Drone (A Troy Pearce Novel)

by Mike Maden

Pearce decided to divide his team into five operational groups. Three groups were responsible for four targets each, and those targets were sorted by geographic proximity. The three lieutenants directly under César Castillo were his three brothers—Napoleon, Alejandro, and Julio—and each of them had three lieutenants within their suborganizations. Napoleon’s organization was based in Chihuahua, Alejandro’s in Nogales, and Julio’s in Tijuana.

  The fourth operational group was tasked with monitoring Ulises Castillo while he sojourned in Venezuela. He was the thirteenth target. They did not have permission to engage that target unless he crossed into international waters or returned to Mexican territory. In Pearce’s opinion, Myers was being too cautious, but she didn’t want to provoke the new Venezuelan president unnecessarily. He was already a staunch opponent of American interests in the region and was looking for any excuse to escalate tensions.

  The last operational group would be headed up by Pearce. His target was the big dog himself: César Castillo. He had special plans for the crime lord.

  All five teams had already done their preliminary scouting and intel work, and had designed their assault plans. Now they were just waiting for the signal to jump.

  Pearce also decided to deploy several high-altitude UAVs equipped with data-link payloads for his drone command-and-control operations rather than rent or hijack satellite bandwidth. The data-link drones not only gave him over-the-horizon capabilities, they also provided a greater measure of operational safety. One of the reasons why so many air force drones had crashed over the years was because of the signal delay between control station, satellite orbit, and drone location that sometimes lasted as long as four seconds. A fatal flaw when trying to fly and fire a precision instrument. He also wanted to create as small a digital footprint as possible in order to keep the entire mission off the record.

  The most difficult task that Pearce’s operation faced had been to find a relatively narrow window in which to carry out the entire operation. Once the first bodies dropped, the others would likely hear about it quickly and quail. With every target located and identified, it was vital that they all be taken down within twenty-four hours of one another, if not sooner. That window of opportunity had just been identified twenty minutes ago.

  “Everybody has been briefed on their mission parameters, Mike, and they’re in position. We’re good to go,” Pearce said.

  “Then light it up,” Early said. “And good hunting.”

  22

  Barranca del Cobre, Mexico

  The ancient hacienda clung to the side of the steep cliff like a barnacle on the hull of a stranded ship. Originally built by a Swiss copper magnate in 1883, the stone-and-wood mansion was built to maximize the spectacular views afforded by Copper Canyon, which was actually a complex of twenty canyons carved out of the high rock by six broad rivers. This made Copper Canyon seven times larger than its more famous cousin in the north, the Grand Canyon. It was the perfect place to hide.

  The hacienda was now occupied by Napoleon Castillo, César’s older brother. He’d wanted to escape the sweltering summer heat of the lavish Mid-century Modern home he’d built in the desert outside of Chihuahua. Even with the home’s two luxury pools and Trane air-conditioning system, it was too unbearable to live there this time of year. So he had made the annual trek up north to his “eagle’s nest” on the side of the mountain.

  Normally at this time of day, the short and stocky man, who shared the same anatomical shape as his infamous younger brother, would have been standing outside on the veranda smoking an excellent cigar. Had Napoleon been outside, he might have accidentally caught the glint of sunlight on a wing high above the canyon floor. It’s doubtful, however, that he would have accurately identified it as a Heron, an Israeli-manufactured, medium-altitude, long-endurance drone similar in capabilities to the more famous U.S.-manufactured Predator. The Heron contained a standard video optical surveillance package, but it had also been equipped with forward-looking infrared radar and ELINT (electronic intelligence) packages. But Pearce Systems had modified the surveillance drone, weaponizing it with two hard points on the wings for missile racks.

  The Heron gave Stella Kang both eyes and ears on the ground and in the house. Phone intercepts of Castillo’s brother and his physician indicated that Napoleon was sick in bed. Advance surveillance had already identified several people inside the hacienda, including Napoleon’s young American-born wife, Suzanna, and his three American “anchor babies,” his preteen daughters Luisa, Carlita, and Victoria. Earlier, Stella had counted only two guards on the estate, but right now one was at the pharmacy and the other was in town, drinking.

  Stella’s explicit orders from Pearce were to limit the strike to Napoleon only. With the drug lord hunkered down beneath his bedsheets with a fever, a missile strike was out of the question. Stella’s partner, Johnny Paloma, was a former LAPD SWAT team leader. He had parked himself behind a McMillan Tac-50 sniper rifle, but now that wasn’t an option, either. Time also wasn’t Stella’s friend. The other strike teams were already in motion and she desperately wanted to be the first team with a kill.

  Stella fell on her backup plan and redeployed Johnny. Minutes later, he was ripping around the curving single-lane mountain road on a Yamaha YZ450F bike. When he reached the hacienda, he slowed down enough to reach into his backpack and toss the ten-pound surveillance drone onto the pavement, then he gunned the engine and raced away.

  The iRobot 110 FirstLook drone was about the size and shape of an old encyclopedia, and was outfitted with tracks instead of wheels, along with cameras on both ends. It didn’t matter which way it landed when you tossed it because it could roll in both directions, and it had rotator arms that could right it without much difficulty if it flipped onto its back.

  Stella was two miles away at her laptop control station. She was a very patient and stealthy operator, but the Heron overhead showed her the coast was clear. The drone scurried toward an open gate in the back and paused while Stella checked for an entry point. She found it. One of the sliding glass doors had been left open.

  Once inside the house, the robot rolled along almost silently on the pink terrazzo tiles that covered all of the floors. It even climbed the staircase with relative ease. One of the cleaning staff, Rosa, saw it scrambling silently down the hallway. She laughed to herself, assuming it was some new toy that belonged to one of the girls. She didn’t watch it long enough to observe it duck into the master suite and take up position in Napoleon’s private bathroom.

  Napoleon Castillo didn’t notice the drone when he came stumbling in. The iRobot was parked just behind the toilet when he pulled down his pajama trousers and lowered his flabby, sweating buttocks onto the cool porcelain seat. He was so preoccupied lighting a cigarette that he barely noticed the tracked drone when it rolled out from behind the toilet and parked itself between his feet.

  Castillo didn’t hear the explosion.

  His brain barely perceived the blinding flash, and that for only an instant. He was dead before the slower-moving sound waves could strike his eardrum and stimulate the aural nerve. In fact, his entire brain case, including the aural nerve, had been splattered like an overripe melon against the bathroom wall tiles, which were also a lustrous pink terrazzo.

  But far down the hallway in another room, Rosa heard the explosion. To her, it sounded more like a thump. She shrugged and figured if there was a mess to clean up, Mr. Castillo would call her soon enough.

  “Target down,” Stella reported to Pearce.

  “Proceed to your exfiltration route, Stella. Tell your team they won the case of beer. You were first on the board.”

  “Thank you, sir. Will do. We’re moving and grooving.”

  “Roger that.”

  Nogales, Mexico

  ICE had discovered several smuggling tunnels leading from Mexico to the United States over the past few years by employing sophisticated ground-penetrati
ng radar. The earlier tunnels they had uncovered were relatively shallow and crudely dug by unemployed local miners who carved small niches into the rock every hundred yards or so. The niches were crowded with plastic saints, melted candles, and strips of paper with prayers for protection for both the miners and the travelers, mostly smuggled migrants.

  The more recent tunnels were somewhat deeper and more sophisticated by an order of magnitude, displaying a level of engineering prowess beyond the reach of day laborers. Sheer walls, wooden floors, and a lighting system were standard. It was unclear to ICE who had designed or built the tunnels, but they were definitely paid for by the Castillo Syndicate for running drugs and people under the heavily secured surface above. They were probably four to five times as expensive to construct as well.

  What the ICE teams hadn’t figured out yet was that at least half of the shallow tunnels were meant to be found in order to absorb ICE’s scarce investigative resources, while the deeper tunnels continued sluicing major profits back to the syndicate. These latter tunnels were highly sophisticated cement structures, designed and built by a Chinese engineering firm specializing in military construction projects for the People’s Liberation Army. One even contained a small rail-car system.

  The most important smuggling tunnel in the network was also linked to an underground meth lab, as well as to sleeping quarters and offices for Alejandro Castillo and his lieutenants. Pearce and his team had found it almost by accident. Ian had intercepted a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers geological survey recently conducted in the area that speculated about the existence of a new smuggling tunnel network. The report hadn’t made its way up the chain of command yet, let alone into the interagency data stream.

  August Mann was in charge of this operation. He based his plan to take out the tunnel complex on a similar job he’d carried out in Ukraine last year before taking on the Dungeness project. He even flew in the same group of subcontractors he’d used to pull it off. Twenty-four hours earlier, his intel team had flown a miniature 3-D mapping camera drone through the underground maze that had generated a perfect image of the tunnel complex. Two hours ago, the same drone cameras had located and identified the tunnel occupants, all of whom carried weapons. That made all of them fair game.

  August stationed an insertion team at the tunnel exit on the American side, and an insertion team at the tunnel entrance on the Mexican side. The American exit was located inside of a Castillo-owned tire warehouse; the Mexican entrance was located inside of a blue stucco Assemblies of God church, also owned by the Castillo organization. Both ends of the tunnel were lightly guarded by a few armed men stationed aboveground.

  When the six tunnel occupants had bedded down for the night, August signaled both teams to take out the tunnel guards. August didn’t want the robots to have all of the fun. He let his human team members drop the tunnel guards with suppressed rifle fire.

  After cutting all of the power down in the hole, each insertion team lowered two Talon SWORDS tracked robots into their respective entrances. The large suitcase-portable tracked vehicles were loaded out with similar packages. In addition to video optics, two of the tracks were mounted with 6mm grenade launchers and 5.56mm semiauto rifles; the other two tracks were outfitted with breaching devices and smoke delivery systems.

  One of both types of drone was dropped in each entrance, along with signal relay boosters to ensure continuous video feeds and radio-control operation of the Talons from the surface.

  August watched the green, ghostly night-vision images of the chaos wrought by the robots with scientific detachment. Groggy, blinded in the dark, and choking on smoke, the defenders shot wildly at the mechanical sounds they heard in the lightless void, but within minutes, the first five targets had been gunned down or shredded with grenade fragments.

  The lone survivor, Alejandro Castillo, had miraculously escaped into an office space and bolted the heavy wooden door. It took August another ten minutes to breach it. The Talon SWORDS had been used extensively in bomb disposal and bunker-breaching missions during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. A simple wooden door was no match. The SWORDS blew off its hinges, revealing Alejandro cowering in the dark. Thirty rounds of steel-jacketed ammo broke his torso open like a crab hammer.

  “Sehr gut, August,” Pearce whispered in the German’s earpiece.

  “Danke.” August switched channels and barked orders to his team. They had to pull those units out and evacuate the area before the federales showed up, which Mann estimated would be in fifteen minutes.

  They left behind a timed demolition charge that collapsed the entire tunnel structure minutes after they egressed. Forty-five minutes after the operation had begun, August, his men, and his robots were all safely back on American territory.

  23

  Tijuana, Mexico

  A black Cadillac Escalade rocketed down the parking garage ramp, skid plates throwing sparks as it banged over a speed bump.

  “There!” Julio Castillo screamed as he pointed at the exit turn.

  The driver threw himself into the sharp left-hand turn, slamming his chest against the shoulder belt with the centrifugal pull. The big SUV tires shrieked on the slick concrete floors of the empty parking garage, still under construction.

  A hundred feet behind them, a Schiebel S-100 helicopter fitted with the GTMax artificial intelligence “learn as you fly” autopiloting package and a six-barreled 7.62mm Minigun raced after them. The three-foot-tall German-manufactured helicopter had already chased them off the highway into the parking structure. Julio couldn’t believe the helicopter would follow them into such a cramped space. They’d dodged scissor lifts and stacked pallets on every level up, and still it followed. The top of the ramp was blocked, so they had to whip around and head back down. The helicopter had just fired its first short burst and missed, blowing chunks of concrete out of the wall in front of the SUV on the last turn.

  Julio glanced back to see that the unmanned helicopter had missed the last turn and was racing past their position. His face was drenched in sweat, but not from the sweltering heat outside.

  The driver turned hard again. Julio banged his head against the thick bulletproof glass but he hardly noticed.

  “Can’t you drive any faster?” Julio screamed.

  The driver said nothing but mashed the gas pedal harder. The Escalade roared down the sloping straightaway.

  “Where the fuck is it now?” Julio screamed, his head on a swivel. His three lieutenants in back peered through the windows, their big pistols drawn as if they were prepared to shoot the drone down.

  The Escalade bucked savagely as it crashed over another speed bump. But the big SUV was flying too fast now. The driver stomped on the brake as he whipped into the next turn. The forward momentum threw all of them against the seat belts, then the sharp left turn crashed their bodies hard into the right-side doors as the Escalade drifted toward the far wall.

  BANG! The side panels crumpled and sparked as the SUV scraped against the concrete wall, but the driver soon righted the vehicle and mashed the throttle again. The exit was just a hundred meters ahead, a big black square framed in the harsh sodium lights of the parking garage.

  Julio roared with delight. He pounded the driver’s shoulders with both of his beefy hands. “You son of a bitch! You did it!” The men in the back laughed, too, until the helicopter dropped into the center of the exit.

  “Gun it!” Julio screamed. He knew the copter would pull away before it got rammed. The driver crushed the gas pedal to the floor.

  The Minigun flashed. Three hundred armor-piercing incendiary rounds poured through the windshield like liquid lead. The Escalade exploded in a ball of fire.

  The helicopter rose at the last second to avoid the fiery wreck as it tumbled end over end out of the exit, finally coming to a halt in the middle of the busy street. Oncoming traffic slammed squealing brakes. Bumpers crashed, glass broke, horns honked.r />
  The burning hulk of the Escalade continued to roar with flames, superheating the already sweltering night air as the pilotless Schiebel slipped away, its stealthy AI navigation program guiding it back to base.

  Isla Paraíso, Mexico

  Pearce studied his monitor. Ten thousand feet above, one of his surveillance drones drew lazy circles around the small island. César Castillo was nowhere in sight, but Pearce had seen him enter his palatial home earlier that evening. So far, so good.

  On the western side of the island, two Castillo guards stretched on loungers by the pool. They were painted like slim gray ghosts in Pearce’s thermal-imaging camera. The tips of their cigarettes flared to white-hot pinpoints when they inhaled. The other two guards patrolling the far side of the home were more diligent. Their skin glowed a whiter shade of gray because they were hotter from trudging steadily in the humid night air.

  Pearce turned to the other two monitors at his station on the boat. They also featured thermal-imaging cameras, but targeting reticles were centered on the screens as well. These were the cameras mounted on two Spartan Scouts, small unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) stationed on either side of the island. The first Spartan monitor was barely catching the tops of the heads of the two lounging guards on the western side, but the other Spartan Scout reticle easily targeted the first of the two guards patrolling the eastern perimeter.

  Pearce engaged the automatic targeting program for the eastern Spartan’s weapons system, which was fitted with a suppressed M110 semiauto sniper rifle firing 7.62mm slugs. The western boat was configured exactly the same way. Both vessels were rubber pontoon platforms, like Zodiacs, with reinforced polymer decking for the gun systems. Tonight’s sea was choppy, but the guns were mounted on a computerized stabilizer to neutralize the motion.

  The eastern Spartan scoped on the rear guard first and dropped him effortlessly. The dead man’s rifle clattered on the ground, alerting his partner, who whipped around to face his fallen comrade. A second later he was tossed backward like a rag doll by a slug that caught him high in the chest.