Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (75 page)

Alex glanced at Logan and Ranya, and then answered for them.  “Can I show you some ID? This is going to take a little while to explain.”

The man spat tobacco juice on the ground between them.  “Explain away.  You’re not going anywhere today, I expect.”  He pointed up at the damaged leading edge of the right wing.  

“You’re all deputies?” asked Alex.

“That’s right.  Cantrell County Sheriff’s Office.  Now, where’s that ID? And how’d your airplane get shot up?”

Alex removed his leather credential holder from a breast pocket on his vest, and flipped it open, showing his identification card and his gold shield.

“What’s that, FBI?” asked the leader, moving closer and squinting.

“That’s right.”

“You’re all FBI?”

“Nope, just me.”

The man paused, and then asked, “So, who put the holes in your airplane?” It was clear that the Cessna had been fired upon from above and behind, by the outward-curling metal slivers.

“The Milicia, in a Blackhawk helicopter.  Up in Torcido County.”

The leader’s walkie-talkie squawked, and he excused himself and walked back down the road, his back to the “refugees,” while his other men kept them covered.  After a minute he returned.  The two pickup trucks that had remained behind were driven down the road and stopped behind the Jeep.  “Okay, load up.  You can tell us all about it in town.  Get in the trucks—one of you in each.”  The flanking squads emerged from the brush and rejoined them.

Ranya turned to climb back into the plane, but she was stopped by a rifle barrel laid across her chest.  Their bearded leader said, “Don’t worry about your stuff. We’re a lot of things, but we’re not thieves.  We’ll leave a guard by the plane.  Just climb into the back of that blue Chevy, thank you very much.”

Alex asked, “Let me get something—a laptop.  What’s on that computer can explain the situation better than anything I could ever say.”

The leader of the deputies hesitated, and then replied, “Okay.  Get it.”

***

Frederica Chupatintas
was working in her office with the door closed. She was slogging through the backlog of work left for her to handle as the acting Special Agent in Charge.  The SAC was still back East at FBI Headquarters, and he had left a mountain of undone and overdue work for her to deal with in his absence.  Typical male.  Bastard.

To make her life more difficult, the internet had been out most of the afternoon, and when it finally came back on she had over forty new emails to answer.  Most of them she could quickly scan or delete, and some she left marked as unread, to handle later.  One email contained routine BOLO information, “be on the lookout” notices concerning fugitives of particular regional interest.  She quickly scrolled down the list, and a female name jumped right off the screen: Ranya Bardiwell!

Well, wasn’t this a most amazing case of visual déjà vu!  She had first heard that name only hours earlier at the downtown women’s health club, when her friend Galatea Obregon had mentioned it.  What had Galatea said?  Bardiwell was an Arab terrorist, who was the birth mother of Alexanndro Garabanda’s adopted son.  Five-year-old Brian Garabanda was now in San Diego, with Alex’s ex-wife.

She clicked the link and scanned the brief informational paragraph, and the pair of attached prison photos.  Bardiwell was 5’9” according to the height lines behind her.  Her head was shaved to dark stubble, and she had a hard, defiant look in her eyes.  Bardiwell was considered armed and extremely dangerous.  She was the only suspect in the murder of a federal officer, which occurred while she was escaping from the federal transit center in Oklahoma City almost two weeks earlier.  It was amazing to see the name Ranya Bardiwell in print, after hearing it for the first time earlier in the same day. Frederica Chupatintas read the paragraph several times.  

The adoption records were sealed, that’s what Galatea had said, and so there was no particular concern. Still, perhaps it would be better to err on the side of caution, and shoot an email out to Garabanda’s ex-wife. Wasn’t she marrying the female IRS agent who had struck Alex Garabanda with a baseball bat?

Gretchen Bosch—that was the woman.  A nasty piece of work, yet still, she was a fellow federal law enforcement officer.  Bosch had a standard federal government email address: first initial, last name, at cid.irs.gov.  This fugitive Ranya Bardiwell could somehow have stumbled onto the adoption record—anything was possible.  She might conceivably even be searching for her child.  It couldn’t hurt to warn them of the possible danger.  A quick note and a link to the BOLO notice was all that it would take.  There.  Done, sent, and on to the next email in her in-box.

34

The laptop computer
was set up in the middle of a varnished pinewood table. The three stranded aviators and the deputies were in the back room of Charlie’s Steakhouse on Main Street in Ripley.  There was only one long table in this rectangular room, which was evidently used to accommodate private parties.  The three self-described refugees and the Sheriff sat at the table in front of the computer’s screen.  Most of the dozen deputies from the road dragged over more of the room’s oak and leather chairs, and clustered closely behind them.

Ranya sat next to Logan on the right side of the computer, sipping a cold Coca Cola from the can, savoring the crisp, sweet flavor.  Once again she was the only woman in a room full of men, only this time they were gringos, speaking English with a peculiar accent she couldn’t quite place. She decided that these Southwestern cowboys had created their own unique twang.

The Sheriff of Cantrell County had met the deputies at the restaurant, and arranged for the private meeting.  The room was paneled in honey-colored knotty pine.  A brass ceiling fan circled quietly above them.  The walls were decorated with antique rifles, and some very impressive racks of elk antlers.  A massive stone fireplace dominated the end of the room opposite the entrance door.  The rest of the wall space not holding up historical Old West firearms or antlers was filled by framed photographs. The pictures showed camouflage-wearing hunters cradling rifles, crouching over or kneeling by freshly shot elk, enormous beasts with wickedly tined antlers to shame any deer or moose.  Ranya thought it was almost inconceivable that there could have ever been so many elk in the entire state of New Mexico, and these were just the ones that had been shot, photographed, and hung on the walls in one room of Charlie’s Steakhouse!

The deputies’ rifles were left leaning against the wall by the door. There was an assortment of FALs, M-1s, M-1 Garands, AR-15s, AR-10s, and bolt-action hunting rifles topped with scopes.  Ranya noted that this could not have been an unusual occurrence, because there was a slotted rifle rack screwed to the wall to hold their barrels.  The men had stripped off their bulky body armor, and were mostly dressed in jeans, hiking boots, and a variety of shirts.  Some of them were wearing mix-and-match camouflage shirts or pants from the last half dozen of America’s wars, but none in complete sets.  Judging by their work clothes and coveralls, there was a welder and a mechanic among the deputies who had come to investigate the downed airplane.

Unlike his deputies, the Sheriff wasn’t wearing civvies or cammies, but instead a tan police uniform complete with shoulder patches and a silver badge.  He was an average-looking man in his forties, with short brown hair, and a cop’s trimmed mustache.  A laminated nametag above his right pocket identified him as Sheriff Leander McNally.  A five-pointed star adorned his chest above the opposite pocket.  He sat front and center between Logan and Alex, watching the view of the jet runway as the film began.

“So this is Vedado Ranch, Wayne Parker’s place?”

“That’s right, up in Torcido County, near the Colorado line,” Logan answered.

“I’ve heard of it.  Biggest private ranch in the state.  And you just made this movie a few hours ago? That time stamp is correct?”

“Yep, that’s the right date and time.  07-02, that’s today.”  The screen showed the first shots around the Vedado Ranch airstrip, with the color picture zooming in to capture images of the tail numbers of the assembled private and corporate jets.

“You shot this from your Cessna, and they never saw you?”

“Oh no, we took it from a UAV,” replied Logan.  “A drone.”

“A drone?”  The Sheriff was visibly impressed.  “So, where’s the drone? How’d that work out?”

“Just watch,” said Logan.  “See these four Blackhawks parked by the hangar? We shot one down, and another one shot up our airplane.  They were carrying Milicia troops from the Falcon Battalion.”

“You shot down a Blackhawk?” asked Sheriff McNally.  “No kidding? How’d you manage that?”

“That was later,” said Alex, who was sitting on the left side of the Sheriff.  “Actually, she shot it down, with a Russian Dragunov rifle.”  Alex gestured to Ranya, who was sitting on the other side of the Sheriff and Logan. The rest of the ‘welcoming committee’ had pulled their chairs up close behind them, or were standing and leaning over the chair backs to see the show.

Logan stopped the video, freezing it on a frame showing the four Blackhawks parked on the tarmac, with their tails toward the largest hangar.  “We were controlling the drone from fifteen miles away.  Our Cessna was hidden under some trees.  They spotted the drone, and the helicopters came searching for us.  I guess they RDF’d us. You know, radio direction finding.  Maybe they found our signal—I thought it was secure. Anyway, one of these Blackhawks was landing in an LZ a couple of hundred yards from us, and she hit it with a rifle.  Nailed the pilot, I guess. Down it went.”  Logan used his left hand, held out flat, to indicate how the helicopter had been descending when it suddenly rolled over and dropped to the ground.  He struck the edge of his hand on the table like a karate chop.

The deputies who were sitting and standing behind them nodded to one other, murmuring.  Alex said, “Let’s watch the whole video, and take it all in sequence, okay? It’ll make more sense that way.”

“Okay, sounds reasonable,” replied the Sheriff.

Alex narrated, with some comments added by Logan, but the video itself made their case.  When they saw the VIP reception on the giant terrace in front of Wayne Parker’s imported Italian castle, the deputies began to recognize faces, and they became agitated and then angry.  Besides Parker, the two senators, the next president of Mexico, the American ambassador to Mexico and Peter Kosimos, they identified several other notable billionaires and politicians.

There was even a famous blow-dried “conservative” media figure, who had once been a Presidential spokesman.  His incongruent appearance was greeted by the deputies with curses and swearing.  One older deputy offered the unconfirmed but adamant opinion that all of the American participants at the Vedado conference were senior members of the Council on Foreign Relations. This charge sparked a heated discussion about that private group’s inordinate influence on United States foreign policy, concerning their relentless drive to merge Canada, America and Mexico into the North American Community, with no internal borders.

Then they watched the wheelchair-bound Peter Kosimos leave the luncheon in his white van, and they saw the Gulfstream jet land on the runway, and the deputies grew silent again.  In astonishment, they saw Dave Whitman step down onto the tarmac, and ride in a black SUV to his impromptu lakeside rendezvous with Kosimos.  The deputies were muttering to one another and bitterly cursing, watching the ex-President and the billionaire currency speculator conferring in private by the lake.  

Alex said, “We brought the UAV down 2,000 feet to get a good look at these two, so the resolution and the angle are pretty good.  We might be able to use lip readers to catch some of what they’re saying. Anyway, I don’t think they just met to discuss the weather.  Okay, this is when they spotted the drone.  We started to pick up radio chatter from their security men.  See the bodyguard coming over?”

“So this is the end of the video?” asked the sheriff.

“Not quite.  Logan did some fancy remote-control flying here.” The camera view tilted up and zoomed out to show a wide-angle picture of a mountain range.  Then the brief view of the sky and the horizon disappeared and the screen again showed only forests, meadows and lakes, turning and spinning.  The view swirled and blurred, and finally steadied again, rushing across treetops and a meadow, and then across a sparkling blue lake.  Pine trees beyond the lake began to come into focus, as the distant shore rushed closer.  Two shapes at the lake’s edge became men, two faces expanded to fill the entire screen, and then the image flashed and went white.

The sheriff spoke for them all.  “What in the HELL was that? Who? Uhh, can you back that up, and play it again, but slower?”

This was also the first time that Ranya had seen the UAV’s film, and she was also studying it intently.

“No problem,” said Logan, jabbing commands on the laptop’s keyboard.  The images began moving again, the drone’s camera eye rushing across the lake waters.  He slowed the forward progress until the video was moving frame by frame, and when the men’s faces were clearly visible, he froze the picture.

The sheriff exclaimed, “Hell yeah, that’s Weasel Dave Whitman and Peter Kosimos!  Ho—ly crap!  Did you kill ‘em?”

“We don’t know,” responded Alex.  “Maybe. We heard them mention a fatality on the radio, but not who.”

The Sheriff was quiet, his brow furrowed, stroking his chin. “Hmmm. Now don’t this just beat all? Don’t this just beat all...”

“Sheriff,” asked Ranya, “Are you going to turn us in? Arrest us?” She was an escaped federal fugitive, and here she was in a closed room, surrounded by local law enforcement officers—although they were like no other cops that she had ever seen before.  Except for the Sheriff, they were wearing no police uniforms, beyond their tan DEPUTY ball caps. She hadn’t even been frisked back on the road, and she was still carrying her barely concealed pistol—as were all of the deputies as well.