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Page 78
The message repeated as wind and spray battered the illegals struggling in the water. Other lights appeared on the far embankment. Karmann could see figures moving across the lights, spreading out. There was a bus with barred windows in the headlights' glare.
The coyote was gone. Migrants were splashing back through the water toward the Mexican shore. In the glare from the helicopter overhead, Karmann saw standing near him the woman with whom he had spoken earlier. The one who had made the sign of the cross at him. Her child was riding uncertainly on her shoulders and screaming with fright. She stumbled in the swift water and almost lost her footing.
"Give me the child," he called. "Let me carry her."
The woman recoiled in terror and went down. One moment she and the child stood in the muddy current, and in the next they were gone downstream.
Karmann dove into the river after them, letting the current carry him out of the cone of blue-white light from the helicopter, away from the milling lights on the bank.
But the woman had vanished, as had the child.
Thirty minutes later, Arkady Karmann dragged himself onto the American shore a half-dozen kilometers from the few lights that could be seen to mark the outskirts of Brownsville. He lay almost until morning on the muddy shingle, letting the rain pelt down on him. But when the sky began to lighten, he struggled to his feet, stumbled to and through a fence that had been cut to a tangle of wire bits by the horde of illegals who passed this way, and began to walk north.

 
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