Invasion USA (18 page)

“Anything?” Bonnie asked from the ground.

Tom shook his head and dropped down from the tailgate of the F-150 where he had been standing as he slowly surveyed the countryside around them with the binoculars. “Nope. It's pretty quiet this evening.”

The border was about half a mile to the south. The pickup was parked on a slight rise. The terrain wasn't really as flat as it appeared on first glance. There were little hills and shallow valleys, brush-choked gullies, and dry creek beds lined with stubby paloverde trees. Off to the east a short distance from where Tom and Bonnie waited, a wide draw ran north and south, extending over the border into Mexico. It was like a highway for illegal immigrants, because it gave them some cover as they tried to sneak into the country. Some of them even tried to get across in the daytime, feeling confident in their ability to avoid the Border Patrol.

Border Patrol agents weren't the only ones out here now, though. Now anybody trying to get across the border illegally had to worry about the Patriots, too.

The walkie-talkie sitting on the tailgate crackled. “Somebody coming up the draw, Tom,” Warren's voice said. The Apache and one of his friends were parked on the other side of the draw, keeping an eye on it.

Tom picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the button. “We're on our way.” He and Bonnie hurriedly got into the pickup.

Enough reddish light remained in the western sky so that Tom could drive without lights as he headed quickly toward the draw, which was only a few hundred yards away. The illegals probably heard the pickup's engine as it approached, but there was nothing he could do about that. The F-150 rocked to a stop near the edge of the draw, and he and Bonnie piled out, each of them carrying a rifle.

Across the draw, headlights flicked on, washing out over the low, brushy area. Warren's voice called loudly, “Hold it!
Alto! Alto!
”

In the glow of the headlights, Tom spotted three men in jeans and ragged shirts and battered hats running through the brush. The illegals veered toward the side of the draw where he and Bonnie were stationed. They were trying to get away from the lights and the shouting and didn't take the time to think that they might be running right into more trouble. Tom slid down the bank, saying over his shoulder, “Cover me from up there!”

“Not hardly!” Bonnie said as she came down after him.

He bit back a curse.
Stubborn woman. Stubborn, stubborn woman
.

They cut quickly through the brush, homing in on the thudding of footsteps and the crackling of branches. Tom told himself that Bonnie would be all right. She could take care of herself. They had been out on patrol together before, had, in fact, stopped several groups of illegals and turned them back to Mexico. The Patriot Project had been in full operation for a week now. In that time, not one shot had been fired, despite all the hand-wringing and predictions of disaster from the media and the left-wing politicians. There hadn't been any violence at all, not even a scuffle.

But in that week, close to a hundred would-be illegal immigrants had been stopped and sent back across the border. Just as Tom had thought would happen, once the men and women were caught, they departed peacefully.

Of course, they tried to get away first, and he didn't mind admitting that a few of them had done just that. The patrols couldn't be everywhere, and they couldn't stop all the illegals they spotted. If they'd had any help at all from the Border Patrol, it might have been a different story.

But unlike what had happened with the earlier Minuteman Project, when Border Patrol forces in the area had been increased, this time the government had pulled back, putting fewer of its agents in the field. When Tom had asked Ralph Vandiver about that, the man had shrugged and said that he was just following orders.

Tom suspected that the FBI, in the form of Agents Ford and Berry, had something to do with those orders. But the pressure came from higher up, too, all the way from Washington, in fact. Although the President couched her words very carefully when she answered questions about the Patriot Project, it was obvious to anyone who could read between the lines that she wanted this grass-roots movement to fail. If this little bunch of local men and women succeeded at something when the government couldn't, it would represent a direct threat to the centralized power of the federal bureaucracy. The President couldn't stand for that. That was why she had ordered that the Patriot Project be left on its own. She hoped that given enough rope, they would hang themselves.

So far, it hadn't worked out that way, and that had to be a pretty bitter pill for certain folks in Washington to swallow.

Tom forced his mind back to what he was doing. The crashing in the brush was close now and coming right at them. He motioned for Bonnie to stop at the edge of a little clearing and did likewise himself, planting his feet. He held the rifle slanted across his chest, ready to use but not pointing at anything or anybody—yet.

The three illegals broke out of the brush on the far side of the clearing, about twenty feet away. “
Alto!
” Tom shouted, and the three men frantically skidded to a stop. Their heads jerked from side to side as they desperately searched for a way out. More noises came from the brush behind them as Warren and his partner closed in. The headlights from Warren's pickup didn't shine directly on this spot, but the beams of illumination were close enough so that their glow lit up the scene.

“Stand where you are,” Tom firmly told the men in Spanish. He was fluent in the language, as most people who lived in this area were. “We're not going to hurt you. We just want you to go back to Mexico.”

“
El
. . .
El Patriotas
?” one of the men gasped.

Tom nodded and said, “
Si
.”

He saw the resignation come into the faces of the men, and he was confident that in a minute they would turn around and trudge back toward the border. Some of the patrol members would follow them to make sure they went all the way back across into Mexico. That was all the Patriots could do, as long as the illegals cooperated.

But before that could happen, a powerful light suddenly flashed on, almost blinding Tom. He said, “What the hell!” and instinctively brought the rifle up. He wasn't sure where the light was coming from.

“Oh, my God!” a woman's voice said in a half-scream. “He's going to shoot us! Look out, Chet, he's going to shoot us!”

“Don't shoot!” a man shouted. “We're unarmed! Don't shoot!”

Tom heard a rush of footsteps and turned his head, squinting against the light that still assaulted his eyes. He saw that the three Mexican men had bolted back into the brush. “Comin' your way, Warren!” he shouted. Then he turned back and snarled, “Shut off that damn light!”

“You won't shoot us?” the man asked nervously.

“No, damn it, I'm not going to shoot anybody!” Tom said, even though at that moment the idea sounded mighty appealing.

The light clicked off. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the relative dimness. Bonnie was having trouble, too. She asked, “Can you see anything?”

“Not much,” Tom told her. He hoped these strangers, whoever they were, didn't represent a threat. Maybe they were unofficial volunteers who had come out here to get in on the action. Their accents hadn't sounded like they were from these parts, but that didn't really mean anything. People moved in from all over the country, drawn by the clean air and the slower pace of life.

Still blinking, he saw two figures push through the brush and emerge into the clearing. The woman was in the lead. She was short, with long dark hair, and wore an expensive pair of slacks and a jacket that were totally out of place in these surroundings, as were her shoes. The man who followed her was almost twice her size, tall and broad-shouldered and probably a hundred pounds overweight. He wore an ill-fitting gray suit and a pair of thick glasses. His light brown hair was cut short. He carried a briefcase in one hand and a hand-held spotlight in the other.

The woman looked at Tom and said, “You're Tom Brannon.” The accent was definitely east coast.

“That's right,” Tom said, in no mood to be overly polite. “Who are you?”

She reached into the little bag she carried and took out, of all things, a business card. Tom was so surprised that he instinctively took the card when she held it out to him.

“Callista Spinelli,” she said. “I'm an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. This is my partner, Chet Eggleston.”

Tom looked down at the card in his hand. There wasn't enough light for him to really read it, but he didn't doubt what it said. “The ACLU.” He shook his head. “Why am I not surprised? I've been waiting for some of you to show up.”

“Some of what?” Spinelli challenged him with a toss of her head. “Decent people who have respect for the rights of others and don't want to see them trampled by a bunch of trigger-happy, reactionary, right-wing racist Neanderthals?”

“Oh, my goodness,” Bonnie said quietly. “This is going to be fun, isn't it?”

That depends on your idea of fun
, Tom thought.

18

“I thought you were going to shoot us, I really did,” Chet Eggleston said as he mopped sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief. “My life flashed in front of my eyes . . . and it wasn't that pretty a picture.”

“I don't go around shooting at people for no good reason,” Tom said.

“No,” Callista Spinelli put in. “You just shoot them because their skin is a different color than yours.”

Tom's jaw tightened. As a matter of fact, everyone he had ever shot at in his life
had
been a different color than he. But that had been more than thirty years earlier in Vietnam, and it wasn't what Spinelli was talking about anyway.

“You're all wrong about that, ma'am,” he said.

“Get him,” she said to Eggleston. “He's a cowboy, calling me ma'am like that. What is it with you cowboys that you like to go around shooting people for no good reason?”

“You say cowboy like it's a dirty word.”

“It is in my book,” she said with a sneer.

Bonnie looked over at Tom. “Is she just dense, or is she trying to be obnoxious?”

“Hey, lady!” Spinelli said, her accent becoming more pronounced. “You got something to say to me, you just go ahead and say it. Bring it on, okay?”

Tom put a hand on Bonnie's arm, but Bonnie just smiled faintly and shook her head. She wasn't going to go after that crass little loudmouth, no matter how much she might want to.

They had gone back to Tom's pickup, where he saw that a rental car was parked nearby. Obviously, the two ACLU attorneys had been out driving around, hoping to find some members of the Patriot Project on patrol. They had spotted the headlights and come blundering in. The distraction had allowed the three illegals to get away. Warren had radioed a few minutes earlier that he and his partner hadn't been able to find the three men.

“Listen, because of you, three men illegally entered the United States a little while ago,” Tom said now.

“Good,” Spinelli shot back at him. “Then we've accomplished something worthwhile tonight. We'll accomplish even more tomorrow when we get an injunction shutting down this little Gestapo you've set up, Mr. Brannon.”

Tom's eyes narrowed. “I don't appreciate the comparison, Ms. Spinelli. As my father would tell you if he was here, he and old Blood 'n' Guts Patton fought their way all across France and Germany to get rid of the Gestapo and everything else that had anything to do with the Nazis.”

“Then it's too bad you have to dishonor your father by acting like a Nazi.”

Tom rubbed his temples wearily. He had never encountered people like Callista Spinelli in person before, but he had seen them on newscasts and read their comments in the newspapers. One of their favorite tactics was to call anyone they disagreed with a Nazi. They preached tolerance but had none of their own.

“Look, you can take a whole legion of lawyers into court if you want—”

“Oh, we will, I assure you.”

“But it's not going to do you any good,” Tom went on doggedly. “We're not breaking any laws.”

“What about depriving people of their civil rights?”

“They're not American citizens. They don't
have
any civil rights. And even if they did, we haven't deprived anybody of anything. We just turn 'em around and send them back across the border.”

“Barbarian,” Spinelli said. “They have
human
rights, no matter where they're from.”

“Nobody's saying they don't. That's why we haven't hurt anybody. We don't
want
to hurt anybody.”

“Then why are you carrying guns? Huh? Tell me that, cowboy.”

Tom gritted his teeth for a second and then said, “In case we have to protect ourselves from somebody who wants to hurt
us
.”

“Which you wouldn't have to worry about if you weren't out here taking the law into your own hands—”

Shaking his head, Tom turned away from her and said to Bonnie, “Let's go. We're just wasting time here.”

Spinelli quivered with rage as she said, “Hey, mister, don't turn away from me when I'm talking to you! Chet, this cowboy just insulted me! Aren't you going to do anything?”

“Take it easy, Callie,” Eggleston said. “It won't do any good to get so worked up that you pop a blood vessel.”

Spinelli threw her hands in the air. “Now you're turning on me, too?”

“No, no, of course not,” Eggleston said quickly. “Why don't you just go sit in the car for a minute, and I'll talk to these people.”

Spinelli didn't want to go, but Eggleston talked her into it. When she was in the front seat of the rental car and he had closed the door behind her, he came back over to the pickup and said, “Sorry about that, folks. Callie's just really passionate about what she believes in.”

Bonnie said, “So are we, Mr. Eggleston.”

“Yes, well . . . Do you mind if I set my briefcase on the tailgate of your pickup for a minute?”

Tom shrugged. “Go ahead.”

Eggleston set the case on the tailgate and snapped the catches open. He pawed through a stack of papers and said after a few seconds, “Ah, here they are.” He took out two documents and turned to hand them to Tom and Bonnie, who took them without thinking. With a friendly smile, Eggleston continued, “There you go. You've both been served. Those are subpoenas requiring you to appear tomorrow morning at a hearing in Tucson for the granting of a temporary restraining order prohibiting any further activities by the so-called Patriot Project.”

Tom stiffened. “Why, you—”

“There's no need for name-calling, Mr. Brannon,” Eggleston went on smoothly as he snapped the briefcase shut. He picked it up and added, “We'll see you in court.”

“That slick son of a bitch,” Tom said as he looked down at the paper in his hand, not caring if Eggleston heard him or not.

“We knew something like this had to be coming,” Bonnie told him. “To tell you the truth, I'm surprised it took them a week to get around to it.”

Tom sighed. “Yeah, I suppose I am, too.”

“Look at it this way, Tom. Now you've got a chance to prove in court that you've been right all along. If the judge rules against their motion, they won't have any choice but to go away.”

Slowly, Tom shook his head. “They're lawyers, honey. They may scurry out of sight like cockroaches when the light comes on . . . but they're still there.”

 

 

Ernesto Luis Montoya struggled to keep the seething rage tamped down inside him. To be summoned here to Mexico City like a mere lackey was an insult. To have to answer the snapping fingers of this Arab was even worse. Montoya had come as a favor only to Señor Garcia-Lopez, who had been his silent partner in M-15 ever since Montoya had assumed command of the operation. There was a connection of some sort—financial, almost certainly—between Señor Garcia-Lopez and this Sami Al-Khan. Montoya had to respect that—but he didn't have to like it.

The two men had met on several previous occasions, in Al-Khan's office here in Mexico City and at Señor Garcia-Lopez's luxurious villa in Acapulco. Al-Khan did not offer to shake hands when Montoya was shown into the office, and for that Montoya was glad. Arabs were almost as bad as gringos.

“Please have a seat, my friend,” Al-Khan said as he gestured toward a thickly upholstered chair in front of the massive desk. “Would you like a drink?” As a Muslim, Al-Khan did not use alcohol, of course, but there was a small, well-stocked bar for visitors and business associates on the other side of the office.

Montoya shook his head impatiently in response to the offer. “I would prefer to get on with it,” he said. “Why did you ask me to come here?”

Al-Khan settled himself behind the desk and clasped his slightly pudgy hands together on its glass top. “Señor Garcia-Lopez asked me to discuss a certain situation with you.”

“What situation?”

“The one in Little Tucson, Arizona, involving the Patriot Project and the man called Brannon.”

Montoya made a sharp, slashing motion with his hand. “I have that under control.”

“Oh? What have you done since ordering the massacre that resulted in a storm of media coverage, the increased attention of the American government, and the formation of the Patriot Project?”

Montoya's hands clutched the arms of the chair. He held on tightly, rather than giving in to the impulse to take this greasy little man's throat and squeeze it until the Arab was dead. “That was a lesson for the people of Little Tucson, to teach them not to defy me.”

“It seems not to have worked,” Al-Khan said. “As I said, what have you done since then?”

Montoya took a deep breath. “I have sent several of my men across the border to test this Patriot Project.”

“And?” Al-Khan asked as he raised neatly trimmed eyebrows.

Montoya didn't want to answer, but Al-Khan's gaze was unflinching. Finally, Montoya said, “They were stopped and turned back.”

“Did they put up any resistance?”

“I ordered them not to . . . this time.”

“So Brannon and his Patriots, they have the potential to form an effective barrier against the traffic you had established across the border?”

“Not at all! I can smash them any time I want!”

“Then I suggest you do so, Señor Montoya. I prefer discretion, but it appears to be too late for that. Now that the gauntlet has been thrown down, the challenge must be answered.
Mara Salvatrucha
must be restored to its former glory. The Americans along the border must live in fear of M-15, as they had been until this man Brannon came along.” Al-Khan leaned forward, and suddenly he did not look so soft and ineffectual anymore. “Do what you must, Señor Montoya, but stop Tom Brannon and the Patriot Project . . .
now.”

 

 

Word of the hearing on the TRO had gotten out, and the scene was bedlam around the federal courthouse in Tucson. Tom, Bonnie, and the lawyers for the city of Little Tucson and Sierrita County had to slip into the courthouse through a rear door to avoid the media mob. The courtroom itself was a haven of peace and quiet, because Judge Elgin Malone had banned cameras and allowed only a small contingent of reporters inside. Malone was a crusty old-timer. He was also extremely liberal, one of the lawyers informed Tom, and Tom felt his hopes sink. He
knew
the law was on his side—but if the ruling went against him here today, it sure as hell wouldn't be the first time some liberal judge had ignored the law and followed his personal biases.

The bailiff called, “All rise!” and everyone got to their feet as Judge Malone came in and took his place on the bench. He gaveled the court to order and told everyone to sit down. As Tom looked over from the defense table, he saw Callista Spinelli and Chet Eggleston sitting at the plaintiff's table along with several other expensively dressed attorneys. Spinelli smirked at him. She was enjoying this.

The next forty-five minutes were pretty much a blur to Tom. He had a layman's knowledge of the law, but he wasn't able to follow all the procedural gibberish that both sides in the case went through. Finally, though, he was called to the stand to explain what the Patriot Project was and his role in it.

When he was sworn in and seated, Spinelli stood up and said with a smile, “Good morning, Mr. Brannon. Thank you for being here.”

Tom nodded to her and replied in his best cowboy drawl, “Mornin', ma'am.” He was rewarded by a slight tightening of Spinelli's lips and a grin from Bonnie, who sat in the front row of the spectator seats.

Spinelli began to shoot questions at him, asking him to describe the activities of the Patriot Project. Tom answered them as honestly as possible. Every time Spinelli tried to make it sound as if the Patriots were doing something illegal, immoral, and downright racist, Tom had an answer for her, deftly turning aside the spurious allegations. Several times his attorneys objected, and for the most part Judge Malone sustained them, although it seemed to Tom that he did so grudgingly. Spinelli was growing more frustrated, and she finally snapped, “No further questions.”

One of Tom's lawyers got to his feet and said, “Tell us, Mr. Brannon, about the events that led to the formation of the Patriot Project.”

Spinelli shot up out of her chair. “Objection! Irrelevant!”

“How can it be irrelevant, Your Honor?” Tom's lawyer said. “The origins of an organization go right to the heart of its motives.”

“The motives of those . . . people . . . aren't what's at issue,” Spinelli argued. “All we're concerned with here are their actions, which are indefensible!”

Judge Malone picked up his gavel but didn't use it. He said, “That's what we're trying to determine, Ms. Spinelli, whether or not the actions of the Patriot Project are indeed defensible. The objection is overruled.”

Spinelli sat down, obviously gritting her teeth. Eggleston leaned over to whisper to her, probably telling her to calm down before she started damaging their case with the judge. They had had an advantage going in because of Malone's liberal leanings, and they didn't want to squander that.

Tom's lawyer asked, “Why
did
you suggest starting up the Patriot Project, Mr. Brannon?”

Tom took a deep breath. “Because somebody had to protect the citizens of Little Tucson and Sierrita County from M-15.”

“What's M-15?” They wanted to get this on the record.

“
Mara Salvatrucha
. A criminal gang composed primarily of Guatemalans and El Salvadorans who have taken over all the drug smuggling and the rest of the illegal activity along the border.” Tom paused for a second. “They've also murdered more than two dozen American citizens in the past couple of weeks.”