Remember The Alamo (6 page)

The phone in Carranza's pocket was a special one that
worked off satellite transmissions. Not only that, its frequency
was shielded so that if anyone tried to capture its signal, all
they would hear would be a burst of high-pitched static. Only
a handful of people knew the number, so Carranza knew the
call had to be important.

He was by himself in the private jet's luxurious cabin, his
coat off, his tie loosened, and a drink in his hand. He tossed
back the rest of the whiskey and reached for the phone. Night
had fallen, and he glanced out the window at the darkness
rushing past before he thumbed the button to answer the call.

"Carranza."

"How did it go, amigo?"

The voice on the other end of the satellite transmission was
a deep, familiar purr. The tone of the question was friendly, with nothing even remotely threatening about it, but Ramiro
Carranza felt a chill go through him, anyway. The same chill
he felt every time he talked to this man.

"Perfectly," he said. "The president was so eager to save
face that she accepted my suggestion without the least hesitation. By the time we reached San Antonio, I halfway expected
her to claim that she had come up with the idea."

"And Alvarez and the members of the City Council?"

"They could not agree fast enough. A great many illegals
have managed to get registered to vote, not to mention all the
first- and second-generation immigrants who still think of
themselves more as Mexicans than Americans. You should
have seen them turned out along the route of the motorcade,
holding up signs and waving Mexican flags. It would have
done your heart good, General."

The voice on the phone hardened. "What will do my heart
good is to see our land returned to us. They call the Alamo the
cradle of Texas liberty. Bah! The cradle of theft and oppression is more like it. But soon, amigo, soon all that will
change"

"Of course," Carranza agreed. He had no choice but to
agree. His son was a hopeless drug addict who, in a stupor,
had murdered the whore who brought him the drugs. General
Salgado knew about that and had, in fact, helped to cover up
the whole sordid affair. If the knowledge of what had happened ever became public, Carranza's career would be over.
So whatever the general wanted, Carranza would do everything in his power to accomplish.

"Soon," Salgado continued, "we will take the first step in
recovering what is our own. And all it took were a couple of
minor incidents to scare the Americans into cooperating.
Those people's cojones shriveled up and dropped off long ago,
eh, amigo?"

Carranza laughed. The general didn't really need to black mail him into embarrassing the Americans. He was glad to do
that on his own. Even in their weakened state, brought on by
years of cancerous liberal rot from within, the arrogance of
the norteamericanos was still astonishing. They deserved to
be brought down a few notches, and men such as Carranza
and General Salgado were just the hombres to do it.

The general's voice became more solemn as he went on.
"You have done your part. Ambassador. Now, leave the rest
tome""

"If there is anything else I can do. .
:

"Just know that soon you will bask in the thanks of the
Mexican people as we are restored to our former glory. No
quarter!"

"No quarter," Carranza echoed. The famous decree by General Santa Anna when he declared that all the Texican defenders of the Alamo would be put to the sword.

Carranza broke the connection and slipped the phone back
into his pocket. The jet droned on into the darkness.

In the mountaintop villa outside Mexico City, General Augusto Lopez Montemayor de Salgado set the satellite phone
aside and looked down at the whore whose head was bobbing
up and down over his naked lap. He enjoyed conducting business on the phone while being serviced like this. It gave him
a chance to practice the iron control he exerted on himself. A
man could not hope to control others if he could not control
himself.

A stocky man with thick dark hair, a mustache, and a small
patch of beard on his chin, Salgado had risen through the
ranks to become one of the leading officers in the Mexican
army. Simply put, that meant he was better at extorting bribes,
strong-arming those weaker than him, and ruthlessly eliminating anyone who got in his way than his competitors were.

Since life was a serious matter, he seldom smiled, but he
did now. Carranza had delivered good, albeit not unexpected,
news. The Americans were going to blindly assist in their own
humiliation. Salgado was so pleased that he allowed the girl to
finish with him quickly and then sent her away.

He got dressed in casual clothes, not his uniform, and left
the villa's spacious study, walking along a covered flagstone
path that bordered the courtyard in the center of the villa. The
courtyard was a beautiful, tranquil place filled with flowerbeds arranged around a central fountain.

Salgado had no interest in beauty or tranquility tonight.
He went to the guest quarters and knocked on a door. A low,
well-modulated voice with a slight British accent told him to
come in.

He stepped into the room and nodded to his visitor, who
stood at one of the windows with his hands clasped behind his
back. The man still wore his robe and kaffiyeh. He turned to
look at Salgado, dark eyes flashing over the hawklike nose and
the gray-shot beard.

"You have news, General?"

"Everything is going according to plan," Salgado said.

The visitor smiled. "Senor Garcia-Lopez told me that you
were a good man and could be trusted. I am glad to see that he
appears to have been right."

"It does me honor to be deemed trustworthy by such a man
as Senor Garcia-Lopez."

Hector Garcia-Lopez was the head of the largest drug cartel
in Mexico, perhaps the largest in the entire Western hemisphere. Like a spider, the cartel had webs that spread out all
over the world, to South America, to the Middle East, to the
Orient. General Salgado's hawk-faced visitor was an associate
of Garcia-Lopez's. Unlike the cartel's leader, however, profit
was not Yar Ali Al-Khan's primary motivation.

He hated America, and that hatred was the most important thing in his life. It lived and breathed with an existence of its
own and a hunger that would perhaps never be satisfied, at
least not until every American infidel had been struck down
by the sword of Islam.

Though Salgado's hatred of the Americans--especially the
ones from Texas-had nothing to do with religion, it, too, was
so strong as to be the defining element of his life. So he understood Al-Khan quite well.

"You are prepared to do whatever is necessary, General?"
the Arab asked now.

"We have a saying here among those who have joined my
movement," Salgado replied. "No quarter"

A smile creased Al-Khan's deeply tanned face. "Ah. No
quarter. I like it."

Yes, they understood each other, Salgado thought. Though
they came from opposite sides of the world, they spoke the
same language.

Death to their enemies.

Not surprisingly, Evelyn Harlow's financial people had
signed off on the terms of the proposal Phil Cody had presented to her. Phil's company, SecureTech, would be providing security not only for the offices of Evelyn's business, but
also their computer network. That meant Phil would have an
excuse to see Evelyn more often. Definitely a good thing.

Good enough that Phil hadn't been bothered for several
days by memories he'd just as soon forget. He had never told
anyone about the vividness of the things that he sometimes
saw and heard and smelled. Ever since Vietnam, some people
had had this crazy idea that veterans who had seen combat
were all walking time bombs, primed to flash back to those
days and go berserk. The idiots who thought that were usually left-leaning idiots who had no understanding or even
sympathy for the military. All they had was their simplistic
philosophy that America was to blame for all the problems
everywhere in the world and that inside, soldiers were all
brutal, civilian-killing lunatics. They would seize on any
excuse they thought confirmed those ridiculous, agendaladen assumptions-and unfortunately, most shrinks fell into
that category. Phil had no desire to listen to some tweedy, pipe-smoking, NPR-subscribing dimwit tell him that his
memories were caused by his guilt over having helped a corrupt administration carry out its jingoistic, imperialistic, warmongering policies.

He was driving across San Antonio when he heard the news
on the radio. At the urging of Mayor Alvarez, the City Council had passed a resolution ceding Alamo Plaza and several
surrounding blocks to Mexico for the duration of the upcoming Pasco de Marzo celebration. Phil took his eyes off the road
for a second and stared at the radio, unable to believe what he
was hearing.

But it was true, he realized as the newscaster expanded on
the story. There would be a big ceremony in front of the Alamo
on March 6th the anniversary of the fall of the old mission
to Santa Anna's army turning it over to Mexico.

Phil's stomach clenched as a wave of sickness went through
him. Who could have come up with such a crazy idea?

Then he remembered that the president had been in town a
couple of days earlier, meeting with Alvarez. Of course, Phil
thought. This president was a longtime believer in style over
substance, in the symbolic gesture that really accomplished
nothing. Phil had no doubt that she had played a part in this
cockeyed scheme.

By the time he reached his office, the sickness inside him
had turned into anger. Every kid who grew up in Texas and attended public schools took a course in Texas history in the seventh grade. Phil had heard that not all states taught their own
history in school. He couldn't imagine not learning about
Texas history in school. The Alamo was just about the most
sacred place in the whole state. Making a show out of giving
it back to the Mexicans, even temporarily, was a slap in the
faces of the defenders who had died there. It was a slap in the
face of every Texan who believed in liberty. Phil wished there
was something he could do...

But of course there wasn't. He was just a little guy, a
small-business owner, somebody who paid his taxes and employed other taxpayers and contributed to the economy.

So in the eyes of the government-especially with the liberals running Washington again-he didn't count for shit.
Like all the other citizens who, in the eyes of those elitists,
were too dumb to know how to live their own lives or spend
their own money, he was just a cash spigot that could be
turned on every time the politicians needed more tax money
for some half-baked social engineering boondoggle.

No, one man couldn't do anything in this world.

"Dave? This is Phil Cody. Remember me?"

Dave Rodriguez had just gotten home from work when the
phone rang. Constance wasn't there; this was the evening she
took a class up at UTSA. So it was Dave's habit to fix supper
and have it ready when she got home.

He didn't want to spend a lot of time on the phone because
of that, but sure, he remembered Phil Cody, and he couldn't
very well hang up on the guy. Not after what had happened in
Kuwait....

For an instant, Dave's mind flashed back to that day, and he
saw the whole scene again, the American troops pinned down
by the Republican Guard, the tracer rounds zipping through
the air, the bursts of sand and smoke and flame as grenades
and rockets exploded, the way the world had tilted crazily as
a rocket burst right under the rear wheels of the truck he was
driving and sent it toppling onto its side and skidding along
the roadway...

Dave had been trying to crawl out through the busted
window before the flames reached the gas tank, but he had
gotten hung up somehow and was only halfway out. Blood ran
down his arms from the cuts made by the broken glass around the edges of the window, but he ignored the pain and kept
trying to heave himself free. Terror pounded inside him like
some kind of crazy drum solo. He knew the truck was going
to blow, and if he didn't get out in time, the inferno would consume him, too. It didn't matter that flying lead filled the air
around the truck. Anything was better than staying there and
burning to death.

Then a shadow fell over him, and he looked up to see an
American soldier who had run up to the truck despite the firefight. The guy had a knife in his hand. He said, "Hang on," to
Dave, then leaned down, reached past him through the window,
and cut whatever it was that kept Dave from getting loose. The
soldier sheathed the blade, grabbed Dave under the arms, and
pulled him the rest of the way through the window. Bullets
whined off the truck's body and the crackle of flames grew
louder as the guy hauled Dave to his feet, slung an arm around
his waist, and started running with him away from there.