Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (28 page)

Chalmers stood beside the white Suburban parked on the apron, arms folded and wearing a scowl. I didn’t need to see his eyes behind the dark sunglasses to know they were following me.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked as Gomez and I walked toward the waiting Mexican Army Black Hawks.

“If anyone asks, US State Department oversight, according to Arlen,” Gomez replied.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You know what he did and so do we but where’s the proof?”

“We all heard his admission. How many excuses do we need to lock him up?”

“You slugged the guy. You can’t have us witnessing the confession on the one hand and turning a blind eye to the assault on the other.”

“Why not?”

“If you bring him down, he’ll take you with him, at least temporarily, and Arlen wants you on the case. He’s a distraction. You know who and what we’re dealing with better than anyone. Forget Chalmers. Sooner or later, we’ll get him. Or he’ll get himself. The system eventually flushes out guys like that. On the subject of flushing, we had to release Kirk Matheson’s uncle Matt, the SO’s operations commander. He was being held on suspicion of aiding and abetting his brother’s escape. Did you know that?”

I didn’t. I’d been away. “Who oversaw the search at Horizon, the one that missed the coke and the homies stuffed into the trailer?”

“No one’s taking the rap for that. The organization of the crime scene was over-complicated by the presence of so many agencies. It got extra messy when the press started snooping around, trying to pin the blame on the donkey. Think of a roomful of law enforcement types each pointing the finger at the other and you’ve got the picture.”

Commander Matt Matheson wasn’t one of my favorite people, but innocent is innocent. Apparently you can’t lock someone up for being an ass.

Heading out on the day’s mission was a ragtag collection of hastily thrown-together anti-drug types:
Federales
, Mexican Army Special Forces, agents provided by SIEDO – the Mexican Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime – US DEA special agents, a bomb disposal team, an OSI special agent, me, and an observer from the Texas Rangers, Gomez.

Frankly, I knew it would be a waste of time going in. The Mexican President was pissed at the US authorities for sending armed drones into Mexican airspace, and the Mexican Army paid us back by processing the request for this mission when it felt like it. And it didn’t feel like it.

So now we were arriving three days after my noisy escape, long after the horse, with Apostles on top, had bolted. We were also departing from Juárez International, the airport servicing Cartel Central and crawling with
halcones
armed with cell phones, so while the Black Hawks were all painted low-vis green, they might as well have been painted with pink and white polka dots for all the stealth that provided.

The four choppers dusted off in a cloud of grit and flew out to the west, a column of black smoke rising into the clear blue desert sky marking the spot. The flight time was less than twenty minutes. Arriving at the encampment, the pilots flew an orbit of the destruction below and then landed.

The law enforcement and military potpourri all disembarked and fanned out through the smoking rubble at a crouch, M4s and AR-15s raised and at the ready. I stayed back, took my helmet and vest off and left it all in the Black Hawk.

“What are you doing?” asked Gomez.

“There’s no one here but us chickens. We’re not going to find squat.”

“What about booby traps?”

“Why would they bother? Half the folks here are probably on the take anyway and Apostles won’t want to randomly kill a possible asset. Not his style. Like I said before we took off, this is a waste of time. If we do find anything, it has been planted for us to find.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

I could only see one good reason. “We’re here to be nice and predictable. Coming all the way out here to search the encampment is what we
would
do.”

“I think you’re giving Apostles too much credit,” said Gomez. “He’s no super villain.”

“Perez might be a straight up and down sociopathic killer with a need that has to be stoked, but Apostles is different. He comes off in some ways like an uncle, someone you can like and trust, but all the while he’s weighing you, judging you, assessing your likely reactions, and feeding you stimulus to guide your actions.” I looked at the armed soldiers and law enforcement hunting through the rubble but getting nowhere. “I dunno … I just have the feeling I’ve been played. We’ve all been played and the strings are still being pulled. Three days ago I escaped a prison cell guarded by a thousand guys on motorcycles, in a truck. Apostles was even there to wave me goodbye. I like to think I’m good. But am I
that
good?”

The men were starting to wander back toward us, their weapons no longer at the ready, the body language relaxed. Like I said, there was nothing doing.

“So what have we missed?” Gomez wondered.

I needed time to think about that so I went for a stroll through the rubble of the encampment on my own. And then I took a tour around the circumference of the place, while several of the men back at the Black Hawks shifted their weight from leg to leg, impatient to get going. On the ground, the breeze had shifted the sand and the dust around since the camp had been evacuated and destroyed, but there were still tracks. It intrigued me that none of them were bike tracks. Looked to me like everything and everyone had been packed into those trucks.

“They’re out there somewhere. Unfortunately it’s a big somewhere,” Gomez said when I rejoined him. His foot rested on a lump of scorched cinderblock while he squinted into the horizon wobbling in the midmorning heat haze.

“They could’ve left us a forwarding address,” I said.

“So what now? We can’t search the whole of north Mexico. Do we wait for them to come to us?”

“That’s what worries me,” I said.

“What does?”

“We’re counting on Columbus being the target. What if it isn’t?”

*

US Army 1st Armored Division Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Needleman commanding the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team’s 4th Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, chewed on a toothpick while he checked the map. The colonel’s baby face, immaculately pressed uniform and hair parted crisply low on the side of his head made him look like this was his first day at school.

“Mendoza, what do you think?”

The colonel’s adjutant, Captain Manny Mendoza, a young, fit man with three fingers on his right hand apparently left behind somewhere in Afghanistan, summed it up pretty quick. “No problem, sir. We dig the battalion in here, here and here. With support from three or four Bradley Fighting vehicles, the threat as we know it should be easily contained. And for insurance, we can get a couple of AC-130s put on standby out of Cannon AFB. Can we expect any cooperation from the Mexican Army?” Mendoza asked.

“In a word, no,” Chalmers replied. “We believe they’re enjoying watching us sweat. Not that they’d ever admit it.”

“What do you think, gentlemen?” Needleman looked at Arlen and me and exchanged his toothpick for a fresh one from a silver case lifted from his breast pocket.

“Sounds good to me,” said Arlen. “Cooper?”

“No problem, as long as Columbus is the target. But what if they hit somewhere else?” I said. “Somewhere like El Paso?”

Needleman seemed indifferent. “Not my problem. CIA said the target was Columbus.”

“It’s Columbus,” Chalmers reconfirmed. “It’s certainly not El Paso. You think the cartel would hit the home of Fort Bliss?”

“Doesn’t look to me like we’ve got alignment here,” said Needleman, nodding in my direction.

Chalmers shook his head, running out of patience. “We’ve been over this at least a dozen times, Cooper. Everything you’ve told us – everything debriefed from Whelt – points to Columbus. And there’s the Pancho Villa connection, let’s not forget that.”

“What Pancho Villa connection?” Needleman asked, an eyebrow raised. “I was led to believe CIA had this one nailed down.”

Yeah, like Jell-O to the ceiling.

“We have good reason to believe that what the cartel plans is a copycat raid on Columbus that mirrors an attack by Pancho Villa on the town,” said Chalmers. “And, I might add, there is no intelligence that points to the target being El Paso or anywhere else. Am I right about that, at least, Cooper?”

I was reluctant to give him this, but I had no place to go. “At the moment, correct – there is no firm alternative target.”

“Thank you. Then we should plan for what we do know, shouldn’t we?” Chalmers was getting way too triumphant for my liking.

“Do you have an understanding of the Pancho Villa attack?” Chalmers asked the army.

Mendoza handled the reply “Sir, Villa, a revolutionary general, brought five hundred men across the Rio Grande to attack the army base there. Villa’s force was badly mauled in the attack, but the general himself escaped and fled back across the border. Washington sent a thousand men after him, led by Black Jack Pershing. They never caught Villa, but General Pershing and his men caused a lot of damage to US–Mexico relations.”

So in short, yes, they had an understanding.

“This have anything to do with the shit that went down at Horizon Airport?” asked Needleman.

Chalmers nodded. “The force that hit Horizon is the same one heading for Columbus, only with ten times the numbers.”

“You can be sure we’ll give them bastards a real Texas-friendly welcome from Old Ironsides then,” the colonel said, standing. Mendoza also stood. “We’d better get a move along. The 20th is only the day after tomorrow.”

“Be good to have a recon force held back for rapid reaction purposes,” I said.

“And put at whose disposal, Cooper?” Chalmers wanted to know. “Yours?”

Needleman and Mendoza glanced at each other, the animosity between Chalmers and me taking its clothes off and parading around naked.

“Why me?” I smiled sweetly. “I’m not a combat commander.”

“No, you’re not.” Chalmers had a look of victory. If he’d had a band, he’d have struck it up.

“Still not convinced about Columbus, Special Agent?” Needleman asked.

“Insurance. Couldn’t hurt.”

Chalmers sighed heavily and lifted his eyes to the heavens for support, and I thought right about now would be a good time for that Jell-O to drop.

Needleman looked at Mendoza, who shrugged. “We’ll see what we can do, Major Cooper.”

After a round of handshakes, the army left.

“Are you on this team, Cooper?” Chalmers wanted know, hands on hips, weak chin jutted forward.

“Not if it’s the side of easy answers,” I told him.

Chalmers couldn’t hide his exasperation. “Okay then, Cooper, for the sake of unity, let’s run through it again.”

“After you,” I said.

Chalmers believed emphatically that he was right and enjoyed laying out what we knew and what we’d been told to prove his point. And though much of the reasoning for his belief in Apostles’ choice of target had come from me, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that we were doing exactly what Apostles wanted us to do.

“So,” said Chalmers once he’d finished his five-minute burst of condescension, “point out the flaw, Cooper. Where have I got it wrong?”

“I can’t see it.”

“Good.”

“Which is why I think Apostles is gonna cornhole us.”

Chalmers picked up his notes and limped out of the room. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

I shrugged. It wasn’t my job to be agreeable. There were lives at stake and I knew better than Chalmers what Apostles and Perez were capable of.

Arlen approached the map. “Vin, help me out here. I trust your instincts.”

“One,” I said, “Apostles positioned his base just fifty miles to the south of the town. What if he did that to make Columbus
appear
to be the obvious choice? Two, let’s say he reinforced that by dangling the whole Pancho Villa thing in my face, which he did on several occasions. Three, Apostles and Perez never fully trusted me, even after those theatrics pulled by Gomez and company in Juárez. Looking back on it, they never confirmed or denied anything in my presence. Four, there was the ease with which I escaped from their base. What if they let me go just to be their messenger?” I gave up on the fingers. “Look, Whelt also readily confirmed Columbus as the target and he even gave us the date of the attack. Finally, there’s Apostles himself. I thought he might be a little mad, but I’ve met several people I trust who think he’s anything but. Add all that up and I get the picture of a man who knows what he’s doing, one who wants us to believe that he’s gonna hit Columbus. Conclusion? Columbus probably isn’t the target.”

“If he’s as smart as you think he is, this could be a double-double bluff,” said Gomez. “You know – he’s made you think it’s a target other than the one he’s put right in front of you, so you run off chasing alternatives and leave the bull’s-eye unguarded.”

“Thanks, Gomez,” I said. “If he’s that clever, we’re screwed.”

Arlen chewed something off the inside of his bottom lip. “Would Apostles seriously consider attacking El Paso?”

Was it warm out here, or was it nerves? The summer temperature at one-thirty in the morning on the desert floor was close to eighty degrees Fahrenheit and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that we were in the wrong place at the right time, so maybe it was a little of both.

The stars were out in their billions, brilliant points of light that, in the lenses of the night vision goggles, were fluoro green. Somewhere unseen among them were MQ-1 Predator drones – unarmed – flying reconnaissance. Five hundred men dug into the desert should be enough to repel a mobile force of a thousand, but nothing was ever certain in a gunfight.

I rubbed a gloved hand across my forearm to squash something biting the exposed skin, the harvester ants doing what they do. And in the forefront of my mind the scorpions were here too, the compact super poisonous ones. Have I mentioned that I hate scorpions? The fuckers make me break out in four letter words.

While Gomez and I were armed with M4s, we were there just to observe. Assuming that there was fighting ahead, the First Armored Division, “Old Ironsides” would wage it. These were good men, well trained, veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Feeling any better about all this?” Gomez asked.

“Overjoyed,” I said.

“Nothing’s happening.”

“They trained in daylight. They’ll come at dawn.”

“
If
they come,” said Gomez.

“So now you’re having second thoughts?” I asked.

“Doubt is infectious.”

It was. There was nothing to do other than wait out the night and see what eventuated, so I closed my eyes and then suddenly came awake with a sharp intake of breath. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Two twenty-two,” said Gomez. “Welcome back.”

While asleep, my subconscious had sifted something important that Captain Mendoza had said out of the debris clogging most of my waking thoughts – that unconscious me at work again. “C’mon. We’re getting outta here.”

Gomez yawned. “Where are we going?”

“We have to reach that ready reaction force and get it in the air.”

“What?” I heard him say, but I was already on the move.

He got up and followed and we ran at a crouch back through the support vehicles and jumped into a jeep, another Jeep Patriot, but this one hired from Dollar. Seemed only fair to spread the risk. Gomez threw himself into the passenger seat and buckled up. “Give me something I can believe in, Cooper. You’re talking in your sleep and suddenly you’re up and sprinting. Who, what, where and when?”

I fired up the jeep and stood on the gas. “We think Apostles is gonna strike Columbus because that’s the town Villa hit,” I shouted above the engine and wheelspin. “We didn’t stop to think
why
Villa chose to attack Columbus.”

“Because maybe Columbus was the only thing around here back then?”

“There was El Paso. It was bigger, richer. But he chose Columbus back then because El Paso with Fort Bliss was a nut too big to crack – like today.”

The Black Hawks held on standby with a reinforced rifle platoon – about fifty guys – were only a mile behind Needleman’s line and, through the NVGs, I could pick out the silhouettes of the helicopters’ tail rotors against the stars. “Mendoza said Villa attacked the US Army outpost at Columbus. Remember? But the army’s no longer in Columbus. If Apostles wants to emulate Villa, he’s not coming here. Like I said, he just wants us to
believe
that’s where he’s going.”

I turned in toward the choppers, stomped on the brakes and came to a sliding stop, my door open while we were still moving.

“Hey, Cooper, stop!” Gomez snapped. “Wait a minute!”

I held the door open and checked my watch: 2:32 am. “Look, the target’s not Columbus because there’s no longer a military outpost there. And it’s not El Paso for the same reason Villa gave the place a wide berth back in the day. But Apostles still wants to use the Pancho Villa imagery, hence the 20 July date for the attack – the anniversary of the general’s death. But he wants to hit something military, just like Villa did, and let’s say it’s something with a runway so that he can again utilize those black King Airs.”

“What? Wait a second, you’ve lost me.”

“Look, Gomez, we’re wasting time here.”

“What are we doing, Cooper?”

“Okay . . . Arlen suggested the raid on Horizon Airport wasn’t just about dropping off a load of cocaine. Remember?” I said. “What if it was part of a dress rehearsal for something a lot bigger and badder?”

“Using the buzzards,” said Gomez.

“It’s a reasonable assumption. Once again they’ll come in low, under the radar. But this time they’ll land around forty assassins who’ll quietly secure the front gate for the dirt-bike-mounted infantry that have jumped the border fence or the river or whatever. I think Apostles and Perez are gonna hit
a US military installation
. That’s the missing link.”

“Then all we have to do is make a phone call. If we give one base an itch, every base within a hundred miles of the border is going to be scratching, on heightened alert.”

“Only this is a new kind of warfare,” I reminded him. “And no one really knows exactly what’s coming at them. With uncertainty on their side, the two-pronged assault like the one I believe is in the cards would be devastating.”

“I’m still not convinced there’s cause for alarm. Lay this insight on Arlen and, as I said, wherever the attack comes, the installation’s security forces will be on alert.”

“Yeah, except their primary task will be to secure base infrastructure. But Apostles and Perez are not really interested in infrastructure. They’ll be going for the resource that’s unprotected, the same one they hit at Horizon –
the people
.”

The full audacity of it finally hit Gomez. “Oh, shit …” he whispered.

“Like I said, it’s not Bliss – that place is way too big. So give me a town with a smallish US military base that sits on the border.”

Gomez didn’t have to think about it too long. “You mean … like Del Rio?”