Bob groaned, “Ah, man,” and Rae had the pants cut off, and they found two large and heavily bleeding through-and-through wounds, on both of Bob’s thighs, eight inches above his knees, apparently from the same shot. He was bleeding steadily, rather than in pulses, so no major arteries had been taken out.
Lucas got on his phone and called O’Brien: “We need guys hereright now,” he said. “We got a guy hit bad in the legs. We need a chopper out of El Paso, I know they’ve got one...”
“Oh, gosh. Oh, gosh. I’ll get it going,” O’Brien said. “You should see our guys coming at any minute.”
Bob was saying to Rae, “Not a tourniquet, not a tourniquet, plug the holes best you can, I don’t want to lose a leg...”
Then they saw a half dozen Border Patrol guys running toward them, all carrying rifles. One of them knelt next to Lucas and Rae, and he said, “We’ve got an EMT on the way. Where’s the shooter?”
“Could be two of them,” Lucas said. “Both out in the field, one right, one left. Stay here behind the buildings. Let’s move Bob to one of your trucks.”
“Better to wait for the EMT, they’ll bring a stretcher...”
Lucas nodded and said to Rae, “Stay with him until they take him...”
Rae’s rifle was back where she’d dropped it while dragging Bob. Lucas scrambled on his hands and knees toward the gun, figuring if Rae hadn’t been shot at, she’d probably been out of the shooter’s sight when she dropped the rifle. He picked it up and scurried back behind the building with the others.
“What are we doing?” Rae asked.
“I’ll talk to O’Brien and get something worked out.” Lucas looked up at the sky. “It’ll be dark in an hour or so and then we’ll have a real problem.”
“Couldn’t be much worse than this,” Rae said. She looked down at Bob, who was lying back, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands curling and uncurling with the stress and pain.
“Yeah, it will be. Those guys will sneak out of here, or try to. Ifthey get out of that field, there’s only one way they get completely away—find somebody with a car, kill ’em, and drive away. We either get them now or we could have some dead civilians on our hands. Maybe a lot of them.”
Lucas took five minutes to place the border patrolmen along the corners of the two domed buildings, plus one in the middle of each building, looking through the glass walls, trying to spot the shooters. The patrolmen included the sniper, who was carrying a bolt-action.308, but had no way up on the roof. “When we heard the shooting, we left the ladder with the trucks. Think we should get it?”
Lucas asked, “How many guys to carry it?”
“Two can carry it, but we can’t go up the sides. The bottoms of those curved roofs are too steep. I’d have to get on at one of the ends.”
Lucas looked at the buildings, shook his head: “Can’t guarantee that he couldn’t see you, if you went up at an end. If he can, you’d be a sitting duck on the ladder. Let’s stay on the ground.”
“Your call,” the rifleman said.
—
TWO EMTScame sloping from behind the smaller salmon-colored buildings, carrying a stretcher. They bent over Bob and one said, “Not as bad as I was afraid of. Let’s block up the holes and get him the hell out of here.” And to Bob, he said, “You’re gonna be all right, pal. We’ve seen worse than this at a Saturday night cockfight.”
“Not that they’re good,” Bob said.
“No, no...”
“How about the helicopter?” Lucas asked.
“On the way, or will be in the next couple of minutes,” one of themedics said. “Flying time is a little more than a half hour each way. They’re putting a trauma doc on board.”
Lucas said to Bob, “Take it easy,” and to Rae, “Stay with him.”
Bob tried to smile and grunted, “Yeah,” and, “Shoot that motherfucker.”
“Doing our best,” Lucas said. He jogged away, on his phone to O’Brien as he ran. “We need to get together,” he said.
“What do you have in mind?”
“How many trucks and guns do you have?”
—
