Real conflict is both more mundane and heart-wrenching than the fictional version, but here is the climax, Chapter 16, of ¡Reconquista!, where everything unravels…
The cross blue lightning should have been an omen to the gathered Baaad Hombres who retired to their RVs and trailers to drowse into their opioid cocoons. By dawn the storm had saturated the desert until the air smelled like ripe succulents and there were still more smoky masses to the north.
Herb surprised all of them while hunched around the pre-action fire barrel by telling them that he had another mission he had to take care of and wouldn’t be initially joining them on their raid. They looked over a map and he thought he could catch up to them on his bike around the Corralitos Ranch. They were planning to hold that point anyway. His initial mission was to manage the skies, he told them cryptically while pointing upward. Several of the men thought he was going to pray for them, which seemed to them acceptable but not very good timing for the critical time of action. They passed around green camouflage face paint. Several men wore ghillie suits in the colors of the desert, making them look like human hedgehogs as they darkened their faces with the paint.
By six thirty they were rolling, their ATVs piled high with extra fuel and ammunition. The storm was quiescent but Herb warned them that the arroyos might be flowing and they may need to plot an alternative course under the fencing. He crawled into his wrecker and turned on the devices. He had only a short window to get the systems working and he had to figure out how to enter the numbers that the pretty woman had given him. It was important to her and he guessed that if he didn’t succeed his chances of bedding her were low. The numbers she had written were 32.62 and -114.11. He couldn’t enter the -114.11 into the Tecstar because it only would take numbers between 90 and -90, so he tried subtracting 114.11 from 90, getting negative 24.11. He figured a negative number probably wasn’t right, so he entered 24.11 and 32.62 as the latitude and longitude. The numbers were accepted and the green light came on. He had done it, he thought, but then remembered that he needed to turn on the jammer, too. He pulled out onto the highway while the transmitters did their thing, leaning over and watching the sky for any signs of drones as he drove along.
***
Candidate Seltzer was surveying the grounds his team had chosen for the rally east of Calexico. He had a tough battle in this border region so he had called upon his fellow Republican, President Montoya, to help him with his campaigning in the area. Montoya was Hispanic so he might sway some of these deceived Mexican Democrats to vote for him. He had to admit that he had been against Montoya during his primary run. It didn’t seem right to him that a Mexican could run for president, but he would plaster on a smile and shake his hand and call him a great leader for America during the rally. The president’s plane would land around 7:30 at El Centro and his motorcade would arrive around 8:30. That gave Seltzer around thirty minutes to warm up the crowd and make sure they were focused on him. The storms were still swirling around to the north and there was a possibility that the smaller jet that was transferring the president from Air Force One in San Diego would not be able to land. He had a backup speech planned if that happened where he would ad lib about his doubts about Montoya during the primaries, but how he had realized that a Mexican man could do a good job for America as long as he wasn’t an illegal immigrant. That was the story of the Party of Lincoln, he would tell them, the party that had freed the slaves and brought them economic prosperity and an end to racism. Not all of them had gotten the memo yet, though. He smiled at the turn of phrase.
He pulled off Rachel and held her in his big, plump fingers. She looked worse for wear, he admitted, and thought he should get her cleaned up. Maybe the black kid could take care of that, he thought. The bandstand had been mostly completed the night before but the rain had taken its toll on some of the bunting and torn the edges of banners. Some Mexican workers were doing repairs, so everything should be in order before the voters arrived. There were some Secret Service guys standing around and supervising the setting up of metal detectors. His armed constituency wouldn’t like that, but he had resigned himself to not packing heat because of the president’s visit. He wandered back to the coffee station and refilled his cup. The redhead girl was on the phone back there, discussing logistics of some sort with someone. He liked the look of her legs under the gray skirt she was wearing. Much better than the slacks she had on the night before. Women shouldn’t wear slacks, he thought, and pulled out his phone and Tweeted his thoughts on the matter to his adoring followers. He was watching Brenda when she pulled her phone away from her face and looked at it, then glared at Roy and turned and walked away. She had seen the Tweet, he thought. Good.
***
Birmie staked out the highway near Sensodyne’s compound. The antenna array was just visible over the stand of trees that blocked Birmie’s view of the house. The case against Sensodyne was not fully developed, yet, he knew, though it was close. He just needed a final, coordinating piece of evidence to call in the arrest. It would be spectacular, he thought, and he relished the look on Sensodyne’s face when he was being arrested.
Birmie’s phone range. It was Cancun. The GPS jamming had begun again. They were triangulating it. Birmie waited on the line. A call came in from the DEA but he let it go to voicemail. He knew what that one would be about. He watched the access road and the highway. That wrecker driver went by. A hardworking man out doing his hard day’s labor on a stormy day, he thought. Getting rained on while helping people, day after day, was a rough way to make a living.
And then she gave him the coordinates. It was moving but it was right on top of him. He thanked Cancun and told her that he was ending the investigation soon. He would need that data to finalize his case. He hung up and called the regional rapid response team leader. They would be going in today, he told the man and then speed-dialed a federal judge in San Diego to get a warrant. The day was shaping up beautifully, he thought.
***
Herb followed the drone through town. He was having a hard time keeping up with it as it headed east following the inverted coordinates he had fed it. The drone itself was perfectly happy, following its plan to perform an emergency landing at it’s home base that Herb had skewed to a location near Egypt’s Aswan Dam. It was getting lower and lower, however, due to the elevation skew that Herb had left in from his previous efforts. He finally gave up and stopped his truck. The drone had disappeared, but the timing was pretty good, he realized as he checked his watch: 7:03 AM.
***
The Baaad Hombres formed an ATV convoy with DontTreadOnMe in the lead. They had taped printouts of the lizard onto whatever surface was available on their vehicles. Herb had managed to get his inkjet printer working with SaltLakeKid’s help but the cyan cartridge was almost empty making the lizard look more pink-orange than green by the second printout. Big drops of rain came down incrementally, causing the salmon-colored lizard to bleed red into the yellow desert below him.
The convoy made their way the mile or so to the arroyo that fed under the border fence, but DontTreadOnMe halted the convoy when he saw the torrent of muddy water running through the gully. The men dismounted and gathered to look over the situation. They walked south for a few hundred yards to the border crossing and could see that the arroyo fanned out just before the fence. The consensus was that they could probably ford through that region, so they mounted up and drove down to the entry point they had identified. DontTreadOnMe took the lead and descended down into the rushing water. He made it around ten feet into the water before he began to sink in earnest. He gunned the engine on his Arctic Cat, sending a puff of gray smoke out over the water, but the torque just pushed the front of the machine further down into the mud and sand beneath him. He cut the engine and carefully crawled up onto the seat of his ATV, his legs and boots running with the cold gully water. He pulled his AR-15 from it’s rack on the front of the ATV to save it from saturation as the front settled further down in the stream. DontTreadOnMe yelled something incomprehensible about the Delaware River while standing impotently on the seat of his machine and holding his rifle over his head.
A second ATV made it slightly further into the torrent by cutting a bit further to the north than DontTreadOnMe, but soon he was stuck, too, wading out of the stream with heavy pulls of his tactical boots to free them from the sucking clay that made up the deepest bed of the arroyo. With a pull rope they got the two ATVs pulled out after twenty minutes of work and were finally able to restart them. The fencing east and west of the arroyo was too thick, they agreed, and finally decided to return to Herb’s compound. When they arrived, several men packed up and left. This precipitated the remainder to prepare to leave. They would try again next year, they agreed. Maybe the weather would be more favorable, then.
***
Seltzer wandered aimlessly around behind the grandstand. He smiled and chatted with the staff, most of whom were Hispanic. Only his security men and some of the Secret Service were white, he realized. There was a brief moment of whooshing and a whirring sound, he would recall later when dictating his thoughts to his ghost writer, though no one else could recall any sense or warning before the drone crashed into the grandstand with an explosive boom followed immediately by the ripping and tearing of the metal and particle board of the stage and sound towers. His recollection suggested a certain heightened or preternatural (the latter compliments of his writer) perception that may have been due to his time as a defensive tight end during college at Arizona State, and that was perhaps amplified by his time in law enforcement. He did remember that everyone flinched oddly at the massive sound, some descending to a knee or raising clipboards over their heads, while he stood steady against his panic. A dust cloud pulsed outward, the dust thickened by the intermittent rain that had varnished the landscape overnight. It was apocalyptic, he would recall later, but he was steady in the face of chaos.
The security team ran around to the front of the stage with their handguns drawn. The Secret Service swarmed with drawn weapons, too. When Seltzer made it around and the dust had cleared somewhat, they could see the remains of a gray drone, its wings shorn until they swept back in a triangle. The forward bulge was collapsed into the ground in a shallow trench thirty feet long. The tail of the aircraft looked largely intact and the plane’s tail number was plainly visible. Seltzer’s security men grabbed him by the arms after a brief survey of the situation and pushed him along at a steady clip to his Escalade sitting near the refreshment tent that had blown over from the impulse of the crash. They fled the area quickly, Seltzer sitting numbly in the back of the SUV as they rushed towards Calexico against waves of police cars that were heading towards the scene.