Howdy.  You’re my mystery passenger?”

“That’s me.”  

“Pleased to meet you, mystery passenger.”  He continued rotating the pump handle while speaking to her. He might have been smiling, but the light was fading fast and it was hard to tell.

“You’re getting out first, so you’ll sit in back, on the right side.  You just have the one pack? Stow it on the floor, between you. We’ll be in the air for an hour and a half on this leg, and when we land, we won’t be hanging around.  Once we stop, I’ll holler go, and out you go.  Open the middle door, chuck out your bag, hop out quick and get clear ‘cause I’m going straight out.  That’s it, that’s all there is to it.  Almost a touch-andgo, and then we’ll be gone.  Just hike south till you hit the tracks.  The half moon’s going to rise at 2300 hours—that’s eleven PM.  It’ll be easy going for you.”

“I really appreciate this, and I’m sorry if I’m putting you at any extra risk.”

“Nah, forget it.  It’ll look just like a false insertion.  We do a couple of false insertions on every run, to make it harder for them.  Just in case they’re tracking us. So far, we haven’t had any problems—I generally fly too low for radar—but it’s SOP.  Doing false insertions, I mean.  Anyway, that part of New Mexico is just one big landing strip for a Maule 7.  The dry salt lakes are even easier.  It ain’t no big thing.”

“Well, I appreciate the ride.” 

“Hey, it’s my job.  But you’re welcome.”  

The sniper who was leaning over the wing whistled, and the pilot finished pumping the aviation fuel.  He retrieved the hose nozzle and the sniper stepped down from the strut.  The pilot walked around the plane giving it a final visual check, and then stood well off by himself and lit a cigarette.  When he was through with his smoke, he ground out the glowing butt with his boot, and climbed back up into the left seat.  

The older sniper from Tennessee, who Ranya recognized from the shooting range, sat in the right front seat next to the pilot.  They conferred quietly over a folded air map, using a pencil light.  She had been proud to overhear during her recent “nap” that she had won the Heckler & Koch pistol off of a Special Forces combat veteran—a Green Beret.  She had been happy to sell it back to him after the matches were over: she needed the cash, and couldn’t take any extra firearms into New Mexico. At the time, she had thought fifteen hundred dollars was a great price. Oh well. “Blue bucks”—it took some getting used to.  Five years was a long time to be away.

The other sniper—the former Albuquerque SWAT cop—climbed into the back seat from the right side and slid across without a word to her, and pointedly looked out the left side window.  So he was one of the cops who had been fired for failing the Spanish test…  She already knew from the big-rig truck driver that this was a new form of governmental ethnic cleansing—Nuevo Mexico style.  

Ranya climbed up and in after the SWAT sniper, placed her pack vertically on the floor in the middle, found her three-point seat belt mostly by feel, and buckled herself in.  Finally she latched the door beside her closed.  It was a tight fit in the narrow cabin, and she was uncomfortably close to the sniper beside her.  They were almost touching at the hips, with their knees bent around her pack.

It was now fully dark, and the pilot fitted a pair of night vision goggles over his face, adjusted the straps, did final checks and switched on the engine.  The moment he let off the brakes, the propeller began to pull the plane forward with a powerful surge.  Ranya couldn’t see any of the gauges or dials in the front of the cockpit; she supposed that the pilot had no problem seeing them with his night goggles.  He taxied to the center of the field, adroitly swerved into the wind, and gave the Maule full throttle. The acceleration pressed Ranya back into her seat and the plane immediately hurtled forward with a roar, bumping down the unseen pasture like a runaway dune buggy.  In what seemed like only seconds, they lifted smoothly off the ground, and began to climb into the night sky.

Unnoticed by the three men, she couldn’t stop smiling.

***

Bob Bullard awoke in the darkness
and checked the glowing face of his watch. It was still Sunday, almost midnight.  He was lying on his back, on the king-sized bed in the master stateroom.  Eldorado was gently rolling alongside the dock, probably from the wake of a tugboat churning out of the bay.  One of Wendy’s long sleek legs was crossed over his.  He made no effort to keep from awakening her, while he pulled off their covering sheet and extricated himself.

It was time for Wendy to go.  She’d been a great lay, and a hell of a lot of laughs, but when you let chicks sleep over all night, they began to get ideas.  Next thing you know, they’re in the galley making breakfast, and after that, they’re setting aside closet space.  No thanks. Been there, done that, paid the alimony.  He switched on the brass desk lamp, and pulled on his khaki trousers.  

“Wha…what time is it?” she asked, arching and stretching. 

“It’s almost Monday, that’s what time.  Look, something’s come up—duty calls,” he lied.  “I’ve got to go.  Cesar will drop you off.  Come on doll face, get dressed.” “But ba…by, I’m slee…py…” she yawned.

“Yeah, me too, but I gotta get up, and so do you.  You can sleep when you get home.  Cesar will take you.  Come on, get up.”  As a rule, he never let broads spend the entire night in any of his beds.  And above all, he never let them stay in
this
bed, especially while he was off of the boat.  

Not with what he had concealed beneath it. No way in hell.

***

Ranya lay on her stomach
among the weeds, on the gravelly slope where the two-lane State Road 60 bridge rejoined the earth.  Behind her was a hundred yards of dry wash, the final pinched remnant of the barren salt flat.  Almost an hour earlier the insertion plane had landed and braked to a rapid stop four miles north.  The pilot yelled go, she threw her pack well clear of the open door, and jumped down.  The plane immediately accelerated away with a roar and a rush of prop blast, pelting her with salty grit.  She had been prepared for this, so her hood was up and she had faced away as the unlit Maule 7 took off.  When she turned around and looked, the single engine plane had already disappeared from view.  She found the North Star to get her initial bearings and began her walk to the south, crunching across the saltpan.

All around her was nothing but salt, faintly glowing bone white in the starlight.  At 11:07 PM the half moon edged above the low eastern horizon, above Caylen Barlow’s ranch, above D-Camp, above her old life in Virginia.  The emergence of the half moon brought a weird sort of dawn.  The cool horizontal light left crazy shadows across the flats, pointing to where dead trees and tough plants had tried to survive at the margins of the harsh alkaline environment.  The walking was easier in the moonlight, with less chance of stumbling into a gully or hole.  In the distance, she could see the occasional flickering headlights of a vehicle driving across State Road 60.

In the sky ahead of her, she noticed an extra bright star, which was both blinking and moving from right to left across the firmament.  After a while, she decided it was a passenger jet, perhaps heading from Los Angeles to Dallas.  She wondered what other aircraft might be above her, which she could not see. 

She remembered a story told by another female prisoner in D-Camp, a woman who had been arrested in the wilderness in Oregon.  She had been doing some shooting practice with her husband and a few close friends.  Nobody outside of this circle knew about their clandestine weapons training.  Just the same, they had been ambushed in thick forest, on the remote Jeep trail leading back to the state road.  On a tight switchback, a platoon of screaming camouflage-clad federal ninjas leaped out from cover and surrounded their SUV at submachine gun point.  They were forced out and down to the ground, and zip-tied with their wrists behind their backs.  The federals’ boots had literally been on their necks, as their faces were ground into the dirt.

After being frog-marched and dragged to a nearby clearing, before being loaded onto a Blackhawk helicopter, these unlucky Oregonians had seen a UAV drone making low “victory passes” over them.  The federal agents looked up and waved skyward for the remotely operated video camera.  Later in D-Camp, Ranya and the woman from Oregon surmised that the UAV had been on a routine patrol, and had possibly homed in on the acoustic signature of their firing, the location of which did not correspond to an “authorized” public shooting range.  The distant operator of the UAV could have then zoomed in with powerful video cameras, and seen their semi-auto “assault rifles,” which had been banned since the Stadium Massacre.  Next, it would have been a simple matter to vector in the platoon of ATF agents, who were themselves carrying everything from MP-5 submachine guns to 50 caliber sniper rifles.

So tonight, Ranya wondered what airborne platforms might be slowly circling above, studying the anomalous heat signature moving southward across the saltpan, after a small airplane had briefly paused on an unauthorized flight…

Well, the feds couldn’t be everywhere, she reasoned.  They couldn’t watch every inch of America, every minute of every day.  As long as Caylen Barlow’s private air force maintained security, there would be no reason for any governmental agency to be focused in on this saltpan, on this particular night…she hoped.  If they were, well, she could easily be surrounded by helicopter-borne troops, or she could simply be blown to smithereens by a missile released from above.  

Such things were beyond her ability to affect, so she trudged on.

She passed the carcasses and skeletons of numerous cattle and sheep that had wandered onto the unforgiving salt.  She had a sudden fright when an immense black-winged bird dived at her unsuspected from behind.  She felt and heard the whoosh from its wings as it glided down and brushed past her, touching her hood, and then skimmed low above the ground until it was out of her sight.

By 11:15, the vast saltpan was narrowing to within clearly visible borders on either side, and by 11:30 it had squeezed into a dry creek bed. She could see ahead where a wide bridge carried the state road safely above the infrequent flash flood torrents. According to her New Mexico highway map, the railroad tracks ran parallel to State Road 60, on the other side.  Her plan was to walk under the two-lane road bridge on the dry wash, and climb up the bank at the steel trestle railroad bridge a hundred yards beyond.  She would hike the remaining five miles to Mountainview on the tracks.

Cars were crossing the bridge only every fifteen or twenty minutes. She turned away and froze when they passed, a black stump to anyone who might chance to look north across the moonlit salt flats.  The closer she walked to the highway the more vigilant she became.  The moonlight didn’t penetrate to the floor of the dry wash under the bridge.  She wondered if any dangerous wildlife lurked troll-like beneath the overpass. The yard-thick concrete pillars that supported the roadway could have hidden a platoon of zombie ghouls, she imagined in her rising fearfulness.  

She pulled the big folding knife from her sweatshirt’s front pouch, thumbed open the blade, and held it at the ready as she entered the shadows.  The Strider knife was worth more than many pistols, and she silently thanked Mark Fowler for the extravagant personal gift.  It was no pistol—the Glock was useless, in pieces hidden inside her pack—but it was the next best thing.  She began to edge her way into the moon-shadow under the bridge between a pair of concrete supports, the space jammed with a helter-skelter tumble of flood-driven rocks and timbers.  She was finding a pathway, watching intently for wild animals or other lurking monsters, when she heard a sudden male voice, loud and clear across the still night air.