Jan nodded yes and picked up the phone. As soon as the administrator turned away, however, rushing to push a gurney and help load a patient, she dialed a friend at the local television station. “Jimmy! Get your mobile broadcasting station over here to the hospital quick. There has been a mass shooting somewhere, and the wounded are pouring in. At least eight wounded according to one observer.”
Incredulous, Jimmy responded, “Yeah, right! What do you think this is, April Fool’s Day?”
Jan, now quite excited and exasperated, shouted, “You asshole, this is no joke! I’ll call CNN,” and slammed down the phone.
Five minutes later, a van with a satellite dish on the roof pulled up outside the Emergency Department door. At that moment, a fourth vehicle with a wounded woman pulled in. The TV station van was blocking the drive. The driver of the Ford Explorer laid on the horn. Jimmy looked behind him and casually climbed back in his van and moved it over to the edge of the drive. At that moment, he saw John, soaked in blood, being wheeled inside. “Holy shit! She wasn’t kidding,” he thought, and opened up the back of the van. Manuel jumped out of the passenger seat and began setting up to broadcast. He contacted their major network so it would be a live broadcast. Jimmy grabbed a microphone, hooked the receiver on his belt, plugged in his earphone, and ran inside. In two minutes, he heard Miguel say, “You’re live” in his earphone.
“This is Jim Rodriguez broadcasting live from the Presidio County Hospital in Marfa, Texas. There are now four vehicles unloading wounded people as I speak. Here comes another victim now.” Manuel panned the portable camera as a gurney went by with a woman moaning softly, her abdomen drenched in blood. Approaching Jan, he asked, “Can you tell us what happened here?”
“All I know is all of a sudden this woman dashes in and says there has been a shooting. She knows of at least eight wounded. We have called in all medical personnel in town, all the doctors and Emergency Medical Technicians and nurses, all twenty of them. I don’t know anything else.”
Miguel pointed the camera into the Emergency Department clinic area, where John was being jabbed with intravenous set needles in both arms. The lady who had just passed them on a gurney had a sheet pulled over her face, and she was rolled off to the side. Another man came in, with an obvious leg wound. He was supported by two others. A nurse sat him in a chair in the hall and tied a tight bandage around it to stop the seepage of blood. Then she went back to the clinic area. Several of the others were dead on arrival. One rather attractive young woman was being helped, half carried, by two others. She obviously had suffered a severe beating.
“What happened here?” James Rodriguez asked of one of the men who helped settle the beaten woman in a chair.
“Apparently, a bunch of Mexican bandits raided Ruidoso, about 60 miles from here. They sealed off all roads in and out of town, shot the deputy sheriff and border patrolman, raided several stores and homes, shot anybody who resisted, and raped a couple of women. We found her,” he said, nodding to the lady, “alongside the road on the way here. I guess it was her husband she was clinging to. He was shot in the head and dead. I guess they were tourists. I don’t recognize them. They were just lying there on the shoulder of the road, no car in sight.”
“Can you describe the perpetrators?”
“No, I was just coming into town from the ranch when I saw the lady and the dead man. Then these other people came whizzing by. One stopped, the man with the leg wound driven by his son, and said a lot of people were shot by Mexicans. You’ll have to get details from somebody else.”
Their network made a scoop. It was immediately broadcast across the nation, as the network cut into live programming. The Associated Press wire service picked up the story for the newspapers. Rodriguez made hourly reports which were often broadcast live. The headlines across the country went “Mexican Bandits Conduct Raid in South Texas! Many wounded and killed.” Jim Rodriguez’s latest broadcast was played again on late night network news across the country. By morning, the Border Patrol, two Texas Rangers, Department of Public Safety Officers, the county sheriff and three deputies, the county attorney, along with people from the state crime laboratory were in Ruidoso to investigate. Initially, there was some heated discussion as to who would take the lead in conducting the investigation. The Border Patrol, the Texas Rangers, and the state police went at it. The Governor, sensing a debacle and having the nose of a politician, ordered the Rangers and state police to support the Border Patrol, who would be the lead agency. A federal agency in the lead would bring in more resources. Also, if another raid occurred, the heat would more likely be directed at the feds for not preventing it.
Thirty miles north of Presidio, Jesus Gonzalez led his column off Highway 170, crossing the Rio Grande at a very shallow place. Actually, it was something of an underwater bridge he had made his men build last year for this very sort of enterprise.
Jesus Gonzalez was celebrating. He had made his mark. A new career was launched. He had conducted the first significant raid as the leader of Mexican bandits since Poncho Villa raided in 1915. He never heard of Black Jack Pershing. After forty-eight hours, the body count was nine dead, thirteen wounded, two women and one twelve-year-old girl raped.
Gonzalez made everyone stay in their temporary camp. They used it occasionally and hid it well. Vehicles were driven inside three-sided buildings. Fresh water came from a very small spring higher up the mountain. That night, they built a fire and roasted the fresh meat they raided from the grocery store. Liquor flowed freely. Tales of prowess, of the struggles of the women who resisted, of the skills of marksmanship, and their fearless courage, regaled into the night.
“My friends, my companions, today was just the beginning. We will now return to our homes for a few weeks. I will send word to you when to come together next time. Next time, we will do even better. Next time, there will be mucho more money as well as food, liquor, women, and fine guns. In the meantime, be very careful, at the risk of your life; tell no one, not your mother, not your girlfriend or your wife, or your children, and especially not your priest what we did today!” That brought a round of laughter. “Now, I have a little money for each of you. If you can line up, Fiero will give each of you one hundred American dollars that we collected.”
At that, a spontaneous cheer arose, and they half staggered, half fell, to the table where Fiero handed each of them one hundred American dollars after they signed their name to the ledger. When one tried to collect twice, Fiero looked at Jesus and nodded. Jesus promptly stepped up and butt stroked the man in the side of the head with a rifle. No one tried to collect the reward a second time.
Sam Dickenson, Lieutenant of the U.S. Border Patrol, studied the site along the highway where the young tourist couple was molested. The blood from the gunshot to her husband’s head formed a dark stain partly on the pavement and partly on the sandy shoulder. He noted a shred of cloth hanging from a greasewood brush ten yards off the highway that was blowing in a faint breeze. The tracks on the sand covering the hardpan were not difficult to follow and showed the woman resisted as she was dragged into the brush. Faint heel prints in the desert indicated that several men wearing boots participated. The Lieutenant put the shred of cloth in a plastic bag as evidence, although he knew it would hardly be worthwhile. They had enough semen collected by vaginal flushing during the rape examination that indicated she had been penetrated by four different men.
He knelt down, studied the tracks, stood, and pointed down at the tracks for the laboratory folks. The crime lab boys took photographs of the prints and then plaster casts of the boot prints. Samples of the blood-stained sand were scooped into a plastic bag. They also took castings of the tire tracks in the sand where the Mexicans had turned the car around and driven off.
Dickenson was an old hand, approaching nearly thirty years with the border patrol. The last twenty of it he spent along the Rio Grande. Out of the office in Marfa, he was the first on the scene, he and his junior partner, Rod Jahrling. As soon as they had interviewed a few people at the hospital, they returned to the office. He put in a call to the next higher headquarters, drew an M1A Springfield, four magazines, a hundred rounds of .308 Winchester cartridges, a hundred rounds for his issue sidearm, a Beretta Model 96 .40 Smith and Wesson semi-automatic, and a Deer Hunter version of the twelve gauge Remington 870 pump shotgun., along with a box of 00 buck for the latter.
Jahrling drew a box of 50 rounds for his Beretta 96, but drew his Remington 700 varmint synthetic stocked rifle in .308 Winchester cartridges in its aluminum case from the trunk of his privately owned vehicle. He took fifty rounds of match ammunition from the ammunition locker. On top of the rifle sat a Burris Black Diamond T-plate variable power telescopic sight. With its twenty-six-inch barrel, he could keep five slowly fired rounds in a six-inch circle at five hundred yards. It was a sniper rifle in the guise of a varmint rifle. He had purchased it two years earlier out of his own pocket. In fact, he had made it to the national finals in the long-range rifle match in the Border Patrol shoot off the previous year.
It was dark by the time they reached Ruidoso, but they began a systematic interview of everyone who had been involved or was a witness. After 22:00 hours, they checked into the single motel at the edge of town, one of the enterprises that had been robbed by Jesus. No one was hurt at the motel where they only took money from the cash register. By morning, others from various law enforcement agencies had begun to arrive. First were two Texas Rangers, followed by two Department of Public Safety highway patrolmen. The laboratory boys had flown in and landed their light plane in Marfa late that night, rented a car, and drove down the next morning.
The first stop was the home of the Border Patrolman, Adam Satcher. According to his wife, he had just stepped out on the porch to go to the local coffee shop where he usually ate breakfast. She heard a rifle shot while in the bedroom. She ran to the living room only to find him sprawled on the front porch in a pool of blood on the other side of the screen door. He had been shot in the middle of the chest. He was instantly killed. This was to be his last year. He planned to retire on 31 December. He had ridden the river for many years, and this was considered a relatively non-hazardous assignment, patrolling up and down the deserted highways. Only occasionally would he find illegal aliens. Sometimes, he would scare them back into the brush by firing a few shots, occasionally, he would take one or two into custody, or if he was in a good mood, ignore them. He felt that he had done his duty for many years but was never supported by national policy. Always so much duty, so much time, so little resources; most of his career he was going in harm’s way without a partner. Therefore, he didn’t feel much of an obligation to his duty anymore. When he had made his intentions known, he was moved from the Marfa office to Ruidoso for his last year. Dickenson, the number two man in Marfa, took the job as section chief. Dickenson thought it was time the old man retired. He didn’t seem to want to leave the office anymore, only shuffle papers and be a petty bureaucrat. It was decided that Satcher would maintain the rank of Lieutenant. They justified moving him to Ruidoso to regional headquarters by claiming it was a hotbed of smuggling activity and a dangerous section that required an experienced man. The regional office was well aware of the circumstances and winked at the move. There was insufficient manpower, and really no reason, to allow him to maintain a partner in Ruidoso.
Dickenson was beginning to have brief periods of the same attitude, and they were coming more and more often. He tried not to let Jahrling see it so he would not influence the young officer. Dickenson searched the area and found a rifle cartridge across the street from the Satcher’s home. According to a neighbor and confirmed by Mrs. Satcher, a white van was seen driving away from the scene. The neighbor and his wife loaded Satcher’s body in the bed of their pickup and put Mrs. Satcher between them in the cab. They drove off for Marfa. They saw the roadblock on the highway and turned around. Afraid to go back into town, they drove into the desert and hid behind a low hill for several hours until the roadblock left. By then, most of the other wounded had also been loaded into various vehicles and the convoy formed for Marfa. It was obvious they knew Lieutenant Satcher’s habits and were waiting for him. Dickenson bagged the rifle cartridge and called the lab boys on his cell phone, as if they couldn’t find the house on their own in such a small town.
Their next stop was at the home of the local deputy sheriff to pay their respects to his wife. He had been ambushed in his office. Apparently, two Mexicans walked into his office, and as he looked up from his desk, drew hidden pistols and opened fire. A Winchester .30-30 rifle case was found outside as well.
Two people were shot at the food store. Two employees and a customer were murdered in the hardware store. The home of the owner of the food store had been burglarized. The owner’s wife, a lady of sixty years of age, had been beaten into unconsciousness but recovered consciousness in a few hours. The house had been ransacked from top to bottom. They even removed a small color television. She managed to drive herself to the doctor’s office in town. His office had also been burglarized, as had been the drug store next door. They took most everything on the shelves. The pharmacist had been pistol whipped, suffered severe contusions and a mild concussion, but was otherwise unhurt.
The physician, a middle-aged family practitioner in his fifties, had made his millions in the city of Bayonne, New Jersey. He moved to Ruidoso to escape the big city life and very quietly practice where his skills were truly needed. He was beaten into unconsciousness for objecting when his nurse turned office girl Friday was held across her desk and gang raped. He offered no violence, only verbally objected to her being raped. His nurse, shaking all the way, drove him to Marfa in her pickup. Radiographs revealed his jaw broken at the symphysis, in two places of the left mandible, and a fracture of the right maxilla where he had been pistol whipped. He was treated with morphine and hospitalized. One of the physicians called a friend at El Paso General and scheduled him for facial reconstructive surgery in two days. His nurse was treated for rape, put on antibiotics for possible venereal infection, blood drawn as a baseline, and hospitalized for the night. She would receive counseling the next day for psychiatric trauma and the possibility of HIV infection. If she would go to El Paso General with her boss, she could receive an experimental vaccine against human papilloma virus, as could the other rape victims.
Chapter 3
Jesus had filled the gas tanks of three vehicles he was immediately commanding, then robbed the only gas station in town. He shot the owner when the man demanded payment for the gasoline. A witness said that Jesus smiled and said, “Die, you Gringo son of a bitch!” in clear English. Jesus then shot the witness, but it was a shoulder wound from which he was expected to recover.
One of the deceased was found dead on the corner of a side street. He was known as something of an old desert rat. He lived alone a few miles out of town in an old shack. He did odd jobs when he could and helped out on the ranches in the county when they needed an extra hand. Apparently, he pulled an old lever action .30-30 rifle out of his gun rack and fired at the raiders from across the hood of his pickup truck. The response was that he was raked with automatic weapons fire. They counted forty holes in his pickup truck, and four in his chest. Nobody knew that he inflicted a lethal wound on one of the raiders. After they pulled off state route 70, Jesus ordered the body of his dead man stripped of all belongings and clothes, taken two hundred yards off the track and placed in a coulee. There, the coyotes and buzzards would make quick work of it. The clothes and belongings were burned back at camp.
The twelve-year-old girl was physically more mature than most girls her age. She just happened to be in the hardware store at the wrong time. She was there when they walked in and was immediately observed. Two dragged her down the aisle and into a corner where she was attacked. Stricken with fear, she offered little resistance at first. Then, she began to fight back. They beat her, raped her, and because she appeared to be Mexican, they let her live.
One rancher had the unlucky fortune to be driving his new pickup into town for a load of barbed wire and fencing staples. Unaware of the robbery occurring, he walked into the store only to be faced with a shotgun. One raider asked if that was a brand new truck, and when informed it was less than a month old, the raider demanded the keys. Reluctantly, the owner surrendered them. “Gracias, Señor,” was the response, along with a twelve-gauge shotgun blast to the chest.
Interviews with forensic artists over the next few days resulted in composite drawings of a number of the raiders. These were computerized and broadcast across the southwest and to all FBI and Border Patrol offices nationwide.
No convoy of the assorted vehicles was noted passing through any of the adjacent towns. Dickenson then concluded that the raiders had turned into the desert somewhere. He sent Jahrling back to Marfa to hitch one of the station’s two horse trailers to their Dodge and load their two saddle horses, two pack horses, saddle bags, and bedrolls. Dickenson continued questioning witnesses, everyone he could find until virtually all of the citizens of Ruidoso had been interviewed.
Jahrling arrived the next morning with the horses and trailer. They put the horses in a local corral and bought dried foods at the local store, enough for three days. Then they drove out of town looking for any indication of where the raiders had left the highway. When they found multiple tracks turning south off Highway 70, they pulled the trailer off the road two hundred meters and unloaded the horses. They unhitched the horse trailer, filled their canteens, packed two panniers on one pack horse and four five-gallon cans of water on the other. Dickenson checked his cell phone, put fresh batteries in his saddle bags, put their rifles in the scabbards and began tracking across the desert. It wasn’t hard to follow so many automobile tracks, even across the hard pan. It wasn’t long before they noticed the buzzards circling. They found a body, already partially devoured by coyotes, foxes and vultures.
Periodically, Dickenson would scan the landscape with binoculars, looking for any indication of an ambush. The second day out, they stopped at the Rio Grande. They were at the river’s edge before they knew it. Dickenson immediately turned them around and backed off four hundred meters. “Unpack the pack horses, keep your rifle within arm’s reach at all times. Keep our saddle horses ready in case we have to high tail it out of here. I’m going to the river for a closer look.” When he came to within one hundred meters of the river’s edge, he sat behind a mesquite tree and carefully surveyed the far side of the river. He thought he could discern where the vehicles had left on the far side. He was particularly interested in places within four hundred meters where a rifleman could hide to ambush anyone who dared cross the river. He crept slowly back to the camp.
“We’ll move back behind that small rise and make camp for the night. Keep your rifle handy. I’ll cook, and you picket, feed and water all of the horses.” Dickenson began to gather dried mesquite wood by digging roots out of the ground. When he had enough, he built a small fire and set a pot of coffee on a camp grill along with a pot of water to boil rice and beans, to which he added a can of tuna fish. After supper, as the sun went down, they took their rifles and binoculars, and Dickenson led Jahrling down to the river. Dickenson took a GPS reading of the crossing site after glassing the area again. He telephoned the location in to his office and informed them they were camping for the night. The information was passed up the chain of command. Thirty minutes later, Dickenson’s cell phone rang. He was given explicit orders not to cross the border but to maintain vigilance there for as long as they had sufficient food and water. Their job was to monitor any activity. An aircraft would be dispatched in the morning for photographic purposes.
When the information continued on up the line, the State Department informed the Mexican ambassador of what had occurred and that the raiders had been tracked into Mexico. Would the Mexican National Police please pick up the trail and continue the search? The Mexican ambassador was only too glad to agree to such accommodation. The National Headquarters of the Border Patrol requested aerial surveillance of the area from the U.S. Air Force. The President ordered a long dwelling drone equipped with high resolution and infra red cameras to be flown just inside the U.S. border but to take photographs for one hundred miles inside Mexico for any sign of the raiding force. Unfortunately, by this time, all the vehicles were parked inside Gonzalez’s packing sheds. Aerial reconnaissance revealed nothing unusual.
Henry Dorn, second term Democratic President of the United States, called to Roberta, his secretary, to get the Mexican President on the phone.
“Good Morning, President Bustamante.”
“And a good morning to you, President Dorn.” Bustamante knew why Dorn was calling him but waited for him to breach the subject.
“I trust you heard of the cross-border raid on Ruidoso, Texas yesterday. We have circumstantial evidence that the raiders originated in Mexico. What do you make of it?”
“Most unfortunate, Mr. President. We are deeply troubled here in Mexico that such violence occurred. Our sympathies go out to all of the families whose loved ones were lost and wounded or otherwise injured. But tell me, what evidence is there that the raiders were from Mexico or that the raid was launched from Mexico?”
“For one, Mr. President, the vehicles were tracked from where they left the highway to where they crossed the Rio Grande. Our officers did not cross into Mexico to continue pursuit. Indeed, they chose to respect the sovereignty of Mexico.”
“Please pass to those officers my respect for their professionalism. If they can identify the location, perhaps our officers can, as you Americans say in your western movies, ‘pick up the trail.’”
Dorn gave Bustamante the coordinates reported by patrolmen Dickenson and Jahrling.
“I will have my officers on it immediately, both on the ground and in the air. We shall do our utmost to bring these murderers to justice. One problem I see, however, is a Mexican law that we cannot extradite criminals to a country where the possibility of capitol punishment exists. The state of Texas executes more felons than any of your other states. When we capture these vicious killers, some other arrangement will have to be made.”
