Target Deck - 02 (20 page)

“Hey, you okay?”

Deckard looked up and saw one of the Samruk men hanging out the driver's side window.

“We've got two missions about to kick off simultaneously. They need you back in the OPCEN.”

Deckard turned and climbed aboard the truck. With a puff of black smoke from the exhaust pipe they left the airport. It was a quick drive to the Samruk compound. Jumping out of the back of the truck, he walked into the OPCEN where Cody and Frank sat quietly, monitoring several ongoing operations.

The projector was in standby, a blue rectangle was the only image being projected on the wall.

“The Agency just cut our ISR feed,” Frank said without looking up from his computer. “You did something to piss them off.”

“Cody?”

“Yeah?”

“When I uploaded those videos to your server I also dumped the contents of the smart phone. You'll find the e-mail for a Case Officer named Grant. I want you to mail him about twenty five percent of the videos I uploaded.”

Cody's hands flew across the keyboard.

“It is sending now,” Cody said as they watched the green bar on the computer screen move as it uploaded the MPEG files. “Ok, it has been sent.”

“What is going on here?”

“A lot since you've been gone,” Frank answered. “We got word through interrogations of how Jimenez has nearly a hundred men down in Guatemala conducting para-military training. He has recalled them and they will be leaving tomorrow morning.”

“We have to ambush them before they get here,” Deckard said. “If they arrive in Oaxaca they will go underground and fight an unconventional war.”

“That's what we've been working on. I've been in touch with the Agency since you took off on whatever errand they had you run. The Guatemalans have had enough with the cartels so their military was more than happy to provide an aircraft. The real trouble was locating the camp.”

“They should be about five minutes out,” Cody announced.

“We can't know for certain until this fucking ISR feed gets unscrambled,” Frank said irritably.

“So the Guatemalan military provided an aircraft for us to use and gave up the location of the camp?”

“No, it is somewhere in the highlands not far across the border. That area is facing its own cartel insurgency and the government forces don't have much of presence there. I looked over the antenna array you brought back from that objective before you left and figured out how it worked. Cody and I were able to back trace their signals part way into Guatemala as it skipped across cell phone towers. At some point it hit a repeater station and the frequency was converted into VHF which we were unable to trace.”

“And not even the CIA or NSA has the assets in place to track something as antiquated as VHF. Who uses a walkie-talkie these days?” Cody interjected.

“Well, thanks to Al Qaeda playing these games with us in the Middle East we have developed the assets. Now with the war winding down, many of those assets are being shifted to Central and South America, lucky for us.”

“How did it go down?”

“As I understand it they flew an F-16 from a carrier to Galeta Island and then on to the target area that I determined. The fighter was outfitted with a Liberty Blue SIGINT collection package that allowed us to determine where the VHF signals were terminating. I would compliment you Deck, you really forged an alliance with Uncle Sugar instead of burning bridges like you usually do. They came through for us, but then,” Frank pointed to the blank projection on the wall, “you went ahead and fucked it all up.”

“OP-1 just called in the airfield as being clear,” Cody announced. “I'm going to radio the Dakota and give them the green light.”

“Wait until they get a load of who is on some of those videos with underage kids,” Deckard frowned. “I think that ISR feed will be coming back up any second now.”

“At least we got a location for the camp. It is up in the mountains of Quiche, about fifty klicks south of the Mexican border. We got our boys loaded up in a Guatemalan Air Force Dakota and off the ground just before you got back. They are almost on target. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. We also borrowed some static line parachutes from the Guatemalan Army.”

“The Kazakhs aren't airborne qualified,” Deckard choked.

“They will be in about three minutes when Pat kicks them out of the door at five hundred feet,” Frank said before spitting brown Copenhagen juice into an empty Styrofoam cup.

Just then the ISR feed kicked back in, some stooge in Langley having shit his pants when he spotted the House Minority Leader on one of Bashir's videos with a fourteen year old girl and made a desperate phone call to the US Air Force who was flying the drone circling over Guatemala. Deckard had documented evidence against some very powerful people, and that in turn made him a very powerful person.

Deckard's jaw dropped as he watched tiny black forms falling out both doors of the Dakota airplane. Their parachutes were inflating just moments before they collided with the jungle airstrip below them.

Kurt Jager was impressed.

The Zapatistas had been living in the jungle long enough that they knew the terrain and knew how to move in it. The entire mission had been a rush to interdict the cartel para-military soldiers before they could depart the camp and cross back into Mexico. More than once it looked like they had faced obstacles that they would not be able to overcome only to have everything work out at the last moment. Having a certain three letter agency greasing the wheels certainly didn't hurt.

He had not even met Commandente Zero but one of his sub-commanders when he requested two Zaptista rebels to take along with him and Pascal, one of the former 7th Special Forces Group Sergeants that Deckard had contracted. They had a half assed comms system but it worked. Kurt had just crept into their Observation Post and got eyes on the objective area. He got on his MBITR radio and called the all clear to the Mission Support Site. The airstrip was empty and quiet. The MSS consisted of Pascal and the other Zapatista who used a SATCOM radio to communicate with their compound back in Oaxaca.

The mission had been green lit.

UAVs could do a lot of reconnaissance work, but nothing beat having actual recce operators getting eyes on the objective.

Kurt Jager and Gomez, his Zapatista partner lay on their bellies in the thick growth next to the airfield trying to ignore the mosquitoes buzzing in their ears.

They didn't have to wait long. In minutes the Dakota was roaring overhead, coming in low and a slow on a heading parallel with the muddy jungle airstrip.

Pat stepped out into the darkness, the scorching hot exhaust from the airplane and smell of burning fuel stinging his eyes for a nano-second before gravity whipped him down and away. His T-10Charlie parachute was snapped into a static line running the length of the inside of the Dakota aircraft so that when the line was extended, it caught and yanked his parachute out as he fell.

As the round parachute deployed, the straps dug tight into his thighs and shoulders. Rocking from side to side by the suspension lines, he reached down and released his assault pack, lowering it on a nylon line below him. The former Delta Force operator couldn't see the ground through the darkness but he wasn't taking any chances, he had a bad experience jumping from an airplane not all that long ago.

Everything was quiet for one single moment as he drifted down through the night. Hearing his assault pack make contact with the ground, he prepared to land by pulling an overhand slip and tugging down on the main lift webbing of the parachute. Keeping his feet and knees together, Pat rolled to the side as his boots hit the ground.

Laying in the dirt, he breathed a sigh of relief as the parachute deflated around him.

As jumpmaster, had been the last out of the aircraft and was now able to see that they had successfully landed on the jungle airstrip. The surrounding terrain was rough mountain highlands and would have been a death warrant had they drifted off the drop zone.

Moving with urgency, he quickly shrugged out of the parachute harness. He had to establish a Control Point with Sergeant Major Korgan while the assault elements had to move out to their objectives. They were only a platoon strong and needed as much of an element of surprise as they could get. Cartel guards were probably already waking up the rest of the camp.

Pat reached into his M-1950 canvas gun case and secured his Kalashnikov and then grabbed his assault pack. He wore his chest rig with additional magazines for the rifle under his parachute rigging for the jump so he would have it close by when he needed it. The Kazakhs were coming off the runway, some of the them limping, a couple were being carried by their buddies.

Their first parachute insertion had taken place after only a few hours of instruction and then they were jumping out of a plane at only five hundred feet and at night. They knew that they would take a few casualties on the drop but it was a calculated risk. They could treat a few broken ankles and use the injured for static security when they got back to the compound. It all had to be weighed against the casualties that they would take if the 100-man para-military force engaged them in direct combat, on their terms, and with the home field advantage in Mexico.

Better to sort these fuckers out here and now
, Pat thought to himself.

Gunfire was already breaking out, the odd green colored tracer round soaring through the night sky when Pat got his long whip antenna up and broke squelch.

“OP-One this is Alpha-One,” he said into the hand mic.

“This is OP-One,” Kurt Jager's voice came over the command net.

“Our boys are hitting their RV and will be moving out shortly. Are there any complications we should know about?”

“Just one,” Kurt said from his Observation Point somewhere nearby. “We have spotted the ingress route to the camp. It isn't wide enough to get vehicles up but looks like a footpath.”

Pat was the Ground Force Commander and ultimately in charge of the entire mission with Deckard out of the picture.

“We are already light on personnel after the jump,” Pat told him. “Can your element break down the OP and lay in an ambush along the trail?”

“Give us a couple minutes. We'll link up with our MSS and get it done.”