Hostile Borders

by Dennis Chalker

  “That train track bit really stumps me,” Reaper said as he sat down and opened his soft drink. “How in the hell could they have built all of this without ever being discovered? Those tunnels had to be dug out, trestles built, the bed graded, track laid. It was not a small job. Where did they get the materials? And just where would they come up with the manpower to do the job. Who were the workers?”

  “Those are a few questions that may not be too hard to explain,” Manors said. “As far as getting the rails goes, it sounds like pretty much a standard mine-car gauge. They could have just stripped the rails themselves from other parts of either mine. Some of those old tunnels go on for hundreds of yards.”

  “A thousand feet or more was my experience,” Reaper said. “That’s at least how long the tunnel was at the bottom of the Blue Star.”

  “The deepest part of that mine was supposed to have flooded out a long time back,” Hausmann said getting up. “The story was that they hit water while following a vein. The whole mine didn’t flood, though. They kept working the upper tunnels for years. You want a drink, Manors?”

  “No, thanks,” Manors said. “You know, as far as the workers go. The cartels have been using native Indian labor for the last twenty years or so. They grab up Indian workers from central and southern Mexico, basically just kidnap them. They move them across the country and put them to work on their opium poppy and marijuana plantations in the Sierra Madre Mountains well south of here.

  “The Indians don’t even know where they are most of the time. If one got away, he couldn’t tell anyone where he came from. Most of them speak their own language and can’t even understand Spanish. The cartels use them and either send them back or dump them someplace.”

  Standing in the kitchen, Hausmann held the cup of coffee he had poured for himself. He just stared at Manors for a moment.

  “You’re talking about kidnapping and slavery,” Hausmann said.

  “That’s the way of the world south of the border,” Manors said. “Whoever built that tunnel system probably used a bunch of those same Indians as slave labor. Then got rid of them. I’ll bet they didn’t see the light of day for weeks. Just stayed and worked in that hole.”

  “I don’t think they ever left,” Reaper said, as he remembered the older bodies and near skeletons that filled that pit back in the cave.

  “Speaking of left,” Hausmann said looking at the clock on the wall, “we’d better get moving if we want to be in Tombstone in time to meet your friends.”

  “Right,” Reaper said. “I have to make a fast report to Washington. Then we can go.”

  Heading upstairs to Hausmann’s office, Reaper logged on to the computer and started beating on the keyboard. After only a few minutes, he had sent a short but complete report on what he had found to Admiral Straker’s office at the Department of Homeland Security. With the message sent, Reaper headed back down to the kitchen where Hausmann and Manors were waiting.

  The three men headed out of the house. Reaper drove his own car while Hausmann and Manors took Hausmann’s Chevy pickup. It was about a thirty-mile drive to the modest airport and both vehicles arrived at the gravel parking lot a little before eight o’clock. There was nothing to do and less to see as the men waited, each with his own thoughts. Before twenty minutes had passed, a lone aircraft could be seen approaching the airport runway from the northeast.

  The fat-bodied, twin-tail boom plane was a Cessna Model 337 Skymaster. The plane had two propellers driving it through the air. One prop was at the front of the body, the other was acting as a pusher-prop spinning at the rear of the fuselage, between the two tail booms. There wasn’t a tower or any facilities at the airport other than an orange wind sock blowing in the breeze.

  The Cessna made one pass over the runway, then turned around and came in for a landing. At Reaper’s direction, Hausmann drove the truck down by the runway, near where the Cessna was going to finally stop.

  As the Skymaster halted, the two propellers spun down and slowed as the engine noise quit. When the props had finally come to a stop, the cabin door directly under the wing opened up. A slightly built man, five feet, four inches tall, with thinning brown hair stepped out of the plane. From the other side of the aircraft, a taller, younger man with white hair emerged.

  “Hey, boss,” Max Warrick, the white-haired ex-Marine scout-sniper called out to Reaper. “You order takeout?”

  On the other side of the Skymaster, Ben Mackenzie, the ex-Air Force parajumper and qualified pilot, was digging around in the back of the cabin for the wheel chocks to secure the plane. Together with Reaper and Enzo Caronti, who wasn’t with them, the group made up the Four Horsemen. This was the first time in over a year that the group was seeing action together, and the first time they were operating under the “unofficial” blanket of authority of the Department of Homeland Security.

  “Come on,” Mackenzie said, “we’ve got to get the cargo pack unloaded while there’s still light.”

  After introducing Manors and Hausmann to the others, all of the men set to work unloading some very heavy boxes and containers from the Skymaster. There was a fiberglass box that had been attached underneath the fuselage of the plane that held some heavy ammunition boxes as well as other packages and odd-shaped bags that Hausmann thought he recognized. For his part, Manors just helped load the materials into the pickup truck, figuring he would be told what they were later.

  Pulling other containers and bags from the back of the Skymaster, Warrick walked over to the truck holding one of several large gun cases. All of the men working together quickly emptied the plane of hundreds of pounds of equipment that was stowed in the back of the pickup truck and covered with a big tarp.

  “Okay,” Reaper said. “Hausmann, you and Manors take the truck back to the ranch. We’ll meet you there later.”

  “Where are you going?” Hausmann asked.

  “They’re going to take the plane over to the Sierra Vista Municipal Airport,” Reaper said. “It’s the closest place we can secure it that has fuel facilities.”

  “Yeah, we sucked gas pretty heavily coming down here,” Warrick said. “We have to refuel before we can head back.”

  “I’m going to head over there and pick them up,” Reaper said. “We’ll drive down to the ranch from there.”

  Mackenzie and Warrick were already climbing into the Skymaster as Reaper finished his explanation to Hausmann. As they fired up the twin props, the still-warm engines caught instantly and quickly ran up to speed. The boxy plane taxied around until it was facing back along the runway and soon was in the air and heading west.

  The Sierra Vista Municipal Airport shared its runway with the Libby Air Force Base and was only a twenty-mile flight from Tombstone. But Reaper had to drive well over thirty miles to get from one base to the other. The Sierra Vista airport was a nice modern facility. And sharing its space with the Air Force made the location very secure. It was just the kind of place that was great for storing a plane, but Reaper and his friends wouldn’t have wanted to unload their cargo there under all of those official eyes. There would have been too many questions that could come up that they just didn’t have the time to answer.

  During the drive to the Dogbone Ranch, Reaper gave Mackenzie and Warrick a full rundown on what had been happening during his vacation. The two men listened intently to the man they looked to as their team’s leader. There had been no question that they would come when Reaper had called. Now they were learning just what the specifics for that call were.

  Pulling into the ranch, Reaper saw that there was another car in the parking area, a dusty 2002 Mustang with Nevada license plates. Reaper had never seen the car before, but he had a really good idea who had been behind the steering wheel all the way from Nevada.

  “Rick, Rick Column!” Reaper said as he walked into the house.

  Sitting at the bar with a beer in his hand was the man Reaper had called that morning. An ex-Army Ranger, Richard Column ran security for a number of men’s
entertainment clubs in Las Vegas. Several branches of the clubs were in Phoenix, Arizona, where Column had been earlier that day.

  “Damn,” Reaper said with a wide smile on his face, “I thought you were just going to call me back.”

  “Hey,” Column said, “I didn’t get your message until early this afternoon. I made some calls back to Vegas to confirm some things. You said in your message that you were here at Hausmann’s, so I figured I would just come down when I had the answers to your question.”

  After everyone was introduced around and had picked up a beer, coffee, or soft drink according to their tastes, Reaper went over the situation that was going on in the area.

  The smiles were gone now, Reaper was deadly serious and it showed.

  “So that’s it,” Reaper said. “We have a group of drug runners who have hooked up with terrorists. And to make matters worse, there’s an ex-SEAL who’s gone over to the dark side working for them. The word from Washington is to shut down the drug runners’ pipeline and take the terrorists out of the equation.

  “They have some very bad news in the way of gear stored across the border. Weapons, explosives, RPGs, and shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. The missiles are SAM-16s, as close to state of the art as there is on the international arms market. I don’t have to tell you what could happen if a terrorist cell in the United States got their hands on those.”

  “There’s more,” Hausmann said, “this message was waiting for you on the computer.”

  Handing Reaper the computer printout, Hausmann leaned down on the bar top to wait while the other man read the message. Reaper’s reaction was what he thought it was going to be.

  “So, things go from really bad to worse,” Reaper said as he slapped the paper down on the table. Column jumped a bit, startled at Reaper’s reaction.

  “This is from Washington,” Reaper said pointing at the paper. “That footlocker I found over in the other mine fits in with some intelligence reports that have been building up. The thought is that al-Qaeda is looking to build a dirty bomb and detonate it in the United States. They want to cause a disruption of our elections just like they did in Spain with that train bombing.”

  “A dirty bomb?” Column said.

  “That’s a radiological device,” Mackenzie said. “A bomb with an explosive core packed inside a container of radioactive isotopes or waste. Just about the dirtiest bomb you can make. It doesn’t make a nuclear explosion, but it can spread radioactive crap around for miles. Set one off of the right size and makeup in the right place, and you could contaminate a city the size of New York.”

  “Or Washington, D.C.,” Reaper said. “And apparently, these guys may have the right stuff to build that bomb with. Some of the intelligence reports list the isotopes as having come from those underground radioactive storage sites they found in Iraq, only the materials were moved before the war started.”

  “So much for them not finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Manors said.

  “A dirty bomb isn’t really a weapon of mass destruction,” Mackenzie said. “It is a hell of a terror weapon, though.”

  “The only part missing from the puzzle is how the terrorists are financing their operation,” Reaper said. “We took down one of their hawala banks last year, and a big one at that. The State Department, Treasury, and Department of Homeland Security have been combining their efforts to shut down the rest of al-Qaeda’s money supply in the U.S. But they must be getting their funding somehow.”

  “That brings up what you asked me about earlier today,” Column said. “If I knew of anything unusual that had happened with this Paul Stebbins character, especially if any Middle Easterners were involved.”

  “What have you got?” Reaper said turning to Column. His blue-gray eyes bored intently into Column’s.

  Boy, am I glad he’s my friend, Column thought. Looking into those eyes is like staring down a pair of gun barrels. He was suddenly worried that what he had to tell Reaper might not be important enough to bother him with.

  “Could be nothing,” Column said after a moment, “but it sure was weird. A couple of weeks ago, we had an incident at one of the clubs in Vegas. There was a couple of guys there, one of them was this Stebbins character. He’d brought an Arab with him into the club who obviously had never been in one before, but was playing the part of a big-time spender and trying to blend in. He was trying to blend in so hard that he stood out like a sore thumb.

  “To make it short, he broke the rules and touched one of the girls. He didn’t know and obviously was scared to death when the girl called security over. The guy looked like he was coming unglued trying to apologize and not make a bad scene worse. Stebbins just kind of stood there with his thumb up his ass not knowing whether to run or stand. The girl was yelling at these two that she was going to have the police come and throw them both out.

  “The Arab offered a stone to the girl as an apology. She saw the guy was completely red-faced over the whole thing and was sweating with fear. So she took the rock and said everything was okay. She didn’t really believe him when he told her it was a diamond. But she took it and those two were escorted out of the club. No one really thought anything of it and I wasn’t told until I called up and asked about things today.

  “You see, the girl took the stone in and had it checked. Damned if it wasn’t exactly what that guy told her it was, an uncut diamond. It’s worth a couple of grand, minimum. She didn’t want to tell anyone after that so that she could keep the stone. When I asked my people about it this morning, the whole story came out. It sounded unusual enough to fit what you had asked about.”

  “Blood stones,” Hausmann said.

  “What?” Reaper said.

  “Blood stones. That’s what they call the diamonds that have been coming out of the African mines that any one of a dozen rebel factions are holding. They’re turning into one of the underground currencies of the world. Small, light, and very valuable for their size. Reports have a lot more guerrilla and terrorist groups than just al-Qaeda using them all around the world.”

  “Underground is right,” Reaper said. “In this case, it looks like the diamonds were taken out of one mine just to end up in another on the other side of the world.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The next morning was an organized blur of activity for each of the men at the ranch. Hausmann had gone with Warrick to open up the vault at the back of the garage and go over all of the hardware. Things would be repacked as necessary to fit everything they wanted to take onto the Prowlers. In spite of the work at hand, Warrick was fascinated by Hausmann’s weapons collection in the vault. He thought taking the Gatling gun would have been an interesting idea at least. Mounting it on the Prowler would make a great picture.

  In the garage, Manors was going over the Prowlers themselves. Mackenzie had decided to go with Column up to Phoenix in case there was any trouble with Diamondback in his signing for the Four Horsemen company. And, with two men in the car, they could switch off driving to keep either one from getting too tired.

  Back in the ranch house, Reaper was in the kitchen going over all of the information they had at hand. Even more materials had arrived from Washington and an express courier was delivering some specialized equipment to Diamondback’s offices for Reaper and his men. One of Admiral Straker’s men was hand-carrying some sophisticated radiation detection gear on a red-eye flight from D.C. Homeland Security could call on the Air Force to fly their people wherever and whenever necessary without questions. Straker had exercised that authority for this operation.

  In addition to the specific information on the operation, Reaper had informed Straker about the situation with Pat Manors. The Border Patrol, now renamed U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was the mobile, uniformed law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Manors was the perfect officer to be on detached duty and working undercover for Admiral Straker’s office. That was going to be the situation as it would be officially recorded. No
matter what happened, at least Reaper was able to make sure that Manors didn’t lose his job over his loyalty to a friend or working with the Four Horsemen.

  There still weren’t any hot radiation sources that could be detected by monitoring satellites over the Northern Sonora countryside of Mexico, or in Southern Arizona. If the isotopes for a dirty bomb were in those areas, they were well shielded from detection.

  Straker was informed about the unusual situation regarding an Arab and uncut diamonds in a men’s club in Las Vegas. He had told Reaper that he would immediately put law enforcement units on the job investigating that situation.

  The description Reaper had been able to give on the single suspected al-Qaeda operative he had seen get in the jeep at the Blue Star mine had been a good one. Straker was certain that a surveillance operation could be conducted that could bring down the entire cell. In addition to identifying those terrorists, the active cell could lead to others in the country. At the very least, they would cut off another source of funds for al-Qaeda and other terrorist operations in the United States. And the lady at the Heart Ranch could expect a visit from the DEA, thanks to a warrant based on Reaper’s observations.

  Reaper’s discoveries had helped give Straker a reason to reinforce the security of the southern border of the United States. Straker was already twisting the arms of other government services and agencies to have men and equipment assigned to the area. Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) were being assigned to overfly the Arizona border with Mexico. The UAVs would publicly be observing for illegal activity along the border with Mexico. They would also be outfitted with sensor arrays to allow them to detect even some shielded radioactive materials.

  That was everything that could presently be done with the information they already had. Anything further would come about in part because of what Reaper and his people found. The Four Horsemen, with their leader, had already proven themselves a valuable asset to the people of the United States. Now, Reaper was concentrating on making sure he did everything he could to bring all of his men back home.