Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (67 page)

“No, I think I’ll be okay today.”

“Good, because we’re not exactly flying a standard flight profile.”

That turned out to be a major understatement.  The plane, instead of climbing into the sky, dove and twisted into a dry creek bed with boulders and trees streaking past their wings.

Ranya sat behind Alex on the right side.  She had an excellent view in all directions, blocked only by the forward headrests.  If the Maule she had flown from Texas was a Jeep, the Cessna 210 was a BMW: faster, quieter and smoother.  The Centurion’s interior was much more elegantly appointed than the Spartan Maule 7.  The four bucket seats were upholstered in honey-brown leather, with headrests and seatbelts like a luxury automobile.

They were nearly always below the level of the surrounding ridgelines, often shockingly close to red rock walls as they zoomed past. Logan had already explained that they were following a “radar route,” keeping the plane in radar “shadows” below terrain. At times this meant that they could climb to over a thousand feet above the ground level, because mountains were blocking the known radar illumination, but most of the time they were below five hundred feet above ground level, and often below one hundred as trees flashed past.  They hugged sandstone cliff walls so closely that Ranya thought they would clip off a wing.  

At the end of what looked to be a box canyon, when it seemed certain that they were going to plow into the sheer rock face ahead, the plane pulled up hard at the last moment, cleared the wall and nosed over, leaving her floating weightless against her seat belt.  In an instant they burst out over what seemed to be a mini-Grand Canyon of red and orange cliffs and buttes.  The pilot immediately dove again and found a new streambed to follow, banking into its turns.  She found it frightening and exhilarating at the same time, but she was not flying the plane, and she had no control over her fate.  She could only trust her life to the pilot, and hope that Alex’s faith in his flying ability was deserved.

Alex and Logan both wore headsets with stalk microphones by their chins, so she was excluded from their communications.  Alex was also monitoring the plane’s radios for any official notice of their low-level flight.  All New Mexico law enforcement frequencies were pre-registered on their scanner.  The Customs and Border Patrol plane’s radios were equipped with the current federal encryption technology.  They would be alerted immediately if they had drawn the attention of law enforcement at any level. She could see the large full-color GPS map screen in the center of the console between the two men, and could follow their route, which was laid out ahead of them.

Their destination was a section of a disused mining road on the edge of the Vedado ranch, fourteen miles south of the runway and the conference center.  As the crow flies, this was only eighty miles from where they had taken off from the reservation, but their winding route snaked through the valleys and canyons, making wide diversions to avoid radar and populated areas.  Even so, in less than an hour Logan reduced the throttle and put down the flaps, slowing the plane, which was already flying only 200 feet above ground level.  Ranya looked ahead for something which might have been a runway, and saw nothing.  

They were descending into another nameless valley, seemingly the hundredth of the flight.  Halfway down the side of the mountain that rose to their left, buildings and other structures appeared before them, unpainted and rusting.  The pilot made one more turn, and ahead of them, she saw the road, with a straight section a few hundred yards long at its end.  She felt the wheels go down, as the ground came up to meet them.  Lining up for the approach was a relief for her.  It was the longest the plane had flown in a straight line during the entire flight.

The right side of the road was barren and spoiled, where the earth had been scraped bare.  On the left side the mountain rose up steeply, covered in spruce and aspen. Beyond the strip mine, a line of heavy timber extended across the road.  They touched down gently then braked hard, but instead of stopping, the pilot continued to rapidly taxi forward until the trees closed in around them from both sides.

She remembered hearing Logan say that the Centurion had a 39-foot wingspan, now she knew why that had been an important number.  There were only a few feet beyond their wingtips to the thick forest on either side.  The tops of saplings brushed the bottoms of their wings.  When they were a hundred yards into the trees, Logan shut down the engine.

Motionless at last, swallowed by the silence, they pulled off their headsets, unbuckled and climbed down onto the old asphalt road.  Ranya was thankful to put her feet back on terra firma.  For much of the past hour, she had wondered if she would survive the flight.  The ground immediately around them was fairly level, a rarity after what she had seen from the air. They were in a leafy green tunnel, the sky visible only above the road where the gently swaying branches did not quite meet.  The warm air actually smelled sweet, like a living potpourri of fragrant balsams.  Insects trilled and buzzed—cicadas perhaps.

As they had planned, their first order of business was to turn the plane around, to ready it to fly out on a moment’s notice.  The three of them once again walked behind the plane to the tail, and put all of their weight down on the horizontal stabilizer’s unmoving front edge to lift the nose, so that they could spin the plane in its own radius.  While turning the plane Ranya asked Logan, “Have you landed here before? How did you find this place? I’d never have thought you could land anywhere like this.”

“That’s the whole idea,” he answered her cheerfully.  “Sure, I’ve been here before.  The trick is you never try to fly into a place like this without driving it first.  At least I wouldn’t!  Not unless I lost the engine, but that’s a different story—then you put her down wherever you can, and hope for the best.  Anyway, I spotted this place from the air a couple years ago, and then I checked it out with a car.  If a car can drive it at seventy miles an hour, then you’re good to go.  That’s all we need, sixty knots of ground speed, and some clear space in front.

“Remember, I used to play the smuggler in training exercises.  My goal was to land, unload and take off before the helicopters could catch me. Sometimes I’d just land and hide, and wait for them to fly past.  They’d have to be right on my tail to know where I stopped.  With trees like this, they’d have to be literally right on top to see the plane.  Any side angle at all, and we’re invisible from above—all they see is trees.  If I got just a few miles ahead of them and I knew where I was landing, I could beat them. Not all the time, but often enough.”  He smiled at her, as they finished turning the plane.  “It got pretty exciting at times.  Like today.”

In order to slide the disassembled UAV out of the plane, the right side door had to be removed.  The UAV’s separate wing section and fuselage were stowed from the extreme end of the cargo area, up between the headrests of the rear seats. Logan used a small hammer and a drift punch to tap the pins up out of their hinges while Alex held the door steady. When the hinges were free, he set the door carefully on the ground.  Logan tilted the right side seats all the way forward and down, and gently maneuvered the long UAV components out of the plane. 

Both men immediately went to work assembling the UAV, while Ranya stood guard with her Dragunov.  The bottoms of the drone parts were painted sky blue, their tops were coyote brown.  The wing section fit into a notch across the top of the fuselage, forming a cross, and was bolted in place.  A pair of wheels was attached in front, and then the propeller, rudder and elevator were quickly installed.  In twenty minutes, the Pelican UAV was ready for flight, and the men were running systems checks.  The UAV came with a pair of laptops, a remote control console, and a UHF radio and whip antenna for its telemetry and video links. When the electronics were powered up, they were able to pan and tilt the video camera protruding from the belly of the little plane, and swing the rudder and elevators from side to side and up and down. 

***

As an assistant dean of admissions
at the University of New Mexico, Inez Ibarra Trejo could have used the perfectly adequate gym right on campus.  Nevertheless, the trim fifty year old made the two-mile drive downtown to the elite
Club De La Buena Salud
women’s fitness center every weekday at lunchtime.  

The reason that she rarely missed her workouts was because the private women’s club was one of Albuquerque’s most productive sources of useful high-level gossip.  Besides being a dean at the university, Inez Trejo was also a clandestine member of Felix Magón’s secret Revolutionary Council.

Today she fiddled with the Nautilus machines, pretending to work on her shoulders, while listening carefully to a conversation between two of her acquaintances.  Family Court Judge Galatea Obregon was pedaling a stationary bicycle next to her unlikely friend Frederica Chupatintas, who was the second in charge of the FBI’s local Field Office.

Inez Trejo knew that Chupatintas also had a perfectly fine gym to use in the Federal Building only two blocks away, but she frequently complained that the male-dominated venue presented a “hostile environment,” and said that she felt more comfortable at the all-female and Latina-oriented
Club de la Buena Salud
. Comrade Inez assumed incorrectly that Chupatintas also belonged to the club in order to pick up useful human intelligence, but in fact, that rationale had never crossed the woman’s blissfully naive mind.

Neither lady was putting much effort into cycling; instead, they were engrossed in office chitchat.  Both women were wearing stylish pastel-colored warm-up suits, which could not conceal that Chupatintas had skinny stork-legs, or that Galatea Obregon had a
culo
like two sacks of cement, and thighs to match.  Even though she was almost a decade older than these two women, Inez Trejo took satisfaction from knowing that she was still in better shape than either of them, despite a few extra lines on her face, and her graying hair.

Inez was half-following some story of FBI office politics, but when she heard one of the names being discussed, she choked out a gasp and let go of her lat bar, causing the small stack of chrome weights to come crashing down.  The name she overheard was Alexandro Garabanda!  She quickly moved over to the curling machine, just a few feet behind the stationary bicycles, where she could hear every word.

“Oh, he’s not really such a bad guy,” said Frederica Chupatintas. “Who knows, maybe this diversity workshop will do him some good.  It might broaden his horizons.”

“I don’t know,” replied the judge.  “These gay-bashers only take the training because they have to.  It’s never from the heart.  A week in Santa Fe doesn’t change them—it just teaches them how to be better at pretending.”

“Well, even if they’re pretending, isn’t that an improvement?”

“Maybe. We’ll see in six months, when I review their case.”

“His ex-wife moved to San Diego, you know.”

“Of course I know—I approved it.  She’s marrying her girlfriend, the one who whacked him at the picnic.”

Chupatintas said, “I’m not sorry that she’s gone.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-gay all the way, but that Gretchen Bosch was one scary chick.”

“That’s quite a value judgment, Frederica,” the judge said in a mildly scolding tone.  “At least their little boy will be raised without all of that heterosexist baggage.  Say, did you know that he was adopted? I’ve seen the original documents—it’s really
quite
the soap opera.  Brian Garabanda’s birth mother was a gringo traitor, an Arab terrorist!  But all of the records are sealed, so Brian will never know he was adopted.”

“His mother was an Arab terrorist? You’re joking!”

“No, for real.  Her name is Ranya Bardiwell, she’s Lebanese.”

“You’re right, that does sound like a
telenovela
,” tittered Chupatintas. “So, what do you think the odds are of Garabanda ever getting visitation rights again? Believe me Galatea, he’s far from the worst of the male agents I’ve dealt with.”

“Hmm…realistically? I’d say very slim.  Slim to none.  It won’t help Brian’s social development to shuttle back and forth between two stable lesbian parents, and a bitter, heterosexist male father figure.  Besides, Alexandro Garabanda’s not his biological father anyway.  There’s no blood connection, so Brian won’t really be missing anything.”

Their conversation continued, but Inez Trejo didn’t hear it, couldn’t follow it.  Ranya Bardiwell and Alexandro Garabanda, mentioned in the same conversation!  The last time Comrade Inez had seen Ranya Bardiwell, the Arab girl’s mettle was being tested against a wall, by Comandante Guzman’s staged firing squad.  The only time that she had ever seen Alexandro Garabanda was in the surveillance photographs from the cemetery, the ones that she had passed on to Basilio Ramos.  These photos had led to the Jewish traitor Luis Carvahal being burned at the stake after the Rally for Social Justice.  In her wildest dreams, she would not have imagined a connection between Bardiwell and Garabanda.  This would require closer scrutiny, much closer. 

***

When they were satisfied with the UAV,
the pilot looked straight up at the patch of blue between the trees, and then checked his watch.  “Al, it’s only 12:30.  Do you want to wait awhile, or put her up now? We’ve got weather coming in this afternoon, what do you think?  Fly now, or wait? It might be too early.  We might miss some of the jets if they’re not all here yet…but on the other hand, we don’t want to get caught by bad weather.”

“We can bring it back and refuel it, can’t we?”

“Sure, I guess so, but the longer it’s up, the greater the chance of being compromised, one way or the other.  And if we wait too long, we might get stuck in here if the weather turns nasty.”

“How high over the place is it going to fly?” asked Alex.  “You’re sure they won’t see it, right?”

“Pelicans should be 8,000 feet higher than the people they’re spying on.  Any lower than 6,000 feet above ground level, and there’s a chance it might be spotted.  Remember, the ranch is already at 6,000, so we’re really talking about flying 14,000 feet above sea level.”