Dale Brown: Edge of Battle

“We’ve spent too much time here already!” a gunman shouted.

“¡Cierre para arriba! ¡Me estoy apresurando!” The gunman was right beside him! Victor heard the attacker searching the Border Patrol agent’s body, probably removing weapons, ammunition, IDs, and radios; then the attacker opened the hood of the Suburban.

“¿Es bueno ir?”

“No, es tiro.”

“ ¡Cabron! I told you not to shoot the damned truck!”

“ ¡Carajo! I was under fire. I…” The gunmen stopped, and Victor heard the upraised rifle. “¡Hey, hay alguien aquí!”

This is it, Victor thought. He froze in place and closed his eyes tightly, moving his lips in a silent prayer, waiting for the heavy-caliber bullets to blow his brains into a million pieces. A few moments later, he heard two gunshots…

…but he wasn’t shot. He heard a loud, anguished woman’s scream, then two more gunshots. “Dos pollos en la furgoneta. Ningún problema,” the gunman shouted. A few more moments later, the gunmen were gone.

Victor stayed motionless until he heard no more vehicle sounds. When all was quiet, he rose and looked into the ditch beside the farm road. Paul Purdy was one of the few good guys on the U.S. Border Patrol—he really seemed to want to help the migrants, not just round them up. He went down into the ditch and saw the three large-caliber bullet holes in Purdy’s back, and he was afraid to touch him anymore. The body was twitching and heaving grotesquely.

The Border Patrol was no match for these gunmen, Victor thought. Those bullet holes were massive—the exit wounds would be many times that size. Purdy was definitely a goner. The other agents would be here shortly; they would know what to do with Agent Purdy.

He stepped out of the ditch and looked inside the Border Patrol van. With horror he recognized the two dead migrants: the woman who had thanked him when she was dropped off after their safe journey, and her eleven-year-old son. He would have been old enough to identify the attackers to the authorities, so of course he had to be eliminated too.

That boy didn’t deserve to die—all he did was accompany his mother to America in the search for work, searching for a better life. Victor was the one who deserved a bullet in the head. It was his fault, he thought bitterly, that all these people died at the hands of that murderous bastard Fuerza.

Unbidden, the child in Victor Flores finally reemerged, and he began to cry just as loudly and sorrowfully as he did when he was a child. He sank to his knees, emotionally and physically spent.

After several long moments of uncontrolled sobbing, his innate sense of danger rang loud and clear, and he jumped to his feet. The Border Patrol was on its way, he could feel it, and he took off running down the dirt road, parallel to the irrigation pipe. He knew enough not to try running through the fields, because the Border Patrol’s infrared cameras could pick him out from a mile away. He ran about two hundred yards, then immediately turned left toward the freeway. In the pitch-black darkness, he made out a shallow culvert. It was small, but he managed to slip inside…

…moments before he heard sirens approaching, then saw the impossibly bright light from a helicopter-mounted spotlight. He scrambled deeper inside the culvert, clawing frantically at every rock, piece of garbage, and bit of soil he could to find room to wriggle in. Victor didn’t have enough room to turn around to see if his feet and legs were all the way inside the opening—if they weren’t, the Border Patrol agents would be on him within minutes, guided in by the helicopter’s observer.

But he had made it. The sound of the helicopter moved away, as did the sirens. When he thought it was safe, he tried to snake his way backward, but he couldn’t move. He had no choice but to go forward. After almost twenty minutes of crawling, he found himself on the other side of the culvert, on the north side of the eastbound lane of Interstate 10. He knew enough not to try to cross the highway—agents would be scanning the highway with night vision equipment. He also knew he could not stay there—the Border Patrol would be quickly setting up a perimeter around the murder scene.

He crawled on his belly in the sandy median between the east and west lanes of the interstate highway, praying that the sand and dirt that covered him from head to toe would allow him to blend in with the earth. A few minutes later he came across a culvert on the westbound lane, and he crawled in. This one was a bit larger, and he found it easy to crawl to the other side. He found another irrigation pipe and decided to follow it, pausing to hide behind a concrete support or valve whenever he heard any vehicles approaching. As his eyes adapted to the dark, he spotted several barns and other service buildings nearby in the fields, but he dared not try to enter any of them because he knew that’s the first place the police would look for him.

After almost an hour of nearly continuous running, interspersed with frantic searches for hiding places, he came across a knoll and a service road that crossed the westbound lane of the interstate. His throat was completely dry, and he was becoming dizzy from dehydration and exertion. He saw several men sitting on the side of the service road, speaking Spanish and passing a large bottle of something in a paper bag back and forth between them. He would only stay for a second, he told himself—one sip of whatever they had, that was all. He started to stand up and raised his arms to flag them down…

…then instinctively dropped to the ground—just as a sheriff’s patrol car, slowly and quietly cruising down the service road on the other side of the interstate, turned on its red flashing lights. “¡No muévase! ¡Este es la policía! ¡Levántese con su arriba las manos! ¡Tengo un K-9!” came the order from the car’s loudspeaker.

Oh shit, a dog! Victor didn’t hesitate. He crawled into the field to his right, took a few moments to find the deepest, smelliest open furrow he could, then began to scoop soil on top of himself. In moments he had completely covered himself in coarse, sandy loam, stinking of fresh fertilizer and decaying vegetation. If the men tried to run and they let the dog go, he was caught.

But the men didn’t run. Victor could hear bits and pieces of conversation: it turned out all the men had identity cards and lived nearby—they may have been illegals, but the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department rarely detained undocumented workers who were minding their own business. If they tried to arrest even a third of them, their jails would be full to bursting, Victor knew. The questioning took some time, but the sheriff’s deputy never let his dog loose, and eventually the patrol car departed.

Not long afterward, Victor rose up from the putrid stench of the furrow when he heard the workers leaving. He was shivering from a combination of thirst, hunger, fear, and adrenaline. He didn’t want to, but he heard himself call out to the workers, “Hey, amigos. Espere, por favor .”

Each of the men instantly produced a weapon—pocket knives, a tire iron, a tine from a tractor-pulled rake, and an ax handle. “¿Quién es ello?” one of them called out.

“My name is Victor, Victor Flores. I need help.”

“Victor? El coyote? ” another asked.

“Sí.”

“Victor! What’s happening, my man?” The older man with the tire iron ran over to him. “I am Jorge. You brought me and my brothers across the border many times, my friend.” He handed Victor a bottle of warm malt liquor; Victor nearly puked on it, but he gulped down a few mouthfuls. “What has happened to you?”