The ICE representative was a small, dark agent named Ray Mondragon, although everyone called him “Razor” because of the long, thin scar that bisected his right brow and cheek. He was seated on the right side of the table in his customary forest green cargo pants and T-shirt with his agency’s shield on the breast. He’d split his childhood between living on the O’odham Reservation and in a Tucson barrio, which meant that not only did he know this area better than anyone, he had the kind of relationship with the police departments, both on and off the reservation, to seal it off at a moment’s notice. He served as liaison with the Border Patrol, which brought to the table a veritable army of agents, air and land vehicles, and a SWAT team with specialized desert-combat training, known as BORTAC.
Agent Travis Becker of the ATF sat across from Mondragon, his heels on the table and his omnipresent cap pulled so low on his forehead that none of them had ever seen his eyes. His team had its finger on the pulse of the smuggling arteries through the vast desert and a network of informants both stateside and in Mexico.
DEA Special Agent James Templeton, who’d been hand-selected for this operation after a successful run in Miami through the cocaine-crazed eighties, assumed a position at the head of the table. As the senior officer, he served as de facto leader and dealt directly with Marchment back in Washington. He struck an imposing presence and reminded most people of the guy from the Allstate commercials, especially when he spoke. He looked pointedly at Kane, who nodded for him to proceed, and got right down to business.
“This should go without saying, but since Marchment has both the DHS and the U.S. Attorney’s Office crawling up his ass, he insisted that I stress the importance of the fact that none of the information discussed in here leaves this room.” Templeton looked from one agent to the next, soliciting the requisite nod or grunt. “I trust you’ve all familiarized yourselves with case file number oscar alpha sierra zero seven two four dash zero five, provided this morning at approximately eleven hundred hours, so I propose we don’t waste any time and go straight into the briefing Kane and Mason have prepared. I understand the CSRT has finally released its findings?”
Kane nodded.
Everyone opened their laptops or brought their tablets to life in order to view the briefing Mason had sent to each of them maybe fifteen minutes ago. Mason reached past Becker to attach his laptop to the projector and focused the image on the creased screen affixed to the wall. Once Kane reached the head of the table and Templeton had taken a seat, he killed the overhead lights.
Kane leaned forward and braced both hands on the edge of the table. Tiny dead vultures spotted his chest, while his massive shadow reared up behind him on the screen.
“Our worst fears have just been realized. We have to act immediately and decisively before this thing gets out.”
4
“All they’ll say is that it’s ‘genetically similar’ to HPAI H1N1—highly pathogenic avian influenza A,” Mason said. “They won’t commit to anything beyond that until the results of the PCR testing come back. They’re doing their best to buy us some time before they call in the CDC and the veil of silence falls.”
“How contagious are we talking?” Becker asked.
“Extremely. Especially by airborne and droplet transmission. Coughing, spitting, the transfer of bodily fluids by making contact with an exposed surface and then rubbing your eyes or nose. The level of contagion is largely dependent upon physical proximity. In theory, the virus can’t survive for very long outside of a living host, though. H1N1 remains viable on environmental surfaces for anywhere from two to eight hours, a fraction of that time in this heat, but we’re not taking any chances. Kane and I got lucky. From here on out, everyone is expected to carry gloves and a respirator mask in the field.”
“Are we still working under the assumption that the humans infected the birds and not vice versa?” Templeton asked.
“Internal body temperature, postmortem lividity, and the level of insect activity place the time of death for the birds between sixteen and twenty-four hours prior to our arrival. The Border Patrol officer who made the initial discovery is convinced that occurred after the victims passed through, which fits with the rest of the physical evidence.”
He clicked quickly through the technical data in the CSRT’s report.
“Our working theory is that seven people entered the valley, and over a stretch spanning roughly three miles, six died and the seventh was collected, along with the remains of the decedents, by a team we speculate numbered between four and six. They were subsequently transported to the north by ATV and to a rendezvous point east of mile marker twenty-nine on Highway Eighty-six. The vehicles were driven onto what we believe to be a semitrailer, based on the lone set of tracks we were able to glean from the shoulder. While it was moving. Whatever their ultimate goal, these men were well trained, and had we not stumbled upon the scene when we did, we undoubtedly never would have known they’d been there.”
“Do we have any idea where the victims originated?” Razor asked.
“At this point, it matters more where they are now than where they started,” Kane said. “Right now, kids, we’re wasting time we don’t have. Somewhere out there, an unidentified group has gained access to potentially inexhaustible reservoirs of a virus similar to the bird flu, which is, by all appearances, one hundred percent and seemingly immediately fatal to birds and at least eighty-five percent fatal to humans. This isn’t someone’s science fair project we’re dealing with here. There’s no doubt in my mind that the end goal is weaponization of the virus.”
“What do we have to go on?” Templeton asked. “If they didn’t have time to cover their tracks, then they had to have left some kind of evidence we can use.”
“Which brings me to the forensics report,” Mason said, and hit the clicker. A graph that looked like an EKG strip with dozens of large, irregular spikes appeared. “Forensics collected samples of the dirt and gravel found in the tread of the footprints, the ATV tracks, and those of the semi where it briefly rode up onto the shoulder, then ran them through a gas chromatograph–mass spectrometer. What you see here are the trace compounds transferred from the bottoms of the shoes and the tires, which presumably contacted the same floor at some common location. And that’s exactly what the results bear out. As you would expect, there’s the standard array of hydrocarbons associated with fossil fuels and motor oils you’d find on any garage floor. Now here’s where things get interesting.…”
He clicked the remote again to change the slide. This one demonstrated three more spiked lines set against axes labeled “Abundance” on the left and “Time” across the bottom.
“All three samples demonstrated spikes in acetoin, 3-methyl-1- butanol, heptanol, and hexanol, which are metabolites found in spoiled meat. In addition, the GC–MS detected the presence of VOCs—volatile organic compounds—specifically esters, aldehydes, ketones, carboxylic acids, and sulfur compounds. Again, these compounds are prevalent in spoiled meat.”
“So we’re looking for some sort of slaughterhouse or meat-processing plant,” Templeton said.
“Not necessarily.”
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Becker said from beneath his cap. “When we were following a lead on an arms racket. VOCs in concentrations that high could also mean we’re looking for someplace with a lot of blood on the floor. When we found where these guys were storing their weapons, the Zetas had already been there. Body parts had been stacked in pyramids in the middle of the room.”
“That’s right,” Kane said. “Mason said meat, not beef.”
The room fell silent.
“Surely whatever trace evidence sticks to the tread of a tire wears off after a while,” Razor said. “There has to be a finite amount, right? And if the trace transfers to whatever it contacts, then at some point all of the trace leaves the tire and is replaced by different kinds of trace it picks up from whatever it drives over.”
“Leave it to ICE to state the obv
ious,” Becker said.
“¡No seas, güey! Isn’t there a moonshine ring in Kentucky you should be busting up?”
Templeton stifled a chuckle.
“I see where he’s going with this,” Mason said. “For there to have been trace on the wheels of the semi, it couldn’t have been driven very far.”
“And considering we have Eighty-six locked down and we cleared all of the semis passing through the roadblocks…” Templeton said.
“They couldn’t have had more than a fifteen-minute head start before we had a bird in the air.”
“No way they made it to Tucson.”
“They never left the reservation,” Becker said.
“Razor … You know this place,” Templeton said. “What’s out there within a fifteen-mile radius, accessible by road, and large enough to hide a semitruck?”
Mason scrolled through his saved images until he found the detailed satellite imaging of the reservation. It took several seconds to triangulate the location where they’d found the tracks, then the point to the north where the ravine intersected the highway. He centered on it and scaled the zoom to a rectangle roughly thirty miles wide. Aside from Highway 86, there were no paved roads and it was nearly impossible to distinguish the dry creek beds from the few winding north-south gravel roads. The east-west Border Patrol–enforced drags were easy to pick out to either side of the Ajo Mountains. Had any vehicles crossed them, they would have set off one of the Oscars—the radio beacons that alerted dispatch when their motion sensors were triggered.
They had to have gone north into the mountains along one of the narrow roads that adhered to the rugged topography.
Mason tapped the map on the screen with his finger at a point where the valley narrowed and the mountains on the eastern side appeared to have been artificially straightened.
“What’s this here?”
All eyes turned to Razor.
“There’s a quarry up there, but it’s been closed since before I was born. And even then it was in such bad shape that it would have fallen apart if you looked at it hard enough.”
“Can you get a drone with infrared and thermal-imaging capabilities over that area?”
“Way ahead of you.”
Kane hit the lights and Mason stepped aside to make room for Templeton.
“Get that drone airborne, Ray. The rest of you … full night tactical gear. Rebreather masks. I want you on-com and ready to roll in ten minutes.” He looked around the table. “What are you waiting for? We can’t let that virus get off the reservation.”
5
The night was as dark as any Mason could remember. The moon, if there was one, must have been hiding behind the storm clouds boiling from the western horizon. The wind whipped sand sideways across the valley. It sounded like sleet pattering against his windbreaker and the side of the decrepit wooden structure, the majority of which had already fallen down the hillside. Broken planks stood from the sand like bleached bones. Cacti grew on and around them. What little remained of the framework of the chutes led down the hillside to a thicket of ironwoods and a stream maybe a foot and a half wide.
He could barely hear the others whispering through the comlink in his ear over the sound of his own breathing through the respirator, which covered his mouth and nose. Even though he knew where they were, their black fatigues and the fortuitous sandstorm made them impossible to see.
Thermal imaging from the predator drone confirmed the presence of eight distinct sources of heat in the warehouse on the opposite side of the mill from him, just shy of where the red rock had been mined into steppes ascending the mountain. There had been a flurry of activity inside. They all knew what that meant. The men inside were in the process of enacting their hurried exit strategy.
It was now or never.
The BORTAC SWAT team had been trained for precisely this scenario and served as the tip of the spear. They had four men positioned at each of the two doors—one on the north and the other on the south, which was situated beside the narrow gravel road that wended downhill from beneath the cranelike conveyor chute. Mason covered the northern team from the rear, while Kane guarded the south. Once the SWAT team penetrated the structure, he and Mason would advance and assume containment position in the doorways. Becker and a sniper were positioned on the ridgeline above the structure, from which they had unobstructed views of both exits through the scopes of their rifles. Razor was currently streaking across the desert in their direction on an MH-60L Direct Action Penetrator Black Hawk piloted by the Border Patrol’s best air interdiction agent. Templeton was in a mobile command station parked approximately eight miles to the south, where he and his team coordinated the operation, utilizing satellite and drone imagery.
They were on Templeton’s mark. When he gave the signal, they were going in hard and fast.
This was why Mason had chosen to become a field officer.
This moment right here.
He heard the thupp-thupp-thupp of the chopper blades, streaking toward them from the west. The chatter in his ear ceased, only to be replaced by the hollow rushing sound of his pulse. The order would be given any second now.
Any second.
Mason adjusted his grip on the .223-caliber M4 carbine, set to fire three-round bursts, and readied himself to press the button that would activate the laser sight.
Time stood still.
His mechanical respirations slowed.
And then Templeton’s voice was in his ear and the world erupted into frantic life.
The red laser streaked from his assault rifle and struck the door a heartbeat before the SWAT guys emerged from the shadows, a battering ram readied between the two in the lead. They swung it and struck the door. The cracking sound of the wood splitting echoed across the valley, in stereo, as the same thing happened on the other side of the building. They shouted and charged—
A blinding light.
A wall of superheated air struck Mason, lifted him from the ground, and tossed him onto his back. The deafening roar of the twin explosions rolled through the valley like thunder. Flames burst from the demolished doorway. Burning men and debris rained down on the shrubs and gravel and struck the wooden ruins all around him. Flaming silhouettes streaked across his peripheral vision, hurled outward over the nothingness to plummet down upon the treetops below.
Black smoke billowed out through the side of the building and his eyes filled with tears.
Mason struggled to his feet and swung his rifle from left to right, cutting his way through the smoke with the red laser. Flames lapped at his feet from burning wood and body parts. He tried to make sense of the situation. The doors had been rigged. The SWAT guys were dead. Given how hard he’d been thrown backward by the explosion, there was no way of knowing whether or not Kane had survived on his side. He couldn’t see Becker or the sniper uphill through the smoke, which swirled at the behest of the Black Hawk overhead. Something about the sound of its blades was wrong, like a heart missing every fourth beat. He caught just a glimpse of it as it banked steeply off to the west.
Templeton was shouting in his ear, but he couldn’t make out the words. The explosion had thrown off his equilibrium, and a hollow sound resonated somewhere inside his head.
His instincts and training kicked in and he advanced toward the burning doorway, moving low and fast. Even with the respirator mask, he still tasted smoke. His eyes burned so badly, he could hardly keep them open.
Smoke swirled and eddied past him and through the gaps in the burning roof. The floor was bare earth covered with a lifetime of accumulated gravel and grit. The wall to his left had been boarded over where the conveyors that brought the stones from the structure next door had once passed. Rusted equipment lorded over the room.
Mason nearly tripped over the first body, which lay facedown on the dirt, arms folded under it. The telltale triangular butt of a Steyr AUG assault rifle protruded from beneath it. Utility boots. Tall. Broad shoulders. Thick legs. Male. There were two holes in the
back of his black neoprene balaclava—.22 by the size of them. Two shots to the base of the cranium, execution-style.
He didn’t have to roll the dead man over to know that he wasn’t one of theirs.
Mason’s laser sight diffused into the smoke, which alternately concealed and revealed sections of the room around him. The flow of air through the burning building made everything seem to come to life with movement.
Static in his earpiece. The crackle of encroaching flames.
There was another body partially hidden behind the heap of scraps from the ruined conveyor. Same black balaclava, matching entry wounds through the back of it. Twin Steyr AUG.
He crouched and, without taking his eyes from his sight line, slid his left hand beneath the neckline of the man’s mask. No pulse, obviously, but it hadn’t been long at all since he’d had one.
What in the name of God was going on here?
Mason stood and pressed on. He glimpsed another body off to his right, behind what looked like a rusted mine cart. And then the smoke swallowed it again.
Three men positioned exactly where he would have posted them were he preparing to defend the northern entry into the structure. Not only had these men known they were coming, someone had seized the opportunity to tidy up his own mess.
Movement ahead of him, toward the rear of the structure.
He ducked behind the nearest cover. A plastic sheet flagged on the other side of the broken conveyor leading up through the roof. The flames reflected from it even as they started to consume it.
A shadow passed behind the plastic.
Mason crouched back down. Blew out his breath slowly. Killed the laser sight. Rolled to his left and lunged to his feet, rifle seated against his shoulder. Heart pounding in his ears, making the edges of his vision throb. He saw the shadow through the smoke, aligned his barrel with it. The sheet rippled as it melted upward toward the ceiling. It was thick and opaque, like the kind painters used as drop cloths.
The Extinction Agenda Page 2
