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control, he gripped the wheel. What was this, a shredded tire? A glance in the rearview mirror revealed only blackness.
    A third crash knocked his head forward and back, and he understood that this was not about the tires. Somebody was ramming him from behind.
    He switched on his high beams and accelerated, drawing away from the other vehicle, feeling his heart match the drumming of the engine.
    So it was Customs and Borders, had to be. That bastard hadn’t been a pissed-off bureaucrat, he’d been a scared-shitless crook. That would be a Customs and Border Protection truck back there, most likely, with Kenneally in it.
    He smashed the accelerator to the floor, drawing farther away from his pursuer.
    Long experience told him not to think more about who was back there. Speculations like that only slowed you down.
    Given the fact that he might not get out of this, he needed to report at once. He flipped open his cell phone—and froze, horrified, when he saw that there were no signal bars.
    His pursuers had known to wait for the dead spot, of course.
    He had to get this report moving!
    Wham! This time the car swerved, went up on two wheels, and almost left the road. As he fought the steering, something in the rear began clattering. Flashes in the mirror told him that his bumper was dragging, making sparks. Another blow might split the gas tank, and then this little game would be over.
    His mouth was dry now, his palms sweating enough to add to the danger of losing control.
    Wham!
    The car shuddered; he felt the wheels slewing, regained control, but barely. No smell of gas, and—at least at the moment—no flames.
    Then the rear window flew to pieces, spraying him with tiny bullets of glass. The flashes that accompanied it told him that he was being fired on with an automatic weapon.
    Back to the drawing boards on the identity of his pursuers, because he’d seen that particular spray of light before, and that was a Kalashnikov, not exactly the kind of weapon used by Customs and Borders. There were incidents of ranchers reporting men with these weapons moving up the coyote trails, but they were drug runners, not U.S. officers.
    He felt that coldness along the neck that comes with being profoundly exposed to a gun. Too familiar.
    It chattered again, its rasp now clearer and closer.
    He took the only choice left to him, and veered off the road into what Texans called the brasada, the brush country. Behind him, he heard the squeal of tires, then the roar of the truck’s engine as the driver geared down to go off-road. Jim could feel his car wallowing in the soft soil.
    The Kalashnikov rattled again—and suddenly there was light behind him, a lot of light, flickering. They’d gotten his tank and he was on fire. Now he had only the gas left in the line, maybe a couple of miles, maybe less, and if that fire ran up the line, he would need to get out of here fast.
    As he continued on, he began to hear the fire, a sound like a fluttering flag, and smell it, too, the sweetness of burning gas, the nasty sharpness of the carpet in the trunk.
    He had to keep maneuvering to avoid contorted mesquite trees and that was slowing him down and he thought that there was a significant risk of an explosion, so he opened the door and rolled out of the car and kept rolling, and the truck passed him at a distance of six inches.
    He scrambled to his feet and blundered off into the tangle of thorny mesquite branches, cacti, and, he had no doubt, snakes. Both his training and experience made it clear that he was in an endgame situation. His pursuers were heavily armed. Already they were off the truck and he could hear them moving in the brush, speaking quick, quiet Spanish: “Over there, Raul. Three meters, that’s it. Forward.”
    He had the uneasy thought that these were military personnel. Mexico was a complex society, the evolution of half a millennium of exquisite corruption. Certainly the military could be involved in something like this. That