DOMESTIC ENEMIES 5
Monday found Bob Bullard in San Diego. The Department of Homeland Security’s Southwest Regional Director had offices in a half dozen states, and his main headquarters in Los Angeles, but he spent as much time as possible in San Diego. Who wouldn’t, he reasoned? San Diego was still livable, at least on the narrow coastal strip west of Interstate 5. San Diego was also where Bob Bullard maintained a mistress, and where he enjoyed his hobby of zooming around the bay, on any of the high performance boats belonging to Customs and the Coast Guard.
Because of the importance to national security of the world’s second largest concentration of naval power (only after Norfolk Virginia) the federal government had drawn a bright red line around San Diego Bay. San Diego would not be allowed to collapse into creeping anarchy and gangster warlordism, like so much of the rest of urban California.
And especially not west of Interstate 5. Bob Bullard saw to that, personally.
Today he had scheduled an hour of “community outreach.” This could often be turned into a profitable exercise in public relations, with photo opportunities showing the deeply concerned regional homeland security boss lending his ear to a stream of noteworthy whiners and malcontents. Artfully staged, these photo ops could perform the miracle of turning the bullet-headed and hatchet-faced 55 year old Bob Bullard into a kindhearted uncle, with a twinkle in his eye and a pat on the head for the kiddies.
This morning it was the turn of the local Muslim Sheiks, Imams and Muftis to moan and complain. Bullard’s secretary buzzed them into his corner office atop the downtown San Diego federal building at 10 AM. He was amused to see the three of them wearing traditional Middle Eastern garb, including colorful dish towels draped over their heads, held in place with what looked like coiled fan belts. Together the three ran the Montclaire section of San Diego (known locally as “Little Fallujah”) as their personal fiefdom. The walled enclave was home to the largest mosque and “Islamic cultural center” in California. Even years before the walls had gone up, Montclaire had proven to be a comfortable haven for a number of the 9-11 hijackers.
Several major San Diego surface streets ran through Montclaire, but off of these public roads, access into the enclave itself was strictly controlled. Licensed armed guards with full beards, wearing green military uniforms and checked Arafat-style kefiyah scarves, were stationed at the few unbarricaded streets leading into the “Muslim Quarter.” These menacing guards were the only visible face which Montclaire showed to the outside world. Bullard often wondered why some of the thousands of Marines who called San Diego home didn’t shoot them on sight while driving past, simply out of habit. This thought gave him a smile, and propelled him up out of his black leather executive chair as they entered his office.
“Good morning gentlemen, good morning. What can the Department of Homeland Security do for you today?” After a prolonged exchange of hand shakes, flowery greetings and one attempted cheek-kissing (he would have bitten off a nose first) the Imams got down to business.
“Director Bullard, we have complained and complained to the mayor about the continuing anti-Muslim harassment, yet our complaints fall on deaf ears. So in desperation, we are coming to you for help.”
“All right, fair enough. So what’s the problem?”
“The law clearly states that we may play the call to prayer of the Muezzin five times a day from our minarets. Yet we continue to have loud ‘rock’ music blasted into Montclaire when we do so! Even worse, our Muezzin’s loudspeakers are fired upon on a daily basis! This is intolerable! You must insist that the local police take their responsibilities seriously!” The other Imam’s nodded their heads vigorously.
“I’m sorry about that, I really am. I’ll do what I can. But in all frankness, as long as you play that ‘Allah Akbar’ tape turned way up, folks might choose to send their own message back at you. It’s still a free country, you know.” The transformation of Montclaire into “the Muslim Quarter” had been startlingly rapid, once the amplified loudspeaker broadcasting of the “call to prayer” had been approved by the city council. Non-Muslims began a mass-exodus from within audible range of the muezzin’s cry, and property values plummeted. Newly arriving Muslim immigrants moved in to snap up the vacant homes at fire-sale prices (using Saudi money) and the process continued until Montclaire was 100% Islamic, and finally their non-Muslim neighbors began to push back.
“But what about the shooting?” asked the leader of the Imams. “Our minarets look like Swiss cheese!”
“Maybe if you turned down the volume on the call to prayer, maybe that would help? Or turned the loudspeakers around, facing inside? So you could hear the prayer in Montclaire, but not all over San Diego?”
“Sir! We have our rights, under the First Amendment!”
“Yes, you do...”
“It is a hate crime to blast idolatrous satanic rock music into Montclaire during the call to prayer! We insist that the perpetrators be pursued and charged! It is disgraceful, it is anti-Islamic bigotry, it is…”
“I’m sure it is. Now, while we’re discussing Montclaire, I’d like to pass along a concern coming up from the mayor’s office. He says they’ve been seeing a steady stream of folks showing up in San Diego emergency departments without left hands. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” Bullard held up his own left hand and wiggled his fingers.
“I don’t see how this is any concern of yours! You know very well that we have an agreement with the city to enforce Sharia Law within Montclaire. I’d like to point out that within our walls, we have the lowest crime rate of any urban area in California.”
“Sure, and you also have the highest rate of one-handed vagrants all around you.”
“Director Bullard, we didn’t come here today to suffer another assault on our faith! We came here to reach some understanding, not to suffer an attack.”
“Oh Jesus…keep your turban on, Sheik. We don’t care how you take care of business inside of your own walls. But outside is another matter. Like when the local girls start getting gang-raped…”
“That is a lie! A slander against all Muslims! I refuse to listen! And those harlots should not dress that way near Montclaire! What are decent Muslim boys to think, when they see those teenage girls half-dressed, like charmutas, whores?”
“Then stop complaining about your minarets getting shot up. It goes both ways. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Director Bullard, this is outrageous! You sound as if you are condoning these unprovoked attacks on Montclaire! You know what is happening in Detroit, and I’m certain that you would not want to see a similar situation here in San Diego!”
“Now listen here Abdul, you’re not in Detroit, and I’m not a liberal pussy like the Mayor and Governor back there. You throw up barricades and block traffic on the through-streets, like they did in Detroit, and I’ll bulldoze right through them, and all of your unapproved neighborhood dead ends and cul-de-sacs, every last one of them! I’ll run tanks through your walls, and leave Montclaire wide open! I’ll have all of your security guards’ gun permits revoked, and let the M-19 gang back in! Trust me, you don’t want that! You’ve got a cozy little situation going on in Montclaire—you’re not fooling anybody. We haven’t come down hard on you, but believe me, we can. So turn down your damn Allah Akbar, and stop chopping off hands, all right? And leave the infidel girls alone outside of your walls! That is, if you three want to keep on playing Grand Pooh-bahs with your little harems! Oh yeah, we know all about your harems, and how young some of those girls are! Now if you’ll excuse me gentlemen, I’ve got other appointments.”
That should hold them for a while, he thought, as they spun in their robes and departed his office, sputtering and muttering and fuming in impotent rage.
After they were gone, Bullard’s young chief of staff entered the office and sat on the black leather couch across from his mahogany desk. “That went well, boss. I think they know you mean business.”
“Damn right I do,” said the bald and hawk-faced Homeland Security honcho. “We won’t be having any of that Detroit bullshit in the Southwest Region! I’ll burn Montclaire to the ground and bulldoze the ashes into the Pacific first!”
“Sounds like they know it now, if they didn’t before. Say, listen, boss, you know that list of yours, the, umm…folks who are presently incarcerated, who you’re interested in?”
“Sure, the scumbags I put away. What about it?”
“Well, you wanted me to tell you when any of them were released.”
“Okay, so who was released?”
“Actually, nobody was released, exactly.”
“Then what are you telling me this for?”
“One of them escaped.”
“Escaped? Who? From where?”
“Umm… it would be a certain Ranya Bardiwell. A female prisoner. An Article 14 prisoner…”
“Bardiwell…Bardiwell…I remember that name. Go ahead, refresh my memory. Who is she, why do I care about her?”
“She’s from Virginia. She was involved somehow in the Malvone affair…”
“Oh yeah, Bardiwell. Now I remember. So where’d she escape from?”
“Officially, she escaped from the federal prison transit center in Oklahoma City. But actually, she escaped from a non-judicial detention camp for Article 14s in western Oklahoma. And she killed an assistant warden on her way out.”
“Hmm. Okay. All right. Keep an eye out for her, tickle your search engines. If she surfaces, let me know.”
“Okay boss, will do. Now, your next appointment is with the Southwest director of the Border Patrol; he wants to know why you’re ordering his men off the line in Arizona again.”
“Christ, whatever happened to just emailing? All right, send him in.”
“Whoa…there’s another one of those red X’s,” said Kalil. The giant X was painted on State Road 355 directly in front of an antler-decorated gateway arch, at the beginning of a long private driveway. The terrain was more forested and hilly now, and the ranch house, if any, was invisible from the road. “What do you think it means?”
“Probably means the land was stolen from the Mexicans,” answered Derek. “Probably marks a ‘land reform’ area. Spanish land grant territory.”
“That’s some serious shit, then,” said Kalil. “X marks the spot…must be some kind of a warning.”
“What did you think ‘Tierra o Muerte’ meant?” asked Ranya.
Derek said, “Man, Governor Deleon, he’s not messing around! Hey look, there’s another sign! At least this one’s in English.”
This sign was also written in red paint, on a white sheet of plywood, attached to a pair of timber posts just off the shoulder of the road next to a barbed wire fence. Derek stopped in front of it, and they all read it together, the girls crouched behind the front seats. While they paused, a black crew-cab pickup truck blasted past them from behind, crossing over to the oncoming lane, going at least one hundred miles an hour and quickly disappearing from sight.
The sloppily hand-lettered sign said: “Warning Gringo! You are trespassing on Land Grant Territory! This is stolen land! Do not attempt to buy any property on this Territory, it is stolen and your deed will be invalid! If you are occupying stolen Land Grant Territory, leave now! You have been warned!”
They were all quiet, reading the sign. Derek whistled softly and said, “Man, I’m glad I don’t live on any stolen land around here. Sounds like the day of reckoning has come at last for the white cattle barons.”
“Yeah,” added Kalil, “And payback’s a bitch. Come on, let’s go.”
“What’s the next town?” asked Destiny. “Maybe they’ll have cell phone coverage. I can’t send these pictures; I can’t get a signal at all! I don’t understand why they don’t have cell phone coverage out here—I mean, this is America, right?”
“Chulada. The next town is Chulada,” replied Derek. “About two miles ahead.” He had his road map, folded to the right section, lying on top of the center console between the front seats. “Doesn’t look like much on the map.”
State Road 355 ran through wildly beautiful country now, at times alongside flowing creeks choked with willows and oaks and cottonwoods, at times winding up and through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, with its peaks ever present on their left side. The van crested a rise where the roadway had been blasted out of live rock, leaving jagged gray stone walls fifty feet high on either side of them. After the top the road dropped and turned suddenly to the west, and all at once they saw the road block, too late.
Derek slammed on the brakes, coming to a sudden stop in front of a row of 55 gallon drums. The steel barrels were painted red, and extended across the asphalt from the right shoulder to the yellow center line. Another row of drums ran across the oncoming lane, but twenty feet further down, so that any traffic in either direction would have to come to a complete stop, and weave slowly between the two barricades to continue on their way. The barrels might have been empty, filled with water, or filled with dirt or cement. There was no way to tell by their appearance.
Ranya was impressed by the setup. Empty barrels were a bluff, but highly mobile. Water-filled barrels would be too heavy to ram at full speed, yet could still be drained and easily moved around, as long as a water supply was available to refill them on site. Dirt or sand-filled barrels would mean a semi-permanent check point. Vehicles parked on either shoulder prevented anyone from going around the obstacles.
“What in the hell is this?” asked Derek. As if in answer, from behind both of the barricades of steel drums, more than a dozen men suddenly stood up in one movement. Armed men, weapons shouldered, aiming black rifles directly at the van’s windshield from a range of twenty feet. Armed men wearing brown berets, and brown t-shirts.
One of them screamed, “¡Salga! ¡Salga del carro! ¡Ahora!”
Ranya looked between Derek, the armed men, and Kalil. “They’re saying to get out, right now!” Sudden fear was rising from her guts, nearly choking her.
“Don’t worry, it’s just the New Mexico Milicia, it’ll be cool. Remember, they’re on our side,” replied Derek. “I’ll do the talking. Just chill, all right?” He kept his hands on the steering wheel as two pairs of the men moved around the sides of the wall of barrels, their weapons still shouldered and aimed at the van’s windows. The pairs advanced toward each side of the van, remaining a bit in front to avoid a crossfire while aiming at the driver and passenger. The rest of the Milicianos behind the barricade kept their rifles trained on the windshield.
“¿Estás loco, gringo? ¡Yo te dijé salga del carro! ¡Ahora! ¡ Rápido!” The Milicia man shouting the demands kept his rifle aimed directly at Derek, through the open driver’s side window, emphasizing his words by thrusting the muzzle forward. Ranya noticed his finger wrapped around the trigger, and she slowly shrank down and back in the van. She recognized the rifles, old M-16 A1’s, the original Viet Nam era Armalites with the smooth black plastic forward stocks. Each rifle was loaded with a long curved thirty round magazine.
“Es okay, amigos...” said Derek, calmly. “We’re on your side. Really, we’re coming to help. Umm…‘E-stamos…con…u-sted-es’.”
Kalil was frozen in his seat, but still whispered, “Derek, man, I think we better…”
“¡Silencio! ¡Callate tu boca, y salga ahora mismo—no voy a decirle otra vez!” This Miliciano continued to advance toward the driver, weapon shouldered, until his rifle’s quivering muzzle was only a yard from Derek’s face.
Derek spoke, slowly and quietly. “Listen, mi amigo…calm down, okay? Calm…down. I’ve got a letter of introduction for Professor Robert Johnson, at the university…it explains everything…” He slowly moved his right hand toward the center console, brushing away the folded map, and began to open the hinged compartment on top.
Ranya was almost in the middle of the back of the van, kneeling, her hands on the foam mattress, when a burst of rifle fire exploded just a few feet in front of her. She saw the top of Derek’s head disappear in a red eruption, and she fell prone, just as Lisa jumped to her feet screaming “Don’t shoot!” There was another burst of fire, and glass fragments rained down on Ranya’s back. There were the louder sounds of the muzzle blasts, and the sounds of bullets pinging through van’s sheet metal skin. There were men yelling, and shouted orders, and after a few timeless seconds the full-automatic firing abruptly stopped.
The side door of the van was slam-rolled back and Ranya went limp, as many strong hands dragged her out and flung her on the ground. She buried her nose into the dirt, and felt a hot muzzle tip against the back of her neck, and another against her spine.
She was instantly filled with sorrow that she would never see her son, after coming so far. She saw Brad’s face, and somehow she felt him beckoning her forward. She saw her father and mother, and a little girl with pigtails running through a sunny field to meet them with her arms held out.
But the awaited flashing plunge into eternity didn’t come. She still tasted the dirt of this good earth against her lips.
Gradually the ringing in her ears subsided, and she heard the moaning and wailing of another girl, and then Ranya began to return to the present. Two college girls. Destiny and Lisa. She slowly turned her head to the side and saw them lying not far from her, a spreading lake of blood under Lisa.
“¡Hijo de puta, qué maldita porquería! ¡Qué desastre! What a God damned disaster!” spat out a voice in guttural foreign-sounding Spanish. “Who the hell told you to fire?”
“The big gringo was reaching for a gun in that box, Chief! I had to shoot!”
“So, where’s the gun, you idiot? Go ahead, check the box!”
Ranya’s mind was now spinning at incalculable speed, sifting through the probabilities which added up to life or to death. Without consciously considering the risk or the alternatives, she said, “No hay fusil, Jefe. There is no gun. Only a letter.”
“What? Who speaks? One of the gringas speaks Spanish?”
“Sí, Jefe, I can speak it. The tall one was only reaching for a letter in the box. A letter explaining that we are revolucionarios, voluntarios, coming to join in the people’s struggle.”
“Is this true? Shit! Then why didn’t the fool simply get out of the truck when he was told?”
“He didn’t speak our idiom, Jefe. He was a fool.”
“Get up. Get up. Help her up, you clowns!”
“Gracias Jefe. Gracias.”
The “Jefe” was examining the Ruskin-Johnson letter, as they were being driven up State Road 355 to Interstate 40, on the way from Chulada to Albuquerque. They were sitting in the comfortable rear seat of the black crew-cab Ford pickup which had passed the van an hour before. Ranya was handcuffed, but at least the cuffs were in front, and not too tight. At least she was still alive…
Three Milicianos were in the front seat, and four more sat in the cargo bed behind them, their loaded rifles carried in various casual positions, some pointed at one another. All of them wore brown berets and brown t-shirts. The t-shirts were decorated on the front with the state logo, the red “Zia” tribal design from the New Mexico flag, the circle with four lines extending out to the top and bottom and left and right. In the center of the circle was a red star, apparently a new addition to the state symbol.
Some of them wore olive drab or camouflage utility pants, some wore blue jeans. Some had boots on their feet, and others only wore sneakers. Some of their faces hinted at Central and South American Indian origins: dark, with a convex profile. Their hair was worn in every length from shaven to shoulder-length. Several of the shaven-headed Milicianos had gang tattoos covering their arms and necks, and even their cheeks and foreheads. These seven troops all carried M-16 A1 rifles in common, but the rest of their gear was a hodge-podge of various military cast-offs and civilian day packs and belt pouches.
When Ranya had been pulled up from the ground, some of the men had lip-smacked lewd sounds at her while suggestively grabbing their groins, and she feared being gang raped. After being patted down and searched, she had been shoved into the back seat of the pickup truck without any more than a few rough gropes through her jeans and her black t-shirt. Her knife, her compass, and her nylon wallet holding part of her cash as well as her recently acquired Texas driver’s license had disappeared.
She wondered if Destiny was alive, and if she was, what was happening to her. The blonde had been left crying on the ground at the scene of the attack. Ranya had the fleeting thought that if she was alive, young Destiny might at this very moment be receiving an intimate tutorial in Spanish… Derek and Kalil she knew were dead, and she was all but sure that Lisa was also dead by now, judging by the amount of blood she had seen on the ground beneath her unmoving body. Ranya, although sprayed with their blood, had not been injured.
The Jefe was sitting across the seat from her, behind the driver. He was the oldest of the Milicianos, at least forty five or fifty, with a thick black Vandyke beard going gray in two vertical stripes, beginning at the creases of his mouth. Instead of a brown t-shirt for a uniform, he wore an old style woodland pattern camouflage utility blouse and trousers. Like his men, he wore the brown beret of the Milicia. Unlike his men, he wore a holstered pistol on a green web belt, and carried no rifle. He wore no other visible insignia of rank, but clearly he was an officer or leader, or as they called him, el Jefe—the Chief.
He slipped on reading glasses, and studied Derek’s infamous blood-stained letter. “Tell me again what this word means. My English is not very good.” He spoke to Ranya in deliberate Spanish, understanding that she was not completely fluent in his tongue.
“It means trusted, trustworthy,” she answered in her more than adequate Español. “The famous socialist Professor Ruskin from the University of Michigan, he tells Professor Johnson that these four of his students are all trustworthy and valiant, that they believe in the armed revolution and the people’s heroic struggle. Professor Johnson should trust them, and use them in any way he can.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “But you’re not on this list of four. Why not?”
“I only met them this morning. I was traveling by my thumb, hitchhiking. I met them in the gringo town of Mountainview, at breakfast. They offered to bring me to Albuquerque, to join the struggle.”
“Well, we’re going to see about that.”
As they neared Interstate 40 at the town of Tijeras, the Jefe pulled a cell phone from his camouflage blouse pocket and punched several numbers, then after a minute he gave up in disgust. “The cowboys, they shoot the cellular telephone towers, and not only for sport I think. ¡Cabrones! The cellulars still work closer to Albuquerque.” Then he removed a walkie-talkie from a pouch on his web belt, and called ahead to the Tijeras check point, to make them aware of their imminent arrival. Finally he tapped the driver on his shoulder, and the driver took a bright red rag and tossed it onto the dashboard against the windshield. A checkpoint recognition signal, Ranya guessed. A crude form of self-identification, to avoid accidental shootings.
“Jefe, the other girl, the blond, was she hit by bullets? Did she live?”
“Stop asking too many questions—some things you don’t want to know. Believe me, you don’t want to know. But I will tell you that you have much luck that your name is not on this letter! Very much luck. Because those four, understand me well, they were never seen, they never came here at all. They have disappeared, and you must forget them completely. That is the ugly reality of dirty war—sometimes accidents happen. Mistakes. Yes, pretty one, you have much luck that your name is not on this letter, or you would be with those four.”
“But why did your soldiers fire? Why were they so quick to fire? The students were not armed; they were only coming to join the revolution.”
“Why did they fire? I’ll tell you why! Because gringo cowboys killed almost twenty of our Milicianos, only three hours ago! Slaughtered them on a school bus, and some of them were only children! Gringo snipers shot them, just fifty miles east from here! Shot children, running for their lives! Then your green van-truck was seen, with a license from a distant Northern state, driven by two gringos—that is why they were very fast to shoot!” He folded the fatal letter and put it into his breast pocket and sat pensively, looking out his window, away from her.
After a while he said quietly, still staring up at the mountains, “You know, I have been in many wars, pretty one. Many wars…for most of my life. And in war…you either kill, or you are killed.” Then he turned to Ranya and said, “Until now, I have not been killed.”
A few minutes later she said, “Jefe…”
“No! I’m not your Jefe. Call me…Carlos.”
“…Carlos… You’re not from around here, are you? Your accent…”
He turned to face her, piercing her with the intensity of his obsidian eyes. “Do you mean I was not born as a Norte Americano, with the silver spoon of the gringo in my mouth? Or that I am not one of the insufferable ‘Spanish’ New Mexicans, who trace their line back to the white-skinned Conquistadores? Well, that may be true, but I am an American now and forever more, believe me! I have a driver’s license—in fact, I have three! I even voted three times for el Gobernador Deleon! So don’t tell me I am not an American! I am three times an American, and what the hell are you? My prisoner!”
They were waved through the Milicia checkpoint at Tijeras without stopping, and merged onto I-40 for the fast fifteen mile run west to Albuquerque.
Ranya was petrified when she saw the black hood. The Jefe had asked for the cubierta when they approached the outskirts of Albuquerque, and one of his troops in the front seat had passed him the cloth bag. The Jefe had simply told her to put it on, and crouch low on the floor of the truck. She had almost fainted when she slipped the dark sack over her head with her cuffed hands, thinking initially that it meant they were going to kill her. Her pulse raced as she began to breathe fast and shallow against the suffocating fabric. But it soon occurred to her that if death was to be her fate, they had no reason to keep her from seeing the world around her until her final moment of life. No, she reasoned, hoods were to prevent prisoners from seeing their surroundings, prisoners who might possibly be released.
Unless the Jefe simply wanted to depersonalize her, to dehumanize her, prior to ordering her execution. She tried to banish this possibility from her mind, but could not.
So she lay doubled up on the floor of the truck and tried to guess their speed, the turns they made, the traffic and city sounds but it made no sense. She had never been to Albuquerque and had no frame of reference. After ten or twenty minutes—she had no way to tell, exactly—the truck came to a final stop, and she was pulled from it. She could feel warm sunshine on her bare arms and hard pavement under her boots. She was led by a hand on her shoulder for a hundred or so steps and several turns, thrust forward, and heard a door close behind her.
A new voice said in harsh Spanish: “You may remove the cubierta. When you hear the key in the lock, you must put it back on. If you try to escape, you will be killed. Do you understand what I’m telling you, gringa?”
“Sí, entiendo.”
She removed the hood, to find herself in a cinder block cell, a tiny room, six feet deep and only a bit wider than the door. A little light seeped in from a mesh-covered air space over the door. There was no bed, cot, or blanket. There was a white plastic five gallon bucket for a toilet, and a one liter clear plastic bottle half-filled with water. There was nothing else in her cell. It was 2:25 PM according to her black plastic digital watch. They had not taken it when quickly searching her at the ambush site; evidently it was too cheap in appearance for even a Miliciano to bother to steal.
The white bucket was clean and empty, so she turned it upside down by the door, and stood on it to take a look out of the ventilation hole. The opening was the size of one missing cinder block. It was covered on the outside with dusty wire mesh too fine to put her fingers through. Stretching on tiptoes she could see a limited view of the outside. She was looking out onto a narrow white-painted hallway, with a bare fluorescent light tube at the limit of her angle of vision a few yards to her right. Across the hallway was another door, and next to it were more doors to the right and left as far as the rectangular vent permitted her to see, eight doors in all. Each door had a heavy steel hasp; three were locked with padlocks and five where not. There was no sound or sign of any other prisoners on the hallway.
It was no jail, but she knew what it was. She had been in such places under other circumstances. She was a prisoner in a commercial mini-storage. The Milicias were using a private mini-storage business as a covert prison. It made sense. It was probably an easy matter for the new state government to close down a business on any number of pretexts, in order to commandeer it for their own purposes. Most of the mini-storages Ranya had visited were surrounded by their own high security fences or walls. Many were in fact built completely inside of a high surrounding wall, virtual fortresses, with power-operated high security gates. All types of closed panel trucks—bringing prisoners—could come and go without attracting outside attention. Interior roads would wind between garage-sized units with metal roll-up vehicle doors. The smaller units were usually inside of a structure within the walled complex. There was no doubt in her mind; she was locked in a mini-storage, a ready-made secret prison.
The entrance was not an actual prison cell door; it was crudely made of wood covered with a sheet of steel bolted on the inside. But how could she escape? Even if she could somehow remove the handcuffs and break through the door, an armed guard could be waiting just out of her sight. And she had been warned: if you try to escape, you will be killed. After what she had seen just hours before at the Chulada checkpoint ambush, she had no doubt about the sincerity of the threat.
She stepped down from the bucket to consider her situation. It was doubtful the cell was meant for long term occupancy. There was no bed, no cot, no blanket, nothing. After her secret arrest five years before, she had survived months of solitary confinement in the underground “Tombs” in Illinois. Ranya knew about living in a small cell, although her five by eight foot cell in the Tombs had been a palace by comparison, with its cement bed, mattress, toilet and sink.
She tried pacing, but the room was too small. One, two, about face turn. One, two, about face turn. She remembered Brad’s story of being crammed inside a small steel locker for hours at a time, a narrow box where he could neither stand up, nor sit down. The “hell box,” he had called it… Well, if Brad could survive the hell box, Ranya decided she could survive being locked in a mini-storage unit, even one this small and dark and stifling hot.
Poor Brad, dead and gone these five years… Now only their unseen and unknown child still linked Brad to her in this world. Their five year old son, now named Brian Garza, who was somewhere in this city, perhaps only a few miles away! Did he even now feel her nearby presence, sense the physical closeness of his real mother? She had memorized his address; she could find and rescue him, if only she was free.
But there was no way to get out, not yet. She would have to wait for events to unfold, events which were beyond her control. She sat on the upturned bucket, and sipped some water from the plastic bottle, weighing and considering the story she would have to tell, when the time came.
She didn’t have long to wait, only an hour by the glowing face of her digital watch. She heard footsteps, stopping outside her door, and she hurried to put on her black hood while the door was unlocked. She stood by the door, it opened, and she was hauled by the shoulders to the right and down the hallway, through a series of turns, out into sunlight, and into another shadowy room.
“Sientate. Sit down.” The hood was pulled off of her head. The two Milicianos who had led Ranya from her cell pushed her down onto a stool. She was in a bare room about twenty by twenty feet, in the middle of the space. She was facing a long table, the kind used in cafeterias, with folding legs at each end. On the wall behind the table was a sheet-sized red cloth banner, showing a black fist inside of an outlining black star. Above the fist was written ¡Socialismo O Muerte! Socialism or death.
Seated across the table were three grim-faced Hispanics, a woman and two men. The woman sat in the center. She was about fifty, with gray-streaked hair drawn back in a bun, and narrow reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was wearing an austere dark green pants suit, with no frills or adornments. The man on the right was in his thirties, skinny with a receding hairline and a beak-like nose over a thin mustache. He was wearing a white and black checked short-sleeved shirt, open at the collar, and had a notebook in front of him. The man on the left was “Carlos,” the Jefe from the black pickup truck, still wearing his camouflage uniform, with his brown beret on the table in front of him. He was puffing on a cigar, ignoring the woman’s apparent discomfort.
The stern-faced woman began, with no exchange of pleasantries. “So. You say you were coming to join us, that you are a revolucionaria. Well, I don’t believe you. I think that you are a spy. We shoot spies. Why shouldn’t we shoot you?”
Ranya answered her right back without hesitation, operating on instinct and anger. “I don’t know if you shoot spies. Today I only saw your soldiers shoot unarmed students. Students who believed with all their hearts in the people’s resistance struggle!”
“How dare you! How dare you!” shrieked the woman, half standing, leaning on the table. “Enrique, don’t write that down!”
The Jefe turned his head to her and said, “But it is true, Camarada Inez. She only tells the truth. Your Milicianos did kill the gringo students today.”
“But you were there, Carlos, not I! You were there! Why was it not your own fault?”
“They were not my platoon; it was only an accident of fate that I was there. That this one is alive before you now to interrogate, is only because I was there. If it was up to your untrained Milicianos, she would be just as dead as…”
“Carlos—now is not the time! Not the time! I insist that you cease this…”
“Fine with me. But she is correct.”
Ranya inwardly breathed a sigh of relief. By going on the counter-offensive, she had successfully derailed the comrade commissar’s accusatory and threatening line of questioning.
“Let’s start this again,” said the woman, catching her breath, and making an effort to appear calm and in control. “Who are you, where do you come from, and why did you come here?”
“My name is Ranya Bardiwell. I escaped from a United States federal camp for political prisoners last Friday. In Oklahoma. I came to New Mexico because I thought I would be safe here from the United States Federales. I killed one of them in my escape, and they will kill me if they find me. That is why I am here.”
The three stared at her, amazed at this frank revelation.
After a long pause, the man with the notebook asked, “How do you spell your name?”
“R-a-n-y-a, B-a-r-d-i-w-e-l-l.” She pronounced the letters in the Spanish way. She was trying her best to use well-accented and grammatical Spanish throughout the questioning, attempting to bond with them at least on that linguistic level.
The woman in the middle asked, “Bardiwell—what kind of name is that? What national ethnic origin?”
“Arab.”
“Arab?”
“Yes, Arab. Lebanese-Palestinian Arab,” Ranya lied, embellishing her biographical legend to best suit what she guessed to be her audience’s prejudices—and outside of their ability to fact-check. Both of her parents were dead, she had no known relatives in America. They would have to go to Lebanon to discover the truth.
The woman looked at Ranya in a new way. “Palestinian? Are you Muslim?”
“No, my family was Christian.”
“And you?”
“I…have no religion.”
“I see. So this identification card here…” The woman held up a shiny driver’s license, the one Ranya had been provided by John Barlow at his ranch house.
“I stole it. When I was hitch-hiking across Texas.”
After answering a few more questions, she was hooded again and returned to her mini-storage cell, but this time, her handcuffs were removed at the cell door.
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