cker meet us and
take them off our hands."

"Affirmative, Five Six. Wrecker will pick you up at Marker 412."

* * * * *

Clay headed the patrol car and its trailed load into an emergency
entrance to the middle police lane and slowly rolled westward. The
senior trooper reached into his records rack and pulled out a citation
book.

"You going to nail these kids?" Clay asked.

"You're damn right I am," Martin replied, beginning to fill in the
violation report. "I'd rather have this kid hurting in the pocketbook
than dead. If we turn him loose, he'll think he got away with it this
time and try it again. The next time he might not be so lucky."

"I suppose you're right," Clay said, "but it does seem a little
rough."

Ben swung around in his seat and surveyed his junior officer.
"Sometimes I think you spent four years in the patrol academy with
your head up your jet pipes," he said. He fished out another cigarette
and took a deep drag.

"You've had four solid years of law; three years of electronics and
jet and air-drive engine mechanics and engineering; pre-med,
psychology, math, English, Spanish and a smattering of Portuguese, to
say nothing of dozens of other subjects. You graduated in the upper
tenth of your class with a B.S. in both Transportation and Criminology
which is why you're riding patrol and not punching a computer or
tinkering with an engine. You'd think with all that education that
somewhere along the line you'd have learned to think with your head
instead of your emotions."

Clay kept a studied watch on the roadway. The minute Ben had turned
and swung his legs over the side of the seat and pulled out a
cigarette, Clay knew that it was school time in Car 56. Instructor
Sergeant Ben Martin was in a lecturing mood. It was time for all good
pupils to keep their big, fat mouths shut.

"Remember San Francisco de Borja?" Ben queried. Clay nodded. "And you
still think I'm too rough on them?" Ben pressed.

[Illustration]

Ferguson's memory went back to last year's fifth patrol. He and Ben
with Kelly riding hospital, had been assigned to NAT 200-North,
running out of Villahermosa on the Guatemalan border of Mexico to
Edmonton Barracks in Canada. It was the second night of the patrol.
Some seven hundred fifty miles north of Mexico City, near the town of
San Francisco de Borja, a gang of teenage Mexican youngsters had gone
roaring up the yellow at speeds touching on four hu