be determined well in advance, coordinated with state and local authorities, and approved. If an OP was to be located on private property, the owner of the land had to be notified. In this way, a great deal of detailed information was available and passing through many hands on a daily basis. It was therefore not difficult for Alaman to energize his own intelligence network. The fact was, some of the state and local officials who were handling the military information were already on Alaman's payroll, holdovers from when Alaman's efforts had been simply to facilitate the movement of drugs and illegal aliens.
Movement of new personnel, funds, and even military hardware, was no problem. In fact, using Alaman's connections, it was surprisingly easy. Secondhand weapons no longer needed by the Nicaraguan and Cuban governments were purchased by Alamdn's agents and shipped to Colombia. There they were combined with regular drug traffic organized and run by Alaman's associates in that country and sent on flights being made into the United States. Once in the United States, the new personnel, funds, weapons, and equipment were moved by road using a trucking company owned by another of Alaman's associates. In this way, Delapos was able to provide antitank guided missiles and portable surface-to-air guided missiles to his teams within a matter of weeks.
Though outdated, the new heavy and precision-guided weapons gave Delapos's teams an edge that the National Guard was unaware of. When they did find out about it, and American intelligence began to look into the matter, they would find little useful or conclusive information, be cause the Nicaraguans were providing the same weapons to the regular Mexican Army. Even this effort was planned in such a way as to reinforce the confusion within the American intelligence community about whether the Mexican government, through intent or ineptitude, was implicated.
By using the same Nicaraguan colonel who was handling the movement of weapons to the Mexican Army, Alaman could avoid duplicate systems. Both he and the Mexican Army were drawing from the same stock of weapons. The Nicaraguan colonel, for his part, ensured that weapons and ammunition provided to either the Mexican Army or Alaman did not have consecutive serial numbers, but were mixed. For example, a shipment of surface-to-air missiles was arranged so that the Mexican Army received weapons with serial numbers one through three, while Alaman received the missile with serial number four, the Mexican Army numbers five and six, Alaman seven and eight, and so forth. In this way, if the Americans were able to obtain the original manufacturer's serial numbers, and track them through Nicaragua, there was the possibility that some would be found to be in the hands of the Mexican Army while others, with consecutive serial numbers, were found conveniently discarded at ambush sites in the United States.
There was little, therefore, from Delapos's standpoint, to fear from the National Guard. With the Guard in place and settled into a discernible routine, and his own teams rearmed and set north of the border, Delapos was more than ready to open the next phase of Alaman's reign of terror.
From the seat of the division commander's command and control helicopter, Scott Dixon watched the two Humvees below for a moment before returning his attention to the border to the south. This was his third trip to the border in ten days and, with pressure increasing for the federal government to take an active role in securing the border, he knew it wouldn't be his last.
The recons, by Dixon and other key members of the division, were meant to prepare them for what some called the inevitable deployment of the division south. Rather than increase his knowledge of the area and better prepare him, however, each successive recon only served to heighten Dixon's sense of foreboding and apprehension. Even Jan, during their brief reunions, noted that Dixon was treating the entire subject of the use of American military forces on the border with great trepidation.
In one halting discussion over dinner, he kept pointing out that unless someone came up with what he called a 'war-winning strategy,' they were not only wasting time and manpower, but were leaving them selves open to a situation that had no definable goal and little direction other than the perceived need to 'teach the Mexicans a lesson.' In his heart, Dixon knew that if the Army deployed to the border, someone, for some reason, would find an excuse for using it in Mexico. And once that happened, there would be no peace for years, on either side of the border.
With a heavy Hispanic population throughout the southwestern United States and a strong anti-American sentiment in Mexico and Central America, the resulting mess would make the Israeli-Palestinian problem in the Middle East look like child's play.
Turning his thoughts away from the politics of the problem, which were not his concern anyway, and back to the immediate military situation, Dixon looked out the open door. The terrain below, the area where the 16th would be operating, was a real horror story. Looking down at his map, Dixon tried to figure out where they were. In the process of trying to solve the problems of the world, he had lost track of his location. When he couldn't relate the terrain he was looking at to the symbols on the map, he flipped the map over and refolded it to uncover the next sheet, taking great care to hang on to it as he did so lest the wind rip it from his hands and out of the helicopter. To lose one's map was the nightmare of every officer, the supreme moment of embarrassment. As a young company commander, leading his tank company on his first major tactical exercise in Germany, Dixon had lost his map doing just what he was doing now.
The image of his wayward map, lazily floating away down the long column of tanks after being ripped from his hands, was burned into his mind as one of the three most embarrassing moments in his life. Though he didn't take the precaution of tying his map to him with a string, like they taught at the infantry school, he was always extremely careful and very mindful of what he was doing whenever he handled his map while on or in a moving vehicle.
It therefore came as a surprise when, after refolding his map, he looked up and saw a UH-1 helicopter flying parallel to them south of the border.
Running his hand along the intercom cable until he found the intercom button, Dixon pressed the button and blurted, 'Who's that?'
The pilot, a young warrant officer, responded without thinking. 'It's a helicopter, sir.'
Taken aback by the comment, Dixon tried to decide if the aviator was trying to be a smartass or didn't understand what Dixon wanted. Either way, he decided that he should have gotten a better answer. He therefore decided to give the young warrant a verbal shot in the head. 'No shit, Sherlock. You figure that out on your own or did the co-pilot help?'
There was a pause while the pilot figured out that Dixon was not pleased with his first response. In a more respectful and less flippant tone, he corrected himself. 'Sorry, sir. It looks like a Mexican Air Force Bell 212. It came up from the south, from our seven o'clock position a few seconds ago and began to parallel us. He's still on his side of the border, traveling at approximately one hundred knots.'
Dixon only grunted in response as he looked across the open space between the two aircraft in an effort to find any distinguishing marks or equipment that would help him identify it later. The Mexican Air Force helicopter, like his, had its doors wide open. He could clearly see its pilot and co-pilot, the crew chief, and the door gunners. On the right side of the cargo bay, a lone passenger sat. He, like Dixon, held a map on his lap and was watching Dixon watch him. No doubt, Dixon thought, the lone passenger was an officer, like him, making his recon in order to prepare himself for the deployment of his forces to the border. The irony of the situation did not escape him. Keying the intercom again, Dixon instructed the pilot to slowly increase their air speed. Dixon wanted to see how badly the Mexican, whoever he was, wanted to play chicken.
Colonel Guajardo had no doubt that the American UH-60 helicopter his helicopter was paralleling was a command and control aircraft. The symbol of the 16th Armored Division, painted in bold colors, was all over it.
That, and the lone passenger seated before a huge radio set in the cargo bay, left little doubt that the anonymous American was doing the same thing that he was. And the presence of door gunners, on the American aircraft as well as his own, told Guajardo how seriously both sides took the current situation.
As he watched the American door gunner that faced him, Guajardo noted that he held the spade grips of his M-60 machine gun with his right hand angled down and away from Guajardo. Guajardo knew, however, what the American gunner was thinking. Even with the American's sun visor down, Guajardo could almost feel the eyes drilling a hole through him as the gunner mentally noted range and computed the angle of deflection he would need to apply in order to hit Guajardo's helicopter.
Such thoughts, Guajardo knew, were expected. In fact, only a poor soldier would have been thinking of other things. And the odds were nonexistent that a poor soldier would be part of the crew on a command and control helicopter.
The thought of flying in such close proximity to a group of men who were prepared to kill him without
