GPS (20 page)

The question that could never be answered about Simmons in Fonseca’s eyes was why? Why did Simmons — who’d spent every night of those two months in the desert gazing at the photographs in his wallet — keep coming back here? When things got too hot, many of the transients were either killed or managed to find their way back home, never to return. Not Simmons. He faithfully came and went daily, hourly at times, and he survived. It never seemed to faze him like it did so many of the others.

Sometimes he was only over here for a half a day or night, sometimes just a few minutes for an update on the army’s travel plans. Sometimes he didn’t show up for days or weeks. But he always knew for sure when he would be coming back.

When he was back, there was no question that they needed him, and often some very important business was put on hold until his next arrival. Maybe it was because he had some of that same weekend warrior mentality of the Freemen — that he simply got off on the idea of firing machine guns at live targets out here in the wastelands where no one was going to call the police or arrest him for murder. Fonseca chose to think it was because Simmons believed in the cause.

It usually didn’t take much more than a day here to figure out the basis of the conflict. The Freemen had started off as little more than a fraternity party gone bad. They were guys with great jobs and plenty of money who had started all this trouble because of their love of guns, their hatred for the people who’d spent decades spilling over their border and their desire to get a big whiff of anarchy.

Like all forms of intoxication, they found quickly they wanted more and more. After they’d arrived, they started recruiting others who they knew shared their ideals. They sneaked them over the ever-loosening border by night, setting up makeshift camps in the middle of the desert before setting out at dawn to chase the glowing lights of nearby villages. As their numbers had grown, so had their number of camps, their number of guns and their thirst for blood.

The groundwork had been laid just that simply, and had spun completely beyond control or reason. The country to which they were laying waste had been staggered by decades of cartel warfare before they invaded, and that made it a perfect stage at a perfect time. It was a nation with no government, no military and no hope.

Dodging FB bullets had become an hourly task for Paulo, and he understood it would almost certainly be the way he died. Delaney, who he thought about frequently since first meeting him, didn’t likely know the first thing about real survival. Yet, he’d seen a demon unleashed in the man that day, a demon which must have been lying in wait for ages. If he could just get Delaney and a couple others like him trained and with the program, anything was possible. Maybe he could convince them to believe in something, this thing, at least long enough to start some real momentum moving north.

The Freemen had bigger guns, but in desert reality, Fonseca knew they were nothing but a bunch of drunken yahoos who knew nothing about it. Paulo thought of the transients who stayed with him as men looking for that worthwhile cause, many of whom hadn’t wanted to end their lives in their own country’s wars. The transients had a completely different look about them than the natives, and Paulo truly knew the difference because he was one of them. He too had come from north of the border.

His family had been a part of the wave of families to come to America looking for something better, and they were part of the reason the Freemen, so many years later, began running their first missions out of the towns and villages just north of the border. Paulo was directly linked to what the Freemen hated most, and for that reason, life in the desert was an easy choice for him, and the reason he himself never considered going back.

The Freemen had advanced more than 400 miles across the former border — the original border line really had no legitimacy anymore — in the blink of an eye, and had grown a hundred times their original number. But with their massive nightly desert orgies and drug-hazed bonfires, they were as vulnerable as ever. Even with the FB’s increasing number of surprise attacks and looting missions, one big day for the revolucion could still change everything.

That big day was coming in June and was to be carried out like all important revolucion missions, in the dark. Like the brutal genesis of the war itself, Fonseca and the others had devised a simple plan of attack, and the revolucion bosses had tentatively gotten on board. As the FB’s numbers soared, so did its massive desert soirees, and that’s precisely where the revolucion planned to execute its surprise strike.

They were out there almost every night at Destinoso, a former cattle ranch the FB had discovered and taken over early in its offensive into the guts of the country. It was where the first stock of horses had been claimed, and where the absurd accompanying idea that they were some modern day cowboy crusaders had been given a big dose of fuel. While their numbers were masked by their steady dispersal across all of the northern and central parts of the country, nothing happened anywhere without some say-so from the leaders, who called themselves The Gauchos. The ranch was still the principal way station for the FB in the north, the place where most of the supplies came first before being doled out to their infantrymen across the country.

After The First Ten had established their initial foothold — what had started as little more than a drunken dare among friends had succeeded — they immediately began networking to get more bodies, more supplies and to establish a more permanent residence in the desert. The challenge, at first, was to take a small village by force at dawn, killing everyone they could chase down or find, shooting dozens of them in or under their beds.

Once they’d gotten in and out, they fled, hiding out for weeks in caves they’d discovered years before while on a hunting vacation. Now the vacation didn’t end, and the Freemen had established a completely autonomous and completely lawless society. Even the original members were surprised by how easy it had been, not only to simply overtake the impoverished little towns one at a time, but at how many new members couldn’t wait to get their share.

The border traffic which once moved almost solely to the north had been turned back by the FB, the momentum now going in the opposite direction. Now, the legions of eager Freemen-to-be up north were placed on waiting lists before they could come through, and now it was the Freemen who occupied almost every lookout tower and former checkpoint along the border.

Fonseca dreamed of watching the vagabonds running back across that border soaked in their own blood and covered in disfiguring burns. If they struck the FB right between the eyes, crippled their infrastructure with a few well-placed sucker punches, their thousands of outlying divisions would become mere splinters. They would be as easily snuffed out and spotted as carcasses to coyotes. The FB’s entire blueprint had been based on getting their victims on the chase, and the revolucion’s aim was to reverse that chase.

The offensive against the ranch could be a perfect, indefensible attack. It would be simple in its design, but would be an unbelievable challenge to execute. The four transient armies would converge on one of the mass parties outside the ranch. Snipers would be charged with taking out the dozen or so guards — who normally had their fair share of the whiskey and pot that were always in great supply there — and the rudimentary surveillance cameras on the corners of the main house.

On many a revolucion scouting mission the last six months, those guards were found to be dozing, or drinking, in vehicles along the fringe of the giant ring of cars and trucks at the ranch. The mayhem of swaying, shouting people and blaring music within seemed to make them further oblivious to outside noise or commotion and therefore made them easier to kill. A couple of times they weren’t there at all or had abandoned their posts. Despite the undying temptation, not a single bullet had ever been sent in their direction during one of these recon missions. Not yet.

If the arrival and the positioning of the revolucion gunmen in the rocks and cliffs around the ranch went unchecked even for five minutes — and it very likely would — the blood of the FB guards would be gushing into the desert below them while the party raged on in the distance. After that, a team of a dozen saboteurs would skirt the gigantic ring of vehicles that always encased the horde of people.

The parties were more and more brash every night, mirroring the growing cockiness of the men staging them. The masses now also regularly included women — though the FB seemed to be a men-only club, its membership had apparently long since grown weary of the nightly sausage parties. So, just like the truckloads of lumber, liquor, petroleum, drinking water and ammunition that now came to them in regular waves from the north, there were busloads of women brought across who were promptly returned across the border the following day and abandoned.

When the transient “hose men” got to the outer wall of SUVs and throngs of dancing, drunken people, they would slash the tires on all the Range Rovers and other transport vehicles, sliding behind one and then another until they’d reached the starting place of the guy to their left. They would then pry open the fuel doors and run a siphon hose out of each gas tank, allowing the fuel from one truck to spray directly onto the one next to it and all over the ground below them.

If they were able to send back the all-clear signal to the hundred or so armed revolucion transients above the ranch in the cliffs, the stage would be set for Paulo and the others to watch. Just for fun, knowing at that point there would be no easy escape for the FB and their nightly whores, the division leaders themselves planned to fire flares down into the crowd to try to jump-start the mass chaos, and hopefully ignite the biggest bonfire those rats had ever seen.

But the flares really were just part of the show, because even if they merely took out a few people and did not ignite the inferno, there was a much surer way to make that fire burn. As those pink streams of smoke went cascading from four different directions down into the crowd, snipers facing the rear of the giant ranch house would take aim at what Paulo called the “big green START button” — the giant propane, kerosene and gasoline tanks left unguarded behind the ranch’s great house, and within a spark’s distance of where the circle of trucks usually stretched.

If even a single bullet rammed into one of those gas tanks, the very face of the Freemen Brigade would peel off like a slug’s skin caked in salt.

- 23 -

The Freemen Brigade was the name the 10 college friends had, jokingly at the time, bestowed upon themselves long before they’d made any real trouble.

Back then, it was mostly about trying to copy the things they’d seen on all the survival and hunting shows on TV, which in recent years had taken on much more sinister ideals as environmental and gun laws dissipated. Their little group, and everything that came of it, was formed out of a shared desire to get away from their desks and out of their cubicles and let it all hang out away from wives and kids and bosses.

Each year, they tried to do it bigger and bigger. They shot mule deer and bears in Arizona and Mexico, and had even gunned down African Cape buffaloes on an unlicensed safari together. But in each of the men was a taste for something bloodier and meaner, and they all knew it was out there for the grabbing.

The first mission carried out by the Freemen really was nothing more than a dare. The men all agreed politically, and they’d seen the efforts of their weak and fragmenting government to stop the daily border crossings fail time and again. They detested outsiders, even though their own families had come into the same country as outsiders centuries before, but that was a fact ignored by every American racist. It was an age when uprising was not only possible, but already starting in many parts of their own country.

In their drunken arguments about where the nation had gone wrong, and what they themselves — 10 guys who had about six total years of military service among them — would be willing or able to do to make it a better place, they had come up with this idea, which seemingly had nothing at all to do with betterment. They would become the invaders, even if just for one wild weekend. It was nothing more than a test of wills among hunting buddies, a game of chicken. But like many such arguments, there were those among them who insisted on persisting in the challenge of it.

“I really would do it if you guys would, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t,” had been the common refrain, the sort of statement that kept all of them talking about it for weeks.

One day, Simon Charles, then a successful online stock trader, sent a text message to his nine friends:
“I’m taking down a fucking village this weekend. Anyone got the balls to take it with me?”
The idea quickly became a plan, hatched by men who each thought themselves the strongest of the group and who each felt the burning need to prove it whenever possible to the others. If that first dare hadn’t gone so smoothly — if one of them had even so much as been shot in the leg — it would have also been the last. There would have been no war.

They all would have scurried, terrified, right back across the border and back into the shelter of fluorescent lights and martini lunches. The biggest dare after that would likely have been to even bring it up in conversation. But the village they’d spied down upon from the cliffs those nights in the desert was actually even poorer and more defenseless than they had thought.

They had all kissed their wives and children goodbye on a Thursday morning — they agreed it would take at least four days to drive down, do the thing and then hide out for a couple days before coming back across — as they had done on the dawn of dozens of other hunting trips. What none of them realized was they would never see their families again. By Sunday, they would be planning their next attack, plotting it out on Charles’ GPS unit and trying to convince their other friends back home to come across and join them.