Jack, Angel, Jim, and I were assigned to work the desert area 6P to 2A (actually 4A with "Uncontrollable Overtime"). This area of The Line runs East from San Luis, Arizona way, way past International Boundry Marker 198. Part of the area contains the bombing range for Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma. It's a vast area of emptiness that includes much of interest if one knows where to look.The Other side of The Line was occasionally patrolled by the the Frontier Battalion of the Mexican Army. But not much. Some of The Line in those parts was marked by a 3-strand barbed wire fence. East of 198, there was no fence at all.
It must have been about 2330 that we received a call from Jack that he was cutting for sign around the agricultural inspection station. Jack saw headlights on the drag road about two miles to his East and wanted to know if it was any of us. It wasn't. The rest of us were either much farther West or East of where Jack was. Each of us told him so.
Sometimes, USDA folks would be on the drag raod ... but not at that time of night. Jack headed for the headlights. The rest of us bumped across the desert toward Jack's sighting of the lights.
In a couple of minutes, Jack had cut tire sign where a vehicle had plowed through the fence and headed cross-country across the desert toward the edge of the mesa some 8 or 9 miles to the North. Jack told the rest of us what the sign looked like.
Angel and Jim spotted Jack first (they were the closest to him when the call came) so they began traveling parallel to his direction of travel. Angel a half mile to Jack's left and Jim, a half mile to Jack's right.
Since I was coming from the North, my job was to cut perpendicular to the route of travel of the Agents and the smugglers. When I started my cut and flashed my spotlight in Jack's direction, the smuggler and the chase party all did a very rapid 180 and began heading South. It was a literal race for the border. The smuggler was attempting to make it back to Mexico.
Remember, we're talking about great distances. Jack, Angel and Jim were about a mile and a half behind the load car when it turned. There was no way we could catch him before he made it back to Mexico .... but we subjected our Ramchargers to metal fatigue caused by high-speed desert bumping anyway. We had to try.
By the time I arrived at The Line Jack, Jim and Angel were already there, but the smugglers weren't. They had gotten the load car 3/4 into Mexico before it had bogged down in the soft sand at the fence. They had popped the trunk and were throwing kilos of marijuana over the fence into Mexico when Jack, Angel and Jim had arrived. At that point, the smugglers ran off into the dark of Mexico - abandoning the weed as well as the car.
We switched off our lights and, gingerly, went 10 feet into Mexico and started throwing the kilos back onto our side of The Line (to be logged and destroyed later in our shift). But the car was another matter. We knew that, as soon as we left the area, the drugistas would come back and dig out the car and take it all the way into Mexico so they could use it again.
None of us wanted that to happen, and were discussing the lousy turn of events when Jim just grinned at us.
Jim went back to his vehicle and got a styrofoam coffee cup, tore it into tiny pieces and dumped them all down the gas tank of the load car. The effect, he told us, would be that they would dissolve in the gasoline and totally lock-up the engine a few minutes after the next time it was turned on. It must have been true because we never saw that car hauling drugs again.
V/F
Agent Nowhere Man
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