Authors: David Hagberg
“I’ll send you a few mixed cases of our best, when we are finished.”
The humor left the room. “So tell us exactly what you want us to do and what’s in it for us?”
María finished her drink and set the glass down on the table. “Over the next twenty-four hours, I want your help to mass at least one thousand people, hopefully five or ten times that many, along the New Mexico–Texas border. Some of them will be ordinary Cuban citizens whom you will fly up from your distribution airstrips in my country.”
“For what reason?”
“We are going to invade the United States.”
No one laughed.
“Why?” Gallardo asked.
“For a Spanish treasure of gold and silver,” Fuentes blurted, but María waved him off.
“There may be no gold where we will be going,” she said. “Though almost certainly gold does exist somewhere in New Mexico.”
“Then why the operation?” Gallardo asked.
And María told him.
SEVENTY
The hill about a mile and a half southwest of the Fort Bliss National Cemetery rose barely two hundred feet above the general elevation of the desert scrub. Bulldozers had been working all through the night since late afternoon, and a little before dawn, McGarvey sat nursing a cup of coffee on the tailgate of an army pickup truck, watching the activity.
He’d given General Gunther twenty-four hours to complete the job of carving three intersecting trenches in the hill, and building two large mounds of dirt ten feet apart straddling the main trench. At this point, it looked as if his engineers were ahead of schedule.
Anyone approaching from the south would be funneled into the narrow opening between the hills in order to reach the trenches. Lights and large projection screens were to be set up on top of each mound, which would rise to at least twenty-five feet.
McGarvey put his coffee down and stood up on the bed of the truck. A couple of miles to the east, El Paso’s International Airport, its rotating white and green beacon flashing in the sky, was well protected by tall fences. Sometime later this morning, the manager would be informed what was going to happen in the next twenty-four hours so that he would have time to beef up his security in case some of the crowd spilled over from here.
Spread out to the south of Fort Bliss, the city of El Paso was brightly lit from the University of Texas and Centennial Museum to the west, and the zoo and the Coliseum to the east, cut through by Interstate 10, which even at this hour had traffic. But across the Rio Grande, which the locals called the Río Bravo del Norte, dividing Mexico from the United States, the city of Ciudad Juárez, with more than twice the population of El Paso, was relatively dark. And very often from even this far, the sounds of gunfire wafted across the river on a chance breeze.
Northern Mexico was at war with itself, mostly over the drug cartels’ desire to control the entire border from Tijuana to Matamoros, and the army’s inability to stop them.
The general had been out here a few hours ago to check the progress his people were making, and he’d shaken his head when McGarvey gave a couple more pieces of the puzzle.
“The border people aren’t going to like it, and El Paso’s cops sure the hell aren’t going to welcome five or ten thousand people walking across the Bridge of the Americas and strolling up the middle of Highway 54 to get here. That’s four, maybe five miles, and it’s going to take them several hours to make it that far. Traffic will be disrupted.”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“Doesn’t matter, because the first time someone pulls out a gun and takes a shot, all hell will break loose.”
“I don’t think they’ll be coming across with guns,” McGarvey said.
“I’m not talking about the Mexicans.”
“This is going to be nothing more than a march across the border by ordinary people, who are coming here to stage a nonviolent sit-in.”
“For what?”
“For something they think rightfully belongs to them.”
“Cut the bullshit, McGarvey,” Gunther said. “You commandeer my base, you talk in private with the president, who orders me to do whatever the hell you want, and that’s apparently going to involve Homeland Security, the local and state cops, and National Guard, and have my people dig up a hill and set up a drive-in movie. Then you tell me five or ten thousand people are going to come here for something they believe is theirs. Which is what?”
“Gold,” McGarvey said. “Spanish treasure from the seventeenth and eighteen centuries.”
Gunther was taken aback for a moment. “There’s no gold here. Never was.”
“Was up on Holloman.”
“Victorio Peak. A legend.”
“There was gold there—that much we know for sure.”
“Then why are they coming here?” the general demanded. “You’ve set up an elaborate ruse, why?”
“I can’t tell you that part. You’ll just have to trust me for the next twenty-four hours or so.”
The general shrugged after a bit and he turned away, but then turned back. “Are you armed? Are you carrying a weapon?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re not expecting trouble, then why?”
“Because there’re probably going to be two people, maybe a few more, who are not going to like what they find, and they’re going to want to take it out on me.”
“Do you want some backup?”
“Nope,” McGarvey said, and now looking in the direction of Ciudad Juárez, he clearly remembered the general’s last words.
“An angry mob is a whole lot more than the simple sum of its parts. Best you remember it.”
But the rewards, he’d decided as early as Spain, were worth the risks. And if they could pull it off with a minimum of damage and casualties, nothing in Cuba would ever be the same again—not for the government, not for the people, and not for the exiles in Miami who only wanted to go home.
He telephoned Otto, who was set up in a suite at the Radisson Airport Hotel, and his old friend answered on the first ring.
“It’s started.”
“Tell me,” McGarvey said.
“Lots of private air traffic across the Gulf, landing at airstrips within a hundred fifty miles of Ciudad Juárez. At this point, Mexican air traffic control is only just beginning to take notice. But it’ll be at least twenty-four hours, probably longer before the army is sent up to investigate. I’ve tried to task a bird to look for infrared signatures across the area, but Louise says there won’t be anything in position until at least noon, and by then, we should start getting visuals. But my guess is they’re putting it together and are heading this way.”
“Stick it out until noon, three at the latest, and then take the jet and get out of here.”
“I still haven’t got a lock,” Otto said. “But I’ll keep trying. Have you talked to Raúl this morning?”
“Not yet.”
Otto hesitated for a moment. “Take care of yourself, kemo sabe.”
“You, too.”
Like Otto, Raúl Martínez also answered on the first ring, as if he’d been holding his cell phone waiting for the call, but unlike Otto, he sounded wound up. And in the background McGarvey could hear a lot of noise, a chanting crowd, a lot of people shouting all at once, and someone on a bullhorn, the voices distorted.
“Are you just about ready?” Martínez asked.
“Within the next twelve hours,” McGarvey said. “Are you getting any hassles yet from the cops or anyone else?”
“The locals are keeping clear, and so far the
federales
have not interfered, thanks to you, but the situation here is nearly at the breaking point. I can’t hold it together much longer.”
“How about the DI?”
“There’ve been a couple of incidents, but nothing we can’t handle,” Martínez said. “Give me the word, Mac.”
“How many people do you think you’ll be able to move?”
“Between the trains, buses, and private cars and vans, at least two thousand, probably more once we actually get started. A lot of people down here have heard this kind of shit almost from the beginning. They’re skeptical. They want to see something concrete for a change, and I can’t blame them.”
“I want them in place in twenty-four hours,” McGarvey said. “Can you manage it?”
“You’re damned right,
comp
!”
“No guns.”
“I can’t guarantee that.”
“Goddamnit, Raúl, this isn’t going to work if there’s even a hint of violence. This has to be a peaceful demonstration.”
“I’ll do my best,” Martínez said. “But they’re fired up. What about Otto?”
“He’s still working on it.”
“This is goddamned tight.”
“Tell me about it,” McGarvey said. “I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”
“Where will you be? Exactly.”
“Around.”
“Good luck.”
“You, too,” McGarvey said, and he phoned María.
She, too, answered on the first ring. “Is it time?”
“Twenty-four hours. Where are you?”
“Just outside Ciudad Juárez. Have you actually found it?”
“It’s not in New Mexico, it’s a lot closer than I thought,” McGarvey said.
“Is it fabulous?”
“More than you’d think,” McGarvey said. “How many people will you have?”
“At this point, it looks like at least five thousand, possibly more.”
“No guns, no violence. This is going to be a peaceful sit-in. It’s the only way it’ll work.”
“I understand.”
“I shit you not,” McGarvey said. “The first shot fired, and all bets are off.”
“I told you that I understood,” María said sharply. “You said closer. Where do you want us?”
“You’re to cross the Bridge of Americas on foot. And from there, it’s a little less than five miles to Fort Bliss. I’ll send a map to your cell phone.”
“It’s actually there?” María asked, and she sounded breathless.
“Twenty-four hours,” McGarvey said.
SEVENTY-ONE
Waiting on the Mexican side of the Bridge of Americas across the Río Bravo del Norte a little past three in the afternoon, María sat in one of the four Hummers blocking the northbound lanes to all but foot traffic as thousands of people, most of them Mexicans, but more than one thousand of them Cubans flown in by the cartels, walked by. And she couldn’t help but think of the colossal chance she was taking.
She had lied to Ortega-Cowan about her intentions from the beginning, and of course she had lied to Captain Fuentes and to Raúl Castro and to McGarvey and his geeky computer freak friend Otto Rencke. Getting the gold to the people had never really mattered to her, nor had McGarvey’s efforts to find the treasure, going so far as to Spain and to track it down.
All along her goal had actually been a simple one: Ever since she’d learned as a child who she was, she’d wanted power. Not the same as her father or uncle, but real power and especially wealth that she could hide from the people and yet still enjoy.
For that to happen, she’d always figured that she would need a cause célèbre, something so big that it would attract the attention of not only the government, but the people as well and propel her to a seat on the Council of Ministers—even a seat as one of the vice presidents on the Council of State just a few ranks beneath the president himself. But the years had passed with nothing on the horizon until her father died and set her on a quest to find Cuba’s salvation with the help of Kirk McGarvey.
And her time was now, yet she was uneasy, unsatisfied.
The pock-faced driver glanced at her. “Are you going to walk with your people, señora?” he asked, and he laughed roughly. He was one of the Los Zetas, a Glock pistol holstered on his chest, a Kalashnikov assault rifle in the rack between the seats.
In the end, the cartels had agreed to take on the job of getting the crowd to the border and across for the continued cooperation of the Cuban government, but so they could get more of their own people across the border in relative anonymity, so that they could slip away and filter north to manage to drug pipelines within the United States. Too many interruptions in the distribution network were happening, and a new order needed to be put in place.
“Of course I am,” she said. “But you’re staying here.”
The driver turned away. This wasn’t his battle.
“Doesn’t matter if you actually find any gold,” the lawyer Rosales had explained to her and Ortega-Cowan and Fuentes at the safe house. “Even though you’re certain such a treasure actually exists, and you can enlist Mr. McGarvey’s aid.”
“It’s there,” she’d said.
“Be that as it may. But if a sufficient number of Cuban citizens can be somehow gotten across the border into the U.S. to stage a peaceful demonstration on the site of one of your treasure caches, the U.S. military will move in, as will Homeland Security, the FBI, and certainly the local authorities. And as long as no Cuban raises his or her hand—and there should be some mothers with children in arms, and old women—this will have a chance of working. Of course, it would be infinitely better if the U.S. authorities were pushed into firing on the crowd, with luck killing someone—a mother and child, an old woman.”
“You mean to get this into the international courts,” Ortega-Cowan had said.
“It’s the only way,” Rosales said. “If there is gold there, none of you can certainly believe that the crowd would be allowed to stuff their pockets and simply return home.”
“You’re talking about a three-way split—us, Spain, and the U.S.,” María said.
“It’d probably be more complicated than that. The treasure has been on U.S. soil for several centuries now, and much of what was hidden by the monks, if the stories are true, was bound for the Vatican.”
“Doesn’t matter, most of the gold that was lost at sea went through Cuba. There’s a treasure off the U.S. East Coast, a portion of which also belongs to us.”
Rosales had nodded patronizingly. “Your job,
Señora Coronel
, is not exploration and mining, it’s simply making a claim loudly enough that the international press will sit up and take notice.”
But the gold could be there after all, and she had given her DI operatives one simple instruction: “No matter what happens, you’ll make your way under cover of darkness to wherever the treasure exists and simply take any samples you can find. Doesn’t matter how much, just bring back something that we can use for proof.”