Ted Bell - Spy

The truck cab, anyway, it just didn’t have the trailer hooked up behind it tonight.

He automatically reached for the headlights and then caught himself, letting out a low whistle as he put the cruiser in gear and mashed the accelerator. No lights turning up on the rack tonight. He fishtailed crazily onto the highway and put his right foot through the floorboard, standing on it, watching the needle creep over a hundred. One ten. One twenty. Up ahead, he saw red brake lights flash on and off, disappearing over a dip in the road. He was half-mile, maybe less, behind the phantom trucker. Keep his own lights out, keep the phantom’s taillights visible. Maintain about this distance and he should be okay.

The phantom took a left off of Route 53 and now he was smoking west. Looked like he might be headed for a little ghost town about thirty miles outside Laredo. It was called Gunbarrel. It was situated at a bend in the Rio Grande about a half-mile or less north of the Mexican border.

Gunbarrel used to be thriving community in Texas oil boom times, round about the early 1900s. Did pretty good until about fifty years ago when they come to find out the oil business had all dried up and took its business elsewhere. Other than the little cemetery, which was full, Gunbarrel now had a population of maybe two, and both of them were prairie dogs.

The police radio was hopping. The chatter he was picking up tonight was nonstop reports of illegal crossings. You get down here on the border, the law speaks with a different tongue. Here they start calling the illegal crossers “bodies.” You hear a lot of chitter-chatter and then someone starts saying, “Okay, look alive! I got six bodies moving northwest toward the radio antenna!”

That kind of stuff makes a lawman uneasy on a night like this. ’Cause now the bodies are carrying heavy machine guns and they’re not afraid to use them on anybody in their way.

“Base of the tower! Base of the tower!” somebody on the radio shouted. The desert around Gunbarrel is spider-webbed with irrigation ditches and deeply rutted farm lanes. The only way you can pinpoint any location for another agent is to use some landmark like a water tower or a radio antenna or whatever. Homer didn’t see any tower, nor any bodies crossing the highway.

He saw the truck cab slowing down now and he did the same. They were both doing under thirty at this point, and it was a lot easier to keep track of what was under your four tires. He still kept a good half-mile between the Vic and the ghost rider, As far as he could tell, he hadn’t been spotted. He hadn’t made positive ID yet, either, but he was sure hopeful it was the Slugger.

Couple of minutes later, there was a faded black and white track-side railroad sign, a wooden rectangle with the word GUNBARREL painted on it in block letters. Sure enough, a hundred yards farther on he came to the old brick railway station house, looking pretty decrepit but still standing anyway. He saw some old abandoned oil tanks, overgrown with weeds, and a falling down building that had once housed something called the Shell Peanut Company. Now he passed a cotton gin, a flour mill, and even a few dilapidated mansions with gingerbread trim. All of them long ago abandoned to the rats and spiders and tumbleweeds.

Up ahead, he saw the phantom’s brake lights flash and he hit his own, mashing down on the pedal. There were no side streets so the trucker couldn’t be fixing to make a turn. He was going to stop right here in the middle of a ghost town.

Stop? For what? There was nothing here.

But the trucker was pulling up out front of a big old two-story brick building up ahead on the left. An old factory maybe, covering an entire square block. And with black holes upstairs where all the windows used to be and a wide arched entrance of some kind on the far end, like you might see at a fire station.

He swerved the Vic off the road and nipped in behind an abandoned Texaco gas station that was half burned down, almost hitting the one remaining pump with a busted gumball light on top. The Vic rolled silently over to the empty repair bay and came to a stop right under an old Hires Root Beer sign that had made it through the fire.

Homer shut the Vic down and quickly pocketed the keys, thinking: You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.

Homer wore a star, and, over his head, a faded red Texaco star was swinging in the breeze, making a creaky noise. It was shot through with rusty bullet holes. Time to go. He checked his sidearm. He checked his mini-flashlight, too, just to make sure the batteries hadn’t wore out.

He eased his car door open (even new, it tended to squeak) and climbed out of the Vic. Then he ran quickly toward the street, keeping the crumbling station building between him and the trucker’s cab. He stopped short, and peered around the edge of the building.

The Yankee Slugger was parked just outside the building. Blacked-out windows gleaming in the moonlight.

Damn. He’d been right. The Slugger had turned all its exterior lights off and pulled up outside the arched entrance to the building. Homer figured the guy (or the spook anyway) couldn’t see him now and he started moving along the deserted road beside the burned-out gas station.

Suddenly, there was a loud hiss of air brakes and then a big diesel engine growled and he saw that the wide factory door was going up. There still was not a single light shining in that building. But clearly someone was home to open the big old wooden door. Homer couldn’t hardly believe it, this was after all, a ghost town, but now the red, white, and blue cab was backing inside, was through the door, and now the door was coming down again. In the wink of an eye, the ghost rider was gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth.

Homer ran across the street, right up to the heavy door that had just slammed shut. He reached out and touched it, and it wasn’t wood at all. Solid steel. Somebody had painted it to look like old wood. Not only that, made it look like it was fading and the paint was peeling off, too. Now, why go to all that trouble? So no one passing through the ghost town would pay it any mind. That was why.

He ran quickly around the far side of the building, sidearm still holstered, but he had the Mossburg. There was a rusted out fire escape going up to the second floor. Windows up there, open. Maybe the stairs were still strong enough to hold him. No lights showing anywhere in the building. He scanned the building a second and then he saw it.

What looked like a tiny red eye up there in one of the darkened windows.

Somebody was standing up there, having a smoke. You couldn’t see anything but the cigarette’s burning coal floating in the blackness.

Another damn ghost?

A ghost didn’t worry too much about cancer sticks, Homer reckoned.

39

KEY WEST NAVAL STATION

A t three o’clock that rainy afternoon, Hawke, Congreve, and Pippa Guinness stood talking quietly. They stood just inside an alcove off the crowded hallway of the old Marine Hospital. The sleepy naval base was now a beehive of activity. At least a hundred other people jammed the hall. All were moving toward a pair of double doors leading to the cavernous base gymnasium. The crowd was restive, and a certain nervous excitement could be felt in the hall. Overnight, Conch’s Latin security conference had seen a dramatic increase in size. There was a palpable sense of urgency about the meeting. And, as Ambrose was explaining, there was a very simple reason for it:

Mexico had invaded the United States.

Rumors were swirling on Capitol Hill about a possible armed incursion by uniformed Mexican Army forces. A credible witness had reported uniformed troops moving north across his ranch at the Texas border in broad daylight. When confronted by the rancher and two of his hands, the men jumped back in their Humvees and hurried south, retreating across the border.