by Tom Clancy
Crystal Cave Area
Sequoia National Park
California
Four Days Later
A U-Haul truck had pulled up outside the big tent, and FBI Special Agent Michael Ansara watched as two men climbed out of the cab and were joined by two more who’d come out of the tent. One guy, the tallest, unlocked the back of the truck and rolled up the door, and the men began passing boxes to one another, forming a line toward the tent’s entrance. This area was a hub for supply distribution to the groups farther north. That the Mexican drug cartels were smuggling cocaine across the border into the United States was hardly as audacious as the operation that Ansara had been reconnoitering for the past week.
The cartels had established extensive marijuana farms within the rugged hills and backcountry of the Sequoia National Park. While there were many hiking trails, large swaths of land were still off-limits to hikers and campers. Foot patrollers were few and far between, meaning the cartels had at their disposal enormous areas of remote, well-camouflaged land protected from aerial surveillance. They were growing their product on this side of the border with impunity and quickly distributing it to their customers, even as the money got shipped back home to Mexico. Ansara had more than once shaken his head in disbelief over those very facts, but the cartels had been doing this for years.
Audacious? Hell, yes. And more so when you’d spent as much time around the area as Ansara had. He’d already noted the extensive security measures put in place, layers of defense beginning with those areas running parallel to the main trails. Any adventurers who strayed far enough off the path might encounter foothold traps of various sizes all the way up to bear, along with trapping pits dug six feet deep and covered with twigs, leaves, and pine needles. At the bottom of these traps lay two-by-fours impaled with nails. The idea was to injure the curious so they’d turn around and seek medical help. Farther in, Ansara found trip wires that again had unsuspecting hikers falling forward onto hidden beds of nails. While admittedly crude, these means of “discouragement” were just part of a more sophisticated network of defense closer in.
Getting to his current vantage point had required a healthy dose of climbing skill. He’d hiked in with a light pack, scaling hills with grades of more than eighteen percent to navigate his way along several rocky cliffs, slipping at least a half-dozen times in order to beat a path wide enough and remain undetected. Loose rocks, low-hanging limbs, and the sheer grade left him gasping.
About an hour north of the big tent he was now observing, and a two-hour hike away from the nearest road, lay what Ansara had nicknamed “the garden.” Shaded by the towering sugar pines were more than fifty thousand marijuana plants, some fanning up to more than five feet tall and planted in neat rows six feet apart. These rows swept up the steep terrain and were planted in the rich soil. Many of the plants lay amid thick brush and near streams that the cartels used for irrigation. Pipes had been buried along the hillside, the streams dammed up, and an elaborate drip-line system complete with gravity-fed hoses was in place so that the plants were not overwatered. This was a professional operation, with no expense spared.
Along the growing area’s perimeter lay knots of small tents where farmers and security personnel lived, most of their food stored in large sacks and suspended from tree limbs to protect it from black bears roaming the area. The fields themselves were watched twenty-four-seven by as many as thirty armed men at any one time. Supplies were brought in by those who were presumably not told about the operation, only that food, water, clothing, fertilizer, and other essential items were needed. Harvested plants were smuggled out at night by teams of farmers protected by guards. Teams that worked by day actually rode expensive mountain bikes and moved swiftly and silently through the unforgiving valleys. Ansara guessed that many of the workers were relatives and friends of the cartels, people they could trust. Every main entrance and exit of the park was protected by rangers, and Ansara’s surveillance had revealed that at least one night guard had been bribed to allow the entrance or exit of a vehicle between midnight and five a.m., about every ten days or so.
Ansara was no stranger to marijuana farming. He had grown up in East L.A., in one side of a Boyle Heights duplex. His mother’s older brother, Alejandro De La Cruz, lived on the other side. During the week, his uncle was a “gardener to the stars” in the affluent community of Bel Air. Nights and weekends De La Cruz grew and sold pot to those very same rich clients. Ansara was his trusted assistant.
By ten, Ansara could spell, as well as pronounce, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical ingredient in pot that enabled the user to get high. He’d spend hours scrounging up and prepping foam cups. He’d start by punching drain holes in the bottom, add potting soil, and last inserted, pointy end up, a dark brown seed with mottled-looking marbling. He’d line thirty or forty cups in a flat, which was a tray similar to his mother’s cookie pan, and then he’d turn on the heating coils lining the underside of the long benches for bottom heat.
He learned how to transplant the germinated seedling, leaving plenty of soil on its root ball, and about the importance of an oscillating fan running twenty-four hours a day. He skimmed newspapers, especially the inserts and flyers, looking for sales on 600-watt, high-pressure sodium grow lamps.
A marijuana plant’s nighttime, or dark period, was equally critical to its growth. Twenty-four-hour timers were a challenge. The grow lamps easily burned out regular timers, so his uncle had taught him that expensive high-power switches known as contactors, or relay switches, were necessary.
The demand for specific amounts of daylight and darkness created two security issues. Covering over windows to facilitate total darkness aroused suspicion from the street. Drug and law enforcement officials looked for it. Chronic above-average residential power consumption could trigger a Southern California Edison heads-up report to those same drug and law enforcement officials. Also, a grow space could become quite humid. Open windows at odd hours, regardless of precipitation or outside temperatures, was risky business.
By twelve, Ansara could recite the top dozen most potent marijuana strains in descending order of their THC content, from White Widow seeds to Lowryder seeds. And during all that time Ansara never once smoked pot—and neither did his uncle, who said they were businessmen supplying an important product. If you sell cookies, he’d told Ansara, you don’t sit around eating all the cookies.
It all came to a screeching halt when his mother discovered why he spent so much time with Uncle Alejandro. She didn’t speak to her brother for months.
That Ansara had gone on to join the FBI and had already busted individuals who grew pot was one of life’s true ironies, and yet another irony was, at the moment, fully alive before his eyes. There were only a handful of drug enforcement agents assigned to police California’s twenty million acres of federal forests, and unfortunately Ansara was not one of them. He was up there because he’d been hunting a particular smuggler, one Pablo Gutiérrez, who’d murdered a fellow FBI agent in Calexico and who he believed had direct ties to the Juárez Cartel. During his pursuit of this man, Ansara had found the Oz of pot farms in California—yet he and his colleagues were hesitant to bring down this operation because they hoped to use it to gather more intel on the cartels. It was clear to all that they needed to remove the lieutenants and bosses. If they struck too soon, the cartels would just plant another field a couple miles away.
As security tightened along the U.S.-Mexican border, the cartels expanded their growing operations in the United States. Ansara had spoken to a special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management, who’d told him that just eight months prior, park rangers had confiscated eleven tons of marijuana in a single week. The agent went on to speculate on how much pot they did not confiscate, how much actually made it out of the fields and was sold …Mexican drug lords were operating on American soil, and there weren’t enough law enforcement officers to stop them. Like soldiers used to say in Vietnam, There it is
…
Ansara lowered his binoculars and tucked himself deeper into the shrubs. He thought he’d seen one of the loaders do a double take in his direction. His pulse began to race. He waited a moment more, then lifted the binoculars. The men were back at it and had set aside some boxes whose lids were removed. Ansara zoomed in to find packages of toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, disposable razor blades, and bottles of aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, and cough suppressant. Larger boxes contained small tanks of propane and packages of tortillas, as well as canned goods, including tomatoes and tripe.
A bird flitted through the canopy above. Ansara jolted and held his breath. Once more he lowered the binoculars, rubbed his tired eyes, and listened to Lisa in his head: “Yes, I knew what I was getting into, but it’s just too much time away. I thought I could do this. I thought this was what I wanted. But it’s not.”
And thus another long-legged blonde with a smoky voice and soft hands had escaped from Ansara’s clutch. But this one had been different. She’d sworn she could put up with his being away and had made a valiant effort for the first year. She was a writer and political-science professor at Arizona State and had told him that it was good when he was away, that she needed time to herself anyway. In fact, on the night of their first anniversary as a couple, she’d seemed completely in love with him. At a party she’d compared him to film and television actors like Jimmy Smits and Benjamin Bratt, and had once described him on her Facebook page as “a tall, lean, clean-shaven Hispanic man with a brilliant smile and bright, unassuming eyes.” He’d thought that was pretty cool. He couldn’t use words like that. But absence did not make the heart grow fonder—not when you’re under thirty. He understood. He let her go. But for the past month he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He recalled their first date; he’d taken her to a little mom-and-pop Mexican place way up in Wickenburg, Arizona, where he’d told her about his own time at ASU and about his work as an Army Special Forces operator in Afghanistan. He’d told her about leaving the Army and getting recruited by the FBI. She’d asked, “Are you allowed to tell me all this?”
“I don’t know. Does hearing top-secret stuff make you horny?”
She’d rolled her eyes and giggled.
And the conversation had gotten serious when she’d asked about the war, about his fallen brothers, about him saying good-bye to one too many friends. After dessert, she’d said she had to go home, and the implication was that she wasn’t really interested in him but that he should thank his sister for setting them up.
Of course, he’d pursued her like any good Special Forces/FBI guy would, and he eventually wooed her with flowers and bad poetry written in homemade cards and more late-night dinners. But it’d all gone to hell because of his career, and he was beginning to resent that. He imagined himself as a nine-to-fiver with weekends off. But then the thought of working in a cubicle or having a boss breathing down his neck made him nauseated.
Better to be up in the mountains with a pair of binoculars in hand and surveying some bad guys. Hell, he felt like a kid again.
The men finished their unloading, got back in the U-Haul truck, and pulled away. Ansara watched them go, then a few more men appeared outside and began filling up backpacks with materials they lifted from the boxes. They finished in about ten minutes and headed off in the direction of the garden.
Ansara waited until they were gone, then turned to head off.
Had he not matter-of-factly glanced down, he would be dead.
Right there, off to his right, was a small device with a laser cone jutting from its top. Ansara recognized the unit immediately as a laser trip wire, its companion unit located on the other side of the clearing. If he broke the laser, a silent alarm would go off. Ansara tightened his gaze, lifted his binoculars, and spotted several more laser units at the bases of trees. They came into view only if you knew what to look for, and the Mexicans had actually taped leaves and twigs to their sides to further camouflage them. Conventional trip wires and claymore mines had been set up all around the garden, but this was a new section of the park for Ansara, and he had not seen these detection devices before. Damn, if he came up here again, he’d have to be even more careful.
Shouting came from below. Spanish. The words: Up on the mountain. East side. Had they spotted him?
Oh, shit. Maybe he had crossed one of the lasers. He took off running, as the men below came rushing out from the tent.
THE GOOD SONS
Miran Shah
North Waziristan
Near the Afghan Border
MOORE AND HIS local contact Israr Rana had driven some two hundred ninety kilometers southwest into North Waziristan, one of seven districts within Pakistan’s FATA, or Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, which were only nominally controlled by the central and federal government of Pakistan. For centuries, mostly Pashtun tribes had inhabited the remote areas. In the nineteenth century the lands had been annexed by the British, during which time the British Raj tried to control the people with the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCRs), which became known as the “black laws” because they gave unchecked power to local nobles so long as they did the bidding of the British. The people continued with the same governance, right up through the formation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1956. During the 1980s the region became much more militant with the entry of mujahideen fighters from Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. After 9/11, both North and South Waziristan gained notoriety for being training grounds and safe havens for terrorists as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda began entering the region. The locals actually welcomed them because the Taliban appealed to their tribal values and customs, reminding them that they should remain fiercely independent and mistrustful of the government.
All of which reminded Moore that he was heading into a most dangerous and volatile place, but Rana had told him the trip would be worth the risk. They were going to meet a man who Rana said might be able to identify the Taliban in Moore’s photographs. This man lived in the village of Miran Shah, which during the Soviet invasion had housed a large refugee camp for displaced Afghans who’d fled across the border from Khost, the nearest village in what was a remote region of the country. In fact, many of the roads leading to Miran Shah were frequently impassable during the winter months, and the only electricity available to its inhabitants came from a few diesel-powered generators. To say they were entering a town stuck in the dark ages was an understatement, yet anachronistic evidence of Western influences took Moore aback as he spied tattered billboards for 7Up and Coke strung between a pair of mud-brick buildings. Dust-covered cars lined the streets, and kids chased one another along garbage-laden alleys. A man wearing a grease-stained tunic and leading a pet monkey by a leash shifted past them, along with a half-dozen other men wearing long cotton shirts draped over their trousers and bound at their waists by long sashes. Some of them carried AK-47s and broke off to examine a bombed-out building in the main market area where a whole group of men and women were still sifting through the rubble. Somewhere nearby a goat was being roasted over an open pit; Moore knew that scent quite well.
“Another suicide bomber,” said Rana, who was behind the wheel and tipping his head toward the building. “They were trying to kill one of the tribal leaders here, but they failed.”
“They did a nice job on the building, though, didn’t they?” said Moore.
At the end of the road they were accosted by two more riflemen, members of the Pakistan Army who’d been providing added security, since Miran Shah was suffering from more frequent attacks from pro-Taliban militants camped in the surrounding hills, no doubt the home of that suicide bomber. The government had been taking action against the “Talibanization” of these tribal regions, providing added personnel and equipment, but their efforts had only limited success. Moore had studied the region well, and there were just too many opportunities for government troops to be bribed by the Taliban-backed drug lords, and Khodai, if he had lived, was going to name names.
Rana told the gua
rds at the checkpoint that they were going to see Nek Wazir, who chaired the North Waziristan Shura, or executive council, and was known to speak out strongly against the Taliban chiefs in the area. The guard returned to his associate and checked a clipboard, then came back and asked for their IDs. Moore, of course, had expertly falsified documents that described him as a gun maker from Darra Adam Khel, a small town devoted entirely to the manufacture of ordnance. Travel to Darra by foreigners was forbidden, but merchants from the town routinely moved throughout the tribal regions making deliveries. The guard was quickly satisfied with Moore’s papers, but after their car was searched, he held up a hand. “Why no delivery?”
Moore grinned. “I’m not here on business.”
The guard shrugged, and they were waved through the checkpoint.
“How do you know Wazir?” asked Moore.
“My grandfather fought against the Soviets with him. They both came here. I’ve known him all my life.”
“They were mujahideen.”
“Yes, the great freedom fighters.”
“Excellent.”
“I told you when you hired me that I have very good contacts.” Rana winked.
“This is a long drive, and I told you my bosses are only giving me two days.”
“If anyone knows who those men are, it’s Wazir. He is the most well-connected man in this region. He has hundreds of spotters, even some in Islamabad. His network is amazing.”
“But he lives in this dump.”
“Not all year. But yes, this ‘dump,’ as you call it, provides ample cover and limited scrutiny from the government.”
The dirt road turned lazily to the right, and they climbed up into some foothills to arrive at a pair of modest-sized brick homes with several tents standing behind them. A pair of satellite dishes were mounted on the roof of the larger structure, and generators hummed from beneath the tents. Farther back were pens for goats and cows, and to the left, in the valley below, lay hectares of tilled fields where local farmers grew wheat, barley, and a Persian clover called shaftal.