Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (37 page)

In any case, the Paradas had put down six generations of deep family roots on Lomalinda since then.  Paradas had built every house and barn and shed, strung every mile of fence, drilled every well.  Six generation of Paradas had bled, sweat, laughed, and cried on every acre, through fires and floods, droughts and blizzards.

And now foreigners, illegal alien Mexicans mostly, were trying to use those ancient so-called Spanish Land Grants to seize the Lomalinda Ranch!  They might as well offer to pay for the land with Confederate money, she thought. The Confederate flag had once briefly flown over New Mexico, and as far as Dolores Parada was concerned, the Confederates had just as much of a right to claim it as these newcomer Mexicans.  Exactly none!

The Paradas had not for one minute ever considered themselves to be Mexicans.  They were proud United States citizens, New Mexicans, and before that, they were Spanish, but never, ever were they Mexicans!  The first Paradas had come to Santa Fe in 1693 with Don Diego de Vargas, thirteen years after the bloody Pueblo Indian Revolt had driven the Spanish out of northern New Mexico. They had come “with a cross in one hand and a sword in the other,” in the name of the King of Spain, when there was not even a country called Mexico, but only a colony called New Spain.

Now they were being threatened, warned daily to pack up and leave, by a gang of red communists and upstart Mexican illegal aliens!  The world had indeed turned upside down.

But today, this Friday morning, something else was happening, something new.  Just after dawn, two more school buses had turned off the state road into the squatter camp, followed by several pickup trucks that seemed to be carrying extra Milicia troops.  Her son Max had stayed by the house, instead of going out on his rounds, after noting their early arrival. Perhaps most worrying, many of the Lomalinda ranch workers were absent this morning, or had quietly scattered to distant sections.

After their breakfast of
huevos con chorizo
, Dolores had walked up the thirty eight winding hardwood steps up to the third floor, to keep an eye on the encampment.  Now, at nine AM, there was a flurry of fresh activity in the squatter camp.  The flags and signs made from painted bed linens, which had been attached to wooden poles and planted in the ground for weeks, were being uprooted.  It seemed like hundreds of the squatters were forming up on the Lomalinda driveway road in a deep line, flags and signs in front, as if in preparation for a march on the house.

***

A simple code word
in Basilio Ramos’s earpiece informed him that the settlers were moving. The New Mexico Air National Guard pilots were already in their cockpit seats, wearing their standard issue green flight suits and helmets, watching him.  He nodded and gave them a sign, twirling his right index finger in a circle.  The turbines wound up with a shrill whine, the jet engines blowing out waves of kerosene exhaust. Their four black rotor blades began to turn.

A tiny stalk microphone extended from his left side earpiece, leading by a wire to the radio on his web belt.  He pushed the button on his radio, and twice he spoke the code word
flecha
, or arrow. After a pause, he said, “
Hazlo
.” Do it.

In his earpiece he heard his distant sniper click the transmit button two times, confirming the order.  Ramos had complete faith that Chino and Genizaro would do their duty, according to that far more secret part of the attack plan, about which the rest of the
Batallón
had no need to know.

The Falcons were pleased to rise from the ground and stretch, their white teeth grinning from behind camouflage face paint, cheerfully joshing one another as they strapped on their helmets.  They climbed aboard the helicopters and sat packed tightly together on the aluminum pipe frame seats, and buckled in.  The rotors picked up speed and whipped the air above them, a blur.  Ramos sat on the gunner’s seat on the right side, across from the crew chief and behind the pilot’s seat.  The crew chief passed him a gray aviator’s helmet; it was wired into the Blackhawk’s intercom system.  He slipped it on and adjusted the microphone.  The machines shook furiously, the pilots pulled pitch and the blades bit, the Blackhawks dipped their noses, rolled forward and they were off.

There was something uniquely stirring, glorious even, about lifting away from the brown earth in a rush of wind and jet turbine noise for an air assault, preparing to drop like hell’s hammers onto an unsuspecting enemy.

Basilio Ramos hated the Yanquis with a burning passion, but oh, how he loved their Blackhawk helicopters!

***

“They’re moving Max,
they’re coming now, over.” Dolores spoke these simple words into her new walkie-talkie. Max said that the radio was “digitally encrypted,” so the squatters and the Milicia wouldn’t be able to hear what they were saying.  Max knew all about these things, and Dolores took his word that this was true.  

“Okay Mom, we’re locking the new gate.  I’ve been trying to call the sheriff again, but I’m still just getting the run-around.”

“I don’t see any sheriffs down by the encampment Max, just squatters and Milicia.  No deputies, no state police, nothing.  Be careful, over.”

Her son Maximilio had installed a new galvanized steel gate across the driveway, over the last open cattle guard 200 yards down from the front of the house.  The shiny silver gate and the barbed-wire cattle fence around the house had been specially topped with a roll of “razor wire.”  If the squatters wanted to seize their home, they’d have to cut through or climb over that last chest-high barbed-wire cattle fence.  In that case, Max had said, the squatters would have crossed the Rubicon, crossed the line in the sand.  Trespassing and camping on so-called “idle lands” was one thing. Climbing the final locked gate to invade a family’s home…that was an entirely different matter.  

Max had strapped on a heavy revolver after breakfast this morning, and had taken his Winchester saddle rifle.  He had also loaded another 3030 Winchester for her, “just in case,” but they seriously doubted whether the squatters would dare to cross that last fence.  The rifle now lay on the sitting room reading table, just a few steps behind her.  Dolores Parada had handled firearms for most of her life, but had not done any shooting for at least two decades.  It didn’t matter: some things you never forget.

She didn’t need a telescope to see her son riding his chestnut gelding down by the new gate, with her daughter-in-law Carly on her palomino mare beside him.  Max was almost fifty, but despite his age he cut a fine figure astride a horse, a modern day cowboy, and still the handsomest man in Monterey County.  Carly was just as tough as Max, in her own way. Dolores had never questioned Max’s decision to marry the pretty blue-eyed blond Carly Drake.  They had met at the University of New Mexico, but she was not even a New Mexican.  Worse, she was a city girl, from Denver!  At least she was a Catholic,
gracias a Dios.
  Carly had made them all proud, she truly became a Parada, and she bore Max four wonderful children, all grown up and moved away…

The horses stood quietly now, on either side of the ring of whitewashed stones around the base of the flagpole, halfway down to the new galvanized gate.  The pole was over seventy years old, hand-hewn and arrow-straight, cut from a single pine by Dolores’s own father. An American flag flew just below the level of her third floor window, rolling and tossing on the breeze as it did every morning.  The wind blew much harder in the afternoons, and the frayed flags with their tattered stripes had to be replaced almost every other month.  The Paradas bought their American flags by the case. 

The squatters were all on the driveway now, less than a mile away, signs and banners in front.  Many of them were carrying those bastardized New Mexico flags, with the red star inside of the Zia’s circle.  Others carried red communist flags of one sort or another, as well as the rainbow flags preferred by the homosexuals, the black flags of the anarchists, and the baby-blue U.N. flags of the one-worlders.  After five weeks of eighty-power telescopic observation, she knew all of their subtypes, and could almost read their tattoos.  A sound truck was behind them, mounting loudspeakers that could be heard clearly from a mile away.  She had heard them for weeks and she knew what they were saying.  They were saying leave now. Flee.  Run.  Give up the “stolen land.”  Hand it over to “the people of Aztlan,” whoever they were, and whatever “Aztlan” was...

Never.  These thieving socialists, these Mexican illegal alien squatters, they were never going to put their dirty communist feet on the hundred year old pinewood floors of Lomalinda, they would never sit on the leather-covered oak chairs her father had built with his own hands, they would never eat a meal from Dolores Parada’s kitchen!

Never!

Then shots rang out, slow fire from booming center-fire rifles Dolores guessed, and she put her eye back to the telescope. Max frequently sighted-in his own elk rifles behind the house, and she knew the sound well.  Pandemonium engulfed the column of marchers, who were at that moment scattering off of the driveway and diving onto the ground!

***

The two Blackhawks flared out
and made rapid landings only a hundred yards from the side of the house, inside a small line of trees, sending twirling eddies of dust in all directions.  As they came in Basilio Ramos saw two cowboys mounted on horses, just like in an old movie, wheeling and rearing as the helicopters roared overhead.  Through the open gunner’s port of the chopper, Ramos clearly glimpsed one of the cowboys on a dark horse raising a rifle.

The first dozen troops hopped down from both sides of his helicopter even before its wheels hit the ground, the other chopper had landed fifty yards away to the side.  The squads immediately formed up in a line abreast for the assault.  Both mounted cowboys were immediately taken under fire, but not before one of his Falcons fell to the ground beside him, his face a crimson ruin beneath his helmet.  There was a flagpole just downhill from the front of the house, where the two horses staggered and fell. Both cowboys were riddled with volleys of well-aimed bullets from the Falcons’ M-16s, dead even before their mounts ceased twitching.  

Another bullet snapped past his head and thudded into the helicopter behind him.  Someone was firing from the ranch house, even as the assault platoon dashed for the stone front steps and the wide covered porch.

***

Dolores Parada heard the helicopters
before she saw them, and then they were landing right over there on the side of the house, just inside of their apple trees, blowing them around like a tornado!  Max and Carly were firing at the helicopters even before they landed, so Dolores picked up her own Winchester from the table and did the same, the heavy rifle’s blast deafening her the first time she squeezed the trigger.  And then Max and Carly were somehow both on the ground, their horses too, rolling and crawling, but then they were so very still, and all in the blink of an eye, even as camouflaged soldiers in full battle dress dashed for the house!  

She had already decided what she must do in the event of this ultimate calamity, but the shock of seeing her son and daughter-in-law shot down before her very eyes kept her at the open window, working the lever and blasting away through angry tears while the soldiers swarmed toward the house.  When at last she dropped the rifle’s hammer on an empty chamber, with a start she remembered her final responsibility.  Earlier she had brought a one gallon metal can of lamp oil and a box of kitchen matches to the sitting room, “just in case.”

If the invaders and thieves and communists were going to come up the varnished pinewood steps to the third floor, to drag her away from her beloved ranch house, they were going to have to run through fire.

Dolores Parada wasn’t leaving Lomalinda.

***

By Friday, Ranya had lost her fear
of doing exactly as she wished in Basilio Ramos’s house.  The Falcons were off on an operation, and once again she had been left to her own devices.  She dressed in one of her new outfits: a green silk blouse, black designer jeans and Gucci sandals.  

There was a full-length mirror on one bedroom closet door, in which she briefly checked her appearance.  Curious, she opened the closet, which turned out to be a large walk-in. A Spartan wardrobe of men’s suits and starched camouflage uniforms lined each side.  In the back of this small room was a black Liberty gun safe the size of a double refrigerator, with an electronic combination number pad in the center.  She was familiar with these heavy steel vaults from her youth as a gunsmith’s daughter, and she wondered what types of firearms Ramos had stashed inside this one.  She guessed that the safe had been the property of the mansion’s previous owner, and it probably contained hunting rifles, and perhaps some expensive pistols.  If she could open it, she thought she would be able to obtain a carbine or other weapons to help her during her escape.

While considering various stratagems for cracking the safe, she walked downstairs to the spacious and ultra-modern kitchen.  The cook, a small dark Mayan woman of fifty or more years, sat at a side table reading a colorful tabloid.  Ranya matter-of-factly asked for a breakfast of coffee, juice, fruit and cereal.  Then she turned and let herself out, and waited imperiously at the patio table by the swimming pool, nonchalantly observing the up-slope guards with their M-16s, as they observed her.  In five minutes, the meal was brought out to her on a silver tray.  

It certainly wasn’t the case that Ranya Bardiwell was used to dominating servants in this way.  It was simply her calculated take on what was expected of her as the new “lady of the house.”  She decided that slinking around like a kept woman would not win her any respect in the eyes of the house staff or guards.  Only by dressing well and demanding service could she do that.  If they were going to consider her their exalted Comandante’s lady, she would have to live up to that high status.