When he had them shouting, the El Paso people passed out clip-on American flags that could be attached to truck windows.
Hawkes took the microphone back.
“I know most of you hadn’t counted on what we’re doing. You’ve got families you’re worried about, you’re worried about getting arrested, and all of that. Even if we were arrested, I don’t think there’s a jury in Texas that would convict us. Nevertheless, it would be tough,” she said. “If you don’t feel right about this, here’s what you do. Get in our convoy, go on down to I-10 with us. We’ll be going under the bridge and turning left. You turn right on this side of the bridge, and it’ll take you straight into El Paso. We’d suggest you keep going, scatter back to wherever you’re from. We won’t hold it against you: but I’ll tell you what, you’ll be missing the greatest day that ever came to people like us. You’ll miss the beginning of the revolution. You’ll miss being genuine American heroes.”
There was some stirring around, after she got off the truck, and Low shouted, “Load ’em up! Load ’em up! We’re going down the hill as a convoy, no matter which way you turn at I-10.”
They spent twenty minutes loading up and lining up, the pickups spaced so they wouldn’t be bumping into one another in the dust they’d be kicking up. Two El Paso women ran down the line of trucks, telling the drivers to close up once they were on the highway. “Lights on! If a highway patrol should try to pull us over, we ain’t pulling over. We think we know where they’re at, and they’re not where we’re going. But we’re a convoy. We keep rolling on no matter what!”
Hawkes rode with Low. When they were set, Low hit his horn a half-dozen times, and led the way down the mountain.
“Think we’ll lose many?” he asked Hawkes. “Guys turning right?”
“Bet it’s not ten,” Hawkes said. “Most of these guys are hot to trot.”
She looked up at the sky: Orion’s Belt had faded away with the dawn.
TWENTY
Stepping back:
After talking to Greet, Letty got ready for bed but couldn’t sleep. If Hawkes was the leader of an El Paso area militia and she’d gone on the run before being pressured by any authority, then she must be considering some action that would require her to run.
An action that would happen soon. But what?
Though she was tired from the day, Letty began looking at online satellite maps of El Paso and the surrounding areas, picking out possible targets. The militia was believed to have been patrolling east of the city, in the rough country on the American side of the Rio Grande; there wasn’t much out there. Once you got past the agricultural strip fed by the Rio Grande, there was nothing but dry mountains and desert.
El Paso had the usual federal buildings of any big city, but an attack on a building didn’t feel right. The amount of money collectedfrom the oil thefts suggested a large operation involving a number of people. A bomb designed to blow up a building took one man, one truck, one timer, and one detonator... and C-4 would be the wrong way to go about it.
She thought about the C-4. The stuff was a powerful explosive, all right, and Hawkes and her friends had been testing it on an I-beam. Not enough to bring down a skyscraper, she’d been told, but she wasn’t sure she believed that. Say you had a huge heavy building and blew out all the supports on one side... wouldn’t that bring the whole thing down?
She didn’t know. She dug around on Google and found an ArcelorMittal site that made her feel foolish, with its models of building structures.Of coursebuildings weren’t supported only around their perimeter. They were supported by beams that rose up all through the building, and some of those beams were far heavier and thicker than the I-beam that Hawkes and her friends had cut in the test explosion.
And she found an image of the federal building in Oklahoma City after the terrorist bombing. The truck bomb had taken off the building’s façade and a chunk of the interior, but the rest of the structure remained standing. That bomb was far more powerful than a hundred pounds of C-4.
So: not a building?
She shut down the computer and turned to the nightstand clock: almost midnight. She turned off the lights and tried to sleep, and failed. Bored in the dark, bereft of ideas, she got the remote, turned on the television, piled pillows under her head, and began clicking around through the cable channels.
Got caught by an old movie calledHigh Fidelity, a rom-com about a guy who ran a Chicago record store. She missed the first part of it, but watched it right to the happy ending, yawned, clicked through the available channels.
She caught a repeat tape of a local news channel. A weary-looking brunette with unsubtle makeup was saying, “...may not be coming to El Paso after all. Reports from Mexico say that at least part of the caravan broke off the main highway and are headed toward the border crossing at Pershing. How much of the caravan is continuing to El Paso and how much is going to Pershing is uncertain, but the caravans should arrive in either place late tomorrow, if their progress continues as it has the last few weeks. Pershing, if you will remember, was the site of a controversial crossing nineteen months ago...”
Letty remembered.
A Central American caravan of men, women, and children, apparently headed north to El Paso, had turned east at a small Mexican town instead of continuing north, and had arrived at a crossing at Ochoa, Mexico, linked across the Rio Grande with the town of Pershing.
There was almost nothing at Ochoa except a Mexican border station, a couple dozen houses mostly inhabited by the border guards, a gas station/convenience store, and a huge parking lot for Mexican eighteen-wheelers headed for the U.S.
Pershing was larger, although Letty wasn’t certain how much larger. If she remembered correctly—she climbed out of bed and fired up her computer and found that she did remember correctly—it was also a small town.
Pershing’s main claim to fame occurred when the Central American caravan, including large numbers of children, showed up at the Mexican side of the bridge with almost nothing in the way of food, water, or shelter. The mayor of Pershing, Harold Lopez, with support from all the city commissioners, had become a hero to a segment of the American political community when he invited therefugees to cross the bridge, and shouted down the Border Patrol when patrolmen tried to stop them.
“Food and water for babies,” Lopez had shouted at the El Paso news crew that had shown up to record the confrontation. The Border Patrol cracked when the news crew reported that a baby had died, possibly of dehydration, and the caravan crossed the bridge. Once inside the U.S., members of the caravan had to be processed through the American legal system. That could take months, and might well result in many of the refugees remaining in the country.
Letty reviewed the whole storyin the Google links, then checked the mileage to Pershing. Kaiser had already told her that nothing in Texas was close to anything else, and he was right. Pershing was the only crossing between El Paso and Presidio, Texas, and was about sixty miles southwest of the I-10 town of Van Horn. The last stretch, between Van Horn and Pershing, was on a two-lane highway through the mountains, apparently designed expressly for truck traffic. Altogether, Pershing was about three road hours southeast of El Paso.
And she thought,Hawkes—Jael—is already running.
