“Vehicles will travel at intervals of no less than five minutes, no greater than ten minutes apart. We will cross into the U.S. using our underwater bridge and travel south on Highway 170 to Presidio, then north on Highway 67 to Marfa, then east on U.S. 90. Again, do not bunch up. We do not want to present the image of a convoy. If you stop anywhere for whatever reason, it will provide the gringos with the opportunity to recognize and remember you. Each vehicle has its own gas and water cans and a cooler full of sandwiches and food.

“The county sheriff’s office, police station and the Border Patrol office will all be attacked at 14:00 hours. Team leaders, co-ordinate your attacks with your shortwave radios. Do not use cell phones. At 14:05 all the banks will be simultaneously robbed. The sporting good stores are not so critical. They are to be robbed between 14:05 and 14:15. Keep radio use to a minimum. Your men are not to know the town or their target. Only that it is a building which might have armed men who will resist inside. Each of you will have a team for which you are responsible for training. Luis will assign you classroom time and range time. Your men are to become proficient with the use of their weapons. You have six seeks to prepare them. They are not to know when we will go until the morning of our departure. Designate two or three of the men on your team as demolitions experts. They have the least amount of time to develop this additional skill. You study the manuals as well. Know what they know and more. The police are to be killed without hesitation. Killing others is to be limited to those who resist in any way. We do not have time to pleasure the gringo women in this adventure. We must wait for other opportunities to indulge them. There is to be no alcohol or drugs consumed for twenty-four hours before this raid. We cannot depend or trust those who are addicted to drugs. These people are to be turned over to Hernando as grave diggers - their own graves. You have complete freedom to summarily execute any member of your team who jeopardizes your mission by balking, attempting to argue with you, or anyone you believe is an informant. It is not unexpected to have one or several informants among us. They make good fertilizer for Hernando.

“Our primary objective here is to collect all the money in the banks. If any vehicle breaks down, take the Vehicle Identification Number off it and set fire to it. Take another from the Gringos. You, my lieutenants, will wear camouflage face masks. If your men wish to be masked, let them wear bandanas.

“Each of you memorize your plan. No one except you is to have a cell phone. Luis has initiated the notification system. If all goes well, we will have at least one hundred and fifty new men in addition to the fifty we already have. Trust none of them.

Luis, start making phone calls.”

Luis dispatched two dozen large vans to a dozen different small towns within one hundred miles of the border the next morning.

The bartender told Gomez about a large farm hiring many new workers. “There is more to it than that,” he said to Gomez, “but I don’t know what.” He heard a rumor that men with a tendency toward violence were preferred. He shrugged, “I know nothing else,” he said.

There were eight men waiting in the cantina, all casually eyeing Gomez. When Luis’s driver came in, the bartender nodded at him and said, “There is the man you should see.” The driver informed Gomez that yes, they were hiring young men in good condition as field hands, nothing more. Yes, the van was there to provide them transportation to the farm.

“I have my own car, so I will follow you,” said Gomez. The driver shook his head no. “No, Señor, you will ride with me in the van or you do not come. I cannot tell you why that is so, only that El Jefe wishes it.”

“What do you expect me to do with my car? I need this job. I cannot leave it here; it will be stolen.”

“I do not care what you do with your car. If you can afford a car, you do not need this job.”

Gomez put his arm around the shoulders of the man and led him toward the bar out of hearing range of the others. “I stole it from the Gringos,” he whispered in the driver’s ear.

“In that case, I suggest you sell it. I will leave in thirty minutes, with or without you.” The driver sat down at the bar and ordered a Corona. Gomez walked to the other end of the bar and motioned to the bartender. “Can we talk in the back for a minute?”

The bartender looked around, and seeing only the driver at the bar, who was appeased for the moment, motioned for Gomez to follow him out the back door.

“I have this very good automobile which is not stolen. I purchased it legitimately. I will make you a good offer for it.

“I paid four thousand Gringo dollars for it a month ago,” stated Gomez matter-of-factly. “I will sell it to you for twenty-five hundred dollars. The legal title I have, and I will sign it over to you.”

“Why are you willing to sell it so cheaply then, to lose so much money?” asked the bartender.

“I am wanted by the Rurales. It would be good for me to disappear for a while. This job you talk about will provide a refuge for me.”

“Where is the car? I will drive it before I consider it.”

“It is on the street, in the front. It is the blue Ford. Let us go drive it.” He handed the bartender the keys and walked back through the bar and out the front door. The bartender climbed behind the wheel, Gomez in the passenger side. When they were a mile out of town, the bartender mashed on the accelerator, and the Ford leaped forward. He mashed on the brakes; the Ford skidded to a stop in a straight line. He accelerated gently, moving the wheel from side to side to test the steering. They returned to the cantina.

“Show me the title?” he asked of Gomez, who promptly pulled it out of the glove compartment. “I will buy your car for twenty-five hundred dollars cash.”

“Agreed. Please pop open the trunk.” Gomez got out and removed a small duffel bag from the trunk. The bartender led Gomez back to the backroom of the bar.

“Fill out the title while I tend to the customers and get the money.” Gomez sat down at the desk to complete the title. As the bartender gave another Corona to the driver, he whispered to him what transpired as a warning of caution for Jesus Gonzalez about Gomez. He returned to the back room and opened a small safe. He withdrew a cash box and counted out the agreed sum. He locked the safe, handed the money to Gomez, and they returned to the bar together.

“I sold my car,” he said to the driver. The driver eyed Gomez warily, looked at the men standing around, then back at Gomez. He simply said, “Get in,” and walked to the men’s toilet. As the men climbed into the van, Gomez noted that all of the windows save for the windshield were tinted sufficiently heavily that it was hard to see out, let alone in. The driver started off and turned on the air conditioner. “We have a long drive, sleep if you can, we will eat when we arrive late tonight.” With that, he sped out of the town. The pickup hour was deliberately late so that most would sleep and not take notice of the route. All of them slept.

None of the new men had ever handled an AK-47. Very few had ever handled any sort of firearm. Fiero gave all of them a demonstration of the capabilities of the rifle. The Chinese had supplied the semi-automatic version only for the troops. The lieutenants had those with the selective fire switch for full automatic fire capability. Fiero had been practicing, and his demonstration was impressive. He selected one hundred meters as the maximum range at which they would fire. He made it very clear that if anyone accidentally shot anyone else, they themselves would be shot or hanged, at the pleasure of El Jefe, Jesus Gonzalez.

They were divided into teams that rotated morning and afternoons, classroom, rifle range, and physical conditioning. Volunteers for handling explosives were called for. Of the one hundred and forty-odd new men, only eight volunteered. It was enough. Experienced drivers were identified and assigned a vehicle to practice driving around the farm. None were to violate its perimeter.

In the classroom, they learned to field strip and clean their AK-47s. Then they learned about aiming and firing their rifles. Each soldier was assigned a number which he painted on the stock of his rifle so each would have an assigned rifle. The teams blocking the roads practiced with the dummy Rocket Propelled Grenades. They stored them overnight in a makeshift arms room under lock and key at night.

Many asked why, what this was all about. They were told that they were now part of a private army. Henceforth, they would be expected to carry out whatever orders were issued to them without question. They would be paid for their services in cash in due time. If they did not agree, now was the time to speak out. Most presumed they would be guarding marijuana fields or engaged in drug smuggling or smuggling aliens into the U.S. Most of them didn’t care, but a dozen asked to be released. Jesus Gonzalez concurred, and in the morning, they would be driven back to their pickup points. Two vans transported the twelve five miles over the highway, then they turned off into the desert. Anxiety arose when they left the highway, and they asked why. The driver told them they were picking up others from a different site. A mile off the road, the two vans stopped, and the drivers got out. They opened the doors and said, “Everybody out.” As the vans emptied, the two drivers climbed in and drove off. Felipe and Gordo and Ramon emerged from the brush. Without speaking, they opened fire with AK-47s in full automatic mode. A few started to run, but Fiero was hiding in the arroyo and killed them with a shotgun as they ran past him. The four then pulled the bodies into the arroyo as vulture and coyote feed.

The return of the vans without their passengers was observed, and the word that there was no out quickly spread among the new men. Some resolved to escape at the first opportunity, but only a handful. Some laughed at the irony of their situation, but most simply decided to go along.

The first week of July, Jesus Gonzalez ordered the mechanics to check each of the vehicles. Brakes, tires, steering, anti-freeze/coolant, air conditioners, four-wheel drive transmission, and overall condition were assessed and brought to good order.

The last week of July, he ordered the tanks filled with gas. Four five-gallon jerry cans filled with gas and ten gallons of water in coolers was placed in each vehicle. He directed the cooks to make six sandwiches per man and hold them in refrigeration. Breakfast was at 06:00. At 07:00, each man drew his rifle, one grenade, and four thirty round magazines filled with 7.62x39 millimeter ammunition. At 08:00, the teams were assigned to vehicles, and they were on the road, headed across the desert for their underwater bridge. There, they spaced themselves five to ten minutes apart. They passed through Marfa at 13:00; they were in Alpine by 13:45. The roadblocks, road guards really, were set up with two vehicles on each side of the road on every road leading out of town. There were three men per vehicle. Weapons were kept out of sight. Each roadblock had at least one pickup truck, in the bed of which were two armed rocket propelled grenades.

At 13:55, each entrance to the courthouse and the police station had a vehicle parked to cover the door. Team leaders walked into each establishment, pulled a grenade from out of his shirt, let the spoon fly, holding the grenade so that it was out of sight, and tossed it into the office. They turned and ran. As soon as the grenades exploded, four men ran in and began shooting everyone in the office. A few took the time to remove the Sam Browne belts with their equipment from the dead officers. After firing ceased, the Team Leaders went back in to survey the destruction and search for weapons. They seized several Kevlar vests, broke into weapons lockers, and removed tear gas grenades, gas masks, AR-15 rifles, and .308 Winchester rifles with large telescopic sights. The surprise had been complete. The two Team Leaders radioed Jesus Gonzalez “mission completed.”

The explosions of the grenades alerted the town. People came outside of their shops and homes to see what happened. At 14:05, the Team Leaders led their teams into the banks. Alarms were immediately set off, to no avail. No one was left to answer them. Several citizens attempted to call the sheriff’s office and the police, but their calls would not go through. Team members assigned to clean out cashiers’ drawers did so at the counters and drive-up windows. One bank manager attempted to swing the vault door closed but was immediately shot down. The second bank had the door closed but not locked. A quick-thinking lady cashier spun the handle, locking it when she saw armed men piling out of a van. The third bank was inadvertently prepared with its vault closed and locked, simply because the manager was late in returning from lunch. Gordo demanded the middle-aged vice president open the vault. He refused, begging that he did not have the key and combination. The Team Leader hit him across the mouth with his pistol. It broke off his four incisors and fractured the mandibular symphysis. Gordo put his pistol into the man’s bloody face and demanded he open it. He tried to explain that he could not, that he lacked both key and combination as best he could, half dazed and through bloody lips and gums. Gordo put his revolver to the man’s forehead and pressed the trigger. The Vice President’s blood, brains and bone fragments splattered over his desk. Gordo motioned to his explosive expert to blow open the vault. He ordered those with bags of money from the cashiers’ drawers outside to cover any approaching police officers or obviously armed citizens.

Quickly calculating that the walls of the vault were a foot thick, the explosives expert packed half a pound of C4 around the combination dial. Then he put another pound on the vault wall just around the corner closest to the hinges of the vault door. He inserted a blasting cap in the larger block and connected the two with Primacord. He unreeled the electrical wire back to the main entrance of the bank, connected the wires to a hand generator and crouched behind a desk. He yelled, “Fire in the Hole!” just as he had read was the proper procedure in the manuals. Everyone dropped to the floor. Mister Explosives twisted the handle of the generator which sent an electrical charge into the blasting cap. The back half of the side of the building which faced the charge collapsed in a cloud of dust. The force of the blast blew Gordo through the main entrance door. Mr. Explosives lost his head. He was peeking around the corner of the desk looking at the vault when he detonated the C4, and it decapitated him with a chunk of concrete. Everyone present was killed with the blast overpressure that ruptured lungs. Their van was rolled over in the street. The two who scraped clean the cashiers’ drawers were standing in front of the double glass doors and were cut to ribbons by flying shards of glass and concrete from the front door and vault. One body slammed into a vehicle and the other skidded down the street. The bank across the street had its windows blown out, as did other nearby buildings. Several other gang members outside were blown several meters through the air and rendered unconscious. Ramon, in the nearby bank, stepped outside and observed the consequences of the explosion. He deemed that the cash from the cashiers’ drawers was sufficient. He would not try to blast open the vault. Ramon ordered his team out of the bank, to pick up the unconscious team members, and load them into the van. He radioed Jesus Gonzalez, who was waiting on the edge of town, that Gordo had blown himself, his team, and the bank apart. No, Gordo did not penetrate the vault; he could see the vault still standing, intact, in the center of what was the bank. No, he didn’t believe that there were any survivors. The vault in their bank was locked, and he wasn’t going to repeat Gordo’s experience. He was pulling his team out now.

The sporting goods stores provided better success. No one was killed this time, and no women were molested. One astute citizen called the Presidio County Sheriff’s Office in Marfa to report multiple explosions and automatic gunfire. The Presidio County Sheriff tried to call the Brewster County Sheriff and then the Alpine Police Department without success. He then called the Texas Department of Public Safety in Marfa. They raised the State Patrol Officer assigned to Alpine on the radio.

DPS Officer Corporal Carlson was in his cruiser on Highway 118 forty miles north of Alpine when he took the call. Three miles outside of Alpine, he noticed a pickup truck and a van on each side of the road, all four vehicles facing forward and spaced fifty meters apart. Several men seemed to be standing around each one. He slowed down to thirty miles per hour to ascertain if they were armed. He didn’t see any weapons. When he was between the spaced cars and ten meters past the first pair, two men, one on each side of the road, suddenly appeared. One of them was pulling on a rope stretched across the highway. It was a string of pyramidal tire slashers that ripped into his tires and flattened all four of them as he drove across the chain. He was boxed in. Immediately recognizing it as an ambush, he floored the accelerator. With flat tires, he couldn’t go very fast. He saw the men ahead reach into the back of a pickup bed and come up with AK-47s.

OK, you SOBs, he thought as they raised their weapons to fire. He suddenly swerved onto the right shoulder of the road to see the look of surprise and fear on the face of one Mexican as he hit him, smashing him against the rear of the pickup truck. The other was bowled over like a billiard ball by the side of the pickup truck as a result of the collision of the two vehicles. The two men on the other side of the road, taken by surprise at the collision maneuver, regained themselves and began to spray the police cruiser with fire from their Ak-47s. The officer had, however, already thrown himself down on the passenger seat, opened the door and was sliding to the ground. He saw the dazed Mexican who was bowled over sit up on the shoulder of the road. The officer drew his Beretta .40 Smith and Wesson and shot him twice in the chest. He crawled to the front of his cruiser as the two Mexicans across the road ceased firing. Seeing their legs beneath his cruiser, he maneuvered around the front bumper and opened fire. He shot each of them in one leg. When they fell to the ground, he shot them in the chest. Caught again by surprise, they were unable to return fire before he killed them both.

Crawling over to the dead man that he shot on the shoulder of the road, he came under fire from the van on the right shoulder of the road, fifty meters behind him. He grabbed the AK-47, dropped behind the dead man for cover, and being an ex-marine, returned their fire, accurately and with lethal results. Taking two magazines off the body, he then crept around the front of the pickup truck and engaged the van on the opposite side of the road. His first three rounds shattered the van’s passenger window and windshield. Its occupants began to pile out of the door on the passenger side. He shot them dead as they emerged. He expended twenty of the thirty rounds in his rifle magazine when their return fire ceased and he had no visible targets.

Creeping back to the starboard side of the pickup, he didn’t observe any motion until movement several hundred meters out in the desert caught his eye. He observed three men running as fast as they could almost in a straight line away from him. He slowly rose to a crouch and approached the passenger side of his cruiser. Observing no motion, he opened the trunk of the cruiser, opened a rifle case therein and removed a Remington Model 700 varmint rifle in .308 Winchester. Sitting down and leaning against the bumper, he racked the bolt to chamber a round from the magazine. Wondering how much to lead them, he held just over the top of the heads of the running men and two feet in front of them. He fired. Shit, I missed, he thought, as the man in the center suddenly went down. The other two looked at each other, dove to the ground and started crawling. Stand up, you sons of bitches, he thought again. After two minutes, one of them did. He started to run, but the bullet knocked him flat before the sharp crack of the rifle reached him. The third man just continued to crawl. After another three minutes, the officer gave up and radioed Marfa, relating what transpired.

Fearing the worst, Marfa called Headquarters, Department of Public Safety, in Austin. Austin called the El Paso DPS office for an aircraft over flight from that office. Officer Carlson was drinking from a canteen out of his open trunk when he saw a line of cars approaching from the north at high speed. He grabbed his rifle and support bag with binoculars, camera and ammunition and ran into the desert. He was better than one hundred and fifty meters out when the cars stopped to see what happened. Ramon flagged the other vehicles to go on while he investigated. He had observed the officer running into the desert, but figured he was too far out for them to engage one another. Carlson watched Ramon through his binoculars as Ramon checked on the would-be ambushers. When he came to the man Carlson crushed between his cruiser and the pickup, he pulled a pistol and shot the man in the head. What the hell is he doing? thought Carlson. Then it dawned on him. The dead don’t talk, and it confirmed that those speeding vehicles were part of the Alpine raiders. Carlson put down his binoculars and picked up his rifle. Ramon shot two more of the downed men in the head to make sure they were dead and walked towards his pickup. Almost as an afterthought, he turned towards Carlson and gave him the finger. It was all the time Carlson needed. The 168-grain bullet caught Ramon right in the middle of the chest, rupturing the thoracic aorta and shattering his spine. The driver of Ramon’s pickup spun out as fast as he could, leaving Ramon a heap on the road.

By the time the state police Cessna flew over Alpine, the remainder of the raiders had fled. The Alpine airport tower radioed the Cessna that the carnage was over, and it was safe to land. At that moment, Corporal Carlson was entering Alpine at five miles per hour on four flat tires.

Chapter 7

Between the three banks, Jesus Gonzalez netted a little over $200,000. While disappointed that it was not in the millions he envisioned, it certainly was nothing to sneeze at. “We must learn more about explosives and bank vaults,” sighed Jesus. Also, his men had gained some practical experience. They tasted the thrill of combat, an addictive, adrenaline high. Out of the 130 men who participated in the raid, twenty were killed, most in the bank explosion. The survivors would be more thorough and more careful. Ramon and Gordo would have to be replaced. He would have to observe who demonstrated leadership qualities among the new men. Gomez, who was carefully being watched, demonstrated a natural leadership. He had been on the highway 118 North blocking team, where there was no incident. Jesus Gonzalez was quite suspicious of him, but he had earned only praise during the six weeks of training. The barkeep received a one-hundred-dollar tip for referring Gomez.

Television crews from the major networks scrambled to be the first to broadcast from Alpine. A small network affiliated station from Odessa was the first to arrive with a van to begin broadcasting. An NBC affiliate out of El Paso rented an airplane, loaded it with gear and flew to Alpine with two camera crews. They began broadcasting several hours later. Since bank robbery is a federal crime, the FBI flew in a full compliment of agents and forensic experts. In less than twenty-four hours, a thorough investigation was under way. A Tactical Operations Center, or TOC, was established with the FBI as lead agency.

With the news broadcast over network television on the morning shows, anxiety all along the Mexican border reached new heights. People who did not own guns missed work and waited for sporting good stores to open to purchase them. The phone lines were jammed to the FBI Center in Clarksburg, WV, for purchase approval. Many bought their limit of two guns per month. Some men purchased two and then went home and got their wives so that they could buy two more. Pistols, rifles, and shotguns all sold like fire extinguishers in a fire. Handguns of all types sold out first, followed by semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. Texans became armed as they had not been since the days of cross border raiding of Poncho Villa and the Carrancistas.