Invasion USA (17 page)

“Just tellin' the truth, Buddy,” Tom said with a shrug. “We may not see eye to eye on everything, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate what a good lawman you are.” He turned back to Vandiver. “So you can't get us on any sort of discrimination charges, and we carry our guns legally. What's left?”

Vandiver shook his head. “Don't get me wrong, Mr. Brannon. I'm not unsympathetic to what you're doing here. I'll follow my orders, to the letter. But I'm not the FBI.”

“Fair enough,” Tom said with a nod. He looked around at the others. “Let's get back to it.”

The discussion continued as they hashed out how the Patriot Project would be organized and would carry out its work. Buddy and Vandiver remained but didn't participate. Tom didn't mind them being there. Everything about the Project had to be open and above-board, or it would defeat its purpose.

After a while, the doors of the meeting room opened, and Bonnie looked around and then touched Tom's arm when she saw who was coming in. He glanced at her and saw her cut her eyes toward the door. He looked over his shoulder, then looked again as he recognized the newcomers. As he came to his feet, he said, “Mom, Dad, what are you doing here?”

Herbert Brannon shuffled forward, his gnarled hands tightly gripping the aluminum walker he used to support himself. His wife Mildred, Tom's mother, trailed behind him, one hand lifted anxiously, ready to reach out and grab her husband to steady him if need be.

Herb wore stiffly pressed jeans and a shirt with silver snaps on it instead of buttons, as he had every day of his life for as far back as Tom could remember. His cream-colored Stetson was perfectly creased and his boots shone with polish. In a voice that was still firm despite his advanced age, he said, “I come to sign up.”

“Sign up for what?” Tom asked.

“Why, the Patriot Project, o' course!”

“As soon as he heard about it, nothing would satisfy him except that I drive him into town,” Mildred put in. “You know how your father gets, Tom.”

“I know how I get when the world starts goin' to hell in a hay wagon!” Herb snapped. “I don't intend to stand by and let my boy rassle with the devil all by his own self, neither.”

Tom said, “I appreciate that, Dad, but I'm not sure it would be a good idea for you to be involved with this.”

“It was a good idea when I drove a Sherman tank all the way from Normandy across France and Germany into Hitler's livin' room with ol' Blood 'n' Guts George Patton, wasn't it? By God, if we had a few o' them tanks patrollin' up and down the border, none o' them Mexican gangsters would get in, that's for damn sure!”

“You might have a point there, but we don't have any tanks.” Tom shot a glance of appeal toward his mother. “Mom, maybe you could—”

“Don't look at me,” she broke in. “I've long since given up trying to talk any sense into your father's head.”

Herb took one hand off his walker. He dug in the pocket of his jeans and brought out a heavy pocketknife. The knife's grip was black and silver and decorated with a fancy silver insignia consisting of two lightning bolts. Slapping the knife down on the table, he said, “I took that off'n a dead SS officer in Berlin after him an' me got in a tussle. If the SS didn't scare me, no bunch o' Mexican thugs is goin' to.”

“That was more than sixty years ago, Dad,” Tom pointed out. “If you were the same man now you were then, I'd be glad to have you help out. But you're not.”

He hated to be so blunt with his father, but he knew how stubborn Herb was. The old man glared at Tom and drew in a deep breath. “That's a fine way to talk to your own daddy,” he accused.

“I'm sorry,” Tom said, and meant it. “But you just can't get mixed up in this, Dad. You fought your war already. This battle is ours to win or lose.”

Muttering under his breath, Herb picked up the pocketknife, stuffed it back in his jeans, and gripped the walker tightly as he turned to shuffle away. Tom stepped closer to his mother and said quietly, “I'm sorry, Mom. But he'll understand when he gets over being mad and stops to think about it.”

“I wouldn't count on that, Tommy.”

She started to follow her husband, but Tom stopped her by saying, “There's something else I need to talk to the two of you about. I'd like for you to come and stay with Bonnie and me until this is all over. Or it would be even better if you spent some time with Helen or Jessie.” Those were Tom's sisters, neither of whom lived in the area anymore.

“You mean we should leave the ranch?” Mildred asked with a frown.

“Just temporarily. Until all the trouble blows over.”

Slowly, she shook her head. “Your father will never agree to that. I'll talk to him, but it won't do any good.”

“Try anyway,” Tom urged her.

At the door of the meeting room, Herb turned back and called, “Are you comin', old woman?”

“Keep your shirt on,” she told him. She reached out and squeezed Tom's arm, then went to join her husband. She helped him out of the meeting room, holding the door for him.

Tom turned back to the group gathered there and began, “Sorry for the interruption—”

“Don't be,” Walt Deavers said. “Your dad's not the only old vet who's gonna want to be part of this. Hell, I'm no spring chicken myself. I missed out on the Big One, but I carried a rifle in Korea. You were in Vietnam, Tom. It'd be a good idea to get as many volunteers with military experience as we can.”

Tom nodded. “That's true.”

“Because no matter what you want to call it,” Pete Benitez spoke up, “this is liable to turn into a war before it's over, Tom.”

Tom hoped Pete was wrong about that . . . but in his heart, he feared the little newspaperman was just as right as he could be.

17

The next few days were a whirlwind of activity for Tom Brannon. With Bonnie at his side nearly all the time, he coordinated the formation and organization of the Patriot Project. The first thing that needed to be done was to interview the volunteers who wanted to be part of the project. There were more than Tom had ever expected, close to a thousand, in fact. He had started out by saying that the group should consist of around two dozen people. The sheer numbers of the turnout forced him to revise that estimate upward. He was determined, though, not to accept more than a hundred or so volunteers. If the group got any larger than that, it could become unwieldy and hard to control.

The interviews took place at the City Hall and were conducted by a committee consisting of Tom and Bonnie, Walt Deavers, Warren Miller, and Ray Torres, one of the county commissioners. Some of the volunteers were too young while others were old and in poor health. Those were the easy ones to send home with the sincere thanks of the city of Little Tucson, Sierrita County, and the Patriot Project. Some didn't own any guns, and the committee thanked them and sent them home, too. A few openly admitted they had been in trouble with the law. Some of them had cleaned up their act and seemed to genuinely want to make amends for their unsavory past by helping out now, and Tom hated to turn them away. In the end, though, he had to, knowing that the project and its members had to be as squeaky-clean as possible to stand up to the scrutiny of the liberal media, not to mention the Border Patrol and the FBI.

Some of the potential troublemakers were easy to pick out. One group of men came in together, carrying beer bottles and wanting to know if this was where they came to sign up to shoot “Meskins”. Another bunch had shaved heads, black leather vests, wristbands studded with silver spikes, and belt buckles emblazoned with swastikas. Tom suspected that both groups had shown up knowing that they would be turned down. The way they headed straight for the media after he told them that the Patriot Project couldn't use their services confirmed his theory. They were there just hoping to get their fifteen minutes of fame. A little face time on TV, a sound bite or two, that was all that mattered.

The soft-spoken, mild-looking ones were harder to pick out. Tom had to look for some indefinable something in their eyes that warned him they were trouble just waiting to happen. When he turned them down, they just shrugged and went away, their eyes still cold and dead.

No one had forgotten about the SavMart Massacre. Several men who had lost wives or children in the tragedy showed up to volunteer, their faces haunted by grief. Tom turned them down as gently as possible. He understood that most of them just wanted to do something to help, so that no one else would have to suffer as they had suffered. But it was possible that some of them were looking for revenge, and they could easily turn into the sort of loose cannons that could bring the whole operation crashing down.

In the end, he had his hundred volunteers, all of them upstanding, law-abiding, patriotic American citizens who were fed up with the floodtide of illegal immigration and the violence it brought with it. They were fed up as well with the government turning a blind eye to the dangerous situation and keeping the Border Patrol weak and ineffective. Their ages ranged from eighteen to seventy-five, with Walt Deavers being the oldest member and Billy Garza, who had been an all-state running back on the Little Tucson High School football team the previous autumn, being the youngest. In the fall, Billy would be going off to the University of Arizona on an athletic scholarship, but in the meantime he wanted to do something to help the town where he had grown up. That desire to help was a sentiment shared by all the volunteers, whether they were lifelong residents of the area or had only moved there in recent years.

Once the volunteers had been selected, the next step was to break up the border into areas and figure out how many Patriots would patrol each one. While that was being done, patrol leaders were being picked out from the volunteers, because each group had to have someone in charge. Tom hadn't realized that there would be so much planning involved. Nothing could be left to chance, though. If the operation was too haphazard, it ran the risk of falling apart quickly. He couldn't let that happen.

And all through the hard work, he also had the distraction of the media to deal with. His phones at home rang so much he finally unplugged them and relied on his cell phone for staying in touch with people, since that number wasn't as easy to get. Somehow the reporters managed, though, and now the cell phone buzzed almost constantly. He only answered when he recognized the number that came up on the display. He couldn't walk the streets of Little Tucson without being accosted by a bunch of well-dressed, hair-sprayed people with microphones. He talked to Louly on the phone, but he didn't go to the auto parts store anymore.

She reported that business hadn't been very good, probably because of all the reporters practically camped out on the sidewalk, hoping to corner the store's owner, the man who was the architect of the Patriot Project. Tom just chuckled wryly and told her to do the best she could. If it got too bad, she could close the store and go home until all this fuss blew over, he said. She told him not to worry about that.

Not surprisingly, nothing had been seen or heard of
Mara Salvatrucha
since the SavMart Massacre. The members of M-15 were lying low, unwilling to venture out into the blizzard of news coverage.

Like a snake curled up in the shade of some rocks, they could afford to wait a while. Sooner or later, though, their very nature would force them to slither out into the open again, their fangs full of venom . . .

The man stood at the window of the office in a glittering Mexico City high-rise and gazed out at filth and squalor. These buildings, these towers of steel and glass and wealth, rose from poverty, from the dung heaps of the great unwashed masses. It was that way everywhere the man had been—his native Riyadh, London, New York, now Mexico City. Always the same. The rich rising to the heavens while the poor clamored about their feet.

Allah must have loved the poor. He had made so very many of them.

The man's reflection peered back at him from the window glass. Around thirty years old, with sleek dark hair and a thin mustache, a slightly round face with olive skin, a slender body clothed in a suit that cost enough to have fed a Saudi Arabian village for a month. Whenever he left these rooms that served as both his office and his living quarters, he wore the traditional Arabian head covering known as the kaffiyeh. He missed the robes that he had worn in his homeland, but the expensive suit served a purpose. He dealt with infidels, and they were shallow, soulless creatures, easily impressed by a blatant display of wealth. His years of trafficking with Westerners had taught him how to turn their own weaknesses against them, and he did it gladly, knowing that Allah understood. Anything that served the holy cause could be justified, especially if it served to bring about the destruction of Allah's enemies.

The phone on the massive glass-topped desk rang. Sami Al-Khan turned away from the window and his musings. He crossed the room to the desk, his footsteps quiet on the deep carpet. Picking up the phone, he said hello and listened to the voice of the man on the other end. A smile lit up his face and made it appear even more cherubic. “Señor Garcia-Lopez,” he said in faintly British-accented English, a product of his years at Oxford. “How good it is to hear from you.”

The smile disappeared from Al-Khan's face as he listened to the angry words coming from the phone. He didn't try to break in. It was better to let Señor Hector Garcia-Lopez vent his fury. Garcia-Lopez was a billionaire, one of the richest men in Mexico, although of course his wealth paled beside that of the Saudi royal family, of which Sami Al-Khan was a member. For more than fifty years, since Garcia-Lopez was a small boy, in fact, he had been selling heroin and cocaine, and on that platform he had built his considerable fortune. He was accustomed to being listened to. He was accustomed to being feared—and rightly so.

“I understand, señor,” Al-Khan said when Garcia-Lopez finally paused to draw a breath, “and I share your concern. I, too, was surprised when I heard about what happened in Arizona. This SavMart Massacre, as the American media call it, draws much unwelcome attention to our subordinates. Señor Montoya acted rashly when he ordered such a high-profile raid . . . Of course he was angry at being defied by the Americans. I understand that. But now the attention of the world is focused on this little town in the middle of nowhere. There are too many eyes watching. I prefer discretion.”

What he preferred was working behind the scenes toward the destruction of the Great Satan. He had done that by funneling money to Al-Qaeda and other groups; he had even funded freelance terrorists who belonged to no particular organization. He let others sit around in their seedy furnished apartments and plan their great strikes against the infidels. They knew how to get in touch with him when they needed money or some other assistance. Those little men were fond of planning and strategizing and coming up with outlandish schemes that had little or no chance of working. The actual carrying out of any plan more complicated than packing a car full of explosives and blowing themselves up along with a few dozen people was usually beyond them. But all it took was for one of those far-fetched notions, one out of a thousand—like flying airplanes into American skyscrapers—to work, and then the infidels truly suffered.

What everyone lost sight of was the fact that it would take scores of such attacks to equal the death toll exacted each year by the partnership formed between Sami Al-Khan and Hector Garcia-Lopez. Every time one of the hated Americans died of an overdose or was shot down while trying to commit a robbery to finance another purchase of drugs, it was a victory for Allah. Garcia-Lopez cared only for the money that the drugs put in his pocket. Al-Khan's motives were much more noble. He was going to destroy the Great Satan from within. He was going to spread his corruption until America's soul rotted and the most evil nation in the world collapsed on itself. Just thinking about it made a warm feeling spread through him. Already he had known great luxuries and the ardor of many beautiful women here on Earth. If he succeeded in his goal, what sort of wonderful reward would Allah have waiting for him when he entered heaven? It was almost beyond his comprehension.

“Yes, of course,” he said as he dragged his attention away from his heavenly reward and back to Garcia-Lopez's ranting. “I will summon Montoya and speak with him. I agree, something must be done. Perhaps things should have been handled differently to start with, but since they were not, the threat must be dealt with as it is . . . Yes, of course, señor.”

Al-Khan said his good-byes and hung up the phone. As he turned back to the vast window, he saw that evening was settling over the sprawling city. The lights were beautiful as they began to come on, spread out at his feet like a field of diamonds.

Dealing with that animal Montoya should have been Garcia-Lopez's responsibility. After all, M-15 was part of the Mexican's sprawling drug empire. The members of
Mara Salvatrucha
came out of the jungles of Guatemala and El Salvador and thought
they
were running things, but those at the top of the pyramid, like Montoya, knew who was really pulling the strings. He would come to Mexico City if Al-Khan ordered him to. He wouldn't like it, but he would come. And to keep the peace with Garcia-Lopez, Al-Khan would speak to Montoya and explain that something must be done about the problem they faced across the border in Arizona.

Something must be done about Thomas Brannon and his so-called Patriot Project.

Dusk was coming on, making it harder to see. Tom lowered the binoculars from his eyes and wondered if they ought to try to get some night-vision goggles. That would sure help. The Border Patrol had them, just not enough agents down here to use them. Somehow, though, Tom didn't think Ralph Vandiver would turn over any unused goggles to the Patriot Project.