The Polaris Protocol (16 page)

F
elix Gomez had grown somewhat used to his situation. The violence of his abduction, the loss of control, and the feeling of impending doom all competed for his attention, but he’d managed to adjust. The first night had been the worst, when he’d been literally catatonic in fear, but that had steadily eroded as he realized that they meant to keep him for his worth and had no inclination to torture him for amusement. The night before he’d even managed to fall asleep. He’d had nightmares, but all in all he was holding up better than the others who were with him.

A man of about fifty and a boy not much older than him, both seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown, their faces reflecting a hollow shell devoid of hope.

Perhaps it was because of their respective timelines. The old man had told him he’d been here for over a week, and the younger one was running up against a week and a half. Felix knew the average time for successful negotiation and repatriation was five to seven days. After that, the kidnappers either felt they were being jerked around, or that the families simply couldn’t come up with the money, with the victim usually found dead alongside a dusty road, bound and blindfolded with packing tape. Another
encintado
to add to the statistics. Both of the men with him were running out of time and knew it.

Or perhaps it was the fact that he hadn’t been abused like the two other captives. The older one’s face was swollen, with a bloodshot, purple black eye, and he was missing his index finger on one hand, the stump covered in dirty cloth. A “proof of life” sent to someone to communicate that Los Zetas meant business. The younger one had a bandage on his upper arm that was mottled red, fresh blood seeping from the wound over the crust of the old. Felix had no idea what that represented, but nothing of the sort had happened to him. Maybe if he’d been treated to constant abuse, he’d be as mentally crushed as they were.

It might also have been his faith in his father. He knew Arturo Gomez would move heaven and earth to free him, and had the power and money to do so. He was sure they were tracking him right now, because he had an ace up his sleeve. Well, underneath his sleeve, that is. He unconsciously rubbed his left triceps, where his ace was buried.

Initially he was petrified the men would undress him when he was placed in the basement, but all they’d done was take anything that could have been of value for escape, such as his shoes and cell phone, leaving everything else as he wore it. Leaving his belt, which was much, much more valuable for escape than his cell phone. Had he been able to call, he had no idea what he would have said to get them to his location, but his belt was sending that out constantly.

He wondered if his father was even now planning his rescue.

The lights flashed on and his two roommates scurried to their designated eyebolts, the older one silently weeping.

Felix did the same, as the enforcer Felix had taken to calling El Barbudo, or the bearded one, came down the stairs. In one hand he held a fillet knife. In the other was a machete. He ignored the other two blubbering captives and came straight to Felix, throwing a pair of handcuffs at his feet. Felix manacled himself to the eyebolt.

His arms drawn out before him, his hands locked, El Barbudo gave him a choice. Tell which arm held the antikidnapping chip or have them both cut off with the machete. Felix felt his world collapse, the reason for the other boy’s upper-arm wound becoming crystal clear.

How did they know? How did they know?

He feigned innocence, and El Barbudo raised the machete, lightly touching the upper bicep of his right arm. Manacled to the eyebolt, his arm in perfect position for getting hacked off at the shoulder, Felix whispered the answer. Ten seconds later, he was screaming. A minute passed, and the man was holding the little device in his hand, covered in a coating of bodily fluid. He dropped it on the floor and stomped. The glass shattered with a small pop, the sound a tiny punctuation of Felix’s dwindling chances for survival.

El Barbudo unlocked his arms and tossed a bandage on the floor. He left, dropping the room into darkness yet again. Felix sat in the gloom, weeping, his face now reflecting the same hollow shell of the other two captives’.

Devoid of hope.

T
he pilot put me on hold, and I was sure it was just to aggravate me. Jennifer saw my face and pulled one hand off the wheel, slapping my shoulder. I glanced her way and she said, “Give him a break. He’s working the problem.”

From the back, looking at a tablet, Knuckles said, “Keep going straight. Right up ahead at the school. That’s the location. The last place his GPS pinged. The phone trace is about four miles away.”

I motioned for Jennifer to stop the car. There was no sense in driving around in circles, and if the target ended up being near the trace, I didn’t want to burn it by rolling aimlessly. We were far south of the city center, on the edges of Mexico City proper, located in a cul-de-sac with a primary school at the end. Why it pinged here at a dead end was beyond me, but there were a ton of parked cars, so maybe it was a transfer point to a different vehicle.

I stared at the phone, willing it to speak, and was startled when it did.

“Pike, this is Jim. We flew right over the plot and got nothing. We’re headed back to the airport.”

Damn it.

“Listen, that plot was general. All we know is it’s tied in some way. If I remember, you collect in a cone off the left side of the aircraft. Is that correct?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the capability.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, fine. I want you to do a slow left turn with that grid at the center. One loop, with like a two-mile radius.”

I heard nothing for a moment, then, “All right, all right. We’re looping now.”

We waited, knowing it would take only a minute or two, me putting the phone on speaker and setting it in the seat. It looked like Jennifer was actually holding her breath. Knuckles said, “What do you want to do if this fails? Hit the phone trace?”

Jennifer scowled as if he was putting out bad vibes. I said, “I don’t know. This will probably be it, unless the Taskforce can give us a lead to the threat from the other end. We can’t hit a phone just because the cop called it. We have no idea what it’s tied to.”

Jennifer snapped daggers at me with her eyes, and I knew we were going to part ways on how this shook out. She wanted her brother, but we were operating on the mission profile that the brother would lead to the threat. If we couldn’t find him, then he wasn’t worth Taskforce time that could be better spent working the problem from another direction. It was a hard truth, but it was reality.

I said, “Jennifer, if this doesn’t pan out, we need to turn what we know about your brother over to the proper authorities. It’s been forty-eight hours. Let them work his abduction while we do what we do: find the threat.”

“What good will the authorities do? The US won’t conduct any investigation down here, and you just watched a Mexican federal agent get killed because he was working for the cartels. You really want me to go to them?”

I started to say something and was cut off by the pilot. “Loop complete. Dry hole.”

Jennifer closed her eyes, her lips set into a grim line.

End of the road.

I said, “Roger, Jim. Thanks anyway. Get back and work your cover. File a flight plan for the US tomorrow. We’ll contact the Taskforce and give you further guidance.”

Jennifer said, “Bullshit! This is bullshit. I’m not giving up. You can fly back, but I’m staying.”

She pounded her fist into the dash, frustrated. I reached forward, grabbing her wrists. “Jennifer! Stop it.”

She glared at me as if I was at fault, and the pilot spoke again, the line still open. “Pike, Pike, we’re getting something.”

We all stared at the phone. I said, “What?”

“A string of SMS on the line. Apparently the backlog that hadn’t gotten out yet.”

No way.

“You’re getting SMS texts? Right now?”

“We
were
getting a steady stream, but it just stopped midtext. It’s dead.”

Jennifer was pinging off the seat, wanting to talk. I held up my finger and whispered, “Call the Taskforce. Let them know it’s coming.” She started dialing furiously, and I said to the pilot, “Get that data to the Taskforce. Tell them it’s from me. They’ll know what to do with it.”

Five minutes later we had the plot. Fifteen separate pings that were all on the same house. The last one time-stamped five hours before, which was ominous. Clearly, the SMS stream had been interrupted by something before it could complete the backlog of updates. Hopefully it was a dead battery.

The good news was the target was about four miles away as the crow flies, and within two hundred meters of the phone trace. Inside the circle of probable error.

The Taskforce had already pulled satellite photos, complete with an imagery analyst’s description of what they thought we were up against, which was a fairly large estate in a neighborhood full of large estates, called Bosques de las Lomas. I gave the tablet with the downloads to Knuckles, telling him to come up with a plan for in extremis assault, then called the rest of the team to my location.

While they were coming, Knuckles said, “You want to hit it now? Or wait until we can get some detailed intel from a recce? We don’t even have our shooting package here. Body armor, breaching charges, long guns, all that shit.”

I looked at Jennifer, who was frothing at the mouth, and said, “I’m leaning toward hitting it. What do you think?” Giving him the out.

He stared out the window for a moment, then exhaled. “Yeah, we need to go. It’ll be a two-hour round-trip for the kit, and we don’t have that kind of time. That data stream shutting down could be because of the cop’s phone call. Which means they could all be getting packaged for transport right now. We know the stream was active as of five minutes ago.”

I saw the tension leave Jennifer’s body and said, “So how do we hit it?”

“Well, an explosive breach is out of the question. I say low-vis and slow. Get in through the pool area. It looks like a damn jungle. Get over the wall and start from there. Taskforce hasn’t identified any guards on the outside, so we can make it to breach unobserved. My bet is they’re hiding in plain sight, using the exclusive neighborhood as security. Hell, the cops probably know it’s a
narco
house.”

“What’s your take on the manpower? I’m thinking no more than five. Just guards for the kidnapped folks. Enough to run errands and provide twenty-four/seven coverage.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t like Jennifer’s show in Ciudad Juárez. We know at least two are in there—Jack and Felix—but there may be more, and they may not be able to move on their own. We’ll need to secure the entire objective before exfil.”

I said, “You think we have the manpower for that? Four guys?”

“Five. Jennifer comes in with us. We’ll do the clearing, but she can help with security, hostage screening, and other shit, freeing us up to take every room with four on assault. Overwhelming them.”

I said, “Whoa. She’s not an assaulter. She can pull security outside for anyone coming up the drive. Give us early warning and other things, but she’s not coming in. Anyway, someone needs to stage for exfil.”

Jennifer cleared her throat from the front seat. I’d forgotten she was there. She said, “I’ll do it. I can do whatever you want.”

I said, “Jennifer, I get you want to save your brother, but let us handle this.”

I saw the other team vehicles pull up, and Knuckles said, “Remember what I told you in Turkmenistan? Is that happening here? Because we need her inside the target. She doesn’t enter, and I can’t recommend assault.”

Am I trying to protect her?
Jennifer wasn’t trained as an assaulter. She could shoot, no doubt about it, but she would only slow us down, and speed was the one edge we had. The one thing that would allow us to defeat everyone in the house, by moving faster than they could react individually. I saw Decoy and Blood get out of the cars and a thought sprang unbidden into my mind.

She’ll get hurt.

It was like a subconscious truth springing forth, clouding my deliberation, making me question my decisions. I trusted Knuckles’s judgment more than anyone on earth’s. Right now, more than my own. I asked, “You think she can handle it?”

He looked at her and said, “Yes, I do.”

In a weird bit of role reversal, Jennifer had finally made it to the inside, convincing Knuckles of her worth, and I was the one keeping her out of the action. Keeping her safe from harm. Protecting her because of what she meant to me.

Decoy opened the back door, looking at me expectantly.

I turned to Knuckles and said, “It’s your plan. Brief it.”

J
ennifer came over the barrier last, being the only one who could scale the fifteen-foot brick wall without any help. When she landed, she was sweating profusely from helping to push all four of us up. I don’t know why, but I found that funny.

I’d gone up first and waited on the top, the wall being about a foot wide at the apex, but luckily not embedded with broken bottles or strapped with razor wire. Blood, the designated point man, came next. I pulled him up, then hoisted up Knuckles. Once he was set on top, Blood and I both went over, giving us two guns on the ground if we ran into trouble instead of one man on his own.

The foliage was extremely thick, reminding me of working in the jungles of Panama. Blood had moved only a few feet, but I had to look hard to see him. The pool area was still out of view, but I knew it was only about fifty meters away.

After we had everyone together, spread in a tight wedge, I signaled Blood, and we began moving like a patrol at Ranger school, only with suppressed Glocks instead of any type of long gun.

We went about twenty meters before I saw Knuckles take a knee and hold his fist in the air, a relay from Blood. I followed suit and took a knee, looking at Knuckles. He shrugged, telling me he didn’t know why Blood had stopped. I saw him lean into Decoy, who whispered something. He then leaned my way and hissed a word I didn’t understand. When he saw I wasn’t getting it, he held his left hand like he was mimicking a pistol, index finger out but with the thumb inverted and pointing at the ground. The hand signal for
enemy
.

I tensed, getting ready for a fight, aggravated that I’d trusted the Taskforce analysts on the guard force outside the compound. He pointed again and hissed a word.

What the hell is he saying? “Fighter”?

I got sick of the dance and slid over to his position, keeping my voice low. “What is it? A guard?”

He whispered back, “No. A tiger.”

“A what?”

“A fucking tiger. Blood says there’s a tiger up there.”

I shook my head, trying to figure out what that meant. Blood was a former Recon Marine but had spent most of his time with the CIA in the Special Activities Division. I wracked my brain for some code word that we didn’t use in the Army but that he might have used as a Marine or paramilitary officer in the CIA.

And came up dry.

I slid through the foliage toward him, moving as slowly as I could. I reached his position and leaned into his ear. “What’s up?”

From a knee, he pointed forward, and sure as shit there was a Bengal tiger staring at us about ten feet away, its tail twitching and its mouth open and huffing.

My first thought was
How many others are in this little zoo?
but I didn’t get to dwell on it long, because the cat darted right at us. We both leapt up, our Glocks spitting rounds, and it kept coming.

Heedless of the noise, the entire team crashed backward, everyone now firing at the wraith coming through the jungle. I could see the bullets hitting its side, the forty-five slugs pummeling the body. The cat leapt in the air right at Decoy, hitting him in the chest and knocking him to the ground. Decoy jammed his barrel into its mouth and pumped two rounds, ending the fight. He kicked the beast off and stood, breathing hard.

He whispered, “Never get outta the boat.”

On a knee, we all began chuckling silently, except for Jennifer, who didn’t get the immortal line from
Apocalypse Now
. I whispered back, “That explains the lack of a guard force here.”

We waited in silence for an additional five minutes, checking to see if there would be a reaction from the house. I knew they couldn’t hear the suppressed weapons from this distance but wasn’t sure about the noise we’d made thrashing through the brush. When nothing appeared, I signaled Blood to continue.

We made it to the edge of the pool area without incident, keeping inside the vegetation, and Knuckles and I left the team, moving forward on our bellies for a view.

A giant wall of glass fronted the pool, and inside an ornate den I could see a man with a beard watching a wide-screen TV. I scanned the room and saw a door to the left, cracked open, which, being the only intel we were going to get, would be the first room we cleared after breach. To the right the glass wall continued on to a small gazebo, complete with a gigantic barbecue grill set into another expanse of brick and an outdoor fireplace.

How do they use all this stuff with a damn tiger roaming around?
I figured there was a cage for it somewhere in the jungle and let it go.

I scanned to the left of the glass and saw a large wooden door.
Breach point
. I looked at Knuckles and he nodded. I pulled back into the foliage, getting the team in close.

“There’s a breach to the left of the glass. Knuckles, you got it. Blood, you’re his backup. Remember, quiet as a mouse on the lock. Inside the house I can see one room with an open door. It’s on the left, and our first interior breach. I’ll take lead toward it.”

I turned to Jennifer. “There’s a man in the den sitting on a couch. That’s your target. You enter first and go right. You’ll see him. We’re coming in right behind and going left toward the door.”

She said, “I’m first in?”

“Yeah. He needs to be dealt with immediately, but I need all the rest of my guys to enter the room. I have no idea how big it is or what’s inside. Once he’s down, fall back to us. Pull security on the door we enter.”

She didn’t speak and I said, “You good with this?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good with it. Just didn’t think I’d be first.”

Knuckles winked at her, and I saw a little smile slip out before she began checking her weapon. I said, “Any questions?”

Nobody uttered a word. I tapped Knuckles on the shoulder, and the plan was in motion.