by Tom Clancy
“All right, all right, we’re good to move in!” Soto cried over the intercom. He removed his helmet and tugged on his gas mask, as the others had already done.
The Black Hawk banked hard, causing Moore to tighten his grip on the edge of his narrow seat. The three FES troops seated directly across from him, their knees nearly banging against Moore’s, grew wide-eyed. In addition to their alien-looking masks, they wore black combat helmets and matching fatigues, with heavy Kevlar vests beneath their shirts and the tactical web gear that covered their chests with pouches for knives, spare ammo, grenades, zipper cuffs, flashlights, compass, and canteens, and beneath that they wore their heavy pistol belts. Moore was dressed similarly, with patches on his shoulders, back, and chest that IDed him as “Marina.” His two trusted Glocks were tucked into a pair of TAC SERPA holsters at his hips, though he’d detached the suppressors. He had also been given a choice of an AK-103, an M16A2, or an M4 carbine. Did they have to ask? Of course, he chose the M4A1 with SOPMOD package, including Rail Interface System (RIS), flip-up rear sight, and Trijicon ACOG 4x scope. SOPMOD stood for Special Operations Peculiar Modification, and Moore considered himself a peculiar kind of guy, well suited to such a weapon. Besides, the rifle was exactly the type he’d often fielded on SEAL missions, and while the M16 he’d fired on Zúñiga’s roof had felt like home in his hands, the M4 felt like a million bucks. Now, with the gun balanced between his legs and his breath coming hard through the mask, he waited as they wheeled around once more and began to descend, the chopper’s engine revving.
At the far south side of the gardens and higher up the hillside stood a smaller building, a two-car detached garage that served as both a lawn and maintenance equipment storage facility and an armory for the guards.
A few of them were dashing toward the building when the pilot pulled back up and called out the targets to the crew chiefs, both of whom unleashed hell, their barrels rolling, the guns booming, tracers lashing out like red lasers toward the building, which began to shatter under the barrage of 7.62-millimeter fire. The portside gunner jerked his rifle to the left and cut down three guards. They were nearing the garage, just as motion-activated lights above the doors clicked on to reveal their bodies, bloody and still writhing.
Before Moore could fully take in that scene, the pilot cut the stick once more and descended sharply, bringing them in over that second-story sundeck at the southwest corner of the house.
The crew chief on the starboard side slid his arm under the first of two fast ropes attached to a support arm extending from the chopper’s open bay door. Each rope had been created out of a four-strand round braid that reduced kinking, created an outer pattern that was far easier to grip than any smooth rope, and allowed operators to better control the speed of their descent through a towel-wringing motion as they slid down. Each rope had been coiled into a loop with the diameter of a truck tire, and the crew chief sent the first one flying over the side, followed by the second.
Moore wasn’t just a little experienced with fast-roping out of a helicopter. He’d spent entire weekends doing it over and over and over again until he could fast-rope in his sleep. When the Navy was dropping you off somewhere, there was never any time for long good-byes or thanks for the hospitality. They booted your ass out of a helicopter, and down you went. As many a crew chief had advised him: Be ready.
“Ropes out,” the chief hollered in Spanish, then glanced over the side. “Ropes on the deck. Ropes clear and ready. Go, go, go!” He pointed at Moore and Towers, who threw off their safety harnesses and got to their feet.
Moore slid the M4 over his back, making sure the single-point storm sling was secure, then he shifted over to the rope on the right side, while Towers took the one on his left.
“One more radio check,” said Towers.
“J-One, this is J-Two, gotcha,” Moore answered. A toothpick-thin boom mike ran down the side of his cheek and was attached to an earpiece even smaller than the average cell phone’s Bluetooth headset.
“This is Marina One, I got you, too,” Soto added over the channel.
“All right, this is J-One. We are good to go!”
Moore braced himself, making sure his heavily padded gloves felt secure on the line. He leaned forward, then swung himself out of the chopper, beginning his descent, the rope firmly guided between his boots. He glanced over and saw Towers on his line, just a meter above. Allowing himself to slide a little faster, Moore craned his head down to better judge his speed and approach.
And that’s when something struck the helicopter with a muffled thud, followed by an ear-shattering explosion that sent Towers and Moore sliding wildly down the ropes.
Moore could barely see what was happening above him, but he felt a rush of heat and suddenly the rope was dragging him away from the sundeck and toward the lawn.
When he glanced up, he saw only smoke and flames.
Fernando Castillo lowered the rocket-propelled grenade launcher from his shoulder, then rushed back into the house, through the sliding glass patio doors. He began to cough, to feel sick to his stomach, because he’d breathed in a bit of the gas before putting on the gas mask and fetching the RPG from his closet.
As Jorge Rojas’s right-hand man and chief security man, Castillo had planned for every scenario his imagination could muster, and an assault using tear gas—or whatever kind of chemical agent the Navy was using against them—was not very creative.
He’d already called his boss, ordered him to go to his own closet gun safe, arm himself, and don his own gas mask. He would get down to the basement, where they would go through the vault within the vault and take a tunnel that led back up the hillside to the two-car garage, where inside was parked Castillo’s armored Mercedes. Castillo would try to hold off the attackers for as long as he could.
Beyond the doors, the helicopter plummeted in a great conflagration, crashing onto the hillside beside the garage, the rotors snapping off as though they were made of plastic, the secondary explosion and burning fuel igniting across the slope and creating walls of flames.
Castillo had but another second to turn away, drop the RPG, and lift his rifle. Waves of gunfire tore through the windows and, as he hit the deck and hunkered down behind a sofa, another volley blasted through, followed by the heavy footfalls of approaching soldiers.
After hearing the gunfire, the hissing of gas, and the much louder droning of the helicopter, Jorge Rojas had gone to his window and had spotted the truck across the street with the soldier launching grenades onto his property. Then Castillo had called.
God, it seemed, had come for Rojas.
And Rojas wished he had the courage of his brother to simply go out there and face his attackers, confront them head-on, but he had to escape. That was everything.
So he’d donned his bulletproof trench coat over his silk pajamas, fetched an AK-47 and spare magazine from his gun safe, along with the gas masks that Castillo had insisted they wear, then told Alexsi to meet him in the basement. She was frightened out of her mind, of course, and twice he’d had to scream at her: “Get to the basement!” She tugged the mask on and dashed off.
Rojas reached for his phone and speed-dialed Miguel. His son did not pick up, and the call went directly to voice mail.
Then what sounded like a great thunderclap came from the backyard, rattling the walls and throwing Rojas off balance.
Moore and Towers had dropped some three meters onto the lawn, hitting the grass and rolling as the chopper had come spinning erratically behind them. They buried their heads as the helo hit the ground, and the explosion ripped across the gardens, flames shooting from the helo’s fuel tanks, the heat billowing in greater waves, the bird’s engines still wailing as the fires began to engulf the chopper.
“Oh my God,” Towers said over the radio, and groaned. “Soto and the rest of them.”
Gunfire boomed from inside the house, multiple weapons, Soto’s men, and an AK-47, at least one.
Moore cursed. “We need
to move!” He bolted to his feet, bringing his rifle around. “Now!”
Towers fell in behind him, rifle at the ready. Still fighting for breath, they charged toward the sliding glass doors, which had already been blown in by the first assault team, whose job was to secure the first floor.
Moore didn’t see him at first, only heard the rat-tat-tat of his rifle, and when he turned in that direction, he spotted the bare-chested figure wearing a gas mask and driving the stock of an AK-47 into his shoulder. Moore wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw an eye patch, and if so, then this was Fernando Castillo, Rojas’s head of security.
In that instant, as Moore was about to return fire, Towers cried out and fell to the carpet near Moore’s boot.
Repressing the desire to look down toward his fallen boss, Moore fired, his salvo piercing the air where their assailant had been.
Leaping on top of a coffee table, then throwing himself toward the sofa, Moore opened fire again, believing the man had ducked down behind the sofa, but as he hit the carpet there, he saw the guy was already darting down the adjoining hall.
“Max,” Towers called over the radio. “Max …”
As if on cue, automatic-weapons fire echoed loudly throughout the house, coming from the front. Glass shattered. Unfamiliar voices lifted, punctuating the rounds with curses in Spanish.
As Rojas rushed into the basement, breathing steadily through the gas mask, he spotted a soldier leaning over his fallen comrade in the living room. And then, beyond them, past the blown-out back doors, he saw more gunmen rushing toward the house. Who were these bastards? And why had no one called to warn him? Heads were going to roll.
CHANGE OF PLANS
Rojas Mansion
Cuernavaca, Mexico
56 Miles South of Mexico City
TOWERS HAD BEEN SHOT in the right biceps and had taken a round in the shoulder that had pierced his Kevlar vest.
The shot in the arm had grazed him, but the round to his shoulder had left a nasty exit wound.
“If he gets away now, we’ll lose him forever,” said Towers. “Get moving!”
“Not before I get you a medic.” Moore reached down and tapped the remote on his belt. “Marina-Two, this is J-Two, over?”
Moore’s earpiece crackled with static, then a voice came through, “J-One, J-Two? This is Marina-Two. Lost contact with Marina-One. Are you there, over?”
It was Soto’s lieutenant on the ground, a guy named Morales.
“Marina-Two, this is Moore. I need a medic in the living room for Towers. We lost Soto in the crash, over.”
“Roger, J-Two. Medic on the way.”
Moore sighed in relief as from the corner of his eye he spotted movement near a pair of doors on the other side of the living room. One door was wide open, revealing a broad stairwell beyond. A figure wearing a gas mask and trench coat raced into the stairwell, setting Moore’s feet in motion. He wasn’t sure, but the height, hair, and build were similar to Rojas’s.
Somewhere on the second floor, Soto’s men traded fire with at least two more of Rojas’s guards as Moore hit the stairwell and charged down across thick carpet, his M4 at the ready.
The lights clicked on as Rojas sprinted across the tile and not two seconds later an explosion from behind sent drywall, beams, and concrete dropping into the subterranean garage where he stored his antique cars. It took him but a single glance to assess what was happening: His attackers had blown a hole in the ceiling and a rope appeared. They were coming down.
Rojas hustled over to the vault on the left side of the basement and got to work on the access panel, struggling for breath. He typed in the code, did the fingerprint scan, then realized he had to remove his mask for the retinal scan. He took a deep breath, held it, then tugged up the mask and placed his eye in the correct spot. The laser flashed. Then he inserted his finger in the tube for the blood sample.
As the first soldier appeared on the rope, Rojas withdrew a pistol from his trench coat pocket and fired, causing the soldier to drop to the floor and seek cover behind Rojas’s vintage Ferrari 166 Inter.
A second soldier started down, and Rojas shifted away from the panel and waited as the vault door thumped and hissed open. He hustled into the vault, then took a breath, figuring the air inside might be clean. It was. But he couldn’t close the door—a fail-safe prevented him from being locked inside.
He rushed on through the hundreds of pieces of art, rows of furniture, cases of books, and boxes and display cases of firearms, along with a vinyl record collection numbering 10,000 that had each album stored in its own plastic case. Sofia had loved that collection and sometimes spent hours leafing through it. He reached the back wall, where stood two large racks from which hung more of his Turkish rugs, along with a Persian silk piece from the sixteenth century that he’d bought from Christie’s for 4.45 million U.S. dollars, making it one of the most expensive rugs in the world.
He shifted the racks aside to reveal a metal door set into the wall with a rotary combination lock. He rolled the dial. The combination was set to the date of his wedding anniversary. The lock thumped, and he lifted the small handle, tugging the door toward him.
He was beginning to panic now, to envision himself being caught and having to explain it all to Miguel. He’d never told Miguel how his brother Esteban had been killed, how that shotgun had felt in his hands, and how desperately he’d wanted revenge; he had never told him how hard he’d struggled to build his businesses, how many risks he’d taken, never told him about how many sleepless nights he’d endured so that he could give the boy anything he dreamed of, anything. But it wouldn’t matter. All the time in the world, all the explaining, and all the apologies wouldn’t change the fact that the lie was death.
And a piece of Jorge Rojas would die this evening.
Gunfire from just outside the vault chilled him back to the moment.
Then it struck him: Where was Alexsi? Had they already captured her?
The lights switched on as Rojas pushed into the rectangular room, no wider than three meters and about fifteen meters long. On both sides stood boltless steel shelving racks buckling under the weight of cash, American dollars, millions and millions of American dollars, perhaps five hundred million or more—Rojas wasn’t even sure himself.
Glimpsing that much money in one place was enough to strike anyone inert, the cash bundled and stacked faceup to form brick-and-mortar walls of mottled green. Rojas had once mused that the bills were the pages of some spectacularly long narrative chronicling his life and that no, they were not tainted by blood. At the far end of the vault were more racks loaded with crates of firearms and more ammunition—not antiques or collectibles like those found in the outer vaults, but police killers and the IEDs given to him by Samad’s people, which had been smuggled up from Colombia. A concrete archway lay at the very end, and beyond it, the tunnel leading out toward the garage on the hillside. The tunnel’s walls had been reinforced with pressure-treated wood, then filled in with cinder blocks, rebar, and concrete. It was the kind of passageway Rojas wished he could build between Juárez and the United States, even more sophisticated than the one Castillo had been forced to destroy.
He started for the archway and the tunnel beyond.
But at the far end of the room behind him, a soldier appeared, leveling his rifle.
Valley View Apartments
Laurel Canyon Boulevard
Studio City, California
Samad was sitting up in bed, the soft glow of his cell phone casting long shadows across the ceiling. Talwar, Niazi, and the rest of the Los Angeles team were sleeping in the other rooms. Rahmani was supposed to call him at any moment so he could report on their practice run, and Samad wished the old man would make that call because he felt entirely drained, his eyes already narrowed to slits. What they were about to do—the complexity and audacity of it all, the sheer will it took—was a lot to bear. He would never admit openly to feeling any guilt, but the nearer they got to that fateful moment
, the sharper, the deeper, his reservations became.
His father was the problem. That old picture spoke to him, told him that this was not what Allah wanted, that killing innocent civilians was not Allah’s will, and that the infidels should be taught the error of their ways, not murdered because of them. That old picture reminded Samad of the day his father had given him a bag filled with chocolate. “Where did you get it?” Samad had asked. “From an American missionary. The Americans want to help us.”
Samad squeezed shut his eyes and balled his hands into fists, digging his nails deeply into his skin, as though he could purge the guilt from his body, sweat it out like a fever. He needed to meditate, to pray more deeply to Allah and ask for his peace. He glanced over to his Qur’an:
O Messenger, rouse the Believers to the fight. If there are twenty amongst you, patient and persevering, they will vanquish two hundred: if a hundred, they will vanquish a thousand of the Unbelievers: for these are a people without understanding.
The phone vibrated, startling him. “Yes, Mullah Rahmani, I am here.”
“And all is well?”
“God is great. Our run went perfectly, and I heard back from the other teams. No problems.”
“Excellent. I have another bit of news I thought I’d share. I made a deal with the Sinaloa Cartel. Even though Zúñiga was killed, his successor, who is also his brother-in-law, has promised me the same arrangement we had with Rojas—but even better, because he’s put us in contact with the Gulf Cartel in order to double our shipments. We don’t need the Juárez Cartel anymore. I never liked Señor Rojas’s attitude.”
“He was not very agreeable when I spoke to him.”
“No matter now. I will talk to you tomorrow, Samad. Rest easy, rest well. Allahu Akbar.”