“I need information on the situation out there,” the President demanded. “I need to find out if Díaz has staged a coup and what we’re up against.”
“We don’t have a functioning embassy in Mexico City that can help us go find out information for us, sir,” National Security Adviser Ray Jefferson said, “so we’re going to have to rely on technical and human intelligence to get information, which will take time. But if these attacks by Mexican émigrés are being supported or even organized by Felix Díaz, and he’s now in charge of the government, we could be looking at a long, protracted, and deadly ongoing insurgency against the United States—perhaps even a guerrilla war.”
The President’s head shot up as if a gun had been fired in the Oval Office, but the Chief of Staff was the first to retort: “Sergeant Major, as usual, you’re overreacting to recent developments. What could his motive possibly be?”
“Exactly what’s happening, Mr. Kinsly: chaos, pandemonium, hatred, distrust, confusion, fear, and violence,” Jefferson said. “An insurgency forces the issue of immigration reform—more accurately, immigration liberalization—onto the front burner.”
“How? What’s he hoping to gain?”
“Do you think, Mr. Kinsly, that Congress is likely to enact any legislation that will curb immigration now, with thousands of Mexican workers leaving the country every day?” Jefferson asked. “Folks won’t focus on the violence—in fact, I would think more folks would likely blame the U.S. government for causing the violence with our ‘radical’ border security measures. Proimmigration reform measures will be seen as the way to stop the violence and get everyone’s lives back to normal. The more restrictive or onerous the rules and requirements for establishing the right to work, deportation, pay, benefits, and citizenship, the more the people and Congress will oppose it. All attempts at meaningful border security and illegal immigration control will be pushed aside.”
“That’s crazy,” Kinsly said. “You can’t possibly believe that Mexico is purposely encouraging people to attack the United States in order to force a resolution to the illegal immigration situation?”
“No, Mr. Kinsly—I’m suggesting that forces within the Mexican government, possibly aided by the Consortium and also by radical leaders like Ernesto Fuerza, are staging violent attacks against the United States in order to incite their people to react against the United States, whether by violence or simply by leaving their jobs and heading south,” Jefferson responded. “There could be other reasons as well—political, financial, criminal, even public relations—but by doing what they’re doing, they are forcing the United States to expend a lot of political, financial, and military resources on this issue. I don’t know if the Mexican government is assisting the insurgents, but they don’t have to—all they need do is play along. Whatever they’re doing, Mr. Kinsly, it’s working.”
“I’m still not buying it, Sergeant Major,” Kinsly said. At that moment the phone rang. Kinsly picked it up, listened…and groaned audibly. “A suspected terrorist attack at a university north of Los Angeles,” he said after he replaced the receiver. “Possibly a truck bomb outside an engineering building. L.A. County sheriffs and California Highway Patrol bomb squads are on it.” The President said nothing, the National Security Adviser noticed, as if suspected terrorist truck bombs were as common as traffic accidents nowadays. But that’s what the world had come to, he thought ruefully: if it wasn’t bigger than Nine-Eleven, the Consortium attacks on Houston, or the floods in New Orleans, it hardly registered on the White House’s radarscope anymore.
At that moment Ray Jefferson’s wireless PDA beeped. Knowing that only an extremely urgent message would have gotten through to him while in a meeting at the Oval Office, he pulled the device from his jacket pocket and activated it. He read quickly, his face falling; moments later, a look of astonishment swept across his face. “I have an update on that situation at the university, Mr. President,” he said, shaking his head in amazement, “and you are not going to believe it.”
CHAPTER 12
OVER SOUTHERN ARIZONA
THE NEXT EVENING
The target was more than eleven hundred miles ahead—almost six hours of one-way flying.
The aircraft made their last refueling over U.S. territory from an MC-130P Combat Shadow aerial refueling tanker low over the Sulphur Springs Valley area of south-central Arizona just before going across the border around 9 P.M. local time. Flying at less than five hundred feet aboveground, the aircraft were still spotted by U.S. Homeland Security antismuggling radar arrays and balloons, but the word had already been passed along, and no radio contact with the aircraft was ever made or even attempted.
After refueling, the two aircraft flew in close formation, with the pilots using night vision goggles to see each other at night. Each aircraft was fitted with special infrared position lights that were only visible to those wearing NVGs, so from the pilots’ point of view it was very much like flying in hazy daytime weather conditions. The pilots of each aircraft would trade positions occasionally to avoid fatigue, with the copilot of one aircraft taking over and then moving over to the other aircraft’s opposite wing. The two propeller-driven aircraft were fairly well matched in performance, with the smaller aircraft having a slight disadvantage over its four-engined leader but still able to keep up easily enough. Throughout all the position and pilot changes, and no matter the outside conditions, the aircraft never strayed farther than a wingspan’s distance from each other and never flew higher than eight hundred feet aboveground.
Mexican surveillance radar at Ciudad Juárez spotted the aircraft briefly near the town of Janos as it made its way southeast, and one attempt was made to contact it by radio, but there was no response so the radar operators ignored it. The Mexican military was tasked primarily with counterinsurgency operations and secondarily with narcotics interdiction—and even that mission ranked a very distant second—but those forces were primarily arrayed along the southern border and coastlines: in northern Mexico near the U.S. border, there was virtually no military presence at all. Certainly if a low-flying plane was spotted going south, it was no cause for alarm. A routine report was sent up the line to Mexican air defense headquarters in Mexico City, and the contact immediately forgotten.
From Janos the aircraft headed south over the northern portion of the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains. The aircraft flew higher, now a thousand feet aboveground, but in the mountains it was effectively invisible to radar sweeps from Hermosillo, Chihuahua, and Ciudad Obregón. Over the mining town of Urique, the aircraft veered southeast, staying in the “military crest” of the mountain range to completely lose itself in the radar ground clutter. This two-hour leg was the quietest—central Mexico was almost devoid of any population centers at all, and had virtually no military presence. They received the briefest squeak from their radar warning receivers when passing within a hundred miles of Mazatlán’s approach radar, but they were well out of range and undetectable at their altitude.
The aircraft performed another low-altitude aerial refueling on this leg of the journey, ensuring that the smaller aircraft was completely topped off before continuing further. The MC-130P had a combat range of almost four thousand miles and could have made two complete round trips with ease; the smaller aircraft had only half the range and needed the extra fuel to maintain its already-slim margin of safety. Once topped off, the MC-130P orbited at one thousand feet above the ground about sixty miles northwest of the city of Durango, over the most isolated portion of the central Sierra Madre Occidental Mountain range and directly in the “dead spot” of several surveillance and air traffic control radar systems. The electronic warfare officer on board the Combat Shadow was on the lookout for any sign of detection, but the electromagnetic spectrum remained quiet as the two aircraft split up.