A goddamned invitation from the governor? Americans are being killed by Mexicans. You gonna sit here and do nothin' about that?"
Briscoe was right. Regardless of the motivation or the question of jurisdiction and authority, the fact was Americans were being killed and he and his company had been sent down to prevent that. The raid by the Mexicans, regardless of why they were doing it, suddenly became a personal affront to him, his company, and the United States Army, an affront that could not go unpunished.
Without further thought, Wittworth ordered his driver to move out and follow Briscoe's directions. Once they were on the street and rolling, Wittworth took the radio hand mike and began to issue orders to his platoons, translating Briscoe's civilian terms into military terms that his platoon leaders could understand.
Sitting on the side of the road near the roadblock established by her platoon on U.S. 83 south of Laredo, Lieutenant Kozak was finishing her breakfast. Carefully picking at an unidentified edible object that the company first sergeant had plopped down in the center of her breakfast plate, she was debating if she should eat it or toss it when Sergeant Tyson, sitting on top of their Bradley, called her. "Hey, Lieutenant, hot flash from the CO. He wants the company to stand to."
Looking up at Tyson, Kozak was about to become upset when she realized that he had not been guilty of making a sexist remark, only of poor terminology. Letting that pass, she turned to the matter at hand.
"Stand to? Why?"
"The CO didn't say much, just that the Laredo police were engaging some Mexicans in a firefight in town."
Kozak looked at Tyson for a moment. Didn't say much? There's a firefight in progress and Tyson thinks the CO didn't say much? Tyson's comments and reactions didn't match. Setting her plate down, Kozak decided she had better contact the CO herself and find out what was going on. Her breakfast could wait. After all, she thought, whatever it was that the first sergeant had served her that morning had been dead for a very long time and could only improve with age.
As his Humvee took a right turn off of Guadalupe Street onto Cedar Avenue a little too fast, Wittworth had to hang on as the centrifugal force threw him over to the left. They were halfway through the turn, veering over into the left-hand lane, when a white van with a plastic pizza attached to its roof came tearing around the same corner, headed in the opposite direction. The speed of the van and the sharpness of its turn, like that of Wittworth's Humvee, was causing the pizza van to veer over into the center of the street. With a flick of his wrists, Wittworth's driver cut the steering wheel as far to the right as it could go, missing the van by inches and, in the process, running the Humvee up onto the sidewalk, and running over two newspaper machines before coming to a jarring stop. In the process, Wittworth watched the van go zinging by. In the open side door, he saw two dark-skinned men holding weapons.
In an instant, the van had disappeared down the street they had just come up. Realizing that the van had to be the one they were pursuing, Wittworth turned to his driver and ordered him to move out and follow the van. The driver, however, did not immediately respond. With his hands frozen to the steering wheel in a death grip, his eyes wide open and his mouth gaping, he was hyperventilating, trying hard to catch his breath and calm down. Wittworth's first attempt to get his attention by yelling elicited no response. The man was shaken. Reaching over, Wittworth grabbed the man's arm and yelled again. The driver, his mouth still gaping, slowly turned his head toward Wittworth and stared at his commander with wide, unblinking eyes. Wittworth shook him and repeated his order. There was a moment's hesitation before a weak, high-pitched
"Okay" issued from the driver's throat.
By the time Kozak had mounted her Bradley and put on her armored crewman's helmet, Wittworth was. back on the radio, issuing orders as he tried desperately to find his location on the street map and hang on at the same time. Briscoe, unable to do anything but hang on, watched the white pizza truck zigzag in and out of traffic. Briscoe thought about putting on his seat belt, but decided against it. To do so would keep him from sticking his head between Wittworth and the driver. But even with his head next to Wittworth's, the only thing he could get through to Wittworth above the noise was that they were on U.S. 83 headed south out of town.
The Humvee driver, having regained his nerve, used the superior mobility of his vehicle to close the distance, running up over sidewalks and across lawns, and scattering pedestrians that stood in their way as they continued their pursuit. He was in the process of negotiating a street corner while Wittworth was looking down at his map when the rear doors of the van flew open. The only warning Wittworth and his driver got was Briscoe's yelling, above the roar of the engine, "Jesus Christ! Duck!"
Looking up from his map, Wittworth was just in time to see the muzzle flash from an assault rifle aimed right at him. The driver saw the same thing and, as before, reacted by jerking the wheel to the side, running the Humvee into an aluminum street lamppost. For an instant, the Humvee pitched up, as if it were about to climb the post, before its weight brought the lamppost crashing down, impaling the Humvee on the stump of the post and pitching Briscoe forward over the windshield and onto the hood.
The same jarring stop launched Wittworth forward just as he was ducking to avoid the gunfire. The forward movement and stop drove Wittworth's Kevlar helmet into the glass windshield like a battering ram.
When everything finally settled, the driver jumped out of the Humvee and turned to Wittworth, who was in the process of freeing his helmet from the glass windshield and slowly sitting up. "That's it, Captain.
That's it. Twice in one day is enough for me. Damned sure not gonna try for strike three."
Shaken by a near collision, being fired at, and piling up on a streetlamp post, and dazed by the impact of his head into the windshield, Wittworth looked to his right at the ground, noticing the front wheels of the Humvee were off of it. Without admitting it, he too realized that he had had enough for one day. But he wasn't ready to give up. As he sat upright and shook himself out, Wittworth's shock was quickly replaced by embarrassment, then, in quick order, by a fit of rage. Grabbing the radio hand mike, he keyed the radio net and ordered all his platoon leaders to pursue and stop a white pizza van with Mexicans in it at all costs. Those bastards, he thought, were not going to embarrass the United States Army and get away with it.
At 3rd Platoon's roadblock, Kozak and her people waited. The 3rd Squad, who had been on duty at the roadblock when the call came in, continued to man it. Their Bradley, with the engine running, the gunner and track commander up and alert, the main gun pointed north toward Laredo, sat blocking the right side of the road. Kozak's Bradley sat on the opposite side of the road, also with its engine running and main gun pointed toward Laredo. The other two squads, with SFC Rivera, were mounted and ready to move out, their Bradleys sitting just off the road fifty meters south of Kozak's and the 3rd Squad's Bradley.
As they waited, watching for any sign of the enemy pizza van, Kozak tried to contact Wittworth, who, for some reason, was not responding.
She was unsure of her instructions. His last orders, "to pursue and stop" the pizza van, were, at best, ambiguous. Kozak didn't know if she was required to challenge the people in the pizza van, offering them an opportunity to submit to a search or surrender before she opened fire. If they showed any signs of resistance or flight, was she authorized to use deadly force? What, she wondered, constituted resistance, and how much deadly force was too much? What did Wittworth have in mind, Kozak wondered, when he ordered them to stop the pizza van? A simple physical roadblock? Warning shots from small arms? Or did he expect her to use 25mm high-explosive rounds and simply blow the van away?