DOMESTIC ENEMIES 4
Ranya awoke from a light cat nap lying on her back. She had been resting on the wild grass, her brown pack for a pillow. She was wearing dark blue jeans and her black hooded sweater, her booted ankles crossed, her fingers intertwined across her stomach. The two men who were going to be the other passengers on the plane were occasionally talking, while sitting on opposite sides of a picnic table twenty feet away from her.
In the camps she had become accustomed to making the transition to consciousness in a sly way, in secret. In D-Camp they had slept in open barracks, on bunk beds. Useful information could sometimes be overheard, if one was skilled at pretending sleep. She knew that a giveaway was sudden perfect stillness and quiet on the part of the faker, so she gradually began a light snoring sound, her mouth partly open. After five years internment in the camps, the natural sleeping sounds women made were all very familiar to Ranya Bardiwell.
She had been dropped off at this place by Mark Fowler, in his truck. The two men were already waiting there, clad in desert camouflage uniforms, sorting through their gear on the wooden picnic table. Fowler asked her to wait in the truck while he went over and talked with them, and he returned in a few minutes. “Don’t bother trying to make friends with those guys. They’ve got their game faces on, you might say. They’re in the tactical mode now. They’ll accommodate you, and that’s about it. It’s Barlow’s plane and pilot, so they don’t have any choice, but don’t expect them to like your showing up. Just listen to the pilot. He’s already been briefed; he knows exactly where to drop you off. You’re clear about the link-up in Mountainview?
“Sure, no problem.”
“You’ve got the New Mexico road map? You’ll be forty miles southeast of Albuquerque, when they drop you off.”
“I’ve got the map in my pack, and a compass. We’re landing on a dry salt lake. After I get out, I walk four miles south, across the salt flats, until I hit State Road 60. Railroad tracks run parallel to 60; I follow the tracks five miles west toward Mountainview. Right at six AM, I walk into the Ancient Pueblos Restaurant on State Road 60, and order breakfast. I ask the waitress for Don, and then I tell him J.B. sent me. He’ll keep me in the back room until the bread truck makes its delivery, and that’s my ride into Albuquerque. It’s a good plan.”
“Yeah, it is,” replied Fowler. “Now, most of the folks in Mountainview are still on our side, but watch out. Milicias could set up checkpoints or do sweeps while you’re there. When they show up, it’s always at least fifteen or twenty of them, sometimes a lot more, and they’re pretty twitchy on the triggers. Especially around gringo cowboys like in Mountainview.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Don’t put your pistol together until you’re in the city. It won’t do you any good at a checkpoint anyway; it’ll just give you away.”
“I won’t.”
“You’ve got my knife…”
“Right here.” She patted her right side jeans pocket. “Thanks.”
“Well, okay then, good luck. I hope you find your son, I really do. Finding his address, that was a lucky break. If you make it back here, you know you’ve got a place to stay.”
“Thanks for everything you’ve done…”
“No problem, I’m glad to help. Say, how’s your shoulder?”
“Sore, but I’m damn glad to be rid of the chip.”
“You’ve got everything you need?”
“Yes, thanks. I’m ready.” Barlow and Fowler had seen to her outfitting with the gear and clothes she would need. After much discussion, she had decided to keep Linssen’s 9mm Glock pistol, because it could be broken down into its main parts, and concealed against the metal internal frame of her pack. They were concerned about magnetometers being used in Albuquerque in portals, and metal detecting wands being used at checkpoints. The Glock had plastic ammo magazines and a plastic grip and frame assembly, and hence fewer steel parts to conceal. These parts and the ammunition were hidden inside the modified seams of the pack’s heavy duty nylon fabric, against the metal alloy internal pack frame.
The downside was that the pistol had to be carried in such a way that it would not be readily available in the case of an unexpected emergency. She was simply smuggling it into the city, to have it ready to use at the time of the hoped-for rescue of her son. Fowler did provide her with a wickedly sharp Strider folding knife for self-defense, in situations where the Glock would be disassembled, hidden and unavailable.
While resting on the grass she reviewed her conversations with Barlow and Fowler. She visualized her forthcoming rendezvous and pickup at the restaurant. She imagined various possible rescue scenarios in Albuquerque. Even through closed eyelids, she could tell that the sun was almost gone. Their plane was going to arrive at last light. She continued to feign light snoring, her mouth agape in an unladylike pose, while she listened carefully. Finally she was rewarded with unguarded conversation by her two reticent companions.
“She’s sure a sweet piece of ass, ain’t she? Pretty face, nice long legs… Looks real inviting, laying there on her back…”
“Too hard for my taste. I can’t abide women that tough. Women should be softer. And she looks like a butch with that short black hair.”
“You’re just pissed because she won your SIG off of you yesterday.”
“Naw, it ain’t that.”
“The hell it ain’t. You’re pissed off because you had to buy back your own pistol from her. You should be grateful she let you have it back for only nine hundred bucks.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t have a clue what they’re worth.”
“Lucky you didn’t bet your rifle, or she would’ve took that too.”
“Like hell she would! Okay, I’ll give her she’s a crack shot with a pistol, and not half bad running around with a little carbine. But take us out to the thousand yard range, and I’d eat her lunch! Nobody can touch me at a thousand yards with my .338.”
“Shit you say! I can beat you left handed at a thousand! Hell, I made a sixteen hundred yard kill with this here fifty caliber last December. Confirmed it with the laser range finder, in front of two witnesses.”
“Where, across the Rio Grande down by El Paso? Man, that ain’t sniping, that’s just plain murder.”
“So? It’s a free-fire zone out on those river islands, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, I suppose it is, but it’s still nothing to brag on. Nobody’s shooting back, to speak of. Nobody serious. Did I ever tell you about when I was in Iraq, when…”
“Only about a dozen times.”
“Yeah, well, that was sniping. The real deal. Spending a week at a time in a sniper’s hide, right in Hadji’s back yard, peeing in a bottle, not moving an inch…you earned your kills over there!”
“Well, we’re going to earn them tomorrow morning, that’s for sure. A whole bus load of armed Milicias, and only two of us…”
“Don’t worry; it’ll be a turkey shoot. We used to do it the same way in western Iraq, taking out Syrian infiltrators in SUV convoys. We’d put a round from a suppressed fifty cal through the lead vehicle’s engine block, and they wouldn’t even know they were being shot at. They’d think they busted a rod or something. Once they’d stop, they’d all climb out to look at the engine, take a leak, stretch their legs...”
“And that’s when the fun begins!”
“Yep. I’ve flown recon over our ambush position. It’s in a draw, on a long upgrade. Once the bus comes to a stop, there’s nowhere for them to go, no cover or concealment at all. You’ll be 400 yards in front with the fifty, so if anybody feels like staying inside the bus, just send rounds straight through it. Then they’ll get out! I’ll be on the flank, and I’ll have the angle to pick off anybody who tries to find cover under the bus, or behind it. We’ll both take out the runners, and they’ll all be dead in five minutes, max. Then we’ll call for the bird. You wait, it’ll be even better than Iraq.”
“How many, you figure?”
“Intell report says they change the guard at 0800 hours, and usually it’s about twenty of them Milicias in a ratty old school bus. Brown berets, M-16s, the whole nine yards. So they’ll be getting to the ambush site just after seven. We’ll do the job and be in the air before they know what hit them.”
“You think they’ll have any shooters, anybody who can put out counter fire?”
“Naw, these Milicias are all show and no go. They’re good for scaring old ladies at checkpoints, that’s about it.”
“What if the plane doesn’t show up for the extraction? We’ll be a hundred miles from nowhere, if the shit hits the fan.”
“It’ll be there. Anyway, we won’t initiate the ambush unless we’re in radio contact with the plane. He’ll be sitting on the ground just a few minutes away, like we briefed it. And just in case, we’ve got a solid escape and evasion plan. Hey, you didn’t mark it on your map, did you?”
“What, you really think we could be captured? Man, I do not plan on being captured by those Milicias—that is NOT in my plan!”
“I didn’t say it was. It’s just not professional to mark your map, just in case. The guy’s taking a big risk, being our E and E contact. So marking his ranch on your map…well, it’s just not right. It’s not professional.”
“Look, just because I didn’t fight in Iraq, doesn’t mean I’m not a professional!”
“No offense, but Albuquerque SWAT isn’t exactly the Special Forces.”
“Now, don’t start on…”
“And anyway, why couldn’t you pass that Spanish test? You’re born and raised in New Mexico, and you couldn’t pass the Spanish test? Hell, I learned some Arabic, and I hated those freaking ragheads! All those pretty little señoritas you got in New Mexico, and you couldn’t learn Spanish in 28 years?”
“Look you dumb-ass Tennessee hillbilly, I do speak Spanish! I mean, I speak it okay for a gringo cop, right? But that test was a son of a bitch! No way could a gringo pass it. It was rigged so only beaners could pass it, I swear to God!”
“Listen…quiet.”
Both men were instantly silent. Ranya heard it at the same time, the faint buzzing sound of a distant airplane engine. She opened her eyes, stretched, and stood up, then slung on her pack, her back to the two men in desert camouflage.
It was in fact last light, and the unlit plane wasn’t visible until it was very near. It was flying only fifty feet above the ground, a high-wing single engine prop plane. The dirt strip was just a designated scrap of flat pasture, identical to any other 500 yard long parcel of dirt and grass. Only the picnic table, a pair of yellow fifty gallon drums of aviation fuel, and a faded windsock on top of a metal pole identified these 500 yards as an air strip. One of the fuel drums had a manual pump and hose attached to the top.
The plane turned into the wind, tipping a wing, leveled out and landed gently, rolling past them and coming to a halt only a few hundred feet away. The little aircraft was a tail dragger and it maneuvered awkwardly on the ground, swinging around and taxiing back toward them. It seemed to be painted in shades of tan and beige, but this was difficult to determine in the fading light. It finally came to a stop with its high right wing tip almost over the table. The big three-bladed prop wound to a halt and the field was suddenly quiet again. It was clear to Ranya that whoever was flying was intimately familiar with this crude landing strip.
The pilot opened the cockpit door beneath the left wing, hopped down, and walked around to the front of the plane, where he was handed a fuel hose by one of the snipers. The other sniper was already opening a pair of doors on the right side of the fuselage, behind the copilot’s door. These two doors swung to both the front and to the rear, revealing a second bench seat behind the pilot and copilot’s seats, and behind that an open cargo area. The two snipers ignored Ranya, and loaded their tan packs and rifle bags into the empty space behind the rear seats. They worked without words; it was evident they were well-practiced at loading the airplane in near darkness.
The pilot took the black hose and clambered up onto the bottom of the angled wing strut, then put the nozzle into the fuel inlet on top of the wing. He jumped down and went to the yellow drums by the picnic table and began manually pumping gas, topping off his tanks. As instructed, she approached him, and he greeted her. He was a lanky thirty or forty-something with crew cut hair, about her height or a bit shorter, wearing jeans and a leather flight jacket. Military, or ex-military, she thought.
“Howdy. You’re my mystery passenger?”
“That’s me.”
“Pleased to meet you, mystery passenger.” He continued rotating the pump handle while speaking to her. He might have been smiling, but the light was fading fast and it was hard to tell.
“You’re getting out first, so you’ll sit behind the copilot's seat, on the right side. You’ve just got the pack? Stow it on the floor, between you. We’ll be in the air for an hour and a half on this leg, and when we land, we won’t be hanging around. Once we stop, I’ll holler go, and you go. Open the middle door, chuck out your bag, hop out quick and get clear ‘cause I’m going straight out. That’s it, that’s all there is to it. Almost a touch-and-go, and then we’ll be gone. Just hike south till you hit the tracks. The half-moon’s going to rise at 2300 hours—that’s 11 PM. It’ll be easy going for you.”
“I really appreciate this, and I’m sorry if I’m putting you at any extra risk.”
“Nah, forget it. It’ll look just like a false insertion. We do a couple of false insertions on every run, to make it harder for them. Just in case they’re tracking us. So far we haven’t had any problems—I fly way too low for radar—but it’s SOP. Doing false insertions, I mean. Anyway, most of New Mexico is just one big landing strip for a Maule 7. The dry salt lakes are even easier. It ain’t no big thing.”
“Well, I appreciate the ride.”
“Hey, it’s my job. But you’re welcome.”
The pilot finished pumping fuel, retrieved the hose, walked around the plane giving it a final visual check, and then stood off by himself and lit a cigarette. When he was through with his smoke he ground out the glowing butt with his foot, and climbed back up into the left seat.
The older sniper from Tennessee, who Ranya recognized from the shooting range, sat in the right seat next to the pilot. They conferred quietly over a folded air map, using a pencil light. She had been proud to overhear during her recent “nap” that she had won the SIG pistol off of a Special Forces combat veteran—a Green Beret. She had been happy to sell it back to him after the matches were over: she needed the cash, and couldn’t take any extra firearms into New Mexico. At the time, she had thought nine hundred dollars was a great price. Oh well. “Blue bucks”—it took some getting used to. Five years was a long time to be away.
The other sniper—the former Albuquerque SWAT cop—climbed into the back seat and slid across without a word to her, and pointedly looked out the left side window. So he was one of the cops who had been fired for failing the Español test… She already knew from the big rig truck driver that this was a new form of governmental ethnic cleansing—Nuevo Mexico style.
The rearmost cargo door was already secured forward. Ranya climbed up and in after the SWAT sniper, placed her pack vertically on the floor in the middle, found her three-point seat belt mostly by feel, and buckled herself in. Finally she latched the door beside her closed.
It was now fully dark, and the pilot fitted a pair of night vision goggles over his face, adjusted the straps, did final checks and cranked up the engine. The moment he let off the brakes, the propeller began to pull the plane forward with a powerful surge. Ranya couldn’t see any of the gauges or dials in the front of the cockpit; she imagined correctly that the pilot had no problem seeing them with his night goggles. He taxied to the center of the field, adroitly swerved into the wind, and gave the Maule full throttle. The acceleration pressed Ranya back into her seat and the plane immediately hurtled forward with a roar, bumping down the unseen pasture like a runaway dune buggy. In what seemed like only seconds, they lifted smoothly off of the ground, and began to climb into the night sky.
Unnoticed by the three men, she couldn’t stop smiling.
Ranya lay on her stomach among the weeds, on the gravelly slope where the two lane bridge reunited State Road 60 with the earth. Beneath the bridge behind her was a hundred yards of dry wash, the final pinched remnant of the barren salt flat. Almost an hour earlier the insertion plane had landed and braked to a rapid stop four miles north. The pilot yelled go, she threw her pack well clear of the open door, and jumped down. The plane immediately accelerated away with a roar and a rush of prop blast, pelting her with salty grit. She had been prepared for this, so her hood was up and she had faced away as the unlit Maule 7 took off. When she turned around and looked, the single engine plane had already disappeared from view. She found the North Star to get her initial bearings and began her walk to the south, crunching across the salt pan.
All around her lay nothing but salt, faintly glowing bone white in the starlight. At 11:07 the half moon edged above the low eastern horizon, above John Barlow’s ranch and RV camp, above D-Camp, above her former life in Virginia. The emergence of the half moon brought a weird sort of dawn. The cool horizontal light left crazy shadows across the flats, pointing to where dead trees and tough plants had tried to survive at the margins of the harsh alkaline environment. The walking was easier in the moonlight, with less chance of stumbling into a gully or hole. In the distance she could see the occasional flickering headlights of a vehicle driving across State Road 60.
In the sky above she saw a bright star which was both blinking red and moving from right to left across the firmament. After a while she decided it was a passenger jet, probably heading from LA to Dallas. She wondered what other aircraft were above her which she could not see.
She remembered the story of a woman in the camp, who had been out in the boondocks in northern Montana. She had been doing a little shooting practice with her husband and a few close friends. Nobody outside of this circle knew about their weapons training, on a vast expanse of private land. Just the same, they had been ambushed on the Jeep trail leading back to the state road by a platoon of black-clad federal ninjas, and arrested.
As they were being loaded into the government helicopter, after being zip-tied, they had seen the UAV drone making low “victory passes” over them, while the federals waved skyward for the camera. Later in the camps, they surmised that the UAV had been on routine patrol, and had homed in on the acoustic signature of their firing, the location of which did not correspond to an “authorized” public shooting range. The distant operator of the UAV could have zoomed in with powerful video cameras, and seen their semi-auto “assault rifles,” which had been banned since the Stadium Massacre a few years before. Then it would have been simple to vector in the platoon of ATF agents, who had been carrying everything from MP-5 submachine guns to 50 caliber sniper rifles.
So Ranya wondered what airborne platforms might have been slowly circling above, studying the anomalous heat signature moving southward across the salt pan, after a small plane had briefly paused on an unauthorized flight…
Well, the feds couldn’t be everywhere, she reasoned. They couldn’t watch every inch of America every minute of every day. As long as John Barlow’s little air force maintained security, there would be no reason for any governmental agency to be focused in on this salt pan, on this night…she hoped. If they were…she could be surrounded by helicopter -troops, or simply blown to smithereens by a missile from above.
Such things were beyond her ability to affect, so she trudged on.
She passed the carcasses and skeletons of numerous cattle that had wandered onto the unforgiving salt pans. She had a sudden fright when an immense black-winged bird dived at her unsuspected from behind. She felt and heard the whoosh from its wings as it glided down and brushed past her, touching her hood, and then skimmed low above the ground until it was out of her sight.
By 11:15 the vast salt pan was narrowing to within clearly visible borders on either side, and by 11:30 it had pinched into a dry creek bed. She could see ahead where a wide bridge carried the state road safely above the infrequent flash flood torrents. According to her New Mexico highway map the railroad tracks ran parallel to State Road 60, on the other side. Her plan was to walk under the two lane road bridge on the dry wash, and climb up the bank at the steel trestle railroad bridge a hundred yards beyond. She would hike the remaining five miles to Mountainview on the tracks.
Cars were crossing the bridge only every fifteen or twenty minutes. She turned away and froze when they passed, a black stump to anyone who might chance to look north across the moonlit salt flats. The closer she walked to the highway the more vigilant she became. The moonlight didn’t penetrate to the floor of the dry wash under the bridge. She wondered if any dangerous wildlife lurked troll-like beneath the overpass. The yard-thick concrete pillars which supported the roadway could have hidden a platoon of zombie ghouls, she imagined in her rising fearfulness.
She pulled the big folding knife from her sweatshirt’s front pouch, thumbed open the blade, and held it at the ready as she entered the shadows. The Strider knife was worth more than many pistols, and she silently thanked Mark Fowler for the personal gift. Her father had carried their line of “combat cutlery” at Freedom Arms, back in the day… Customers had joked that you could use one to cut through a burning helicopter, and still shave with it the next day. It was no pistol—the Glock was useless, in pieces hidden against her back—but it was the next best thing. She began to edge her way into the moon shadow under the silent bridge between a pair of concrete supports, jammed with a tumble of flood-driven rocks and timbers. She was finding a pathway, watching intently for wild animals or other lurking monsters, when she heard a sudden male voice!
“Is that you!? Finally! We’ve only been waiting here for three frikkin’ hours!”
Ranya spun around and dropped to a crouch behind a boulder, as a vise of fear clamped around her chest and throat. Who was above, waiting for her? This was not in the plan!
Then a female voice, high and young, said, “God Derek, what took you so long? You’ve been gone forever! My cell phone doesn’t work out here, and we were really, really scared! You got the gas?”
“Yes, I got the gas, any other stupid questions?”
“Was the gas station open in Mountainview? Do they have any food?” asked the female.
“No Destiny, the gas station was not open! First I had to find a hose, and then I had to steal this gas. I had to! Then a dog heard me and almost woke up the whole God damned town! I thought any minute some redneck was going run out and blast me full of lead, while I was stealing the gas right out of his pickup truck! So don’t even tell me about how scary it was, waiting in the van for good old Derek to go get the God damned gas!”
Twenty feet below and an unknown distance from the unseen quarrelers, Ranya’s heart gradually dropped back below a hundred beats a minute, and the garrote of sudden terror gradually eased its pressure around her neck. She continued listening, putting the pieces together, and crept in the moon shadow beneath the side of the bridge to the slope at its end, and up the sandy bank to the highway.
“B-b-but Derek, if the gas station is closed, how will we be able to get to Albuquerque tonight?” asked the young female.
“We won’t, obviously!”
Ranya could hear the sounds of a vehicle’s gas cap being opened and removed.
“But I’m hungry, and I want to sleep in a real bed…”
“And your rich Daddy isn’t here to make it all better, is he? What kind of a comrade volunteer are you? They want fighters for the revolution, not crybabies!”
“We’re not crybabies Derek,” said another female voice. “We just need to take showers and wash our hair! That’s not too much to ask, not after four straight days in the van! We thought for sure we’d be in the dorms by now.”
The other male voice said, “We would have been, if we hadn’t of gotten off the interstate back at Santa Rosa. That’s why we ran out of gas!”
“Don’t you start that again, Kalil! You’ve got NO room to talk! If you hadn’t of talked us into going all the way to freaking Saint Louis just to score some dope, we would’ve been in Albuquerque yesterday! And then you got ripped off and lost almost all of our money, and for what? Two freaking ounces of shitty ditch weed! So don’t you even talk to me about…”
“But if we had stayed on the I-40, we…”
“Kalil, you don’t know shit about cars! The front end is wrecked on this piece of crap! Above 50, it’s shaking so bad it’s going to…”
“Then let me drive it, if you can’t handle it! A little shaking isn’t the end of the world! It can take it…”
“You don’t know shit! If we…”
“Look guys, it doesn’t matter!” said the first female, ‘Destiny’. “Stop fighting, okay? The blame game, it’s so over, like, it’s so yesterday! Let’s look at tomorrow, okay? We can handle another night in the van, what’s one more night, right Lisa? We’ll get more gas in the morning, and we’ll be at the university by lunchtime. Like, it’s okay! Really!”
“If they even have gas in Mountainview,” said ‘Kalil’. “And if they’ll sell it.”
“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” said ‘Derek’.
Ranya snaked up the slope between prickly weeds and cactus until she could peer under the steel guardrail at the western end of the bridge. A dark full-sized van was parked on the dirt shoulder, partly obscured by tall spiked shrubs along the side of the road. How had she missed seeing it? She must have been too fixated on getting under the bridge—not a good sign. Literally tunnel vision, she reflected.
A man was tilting a gas jug above the fuel inlet on the left side of the van. Another man stood on the other side, looking out to the north, across the dry salt lake. A smaller person, a female, stepped out of the van and hugged this man from behind, and then pulled him back inside. The one with the fuel can finished, closed the gas cap, and tossed the empty jug into the back. Then he went around to the driver’s side, climbed in, and began turning over the engine.
After a few tries the engine caught, the lights went on, and the dark van drove off with a backfire, amidst a cloud of smoke. Ranya watched its tail lights disappear down State Road 60 toward the west, toward Mountainview. ‘Comrade volunteers’, heading toward a ‘revolution’? Were they for real? She guessed their accents to be from the upper Midwest. Well, whatever they were, wherever they were from, they were apparently heading for the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque.
Score one for John Barlow. Evidently, he knew what he was talking about.
Ranya slept in the backseat of an abandoned Cadillac, on the outskirts of the crossroads village of Mountainview. Even in June the high plains were chilly at night, at 6,000 feet of elevation. Mountainview was in fact entirely flat, but it did in truth enjoy a spectacular view of the Monzano and Sandia mountains erupting to above 10,000 feet just behind it. On the other side of these mountains, fifty miles northwest as a crow might fly, lay her destination: Albuquerque.
She washed her face with a baby wipe from her pack, and applied light makeup in the Caddy’s rear view mirror. She hated the length of her hair: too short to tie back in a ponytail, but too thick to stay put behind her ears. She wasn’t used to loose hair rubbing her face this way, it irritated her. But the chopped and dyed-black hair had gotten her out of D-Camp… She brushed it back, and pulled on her newest ball cap: tan, with a leaping blue marlin on the front. It was one of her “sterile” untraceable Barlow ranch acquisitions, along with her cheap Timex digital watch, her folding knife, and other items. She wore the same clothes she had hiked and slept in: blue jeans and the dead assistant warden’s black hooded sweatshirt.
At six AM she was standing outside the front door of the Ancient Pueblos Restaurant on State Road 60, when it was unlocked from the inside by a plump middle aged woman. The gray-haired lady smiled and said, “Good morning, honey, c’mon in,” and flipped the “Closed” sign inside the glass door over to read “Open.” Evidently, the “Español Solamente” laws had yet to take hold in Mountainview.
Ranya followed her inside and picked a table near the kitchen. The restaurant was humble, but homey, with just eight tables in the main dining room. But the place was neat and clean, and the tables were covered with fresh white tablecloths, and mouth-watering aromas were emanating from the kitchen.
The waitress returned to her table with a steaming pot of coffee, and Ranya turned over a porcelain cup already on the table to be filled. “I’ll be right back with the cream, all right?” she said. “Will you be having breakfast? We only take cash, hon.” She gestured to a hand-painted sign above the kitchen, which read, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.”
Ranya understood that the woman had noted her green back pack, her lack of a car, and the dust on her slept-in clothes. “Cash is fine. Can I see a menu?” Ranya guessed that the regulars at this small town diner probably knew the selections by heart.
“Sure thing—just a sec.”
While the waitress was gone, the front door opened again with the jingle of a bell. Four young people, college age, entered the dining room. Two guys and two girls. Ranya pretended to examine the mural of an ancient Indian mesa dwelling painted on the wall behind them, while observing them in her peripheral vision.
It was the comrades from the bridge. Ranya glanced over at them. They were wearing jeans and khaki shorts, and sweaters and sweat shirts. One very tall guy, at least six foot four, had dirty blond shoulder length hair and wore round gold-rimmed glasses. The other was a young black of medium height and build, with a bushy Afro hairstyle. Both had several day’s growth of whiskers on their oily faces. One girl was a blonde with a long ponytail, fairly attractive except for the rings through her eyebrow and lip. The other was a dumpy brunette with her hair in tight braids, and too many silver ear rings to count. Derek, Kalil, Destiny and Lisa...up close, and in the light of day. Derek had large blue oriental character tattoos visible on the back of his neck above his gray University of Michigan sweatshirt, and silver rivets punched through his ear lobes big enough to serve as pencil holders. Ranya turned away, disgusted.
The waitress returned with Ranya’s menu and cream, and four more menus for the other table. Derek asked the woman, “What time does the gas station open up around here? We need to get back on the road.” The town’s independent service station and mini-mart was visible through the front windows across State Road 60.
“Don’t worry, by the time you finish breakfast, they’ll be open. You’re having breakfast, right?”
“Um, sure. Yeah, we’re having breakfast,” said the tall one.
“We only take cash. Cash or trade. No checks, no credit cards, no e-bucks.”
Ranya watched out of the corner of her eye at their obvious discomfort.
“Uhh…yeah, no problem. Let’s see the menus.”
Ranya studied her own plastic laminated folding menu. The prices were marked in black grease pencil over the old printed figures. Pancakes, bacon and two eggs were $34! Suddenly her bankroll of nearly $4,000, mostly in crisp new hundred dollar “blue bucks,” didn’t make her feel quite as rich as it had yesterday.
The waitress came back to her table to take her order. The glass-plated front door opened again, and a genuine cowboy, about forty, held it open for his wife. He was wearing a black cowboy hat, cowboy boots, jeans and a jean jacket. Ranya could see at a glance that he was the real thing, not a poser. The man nodded to the waitress, and they both raised eyebrows at the table of unsavory young people.
“Have you decided yet, hon?” she asked Ranya, her pencil poised over her blank pad.
“I’ll have the Western omelet, with the home fries, and a side of bacon. And a glass of orange juice.”
“Okay, coming up.”
“And, ahh…” She lowered her voice. “Is…Don here?”
The waitress looked directly at Ranya, skeptically, sizing her up. “Don? You want to see Don? You know him? You related?”
“Ah, no, not exactly, but somebody told me…” Ranya was flustered and floundering slightly, afraid of being overheard. The meticulously planned linkup was suddenly not going according to the plan.
The waitress just stared at her. “Don’s not in yet. He’ll be in later, most likely. You want to leave a message?”
“Ahh, no. Well…maybe. After breakfast. If he’s not here by then.”
“Sure thing.” The waitress turned for the kitchen.
Damn, thought Ranya. Now what? Hang around and wait for Don? Leave a note for him, and kill time in this remote little town, where a stranger without a car will stick out like an Eskimo in the Sahara? While pondering her options, she overheard the college-aged group talking quietly among themselves.
“I’ve got three hundred left, but it’s got to go for the gas,” said the long-haired Derek. His hair was parted in the middle, and hung in dirty strands under his prominent dimpled chin. “We can eat when we get to the university; they’ll have something there.”
Destiny, the pony-tailed blond girl said, “I can’t get my cell phone to work in this crappy little town! Daddy…um, my f-father…he could zap me a thousand e-bucks, if I could only get this stupid cell phone to work!”
“Des, didn’t you hear her?” whined the chubby brunette Lisa. “They don’t take e-bucks here! Cash only, she said.”
“Shit!” exclaimed Destiny, getting a look from the cowboy’s wife two tables over. “How much is toast and coffee?”
Ranya looked across at them again, sizing up the situation. She got up and sidled over to their table, drawing their hushed attention, and leaned among them and said softly, “Hey, you guys go to Michigan? I go to Virginia—UVA.” She addressed herself primarily to their apparent leader, Derek with the neck tattoos and the rivet-punched ears, smiling while suppressing her revulsion.
The long-haired young man had a greasy face and terrible body odor…or perhaps his entire group did. He replied, “Yeah, I do…I mean, we do…or at least we did.”
“You wouldn’t be heading to Albuquerque by any chance, would you? If you are, I could chip in for gas, if that would help. I could even pay for a full tank, if you can give me a lift up there.”
The four of them broke into smiles, sudden relief flooding their faces at the prospect of both a hearty country breakfast, and an easy non-stop drive to the University of New Mexico, their neo-Marxist Mecca.
It had taken Special Agent Garza only five minutes to walk up 5th Street from the Federal Building to the Bernalillo County Courthouse, where the latest installment in the ongoing custody battle with his former wife Karin was going to be played out. They were the first case on the docket this Monday morning at 9 AM, and the judge was only fifteen minutes late when she appeared from her chambers.
The family court judge had a long gray ponytail, and a pierced nose. Al Garza knew he was in deep trouble going before Judge Galatea Balfour-Obregon. Before becoming a judge, she had been a New Mexico left-wing “radical activist” and public defender for decades. It was not his first time going before her, and so far it had never turned out well.
His ex-wife Karin was seated at the other table, on the far side of her female
attorney, and refused to even make eye contact with him. Instead, she had stared straight ahead while they all waited for the judge to appear. He had to admit, Karin looked terrific, with her long blond hair teased out. She was wearing her beige pants suit, with the ruffled blouse showing at her throat and cuffs.
His former wife had already dropped his name; and Karin Garza-Bergen was once again simply Karin Bergen. She had divorced him, dropped his name, and was now attempting to take Brian away. The fact that the female judge also had a hyphenated last name filled him with an additional sense of foreboding.
His attorney whispered, “No matter what, don’t let the judge bait you into losing your temper. That’s what she wants, an incident—I know how this bitch works. Remember, if it doesn’t go our way today, we’ll straighten it out on appeal. Just keep it cool.” Rudy Salazar was a local Albuquerque lawyer with a good reputation for successfully defending fathers’ custodial rights, even if he looked somewhat sleazy, with his thin mustache and slicked-back hair.
Judge Balfour-Obregon began, while slowly shaking her head in obvious disdain. The proceedings were being conducted entirely in Spanish, in accordance with recently passed state laws. “Special Agent Garza, I’ve reviewed the case file, and in particular the last series of events, culminating with that absolute disaster two weeks ago, at the Federal Law Enforcement Officers annual picnic. I must say, I find it hard to believe that the federal government entrusts a firearm to an FBI agent who can get drunk and assault a woman, in front of over a hundred witnesses!”
“Your honor, my client was not under the influence of alcohol, and he did not ‘assault a woman’! What happened at that picnic was deeply regrettable, but a board of inquiry has determined that it was Ms. Bosch who initiated…”
“That’s enough, counselor! Don’t even go there! Special Agent Bosch, let us not forget, had to be hospitalized after your client put her in a choke hold!”
“My client was only restraining Ms. Bosch, so that she could not strike him again with an aluminum softball bat…”
“Silence! I’ve heard enough! More than enough! The irrational homophobic attitude of your client is very well known to this court! He’s lucky he wasn’t charged with multiple hate crimes after that picnic incident! If Special Agent Garza can’t deal with the fact that his ex-wife is dating a woman, that does not speak well to his stability nor to his socialization, not to mention his fitness to share in the raising of their son.”
“But…”
“Therefore, it is the decision of this court that your client shall lose all custodial rights and privileges. Mr. Garza, your joint custody agreement is hereby terminated. And furthermore, I’m granting Plaintiff’s motion to make the temporary restraining order against you permanent. Special Agent Garza, if you so much as come within two hundred yards of your former wife, your son Brian, or Gretchen Bosch, unless it’s with the permission of this court, I’ll have you arrested and thrown in jail for contempt!”
Garza’s lawyer tried again, “Your honor, I…”
“Save it counselor! It’s time that homophobes like your client were dragged into the 21st century! The fact that he is an FBI Special Agent doesn’t mitigate the facts of this case. In fact, I should have expected a much more socially progressive attitude from someone of his ethnic background!”
“Your honor, the fact that my client is…”
“I told you I was finished, counselor! We’ll re-examine limited visitation rights in, oh, six months. Until then, I would strongly advise your client to stay well clear of his former wife, her fiancée Ms. Bosch, or their son Brian!
Special Agent Alvarez Garza slowly lowered his forehead to the table. Behind him, he heard Gretchen Bosch snickering, in her unmistakable female baritone voice.
The back of the old Dodge van had a thick yellow foam mattress pad covering the cargo deck. That was the extent of the custom furnishings and creature comforts. Derek and Kalil sat up front in the separate “captain’s chairs,” arguing about road directions, arguing about the perfect socialist utopia, arguing about their best speed to avoid shaking the van to pieces. Because of their limited top speed, there was no benefit to taking State Road 60 all the way west to I-25, which ran north along the Rio Grande, on the other side of the mountains. Instead, they decided to take the narrow two lane State Road 355 north from Mountainview, along the eastern slopes of the Manzano and Sandia mountains. This was shorter in total mileage, and their wobbly front end meant holding their speed below 60 miles per hour anyway.
The green van was a clapped out windowless commercial model, with exposed steel frames on the insides. Destiny and Lisa wedged themselves into sitting positions in the back, leaning against luggage bags and heaps of mixed up clothing. Ranya was not surprised to see that the male “comrades” took the two comfortable front seats. She guessed that Derek, the driver, owned the van. He looked to be the oldest, probably a graduate student.
The interior of the van stank of unwashed clothes and stale food, but it was a ride, and it was heading to Albuquerque. The 20 gallons of gas Derek had put into the tank at the service station in Mountainview had cost Ranya eight of her crisp blue $100 bills. This was a flat non-negotiable $40 a gallon, over twice the posted cost, and even then it required extensive pleading to get the fuel at all. This was almost a quarter of her capital, but she knew that if she couldn’t make it to Albuquerque, the money meant nothing anyway.
The girls were quiet, zoning out with tiny wireless music buds planted in their ears. The guys were talking almost nonstop, providing a running political debate and travelogue from the front seats, almost shouting over the music blasting from their stereo. Ranya didn’t recognize the rock group or the songs. It appeared that Derek leaned toward classical Soviet or Cuban-style Marxism, leavened with a dash of Trotsky. Kalil seemed to be a garden-variety America-hating anarchist; out to take part in what he believed was his best opportunity to strike back at the “white corporate power structure.”
Ranya sat on an overturned plastic milk crate just behind them, between their two seats, where she could see out of the front windows, and enjoy the odor-dampening fresh air. She had peeled off her sweatshirt as the morning warmed up, and was wearing a plain black t-shirt above her long blue jeans. They occasionally plied her with questions as they drove up the cracked asphalt.
“That’s right, I came from Virginia.”
“You hitched all the way from Virginia to New Mexico?” asked Derek. “That’s like, so totally awesome! I’ll bet you had some gnarly adventures along the way, eh?”
“Yeah, you’d win that bet. Totally gnarly.”
Kalil said, “I know how bad the rednecks are back there in Virginia and Tennessee! They’d probably lynch my black ass in a heartbeat. You see any of those KKK dudes back there?”
“No, I guess I got lucky. Didn’t see any Klan this time.”
Derek spoke again, finally getting to the point. “So, umm, you’re going to UNM to join the revolution…right?” He kept pushing his loose hair behind his ears, and it kept sliding forward across his unshaven face. Ranya wished he would let it hid the holes in his lobes. “That’s where we’re going. Time to put up, or shut up, right?”
“Right, put up or shut up.” Ranya fervently hoped they would shut up. She didn’t want to sit this close to them, but she felt compelled to look out the front windows, and she needed the fresh air from the open side windows to subdue the pervasive body odor in the back.
Derek continued, “Michigan sucks so bad anyway. Other than school, there’s nothing left for us back there. Nothing but reactionary Republican fascists up there anymore! Real Nazis! Except for Detroit, and Lansing of course… But what’s the point of just preparing ourselves to join the intellectual class? I mean, how’s that going to help the people? Sitting around Starbucks, bitching and moaning about the fascist plutocracy, while we swill their corporate coffee? What good does that do? Right here is where the front line in the revolution is today! ‘Viva la revolución’, right?”
“Oh yeah, viva la revolución,” she replied. “Say, Derek, speaking of la revolución, how’s your Spanish? You know, with the ‘Español Solamente’ laws down here?”
“Oh, that…that’s no problem. That was just so they could fire all the reactionary white racist pigs. That won’t matter for us, because we’re coming to help, we’re joining the cause!”
“So…you don’t actually speak Spanish?” Ranya asked.
“Uhh…yo quiero Taco Bell?” Derek twisted around and winked at her, and laughed at his own joke. The holes punched in his ears disgusted her more each time he turned in profile.
“Do any of you guys speak Spanish?” Ranya asked, looking around at them. She repeated her question twice, and the blond girl pulled out an ear piece to hear her.
“I’ve got Spanish One loaded on my music pod,” offered Destiny. “I’ve been listening to it when I can, sometimes. ‘Yo hablo Español.’ See, I’m picking it up.”
Derek said, “It won’t matter. They have volunteers coming from all over, like an international brigade! Kind of like the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. You know, I took the most incredible course on the history of the internationalist proletarian struggle last semester. That’s how I found out the real truth about New…I mean...Nuevo Mexico’s new revolution!”
“Yeah,” added Destiny. “Professor Ruskin, he was just so awesome! He really opened up my eyes, I want to tell you. He was just…the best…ever. Show her his letter, Derek! Show her Ruskin’s letter to Professor Johnson!”
“Oh yeah,” he replied, opening the lid on top of the center console between the seats. He pulled out a folded sheet of personalized stationery. “Check this out…with this letter, we’re like, totally golden! We’ll be so totally in, man!” He held it up for Ranya to see, and then put it back into the console. “Professor Ruskin at Michigan is in tight with Professor Johnson at the University of New Mexico…there I go again! Nuevo Mexico! Hah! I gotta watch that! Anyway, he’s vouching for us, in this letter. Man, when we find Professor Johnson, and give him this letter…oh man, it’s going to be so great! Land reform, that’s Professor Johnson’s gig. We’ll probably be able to help him, you know, like researching the old Spanish land grants and deeds and titles. The Mexicans were so totally ripped off after 1847! It’s like, all their land around here, you know?”
Destiny was nodding enthusiastically, gazing up at Derek. “Professor Ruskin was really the one who gave us the idea for all this. Joining the revolution, I mean! At least for the summer. Who knows, maybe for even longer! Maybe we’ll be able to transfer into UNM, you know? But it’s definitely going to be good for a master’s thesis, at least.”
Kalil opened the glove box, found a brass cigarette case and extracted a pre-rolled joint. He fired it up with a butane lighter, took a prolonged drag and passed it over to Derek. After holding his breath for an inordinate time, Kalil exhaled most of the smoke through the open passenger side window, and choked out, “Yeah man, the revolution, that’s the real thing! No more talk—talk is bullshit!”
State Road 355 headed in long straight lines toward the mountains, and then began to curve and twist as it followed the contours where the high plains met the foothills. The junipers and grasslands gradually turned to pines, as the van rolled down into valleys, and struggled back up again. Small and not so small ranches were visible on both sides of the two lane asphalt road. Some houses were close to the road, some were set far down paved driveways. Some of the ranches had Western-style arched gates created from iron or timber, often decorated with their particular cattle brands. There were some rather shabby trailers and private junkyards, but also many comfortably affluent homesteads and a few of what might almost have been called mansions.
“Look at that, another burned-down house!” announced Derek, slowing the van to gaze to the left at a heap of ashes punctuated by a pair of standing chimneys. “That’s the third one in just a couple of miles, what’s up with that?”
Destiny was now kneeling behind Derek’s seat, to look out the front windows, and take a hit off of the joint. Her clingy green Sierra Club t-shirt was riding up, and Ranya couldn’t help but notice the hideous platter-sized sunburst tattoo across the small of her back. Destiny said, “Oh, I heard all about that on NPR! The rich white ranchers who have to leave, you know, to give back the stolen land…well, sometimes they’re burning down their own places. So that nobody else will be able to live in them! Can you believe that? It’s so typical of the greedy white man. You know, ‘if I can’t have it, nobody can’!”
“Yeah,” said Kalil, “That’s whitey for you all right.” Then he turned to her, beaming a glassy-eyed smile. “But hey, you all, you’re not like that, at least most times! I mean, for white folks, you is all right. Now pass that spliff back up here, Destiny girl.”
“You remember what Susan Sontag said about the white race?” asked Derek.
Destiny answered him, nodding. “Sure. That’s Diversity Studies 101, everybody knows that quote! ‘The white race is the cancer of human history’…”
“…And treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” he finished for her.
“Right on!” Destiny exclaimed. “I just wish Professor Ruskin could see us now!”
“Oh, hey, look at that sign!” said Kalil, exhaling another cloud of dope smoke out the right side window. “Check it out: ¡TIERRA O MUERTE!” What’s that mean?” He was pointing to a crude homemade red and white billboard, painted on a dilapidated barn along the right side of road. The former ranch house, which was a few hundred yards away across a pasture, was a pile of ashes, with only some charred timbers and a chimney still standing.
“Land or death,” replied Ranya. “It means land or death.”
“Oh wow!” said Derek excitedly, “We must be getting close to the liberated zone! No more rednecks! No more racists! Viva la Raza!”
“Looks like the party is over for whitey in Nu-e-vo Mex-i-co!” added Kalil. “Oh yeah, this is gonna be so sweet! Payback time!” Ranya thought that he resembled Jimi Hendrix, from the posters she remembered seeing in college. Afro hairstyles must have made a fashion return while she was imprisoned.
“Derek, stop the van!” said Destiny. “Let’s get out and take some pictures! I can send them back to Michigan on my cell phone! We can show everybody that we’ve actually made it to the revolution! We’ve made it! I can’t believe it, we’ve actually made it! This is going to be the best summer ever!”
There was no other traffic in sight on the long straight run of ranch land. Derek slowly reversed back down the road and pulled off on the dirt shoulder. The four giddy comrades climbed out of the van, with Ranya following the girls out of the sliding side door. Destiny handed Ranya her Nikon digital camera, already opened up and ready for use. The four “voluntarios” stood in front of the barn, the white and red ¡TIERRA O MUERTE! sign behind them against the backdrop of the Manzano Mountains. They were smiling ecstatically, standing side by side, their right fists high in the air, as Ranya filmed them for posterity.
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