The four-cycle engine was game but overburdened. Ozburn’s memory of the terrain was good, and in the darkness he was able to keep the quad on its own track most of the time. Hood looked a quarter mile ahead to the pool of security light and the end of the wall. He saw the other American vehicle now, an ATFE Humvee crawling toward them through a sandy plain. The Mexican vehicles closed fast but they were still half a mile out. Hood held to the roll bar with one hand and lowered the assault gun at the oncoming enemy, but in his logic, gunfire wasn’t worth betraying their position in the darkness. Ozburn found a hard-packed gulley and the quad groaned along. Hood watched the Humvee, a hundred yards to their left and a hundred yards behind them, make a wide U-turn and pull up slow so Duarte and his men could climb in. The driver kept the rpms high and the speed even, and the heavy machine began across the sand again, back toward the wall.
Ozburn steered them onto American soil. He veered around the floodlit construction area, then brought the smoking ATV to a stop on a rise a few hundred yards from the unwalled border. The engine smoked, and smelled of overheated metal. Hood saw the Humvee lumbering toward them, rhinoceros-like and unfazed. He watched as the three Zeta vehicles stopped forward progress a quarter mile away and began circling like meat bees, their dust-filled headlight beams crisscrossing the night, then finally turning and speeding off into the darkness. He realized he’d never even seen what kind of vehicles they were.
The Humvee rolled to a stop, and Janet Bly got out of the driver’s side and headed straight for Jimmy. Soriana exited the front, then the three Chihuahua state policemen, then Mars.
Holdstock stood in the moonlight beside the smoking quad with his bandaged hands at his sides while the Blowdown team welcomed him back and lightly clapped his shoulders and messed his hair and told him how good it was to see him. Bly hugged him, crying, and Ozburn hugged him, swearing they still had plenty of beer to drink and Zetas to kill. Then they stepped away just a little to give Jimmy some breathing room, to hear his piece, to reestablish his place within their pack, and Jimmy looked at each of them in turn before turning his tearful gaze to the desert floor and saying nothing.
Ozburn introduced himself and the others to Duarte and his officers. “We’ll give you a ride back to your truck if the Zetas don’t blow it up,” he said.
Before ten minutes had gone by, an orange ball of flame puffed to life a mile south, roiling and growing and fighting to stay upright against the westerly breeze.
34
Two evenings later, Hood watched Jimmy’s taped statement on World News Tonight. Jimmy was made up, Hood saw, and his hair was freshly cut and styled. The set was designed to look like a home, but Hood knew that the segment had been taped at the ATFE field division HQ up in Glendale.
Jimmy sat in an armchair, the room bathed in warm lamplight, and there was an end table beside him with a Bible and a vase of yellow roses on it. Jimmy’s eyes were glassy, but he had a small smile on his lips, just an upturn, just a hint. The bulbous bandages on his hands were gone, replaced by streamlined wraps of flesh-colored dressings.
“I’m James Holdstock of ATF and I’m back home in the United States now,” he said. His voice was soft. “I want to thank my friends for getting me back home, and the Mexican government for helping all of us. I wouldn’t be here without them. I know that my abduction has become a controversy, but now it’s over. I’m safe and healthy and I’ll return to work soon. I’m proud to be an American and an agent of the ATF and I’m proud to call Mexico my friend.”
Hood took his beer outside and sat on the flagstone patio. Bly had told him that it had taken nine tries for Jimmy to get the speech right. In spite of the teleprompter, he kept losing focus, slurring words, tearing up. She also said that Jimmy was living in an ATFE safe house now, out of state and heavily guarded. His family had moved in with relatives in St. Paul.
Through the screen door, Hood could hear the anchor interviewing the expert.
First off, was this a matter of derring-do south of the border, or was Mr. Holdstock’s release somehow negotiated?
There is no negotiation with narcoterrorists. I can’t go into details, but yes-cooperative derring-do involving two countries.
This is far from usual, or is it?
It is, Charles, and I think it’s the face of things to come. If we want to win this war against the drug cartels, we must have more cooperation. Much more. And by we I mean the United States and Mexico.
Hood looked out to the sprinkling of lights that was Buenavista, and the tent city of the National Guard sprawling to the west. A convoy was now departing the base, heading through the desert on a just-bladed road, a chain of headlights snaking into the dark. He thought of the steep descent to Batopilas, his own headlights faint in that hostile world, the immense spires of rock engulfing them finally and the sky disappearing. He thought of the bodies and the heads, and of Jimmy sitting defeated upon his horse beside Vascano, and he heard Luna say that his wife was beautiful even in old clothes and that his daughters would marry warriors like themselves, and he saw Luna’s great bull’s body shiver as the bullet passed through. He heard the twang of that bullet ricocheting off the rock behind him. Hood put his head in his hands.
A few minutes later he brought his stationery and a good pen outside and he set the paper on the old rough table with a Road & Track magazine to pad it.
Dear Mom & Dad,
I
But this was all he could muster.
35
Hood parked his Camaro in the improvised lot near the pond on Bradley Jones’s ranch. There were scores of cars and a charter bus and a place for taxis and limos to drop off and pick up. A passenger helicopter lowered to a pad cut in the woodland beside the pond. Beth Petty waited for him to get her door and they walked toward the barnyard in the late afternoon.