Invasion Usa: Border War Read online

  Angelina and Shannon went back to their conversation. Laura sighed as she realized that she had read the same paragraph at least four times. She gave up, sticking her bookmark back in the book and returning it to her backpack. She looked up and down the aisle of the bus instead.

  There were forty girls on this bus, all of them juniors and seniors, their ages ranging from sixteen to eighteen. Twenty-eight of them were Latinas. That was seventy percent, which Laura knew without having to think about it because she did the math automatically in her head. Nine were Caucasian and three African-American. That was fairly representative of the population of Laredo, and Webb County. The actual figures skewed slightly higher Hispanic, as Laura knew because she had done a report on the demographics of La Frontera for her AP Government class the year before. The expenses involved in sending a child to private school tended to have an effect on the ethnic makeup of the student body, but with the population figures so predominantly Hispanic to begin with, they still comprised a large majority of the students.

  Which meant, once you got past all the politically correct, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that you had to put in reports for school, there were a lot of Mexican-American kids at Saint Anne’s, a good number of whites, and a few blacks. Everybody spoke Spanish, of course, no matter what their race. You grew up bilingual in Laredo. In fact, Laura thought she spoke better Spanish than some of the Hispanic kids. The old Mexican culture still existed, but in these days of the Internet and cable TV, iPods and wi-fi, a Hispanic kid was more likely to be familiar with 50 Cent than with Flaco Jimenez, and any mention of Cantinflas would get you a blank look.

  Laura’s fair skin and blond hair—which was pulled back into a ponytail at the moment—didn’t cause her any trouble with the other kids. Some of them didn’t like her, but that was because she was smart and didn’t try to conceal it. She told herself she didn’t care. School wasn’t a popularity contest. One more year and she’d be graduated, ready to move on to college. If she could bump that 2350 SAT score up to a perfect 2400, Harvard wasn’t out of the question... .

  Excited whoops from the girls on the left side of the bus brought Laura out of her thoughts. She looked over and saw a couple of pickups full of young men passing by in the highway’s left lane. They grinned and waved at the girls staring out the bus’s windows at them.

  Shannon crossed the aisle, crowding in between other girls until she reached the window. Then she reached down, pulled the hem of her shirt out of her jeans, and lifted the shirt, exposing her breasts in a lacy, pale green bra just as the second pickup went by. The grins on the faces of the young men got bigger.

  Sister Katherine, who was driving the bus, looked wide-eyed into the mirror and bellowed, “Sit down back there! Everyone back in their seats! Shannon, what are you ... oh, my word! Shannon!”

  The two pickups shot ahead and then cut back into the right lane. They slowed. The bus was the last one in the convoy of four, and Sister Katherine was notorious for not being as heavy-footed as the nuns driving the other buses. They were still in sight, but they had pulled ahead quite a bit. The gap got bigger as the pickups slowed even more and so did Sister Katherine. She probably didn’t want to pass them because that might set off another round of hooting and flashing, Laura thought.

  Something made her turn her head and look back, some instinct inherited from her dad, perhaps. He had been a cop before cancer had taken him five years earlier, when Laura was twelve. A good cop, too, from everything she remembered about him. And she made an effort not to forget, because she missed him fiercely. Her mom was a lawyer and expected Laura to follow in her footsteps, which was one reason for going to Harvard, and Laura figured that in the end, that was what she would do.

  But there was still a part of her that wanted to put on a badge, to take names and kick butt, but more than that, to help people and get the bad guys off the streets. It would probably never happen, but still ...

  In the meantime, she liked to think that she had at least some cop instincts, and that was why, when she looked out the rear window of the bus and saw four more pickups full of young men, she felt a sudden twinge of worry.

  What was going on here?

  Before she could do more than ask herself that question, two of the pickups behind the bus veered into the left lane and sped up.

  “You girls get back in your seats!” Sister Katherine shouted. “I’m not joking! If you don’t behave, as soon as we get to the lake I’ll turn this bus around and go back! You’ll miss the picnic!”

  The warning had some effect on the girls. Most of those who had crossed the aisle moved back to their seats. As the second pair of pickups drew alongside the bus, Shannon leaned closer to the window, waggled her fingers at the young men, and said wistfully, “’Bye, boys.”

  Laura sat up straighter in her seat. The pickups had pulled up beside the bus, but they weren’t going on. The drivers seemed to be matching their speed to Sister Katherine’s. And the final two pickups had closed the gap so that they were right behind the bus. Six pickups in all, more than fifty men ...

  They had this bus full of teenage girls surrounded.

  “Oh my God,” Laura said softly as her heart began to hammer in her chest. “Oh my God.”

  She lifted her voice and started to call out, “Sister Katherine, there’s something—”

  But before she could finish, the front pickup that was beside the bus suddenly swerved toward it. A jolt shivered through the vehicle as the pickup’s right front fender rammed into it. Sparks flew and metal shrieked. Several of the girls screamed in surprise and fear as Sister Katherine uttered an uncharacteristic but heartfelt, “Oh, crap!”

  She fought desperately against the wheel as it tried to tear itself out of her hands. Before she could regain complete control, the pickup hit the bus again, and so did the other pickup racing alongside. Lights flared redly just ahead as the driver of the pickup immediately ahead of the bus slammed on his brakes. Sister Katherine was forced to brake violently, too. The girls were thrown forward in their seats.

  Most of them were screaming now. Laura pushed herself back up and rubbed her left wrist, which throbbed a little because she had used it to brace herself against the seat in front of her. Before she could steady herself again, she was thrown out of her seat to the floor as the bus left the paved surface of the road and bounced across the rougher right-of-way next to the highway. Luckily, this was a very flat stretch of terrain, and there was nothing to the side of the highway for hundreds of yards except open ground with a few mesquites and some other scrubby brush.

  Luck probably had nothing to do with it, Laura thought as she tried to pull herself back onto her seat. The men in the pickups had chosen this spot to make their move. They wanted a place where they could force the bus off the road and yet minimize the chance of the big vehicle crashing.

  Think like a cop, she told herself, think like a cop. Why were they doing this? The men in the pickups were all Latinos. Across the border, Nuevo Laredo was practically ruled by gangs of lawless, mostly young Latinos. Kidnappings were common, and how much more audacious could you get than to kidnap an entire busload of teenage girls from a private school, most of whom had parents who would be willing to pay ransoms for them?

  But things like that happened on the other side of the border, not here. Not in the United States. Not in America.

  Laura bit back a sob as the bus continued to careen across the sandy ground, gradually slowing. Clouds of dust swirled around it. Laura tried to remain calm, tried to force herself to think rationally, but when you came right down to it, she was still a seventeen-year-old girl.

  And she was scared shitless.

  Three

  The bus finally rocked and skidded to a halt a hundred yards off the highway. Four of the pickups had followed it, and now surrounded it as the cloud of choking dust began to dissipate.

  Inside the bus, Laura coughed and blinked watering eyes. She thought she had heard a couple of explosions in the dis
tance as the bus careened out of control, but wasn’t sure about that. It was hard to be sure about anything with all the screaming and crying going on.

  Glass shattered. A sound like very loud, very rapid hammering filled the bus. Laura had heard automatic weapons fire often enough in action movies to recognize it now. She threw herself to the floor again and shouted, “Get down! Everybody get down!”

  She clapped her hands over her ears in an attempt to shut out the chaos. The men were going to kill all of them, she thought hysterically. They were going to storm onto the bus and machine-gun the girls.

  That made no sense. Why would they do such a horrible thing?

  Laura lifted her head as the bus door was jerked open. A man in jeans and a black T-shirt, with a black hood pulled over his head and an automatic rifle in his hands, lunged up the steps and onto the bus. Sister Katherine, half out of the driver’s seat, swatted at him with her open hands and shouted incoherently. Ruthlessly, the man drove the butt of the rifle into her face and knocked her back across the seat, shutting her up. Then he fired a burst into the roof of the bus, and the deafening racket shocked the screaming girls into sudden silence.

  “Quiet!” he shouted in English. “All of you be quiet and don’t move! You’re all right. We won’t hurt you if you do as you’re told.”

  Laura doubted that.

  “Angelina Salinas!” the hooded man called. “Angelina, where are you?”

  That shocked Laura almost as much as anything else that had happened. What sort of connection could these awful men have with Angelina?

  That meant, too, that this wasn’t a random kidnapping. What was going on here?

  Think like a cop. No matter how scared you get, Laura told herself, keep thinking like a cop.

  She looked around. Most of the girls were lying in tumbled heaps in the aisle, where they had been thrown during the wild ride. Angelina and Shannon were there, right in front of her. Shannon was crying, quietly but hysterically. Angelina just looked stunned. She hadn’t responded to the man’s mention of her name.

  “Damn it,” the man said, obviously growing impatient. “I’m looking for Angelina Salinas.”

  Laura thought about standing up and saying that she was Angelina. That made her think of an old movie she had seen, where a bunch of guys all stood up and claimed to be somebody named Spartacus. The difference was that nobody else on this bus would claim to be Angelina, and by doing so she might just get shot.

  She stayed where she was.

  “Angelina!” the man bellowed.

  Finally, Angelina lifted her head, despite Laura hissing at her to stay down, and what she said then stunned Laura into silence.

  “D-daddy?” Angelina asked.

  The man reached up and pulled the hood off his head. He was older than the men who had been riding in the backs of the pickups, in his forties at least. His thick dark hair was touched with silver, and his lean face was handsome in a very dangerous way. But his eyes were as dark and cold as a snake’s, even when he smiled and said, “Sí, chiquita, your papá has come for you.”

  He started down the aisle toward her, the automatic rifle swinging easily in his hands, as if he carried it every day. The girls lying in the aisle recoiled and crawled out of his way, making a path for him.

  “No,” Angelina whispered, then she cried out urgently, “No!” and twisted around frantically, trying to get away. She shoved the sobbing Shannon aside and came up on her hands and knees.

  Before she could crawl more than a foot, the man loomed over her and reached down to hook an arm around her. He pulled her up against him. She screamed and jerked around and tried to fight him. “Angelina!” he said. “Angelina, stop it! I will not hurt you!”

  “No! No, I can’t be with you! Mama said!” She took a choking, gasping breath. “You’re not supposed to even come within five hundred yards—”

  His laugh stopped her, and from Laura’s vantage point on the floor, she thought he looked crueler and more evil than ever. “Gringo law!” he practically spit, contempt dripping from the words. “Since when did gringo law mean anything to Colonel Alfonso Guerrero? It will never keep me away from my little girl!”

  With that, he started dragging her toward the front of the bus.

  Maybe he would just take Angelina and leave the rest of them alone. Laura felt bad for having that thought, but she couldn’t help it. Maybe all the man wanted was Angelina ... his daughter, if he was telling the truth. Maybe this nightmare would be over soon.

  But then the man reached the door, and before he stepped down out of the bus, taking the still-struggling Angelina with him, he said to someone outside, “Take the rest of the girls and put them in the trucks.”

  Hope vanished, heart sank, terror welled up. That turmoil of emotions filled Laura, clogging her brain, making her heart pound, causing her stomach to clench sickly. This couldn’t be happening.

  Men in black shirts and black hoods, men carrying pistols and rifles, poured onto the bus, and the girls began shrieking in terror again as they were grabbed and dragged toward the door. One by one they were taken prisoner.

  Laura bolted up from the floor. She knew she wasn’t thinking straight, but it might be better if they shot her instead of whatever else it was they had in mind for her. She hit the bar that opened the bus’s rear, emergency door.

  If this wasn’t an emergency, she had never seen one.

  The door flew open and she leaped out into space, throwing her hands in front of her to catch herself when she hit the ground. But she didn’t land on the ground because strong, mostly bare, brown arms closed around her, catching her in midair.

  Of course Guerrero had put some of his guys behind the bus. He wouldn’t go to this much trouble and then leave the emergency exit unguarded.

  Laura’s muscles spasmed. She couldn’t stop the tears that ran down her face as she tried to tear herself free from the grips of the men who held her. No matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t get loose. Finally, after long seconds that seemed even longer than they really were, she subsided. She couldn’t get away, but she could look around and record every detail in her mind, just in case she ever got to tell the story of what was happening on this horrible day.

  For one thing, there were a bunch of bad guys. Sitting in the back of pickups, grinning and waving, they hadn’t looked so bad, nor seemed so numerous. But now, clad in their black hoods and brandishing weapons, their numbers seemed overwhelming, especially when they were matched against teenage girls. The bus had been emptied out by now, and there were enough of the men so that every girl was being held tightly and there were kidnappers left over.

  Laura turned her head toward the highway. Any hope that help might come from that direction disappeared when she saw the columns of black smoke rising from several burning vehicles. The men had blown up the rest of the sparse traffic along the road, using God knows what, grenades or rocket launchers or something.

  But the other buses were still up ahead somewhere, and surely by now the people on them had noticed that the last bus wasn’t behind them anymore. They had to see the smoke, and they would be calling 911.

  That was why Guerrero wasn’t wasting any time. “Get them in the trucks!” he ordered again. He still had an arm around Angelina’s waist. She had stopped fighting him and now just stood there sobbing futilely.

  The kidnappers dragged the girls toward the pickups. Some of the girls struggled until the men holding them hit them in the head, stunning them and making them cooperate. Laura saw blood running down the faces of both Billie Sue and Aubrey Cahill, twins who had been Laura’s friends since third grade. Their captors had slapped them around.

  Only one man had hold of Laura now, but he was too strong. When he shoved her toward the same pickup where Billie Sue and Aubrey had been placed, along with Shannon and several other girls, all she could do was go along with what he wanted. She didn’t want to get hit.

  She had to keep her mind clear so that she could take a
dvantage of any opportunity to escape that came along.

  She climbed onto the open tailgate and scuttled forward, wedging herself among the other girls crowded into the bed of the truck. Some of them were sobbing while others looked almost catatonic with fear. Laura bit her lip and kept her eyes open alertly, fighting down her own terror as it tried to rise inside her.

  All the girls had been crammed into the backs of two of the pickups. As the tailgates slammed shut, Guerrero shouted in Spanish, “Cover them up and move out!”

  But the bus wasn’t completely empty. As men moved forward with large canvas tarps, Sister Katherine staggered out of the wrecked vehicle, having regained consciousness from the blow that had knocked her out.

  “Stop this!” she cried as she held out her hands toward Guerrero. “Please! You can’t do this! Let these innocent children go!”

  “I cannot do that, Sister,” Guerrero told her. “They must go with us.”

  “For the love of God! Please!”

  With Angelina still huddled against him, Guerrero smiled, lifted the rifle, and fired it one-handed, just a single short burst that stitched into Sister Catherine’s body and tossed her backward onto the steps leading up into the bus. Sister Katherine jerked and twitched and then lay still, and after a moment blood began to pool on the bottom step and drip to the sandy ground beneath it.

  Laura’s eyes were wide with horror as she saw that terrible sight, and then it was suddenly cut off from view as the men threw the tarps over the pickup beds. The coverings had bungee cords attached, and in a matter of seconds they were lashed down securely. The girls couldn’t see anything, and the air rapidly grew hot and stifling.

  Laura felt the lurch as the pickup she was in roared into motion. She could tell from the way the tires bounced and jounced across the landscape and continued to do so that they weren’t going back toward the highway. They were going across country. The truck’s transmission growled. It had four-wheel drive, Laura thought, and could go almost anywhere, on-road or off. Since they had left the highway behind, they had to be headed east, but there wasn’t anything for fifty or sixty miles in that direction.