by Ross Sidor
Avery saw Ibarra suddenly spring onto his feet and push a nearby waiter out of his way. The waiter fell over into a table, creating a new spectacle for the café’s patrons. Maneuvering around one of the Zetas, who had jumped onto his feet to cover Silva, Ibarra produced his Taurus pistol as he stepped over the low railing and onto the exterior sidewalk between the café and Roots. He looked frantically around, hesitated as he considered which direction to go, and then headed in a sprint for the south parking lot.
Avery and Aguilar bolted out of Roots and took after him, ignoring the shouts from the waiter and hostess calling after them.
Padilla’s voice boomed over the radios, ordering his officers to move in on the subjects.
Silva and his men were now also calmly making their way across the café toward the exit door, hoping to use the chaos and confusion to mask their escape.
Stepping outside, Silva and his entourage found themselves staring down the barrels of MP5 submachine guns in the hands of Padilla and seven other Federal Police officers wearing ski masks, body armor, and Nomex fatigues. The Mexican cops spread out, forming a wide, half circle covering the doors to Café de la Flora.
Before Padilla could bark the order for Silva and his men to put their hands in the air, his eyes caught a blur of movement, a flash of gray as a pistol came up in one of the bodyguard’s hands. Reflexively, Padilla sighted the threat and triggered his MP5, catching the Zeta man three times in the chest. The second bodyguard reached for his own gun, and three cops simultaneously fired into him. He caught nine bullets from two directions before he hit the pavement, and the third and fourth Zetas likewise absorbed a hail of gunfire. The officers then charged ahead, screaming orders, and converged on Silva. They threw him down to the ground, and disarmed and handcuffed him.
In the background, sirens blared, and more police cruisers pulled up, dismounting additional officers, who made their way through the panicked crowds.
Simultaneously, a hundred feet away, sprinting full out, Ibarra reached the south parking lot. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw Avery and Aguilar coming after him, thirty feet back. Pedestrians were quick to get out of their way, while others ran for cover.
Hearing the gunshots behind him, Ibarra searched the sidewalk and parking lot ahead for a way out. And he found it. He sidestepped and extended his freehand to reach for a startled woman. His left hand clasped her arm, and he pulled her in close. He spun around with her to face his pursuers.
Twenty feet away, weapons drawn, Avery and Aguilar stopped in their tracks.
Ibarra positioned himself behind his hostage and put the Taurus to the side of her head. The expression on his face indicated satisfaction at believing he’d gained the upper hand, even though his mind, in overdrive, was incapable of thinking more than one step ahead.
Tires squealed and sirens screamed as four black Federal Police Dodge Chargers skidded across the parking lot and braked to a stop thirty feet behind Ibarra. Officers dismounted from their vehicles, taking up cover behind the Kevlar doors. They drew their pistols on Ibarra’s back. The Spaniard heard them, but he didn’t turn around, didn’t dare take his eyes off Avery and Aguilar, who he recognized as being something more dangerous than the cops.
Avery held his Glock level in the isosceles stance, with the tiny white dot aligned over Ibarra’s panic-stricken face.
A second later, Avery felt the pain and tension flare in his shoulder where the shrapnel had nicked him in Panama, extending in a line halfway down his arm. His aim wavered, and the hostage’s face entered his target picture. He immediately shifted aim. Knowing that he couldn’t possibly take the shot without endangering the woman, he lowered his weapon.
Aguilar stood two feet away and kept Ibarra covered in his Beretta’s sights, his hands still as rock.
Avery shifted his eyes on Ibarra’s gun hand and saw the index finger tighten around the trigger, taking up first pressure, the knuckle bulging against the flesh.
“Drop the gun and let her go, Ibarra,” Avery commanded. The dossier from Spain’s National Intelligence Center indicated that Ibarra spoke English. “We know about the missiles, and we have agents moving on the Viper right now. It’s over.”
“No! Lower your weapons and clear the area now! The only way you’re taking me is over her dead fucking body!”
From the intensity in Ibarra’s voice and the glare in his eye, Avery knew this was a desperate man who was never going to surrender. He intended to put up a fight, and he’d make sure to kill as many innocent people as possible.
Then Avery heard a new voice through his earpiece: “Slayton for Carnivore. Benning thinks Ibarra’s phone can lead us to the Viper. We only need his phone.”
“Roger that.”
Well, too bad for you, Carlo.
“What did you say?” Ibarra asked, pressing the Taurus’s barrel harder into the woman’s head. “Drop your fucking weapons now!”
To Aguilar, without taking his eyes off Ibarra, Avery said, “Drop him.”
In response, Avery heard the single discharge of the Beretta near his right ear.
Ibarra’s head snapped back. He never knew what him. The hostage screamed as blood spattered her face, and she suddenly supported the weight of Ibarra’s slack body as his legs gave out. She pushed forward, breaking free of his arms, and the body collapsed onto its knees, then slumped forward face first onto the sidewalk as she stepped clear. Blood streamed out of the small hole above his right eyebrow, and the back of his skull was blasted apart.
Aguilar holstered his Beretta and caught the terrified hostage as she ran in his direction while police swarmed on them.
Avery approached Ibarra’s body and crouched near it, taking a wide stance to keep his foot out of the expanding pool of blood. He flipped the body over, padded it down, and searched its pockets until he found the cell phone. They keypad wasn’t locked, and Avery thumbed his way to the recent calls. His lips formed a tight smile when he saw the time and date of the last call; three minutes ago.
“That number has to be the Viper,” Slayton said six minutes later in the back of the Geo Cell’s surveillance van.
Contreras’s Predator drones were standing by, fueled to capacity and prepped for flight, waiting for someone to point them in the right direction.
Abigail Benning said that she could hack the phone’s SIM card of the recipient of Ibarra’s last call, and find a location.
But curiosity and impulsivity got the better of Avery.
He picked up the phone and dialed the number.
There was no risk. If this caller was the Viper, then she already knew they were compromised anyway, because she’d been on the phone with Ibarra when the surveillance was blown, right before Ibarra bolted.
Avery wanted to know for sure, though. He wanted to hear her voice.
A woman answered on the third ring.
“Que pasó?”
“Viper,” Avery answered in English. “It’s over.”
There was silence for several seconds, and Avery wondered if the call was disconnected. But then he heard heavy breathing and finally recognition.
“Carnivore.”
She ended the call.
“It’s her.”
Twenty seconds later, Benning reported that the phone had just vanished from Stingray’s grid, indicating that the phone was turned off. Her attempt to remotely hijack the cell phone tower and turn the phone back on didn’t work, but she still had the general area the phone was in, based on the base station to which it had connected when it received the call from Ibarra’s phone. This data was relayed to Tijuana Airport, and the drones went into the sky.
___
The Viper screamed, breaking even Mirsad Sidran’s stoic shroud. Outside the Gulfstream, the Zetas surely heard it too, because Carlos and another man jumped out of their truck, looked at the Gulfstream, and then exchanged looks.
She removed the phone’s battery and SIM card and threw the phone against the cabin’s floor. It boun
ced along, end over end, until coming to a stop ten feet away, and then she hurled the battery after it and snapped the SIM card in half.
“Perhaps it would be prudent to pay Carlos for the fuel and fly out of here,” Sidran said. “We are compromised, and are quickly losing control of the situation.”
“Never. I will not turn back now. We can still make it over the border. You can go back with the plane if you want to, but I’m going forward.”
Trujillo scooped up his Uzi off the table. Glaring at Sidran, he told the Viper, “I’m with you.”
Sidran sighed. He wasn’t going to argue further. He’d have to go along, but he suspected it would quickly become necessary to execute Kashani’s contingency plan. A pity, he thought, that all of this had been for nothing.
“Hey, it looks like somebody wants to talk to you,” the pilot’s voice called out from the cockpit.
The Viper stepped away from Sidran. She bent over to peer through a window, and saw Carlos approaching the aircraft. He held his hands out to the side, palms facing out.
“Cover me, Benito.”
Carrying the VSS, the Viper opened the cabin door, stepped out, and descended the stairs toward Carlos.
“Did you speak to Arturo yet?” she said. “A price was agreed.”
“Don’t you know what’s fucking happening? The federales took Arturo, and your man too, you stupid cunt. If the gringos are involved, you can bet they’ll be here shortly. Everything is fucked now. The deal is off, senorita.”
Movement caught the Viper’s eye, and three more men emerged from the nearby garage. They carried AK-47s.
And she understood. The cartel was going to hold her here and turn her over to the Americans. She tightened her grip around the VSS, which she held at her right side along her leg. The approaching Zetas already had their weapons shouldered, and she wouldn’t be able to get the VSS into firing position fast enough.
But the Viper had absolute faith in her men.
So she waited until she heard the crack of Trujillo’s Uzi open up from the cabin behind her, and she saw one of the Mexicans drop. The other two immediately shifted their aim off the Viper and onto the Gulfstream, and, with lightning fast movement, she snapped up the VSS into target acquisition, aligned her sights over one of the Mexicans, and squeezed the trigger as Trujillo simultaneously put four more bullets through the other Mexican’s chest.
Both men hit the ground, dead.
The shots echoed loudly across the expanse of open desert.
Taking advantage of the distraction, Carlos lunged for the Viper, reaching out for her rifle. She stepped back and to the left, raised the VSS, and smashed the wood stock into the back of Carlos’ skull. He stumbled forward, landed on his face, and rolled over onto his back. Holding his bleeding head, he stared up at the Viper. She stood over him, blocking out the sun, and aimed the VSS at his face.
Four more Zetas appeared from the garage, but they stopped short when they saw the Viper holding Carlos at gunpoint. Trujillo covered them with his Uzi.
“Tell them to lower their weapons now, Carlos, or everyone dies.”
Carlos hesitated, and then shouted the order in Spanish, and his men set their rifles down and stepped back. They relaxed when the Viper allowed Carlos onto his feet, and then lowered her own weapon. She stepped forward and reached into Carlos’s pants pocket to retrieve his cell phone. She powered the phone down and hurled it into the desert.
“I still need to get over the border, Carlos, and I’m still willing to hold up my end of the bargain. You’ll receive the agreed one hundred thousand, in addition to keeping your life. How does that sound to you?”
He didn’t need to think it over.
“Let’s go.”
TWENTY
Inside the command and maintenance trailer parked at the military section of Tijuana International’s Old Airport Terminal, Avery looked over the shoulder of the drone pilot to view the monitor displaying the crystal clear live feed from one of the unmanned aerial vehicles. With Padilla and the DEA agents present, the tiny trailer was overcrowded, and Avery tried to keep a respectful distance from the drone operators, to stay out of their way and give them room to breathe. Just standing there in the air conditioned trailer, he sweated and could feel the collective heat emanating from the closely packed bodies.
Contreras’s UAVs were the older, unarmed RQ-1 reconnaissance variant of the Predator, equipped with a tracking pod running NSA’s GILGAMESH geo-location system capable of tracking and finding SIM cards, in addition to collecting data from computers and phones within range. Despite the removal of the battery from the Viper’s cell, a small chip in the phone continued to function and broadcast its location, revealing that the phone had been stationary since the phone call.
Avery was kitted up; his ModGear vest loaded with ammunition and equipment, his Glock holstered at this side with spare magazines. He’d left his M4 behind in one of the DEA Forerunners parked ten feet from the trailer.
Aguilar and his troops lingered outside, chatting amongst themselves, eager for something to do, but not anticipating being called to action. It looked like it’d be the Mexicans’ show now. A couple hundred feet away, the GAFE troops were likewise standing by in their Blackhawk helicopters. The DEA Aviation Division’s own UH-1 Hueys were prepped to fly, too, just in case.
Thirty-five minutes after Abigail Benning triangulated the location of the Viper’s phone, the Predators were buzzing over the cartel’s desert airstrip. The drones arrived in time to catch the Gulfstream prepare for takeoff after refueling, but there was no sighting of the Viper, unless she was already aboard the plane or staying inside one of the airfield’s small structures. With the helicopter-borne GAFE element unable to arrive on target in time, the Gulfstream was to be intercepted shortly after takeoff by Mexican Air Force F-5 fighters and forced to land.
Padilla then gave the GAFE team the green light to hit the airfield, against Avery’s protestations that he and Aguilar’s crew go in, but Avery knew it was an argument he wouldn’t win. Padilla would have a hard time explaining to his superiors why he allowed a foreign strike team to deploy against a cartel target on Mexican soil. The GAFE commander likewise refused to allow Avery and the Colombians to accompany his team.
Avery’s intuition told him that the Viper was long gone anyway. She already knew she was in danger. She wasn’t going to sit around in the middle of the desert waiting to be attacked, and he didn’t believe that she’d abort everything and fly out at the first sign of danger.
He reckoned she had a forty-five minute head start to the border, but maybe in her haste she’d left something behind at the airstrip, something to point them in the right direction. They knew from the aerial recon that there were still men at the airstrip. Maybe one of them could be convinced to talk.
With the others, Avery listened with bated breath to the radio transmissions coming into the command trailer from the assault team while staring intently at the feed from the Predators, watching the takedown play out in real time.
Part of him hoped that GAFE would find the Viper on the spot and end this.
A bigger part of him hoped that she’d gotten away, was getting closer north by the minute, closer to him, thereby giving him another shot at her. With lives on the line, he knew it was a selfish and shitty way to think, but that’s how he felt.
The Blackhawks arrived on target twenty-six minutes after takeoff. The squads of special ops paratroopers clad in gray and white camou fatigues and web harnesses, brandishing carbine assault rifles, expertly fast-roped to the ground at their designated drop zones and simultaneously hit the storage building and the garage.
A brief firefight ensued—on the monitor Avery saw the tiny figures running across the airstrip and take firing positions, and the exchange of muzzle flashes. But GAFE possessed superior numbers, training, and firepower, and they quickly overcame the cartel’s ragtag collection of hired shooters. Within fifteen seconds, four cartel gunmen were killed. Another wa
s wounded, and another, a mechanic, was found cowering beneath a pick-up truck in the garage.
There was no sign of the Viper, which came as no surprise to Avery. He’d known it ten seconds after the Blackhawks were still in the air. If she or her agents were present with the missiles, those helicopters would have been knocked right out of the sky.
One of the prisoners reported that the Viper was headed toward the border. He didn’t know where or how Silva’s men intended to get her across, but he provided a description of the vehicles in which her party had left about thirty minutes earlier.
She was accompanied by a cartel lieutenant named Carlos, a four man Zeta escort, and two of her own men, one of which was described as a crazy Latino, the other an intense Caucasian who spoke like a North American.
Avery frowned upon hearing that particular update over the radio.
Caucasian? That was obviously the foreign operative Sean Nolan had reported, but he definitely didn’t sound like an Iranian operative.
The Predators scoured the surrounding desert immediately north of the airfield. Following the highways going in that direction, they worked their way toward the border. All police units in Tijuana were likewise given a description of the vehicles in which the Viper’s contingent travelled, and so were ICE, Border Patrol, and California police on the American side of the border, where additional drones were put to the sky. The FBI also deployed an assault element of its Critical Incident Response Group that had been in Houston that morning to resolve a hostage situation at a bank.
Twenty-six miles north of the airstrip, the Predators picked up two trucks matching the description provided by the captured cartel men exiting a highway and speeding along a rural back road. The drone pilot in the trailer stayed on the pair of dark blue Chevy Silverados with covered beds, and enhanced the zoom lens on the Predator’s 950mm spotter.
“It’s her,” Avery said. “Let’s move.”
“I will redeploy the GAFE element,” Padilla said.
Avery shook his head. “They’re almost fifty miles off target now. We’re closer, and we have the DEA choppers right here.”