“Me, too, but I’m still a little nervous.”
LAS CRUCES had a regional airport for short hauls and puddle jumpers. Along with that came rent-a-car outlets. They pulled in, and it was time for Mustafa to get nervous. He and one of his colleagues would hire cars here. Two more would make use of a similar business in the town itself.
“It is all prepared for you,” the driver told them. He handed over two sheets of paper. “Here are the reservation numbers. You’ll be driving Ford Crown Victoria four-door sedans. We could not get you station wagons as requested without going to El Paso, and that was not desirable. Use your Visa card in there. Your name is Tomas Salazar. Your friend is Hector Santos. Show them the reservation numbers and just do what they tell you to do. It is very easy.” Neither man struck the driver as overly Latin in appearance, but the people at this rental office were both ignorant paddies who spoke little Spanish beyond “taco” and “cerveza.”
Mustafa got out of the car and walked in, waving for his friend to follow.
Immediately, he knew it would be easy. Whoever owned this business, he hadn’t troubled himself with recruiting intelligent people. The boy running the desk was hunched over it, reading a comic book with attention that looked a little too rapt.
“Hello,” Mustafa said, with false confidence. “I have reservation.” He wrote the number down on a pad and handed it to him.
“Okay.” The attendant didn’t show his annoyance at being diverted from the newest Batman adventure. He knew how to work the office computer. Sure enough, the computer spat out a rental form already filled out in most details.
Mustafa handed over his international driver’s license, which the employee Xeroxed, and then he stapled the photocopy to his copy of the rental form. He was delighted that Mr. Salazar took all of the insurance options—he got extra money for encouraging people to do that.
“Okay, your car is the white Ford in slot number four. Just go out that door and turn right. The keys are in the ignition, sir.”
“Thank you,” Mustafa said in accented English. Was it really this easy?
Evidently, it was. He’d just got the seat in his Ford adjusted when Saeed showed up at slot number five for a light green twin to his sedan. Both had maps of the state of New Mexico, but they didn’t need them, really. Both men started their cars and eased out of their parking slots and headed off to the street, where the SUVs were waiting. It was simple enough to follow them. The town of Las Cruces had traffic, but not all that much at the dinner hour.
There was another rental car agency just eight blocks north on what appeared to be the main street of Las Cruces. This one was called Hertz, which struck Mustafa as vaguely Jewish in character. His two comrades walked in, and, ten minutes later, walked back out and got in their leased cars. Again, they were Fords of the same make as his and Saeed’s. With that done, perhaps the most hazardous mission they had to accomplish, it was time to follow the SUVs north for a few kilometers—about twenty, as it turned out—then off this road onto another dirt one. There seemed to be a lot of those here . . . just like home, in fact. Another kilometer or so, and there was a house standing alone, with only a truck parked nearby to suggest residency. There, all the vehicles parked and the occupants got out for what would be, Mustafa realized, their last proper meeting.
“We have your weapons here,” Juan told them. He pointed to Mustafa. “Come with me, please.”
The inside of this ordinary-looking wood-frame structure appeared to be a virtual arsenal. A total of sixteen cardboard boxes held sixteen MAC-10 sub-machine guns. Not an elegant firearm, the MAC is made of machine-steel stampings, with a generally poor finish on the metal. With each weapon were twelve magazines, apparently all loaded, and taped together end-to-end with black electrician’s tape.
“The weapons are virgins. They have not been fired,” Juan told them. “We also have suppressors for each of them. They are not efficient silencers, but they improve balance and accuracy. This gun is not as easily handled as the Uzi—but those are also more difficult to obtain here. For this weapon, its effective range is about ten meters. It is easily loaded and unloaded. It fires from an open bolt, of course, and the rate of fire is quite high.” It would, in fact, empty a thirty-round magazine in less than three seconds, which was a little too fast for sensible use, but these people didn’t seem overly particular to Juan.
They weren’t. Each of the sixteen Arabs lifted a weapon and hefted it, as though to say hello to a new friend. Then one lifted a magazine pair—
“Stop! Halto!” Juan snapped at once. “You will not load these weapons inside. If you wish to test-fire them, we have targets outside.”
“Will this not be too noisy?” Mustafa asked.
“The nearest house is four kilometers away,” Juan answered dismissively. The bullets could not travel that far, and he assumed the noise could not either. In this, he was mistaken.
But his guests assumed he knew everything about the area, and they were always willing to shoot guns off, especially the rock-and-roll kind. Twenty meters from the house was a sand berm with some crates and cardboard boxes scattered about. One by one, they inserted the magazines into their SMGs and pulled back the bolts. There was no official command to fire. Instead, they took their lead from Mustafa, who grasped the strap dangling from the muzzle and pulled his trigger back.
The immediate results were agreeable. The MAC-10 made the appropriate noise, jumping up and right as all such weapons did, but since this was his first time and this was just range shooting; he managed to walk his rounds into a cardboard box about six meters to his left front. In seemingly no time at all, the bolt slammed shut on an empty chamber, having fired and ejected thirty Remington 9mm pistol cartridges. He thought of extracting the magazine and reversing it to enjoy another two or three seconds of blazing bliss, but he managed to control himself. There would be another time for that, in the not-too-distant future. “The silencers?” he asked Juan.
“Inside. They screw on the muzzle, and it’s better to screw them on—easier to control how they spray their bullets, you see.” Juan spoke with some authority. He’d used the MAC-10 to eliminate business competitors and other unpleasant people in Dallas and Santa Fe over the years. Despite that, he looked on his guests with a certain unease. They grinned too much. They were not as he was, Juan Sandoval told himself, and the sooner they went on their way, the better. It would not be so for the people at their destinations, but that was not his concern. His orders came from on high. Very on high, his immediate superior had made clear to him the week before. And the money had been commensurate. Juan had no particular complaint, but, as a good reader of people, he had a red light flashing behind his eyes.
Mustafa followed him back in and picked up the suppressor. It was perhaps ten centimeters in diameter, and half a meter or so long. As promised, it screwed onto the thread on the gun’s muzzle, and on the whole, it did improve the weapon’s balance. He hefted it briefly and decided that he’d prefer to use it this way. Better to reduce muzzle climb, and make for more accurate shooting. The reduction in noise had little bearing on his mission, but accuracy did. But the suppressor made an easily concealed weapon unacceptably bulky. So, he unscrewed it for now, and replaced the silencer in its carry-bag. Then he went outside to gather his people. Juan followed him back out.
“Some things you need to know,” he told the team leaders. Juan went on in a slow, measured voice: “The American police are efficient, but they are not all-powerful. If, during your driving, one pulls you over, all you need to do is to speak politely. If he asks you to get out of the car, then get out as he says. He is allowed by American laws to see if you have a weapon on your person—to search you with his hands—but if he asks you to search your car, simply say no, I do not wish you to do that—and by their laws he may not search your car. I will say this again: If an American policeman asks to search your car, you need only say no, and then he may not do it. Then drive away. When you drive, do not go faster than the number on the highway signs. If you do that, you will probably not be disturbed in any way. If you go faster than the speed limit, all you do is to give the police a reason to pull you over. So, do not do that. Exercise patience at all times. Do you have any questions?”