Remember The Alamo

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Chapter 1

It was broad daylight, damn it. Ernie Martinez hunkered behind the little outcropping of dirt and stone and listened to the chatter of machine guns. Nobody expects to be attacked in broad daylight.

Nobody expects to die in broad daylight. Death’s natural habitat is the night, especially the lonely hours after midnight. That was when Ernie had always hated to go out on patrol, because the darkness could hold many things, and most of them were dangerous.

He held his radio to his mouth and shouted over the racket, We need help out here! Somebody! We’re pinned down—

A bullet struck close enough to sling grit into Ernie’s eyes. He yelped in pain and recoiled, and that lifted his body just enough so that the next slug to come whistling toward him clipped his upper left arm, just above the shoulder.

The impact drove him back down into the ground. Sand clogged his mouth and nose. He choked and spat, but fought off the impulse to rise up again. That had almost gotten him killed just now. He had to be more careful if he hoped to survive this ambush.

Three of his fellow Border Patrolmen were already dead, sprawled in jeeps and on the ground nearby, their uniforms turning dark with the blood that leaked from the bullet holes in their bodies.

Ernie and four more patrolmen had lived through the opening volley that had also blown out the tires of the four jeeps, trapping them here in this sandy, rocky stretch of ground less than a mile north of the Rio Grande.

The bullet hitting Ernie’s arm had felt like a hard punch from a fist. Then that shoulder and the whole arm had gone numb for a minute or so.

Now the numbness was wearing off, and pain flooded through him. He gritted his teeth against it. He didn’t want to cry. But tears welled from his eyes, anyway, and rolled down his cheeks. He didn’t make a sound, though.

After a few minutes he was able to reach over with his good arm and snag the radio he had dropped when he was shot. He dragged it closer to his mouth, pressed the button, and said, Help. I’m shot. Three patrolmen down.

He gave their location as best he could estimate it, then went on. We’re under heavy fire. Please help.

When he released the pressure on the talk button, he heard only a static hiss from the radio’s speaker. Was it possible the attackers had some way of jamming the Border Patrol’s radios?

Ernie wouldn’t put anything past the bastards. The days were long gone when all the Border Patrol had to worry about were the coyotes, mostly independent contractors who smuggled illegals across the Rio Grande.

Now the enemy was well organized and well armed, and most of all well funded by the drug cartels. Ernie had even heard rumors that some of them were tied to Islamic terror groups. He had no trouble believing that, either.

One thing was for sure: The gang that had ambushed them had the advantage in numbers and weaponry. The patrolmen carried handguns and had some shotguns and rifles in the jeeps. They were no match for the modern assault rifles being wielded by the unseen attackers.

So it was entirely possible that they could possess the technology to prevent the luckless Border Patrolmen from calling for help. Technology bought and paid for by drug money, terror money.

A wave of nausea swept through Ernie. He was losing too much blood. The left sleeve of his uniform shirt was soaked by now, and the hot flood continued. He was going to lose consciousness soon, he knew, and then he would bleed out and die.

The firing stopped. Ernie was so groggy he thought for a second that he had imagined the silence. But then he realized it was real. Were the attackers leaving, content with the damage they had already done?

Viva México! Viva Reconquistar!

Hard on the heels of the shout, somebody screamed. Ernie couldn’t stand it. He lifted his head to peer over the little hump of ground in front of him.

He saw more than a dozen men stalking through the scrub brush, assault rifles in their hands. They wore uniforms of some sort—high-topped black boots, tight white trousers, blue coats, narrow-brimmed caps.

A shock of recognition went through Ernie. Those were the uniforms of Santa Anna’s army, from the 1830s. Ernie would know. He had seen them often enough, growing up as a kid in San Antonio and watching that TV show about Davy Crockett, rooting for the guys inside the Alamo instead of the dictator’s army outside.

And why wouldn’t he root for the defenders of the old mission? He had been born and raised in Texas, not Mexico. Quite a few of the Alamo’s defenders had been of Spanish descent, too. People tended to forget about that and think of the Texas revolution as a gringos-versus-Mexicans conflict, when it hadn’t been that way at all.

Ernie had time for those thoughts to flash through his mind before he realized that despite the old-fashioned uniforms, the killers were using modern weapons. Except for the handful who carried machetes. Sunlight glinted on the blades as they rose and fell, chopping the screaming Border Patrolmen into bloody, quivering pieces.

The other guys had to be wounded too bad to fight back, or they wouldn’t have let the ambushers murder them like that. One by one, the attackers closed in on the patrolmen, shouting, Reconquistar! Reconquistar! and using the machetes on their victims.

Ernie could put up a fight, though. He took the radio in his left hand. The fingers didn’t want to work very well because of the wound on his upper arm, but he managed to close them around the radio and press down on the transmit button with his thumb. Blood ran down the back of his hand.

Then Ernie pulled his pistol with his other hand and lurched upright, yelling, Reconquer this, you sons of bitches! He started firing.

He was too shaky to do more than aim in the general direction of the men in the old-fashioned uniforms. One of them staggered, hit by blind chance. The others turned and brought up their assault rifles. Flame and lead spat from the barrels.

Ernie felt the bullets thudding into him, driving him off his feet. He didn’t know how many times he was hit, but he was shot to hell, he knew that. He had dropped his gun, too, so he couldn’t even get in a last shot as the killers in the old-fashioned uniforms stalked over to him.

One of them glared down at Ernie and said in Spanish, You are a traitor to your people.

In English, Ernie gasped out a reply. My people are . . . Texans. . . .

He saw the sun shining on the blade of the machete as it descended toward him.

That was the last thing he ever saw.

But his last thought was the hope that the transmission from the radio still clutched in his hand got through somewhere, somehow.

Chapter 2

Pain pounded behind Phil Cody’s eyes. He’d had too much to drink the night before, and he was paying for it this morning. The sunlight lancing in through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the office in the San Antonio high-rise didn’t help matters, either.

Phil forced his attention back to what Evelyn Harlow was saying. She was the CEO of the real-estate marketing firm that took up three floors in this building. If Phil wanted the job of providing security for her company, it would pay not to let her know that he was hungover.

So you can see that with millions of dollars involved, we can’t afford to take any risks we don’t have to, can’t you, Mr. Cody?

Of course, Phil said. He smiled. He could manage to do that much, anyway.

Your computer people are top notch, I take it?

Of course. Damn it, he’d just said that. Now he was repeating himself. He figured he had better expand on his answer. I have the best people in the business working for me.

Evelyn Harlow smiled back at him. She was forty-five, maybe fifty, with a well-preserved beauty that showed she was willing to spend time and money on it.

What about your own computer skills?

This was where Phil had always believed that honesty was the best policy. If he claimed to know more than he did and a potential client started throwing around reams of computer jargon, he would be shown up as a fraud in a hurry, and that could only hurt his chances of landing a new job.

I can turn the computer on, get my e-mail, and surf the Web a little. He shrugged. Beyond that, I depend on people who really know what they’re doing.

In other words, you know your limitations.

A man’s got to, Phil said, sort of quoting Clint Eastwood. You couldn’t go wrong with Clint.

Evelyn reached out and tapped a well-manicured fingernail on the folder that sat on her desk. I’ll give your proposal to my people and let them run the numbers. I should have a decision for you by the close of business today.

Phil nodded. That’s fine.

In the meantime, Evelyn went on, are you free for lunch today?

He was tempted. He saw interest in her eyes and no wedding ring on her finger. She would be good company at lunch, he sensed, and after that . . . well, she might be even better company.

But he shook his head and said, I’m afraid not. I have meetings all day.

That’s a shame. Maybe another time, since I have a feeling there’s a good chance we’ll be working together.

I hope so, Phil said.

He stood up, shook hands with her—her hand was cool and smooth, and he liked the strength in her grip—and left the office. He didn’t loosen his tie and swipe the back of his hand across his forehead until after he had ridden down on the elevator and left the high-rise.

A bomb exploded a couple of blocks away as he walked across the building’s tree-shaded parking lot. He heard the whistle of incoming artillery and ignored that, too, knowing it wasn’t really there. As he reached his car and grasped the front door handle, the smell of roasting flesh filled his nostrils and he was back on the highway in Kuwait, the highway that Saddam’s Republican Guard had used to try to flee the country they had occupied. The road was littered with burned-out vehicles, and inside those vehicles were the charred corpses of Guardsmen. The flesh was gone from many of them, leaving only blackened bones. Skulls leered at Phil as he walked past in his combat gear, rifle in hand.

He took a deep breath and looked down at the smooth pavement of the parking lot. The stench was gone. The air was warm, like it had been in Kuwait, but it was filled with the smell of flowers, not burning humans.

His father must have smelled that stink a lot, tramping across Europe behind Patton’s tanks as he had. Phil wondered how his dad had been able to stand weeks and months of that. The ground offensive in Desert Storm had lasted only a few days, and the things he had experienced there still haunted Phil many years later. They came back to him especially strong on mornings like this, when he’d had too much to drink the night before.

He knew that was a damn cliché, the burned-out vet who couldn’t let go of what he had seen and done in combat. And most of the time he didn’t really fit that description. He was a fully functioning member of society, the owner of a successful business. He even belonged to the Rotary Club, damn it!

And you couldn’t lay the failure of his marriage at the feet of the war, either. Things had been fine with Nancy when he got back from Kuwait. It wasn’t until a few years later that she had gotten the wandering eye and cheated on him. He had walked away from the marriage then, and even though he had just been getting his business off the ground, he had been generous with Nancy, considering what she had done.

He couldn’t afford to be otherwise, because by then he’d had a daughter, and he knew that if he wanted to see her on any sort of regular basis, he couldn’t make a bitter enemy out of his ex-wife.

He opened the car door and got in. Even though it was February, the sun had heated up the inside of the car until it was uncomfortably warm. Here in San Antonio, winter was just about over.

Phil drove past the Alamo as he left downtown, heading for Interstate 10 so that he could go back out to the northwest part of town where his office was located. He glanced across the plaza at the old mission, which always looked smaller than most people expected when they saw it in person for the first time. Surrounded by downtown as it was, you could almost miss it if you didn’t know it was there. And if not for the flock of tourists that was always around it.

The car radio was tuned to a talk-radio station, and the host was discussing the massacre of those eight Border Patrolmen a few days earlier.

"—time we realized that we have to devote more money and more manpower to securing our borders. We were about to get off to a good start on that a few years ago, but then the current administration undercut everything that had been done. Folks, we simply cannot allow unchecked illegal immigration to continue. It’s a matter of national security.

Oh, I know that some people say our economy depends on undocumented workers, but that’s bull-you-know-what. Those jobs should go to either American citizens or aliens who are here legally. What we need to do is crack down on employers who hire illegals because they know they can get away with paying lower wages to them, and we should build that fence to crack down on illegal immigration. Because we don’t know who’s coming across the border. It’s not just honest, hardworking people who want to make a better living for their families anymore. It’s drug smugglers and thieves and criminals. It’s vicious thugs like the ones who killed those Border Patrolmen. The people we put out there to protect our borders are outnumbered and outgunned now, folks. They’re in a fight for their lives, and Washington won’t give them the tools, or the leeway, to do their job properly. When we hamstring our efforts to secure our borders, we’re putting all of us, every man, woman, and child in this country, in a little more danger every day.

That made sense to Phil. He had nothing against Hispanics. Having grown up in South Texas, he spoke Spanish like a native and had many friends in the Hispanic community. A lot of his employees were Hispanic. Most of them came from families that had been in Texas as long as or longer than Phil’s family had been.

What he couldn’t understand were the people who considered themselves Mexican even though they were American citizens. The ones who waved the Mexican flag during protests or wanted to fly it at schools and public buildings right along with the American flag and the Texas flag. The ones who wanted everything from school to business to the government to be bilingual, so people who didn’t speak English would never have any reason to learn how to do so. That was crazy, in Phil’s opinion. This was America. People who wanted to live here ought to be able to speak English. What could be simpler than that?

But he wasn’t going to be able to solve the problems of the world, he thought with a sigh as he pushed a preset button on the radio and changed the station to classic rock. It was all he could do to live his own life.

Because in the big scheme of things, one little guy didn’t matter.

Chapter 3

The ground behind the VFW hall sloped down to a pretty, cottonwood-lined creek, which made it a perfect spot for a picnic. Tables and benches had been carried down there and set up; then the tables were piled high with food and kegs of beer. Although the official start of spring was more than a month off, here in South Texas winter was already dead and gone. The sunshine that washed over the landscape this Saturday was warm, as were the breezes from the south.

Given the circumstances—good food, good fellowship, good weather—the atmosphere should have been happier. Instead, a pall hung over the gathering. Maybe they should have canceled the picnic, Dieter Schmidt thought, after the bloodbath on the border.

That was what people had started calling the brutal slaying of the eight Border Patrolmen a few days earlier. They had been out on a routine patrol, looking for illegals crossing the border, when someone had come along and massacred them. Nobody knew exactly what had happened. A piece of a garbled radio transmission from one of the patrolmen had gotten through, but it didn’t provide any answers.

Just gunshots, screams—and a voice shouting, Reconquistar!

To reconquer was the word’s literal meaning, but what the hell did that mean? Dieter didn’t know. All he knew was that the talk around the picnic tables was quieter than it should have been, and there wasn’t as much laughter, and even though the kids ran and played, their folks kept a closer eye on them than usual.

They weren’t that far from the border here. Less than thirty miles, in fact.

Mike Belkowicz came over and sat down next to Dieter. With his campaign cap, medal-decorated vest, and beer gut, Belkowicz looked like a walking cliché of a VFW member. He had been in Vietnam, and his father had fought in the Italian campaign and then left a leg on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944.

Belko—Not Bilko, damn it, I hated that show—had taken a while to warm up to Dieter. At first he had wondered if it might have been Dieter’s grandfather manning the machine gun that ripped away the elder Belkowicz’s leg on D-day. He didn’t like the idea of a Kraut being in the VFW, even though Dieter had done a tour of duty in Baghdad and Fallujah.

Dieter had explained to him, though, that his grandfather Alfred Schmidt had been a house painter in Chicago during World War II and hadn’t been anywhere near Utah Beach. He had moved his family to Texas after the war, and Dieter had been born in Waxahachie, where he had grown up, played high school football, climbed the local water tower, and gotten a shy, studious girl named Beth knocked up just as if his name had been John Smith or Jimmy Williams.

Once Belko had understood all that, he had accepted Dieter as an American, although he had warned him, I’m a Polack, and I ain’t ever gonna be too fond o’ Krauts.

Now Belko popped the top on a can of beer he’d gotten from one of the coolers and said, That wouldn’t’a happened if they’d built the damn fence like they were supposed to.

You mean what happened to those Border Patrolmen? Dieter asked.

Belko took a swig of beer. What the hell could I be talkin’ about? They should’ve built the damn fence.

A law had been passed several years earlier authorizing the construction of a fence along sections of the border between the United States and Mexico. Quite a bit of it would have been here in Texas.

But although a few short sections of fence had been erected, the rest of the project was stalled out at the moment because of economic and political considerations. In other words, there wasn’t enough money to pay for it, and not as many politicians in Washington thought it was a good idea anymore.

Even with the fence, illegals would still cross the border, Dieter said. The Border Patrol would still be out there.

You don’t know that. They put up a big enough, long enough fence, and line it with cameras, that’ll keep the illegals out. Belko took another drink. A few land mines wouldn’t hurt anything, either.

You don’t mean that. You’re just upset because those men were killed.

Yeah, well, this country could use a few more people gettin’ upset about all the crap that goes on. I heard the other day that a rancher in Arizona shot a wetback who was tryin’ to break into his house and rob him. Didn’t kill the son of a bitch, though, so what happens after that?

I’m sure you’ll tell me, Dieter said.

"Damn right I will. The illegal bastard sues the rancher! And some damn judge sides with him! Takes the rancher’s place away from him and gives it to the illegal. You ever hear anything to beat that, Dieter?"

Judges do outrageous things all the time, Dieter said with a shrug. That doesn’t mean the system is broken, just that its administration is flawed.

"That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. The system in this country is broken. It’s busted all to pieces. More than fifty years of liberal judges and politicians and reporters have seen to that."

Dieter wanted to believe that Belko was wrong, but he couldn’t bring himself to argue about it anymore.

Besides, the rumble of truck engines had caught his attention. He looked up the hill toward the VFW hall and saw several vehicles pulling into the gravel parking lot in front of the building. They looked like UPS or FedEx trucks, but without the markings.

Who the hell’s that? Belko said.

Dieter didn’t know, but he pushed himself to his feet and said, I’ll go see. He started walking up the hill, a tall young man with dark, curly hair under his campaign cap. He waved to his wife and six-year-old daughter as he passed them. Beth looked good in jeans and a man’s shirt with the tails tied up so that a little of her stomach was revealed. She was nibbling on a chicken leg. Amber had a plate full of fried chicken and potato salad in front of her and was digging into the salad with a fork.

Dieter was halfway to the VFW hall when the back doors of the trucks opened and men began piling out. He frowned in surprise as he saw that they wore some sort of old-fashioned military uniform that included boots, white leggings, and blue jackets. Dieter thought for a second that they looked French or maybe Prussian, but that wasn’t right.

Then he saw the guns in their hands and didn’t care anymore what sort of uniforms those were. He whirled around and shouted, Run! Everyone run!

The picnickers under the trees just looked at him, startled and confused, unsure what was going on. Dieter ran toward them, waving his arms over his head. Run! He saw his wife and daughter. Beth, run!

A volley of automatic weapons fire ripped out behind him. A white-hot poker jabbed into his side and tumbled him off his feet. As he rolled over, the roar of gunfire grew louder, but not loud enough to drown out all the screams.

Or the proud, angry shouts of Reconquistar! Reconquistar!

Chapter 4

Damn it, Mr. Mahone, don’t tell me you don’t have any idea what’s going on, the president of the United States said. "You’re the head of the FBI. It’s your job to know what’s going on, everywhere, all the time."

Edward Mahone refrained from pointing out that doing the job the president was talking about would be a hell of a lot easier if she and her cohorts in Congress hadn’t gutted not only the Bureau, but just about every other law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering agency in the country. It took a considerable amount of tongue-biting on his part to do so.

Yes, ma’am, he said, his deep, powerful rumble of a voice sounding reassuring, whether it really was or not.

But that was all that was required to succeed in government these days, he thought. You had to sound like you knew what you were doing, even if in truth you were the biggest foul-up to ever come down the pike.

The president was sitting in a makeup chair in a small room off the Oval Office. In a few minutes she would be addressing the country, breaking into network programming to do so. Thank goodness it wasn’t playoff season in any major sport, or that might have caused a problem. A couple more weeks and March Madness would be under way.

"Just tell me what you do know, Mr. Mahone," the president said.

We have survivors this time, thank God. Fourteen people lived through the attack at the VFW picnic this afternoon. A couple of them might not make it, but most of them are expected to recover.

And how many died?

Mahone tried not to wince. Ninety-four.

So nearly a hundred Americans are dead tonight, massacred by . . . who?

Mahone didn’t have to look down at the printouts he clutched, transcripts of the interviews that had been conducted by local authorities after the shooting. As far as we can tell . . . the Mexican army.

An invasion—

Not the current Mexican army, Mahone interrupted, forgetting for a moment who he was talking to. The army of General Santa Anna.

Is he some sort of warlord or the head of a drug cartel?

And she’d gone to an Ivy League university, as well as law school, Mahone thought. He had learned about Santa Anna in junior high in Luling, Texas, and again in college at Grambling, where he had gone on a football scholarship. He remembered, briefly, a former presidential candidate from the current president’s party seeing