Texas Blood by Roger D. Hodge

Author:Roger D. Hodge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Falfurrias checkpoint

Come daylight, after consuming plates of breakfast tacos, Agent Milian and I traveled to the Falfurrias checkpoint, which consistently maintains the highest seizure rate of any checkpoint in the country. Every agent carried a personal radiation detector, a small pager-like device on his belt. An agent demonstrated a device that identifies the particular radioactive isotope detected; almost invariably, a radiation alert turns out to have been the result of a medical procedure. Another agent showed me how to use a “buster,” a small handheld device that detects anomalous variations in the density of, say, a car door or a tire. I watched as a rented red Hyundai driven by a group of young people got worked over in “secondary.” The color of the men’s skin and their manner of dress suggested that they were not from the Rio Grande valley, where few African Americans live. But it was not their skin color that triggered the extra attention; something had alerted a K-9 search dog when the car passed through “primary,” the quick and simple interview conducted by an agent with every one of the drivers who pass through this busy checkpoint every year. The buster detected nothing along the perimeter of the vehicle or in the tires. Neither did a camera scope detect anything in the gas tank. I peered down that long, narrow passage and saw the intact wire mesh marking the aperture of the fuel tank. A new dog passed through the vehicle without incident. Perhaps the driver or one of the passengers had smoked a joint that morning, and the dog could smell the residue on his fingers. Nothing turned up; the red Hyundai went on its way.

I was shown into a locked container in which the walls were lined with neat stacks of dope, small bales of pot, mostly, awaiting pickup by the DEA. Some baggies of smaller quantities were hanging on the wall. One bag contained a quarter ounce seized from a young man who was planning to celebrate his eighteenth birthday that day but made the mistake of driving through a checkpoint while he was holding.

Meanwhile, I was attracted to the sight of a white pickup equipped with what appeared to be an extremely bulky camper driving very slowly by a large refrigerated truck that had been pulled over into secondary. It was a Z Backscatter Van, a mobile backscatter X-ray scanner similar in concept to those used for full-body scans at airports. Backscatter technology works by exploiting the fact that low-density organic materials, such as explosives, drugs, or human bodies, contain elements with low atomic numbers, which cause X-rays to scatter, whereas high-density, high-atomic-number elements such as metals are more likely to absorb them. By interpreting the ways in which X-rays, fired in a narrow beam that rapidly scans the target, respond to the materials under examination, and plotting the position of the beam relative to the target, backscatter scanners produce remarkably clear, photo-like images of organic materials that conventional X-ray techniques are unable to capture.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.