*
He’d been hit in his right thigh. When I cut away his pant leg, I saw that the wound was a through-and-through and seemed to have struck no bone. There were entrance and exit wounds, which had bled significantly. He’d bound them with a strip of cloth one of the women had torn from her blouse. Blood had completely soaked the binding, and when I removed the cloth, I saw that the bullet holes were festering. I took the iodine from the first aid kit I’d bought at the truck stop, cleaned the wounds, and bound them with sterile gauze.
“Mom?” Peter asked as I worked.
“She’s with your father. I’m not sure where they are right now. We were all at the Lulabelle yesterday, but you’d left.”
“Jocko must have told you he’d seen my signal.”
“I was in the plane with him.”
“I would have kept signaling, but I saw the chopper hovering off to the west.”
“We figured,” I said. I finished the bandaging and sat back. “What happened at the rendezvous with these people?”
“Someone gave us up to Carlos Rodriguez,” he said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But Rodriguez and his people were waiting for us after we crossed the border.”
“They shot you?”
“Maybe. Or it might have been the others.”
“The others?”
Peter lay back against the rock of the tunnel wall. At twenty-nine, black-haired, tawny-skinned, and slender, he looked little different from those he was helping. I could see Rainy in him, in his eyes especially. They were like hers in color and in the compassionate spirit that shone through them. But Mondragón was there, too, in the handsome face and the hard set of his jaw. The women and children—I’d counted eleven in all: six women and five children—had crowded near and had watched as I’d worked on Peter’s wounds.
“A bunch of men jumped us but didn’t fire their weapons. They were suddenly there, all around us, coming out of the dark. I thought we were done for. Rodriguez identified himself and told me he was going to kill me. He said he was going to take the women and make prostitutes of them and sell their children. Then all hell broke loose. Someone started firing at Rodriguez and his men. I have no idea who it was. I saw him go down. I called to the women and the children, and they followed me out of the firefight. It was only after we were away that I realized I’d been hit. Thank God I was the only one.
“I patched myself up as well as I could and took everyone to the Lulabelle, a full night’s walk from the border. On the way, I called Mom. Or tried. I had only one bar and my cell was in the process of dying on me.”
“You have a sat phone though, right?”
“Had. I lost it in the firefight.”
“Why call your mom? What could she do? Why not call one of the Desert Angels?”
“So you know about us?” he said. “I understood we’d been compromised, and I had no idea who’d sold us out. I thought if I could explain to Mom, she’d rope you into helping. Which, it looks like, is exactly what happened. She must have called my father to enlist his help, too.”
He paused a moment and squeezed his face in pain.
“You okay?” I asked.
“I’ll live. You didn’t happen to bring water, did you?”
“I have some in my hydration pack and four gallons in the truck.”
“Could you share what you have with the folks here? That rain yesterday gave us some relief, but they’re all still pretty thirsty. And hungry. If you hadn’t come along, I was ready to head out, see if we could find some Border Patrol and turn ourselves in.”
“Head out? With that leg? You wouldn’t get far.”
The water in the hydration pack went quickly. I gave out the jerky and the power bars, and they went down fast. Peter asked me to tend to the feet of several of the women and children. They’d walked from Guatemala. Some had worn the shoes nearly off their feet, and their soles were cut and blistered. That they’d kept walking spoke in a heartbreaking way of the depth of their desperation.
“Maybe it would have been better to give them up to the Border Patrol,” I said as I worked.
“Last resort,” Peter replied. “None of them have family here. Do you know what would have happened? After all they’d been through, they’d have been sent back to Guatemala. And do you have any idea what they ran from? So many of them have seen their husbands, fathers, brothers slaughtered in the violence there. If you could talk to them, they’d tell you that dying in the desert is no worse.”
“Why did you leave the Lulabelle?”
“I’d posted some of the women and children as sentries. They spotted men coming into the mountains. These men weren’t wearing uniforms, so I knew they weren’t Border Patrol. I figured Rodriguez’s men. Or maybe whoever it was who’d attacked Rodriguez. We left quickly and set out for the Jesus Lode.”
“You knew where it was?”
“Approximately. I have to tell you, though, it was a stroke of luck actually finding it.”
“I know a man who would say you were always meant to find it.”
“I know him, too,” he said with a laugh. “How is Uncle Henry?”
“Hopeful, as always.”
I finished tending the final woman whose feet needed care, and she said something shyly to me in a tongue I didn’t recognize.
“She says thank you,” Peter translated.
I began to put away the medical supplies. “We were ambushed at the Lulabelle yesterday. By the same people you ran from, I’m sure. Rodriguez’s men. We’d have been toast except your father called in the cavalry.”
Peter looked pained, and not from the wounds in his leg. “Who knew about the Lulabelle?”
“Jocko. Somebody beat him up, and maybe the intel came from him. He was still in bad shape when I talked to him, and he couldn’t say for sure. I also talked to your friend Sylvester. But somebody killed his mule, so I’m thinking he wasn’t inclined to be cooperative. It’s possible whoever was in the chopper that was hovering out here spotted your signal and relayed that information to Rodriguez.”
“I figured the chopper was Border Patrol.”
“Could have been. Like your father said to me, anybody can be bought. What now?”
“First, we cart that water up from your truck. Then you get me to Ark.”
“Arivaca?”
He nodded. “I have friends there who’ll help us. I need to arrange to get these people to safety.”
He spoke to the women in a language that wasn’t Spanish, and three of them followed me down to the pickup. We carried the water back to the mine. Peter talked with them all for some time, then he said to me, “They understand that you and I have to leave, but that I’ll be coming back. I’ve promised them. If I can’t come back, for whatever reason, you have to make sure that someone does.”
I looked at the faces of those women and their children, who’d traveled God knew how many miles and had endured God knew how many different kinds of hell. I understood why Peter would do his best to move heaven and earth to help them. What human heart was stony enough to refuse?
“You have my word,” I said.
CHAPTER 28
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