“Sounds good to me, I’m dehydrated as hell,” Hawkes said. “If it rains, we’re screwed.”
“No rain for at least a couple weeks, last time I looked,” Duran said.
* * *
Hawkes told them about the call from Crain.
“R.J. goes on duty at eleven o’clock, he’ll still be asleep. I’ll wait until ten to call him,” Hawkes said. “We need to know what happened to Max.”
“Max won’t give us up,” Low said. “Though I sorta don’t think that he ought to come on the raid with us. If they think he was with us, something to do with us, they’d be right back in his face. He ought to be somewhere that gives him an alibi. I don’t want to lose that boy.”
“I’ll think about it,” Hawkes said. “You might be right.”
“What about the oil?” Duran asked. “Think we ought to quit?”
“I’ll talk to Terry about it, but I don’t want to quit yet,” Hawkes said. “The raid is costing us a chunk. We got forty-four people coming in from out of town and I’m sending them two thousand bucks apiece for travel money, gas, food, and motels. It’s a solid three days from Seattle down to El Paso. Less for other people, but those ones from Seattle and Michigan got a long haul.”
“I worry if that’s enough guys. Forty from out of town, sixty-some of ours. Some of the out-of-towners might chicken out when they hear the whole plan.”
“Not many,” Hawkes said. “I know them all personally and they are the hardcore.”
“Better be,” Duran said. “It’s not like the assholes here in Pershing don’t have guns. And the FBI and maybe the National Guard is gonna be on us like flies on shit.”
“We worked it all out,” Hawkes said. “It’ll all be fine.”
* * *
Pershing, Texas, had two things going for it: a bridge across the Rio Grande, to Mexico; and it was home to the second-largest battery in America, which wasn’t as much of a tourist attraction as the locals thought it should be, being a group of electrical lumps inside a concrete-block building.
Located halfway between its border-crossing competitors at El Paso and Presidio, and southwest of the town of Van Horn, Texas, its only link to the rest of the U.S. was a single narrow highway that connected to I-10 at Van Horn. The road was used largely by semi-trailer truck traffic hoping to avoid the traffic jams at El Paso, and also as a shortcut to I-20 and highway routes going northeast into the U.S., and from the U.S. southwest into Mexico.
The Pershing residents didn’t know it, but Hawkes, Low, and Crain had just finished forging a second road out. An existing dirt road led out of the town, a mile northwest along the Rio Grande, to the Pershing Sportsmen’s Club, which amounted to a clearing in the brush where the sportsmen had set up a shooting range, with a mountain bluff as the backstop. A two-lane track led farther northwest out of the sportsmen’s club, used only occasionally by four-wheelers and dirt bikes.
Those tracks dead-ended at the Arroyo Grande, the ditch that Hawkes and the others had just crossed. Once across the arroyo, more four-wheeler tracks connected north to agricultural access roads for fields along the river. While Hawkes and her crew had spent most of their time working on the arroyo, they’d also smoothed tougher patches along the four-wheeler tracks, back as far as the farm roads.
* * *
A hot, disheveled town of eighteen hundred souls, Pershing was one of the most isolated towns in the lower forty-eight states. Electric power flowed along a single line of power poles from Van Horn, which was the reason for the second-biggest battery. When the power went out, as it occasionally did during thunderstorms, the town would have been out of luck without the battery backup.
Pershing lived on the bridge and what went across it in both directions. There was a substantial U.S. government Customs and Border Protection post, which provided the best jobs in town, along with three bars and a motel, an auto-parts store, a couple of different brands of dollar stores, two convenience stores, one small supermarket, two churches, a café, a Subway and a Regio’s Pizza, and a green-painted concrete-block jail surrounded by Spanish bayonet plants.