DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED
BY MR. STENNINGS:
Q. And when did you get the idea in your head that maybe something could be done?
A. I guess it was not too long after someone finally decided to do something, about them kids in the mission, at least, if not the entire problem. "Cooler heads prevailed," as they say. We were all plumb sure that the feds would just go in and kill 'em all. But we were wrong . . . sort of.
Still and all, one of the folks surrounding the place—he was one of us, a Texas man, go figure—decided to give it a try. I don't know what he said to 'em, both the folks in the mission and the ones outside. Whatever it was, it seemed to work.
I got myself and my wife up early to watch it on the TV. Even Daddy came over to see. One lone man, wearin' one lone star, standin' outside the mission walls waiting for the kids to come out.
Made me proud, it did.
Course, you couldn't see the man's face or anything. There must have been a dozen TV cameras on him, but they were all back where it was safe and he . . . well, he was up front where it wasn't.
Qui Nhon Province, Republic of Vietnam, 1966
"We should be safe here for a while, Jack," Jorge lied, as he gently laid Schmidt down on the base of a muddy ditch.
Montoya, even carrying Schmidt, reached the PZ before the helicopters. So, apparently, did the Viet Cong. So, for that matter, did Sergeant Tri. It was this, seen as if close up through the lieutenant's binoculars, that caused the sergeant to whisper, "Christ have mercy."
Tri's head was perched atop a red stained pole, his eyes still closed as Jorge had left them.
"Wha'? What is it, Jorge?"
"Nothing, Jack. Nothing. Just relax and wait for the choppers to come."
Montoya searched through his own pouches for ammunition. Finding a bare three magazines—those only courtesy of looting the dead, previously—he began to rummage through Schmidt's own harness.
Call it . . . ninty rounds. Five frags—fragmentation grenades. One claymore. Couple smoke; one colored. Jack's .45 and twenty one rounds for that.
As he coolly set up the claymore to fire down a likely trail that led onto the PZ, Montoya began whistling something, a faintly Arabic sounding tune. "Deguello," it was called. It seemed appropriate.
As he worked, Montoya heard the sound—indistinct, faint—of brace of a Hueys.
The sound of the helicopter was strange to his ears. It was straining, so much was obvious. But the strained pitch was not that of the Hueys with which the priest was familiar. Perhaps one of those new jobs; a "Blackhawk," Jack called them.
Montoya strained his eyes against the midnight gloom. Yes, there it was. A helicopter, some pendulumlike thing swinging underneath.
This was nothing new. Forces had been building up around the mission for days. Some came by helicopter, some by automobile and truck, some by the light armored vehicles, LAVs, favored by the PGSS. Oftentimes the helicopters swung overhead for a view. So far the priest had refused to open fire on them. "Let them fire the first shot," he had ordered.
Most of the helicopters had kept high; out of practical range. Curiously, this one did not. With each passing second the priest's grip on his rifle grew tighter, unseen fingers whitening from the pressure. As the chopper came over the low mission wall he shifted to a firing stance. Then he recognized the pendulum, two big cubes swinging underneath. A slingload? Nobody assaults with a slingload. The rifle lowered.
The helicopter's nose pulled up slightly, raising a cloud of dust and grit. The pitch changed yet again as it settled closer to the ground. The priest saw the crew chief leaning out, watching for the load slung underneath to touch down. When it did the chief put a hand to his throat, said something that would have been unintelligible to anyone not on the same intercom system, and waved to the priest. Montoya waved back.
The helicopter moved forward and lowered itself again, this time until the higher cube touched down. The priest perceived, dimly, some kind of flexible strap falling over the second cube. Then the Blackhawk, black indeed in the moonless night, pulled up and away.
Montoya waved again as he walked forward toward the netted cargo that had been left for him.
He pulled away a letter he had found "hundred-mile-an-hour" taped to the side.
"Dear Jorge," the priest read in the bright oval cast by his flashlight. "In all the world there is nobody to whom I owe the debts and favors that I owe to you. Please accept these small tokens of my personal esteem in this, your hour of need.
Sincerely,
Jack
P.S. The ammunition is on the bottom layer of this load; the rifles and such on top. Most of the rest is food, some body armor, gas masks, and some medical supplies. There's one radio and half a dozen batteries. Good luck, friend. I'll do what I can. I am trying. There's a cell phone in there, one of those disposable jobs. Give your sister a call, why don't you."
"Yes, Rodg'—ah . . . mission accomplished? Great. Great news, friend." With a lighthouse-beam smile, Schmidt replaced the telephone on its cradle and returned to the governor's conference table.
"What has you looking so happy?" Juanita enquired.
"Nothing, Governor," Schmidt answered formally. "Nothing for you to worry about in any case."
She gave him a look of extreme suspicion, raising nothing more than a shrug in return. What have you done now, Jack?
Juanita turned her attention to the chief of her Department of Public Safety and his close cohort, Jeffrey Nagy, the Senior Captain of the Texas Rangers, a bejowled and utterly humorless looking man.
"We're following it, Governor. Company F"—the Waco-based Ranger company—"has Sergeants Akers and Guttierez on site twenty four hours a day.
Is that Johnson Akers? The Johnson Akers?" asked Schmidt.
Surprisingly, Nagy smiled, his previously humorless face brightening as the sun brightened the lonesome Texas prairie; his smile a match for Schmidt's own. "Yeah . . . him."
"What am I not getting?" Juanita enquired.
The tall, thin to the point of emaciated, civilian-dressed man drew no interest from anyone present. His white ten-gallon hat perched back on his head shouted "Yokel!" to everyone present. That he had as open, kind and friendly a face as one might ever hope to see only confirmed the impression.
And indeed, Sergeant Johnson Akers, Texas Rangers, was every bit as open and friendly and kind as his face portrayed.
He was also a stone-cold killer; nerveless, unstoppable, impossible-to-intimidate. In all the history of the Texas Rangers and their higher headquarter, the Texas Department of Public Safety, only one man had ever won the Medal of Valor twice.
That man, with his open, gentle, kindly, grandfather's face, sat quietly under his ten-gallon hat, keeping careful track of every federal law enforcement agent, detachment and observer on site . . . and reporting the same to his chief.
What few knew, outside of the Rangers, was that Sergeant Akers had won both medals in the course of saving children.
Sister Sofia sat on a rocking chair surrounded by the twenty six children of the mission aged twelve and under. (The older ones were either guarding the mission's thick adobe walls, doing necessary work to keep the operation running, or being trained by Father—as best he could under the circumstances—on the dozen rifles and two night vision scopes sent by Schmidt.)
The delivery of two and a half tons of canned and dried food had, to a degree, alleviated Sofia's concerns in the commissary department—though re-hydrating Army "B"-rations had proven problematic to people who had never seen them. Nonetheless, food was food, even if it sometimes crunched when you bit it.
Still, the possibility—she could not bring herself to think "probability" let alone "certainty"—of a federal assault on the mission set her stomach to churning and brought tears to her eyes. Her innocent little ones under fire? No. Never. It was unthinkable.
So she led the children in songs, mostly but not entirely of a religious nature, while the elders, in many cases the teenaged parents, stood to and prepared for the worst.
"Now if worst comes to worst and they get over the wall we fall back to the main chapel," Montoya instructed his boys. Miguel looked to the chapel behind him and nodded understanding. He thought, Father's plan is a good one. From behind the wall only those exposing themselves can shoot at us. And unless they come over in a huge group we will outnumber them. From underneath the central water tank, Julio—who is a better shot than I will ever be—can take care of any tower they might put up to snipe at us. If they use tanks there are the "special" bottles.
Miguel referred not to flammable Molotov cocktails but to bottles of household ammonia, good for taking out any tank in the world. This was not only true if the tank had an air filtration system, but especially if it had an air filtration system. Ammonia molecules were smaller than oxygen molecules. They would pass through any filter that would pass oxygen through. The bottles were positioned around the mission's adobe wall.
Miguel spared a surreptitious glance at hidden position and emplacements. The police have no clue about the weapons; all we are letting them see are the old ones we had. We have a chance.
"Gas!" Montoya announced, half unexpectedly. The boys immediately started fumbling with their cumbersome, clumsy face masks as the priest counted off, "One thousand, two thousand . . ."
Sergeant Akers walked off alone and made a cell phone call directly to the Chief. "Captain Nagy? Boss, there's nearly a thousand feds here. Twelve from the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. Thirty-seven from BATF. About nineteen from the Department of Justice. A hundred man maintenance and support team for the armored vehicles Fort Hood loaned them. They have about thirty-five cooks with them. Four 'observers' from . . . well, I think they're from Delta. You know, the Special Forces types? Act that way, anyway. Arrogant folks, you know? Then there's two full companies from the Secret Service. Over four hundred in that crew. Plus there are two more companies of riot control troops from the Office of the Surgeon General. Oh . . . and something like twenty-one folks toting guns from the Environmental Protection Agency. No, sir. No, I haven't a clue what EPA thinks they're doing here."
"Yessir. Tell the governor. Forty-eight hours. No more. In forty-eight hours the feds will assault."
Grimly, Akers shut off his own phone, closed the cover, and contemplated a dilemma he had never thought to confront.
Nagy sighed. "My man on the ground says forty-eight hours, Governor. Then the feds go in."
"Forty-eight hours," Juanita echoed, faintly.
"Your brother doesn't stand too much of a chance, Governor. They have tanks, armored personnel carriers, two helicopter gunships with Army crews, and some very well-trained specialists."
"Any artillery? Mortars?" asked Schmidt.
"My man didn't see any," Nagy responded. "That would kind of be 'overkill' anyway, wouldn't it?"
"So are tanks. So are gunships."
Juanita shuddered at the image that came unbidden of an armored vehicle crushing her brother's body into the dirt.
There were in fact only a brace of tanks, those having to be taken from storage where they had languished since the conversion of the Army's First Cavalry Division to a medium force suitable for deployment to and employment in any operation short of real war against a heavily armored enemy. Worse, the tanks had no ammunition suitable for breaching the walls that surrounded the mission.
They did have, however, a number of machine guns suitable for beating down fire when and if the time came for a dismounted team to carry a breaching charge forward. And the defenders had nothing that could penetrate a tank's armor. Moreover, the tanks themselves—seventy tons of moving metal—could breach most walls simply by slamming against them, though this was a tactic much frowned upon by real tankers whose job was largely keeping their tanks running.
Group Commander Sawyers, First Security Group, Presidential Guard Secret Service, patted one of the tanks affectionately.
Schmidt saw Juani's involuntary shudder, saw the beginnings of tears forming in her eyes. "Folks. I think we ought to leave the governor alone for a bit."
Juanita shot him a grateful glance. At her nod of agreement the others began to file out of her office. Schmidt lagged behind until all the others had left. Then he quietly closed the door behind them.
Even before they were alone, the governor had folded her arms across her desk, laid her head upon them, and begun to weep quietly.
Schmidt hurried to her side, pulling a chair with him as he went.
Seated beside her, he patted her back affectionately. "Juani, I know how you feel right now. But we have forty-eight hours, no more than that . . . and maybe less. Have you considered calling the President to try to work something out?"
The shaking of the governor's shoulders subsided somewhat. She lifted her head up, wiped a runny nose with a hand, and sniffled, "She won't take my calls, Jack. Her chief of staff said, 'The President is too busy with the crisis.' But that's horse manure. She wants to make an example of Jorge."
"Doesn't she care about the kids in there?" asked an incredulous Schmidt. "Her and all her 'it's for the children' crap?"
Johnson Akers would do anything to save a kid. He just couldn't help it. He had never been able to help it. Shoot a criminal? Easy. Take a bullet? He'd done that, too. Anything.
"Look, Mister FBI man. Sir, I'm not asking you to risk one of your precious hides getting those kids out. I'll do it."
The senior FBI man on the scene was as arrogant as any federal agent could be expected to be. From his expensively coiffed hair to his Pierre Cardin shoes to the tailored Italian suit in between, he portrayed an image of anal retentiveness difficult to equal. Even the high-fashion Gucci shoulder holster, which his suit successfully failed to hide, reeked of the proper FBI image.
What the man was not, however, was a child killer. His orders left little doubt that the priest was to die. They gave no indication that the kids must as well.
He looked over Akers—from his ten-gallon hat to his string tie to his faded denims and cowboy boots. Something about the old man must have struck a cord. Slowly the agent nodded agreement. "Okay, Sergeant Akers. You can try. I'll pass the word."
"Thank you, sir," said Akers . . . and really seemed to mean the "sir" this time.
"Padre, there's a man at the front gate. Says he's with the Texas Rangers."
"Is he alone, Miguel?"
"Si, Padre. We used a little mirror to check over the wall and around the door. Nobody but him."
With a fatalistic, and yet slightly hopeful, shrug, the priest walked to the gate. "What can I do for you?" he asked.
"Is this Father Montoya?" Akers queried.
"Yes. And you would be?"
"Sergeant Johnson Akers. Texas Rangers. F Company. I've come for the kids if you will let them out, Father."
An old memory tugged at the priest. He hesitated a moment or two, straining to remember. When memory struck, his face split in a wide, happy grin, his decision already made.
"Sure, Sergeant. Can you give me a little time to get them ready? And how do I know it isn't a trick to get the gate open?"
Akers voice was deadly serious. "I don't play games where children's lives are at stake, Padre."
"No. I suppose you don't. Thirty minutes?"
"Thirty minutes will be fine. I'll just wait right here." Akers leaned against the mission wall calmly, struck a match against it, and proceeding to smoke away the time.
"Oh, Sister, wait . . . just a minute . . . please?"
Sofia's face showed how she was torn. "Won't you please go with him, Elpi? You don't have to stay here."
The girl set her own face in grim determination. "I will not leave the padre." Her grim face melted as she hugged her infant son to her breast for what she was certain would be the last time. Tears welling, she very reluctantly passed the boy over to the arms of Sister Sofia.
"Please take good care of him, Sister. Please."
"Hush child. You know I will."
It had not been without difficulty that Montoya had persuaded the sister to leave the mission with the infants. Ultimately, though, his reasoning had prevailed. "Get out of here, Sister. Somebody will have to look out for the little ones."
And so the sister had formed her charges into a column of twos and let young parents like Elpidia bid choking goodbyes.
As the little ones, lamblike, followed the nun to the gate, Elpidia raced to the wall for a last glimpse.
A broadly grinning Akers met Sister Sofia as she began to lead the column of children out the gate. "Sister," he greeted.
Believing that Akers was one with "the enemy," some hundreds of whom were gathered by the operation headquarters to watch the peaceful surrender, the sister halted briefly, looked him over once, then semi-snubbed him.
"I'm Sergeant Akers, Sister. How many children do you have? And how old?"
"I have twenty-six children following me, Sergeant. They range from little Pedro, here; less than a year, up to age twelve."
"Thank you, Sister. Now if you will follow me, please."
"Very well," answered Sofia. Turning her head over her should she called, "Follow me, children."
"Sister?" asked one of the elder ones, Josefina by name. "What's going to happen to us? Once it is over, I mean."
Again the sister stopped, looking mournfully behind her. "I do not know, child." She could never have imagined the years of solitary confinement that lay before her if the FBI was to have its way.
"That nun looks about ready to turn around and go back," announced the spotter of a two man sniper team from the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team.
"What do I do if she does turn around?"
"Drill her," said the spotter to the sniper. "Can't let her take the kids back inside."
"Got it," whispered the sniper, settling his cross hairs on the sister's head, a foot or so above little Pedro's. Pedro was in no danger, however; the sniper was a master.
Crying, "Pedro," softly, Elpidia didn't notice that her rifle was still slung over her shoulder as she climbed the ladder inside the wall for a last glimpse of her son. Parting was more than a mother's heart, even a young mother's . . . perhaps especially a young mother's, could bear.
"Armed target, bearing eleven o'clock," announced the spotter. "Take it."
"On it," said the sniper, making the minute correction to the new target. A slim, long-haired target ascended into his cross hairs. The sniper's trigger finger had already been given the unvoiced command, "fire" when the more conscious part of his mind realized his target was just a young girl.
The sniper flinched in surprise, but not by much. His finger still closed, the rifle still fired, and the recoil still rocked him back.
In the sniper's view, his target—struck by her left shoulder rather than her heart, so much had his flinch accomplished—spun away and fell from view.
As if in slow motion, or in one of those dreams where one seems to move as if through a thickened liquid, Elpidia felt the bullet, heard as much as felt it pass through the complex of bones in her left shoulder, then was forced away from the ladder by the power of the blow. The ground rushed up at her, but also in slow motion. She struck the ground in a cloud of dust raised by the impact of her limp body.
Only a short moment passed before the immediate shock wore off and Elpidia was overwhelmed by the pain of shattered bone and burning bullet track. She screamed.
Miguel had already been running for Elpidia, to stop her, when he heard the bullet crack overhead. In his view the girl spun, oh so slowly, away from the ladder and collapsed to the ground below.
When he heard her high-pitched, shattering scream Miguel's mind turned half to mush.
Sophia heard the shot, then heard Sergeant Akers' mutter, "Shit," then shout "Down!" before diving himself for a nearby ditch to show the children the way. For a moment only was Sophia frozen. Then she turned and shouted, "Back to the mission, children. Run!"
Sophia did not see Akers draw his pistol. If she had, she would have seen it pointed not at her, but in the general direction of the FBI.
Gathering her skirts around her with one hand, Sophia tried to follow the fleeing boys and girls to the gate. She had nearly made it when the sniper, recovered from his surprise, put a bullet through her panic-filled brain. Little Pedro was flung forward as the sister fell.
"Hit," announced the sniper, softly.
Josefina was already at the gate when she heard the shot. By the time she turned, a fiercely wailing Pedro lay upon the mission walkway. Without hesitation, Josefina ran to pick up the child. With him safely in her arms she sprinted for the greater safety of the gate.
Though the sniper tracked her progress in his scope, he did not fire. There was no point to firing; the other children had already reentered the mission.
As Josefina reached the gate, a hard hand grabbed her clothing and pulled her inside. Then an outraged Father Montoya took a mostly covered kneeling firing position and scanned for targets. Most especially did the father look for whoever had shot Sister Sophia.
"Are you all right, Elpi? Oh, God, please be all right."
Miguel didn't have the training to know that the girl's wound was nonfatal; so far and no farther had the FBI man flinched. But she wasn't talking, she didn't seem conscious, and there was blood all over her side.
Certain the girl was dead, with a wordless cry of utter anguish Miguel began climbing the same ladder from which she had been hurled. With each step upward he muttered, "Motherfuckers. Motherfuckers. Motherfuckers."
"New target. Prior location. Eleven o'clock."
Again the sniper made a minute adjustment. Again, he commanded his finger to tighten. Again the rifle rocked against his shoulder.
"Hit," he announced.
Frustrated beyond words, Montoya saw only a spurt of dust to mark the sniper's position. Not a chance. They're behind cover from here. With a sigh of regret he withdrew the rifle from his shoulder, then leaned against the rough-hewn gate to close it. Once it was in place he lowered the bar.
Already some of his people were rushing to the still warm and breathing Elpidia . . . and rapidly cooling Miguel.