Not everybody would have a four-wheeler, they thought, so after knocking the edges off the hole and partially filling it, they widened the bottom, building a parking platform. If some couldn’t make it up the slope, they’d pull the truck off until everybody elsewas through, then they’d use a winch to pull the truck up the far side.
Once across the hole, they’d be fine, even in the dark.
“What do you think?” Hawkes asked Rand Low, looking down the hole.
“We gotta pack it better if we’re gonna put sixty or seventy or eighty pickups across it. But I could take the truck down there now and get it out. Those rocks down there actually make a decent foundation.”
“If you can’t get out, we’d have a long walk,” Hawkes said, hands on her hips.
“Ah, we’re good,” Low said. “Let’s give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, we’ll pull it out with the Bobcat.”
They were all soaked with sweat and brown with dust. Terrill Duran was wearing a bandanna around his face as he worked the Bobcat. He killed the engine and walked over and asked, “You wanna try?”
“We’re talking about it,” Hawkes said doubtfully. “If you guys think so... Take it easy.”
Low got in the pickup, eased it up to the hole, then let it roll down over the edge, slowly, to the bottom, fifteen feet below, across the built-up pad, then up the other side.
At the top, on the far side, Low got out and called, “It’s soft, we need to pack it some more, but it’ll work fine. I think we’re done with it.”
“C’mon over,” Duran called back to him. “I’ll push some more dirt down and we can pack it, and then we can run the truck up and down it for a while.”
They gave it another hour, rolling the pickup and the tiny Bobcat up and down the arroyo wall, until the dirt was solid. Whenthey were finished packing, they took a heavy-bristled push broom out of the truck and pushed white surface dirt back over the raw earth of the refashioned arroyo. When they were done, Low stuck a couple of rod-mounted red reflectors into the dirt on both sides of the track into the hole.
“How about we go into Pershing and check in to the motel, like we talked about?”
“Waste of money, if we leave tonight,” Crain said. “And it’s a risk.”
“We got the money,” Low said. “Not much risk. And I stink. We all stink. Instead of stinking all the way back to El Paso, I’d like to get cleaned up and maybe spend an hour in the pool. We all brought our swimsuits.”
“Sounds good to me, I’m dehydrated as hell,” Hawkes said. “If it rains, we’re screwed.”
“No rain for at least a couple weeks, last time I looked,” Duran said.
Hawkes told themabout the call from Crain.
“R.J. goes on duty at eleven o’clock, he’ll still be asleep. I’ll wait until ten to call him,” Hawkes said. “We need to know what happened to Max.”
“Max won’t give us up,” Low said. “Though I sorta don’t think that he ought to come on the raid with us. If they think he was with us, something to do with us, they’d be right back in his face. He ought to be somewhere that gives him an alibi. I don’t want to lose that boy.”
“I’ll think about it,” Hawkes said. “You might be right.”
“What about the oil?” Duran asked. “Think we ought to quit?”
“I’ll talk to Terry about it, but I don’t want to quit yet,” Hawkes said. “The raid is costing us a chunk. We got forty-four peoplecoming in from out of town and I’m sending them two thousand bucks apiece for travel money, gas, food, and motels. It’s a solid three days from Seattle down to El Paso. Less for other people, but those ones from Seattle and Michigan got a long haul.”
“I worry if that’s enough guys. Forty from out of town, sixty-some of ours. Some of the out-of-towners might chicken out when they hear the whole plan.”
“Not many,” Hawkes said. “I know them all personally and they are the hardcore.”
“Better be,” Duran said. “It’s not like the assholes here in Pershing don’t have guns. And the FBI and maybe the National Guard is gonna be on us like flies on shit.”
“We worked it all out,” Hawkes said. “It’ll all be fine.”
Pershing, Texas,had two things going for it: a bridge across the Rio Grande, to Mexico; and it was home to the second-largest battery in America, which wasn’t as much of a tourist attraction as the locals thought it should be, being a group of electrical lumps inside a concrete-block building.
Located halfway between its border-crossing competitors at El Paso and Presidio, and southwest of the town of Van Horn, Texas, its only link to the rest of the U.S. was a single narrow highway that connected to I-10 at Van Horn. The road was used largely by semi-trailer truck traffic hoping to avoid the traffic jams at El Paso, and also as a shortcut to I-20 and highway routes going northeast into the U.S., and from the U.S. southwest into Mexico.
The Pershing residents didn’t know it, but Hawkes, Low, and Crain had just finished forging a second road out. An existing dirt road led out of the town, a mile northwest along the Rio Grande, to the Pershing Sportsmen’s Club, which amounted to a clearing in the brush where the sportsmen had set up a shooting range, with amountain bluff as the backstop. A two-lane track led farther northwest out of the sportsmen’s club, used only occasionally by four-wheelers and dirt bikes.
