“I’ll wait with you,” Letty said.
He sighed and said “Goddamn it” and turned away. A man with a cowboy hat moved in front of Letty and she couldn’t see past him. She poked him in the side. “I can’t see.”
Without looking at her, he said, “Tough.”
She said, “If you don’t move, I’ll take out my knife and cut your belt and your pants will fall down.”
Now he looked at her and Rodriguez said, “She’ll do it,” and the man moved sideways. Letty said, “Thank you.”
Across the bridge, a dozen people appeared on the highway behind the group already gathered by the Mexican border post, and then an old yellow school bus that resembled all the old yellow school buses in the world edged around a turn behind them.
Rodriguez said, “Here we go.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Standing in the crowd, Letty was gripped by the idea that she was stuck, that she was letting events run over her. As the school bus edged forward, a group of Mexican border patrolmen lined up at the edge of the bridge to block the bus and the people behind it. Then nothing happened.
But something was going to happen.
The highway down to the bridge was flanked on the left side by the substantial American border station, which included the main building plus two smaller buildings surrounded by a large parking lot meant to hold eighteen-wheelers while they were being inspected. On the right side of the highway, the mountains sloped down to the Rio Grande flood plain, which was several hundred yards across. Probably once used for agriculture, it was now half-covered by scrubby brush, while a portion of the plain closest to the river was plowed and mown bare, right down to the dirt, with hardly a weed poking up.
Letty walked back up the hill, far enough that she wouldn’t be noticed as she crossed the highway and pushed into the brush and began to make her way through it, back down the hill again. The going was rough: scrubby, tangled pinions and woody bushes plucking at her blouse, her hat, the backpack, and her hair. She made her way to the sandy flood plain, crossed a dirt track, and then moved carefully on through the jungle of brush and weeds on the plain to the point where the plowed ground started. Sitting just inside the brush line, she slipped off the pack, took out the monocular, and looked at the bridge, where she’d seen the men disappear earlier in the day.
She didn’t see them immediately, because they weren’t moving, but after a fast scan, she did a slower inspection, and one of the men raised an arm, and she picked him up. There were two of them, tucked in the shadows under the Mexican end of the bridge, dressed from head to toe in camo.
Scanning the underside of the structure, she began picking up what she thought might be the explosives; she wasn’t sure of that, but she could see changes of color at the ends of the red-painted support beams. The beams, she thought, were the same size as the one that had been cut in half by the C-4 experiment they’d seen with Hawkes and the others at the mountain off I-10.
Then the men stood up, as if on a command, did something under the bridge that she couldn’t see, then moved down the slope toward the river, still concealed beneath the structure from eyes at either end.
One of the men was carrying something metallic. As she watched, the two men paused near the end of the first slab on the Mexican side and began working with the metallic object . . . a lightweight aluminum extendable ladder. They put it up against the bridge support structure, one of the men climbed it, did something under the bridge, came down, carried it over to the other side of the two-lane bridge, climbed again, and did something again.
Setting the timers on the explosive, Letty thought. The C-4 was already in place. They were going to take down the bridge.
The river, which might not even have been called that in Minnesota—more like a big creek—was shallow beneath the bridge, and the men waded halfway across to a support structure that stood in the middle. The ladder was extended, and one of the men climbed it while the other supported the ladder.