Invasion Usa: Border War

by William W. Johnstone

Genres: Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

William W. Johnstone continues his all-new action-packed series torn from today's headlines in which the American people must fight for the future of their country. . . Border War Not since the days of the infamous Pancho Villa has a foreign force raided American soil for plunder. And when a busload of American schoolgirls is hijacked and taken across the border into Mexico, the repercussions prove to be deadly. The gang of kidnappers is led by the ruthless crime lord Alphonso Guerrerro, whose daughter is on that bus. His ex-wife took his daughter back to the States, but Alphonso wants her back--it's a matter of pride--and will stop at nothing to get her. Now he's got a devil's bounty of young women to be used as hostages, or sold into the horrors of white slavery in South America if his demands are not met. But Vietnam vet Tom Brannon has something to say about this. His niece is on that school bus, so he's recruiting a battle-tough squad of ex-soldiers made up from the families of the kidnapped girls. They're going to rescue the girls and destroy Guerrerro and his gang of border thugs once and for all.

Release date: September 1, 2006

Publisher: Pinnacle

Print pages: 320

Sample

The Texas-Mexico border, upriver from Laredo Even here, in the middle of nowhere, it was hard to escape from the lights. In the sky to the southeast, the stars were dimmed by the wash of illumination from Los Dos Laredos—the two Laredos, the American city of that name and its sister across the Rio Grande, Nuevo Laredo. Up here, the landscape on both sides of the border river was desolate, mostly uninhabited plains dotted with scrub brush, but always in the night sky was the reminder that civilization was not far off.

So-called civilization, thought Brady Keller as he crouched in the brush and waited. Sometimes he wondered just how far mankind had really progressed when somebody like him had to risk his life to keep a bunch of damn fools from injecting poison in their veins or sniffing it up their nose.

Brady was a man in his thirties wearing a dark blue flak jacket with the letters DEA displayed prominently on the back. The men scattered through the brush tonight were a combined force drawn from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Border Patrol, and the Texas Rangers. They were members of a task force that had been trying for years, with limited success, to curb the drug traffic across the Mexican border. There were times when Brady felt like this was an unwinnable war, that they ought to just give up and let the animals take over.

But then he thought about all the men who had died in the effort to clean up the border, and knew that he and all the others like him couldn’t give up. That would dishonor all the ones who had come before and made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

Sure as hell, though, there were times when it seemed like the country didn’t really give a damn. Brady thought of himself as a simple policeman, but he understood the law of supply and demand. If the cartels didn’t have a voracious market for their drugs in the United States, they wouldn’t be bringing them across the border. Maybe the public didn’t really want this war to be won.

The politicians sure didn’t. That included both the ones who whined about civil rights and bent over backward to protect the rights of criminals, even foreign criminals, and the others who were too tightfisted to commit the money and manpower necessary to truly shut down the drug trade. Even though he loved his country dearly, Brady often thought that its leaders had raised the practice of doing something in a half-assed manner to an art form.

The earphone tucked into his ear crackled, cutting into his musings. “Here they come,” said the voice of Eduardo Corriente, the DEA agent in charge of tonight’s operation, which had been set up following tips from several of the task force’s sources. The radios were set on a special frequency that was jammed except for task force members, so that the enemy wouldn’t know they were here.

Brady’s grip tightened on the assault rifle in his hands. The dirt road in front of him ran from the Rio Grande to the railroad, about a mile behind the site of the ambush. A freight train had stopped back there on the rails, its crew working for the cartel. Those who couldn’t be bought off were terrified into submission by horrible threats against their families. They had stopped the train, and when the trucks rendezvoused with it, an entire freight car would be filled with drugs headed west.

But that rendezvous would never take place. The task force would stop the trucks carrying the drugs before they ever reached their destination, and another group of agents would move in on the train itself and arrest the railroad workers who were working with the cartel. For tonight, at least, the poison’s flow would be stopped.

But it was a mighty river, with many branches... .

Brady leaned forward as he heard the rumbling of heavy engines. He pulled the night-vision goggles down over his eyes, and as he peered through the brush that lined the road, the scene sprang into sharp, green-tinted relief.

Four big trucks with canvas covers over their backs rolled past Brady’s position. Each truck would have some guards riding on it, probably armed with automatic weapons, but the task force numbered over forty men, also heavily armed, plus several jeeps. Brady was confident they could handle the smugglers.

“Go! Go!” Corriente yelled through the earphones. Brady surged to his feet, cradling the assault rifle against his chest, and along with several dozen other agents, he ran through the brush toward the road. At the same time, the jeeps roared out of the concealment of a clump of mesquites and blocked the road, forcing the driver of the lead truck to slam on his brakes.

As the trucks rocked to a halt, the agents surrounding them began shouting in Spanish for the drivers and the guards to get out with their hands above their heads. The men in the truck cabs didn’t do any such thing, however. They stayed right where they were, and alarm began to gnaw at Brady Keller’s guts.

The canvas covers on the backs of the trucks were suddenly thrown up, revealing not the tons of drugs the authorities had been expecting, but rather men in black hoods and commando garb, overlaid with body armor. Four men to each truck, two to each side, had bulky tanks strapped to their backs and carried some sort of apparatus. Brady barely had time to take in the sight and realize what it meant before long tongues of flame shot out from the nozzles of the outlandish gear and engulfed the members of the task force.

Flamethrowers ... plain, old-fashioned flamethrowers. The members of the task force had been prepared for a gun battle, but not this. Men screamed and died horrible deaths as the fingers of hell closed around them.

Nor was that the only weapon being employed by the men on the trucks. Some of them threw grenades that burst in body-shredding explosions and sent bundles of torn flesh and blood that had been men flying into the air. Others wielded the sort of automatic rifles that the task force had been expecting, but now, in a matter of mere seconds, the agents were too disoriented and decimated to put up much of a fight.

One black-garbed fighter on the lead truck rested a rocket launcher on the top of the vehicle’s cab and fired at the jeeps blocking the road. The rocket sizzled through the night, trailing fire behind it, and slammed into one of the jeeps, blowing it into a million pieces along with the men inside it. The force of the explosion toppled another jeep sitting close beside the one that was struck, and as men were thrown out of that vehicle, a hail of steel-jacketed slugs riddled them. The driver of the third jeep tried to back away hurriedly, but another rocket launcher was ready and flung its deadly missile through the night. The man at the wheel of the jeep screamed as the rocket impacted the hood just in front of him and consumed it in a ball of fire.

Brady hugged the ground to the side of the road. The assault rifle in his hands chattered as he fired instinctively toward the trucks. Somehow he had avoided a direct hit by the flamethrowers, although the hellish stream had come so close to him that the heat had blistered his skin even through his clothes. He had been blinded by the flash that had burst in his goggles during the split second before they had burned out. Now he ripped them off and tried to aim by the garish light of burning brush—and burning men.

The black-clad figures were jumping off the trucks, shooting as they came. Mopping up what was left of the task force. Bare minutes earlier, the Americans had been a group of proud, confident men, ready to bring justice to the brazen lawbreakers of the cartel.

They hadn’t had a chance.

Moving like a wraith, one of the killers in black appeared beside Brady and kicked the assault rifle out of his hands. Brady rolled over and clawed at the pistol holstered on his hip, but before he could get it out the rifle in the enemy’s hands blasted. Brady screamed as the bullet shattered his right elbow, flooding him with pain. He clutched his wounded arm with his left hand and lay there panting.

He expected to die at any second, but gradually he became aware that he was still alive. His elbow throbbed unmercifully, and his face stung where the skin had been blistered and cooked by the near miss with the flamethrowers. He couldn’t see anything out of his right eye, and the vision in his left was blurred. It worked well enough, though, for him to see the menacing black-clad figure looming above him, rifle in hand.

He heard the crackle of flames and the screaming of wounded men. The gunfire had died away, and now there were only sporadic blasts. Brady felt sick to his stomach when he realized that after each shot, there was less screaming.

The killers were finishing off the task force members who had survived the ferocious counterattack. Tonight’s ambush had been a trap, all right, Brady realized, but it had been he and his companions who were caught in it.

Finally, there were no more shots, no more screams. He was the last one left alive. He had no idea why he had been spared, but he prayed that they would let him live. Even in agony, life was so sweet that he didn’t want to let go of it.

He had been raised on the border, down the Rio Grande valley in McAllen, and he spoke Spanish just as well as he did English. So he had no trouble understanding when the man standing over him called, “Here is the one you wished, Colonel.”

They had kept him alive for a reason? Him in particular? That made no sense. But as Brady looked toward the lead truck and saw one of the black-clad figures remove the hood that covered his head, he began to understand.

The man was tall and powerful-looking, and the glare from the flames on both sides of the road lit up a face that was both handsome and cruel. Brady had never seen him before, not in person, but he had seen the one photo that the task force had, the picture that had been taken with a telephoto lens and had cost the agent who took it his life.

Colonel Alfonso Guerrero.

“Listen to me,” Guerrero said in English. “You understand what I am saying? You know who I am?”

Brady managed to nod his head. It didn’t matter to the killers who he was; they had kept him alive simply as a messenger boy.

“Tell the ones who sent you and your companions on this foolish errand that La Frontera now belongs to Los Lobos de la Noche. Tell them that if they interfere with our mission, they will die. All of them, every time. And if they continue to annoy me, their families will die as well. Can you remember that?”

Again, Brady nodded.

Guerrero said, “To be sure that you do not forget ...” and nodded at the man standing over Brady.

The rifle in the man’s hands blasted twice more, and Brady howled as the slugs shattered both kneecaps. His body arched and spasmed in agony.

“Of course,” Guerrero continued, “you may bleed to death before help arrives, in which case I will have to send my message the next time you fools try to stop us. Really, it matters very little.”

With that, Guerrero pulled the hood back over his head and turned away. His men climbed back onto the trucks, their job here done.

Brady lay on the sandy ground, awash in pain and only half-conscious. He heard the trucks pull away, and a few minutes later, more heavy vehicles rumbled past. Those would be the trucks carrying the shipment of drugs, he thought in the pain-wracked wasteland that was his mind. He was barely coherent enough to wonder if Guerrero’s men had struck against the task force members waiting at the train as well. That seemed likely. Tonight had seen mass murder on two fronts.

Mass murder carried out by the self-appointed guardians of the drug trade, the mercenaries who hired themselves out to the cartel to carry out an orgy of death, destruction, and intimidation.

The men who now ruled La Frontera—literally, the frontier, that strip of land extending for miles on either side of the border—like a feudal kingdom. The men who called themselves Los Lobos de la Noche ...

“The Night Wolves,” Brady murmured, and those were his last words before oblivion claimed him.

Angelina Salinas said, “Have you ever . . ” and then leaned over to whisper the rest of the question into Shannon Horton’s ear.

Shannon’s face turned a bright red as she exclaimed, “Oh my God! Of course not. I wouldn’t do that. It’s ... icky.” She hesitated. “Have you ... ?”

Angelina smiled knowingly.

Unwilling to let herself be one-upped that way, Shannon said hurriedly, “One time, though, Jimmy Dominguez and I ...”

On the bus seat behind Angelina and Shannon, Laura Simms muttered to herself, “Children,” and tuned out the rest of Shannon’s lurid confession. She didn’t care what Shannon and Jimmy had done together. Anyway, there was a good chance Shannon was making the whole thing up. The redheaded girl hated to think she was being left out of anything.

Laura reached down to the backpack at her feet and took out her copy of The Once and Future King. It had been one of her summer reading assignments for Advanced Placement English, and she hadn’t quite finished it. Classes started the next day at Saint Anne’s Catholic School, following today’s annual junior/senior picnic at Lake Casa Blanca State Park, a short distance northeast of Laredo. Four buses carrying the small private school’s students rolled up the highway toward the lake. For today, at least, they didn’t have to wear the school uniforms; jeans were allowed. But not shorts.

And of course, the nuns had split up the boys and the girls, herding the separate groups onto two buses each. They would be allowed to mingle once they reached the park, but being together in the close quarters of the buses would be too much temptation for their overheated teenage hormones. At least, so the nuns believed. And considering the things that Angelina and Shannon were whispering to each other, the nuns might have been right.

Laura gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate on the words in her book. It was difficult to do, especially when Shannon giggled and said, “It was so big, I never—”

“Will you two sluts be quiet?” The words came out of Laura’s mouth before she really thought about what she was saying. “I’m trying to read back here.”

Angelina and Shannon turned around to glare at her. Shannon said, “Laura, you’re the only person I know who would bring a book to a picnic.”

“Nerd,” Angelina muttered.

Laura looked down at the book again and gritted her teeth. She didn’t care what they called her. She didn’t.

She wanted to say that being a nerd was better than being a boy-crazy whore. But she couldn’t. That would just make the others hate her that much more.

Angelina and Shannon went back to their conversation. Laura sighed as she realized that she had read the same paragraph at least four times. She gave up, sticking her bookmark back in the book and returning it to her backpack. She looked up and down the aisle of the bus instead.

There were forty girls on this bus, all of them juniors and seniors, their ages ranging from sixteen to eighteen. Twenty-eight of them were Latinas. That was seventy percent, which Laura knew without having to think about it because she did the math automatically in her head. Nine were Caucasian and three African-American. That was fairly representative of the population of Laredo, and Webb County. The actual figures skewed slightly higher Hispanic, as Laura knew because she had done a report on the demographics of La Frontera for her AP Government class the year before. The expenses involved in sending a child to private school tended to have an effect on the ethnic makeup of the student body, but with the population figures so predominantly Hispanic to begin with, they still comprised a large majority of the students.

Which meant, once you got past all the politically correct, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo that you had to put in reports for school, there were a lot of Mexican-American kids at Saint Anne’s, a good number of whites, and a few blacks. Everybody spoke Spanish, of course, no matter what their race. You grew up bilingual in Laredo. In fact, Laura thought she spoke better Spanish than some of the Hispanic kids. The old Mexican culture still existed, but in these days of the Internet and cable TV, iPods and wi-fi, a Hispanic kid was more likely to be familiar with 50 Cent than with Flaco Jimenez, and any mention of Cantinflas would get you a blank look.

Laura’s fair skin and blond hair—which was pulled back into a ponytail at the moment—didn’t cause her any trouble with the other kids. Some of them didn’t like her, but that was because she was smart and didn’t try to conceal it. She told herself she didn’t care. School wasn’t a popularity contest. One more year and she’d be graduated, ready to move on to college. If she could bump that 2350 SAT score up to a perfect 2400, Harvard wasn’t out of the question... .

Excited whoops from the girls on the left side of the bus brought Laura out of her thoughts. She looked over and saw a couple of pickups full of young men passing by in the highway’s left lane. They grinned and waved at the girls staring out the bus’s windows at them.

Shannon crossed the aisle, crowding in between other girls until she reached the window. Then she reached down, pulled the hem of her shirt out of her jeans, and lifted the shirt, exposing her breasts in a lacy, pale green bra just as the second pickup went by. The grins on the faces of the young men got bigger.

Sister Katherine, who was driving the bus, looked wide-eyed into the mirror and bellowed, “Sit down back there! Everyone back in their seats! Shannon, what are you ... oh, my word! Shannon!”

The two pickups shot ahead and then cut back into the right lane. They slowed. The bus was the last one in the convoy of four, and Sister Katherine was notorious for not being as heavy-footed as the nuns driving the other buses. They were still in sight, but they had pulled ahead quite a bit. The gap got bigger as the pickups slowed even more and so did Sister Katherine. She probably didn’t want to pass them because that might set off another round of hooting and flashing, Laura thought.

Something made her turn her head and look back, some instinct inherited from her dad, perhaps. He had been a cop before cancer had taken him five years earlier, when Laura was twelve. A good cop, too, from everything she remembered about him. And she made an effort not to forget, because she missed him fiercely. Her mom was a lawyer and expected Laura to follow in her footsteps, which was one reason for going to Harvard, and Laura figured that in the end, that was what she would do.

But there was still a part of her that wanted to put on a badge, to take names and kick butt, but more than that, to help people and get the bad guys off the streets. It would probably never happen, but still ...

In the meantime, she liked to think that she had at least some cop instincts, and that was why, when she looked out the rear window of the bus and saw four more pickups full of young men, she felt a sudden twinge of worry.

What was going on here?

Before she could do more than ask herself that question, two of the pickups behind the bus veered into the left lane and sped up.

“You girls get back in your seats!” Sister Katherine shouted. “I’m not joking! If you don’t behave, as soon as we get to the lake I’ll turn this bus around and go back! You’ll miss the picnic!”

The warning had some effect on the girls. Most of those who had crossed the aisle moved back to their seats. As the second pair of pickups drew alongside the bus, Shannon leaned closer to the window, waggled her fingers at the young men, and said wistfully, “’Bye, boys.”

Laura sat up straighter in her seat. The pickups had pulled up beside the bus, but they weren’t going on. The drivers seemed to be matching their speed to Sister Katherine’s. And the final two pickups had closed the gap so that they were right behind the bus. Six pickups in all, more than fifty men ...

They had this bus full of teenage girls surrounded.

“Oh my God,” Laura said softly as her heart began to hammer in her chest. “Oh my God.”

She lifted her voice and started to call out, “Sister Katherine, there’s something—”

But before she could finish, the front pickup that was beside the bus suddenly swerved toward it. A jolt shivered through the vehicle as the pickup’s right front fender rammed into it. Sparks flew and metal shrieked. Several of the girls screamed in surprise and fear as Sister Katherine uttered an uncharacteristic but heartfelt, “Oh, crap!”

She fought desperately against the wheel as it tried to tear itself out of her hands. Before she could regain complete control, the pickup hit the bus again, and so did the other pickup racing alongside. Lights flared redly just ahead as the driver of the pickup immediately ahead of the bus slammed on his brakes. Sister Katherine was forced to brake violently, too. The girls were thrown forward in their seats.

Most of them were screaming now. Laura pushed herself back up and rubbed her left wrist, which throbbed a little because she had used it to brace herself against the seat in front of her. Before she could steady herself again, she was thrown out of her seat to the floor as the bus left the paved surface of the road and bounced across the rougher right-of-way next to the highway. Luckily, this was a very flat stretch of terrain, and there was nothing to the side of the highway for hundreds of yards except open ground with a few mesquites and some other scrubby brush.

Luck probably had nothing to do with it, Laura thought as she tried to pull herself back onto her seat. The men in the pickups had chosen this spot to make their move. They wanted a place where they could force the bus off the road and yet minimize the chance of the big vehicle crashing.

Think like a cop, she told herself, think like a cop. Why were they doing this? The men in the pickups were all Latinos. Across the border, Nuevo Laredo was practically ruled by gangs of lawless, mostly young Latinos. Kidnappings were common, and how much more audacious could you get than to kidnap an entire busload of teenage girls from a private school, most of whom had parents who would be willing to pay ransoms for them?

But things like that happened on the other side of the border, not here. Not in the United States. Not in America.

Laura bit back a sob as the bus continued to careen across the sandy ground, gradually slowing. Clouds of dust swirled around it. Laura tried to remain calm, tried to force herself to think rationally, but when you came right down to it, she was still a seventeen-year-old girl.

And she was scared shitless.

The bus finally rocked and skidded to a halt a hundred yards off the highway. Four of the pickups had followed it, and now surrounded it as the clou. . .