Damage Control (42 page)

A
s soon as Palma told him the story of Maria’s rescue, and the bombings, Felix realized that they would attempt to use his tunnels as a means to get out of the country. The question was which one?

He had a vast array of smuggling tunnels—at least eight of them currently in operation—that circulated literally tons of drugs into the United States every year. The Americans were such morons. While they distracted themselves with debates over whether or not to built a multibillion-dollar fence along the border, Felix and a few of his competitors owned the subterranean real estate—just as surely as they owned American Border Patrol agents and the owner of the properties on the other side where the tunnels rose back to the surface.

Every now and then, Felix would tip off the El Paso police and the local news media so that they could discover one of his less productive tunnels and make a show for the American public about the hard work they were doing to stop the flow of drugs into their country. Each new discovery would boost a bureaucrat’s career. In their gratitude, they would only look but so hard for the next tunnel.

As a new generation of politicians and civil servants came to power in America—many of them current or reformed consumers of the products Felix created—it became progressively easier to smuggle drugs into the United States. As long as he handed the Americans enough victories in their drug war to allow the politicians to preen, and he cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide protection for their clandestine launch platforms and listening bases throughout Central America, they stayed out of his way, going so far as to falsify reports to their handlers back in Langley. For that last part—the falsified reports—Felix paid several chiefs of station up to twice their legitimate salaries in thank-you gifts.

Of them all, Trevor Munro had been the most demanding—and, in the end, the most ungrateful.

Until yesterday, Felix had never believed Munro’s claims that he’d had no knowledge of the Colombian incursion that had killed Mitchell Ponder and cost him so much. Who but the American military, after all, could have pulled off that kind of operation with such precision? Now that they’d lured the same operators into Mexico, their ingenuity and capacity for violence made Munro’s denials more credible.

But the American commandoes were still but a few against many, and soon they would be dead. Palma’s guess that they would choose the nearest tunnel had turned out to be correct. And now, according to his last report, they were surrounded.

Soon, they would be dead, and this long, annoying distraction would finally be over.

Even better, if Felix’s intelligence gatherers were correct, Munro would soon be the associate deputy director of the CIA, with access to all of that agency’s assets. He’d be in a position where one word from Felix could bring him down, with a future measured in prison time.

This blooming reality was far greater than any fantasy Hernandez had ever dared to dream.

One million candlepower.

For the last twenty years, that had been the standard wattage for helicopter searchlights. Jonathan figured that was the minimum wattage of the beam that lit them up, and he could tell from the way that Boxers ripped at his NVGs that the blast of light had damn near blinded him. When he swerved, he ran head-on into three steel-and-concrete bollards that stood sentry outside a warehouse building.

“God
damn
it!” Boxers yelled. The plume of steam from under the hood told them that the Sandcat was dead.

As the chopper continued to circle overhead, the floodlight remained fixed on the ruined vehicle, a beacon to the horde of pissed-off soldiers who would soon be racing after them.

“Big Guy, you all right?”

“I
so
want to kill somebody right now!” Cursing, he undid his harness and shouldered his door open. He grabbed his ruck and shouted, “Where’s my weapon?”

Jonathan handed it to him, and without pausing even a beat, Boxers rolled out of the Sandcat, pressed the weapon to his shoulder and fired two quick rounds into the artificial sun that had lit them up.

The chin light flared and went black. You just don’t get to see marksmanship like that very often.

Palma saw the shooter step out of the vehicle and drop to his knee, and as the enormous man took aim, he thought for sure that his bullet was somehow going to go straight between his eyes. In the wash of the light, the muzzle flash registered more as smoke than light. The world went dark, and Palma could not have been more impressed.

“Set us down!” he commanded.

Instead, the pilot pulled pitch and they rose higher.

“Down there!” Palma yelled. “Our prey is down there!”

The gunfire had frazzled the pilot. He was not trained in combat tactics. His job was to track traffic and deliver VIPs to their venues of choice. Getting shot at was not part of the deal.

“Everybody out!” Jonathan commanded. “Everybody bring weapons.” God knew they had a big enough selection. Jonathan shrugged back into his ruck, and by the time he stood to his full height outside the vehicle, the others had gathered in a semicircle.

“Where are we going, Maria?”

She seemed startled by the realization that they were depending on her to be their guide. “I haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “I don’t know where we are, exactly.”

In the distance, Jonathan heard the sound of approaching vehicles. If he used his imagination, he could see the distant phantoms of red and blue emergency lights. Staying put was out of play. He had to assume that the people in the chopper had weapons, and a stationary target would be their greatest gift.

“Okay, this way,” he said. Relying on instinct and his memory of the map he’d studied on his GPS, he led them off in what had to be north. “Stay close to the buildings and move fast.”

In the canyons created by the low-rise warehouse buildings, the chopper overhead appeared to be everywhere. The grinding hum of the rotor blades pounded the night from all directions.

The fact that the aircraft had had a chin light in the first place gave Jonathan hope that the flight crew didn’t have night vision, but hope was a lot like prayer—always welcome, but rarely dependable for results. The chopper would find a place to set down soon, and in the meantime, the crew was no doubt working the radio to coordinate ground forces.

They needed to keep moving.

“Maria, is any of this looking familiar?”

“It all looks familiar,” she said. “The buildings all look the same. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”

“What’s the unit number again?”

“Twelve-seventy, I think.”

“You think?”

“That’s what I remember.”

“Is that the number you gave to the FBI?”

“I think so, yes.”

Jonathan felt a swell of anger, but he swallowed it down. What was it about civilians that once the tension ratcheted up, made everything become a question? No one was sure of anything anymore. Well, there was a solution for that.

Jonathan tapped the transmit button on his chest. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

In Fisherman’s Cove, Venice jumped when the SkysEye image refreshed and she saw the wrecked vehicle, the horror of the image made even worse by the fact that Jonathan hadn’t checked in afterward.

She was just reaching for the transmit switch when her speakers popped. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

Relief. She fought hard to keep the emotion out of her voice as she replied, “Is everybody all right? Looks like a bad wreck.”

“We’re fine, but we’re in trouble. A little lost in the forest. Can you talk us in?”

Venice spun her chair a little to view a different screen. “Where are you exactly? I won’t get another satellite image for two, almost three minutes.”

A pause. “We’re in front of unit seven-thirteen.”

“Stand by one,” she said.

“We don’t have much more than one,” Jonathan quipped. “The quicker the better.”

Anticipating a challenge like this, Venice had called up a schematic for the storage facility over an hour ago. It appeared on her screen as checkerboard of north–south streets intersecting with east–west streets. Depending on size, some blocks had more units than others.

She keyed her mike. “From seven-thirteen, you need to go five blocks north and three blocks east.”

“Roger,” Scorpion said. “Keep an eye on the SkysEye feed. I know the bad guys are close, but I don’t have a visual. We need to know where they are.”

“Will do,” she said.

Venice hated this part of her job—the passive watching and waiting while people she cared about fought for their lives. She knew they needed her—that the technology she tamed and interpreted was as critical to every mission as the weaponry wielded by the guys, but from this far away, the team felt very small and terribly isolated.

When her image finally refreshed, she used thermal imagery to find Jonathan and the team, and was pleased to see that they were making progress toward the target building. When she saw that the pursuing troops were taking the wrong path, she smiled.

The happiness evaporated in an instant when she realized what she was
really
seeing.

Jonathan’s earbud popped. “Scorpion, they’re trying to flank you on your right. It looks like they’ve figured out where you’re going.”

He and Boxers said it together: “Shit.”

“What?” Tristan asked.

Jonathan keyed his mike. “Any chance we’ll get there first?”

“They’ve got vehicles.”

Not the question he’d asked, but it was an answer nonetheless.

Jonathan played the next few minutes out in his mind, and it all came down to a firefight that they couldn’t possibly win. Surrender was not an option, so that left only a third alternative. If only he knew what it was.

“I’m open to suggestions, Big Guy,” he said.

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something, Boss. Meanwhile, is it your plan to keep jogging toward the ambush?”

Stopping made no sense. They had no defensive positions and they were outgunned. They’d lost the elements of surprise. So, what did that leave? If only storage units had secondary entrances.

Wait. That was it. “We’ll go in through the back door,” he announced.

Boxer gave him The Look. “What back door?”

“How much det cord do you have?”

The Big Guy beamed. “Enough to make a lot of back doors,” he said.

Jonathan keyed his mike. “Mother Hen, I need the name of the street that runs parallel to the one with our target building.”

Tristan was growing tired of the mysterious communications between Scorpion and the Big Guy. He got that they had somebody talking in their ear, but Tristan had a stake in this thing, too, you know? The least they could do was speak in complete sentences, or maybe even relay what it was they were talking about.

He was also tired of being the only one who seemed to struggle with the running. His lungs had burned before, but now with this huge bruise on his chest, the pain was even worse. The vest swung a little on his body with every step, and with each swing, it felt as if someone were poking a finger into the center of the sore spot.

And where were all the police and soldiers? Not to jinx anything, but after all that shooting, he’d have thought there’d be a little more hubbub.

Without warning, Scorpion and the Big Guy slid to a stop in the middle of the road.

“Okay, Tristan and Maria, there’s been a change in plans.”

Tristan felt something dissolve inside him. Every time Scorpion said something like that, life got a lot shittier.

As if to prove the point, the night became day as floodlights jumped to life from high atop God only knew how many poles.

The invaders’ night vision was no longer an advantage. Palma felt proud that he’d thought of finding and throwing the main power switch that he knew had to be here somewhere.

The flanking maneuver was really just an extension of the strategy that Palma had put together to catch Harris and his team at Maria’s house. Surround the one place they had to go, and wait for the prey to arrive. It was the most logical play, and therefore one that he had no choice but to deploy.

Because it was logical, and therefore obvious, he worried that his enemy would once again get a step ahead.

This time, he held back a reserve of eight men, two each to cover the likely escape routes if the criminals tried to get away.

Meanwhile, Palma himself took Sergeant Sanchez and three of the surviving members of his original team and pursued his prey on foot.

Harris and company would have to be near panic now as they realized that they were being driven to a killing zone. Palma would enjoy watching them die.

He and his tiny squad moved carefully yet quickly as they pursued their targets north and east inside the storage compound. Hernandez had been very specific about the location of his smuggling tunnel. It was the single destination for Harris to target, so therefore it made no sense for them to lie in hiding along the way. As they got closer, he’d slow down.

On the other hand, if he heard shooting, he’d know that it was time to run in earnest.

Stealth no longer mattered. Bathed in light, their final advantage had been stripped away. From this point forward, survival was all about speed.

All they had to do was outrun a shitload of people who were all bent on killing them. Jonathan grabbed Tristan by the vest and pulled him close. “Listen to me,” he said. “Do exactly as I say. Are you good with that?”

Tristan’s eyes were twice their normal size and they showed terror.

“You can’t panic on me, son. Do you understand that?”

“Yes. Yes, I understand.”

“Okay.” Jonathan spun him ninety degrees so that he was facing west. “You keep an eye on the end of the block. If you see a person—I mean, if you see
anyone
, shoot them. Set your selector on full-auto, and try to keep it to three-round bursts. A lot of them. Remember what we talked about. Keep the butt tightly in your shoulder, and get a lot of bullets downrange. Even if you don’t hit anything, you’ll keep their heads down. Can you do that?”