The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “I must intercede,” de la Cruz said. He’d been sitting at the far end of the conference table, listening to the discussion but not participating. “I agree with Mr. Wentworth. There is nothing more that you gentlemen can do here, and in view of the, shall we say, public perception of your actions last night, I do not believe it wise for you to remain. CISEN will extend every effort to locate Ms. Dominique and free her. I promise this.”

  “He’s right,” Wentworth said. “I was trying to keep this civil, but you two stirred up one hell of a hornet’s nest, calling in an ops team.”

  So that was how they were going to play it. Teller leaned back in his chair, arms folded. He was pissed. “We stirred it up? Are you freakin’ nuts?”

  “Your former deputy chief of station got greedy,” Procario added. “If you want to lay blame.”

  “And the ops request was approved,” Teller reminded them.

  “The operation will be brought up for formal review,” Wentworth said, ignoring them. “We had hoped you two would be able to handle things … more discreetly.”

  “Well, maybe you should have a talk with the drug lords about that,” Procario said. “They’re the ones with an army down here. They’re the ones killing anyone who gets in their way.”

  “They butchered seven civilian archaeologists,” Teller said, “apparently for no reason other than that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “The civilians are not our concern,” Wentworth told them. “What is our concern is that someone has leaked details of your operations down there to the Mexican media. I understand that the ambassadors of Mexico and Belize are delivering joint messages to the president this afternoon protesting illegal military operations on their sovereign territory. I can tell you right now that the president, State, INSCOM, and quite a few other people up here are not happy with you at the moment.”

  “We had a good chance to secure the nukes,” Procario said. “What were we supposed to do—use local assets?”

  Teller glanced at de la Cruz, sitting at the end of the table, looking for a reaction to this. The CISEN officer appeared absorbed in his laptop at the moment, however.

  “Both ops were quiet and slick,” Teller pointed out. “In and out. No collateral damage.”

  “Have you seen the headlines down there this morning?”

  “No.”

  “‘U.S. Troops Attack Chetumal Warehouse.’ ‘U.S. Troops Invade Belize Soil.’ They’re playing it up big.”

  Both raids—the one at Cerros and the simultaneous raid on the airport warehouse next to the Chetumal Airport—had gone down, so far as Teller could see, with absolute perfection, a rarity in any military operation. There’d been no U.S. casualties at all, and no civilians caught in the line of fire. A total of twelve narcoterrorists had been killed and ten captured; the only thing that had gone wrong was that neither the Russian submarine or the missing nuclear weapons—the whole point of the double raid—had been found. Hell, they hadn’t even turned up any drugs.

  “Is that the real reason you’re yanking us out?” Teller demanded. “Bad media coverage? Political expediency?”

  Wentworth’s face darkened. “Our reasoning is not for you to question, Captain. Getting on a plane and returning to Washington is now your sole concern. Do you understand me?”

  Teller laughed. “Oh, yes. I understand very well.”

  On the street a few minutes later, Procario looked askance at his companion. “You’re not going back, are you?”

  “No, Frank, I’m not.”

  “You’re a cowboy, you know that?”

  “I’ve heard that.” “Cowboy” was slang within the intelligence services for someone who did it his own way, someone who shot from the hip and didn’t necessarily check in for guidance from headquarters. Not, in other words, a team player.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Using a ghost tracker to find Jackie.”

  “You don’t trust de la Cruz, do you? That’s why you cut Wentworth off before he could say more.”

  “That’s right. We can’t trust anyone down here, especially anyone with the government. The narcotrafficantes have been three steps ahead of us all along, and we know they get their information from corrupt government and police officials.”

  “They’re not all corrupt.”

  “No—not all. But we can’t afford to risk any breach of security. If Wentworth had spilled the fact that we, and presumably Jackie, had been carrying ghost trackers, then de la Cruz—if he’s a black hat—would have told Jackie’s abductors. They would then either kill her or find her transmitter. And we would be back to square one.”

  Ghost-series transmitters were wireless microphones/transmitters printed on a sliver of plastic small enough to fit inside the barrel of a working ballpoint pen. They had a range of a mile or a little less under ideal conditions. When Teller had pulled out his pen and clicked it during the video conference, he’d been suggesting to Wentworth that they would be able to track Jackie by means of her transmitter. He’d not expected the idiot to begin discussing ghost technology with de la Cruz in the room, however. As it was, ghost-series trackers were in widespread use all over the world to thwart kidnappers and cargo thieves. U.S. citizens couldn’t own them—that was illegal unless you were a law enforcement professional—but it was quite possible that CISEN officers like de la Cruz knew all about the things.

  That worried Teller.

  “Okay, so how do we cover the city? Or did you buy Wentworth’s assessment that she could be in some other city by now?”

  “Chances are she’s still here in Mexico City,” Teller said. “They would be running a risk moving her somewhere else, and they probably think they don’t need to move her.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “We can tap into the Cellmap feed and locate clusters of bad guys throughout the city. Then we check out each cluster with a FIDR.” The acronym rhymed with “spider.”

  “We’ll need a helicopter.”

  “Gray Fox?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Procario said. “We’ll need armed backup and special gear anyway to pull this off.”

  “I’ll put in a call to Ladyville,” Teller said.

  Marcetti and his team should still be at the Belize lily pad. The CH-47 crew and some of the commandos had taken the prisoners back stateside yesterday, but the rest had gone back to the lily pad in case an assault was also needed on the Zapoteca or some other target objective turned up. Teller had Marcetti’s number. He remembered that the man had been as shaken by the butchery at Cerros as Teller was, and thought he would help them if he could. One thing long experience had taught Teller: The members of elite teams—marines, SEALs, Special Forces, ISA commandos—all shared an absolute devotion to the concept that no one ever was left behind.

  The thought of doing so for political expediency was guaranteed to send such people ballistic, and Teller was guessing that Marcetti was no exception.

  “What do you want me to do?” Procario asked.

  “Sir, I want you to check out the hospital where they took Jackie. I’d kind of like to validate de la Cruz’s story.” Teller tended to return to military protocol when he really needed Procario’s help—and this had become a deeply emotional issue.

  “And after that?”

  “After that, we’ll see. But I’m expecting that we’ll be going in hot.”

  MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  1350 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  “Abra la boca,” the voice said.

  Obediently, Dominique opened her mouth, and the woman slipped in a spoonful of hot soup—broth and chicken, tomatoes, and corn, mostly, she thought. She was still tied, still blindfolded, but at least that damnable gag had been removed. The woman continued to feed her. Earlier, she’d untied Dominique long enough to take her into the bathroom.

  Dominique didn’t try to carry on a conversation, though. She co
uld sense at least one other in the room, and once she caught a murmured exchange of conversation between the woman and a man—one of the men who’d been joking with a friend about cutting her into pieces a few hours ago. When the woman spoke to her, it was with curt, brief orders, but Dominique thought she sensed a kindness there behind the mask.

  She hoped so, hoped she wasn’t letting desperation make her delusional. She heard the spoon scrape across the bottom of the bowl, then opened for a final spoonful.

  “Allá,” the woman said. “Eso es todo.”

  “Mil gracias,” Dominique replied. A thousand thanks.

  “¿Le gusta agua?”

  “Si. Por favor.” A glass was held to her lips, and she gratefully took a long drink of water. “Muchas gracias.”

  “De nada.”

  The gag was stuffed back between her lips, the knot at the back of her head tightened. She lay back down on the unseen bed. The guard retied her wrists to her ankles, leaving her helplessly trussed, a piece of meat.

  She could still feel the reassuring presence of the pen clipped inside her bra, and she thanked God once again that they hadn’t stripped and searched her when they’d tied her up and dumped her on the bed. She’d expected to be raped and tortured as soon as they got her here—assuming they didn’t just shoot her outright and dump her body on the street—but she had the feeling that they were waiting for someone else to arrive before anything like a thorough interrogation.

  Interrogation, she knew, would come. They knew she and Chavez were CIA; de la Cruz had burned them from the start, the filthy, bought-and-paid-for bastard. Presumably they wanted to know what she knew, details on the Cellmap program, for instance; maybe they wanted to know what the Agency had uncovered so far about nuclear weapons on the Zapoteca, or the mission of the Kilo submarine.

  At the very least they would demand the identities of other Agency operators in Mexico—the ones they did not get from Nichols when he had sold out.

  Operators like Teller and Procario.

  The pen and the ghost transmitter hidden inside gave her at least a shadow of hope.

  Hope that Teller was out there looking for her.

  Hope that he was on his way.

  HOTEL HILTON

  CIUDAD DE MÉXICO

  REPÚBLICA DE MÉXICO

  2127 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  “So what the hell was it the DEA guy owed you for, March?” Teller asked.

  They were sitting at the desk in Teller’s room at the Hilton, a laptop open and displaying a graphic street map of central Mexico City. Small blue dots were scattered across the map in haphazard randomness; at the center of the screen was a green aircraft icon. The icon remained motionless as the map shifted and turned around it.

  “A few years ago, an op went bad in T-town,” Marcetti told them. “A couple of DEA operators were trying to pull off a wired buy, but the opposition made them, and things turned pear shaped. I took a covert team in across the border at San Diego and got them out.”

  “Sinaloa Cartel?”

  “Uh-uh. Tijuana and Oaxaca, working together. That was 2008, right after the big shoot-out between Sinaloa and Tijuana, though.”

  “I remember reading about that one,” Teller said. Fourteen cartel members had died and eight were wounded in the gun battle at the U.S. border

  “Yeah, well, the targets were pretty nervous, on their guard, you know? They grabbed the DEA people and were threatening to execute them. We brought them out.”

  “So now one of them’s willing to loan you an RQ-4?” Procario said. “Sweet.”

  Teller had feared that it might take a long time—a day or more—to track down Marcetti and get him up to Mexico City, but he’d managed to get him on the phone and explain the situation. Marcetti, four of his men, and several crates of equipment from the lily pad had been on the way to Benito Juárez International less than three hours later in a private Beechcraft rented at Chetumal.

  Using the Black Hawk DAPs, it turned out, was not even a remotely viable option. The UH-60s were expensive aircraft with a lot of highly classified hardware on board, and there was no way to sideline them for an operation over Mexico City, especially when the local news media were screaming murder over Mexican nationals killed or captured by American troops at Chetumal. Marcetti had thought a moment, then promised to make some phone calls during his flight to BJI.

  “We really do appreciate you dropping everything and coming up here, March,” Teller told him. It hadn’t taken long after the ISA team’s arrival for the three of them to get on a first-name basis. “I just hope you don’t land in hot water over this. We’re not even supposed to be here now.”

  “Hey, glad to help out. I’ve had the REMFs yank the plug on me a time or two. I don’t care where the orders come from, I do not leave my people in the field.” He chuckled. “Besides, we were just sitting on our assets down there in Ladyville. They scrubbed the op on the Zapoteca, you know that?”

  “I figured that,” Teller said. “Everyone’s sure the nukes are already on their way to the States. Besides, the bad press down here is making Washington real leery of doing anything else to piss off the Mexicans.”

  “Right. So we were finishing prepping the DAPs with long-range tanks for a ferry flight to McDill when your call came in. The rest of the team went back with the helos, but a few of us just decided we were overdue for some leave time. No reason not to take it in sunny Mexico, right?”

  “Well, we’re glad to have you on board,” Procario said. He nodded at the computer display. “And we really appreciate your buddy’s toy.”

  Marcetti’s phone call to a friend in the DEA had resulted in an unexpected addition to the team’s arsenal in Mexico City.

  A Global Hawk.

  The United States had been tracking drug smugglers using unmanned aerial vehicles—UAVs—over Mexico for more than twenty years. Most of those overflights had been made with MQ-1 Predators, operating along the U.S.-Mexican border, with the intelligence they picked up shared with the Mexican authorities. Predators had a range of only 675 nautical miles, however, and the nearest was deployed at JBSA—Joint Base San Antonio, 600 miles from Mexico City. A Predator would have been able to arrive over the target, but it would be a one-way flight. Teller could just imagine the news headlines if a Predator crashed outside of Mexico City—or tried to land at Benito Juárez.

  The RQ-4A Global Hawk, however, was a whole different breed of bird. Over 44 feet long and with a wingspan of better than 116 feet, it was more than twice the size of the Predator, with greater speed, much greater range, and an astonishing mission endurance of thirty-six hours. By the time Marcetti and his men landed at Benito Juárez, an RQ-4A based at JBSA had been fitted out with a Field Intensity Directive Receiver (or FIDR) keyed to the frequency broadcast by Dominique’s ghost-series transmitter, and was being readied for takeoff. With a range of well over 15,000 miles, the Global Hawk had arrived over Mexico City an hour and a half after takeoff. If need be, it could circle above Mexico City for over a day. If it came within a mile of Dominique’s transmitter, it would send the signal back to JBSA and to Teller’s laptop.

  To narrow the search, Teller had provided Marcetti with the Cellmap data showing clusters of cell phones carrying the network-mapping virus. Analysis showed lots of lone signal sources, but twenty-five clusters of two or more targets within the Mexico City metropolitan area; a simple flight plan algorithm was now guiding the Global Hawk above each concentration in turn. Though he was impatient to get started, he and Procario had agreed to wait until after dark to reduce the chances of the Global Hawk being spotted while it was at low altitude. The aircraft was quite stealthy and should be able to avoid local radar, but it had to stay well below 5,000 feet in order to have a chance to pick up the signal. In daylight people would be able to see it, and that could give the game away. For several hours, Procario kept the Global Hawk circling 50,000 feet above the uninhabited slopes of Mount Tlaloc, thirty miles east of the city, waiting for the
sky to grow dark.

  An hour ago, they’d brought the Global Hawk in, routing it well clear of the airport and bringing it down to just 2,500 feet above the streets. Technically, since this was an unauthorized violation of Mexico’s sovereign airspace, the Mexicans would be perfectly within their rights to shoot the UAV down. At thirty-five million dollars apiece, not counting the development costs, the Global Hawk was an expensive toy—far too expensive for the price to come out of Teller’s pocket if he broke it.

  Fortunately, the authorities were unlikely to bring the eleven–ton aircraft down inside the crowded city. The biggest danger, Teller thought, was running into a small private aircraft, and the Hawk’s onboard radar navigation systems should be able to keep it well clear of any such threat.

  “Got her!” Procario jumped up from the keyboard as a rapidly pulsing chirp came from the speaker. “By God, we got her!”

  “Jesus!” Teller exclaimed. “That was fast! Where?”

  Procario turned the laptop so that Teller could see the screen. “You’re gonna shit yourself.”

  “I take it,” Captain Marcetti said quietly, “that we have a target now.”

  “That’s Iztacalco,” Teller said, looking at the aircraft icon positioned above the slowly turning mosaic of city streets. Two tight clusters of blue dots were visible on the map. He leaned forward, translating coordinates. “Shit! It’s La Calle Sur 145! The Perez house!”

  Procario grinned. “Damned straight. They took her right back to the place we were surveilling the other night.”

  The computer was chirping the announcement of the receipt of signal. Procario now jacked a headset into the computer and started listening. “The signal’s weak,” he said, “but we’re getting it all. Heartbeat … so she’s alive. And some muffled sounds that might be conversation in the room with her.”

  “Let me hear.”

  Procario handed him the headset, and Teller listened. He could hear words in Spanish, a fuzzy backdrop to the steady the-thump the-thump the-thump of Jackie’s heartbeat, but it was hard to make them out.