Standoff

Twenty-nine

Was it warm out here, or was it nerves? The summer temperature at one-thirty in the morning on the desert floor was close to eighty degrees Fahrenheit and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that we were in the wrong place at the right time, so maybe it was a little of both.

The stars were out in their billions, brilliant points of light that, in the lenses of the night vision goggles, were fluoro green. Somewhere unseen among them were MQ-1 Predator drones — unarmed — flying reconnaissance. Five hundred men dug into the desert should be enough to repel a mobile force of a thousand, but nothing was ever certain in a gunfight.

I rubbed a gloved hand across my forearm to squash something biting the exposed skin, the harvester ants doing what they do. And in the forefront of my mind the scorpions were here too, the compact super poisonous ones. Have I mentioned that I hate scorpions? The fuckers make me break out in four letter words.

While Gomez and I were armed with M4s, we were there just to observe. Assuming that there was fighting ahead, the First Armored Division, “Old Ironsides” would wage it. These were good men, well trained, veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Feeling any better about all this?” Gomez asked.

“Overjoyed,” I said.

“Nothing’s happening.”

“They trained in daylight. They’ll come at dawn.”

“If they come,” said Gomez.

“So now you’re having second thoughts?” I asked.

“Doubt is infectious.”

It was. There was nothing to do other than wait out the night and see what eventuated, so I closed my eyes and then suddenly came awake with a sharp intake of breath. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Two twenty-two,” said Gomez. “Welcome back.”

While asleep, my subconscious had sifted something important that Captain Mendoza had said out of the debris clogging most of my waking thoughts — that unconscious me at work again. “C’mon. We’re getting outta here.”

Gomez yawned. “Where are we going?”

“We have to reach that ready reaction force and get it in the air.”

“What?” I heard him say, but I was already on the move.

He got up and followed and we ran at a crouch back through the support vehicles and jumped into a jeep, another Jeep Patriot, but this one hired from Dollar. Seemed only fair to spread the risk. Gomez threw himself into the passenger seat and buckled up. “Give me something I can believe in, Cooper. You’re talking in your sleep and suddenly you’re up and sprinting. Who, what, where and when?”

I fired up the jeep and stood on the gas. “We think Apostles is gonna strike Columbus because that’s the town Villa hit,” I shouted above the engine and wheelspin. “We didn’t stop to think why Villa chose to attack Columbus.”

“Because maybe Columbus was the only thing around here back then?”

“There was El Paso. It was bigger, richer. But he chose Columbus back then because El Paso with Fort Bliss was a nut too big to crack — like today.”

The Black Hawks held on standby with a reinforced rifle platoon — about fifty guys — were only a mile behind Needleman’s line and, through the NVGs, I could pick out the silhouettes of the helicopters’ tail rotors against the stars. “Mendoza said Villa attacked the US Army outpost at Columbus. Remember? But the army’s no longer in Columbus. If Apostles wants to emulate Villa, he’s not coming here. Like I said, he just wants us to believe that’s where he’s going.”

I turned in toward the choppers, stomped on the brakes and came to a sliding stop, my door open while we were still moving.

“Hey, Cooper, stop!” Gomez snapped. “Wait a minute!”

I held the door open and checked my watch: 2:32 am. “Look, the target’s not Columbus because there’s no longer a military outpost there. And it’s not El Paso for the same reason Villa gave the place a wide berth back in the day. But Apostles still wants to use the Pancho Villa imagery, hence the 20 July date for the attack — the anniversary of the general’s death. But he wants to hit something military, just like Villa did, and let’s say it’s something with a runway so that he can again utilize those black King Airs.”

“What? Wait a second, you’ve lost me.”

“Look, Gomez, we’re wasting time here.”

“What are we doing, Cooper?”

“Okay… Arlen suggested the raid on Horizon Airport wasn’t just about dropping off a load of cocaine. Remember?” I said. “What if it was part of a dress rehearsal for something a lot bigger and badder?”

“Using the buzzards,” said Gomez.

“It’s a reasonable assumption. Once again they’ll come in low, under the radar. But this time they’ll land around forty assassins who’ll quietly secure the front gate for the dirt-bike-mounted infantry that have jumped the border fence or the river or whatever. I think Apostles and Perez are gonna hit a US military installation. That’s the missing link.”

“Then all we have to do is make a phone call. If we give one base an itch, every base within a hundred miles of the border is going to be scratching, on heightened alert.”

“Only this is a new kind of warfare,” I reminded him. “And no one really knows exactly what’s coming at them. With uncertainty on their side, the two-pronged assault like the one I believe is in the cards would be devastating.”

“I’m still not convinced there’s cause for alarm. Lay this insight on Arlen and, as I said, wherever the attack comes, the installation’s security forces will be on alert.”

“Yeah, except their primary task will be to secure base infrastructure. But Apostles and Perez are not really interested in infrastructure. They’ll be going for the resource that’s unprotected, the same one they hit at Horizon — the people.”

The full audacity of it finally hit Gomez. “Oh, shit …” he whispered.

“Like I said, it’s not Bliss — that place is way too big. So give me a town with a smallish US military base that sits on the border.”

Gomez didn’t have to think about it too long. “You mean … like Del Rio?”