The Last Line

by Anthony Shaffer

  “What do you hear, man?” Marcetti asked.

  “I’m not sure. Might be an argument.” He listened a moment more. “Two men … and a woman, too. Not Jackie. Maybe the Perez woman? Something about … the woman wants to untie her. One of the men just called her a puta … a whore, and said she shouldn’t stick her nose where it’s not wanted.”

  He strained to hear, strained harder to understand. “Shit. Someone named Calavera is on the way.”

  “‘Skull?’” Procario asked, one eyebrow raised. “Seems a bit melodramatic.”

  “These people excel in drama,” Marcetti said. “The bloodier, the better.”

  “We’d better saddle up and get over there,” Teller said, “before things get really ugly.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  VICENTE HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2231 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  20 APRIL

  It had taken less than an hour for the eight of them, traveling in two vehicles, to thread through the city’s streets from the Hilton to Iztacalco. Teller and Procario had gone up to the OP house and awakened an angry Vicente.

  “¡Diablo! ¿Tienes una idea qué hora es?” the informant had demanded of the men at his door.

  Teller glimpsed a pretty, younger woman in the hallway behind the man, clutching a robe tightly at her throat. “I am sorry, Señor Vicente,” he’d replied, speaking Spanish. “But you can blame it on your neighbors.”

  Vicente’s eyes had widened, he’d glanced out the door, looking up and down the street, and then he’d motioned the men inside with a hurry-up motion of his hand. “If they discover that I am helping you—” he began.

  “With a little luck,” Teller told him, “your neighbors will not be a problem for much longer.”

  “God willing,” Vicente said. “But you will forgive me, señor, if I believe that when it happens. You Americans, you come and then you are gone. The Mexican police … half of them work for the cartels, and the rest are never around when you want them. But the cartels, and the evil they bring, they are always here.”

  In the third-story room upstairs, they began setting up their equipment—the triple-M scope and the satcom link back to Langley first. Langley, Teller thought, might not be particularly thrilled to hear from them. He and Procario weren’t even supposed to be here now, and Marcetti and his team technically were working for INSCOM. Still, they knew some people at the Agency who would be willing to work with them back-channel, and the satellite feed allowed them to keep tracking the Cellmap data.

  Once the connection was complete, Teller brought up the street map showing central Iztacalco. As he zoomed in for a close look, two clusters of blue dots defined themselves, one on the west side of La Calle Sur 145, one on the east. Closer still, and he could see the specific houses.

  “So,” Procario said, looking over his shoulder. “Now we know how Grant and Dominique got spotted when they were surveilling the Perez house.”

  “An overwatch,” Teller agreed. “Looks like six in the Perez house, and … Christ. Twelve in the other. I think what we have here, March, is an ambush.”

  “You’re right. So, how do we take them down?”

  “We need some tactical intel,” Teller said. He moved the cursor over one of the blue dots in the Perez house and clicked on it. A phone number came up. A long moment passed. Then data scrolled down the side of the screen, personal information on Federico Ortega Noreno—his address in Mexico City, driver’s license statics, arrest warrants, prison records …

  “Looks like a street-level thug,” Procario said. “Since he turned twenty-one he’s been in jail more than he’s been free. Theft, breaking and entering, aggravated assault, auto theft, narcotics possession with intent to sell…”

  One by one, they identified the owners of each of the cell phones in both target houses. One, Maria Perez, had no police record—though she was listed as a “person of interest” both because she was the niece of a Los Zetas big shot and because she was the novia, the girlfriend, of Juan Escalante.

  Only one target appeared to be more than a street-level cartel soldier. Enrico Barrón was listed as a deserter from the Mexican Army, was suspected of being a member of the Sinaloan Cartel, and was thought to be a member of Los Matazetas, the Zeta Killers. Except for the desertion, there was nothing on his rap sheet; his army records, though, were reasonably impressive: sargento primero—first sergeant—with twelve years in service, eight of them in GAFE, the Mexican Army Special Forces. Like Escalante, he’d been trained in the United States, including both the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Airborne training at Fort Bragg. He’d applied for Ranger School at Fort Benning, too, but the request had been denied.

  He’d also gone through the CIA’s clandestine ops course at the Farm, supposedly to prepare him for paramilitary operations with CISEN. Graduates of the orientation course did not leave with case officer skills, but they did gain an awareness of “how the magic was made.”

  That one, Teller thought, would be dangerous.

  The twelve targets at the overwatch house, just three numbers up from the Vicente place, all appeared to be relatively low-level cartel operators. Three had at least some military experience, though, and one, Carlos Mora, was listed as a former sergeant with the Guatemalan Kaibiles.

  Another one to watch out for.

  Within a few minutes, Procario had the MMMR set up and returning a through-the-walls image of the inside of the Perez house, the black-and-white image displayed on the screen of a second laptop. Procario adjusted the aim of the triple-R transmitters and soon had the unit focused in what appeared to be an upstairs bedroom. “Got her,” he said.

  Anxious, Teller leaned over the marine’s shoulder, studying the laptop screen. One guard, a male, sat in a chair at the back of the room, an assault rifle beside him as he held an invisible magazine in front of him. That was Ortega. A female lay curled up on the fuzzy crisscross pattern of mattress springs beneath her, arms behind her back, which was turned toward the guard. At the extreme limit of image magnification, Teller could see the metal parts of what appeared to be a ballpoint pen resting vertically between her breasts.

  They scanned the rest of the house, top floor to bottom, though the southwestern corner—perhaps a quarter of the building’s floor space was, from this angle, masked by the walls of the next-door house to the south. Millimeter waves could penetrate a couple of feet of concrete, but they lost a lot of resolution as they did so, and internal walls and staircases further obscured the view.

  Still, the watchers had a pretty good map of what was going on inside. The woman—Maria Perez—was alone in another bedroom upstairs, sitting upright on a bed. Five other people, all male, were downstairs, one moving about in the kitchen—Barrón, according to the Cellmap—and the other four in what was probably a nearby living room, sprawled on chairs and a sofa watching television.

  As the team collected information, they began hammering out a plan. Clearly, the overwatch group was part of an OP keeping an eye on the Perez house. An attack on the Perez place would bring those twelve running, or at least alert them so that when the strike force came out the front door they would be gunned down in the street. Somehow, both cartel groups had to be neutralized—and at close to the same moment, to avoid having the Perez group kill their prisoner and to avoid having the strike force trapped by the opposition’s overwatch gunmen.

  Six men to take on eighteen in two locations, three to one. The odds might be even worse than that, since there could be people in those houses who weren’t packing cell phones, and there was that portion of the Perez house interior that was blocked.

  The odds weren’t looking real good.

  They had an equalizer, however, a force multiplier, in the MMMR gear. Traditionally in hostage rescue takedowns, the hardest part about the assault was figuring out just where the hostages were being held, where the defenders were, and how
many defenders were close enough to harm the hostages once the shooting started. The MMMR showed them all of that, and more, by rendering the walls of the Perez house all but invisible.

  One of Marcetti’s men, Staff Sergeant Rogers, was in the process of unpacking and assembling a second force multiplier—a Barrett M-107CQ, broken down into pieces and carried in a foam-padded aluminum case. A second man was unpacking the ammunition.

  “Okay,” Teller said. He indicated the Cellmap screen data. “Taking down the Tangos in the Perez house should be pretty straightforward. But we can’t hit the second house from here.”

  That house, now identified as Hotel Two, “Hotel” for “hostage,” was on the same side of the street as the Vicente house, and separated from it by two intervening houses. Microwave radiation could pass through brick walls—even a single thickness of concrete blocks—but two or more such barriers tended to block them off.

  Marcetti used his ballpoint to indicate a path on the Cellmap screen. “It looks like we could take the team up to the roof of Hotel One back here,” he said, “and that would keep it out of Hotel Two’s line of sight, at least until we’re on the roof. The rooftop is flat. We have what looks like a ventilator there … and this over here might be a trapdoor leading down.”

  “The through-wall shows a stairway underneath,” Procario said. “It’ll be a bottleneck, though.”

  “Hey, better going down than going up,” Marcetti replied. “And with a sniper able to interdict the hallway next to the stairs, we’re in, no worries.”

  Hostage rescue and building close-assault teams always preferred to come in through the roof if at all possible if there was more than one floor in the target structure. In a firefight in a stairwell, it was always better to be the guy up on top, able to drop grenades down the stairs at the guys below.

  “The rooftop trapdoor will be locked.”

  “Breaching charge, shotgun, or a bolt cutter, whichever seems right for the job.”

  “So how about Hotel Two? We don’t have the numbers for two separate assaults.”

  “No,” Marcetti said, “but we have claymores. That ought to even the odds a bit.”

  “That’ll do,” Procario agreed. “So … one sniper. If he works without a spotter, one man to plant the claymore. He could either come back here and be the spotter or join the assault.”

  “Better yet,” Teller said, “our extra man plants the claymore, then works his way south along here—sticking to the shadows in front of the houses. Crosses the street somewhere around here, out of sight of Hotel Two … then works his way back north up the west side of the street to here. That looks like a fence, doesn’t it? He would then have a line of sight to the front of Hotel Two, could set off the claymore when necessary, and provide covering fire for our E&E. And that leaves five for the actual assault team.”

  “Are you volunteering for claymore duty?”

  “Actually,” Teller said, “no. I’m going to be on the assault team.”

  “Excuse me?” Marcetti shook his head. “You know better than that, Chris.”

  “I brought you in on this op. I’m going in with you.”

  Marcetti indicated the other four men in the room, all of them clad in black combat utilities, with combat vests, weapons, and night-vision devices already laid out and ready on the bed. They were listening with a range of expressions running from openly amused to carefully neutral. “The five of us have been training as a team for months. We know exactly how we’re all going to move, react, and fire. All it takes is one guy to turn left instead of right, and you have a friendly fire casualty—or, worse, the mission is compromised.”

  “I know all that. But you should know that the hostage over there is … someone I know. Someone I care about, a lot. I’m going in with you guys.”

  “That makes it worse. If you have an emotional attachment, it can cloud your judgment. I don’t need that fucking grief in a CQB.”

  CQB—close-quarters battle. It was the most difficult, most challenging form of combat, a firefight where your opponent might well be hidden just around that next corner or emerging from a closed door at your back. Hostage rescue units trained as teams endlessly until each team member knew where every other team member was at every moment, could feel his presence even when he was out of sight.

  “How about this?” Teller asked. “That hostage over there isn’t going to be trusting anybody right now. She was handed over to the Tangos by CISEN. If you go in there without me, you might have to fight her to get her out.”

  Teller felt Marcetti’s cold stare at that one and knew just how thin an excuse it was. Jackie was well trained and highly experienced; she would know what was happening the instant a team of black-clad commandos burst into her room shouting, “Stay down! Americans!” She wasn’t about to confuse Marcetti’s team with more Mexican drug lords, and she absolutely was not the sort of person to go into hysterics at the wrong moment.

  Hell, even if she had been, there was always the field-ready expedient of knocking her unconscious and hauling her out over someone’s shoulder.

  That stare dragged on for an uncomfortable number of seconds. Then Marcetti threw up his hands. “Okay. You’re in. But you will stay out of our way, and you will do exactly what you’re told, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And I’m OIC, understand me?”

  “You’re the officer in charge. Sir.”

  Marcetti sighed. “I’m probably going to regret this…”

  “I can handle the claymore, boss,” one of the ISA men said.

  “Okay, Patterson.” Marcetti looked at Procario. “You qualified to play sniper?”

  “Former marine,” Procario told him. “Expert rifleman. Scored two-forty-five out of two-fifty on my last qual. Distinguished Marksman Medal, McDougal Trophy, and President’s Hundred.”

  “Okay! Okay! You’ve got the job.”

  “Uh-oh,” Teller said. He was looking again at the MMMR screen, where one of the men from the living room was trudging up the stairs to the second floor. “Looks like we might have some trouble here.”

  MARIA PEREZ HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2250 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  Dominique heard the second man enter the room. It was Loudmouth, as she’d named him, the bigmouthed, vulgar one that liked to taunt her about what he was going to do to her. Of them all, he was the one who always managed to make her blood run cold. The others were bad, although the Perez woman was decent enough. At least she saw to it that Dominique got to eat once in a while—and use the rest room. Loudmouth, though, was terrifying.

  “So, how’s our girlfriend?” he boomed. The floorboards creaked beneath his shoes as he walked closer. A sudden, sharp crack sounded as he slapped her butt. Even through her jeans, the blow stung. “Ready for a little action?”

  His voice was slurred, his Spanish sloppy and imprecise. God, he’s drunk, she thought. Not good …

  “C’mon, Renaldo,” the other voice said. “You heard the orders. Hands off the merchandise until the Skull says differently.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of waiting for Mr. Skull.” The hand on her hip was caressing now, rough and insistent. “He won’t be here until tomorrow morning. I think we have a perfect right to sample the goods, don’t you?”

  “You stick it in, he’s going to cut it off, you know that?”

  “And who’s going to tell him? You?”

  “Her, maybe.”

  “Ah. Just my word against hers, right?” Another stinging crack brought tears to her eyes beneath the blindfold. “And you never know, right? She might like a little rough loving! And if not, she might have a real good idea of what I’d do to her if she does tell.”

  Dominique heard a chilling click, and then she felt a cold blade pressing against her cheek. “How about it, girl? Are you going to … cooperate? Be a good girl?”

  Dominique managed a nod. They already k
new she understood Spanish, and at this point resistance would just result in her being hurt more. If she played along, she might buy some time.

  “Good,” Loudmouth said. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  She felt him fumble with the rope tying her ankles to her wrists, felt the sharp snick of a blade, and the rope parted. She was still tied hand and foot, but at least she could stretch out her legs. Incongruously, it felt wonderful.

  Rough hands rolled her over onto her back. She tensed, expecting the worst.

  A phone chirped.

  Dominique felt the man’s hands leave her and heard his curt “Aló? Sí.” A moment passed, and he said, “Pero … no. Intiendo. Sí, señor. ¡Sí, gracias! ¡Con mucho gusto! ¡Sí, mil gracias!”

  The man’s demeanor felt changed. She sensed him turn away. “Nada va a pasar a esta mujer,” he told the other man. “Absolutamente nada.”

  Nothing is to happen to this woman.

  “What was that about?” the guard asked, still in Spanish.

  “Orders,” Loudmouth said. “Very special orders.”

  Dominique heard him stalk from the room.

  Reprieve.

  She drew a long, relieved breath and worked at stretching her stiff knees.

  VICENTE HOUSE

  LA CALLE SUR 145

  DISTRICTO IZTACALCO

  2254 HOURS, LOCAL TIME

  “That,” Procario said, “was fucking brilliant!”

  On the laptop display, the male target fondling the woman on the bed had just turned away abruptly and was now going back down the stairs.

  “It was also damned risky,” Marcetti said. “What if the bastard knew the voice?”

  Teller flipped his cell phone shut. “I figured that having ‘Juan Escalante’ call him would be quite a surprise. He also sounded pretty drunk.”

  Moments before, they’d engaged yet a third force multiplier, keying in through the satellite network to turn one of the cell phones in that upstairs bedroom into an open microphone. They’d heard the phone’s owner, Renaldo Pascua Sosa, speaking with the guard in slurred, drunken tones and then asking if Jackie was going to cooperate with him. With Pascua’s phone number on the screen, Teller had pulled out his own phone and keyed in the number, identifying himself as Juan Escalante.