“We think they won’t be here more than a day or maybe two,” Kaiser said. “I’m not sure, but it’s possible that they’ll be trying to get out of here tonight, after the caravan gets here. I don’t know what they’re planning to do about that. Anyway, I’m taking you up to the Mescalero Cave. I’ve got food and water and blankets for the night, we’ve got guns. That cave is a fort.”
“We could hide out in a house in town,” Moreno suggested. “They can’t search them all.”
“Lot of reasons not to do that,” Kaiser said. “We can talk about it up at the cave. The fact is, they could search all of them. There are a lot of militia people here and I think they’d enjoy doing that.”
The path leading to the cave was three and a half miles up the highway. Kaiser got on the gas pedal and, a mile out, burned past two pickups coming from the other direction.
“They turn around? They coming after us?” he asked. He couldn’t see anything in the rearview mirror except the women sitting on the councilmen’s laps.
The councilwomen looked out the back window. “No.”
* * *
The cave was a five-minute walk uphill from the campground, a cup-shaped hole in the soft red rock of the mountain, fifty feet across and fifty feet deep. Boulders and ragged chunks of rock from the mountain, some as big as buses, littered the ground in front of the cave, providing cover.
Kaiser loaded the council people with the food, water, and bedding he’d collected, and sent them up the hill. Running down the path to the road, he checked both ways and saw nothing. When he’d given the council people enough time to make it to the cave, he followed them up the hill, pausing to lock the doors on the Explorer.
“Now,” he said, when they were gathered in a circle of boulders, “Who here hunts? Who knows how to shoot a rifle or a pistol?”
The five council people looked at one another, then all five raised their hands.
“Outstanding,” Kaiser said.
* * *
The first militia truck pulled into the campground a half-hour later. A man got out, ran to the Explorer, peered inside, then ran back to the truck. Five minutes after that, there were eleven trucks in the campground area.
Kaiser looked down at them, then turned to the five council people and said, “You know what I said. I’ll do the talking. I want you all in your holes, behind your rocks. I’ll yell if I need you to open up. Main thing is, stay under cover. Nothing can get at you where you are.”
“Will you shoot somebody?”
“If I have to. I’d rather not,” Kaiser said. “If I do, stay in your spots.”
The trucks could be negotiating chips, Kaiser thought. Pickup owners often loved their vehicles like pets, and trucks with a couple of dozen bullet holes are not only expensive to fix, they tend to attract the eye.
He watched as the men below got themselves organized, split into three groups, and began climbing toward the cave, one well to the left, one to the right, one up the center. Kaiser put his two riflemen on the wings and said, “Everybody take it easy.”
Veronica Ruiz, in the white blouse, had brought the two walkie-talkies from the Explorer, and now said, “They are talking on channel twenty-two.”
“Great. Listen in. The minute you hear anything interesting, let me know. Keep your fingers away from the transmit button. We don’t want them to know we might be listening.”
Down below, the men were scrambling from one rock to the next; not very good technique, Kaiser thought. He could shoot one of them in the open, and if anyone tried to help him, he’d get another. A thought to be put on reserve.
“We could pick off a few of them right now,” the stocky councilman said.