He snorted. “They start blowing up schools in Happytown, USA, and it turns out they crossed here, and then the US overreacts once the shit’s already blown up, and it’ll kill business for us regular guys. It’ll go from one Border Patrol per hundred square miles to a thousand Navy SEALs. I know how you Americans do it. You love to lock the barn after all the horses are gone. It’s getting bad lately. The world’s getting crazier, I tell you.”
It was kind of sad when smugglers were our first line of border security. The food was amazing. Juanita was still a great cook. “Got a map?”
Santa Vasquez stank.
The smell was a combination of chemicals, garbage, open sewer, and crowded humanity. I had been all over the Third World, and this town had to be in the middle of the list of olfactory offenders. It was worse than Afghanistan, where the stink of dried human waste was embedded into the dust, but it was far better than the shallow-grave smell of Bosnia back when everything fell apart there.
The town was on the other side of the sagebrush-covered hillside, but the prevailing winds still carried the funk toward the Arizona border. It was night and dark enough that I could barely make out the rest of the group stumbling northward. During the day illegals tended to walk in bunches, but at night they unconsciously strung out into a single-file line. I could hear the sloshing of the milk jugs of water that everyone else was carrying. The ground was rough, uneven, and strewn with trash.
I was dressed like the other border jumpers. Rough jeans, a button-down work shirt, and a ratty ball cap. I was unshaven and had not bathed since my flight had landed in Mexico City yesterday morning. I was traveling light, just a small pack and some water. The drug mules were the ones with the burlap forty-five-pound backpacks, and their tracks tended to leave deeper heel prints. Those were the ones that the Border Patrol paid extra attention to, and those boys knew how to track. Once I split off from the herd, I didn’t want my footprints to stand out.
It was late June and hot, but my body was acclimatized to the Middle East. This was pleasant by comparison. We were 5,000 feet farther above sea level than I was used to, so I was a bit out of breath. The border was a hundred yards away, and Guillermo said that the terrain was rough enough and covered in ocotillo that it was a rare occurrence to have Border Patrol vehicles in the area. Since I wanted to be discreet, Guillermo had pointed me to this section. The path was through a rough, hilly area. If any of my fellow travelers got picked up by the USBP, they would be detained, given a Capri Sun drink and a picante-flavored cup of noodles, fingerprinted, and bussed back across the border. For me, I was armed, smuggling something priceless, and had no idea what kind of flags my fingerprints might raise in America, so better safe than sorry.
Jill had not called me back yet, and it was beginning to worry me. I had left a message with the Fat Man to tell Eddie that I would arrange a drop-off within the week. The last thing I wanted was for him to get jumpy. When Eddie gets jumpy, people get burned.
There was movement in the sagebrush ahead. Instinctively, I took a knee and crouched low. The other illegals—technically I suppose I was an illegal, too, even if I was an American citizen—kept walking. They were talking, laughing; a few had ear pieces in and were listening to radios or iPods. I had the impression that most of them had done this before. Pulling the night-vision monocular from a pocket, I pressed it to my eye and scanned the horizon.
Vehicles at the border. Damn it, Guillermo. Staying low, I moved off to the side. Thousands of people walk across this border every day, and I have to blunder into a section that was actually covered by La Migra. We were in a natural gully with rocky hills surrounding us. It looked like it would be one heck of a climb. I sighed. Apparently I would be taking the high road.
Twenty minutes of hard scrambling later, I was on the top of the rocky hillside. The terrain up here was horrible, but I was certain that I wouldn’t run into any more inconveniences. Only a crazy person or somebody who really wanted to avoid getting spotted was going to take this path into Arizona.
Somebody was coming.
Give me a break. I settled myself into a depression in the rock beneath some prickly pear and scanned through my monocular. Three men were on the steep hillside above, moving through the shadows. They were dressed similar to me, each carrying a heavy pack, and were having a tough time moving through the thick brush and cacti. Probably drug runners. I stayed hidden. Most mules were unarmed, just regular Josés roped into carrying the packages in exchange for passage, but in every group there was usually one actual bad dude with a gun.
I watched them pass. Two of them had long tubes strapped to their packs. They paused just past me at the lip of the hill and examined the trucks parked below. One of them pointed and spoke. It wasn’t in Spanish. My ears perked up. I recognized the language. No way. I crawled forward slightly, careful to not shift any of the rocks. Scorpions crawled under my body. The man said something else before turning toward the border and continuing on.
What the hell were Chechens doing crossing the American border?
Guillermo hadn’t been kidding. It was getting crazy around here. I refocused the monocular and took a closer look. Those tubes looked suspicious.
Oh, wow.
I pulled my STI 9mm from my holster, the Silencerco suppressor from my pocket, and began screwing them together. Not in my country, assholes.
A few hours later, I stood inside a gas-station phone booth in a town north of Nogales, Arizona. It was close to three in the morning and the little desert town was utterly silent. A stray dog watched me from under the gas station’s neon sign. Loud insects buzzed around the glass.
“Sheriff’s Department.”
“Listen to me very carefully,” I said, adding a Mexican accent to my voice. “There are three dead men on the American side of the border, just north of Santa Vasquez.”
“Okay, and who is this?” The deputy sounded almost bored. Apparently multiple dead bodies were not that strange of an occurrence on the border.
“I’m the man that killed them.”
“Wait, what?” That got his attention.
“The men were crossing the border. They were Chechen terrorists.” I was careful not to touch anything in the booth in a way that would leave fingerprints. My rough clothes were splattered with dried blood.
“Chechens, like from Chechnya?”
“Yes. Write this down.” I rattled off the GPS coordinates. “That’s where you’ll find the bodies. There’s a missile hidden under some rocks ten meters east of the bodies.”
“A missile?”
“Look, I’m just a coyote,” I lied, “but I don’t want guys like that shooting down airliners, you know what I mean. I’m calling because one of them talked before he died. There will be a second group crossing the border in the same area just before dawn.”
“Sir, I need—” I hung up the phone and quickly walked to the still running Ford Explorer. The last Chechen had talked all right, encouraged by some expedient use of my Greco knife. There had been a vehicle waiting for them, but I didn’t feel the need to tell the deputy about where I had left the driver’s body. Besides, I had needed a ride.
I had dealt with people like them before, bloodthirsty fanatics who just plain liked to kill innocent people. The average American had no idea what was waiting for them out in the world, and there was some serious badness crawling across the country’s soft white underbelly. At first I had assumed that it was just random chance that had allowed me to bump into those men, but I had a sneaky suspicion that Guillermo might have put me on that particular path for a reason, and probably saved him some work, the sneaky bastard.