Tier One Wild (35 page)

“This time it is a clear misunderstanding. Mind if I try and rectify it before you toss him?”

Collins shrugged, and Kolt leaned forward. “Okay, Troy. Number one, Sergeant Bird and I work together, that is all. Number two, she obviously sees something in you, otherwise she wouldn’t give your mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging dumb ass the time of day, so you might want to think about treating her with a little more respect before she wakes up and decides that you are not only ugly and stupid, but you are also an asshole, at which point she will hit the bricks and find someone worthy of a woman with her obvious beauty, intelligence, and poise.”

“Look,” Troy said with his face pressed hard into the tabletop. “I—”

“
You
look, Sergeant. I’ve got no problem with you at all. In fact, from what little time I’ve spent around Sergeant Bird, I’ve heard good things about you, and I do know her well enough to respect her judgment to some degree. All that said, if you want to go to war with me out of some misplaced need to compensate for some shortcoming, we can go outside, at which point I
will
fuck you up.”

“I thought that you—”

“You and me and Bird have real enemies in this world, Troy. We are in the military because we feel the call to fight those enemies. I understand how shit can get turned around in your head to where you lose track of that for a minute. I was twenty-nine once myself, though back then the Krauts and the Japs required my full attention, so I never got the chance to court a young lady as lovely as Sergeant Bird.”

Troy seemed to relax with the joke. Collins kept the pressure up in case the young man still tried to lunge at Raynor.

Kolt wrapped up his speech. “But you are a Special Forces man, which means you deserve my respect and you have it. It also means you have a hard job against hard enemies, so you would do well to make friends when you can.”

Kolt looked up at Josh Collins and gave him a subtle nod, and Collins released his grip on Troy. The SF soldier stood up slowly.

Raynor reached out his hand again and, this time, Troy took it.

“I’m sorry, sir. Shitty day all around, I guess.”

Kolt stood. “No problem.” He looked over to Cindy, who was sitting alone in a booth and staring back at the two men, her eyes wide at the quick turn of events. Raynor slapped Troy playfully on the arm. “Got a feeling your evening is going to be just fine.”

Kolt nodded to Cindy and headed out the door, shaking Josh Collins’s hand on the way.

THIRTY

On the evening of their first night in Mexico, David Doyle and three of his cell members left the safe house in San Pablo Chimalpa and headed toward the airport in a van driven by a man working for the Zetas.

They pulled into the gated property of a shipping company on Ruiz Cortina, just off the airport grounds, and drove past armed sentries in blue uniforms, and through iron gates that locked again behind them. They were then ushered out of their van and taken into a large nondescript storage building set apart from the warehouse.

Along the wall of the building were three air freight containers, each one the size of a small car. Their doors were sealed, and a sticker affixed to each one showed the shipping point of the cargo. Even though all the goods had left the Middle East through Dubai, the shipping origins of these containers read Paris, Marseilles, and London.

The agent the Zetas arranged for the al Qaeda cell to use was accustomed to the importation of contraband. He and his people had taken care of everything on this shipment, including the bribing of Mexican officials, so the containers remained sealed and had not been X-rayed while in customs control. They had cleared customs the day before and had remained untouched, here in the receiver’s storage building.

Also, as previously arranged, the Mexican agent had purchased four International TerraStar medium-duty work trucks, each a different color, and each with a covered bed that could carry fifteen crated Igla-S systems. The ample cab space allowed for four men, including the driver. The trucks were not new, but the agent followed his instructions from his mysterious Middle Eastern contacts to the letter, and he had each of the vehicles painstakingly checked and reconditioned.

These four vehicles were lined up in the warehouse next to the sealed containers, and next to these trucks sat several canvas bags. Each bag contained a Kalashnikov rifle with a folding stock and several loaded magazines.

Compliments of the Zetas.

The Mexican agent left the Middle Easterners to their work and they broke open the seals of the shipping containers and began loading the crates onto the trucks.

It was the first time any of the cell other than David and Miguel had seen a crated Igla-S MANPAD system in person.

It was backbreaking work for only four men, but Doyle did not want to expose his entire force in case the agent double-crossed them and sold them out to the authorities. It took over a half hour to load the cargo, and another forty-five minutes to return to the safe house. Here Doyle took the license plates off the trucks and handed them to four more of his men. Each of these men then left the house that night under cover of darkness, and returned later with a different plate. The truck plate they had placed on a parked vehicle somewhere in the neighborhood, exchanging it for the parked vehicle’s plate.

It was not perfect tradecraft, but he expected it to get them through the next days in Mexico in case the agent turned them in down the road.

At eight a.m. on their second day in-country, David and his men stood in the large driveway of the home, their missiles and guns loaded onto the four trucks. As rain fell, a single black Jeep Liberty stopped at the edge of the drive, and a man climbed out of the passenger seat.

He was Hispanic, late twenties, and armed with a small Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol that swung from a strap on his shoulder, the black metal glistening wet on the outside of his green rain parka.

David and Miguel stepped up to him as he scanned the group of men by the trucks.

“You are Henrico?” David asked.

“Yes. David?”

Doyle just nodded. “I assume you have more men and vehicles?”

Henrico reached into his parka to his belt and pulled out a walkie-talkie. He handed it to David. “Take this to communicate. The total distance of our journey is thirteen hundred miles. We will have seven vehicles in the convoy in addition to your four. They will stay in traffic, mostly ahead of you, until we get out of the city, but as we head north we will be all around you. We have a bus, a minibus, some sedans, some SUVs. Twenty-eight men. We will drive all day and arrive at our first destination after nine p.m. Tomorrow we will go farther, and arrive at the border around midnight.”

“You don’t want to drive at night?” David asked.

Henrico shook his head. “On some of these highways, only a fool or an army drives at night. We are like an army, but we do not want anyone to know this. We will travel during the day.”

“Fine,” said Doyle. It was much the same back in Yemen.

Henrico said, “On the morning of the third day, we will take you to the final destination, where more vehicles are waiting for the crossing.”

David nodded. He did not like depending on the Mexicans, though his organization had used them in the past in smaller-scale operations to test their competence and trustworthiness, and they had passed these tests with flying colors. These Zetas were coldhearted killers, but they did not kill for ideology or for honor. No, they were in it for the money. David’s benefactors had paid them well with heroin and access to more heroin and, David knew, there was no way he could get his men and his munitions into the United States without making an alliance with these criminals whose expertise on the southern border would be crucial to his operation’s success.

David said, “Your men. I assume they are armed?”

Henrico smiled. “
Sí, señor.
Rifles and RPGs. But we do not expect problems. The route we are taking should be safe. The Federales are patrolling more to the west, and our scout car in front will alert us of any police or Army roadblocks. If we run into bandits or other competition”—Henrico patted his MAC-10—“we will take care of it.”

Doyle knew these men would be decent fighters. Not good, but good enough for most encounters.

“All right. Let’s go.”

Minutes later, Doyle and his four TerraStar trucks were rolling out of the driveway and toward the United States.

*   *   *

Kolt spent his morning at the rifle range with several of his mates, and then he showered, slammed some powdered protein from a blender in the squadron lounge, and had just sat down behind his desk to do some paperwork when his secure red line rang.

“Racer,” he said.

“Hi, Racer. Kenny Farmer here, from down in the—”

Kolt interrupted him. “You got something?”

“I’m not sure what it is, but I did find something. Yes. If you want, I can—”

“Stay put. I’m en route,” Kolt said, and he hung up the phone.

*   *   *

Racer leaned over Kenny Farmer, too close for the redhead’s comfort, and he looked at the Booz Allen man’s monitor. On it was a thermal overhead image of a simple village. Raynor’s eyes flashed to the time stamp on the lower left portion of the photo, and saw that the shot was taken three nights prior.

“Where is this?”

“It’s a no-name settlement in southern Yemen, about a hundred and fifty klicks south of Sana’a, just east of Wadi Bana.”

“AQAP territory?”

“Most definitely, although we’ve never heard a peep out of this tiny speck. Al Masani, just to the east of this grid, is a hotbed. CIA has launched three Hellfire strikes there in the past year.”

“So…” Kolt asked, “what am I looking at here?”

Farmer tapped a tiny building’s roof with his pen. “See the heat signature off of this structure?”

Raynor did, and he’d spent enough time looking at thermal images in his career to get an idea of what was going on. He said, “It’s uniform all over the structure. Not like warm bodies inside, or cooking fires.” Kolt looked up to Farmer and spoke as if he were guessing the answer on a quiz in school. “It doesn’t have central heat … Is this building made out of metal?”

Ken nodded. “Yes. Steel, by the looks of it.”

Kolt looked back to the screen. He tried to get an idea of the size of it by comparing it with a donkey standing nearby. “Is it a shipping container?”

Farmer smiled and nodded, either impressed with Racer’s analytical abilities or just faking it to be polite. “It’s a twenty-foot standard dry goods intermodal shipping container.”

Kolt knew these devices well. Although Delta operators did not find themselves working on or around ships as much as SEAL Team 6 crews, intermodal containers were carried by truck and stored in warehouses and ports and were therefore ubiquitous in locations where Delta might find themselves operating. He had trained on and around shipping containers many times over the years.

“I would have thought the heat register would have been higher,” Kolt said. “I mean, this
is
Yemen in the summer.”

“It
should
be higher,” the younger man agreed. “What I think they have done, along with painting the walls the same color as the baked brick buildings all around, is cover the roof of the structure with burlap or canvas or something to mask the register. It helps, but the focal-plane-array thermal imagers on our collection assets can see right through them.”

Raynor pulled up a chair and sat next to Farmer slowly. “So … so it looks pretty obvious that this is something they are trying to mask from UAVs overhead.”

“No question about it. Whatever is in that container is something they are trying to keep under wraps.”

“Does the rest of the village look quiet?”

“At first we thought it was quiet. No obvious militant presence. But…” Farmer said as he began clicking away on his keyboard. Kolt got the impression that the Booz Allen contractor was glad he’d been asked the question. “But after I found the intermodal container out here in the boonies, I double- and triple-checked everything we have on this vil.” He took a few more seconds to bring up a set of overflight images in daylight. He moved to a picture of a highway bisecting low brown hills, and he enlarged it. He said, “It’s only by chance that we caught this shot. UAVs overfly the village all the time, but with a regular overflight they never would have caught it. But these pictures came from a Reaper on station in a sector well to the south, looking at some traffic on the highway near Al-Safra. It looks, from the progression of the images, like the camera was just recording as the UAV circled around, when it caught this.” He zoomed in again and enhanced the image.

Kolt Raynor cocked his head and leaned forward. On the screen he could make out two simple buildings, photographed at an angle shallow enough to show the walls, windows, and doors, instead of the roofs. Raynor saw some sort of covered walkway that led between the buildings, and two men walked under the covering, shaded against the sun and hidden from any UAVs flying overhead.

Kolt focused on the men, but Kenny Farmer used the tip of his ballpoint pen to point to the tops of the buildings. “Here and here,” he said, referring to both structures.

Kolt said, “I see shadows, but it’s too dark to see anything there.”

“Exactly,” confirmed Farmer. “But it’s not what’s there that is important. We can infer what is there.”

Kolt was confused. He chuckled, admitting that he was lost. “We can?
You
can, maybe, you are the whiz kid. I’m just the dumb ROTC grad.”

Farmer laughed at this. “What I mean is … I can tell that this is some sort of false roof on the building. On both buildings. It has been created by putting beams up at all four corners and covering them with canvas. Under the canvas, just like under the material covering up the intermodal container, lies something the people at this location do not want us to find.”

Kolt nodded. “From the placement here at the tops of the buildings and overlooking the open ground to the south, I wonder if they could be gun emplacements.”