Brows flew upward as Gabe stared at him. “You’re putting me in that situation?”
“Yes. The cover story that your parents are going to tell everyone in the valley is that you wanted to strike out on your own, so you, not them, bought the Rocking G as a starter ranch. You’re going to become a land and ranch owner.” He gestured toward Anna. “She’s been hired to help you as your wrangler. To the Elsons, she’s nothing more than your employee. Together, you will eavesdrop, lay certain listening devices in and around their house and barn, and start watching them daily. In the meantime, you will be repairing this ranch that has sat empty for twenty-five years, and bring it back to life. We’re hoping the Elsons accept you as their neighbor and won’t think anything of someone buying the ranch and bringing it back to life. It’s perfect cover for what we need you to do.”
“So,” Anna said, “this is more surveillance than anything else. Who are we hooked up with?”
“Yes, you’re right. We need several things from the two of you and both of you are perfect for this mission. I’ll be handing it off to the Salt Lake City, Utah DEA HQ. Because you’re a sniper, Anna, you are going to be key in surveilling. Both of you will ride up into the Salt Mountain Range to find out where Gonzalez has his eye on drug dumps by airplanes. That will be important, too. We think they’re making drops in high mountain meadows west of the valley. We need to find out where their camp is located, how many soldiers, when and how the drugs are dropped, and see if you can’t both establish a pattern of drops. Once all that’s done, you can form a mission to move in on that gang after a drop and we arrest all of them.”
Anna sat back, the air whooshing out of her lungs as her head spun with the unexpected mission. She saw a lot of different emotions playing out across Whitcomb’s face, too. He wasn’t exactly happy about it, either, for a lot of obvious reasons.
“You enlisted my parents to help you in this?” Gabe demanded harshly, his hand moving into a fist on the chair as he sat down.
“We did. I flew out there months ago and laid out what was going on and I asked for their help and they gave it.”
Nostrils flaring, he glared at Hardiman. “This is damned dangerous work, Director. I do not like the idea that my parents are wrapped up in this mission. For all we know? Gonzalez could send an ambush team and get on my parents’ ranch and kill them if they find out they’re involved. Did you tell them that side of our business?”
“I did,” Hardiman said quietly. “We do not want your parents in harm’s way. That was why the purchase of the Rocking G surfaced and was placed in your name only. There’s eighty miles between your parents’ ranch and this one at the south end of the valley. This is top-secret clearance only on this particular assignment. No one outside of those working on it know about it. There’s no way that your mother and father or their ranch can be implicated in this except from the standpoint that you are their son. And, you are striking out on your own, which would seem normal, once you got home. They are sworn to secrecy and your mother assured me, they would not ever tell anyone. Not even your brothers or your sisters know about it. They know nothing about it except that you’ve bought the Rocking G.”
“Hell!” Gabe growled. “You’re putting my whole family at risk!”
“There’s some risk,” the director admitted, spreading his hands out across the desk to try to lower the level of emotion rising, “but we feel it’s minimal. You’ll be living next to the Elson clan. Your parents are not going to visit your ranch. I’ve asked them to stay away and disappear, so to speak, and not drive south to visit you.”
“And I could have a drug soldier tail me up the highway from the Rocking G to Wind River Ranch, too. They could find out.”
“All they’ll find out is that you are their son and you’ve bought the Rocking G as a starter ranch. So long as the Elsons don’t catch on to what you’re doing there, we feel the odds of the Gonzalez ring putting this together are very, very low.”
“God,” Anna muttered, shaking her head, “how would I feel if you told me I’d go home and do the same thing? I’d worry nonstop about my mother. Drug lords are inventive, creative, and they are like spiders that find cracks in security all the time.”
“Got that right,” Gabe bit out angrily, glaring at the director.
Chapter Two
Gabe thought his chest was going to expand and burst open right then and there. All his career he had to rein in his emotions which were easily triggered, stuff them away so they couldn’t impact his focus. He held Hardiman’s patient look and the man seemed unmoved by his concern for his family. The DEA had sent someone to convince his mother and father that it was easy-peasy to get embroiled in a highly volatile and dangerous mission. Son of a bitch! He consciously uncurled his fist on the chair arm, cutting a glance to his new partner, Anna Navaro. She had a distraught expression, her attention on their boss, disbelief in her husky voice tinged with high emotions.
“Look,” Hardiman soothed, giving them both a look of understanding, “I want you to go down to planning. Tom Brown has worked up the mission and you sit with him. See what we have created and then you come back and see me. Fair enough?”
Gabe gritted out, “I’ll listen,” he said, “but my next order of business is to call my parents. By that time, I’ll be armed with the basics of this crazy scheme.” Right now, he could give a rat’s ass if Hardiman decided to fire him on the spot for his insubordination. And the look on Anna’s face was one of terror resting in her eyes. He could tell she wasn’t for this plan, either.
“Fine,” Hardiman said. “I’ll stick around until 1800 to be here to answer any further questions you might have that Tom didn’t cover.”
Some of the anxiety left Gabe. “Okay,” he muttered, standing up, “thanks.” He glanced over at Anna, who stood and turned on her heel, saying nothing. She was a woman of action and had little patience, he would guess, with things that didn’t count in life. She pushed her long, dark hair across her shoulders, jerked the door wide open, and stepped out, heading down the hall to planning. She was pissed off too, for different and tragic reasons. He was sorry her father had been murdered. Was she a sniper because of that, he wondered?
Gabe caught up easily with her, his six foot height and long legs eating up the distance between them. “I’m sorry you got snagged in this,” he offered, giving her an apologetic look. “I knew nothing about this mission.”
“Don’t worry about it.” She punched her chest with her thumb. “I damn well know what happens when a drug lord decides to kill one of your parents, and what happens next to the rest of a family.” She gave him a fierce look. “And you won’t like it.”
Halting, he said, “Stop. Tell me?”
She spun around and came back to where he stood in the hall, looking up and down it, making sure no one was nearby to hear her. Keeping her voice low and raspy, her feelings raw, she said, “My father was a Marine general in Guatemala, where I was born. He headed up a countrywide taskforce to eradicate several drug lords, including Gonzalez, and get stability back into where we lived. My father was VERY good at destroying these filthy animals and where they hid and moved their drugs. A year later, it was Gonzalez who ordered a sniper hit on my papa.” Her voice became choked and she looked away, blinking rapidly a few times, forcing back tears that came naturally whenever she replayed this event. Swallowing, she turned and lifted her chin, meeting Gabe’s narrow-eyed look, his full focus on her. “They murdered him. It was a sniper. I had just come home on Christmas vacation from Yale, my mother’s alma mater, and I was in my first year of law school, when it happened . . .” Her voice became clogged with tears she fought to stop. “My mother had to have six security guards at our estate from that day forward. She could go nowhere without an armed escort. Her life is no longer her own.” Making a dismissive gesture to push away the tears threatening to fall, she stepped back, seeing the sudden sympathy come to his tight expression. Anna did not expect that. “My mother is hunted to thi
s day, a price on her head by the drug lords, including Gonzalez. It’s horrible. It will happen to your family if you let this mission go forward. You have to stop it if you can.”
Gabe stood there, wavering inwardly. The mask of the sniper had fallen from Anna’s unreadable features. “I-I’m sorry,” he managed, his voice hoarse. “I didn’t know. . . .”
“I’m not telling you this for nothing!” she hissed, stepping up to him, drilling him with a dark look. “You said you have two brothers and two sisters, not to mention, your parents. Who’s going to protect all of them?” She jammed her finger down the long, quiet hall. “It sure as hell won’t be the DEA! No, you know what they’ll force your family to do? To go into the Witness Protection Program. Is that what you WANT?”
“Hell no!” he snapped.
She stood there, breathing hard, assessing him. “I don’t know you. I’ve never heard of you.”
“I was undercover for two years in Tijuana, Mexico,” he muttered, running his fingers through his short hair in an aggravated gesture.
“Oh . . .”
“I don’t know you, either.”
“I’m on loan from the Guatemalan government for a three-year contract with the DEA as a sniper.”
“I want to know who threw this mess of a mission together and then picked us for it,” he growled. “Let’s go talk to Tom and get the facts, first. He’s a decent guy and he’ll give us the lowdown.” He wanted to hold out his hand out to her, cup her elbow, but stopped himself. This was a twenty-first-century woman. He assumed she knew only too well from the past few years that a lot of white men—or men of any color in power in any country—disdained women. All they wanted was to use women for their own pleasure and keep them under their boot, never allowing them to become fully empowered human beings. Maud had taught him and Luke early on to respect women, to always see and treat them as equals, and never consider them as sex objects to be used. Still, he saw the suffering in the way her lips twisted, and his protective side instinctively wanted to comfort Anna. It was a compassionate response on his part, not sexual, but his gesture could easily be read differently by her, and he had no wish to step into that bear trap right now. He knew she was a fully empowered individual and didn’t need his antiquated helpful male hand.
“Okay, let’s go hear him out,” she agreed, her voice rough with remnants of her own tearful, gut-wrenching truths. She hadn’t entertained baring such a deep, painful part of her life that she’d always carried within herself. What was it about this guy that made her feel safe when there was nothing safe about her life or this world? Ever since she was fifteen, Anna understood her life was worthless if she was captured by the drug cartels. On some days, she felt eighty, not twenty-seven. Sometimes? She yearned for a safe place. But there were none for people like her. Ever.
The mission planning office was near the end of the hall. Gabe opened the door for her. She gave him an odd look.
“Habit,” he said, “my mother drilled into me and my brother Luke that we were always to be gentlemen.”
A sour grin came to her lips. “Yeah, okay, I’ll deal with it. Thanks.”
Curbing a grin of his own, he liked her spunk and solid confidence. She was a sniper by trade. Lethal. Dangerous. So why was he so powerfully drawn to Anna Navaro? She could be married, but didn’t wear a ring to prove it. In her business as a military sniper, they never wore anything that might give away who or what they were. Having no explanation for this ache centering in his chest once more, he entered and shut the door, seeing Tom just coming out of the planning room. Hailing him, he made a gesture with his head for Anna to follow him.
In a matter of minutes, Tom had taken them to another room and sat them down with a screen up in the semidarkened space. They sat on either side of him at the end of the rectangular table. Both had yellow legal pads in front of them to take notes, although they would be given a full briefing on a thumb drive they could read and study any time they wanted.
“Sheriff Sarah Carter from Lincoln County, where the Wind River Valley sits, requested federal help in trying to stop the encroachment of serious and heavy drug movements through the southern area of her county by the Gonzalez cartel. We did a satellite flyover and spotted this, the Rocking G Ranch, which was up for sale. Best of all, it sits right next to the Elson home, which is five hundred acres.” He pointed to the picture of the Rocking G. “It has been standing unlived in for twenty-five years. The last owner, Mr. Gardner, died at that time, and there was no relative to claim it. The attorney who was in charge of the last will and testament died, and gave it to his younger partner, telling him to try to sell it.”
“That place is in rugged shape,” Gabe said, scowling. All the paint had long ago been wind- and snow-blasted off the graying wooden sides of the structure. The roof was in sorry shape. In fact, everything about the ranch was in a nasty state of disrepair.
“I’m not a cowboy like you, Gabe, but even I can see it’s pretty bad off,” Tom admitted.
“What kind of hectares come with it?” Anna wondered.
Tom, who spoke Spanish and French, quickly made the change from hectares to acres in his head. “This was a cattle grass lease and lumber ranch in its heyday, and there’s ten thousand acres to it.” He moved the pointer, showing the land spreading up into the thickly wooded slopes of the Salt Mountain Range to the east of the main ranch house area. “The family settled in the area in 1875. First relative was a trapper turned logger. He saw logging as a way to make money, and for over a hundred years, the Rocking G was a very rich ranch. The family made money on cattle grass leases during the spring through fall, plus logging that nine thousand acres of trees up on the slopes of the mountain range. They were a pretty ecological family because they replanted young trees in the wake of their logging activities. That guaranteed them more harvesting over the decades.”
“I remember my father telling me about the Ghost Ranch, as he called it,” Gabe said. “It was the Rocking G.”
“Right, it carries that name, too,” Tom agreed. “The most important element of this is the fact that it’s less than half a mile from the main ranch house on the Elsons’ small spread. It sits right next to it, a barbed-wire fence in between them.”
Eyes narrowing, Gabe said, “My parents always told us to avoid this area because of the Elson clan.”
“With good reason,” Tom said, flipping to another photo. “The grandfather is in federal prison in Montana for life. Brian Elson, the husband, was killed by Sheriff Sarah Carson a year ago. Cree Elson, the youngest, was also shot and killed that same year when he kidnapped a local woman and tried to run off with her. Hiram is in prison for ten years. The two brothers who are left, Kaen and Elisha, live at the ranch with their mother, Roberta.” He grimaced. “This family has a rap sheet a mile long. Brian used to beat his wife. She’s been to the ER in Wind River for a broken nose, cheekbone, and jaw, not to mention both arms being busted up by that guy.”
“You ask me,” Anna snarled, “it was a good thing Sheriff Carson killed him. He’s a piece of vermin.”
Tom gave her a sympathetic glance. “Yeah, for sure, Agent Navaro. Nothing good about Brian Elson.”
“Do the two brothers beat up on their mother too?” she demanded.
“Not that we can tell. They’re a tight-knit, dysfunctional family. We don’t know much because no one has gotten close to observing or surveilling the family to understand their interpersonal dynamics. And that’s one of the things that we want to know that, hopefully, you two can provide us over time. Further”—he flipped to a photo of several men standing outside the house at dusk—“we want to understand, through video reconnaissance, who these dudes are. We think they are Gonzalez drug soldiers, but aren’t sure.”
“And any photos can be run through our extensive facial recognition software and potentially ID them,” Anna said with satisfaction.
“Right on.”
“So,” Gabe said warily, “we’re basically setting up a su
rveillance and ID site on this ranch?”
“Yes, the deed to the ranch is in your name, Gabe. Do you still have Ace? Your dog?”
“Yes. He’s always been a part of my cover since I joined the DEA after leaving the Marine Corps. My hitch in Tijuana undercover, the men called me El perro soldado, the Dog Soldier, because Ace is an ex-IED-trained military dog. I could easily fold in my four years in the Marine Corps as a dog handler. Plus, Ace has saved my butt more times than I can count. He’s my friend, my buddy and he’s a helluva guard dog.”
“Good to know, because you can utilize Ace as a warning system if anyone is snooping around the property. The story that your parents are telling everyone is that you’re coming home to stay and wanted to strike out on your own, starting up your own ranch in the valley.”
“And yet? My parents’ name is involved because I’m at that ranch.”
“It is, only because you are their son,” he agreed. “But there’s eighty miles between the two ranches. And we have plenty of info on Gonzalez and his activities down in Guatemala”—he nodded in Anna’s direction—“because we debriefed her a year ago on his strategies and tactics. We found with him, when he wants to establish a new territory, he always goes and looks for a local gang, if possible, as cover and to work with them.”
“Then,” Gabe said, “the Elsons were perfect for the way he operates.”
“Correct.”
“Gonzalez moves slowly compared to other drug lords,” Anna added. “He’s very strong in family dynamics, hires carefully and not quickly. He thoroughly vets who’s working for him from the lowest man on the totem pole up to and including the men who are closest to him at the top. He does a lot of background checking. He trusts no one. As a consequence, his cartel has a stronger loyalty rate and he knows all his men.” She gave Gabe a sad look. “Someone like you trying to break in as an undercover agent? He’ll suss you out in a heartbeat and kill you before you ever got a chance to get into his organization even at the lowest level.”
Wind River Undercover Page 3
