* * *
When Letty returned to the motel, she found that two rooms had been taken over by the militia’s medics, all but one female, all dressed in medical whites, all wearing white N95 masks. The militia had a thing about uniforms, she thought. She asked the medics if they thought people would get shot, and a woman told her, no, they didn’t expect that.
“We’ve got a lot of people running around in the hot sun. We’re thinking heat stroke, dehydration, that sort of thing. But we’re all nurses here, so we can handle everything except major trauma. If somebody gets shot, we’ll do what we can here and call in a medevac chopper from El Paso.”
“Sounds like you got it under control,” Letty said.
“We do,” the woman said. “You from around here?”
“I’m from Midland, my boyfriend and I were headed across the river,” Letty said. “We decided we better stay put, after . . . you know . . . you guys got here. Americans might not be too popular down there for a while.”
As they were talking, Kaiser pulled into the parking lot and Letty said good-bye to the nurses and went to meet him. “I’m your girlfriend, we’re going to the same room,” she said, as she walked up. “The people I was talking to are militia, their medical team. Nurses.”
Kaiser looked over at them: “Man, they’ve got it together. A medical team.”
* * *
In Kaiser’s room, he pulled his carry gun out from under his shirt and dropped it on the tiny desk, went over and sat on the bed. “No way anybody’s going to get across that highway barricade in a hurry,” he said.
He told her how the palm tree trunks had been woven together into an immovable mass. “A bulldozer could push it out of the way, but you’d have to get one down there and that’ll take a while. The guys manning the barricade are flashing their guns. There are cop cars on the other side and people have been yelling back and forth.”
“No way to get around it?”
Kaiser shook his head. “The mountain comes right down to the road on the west side, the east side is a steep downhill, and it’s all stone rubble down there. You’d have trouble getting anything bigger than a trail bike through, even if you didn’t have people shooting at you. A Delta team or SEALs could hike in overland. They could take out the guys on the barricade, no problem, but that’d mean killing a lot of people. I don’t think we’re there yet.”
“What about that checkpoint? I saw it stopping cars.”
“They waved me through when I was going out, stopped me when I was coming in. I guess they don’t care if you go out, there’s nothing out there, you’re not a threat. Actually, there’s a back way around the checkpoint, on the west side of the highway, that they haven’t blocked off. Not yet, anyway.”
“We need to brief Greet on what we’ve seen,” Letty said. “I walked all over town, I’ve got numbers they need to know. The biggest thing right now is, they’re talking about having a trial for the mayor and the city council. For treason. The way they’re talking, they could hold the trial this afternoon or tonight. I don’t think the council’s gonna get found ‘not guilty.’？”
“That . . . doesn’t sound good,” Kaiser said. “The nutso militia guys usually talk about the penalty for treason being death.”
Letty nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of. So far, they’re saying they don’t want anyone hurt. But a trial . . . they might be backing themselves into a corner with their own people.”
“You know where they’re holding the council?”
“The jail. There’s a jail here,” Letty said. “I talked to this old lady who pointed it out to me. It’s a little brick building with two guys sitting outside the door with ARs.”