Aztec File

Rio Grande ValleyF rom the outside, it looked like any number of sunbaked south Texas homesteads gamely resisting urban encroachment throughout Hidalgo County. The ranch house sat on the western quarter of a 90-acre spread that once fed a small herd of Charolais cattle. That was before the owners decided ranching just five miles north of the Mexican border was a whole hell of a lot more dangerous than profitable. Now the tortilla-flatland around the faux-adobe walls of the old house lay lonely and fallow. The prairies and pastures on either side of a winding gravel road that ran off Highway 281 southeast of McAllen, Texas was overgrown with jimson weed and wind-warped Manzanita trees. But if he squinted against the glare and let his imagination run, the visitor approaching in his new Ford F-250 pick-up could see the attraction of living in a rambling old barn of a house like this one. It could be soul-satisfying, a throwback to the days when a man planted his roots deep and lived off the land. On the inside, as the visitor followed his host through a long dark hall and into a high-ceilinged room, the house looked like an old hunting lodge. The furniture was rough-hewn of unfinished native wood with not a hint of plastic in sight. The walls were spotted with game trophies bearing huge antler racks. Deer, elk, and antelope shared wall space with fat largemouth bass. There was a full-figure stuffed mountain lion in one corner of the room that seemed to be snarling at the porcine javelina that glowered back from the opposite corner. And everywhere he looked, as the visitor accepted a cut crystal glass his host offered from a wet bar built into an alcove just off the big central room, there were locked cases containing lovingly maintained rifles or racks of gleaming handguns. Shake Davis couldn’t help feeling like a sweet-toothed kid in a candy shop. Reluctantly pulling his gaze away from the guns and game on display, he sipped at the dark liquid in his glass and nodded approvingly at his host. “This is really good stuff. Am I impolite if I ask what it is?” “Not a bit of it,” said the lanky man who lured him down to the Rio Grande Valley with a disturbing revelation about threatening events in northern Mexico. “It’s a special blend of bourbon made by a friend of mine in Paducah, Kentucky.” Joaquin Sutler folded himself into a padded chair and pointed at a matching seat on the other side of a big fieldstone fireplace. “In these parts, we call it bourbon and branch. Branch water makes it right tasty. Comes from a little creek that runs through here.” Sutler pronounced the word “crick” in a slow, slightly nasal drawl that Shake had learned was the mark of a true native rather than transplanted Texans like himself and his wife. A lot of the country vocabulary was similar to what he grew up hearing in rural Southeast Missouri, but the tone and tenor was unique to born Texans. “Well, I damn sure appreciate the hospitality, Joaquin, but you didn’t call me down here just to drink whiskey.” From the time Shake had met the man the day before at their new Lockhart homestead, just south of Austin in the Texas hill country, Shake had found the lanky Marine Corps veteran and retired Texas Ranger prone to talk around topics, taking a roundabout route to get at what he wanted to say. Probably a hold-over from a long career in law enforcement, Shake had long since decided. Joaquin Sutler defined the word taciturn, not the kind of guy who liked to be rushed. Shake would eventually get the responses he wanted, usually after long silences when Joaquin seemed to be either drifting or dreaming. Attempts to speed up conversation on any topic just set the man off on a tangent. He waited quietly, silently identifying the firearms he could see around the room while Sutler shifted in his chair and sipped whiskey. “It’s like I said when I dropped by your place, Shake. We got a situation down here—specifically just across the border in north Mexico—that myself and some others consider a genuine threat to national security. Now I don’t use terms like that lightly. What we want is some experienced eyes on that situation, you know? We’re needin’ someone who knows the right people and has some decent credibility to take a look. Some old pals of mine from the Marine Corps said if there was a man like that available outside official circles, it would be Gunner Shake Davis.” “I’m a little unclear about the ‘outside official circles’ thing, Joaquin.” Shake handed over his glass as his host brought a bottle and pitcher of water from the bar and set it down on a table inlaid with colorful tiles. “If you folks have seen what you described, why not just turn it all over to the Feds?” “We tried that, Shake.” Sutler poured fresh bourbon and water for them both and then retrieved a manila file folder that he tossed on the table. “Take a look at those.” Shake studied a series of a dozen or so color photos obviously taken with a sophisticated camera and a good long lens. He could see a small cadre of men dressed in jeans and nondescript shirts. Some of them were sporting camel-back hydration packs, and one guy had a distinctive high-vis orange backpack that looked like something a medic might carry. Some were armed and some weren’t. The guns he could see were mostly AKs or clones from the Kalashnikov stable. They were doing what he’d often done in his own military career. Several views showed an instructor—or what might be a range-master—demonstrating field stripping in front of the assembly. There were other shots of different activities. It was hard to determine what was happening but if Shake had to guess from the gear he could see, it was some kind of explosives or demolition class centered on a rusty old GMC delivery van. He counted four men, all of them swarthy, stringy, and tough. They could be Middle Eastern, or Mexican, or just Anglos with deep tans. And there were no identifiable landmarks to indicate the training was being conducted in Mexico. It could be a bunch of survivalist yahoos playing soldier in Arizona or some other arid location north of the border. “Those are all prints from the digital camera we used. There’s plenty more on the disc, but it ain’t enough to get the right people off their dead asses, Shake. Hell, son, I pulled out every contact I ever made in the Marine Corps, in the Rangers, everything I could think of, told them about what we saw and where it was, showed them the pictures. We went to Homeland Security but they mostly shrugged us off like we were a bunch of right wing loonies—except for one fella. At least he said they’d put a drone up over the site.” “Did he do that?” “Got a call from him just last week…he’s an old Aggie or we’d probably have never heard anything at all…and he claimed they took a look where we told them to but they couldn’t see nothing but cactus and sand. We sent a couple of our Tex-Mex guys down to take another look and sure enough, the people we saw were gone—probably crossed the border and headed north. God knows what they’ve got in mind, but from what we saw, you know it can’t be good.” “Day late and a dollar short, I guess.” Shake had been up against parts of the national security bureaucracy often enough to know the drill. There was a lot of lip service paid to the see-something-say-something trope, but the guys flying the government-issue desks thought everyone outside the system was a de facto unreliable source. Regardless, if the people Joaquin and his group spotted in Mexico were now on this side of the U.S. border, it was a law enforcement problem. “Even if the authorities aren’t willing to go down into Mexico and investigate, you probably put them on alert to be watching for something coming from south.” “I ain’t so sure. They just don’t seem to think the southern border area represents a real terrorist infiltration threat like those of us who live down here know it is. You know, if it ain’t a hijacked airliner or a truck full of dynamite they just shrug it off, and it’s gonna bite us all in the ass sooner rather than later. You’ve got to understand, the people who live down here have pretty reliable contacts with the Mexicans in the little towns and cities on the other side of the Rio Grande. Those folks tell us there’s a regular group of Middle Eastern types who show up and do some training out there in the desert and then just disappear. Those Mexicans may be poor, but they sure ain’t stupid. They don’t want any part of that kind of thing.” “I’m guessing you reported all this to the Border Patrol guys down here?” “One bright spot there, Shake. We got real good relations with those poor overworked bastards. They seemed to take what we reported seriously. Trouble is, the Border Patrol has got its hands full just handling the flood of illegals that cross the Rio Grande every day. Under the current system, they can’t even do much about that. It’s like a damn old fishing tournament with the Border Patrol, you know? Catch and release. On top of all that, there’s a powerful stretch of border for them to patrol and they ain’t got near enough money or manpower. I’m told by my Ranger contacts that the Border Patrol has reported what we found to the Mexican authorities, but that’s pissin’ in the wind.” “Why? Won’t the Mexican authorities do something about it?” “Not hardly, Shake. The Mexican cops and military just ain’t sophisticated enough to find these guys and the few that might be prone to pursue the situation are either tied up with chasing druggies or they get paid off to look the other way.” “Paid off by whom, Joaquin?” “Well, now we get to the nut of the problem. Whoever these bastards are—whatever they’ve got in mind—they are apparently in bed with the Mexican drug cartels. Them bastards will do anything to turn a dollar, and if the terrorists pay them enough, they provide cover. Any law enforcement that starts sniffing around down there either gets whacked in ambush or the druggies let the bad guys know and they just move—break camp and head for another stretch of Mexican desert. There’s a lot of it down there, and it ain’t hard for experienced men to hide in it.” “So you want me to find these guys—then what? If you’re looking for someone to whack people down in Mexico, you’ve got the wrong man.” “I know that, Shake. Hell, if we wanted to hire some bad-asses to find these people and blow them away, that’s doable with the right amount of money. I believe it’s bigger than just the one bunch of hombres we saw down in Tamaulipas State. We got terrorists training for cross-border missions just south of us, for Christ’s sake, and we can’t get anything done about it. That might change with you as an eye-witness. You know the right folks and they’ll listen when you speak.” Shake sipped whiskey and stared into the mesquite fire Sutler had laid and lit in the fireplace. He wasn’t at all sure he did know the right people in the shady zone between military, intelligence, and law enforcement anymore. His most reliable high-level contact in those dark circles—the man who calls himself Bayer—had been forcibly retired after the Cuban rescue mission, but he might still have the ear and the trust of influential people. Bayer didn’t need official status with his record of reliability and a new conservative administration in Washington that had an avowed agenda of taking it to outfits like ISIS and Al Qaeda worldwide. Maybe there was something he could do, but Shake wanted to be sure he was consorting with reliable people. “Tell me more about these folks we’re supposed to meet, Joaquin.” “All good and true Americans, Shake. And I ain’t talking about a bunch of bubbas or paranoid minutemen either. Most of them coming by tonight to meet you are veterans—a goodly number of Marines and some serious ex-soldiers, a couple of retired Rangers like me. What we all got in common is that we love this country and we’ll do whatever we can to defend it. There’s an old boy named Chavez—Army vet—did a couple of tours with Special Ops teams over in the Sandbox. He’s got family down in Tamaulipas State, and they tipped him off to this stuff happening damn near in their backyard. That’s what got us interested, and then we started getting reports from Nuevo Leon and some other places close to the border. We put together a couple of teams driving around like touristas on a tear, and that’s when we got those pictures.”