Ode To Defiance Chapter 20

15

The Wall and the Miracle

You can depend upon the Americans to do the right thing. But only after they have exhausted every other possibility.

—Generally attributed to Winston Churchill, original variant probably by Abba Eban

Dr. Lancaster was now famous throughout the medical profession of the United States for having helped develop and promulgate the vaccine for Blue Rubola. Fortunately, however, he had not yet become famous in government circles. He occasionally awoke in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, expecting someone to spill the beans on the role he’d played. Expecting some SWAT team to break down his door and take him to a cell with neither windows nor legal protections.

On the days when he didn’t expect the FBI or someone worse to drag him away, he expected instead to be informed that the next Rubola variant had landed. So he was not surprised when a friend from L.A. called him. Dr. Lancaster was on a plane to L.A. an hour later.

As he stood over Patient Zero wearing his moonsuit, his friend explained. “See the little black dot in the middle of the individual rash? I didn’t expect the Blue Rubola vaccine to help, and I was right. It didn’t. This one is new. Or is it the one released on the BrainTrust? The UVR Rubola?”

Lancaster shook his head as he grimly examined the young woman. “This is new, and probably just as lethal as the UVR Rubola, which they concluded probably would have been eighty percent lethal had they not been able to counter it so quickly.” His heart leapt in his throat. “There must already be millions of people infected, and in the course of the next couple days, the whole nation will be swamped with outbreaks.”

The other doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’re right that there are probably millions infected and they’re infecting others as we speak, but our patient here has a severely impaired immune system. I think she’s gone symptomatic much more quickly than a normal person.”

Lancaster straightened up as he felt a spark of hope. “So we could have a week or even more before most of those infected go symptomatic? They’ll spend that week infecting others, but if we hurry…” He phoned Wolf. Wolf was not on the BrainTrust at the moment, but he knew who to call.

A BrainTrust copter that had just landed in Silicon Valley flew directly to L.A. It took Dr. Lancaster and his blood samples from Patient Zero directly to the BrainTrust.

By the time he landed, Patient Zero had already died.

The arrival of Dr. Lancaster on the

Chiron

initiated a tsunami of activity. To the outside observer, it would have looked like pure chaos, but everyone had known this day would come, and Simon had spent the quiet time since the end of the UVR Rubola threat pre-organizing everyone on the ship for this moment. They had rehearsed their rapid response to this situation over and over again.

Within minutes of the copter touchdown, blood samples were being distributed amongst the biosafety cabinets. Some samples went into cultures to manufacture more virus particles for later experiments. In other cabinets, the virus was separated, poked, prodded, and molecularly mapped. Simulations running on immense banks of computers now augmented with a whole new data center on the

Chiron

that had supplanted two whole floors of medical tourism beds started cranking, all configured and guided by Dark Alpha 43 with oversight provided by Chance.

Chance herself went into an impossible, fevered overdrive. She was everywhere, throwing down new suggestions and insights as fast as she could talk. Somehow, in addition, she simultaneously participated in the CEREBRUM forecasts and concurrently ran a batch of experiments of her own, with an eerie rate of success.

Never before in the history of science had the process of variation and selection moved so rapidly. Never before had such a variety of alternatives spawned so swiftly. Never before had the best selections been extracted so precisely.

Ten days later, reports of Black Rubola started coming in from all over the United States. This time the terrorists hadn’t just attacked the big Blue coastal cities. This time they’d hit almost every city of reasonable size from coast to coast, heedless of the politics of Red and Blue.

Four days after that, the scientists gathered once more in the auditorium. Amanda and Simon stood on the podium. Amanda gave the introduction. “As you have heard by now, the terrorists have already disseminated Black Rubola throughout America. The hospitals are filling up, and we expect them to be driven beyond capacity within another week. As we had feared, the virus incurs a mortality rate of eighty percent.” Into the following silence, Amanda described the consequences. “Barring a miracle, two hundred and fifty million people will die in the States alone. There will hardly be enough survivors to bury the dead.”

With that as a preface, she continued, “Which brings us to the miracle. I’ll let Dr. Dixon bring you the results since, as you all know, she has contributed the most to the near-miracle we have to announce.”

Much cheering greeted Chance’s arrival on stage. Her hair was a mess, and despite her naturally dark skin, she looked pallid. She went to the microphone but did not speak.

Instead, she held up a vial filled with translucent green fluid, the gentle green that spoke of pine forests and the resilience of Nature. “Vaccine,” she said quietly.

The vial, even more than Chance, inspired wild cheering.

Chance let it go on for a moment, then motioned for quiet. “It’s not really ready. This Rubola is so ferocious that the vaccine has to be more aggressive than anything we’ve ever done before. Make no mistake; this vaccine will kill some people.” She took a deep breath. “In a more ideal world, we would continue to evolve it until it was safe.”

She finished in a tone of pure determination. “But time has run out. We will go ahead with this. We will save America, and no one will stop us.”

Someone yelled from the audience, “Can we manufacture it fast enough? How will we get it into the country?”

At this Amanda took the mike. “Manufacturing has already started. How will we get it into the country?” She smiled wickedly. “With unprecedented speed and authority.”

Just as the scientists had prepared for this moment, so had the managers and planners of the BrainTrust. Tendrils had reached across the globe, luring, coaxing, and sometimes compelling assistance. Rooks and knights had been moved into position to protect and maneuver pawns into locations where they could be queened at a moment’s notice.

Consequently, long before Dr. Lancaster reported on Patient Zero, Amanda had ordered Major Wolf Griffin to take a paid leave of absence to visit an old friend.

Wolf stood next to Major Drew Moreno, who leaned against his white four-wheel SUV with a set of red and blue Border Patrol flashers mounted across the roof.

Wolf took a sip of his beer. “You know, I’ve never been down here before.” He gestured to the south. “Quite a sight.”

Before him stretched, mile after mile for as far as the eye could see, The Wall: an immense canvass of rust-red steel slats.

Drew looked at it with an expression of awe. “It’s remarkable, all right. Big and beautiful, just like he promised.”

Wolf changed the subject. “So, how’d you and your family do in the Blue Rubola epidemic?”

A flash of rage crossed Drew’s face. “My aunt died, as did my wife’s niece.” He looked away. “Of course, they were both living in big cities, on the front line. We were luckier, living out here.”

Wolf looked at him sharply. “You did get vaccinated, right? Like I told you?”

Drew’s expression turned sheepish. “Yeah, sort of. Eventually the epidemic made it to us, and when Molly came down with it, I got us all vaccinated.”

Wolf glared. “You waited until your wife caught it? Are you crazy? What did I tell you, blast it?”

Drew nodded. “I screwed up bad. I should have believed you.” He looked at his feet. “I should not have believed the jerks in the media or the people in Washington.”

Wolf turned earnest. “Listen to me. You know that plague was a bioterror attack, right?”

Drew shook his head from side to side. “Not everyone agrees.”

Wolf grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “

You

know, right?”

Drew twisted out of his grasp. “Yeah, right.”

“Well, the terrorist hasn’t been caught yet, and he’s going to do it again, but worse this time. A lot worse. That was just a trial run.” He told Drew about the attack on the BrainTrust.

Drew turned conciliatory. “Wow. I had no idea. I knew there was a quarantine and a blockade, but the news—”

“—the news

you

listen to, not

all

the news—”

“—never went into detail.”

Wolf leaned back against the SUV, getting calm. “It was real dicey there for a while. We lost some of our best people.” He held back a sob. “So the next time an epidemic hits our country, you have to listen to me. You have to do what I tell you to do.”

Drew scowled. “Like what?”

Wolf told him what he should do, and why he would have to do it.

Drew leaned away from his old friend. “I should probably arrest you just for suggesting that. But there’s no way it will come to that. No way.”

Wolf figured he’d done enough for one day. He drained his beer and clinked the empty bottle against Drew’s. “Looks like you’re empty. I am too. Can I get you another one?”

The voice on the phone sounded enraged and on the verge of hysteria. The Chief Advisor could hardly believe that Amanda Copeland, that infinitely prim, prudish schoolmarm, could be so close to breaking down. “Chief Advisor, you have to believe me. Unless you change your policy, you won’t be the boss of a great nation anymore. You’ll be the boss of the largest graveyard in history.”

For just a moment, the Chief Advisor felt a chill roll down his spine. Prim and prudish she might be, but had Amanda ever lied? About anything? Or had she been saving it up for today, for one big lie? He shrugged. “I’ll take your concerns under advisement. Thank you for the update on what you think is happening.”

As she spluttered, he hung up and turned to Rodrick Sprague. “So, is there any truth in what she’s saying?” His heart leapt briefly into his throat. “One thing she didn’t say, but it lines up. There’s not a hospital in the country that isn’t overwhelmed.”

The Acting Commissioner of the FDA shook his head. “Only the most hysterical media sources are saying that, sir. The hospitals are filling to capacity, but we’re a long way from being overwhelmed.”

Sprague sat back in his chair. “We do have an epidemic, but an epidemic capable of such death rates? It’s simply not possible. No virus in the history of the world has ever achieved an eighty percent lethality rate. Human genetic variation is too great, and viruses are too specialized.”

The Chief Advisor wasn’t quite on board with this glib analysis. “Still, the Blue Ebola really was killing ten percent of its victims, right?”

Rodrick did not quite correct the Advisor. “More or less, before the plague burned itself out the way I said it would.”

The Chief Advisor felt himself catching an edge of the hysteria Amanda had projected through the phone. “Don’t you think the bioterrorist who created Blue Ebola could have improved it? Made it more deadly and maybe a little more stable?”

Sprague closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I understand your concerns, Mr. Advisor, but they are groundless.”

When the Advisor’s expression remained unchanged, he continued, “Let’s suppose for a moment that just a bit of what she’s saying is true. Maybe it’s a little more lethal and has a little more staying power.” He leaned forward in his chair more aggressively then he had ever done before. “But by their own admission, the BrainTrust’s

vaccine

is a killer! A one-percent death rate just for taking the cure! Millions would die! That’s insane, Mr. Advisor.”

Sprague leapt from his chair, heedless of protocol. “This is the kind of lunacy the FDA was built to stop! Imagine the media headlines if we allowed this poison into the country!”

The Chief Advisor blinked. “Media headlines?”

The FDA Commissioner stopped pacing and straightened his necktie as he regained control. “Of course. Understand that if someone dies because of the plague, it’s the bioterrorist’s fault. But if someone dies of the vaccine, it is

our

fault. We’d get crucified.”

The Chief Advisor nodded. “Still, if only a few die of the vaccine and it saves a lot of lives, wouldn’t that be better?”

Sprague shook his head. “Not in the long term. The harm it would do to our reputations would make it more difficult in the future to act wisely on rash medical inventions.” He sat back down again. “Let’s take a look at an example from history: beta blockers.”

The Chief Advisor shook his head. “What’s a beta blocker?”

Sprague waved a hand dismissively. “It’s a heart medication from the twentieth century. Quite good, actually. The European Union moved swiftly to certify it, but we insisted on being more thorough. We took our time.”

He continued with satisfaction. “So ten years later, when we eventually certified it, the FDA announced it to the world with all due pride: the beta blockers we’d just allowed the industry to bring to us would save ten thousand lives a year.”

The Chief Advisor nodded. “Sounds like a good thing.”

Rodrick leaned forward again. “Exactly.” His expression turned sour and his voice aggrieved. “But a handful of those crazy anarchists and libertarians complained that, during the extra ten years of investigation, a hundred thousand people died who could have been saved if we’d just certified the drugs right away. They blamed us.”

The Advisor nodded slowly. “I see. Sort of.”

The Commissioner finished with satisfaction. “Anyway, the claim that those deaths were our fault didn’t stick. Five years later, all anyone remembered was the good job we’d done of protecting America from the overeager acceptance of potentially dangerous drugs. It will turn out the same way here.”

The Chief Advisor sighed. “So, stay the course? No emergency certifications?”

Sprague smiled. “Trust me. It’ll all work out in the end.”

Outside the pharmaceutical factory on the west coast of Mexico, Oziegbe stood before his team. And what a team it was.

Ted Simpson had come from the BrainTrust with a dozen copters. Jun Laquan and Chen Ying had come from the Fuxing archipelago to tweak the bots and help him streamline the production lines. And Shura had come from the Prometheus archipelago with boxes of goodies.

“Chance has sent us the process for manufacturing the Black Rubola vaccine. This is it. Take no prisoners. And get those production lines rolling!”

Everybody ran off in different directions except Ted. “Do you want me to take you up so you can see who’s coming and who’s going?”

Oziegbe looked into the distance. “I can see what I need to see for today.” He pointed at the clouds of dust heading their way. “Here comes the cavalry.”

Ted shook his head. “That’s just the cavalcade arriving. The cavalry is what you’ll need to leave again.” Ted smiled wickedly. “Let me know when.”

The Attorney General of California shook his head vigorously. “No, I’m not agreeing with the Chief Advisor.”

The Governor responded jovially. “It certainly sounds like it. I’ll be amused to hear how it’s different.”

The AG laughed, embarrassed. “OK, maybe I don’t entirely disagree. But the guy I’m actually agreeing with is the Commissioner of the FDA.”

The Governor shook his head. “So all our hospitals are filling up, and you’re telling me to do nothing?”

The AG growled. “Of course not. Go out and walk among the people. Seize some warehouses and office buildings to house the sick. Just don’t go overboard and let that BrainTrust vaccine into the state.” He threw up his hands. “A one-percent death rate from the vaccine? Are you kidding me? There’d be half a million deaths among your voters.”

He pointed an accusatory finger at the Governor. “And it would be your fault.”

The Governor pursed his lips. “Well, we’ll stick with that for now. But if things get worse, we’ll have to reconsider.”

As the Attorney General left, the Governor unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. The office felt unusually warm. His joints felt a little achy. Just to be on the safe side, he popped a couple of aspirin. While he chugged another couple of gulps of water, he rubbed at an itchy spot on his neck.

Was he coming down with a fever? Just his luck, to come down with the flu in the midst of this emergency.

Drew was letting Wolf drive the SUV, bouncing and plunging, across the desert paths when Drew’s phone came to life.

Wolf slowed down a little bit so Drew didn’t break his teeth on the phone as they jounced along. Drew spoke in horror. “He’s where? Oh, my God. And there’s nothing they can do?” He listened. “Very well. Keep me in the loop. Thanks.”

Wolf had a dark suspicion he knew what was coming. “What’s happened?”

Drew held his head in his hands. “It’s my brother. He’s got Black Ebola. They don’t think he has much of a chance.” He looked up, staring straight ahead. “His wife’s just gone symptomatic.” A wild look entered his eyes. “And the kids! What’ll happen to the kids?”

Wolf stopped the car. “How can I help?”

Drew looked at him furiously. “You were right, goddammit. This is out of control.” He looked south; in the distance, they could see The Wall. “I just don’t see what else to do.”

Wolf stayed glued to Drew’s side all that night and the following day to help him stay calm, to help him stay focused, and to protect him if someone showed up intending to disagree with the plan using extreme prejudice.

The sun was sinking as the last report came in from near the Texas border. Wolf asked, “Trouble?”

Drew shrugged. “A little. But we—you, rather—have been warming them up for this for a while, and just about everybody knows someone who knows someone in the hospital. When your FB account is drowning in people talking about their sick relatives, you know you’ve got a problem on your hands.”

Drew looked for a last time at The Wall, so beautifully radiant in the reddish-yellow sunset. “OK, then.” He set his phone to broadcast the activation code.

Distant though they were from The Wall, the ground underneath their feet still shook with the immense power of the endless chain of explosions that ran off farther than the eye could see.

All along the Mexican border, from the westernmost point of Arizona to the easternmost point of New Mexico, the light and sound of C-4 going off filled the air.

America’s Wall, far vaster in scope than the Berlin Wall of the Soviet Union and even longer than the Maginot Line of France, fell with sinuous grace.

Wolf popped off a text to Oziegbe, then put his hand on Drew’s shoulder. “Nothing lasts forever. What is beautiful must be transient, else it would not shine so brightly.”

Drew responded with a more proper Marine perspective. “Whatever works.”

Oziegbe paced back and forth before the immense gaggle of vehicles sitting outside the pharmaceutical plant.

Ted leaned against his favorite copter; he’d finally figured out how to use paint over the stealth coating of graphene without losing the radar absorbent stealth properties. His newest creation was sky-blue on the bottom and camo on the top, so when flying, whether viewed from above or below it was quite difficult to see even in broad daylight. It would be fun to fly today.

Ted spoke to the weary but eager manager. “Relax. I’m sure Wolf has it all under control.” He looked to the far north. There one could barely make out, in the distance, another gaggle of vehicles every bit as seemingly random as the gaggle here in the parking lot. His voice turned dark while remaining cheerful. “And soon enough,

I’ll

have it under control.”

Soon enough, indeed, before the sun had touched the ocean, Oziegbe’s phone blared the words,

From the halls of Montezuma

.

Even before Oziegbe could read the message, Ted had spun and yelled to his teenage pilots, “Go, go, go!” A dozen young men and women leapt into their copters.

Shura skipped up to Oziegbe as he watched the takeoff. “You worry too much.”

Oziegbe growled. “I’m the boss. Worrying is my job.” He looked down at her. “You’re sure this will work?”

Shura touched a plastic and metal hand to his arm. “Yes, boss. You worry too much.” She turned and waved to the men by the vehicles. “Give the order, boss.”

Oziegbe marveled once more at the commanding presence of the girl. There was just something wrong about being ordered to give orders. He complied nonetheless. He raised his voice, projecting from the diaphragm. “Everybody mount up.”

The vehicles in the parking lot came in many shapes and sizes, but they all had two things in common: they were all trucks, and they were all stuffed, packed, and stacked as high as rope could hold in place, with crates and crates of Black Rubola vaccine.

Most were pickup trucks, and of those, many were dualies. Of these vehicles with open beds and netting, all were four-wheel drive. The four-wheel drive had been a requirement to be allowed to take the job.

Some of the vehicles were larger. A surprising number were tractor-trailer rigs, though they bore only the short twenty foot trailers rather than the full sized forty-foot ones. Even at half-size, though, such a vehicle could carry three million doses of vaccine.

Another thing all the vehicles shared was drivers who were familiar with the terrain, the roads, and the official ports of entry in Arizona and New Mexico. A couple of the tractor-trailer drivers thought they’d made good connections with the guards at the official access points and would go through there. Everyone else was quite confident that they knew a couple of ways across the border that their specific vehicles could wangle through.

At this point, Oziegbe lost control. The drivers, with confidence bordering on arrogance because of their numbers, decided it was time to go. With some humorous jockeying for position, they rolled out of the lot and headed down the road toward the first deployment of opposing forces.

While the street operators selling drugs in the United States had survived the transformation of marijuana into a legal industry more or less satisfactorily, the Mexican drug cartels had suffered great pain. Cocaine and heroin continued to make money, but large chunks of their network had to be shut down without the revenues from pot.

The rise of the opioid black market did little to help them. Organizations geared for the rather simple process of transforming grass into weed or cooking out the active ingredients in a flower were simply not suited to the production of high-quality pharmaceuticals.

So the cartels had hungered and raged at the misfortune of drug legalization for years.

And then one day, behold! Someone built a pharmaceutical plant, an enormous facility capable of churning out millions and millions of doses of incomparably valuable medicines right under their noses in one of the most remote regions of Mexico, where the law only applied when the cartels allowed it.

Early in the project, the Tijuana Cartel had sent an emissary to the plant to explain the cartel’s role in the factory’s well-being. The boss of the project, a black imbecile from the far side of the planet, had listened to the cartel’s pitch with patience, then said, “But what do you give us in return? Where’s the value?”

The emissary had lowered his voice as his anger rose and explained, “You get to stay alive.”

Oziegbe had raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “You do know this is a BrainTrust factory, don’t you?” He escorted the emissary off the premises personally. When the emissary offered one last dire threat, Oziegbe had rolled his eyeballs. “Knock yourself out.”

Oziegbe himself rarely left the factory except via the ferry to the BrainTrust, so while the cartel worked up an assassination plan to bring in a more accommodating manager, a second team of emissaries attempted to conduct a brute force demonstration of the merits of working with the local authorities. Four technicals roared into the plant parking lot. Four explosions later a swarm of bots wrangled the remains of the technicals into the open desert. Later investigation suggested the plant’s security personnel carried several devices referred to as Ping’s Big Guns.

A number of cartel members tried to get hired for the opportunity to conduct sabotage and fulfill the plan of assassinating the boss, but the plant used something called an Accel testing system for new employees. The employment office rejected most of the cartel operatives.

Ironically, the few cartel members to survive the interviewing process were the most vicious and deadly psychopaths of the organization. The day they reported for work they went in gleefully, visions of mayhem and murder in their heads and their hearts.

They were not seen again. A number of ordinary employees, not cartel members, were overheard the next day muttering that Oziegbe had spent the day chattering about having performed a “public service.”

The other cartels had laughed at the Tijuana Cartel. Having suffered such a loss of respect, it was not surprising that the other cartels decided to eliminate the weak player. So they’d formed a meta-cartel, muscled the Tijuana folks who survived the resulting war into submission, and watched for an opportunity.

At last, the opportunity was upon them. When the Black Rubola erupted, they knew that the factory would respond with vaccine, millions of doses. At first, they figured the vaccine would ship out on ferries, but then the plant boss had advertised for truckers to carry the loads. The cartels prepped for engagement even as they wondered exactly where the BrainTrust expected the trucks to go. Did they really think the American Border Patrol would let them in?

Regardless, if they were going to move by truck across Mexican roads, the cartels had them. A couple hundred million doses of vaccine held hostage for the dying would make for quite a payday.

So they too had assembled a fleet of vehicles. Those vehicles, dozens of them with over a hundred armed men, now sat astride the road, waiting.

Both sides had prepared extensively for the confrontation, but of all the forces arrayed on that desolate road for this desperate battle, none had prepared more than Ted Simpson and his cadre of copter pilots.

Ted yelled into his mike, “Higher! Get those copters higher! The first one of you who gets a bullet in his ass because he came in too low will be the last one to see a medic!” He paused. “We do not need a precision drop here, people. The payloads are smart enough.”

One of the girls grumbled, “It would still be better if we hit the trucks right on target.”

A murmur of assent arose through the channel.

Ted rolled his eyes.

The grumbling teen zoomed passed him low and fast. Ted muttered to himself, “Which way did my people go? I must find them. I am their leader.”

Then he screamed, “And slow down! This is not a race!”

Now a chorus arose, “Beat you there!”

The girl in the lead pointed out the obvious. “Yahoo!

Now

it’s a race!” Her copter zoomed lower, and flashes of machine gun fire from the trucks sparkled all over the ground.

She dropped her payload, and because they had practiced this maneuver so many times, Ted was not surprised that the half dozen hornet’s nests broadsided the lead truck quite nicely.

Then she screamed angrily, “Ach! I’m hit!” Black smoke trailed from her copter, but it kept flying.

Ted examined the wounded vehicle with an expert eye. “I don’t think you can make it back to base. Veer west, and get as close to the ocean as you can. I’ll cover you.” He licked his lips. “At least it’s only the copter that got hit.”

She slewed her copter sideways. “What do you mean? You dummy, when I said I was hit, I didn’t mean the copter! I meant,

I’m

hit!”

Ted’s eyes widened in alarm. “How bad?”

Now the girl’s voice filled with irritation. “What do you think? I think I’ve got a chunk of the copter in my butt.”

Meanwhile, other events proceeded too rapidly for Ted to track, much less organize. The main flock of copters arrived, now going lower and faster than planned, helplessly vulnerable to another fusillade. It was too late for the pilots to pull up; they were committed.

However, the cartel thugs on the ground had erred as well. They’d become fixated on the lead copter and continued to fire at it well after it dropped its load, right up to the moment when another distraction intervened in their lives.

The first hornets hummed outward in all directions from the first truck, hungry for vengeance, and found them.

As had happened in Benin, the men responded to the hornets by swinging their rifles in wild arcs before running for their lives. The cartel members, however, were better trained than the road blockaders in Benin, or at least were more practiced. They managed to avoid shooting each other, and when they ran, they took their guns.

A force of Roman infantry with iron will and unyielding discipline might have seen what would happen next and might have made an attempt to prevent it, but this was not Roman infantry. Their failure to stand together and focus on the succeeding waves of copters led to the inevitable result: unimpeded by gunfire, the next copters released their payloads unmolested and plastered the area with dozens of nests.

The buzzing grew so loud that no one could hear the screams.

Now most of the men dropped their rifles to run, then dropped in their tracks as the stingers injected the Rohypnol that made further running impossible.

Meanwhile, the truck convoy, hurtling down the road with pedals to the metal, trying if possible to out-speed the copters, approached. Ted tried to persuade them to try something sane. “Hey, whoever’s driving the lead truck! Slow it down! The guys with the guns are all gone, but there’s a roadblock up ahead.”

The driver of the lead tractor trailer responded with sarcasm in his voice. “Idiots. I can ram through a couple of puny SUVs without even noticing.”

“No you can’t,” Ted snapped. “That roadblock has five pairs of SUVs stacked up. Try to ram through that, and your truck’ll jack-knife, and it’ll take us all night to clean up the mess so someone can get through.”

As the truck driver grumbled and slowed down, another voice came up. “Don’t sweat it, my boys and I have got this.”

Four dualies, each with a thick steel grill on the front end, peeled out of the convoy into the lane of oncoming traffic…though of course there was no oncoming traffic; the way was clear.

They roared passed all the other vehicles and slid back into the right side of the road, then barreled forward, letting a little distance into their spacing so each had some room to maneuver.

The first dualie crashed into the first pair of SUVs, spun them off the road, and spun off the road himself.

The next three dualies each took out another part of the barricade in a similar fashion.

One of the cartel members had reacted with remarkable insight and dispatch when the hornets billowed around him; he had dodged into the nearest SUV with the windows closed and awaited events. When the dualies pushed his SUV aside, he knew it was now or never. So he machine-gunned his windshield and started hosing down the offending vehicles and their drivers.

However, by the time he’d emptied his first clip, futilely because the swirling mass of the insects distracted him, the hornets had become aware of his presence. His truck cab filled with angry stingers. He threw open his door and took two heroic steps before falling to his knees and succumbing.

Once the dualies had cleared the first four barriers, the tractor-trailer driver saw that, as Ted had explained, only one pair of SUVs remained. He gunned his engine and proved he’d been telling the truth all along by plowing through them with no perceptible loss of speed.

In the darkening twilight, as Ted drove his copter toward the place where his wounded pilot had touched down, he saw one more pair of cartel thugs. They were moving in the same direction he was, survivors with clear intent to take home some sort of trophy.

Ted had been brooding for the last few moments that he’d never even had a chance to drop his payload. He waggled his copter blades for the folks below, who fired pointlessly at his copter, much higher in the air than his first overeager pilot. The payload fell away, the hornets buzzed up, and the thugs collapsed on the ground.

He landed beside the wounded copter and its wounded pilot. As he helped her into the passenger’s seat on his own machine, she muttered, “So, are you really gonna make me be the last person to get medical attention?”

Ted responded cheerfully. “Oh, absolutely. Of course, since you’re the only person to take a hit, you’ll also be first.”

The convoy roared off to the border as the horizon swallowed the sun.