Invasion Usa: Border War Read online

  INVASION USA BORDER WAR

  William W. Johnstone with J. A. Johnstone

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dateline: Washington, D.C.

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  “This will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”

  —Elmer Davis

  This is a work of fiction. Unfortunately, events such as the ones depicted in this novel occur all too often along America’s Southwestern borders in this day and age.

  Dateline: Washington, D.C.

  The U.S. State Department today issued its strongest warning yet regarding travel along the United States-Mexico border, urging American citizens not to cross the border into Mexico except in extreme emergencies.

  “I was in Saigon. I was in Baghdad,” said Jeffrey Parkhill, 52, an official in the Homeland Security Department and a retired colonel in the Marine Corps. “Nuevo Laredo and other Mexican border towns are rapidly becoming as dangerous as those cities were.”

  The Mexican government reacted quickly to the tough new travel advisory, accusing the U.S. authorities of overreacting to the problem and attempting to undermine the Mexican economy. “Our military and police forces are engaged in a valiant effort to stem the tide of violence along the border and bring the wolves of the drug trade and other criminal activities to bay,” the Mexican foreign minister said in a statement released in Mexico City.

  Parkhill responded, “The Mexican government had a stake in such things when the country’s economy depended to a large extent on tourism. Now the Mexican economy is built almost exclusively on the drug trade, and that’s what has turned the border into a war zone.”

  Over the past several years, conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border have worsened as rival gangs such as the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels struggle to dominate the trafficking of illegal drugs. There have been hundreds of assassinations, the victims of which include numerous law enforcement officials, and Americans who venture across the border are prime targets for kidnapping. State Department officials say that this abduction epidemic is what prompted the latest, most stringent warning.

  “An American’s life isn’t worth a plugged nickel on the other side of that river,” said a police source in Laredo, Texas, who requested anonymity. “But what really worries me is what’s going to happen when the killers who are running things over there start coming across the border. It hasn’t happened yet, but borders don’t mean anything to animals like that... .”

  One

  The Texas-Mexico border, upriver from Laredo Even here, in the middle of nowhere, it was hard to escape from the lights. In the sky to the southeast, the stars were dimmed by the wash of illumination from Los Dos Laredos—the two Laredos, the American city of that name and its sister across the Rio Grande, Nuevo Laredo. Up here, the landscape on both sides of the border river was desolate, mostly uninhabited plains dotted with scrub brush, but always in the night sky was the reminder that civilization was not far off.

  So-called civilization, thought Brady Keller as he crouched in the brush and waited. Sometimes he wondered just how far mankind had really progressed when somebody like him had to risk his life to keep a bunch of damn fools from injecting poison in their veins or sniffing it up their nose.

  Brady was a man in his thirties wearing a dark blue flak jacket with the letters DEA displayed prominently on the back. The men scattered through the brush tonight were a combined force drawn from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol, and the Texas Rangers. They were members of a task force that had been trying for years, with limited success, to curb the drug traffic across the Mexican border. There were times when Brady felt like this was an unwinnable war, that they ought to just give up and let the animals take over.

  But then he thought about all the men who had died in the effort to clean up the border, and knew that he and all the others like him couldn’t give up. That would dishonor all the ones who had come before and made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

  Sure as hell, though, there were times when it seemed like the country didn’t really give a damn. Brady thought of himself as a simple policeman, but he understood the law of supply and demand. If the cartels didn’t have a voracious market for their drugs in the United States, they wouldn’t be bringing them across the border. Maybe the public didn’t really want this war to be won.

  The politicians sure didn’t. That included both the ones who whined about civil rights and bent over backward to protect the rights of criminals, even foreign criminals, and the others who were too tightfisted to commit the money and manpower necessary to truly shut down the drug trade. Even though he loved his country dearly, Brady often thought that its leaders had raised the practice of doing something in a half-assed manner to an art form.

  The earphone tucked into his ear crackled, cutting into his musings. “Here they come,” said the voice of Eduardo Corriente, the DEA agent in charge of tonight’s operation, which had been set up following tips from several of the task force’s sources. The radios were set on a special frequency that was jammed except for task force members, so that the enemy wouldn’t know they were here.

  Brady’s grip tightened on the assault rifle in his hands. The dirt road in front of him ran from the Rio Grande to the railroad, about a mile behind the site of the ambush. A freight train had stopped back there on the rails, its crew working for the cartel. Those who couldn’t be bought off were terrified into submission by horrible threats against their families. They had stopped the train, and when the trucks rendezvoused with it, an entire freight car would be filled with drugs headed west.

  But that rendezvous would never take place. The task force would stop the trucks carrying the drugs before they ever reached their destination, and another group of agents would move in on the train itself and arrest the railroad workers who were working with the cartel. For tonight, at least, the poison’s flow would be stopped.

  But it was a mighty river, with many branches... .

  Brady leaned forward as he heard the rumbling of heavy engines. He pulled the night-vision goggles down over his eyes, and as he peered through the brush that lined the road, the scene sprang into sharp, green-tinted relief.

  Four big trucks with canvas covers over their backs rolled past Brady’s position. Each truck would have some guards riding on it, probably armed with automatic weapons, but the task force numbered over forty men, also heavily armed, plus several jeeps. Brady was confident they could handle the smugglers.

  “Go! Go!” Corriente yelled throug
h the earphones. Brady surged to his feet, cradling the assault rifle against his chest, and along with several dozen other agents, he ran through the brush toward the road. At the same time, the jeeps roared out of the concealment of a clump of mesquites and blocked the road, forcing the driver of the lead truck to slam on his brakes.

  As the trucks rocked to a halt, the agents surrounding them began shouting in Spanish for the drivers and the guards to get out with their hands above their heads. The men in the truck cabs didn’t do any such thing, however. They stayed right where they were, and alarm began to gnaw at Brady Keller’s guts.

  The canvas covers on the backs of the trucks were suddenly thrown up, revealing not the tons of drugs the authorities had been expecting, but rather men in black hoods and commando garb, overlaid with body armor. Four men to each truck, two to each side, had bulky tanks strapped to their backs and carried some sort of apparatus. Brady barely had time to take in the sight and realize what it meant before long tongues of flame shot out from the nozzles of the outlandish gear and engulfed the members of the task force.

  Flamethrowers ... plain, old-fashioned flamethrowers. The members of the task force had been prepared for a gun battle, but not this. Men screamed and died horrible deaths as the fingers of hell closed around them.

  Nor was that the only weapon being employed by the men on the trucks. Some of them threw grenades that burst in body-shredding explosions and sent bundles of torn flesh and blood that had been men flying into the air. Others wielded the sort of automatic rifles that the task force had been expecting, but now, in a matter of mere seconds, the agents were too disoriented and decimated to put up much of a fight.

  One black-garbed fighter on the lead truck rested a rocket launcher on the top of the vehicle’s cab and fired at the jeeps blocking the road. The rocket sizzled through the night, trailing fire behind it, and slammed into one of the jeeps, blowing it into a million pieces along with the men inside it. The force of the explosion toppled another jeep sitting close beside the one that was struck, and as men were thrown out of that vehicle, a hail of steel-jacketed slugs riddled them. The driver of the third jeep tried to back away hurriedly, but another rocket launcher was ready and flung its deadly missile through the night. The man at the wheel of the jeep screamed as the rocket impacted the hood just in front of him and consumed it in a ball of fire.

  Brady hugged the ground to the side of the road. The assault rifle in his hands chattered as he fired instinctively toward the trucks. Somehow he had avoided a direct hit by the flamethrowers, although the hellish stream had come so close to him that the heat had blistered his skin even through his clothes. He had been blinded by the flash that had burst in his goggles during the split second before they had burned out. Now he ripped them off and tried to aim by the garish light of burning brush—and burning men.

  The black-clad figures were jumping off the trucks, shooting as they came. Mopping up what was left of the task force. Bare minutes earlier, the Americans had been a group of proud, confident men, ready to bring justice to the brazen lawbreakers of the cartel.

  They hadn’t had a chance.

  Moving like a wraith, one of the killers in black appeared beside Brady and kicked the assault rifle out of his hands. Brady rolled over and clawed at the pistol holstered on his hip, but before he could get it out the rifle in the enemy’s hands blasted. Brady screamed as the bullet shattered his right elbow, flooding him with pain. He clutched his wounded arm with his left hand and lay there panting.

  He expected to die at any second, but gradually he became aware that he was still alive. His elbow throbbed unmercifully, and his face stung where the skin had been blistered and cooked by the near miss with the flamethrowers. He couldn’t see anything out of his right eye, and the vision in his left was blurred. It worked well enough, though, for him to see the menacing black-clad figure looming above him, rifle in hand.

  He heard the crackle of flames and the screaming of wounded men. The gunfire had died away, and now there were only sporadic blasts. Brady felt sick to his stomach when he realized that after each shot, there was less screaming.

  The killers were finishing off the task force members who had survived the ferocious counterattack. Tonight’s ambush had been a trap, all right, Brady realized, but it had been he and his companions who were caught in it.

  Finally, there were no more shots, no more screams. He was the last one left alive. He had no idea why he had been spared, but he prayed that they would let him live. Even in agony, life was so sweet that he didn’t want to let go of it.

  He had been raised on the border, down the Rio Grande valley in McAllen, and he spoke Spanish just as well as he did English. So he had no trouble understanding when the man standing over him called, “Here is the one you wished, Colonel.”

  They had kept him alive for a reason? Him in particular? That made no sense. But as Brady looked toward the lead truck and saw one of the black-clad figures remove the hood that covered his head, he began to understand.

  The man was tall and powerful-looking, and the glare from the flames on both sides of the road lit up a face that was both handsome and cruel. Brady had never seen him before, not in person, but he had seen the one photo that the task force had, the picture that had been taken with a telephoto lens and had cost the agent who took it his life.

  Colonel Alfonso Guerrero.

  “Listen to me,” Guerrero said in English. “You understand what I am saying? You know who I am?”

  Brady managed to nod his head. It didn’t matter to the killers who he was; they had kept him alive simply as a messenger boy.

  “Tell the ones who sent you and your companions on this foolish errand that La Frontera now belongs to Los Lobos de la Noche. Tell them that if they interfere with our mission, they will die. All of them, every time. And if they continue to annoy me, their families will die as well. Can you remember that?”

  Again, Brady nodded.

  Guerrero said, “To be sure that you do not forget ...” and nodded at the man standing over Brady.

  The rifle in the man’s hands blasted twice more, and Brady howled as the slugs shattered both kneecaps. His body arched and spasmed in agony.

  “Of course,” Guerrero continued, “you may bleed to death before help arrives, in which case I will have to send my message the next time you fools try to stop us. Really, it matters very little.”

  With that, Guerrero pulled the hood back over his head and turned away. His men climbed back onto the trucks, their job here done.

  Brady lay on the sandy ground, awash in pain and only half-conscious. He heard the trucks pull away, and a few minutes later, more heavy vehicles rumbled past. Those would be the trucks carrying the shipment of drugs, he thought in the pain-wracked wasteland that was his mind. He was barely coherent enough to wonder if Guerrero’s men had struck against the task force members waiting at the train as well. That seemed likely. Tonight had seen mass murder on two fronts.

  Mass murder carried out by the self-appointed guardians of the drug trade, the mercenaries who hired themselves out to the cartel to carry out an orgy of death, destruction, and intimidation.

  The men who now ruled La Frontera—literally, the frontier, that strip of land extending for miles on either side of the border—like a feudal kingdom. The men who called themselves Los Lobos de la Noche ...

  “The Night Wolves,” Brady murmured, and those were his last words before oblivion claimed him.

  Two

  Angelina Salinas said, “Have you ever . . ” and then leaned over to whisper the rest of the question into Shannon Horton’s ear.

  Shannon’s face turned a bright red as she exclaimed, “Oh my God! Of course not. I wouldn’t do that. It’s ... icky.” She hesitated. “Have you ... ?”

  Angelina smiled knowingly.

  Unwilling to let herself be one-upped that way, Shannon said hurriedly, “One time, though, Jimmy Dominguez and I ...”

  On the bus seat behind Angelina a
nd Shannon, Laura Simms muttered to herself, “Children,” and tuned out the rest of Shannon’s lurid confession. She didn’t care what Shannon and Jimmy had done together. Anyway, there was a good chance Shannon was making the whole thing up. The redheaded girl hated to think she was being left out of anything.

  Laura reached down to the backpack at her feet and took out her copy of The Once and Future King. It had been one of her summer reading assignments for Advanced Placement English, and she hadn’t quite finished it. Classes started the next day at Saint Anne’s Catholic School, following today’s annual junior/senior picnic at Lake Casa Blanca State Park, a short distance northeast of Laredo. Four buses carrying the small private school’s students rolled up the highway toward the lake. For today, at least, they didn’t have to wear the school uniforms; jeans were allowed. But not shorts.

  And of course, the nuns had split up the boys and the girls, herding the separate groups onto two buses each. They would be allowed to mingle once they reached the park, but being together in the close quarters of the buses would be too much temptation for their overheated teenage hormones. At least, so the nuns believed. And considering the things that Angelina and Shannon were whispering to each other, the nuns might have been right.

  Laura gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate on the words in her book. It was difficult to do, especially when Shannon giggled and said, “It was so big, I never—”

  “Will you two sluts be quiet?” The words came out of Laura’s mouth before she really thought about what she was saying. “I’m trying to read back here.”

  Angelina and Shannon turned around to glare at her. Shannon said, “Laura, you’re the only person I know who would bring a book to a picnic.”

  “Nerd,” Angelina muttered.

  Laura looked down at the book again and gritted her teeth. She didn’t care what they called her. She didn’t.

  She wanted to say that being a nerd was better than being a boy-crazy whore. But she couldn’t. That would just make the others hate her that much more.