Hostile Borders (18 page)

Sitting at the computer, Reaper went online while Hausmann and Manors took care of the dogs and the rest of the livestock. Not having a secure line meant Reaper had to go through some long procedures to get the information he had to the right people in D.C. It was early morning in Washington, but Reaper still didn't want to try and make any direct phone calls just yet. He still wanted to think a little about what he
would say, especially considering that he would be talking to another SEAL.

The wheels were now in motion. The information that he and his friends had developed on the situation in Southern Arizona was sketchy at best. But he had the feeling at the back of his mind that this was a really important situation that had to be addressed by the right people. The actions of that sheriff's deputy the night before had told Reaper that the local law enforcement might have a hard time dealing with exactly who, and what, was going on.

Besides the professional considerations, there were personal ones he had to think about. This was not just an enemy who was very good, this was someone he had known closely at one time. And Santiago had known him as well. Reaper would want the best people he could find to help him on this one, and he knew just who they were and how much he could trust them.

After careful thought, Reaper went back online and sent out some additional email. This was more of a warning order to his friends back in Michigan. There might be a very hot time coming up in the desert of Arizona, and they were cordially invited to the party. This was going to be a BYOB—bring your own booze—affair and he would let them know just what party favors they should get together.

The sun was just starting to lighten the sky to the east as Reaper signed off on the computer. Hausmann had already hit the sack after telling Manors to grab one of the guest rooms. Heading to his own room, Reaper stripped off his 5.11 tactical shirt and pants.
Changing to a fresh pair of 5.11 Academy shorts, he pulled on a well-worn T-shirt and tied on his running shoes.

The cold early morning air felt good as Reaper started off on a run. The exercise would help clear his head for the work that he would have to do that day. He needed to get some sleep, but that could come later. Right now, the peace of the desert beckoned to him and he heard his shoes hit the sand and gravel in a rhythmic crunching beat.

The peaceful image would have been a lot more complete if he hadn't also felt the bounce of the M1911A1 pistol at his right rear hip. The weight of the weapon had a comforting feel of its own as he continued on his run.

Though SEALs are trained to be able to go long periods without sleep, that doesn't mean they want to. Reaper well knew the value of being rested, and that was something he was going to have to make time for.

After he came in refreshed from his run and had eaten breakfast, Reaper decided that getting some sleep was a priority. It had been an all-night operation the evening before and Reaper knew that things promised to only get busier. Grabbing some rest while he could, he crashed in his room and was sound asleep within a minute of his head hitting the pillow.

It was close to noon when Reaper awoke. The house was silent as he headed downstairs. The dogs were there and greeted him enthusiastically, but no one else was around. A note in the kitchen told him that Manors had gone home and would be back that afternoon. Hausmann had to go in to nearby Sierra Vista to deal with the disposition of Duran and the care of his estate.
He would also be back as soon as he could.

Going into Hausmann's office and logging on to the computer, Reaper started downloading the information that came in as a result of some of his earlier requests. At Homeland Security in Washington, Straker had been very interested in what Reaper had spotted at the mine. Not only was the appearance of the Arabs a serious development, the Santiago presence held personal importance. Straker had been a SEAL himself, and Santiago's story was known to every SEAL in the community. The chance to bring in one of their own who had gone bad greatly appealed to the retired admiral.

Attacking the pile of information that had come in, Reaper noted that it was a good thing that Hausmann had a high-speed connection as he was downloading hundreds of megabytes of information and photographs.

Not having taken full advantage of the facilities of the Department of Homeland Security before, Reaper was surprised at the volume of information that was made available to him. This was more information, and was supplied in greater detail, than he usually worked with even when he was an active-duty SEAL. All of the Intelligence services and law enforcement had been tapped for what they could bring to the table. The picture of just what may have been happening along the Arizona border was filling out rapidly.

The partial license plate and vehicle description Reaper had sent in had borne fruit. A Jeep Wrangler was registered to a Michael Sanskrit of Las Vegas. What had proved more interesting than knowing the
owner was the record of a traffic ticket issued on the vehicle only a few days earlier. The driver who had been ticketed for speeding used a license under the name of Paul Stebbins. Sanskrit had no police record and nothing had come up under his name. The name of Stebbins brought up a police record, an FBI file, and even a Secret Service notation.

Apparently Stebbins had been a student who found his calling not between the pages of books, but as a protester. He had a wide number of minor infractions in his police record, most of them involving trespass and making a public nuisance. It was after 9/11 that Stebbins had increased his enthusiasm as a protester, claiming that the U.S. was unjustly accusing Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda of having a hand in the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings.

The Secret Service notation on Stebbins regarded an incident during the visit of President George W. Bush to New York and ground zero shortly after 9/11. Some New Yorkers—in particular a group of construction workers—had taken offense at a protest sign carried by Stebbins, and had removed both him and the offending sign from the area. The notation listed the results of the police investigation, and that no assault charges were pending against the workers as no one admitted to witnessing the incident. The fact that Stebbins had still been on probation resulting from a trespassing charge months earlier had also weighed in on the disposition of the case.

This guy is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, Reaper thought. The report didn't list what the
protest sign had said, but that was a time in New York when it wouldn't take much to get a punch in the face from a construction worker, or damned near anyone else for that matter. Stebbins sounded like just the kind of guy that a terrorist group would use for cannon fodder; a disposable worker who would act as a cutout, eliminated after his useful time was over.

After the New York incident, Stebbins had moved out West and taken up residence in Las Vegas. The report listed his employment record and the release given to him by the probation department. The address of Stebbins's employer brought a smile to Reaper's face. He had a much more direct source of information regarding this particular employer.

Using a number from a card in his wallet, Reaper called Las Vegas. As he had suspected for that time of day, only a machine answered the phone. Leaving a message, Reaper hung up and went back to the task at hand.

Even with the cable hookup, it took some time to download the huge photo files that had been sent. These were almost real-time satellite images of the immediate area of the border and were more than worth the wait. Hausmann's computer laser printer was working overtime to crank out the pictures and files Reaper fed into it.

In spite of the work he was doing, Reaper found a moment to smile about the situation. Not much longer than a year before, he had barely used a computer. Now he was finding it an indispensable tool for gathering intelligence and transferring information.

Finally, Reaper started reading through the message that had come directly from Admiral Straker's desk. There wasn't going to be any time for smiles or pleasant thoughts after Reaper got through reading the admiral's message. Working with a scratch pad and pencil, Reaper went over a simple plan of action. Revising, scratching out, and writing over, he came up with the outline of what and who he needed to help him.

Once more getting on the phone, Reaper dialed a long distance number from memory. This conversation was a long and involved one. When he finally hung up the phone, Reaper knew he had committed himself to a major course of action. When Hausmann returned home a few hours later, he found Reaper in the dining room with maps, photos, and printouts scattered all around him.

Before Hausmann said a word, Reaper held out a sheaf of papers to him.

“Take a look through these,” he said, “tell me if anyone looks familiar.”

A little puzzled, Hausmann took the papers and began flipping through them. He saw the faces of a variety of men, all generally the same, and all looking as if they were of Latino or Middle-Eastern descent. As he went through the pictures, one in particular caught his eye.

“Hey,” Hausmann said, “this guy here, he's the same one that we saw last night. Yeah, he's the one who hugged the other guy before he left in the jeep. Just who in the hell is he anyway?”

“Same guy as I picked,” Reaper said as he took the papers back. “I thought you might have gotten a better look at him through that spotting scope. There are people in D.C. who are very interested to know that he's in the area along the U.S. border.”

“People in D.C.?” Hausmann said. “I thought you were out of the service, that all you did now was consulting and training. This sounds pretty damned official to me.”

Taking a deep breath, Reaper blew it out through pursed lips.

“Okay, I guess you have a pretty good need-to-know now,” Reaper said. “I don't really work as a consultant for the government. There's a small group of us who work as kind of a contract security service for the Department of Homeland Security. We get support and direction from a director at Homeland Security, but we only have a very limited official standing. Strings get pulled and legal problems go away and, as you can see, the intelligence we have access to is pretty impressive.”

“So you're a mercenary for Homeland Security?” Hausmann said. “You came down here on some kind of mission?”

“Hell, no, I didn't come here on any mission,” Reaper said. “I came down here to hang out a little with you on the first vacation trip I've had in years. All of this crap just came up—lucky me. My vacation just became work, in as official a way as it gets for me. As far as being a mercenary—I do get paid, and pretty damned well, but I work for Homeland Security, not some foreign military.

“This wonderful gentleman,” Reaper said as he picked up another sheaf of papers, “is Youssef Daumudi. He's the reason a bunch of intel people are jumping through hoops for me. He's a higher-up in the food chain of al-Qaeda leadership. This guy is Osama's go-to man for building sophisticated bombs and making them go boom at the right time and in the right place. This clown being spotted right on our doorstep during an election year is not a good thing at all.

“Daumudi was a chemical-engineering student in Germany when he decided to go jihad and joined with bin Laden. His hand has been found in a number of attacks against U.S. interests, but he's been keeping a low profile for the last few years

“Two years ago, he was spotted in Afghanistan, but he disappeared before our Special Forces could move into the area and grab him. The year before, he was spotted in Iraq, attending a meeting with some of Saddam's scientists, the ones he had working on his weapons of mass destruction program. Daumudi had made a particular point to spend a lot of time with Dr. Emil Ammad. Ammad disappeared from Iraq before the invasion took place and hasn't been seen since.”

“Who's Dr. Ammad?” Hausmann asked as he picked up the paper that had Daumudi's information on it. “Was he that other Arab? The one who drove off.”

“He wasn't that other guy,” Reaper said. “They sent me pictures and information on Ammad and his description doesn't fit that guy last night at all. Ammad was one of Saddam's nuclear scientists. He worked on
Hussein's radiological bomb project in the 1980s. That's the proper name for what the news services call a dirty bomb. It's not a nuclear explosion, but it spreads radioactive material all over the blast site. If he couldn't get a real atomic bomb, Saddam was going to settle for one that just poisoned the area for a couple of thousand years.

“The Iraqis built and tested some radiological bombs back around 1987. But Saddam killed the project for military use before the Gulf War started. In the 1980s, he was probably looking for something he could use against the Iranians. A dirty bomb is a crappy military weapon and he probably wanted a bigger bang for his buck. It does make a hell of a terrorist weapon, though. And you would need a nuclear scientist and a bomb maker to crank one out without killing yourself.

“So D.C. wants this Daumudi character badly. Everything we've come up with points to Daumudi having hooked up with a major drug cartel in Mexico. That puts a known terrorist in bed with people who commonly smuggle material and people across the border. That's a bad mix by anyone's standards and it only gets worse.”

“Worse?” Hausmann said. “How's that? It sounds bad enough all by itself.”

“The people at Homeland Security have access to sources of intelligence that you or I are only used to seeing in the movies at best,” Reaper said. “They've sent me photos taken by some of the new KH-Improved Crystal spy satellites. Those are the new, up
graded Keyhole birds. This stuff is amazing, take a look for yourself.”

Picking up some of the photo printouts he had scattered on the table, Reaper handed them over to Hausmann. The detail in the pictures was incredible—they appeared to have been shot from an overhead aircraft, not a satellite orbiting out in space.

Most of the photos covered an overlapping area around the Blue Star mine. There were also shots of another mine entrance that Hausmann wasn't familiar with. Still other photos had a very strange color scheme in their layouts. In those pictures, the entrances to the mines stood out in high contrast to the surrounding desert.

“Jesus,” Hausmann said. “These pictures were taken by our own spy satellites? Over our own country?”

“Things are a little different in the spy game now,” Reaper said. “Our intelligence agencies have been paying a lot more attention to our own borders rather than just those of other countries. There's always been satellites overhead, orbiting above the United States, both ours and Russian birds. They're always looking down at something.

“The thing was that the folks in the intelligence community who analyze these pictures didn't know where to look, or just what to pay attention to. Our information told them that. The importance of this Daumudi character was enough for the folks at the National Security Agency to download some shots from a satellite passing right over the area we were looking at last night. The bird was overhead within a
hour of us being out there in the woods. That's not a small bit of luck and these results show it.”

“I'll say so,” Hausmann said. “But I'm not so sure I like the idea of Big Brother looking over my shoulder in my own backyard. There's no question that these pictures are fantastic, though. I've never seen anything like them. You'd swear you can see individual rocks in these shots.”

“You can,” Reaper said. “And, by the way, that's classified. These shots were taken with a camera that has a resolution of about ten centimeters. That's about four inches. You could tell if a man had his hand open or was making a fist in that fine a picture. And you can see it from a couple of hundred miles up in space.”

“Amazing,” Hausmann said. “So what are these weird-looking shots?”

“Those are specialized infrared and radar images,” Reaper said. “They confirm activity at both mines.”

“Both mines?” Hausmann said. “Where's the other one?”

“In Mexico,” Reaper said. “Not far at all from the border. These shots here,” Reaper tapped a couple of the pictures with his finger, “are of a place called the Crystal mine in Sonora, Mexico. It's an old mine with a hell of a lot of activity around it for a place that's been shut down for the last half-century.”

“The Crystal mine?” Hausmann said. “Never heard of it.”