Remember The Alamo (4 page)

"General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was the dictator of
Mexico during the Texas Revolution. It was his army that laid
siege to the Alamo, killed all the defenders, and then was defeated at the Battle of San Jacinto by Sam Houston's army."

The president glared at him, waved the makeup people away, and said, "What the hell are you telling me? That this
massacre was carried out by soldiers who were nearly a hundred and eighty years old?"

Mahone shook his head. "They were dressed like Santa
Anna's soldiers, that's all. They drove up in trucks and were
armed with modern weapons. They swept through the crowd,
cutting down everyone in their path and shouting the word
`Reconquistar.."'

"Which means?"

"To reconquer." Now Mahone held up one of the printouts.
"We've done some research online and found out that it's the
name of a political movement in Mexico. It got started some
years ago. No one took it too seriously at first because its
goals seemed so far-fetched, but evidently it's been gaining in
support recently."

"What are their goals?"

"The members of the Reconquistar movement-who call
themselves Reconquistadores, by the way-believe that Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, and California were taken away from
Mexico by illegal means"

"Texas won its own independence, and the others were
ceded by treaty."

Mahone was a little surprised the president knew that much.
He shook his head and said, "That doesn't matter to the Reconquistadores. They still maintain all of that was illegal and
that those states still belong to Mexico. They claim that the
Americans living in those states are the real illegal immigrants who should be forced to leave."

"Forced?"

"Yes, ma'am. While the Reconquistar movement was a political one at first, designed to pressure the Mexican government into seeking concessions from the United States through
peaceful protests, it's become more radical and begun to advo cate the retaking of what they consider Mexican territory by
force if necessary."

"That's insane!" the president said.

Mahone nodded. "And the Mexican government repudiates
the Reconquistadores, at least officially."

The president sighed and said, "Yes, I know how that
works" She stood up and squared her shoulders. "So what
you're telling me is that I have to go out there and explain to
the American people that our country is under attack by Mexican dissidents who like to dress up like Santa Anna's soldiers?"

"That about sums it up," Mahone said.

The president shook her head. "God help me"

"God help us all," Edward Mahone said.

"I have been in contact with the Mexican government and
assured Presidente Guzman that in no way do we hold him or
his administration to blame for this vicious, unwarranted
attack on the American people. Unlike the attack on Columbus, New Mexico, by troops under the command of Pancho
Villa in the early part of the previous century, this incident will
not provoke an armed response from the United States. Our
troops will not be sent to the border to exacerbate the already
existing tension between the two countries. I am going to rely
on the word of Presidente Guzman that Mexican authorities
will seek out, locate, arrest, and punish those responsible for
this act.

"Now, some have called what happened in Texas today, as
well as the earlier attack on a group of Border Patrolmen, terrorist attacks. Nothing could be further from the truth. While
the men who carried out these attacks are criminals, they are
also misguided souls who ultimately seek only to promote the
interests of their own country. They should be punished for their actions, but not for what is in their hearts. And I promise
you, the American people, that I will do everything in my
power to work to improve conditions along the border so that
people who live there will no longer feel that they have to lash
out at us. This country can win any battle it chooses to fight
through force of arms. Now we face the much more difficult
task of winning the battle of hearts and minds.

"In closing, I extend the country's sympathy, and my personal sympathy, to the victims of this tragic situation on both
sides of the border. Thank you, and long live the United States
of America."

Standing off to one side of the Oval Office, well out of
camera range, FBI Director Edward Mahone watched and listened to the speech that had been hastily written for the president by her inner circle of advisors, which included two of her
old law professors, her head of polling and focus groups, a
couple of lawyers who had fled to Canada during the Vietnam
War, and a woman who had retired from writing and directing
movies in Hollywood to help her old friend run the country.

Then Mahone slipped off to one of the White House bathrooms and threw up.

It didn't help. He still felt sick.

Dave Rodriguez finished tightening down the last nut on
the new oil pan, then rolled out from under the car on the
creeper. He sat up and called, "That'll do it, Boss," to the manager of the garage.

Dave got to his feet and pulled a rag from behind his belt to
wipe the grease from his hands. This was his last job of the day
and he was anxious to get home to his wife. Thinking about
Constance made a smile spread across his rugged face.

He was a compact, strongly built man in his forties with
thick, prematurely gray hair. His light blue eyes were the one
feature he had inherited from his Anglo mother. Everything
else had come from his father, Bartolomeo Rodriguez, who
had immigrated to Texas from Mexico in the late fifties. Bart,
as he had come to be called, had married blond and blue-eyed
Ingrid Stevenson, and Dave had been born a few years later,
followed by a couple of sisters who got their mother's blond
hair and fair skin and didn't look like they were related to
Dave at all. That was the way they liked it, too.

Dave didn't care if his sisters wanted to forget where they
had come from. He had made numerous trips to Mexico to see
relatives who still lived there, and it was on one of those trips, after he'd gotten back from Desert Storm, that he met
Constance Aguilar.

It had been an international, long-distance courtship. But
Dave had known the first time he saw Constance that he
wanted to make her his wife, so he didn't let those obstacles
stand in his way. They had finally gotten married in Mexico
several years earlier, a late marriage for both of them since
they were in their thirties, and Constance had come to San Antonio to live with Dave. So far they had been very happy together, although it was starting to look like they wouldn't be
blessed with children, and Dave knew that bothered her.

Dave plucked his fatigue jacket from the hook in the
garage's break room where he had hung it when he came to
work, and went out the rear door. The employees parked back
here. Dave unchained his ride, his pride and joy, a big Harley
with plenty of leather and gleaming chrome, and swung a leg
over the bike. It started with the deep, full-throated roar that
always touched something deep in his soul.

Some people were meant to ride the wind, Dave had always
thought, and he was one of them.

He zipped up his jacket, settled the helmet on his head, and
pulled out of the rear parking lot. The sun had gone down already, but an orange glow still remained in the western sky.
After a couple of blocks, Dave zoomed up an entrance ramp
onto the interstate and blended into the flow of traffic with no
difficulty.

It was a good ride home, and as always, the wind in his face
and the roaring cycle underneath him took away all the kinks
and frustrations from the day. Dave enjoyed being a mechanic,
but he'd always thought he could do better. Bart Rodriguez had
been a mechanic, though, and he had believed that a son ought
to follow in his father's footsteps. Then, when Dave's reserve
unit had been called up and sent to Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, the runup to the Gulf War, the army had taken advantage of his talents and stuck him in the motor pool.

He'd seen action, though. It hadn't all been fixing jeeps and
Humvees. He had gotten assigned to a convoy of supply trucks
heading into Kuwait, and they'd run into some American
troops that had been ambushed by a holdout Republican
Guard unit....

With a little shake of his head, Dave pushed those memories out of his mind. Those days were long gone, and he was
almost home.

The delicious smell of enchiladas filled the kitchen of the
little suburban home when Dave came into it a short time later.
Constance wasn't in the kitchen. Dave heard the sound of the
TV from the den.

Constance was watching the news. Dave glanced at the TV
screen and said, "The president's on again? Dang, I never saw
anybody who liked TV cameras more than she does."

"This is tape from her press conference earlier in the day,"
Constance explained. "All they wanted to know about was this
Reconquistar business."

Dave didn't care about any of that. He was more interested
in sitting down on the sofa and snuggling with his wife for a
few minutes before they had supper. Constance wore jeans and
a short-sleeved blue T-shirt, and despite the fact that she was
thirty-six, she could pull it off because she looked younger.
Her olive skin was smooth and unlined, her long hair thick and
black as midnight. Her face, with its high cheekbones a slight
indication of Indian blood somewhere in her ancestry, was
strikingly beautiful, or at least Dave had always thought so.
And who was a better judge of that than him?

He sat down beside her and started to slip an arm around
her shoulders. She drew away a little and said, "You could take
a shower first, you know."

"Supper's almost ready, isn't it?"

"Yes, I'll take the enchiladas out of the oven as soon as this
is over."

"Then there's not really time for me to take a shower, is
there?"

She leaned against him and let him put his arm around her.
"All right," she said, "but you'll have to clean up before you
get anything else."

Dave grinned. "Si, senora."

He found his attention drawn to the TV despite himself. The
president was talking about how the Mexican government had
assured her that the people responsible for the attack on the
VFW picnic would be found and dealt with properly. That was
the same old tired refrain everybody in Washington had been
parroting ever since the atrocity.

They were fools, Dave thought, if they were relying on the
Mexican government to do anything positive. With the widespread corruption and the sheer incompetence that ran rampant in all levels of government below the border, the country
barely functioned. Even though Dave hated to think it about
his father's native land, the drug cartels and other criminals
were the only real authorities in Mexico now.

What else could the American government do, though,
except make a show of letting Mexico handle things? They
couldn't send armed troops across the border without causing
an international incident, and the current occupant of the
White House was so timid and politically correct that she
would never even consider such a thing. It would damage
world opinion about the United States.

Although why we should give a rat's ass what the world
thought of us was beyond him, Dave thought. The Europeans sneered at us no matter what we did, the Communist
holdouts and the other leftist dictators hated us, and the Islamic terrorists wanted to wipe us off the face of the earth. Yeah, the world had no use for the United States of
America....

Until some other country needed help of some kind. Then
things were different. Then we were supposed to bend over
backward to lend a hand and shovel out billions of dollars of
foreign aid, which the other country would gobble up, and
then turn right around and tell us we were cultural morons or
running-dog imperialists or the Great Satan. It was enough to
make you want to tell the rest of the world to go take a flying
leap.

But of course we would never do that, Dave knew. We
couldn't, because we were Americans and even when we
failed, we tried to do the right thing. We could take some comfort from that knowledge, he told himself, even while the rest
of the world was spitting on us.

"What are you frowning about?" Constance asked, intruding on his gloomy thoughts.

He shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing important, anyway."

"By the way, Al Guerrero called earlier."

Dave sat up. "Do we have a ride? Why didn't you tell me
earlier?"

"Take it easy. There's no ride. Al just wanted to remind you
about the meet-and-greet next weekend."

Dave and Al Guerrero were both members of Freedom's
Guard, an organization of bikers, all of whom were also vets.
For some years now, ever since the Guard had been formed,
members had been attending the funerals of soldiers who had
been killed in action or otherwise died in the line of duty. They
formed a cordon around the bereaved family and friends of the
fallen soldiers, protecting them from the left-wing assholes who
thought it was a good idea to stage their half-baked protests on
such solemn occasions. Those protesters might talk a good
game, but they disappeared in a hurry when confronted by a
dozen or more patriots who didn't appreciate their presence. They yapped to the press about how their right to dissent was
being stifled, and of course the media ate it up.

It wasn't a matter of stifling dissent. The protesters could
spew their venom in other places, at other times. If they
wanted to march on City Hall or the State Capitol or even
Washington, D.C., fine, Dave didn't give a damn. But to disturb grieving families who had lost a loved one ... well, preventing that was just a matter of common decency.

On the television screen, the president was saying, "I plan
to meet with representatives of the Mexican government to
discuss ways of potentially defusing the tension that now
exists between our two countries."