The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (97)
“We gotta talk about that,” Letty said. “Let’s see what Greet and Colles have to say. They’ve been calling me, but I’ve been too busy.”
* * *
Letty called Greet and put the phone on speaker, so Kaiser could hear and chip in. Greet, sounding stressed, demanded, “Where in the hell have you been, goddamn it? We needed to talk to you. We’ve got a conference call set up here. Give me a minute to get everybody plugged in. It’ll be Senator Colles and some DHS people here in Washington and an emergency task force at FBI headquarters in El Paso.”
“El Paso? Who’s down here? Who’s on the road into Pershing?” Letty asked.
“They’ve got FBI and Texas cops down there, they’re working out jurisdiction issues right now, but what they don’t have, and they need, is intelligence. I mean like . . . military intelligence.”
“How about the other kind of intelligence . . . you know, like IQ? They got any of that?” Letty asked.
“I’m not recording this yet, but I will be,” Greet said. “I don’t know about IQ, but watch your mouth.”
“Got it.”
* * *
After some clicking and static, Greet came up again and said, “Letty, John, I’ve got Senator Colles and a dozen of our DHS executives here, plus task force members in El Paso, all on the line.”
Colles jumped in: “Letty! Are you and John okay?”
“We’re in a motel room in the middle of town,” Letty said. “John drove out to the highway barricade. He has some things to say about that. I’ve walked all over town, I watched the press conference that Jael, Hawkes, had here, I expect you’ve seen that. I talked to some of the militia people, I’ve got some numbers for you . . .”
A man’s voice: “This is Tim Jackson, I’m a lieutenant colonel with the Texas National Guard. We appreciate any intel you can give us, but I have one question first: Why haven’t they taken out the cell phones? We’re getting calls from people down there.”
“I looked at the cell phone tower,” Letty said. “They’ve got three men guarding it, and one guy was working around the base. I can’t promise you this, but I suspect he was putting some of that C-4 on it.”
“Then they could cut us off at any minute.”
“Yes. I expect they’re planning to do that. If everybody will shut up, John and I will tell you what we know and what we’ve seen that you might not have gotten from the helicopter run or from other people. And hope we don’t get cut off.”
Jackson again. “Okay. Go. We’re recording.”
Letty began, “There are a hundred and five, to a hundred and ten, militia here, both men and women, counting the seven at the highway barricade . . .”
“Seven? We’ve been told there are twenty to thirty at the roadblock,” a man said.
Kaiser: “There are seven. I not only counted them, I talked to them. Six men and a woman.”
“Okay. If you say so.”
A slight skepticism in the voice. Kaiser rolled his eyes and then snapped: “Seven! Exactly!”
Letty: “There are twenty of them—that’s another exact number, by the way—blocking the bridge. They are on the Mexican side of the bridge. The bridge has six spans and they are about halfway across the last span. The Mexicans have taken positions on the other side, but there has been no shooting. They are shouting back and forth in Spanish, so that’s well thought out.”
She gave them numbers of militia she’d counted in town, as well as armament and personal protective gear: rifles, sidearms, bulletproof vests. She told them that the border station personnel had been disarmed and most of the employees were being held in the station, and that two others had barricaded themselves in a house above the station.
“We’ve talked to those guys,” somebody said.
Kaiser chipped in, “Most of the guns are AR-15s, with a mix of AR-10s and AKs and at least one Barrett .50-caliber that I’ve seen. I haven’t seen anything bigger. No grenades, no M320s. Everyone has a sidearm.”
Letty: “They are very well organized into teams: the bridge team, the blockade team; there’s a fast-reaction team, there are thirty-five members in it, equipped like full-on military with all the gear. There’s a medical squad, five nurses. The leaders are this Jael woman, who I believe to be Jane Hawkes, and a man called Rand Low. Billy Greet has files on both of them . . .”
Jackson: “Are they digging in?”
Kaiser: “Yes. In a way. Not in the sense of emplacements of any kind, but the houses here are built on a slope, and the downhill sides of the concrete foundations are two or three feet high. They are setting up behind those foundations, which, in my judgment, is pretty substantial protection. If there was a real fight, it’d get ugly, overlapping fields of fire all the way down the hill to the river. And they’ve got that Barrett, if you thought you might send some choppers over . . .”
Greet jumped in: “For anyone who wasn’t told yet, John is a former Delta master sergeant.”
Jackson: “Good to know.”
Letty: “They’ve detained the mayor and city council and are saying that they plan to put them on trial for treason because they let that other caravan across the bridge.”