Remember The Alamo (2 page)

Where liberty dwells,
there is my country.

-Benjamin Franklin

Texas, by God!

-John Wesley Hardin

Remember the Alamo!

-Battle cry of the Texas
Army at San Jacinto

Note: This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are
entirely the products of the authors' imaginations. Certain
minor geographical details have been altered slightly for dramatic purposes. The spirit of Texas and Texans remains
unchanged.

It was broad daylight, damn it. Ernie Martinez hunkered
behind the little outcropping of dirt and stone and listened to
the chatter of machine guns. Nobody expects to be attacked in
broad daylight.

Nobody expects to die in broad daylight. Death's natural
habitat is the night, especially the lonely hours after midnight. That was when Ernie had always hated to go out on
patrol, because the darkness could hold many things, and
most of them were dangerous.

He held his radio to his mouth and shouted over the racket,
"We need help out here! Somebody! We're pinned down-"

A bullet struck close enough to sling grit into Ernie's eyes.
He yelped in pain and recoiled, and that lifted his body just
enough so that the next slug to come whistling toward him
clipped his upper left arm, just above the shoulder.

The impact drove him back down into the ground. Sand
clogged his mouth and nose. He choked and spat, but fought
off the impulse to rise up again. That had almost gotten him
killed just now. He had to be more careful if he hoped to survive this ambush.

Three of his fellow Border Patrolmen were already dead, sprawled in jeeps and on the ground nearby, their uniforms
turning dark with the blood that leaked from the bullet holes
in their bodies.

Ernie and four more patrolmen had lived through the
opening volley that had also blown out the tires of the four
jeeps, trapping them here in this sandy, rocky stretch of
ground less than a mile north of the Rio Grande.

The bullet hitting Ernie's arm had felt like a hard punch
from a fist. Then that shoulder and the whole arm had gone
numb for a minute or so.

Now the numbness was wearing off, and pain flooded
through him. He gritted his teeth against it. He didn't want
to cry. But tears welled from his eyes, anyway, and rolled
down his cheeks. He didn't make a sound, though.

After a few minutes he was able to reach over with his
good arm and snag the radio he had dropped when he was
shot. He dragged it closer to his mouth, pressed the button,
and said, "Help. I'm shot. Three patrolmen down"

He gave their location as best he could estimate it, then
went on. "We're under heavy fire. Please help."

When he released the pressure on the talk button, he heard
only a static hiss from the radio's speaker. Was it possible the
attackers had some way of jamming the Border Patrol's radios?

Ernie wouldn't put anything past the bastards. The days
were long gone when all the Border Patrol had to worry
about were the coyotes, mostly independent contractors who
smuggled illegals across the Rio Grande.

Now the enemy was well organized and well armed, and
most of all well funded by the drug cartels. Ernie had even
heard rumors that some of them were tied to Islamic terror
groups. He had no trouble believing that, either.

One thing was for sure: The gang that had ambushed them
had the advantage in numbers and weaponry. The patrolmen
carried handguns and had some shotguns and rifles in the jeeps. They were no match for the modern assault rifles being
wielded by the unseen attackers.

So it was entirely possible that they could possess the
technology to prevent the luckless Border Patrolmen from
calling for help. Technology bought and paid for by drug
money, terror money.

A wave of nausea swept through Ernie. He was losing too
much blood. The left sleeve of his uniform shirt was soaked
by now, and the hot flood continued. He was going to lose
consciousness soon, he knew, and then he would bleed out
and die.

The firing stopped. Ernie was so groggy he thought for a
second that he had imagined the silence. But then he realized
it was real. Were the attackers leaving, content with the
damage they had already done?

"Viva Mexico! Viva Reconquistar!"

Hard on the heels of the shout, somebody screamed. Ernie
couldn't stand it. He lifted his head to peer over the little
hump of ground in front of him.

He saw more than a dozen men stalking through the scrub
brush, assault rifles in their hands. They wore uniforms of
some sort-high-topped black boots, tight white trousers,
blue coats, narrow-brimmed caps.

A shock of recognition went through Ernie. Those were the
uniforms of Santa Anna's army, from the 1830s. Ernie would
know. He had seen them often enough, growing up as a kid
in San Antonio and watching that TV show about Davy Crockett, rooting for the guys inside the Alamo instead of the dictator's army outside.

And why wouldn't he root for the defenders of the old mission? He had been born and raised in Texas, not Mexico.
Quite a few of the Alamo's defenders had been of Spanish descent, too. People tended to forget about that and think of the Texas revolution as a gringos-versus-Mexicans conflict,
when it hadn't been that way at all.

Ernie had time for those thoughts to flash through his
mind before he realized that despite the old-fashioned uniforms, the killers were using modern weapons. Except for
the handful who carried machetes. Sunlight glinted on the
blades as they rose and fell, chopping the screaming Border
Patrolmen into bloody, quivering pieces.

The other guys had to be wounded too bad to fight back,
or they wouldn't have let the ambushers murder them like
that. One by one, the attackers closed in on the patrolmen,
shouting, "Reconquistar! Reconquistar!" and using the machetes on their victims.

Ernie could put up a fight, though. He took the radio in his
left hand. The fingers didn't want to work very well because
of the wound on his upper arm, but he managed to close
them around the radio and press down on the transmit button
with his thumb. Blood ran down the back of his hand.

Then Ernie pulled his pistol with his other hand and lurched
upright, yelling, "Reconquer this, you sons of bitches!" He
started firing.

He was too shaky to do more than aim in the general direction of the men in the old-fashioned uniforms. One of
them staggered, hit by blind chance. The others turned and
brought up their assault rifles. Flame and lead spat from the
barrels.

Ernie felt the bullets thudding into him, driving him off
his feet. He didn't know how many times he was hit, but he
was shot to hell, he knew that. He had dropped his gun, too,
so he couldn't even get in a last shot as the killers in the oldfashioned uniforms stalked over to him.

One of them glared down at Ernie and said in Spanish,
"You are a traitor to your people."

In English, Ernie gasped out a reply. "My people are .. .
Texans...."

He saw the sun shining on the blade of the machete as it
descended toward him.

That was the last thing he ever saw.

But his last thought was the hope that the transmission
from the radio still clutched in his hand got through somewhere, somehow.

Pain pounded behind Phil Cody's eyes. He'd had too much
to drink the night before, and he was paying for it this morning. The sunlight lancing in through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the office in the San Antonio high-rise didn't help
matters, either.

Phil forced his attention back to what Evelyn Harlow was
saying. She was the CEO of the real-estate marketing firm
that took up three floors in this building. If Phil wanted the
job of providing security for her company, it would pay not to
let her know that he was hungover.

"So you can see that with millions of dollars involved, we can't
afford to take any risks we don't have to, can't you, Mr. Cody?"

"Of course," Phil said. He smiled. He could manage to do
that much, anyway.

"Your computer people are top notch, I take it?"

"Of course" Damn it, he'd just said that. Now he was repeating himself He figured he had better expand on his answer. "I
have the best people in the business working for me"

Evelyn Harlow smiled back at him. She was forty-five,
maybe fifty, with a well-preserved beauty that showed she
was willing to spend time and money on it.

"What about your own computer skills?"

This was where Phil had always believed that honesty was
the best policy. If he claimed to know more than he did and a
potential client started throwing around reams of computer
jargon, he would be shown up as a fraud in a hurry, and that
could only hurt his chances of landing a new job.

"I can turn the computer on, get my e-mail, and surf the
Web a little." He shrugged. "Beyond that, I depend on people
who really know what they're doing."

"In other words, you know your limitations."

"A man's got to," Phil said, sort of quoting Clint Eastwood.
You couldn't go wrong with Clint.

Evelyn reached out and tapped a well-manicured fingernail on the folder that sat on her desk. "I'll give your proposal
to my people and let them run the numbers. I should have a
decision for you by the close of business today."

Phil nodded. "That's fine."

"In the meantime," Evelyn went on, "are you free for lunch
today?"

He was tempted. He saw interest in her eyes and no wedding
ring on her finger. She would be good company at lunch, he
sensed, and after that ... well, she might be even better company.

But he shook his head and said, "I'm afraid not. I have
meetings all day."

"That's a shame. Maybe another time, since I have a feeling there's a good chance we'll be working together."

"I hope so," Phil said.

He stood up, shook hands with her her hand was cool
and smooth, and he liked the strength in her grip and left
the office. He didn't loosen his tie and swipe the back of his
hand across his forehead until after he had ridden down on
the elevator and left the high-rise.

A bomb exploded a couple of blocks away as he walked
across the building's tree-shaded parking lot. He heard the whistle of incoming artillery and ignored that, too, knowing
it wasn't really there. As he reached his car and grasped the
front door handle, the smell of roasting flesh filled his nostrils and he was back on the highway in Kuwait, the highway
that Saddam's Republican Guard had used to try to flee the
country they had occupied. The road was littered with
burned-out vehicles, and inside those vehicles were the
charred corpses of Guardsmen. The flesh was gone from
many of them, leaving only blackened bones. Skulls leered at
Phil as he walked past in his combat gear, rifle in hand.

He took a deep breath and looked down at the smooth
pavement of the parking lot. The stench was gone. The air
was warm, like it had been in Kuwait, but it was filled with
the smell of flowers, not burning humans.

His father must have smelled that stink a lot, tramping
across Europe behind Patton's tanks as he had. Phil wondered
how his dad had been able to stand weeks and months of that.
The ground offensive in Desert Storm had lasted only a few
days, and the things he had experienced there still haunted
Phil many years later. They came back to him especially
strong on mornings like this, when he'd had too much to drink
the night before.

He knew that was a damn cliche, the burned-out vet who
couldn't let go of what he had seen and done in combat. And
most of the time he didn't really fit that description. He was
a fully functioning member of society, the owner of a successful business. He even belonged to the Rotary Club, damn it!

And you couldn't lay the failure of his marriage at the feet
of the war, either. Things had been fine with Nancy when he
got back from Kuwait. It wasn't until a few years later that
she had gotten the wandering eye and cheated on him. He had
walked away from the marriage then, and even though he had
just been getting his business off the ground, he had been
generous with Nancy, considering what she had done.