The border station sat on a slab with an extensive parking lot behind it, a brown building with an American flag hanging limply from a pole near the front door. The militia’s pickups were jammed around the buildings on three sides, men standing behind the trucks with rifles. A yellow concrete welcome to texas sign punctuated the cluster of trucks.
A long-haired man named Dick ran up to them as they stopped, a harried look on this face, and said, “We got the town, if we can keep it.”
Hawkes and Low got out of the truck, and Low asked, “Where’s the mayor and all them?”
“Jail. No problem.”
“Somebody watching them?”
“Two guys, on the door,” Dick said.
“Good. The Mexicans done anything?”
“Watching us with binoculars . . .”
“Get the first shift of bridge guys out there. Nobody goes across, either direction . . .”
“I know, we got that,” Dick said. “We got the Customs guys nailed down, inside, but I kept the fast-reaction team here in case there’s trouble. I could send them to their positions if you think it’s time.”
Hawkes shook her head. “Keep them here until the bridge guys are set up . . .”
The Customs and Border Protection employees were holed up inside the building, and some were armed. One of the El Paso militia members, wearing camo and armor, was negotiating with them, standing by the front door, shouting through it.
The negotiations went on for fifteen minutes, and the camo-clad man eventually walked away from the door and down to where Hawkes had met with Low, Duran, and Crain.
“They’re being stubborn, but they’re arguing among themselves,” the camo guy said. “I think we’ll need the demo.”
“Okay with me,” Low said. “Me ’n Vic will tell everybody.”
“Like we talked about,” Hawkes said. She was wearing a gunbelt with a Beretta nine-millimeter in a holster. She took the gun out, and when Low and Crain finished circling the trucks, Low waved at her, and she pointed the gun in the air, over her head, and fired a single shot.
At her signal, all the men around the trucks began firing in the air, downriver, where there wasn’t much but desert. One full thirty-round magazine, they’d said. Hawkes put her fingers in her ears as eighteen hundred rounds went downriver.
The border station employees quit. Three militiamen went inside the station and collected sidearms, got keys for a secure file cabinet from the man in charge, and locked the weapons in the cabinet.
“I knew that would happen,” Hawkes told Low. “As long as everyone thinks they can give up and nobody gets hurt, they’ll do it.”
“But they’re pissed,” Low said. He looked up the hill to the houses of the town. “And there are guys up there in town with guns as good as anything we have.”
“We gotta stay on top of them. Pass the word to keep patrolling.”
* * *
A while later, as Hawkes and Low were checking with their various militia squads, making sure their missions were on track, they heard the paddling sound of a helicopter, coming in fast.
Hawkes said, “Here we go,” and Low said, “Holy shit,” and the Black Hawk screamed down at them and the men in the trucks began shooting at it, and Hawkes dropped behind the pickup and boom, the .50-cal got in the fight and the chopper turned and climbed out, and as it went by a second time, Hawkes could see a man watching them from the door gunner’s window, and a silent machine gun pointing down at them.
And from the ground, bapbapbapbapbapbapbapbapBOOM . . .”
The chopper disappeared over the mountain and Hawkes said, “Okay, we need to get the news to them that we’re all mixed up with civilians. We need to get these trucks spread out, right close to the houses, like we planned. We don’t want them to be able to blow us all up in a big cluster like this . . . That M240 would take us apart.”