Hostile Borders (2 page)

Up on top of the machinery structure, Munson stood watching Pena jogging around the basketball courts. He was standing next to the small guard shelter, a short, six-sided booth with windows on all sides where a guard could stand under cover and watch the prisoners. On top of the shelter was a flagpole with the American flag flying from it. A pair of spotlights illuminated the flag so that it could fly twenty-four hours a day.

As he stood and watched Pena, Munson spoke quietly to himself.

“A half-million dollars,” he said. “Enough money to start again anywhere. And it's not like the courts would convict him, not with all of his money. Fucking lawyers.”

Reaching into his shirt pocket, Munson pulled out a small plastic bag wrapped in his handkerchief. Spreading the handkerchief out over his hand, Munson dumped the contents of the bag onto it. Tumbling out of the bag was a nine-volt battery and a small plastic cube about half the size of the battery. Though he didn't know it, the cube was an IR-15 model Phoenix infrared flashing beacon. What Munson knew was that he was supposed to snap the terminals on the bottom of the cube onto the top of the battery and drop it to the rooftop.

Holding the parts inside of his handkerchief to keep his fingerprints from the battery, he snapped the two pieces together. Invisibly, the light inside the Phoenix
beacon began to flash. Though Munson couldn't see anything happening, under good conditions, the flashing infrared beacon could be seen for twenty nautical miles by anyone looking for it through a night-vision device.

Dropping the beacon to the rooftop, Munson reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a cell phone. Like the parts to the beacon, the cell phone had been given to Munson by one of Pena's lawyers inside an envelope that held a page of instructions and a thick wad of cash. The money had been a down payment to Munson for a promised half-million dollars. All he had to do to earn the rest of the money was follow the directions on the sheet. As an added incentive, the sheet also listed a secure Web site for an offshore bank along with an account number and a set of codes. On a computer at the San Diego Public Library, Munson was able to pull up a bank account, a secret account in the Grand Caymans. Not even the IRS could check this account without the long strings of numbers and letters that made up the access code.

Staring at him from the computer screen was his own name followed by a huge number, $450,000.00. More money than he could ever expect to make in his whole life. Enough money to drop a job where he was spit at and ridiculed by the prisoners he guarded. And when he retaliated to the abuse, the higher-ups in the federal system looked down on him. They even took the side of the prisoners most of the time. This much money was freedom, and he wasn't going to let it go.

Assembling and dropping the beacon was only part
of what Munson had to do. Before he burned the envelope and the instruction sheet to ashes, he had memorized the few lines on the sheet. Once Pena was away, Munson would be able to access the money in his account. How the man intended to get out of the building, Munson neither knew or cared. He was just supposed to act as if everything was normal, even to giving Pena a hard time. And, he was to make sure that Pena was exercised early in the morning.

There was nothing about the cell phone that looked at all unusual. Flipping up the cover on the phone, Munson watched as the small display lit up. Punching in the numbers 999-999-999, he pushed the little green-phone symbol. When the light on the screen went out a moment later, he dropped the phone back into his pocket.

Though his heart was still beating as if he had just finished a hard run, Munson's hands had stopped shaking. Now he would just see what was going to happen next.

Inside his pocket, the Global Positioning System locator beacon disguised inside the cell phone sent out a steady, coded signal up into the night sky.

“We've got a signal!” the pilot of the Super Courier said into the boom microphone of his headpiece.

“Where away?” Garcia Santiago asked from his seat behind the pilot. The heavy load of equipment bags Santiago had resting on his lap, attached to his parachute harness, kept him from being able to lean forward easily. He could just see the visual display the pilot had mounted to the top of the control panel of the Super Courier.

“Just to our west,” the pilot said as he pointed to the display. There was a Palm O.S. 5.0 personal digital assistant open in a holder attached to the control panel. The PDA was connected to an NMEA–018 GPS receiver. A map of San Diego was programmed into the Fly in-flight navigation system and was showing on the screen. A small flashing dot showed where the GPS locator hidden in Munson's cell phone had been activated.

The navigation and tracking system in the plane was simple, accurate, and made up of off-the-shelf components. Using the satellite system of the GPS network meant that the display was showing the position of the locator to within a meter of where it was lying on the rooftop. And the system was completely anonymous.

“We're less than five minutes away,” the pilot said, “make ready.”

Santiago turned to the other two men in the plane with him. They were both ex-members of the Mexican Grupo Aerotransportado de Fuerzas Especiales (Airborne Group of Special Forces) the GAFE. Both men had been in some of the Mexican GAFEs that had operated death squads against the guerrillas and the peasants who supported them in Southern Mexico during the 1990s. The massacre of civilians during the suppression of the guerrilla bands had led to a number of GAFE troops being forced to leave the Mexican military. Those men included Franco Reyes and Alano Falcon, the other men in the plane.

Neither of the ex-GAFE troopers were physically large men, but Garcia Santiago knew very well not to judge the measure of a man by his physical size. Before he was forced to leave the United States rather than face drug charges, Santiago had been a Navy SEAL. In the Teams, he had seen men complete physical acts you would not have thought possible by just looking at them.

During a more recent career working for the leaders of the Colombian drug cartels, and gradually moving north toward the border of the United States as his rep
utation grew, Santiago had developed a number of contacts in the criminal underworld as well as in the international mercenary community. He had been able to pick and choose his men for the mission. The two men with him were some of the best available and had been training with him for over a month.

Franco Reyes was an experienced parachute jumper with nearly eight hundred jumps to his credit. At five feet, seven inches tall and weighing 150 pounds, he was a slender man. But Reyes was big compared to the man sitting in his lap. Alano Falcon was only an inch or so over five feet tall and weighed only 115 pounds. But Falcon had a “won't-stop” attitude that kept him going in the worst of situations. Both men were in excellent physical condition, hardened by tough hours training with Santiago. Theirs was going to be a particularly unique part of the upcoming mission. As far as they all were concerned, they were about to conduct an airborne infiltration well behind enemy lines. Only this mission was going to pay much, much better than anything they had ever done before.

It was 0537 hours in the morning, Pacific time, as the Super Courier maintained its turn toward the locator signal. Below them were clouds that started from a base of nearly 3,000 feet and extended upward to rolling domes at 10,000 feet. The plane moved along above the clouds, maintaining an altitude of 13,500 feet.

At that time of the morning, none of the local airports were operating. Even the large naval air base on North Island, to the west of San Diego Bay, had no on
going operations. The skies were clear, and there were no special radar signals painting the plane.

They were operating at a normal altitude for local civilian aircraft and had approached from the east to appear to be just another plane. Having slipped north across the border several hundred miles away in Arizona some time earlier, the Super Courier had drawn no attention from any U.S. Border Patrol assets during its flight toward San Diego. They were even following a registered flight plan that would take them from their takeoff point in Arizona out to sea to the Channel Islands and the airstrip on Santa Catalina Island. But the passengers on board the plane had no intention of going all the way to the islands.

The men were dressed to conduct a very specialized airborne infiltration. Each of them was wearing additional protective equipment besides his helmet, balaclava, and flight suit. Impact-resistant ESS Profile NVG goggles covered the upper part of each man's face. They all had on black Hatch Centurion nylon-and-foam knee and elbow pads, Kevlar-cloth Operator Tactical padded gloves, and Han Way Fly 2000 boots. The boots were specially made for paragliding with especially strong ankle support.

They all were carrying weapons, though none of the men appeared heavily armed. On the right hip of each man was a Omega VI Airborne model assault holster holding a Glock 19 9mm pistol. Reyes had an additional long pouch strapped to his left hip, opposite the leg holding the holster. Falcon was wearing a bulky padded chest pack over his harness, a pack that extended from
his lower right hip almost to his left shoulder.

On his back, Santiago was wearing an all-black Vector 3 M-series skydiving harness/container. Inside the container on the back of the harness was a Performance Designs PD-193 main canopy. The canopy was a seven-cell construction made of low-porosity fabric and capable of being very precisely handled by an experienced jumper. In case there was a problem with the main canopy, there was a pack holding another PD-193 canopy in reserve below the main container. Like almost all of the rest of his equipment, both canopies were dyed black.

Normally, Santiago would have been using his personal Katana 120 canopy. That elliptical rig only had a surface area of 120 square feet as compared to the 193 square feet of the PD canopies. But he needed the larger canopy to properly support the heavy load he was carrying. Also, the larger canopy would let him descend at roughly the same rate as Reyes and Falcon.

The other two men were only wearing one parachute rig between them. Falcon was sitting in Reyes's lap because he was attached to the man by a tandem rig. Instead of jumping with his own parachute, Falcon would be hanging from Reyes, attached to his harness at the shoulders and hips. During the descent under the shared canopy, Falcon would have his hands free while Reyes controlled the chute.

For his rig, Reyes was wearing an RW Sigma tandem parachute system. Inside the main container of the system was an Icarus 400-square-foot canopy. There was a special drogue chute on the end of a long tether
that would be deployed to help keep the tandem jumpers properly oriented in a stable position for the drop. While Reyes would be working the system and paying attention to the altimeter attached to his left wrist, Falcon would be sitting back in the Sigma tandem harness. The harness went around Falcon's shoulders, chest, waist, and thighs, holding him in a partially sitting position.

As the Super Courier approached the calculated release point indicated on the PDA screen, each jumper went over his gear in a last-minute check. Nothing had slipped or become unattached. Attached to the jumpers' right ankles and wrist altimeter were activated chemical lightsticks. Stripping off the shielding tape exposed the blue-green glowing sticks. On the right hand riser of each main canopy was another glowing lightstick, this one unseen inside the parachute container. The lightsticks would be too faint to see from the ground, but they would help guide the jumpers to each other through the clouds below them.

Each man pulled down a set of AN/PVS-7B night vision goggles that were attached to quick-release fasteners on their Pro-Tec helmets. The ESS Profile NVG goggles they were each wearing had been designed to be compatible with all night-vision systems. Flipping the switch on the upper right side of the goggles turned them on. Suddenly, each man saw the inside of the aircraft cockpit become starkly bright in shades of green while looking through the AN/PVS-7Bs.

As his last act of preparation, Santiago unwrapped a short length of ribbon he had tied around his left wrist,
just above his altimeter, and wadded it up in his gloved hand. Acting as the jumpmaster, Santiago signaled to Reyes and Falcon to move to the open doorway.

The two men were clumsy but had practiced this set of motions over and over again, first on the ground and then while sitting in the Super Courier they would be using on the jump. There was no danger of them accidentally falling through the door and out into the night sky.

The indicator for the aircraft kept closing with the pip showing the calculated release point for the drop. Looking down out of the plane, all that could be seen was a dark rolling sea of clouds. There were no gleams of the city that was supposed to be stretched out underneath them.

Pulling his headset off, Santiago disconnected himself from the aircraft's intercom system and moved into the doorway. He crouched in the open door of the plane on bent legs, his hands on either side of the doorway. Looking forward, Santiago could see the pilot's hand clearly. As the release point approached, the pilot started lifting his arm up in a chopping motion. First his hand came down with one finger pointing out, then two, then a clenched fist and the shouted command—“Go!…go!…go!”

Immediately, Santiago jumped out of the door, pulling himself through with his arms and pushing with his legs. A few seconds later, Reyes and Falcon pulled themselves through the door and pushed away from the plane. All three men dropped away into the darkness and were instantly swallowed up by the night.

 

Assuming a good modified frog position, Santiago fell through the sky in a stable drop. His legs were bent up at the knees and his hands were on either side of his head with his arms bent at the elbows. The air whistled past his ears and the changing pressure made his eardrums pop. It seemed that only a few seconds passed before he entered the top layer of the clouds.

The impact with the cloud gave Santiago the sensation of hitting a solid surface. The water droplets that made up the cloud were not solid enough to affect his fall at all, but the sudden darkness on entering the cloud was startling.

Moving his head only slightly, Santiago could make out the glowing lightstick attached to his altimeter. He had to turn his head more than he liked to in order to see the lightstick through the night-vision goggles, but his experience and expertise gave him the ability to maintain a stable position in spite of the movement.

When he had opened his hand after exiting the plane, Santiago had let go of the ribbon he was holding. Now he could see the streamer of cloth as it fluttered up from his hand. The moisture in the cloud built up on the single lens of his night-vision goggles, blocking his view of the altimeter. As he carefully reached and wiped off the goggles with his hand, Santiago suddenly saw that the ribbon was fluttering directly in front of his face. The streamer was extended from his left hand straight across to his right side. Without the indicator as he fell through the clouds,
Santiago would have never known he was tilting—outside of the wind, there was no sensation of him even falling. Turning his body, he straightened his position and continued to fall through the cloud.

The darkness inside the cloud seemed to become even blacker. Suddenly, Santiago found himself breaking through and underneath the clouds. The altimeter on his wrist read just below 4,000 feet and the city of San Diego spread out below him.

An instant later, the bulky figures of Reyes and Falcon broke through the clouds less than a hundred feet from where Santiago was falling. The ballooned drogue chute streamed behind the tandem jumpers, both men maintaining a modified frog position, Falcon having his feet sticking up between Reyes's spread legs.

Looking down, Santiago could see that they were dropping almost directly above the huge L-shaped federal office building just to the northeast of their target. Through his night-vision goggles, each man could see the brilliant pulsing of the infrared beacon on top of their target. As they dropped to 3,500 feet, Santiago and Reyes opened their main canopies.

Both Ram-air canopies streamed out from their container, pulled by the small pilot chutes the jumpers had released. The dark cloth canopies trailed from the pilot chutes like long tails as they slipped through the air. The individual cells bulged from the pressure of the air that was rammed by the momentum of the fall into the leading edges of the canopies. The inflating cells curved the cloth of the canopies into flat rectangular
wings, wings that could be controlled and flown through the air like a plane.

Holding on to the toggle line controls, the jumpers steered for the top of the tall building off to their left. The night-vision goggles were no longer needed because of the bright lights illuminating the top of the building. Automatic high-light cutoff controls turned down the power of the goggles, protecting both the image tubes, and the eyes of the wearer. Watching the flag on top of the flagpole told Santiago the direction and approximate speed of the wind below them. Correcting their approach by pulling on the toggles, Santiago and Reyes turned their canopies and tracked to the wind.

Now the jumpers silently slipped through the air toward their target.

 

Watching Pena run around the circumference of the exercise area made Stevens realize even more that smoking was a bad habit for him or anyone else. He knew that he should quit, it wasn't as though he didn't hear that advice from just about everyone. For right now, these midnight-to-eight shifts were real killers. Coming up as he was to the last few hours of a shift, he found that a cigarette helped keep him awake. And even if they were watching just one prisoner right now, staying alert in this kind of job was a good thing.