Invasion Usa: Border War Read online

  “I thought that was some old politician guy.”

  “No, he invented the information superhighway.”

  “That’s the same thing as the Internet, isn’t it? Anyway, you’re thinking of the guy who was in that old movie Love Story.”

  “The guy who used to be married to Farrah Fawcett invented the Internet?”

  “Who’s Farrah Fawcett?”

  “The one who was all stoned and acting crazy on David Letterman’s show one night.”

  “That was Courtney Love.”

  “She’s the one who got up on his desk and flashed him.”

  “No, no, you’re thinking about Drew Barrymore.”

  Laura bit back a scream. She had the horrible feeling that some valuable brain cells were dying just from listening to this.

  There was no light in the cell, so when the sun went down and the last of its glow faded from the high window, darkness closed in. As frightened as the girls had been during their captivity so far, the darkness made it worse. They weren’t able to distract themselves by arguing about who had invented the Internet or just how slutty Shannon really was, so all they could think about as they huddled there in the thick shadows was what was going to happen to them. None of them expected it to be anything good. The cell grew a little chilly, too, as the heat of the day dissipated quickly once the sun went down in this desert landscape.

  After a while, though, no matter how scared and cold and lonely they were, exhaustion began to take its toll. Laura heard soft snores coming from a couple of the girls in her cell. She couldn’t tell which ones were asleep, but it didn’t really matter. She felt her own eyelids getting heavy, and her head drooped forward as she continued to sit up. She wanted to stay awake, so she wouldn’t be taken by surprise if any shit came down. If she spread the sleeping bag on the floor and stretched out on it, she knew she would be asleep in minutes.

  Despite her intentions, she dozed off anyway. When a sudden noise woke her, she was slumped on her side, her arms wrapped around the rolled-up sleeping bag as she used it as a pillow.

  She wasn’t sure what had roused her from sleep, but a second later a man yelled in Spanish, “Watch out! She has a gun!”

  Somewhere down the corridor, shots blasted out, the reports deafeningly loud as they echoed back from the thick adobe walls. The muzzle flashes lit up the cells with their brief, hellish glare. A man shouted in pain. Running footsteps slapped against the concrete floor.

  Laura and her companions were all awake now. They scooted back against the wall as far as they could and huddled there, trying to stay out of the line of fire even though they didn’t know exactly where the line was.

  A flashlight snapped on, its beam of light lancing through the darkness. Laura squinted against the brightness. The beam darted here and there and then froze, pinning a girl against the heavy door at the end of the corridor, just outside the cell where Laura and the others were locked up. The girl was fumbling at the door, trying to get it to open, when the light hit her. She twisted around and brought up the pistol in her other hand.

  Laura recognized the girl as Rosa Delgado, another senior. Rosa wore only a pair of pink panties. There was a smear of what looked like blood across her bare breasts.

  In that frozen instant, Laura knew what must have happened. Some of the men had taken her out of the cell and started to have some fun with her, probably tearing her clothes off until she was nearly naked.

  But in his animal lust, one of the bastards had been careless, and Rosa had grabbed his gun and shot herself free of their clutches. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to run, no way to escape. She was trapped in the beam of the flashlight, pinned against the heavy wooden door that barred the way out of the corridor.

  “Drop the gun, girl!” a man yelled in Spanish.

  Rosa didn’t drop the gun. She kept pointing it at them. The barrel shook. Rosa didn’t say anything. Her eyes were wide with terror and hysteria.

  But then she grew calm suddenly and a look of resolve appeared on her face. She turned the gun around.

  “Rosa, no!” Laura screamed.

  The girl ignored her. Rosa opened her mouth, put the barrel of the gun in it, and pulled the trigger.

  The blast threw her back against the door behind her. A huge mass of blood and brains and bone fragments splattered the wood, leaving a grisly, irregular splotch on the door. Rosa bounced off and pitched forward, landing in a limp sprawl on the concrete.

  All the girls in the cells were screaming now. Laura joined in, unable to control the horror. The girls clutched at each other and practically crawled in each other’s laps as they desperately tried to escape the nightmare.

  But there was no escape—short of what Rosa Delgado had just done. This was their life now, for however long it lasted.

  Heavy footsteps in the corridor made the girls in the cells recoil even more. Several men stepped into the reflected glow of the flashlight, which was now shining on Rosa’s body. One of the guards, an older man with a mustache, turned his head and looked into the cell at the terrified prisoners. “You see what happens?” he said to them. “This one did not have to die. All she had to do was cooperate, and she would still be alive. It’a damned shame.”

  “The colonel—” one of the other men began.

  “The colonel cares only about the one he keeps with him,” the older man snapped. He jerked a thumb toward the door to the courtyard. “Take her out and dispose of her.” Then, with his thumb sticking up and his index finger extended to make a gun, he pointed at Laura and the other girls and said, “Learn from this, eh? Be good girls. You will live longer that way.” His thumb snapped down as if he had fired.

  Then he stalked off, leaving the other men to take care of Rosa’s corpse.

  One of them, Laura noted even in her stunned state, was the young man who called himself Ricardo. His face was drawn and pale in the glow of the flashlight, and as he looked down at Rosa, Laura saw the same sort of shock in his eyes that she was feeling. He lifted his gaze and suddenly it locked with hers, and she felt something go through her like an electric shock. It wasn’t love at first sight or anything stupid like that. Under these horrible circumstances, nobody could even think about such a thing. It was a spark of empathy, a shared moment of revulsion and horror at the fate that had overtaken Rosa Delgado. A fate that might well be in store for all the captives, sooner or later.

  And Ricardo didn’t like that idea, any more than Laura did.

  Then he tore his eyes away, and she sensed that he deliberately didn’t look at her again. Because he was afraid to? She wondered. Because he sensed the same sort of connection that she had in that fleeting moment?

  The chances were overwhelming that in the end it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. But as the men picked up Rosa Delgado’s limp body and carried it out and Ricardo followed them, flicking one last glance back at the cell where Laura was held captive, she allowed herself for the first time since this ordeal had begun to clutch at a tiny shred of hope... .

  Eleven

  Ricardo Benitez leaned against the adobe wall and took a deep drag on the joint, drawing the smoke into his lungs and holding it there for a long moment before he allowed it to trickle slowly out of his mouth. A calmness spread through him, soothing him and dulling the clamor of alarm that had threatened to overwhelm his brain. This was good weed. He needed something right now to keep him focused on the job at hand.

  He needed something to keep him from thinking too much about those girls ... especially the blonde.

  The redhead would be the biggest annoyance, smiling at him and flaunting her ripe young body and promising all sorts of things in her coy voice without ever actually promising anything at all. But he was confident that he could handle her, even though in a moment of weakness he had given in to her flirting and fetched the sandwiches and water for the prisoners.

  No, it was the quiet blond one who represented the greatest threat to him. When their eyes had met, during that terrible m
oment after Rosa’s death, Ricardo had seen intelligence there, a keenness of intellect that not even fear could totally conceal. More than that, he had sensed the courage in her, too, and was drawn to it. She would fight to the very end, and she probably possessed more aptitude for such a battle than even she herself dreamed of.

  Maybe the other girl’s suicide would serve a purpose. Maybe it would convince the blonde to cooperate and not to fight. Ricardo hoped so.

  Otherwise, sooner or later she would be trouble, and he didn’t want to be forced into the position of having to make a decision he didn’t want to make.

  Ricardo inhaled another lungful of the marijuana smoke and looked up at the stars floating in the night sky above the old mission. They seemed more brilliant than ever tonight. It was wrong somehow for something so beautiful to shine down on a scene of such evil.

  Several men tramped toward the wall surrounding the mission compound. They were returning from the grim chore of burying the dead girl. An unmarked grave in the desert would be her final resting place. Sun and wind and the passage of time would erase all signs, and no one would ever know where Rosa Delgado lay. Her clothes would be burned, and the identification that had been taken from her purse and that had given her captors her name would be disposed of as well. It would be as if she had never been here.

  Eventually, that would be true for all of them. He knew from listening to them talk that they thought they had been kidnapped for ransom, as happened so often along the border. Guerrero’s e-mail had teased the American authorities with that possibility without actually saying as much. Just like the captives, the law-enforcement personnel on the other side of the border would assume that they were dealing with a simple kidnapping.

  In reality, though, none of them would ever go home. They would be sold into what was once quaintly known as white slavery and shipped off, dispersed to brothels throughout Mexico where they would live out their lives pleasuring the men who paid their owners for the privilege. A terrible existence, but they would still be alive, at least for a while.

  The money that the Night Wolves would make from all of this would be a mere pittance compared to what they made working for the cartel. But the colonel had to justify his actions some way, and as long as he turned a profit for his men, neither they nor his employers could complain.

  All because of one girl ... the girl Colonel Guerrero had taken off the bus and kept with him ever since. It was rumored among the men that she was his daughter, but Ricardo didn’t know that for sure.

  If it was true, it would be a nice bit of knowledge to have. One never knew when even the smallest bit of leverage might come in handy.

  Ricardo lounged against the wall as he smoked. His rifle was tucked under his arm. As the men from the burial detail came up to the gate, one of them said, “You should have come with us, Ricardo. One more man to dig would have made the job go faster.”

  “It was not my job,” Ricardo said. “You four were the ones who decided to rape the girl on her first night here. It was fitting for Major Cortez to assign her burial to you.” Cortez was Colonel Guerrero’s segundo, a grizzled military veteran who was the oldest member of Los Lobos de la Noche.

  “What does it matter if it was her first night here?” one of the other men demanded angrily. “All of them will be raped before we’re through with them.”

  Ricardo smiled thinly. “You’re just upset, Pablo, because it was your gun the señorita grabbed. The colonel will not be pleased with you when Major Cortez tells him about the incident.”

  The man called Pablo snarled a curse and stepped toward Ricardo. He still had a shovel in his hands, and for a second it seemed he was going to strike the younger man with it.

  Ricardo moved slightly, and the rifle was no longer held negligently under his arm. It was in his hands, ready to fire, with the barrel pointed toward Pablo.

  Still muttering curses, Pablo turned away and went through the gate into the compound.

  “That one hates you,” one of the other men said to Ricardo.

  He replied, “The opinion of such a dog means nothing to me.”

  “Are you coming in?”

  “In a minute.” Ricardo stayed where he was as the others filed inside. He had been detailed to stand guard over the burial. Now that it was finished, he was off duty for the night. He could go to his room and sleep... .

  Or he could return to the wing of the mission where the girls were being held and look through the bars again at that blond one.

  With a jerk of his head, Ricardo forced that idea out of his thoughts. He couldn’t afford to weaken and do something foolish now.

  Not after all the time and effort he had put into this assignment.

  He had started out as a mule, one of the drug runners for the cartel. Getting the job hadn’t been all that difficult. He had gone into a Nuevo Laredo bar that was frequented by a known mule, picked a fight with the man, and then killed him as they fought with knives in the alley behind the place. That had displeased the people the man worked for, until Ricardo offered to take his place in the distribution chain. Since he was responsible for the man’s death, that was the way of the cartel.

  He wasn’t supposed to kill the mule, just injure him badly enough to take him out of circulation for a while. But plans hatched in a well-lit office where a ceiling fan stirred the hot air meant very little in a dark alley that stank of garbage and shit. The garish glow from a neon sign was the only light that filtered into the alley, and in that glow Ricardo had seen the knife in the other man’s hand coming at his throat. He had reacted the only way he could—instinctively and fatally.

  From there he had worked hard, done his job well, kept his mouth shut. His rise in the organization was steady, if not spectacular.

  No, “spectacular” had waited for the ambush laid by members of the rival cartel, the ambush that had been sprung as Ricardo and a couple of his fellow mules had been driving a pickup full of drugs across an isolated river ford. Suddenly the air was full of bees buzzing around them—deadly, steel-jacketed bees. The man behind the wheel of the pickup lurched forward, his head practically exploding as several slugs smashed into it. Blood and brains splattered all over the inside of the cracked windshield.

  Ricardo was sitting in the middle of the seat. The man on his right, by the passenger door, died in the early seconds of the ambush, too. Suddenly alone, Ricardo did the only thing he could. He bent low, reached across the body of the man who had been driving, and opened the door. A hard shove sent the corpse tumbling out of the pickup. Staying hunched over in the seat, Ricardo punched his foot against the accelerator, stuck the MAC-10 machine gun he had been given out the window, and fired blindly as the truck surged ahead.

  He was driving almost blindly, too, risking only an occasional glance through the blood-smeared windshield. Then the glass shattered under the fusillade of lead, showering him with razor-sharp shards. Luckily he was able to close his eyes in time to keep any of the glass splinters from getting into them, although his face was scratched up pretty bad. He ignored the stinging pain and kept going, the machine gun chattering in his left hand as he gripped the steering wheel with his right. The previous driver’s blood and brains made the wheel slippery, but Ricardo ignored that, too.

  Then he was through the ambush and roaring away from the river, although a bullet had found the pickup’s radiator and it was destined to go only another mile before giving out. That mile was enough, though. He was able to rendezvous with the cartel’s men who were supposed to meet him on the American side of the river. He heard them talking about it later, about how they had seen the bullet-riddled truck approaching, apparently driving itself, and how surprised they had been when the pickup lurched to a halt and a young man, covered with blood and with broken glass in his hair and embedded in his cheeks, had crawled out with an empty machine gun in his hand.

  A story like that gets around. It hadn’t been very long after that when a tall, powerful-looking man had come to see him
in Nuevo Laredo and introduced himself as Colonel Alfonso Guerrero. Ricardo knew who the colonel was, of course, and when Guerrero asked him if he would be interested in joining Los Lobos de la Noche, there was a genuine catch in Ricardo’s voice as he replied that this was the proudest day of his life.

  The joint was down almost to the end now. Ricardo took one last drag on it and then pinched out the glowing ember. He slipped the roach into the pocket of his T-shirt.

  Six months had passed since he was invited to join the Night Wolves, and during that time, he had hardly left this compound south of Nuevo Laredo. He hadn’t gone along the night that the Wolves ambushed the American task force on the other side of the Rio Grande, and he hadn’t been part of the force today that had crossed the border to attack the school bus and capture the girls who were on it. He didn’t think it was because Guerrero didn’t trust him—Dios, he hoped that wasn’t the case!—but rather because he was still relatively new to the group.

  That was all right with Ricardo. He could do a lot of things—hell, he had already done a lot of things to get to where he was—but he wasn’t sure he could pull the trigger and kill American lawmen. He knew damned well he couldn’t kill a bunch of teenage girls, and he was fervently thankful that the blood of that poor nun wasn’t on his hands.

  Or was it? He had known that Guerrero was about to pull off something major, and he had done nothing. He knew the fate that the colonel had in mind for the captives, too, and unless something unforeseen happened, he would be forced to stand by and do nothing to stop this atrocity, as well.

  Because he couldn’t. He had bigger goals. The lives of a few dozen people were as nothing compared to the death toll that the Night Wolves took on an annual basis. Factor in the tens of thousands of deaths caused each year by the drug traffic—if the number wasn’t even higher than that, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands—and it quickly became clear that those poor girls might have to be sacrificed for the greater good. Ricardo’s goal, his job, was nothing less than the destruction of Los Lobos de la Noche and the crippling of the cartel they worked for.