Hostile Borders (22 page)

“I think that is agreeable,” Daumudi said. “Don't you agree, Dr. Ammad?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ammad said, “I think that is a satisfactory arrangement. As long as the materials always stay in our sight.”

“That is easily accomplished,” Masque said. “We will simply drive in front of you.”

This is madness, Santiago thought to himself. Smuggling radioactive isotopes to be used against U.S. cities? Drugs were one thing, but this? There was no affection in Santiago's heart for the country that had hounded him since Panama. But he knew that the American government would spend years hunting down everyone involved in such a terrorist incident.

The U.S. had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Didn't Masque realize that? The leader of a drug cartel taking part in such an attack on the U.S. would just be signing his own death warrant. No place on earth would be safe for such a person—or the men who had worked for him. And that included Santiago personally!

While he maintained a calm outward appearance, Santiago was coming to a very serious decision. It was time for him to leave Masque's employ. The money had been good, but now the risks far outweighed the value. He would have to make arrangements immediately.

The ex-SEAL looked at the bulky presence of Hydar across the room. The bodyguard scowled at the slight smile that was on Santiago's face.

It was late in the afternoon when Reaper finally pulled into the parking area of the Dogbone Ranch. He was dusty, dirty, stank, and knew that he would barely have time for a shower. The dogs didn't care how he looked, they enthusiastically greeted him as he stepped down from the truck. Considering how torn up some of those corpses in the cavern had been, Reaper had a lot of respect for the power contained in the jaws of the two rottweilers. He was very glad they gave him the reception they did as the two big dogs bounced and jumped around him, wagging their stub tails.

Once inside the ranch house, Reaper saw that Hausmann was sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by an even higher pile of papers than earlier. There were stacks of documents and printouts all around him with a cordless phone on top of the largest pile of papers.

“Damn, Reaper,” Hausmann said, “I was starting to worry about you. This lone-hero crap really wears on the
folks waiting back home. Find anything interesting?”

“That's the understatement of the decade,” Reaper said. “Before we go into any of that, did my people check in?”

“Yeah,” Hausmann said as he picked up a pad of paper and checked his notes. “Max Warrick called in from the Albuquerque airport a little while ago. Said that he and Mackenzie were refueling and that their ETA in Tombstone was 2000 hours. Pat Manors called in and he'll be here within the hour.”

“Great,” Reaper said, the relief showing in his face, “my guys will be bringing in the bulk of the gear we'll need to hit this place. We've got to move as fast as we can. I figure tomorrow night at the latest.”

“Tomorrow night?” Hausmann said. “That's moving pretty damned fast. Just what did you find this afternoon, anyway?”

“I just hope it's moving fast enough going in tomorrow,” Reaper said with concern in his voice. “I'd rather go in tonight, but there just isn't enough time to pull everyone and everything together.”

Sitting down at the table, Reaper proceeded to tell Hausmann just what he had seen that afternoon. He spoke quickly and concisely, embellishing nothing but not leaving out any details either. Hausmann grimaced when Reaper described the pit full of bodies, but he didn't interrupt what the other was saying. The story took a while to tell. When Reaper was finished, he inhaled a deep breath and blew it out slowly. It had been a long, stressful afternoon, and the day was hardly over yet. He got up and walked into the kitchen.

For a moment, Hausmann just sat and looked at his friend rummaging in the refrigerator. It took a minute for everything Reaper had said to sink in and take hold.

“A cave?” Hausmann said finally. “You found a cave a couple of miles long?”

Straightening up from the refrigerator with a cold can of Pepsi in his hand, Reaper popped the top open and took a long drink.

“Not just a couple of miles long,” Reaper said. “It's much longer than that. I only followed the tracks in it for about a mile and a half. The cave stretched out much farther. It went well past where the light could reach.”

“Then you found the other mine?” Hausmann said.

“Just like the satellite pictures showed,” Reaper said. “That underground railroad ends right in the middle of the Crystal mine in Mexico. There was activity at that other mine just like the infrared pictures showed. It sure as hell isn't abandoned by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Son of a bitch,” Hausmann said slowly. “They must have been running drugs under the border for years. I'll bet that bitch at the Heart ranch is involved with drugs up to her skinny ass. That company of hers was in financial trouble just a year or so ago. Then some kind of investor helped her out. I never did think that organic food business could make a go of things out here and turn any kind of a profit. I'll bet she's been moving pot and coke in those trucks of hers.”

“Oh, that snake lady, as you call her, has to be involved,” Reaper said as he sat at the table and took another drink, “involved up to her neck, I would think,
going by that show we saw last night. But I don't believe that tunnel and the train system has been running for years. A lot of that installation looked pretty new. And I didn't see any drugs in either mine, though there's a hell of a lot of other stuff there we have to be worried about. That train setup can move a small truckload of freight past the border. And there's some really dangerous ordnance piled up in that mine tunnel.”

“So why don't you call your Washington people about it and let them deal with things,” Hausmann said. “They can send in the military.”

“What I found won't change the situation,” Reaper said. He got up and started pacing around the room while he spoke. “Washington will have the same problems moving that I was told about this morning. By the time they get something staged to go across the border, that tunnel would be empty. There's no way they could stockpile all of that stuff there without some cooperation with the local military. Even an airborne helicopter assault would take some time to get to the mine, and it would be on Mexican radar all the way.

“They would get a warning, Santiago was way too good not to make arrangements for something like that. They'd either bring the stuff through the tunnel, or more likely just move it and cross someplace else.”

Ceasing his pacing for a moment, Reaper stood by the table looking down at the documents all across it. Anger started to well up in him as his face grew dark.

“Damn it,” he said as he slapped the Pepsi can down on the table. “We can't make a mistake and let that stuff get away, not this close to the border. Those mis
siles alone could rip an airliner out of the sky. The rest of the weapons and munitions could keep a bunch of terrorist cells operating for weeks. No, Straker wanted me to deal with the problem down here if I could, and I think I can. He knows he can't order me to go, but he also knows that I will. So will my partners once I give them the details.

“You can count me in on this one,” Hausmann said as he leaned back in his chair. He looked Reaper straight in the eye. “And don't argue about it. Those bastards killed a friend of mine, and they tried to kill me, too. If you think I'm good enough, I want to go with you.”

Looking at his friend, Reaper knew that Hausmann meant every word that he had said. And he knew that Hausmann had tactical experience behind him, as a sworn police SWAT officer he had been on the sharp end more than once. Before that, he had spent a stint in the Army as an MP. He had experience and skills that would help and the determination to see things through to their end. Since he'd received his law degree, Hausmann was the only lawyer Reaper knew who habitually carried a cocked-and-locked M1911A1 under his suit jacket. His help would be welcome.

“Okay,” Reaper said. “You're in, I hope you don't regret it.”

“By the looks of this situation,” Hausmann said, “you just may need a good lawyer along, anyway. I may have to brush up on my international law, though.”

“Just don't take too long,” Reaper said. “We have to move on this.”

Before Hausmann could say a word, the intercom on
the wall behind him beeped for attention. Getting up from where he was sitting, Hausmann walked over to the unit. Leaning in to the speaker, Hausmann pressed one of the buttons on the panel.

“Yes,” he said.

“It's Manors, Pat Manors,” came out of the tinny-sounding speaker.

“Come on in,” Hausmann said and he pushed a large red button on the panel. Outside, the electric gate opened to let Manors's truck in.

“Did you change the combination on the gate?” Reaper said.

“All but yours,” Hausmann replied. “It seemed like the prudent thing to do.”

The barking of the dogs cut into the conversation as Manors opened the door and walked into the house. Greeting everyone, he sat at the table and Reaper took him through the materials they had spread out. As Manors looked at the paperwork, Reaper went over what he had seen that afternoon, the Border Patrol agent was more than a little astonished at Reaper's discovery.

“A tunnel several miles long?” Manors said. “I've heard of tunnels that were dug under the border that were over a thousand feet long, but a couple of miles?”

“It's not just the tunnels of both mines,” Reaper said as he got up and headed into the kitchen. “There's that huge cave connecting the two of them together.”

“Even so,” Manors said, “you're talking about one great big hole in the fence down here. Were there any other exits besides the two mine tunnels that you saw?”

“Nothing that I could see,” Reaper said, pulling an
other Pepsi from the refrigerator. “I just followed the train tracks from one mine to the other. The cave is gigantic. You couldn't see either end with the lights that were down there. I would imagine that there are other openings to the surface, I just didn't see any. Parts of the cave floor were covered in bat shit, but there wasn't any bats, they had to get out somehow.”

“There's small caves all around here,” Hausmann said. “Some aren't much bigger than a coyote den, others are pretty deep. Every now and then, somebody stumbles across one with some old Indian artifacts in it that turn out to be a couple of hundred years old. But the only holes I've ever heard about that were big enough to lay tracks in were always mine tunnels, never a cave.”

“That train track bit really stumps me,” Reaper said as he sat down and opened his soft drink. “How in the hell could they have built all of this without ever being discovered? Those tunnels had to be dug out, trestles built, the bed graded, track laid. It was not a small job. Where did they get the materials? And just where would they come up with the manpower to do the job. Who were the workers?”

“Those are a few questions that may not be too hard to explain,” Manors said. “As far as getting the rails goes, it sounds like pretty much a standard mine-car gauge. They could have just stripped the rails themselves from other parts of either mine. Some of those old tunnels go on for hundreds of yards.”

“A thousand feet or more was my experience,” Reaper said. “That's at least how long the tunnel was at the bottom of the Blue Star.”

“The deepest part of that mine was supposed to have flooded out a long time back,” Hausmann said getting up. “The story was that they hit water while following a vein. The whole mine didn't flood, though. They kept working the upper tunnels for years. You want a drink, Manors?”

“No, thanks,” Manors said. “You know, as far as the workers go. The cartels have been using native Indian labor for the last twenty years or so. They grab up Indian workers from central and southern Mexico, basically just kidnap them. They move them across the country and put them to work on their opium poppy and marijuana plantations in the Sierra Madre Mountains well south of here.

“The Indians don't even know where they are most of the time. If one got away, he couldn't tell anyone where he came from. Most of them speak their own language and can't even understand Spanish. The cartels use them and either send them back or dump them someplace.”

Standing in the kitchen, Hausmann held the cup of coffee he had poured for himself. He just stared at Manors for a moment.

“You're talking about kidnapping and slavery,” Hausmann said.

“That's the way of the world south of the border,” Manors said. “Whoever built that tunnel system probably used a bunch of those same Indians as slave labor. Then got rid of them. I'll bet they didn't see the light of day for weeks. Just stayed and worked in that hole.”

“I don't think they ever left,” Reaper said, as he re
membered the older bodies and near skeletons that filled that pit back in the cave.

“Speaking of left,” Hausmann said looking at the clock on the wall, “we'd better get moving if we want to be in Tombstone in time to meet your friends.”

“Right,” Reaper said. “I have to make a fast report to Washington. Then we can go.”

Heading upstairs to Hausmann's office, Reaper logged on to the computer and started beating on the keyboard. After only a few minutes, he had sent a short but complete report on what he had found to Admiral Straker's office at the Department of Homeland Security. With the message sent, Reaper headed back down to the kitchen where Hausmann and Manors were waiting.

The three men headed out of the house. Reaper drove his own car while Hausmann and Manors took Hausmann's Chevy pickup. It was about a thirty-mile drive to the modest airport and both vehicles arrived at the gravel parking lot a little before eight o'clock. There was nothing to do and less to see as the men waited, each with his own thoughts. Before twenty minutes had passed, a lone aircraft could be seen approaching the airport runway from the northeast.

The fat-bodied, twin-tail boom plane was a Cessna Model 337 Skymaster. The plane had two propellers driving it through the air. One prop was at the front of the body, the other was acting as a pusher-prop spinning at the rear of the fuselage, between the two tail booms. There wasn't a tower or any facilities at the airport other than an orange wind sock blowing in the breeze.

The Cessna made one pass over the runway, then
turned around and came in for a landing. At Reaper's direction, Hausmann drove the truck down by the runway, near where the Cessna was going to finally stop.

As the Skymaster halted, the two propellers spun down and slowed as the engine noise quit. When the props had finally come to a stop, the cabin door directly under the wing opened up. A slightly built man, five feet, four inches tall, with thinning brown hair stepped out of the plane. From the other side of the aircraft, a taller, younger man with white hair emerged.

“Hey, boss,” Max Warrick, the white-haired ex-Marine scout-sniper called out to Reaper. “You order takeout?”

On the other side of the Skymaster, Ben Mackenzie, the ex-Air Force parajumper and qualified pilot, was digging around in the back of the cabin for the wheel chocks to secure the plane. Together with Reaper and Enzo Caronti, who wasn't with them, the group made up the Four Horsemen. This was the first time in over a year that the group was seeing action together, and the first time they were operating under the “unofficial” blanket of authority of the Department of Homeland Security.