by Tom Clancy
A few hours later at the wake, held at a big Italian restaurant called Anthony’s, Moore took Laney aside and tried to explain to her what had happened. She’d been told only a very broad-stroke account of the incident, and nowhere in the report did it say that Moore had made the decision to leave Carmichael and take the rest of the team back to the helicopter, only that the SEALs had taken heavy fire and Carmichael had been killed.
“The truth is, Laney, it’s all my fault.”
She shook her head and pushed him away. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to know. Nothing will change. I’m not stupid, Max. I knew this was a possibility, so don’t think I’m some poor and shocked widow and try to give me someone to blame. You can apologize if it makes you feel better, but you don’t have to. I took on the responsibility of marrying a Navy SEAL, and I’d be a goddamned fool if I didn’t think this day might come. You know what’s weird? When you guys were last deployed, I had this feeling …I just knew …”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Frank died doing what he loved. And he loved you guys. It was his life. That’s the way we’ll remember him.”
“But he didn’t have to die. And I just …I wouldn’t even be here if …”
“I told you—no apologies.”
“I know, but—”
“Then just forget it.”
“Laney, I don’t expect you to forgive me.” Moore choked up. “I just …There wasn’t …He tried to tell me to go …”
“Stop it. Don’t say anything else.”
“But I have to.”
She put a finger to his lips. “No. You don’t.”
Moore abruptly turned away and rushed out of the restaurant, feeling the gazes of every other SEAL burn into the back of his head.
Crystal Cave Area
Sequoia National Park
California
“Just five,” whispered Ansara as he stared through his binoculars. He was lying on his belly, shoulder to shoulder with Moore, who confirmed the same from behind his own binoculars.
In a clearing about fifteen meters below, five Hispanic men were loading a fourteen-foot-long nondescript truck with brick after brick of dried marijuana. Ansara had already given Moore the tour of a place he called “the garden,” where beneath the extensive cover of sugar pines the cartel had established a sophisticated growing operation whose expansive and clever irrigation system left Moore stunned. He had witnessed the growers’ tents, and the other much larger and longer tents where the harvested plants were hung from twine and carefully dried over a three- to four-day period, with the growers carefully checking each plant to be sure it had not contracted any mold. Once dried, the bundled plants were moved to yet another tent, where a team of sixteen women (Moore had counted them, and some appeared as young as fifteen or sixteen) did the weighing, bundling, and taping of each brick. They’d left the tent’s side flaps open, and through those openings Moore had been able to photograph the entire operation, itself under surveillance by a collection of battery-operated cameras mounted within and around the tents. Ansara, who’d already performed excellent reconnaissance of the operation, knew every guard post, and every weak section in the farm’s defenses.
“I wanted to bust these guys the last time I was up here, but the Bureau wouldn’t have it,” he’d told Moore. “Probably the right decision.”
“Yeah, because in a week they’d set up another shop. We need to shut them down back in Mexico and break the chain of command.”
“Why is it all you ex-military boys talk about the tactics, techniques, and procedures and refer to a bunch of drug dealers as having a ‘chain of command’?”
“Because we’re not ex-military. We are always military. And because that’s exactly what it is.”
“I’m just busting your balls.”
Moore smiled as he remembered the conversation and now glanced back at the laser trip wire they’d marked with a small piece of duct tape on each tree. Those were the areas through which they could not pass, and Ansara had twice prevented Moore from slipping up and breaking a beam. He’d taken a little baby powder between his fingers to show Moore exactly where the laser traversed, dusting the beam ever so slightly with the powder.
A camera mounted on top of the tent from within which the men were moving the bricks panned toward the hill, then tilted up, toward Moore and Ansara, who dug deeper behind the log they were using for cover. At that precise moment, footfalls and the crunching of leaves came from behind them, the southeast. Guards on patrol. Voices. Spanish. Something about bear tracks.
Bears? Not good.
Ansara gestured to him. Wait. They’ll pass.
The men below finished their loading, and just three of them climbed into the truck’s cab, and the driver started the engine.
Moore and Ansara needed to get back down into the valley, where they’d retrieve their full-suspension mountain bikes and ride soundlessly down to the main roads to their 4x4 pickup truck. The cartel truck would have a significant lead on them, but it would be tracked by satellite, those feeds piped directly to Moore’s smartphone. Somewhere along the line Moore would need to get close, to plant a GPS tracker on the vehicle, which would provide more accurate data on the truck’s location. The satellite feeds were often interrupted by the weather and terrain, and this was one truck they did not want to lose.
Once the voices of the guards grew faint, Ansara led the way through knots of pines and across the beds of needles crackling under their boots. It was 11:35 a.m.
By the time they reached their bikes, they heard the truck lumbering slowly down the dirt road, a single narrow path that had been cleared by cartel workers and lying about twenty meters east of their location. Ansara mounted his bike and took off. He was an experienced bike handler, having trained extensively with his buddy Dave Ameno, who’d taught him to navigate some of Central Florida’s most technical trails. Ansara’s skills annoyed Moore, who could barely stay on his wheels as he leapt over roots and made small jumps. Ansara knew exactly when to come out of the saddle and throw his weight back, while Moore got thrown around on the bike like a rag doll whose wrists had been duct-taped to the handlebars.
That Moore fell only twice before they reached their truck was sheer luck. That he hadn’t broken anything or drawn blood was the miracle they needed. They threw their bikes in the back of the pickup and took off, heading southwest down Sierra Drive, with Moore studying the map and the superimposed blue blip that represented the truck.
“How far up are they?” Ansara asked.
“Three-point-four-five miles.”
The FBI agent nodded. “Remind me when this is all over to teach you how to ride a mountain bike. I can see that wasn’t part of your extensive training.”
“Hey, I made it.”
“Yeah, but you looked real tentative through those whoop-de-doos. I told you to relax and let the bike tell you where it wants to go.”
“I don’t speak bike.”
“Obviously.”
“The bike wanted to go in the trees.”
“You must become one with the machine, grasshopper.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Ansara laughed. “Hey, you got a girlfriend?”
He grinned crookedly at the man. “You always talk this much?”
“Hey, we’re following a truck.”
“That’s right. So let’s stay on it. Signal’s still good. Any speculation on their first stop?”
“Well, if they get onto 198, then I’m thinking Porterville. There’s been some trafficking through there before. DEA scored big a couple of years ago, I think.”
Moore was about to broaden his view of the map when he turned to Ansara and said, “And to answer your question, I don’t have a girlfriend. I was with a very nice lady in Afghanistan, but I’m not sure when I’ll ever get back.”
“A local?”
“Oh, that would go over well, eh? They’d string me up by my you-know-whats, so no, she’s an Ame
rican. She works for the U.S. Embassy.”
“She hot?”
Moore grinned. “No.”
“Too bad.” Ansara’s cell phone rang. “Oh, this is a call I need to take.”
“Who?”
“Rueben. The kid I recruited. What do you have for me, young man?”
Moore picked up only bits and pieces of the kid’s voice on the other end, but Ansara’s reaction filled in the blanks: The cartel had completed some kind of extensive tunnel running between Mexicali and Calexico. Rueben was one of about ten young men who were going to begin making major shipments through the tunnels, probably cocaine from Colombia and opium from Afghanistan. This was a brand-new avenue of approach for the cartel, and after the call, Ansara said that the mules had already made several dry runs. Now they felt certain the passageway was clean and undetected, thus the real product would begin moving north, while the money and weapons flowed south.
The cartel truck moved at no more than forty-five miles per hour through the winding roads, and Ansara’s guess had been right. They’d driven directly into the small town of Porterville, California, population about fifty thousand, and headed straight for the Holiday Inn Express, where they parked in a space behind the three-story building.
Moore and Ansara watched them from the parking lot of the Burger King across the street. All three men remained in the cab, nixing Moore’s plan to affix his GPS tracker to the underside of the vehicle. They dared not get any closer.
“You want a cheeseburger?” asked Ansara.
Moore looked at him in mock disgust. “Well, the In-N-Out Burger is the best burger on the West Coast, in my humble opinion, because it is one hundred percent pure beef. And their fries are cooked in one hundred percent pure cholesterol-free vegetable oil.”
“Are you serious? You want a burger or not?”
“Get me two.”
And by the time Ansara returned with their food, another vehicle had pulled up beside the cartel truck. This second one was a white cargo van with tinted windows.
Staring through the long lenses of his digital surveillance camera, Moore nearly choked on his cheeseburger as he watched the men transfer at least forty cinder-block-size bricks from the cartel truck to the van—in broad daylight.
The driver of the van, another Hispanic man wearing a denim jacket and sunglasses, handed the cartel men a backpack, assumedly bulging with cash.
“I can’t believe they’re this bold.”
“Believe it,” answered Ansara. “Hi, there. Here are your drugs. Thanks for the money. Have a nice day.”
The van left, and while the Agency would track it via satellite and Moore’s photographs of its tag number, intercepting it might result in a call back to the cartel guys in the truck, who would panic and not complete their distribution, so the van would be left alone. The truck pulled out of the parking lot and headed west, back out toward 65. Ansara kept well behind them, and by the time they merged onto the highway, heading south, the cartel truck had a two-mile lead.
“So this girlfriend of yours,” Ansara said out of nowhere. “You still talking to her?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t have much luck with women.”
“Because of this.”
“The job? Hell, yeah …”
“Well, I’m the wrong guy to ask for advice.”
Ansara cracked a grin. “Maybe one day I’ll find a guy who knows how to do it. I’d forgotten you were a SEAL, so that pretty much dooms you.”
“Hey, I knew some guys with families.”
“They’re the exception, not the rule. Women nowadays want too much. I think some think we’re selfish for spending so much time away. When I was in the ’Stan, I didn’t know anyone on any of the ODA teams who wasn’t either single, divorced, or going through a divorce. It was kind of pathetic.”
“I’d forgotten you were Special Forces. I thought you were just an ex–mountain biker looking for fame and fortune.”
“Yeah, that’s why I joined the FBI—so I could work ridiculous hours and get underpaid while people try to kill me …”
“You love it.”
“Every minute.”
Moore glanced down at the map. “Hey, bro. They stopped. Gas station. Near Delano.”
“Could be just to refuel—but if it’s another exchange, we need to boogie, otherwise we could miss it.”
Moore was about to zoom in on the image when the satellite feed froze up. “Shit. Lost the signal.”
DEAR LADY
Bonita Real Hotel
Juárez, Mexico
GLORIA VEGA was sitting in the unmarked sedan across the street from the hotel. Inspector Gómez was at the wheel. At Gómez’s request, they were dressed in civilian clothes but wearing their Kevlar vests. The desk clerk at the hotel, a man named Ignacio Hernández, had been found dead the night before, shot once, execution-style, in the forehead. The owner of the hotel, Mr. Dante Corrales, was nowhere to be found, and neither was his girlfriend. Gómez had contacted several other employees of the hotel, along with construction workers involved in a renovation project, and he and Vega were going to interview them today.
“You see them up there,” said Gómez, referring to the two men sitting on the hotel’s roof. “They’re spotters, but not the usual ones. These men I haven’t seen before.”
“Maybe Corrales killed his desk clerk and took off,” said Vega.
“Why would he do that?”
She shrugged. “He was stealing.”
“No. It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
“How do you know?”
He faced her and snapped. “Because I’ve been doing this for most of my life. Wait here until I come back for you.”
With a little snort, the old man levered himself out of the car, slammed the door shut, and ventured across the street, toward the hotel’s main entrance. Vega watched as the spotters marked his every move.
When would the hammer fall? Everything had to be carefully timed and planned, Towers kept telling her. In point of fact, she was running out of time, and being careful was a hell of a lot harder now. Could she survive another attempt on her life? Was any of this even worth it anymore?
She looked to the hotel.
The spotters were focused on something else.
She heard the engine first. Then a dark blue sedan came barreling around the corner with two men hanging out the passenger-side windows. They wore T-shirts, jeans, and balaclavas over their faces.
Vega bolted out of the car as their shotguns swung around, toward her. She was already returning fire as they opened up on her, their guns booming, buckshot ripping into the car.
But their shots were accompanied by two more, and her gaze flicked up to the rooftop of the hotel, where both the spotters were now holding rifles and firing at her.
A breath later, a needling pain woke in her neck, and two more needles pierced her shoulders as blood began pumping onto the pavement. Her hand went reflexively for her neck, which was now bathed in blood. She shuddered, wanted to scream, opened her mouth, but her vocal cords no longer worked. She collapsed behind the car as the other vehicle screeched to a halt, and Vega barely turned her head in that direction as one of the men approached her, lifted his shotgun, and fired point-blank into her face, which was already going numb.
It might’ve been a minute or two, or just a few seconds, she wasn’t sure, but she looked up with one good eye and through a haze of blood and saw Gómez leaning over her.
She should be dead already. She knew that. But her body was as stubborn as her spirit.
“I’m sorry, dear lady,” said Gómez. “I’m so sorry …” He reached into her pocket and fished out her cell phone. “I’ve been doing this for too long to let myself get caught. You know that. And I know they sent you to find a rat. It’s a terrible business. Terrible, terrible, terrible.”
He rose and turned back to another man. “Pablo? What are you doing here? Where’s Dante?”
�
�He’s safe. We had some trouble with the Guatemalans.”
“What can I do?”
“Dante sent me with a message: Leave Zúñiga alone. Don’t touch him.”
“Zúñiga? Are you crazy? He’s the one we need to kill.”
Vega tried to listen, wished she could contact Towers, and then her thoughts broke off from their constricted orbit and floated away to her dead parents. She wanted to see them, to see the light, but for the time being there was only a numbing darkness.
And from that void came a final exchange of voices.
“Dante is making a horrible mistake. Tell him I want to speak to him before he does anything.”
“I will, señor. I will.”
And now the cold set in, pushing back the numbness. She shivered violently. There it was now, a pinprick at first and then a glorious beam of light as hot and warm as the summer sun. This was not God, some argued, only a reaction of the brain. But Vega knew better. She knew …
Chevron Gas Station
Delano, California
Despite losing the satellite signal, Moore and Ansara went to the truck’s last known location at the gas station, and by the time they arrived, Moore had reacquired the satellite and confirmed that the truck had not moved. Sometimes they picked up a little luck in their travels, most times not.
A surprise phone call from ATF Agent Whittaker as they were nearing the station left Moore’s breath shallow.
“You’re looking for a silver Honda Odyssey van,” the man said. “Should be reaching your location pretty soon. They’ll pull out back behind the car wash, I think. Towers says we let ’em make the exchange.”