Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  She clicked back to the ICIS site for an update, but found nothing new—although she had an address to reference. After a few clacks of the keys, she saw that Fort Something was actually Fat Freddie’s.

  Another picture of the shot-up Mercedes was up, and this one showed the license plate.

  She ran the number and got a name she’d never heard of—a guy who lived in Hampton Roads, Virginia. She fought the urge to look him up because he wasn’t one of her targets.

  ICIS dinged again with an update on the shooting. No real details, but a name jumped off the screen. Angelina Garcia. Venice knew that name. A recent reference.

  Then it dawned on her. “Oh, God, no.” The name came from Gail’s research on the Pérez case and the Toby Jackson Bail Bondsman thing. The U.S. attorney didn’t want any bail set, and he quoted an FBI agent who was working the case. Venice remembered less about the specific quote than noting the irony that the agent had a Hispanic name. Angelina Garcia.

  ICIS dinged again. “LEOs ok. Suspect dead.”

  Venice started to hyperventilate. This information could mean only one thing—that Patrick Kelly’s mission—the one he wouldn’t talk about—was all about killing the agent in charge of the Pérez investigation. That was the price he needed to pay to get his little girl back.

  Right away, Venice saw Angelina Garcia’s reprieve from death was in fact a tragedy.

  God bless Agent Garcia for still being alive, but with Kelly dead, there was no reason to keep Ciara alive. Certainly, there was no reason to keep her safe. And with Ciara no longer an asset, was the promise of money still enough to keep Roman out of danger? The cartels had more than enough money. What was two million dollars more?

  What was it the Digger had called this? A shit sandwich? The leaders of the Cortez Cartel would know all too well the risks of the physical handoff of their hostage. If they didn’t already have the real prize they were after—a dead FBI agent—why would they go ahead with such a risk?

  Venice needed to do something. She had no idea what that something might be, but she had to figure it out.

  Now.

  An idea formed in her mind, and she knew the instant it arrived that it was stupid. Unworkable.

  It required her to violate long-standing protocol with the Security Solutions team, and it required her to make a phone call that was going to piss everyone off.

  But she had no choice.

  It took her less than a minute to cloak her phone, to make it appear that she was Digger. Then she dug into a deeply encrypted file to recover the phone number that she had no right to know but had stolen nonetheless.

  She pressed the buttons and clicked SEND.

  FBI Director Irene Rivers answered on the third ring. “Hello, Mother Hen,” she said.

  Venice’s heart skipped. “Um . . . how . . .”

  “Your boss doesn’t use this number anymore,” Irene explained. “And he told me a long time ago that if you ever called it, it would be a huge emergency. So, talk to me.”

  * * *

  The house Sofia Reyes sent them to wasn’t visible from the main road. Rather, it sat at the end of a half-mile long driveway that itself was shielded by a line of trees and tall shrubs. According to the satellite map Jonathan had pulled up, the house sat in a field, among a few scattered outbuildings.

  “Pretty high-end for a brothel,” Jonathan said.

  “Did you see the guards stationed out front as we drove by?” Dawkins asked.

  “Two of them,” Jonathan said.

  “Looked like MP5s to me,” Boxers said, a reference to their armament.

  “Not the worst news,” Jonathan said. While the Heckler and Koch MP5 had a blistering-fast cycling rate, it was a pistol-caliber carbine, packing no more firepower per bullet than a nine-millimeter pistol. Translation: Body armor was a more effective defense than it would be with hotter rounds.

  “I’ve heard better,” Dawkins said. “What’s our plan here?”

  “Ask me when I have one,” Jonathan said. “For right now, all I have is a goal. We’re looking for our precious cargoes.”

  “And if they’re not there?” Dawkins pressed.

  “If they’re not there, we say some bad words and rescue whoever else we can. We’re not leaving any of them behind.”

  Dawkins took a deep breath, started to speak, and then stopped himself.

  “Don’t be a pussy,” Boxers said. “Say what’s on your mind.”

  “You’re poking a hornet’s nest,” Dawkins said. “We’re about to trigger a shitstorm. It’ll be worth it for Roman and Ciara. But if they’re not there . . .” His voice dropped away.

  “What?” Jonathan said. “Just leave them there? You saw that girl. You saw Erica.”

  “And after we shoot this place up and take away whoever’s in there, do you really think there won’t be others to take their places?” Dawkins pressed. He was building a head of steam. “You think you’re going to wipe out prostitution in this cesspool?”

  “God grant me the serenity,” Jonathan said. “The system is a thing I cannot change. These kids in that hacienda? They are in a situation that I can change, whether our PCs are there or not.”

  “Regardless of the collateral damage?” Dawkins asked. “Do you believe for a moment that there won’t be some form of retaliation?”

  “That is not my problem,” Jonathan said. “We’ll be long gone.”

  “But the locals—”

  “The locals shouldn’t frequent whorehouses staffed with children,” Boxers said.

  “I’m not going to fight you on this,” Dawkins said. “It’s all so soul-stealing. Going in there and rescuing those kids is like building a mile-long wall on a five-hundred-mile beach. The flooding won’t stop.”

  “Roman or no Roman, a handful of lucky kids get to go home to their families,” Boxers said. “And if the bad guys cause trouble, we get to kill some child abusers. How could a day get any better?”

  Dawkins smiled.

  “Tell me you haven’t dreamed of doing something like this,” Jonathan said.

  “We have no authority.”

  “All the better,” Jonathan said.

  Dawkins shook his head as if he were tired. “I surrender. Here’s hoping this is our final stop.”

  “But for the right reasons,” Jonathan said with a wink.

  “By the way,” Dawkins said. “I never heard what happened to that guy from La Lagartija. Esteban was his name?”

  “Was that his name?” Boxers asked. “Good for him. And you didn’t hear what happened to him because I didn’t tell you.”

  “And?”

  Jonathan said, “Are you sure you want to know? Wouldn’t you rather just suspect?”

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, they had a plan. Boxers parked the Durango behind a patch of trees about a mile from the hacienda. Once there, they kitted up in body armor and did a weapons check. Jonathan’s long gun would be an M27, the Marine Corps’ version of the Heckler and Koch 416 assault rifle. An improved version of the stalwart M4 rifle, the M27 was chambered in 5.56 millimeter. He carried eight spare thirty-round magazines, along with the one in the mag well, so that should give him all the firepower he needed. His CQB weapon—close-quarters battle—was an HK MP7, which he carried in a holster on his right thigh. Barely bigger than the Colt 1911 he carried on his belt, the MP7 fired a wicked 4.6-millimeter round that was lightning fast.

  Boxers was similarly kitted out, but he preferred the HK 417 as his long gun. Physically a close cousin to Jonathan’s M27, the 417 was chambered in 7.62 millimeter. It made much bigger holes at much longer distances. An HK45 pistol adorned his hip.

  For his part, Dawkins preferred the old-school M4 with a Glock 19 on his hip. At Digger’s suggestion, Dawkins switched out his G-man DEA vest for one of Jonathan’s generic black ones.

  “No Policía gear?” Boxers asked. The team had an assortment of Velcro patches to attach to their body armor. The one they used most frequently
proclaimed them to be FBI, but they also had Policía patches when they wanted to masquerade as cops south of the border. Even the baddest of bad guys hesitated a second or two before shooting law enforcement officials. When bullets travel at 2,300 feet per second, a second or two was the only advantage you needed.

  “Not today,” Jonathan said. “We’re gonna be sideways with Wolverine over this no matter how it turns out. No sense launching her to Mars.” While the FBI didn’t have much of an official role in quelling the cartels south of the border, Irene Rivers worked closely with the agencies that did. No one at her level enjoyed surprises, and Jonathan had supplied more than his share over the years.

  Once they were geared up, Boxers launched Roxie, the latest in civilian drone technology. This Roxie was the fourth or fifth in his collection, which was constantly updated to include new toys. Size was a limiting factor, of course, but even the smaller drones had great photographic and listening capabilities. The last few iterations came equipped with great tracking and hovering capabilities, as well, but Jonathan drew the line at Boxers’ dream of being able to drop munitions from the air.

  Roxie provided the kind of intel that they used to depend on satellites to give them—and satellite time was a pain in the ass to arrange. Not only was Roxie easier to use, the quality of the intel was far better than what they could expect from civilian satellite systems. With Roxie at two hundred feet, they could count individual rocks on the ground if they wanted to.

  Under the cover of the trees along the side of the road, Jonathan and his team gathered around the hood of the Durango, where Boxers had propped his laptop and flight controller. “Let’s start out far and then move closer,” Jonathan said. “What kind of perimeter security do they have?”

  The house sat on what appeared to be about two acres of unremarkable land, its boundaries defined by a garden-variety chain-link fence. “Okay,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go around front and take a look at the guards at the entrance.”

  The image swooped in a blurred transition that finally settled on the gravel driveway and then advanced to a faded green Beefeater guard shack where two young men lazed in the shade.

  “Want to hear their conversation?” Boxers asked.

  “Nah,” Jonathan said. “I just wanted to get an idea of what we’ll be up against.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to wait till dark for this?” Dawkins asked.

  “Ordinarily, yes,” Jonathan said. “But dark is a long time from now. That’s a lot of extra raping.” He pointed to the screen. “Do we agree there are only two guys and the only visible weapons are MP5s?”

  “That’s what I see,” Dawkins said.

  “Yup. Time to look at the house?”

  “Yeah,” Jonathan said.

  The ground dropped away and rotated 180 degrees. In a few seconds, they were looking down on a red tiled roof supported by beige stucco walls. The building itself was T-shaped, with the top cross defining the front of the house and the vertical portion of the T represented by an annex that extended out into the backyard, or the black side. Eight vehicles were parked at random angles in the patchy lawn in front of the front door.

  “Can you get us a better ground-level view?” Jonathan asked.

  “Easy-peasy.” The computer brain that made Roxie so expensive was able to transform overhead views into lateral views, enabling them to observe details as if they were standing on the ground. Some finer details got lost in the translation, depending on the steepness of the angle, but for now there was enough to suit their purposes. If they were doing this at night, they could bring Roxie right up to a window to peer inside, but that move was too risky in daylight.

  “Look how all the windows are open in the front,” Jonathan said, tapping the screen to show all the casements gaping wide.

  “You say that like it’s important,” Boxers said.

  “I think it is,” Jonathan said. “Now, take us around back.”

  The image shifted violently, and then they were in the backyard, looking at the building.

  “It’s all buttoned up back here,” Jonathan pointed out. “Only a couple of windows. They’re small and they’re closed.”

  “Must be hot as shit in there,” Dawkins said.

  The image shifted again as Boxers piloted his toy around to the left side—the green side. “Nope,” Big Guy said. “That’s an air conditioner compressor.” The boxy air handler sat on a concrete pad close to the building. The image zoomed in, and they could see the blades spinning at the top of the unit. “And it’s working.”

  “I think that’s where the victims are,” Jonathan said. “Kept in a prison in the dark. No windows, so they can’t run away.”

  “That’s a lot of speculation, Scorpion,” Dawkins said.

  “It makes sense, though,” Boxers said. “Reception area in the front, business in the back.”

  “Go back higher,” Dawkins said. “There was something in the backyard I want to get a closer look at.”

  The ground fell away again, and they had a broad view of the scruffy back lawn.

  “What are we looking for?” Jonathan asked.

  “That thing there at the top of the screen,” Dawkins said. “Looks like a clothesline.”

  Two posts had been sunk into the ground, about fifty feet apart, with a wire five feet off the ground spanning the distance.

  “That’s not a clothesline,” Jonathan said.

  “Looks like a dog run to me,” Boxers said. He zoomed in closer, revealing a worn path that ran parallel to the strung wire. “Those are footprints, Boss.”

  Once you knew what they were, it was obvious.

  “I think it is a run,” Dawkins said. “But not for a dog.”

  “Jesus,” Jonathan said. “Their version of an exercise yard?”

  “I think so,” Dawkins said. “Look how the footprints run strictly parallel to the wire. I think they must be shackled to the wire to keep them from running away.”

  “This is why we don’t wait till the sun goes down,” Boxers said.

  “Go back to the rear annex,” Jonathan said. “Is there a door?”

  As the image spun again, Boxers said, “Yeah, I saw one. There it is. Looks like steel to me.”

  “Is that our breaching point?” Dawkins asked.

  In most circumstances, that would be the perfect spot. Close to the hostages and likely unguarded. In this case, though, it wouldn’t work. “We don’t know what’s on the other side,” Jonathan said. “The only reliable way to breach it would be with explosives, and that’s too risky.”

  “So, we’re going to go in through the front door?”

  Jonathan and Boxers exchanged glances. In unison, “Yes.” Digger added, “But fast and violently.”

  “What are the rules of engagement?” Dawkins asked.

  Boxers said, “Whatever it takes to rescue those kids and get them out healthy.”

  “I meant with the johns.”

  “Same thing,” Jonathan said. “Whatever it takes to rescue the victims. I’m not here to punish those perverts, but I’m not going to shed a tear if they get hurt.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The shakes always come later. Not the mild, immediate post-shooting shakes, but the whole-body temblor-quality convulsive shakes. Angelina Garcia had felt perfectly fine until the local cops arrived. She greeted them with her hands in the air, her left palm displaying her gold FBI shield. But when one of the first-arriving officers approached her—a young guy named LePew, according to his nametag—her body started to seize.

  “I–I’m FBI,” she said. “That man tried to shoot me. I returned fire. He’s . . . he’s dead. I secured his weapon in my vehicle.”

  Officer LePew looked nearly as unnerved as she. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Here, sit in my car,” he said.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You’re not under arrest, Agent . . . What’s your name?”
>
  “Garcia. Special Agent Angelina Garcia.”

  “Ma’am, you’re not in trouble, so far as I can see, but you really need to sit down. Before you fall down. You don’t look good.”

  As more emergency vehicles arrived at the scene, Officer LePew escorted Angelina to the backseat of his cruiser and opened the door.

  “I don’t want to be sitting in the back of a police car like a criminal,” she objected.

  “Ma’am, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But it’s cool and it’s safe.”

  “The press will see it and take pictures. You can’t undo that kind of narrative.”

  LePew thought for a few seconds, then shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He withdrew a notepad from his back pocket and flipped it open. “Tell me what went down here.”

  * * *

  The first step for Digger and his team would be to get past the guards out front. Jonathan knew better than most about the danger of underestimating your opposition, but these sentries were just boys, fifteen, sixteen years old, and they were working for pennies and maybe some stash on the side. He didn’t relish the idea of shooting them. Even beyond their relative innocence, there was the noise factor. If the fighting started so far from the front door, the rest of the bad guys would have too much time to prepare.

  Jonathan was hopeful for a peaceful solution out here. From what he’d seen through Roxie’s eyes, he thought there was a way to keep things from getting violent at the guard shack. His plan hinged on scaring the shit out of them.

  Boxers piloted the Durango past the guards, then pulled over twenty yards later, where they were barely out of sight. They pulled balaclavas down over their faces.

  All three of them got out of the truck together, and with their weapons up to their shoulders, they rushed back to the guard station.

  Jonathan arrived first, but he became invisible to the kids as soon as they saw Boxers.

  “Hands up!” Jonathan said in Spanish. He kept his M27 leveled at the chest of the guard on the left. He assumed that Boxers was covering the other one. Dawkins’s job was to keep security at the mouth of the driveway to make sure they didn’t get sneaked up on.