Kaiser dropped flat on the bed, crossed his ankles, wrenched a pillow around under his head, and said, “Okay. Here’s something. On the way back down here, about, mmm, a mile this side of the barricade, there’s this turnoff with a sign that says mescalero cave trail. I went in to take a look. I thought if it was a trail out of here, maybe the cops or the Army could come in around the barricade. But it’s just a campground, a couple of picnic tables, with a trail going out the back side. I walked up the trail and it dead-ends at a bluff. There’s a cave there, more like a rock shelter. It’s maybe fifty feet deep and probably that wide, with a lot of rubble in front of it, rocks that fell off the bluff. Boulders, big ones. If we got the mayor and council out of the jail, we could hole up in that cave and there’s no way anyone could get at us. If I’m back there with my shotgun . . . if we took the ARs away from the guards . . . it’s a perfect defensive site. We’d need about a five-minute lead getting out of town.”
“We gotta talk about that,” Letty said. “Let’s see what Greet and Colles have to say. They’ve been calling me, but I’ve been too busy.”
* * *
Letty called Greet and put the phone on speaker, so Kaiser could hear and chip in. Greet, sounding stressed, demanded, “Where in the hell have you been, goddamn it? We needed to talk to you. We’ve got a conference call set up here. Give me a minute to get everybody plugged in. It’ll be Senator Colles and some DHS people here in Washington and an emergency task force at FBI headquarters in El Paso.”
“El Paso? Who’s down here? Who’s on the road into Pershing?” Letty asked.
“They’ve got FBI and Texas cops down there, they’re working out jurisdiction issues right now, but what they don’t have, and they need, is intelligence. I mean like . . . military intelligence.”
“How about the other kind of intelligence . . . you know, like IQ? They got any of that?” Letty asked.
“I’m not recording this yet, but I will be,” Greet said. “I don’t know about IQ, but watch your mouth.”
“Got it.”
* * *
After some clicking and static, Greet came up again and said, “Letty, John, I’ve got Senator Colles and a dozen of our DHS executives here, plus task force members in El Paso, all on the line.”
Colles jumped in: “Letty! Are you and John okay?”
“We’re in a motel room in the middle of town,” Letty said. “John drove out to the highway barricade. He has some things to say about that. I’ve walked all over town, I watched the press conference that Jael, Hawkes, had here, I expect you’ve seen that. I talked to some of the militia people, I’ve got some numbers for you . . .”
A man’s voice: “This is Tim Jackson, I’m a lieutenant colonel with the Texas National Guard. We appreciate any intel you can give us, but I have one question first: Why haven’t they taken out the cell phones? We’re getting calls from people down there.”
“I looked at the cell phone tower,” Letty said. “They’ve got three men guarding it, and one guy was working around the base. I can’t promise you this, but I suspect he was putting some of that C-4 on it.”
“Then they could cut us off at any minute.”
“Yes. I expect they’re planning to do that. If everybody will shut up, John and I will tell you what we know and what we’ve seen that you might not have gotten from the helicopter run or from other people. And hope we don’t get cut off.”
Jackson again. “Okay. Go. We’re recording.”
Letty began, “There are a hundred and five, to a hundred and ten, militia here, both men and women, counting the seven at the highway barricade . . .”
“Seven? We’ve been told there are twenty to thirty at the roadblock,” a man said.