Aztec File

Rio Grande Valley-2

Shake took another look at the photos. It was hard to believe that what looked to him like a rehearsal for a raid or guerilla-style tactical training could be pulled off so blatantly without drawing some serious official interest or surveillance, even if diplomatic issues or Mexican corruption made action difficult. He needed more information and perspective. “Look, Joaquin—I don’t know why the right people aren’t taking this more seriously, but I’m down here with you for the next couple of days anyway. Let me make a few calls and talk to some people I know.”

“That’s all we’re asking, Shake. You talk to these folks coming by tonight, maybe you’ll want to go on down there and see for yourself.”

u

Shake was toweling dry after a shower in a well-appointed guest room in a loft on the second deck of the big house when his phone chirped. Caller ID indicated the man called Bayer had gotten his message and was returning the contact.

“Davis—send your traffic.”

He got the laugh he intended from his old friend in the Virginia suburbs. “They can take the Marine out of the Corps, but they can’t take the Corps out of the Marine. Where the hell are you, Shake?”

“South Texas—way south—damn near in Mexico. You at home?”

“I’m rambling around the same shack in the shadow of the flagpole. That’s about as close as they let me get these days. Guess I don’t have to tell you retirement sucks.”

“You still in contact with any big dogs in the FBI? Still got your oar in the water at CIA or Homeland Security?”

“A few of them will still talk to me—just not about anything important.” Shake could hear a change in the pitch of the voice on the other end of the call. The man called Bayer had picked up on the question. A guy like him with long years of experience running clandestine operations for various overt and covert agencies around the world wouldn’t miss the overture. “You got something down there?”

“Not sure just yet. Maybe. Probably not something to discuss on the phone—especially your phone. Check your email. I sent you some photos. We’ll talk after you take a look. Call me on this number in the morning.”

“You sure you want me in on this, Shake? It might be bad medicine. I’m not exactly sunshine and lollipops with the establishment these days.”

“There’s a new administration, Bob. I’m thinking attitudes will change. If you want back in, I don’t see how they can ignore your record.”

“Yeah, maybe. I’ll take a look and we’ll talk tomorrow. Chan OK?”

“She’s teaching at U-T and loving the new place. We’re fine.” Shake could hear loud voices and a general hubbub from the room below the loft. “Meeting some people. Gotta go. More later.”

u

It was all pressed jeans; boots and big belt buckles among the ten or so people gathered in the big room, but Shake didn’t get any warning signals as he moved around and shook a lot of strong hands. There were three females in attendance, all of them middle-aged and attractive, in similar western attire. They looked like the kind of independent women that socialized easily and on a solid par with the men. Whoever these people were and whatever they did for a living in the Rio Grande Valley area, they didn’t seem like a gaggle of ultra-right wing conspiracy nuts. There was money and influence here. Shake could almost smell it. Their small talk was calm and about innocuous topics like business, local politics, hunting, or fishing. Most of them seemed to know a little about Shake’s military background, and all were polite and respectful.

After he made initial rounds, Shake settled on a stool near the bar. Joaquin Sutler approached with a stocky Hispanic man in tow. “This is the guy I was telling you about. Gunner Shake Davis, meet Manny Chavez.” Shake shook the proffered hand and smiled at the stocky man smiling back at him. From the haircut and deep tan, Chavez hadn’t been long out of uniform. Like most recent combat veterans, he moved like a cat with no wasted motion and eyes that swept his environment regularly looking for potential threats. If he had to guess without any further information, Shake would peg the man as some kind of operator beyond regular combat-arms experience. There was a subtle vibe about the man that Shake recognized. Sutler indicated the guy had done a couple of tours in the Sandbox, which was a modern military term applied to any number of Middle Eastern battlefields like Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, so Shake decided Manny Chavez was likely former Special Forces—maybe even a Delta guy.

“I saw you down at Bragg one time,” Chavez said. “You were out on a range at Smoke Bomb Hill when my unit was doing kinetic entry drills.” Definitely SF and probably an officer, Shake decided as he nodded over a sip of whiskey. Only a Green Beret officer would use a term like kinetic entry. If Chavez had been an enlisted Marine Raider or SEAL, he’d have referred to the exercise as “blowing s**t up” or something similar.

“I had an old buddy in the outfit,” Shake admitted. “He wanted me to see some of your new toys for explosive breaching. It was impressive stuff.”

“That would have been Chief Hillman?” The man’s grin got wider. “He told us some stories about you and him in Beirut. That was before my time. If half of it was true—well, you guys are legends in the community.”

“Half would be about right,” Shake said, leading Chavez over to a seat near the fireplace as Joaquin Sutler walked away to circulate among his guests. “Joaquin tells me it was your family down south that spotted whoever these guys are out in the desert.” Chavez nodded and leaned forward in his chair with elbows on his knees. He glanced around the room and took a deep breath.

“I got an aunt and uncle run a little cactus farm down in Tamaulipas. They live way the hell out in the desert due south of a little Mexican burg called Providencia. They harvest agave for the tequila makers. I used to go down all the time and help out before I went into the Army. My uncle’s a pretty savvy guy and he started looking around when he heard explosions south of his property. He spots these guys with guns and it doesn’t look right to him. He called me and I went down to take a look.”

“Did you take the pictures?”

“Not that first time—didn’t have any camera gear with me. I went back down there two days later with a buddy who was an Army photographer. We brought them up here and showed them to Joaquin. Figured him being a Texas Ranger and all, he’d know what to do and how to get to the right people.”

“How come you didn’t take them to the people you know at Fort Bragg?”

“Well, the truth of it is that me and the Army didn’t exactly part on good terms. There was some trouble with a raid my team made in Afghanistan. Lawyers claimed we blew away an innocent civilian. There’s more to it than that, but bottom line is I was in command, so I took the heat. Nobody got court-martialed in the end, but I decided to get out when my EOS came around. I would have stayed, I guess, but you know how it goes. Zero defects and all that happy horseshit.”

“I know how it goes.” Shake nodded. “We’re either gonna get over that kind of stuff or we won’t have an Army worth putting in the field. Combat—especially combat of the SpeOps nature—is messy business.”

“There it is…” Manny Chavez raised his glass and polished off its contents. “Anyway, I’m doing OK down here in the Valley. This group of vets…” He waved his hand generally toward the assembled crowd. “We take care of each other when and where we can. Good people—and we all want what’s best for the country.”

“You fairly sure the guys you saw down south were Arabs? It was hard for me to be sure looking at the pictures.”

“You mean were they Muslims? Yeah, no beards—we noticed that right away. But you gotta figure they’d shave to keep from being profiled if they were headed north across the border, right? We got close enough to hear them at one point. It sounded like some kind of language class, you know, Arabic to English. I heard enough Arabic on deployment to know it when I hear it.”

Shake was about to probe further, but he was distracted by a woman striding across the room in their direction. He’d met her during the first round of introductions. Carlotta something…he couldn’t remember the last name. She owned a bakery or tortilla factory or some such enterprise in McAllen. She had a long fall of jet-black hair, lively brown eyes, and a complexion that proclaimed a Hispanic lineage. She was short and curvy with fulsome breasts that strained a pale blue western-cut shirt worn over form-fitting Wrangler jeans. Shake stood as she approached, thinking idly that she’d be a good model for a Rubens paining. She shifted a drink in her hand and pointed at Manny Chavez.

“Manny, you cain’t hog our guest all night. Let somebody else get a word in edgewise.” She offered a hand to Shake and smiled showing a bright array of well-kept teeth. “I know you won’t remember, darlin’, but I’m Carlotta Valdez and I just wanted to say how proud we are that you’d make the trip down here to give us a hand with our little situation.”

“I’m not sure how much help I can be.”

“Oh, Lordy, darlin’, we damn sure got hold of the right man. Ah told Joaquin we need a man that had some solid cred for the job. Ah was an Intel weenie for six years in a U.S. Army uniform and there were a number of files I read that featured your name right prominently. Your reputation precedes you, Gunner Shake Davis.”

“More like my reputation exceeds me—but I’m intrigued by what you all are saying.” The crowd had gathered around the fireplace in the big room and guests were maneuvering for seats as Joaquin Sutler moved center stage, sipping his drink and waiting for the murmur of conversation to die down.

“Thanks for comin’ by tonight and helpin’ me dispose of some excess whiskey.” There was a ripple of polite laughter and Sutler waited for it to ebb before he continued. “For the past six months, we’ve been tryin’ to get the right folks to listen to us about what we know is goin’ on south of the border. We got no way of knowin’ if any of the people we contacted took us very seriously—but I’ve got to believe they didn’t. There’s been no follow-up beyond that one drone flight our Aggie buddy from Homeland Security ran. That turned up a dry hole as y’all know and I believe what we reported has by now been stuck in some file and won’t see the light of day again until some bad-ass hombre comes north and kills a bunch of Americans. We ain’t about to let that kind of thing happen.”

Sutler scanned the crowd with the same look of solid determination and purpose that he’d displayed when Shake first met him at the new house in Lockhart. Retired Texas Ranger Joaquin Sutler likely turned criminal guts to water just by showing up with a big hat and a bigger pistol. Shake didn’t peg him as the kind of guy who chased conspiracy theories or suffered from paranoid delusions. No doubt he was a real patriot in the founding fathers sense of the term. And that seemed to fit the kindred spirits in the room who had all expressed frustration with bureaucratic indifference to what they perceived as a real threat to the nation, the kind of threat most of them had enlisted to fight one way or another at some point in their lives.

“We need us someone who can get some official attention beyond lip service,” the retired Ranger continued. “Now, all y’all have had a chance to meet our distinguished guest,” he said with a nod at Shake who stood next to Carlotta Valdez at the back of the assembly. “And I invited him down here to meet y’all, get our perspective on the situation and maybe use his influence to get something done about what’s happening south of the border.” As the group turned to acknowledge him with smiles, Shake just lifted his glass and nodded. It was still a little too early for him to commit to what they wanted him to do. He needed more information. Joaquin Sutler seemed to sense that.

“Shake, I know we’re askin’ a lot of you. Is there anything else we can say? Any questions you have that we can answer?”