Noon came and went and militiamen were running in and out of the border station, which they’d apparently turned into a headquarters. A man jogged up the hill, past the crowd, got in a pickup, and drove farther up the hill and out of sight. He was in a hurry, but not a huge hurry, Letty decided, more like a man with a mission than a man on an emergency run.
And she thought, The cell tower is up on that hill.
She walked away from the crowd, got behind a pickup, squatted, and called Kaiser.
“I got the groceries, I’m checking out the jail,” he said. “Still two guards. Something happening?”
“Guy just took off up the hill in his truck. He could be going to the cell tower.”
“Okay.”
“That’s all I got,” Letty said. She clicked off, and was about to stand up when she noticed the truck’s taped-over New Mexico license plate—and the renewal sticker in the lower-left corner. The renewal sticker had the tag number on it.
She’d vaguely known that about renewal stickers. She’d had to buy three of them for her car in California, and she’d asked about what looked like a random number on it. The DMV counter person told her that the sticker number went to the car’s registration, and that the police could check to see that the right sticker was on the correct car. The California number wasn’t the tag number, but it would identify a specific car or truck.
She pulled out her phone and took a photo of the New Mexico renewal sticker.
Did all the states do that? The next truck was from Texas—and had no renewal sticker. Neither did the next few Texas trucks. Since most of the trucks driven by the militia were from Texas, she thought, she was out of luck.
As she was walking down the line of trucks, looking for non-Texas renewal stickers, Hawkes and a man in a mask, who Letty thought was Rand Low, climbed into the back of a pickup, dropped the tailgate, and hit the switch on an amplifier. Hawkes lifted a walkie-talkie to her face and said something into it. She listened for a reply, then nodded to Low, looked at her watch, said something else to him, and picked up the microphone.
“You all know what this is about,” she said. “We’re planning to stop the caravan that’s coming our way. We will not let them cross the bridge. The last we heard, they should be coming down the hill on the Mexican side around six o’clock, if nothing slows them down. We could have quite the confrontation here. We could be attacked from the east, by our own people, and from the west, by the people in the caravan. We don’t want anyone to get hurt, so we’re asking you, when you see the caravan arrive on the other side of the river, to stay in your homes. Between now and then, you’re free to go about your business. We mean none of you any harm.”
She looked out over the crowd, as if surveying them for signs of acquiescence; there was a shuffling of feet, glances exchanged, but nobody said anything, neither protest nor acceptance. The TV crew was standing directly in front of her, recording the speech.
Hawkes looked down toward the bridge. Letty caught it, and edged out to the side of the crowd and looked where Hawkes had. She saw the shoulders and heads of four men wearing camo shirts and hats sliding under the bridge; they’d apparently been concealed behind a house that stood closest to the riverbank.
Letty worked back through the crowd, where she could see the bridge at an angle. There were six sections spanning the river.
She did the numbers: blowing I-beams would take four chunks of C-4 for each section; six sections, twenty-four bricks of explosive, twenty-four timers, twenty-four detonators. Five support pillars would take more explosive to bring down, but only five timers and detonators. If they were planning to use one on the cell phone tower . . . twenty-nine detonators and timers. If the Army lieutenant had told the truth, they had more than enough.
Holy shit: they’re going to take out the bridge. And they’re waiting for the caravan to arrive before they do it.