NUMA 2 - Blue Gold

CHAPTER 6

The Mexican customs agent leaned from his window and checked out the two men in the white Ford pickup truck. They were wearing beat-up shorts and T-shirts, Foster Grant sunglasses, and baseball caps with bait shop logos on them.

“Purpose of your visit?” the agent asked the husky man be hind the wheel. The driver jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the fishing rods and tackle boxes in back. “Going fishing.”

“Wish I could join you,” the agent said with a smile, and waved them on into Tijuana.

As they pulled away, Zavala, who was sitting in the passenger seat, said, “What's with the Spies Like Us routine? All we had to do was flash our NUMA IDs.”

Austin grinned. “This is more fun.”

“We're lucky our clean-cut appearance doesn't fit the profile for terrorists or drug runners.”

“I prefer to think that we're masters of disguise.” Austin glanced at Zavala and shook his head. “By the way, I hope you brought along your American passport. I wouldn't want you to get stuck in Mexico.”

“No problem. It wouldn't be the first time a Zavala sneaked across the border.”

Zavala's parents had waded across the Rio Grande in the 1960s from Morales, Mexico, where they were born and raised. His mother was seven months pregnant at the time. Her condition didn't stand in the way of her determination to start life with her newborn in El Norte. They made their way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Zavala was born. His father's skills as a carpenter and woodcarver brought him steady work with the wealthy clients who built their fashionable homes there. The same influential people helped his father when he applied for a green card and later for citizenship.

The truck was on loan from the Red Ink's support team because rental cars couldn't be taken into Mexico. From their hotel they headed south from San Diego, passing through Chula Vista, the border town that is neither Mexican nor American but a blend of both countries. Once into Mexico they skirted the sprawling slums of Tijuana, then picked up MEX 1, the Carretera Transpeninsula highway that runs the full length of Baja California. Past El Rosarita with its concentration of souvenir shops, motels, and taco stands, the commercial honky-tonk began to thin out. Before long the highway was flanked by agricultural fields and bare hills on the left and by the curving emerald bay known as Todos Los Santos. About an hour after leaving Tijuana they turned off at Ensenada.

Austin knew the resort and fishing city from the days he crewed in the Newport-Ensenada sailboat race. The unofficial finish was at Hussong's Cantina, a seedy old bar with sawdust covered floors. Before the new highway brought the tourists and their dollars, Baja California Norte was truly the frontier. In its heyday Hussong's was a haunt for the colorful local characters and rugged individuals, and the sailors, fishermen, and auto racers who knew Ensenada when it was the last outpost of civilization on the eight-hundred-mile-long Baja peninsula before La Paz. Hussong's was one of those legendary bars, like Foxy's in the Virgin Islands or Capt'n Tony's in Key West, where everybody in the world had been. As they stepped inside Austin was heartened to see a few scruffy barflies who might remember the good old days when tequila flowed like a river and the police ran a shuttle service back and forth between the cantina and the local hoosegow.