by Mike Maden
They unloaded quietly and scoped out the ramshackle farm. The house was barely more than a shack. In the front, a couple of goats chewed on grass and a half dozen chickens wandered around a tractor that hadn’t moved since the Carter administration. Off the near side of the house, five huge sows shouldered against one another in a muddy pen, grunting as they fed greedily from a trough, fat stinging flies buzzing in their flicking ears. Otherwise, no other sounds or movement.
“There.” Pearce pointed at a dirt bike dropped in the grass.
Three yards from the bike, a body.
Tamar gasped.
“Not Udi. Too young. Let’s move.”
Pearce carried a short-stock M-4 carbine. Tamar gripped her Mini-Uzi. Judy hauled the medical kit.
The three of them crouch-walked past the motorcycle. Key still in the ignition. Smell of gas. They reached the body. A teenage boy, fourteen, maybe fifteen. Single gunshot to the side of his head. “He tumbled off the back and the bike kept rolling,” Pearce whispered in his mic.
Judy felt for a pulse. Knew there wouldn’t be one. “Dead awhile.” She shooed the flies off of the boy’s head wound.
“Wait here,” Pearce said to Judy. He nodded at Tamar, gave her a hand signal. Tamar sped around back, keeping low to the ground, as Pearce approached the front door.
“Another body back here,” Tamar whispered. “Probably the boy’s mother. Throat cut.”
“Bastards,” Ian hissed in Pearce’s ear.
Pearce reached the porch. The door was shut, but a front window was open.
“In position,” Tamar said.
“Hold,” Pearce replied. He pulled a four-inch-long Black Hornet Nano helicopter drone from his pocket and activated the flight software on his iPhone. The half-ounce surveillance drone featured a small camera. No telling what or who might be waiting inside. Pearce powered up the unit and tossed it through the window. Forty seconds later, the Norwegian-built drone had circumnavigated the two-room shack. No trip wires, no bad guys.
“All clear,” Pearce said. “But stay frosty. Go.”
Pearce and Tamar burst into the two-room shack at the same time. They cleared the shack.
Cigarette butts on the plywood floor, ashtrays overflowing on the card table. Dirty dishes in the filthy washtub. Christ on the bedroom wall staring down at the unmade bed tangled with bloody sheets.
Pearce pocketed the Hornet.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
Tamar’s eyes posed the obvious question.
Pearce checked his tablet. The transponder signal still flashed. It was only accurate to ten meters. “Better check outside,” he said.
He stepped off of the porch into the blinding sun, heading for the far side of the house. Clothes already sticky with sweat. Tamar took the opposite tack and headed for the animals. Judy was still crouched low by the boy, shooing flies. She’d covered his lifeless face with a square of gauze from the medical kit.
Pearce checked the side of the shack. A rabbit cage with three fat rabbits and a rusty rake leaning against the wall. Farther back, an outhouse. Flies. Stink.
A bad kind of stink.
Pistol up, Pearce opened the door. A corpse. Pants down around his ankles. Bled out. Pearce didn’t have to raise the slumped head.
Must be the dad, he told himself.
Tamar screamed.
Pearce bolted toward her. She stood near the pig trough, clutching her horrified face in her hands.
It was Udi.
Pearce recognized the mop of hair and the thick hands, but not much else. The pigs had gutted him. Had devoured his face.
Tamar howled, crazed with rage. Her Uzi split the air, slugs slapping the huge pig bellies. The swine screamed as if possessed, charging and slipping through the mud and gore, dropping one by one, as 9mm rounds sliced through their spinal cords and brain stems.
Tamar stopped firing, pirouetted, arms flailing. The Uzi sailed through the air as she spilled into the grass, her shoulder painted red.
A shot rang out. The bullet zooped like an angry bee past Pearce’s ear. He dropped to one knee, trying to see where it came from.
Judy ran full throttle toward Tamar, despite Troy screaming in her ear, “Down, down, down!” until she dropped by her friend’s side with the med kit. She began unzipping it when a geyser of dirt leaped up between them.
“Let’s go!” Pearce shouted as he grabbed Tamar’s shirt collar and dragged her toward the tractor, Judy close behind.
Pearce lay Tamar behind the shelter of the big rear steel wheel where Judy could safely work on her. Pearce crouched behind the small front wheel. Another rifle crack. A round spanged against the tractor.
“Status!” Ian shouted.
Judy tore open the med kit and ripped open bandages.
“Tamar’s hit. Judy and I are under cover.”
“I’m calling in support—”
“Stand down, Ian. I need that guy alive.”
“But Troy—”
“That’s an order.” Pearce tapped his earpiece, cutting Ian off. He pulled his Glock from his holster and handed it to Judy. “Take this.” And he added, “Just in case.”
Another bullet hit the tractor. The steel fender rang like a church bell.
Judy shook her head as she applied pressure bandages to Tamar’s shoulder wound. “Forget it. Just go!”
Pearce glanced through the tractor. Two hundred yards away, sunlight winked off of a scope. A man stood in the bed of a pickup truck using the roof as a rifle bench. Too close for comfort, especially with a scope.
Judy was right.
Just go.
Pearce dashed back toward the motorcycle in the grass. He’d seen the key in the ignition. He prayed there was still enough gas in the tank. Dirt puffed next to his foot. Pearce pumped the kick-starter twice and the engine roared to life. He gunned the throttle hard, popping the clutch and shifting gears as fast as he could. The bike tore up dirt clods behind him as he raced toward the berm. He took the hill at an angle and jumped it easily, crashing both tires into the dirt road just a few feet behind the pickup, fishtailing ahead of him, racing away. The man in the back of the battered gray Dodge crashed to the steel deck, dropping his rifle in the bed. Otherwise he could’ve shot Pearce dead without even aiming.
The truck picked up speed, throwing dirt and rocks behind it. Pearce could feel the grit blasting against his face; his Oakleys saved his eyes. He kept the throttle full-on with his right hand while he slid the M-4 sling around with his left. He raised the carbine up and fired three three-round bursts, trying not to hit anyone.
Slugs sparked on the tailgate, then shattered the rear glass. The truck didn’t slow down—in fact, it kept gaining speed, but the man in back ducked down. The bike Pearce was on was only 125cc, too small to keep up with a big V-8 truck engine running full bore. He fired again, twice, aiming for the tires. He missed. Fifteen rounds left.
The shooter in the back of the truck sat back up, aiming his gun. Pearce ducked low as he swerved the bike side to side. The big semiauto rifle thundered.
Pearce felt the heavy rounds blow past his head even with the wind and the dust whipping his face. He raised his gun again, firing at the tires.
The left rear truck tire blew. It must have been a retread. The tire unwound like a strip of tubular dough and wrapped itself around the rear axle. The truck bucked and swerved as the driver lost control. The big Dodge plowed into a ditch on the side of the road and flipped over.
Pearce dropped his carbine to downshift. He was still a hundred yards back and didn’t want to come racing up to a hail of bullets. The rifle cracked again. Pearce ducked off the side of the road and dropped the bike, finding cover behind a rock. A bullet shaved a fleck of stone just above Pearce’s head. He shifted to one side of the rock and opened fire, emptying his mag.
<
br /> WHOOSH!
The truck erupted in a cloud of fire and steel. Shrapnel whistled past. The pressure wave rocked the trees overhead.
“I SAID I NEEDED THEM ALIVE!” Pearce screamed.
“Wasn’t us, boss. Still haven’t armed the missiles,” Stella said. She had been on overwatch with an extended-range Reaper drone temporarily “borrowed” from an air force maintenance hangar. A $14 million favor, courtesy of Mike Early. Pearce wasn’t stupid enough to think he could handle the mission without a Hellfire angel on his shoulder.
Pearce tapped his earpiece as he raced toward the burning hulk. “Ian. Are we alone out here?”
“All clear.”
“Must have been a suicide bomb,” Pearce said. “Damn it.”
Pearce stopped. Stood as close to the flames as he could stand. No survivors. “Judy, how’s Tamar?”
“The bullet passed clean through the shoulder, but she’s in shock. I’ve stopped the blood flow and got her on a plasma drip. She’s stable for the moment, but she needs help now.”
“Ian, call in a medevac.”
“Already on the way,” Ian said. He’d notified a private air-ambulance service out of Veracruz on standby. “ETA two minutes.”
“Can she talk?” Pearce asked Judy, running back to the bike.
“She’s out.” But knowing Pearce, added, “I know she’d tell you this wasn’t your fault.”
He almost believed her.
Washington, D.C.
Britnev sat in one of the computer carrels at the Georgetown public library. He hated computers, at least for this kind of effort. He’d been trained in the early ’80s in the traditional methods of tradecraft—dead drops, brush passes, and one-time pads. Britnev believed that using any kind of electronic communications was the clandestine equivalent of walking around with his fly open. But in this case, it couldn’t be helped. His contact in Mexico refused to communicate with anyone but him and this was the best arrangement they could make.
After covering the PC’s webcam with a sticky note—he always assumed a computer’s webcam was hacked—Britnev logged in under his fake identity and pulled up a coded e-mail in his Dropbox account left there by his Mexican contact, Ali Abdi.
Britnev memorized the jumble of numbers and symbols in the e-mail message—they would have looked like gibberish to anyone passing by—then deleted both the e-mail and the Dropbox account.
He took a short but sweaty walk to a nearby Starbucks and ordered a venti black iced tea with lemon, no sugar, and took a seat in the back, away from the windows. Britnev pulled out a pen and deciphered the code in his head, scratching each letter onto a napkin. Ali had already informed him last week about the Castillo decapitation strike. What Ali hadn’t been able to find out was who was behind it.
Until now.
Britnev was a little queasy. The intel had come from the Israeli Ali had tortured and killed in Mexico. He knew what terrible things Ali had done to get it, but he pushed the butchery from his mind and finished the transcription. The first letters on the napkin spelled a name.
Troy Pearce.
Britnev transcribed the rest. A request from Ali for intel on Pearce and Pearce Systems. Britnev took a sip of tea, crumpled the napkin, and pocketed it.
Ali had found his trigger and handed it to Britnev. Now it was up to him to pull it.
31
Texas City, Texas
The Estrella de la Virgen was a privately owned twenty-five-thousand-ton Mexican oil tanker ported out of Veracruz but sailing under a Panamanian flag and captained by an American, Gil Norquist.
The Estrella had arrived at the Millennium Oil refinery on the Texas Gulf Coast loaded with a shipment of gasoline from PEMEX, the state-owned petroleum company of Mexico. Millennium was experiencing a shortage of summer-blend gasoline for its distributors and had made the emergency purchase after a recent spike in market price. It was a pretty standard run and the Estrella had made the exact same trip several times earlier in the year, though not always to the Millennium facility. BP, Marathon, Valero, and several other refineries were located in the Houston port area as well.
When Captain Norquist confirmed that his Grand Cayman bank account had received a deposit of $50,000, he gladly turned a blind eye to the twenty-eight unregistered civilian passengers and the unmarked crates of cargo they had hauled on board his ship. He assumed it was another drug and guns shipment; he’d had this arrangement with the Bravo organization for years. The Estrella had special passenger and storage compartments fitted out for just such transactions. The passengers always stayed clear of the crew on the short voyage, and the crew knew not to venture down to where the mysterious passengers were located. His ship was never inspected on the Mexican side because Bravo owned the Veracruz port authority. Clearing customs on the American side wasn’t much more difficult. It was just a matter of timing the unloading with the shifts of the customs officers who were on the Bravo payroll. Security on both sides had been something of a joke for years now.
A brilliant orange sunset greeted the Estrella as she docked in Texas. Once her lines were secured and the marine loading arms attached to the Estrella’s cargo manifolds, the unloading procedures began. The marine surveyor was already on board gathering samples from the cargo tanks to test for purity.
The captain stepped into the cargo control room along with his first officer and radioed in to the loadmaster person in charge (LPIC) onshore. The order of tanks to be emptied, their flow rates, and the destination tanks on the tank farm were all agreed to and soon the gasoline began to flow.
During the gulf crossing, the Bravo soldiers and their Quds Force officers remained well hidden belowdecks. They used their time to change out of civilian clothes into their combat gear. The officers also had the men break down, clean, and reassemble their weapons to keep their anxious young minds occupied.
After an hour, Captain Norquist checked his watch and decided it was time to go. The eager redheaded mistress he kept in Houston would be waiting for him in her cherry red Mercedes SL convertible down in the port parking lot. They would go out for a couple of thick rib eyes at Charley’s Steakhouse, and then he would spend the evening with her at her downtown condo, messing the sheets up for the better part of the night. They’d grab breakfast at their favorite diner first thing in the morning and then she’d drive him back just in time to cast off and set sail back to Veracruz. They were both creatures of pleasure and routine, and it had been a mutually satisfying arrangement for the past five years.
He turned over the control-room responsibilities and the overnight watch to his extremely competent Filipino first mate and headed for his small private cabin. At forty-eight years of age, Norquist still cut a dashing figure, like an old Hollywood leading man, with just a hint of silver in his thick blond hair. He didn’t bother changing into his civvies because his mistress said she loved him dressed like a sailor in his crisp white captain’s uniform.
Norquist stepped into his bathroom and ran the water in his small steel sink. His mouth watered; he could already taste the succulent slab of beef he’d soon be tucking into at Charley’s. He leaned over and splashed his face with cold water, then rose up just in time to feel a hand slap his forehead and yank his head back, exposing an enormous Adam’s apple. Norquist didn’t even feel the razor-sharp blade slice open his throat, but he heard the tremendous gush of air escaping out of his lungs through the gaping wound, and his dimming eyes caught sight of the arterial spray spattering against the mirror. The last thing his unconscious mind registered was the sound of his own body thudding against the steel deck.
—
The Quds Force commandos and their Bravo recruits were clad in black from head to foot, their faces hidden beneath balaclava masks despite the suffocating humid night air. They burst into the port control room and slaughtered the port technicians with suppressed semiautomatic pistols, then remotely op
ened the valves on the massive port storage tanks, emptying thousands of gallons of gasoline and oil, flooding the storage yard. They had already slapped magnetic demolition packs to several of the tanks and set the timed detonators to blow with just enough time for them to make their escape.
Hamid Nezhat led the team out of the main gate, careful to run in full view of the security cameras high up on the lampposts illuminating the parking lot. The Quds commandos all lugged the antiquated AK-47s and RPG-7s even though they had trained on superior German and Israeli equipment back in Iran, but it was necessary for the show.
Nezhat spotted a red Mercedes convertible shot to hell in a reserved parking space. The long, busty torso of a woman had tumbled out of it, her corpse half trapped inside the car while her upper body twisted out and her bright red hair splayed like a fan on the hot asphalt. Wide, green, lifeless eyes stared unblinkingly at a hazy night sky. A pity and a waste, Nezhat thought to himself. What he could do to a woman like that.
Two big Chevy panel trucks were parked haphazardly near the Mercedes and Walid Zohar, Ali’s Azeri sergeant, stood in front of the first one. He was dressed the same way as the rest of the team and also had his head covered.
“No problems, brother?” Nezhat asked in Spanish as his men loaded into the two vans.
“One guard at the gate, neutralized. Roads are clear.”
“Good.” He checked his watch. “Seven minutes to clear out.” He slapped Walid on the shoulder and the two men crawled into the big van, Walid taking the driver’s side. Nezhat was pleased. Phase one of the plan had been a complete success. Phase two would be even more spectacular, he thought, but also far more difficult to execute. He glanced back over at the Mercedes. He prayed that one of the virgins waiting for him in heaven was a big-breasted redhead like that one.
32
The White House, Washington, D.C.
Myers stood up from behind her desk and checked her watch. It was nearly 10 p.m. “The meeting begins in two minutes.”
