Remember The Alamo (28 page)

"You're talkin' about givin' up," Belko said.

Dave nodded. "We kept the Reconquistadores from slaughtering as many people as they would have otherwise, and we
stopped them from taking over the Alamo. Maybe that's
enough. Maybe we made our point."

"Hell, no," another defender said. "If we leave now, the
Mexicans get the Alamo. And what's to stop the Reconquistadores from waltzing in, taking over, and refusing to leave
when the weekend is over?"

Mahone said, "That's a good point. We know there are
strong ties between the Reconquistadores and the Mexican
government, as well as with the Garcia-Lopez drug cartel. It's
entirely possible that if they get their hands on the Alamo, they
won't give it up"

"They're a mighty arrogant bunch," Stark agreed. "They'd like nothing better than to rub America's face in something
humiliating ... like losing the Alamo."

"But how could it ever come to that?" Dieter asked. "The
treaty only gives them the Alamo for the weekend. They'd
have to give it back when the time is up"

Mahone's words had caused Dave to think. He believed
the former FBI boss was on to something.

"Why would they have to give it up?" he said.

"Well, if they didn't, then we'd just make them hand it over,"
Dieter said with a frown.

"You mean take military action against them?"

Dieter's frown deepened. "Oh. Yeah. I see what you mean.
This president doesn't like to take military action against anybody except her own people."

Mahone said, "They'll stonewall, and form committees to
study the situation, and petition the United Nations or the
World Court, and in the end nothing will get done. I've lived
and worked in the belly of the beast, people, and I can tell you
that the chances of our current government actually reclaiming the Alamo by force are almost nonexistent. If the Reconquistadores ever get in here, they'll squat just like the Iranians
did in our embassy all those years ago"

"Then the solution's simple," Belko said. "We keep 'em
outta here"

"You're talking about holding the Alamo by force," Dave
said.

"Damn right I am"

"Against the Mexican army. Less than sixty of us" Dave
couldn't help but smile. "Crockett and Bowie and Travis had
better odds"

"There's no sand in here to draw a line in," Mahone said,
"but you can put it to a vote"

Dave nodded. "I guess that's what we need to do" He looked around the group. "Everybody in favor of trying to
hold the Alamo, say aye"

The chorus of "ayes" was loud and strong. Belko added,
"That's what we're here for, ain't it?"

Dave ignored the rhetorical question and said, "Anybody
opposed? Because if you are, you can walk out now, and
nobody will think any less of you. I know a lot of you men
have families who are depending on you"

He had a wife himself, but he wasn't budging. He knew
that, and so he wasn't surprised when no one spoke up. The
men were worried, of course, about what might happen, but
that didn't make them any less determined.

Dave took a deep breath and nodded. "All right. We hold the
Alamo."

"To the last man," Stark said.

"To the last man," Dave agreed.

Cecilia Montez sat in the back of the TV truck and watched
a monitor showing footage of the interview she had done earlier with Elena Alicia Obregon. The tape had been shot while
paramedics were still tending to the actress, and Cecilia
thought with a flush of pride that she looked better than Elena
Alicia, at least at the time when the interview was done. But
then, Elena Alicia had barely survived the violence in the
plaza. Her clothes and hair were disheveled, and she had blood
smeared on her face and hands. If Cecilia couldn't look better
at a time like that, then it was time for her to get out of the
news business.

The footage had been sent back to the station, where it was
currently being edited. Cecilia hoped it would lead the six o'clock news, which would be coming up soon. By all rights,
one of those chairs at the anchor desk should have been hers,
and once this interview aired, with its dramatic story of life
and death, maybe the fools at the station would realize they
were wasting Cecilia's potential by using her as a feature reporter. She could do hard news as well as anybody, and
nobody was better in a live shot.

"Hey, Sissy, guy out here wants to talk to you," Eddie
Vasquez told her from the back door of the truck.

"Don't call me Sissy," she snapped without looking
around. She put up with a lot from Eddie, since he was a good
cameraman and always made her look her best, but she had
been called Sissy while she was growing up and she'd never
liked it.

"I think you ought to talk to him," Eddie prodded.

Cecilia sighed, paused the raw footage playing on the monitor, and swung around in her chair. "What is it?"

"Guy's got home video of the riot."

Cecilia shot up out of the chair. It was a given that in a
crowd as large as the one that had been in Alamo Plaza that afternoon, somebody would have been shooting video, even if it
was just short clips taken with a phone cam. But so far, none
had shown up. News crews from every station in the city and
the national outlets, too, had been searching high and low for
good tape ever since the outbreak of violence.

Cecilia smoothed her skirt, which was short enough to
show her legs to good advantage, and tugged down her jacket
so that the low-cut neckline of the frilly blouse underneath it
was displayed properly. Then she stepped to the rear of the
truck and went down the folding steps to join Eddie and a
middle-aged man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. The man
held one of those small video cameras that would almost fit in
the palm of a hand.

"Cecilia, this is Richard Zachary," Eddie said.

With a smile on her face, Cecilia held out her hand. "Mr.
Zachary," she said, "so nice to meet you"

He looked suitably impressed as he shook hands with her.
"I watch you all the time on TV Ms. Montez," he said. "That's
why I came looking for your station's truck"

There were plenty of news trucks to choose from, that was
for sure. They had all been forced to move back several blocks from the Alamo, behind the line that was cordoned off around
the old mission. Satellite uplink antennas sprouted along the
streets like a forest of electronic saplings.

"Eddie tells me you have footage of the riot," Cecilia said
as she smoothly extricated her hand from Zachary's grip.

"Yeah." He held up the camera. "But it wasn't a riot."

She frowned. "What do you mean it wasn't a riot? All the
official statements .. ." She stopped as she saw him shaking
his head.

"It was a battle," Zachary said. "One group of guys started
shooting first, and then another group of guys tried to stop
them"

"The men who are now in the Alamo, they started shooting," Cecilia began, only to have Zachary shake his head
again.

"No, it was the other ones, the ones who were yelling, 'Re-
conquis tar.' They're the ones who started it. The other guys,
the ones who holed up in the Alamo, they were just trying to
protect the cops and the civilians in the plaza."

That claim ran directly counter to the official statements
that had been released, which claimed the men who had taken
refuge in the Alamo were the only ones shooting. True, early
on in the story there had been rumors floating around about a
battle such as the one Richard Zachary had just described, and
some of those rumors had come from the cops who had been
on the scene themselves.

But in the confusion of a riot, cops could make mistakes
just like anybody else and think they saw things they didn't
really see. During the past hour, there had been statements
from the chief of police, the director of the FBI, and the president herself making it very plain that what had happened in
the plaza was a riot sparked by right-wing protesters.

And what sort of reporter are you, Cecilia suddenly asked
herself, blindly accepting everything the government tells you?

At the same time, she was a member of the media, which
meant she supported the president's agenda and didn't really
want to do anything to damage it. Skepticism and hard questions were reserved for members of the other political party.
That was just the way things worked.

But getting actual videotape from the riot on the air first
would mean huge ratings, she told herself, and the bigger the
ratings, the bigger the chance that one of those anchor chairs
would belong to her in the near future.

Making up her mind, she said, "I'm sure you're mistaken,
Mr. Zachary, but I'd like to see your footage anyway. Why
don't you come into the truck, and we'll take a look at it?"

"You mean I can get in the truck and watch it with you?" He
was still more of a fan than anything else.

"Of course," she told him with a smile, and put a hand on
his arm, which he obviously liked a lot. "Come with me"

She led him up the folding steps into the truck, which was
crowded with technicians and equipment. Insisting that
Zachary take her seat in front of the monitor she had been
watching earlier, she eased the camera out of his hands and
gave it to Eddie, who popped the tape out and loaded it with
practiced ease. He pushed a button and started it rolling.

The tape started with Mayor Alvarez getting up to make his
speech. "Fast forward through this," Cecilia told Eddie. "We
don't need to hear it again."

Eddie ran the tape up to the spot where Alvarez was shot.
He stopped it and rewound it a little, and Cecilia winced as she
watched the scene playing in reverse, the mayor's head coming
forward and the bullet hole above his eye disappearing. If it
were only as easy to back things up in real life ...

"You can't see where the shot came from," Zachary said,
"but as soon as I heard it I turned the camera in that direction, and a few seconds later I spotted ... that guy." He pointed
at the monitor screen.

Eddie froze the shot. People were starting to stampede in
fear and shock, so they were caught leaning in all directions,
their eyes wide and their mouths open as they screamed or
shouted curses and questions. As if an aisle had deliberately
parted in the crowd at that instant, Zachary had gotten a good
shot of a man in jeans and windbreaker, clutching what appeared to be some sort of automatic pistol in his hands.

His face was brown and undoubtedly Hispanic.

"Let it play some more," Cecilia told Eddie in a voice that
had gone taut with tension.

As the tape resumed rolling, the scene on the monitor
showed the gunman spraying the crowd. A couple of cops ran
to stop him, and the gunman cut down one of them and
wounded the other. The audio was filled with gunshots and
screams and confusion, but the images were clear enough, although jerky because Zachary was being jostled roughly by
the panic-stricken crowd as he shot the footage.

Suddenly another man appeared with a pistol in his hand.
He shot the man with the automatic weapon. The plaza began
to clear as people flooded out of it. The camera caught several
more instances of Hispanic males firing automatic weapons
into the crowd. In each case, men armed with handguns returned the fire, fighting back against the killers, who were obviously out to massacre as many police and civilians as they
could. Most of the men in the second group were Anglos, but
there were a few Hispanics and blacks mixed in with them.

"Hey!" Eddie exclaimed, pausing the tape again and pointing to a tall, broad-shouldered black man who fought back
against the killers. "Isn't that that FBI guy, the one who just
resigned?"

"Oh, my God," Cecilia breathed. "It is. It's Edward
Mahone"

"So, you can see there are definitely two groups," Zachary
said. "The one that started all the trouble, and the one that tried to stop them. I was pretty scared, you know-I mean, who
wouldn't have been, with all that shooting going on? but I
saw what happened. The first bunch ran off-the ones who
weren't shot, I mean and the second bunch went in to the
Alamo."

"That's not what all the official sources are telling us,"
Cecilia said.

"Maybe not, but you can see what happened with your own
eyes, Ms. Montez. And if you listen closely, you can hear those
first guys yelling. They were saying-"

Reconquistar, reconquistar," Cecilia murmured.

"Yeah. That. They were some of those Mexican terrorists,
the ones who killed those Border Patrolmen and shot up that
VFW picnic."

"Dios mio," Cecilia said. "Play the rest of the tape, Eddie."

The tape lasted only a couple more minutes and showed
more of the same violent chaos, but now that Cecilia knew
what to listen for, she heard it, all right. The shouts of "Reconquistar! Reconquistar!" were caught on the tape's audio,
coming from the men with automatic weapons.

"You know what this means?" Eddie asked with excitement
in his voice.