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  Each of the men instantly produced a weapon—pocket knives, a tire iron, a tine from a tractor-pulled rake, and an ax handle. “¿Quién es ello?” one of them called out.

  “My name is Victor, Victor Flores. I need help.”

  “Victor? El coyote?” another asked.

  “Sí.”

  “Victor! What’s happening, my man?” The older man with the tire iron ran over to him. “I am Jorge. You brought me and my brothers across the border many times, my friend.” He handed Victor a bottle of warm malt liquor; Victor nearly puked on it, but he gulped down a few mouthfuls. “What has happened to you?”

  “We must get out of here, Jorge,” one of the other workers said. “The sheriff will be back.”

  “Shut up, Carlos. This man has helped me more than you ever have.” Jorge looked at Victor carefully and said, “They say there was a shooting back there. Were you involved in that, Victor?”

  “Let’s get out of here, dammit!”

  “Look, Jorge, help me,” Victor said. “I was not involved in the shooting, but the ones responsible will find me if I’m caught by the police.” He produced the hundred-dollar bill the one called Zakharov had given him. “This is all I have, but it’s yours if you help me.”

  The one named Carlos licked his lips and made a step toward the money, sensing its value even in the darkness, but Jorge blocked his way. “Vete a hacer punetas, puta avara!” he swore. “Victor has helped me many times in the past—now I will help him.” He turned to Victor and said, “We are waiting for a ride to a farm in Indian Wells, my friend. We can take you as far as that.”

  “Gracias, amigo,” Victor said, holding out the money to him.

  “Keep your money, Victor—you may need it later,” Jorge said. “Just tell me you were not involved in a shooting.”

  “I saw what happened,” Victor said. “A group of Ernesto Fuerza’s pollos killed four Border Patrol agents and some migrants. I…I got away.”

  “¡Mi Díos!” one of the workers gasped. “Comandante Veracruz? He attacked la Migra?”

  “Him and a pollo, a big guy.”

  “The fight for freedom and liberty from American repression must be underway!” the worker said happily. “Comandante Veracruz has been calling for the workers of the world to rise up and resist the American oppressors! He must have raised an army and the fight is beginning!”

  “Shut up, you idiot,” another worker said. To Jorge, he said, “You cannot let him travel with us—we will all be taken to prison or killed by the Border Patrol in retaliation if he is caught with us!”

  “I said Victor will go with us, and he shall,” Jorge said. He looked at Victor. “But Carlos is right, my friend—it is too dangerous for you to stay with us.”

  “I won’t,” Victor said. “Indian Wells would be fine. I can find my way from there.”

  About an hour later, a large produce truck stopped near the service road overpass, and the men piled in. No one spoke to Victor for the rest of the trip. When the truck stopped and everyone got out, no one at all said a word—they just walked off toward their destination, none of them expecting Victor to follow them. He didn’t.

  He watched the sunrise as he lay against a rock about two hundred meters away from Route 74 outside Indian Wells—secretly he hoped the rock hid a rattlesnake or some other desert predator that would just put him out of his misery. But thinking of suicide was sinful, an affront to Jesus the savior, and he immediately regretted those thoughts.

  Instead, he thought about going home. He was born not far from here, and he had not been back in many months. Technically Thermal was not his real “home,” since his parents were migrants from Mexico and he didn’t have a real home, but he always considered the fertile, expansive Coachella Valley his home, and that’s where he thought he should go. He knew he shouldn’t risk it—he was an American citizen, so he assumed the government knew a lot about him, including his place of birth and the names and addresses of his closest living relatives, so that’s where they were sure to look for him—but he was tired, bone-tired, and still more scared than he had ever felt in his entire life. He had to do something, or the fear would surely cause him to go out of his mind. After a few more minutes’ consideration, he got up and started walking toward the sun rising over the Orocopia Mountains, toward home…and, hopefully, some rest.

  The air was crisp, clean, and not yet hot; there was a gentle breeze blowing from the west that actually seemed to help him as he headed east. Yet the horrible, stupefying stench of death and guilt encircled his head like cigar smoke, and would, Victor was certain, remain with him for the rest of his life.

  CHAPTER 1

  HENDERSON, NEVADA

  LATER THAT MORNING

  “Don’t talk to me about bigotry, xenophobia, or racism,” Bob O’Rourke said even before the country-western bumper music faded completely away. “Don’t you dare call this show and call me a racist. I’m mad enough to chew nails right now, my friends, and I might just lose my temper.”

  Fand Kent, Bob O’Rourke’s producer and call screener on the top-rated nationally syndicated talk radio show The Bottom Line, smiled broadly as she turned the gain down on her headphones. If you looked up the term type-A personality in the dictionary, you might find Bob O’Rourke’s picture there. He was always head-strong, dynamic, animated, energized—but he was even more so behind the microphone. During their one-hour production meeting before each show in Bob’s office, he had the usual array of national newspapers stacked up on his desk and his ever-present tablet PC notebook ready to take electronic notes, but today when she walked in for the meeting there were just as many newspapers on the floor, and crumpled up and tossed toward the wastebasket.

  Bob O’Rourke’s loud, deep, rapid-fire voice with just a slight Texas twang in it was exactly opposite of his physical appearance, which Bob carefully worked to conceal (and which cost the jobs of a few other producers when they slipped up and released unflattering descriptions of their boss): he was five six and weighed one-forty soaking wet, with thin black hair, a thin neck, very light skin, despite living in a town with eleven months of sunshine a year, and rather delicate-looking features. He was so self-conscious of his physical stature that he wore a cowboy hat, boots, and sunglasses all the time, even in the studio, and had trained his voice to become deeper. Some might call it a “Napoleon complex,” others might call it ego and vanity carried to the extreme. Fand Kent knew enough to keep her mouth shut whenever that subject was broached. You never knew when a rival producer or media reporter was nearby.

  “If you ask me, my friends,” O’Rourke went on, “this attack, this assault, this brutal assassination is every bit as serious and troubling as the terror attacks in San Francisco, Houston, and Washington in recent months. Don’t give me that look, Fonda. Don’t you dare roll your eyes at me! You know what I’m talking about!”

  Fand was busy with the phones and her computers and hadn’t even looked up at him, but it didn’t matter—he constantly accused her of disagreeing with his comments and ideas, which were all part of the show. She was smart enough never to let him know her true opinions.

  “I know, I know, it’s not Fonda, it’s ‘Fand,’ the Celtic goddess of truth, goodness, happiness, understanding, and Kumbaya, or some such nonsense that you were named after. To me, it sounds like ‘Fonda,’ another liberal tree-hugging ‘everyone be happy let’s all get along’ character, so that’s what I’m going to call you. I’m warning you, Fonda, the O’Rourke trap is open and you’re one step away from getting chomped, young lady.” Fand only shook her head and smiled as she went about her work.

  “I am not talking about numbers of dead or injured, my friends,” he went on to his worldwide radio audience. “I’m not talking about weapons of mass destruction. I am talking about the enormity of the attack, the audacity, the sheer brazenness of it. You liberals think that an attack against the United States has to kill hundreds or thousands of persons, or law enforcement officers killed in t
he line of duty aren’t to be considered victims of an ‘attack.’ Well, my friends, I don’t.

  “In case you don’t know what I’m talking about here, in case you’ve been living under a rock or hugging a tree or counting snail darters in Lake Mead with your head underwater and your brains up your butt, I’ll bring the ignoramuses in the audience up to speed,” O’Rourke went on. “Yesterday evening, four United States Border Patrol agents were gunned down just off Interstate 10 between Blythe and Indio, California. No, wait, just hold on. ‘Gunned down’ is too soft, too gentle, too Fonda. Let’s call it what it was: they were slaughtered. They were shot to death by automatic gunfire as they were making an immigration stop. These men were executed. And for what? For enforcing the immigration and border security laws of the United States of America, that’s what.

  “The assassins didn’t stop there, my friends, oh no, not by a long shot. They killed a total of ten Mexican nationals, including a pregnant woman and an eleven-year-old boy. The killers then made off with a Border Patrol vehicle. Incredible. Simply incredible. Horrifying is more like it. This is the worst killing in the line of duty in the history of the Border Patrol.”

  As if he needed something to get him even more hopped up, O’Rourke took a handful of chocolate-covered espresso beans and popped them into his mouth before continuing: “So what’s the status of the hunt for the killers? I called Mr. James Abernathy, director of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the folks who run the Border Patrol. He said he could not comment because of the ongoing investigation. Same response from Attorney General Wentworth. Fair enough. I’m not going to aid and assist the terrorists by pushing the investigators into revealing any clues that might make the killers scatter.

  “But I asked both gentlemen what’s being done to secure our borders and prevent another attack like this from happening again, and do you know what they said? Mr. Abernathy’s spokesperson said, ‘We’re doing everything possible.’ Attorney General Wentworth’s spokesman said, ‘Everything legally authorized is being done, with all due respect for the rights of those involved in this activity.’ Excuse me?”

  O’Rourke hit a button and the recorded sound of a large steel trap snapping closed went out over the airwaves. “I sense fresh meat in the O’Rourke trap, my friends. “‘Everything possible?’ My friends, do you realize that the four agents killed yesterday represented one tenth of all of the agents assigned to patrol the eastern Riverside County area of southern California? Ten percent of the agents assigned to ground patrol duties were killed in one night. Forty agents assigned to patrol about twenty-five hundred square miles of some of the busiest illegal migrant activity in the southwestern United States? That’s one agent for roughly every fifty square miles. Imagine having two cops to patrol a city the size of Las Vegas. How many crooks do you think they’re going to capture?

  “Attorney General Wentworth’s spokesman said that the government is going to respect the ‘rights of those involved in this activity.’” The snap! of the steel trap closing sounded again. “Wrong! I believe Attorney General Wentworth’s spokesman is referring to respecting the rights of illegal migrants, migrant smugglers, and maybe even the rights of murderers. Is he actually suggesting that we consider the rights of the trespassers and murderers versus the rights of endangered American citizens before deciding what we’re going to do to combat these border incursions and attacks?

  “As all my loyal listeners around the world know, I always have a copy of the Constitution of the United States right in front of me, and I refer to it often in questions like this. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution says that all rights, liberties, and protections of the Constitution apply to citizens of the United States. It also says that no state can deny any person—including illegal aliens and murderers, I suppose—life, liberty, property, or access to the legal system without due process. My question to Attorney General Wentworth is: what further considerations are you bound to give illegals and murderers before deciding how to enforce the law? We have laws against murder and crossing the borders through other than regular border crossings; we have agencies legally set up to enforce those laws. No one is being denied anything. So why isn’t the government acting to stop illegal immigration?

  “The bottom line: this wishy-washy feel-good politically correct nonsense has got to stop, my friends, before we blindly allow more violence across our borders,” Bob O’Rourke went on. “This namby-pamby mealy-mouth tap-dancing rhetoric regarding such a basic, fundamental, and important national policy such as controlling immigration, sovereignty, and security is a national outrage. An estimated one million persons illegally cross the borders of the United States every year. Estimates of the number of persons illegally in the United States at any given time range from ten to twelve million, and the number is increasing every year despite the attacks on Nine-Eleven and the recent Consortium terror attacks. The United States can put a man on the moon, read newspapers from twenty-one-thousand miles in space, and fly a plane across the country in two hours, but we can’t stop poor uneducated Mexican peasants from strolling across the border?

  “I say we can, my friends, and I say we do it now, before any more law enforcement officers get slaughtered. Those four men left behind wives, children, family, and friends, and our country owes it to them and owes it to all citizens to do something right now to stop this tidal wave of illegal immigration.

  “As you all know, because I’ve been harping on it for months now, the effort to repeal the Posse Comitatus Act is stalled in Congress, and President Conrad seems unable or unwilling to push it. This is another outrage, and the President had better have the guts to take the hands of the wives, children, and mothers of those slain officers in his, look them in the eye, and promise he’ll get the job done. What else will it take? Will more officers and illegals have to die? Does another city have to be attacked before this President gets off his best intentions and puts his political and personal reputation on the line to repeal Posse Comitatus and protect the borders?

  “All of my loyal listeners across this great country know my plan, but in case you’re tuning in for the first time or you’re just a bleeding-heart liberal illegal-hugger like Fonda, here it is, so listen up. It’s simple: bring every National Guardsman home from overseas and put him and her to work patrolling the nation’s borders. We’ve had experts on this show many times that say the U.S.-Mexico border can be sealed off with fewer than ten percent of the entire manpower of the Army and Air National Guard, or twenty percent of the manpower of the Guard just in the south border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and Texas. The National Guard was originally established to protect, defend, and secure the individual states and the United States, and only secondarily to augment the regular forces. We already have a nationwide declaration of war against terrorism—the governors don’t need any more authority or repeal of Posse Comitatus to deploy Guard forces in their own states.

  “But the active-duty military forces have the real equipment, training, and manpower to make this work, so they need to be brought in as soon as possible. Therefore, step two: Congress should repeal the Posse Comitatus Act immediately, or at the very least the President should suspend it while the country is in a state of war, as we are now, and all of the strength and capabilities of our military forces should be brought to bear to secure the borders.

  “I’ve been in the Air Force command centers up at Beale Air Force Base in California watching unmanned Global Hawk aircraft twenty thousand feet in the sky locating and tracking individuals from half a world away; I’ve seen infrared detectors spot individuals hiding under trees or even in underground spider holes; I’ve seen Joint STARS aircraft identifying and tracking hundreds of vehicles by radar over thousands of square miles. Guess how many Global Hawks we have patrolling Iraq and Afghanistan right now? Seven, according to the public affairs folks at Beale Air Force Base. How many do we have patrolling anywhere in the U.S.? You guessed it—none! How many Joint STARS patrol
ling Iraq and Afghanistan? Six—that’s all we have, my friends, leaving none to protect our own borders. We have less than twenty percent of the Air Force’s fleet of smaller Predator unmanned reconnaissance aircraft patrolling our own borders.

  “Technologically, I know we can do it—the question is, do we have the political will to do it? You will hear that illegal immigrants do work that Americans don’t want to do.” Again the sound of the trap snapping shut. “O’Rourke says ‘hogwash’! Farm owners prefer immigrant labor because they’re cheap, plentiful, work in absurdly deplorable conditions, and don’t complain or cause trouble for fear of deportation. If farmworkers were paid an honest wage instead of a slave laborer’s wage, more Americans would do those jobs, or the farm owners would modernize their equipment and procedures to make farming even more efficient and profitable. Any higher costs would just be passed along to consumers anyway, where the market would then dictate prices—but undoubtedly unemployment would go down in the meantime.

  “You will hear that politicians don’t like legislating against illegal immigrants because it will anger ethnic voters.” Snap! “Again, O’Rourke says ‘hogwash’! Legal immigrants and naturalized citizens oppose illegal immigration just as much as native-born citizens do because illegals are breaking the law—which hurts everyone—paints them with the same bigoted, racist, xenophobic brush as the illegals, and diminishes all the efforts they’ve made to come into this country legally.”

  O’Rourke paused for a few breaths, then went on: “I know a lot of you are advocating a guest worker program. Say what? A what worker program?” Snap! “Bullpies! I won’t even consider a guest worker program until every last man and woman in this country who wants a job has a job, and that’ll be a long, long time in coming, my friends. Don’t you dare try to sugarcoat the issue by telling me that Mexicans do jobs that Americans won’t do! Illegals have done those jobs because farmers and other employers would rather pay them a few pennies an hour rather than what a worker is legally entitled to. Pay an honest wage for an honest day’s work and you won’t need to hire slave labor to do the work.