Part 48 (2/2)

'How old is she?' Big Rick said.

'Can we focus here?'

Big Rick took a long drag on his joint then hung his head out the window.

Border Patrol Agent Wesley Crum chased the wets into the desert just off Highway 67 about forty miles south of Marfa and twenty miles north of the border. Through the night-vision goggles, he counted five males and five females. No doubt a family reunion. An odd sound broke the silence of the night and caused him to stop and turn back to the highway. He observed an equally odd sight: a long line of tanker trucks heading south like ducks migrating for the winter. Only it was late spring, so they should be migrating north. The ducks, not the tanker trucks.

'Where the h.e.l.l are they going?'

'Come on,' Angel said, 'let's get these folks.'

'You're always wanting to let them go. Tonight you want to chase them? Look.'

Wesley pointed, and Angel turned and looked. A ways behind the last tanker truck, a pickup truck followed with its lights off. But with the goggles, Wesley recognized the big potato embedded on the antenna.

'I know that potato. That's Carla's truck. And the professor. Maybe he ain't a good guy after all. Let's find out.'

'Come on, Wesley, let's take care of these people.'

Just then another pickup truck with its lights off pa.s.sed. It was following Carla's truck.

'Who the h.e.l.l is that? Come on, Angel, they're up to something, and at four in the morning, it ain't no good.'

'They're just tanker trucks, Wesley. Going south, not north. They're not smuggling dope into Mexico. Let's do our job.'

'I am.'

Wesley took off running toward the highway and their Border Patrol SUV parked off the road. Angel shook his head then dropped the jug of water he was carrying and yelled to the Mexicans in the desert.

'Agua! Agua!'

Angel Acosta ran after Wesley Crum.

Twenty minutes later, just outside the town of Presidio, the tankers turned west on Farm-to-Market 170, the river road. Book steered the pickup after them. The Rio Grande was visible to their left in the illumination of the lightning strikes, which came more often now.

'I'm hungry,' Big Rick said. 'You kids hungry?'

'They're going to cross the river,' Carla said.

'How?' Book said. 'The river's full.'

'The Rio Conchos from Mexico joins up just a few miles upriver. Beyond that, the riverbed is dry because of all the dams upstream of El Paso. If not for Mexican water in the Conchos, the Rio Grande would be dry all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.'

'I know an all-night cafe in Presidio,' Big Rick said. 'We could stop off and-'

Book looked over at Big Rick and put a finger to his lips.

'Shh.'

Border Patrol Agent Wesley Crum drove the SUV. The tanker trucks were leading this caravan south. Carla and the professor were following the tankers with their lights out. The second pickup truck was following Carla and the professor with its lights out. Wesley and Angel were following the whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned bunch of them with their lights out. And Wesley was thinking, Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? On the border, it was often difficult to tell.

'Am I right, Angel?'

'Yeah, you're right.'

'I figure they're gonna head west on One-seventy, cross the river above the Conchos.'

'Looks that way.'

'We could hit the lights and siren, speed to the front of the line, and try to stop the tankers.'

'That would be one option. How many guns we got?'

'Not enough.'

'Exactly.'

'So we follow?'

'We follow.'

Chapter 35.

Six hundred miles southeast of Presidio in the Predator Ops command center on the second floor of an airplane hangar at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air Interdiction Agent Dwight Ford watched the live video feed from the infrared camera aboard the Predator B drone as the unmanned aircraft banked left and right with the course of the Rio Grande. The drone's camera gave them 'eyes in the sky' above the 1,254-mile MexicoTexas border. The images on the flat screen were sharp; from twenty thousand feet up, the camera could identify vehicles and humans, but not faces. But all it was identifying at the moment was the bare desert on either side of the river.

Dwight 'liaised'-a word he had never even heard before he was a.s.signed to the drone-between the drone pilots and the Border Patrol agents on the ground. They had gotten a call-in tip that a big drug s.h.i.+pment was coming across the river below Nuevo Laredo, so the Predator had flown over that location most of the night; but it turned out to be another bulls.h.i.+t call. Dwight figured it might be a decoy, so he had the pilot fly the drone west of Nuevo Laredo. They found no activity, so they flew further west. They were now over Presidio.

Dwight wore his military-style tan jumpsuit and brown cap. He was leaned back in his captain's chair, and his feet were kicked up on the desk where the computers and keyboards and phones were situated; his hands were clasped behind his head. He glanced up at the black digital strip on the wall showing military times in red numerals: Pacific, 02:31 ... Costa Rica, 03:31 ... Panama, 04:31 ... Eastern, 05:31 ... Zulu, 09:31 ... Local, 04:31. He was having a h.e.l.l of a time keeping his eyes open.

'Dwight-wake up!'

Dwight snapped forward in his chair. The drone pilot was on the radio. Dwight clicked on his radio headset that connected him to the flight trailer parked outside where Lance and Grady, the pilot and co-pilot, flew the drone with a joystick like the kind his sons used to play their video games.

'What?'

'Look.'

On the screen were images of tanker trucks, a long line of tanker trucks. He checked the other flat screen displaying a Google Earth map that tracked the drone's path.

'They're driving west on FM One-seventy,' Lance the drone pilot said.

The drone had cleared Presidio and now flew west over the river road past the point where the big Rio Conchos flowed into the Rio Grande. The trucks seemed to be slowing-yes, they were definitely slowing-and turning south. The line of trucks drove across the dry riverbed and crossed into Mexico as if they were UPS trucks making deliveries in the neighborhood. But what were those tanker trucks delivering to Mexico?

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