Viper: A Thriller (31 page)

But the Viper
had absolute faith in her men.

So she waited
until she heard the crack of Trujillo’s Uzi open up from the cabin behind her,
and she saw one of the Mexicans drop. The other two immediately shifted their
aim off the Viper and onto the Gulfstream, and, with lightning fast movement, she
snapped up the VSS into target acquisition, aligned her sights over one of the Mexicans,
and squeezed the trigger as Trujillo simultaneously put four more bullets
through the other Mexican’s chest.

Both men hit the
ground, dead.

The shots echoed
loudly across the expanse of open desert.

Taking advantage
of the distraction, Carlos lunged for the Viper, reaching out for her rifle.
She stepped back and to the left, raised the VSS, and smashed the wood stock
into the back of Carlos’ skull. He stumbled forward, landed on his face, and
rolled over onto his back. Holding his bleeding head, he stared up at the
Viper. She stood over him, blocking out the sun, and aimed the VSS at his face.

Four more Zetas
appeared from the garage, but they stopped short when they saw the Viper
holding Carlos at gunpoint. Trujillo covered them with his Uzi.

“Tell them to lower
their weapons now, Carlos, or everyone dies.”

Carlos
hesitated, and then shouted the order in Spanish, and his men set their rifles
down and stepped back. They relaxed when the Viper allowed Carlos onto his feet,
and then lowered her own weapon. She stepped forward and reached into Carlos’s
pants pocket to retrieve his cell phone. She powered the phone down and hurled
it into the desert.

“I still need to
get over the border, Carlos, and I’m still willing to hold up my end of the
bargain. You’ll receive the agreed one hundred thousand, in addition to keeping
your life. How does that sound to you?”

He didn’t need
to think it over.

“Let’s go.”

Inside the command and maintenance trailer
parked at the military section of Tijuana International’s Old Airport Terminal,
Avery looked over the shoulder of the drone pilot to view the monitor
displaying the crystal clear live feed from one of the unmanned aerial
vehicles. With Padilla and the DEA agents present, the tiny trailer was
overcrowded, and Avery tried to keep a respectful distance from the drone
operators, to stay out of their way and give them room to breathe. Just
standing there in the air conditioned trailer, he sweated and could feel the
collective heat emanating from the closely packed bodies.

Contreras’s UAVs
were the older, unarmed RQ-1 reconnaissance variant of the Predator, equipped
with a tracking pod running NSA’s GILGAMESH geo-location system capable of
tracking and finding SIM cards, in addition to collecting data from computers
and phones within range. Despite the removal of the battery from the Viper’s
cell, a small chip in the phone continued to function and broadcast its
location, revealing that the phone had been stationary since the phone call.

Avery was kitted
up; his ModGear vest loaded with ammunition and equipment, his Glock holstered
at this side with spare magazines. He’d left his M4 behind in one of the DEA
Forerunners parked ten feet from the trailer.

Aguilar and his troops
lingered outside, chatting amongst themselves, eager for something to do, but
not anticipating being called to action. It looked like it’d be the Mexicans’
show now. A couple hundred feet away, the GAFE troops were likewise standing by
in their Blackhawk helicopters. The DEA Aviation Division’s own UH-1 Hueys were
prepped to fly, too, just in case.

Thirty-five
minutes after Abigail Benning triangulated the location of the Viper’s phone,
the Predators were buzzing over the cartel’s desert airstrip. The drones
arrived in time to catch the Gulfstream prepare for takeoff after refueling,
but there was no sighting of the Viper, unless she was already aboard the plane
or staying inside one of the airfield’s small structures. With the
helicopter-borne GAFE element unable to arrive on target in time, the
Gulfstream was to be intercepted shortly after takeoff by Mexican Air Force F-5
fighters and forced to land.

Padilla then
gave the GAFE team the green light to hit the airfield, against Avery’s
protestations that he and Aguilar’s crew go in, but Avery knew it was an
argument he wouldn’t win. Padilla would have a hard time explaining to his
superiors why he allowed a foreign strike team to deploy against a cartel
target on Mexican soil. The GAFE commander likewise refused to allow Avery and
the Colombians to accompany his team.

Avery’s
intuition told him that the Viper was long gone anyway. She already knew she
was in danger. She wasn’t going to sit around in the middle of the desert
waiting to be attacked, and he didn’t believe that she’d abort everything and fly
out at the first sign of danger.

He reckoned she
had a forty-five minute head start to the border, but maybe in her haste she’d
left something behind at the airstrip, something to point them in the right
direction. They knew from the aerial recon that there were still men at the
airstrip. Maybe one of them could be convinced to talk.

With the others,
Avery listened with bated breath to the radio transmissions coming into the
command trailer from the assault team while staring intently at the feed from
the Predators, watching the takedown play out in real time.

Part of him
hoped that GAFE would find the Viper on the spot and end this.

A bigger part of
him hoped that she’d gotten away, was getting closer north by the minute,
closer to him, thereby giving him another shot at her. With lives on the line,
he knew it was a selfish and shitty way to think, but that’s how he felt.

The Blackhawks
arrived on target twenty-six minutes after takeoff. The squads of special ops
paratroopers clad in gray and white camou fatigues and web harnesses,
brandishing carbine assault rifles, expertly fast-roped to the ground at their
designated drop zones and simultaneously hit the storage building and the
garage.

A brief
firefight ensued—on the monitor Avery saw the tiny figures running across the
airstrip and take firing positions, and the exchange of muzzle flashes. But
GAFE possessed superior numbers, training, and firepower, and they quickly
overcame the cartel’s ragtag collection of hired shooters. Within fifteen
seconds, four cartel gunmen were killed. Another was wounded, and another, a
mechanic, was found cowering beneath a pick-up truck in the garage.

 There was no
sign of the Viper, which came as no surprise to Avery. He’d known it ten
seconds after the Blackhawks were still in the air. If she or her agents were present
with the missiles, those helicopters would have been knocked right out of the
sky.

One of the
prisoners reported that the Viper was headed toward the border. He didn’t know
where or how Silva’s men intended to get her across, but he provided a
description of the vehicles in which her party had left about thirty minutes
earlier.

She was
accompanied by a cartel lieutenant named Carlos, a four man Zeta escort, and
two of her own men, one of which was described as a crazy Latino, the other an
intense Caucasian who spoke like a North American.

Avery frowned
upon hearing that particular update over the radio.

Caucasian? That
was obviously the foreign operative Sean Nolan had reported, but he definitely
didn’t sound like an Iranian operative.

The Predators scoured
the surrounding desert immediately north of the airfield. Following the
highways going in that direction, they worked their way toward the border. All
police units in Tijuana were likewise given a description of the vehicles in
which the Viper’s contingent travelled, and so were ICE, Border Patrol, and
California police on the American side of the border, where additional drones
were put to the sky. The FBI also deployed an assault element of its Critical
Incident Response Group that had been in Houston that morning to resolve a
hostage situation at a bank.

Twenty-six miles
north of the airstrip, the Predators picked up two trucks matching the
description provided by the captured cartel men exiting a highway and speeding
along a rural back road. The drone pilot in the trailer stayed on the pair of
dark blue Chevy Silverados with covered beds, and enhanced the zoom lens on the
Predator’s 950mm spotter.

“It’s her,”
Avery said. “Let’s move.”

“I will redeploy
the GAFE element,” Padilla said.

Avery shook his
head. “They’re almost fifty miles off target now. We’re closer, and we have the
DEA choppers right here.”

“You don’t have
jurisdiction,” Padilla protested, but then he saw the look on Avery’s face, and
he thought again of the missiles the Viper carried. “My officers and I are
coming with. Officially, it’s a Federal Police operation, with advisory and
support from DEA.”

“Fine,” Avery
said. “But the Viper’s mine.”

Slayton stepped
up behind Padilla.

“If she crosses
the border, then we vector ICE and Border Patrol to intercept her. No
arguments.”

Slayton had more
to say, but Avery had already left the trailer. Passing Aguilar and Diego on
his way to retrieve his rifle from the Forerunner, he said, “We’re up.”

They grabbed
their gear and jogged across the tarmac to the Bell UH-1s. They climbed aboard
one of the choppers, waiting for Slayton and the DEA and Federal Police agents
to catch up and pile into the second chopper.

Six minutes
later, with the drone pilots vectoring them in, they were twelve thousand feet
in the air over Tijuana, flying southwest on a course to intercept the target
vehicles.

Strapped into
the open cabin, with his M4 secured diagonally across his vest, Avery watched
the city streets and highways whip by below. As they cleared the city, the
terrain became flat, dusty, and brown, less developed and less populated, the
way he liked it.

The net was
closing on the Viper, but if she made it over the border, then Avery would lose
his shot at her. Plus more American lives would be lost. Avery knew she wasn’t
going to allow ICE or FBI to put the cuffs on her and read her rights. It was
best to end this here, quickly.

___

From the front passenger seat of the lead
Silverado, Benito Trujillo squinted against the rays of sunlight shining
through the windshield. He craned his head to get a better look around the
extended visor as the truck bounced along over the cracked, crumbling desert
road.

There…as the
road inclined slightly over a hill, he saw it again, a small black shape
fluttering in the sky just off the horizon.

From the rear
passenger seat of the extended cab, the Viper noticed that something caught
Trujillo’s attention, and asked, “What is it?”

“I see a
helicopter.”

Trujillo turned
around in his seat to face the Viper and Sidran. Carlos drove, but Trujillo had
the Mexican’s full attention now too. Carlos’s eyes searched the sky, but he
saw nothing beyond the sun’s glare.

“I don’t see
anything,” Carlos said.

“It’s there.
Trust me. We’re being followed.”  Trujillo set his gaze on Carlos and
repositioned the Uzi in his hands. “Friends of yours maybe?”

“Not in a
fucking helicopter,” Carlos said. “It’s the
federales
.” 

To the Viper,
Trujillo said, “We should have checked his phone. Maybe he already contacted
the cops.”

Carlos began to
sweat despite the air conditioning blowing against him. “I didn’t bring them
here, I swear. Perhaps we should find a safe place to stay low, and try for the
border later.”

“Keep driving,”
the Viper ordered, wondering if Carlos forgot what was in those cases loaded on
the truck’s bed. “Helicopters aren’t a problem.”

Carlos hit the
accelerator, and the truck rapidly gained speed.

___

“They’re speeding up. I think they
spotted us.”

“Move in,” Avery
said in response to the DEA pilot. “We’ll intercept them on the road.”

“Hold on,” the
pilot replied as he listened to instructions from the command trailer. Then to
Avery, he responded, “That’s a negative. We’ll stay back and give them some
room. There are civilian vehicles within the target’s vicinity. Besides, we
still have the Predators on them. They’re not getting away from us.”

Avery swore,
exasperated, and tried to maintain patience. He rode out the next eight minutes
in silence.

Then, from the
UAV trailer back at the airport, where he monitored the Predator’s feed,
Contreras’s voice came in over the radio: “Okay, they’re stopping about thirteen
miles up the road. They’ve arrived at a ranch, less than half a mile from the
border.”

One of the
Predator technicians relayed the coordinates to the DEA pilots.

“We’ve got
positive ID of the Viper. She just exited one of the trucks,” Contreras’s voice
reported twenty seconds later. “She’s with five, no six other men armed with assault
rifles. Be careful, guys, and good shooting.”

___

“That’s not a helicopter.”

Trujillo continued
to obsessively watch the skies after hopping out of the truck. He stepped
several yards out into the dusty field, behind the rickety, dilapidated barn
that looked like it was about to collapse under its own weight if the wind
picked up.

Nearby, Carlos
and his men unloaded the SA-24 transit crates from the Silverados. The trucks
were parked near a wooden shed with a padlocked door. The shed was a recent
addition to the property, and looked in much better condition than the barn. The
entire farm appeared abandoned and neglected. Out in the distance, several
malnourished cows grazed the land, and rotting, half-eaten carcasses of dead
cattle could be found baking under the sun. Farther out, there would be signs
warning against trespassing, enforced by the cartel’s men who regularly
patrolled the property. The cartel had paid the old rancher extremely well for
his property, and, over the past year, transformed it into an important hub for
delivering drugs across the border.

The Viper
stepped up behind Trujillo and followed his gaze, at first finding nothing in
the open blue sky, but then she caught a reflective shimmer.

Trujillo was
right. There was something out there, and it definitely wasn’t a helicopter.

It took her
several seconds to realize what it was. She wasn’t too familiar with drones.
They’d never been a concern for her, not the way they were for the jihadists,
since drones were generally incapable of seeing through the jungle’s
protective, thickly layered canopies.

The Viper turned
and pushed two Zetas out of her way as she walked back to the trucks, where she
retrieved one of the long transit cases. She slid the case off the bed, set it
down on the ground, flipped the catches, opened the lid, peeled back the sheet
of packing foam, and removed the launcher, which came pre-armed with a
missile.