Hostile Borders (11 page)

“Your reluctance to tell us about such a commodity is understandable,” Daumudi said. “But even though you will be risking such a rarity, we will be risking our lives and mission. We will do nothing that will put our
actions at risk before we can act against the Americans, and that includes exposing your tunnel or any part of your organization.”

“I understand this and respect your position,” Masque said. “To demonstrate my own good faith to you, I will assign my very best man, my most trusted lieutenant, to guide you across the border tonight. You can see how a part of our operation works and just how valuable it can be to your own actions. But you will follow my lieutenant's instructions to the letter. It is no small trust I am putting in you having all of this shown to you.

“It would be very valuable for you to remember that I am the only one who is taking product across the border now who is even willing to help you. None of the smaller dealers will risk exposing their smuggling routes no matter how much you offer them. In the words of our shared enemy—we're the only game in town.”

No matter how beat up the men were, there were things that had to be done on the ranch before they could go on to Tombstone and meet with the Border Patrol agent. Hausmann and Reaper made sure both the horses and the dogs were fed and watered. The horses were rotated out of their stalls into the exercise yard, the area mucked out, and all of the things done that couldn't be ignored. Navy SEALs and Mexican gunmen didn't impress a bunch of hungry horses and dogs.

The drive along Route 80 passed a lot of open, desert terrain. There were long spaces between any form of home, spaces filled with creosote bushes, mesquite, and a variety of cactus. As the two men approached the town, they passed the Tombstone Hills off on their left. To the right of the road, Reaper saw a chain-link fenced area surrounding a flat field and three arched silver Quonset hut shelters.

“Just what is that?” Reaper said from the driver's seat.

“That is the luxurious, ultramodern Tombstone Municipal Airfield,” Hausmann said. “There's a graded airstrip down in the draw past those shelters there. That's about it, no control tower, radio, radar, gas pumps, or anything else really.”

“Who uses it?” Reaper said. “Drug runners?”

“I don't think even dopers use this field,” Hausmann said. “This really is the middle of nowhere. Besides, it's a long drive to anywhere and outsiders kind of stand out during the off season at Tombstone.”

“The off season?” Reaper said.

“Pretty much the summer around here,” Hausmann said. “The tourists don't like the heat that much. And tourism is just about the major industry here in Tombstone.”

The town in question was coming up as the two men were talking. There was a substantial residential area built up around the central core of historic buildings. Several blocks of downtown Tombstone were closed off to motor traffic, so Reaper parked his car under the shade of one of the trees lining Allen Street, the main street. Except for the vehicles that could be seen several blocks away down the street, the central area of Tombstone in the middle of the day didn't appear to have changed all that much from over a hundred years ago.

The place where they were meeting Pat Manors, the Border Patrol agent, was just across the street from where Reaper had parked the car. As he looked toward the central part of historical Tombstone, Reaper asked:

“And just where is the O.K. Corral anyway?

“Right there across the street,” Hausmann said
pointing. “That's it behind that fence. That's why they call this restaurant the O.K. Cafe, it's not thirty yards from the corral.”

There were several tables outside the cafe and sitting at one of them in the shade of a tree was a young man wearing a white Stetson hat and dark sunglasses. He stood up as Hausmann and Reaper approached. He was about medium height and slender, wearing denim jeans and a light-colored shirt.

“Hey, Pat,” Hausmann said as he extended his hand, “good to see you again.”

“Same here, Cowboy,” Manors said using Hausmann's nickname. “So this is your SEAL buddy? A long way from water, guy.”

“Ted Reaper,” Reaper said as he shook hands with Manors. “As long as there's ice to cool the beer, I'm close enough to water.”

Small talk continued as the men sat down and took a look through the menus. When the waitress came out to take their orders, Reaper passed on the famous O.K. buffalo burger and just went with a standard hamburger and fries. He felt he had probably done the right thing when Hausmann and Manors both ordered the same.

“Nah,” Hausmann said, “I just like their hamburgers.”

“Their breakfasts are pretty darn good, too,” Manors said.

They continued to talk about nothing very important until their food had arrived and they ate. There were no other customers at the sidewalk tables and few pedestrians were walking past. The trio had sufficient privacy to talk about more serious subjects while they were lean
ing over their coffee. Manors sat quietly listening while Hausmann brought him up to speed on the situation. Reaper filled in the detail about what happened the night before, after Hausmann had been injured.

“So you had a run-in with some kind of armed coyotes the other night?” Manors said.

“Not quite a run-in,” Hausmann said, “more of an out-and-out ambush. And these guys weren't like any coyotes I ever heard of. They weren't guiding a bunch of illegals through the desert, or escorting some drug mules. They were moving in to set up an ambush—specifically for me. And the evidence looks like this might be the same bunch who hit Sam Duran last night.”

“I sure wouldn't mind nailing the bastards who took Sam down,” Manors said. “You know the department is writing it off as a drug hit? They figure it was either a falling out among thieves, or a payback for all of the trouble that came down on the border after Langstrom was killed.”

“There's not much question the men we're after were at least involved in Sam's murder,” Hausmann said, “they were carrying his address as well as mine.”

“And they had a newspaper picture showing both Hausmann and Duran,” Reaper said as he pulled the clipping from his shirt pocket. “This thing had all the earmarks of a military ambush, including the use of only military weapons and ammunition.”

“Sounds like you folks ran into some Mexican military types working for the wrong side,” Manors said. “That isn't all that new, I'm afraid. Rogue Mexican military units have been renting out troops as drug es
cort guards for years now. It's really bad along some parts of the border.”

“This hasn't been something that's made the press very much,” Reaper said. “And there has been almost nothing reported about it in DEA and intelligence reports about the border.”

“No one back in D.C. wants to make this a major diplomatic incident,” Majors said. “Most of the time, any reports about Mexican military units crossing over into the United States seem to get squashed long before anyone important reads them. And the DEA doesn't want to rock the boat by demanding any action. And they sure as heck don't saddle up and ride out into the desert where they could meet these guys face-to-face.”

“There doesn't seem to be a lot of love lost between the DEA and the men on the ground in the Border Patrol,” Reaper said.

“The DEA? For the most part we hate them,” Manors said. “I don't know any agents who like them at all. It seems that they mess with us every chance they get. I'll give you an example. The DEA is supposed to have all of this intel available to them. A Border Patrol agent, a close friend of mine, was driving down the road and saw this horse trailer heading on down the way. He couldn't put his finger on it, but something about the trailer just didn't seem right to him.

“Something just wasn't hitting him right about that trailer, and then he finally figured it out. So he pulled over the trailer and went up to talk to the driver. Now, the driver was just sitting there, he had a ball cap on, mustache, looked like he lived in the local area. That
was just the wrong combination, this guy should not be driving this truck.

“When my friend asked the driver if he minded if he looked in the trailer, then the guy got nervous and a little belligerent. So he took the guy out of the truck and cuffed him. In the trailer was 3,800 pounds of marijuana, a whole trailer load, one of the biggest ones we ever had.

“So here's this Border Patrol agent, just doing what he's doing, going by a hunch—and he really did take it seriously, he's a good agent. The DEA comes in and they wanted to claim the load.”

“So there's no love lost between the Border Patrol and the DEA?” Reaper said.

“I will tell you,” Manors said, “and any Border Patrol agent will say the same thing, a huge percentage of the DEA's local narcotics seizures are ours. If I was to just pull a number out of my hat, I would say that 80 percent of their numbers belong to us. We do the seizing, and they get the numbers.

“There was a time when a group of us walked more than 350 pounds of marijuana out of the desert. It took something like ten hours to get all of it out. There was no way to get anything on wheels in there and we didn't have a helicopter to fly it out. So we packed it out on our backs.

“After we got in, it was put in the station. All of us were pretty dusty and dirty, but we took the time to take a bunch of hoo-rah pictures standing around the seizure. Then the DEA came down and got out of their air-conditioned trucks. One DEA agent was here, and
another in the back. It looked like they were setting up some protective detail for some super-important person, at our station.

“And they were all wearing their little fag-bags right up front, the fanny packs that go around the waist. Those things just aren't cool out here. They denote you as someone who just doesn't know any better, and around here that means FBI or DEA.

“And they took the marijuana, claimed it for their own right there in our station. And we hadn't even cleaned up yet after packing it in on our backs. That one pissed off a bunch of us. So you could say there isn't the best working relationship between most of the agents in the Border Patrol and the DEA.

“But Sam Duran was never like that,” Hausmann said. “He never became the kind of bureaucrat who looked at just the numbers over the people. That's why the higher-ups in the DEA always had a case of the ass against him.”

“I never heard about his career problems in the DEA,” Manors said, “but you're right about things being a hell of a lot different with how he operated. Duran always made sure that the men who did the work got the credit. It didn't make him the most popular man with the bean counters back in D.C. Those guys just live to count the numbers, that's all that means anything to them. Bigger numbers for their agencies meant more money coming their way.

“No, none of the DEA supervisors were very happy with Sam not making sure that their agency got the credit for all of the seizures that it could. But he was so
good at working undercover and pulling in the big busts that they couldn't do anything to him. His seizure and conviction rates were so high just because of his own work that he didn't need to steal anything from any of us just to puff himself up. He wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty, knew the area up and down the border as well as anyone, and could ride a horse without falling off—not something a hell of a lot of DEA agents can do. When Sam Duran retired last year, he was on the books as one of the most successful agents of all time down in Mexico.

“Then he came out here, back where he grew up on the ranch. Victor Langstrom knew him back in the days when they were kids together climbing around the hills along the border. They both could speak Spanish like a native, that was one of the things that made them both so successful at what they did. But a whole lot of people could never get past Duran's background as a DEA agent.

“Some of that was just because of what I told you with the DEA doing what they do. Other law enforcement agents, and quite a few prosecutors, just can't believe that a man can be as successful an undercover agent as Duran was without some dirt rubbing off on him.

“Victor Langstrom was my mentor. I loved that man like a father. No one wants to nail his killer more than I do. But he personally vouched for Sam Duran and that was good enough for me. That case they had against Sam never did make any sense to me. And I don't blame you,” Manors said as he nodded at Hausmann, “for it falling apart.”

As he leaned back in his seat, Hausmann looked down at his coffee cup in quiet silence for a moment.

“It strikes me,” Hausmann said, “that if anyone was willing to go through all of the trouble that it took to try and frame a man like Sam Duran, they would still have a serious case of the ass against him after he slipped out of their trap. They killed a federal agent, a Border Patrol agent, and that brought all kinds of hell down on the border.”

“I know for a fact,” Manors said, “that every Border Patrol agent for a hundred miles in any direction showed up here. It was when they couldn't find any other suspects that they came down so hard on Sam Duran.”

“Then those same people,” Reaper said, looking pointedly at Hausmann, “would probably be seriously pissed off at whoever it was that wrecked their frame-up of Duran.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Hausmann agreed.

“Sounds like you two are thinking along the same lines,” Manors said. “Do you have a plan together yet? And just what part did you have me playing in it?”

“Just to use some of your skills, really,” Reaper said. “Hausmann told me that you were one of the best trackers he knows.”

“I don't know about being the best,” Manors said, “but I've had my share of practice. Illegals don't just walk along the roads around here.”

“Well,” Reaper said, “it's not exactly people we need you to help track.”

Filling Manors in on what they had found earlier
that afternoon, Reaper and Hausmann told him about the footprints and the blood trail ending at the tire tracks.

“And you figure those vehicles were some kind of dune buggies or ATVs?” Manors asked.

“They definitely had four tires,” Reaper said. “So they weren't some kind of dirt bikes.”

“The tire tracks had very deep tread marks,” Hausmann said. “They could have been dune buggies. Why? Is that important?”

“It could be,” Manors said. “Dirt bikes would be a lot easier to take across the desert and still stay hidden. And crossing the border with them would be easier as well. But injured men would have a real hard time riding one, especially across country.

“Dune buggies and ATVs are a lot bigger than bikes. That makes them a heck of a lot harder to hide when you cross the open desert, even at night. And Border Patrol agents are keeping a careful eye out for cross-country vehicles this close to the border. Your place is what, twelve miles from the border?”