When she was done, Low talked for ten more minutes, winding up the crowd. There were doubters, but not many.
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 collected from 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 course buildings 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.