She remembered a quotation she’d seen in one of her history books, from a German general: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
She was thinking about that when she dozed off; hours later, she heard her phone beep at her, opened her eyes, and saw the night sky, and down to the horizon, Orion’s Belt, pointing down at the town of Pershing, Texas. Her mouth was dry and tasted bad; she sat up, kicked out of her sleeping bag, looked again at Orion’s Belt. An omen, she thought, and it gave her confidence.
Pershing was named after Black Jack Pershing, an American general who chased Pancho Villa all over northern Mexico, and never did catch him.
* * *
By dawn, the encampment was awake, eating breakfast. There wasn’t enough cereal to go around, though she’d bought fifty boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and twenty gallons of milk that had been kept cool in a stock watering tank full of ice. There was a little early-morning grouching and bitching, the group winding up for the action in El Paso, though it wouldn’t exactly be in El Paso.
The militias rekindled a couple of fires, burning the last of the pinewood, people spitting toothpaste into the sand and scuffing more sand over it, and there was a line at the latrines for a while.
Hawkes let that go on for forty-five minutes, then climbed up on top of the truck with the microphone and amp. “If we could crowd in around here, we’ve got some important stuff to talk about this morning. I’m going to start things off and I’m going to tell you three shocking things. First thing. I would not be totally surprised if there was an FBI informant among us. Or, maybe, an out-and-out FBI agent, a spy. That is just the way it is. That’s life. Because of that possibility, that we have a flea in our ear, here’s the second shocking thing. We lied to you last night, getting you whipped up for an action in El Paso. We’re not going to El Paso. We’re going to a town called Pershing, Texas.
“You remember Pershing. A year and a half ago, a caravan from Central America, more than a thousand people, came up here, like it was headed for El Paso, planning to rush the border. At the last minute, the whole caravan swerved down a side highway, used mostly by trucks headed for the eastern part of the States. That highway runs through the town of Ochoa, Mexico, on the Rio Grande, and across the bridge to Pershing, here in the States.
“The whole thing was stopped on the Mexican side, all those illegals packed into a parking lot. The mayor of Pershing declared a human disaster and invited them across the bridge, and the gutless men at the Customs and Border Protection station allowed them through. We have word that the same thing will happen again today, this evening—a caravan has already turned off the main Mexican highway and is headed for Pershing. We’re gonna go down there and we’re gonna stop them. I can promise you, this will be a great day for our kind of people. I’ll tell you something else: we’re not gonna get arrested, we’re not going to jail. Some of our El Paso people are walking around right now, putting duct tape on your license plates, covering up the numbers.
“We’re not far from the highway that runs from I-10 to Pershing, which is why we chose this place, which I know some of you thought was too far from El Paso . . . We picked it because we’re not going to El Paso.”
She spoke for ten more minutes, outlining the detailed plan for invading Pershing, holding it, and then . . .
“We’ll talk more about the details this afternoon. Each of you will get a small file folder with an informational packet, which you should look at when you have a break. We think we have things fixed so nobody gets busted. Again, because there might be an FBI agent here—hello there, wherever you are, you fuckin’ rat, if you’re really out there—we don’t want to talk about it right now,” she said. “Okay, next thing. How many of you guys have used chain saws? Raise your hands . . .”
A lot of them had. Hawkes got them working on sign-up lists, organized by her El Paso faithful, depending on what they could do, and what they were willing to do.
* * *