Before Hausmann said a word, Reaper held out a sheaf of papers to him.
“Take a look through these,” he said, “tell me if anyone looks familiar.”
A little puzzled, Hausmann took the papers and began flipping through them. He saw the faces of a variety of men, all generally the same, and all looking as if they were of Latino or Middle-Eastern descent. As he went through the pictures, one in particular caught his eye.
“Hey,” Hausmann said, “this guy here, he’s the same one that we saw last night. Yeah, he’s the one who hugged the other guy before he left in the jeep. Just who in the hell is he anyway?”
“Same guy as I picked,” Reaper said as he took the papers back. “I thought you might have gotten a better look at him through that spotting scope. There are people in D.C. who are very interested to know that he’s in the area along the U.S. border.”
“People in D.C.?” Hausmann said. “I thought you were out of the service, that all you did now was consulting and training. This sounds pretty damned official to me.”
Taking a deep breath, Reaper blew it out through pursed lips.
“Okay, I guess you have a pretty good need-to-know now,” Reaper said. “I don’t really work as a consultant for the government. There’s a small group of us who work as kind of a contract security service for the Department of Homeland Security. We get support and direction from a director at Homeland Security, but we only have a very limited official standing. Strings get pulled and legal problems go away and, as you can see, the intelligence we have access to is pretty impressive.”
“So you’re a mercenary for Homeland Security?” Hausmann said. “You came down here on some kind of mission?”
“Hell, no, I didn’t come here on any mission,” Reaper said. “I came down here to hang out a little with you on the first vacation trip I’ve had in years. All of this crap just came up—lucky me. My vacation just became work, in as official a way as it gets for me. As far as being a mercenary—I do get paid, and pretty damned well, but I work for Homeland Security, not some foreign military.
“This wonderful gentleman,” Reaper said as he picked up another sheaf of papers, “is Youssef Daumudi. He’s the reason a bunch of intel people are jumping through hoops for me. He’s a higher-up in the food chain of al-Qaeda leadership. This guy is Osama’s go-to man for building sophisticated bombs and making them go boom at the right time and in the right place. This clown being spotted right on our doorstep during an election year is not a good thing at all.
“Daumudi was a chemical-engineering student in Germany when he decided to go jihad and joined with bin Laden. His hand has been found in a number of attacks against U.S. interests, but he’s been keeping a low profile for the last few years
“Two years ago, he was spotted in Afghanistan, but he disappeared before our Special Forces could move into the area and grab him. The year before, he was spotted in Iraq, attending a meeting with some of Saddam’s scientists, the ones he had working on his weapons of mass destruction program. Daumudi had made a particular point to spend a lot of time with Dr. Emil Ammad. Ammad disappeared from Iraq before the invasion took place and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Who’s Dr. Ammad?” Hausmann asked as he picked up the paper that had Daumudi’s information on it. “Was he that other Arab? The one who drove off.”
“He wasn’t that other guy,” Reaper said. “They sent me pictures and information on Ammad and his description doesn’t fit that guy last night at all. Ammad was one of Saddam’s nuclear scientists. He worked on Hussein’s radiological bomb project in the 1980s. That’s the proper name for what the news services call a dirty bomb. It’s not a nuclear explosion, but it spreads radioactive material all over the blast site. If he couldn’t get a real atomic bomb, Saddam was going to settle for one that just poisoned the area for a couple of thousand years.
“The Iraqis built and tested some radiological bombs back around 1987. But Saddam killed the project for military use before the Gulf War started. In the 1980s, he was probably looking for something he could use against the Iranians. A dirty bomb is a crappy military weapon and he probably wanted a bigger bang for his buck. It does make a hell of a terrorist weapon, though. And you would need a nuclear scientist and a bomb maker to crank one out without killing yourself.
“So D.C. wants this Daumudi character badly. Everything we’ve come up with points to Daumudi having hooked up with a major drug cartel in Mexico. That puts a known terrorist in bed with people who commonly smuggle material and people across the border. That’s a bad mix by anyone’s standards and it only gets worse.”
“Worse?” Hausmann said. “How’s that? It sounds bad enough all by itself.”
“The people at Homeland Security have access to sources of intelligence that you or I are only used to seeing in the movies at best,” Reaper said. “They’ve sent me photos taken by some of the new KH-Improved Crystal spy satellites. Those are the new, upgraded Keyhole birds. This stuff is amazing, take a look for yourself.”
Picking up some of the photo printouts he had scattered on the table, Reaper handed them over to Hausmann. The detail in the pictures was incredible—they appeared to have been shot from an overhead aircraft, not a satellite orbiting out in space.
Most of the photos covered an overlapping area around the Blue Star mine. There were also shots of another mine entrance that Hausmann wasn’t familiar with. Still other photos had a very strange color scheme in their layouts. In those pictures, the entrances to the mines stood out in high contrast to the surrounding desert.
“Jesus,” Hausmann said. “These pictures were taken by our own spy satellites? Over our own country?”
“Things are a little different in the spy game now,” Reaper said. “Our intelligence agencies have been paying a lot more attention to our own borders rather than just those of other countries. There’s always been satellites overhead, orbiting above the United States, both ours and Russian birds. They’re always looking down at something.
“The thing was that the folks in the intelligence community who analyze these pictures didn’t know where to look, or just what to pay attention to. Our information told them that. The importance of this Daumudi character was enough for the folks at the National Security Agency to download some shots from a satellite passing right over the area we were looking at last night. The bird was overhead within a hour of us being out there in the woods. That’s not a small bit of luck and these results show it.”
“I’ll say so,” Hausmann said. “But I’m not so sure I like the idea of Big Brother looking over my shoulder in my own backyard. There’s no question that these pictures are fantastic, though. I’ve never seen anything like them. You’d swear you can see individual rocks in these shots.”
“You can,” Reaper said. “And, by the way, that’s classified. These shots were taken with a camera that has a resolution of about ten centimeters. That’s about four inches. You could tell if a man had his hand open or was making a fist in that fine a picture. And you can see it from a couple of hundred miles up in space.”
“Amazing,” Hausmann said. “So what are these weird-looking shots?”
“Those are specialized infrared and radar images,” Reaper said. “They confirm activity at both mines.”
“Both mines?” Hausmann said. “Where’s the other one?”
“In Mexico,” Reaper said. “Not far at all from the border. These shots here,” Reaper tapped a couple of the pictures with his finger, “are of a place called the Crystal mine in Sonora, Mexico. It’s an old mine with a hell of a lot of activity around it for a place that’s been shut down for the last half-century.”
“The Crystal mine?” Hausmann said. “Never heard of it.”
“No reason you should have,” Reaper said. “It was closed down years before either of us were born. It used to supply optical-grade feldspar crystals to the U.S. war effort during World War II. They made lenses for bombsights out of the crystals, so the place was
considered of strategic importance.
“There’s a lot of information about the place in the stack here. Old maps of the layout of the tunnels and everything. By the way, your printer is low on ink.”
“There’s more in the office closet.”
“No,” Reaper said with a grin, “not anymore there isn’t.”
“So,” Hausmann said as he shuffled through the papers, “what are your people in Washington going to do about all of this?”
“Nothing much they can do,” Reaper said. “At least not immediately. There’s that little problem of Mexico being a sovereign country. We can’t just send troops in, that would cause a diplomatic incident that no one in D.C. is willing to accept right now. And by the time the Mexican and U.S. authorities could agree on any course of action, Daumudi would be long gone.
“Even increasing the law-enforcement presence on our side of the border could warn off Daumudi and whoever he’s working with. If he gets scared off, we could lose him until it was too late and he pulled off whatever operation he has in mind. If he took off, he would just set up his operation in another location.”
“So what in the hell are they going to do about him?” Hausmann said.
“Not them,” Reaper said, “me. I’ve already called people in to help, both with equipment and manpower. It has been strongly suggested by Homeland Security that I try to find out just what Daumudi’s mission is, capture him if I can, and kill him if I can’t grab him up. Anything happens to me or my people, and the government had no idea about what was happening, never heard of us. We’re just private citizens acting on our own volition.”
“Not just you,” Hausmann said, “or the people you have coming in. You can count me in too. These bastards took a shot at me and killed a friend of mine as well. I owe them big-time.”
“I kinda figured you’d feel that way,” Reaper said.
“So what can I do right now?” Hausmann said.
“Not much, to tell you the truth,” Reaper said. “The most important thing you can do is maintain a communications watch here at the ranch. I’ve got people coming in who’ll use the number here to get in touch with us about their final arrival time. There’s also probably going to be more intelligence coming in over the computer and you can download it as it comes in. And I want you to get Manors back in with us when you can. You can tell him as much as you feel you have to. I’ll make sure things are square with his higher-ups.”
“I don’t think that’s going to matter a hell of a lot with him,” Hausmann said. “He never did give a hoot or a holler about what the boss thought of him, as long as he could do his job. But what are you going to do?”
“Me?” Reaper said. “I’m going to explore an old mine shaft.”
Chapter Twenty
With Hausmann maintaining a communications watch on the phone and computer at the Dogbone Ranch, Reaper headed back to the Blue Star mine to conduct a more in-depth reconnaissance than they had done the night before. Heading in to do such a dangerous mission by himself wasn’t exactly his choice. It wasn’t bravado that sent the ex-SEAL to the mine, Reaper didn’t have anything to prove to anyone, not after a career in the Teams.
The situation was simple enough. Time was in short supply, he had people coming in to conduct an op and a high-value target that could leave the area at any moment. Someone had to see just what was inside that mine, and he was the most qualified person on hand to do it.
During a career in the Navy SEAL Teams, the first thing an operator learns is the value of teamwork. Everyone works to the betterment of the group. That didn’t mean a maximum single effort wasn’t asked of an individual from time to time. Reaper knew that rule well, and it was what led him to be driving Hausmann’s pickup truck back to the area of the Blue Star mine.
The fact that Reaper didn’t have all of his tactical gear with him in Arizona had at least been partly dealt with by Hausmann. Digging around in Cowboy’s own equipment, Reaper had been able to gear up properly for the reconnaissance he was facing.
The khaki-colored 5.11 tactical pants and shirt would blend in with the surrounding area well enough, so Reaper stuck with them. He added a new accessory to the tactical pants that 5.11 had sent him some weeks earlier. There was a pocket on the inside of each pant leg that accepted a pad to protect the knee. The seven-millimeter-thick neoprene pads that 5.11 had sent him slipped into the knee pockets and would protect those joints from the rocks and sharp corners he could expect to encounter in a mine.
Reaper was still using the 5.11 tactical vest to carry his spare ammunition and other equipment. His Emerson CQB-7 knife was still in his right front hip pocket, but Reaper had borrowed a sterile-model Gerber Silver Trident knife from Hausmann.
The sheath to the big fixed-blade knife was hanging behind Reaper’s right hip. The Blackhawk airborne deluxe knife sheath that the knife had come in was a good one. There was a big pocket on the front of the black nylon sheath that held Reaper’s Victorinox SwissTool firmly under a velcro flap. Reaper knew that he was going to have to go back through the barbedwire fence they had seen the other night and wanted to have his folding pliers easily accessible.
Since the inside of the mine would be dark no matter what time of day it was, Reaper had taken his SureFire 9Z flashlight and put it in a SpecOps deluxe tactical light sheath that fit on his belt. The light sheath had a velcro flap that held the light in place. The top of the flap was flexible enough to be pressed in and activate the light inside it. The bright white beam from the flashlight would shine through a grommeted hole in the bottom of the sheath that was lined with a blue filter. Only a faint beam of blue light would leave the sheath, more than enough to see by to dark-acclimated eyes, but too dim to be seen by anyone looking from a distance.
Since the old SEAL rule of thumb for any critical piece of gear was “two is one, one is none,” Reaper carried a spare tactical light in a pocket of his vest. Four spare lithium batteries were also in the vest. In a dark mine, a dependable light source would be worth a man’s life.
By the looks of the satellite photos and maps of the area, Reaper might have to move underground for several miles to go from the Blue Star mine to the Crystal mine in Mexico. To get up and down in the mine’s tunnels and shafts, he had brought a Blackhawk tactical rope bag that Hausmann used when he climbed around the Arizona mountains. The black nylon bag held the 165-foot length of olive drab New England Maxim climbing rope Reaper was carrying. The 7?16-inch-thick nylon rope was still new and more than strong enough for any practical need that Reaper would have for it.
In the outside pocket of the rope bag, Reaper had put the CMC Rescue eight-link and some carabiners he would need to rappel with if necessary. Around his waist, he had already secured the CMC Rescue tactical rappelling harness.
Inside the hidden holster of his vest, Reaper had his M1911A1 pistol. For a primary weapon, he had accepted the loan from Hausmann of his registered, transferable MP5A3 submachine gun. Fitted with a Gemtech Raptor suppressor, the weapon was quiet, reasonably compact, and not something Reaper could legally borrow from Hausmann. Legal questions were the least of either man’s worries right now and Reaper was glad to have the suppressed capability of the MP5A3 available to him for the recon. Four spare thirty-round magazines filled the long pockets of his vest with a single magazine locked into place in the receiver of the submachine gun.
With all of his gear and weapons, Reaper was not going to be able to pass himself off as a lost hiker if he was spotted during his recon. For the drive down to the mine area, he carried the bulk of the gear inside Hausmann’s SpecOps T.H.E. pack. At least while he was in the pickup, he wouldn’t stand out at all from the local traffic.
One thing he had added to the inside compartment of the pack was a Camelbak hydration bag full of water. The hose that let him drink from the hundred-ounce water bag slipped through a hole made for it on the top of the pack and was secured to the upper-left shoulder strap. Until he entered the mine itself, Reaper would be
under the desert sun, not a place to be found without water available.
Traffic was very light in the area and Reaper had no trouble finding the stream they had followed the night before. Moving the Chevy pickup along the edge of the streambed, Reaper parked it in a group of trees and bushes that concealed it. In short order, he had the Prowler unloaded and was heading up toward the fence line.
The cutting jaws on his SwissTool folding pliers easily cut through the barbed-wire fence surrounding the reptile sanctuary. It would not have been a problem for Reaper to find the same section of fence that they had cut through the night before, but following the same line of infiltration on a sneak-and-peek twice in a row was just asking for trouble.
Not one to take chances when he didn’t have to, Reaper took the Prowler through the new hole in the fence and secured the cut ends of the barbed wire behind him. The ground ahead was scattered with brush and rocks, but didn’t look to be any problem for the tough little Prowler. The deep-treaded tires and heavy-duty suspension went across the hard-packed gravel and sand without difficulty. Reaper traveled slow and easy in order not to raise up a dust trail behind him.
It was early afternoon with broad daylight under a bright blue sky. The perforated metal covering the roll cage of the Prowler offered little in the way of shade as Reaper drove carefully along the side of the ridge line. The hot sun was probably also what was keeping the snakes that were supposed to be all over the sanctuary back under cover. Reaper didn’t see any of the poisonous reptiles as he drove along, and he didn’t mind at all. He’d had his fill of rattlesnakes the night before. Never seeing one again would be just fine with him.
Hostile Borders Page 19
