by Dalton Fury
Also, as previously arranged, the Mexican agent had purchased four International TerraStar medium-duty work trucks, each a different color, and each with a covered bed that could carry fifteen crated Igla-S systems. The ample cab space allowed for four men, including the driver. The trucks were not new, but the agent followed his instructions from his mysterious Middle Eastern contacts to the letter, and he had each of the vehicles painstakingly checked and reconditioned.
These four vehicles were lined up in the warehouse next to the sealed containers, and next to these trucks sat several canvas bags. Each bag contained a Kalashnikov rifle with a folding stock and several loaded magazines.
Compliments of the Zetas.
The Mexican agent left the Middle Easterners to their work and they broke open the seals of the shipping containers and began loading the crates onto the trucks.
It was the first time any of the cell other than David and Miguel had seen a crated Igla-S MANPAD system in person.
It was backbreaking work for only four men, but Doyle did not want to expose his entire force in case the agent double-crossed them and sold them out to the authorities. It took over a half hour to load the cargo, and another forty-five minutes to return to the safe house. Here Doyle took the license plates off the trucks and handed them to four more of his men. Each of these men then left the house that night under cover of darkness, and returned later with a different plate. The truck plate they had placed on a parked vehicle somewhere in the neighborhood, exchanging it for the parked vehicle’s plate.
It was not perfect tradecraft, but he expected it to get them through the next days in Mexico in case the agent turned them in down the road.
At eight a.m. on their second day in-country, David and his men stood in the large driveway of the home, their missiles and guns loaded onto the four trucks. As rain fell, a single black Jeep Liberty stopped at the edge of the drive, and a man climbed out of the passenger seat.
He was Hispanic, late twenties, and armed with a small Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol that swung from a strap on his shoulder, the black metal glistening wet on the outside of his green rain parka.
David and Miguel stepped up to him as he scanned the group of men by the trucks.
“You are Henrico?” David asked.
“Yes. David?”
Doyle just nodded. “I assume you have more men and vehicles?”
Henrico reached into his parka to his belt and pulled out a walkie-talkie. He handed it to David. “Take this to communicate. The total distance of our journey is thirteen hundred miles. We will have seven vehicles in the convoy in addition to your four. They will stay in traffic, mostly ahead of you, until we get out of the city, but as we head north we will be all around you. We have a bus, a minibus, some sedans, some SUVs. Twenty-eight men. We will drive all day and arrive at our first destination after nine p.m. Tomorrow we will go farther, and arrive at the border around midnight.”
“You don’t want to drive at night?” David asked.
Henrico shook his head. “On some of these highways, only a fool or an army drives at night. We are like an army, but we do not want anyone to know this. We will travel during the day.”
“Fine,” said Doyle. It was much the same back in Yemen.
Henrico said, “On the morning of the third day, we will take you to the final destination, where more vehicles are waiting for the crossing.”
David nodded. He did not like depending on the Mexicans, though his organization had used them in the past in smaller-scale operations to test their competence and trustworthiness, and they had passed these tests with flying colors. These Zetas were coldhearted killers, but they did not kill for ideology or for honor. No, they were in it for the money. David’s benefactors had paid them well with heroin and access to more heroin and, David knew, there was no way he could get his men and his munitions into the United States without making an alliance with these criminals whose expertise on the southern border would be crucial to his operation’s success.
David said, “Your men. I assume they are armed?”
Henrico smiled. “Sí, señor. Rifles and RPGs. But we do not expect problems. The route we are taking should be safe. The Federales are patrolling more to the west, and our scout car in front will alert us of any police or Army roadblocks. If we run into bandits or other competition” — Henrico patted his MAC-10 — “we will take care of it.”
Doyle knew these men would be decent fighters. Not good, but good enough for most encounters.
“All right. Let’s go.”
Minutes later, Doyle and his four TerraStar trucks were rolling out of the driveway and toward the United States.
* * *
Kolt spent his morning at the rifle range with several of his mates, and then he showered, slammed some powdered protein from a blender in the squadron lounge, and had just sat down behind his desk to do some paperwork when his secure red line rang.
“Racer,” he said.
“Hi, Racer. Kenny Farmer here, from down in the — ”
Kolt interrupted him. “You got something?”
“I’m not sure what it is, but I did find something. Yes. If you want, I can — ”
“Stay put. I’m en route,” Kolt said, and he hung up the phone.
* * *
Racer leaned over Kenny Farmer, too close for the redhead’s comfort, and he looked at the Booz Allen man’s monitor. On it was a thermal overhead image of a simple village. Raynor’s eyes flashed to the time stamp on the lower left portion of the photo, and saw that the shot was taken three nights prior.
“Where is this?”
“It’s a no-name settlement in southern Yemen, about a hundred and fifty klicks south of Sana’a, just east of Wadi Bana.”
“AQAP territory?”
“Most definitely, although we’ve never heard a peep out of this tiny speck. Al Masani, just to the east of this grid, is a hotbed. CIA has launched three Hellfire strikes there in the past year.”
“So…” Kolt asked, “what am I looking at here?”
Farmer tapped a tiny building’s roof with his pen. “See the heat signature off of this structure?”
Raynor did, and he’d spent enough time looking at thermal images in his career to get an idea of what was going on. He said, “It’s uniform all over the structure. Not like warm bodies inside, or cooking fires.” Kolt looked up to Farmer and spoke as if he were guessing the answer on a quiz in school. “It doesn’t have central heat … Is this building made out of metal?”
Ken nodded. “Yes. Steel, by the looks of it.”
Kolt looked back to the screen. He tried to get an idea of the size of it by comparing it with a donkey standing nearby. “Is it a shipping container?”
Farmer smiled and nodded, either impressed with Racer’s analytical abilities or just faking it to be polite. “It’s a twenty-foot standard dry goods intermodal shipping container.”
Kolt knew these devices well. Although Delta operators did not find themselves working on or around ships as much as SEAL Team 6 crews, intermodal containers were carried by truck and stored in warehouses and ports and were therefore ubiquitous in locations where Delta might find themselves operating. He had trained on and around shipping containers many times over the years.
“I would have thought the heat register would have been higher,” Kolt said. “I mean, this is Yemen in the summer.”
“It should be higher,” the younger man agreed. “What I think they have done, along with painting the walls the same color as the baked brick buildings all around, is cover the roof of the structure with burlap or canvas or something to mask the register. It helps, but the focal-plane-array thermal imagers on our collection assets can see right through them.”
Raynor pulled up a chair and sat next to Farmer slowly. “So … so it looks pretty obvious that this is something they are trying to mask from UAVs overhead.”
“No question about it. Whatever is in that container is something they are trying to keep
under wraps.”
“Does the rest of the village look quiet?”
“At first we thought it was quiet. No obvious militant presence. But…” Farmer said as he began clicking away on his keyboard. Kolt got the impression that the Booz Allen contractor was glad he’d been asked the question. “But after I found the intermodal container out here in the boonies, I double- and triple-checked everything we have on this vil.” He took a few more seconds to bring up a set of overflight images in daylight. He moved to a picture of a highway bisecting low brown hills, and he enlarged it. He said, “It’s only by chance that we caught this shot. UAVs overfly the village all the time, but with a regular overflight they never would have caught it. But these pictures came from a Reaper on station in a sector well to the south, looking at some traffic on the highway near Al-Safra. It looks, from the progression of the images, like the camera was just recording as the UAV circled around, when it caught this.” He zoomed in again and enhanced the image.
Kolt Raynor cocked his head and leaned forward. On the screen he could make out two simple buildings, photographed at an angle shallow enough to show the walls, windows, and doors, instead of the roofs. Raynor saw some sort of covered walkway that led between the buildings, and two men walked under the covering, shaded against the sun and hidden from any UAVs flying overhead.
Kolt focused on the men, but Kenny Farmer used the tip of his ballpoint pen to point to the tops of the buildings. “Here and here,” he said, referring to both structures.
Kolt said, “I see shadows, but it’s too dark to see anything there.”
“Exactly,” confirmed Farmer. “But it’s not what’s there that is important. We can infer what is there.”
Kolt was confused. He chuckled, admitting that he was lost. “We can? You can, maybe, you are the whiz kid. I’m just the dumb ROTC grad.”
Farmer laughed at this. “What I mean is … I can tell that this is some sort of false roof on the building. On both buildings. It has been created by putting beams up at all four corners and covering them with canvas. Under the canvas, just like under the material covering up the intermodal container, lies something the people at this location do not want us to find.”
Kolt nodded. “From the placement here at the tops of the buildings and overlooking the open ground to the south, I wonder if they could be gun emplacements.”
Farmer said, “I guess you aren’t just a dumb ROTC grad, sir. That’s what I think it is.”
“So this village is not just a little collection of houses. It’s a fortress.”
“A clandestine fortress,” Farmer said. “I spent all day looking over the images we have of the vil, the vehicles coming and going, the tracks in the dirt around there, things like that. And I have found things.”
“What things?”
“Motorcycle tracks down to the wadi, although I don’t see any bikes in the village. They have a burn pile for their trash that looks like it’s working about four times harder than one would expect for the trash accumulated by dirt-poor civilians in the quantity that we would expect to find living in a settlement of this size.”
“You’re pretty slick.”
“Thank you, sir, but I’m not slick enough. I’m sure there’s something I’ve left out. I wish I could get more overflights of this area from the north, maybe just to see if more of the structures there have false roofs.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it with this intel that you’ve pulled off of the images we have.” Kolt was damn impressed, but nearly certain this fake village wasn’t actionable enough for JSOC to commit to it. He knew how hard it was to get boots on the ground in Yemen. He asked, “Anything else? Anything at all?”
Farmer nodded, then brought a new image up on the monitor. It was a further enhanced shot of the two men under the covered walkway.
Kolt looked at it for a long moment. “Is that guy on the right wearing … No. No way.”
Ken Farmer just looked at Raynor. “It’s two males. One in garb traditionally worn in the area.”
Kolt blinked hard and leaned forward. “And the other guy has on blue jeans and a baseball cap.”
“And what look like tennis shoes,” Farmer added. “I don’t think this is a CIA base, though, just from the location.”
“No way. We’d know.” Kolt did not look away from the monitor to say, “I’ll be damned.”
* * *
The four TerraStar trucks full of Igla-S surface-to-air missiles pulled off the highway and into their first overnight destination just after eight p.m. Ahead of their arrival four of the vehicles driven by the Zetas gunmen had rolled up the long gravel drive and then parked, and the dozen or so men inside the vehicles had fanned out to guard the area.
David Doyle had been traveling in the third vehicle in the TerraStar convoy and as he climbed out to stretch his tight muscles he looked around at the location. Under a moonlit sky he could see the Sierra Madre Occidental all around him and, in his immediate vicinity, a cluster of large vacant buildings built on a rocky expanse of ground next to a mountainside.
As Doyle took in the view here in the dark, Henrico appeared next to him. “This is a vacant silver mine. We have used it many times in the past when we have convoys passing through this part of Coahuila. There is only access from one road, and I can put my men on the hills to see the highway from a great distance. There is some risk from helicopters, of course, but we will put men on higher ground to watch out for them.”
Henrico continued, “We have twelve men on guard duty around the mine. I am in contact with them. If there is any trouble, we will be ready.”
Doyle left the Mexican by his truck and walked back to the rear TerraStar. Here, Miguel stood with Charles, Nick, and George.
David said, “I want two of our men awake all night. Everyone stays armed, even while sleeping.”
Miguel said, “Very well, David. I will organize this.”
Doyle then walked away from the group, made his way up a pile of black rock discarded during the mining process, and took out a mobile phone and battery set that he’d bought at a gas station that afternoon. He put the battery in the phone, then activated it with the prepaid card he’d purchased along with the phone.
It took a minute for the device to power up, but as soon as it did, David dialed a number that he’d committed to memory months ago.
The call was to the United States, and it took a moment to make the connection, but soon enough Doyle heard the ringing signal.
“Hello?” The voice was tentative.
“Hello,” David said, his own voice lighter and more relaxed. “I wanted to let you know we will be in town soon. Not more than four days’ time. Perhaps a little sooner.”
“Good.”
“Are you ready for our visit?”
A pause. “All is in place. We are ready. We are excited.”
“Then I can’t wait to get there.” Doyle looked down to his watch. Only twenty seconds had passed since the man on the other end had answered. “Good-bye,” he said. And he quickly ended the call. Then David took the battery out of the back of the phone, and smashed the device with his bootheel.
* * *
The discovery of the shipping container in the clandestine militant stronghold in al Qaeda territory sent a shock wave through the U.S. intelligence communities. Numerous satellites were diverted and more overhead flights of the area became an instant priority, and within thirty minutes of a directive being sent out to Langley assets in the area, an unarmed Predator drone’s cameras were snapping tens of thousands of digital frames of the tiny settlement along Wadi Bana.
The video and still images were fed to Langley, and there, imagery analysts went to work.
They found women and children in the village, but they also found canvas-covered breezeways between freestanding homes, gun emplacements on the roofs of six of the buildings, armed men with binoculars on the hillside who, no doubt, served as lookouts for the village, and the telltale sparkle of spent rifle and pistol a
mmo in the dirt. Most telling, though, was that all the historical pulls of sat images couldn’t find a single evening in the last two weeks when the occupants had slept on the roof. Prior to that, for the past seven months, there wasn’t a night they hadn’t slept on the roof. Something, for some reason, had forced a change in an age-old local custom.
This was no innocent settlement in the hills.
Just three hours and twenty minutes after Kenny Farmer pointed out the curiosities in the tiny village in Yemen to Kolt Raynor, Langley and JSOC had determined the village to be a clandestine training camp of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Kolt thought that determination should have taken only about twenty minutes.
This information went straight to the Secretary of Defense, along with the CIA’s admission that, without a well-placed HUMINT or human intelligence asset in the village, they could not know what was going on there without boots on the ground, kicking in doors and searching the homes, barns, corrals, and adjacent area.
They did not need to remind SECDEF that approximately fifty SA-24 Grinch man-deployable air-defense systems had disappeared in that area, and the President of the United States had demanded that the weapons be found before they could fall into the wrong hands.
* * *
The order to send the Delta alert squadron to Yemen came at 1700 hours. ST6 was still deployed in the Mediterranean after their operation to take down the SAMs purchased by Quds Force operatives, so they were much closer than Gangster and his men at Fort Bragg, but ST6 was also close to getting a high-probability hit themselves of a suspected cache of SA-24s and other munitions in Libya, near Sirte. There was plenty of work for everyone.
Gangster and his team were wheels-up at nearby Pope Field at 1930. They would be flying to Eritrea in advance of the mission into Yemen, although they would work on the details of the hit throughout the flight, just in case their timeline got pushed up and they had to do an in-extremis hit.