A state of disobedience (7 page)

Rottemeyer felt a momentary flush of indignation—not at McCreavy, no never!—but at the narrow-minded, patriarchal men who ran her armed forces and failed to recognize their place in the world . . . and her own.

"Where do your loyalties lie?" Rottemeyer demanded. "Can't
anyone
here get rid of this fucking priest?"

Still, she was a practical politician. No sense in setting unfortunate precedents. She turned her attention to the Attorney General, Treasury, the Surgeon General and the Bureau. "Jesse, you take charge of this. I want that mission destroyed. BATF will provide some forces, likewise I want a force from the Presidential Guard"—Treasury nodded, both groups fell under his jurisdiction—"and the Hostage Rescue Team"—this set Friedberg to scribbling.

The surgeon general added, spontaneously, "I'll put my security police on alert in case this turns nasty . . ."

"Maaaaan," whispered Julio. "Whoever thought Padre could look so . . . so . . . nasty?" he asked with more than a touch of admiration and pride.

Miguel turned to look. There, alone in the sun, stood the priest. Atop his head, a green beret. Clothing his body, faded but crisp green fatigues, the clerical collar still visible. Over his shoulders was draped the harness that all boys know to be a warrior's battle equipment.

In his left hand, grasped at the balance firmly but not tightly, was the rifle.

For the first time since his beating the priest had regained the young, vigorous look that belied his years.

He made a motion with his right hand circling over his head. He had used the sign before, to call the boys together. Old habits die hard.

One by one, and by twos and threes, the boys and some few girls began to gather around the priest for their orders.

"Just give me the orders, Juani. That's all I ask. Let me save your brother and my friend."

Torn with indecision, demoralized with self-doubt . . . if one had asked an honest answer she would have said "out of my depth" . . . the governor of Texas simply wept.

"Juani . . . I have to do something."

DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED

BY MR. STENNINGS:
Q. And when did you get the idea in your head that maybe something could be done?
A. I guess it was not too long after someone finally decided to do something, about them kids in the mission, at least, if not the entire problem. "Cooler heads prevailed," as they say. We were all plumb sure that the feds would just go in and kill 'em all. But we were wrong . . . sort of.
Still and all, one of the folks surrounding the place—he was one of us, a Texas man, go figure—decided to give it a try. I don't know what he said to 'em, both the folks in the mission and the ones outside. Whatever it was, it seemed to work.
I got myself and my wife up early to watch it on the TV. Even Daddy came over to see. One lone man, wearin' one lone star, standin' outside the mission walls waiting for the kids to come out.
Made me proud, it did.
Course, you couldn't see the man's face or anything. There must have been a dozen TV cameras on him, but they were all back where it was safe and he . . . well, he was up front where it wasn't.

"We should be safe here for a while, Jack," Jorge lied, as he gently laid Schmidt down on the base of a muddy ditch. 
 

Montoya, even carrying Schmidt, reached the PZ before the helicopters. So, apparently, did the Viet Cong. So, for that matter, did Sergeant Tri. It was this, seen as if close up through the lieutenant's binoculars, that caused the sergeant to whisper, "Christ have mercy."  
 

Tri's head was perched atop a red stained pole, his eyes still closed as Jorge had left them. 
 

"Wha'? What is it, Jorge?" 
 

"Nothing, Jack. Nothing. Just relax and wait for the choppers to come." 
 

Montoya searched through his own pouches for ammunition. Finding a bare three magazines—those only courtesy of looting the dead, previously—he began to rummage through Schmidt's own harness.  
 

Call it . . . ninety rounds. Five frags—fragmentation grenades. One claymore. Couple smoke; one colored. Jack's .45 and twenty-one rounds for that.  
 

As he coolly set up the claymore to fire down a likely trail that led onto the PZ, Montoya began whistling something, a faintly Arabic sounding tune. "Deguello," it was called. It seemed appropriate. 
 

As he worked, Montoya heard the sound—indistinct, faint—of a brace of Hueys. 
 

The sound of the helicopter was strange to his ears. It was straining, so much was obvious. But the strained pitch was not that of the Hueys with which the priest was familiar.
Perhaps one of those new jobs; a "Blackhawk," Jack called them.
 

Montoya strained his eyes against the midnight gloom. Yes, there it was. A helicopter, some pendulumlike thing swinging underneath.

This was nothing new. Forces had been building up around the mission for days. Some came by helicopter, some by automobile and truck, some by the light armored vehicles, LAVs, favored by the PGSS. Oftentimes the helicopters swung overhead for a view. So far the priest had refused to open fire on them. "Let them fire the first shot," he had ordered.

Most of the helicopters had kept high; out of practical range. Curiously, this one did not. With each passing second the priest's grip on his rifle grew tighter, unseen fingers whitening from the pressure. As the chopper came over the low mission wall he shifted to a firing stance. Then he recognized the pendulum, two big cubes swinging underneath.
A slingload?
Nobody
assaults with a slingload.
The rifle lowered.

The helicopter's nose pulled up slightly, raising a cloud of dust and grit. The pitch changed yet again as it settled closer to the ground. The priest saw the crew chief leaning out, watching for the load slung underneath to touch down. When it did the chief put a hand to his throat, said something that would have been unintelligible to anyone not on the same intercom system, and waved to the priest. Montoya waved back.

The helicopter moved forward and lowered itself again, this time until the higher cube touched down. The priest perceived, dimly, some kind of flexible strap falling over the second cube. Then the Blackhawk, black indeed in the moonless night, pulled up and away.

Montoya waved again as he walked forward toward the netted cargo that had been left for him.

He pulled away a letter he had found "hundred-mile-an-hour" taped to the side.

"Dear Jorge,"
the priest read in the bright oval cast by his flashlight.
"In all the world there is nobody to whom I owe the debts and favors that I owe to you. Please accept these small tokens of my personal esteem in this, your hour of need.
 

Sincerely,
Jack
 
P.S. The ammunition is on the bottom layer of this load; the rifles and such on top. Most of the rest is food, some body armor, gas masks, and some medical supplies. There's one radio and half a dozen batteries. Good luck, friend. I'll do what I can. I am trying. There's a cell phone in there, one of those disposable jobs. Give your sister a call, why don't you."  
 

"Yes, Rodg'—ah . . . mission accomplished? Great. Great news, friend." With a lighthouse-beam smile, Schmidt replaced the telephone on its cradle and returned to the governor's conference table.

"What has you looking so happy?" Juanita enquired.

"Nothing, Governor," Schmidt answered formally. "Nothing for you to worry about in any case."

She gave him a look of extreme suspicion, raising nothing more than a shrug in return.
What have you done now, Jack?
 

Juanita turned her attention to the chief of her Department of Public Safety and his close cohort, Jeffrey Nagy, the Senior Captain of the Texas Rangers, a bejowled and utterly humorless looking man.

"We're following it, Governor. Company F"—the Waco-based Ranger company—"has Sergeants Akers and Guttierez on site twenty-four hours a day."

"Is that Johnson Akers?
The
Johnson Akers?" asked Schmidt.

Surprisingly, Nagy smiled, his previously humorless face brightening as the sun brightened the lonesome Texas prairie; his smile a match for Schmidt's own. "Yeah . . . him."

"What am I not getting?" Juanita enquired.

The tall, thin to the point of emaciated, civilian-dressed man drew no interest from anyone present. His white ten-gallon hat perched back on his head shouted "Yokel!" to everyone present. That he had as open, kind and friendly a face as one might ever hope to see only confirmed the impression.

And indeed, Sergeant Johnson Akers, Texas Rangers,
was
every bit as open and friendly and kind as his face portrayed.

He was also a stone-cold killer; nerveless, unstoppable, impossible-to-intimidate. In all the history of the Texas Rangers and their higher headquarter, the Texas Department of Public Safety, only one man had ever won the Medal of Valor twice.

That man, with his open, gentle, kindly, grandfather's face, sat quietly under his ten-gallon hat, keeping careful track of every federal law enforcement agent, detachment and observer on site . . . and reporting the same to his chief.

What few knew, outside of the Rangers, was that Sergeant Akers had won both medals in the course of saving children.

Sister Sofia sat on a rocking chair surrounded by the twenty-six children of the mission aged twelve and under. (The older ones were either guarding the mission's thick adobe walls, doing necessary work to keep the operation running, or being trained by Father—as best he could under the circumstances—on the dozen rifles and two night vision scopes sent by Schmidt.)

The delivery of two and a half tons of canned and dried food had, to a degree, alleviated Sofia's concerns in the commissary department—though re-hydrating Army "B"-rations had proven problematic to people who had never seen them. Nonetheless, food was food, even if it sometimes crunched when you bit it.

Still, the possibility—she could
not
bring herself to think "probability" let alone "certainty"—of a federal assault on the mission set her stomach to churning and brought tears to her eyes. Her innocent little ones under fire? No. Never. It was unthinkable.

So she led the children in songs, mostly but not entirely of a religious nature, while the elders, in many cases the teenaged parents, stood to and prepared for the worst.

"Now if worst comes to worst and they get over the wall we fall back to the main chapel," Montoya instructed his boys. Miguel looked to the chapel behind him and nodded understanding. He thought,
Father's plan is a good one. From behind the wall only those exposing themselves can shoot at us. And unless they come over in a huge group we will outnumber them. From underneath the central water tank, Julio—who is a better shot than I will ever be—can take care of any tower they might put up to snipe at us. If they use tanks there are the "special" bottles
.

Miguel referred not to flammable Molotov cocktails but to bottles of household ammonia, good for taking out any tank in the world. This was not only true if the tank had an air filtration system, but especially if it had an air filtration system. Ammonia molecules were smaller than oxygen molecules. They would pass through any filter that would pass oxygen through. The bottles were positioned around the mission's adobe wall.

Miguel spared a surreptitious glance at hidden position and emplacements. The police have no clue about the weapons; all we are letting them see are the old ones we had. We have a chance.

"Gas!" Montoya announced, half unexpectedly. The boys immediately started fumbling with their cumbersome, clumsy face masks as the priest counted off, "One thousand, two thousand . . ."

Sergeant Akers walked off alone and made a cell phone call directly to the Chief. "Captain Nagy? Boss, there's nearly a thousand feds here. Twelve from the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. Thirty-seven from BATF. About nineteen from the Department of Justice. A hundred man maintenance and support team for the armored vehicles Fort Hood loaned them. They have about thirty-five cooks with them. Four 'observers' from . . . well, I
think
they're from Delta. You know, the Special Forces types? Act that way, anyway. Arrogant folks, you know? Then there's two full companies from the Secret Service. Over four hundred in that crew. Plus there are two more companies of riot control troops from the Office of the Surgeon General. Oh . . . 
and
something like twenty-one folks toting guns from the Environmental Protection Agency. No, sir. No, I haven't a clue what EPA thinks they're doing here."

"Yessir. Tell the governor. Forty-eight hours. No more. In forty-eight hours the feds will assault."

Grimly, Akers shut off his own phone, closed the cover, and contemplated a dilemma he had never thought to confront.

Nagy sighed. "My man on the ground says forty-eight hours, Governor. Then the feds go in."

"Forty-eight hours," Juanita echoed, faintly.

"Your brother doesn't stand too much of a chance, Governor. They have tanks, armored personnel carriers, two helicopter gunships with Army crews, and some very well-trained specialists."