Get on with it, you oaf, Rodriquez thought.
“Your problem is that these voters here aren’t going to let your sailors get on your submarine. And it looks to me like those tugboat captains ain’t goin’ to move their boats to allow you to get goin’, even if you had all your sailors. That’s kinda it in a nutshell.”
“And you aren’t going to clear the pier and tell the tugboat captains to get out of the prohibited area?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Rodriquez thought of a common dirty word but didn’t say it. He pulled at the door handle.
The sheriff laid a hand on his arm. “You stay right here. I think this whole situation will go better if you sit right here with me. Keep the crowd calmed down. If these people start shootin’ your sailors, we’ll both have more problems than we do now.”
“If they shot my sailors, you’d arrest them, wouldn’t you? A crime committed in your presence.”
“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t got my thinkin’ that far down the road. Been my experience that problems are best headed off, if possible, rather than tackled afterward. That’s what I’m tryin’ to do. Now are you gonna just sit here like I told you, or do I have to handcuff you and lock you in the back?”
Rodriquez couldn’t contain himself. “You son of a bitch!”
“Be that as it may, I need a yes or no.”
“I’ll sit.”
“Fine. I’ll radio for one of my deputies to stop by McDonald’s and get us some McMuffins and coffee. Or do you want something else?”
“That’ll do, thanks.”
The sheriff picked up the dashboard mike and started talking.
Forty-five minutes later, after they had eaten, the sheriff had the deputy, with the crowd’s help, disarm Rodriquez’ sentries and take them to jail. “Just to hold for a little while,” the sheriff told Rodriquez, “until somebody with more brains than me can figure out what we oughta do.”
Five minutes after the sentries had departed with the deputy, a sailor from the sub came looking for his captain. He had a wad of paper in his hand. He spotted Rodriquez in the patrol car and came over to the open window. “Messages, Captain,” he said and offered them.
“I’ll take those, son,” the sheriff said, holding out his right hand. When he had them, he told the sailor, “You’re under arrest. Now you get in the back of the car here.”
The sailor looked beseechingly at his commanding officer.
“Do as he says,” Rodriquez said listlessly. Shit, he thought, I should have stayed on the boat. What a fool I was! There goes my naval career!
By ten o’clock the crowd had swelled to at least fifty people, most of them carrying rifles. They were having a high old time. Some of them had brought beer, which they shared. Sailors who were ashore and wanted back aboard their submarine were arrested and taken away.
“Crowd’s gettin’ a little rowdy, don’t you think?” the sheriff asked Commander Rodriquez.
“Yes,” he agreed.
“I kinda think it’s time we put an end to this and let these folks go home or to work or to a bar someplace to tank up. Let’s you and me walk down the pier and you get all your people out of that thing and bring them along. I’ll get a bus to take them to a hotel.”
Rodriquez felt like a cornered rat. Aboard the boat he could overpower the sheriff, scram the reactor, and order her scuttled. But should he scuttle her? If this political thing blew over… He looked longingly at the classified messages the sheriff had read and tucked into a pocket in the driver’s door. It wasn’t as if these civilians knew how to operate a nuclear submarine, for Christ’s sake. USS Texas wasn’t going anywhere. And the U.S. Navy could destroy her with a Tomahawk cruise missile or two anytime they got around to it.
“Let me read those messages,” he said.
“Nope. It’s my way or I send you off to join your sailors in jail. Then I’ll go down there with these voters and arrest all of them aboard. Your only choice is to go with me or go to jail.”
“I’ll go with you.”
The sheriff got out of the car. He stopped the captain and pulled out handcuffs. “We’ll put these on you,” he said, “in case you get any big ideas. Just to protect myself, you understand.”
He cuffed the captain’s hands in front of him, then pulled his pistol. He waved it at the crowd. “You people back off and give me room. Don’t want anyone comin’ down the pier. Don’t want anyone doin’ anything we’ll all regret. Come on, Captain.”
At the gangway, the sheriff could see an officer or sailor on the bridge. He told the captain, “Tell them to turn off the reactor and come out. All of ’em.”
“Aren’t we going aboard?”
“No. They ain’t goin’ no place in that boat and you ain’t neither. So get them out here.”
When the remainder of the submarine’s crew were on the pier, about two dozen men, the sheriff thought, although he didn’t bother to count them, he asked one of the chiefs, “Did you turn that reactor off?”
“Yeah.”
“Got everybody out of there?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good, ’cause after you’re gone, I’m goin’ aboard and look around, and if I find anybody they might scare me and I’ll probably have to shoot ’em. Hate to do it, but if I fear for my personal safety, and I will, there ain’t nothin’ else I can do. Promised my wife when I first run for sheriff that I wouldn’t endanger myself.”
“There’s no one else aboard,” the chief said sullenly.
The sheriff looked down the pier and saw that a blue bus marked SHERIFF had arrived on the quay. “There’s your ride, Captain. Lead them down the pier and climb aboard.”
That was how the brand spanking new Republic of Texas acquired its first warship.
EIGHT
In the dim light of dawn JR inspected the bodies. Some of the nails and screws in the mines had ripped open the backpacks and blasted white powder everywhere. JR didn’t know if it was cocaine or heroin, and he didn’t care. Only two of the mules had obviously tried to crawl away and bled to death; the others died almost instantly, perforated by the metal from the mines — four with nails and screws that had ripped into their brains, another eviscerated.
The two at the fence were well and truly dead, too. The man who had dragged himself had his gut torn open and intestines were trailing behind him. The bullet that killed him had been a mercy.
JR got his first surprise when he looked at the first man he shot, the man near his hide. The man had yellow and green tattoos that started at his wrists and ran up his forearms.
That deputy sheriff — he had tattoos like that, very distinctive. What was his name? Morales? He seemed to recall that was it.
JR didn’t recognize the other man wearing night-vision goggles. JR pulled the goggles off. He looked like he might have a lot of Mexican in him, but with his face contorted in death, it was difficult to say.
Hays walked back to the ranch house and poured himself a stiff tot of bourbon. Sat on the porch with the AR across his lap sipping the whiskey as the sun poked over the horizon and sunlight began illuminating the high places in the brush. Cloudless blue sky. Another scorching hot day in the works. Those bodies were going to get ripe pretty quick.
The syndicate that sent those drugs across the border would send more men, probably pretty soon. JR had no idea how much money the drugs represented, but he knew it was a lot. Enough to buy the deaths of a thousand peons and a whole lot of Americans. Enough to buy half the sheriffs in Texas.