Jericho

Day One

Chapter 1. 0200 Mountain Standard Time.

Goodtime Bob’s stank as usual of the beer and alcohol slopped over the floors and counter, along with the still-clinging reek of ancient cigarette smoke etched indelibly into the ceiling.

Shutters over the windows kept daylight, moonlight, the night stars and morning mists from outside eyes. The shutters hadn’t been opened in more than twenty years and anyone who might want to pry them open would need to come prepared with bolt cutters.

Years past, the man who gave his name to the road bar off the 1-10, a few miles outside Anthony, installed them to make entry difficult for the local sheriff, the Border Patrol, the DEA, the New Mexico State Police or the ATB, whichever came first, or even if they all came together.

After a time, no one did. Goodtime Bob’s had become an institution that the authorities left alone because it provided an outlet for all kinds of excesses that might otherwise have been less channeled. All knew that if they closed down Bob’s the traffic would only go over the border, a couple of miles away, into Mexico. It was available there in plenty. Why send good Yankee dollars south? Besides, for the sheriff, there were no votes in it.

On the screen above the dance floor two naked women and a man wearing only a mask over his eyes writhed on a bed. It was photographed from an angle that needed a contortionist as a cameraman but no one was really watching. Two women who looked like sisters, some age between twenty-eight and fifty-eight, danced in a 1960’s shuffle around the perimeter of the floor. It was hard to tell which one was leading or what music they were dancing to.

A few other women sat drinking and occasionally chatting at the tables but the bulk of the clientele were men, packed close to the bar or leaning against the rough stone wall either side of the single unisex toilet, which lacked a toilet set, a chain to flush and a door. Around them strolled a hard faced waitress, sometimes throwing out those who lingered too long over a single beer. From time to time she would slip a shoulder under a drunk and haul him to the front door, prop him against a flyspecked wall, open the chocolate painted door and push him through. If he sobered up enough to stand unaided and order another beer he came back in. If not, he could lie there until he did. No one ever moved a drunk from the step at Goodtime Bob’s. Anyone coming in stepped over him.

Urban legend had it that a Vietnam War vet who walked in and found his wife on the dance floor with a truck driver doing something that didn’t look like dancing in any known Western style, went home and returned with a live grenade. Sure enough there were holes in the wall that could have been shrapnel marks. They could just as easily have been marks from broken beer bottles and the bloodstains could have come a dozen ways, all of them violent.

Al Tucker stood behind the bar wiping glasses he hadn’t bothered to wash, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. When a man dressed in pale blue jeans and a dark blue shirt came through the door, looked around, then strolled over and sat at a stool in front of him, Al said nothing. When the man ordered a Tres Equis Tucker slipped a bottle onto the counter with the ease of one long accustomed to it, silently and unopened, leaving the customer to open it himself.

It was half an hour and three beers later that the man raised his eyes from the bottle and beckoned Tucker over.

‘I need a favor, amigo,’ he said.

‘I ain’t your friend,’ answered Tucker. In a place like this you laid down the ground rules early. ‘I pull beers, not favors. Doing favors can make a guy’s life expensive.’

In front of him a $20 bill floated down into a patch of spilled beer. Tucker left it to lie there until four more joined it. Then he picked them up without a shadow of change to his bland expression and put them in his shirt pocket.

‘I don’t sell coke and the women do their own negotiatin’,’ he said. ‘Carol, the blonde over there, and the Windsor sisters on the floor are pretty clean. You’ll need to see a doctor after the others. There’s rooms upstairs. $50 for the room, what they get they keep themselves.’

‘I don’t want a woman,’ the man said.

‘You want Mexican boys you gotta go down into Juarez,’ muttered Tucker, the idea seeming neither to pleasure nor disgust him. ‘None of that trade here.’

‘I don’t want boys either. I want you to hold onto a package for me for an hour or two.’

Tucker shook his head. This time he was more emphatic but not so much as to be exclusive. ‘No packages,’ he said. ‘Guys from the Border Patrol and the DEA drop by all the time. If they caught me with coke or anything like that they’d haul my ass.’

‘It’s not drugs,’ the man answered. ‘Open it and check if you want. It’s a damn expensive suede leather case, gold plated locks and all, with some fine Mexican jewelery inside. I promised I’d deliver it to a buyer here half an hour ago. He ain’t shown yet and I can’t wait any longer. I’m over schedule now.’

‘Uh, uh,’ Tucker grunted. Whatever the man did it was none of Tucker’s business. Being curious wasn’t only expensive, in this part of the world it was deadly.

‘Mexico City to Houston,’ the man said, as if he wanted to explain anyway. ‘Delivery run with the rig. I don’t normally do it but the driver got thrown into jail for running down a kid in Mexico City. They flew me out to drive the rig back. The jewelery’d already been paid for. The buyer ain’t here on time so delivery’s going to be his problem.’

Tucker shrugged. Smuggling he understood. Around the border it was a way of life, and unless it was drug money or wetbacks the Border Patrol didn’t give a shit but the Mexicans were tough on drivers. Anyone who hit anyone, or anything that caused anybody to be hurt got thrown into jail right away while the federales asked questions and sorted out the blame at their leisure.

It made sense that a Yanqui who knocked down a kid would be put in prison and no one left a hundred thousand dollar rig lying idle in one of Mexico City’s police pounds. Not if he wanted to see it again.

‘Who’ll call for it?’ asked Al, taking the brown paper parcel from the counter where the stranger had put it, shaking it to hear if there was a rattle such as jewelery might make, weighing it in his hands and giving a quick sniff for any telltale odor other than soft leather. When he heard the tinkle of metal hitting metal, recognized that in total it weighed less than a kilo of cocaine, and neither smelled nor sounded otherwise untoward, he put it on a shelf below the counter top.

‘Name’s Henderson, if it matters,’ the stranger said. ‘I don’t think you’ll need to be asked. The buyer don’t look like he belongs here, you know what I mean?’

Tucker nodded. ‘If no one comes?’ he asked.

The stranger slid off his seat. ‘Then you got yourself some expensive necklaces to hang around your neck. 'luego.’

‘Dios’ muttered Tucker, wiping the wet patch on the counter as the man vanished through the door. He glanced at the clock on the wall over the exit. Eight minutes after two in the early hours of the morning.

High above the border, from Brownsville, Texas to San Ysidro in California, a series of pot-bellied aerostat balloons floated in the sky from ground tethers, moving gently in the breeze. From them, and others at Yuma and Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Deming in New Mexico and Eagle Pass in Texas a steady stream of information from outboard radar surveillance of the border flowed to the Aviation Control and Intelligence Center in Riverside, California where technicians sorted the electronic data and ran it through computers from military and civilian sources to determine whether the balloons were picking up legitimate international air traffic or had spotted a drug running plane trying to beat the air interdiction system at low levels.

Two aerostats tethered at Marta and Rio Grande City in Texas were out of commission, one because of adverse weather conditions along the coast and the other for maintenance. A surveillance Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew along the border trying to fill the gap in electronic surveillance but the operational cost couldn’t cover the budget for too long.

Even when aerial surveillance was fully operational there were blind spots that nothing could cover, among them a series of arroyos west of the Mexican town of Milagro that led northwest through the Big Hatchet wilderness. The area, almost devoid of population, had been a smugglers’ route for a hundred years or more. Here there were more holes in the border cover than a slab of Gouda cheese.

The eighteen ft high steel wall that stretched along part of the border closer to El Paso gave way to Normandy style steel barricades north of Milagro but along the eastern side of the New Mexico Bootheel stretches were blocked by nothing more than strands of rusted barbed wire.

Where country dirt roads ran close to the border and smugglers could use trucks or backpack mules across the line, acoustic detectors, strong enough to pick up the sound of an animal moving, were buried in the ground.

In monitoring centers in several towns Border Patrol officers watched over banks of flickering screens, linked to the detectors and their locations. The blips came continually, sometimes they were smugglers, mostly it was innocent cattle moving across the border in search of fodder. The trick was deciding what was innocent and what was not.

Chuck Welling sat in the monitoring room at the Patrol HQ in Las Cruces watching the screens, part listening to the radio in the background, sometimes glancing at the television set in the far corner of the office. There had been demonstrations in town all evening over the disclosure that yet another batch of nuclear cores, dismantled from old missiles, was going into the underground Waste Isolation Plant not far away in Carlsbad. Demos like this flared up from time to time and Weller hardly thought about it. If asked his opinion he said it was a waste of breath. ‘They protested to get the nukes disarmed,’ he’d say. ‘Now they protest against having the warheads disposed of because it’ll harm the environment somewhere. Dammit, they want it every which way.’

He switched attention away from the telecast and glanced at his wristwatch.

It was 0230.

Three and a half hours more of his watch to go.

Beneath the soft brown suede on the base and inside the polished black leather of the briefcase the tiny battery-powered six-digit timer ticked down the final seconds on a wafer thin LCD screen, in ominous red numbers. As all six digits coincided on zero the primary and backup circuits closed, allowing electrical impulses to flash through wires that jutted from it, into the gray, claylike surface of a half-kilo of Semtex that formed a pliable second skin under the surface of the leather. It was hardly state of the art. The basic methods of this type of bomb making hadn’t changed since a former PLO bomb maker built the first in the 1970’s. There were better, more sophisticated methods now, but the old way still worked.

The explosion lifted the counter and as the blast mushroomed into the room it picked up tables and chairs, flung bodies from their stools and tossed them through the air like matchsticks in a whirlwind.

Tucker was standing only a foot away from it, wiping another unwashed glass. It ripped him apart, splattering the remains of his body over the bottle-stacked back shelves a millisecond before it shattered everything behind and on top of the bar into tiny glass fragments.

The Windsor sisters were picked up from the dance floor like rag dolls and flung through the picture screen. As it tore apart one sister lost her head, the other her legs. They were both dead in an instant.

The back wall of the bar collapsed in a heap of rubble and the shutters over the window, rusted bolts and all, rocketed into the waste land beyond as the force of the explosion rolled on, snapping electricity cables from the roof. Sparking cables set fire to liquor flowing from the broken bottles and flames rippled out over the dry wooden floor.

Moans from the torn and twisted bodies that lay under shattered tables and chairs and beams from the fallen roof, turned to screams as the flames set fire to the clothing of the fallen.

The old, indifferent waitress, a six-inch sliver of the countertop rammed through her chest, lay pinned to the front door through which, over the years, she had thrown so many drunks. Slowly, as the once whitewashed walls disintegrated, the door fell backwards, still hinged to its jambs, carrying her over the threshold with it. Her eyes, unseeing, stared upwards into the star-filled night sky.

Outside in what passed for a car park the fuel tanks of two trucks caught fire and exploded, showering nearby eighteen-wheelers with flaming debris.

As they too ignited and then exploded, the flames lit up the night sky with a flickering orange-red glow brighter than the lights at Las Cruces where moments later the sound wave began to reach.

Welling was half asleep when he heard the explosion. Instinctively he checked his screens but saw no sign of activity.

He shook his head. Maybe he’d dozed off for a minute and dreamed it.

But moments later the all-night, no-interruptions country music radio station he had on in the background went quiet in the middle of a Roseanne Cash oldie and a clearly untrained announcer’s voice broke across to say that reports were coming in of a massive explosion some miles outside the city at a road bar known as Goodtime Bob’s. First reports suggested dozens of people were dead or injured and some might still be trapped inside, under burning rubble from the building.

‘Holy shit,’ Welling swore, getting up from his seat and walking over to a radio tuned into the Sheriff’s Office frequency. It was a cacophony of activity. Units from Las Cruces seven fire stations were racing to the scene and he could hear sirens and the ululating call of ambulances as the Disaster Plan swung into operation. Hospital staff were recalled for emergency operations, theaters made ready to take the injured. At the morgue space was cleared for the remains of those who could be identified and the limbs of those who, as yet, couldn’t. Paramedics automatically came in off-duty.

Welling turned up the TV. It had cut into its through-the-night run of old black and white movies and was sending on the spot cover of what was happening at Goodtime Bob’s. The screen filled with pictures of firemen playing streams of cascading water over flaming timbers, while paramedics carried stretchers in relays from the debris to waiting ambulances. An eerie color scheme, constantly altering because of the interplay of the reds, whites and blues on the tops of the police cruisers, the fire engines and the ambulances, gave a surreal effect, more like a carnival than a disaster zone.

A pale faced woman reporter, falling over her words in her excitement, tried to explain that ambulance men had told her more than twenty people were dead and others could be dying. No one knew how many were trapped under the rubble of what she called ‘an all-night truck stop of considerable local repute.’

Welling stood glued to the set, half listening at the same time to the police radio as they called up ever more units. He totally forgot about his monitoring screens, flickering away fifteen feet behind him.

Had he not, he might have noted how one of them, not far from the Milagro arroyos suddenly sprang into frenzied activity, as though a herd of cattle had stampeded over the sensors.

For more than fifteen minutes the sensors blipped out a warning but Welling, engrossed in the carnage and chaos at Goodtime Bob’s missed them.

Half an hour later, when the fires seemed to be under control and the television cover was becoming repetitive he turned back to the screens. All was normal.

In just under three hours he handed over to his replacement. They chatted about the fire at Goodtime Bob’s, the Lakers’ game the night before and then he went home for a peaceful sleep.

Chapter 2. Jericho, New Mexico. 0600 MST

Dawn broke like a miser opening his moneybox. A sliver of golden light scored the skyline, breaking the black frame that had, until then, united the desolate scrubland and the heavens. It crept over the desert’s edge to the Mogollon Mountains, towering up like jagged spurs beyond Silver City, bouncing shafts of flame from their peaks into the air and silhouetting the range as if in a shadow play.

It was light edging over the Fra Cristobel range that woke Jake Travis. He rolled over in bed, feeling a twinge of backache, and looked out through the uncurtained bedroom window as the sliver widened to a crack then opened into an orange bar along the horizon. Another August scorcher, Travis sighed, already imagining the heat haze rising although it was at least an hour too early for that.

Beside him his wife, Elly was snoring heavily. Once he’d have rolled her over onto her side but with the baby due any hour there was no side left to turn onto. It was all one bulge of pulsating stomach waiting for the child’s time to come.

Instead he heaved himself out of bed, lifting the light covers carefully so as not to disturb her, then placed them back over her shoulders as protection against the draught from an air conditioning unit set in the window. Modern heat-exchange pumps had long since replaced those over most of the big towns but here the old appliances, along with the old ways, were slow to be discarded and a deputy’s pay in a small weather-beaten county in New Mexico, where even the roadrunners had stopped running and preferred to sit in the shade, wouldn’t pay for a heat pump. It damn near didn’t cover the cost of running the ancient air conditioning for Elly, but she needed it badly right now.

A brief smile flitted across her face and he knew the movement had awoken her, even though she kept her eyes closed. Her hand reached out across the sheet and touched his. ‘Make it early back, Jake,’ she said softly. ‘It won’t be long.’

He got up and went into the small shower, dried off, came out and slipped into his pants and a clean brown uniform shirt, then pinned the badge back on. He pulled on his boots and went over to the armchair by the window to pick up the Sam Browne belt, aware of her watching him from the stillness of the covers. He knew she was wondering each time he went out whether he’d be coming back. He’d told her she didn’t need to worry. This was Boondocks, New Mexico, not the Los Angeles ghetto nor the streets of New York. In any case, Travis might be easy going but he was good at his job.

She worried anyway.

He leaned over her and stroked the hair from her forehead. It was already tinged with gray, but not as much as his own. She was over forty-three years old and for a first child everyone had warned her it would be hard. Now she was sweating, even with the air conditioning on and the sun not really up.

‘You want some coffee?’ he asked gently.

She rocked her head on the pillow. ‘No. Couldn’t take it right now. I’ll get some in a few minutes. I want to lie in a bit longer.’ She sat up slightly in bed. ‘You take care now,’ she warned.

‘I know,’ he grinned. ‘It’s a jungle out there, right?’

Over the years they’d watched re-runs of Hill Street Blues, lying in bed at night, munching on tortilla chips. They knew all of the episodes off by heart.

‘Right,’ she laughed, the deep, husky, sexy chuckle that had been one of the things that attracted him to her when no other woman did, because none could match up to his now-dead Billy Jean. Not until Elly. And she had fallen for him even though he was a good fourteen years older and there were younger eligible men around in LA where they lived when they first met ten years ago.

Travis kissed her on the head. ‘I’ll come back at lunchtime. Call me if you need me before then.’

The heat outside hit him like a blast furnace when he stepped onto the veranda of the rancher. But it was only a foretaste. There was a lot more heat to come. The thermometer outside was already rising to levels he didn’t even want to look at.

He put on his Stetson and climbed into the car, easing his six foot two frame under the roofline and settling into the seat of the white Chevy, wincing inwardly at the thought of how hot the vehicle would be in a few more hours. He was the oldest deputy in Sierra County but one with most experience of Highway Patrol work and he spent much of his time cruising the dusty off-highway roads on radio call, leaving the paper work to deputies who preferred it.

His bones were aching as he made his morning check on the vehicle. Video cameras were standard on county patrol vehicles, along with a .12 gauge shotgun, a Colt .223 AR-15 rifle and nowadays pepper ball guns, useful up to fifty feet.

His uniform included the Sam Browne and its keepers, his .45 caliber Sig Sauer handguns and extra magazines, and the ASP retractable metal baton. Then there was the body armor, handcuffs, external mike and cans of OS pepper spray. Thirty pounds of extra weight to carry. Even an ex-combat vet preferred to leave that kind of weight on the back seat. Especially one who was fifty-six years old, going on fifty-seven, with a middle age spread that sitting around in the cruiser didn’t help.

As for crawling around in the sand, the way he had in Desert Storm, forget it. He sometimes felt he could hardly run up a flight of stairs any more. Getting old was a bitch.

He reached for the radio mike. ‘Hi, Joe,’ he said. ‘What’s the day look like?’

José Echeverria’s voice came back with a lazy drawl, more Texan than Mexican, but in the background Travis could hear the little desk radio tuned to a Juarez station, the way it always was. Not that there weren’t enough Spanish language radio stations in New Mexico, but Echeverria was a little turned on to the genuine ethnic stuff. He had the whole collection of ‘Roots’ on old videos back home although Travis doubted that Echeverria watched it. There was no love lost between Hispanics and African-Americans in this part of the country. Not even a benign tolerance. Mostly they ignored each other.

‘Another day like yesterday, Jake,’ Echeverria answered. He’d have his feet on the desktop, his Ruger Super Redhawk revolver, with its nine and a half inch barrel, next to it. The New Mexico Mounted Police were a unique organization in American Law Enforcement. All volunteers, paying for their own uniforms and equipment, always ready to throw up everything and come running if the State called. Or if it didn’t. Echeverria had bought his revolver from his savings and was careful about the cost of ammunition. So far he’d used two rounds on duty, fired at a couple of drug runners he’d pinned down in Monticello, one of the County’s handful of ghost towns.

Echeverria had tried a lot of things. Cowboy, barman, bouncer. Nowadays he spent most of his time inside what he called his office on the main street in Jericho. It was the jail in the days when Jericho was a thriving silver mining community. Echeverria had bought it, restored it, and now spent his time with his HAM radio and other gear, surfing police frequencies, waiting for a chance to use a third round. As for his choice of personal choice of weaponry, Travis thought if it made Echeverria feel like Pancho Villa, so what?

‘Nothing huh?’

‘Larry Caine went out on another drunk, four or five days ago. His girl called in, asked if you could keep a look out for him, sober him up and drop him back at the house when he’s fit.’

‘Damn him,’ muttered Travis. ‘Why the hell can’t he let it go? Settle back down like the rest of us did?’

‘Don’t know, Jake,’ Echeverria laughed. ‘Before my time. I’ll leave you to sort that out.’

‘Sure,’ Travis shrugged. ‘Give Lucy a call will you. Tell her I’ll bring him back when he’s respectable.’

Travis replaced the hand set, opened the glove box and took out his pipe. He’d never smoked in his life but he liked having it there, between his teeth, like a baby’s comforter. Everyone needed something sometime to help out when the hands started to shake and the skin began to crawl. With him it was his pipe. With Larry it was booze. Nothing particular, just whatever happened to be handy and cheap. Mescal, beer, kerosene. Whatever, as long as it had alcohol.

The difference between Travis and Caine was that Jake had come to terms with Iraq from the start. It was just another situation where you killed or got killed. Morality didn’t come into it.

Caine hadn’t been that way. They’d met in Iraq. Travis was a Ranger, Caine a SEAL but part of a special unit they’d brought together.

Only weeks before Travis’ tour was up, they went to a village raid on the Iran border. Larry saw a young boy, no more than twelve years old, reach inside his dirty, torn shirt. Caine did what he was trained to do. He half emptied the magazine of the M-82 into the child.

It could have been a grenade the boy was reaching for. Everyone knew that. Everyone was trained to react to that kind of situation, where not only his own life but those of the other guys in the unit were at stake. Shoot first, check later.

When Caine checked he found the boy had been reaching for an Arab-English dictionary he kept inside the shirt.

They didn’t court martial him and send him back Stateside in disgrace the way they did with Calley after Mai Lai in Vietnam. What Caine did wasn’t deliberate. It was the happenstance of war. So they pinned a medal on him and sent him of to Afghanistan for another three years.

Travis sighed. Another day of picking up the pieces.

He switched on the ignition, shoved the lever into ‘drive’ and rolled out onto the dirt side road before he picked up the mike again and called Felipe Galega.

There was no answer. Galega had a radio set in the shack he called a home on the edge of the town but half the time no one could reach him there. That was because he was with Hannah May.

Travis linked up with the asphalt a mile down the road and hung a left two miles out just inside the town lines. The yuccas, flowering in creamy-milk-white glory stretched ahead, over the dusty packed sand and scrub to the far distance and the dark haze of the Animas Range.

It was another ten miles on the dirt before he came to the collection of decayed buildings known as Henry.

Henry was long since abandoned and the reason it was built in the first place was only a fact in a handful of local history books. They said that Old Bill Henry persuaded people there was gold in the locality and sure enough sufficient came out of it at one stage to make a small town. It thrived for a few years, mostly on optimism, but when the little bit of gold ran out and there was no land fit for cattle everyone drifted away. Old Bill was the last to go. He died in the house he built for himself and was buried by his son in the desert, then the son piled up the furniture in a buckboard and left as fast as the team of horses could pull it. He never went back. No one else did.

Except Hannah May Wayman.

She drifted into Jericho in a broken down ancient Ford Pinto four or five years back, tried to get a job and found no one wanting a middle aged, if still virile, black woman who could cook and wash but had no other skills. They wouldn’t have wanted her if she’d been white or Hispanic either because there were no jobs. But being black was a strike that ruled her out from the start.

With no money she’d gone as far as the Pinto would take her. To Henry. Then when it’s engine decided enough was enough and died on the edge of the town, she hauled her sacks of belongings out of the vehicle and moved into Old Bill Henry’s place.

Galega, who was a ranger at the City of Rocks State Park found her there a few weeks later, living off jackrabbits she shot outside her front door. He should have reported it and moved her on but he hadn’t got the heart. Instead he all but moved in.

Travis could see the Henry place half a mile away. Sure enough, the thirty-year old Pinto was there, parked under a piñon tree. Galega had repaired the car, spending his spare time taking the engine and transmission to pieces, scouring junkyards for parts and rebuilding it.

Travis pulled up beside it, got out of the cruiser and stretched in the sunshine before walking up to the front porch of the sun-bleached house, the paint long since peeled from it.

‘Phil,’ he shouted, not bothering to go in. ‘Haul your ass out of there.’

Above him he heard a window being thrown open and the smiling face of Hannah May beamed down. He could only see her head and shoulders but clearly there was nothing covering her below that either.

‘Hi there, Deputy,’ she called down. ‘He can’t haul his ass. He can’t hardly haul nothin’ these days.’ She giggled. ‘When you goin’ to find me a man with some stamina?’

‘Hannah May, you’d only wear them out if I did,’ Travis sallied back. ‘I got enough problems with one half worn-out ranger. How d’you think Caleb Black would like it if he found out?’

She laughed. ‘Caleb Black wouldn’t take to anything to do with Hannah May, Deputy. God rest his petty, cotton-pickin’ little nigger hatin’ soul.’

Travis heard Galega call out to her. ‘Now don’t go on about that, Hannah May,’ he said. ‘You’ll only make things worse.’

His head appeared beside her, framed in the window. ‘On my way, Jake.’

Travis nodded and tipped his hat. ‘Bye, Hannah May.’

‘See you tomorrow,’ she shot back, laughing.

‘You probably will,’ Travis thought as he ambled over to the cruiser. ‘But not if Galega’s got any sense.’

He’d hardly settled into the vehicle when Galega was at the side door, lowering himself inside. In his hand he carried an old model Remington twelve-gauge pump shotgun with an extended five round magazine. A heavy weapon but a formidable one.

Galega checked there was a round in the chamber, the magazine was full and the safety was on, then placed it between his knees.

‘Sorry, Jake’ said Galega with a sheepish look on his face, as he sat back in his seat, ‘I overslept.’

Travis nodded but said nothing. He reversed the cruiser and headed back in the direction of the main road. At some stage he’d have to do something, he knew that. There was already talk in town and Caleb Black had made it clear a number of times that Galega’s relationship with the ‘black woman’ was upsetting the delicate racial balance in Jericho.

‘The Hispanics are talking about Galega,’ Black had said the last time they’d spoken. ‘So are the rest of the townspeople. None of the sides likes it.’

‘I didn’t know we had sides in the town, Caleb,’ Travis had replied. ‘Just voters.’

But it was a problem. Echeverria had told him the Hispanics didn’t like Galega’s relationship with the mayate and the few black families were angry too. They’d told Travis that Galega was ‘using his position to exploit a helpless black woman.’ Travis replied that if giving half of his pay every week to help feed her was exploitation then he wouldn’t mind being exploited himself, but it hadn’t done any good. The simmering tensions that lay underneath the placid surface of the town ran too deep.

Nevertheless, this wasn’t the time to say anything. He had done it once before and Galega left her alone for nearly a month. When he finally went to check on her Hannah May was almost dying of starvation in her bed. He drove her back to his own place, fed her and nursed her to health, then took her back out to Henry. He’d done it in silence, without asking for any outside help.

Travis knew Galega was aware of what the town thought about him and his temper was on a short fuze.

‘Larry Caine’s off again,’ Travis said, breaking the silence. ‘I’m going to make a detour, have a look around but I’ll get you to the Park on time. Keep an eye out for him if he’s wandered over that way, will you? Other than that … what the hell!’

Ahead of them the heat haze rising off the surface shimmered with a new view. Something solid was taking shape across the road. The flickering outlines of what looked like military vehicles.

Twenty yards from them Travis braked to a halt.

Two old-style army Jeeps, with long menacing tubes mounted in the bed at the rear blocked the roadway. In front of them wooden barriers were placed across the asphalt and into the desert for at least fifteen yards. An officer in desert camouflage uniform stood in front of the vehicles, a radio mike to his mouth, staring in Travis’s direction and talking rapidly.

But it was to the desert beyond the barrier, that Travis’ eyes were drawn. Half a mile from the road on either side, were the gaunt shapes of two long, low, tank like vehicles, their central sections topped by a tower from which projected the lethal, drab painted shapes of four finned missiles.

Chapter 3.

Soon after the explosion at Goodtime Bob’s, if there had been any travelers on the road, they would have noticed a small convoy of Army vehicles, mostly old jeeps towing trailers with tarpaulins over them, traveling along New Mexico state road 9 near Animas. There were also four tracked vehicles on low-loaders, covered by the same camouflage tarps, driving at, or close to a steady fifty miles an hour as they could manage.

A small number of cars went past but drivers were used to convoys out of Fort Bliss and thought nothing about it.

At much the same time another small convoy was approaching along the I-10 from the direction of Las Cruces, and another coming south through Truth or Consequences.

No one who saw them bothered to think whether or not any army maneuvers had been announced.

Leading the convoy near Animas was the commander of the operation, a Colonel with the name ‘Joshua’ emblazoned on his uniform. At this moment he was becoming increasingly concerned because the southern parts of the convoy had failed to maintain the kind of speed that had been calculated.

By the time dawn broke his men should have had Jericho surrounded and key locations in the town, such as the school, the three churches and the bank should have been under his control.

They were not.

Capt. Hermansonn commanded the group coming from the north. His troops were in location at the eastern end of the single road in out of Jericho by dawn but with insufficient strength to contain the perimeter by seven o’clock, two hours later than the calculations called for.

That meant some of the townspeople who traveled to work