Yerby watched the illegal immigrants move slowly. These were not the poor ones who paid an outrageous fee to be stuffed into trucks or the holds of boats. These were the poor ones who agreed to work for the Hernandez Cartel in exchange for safe passage. They were shown where the underground tunnel border crossings were. They were escorted by armed guards into the United States. They were met by guides who transported them to safe houses. Once they were shown the route they were expected to make three years of crossings, carrying drugs. During that time their families were watched back in Mexico. If the drugs did not arrive, the families were made to pay for the loss. Especially the daughters, whose mothers were given a choice: watch them be raped and killed, or have them sent into prostitution. If a mother chose the latter, she was spared having to witness the rape.
One reason Yerby’s missions were typically off the books was that unlike drones that carried sophisticated target-ID software, his hits were instinctual. The target could be a decoy double. It could be a coincidental lookalike. That was why he had to act on solid intel that the individual he sought was on the move and in the vicinity. The good news was, right or wrong—and unlike drones—there was never collateral damage.
But Yerby had been doing this long enough to have a good instinct about whether the person in his sights was the person he wanted. No interaction with those around him, suggesting his elevated status. Persons in his group scanning the region for an ambush. A point man some distance ahead watching for tripwires or alarms; this group had two of them. The usual mule train that consisted of only two or three people, typically a man and two women, did not take those kinds of precautions.
Yerby was in no hurry. The ridgeline was the only clear spot to walk. To their left was a steep drop. To their right was a six-foot brick wall and a property owner who knew what took place on the other side and didn’t want any part of it. He didn’t even have security cameras, though Yerby could see a pair of mountings. No doubt someone had removed them on their way through the mountains at some point and probably left a dead animal in its place. That was the cartel way: offense with a sharp postscript.
Yerby focused on the man in the middle, tracking him as he walked. The elbow pads kept Yerby’s sweater from tearing, allowed him a smooth and steady motion. The man walked tall, had what appeared to be new hiking shoes, and wore a firearm under his dark Windbreaker. The outline wasn’t distinguishable but the bulge was unmistakable. And he wasn’t wearing a backpack. If by some mischance the group was arrested, he could break off from them, say he had nothing to do with the smugglers. That was why Yerby shot people dead. Because guys like Hernandez always had a way of slithering from the fingers of the law.
The monster seemed absorbed in his footing, letting the others worry about his security. Yerby watched the man’s gait. He couldn’t make out any features, but the walk was the same as in the surveillance footage. The man raised and rode horses. He was slightly bowlegged. Yerby was confident—
There was a sound like a dry branch being snapped over a knee. Yerby felt a small fist of air on his left cheek an instant before his chin struck the top of the boulder. His face was dragged to the side, hard. The rifle tumbled from his grip as he slapped his hands out to brace himself. He tried to push off but found that he didn’t have control of his head. It was lopsided and wouldn’t move. He reached for it and felt something strange inside. His teeth had somehow shifted; no, they were loose and they were on his tongue—which hurt him. He tasted blood. He coughed as he finally inhaled, and blood clogged his throat.
All of that had happened in a few seconds. His face hurt. He picked up his left hand. It was weak and trembling violently. He let his hand drop to the rock, which felt sticky. He dragged his fingers toward his face.
What the hell happened? His only thought was that a bird may have struck him, possibly an owl thinking he was dinner.
His wriggling fingers reached his cheek, felt something that didn’t belong. A beak? There were feathers—
He let his hand drop, tried to move his head but it was too heavy. The wind cooled his flesh, which was wet. But it wasn’t raining. This didn’t make sense and he found it difficult to focus.
Someone stepped beside him. He didn’t know who it was because his face was turned the other way. He heard heavy breathing, as if someone had been running. He tried to turn but his head wouldn’t obey.
“Help.”
Yerby heard the word in his head. What came from his mouth, though, was just burbling. He saw light in front of him but the source was behind him. There were two flashes. In the distance he saw two pinpoints of light flare in return.
Oh, Christ, he thought. They had a spotter.
That was always a danger on these lone-wolf operations. He had to sleep sometime. It left him exposed if the criminal had been tipped off, or was simply overly cautious.
Yerby had done nightly circuits of the perimeter before taking his position. These guys were tunnel diggers, so a foxhole wouldn’t have been a problem for them. Still, he hadn’t seen anyone. He hadn’t smelled food or waste products or tobacco or anything that would suggest someone was up here. He knew his skills weren’t slipping. Someone was either better at skulking than he was, or luckier.
Yerby pressed his palms on the rock, pushed hard. He had to get up, get to his bowie knife, and at least inflict a wound on whoever was there.
He felt a hard rubber sole push down on the side of his head. His face was pressed to the stone, slamming the pain in harder. He cried out, but all that emerged was a throaty release of air. It blew a metallic taste into his nostrils: his own blood. He felt his teeth tumbling like hard candies in his mouth with every breath, every involuntary move of his tongue. His eye sockets ached. His eyes felt rigid. He was breathing roughly through his nose so he didn’t swallow blood. His brain was finally processing the fact that he had been badly injured. Some corner of his mind was ticking off the little evidence he had. It hadn’t been a bullet or knife that had taken him down. It was a shaft, an arrow. Sighted and fired at night, it was most likely a bolt from a crossbow. Cartel soldiers used those when they didn’t want to make any noise.
Yerby felt someone feeling around his waist. He made an effort to reach down, stop it, but his hands were like empty gloves, limp and helpless. He felt himself being pulled on his left side, then his right. His cell phone was on his left hip. On his right—
He heard a voice speaking a language he did not recognize. He couldn’t place the language but he knew the name he heard: Hernandez. He felt spit land on the back of his neck. A moment later his entire body came electrically alive as the tip of a knife, probably his own—these bastards liked using a man’s own weapons against him—was pressed to the spot where the spittle had landed. There were more words. He was glad he didn’t know what was being said; it allowed him to collect his thoughts. Yerby actually savored the breaths that gurgled deep in his throat, the sudden numbness that filled the lower half of his face as though he were waiting for a root canal. The body was a marvelous machine, a guardian that protected itself from debilitating pain when it could. Except for that point of fire in his neck, he felt surprisingly all right.
But he didn’t want to waste his last seconds running a self-diagnostic. His brain flashed to the wonderful people he had known. Juri, whom he would have married except for the fear that he would leave her a widow. Ryan Kealey, the CIA agent who had understood his approach and goals in the drug war and helped him to perfect his black-ops skills. Yerby sent a wordless wish to the agent, telling him how much he respected him, how grateful he was that Kealey’s unofficial training of him had resulted in so many successful missions. He smiled, his expression frozen as the words stopped in his mind. He knew he only had a moment left. He made an effort to flop over, to dislodge the foot from his head, to put up some kind of struggle—
Yerby felt a fist of fire punch the base of his skull. The spotter leaned into the knife, the tip reaching to the vertebra of the wounded man. The pain
caused Yerby to cry through his broken teeth, made his limbs stiffen and shake. He felt the blade cut downward along his spine, blood spilling over the sides of the wound. This was more pain than his body could handle; it didn’t grow dull but just the opposite. Lightning raced to the small of his back, along his rib cage, down through his groin and into his thighs. He screamed horribly and kept screaming, twitching, flopping even as the cutting stopped between his shoulders. However much he wished it, the world refused to go black. It remained a bright, hideous red, like fireworks of blood exploding against the darkness....
2
The killer left the knife protruding from the base of Yerby’s neck. It took several minutes for the man to die, his struggles subsiding slowly like a fish in a canoe. It was partly the fault of the knife, so sharp that it made an incision like a paper cut, doing very little lateral damage. The man bled out slowly.
Not that Abejide minded. She had been out here since dawn, going wide of the house by making her way along the steep mountain slope. Though the woman was five foot eight she was extremely thin, moving with snake-like sinuousness below outcroppings and plentiful shrubs. Born in South Africa, as a youngster she had learned to avoid predators both animal and human; unless there was drought or famine, leopards and Cape buffalo were not typically as dangerous as packs of men who had been drinking.
Like many hunters, this man before her had been so confident of his location and arsenal, so sure of the actions of his enemies, so entrenched in his methods that he had not allowed for something outside his experience.
Under a blazing sun she had used binoculars to scan the area around the house. She had seen the spot where the man waited each night. The dirt was darker there, moist subterranean grains stirred by his footsteps. There was also a crushed anthill. She had also spotted a discarded branch where it did not belong, far from a tree and alone in the grasses. It had not been blown there: it had been used to erase the man’s tracks.
While the target had slept she had picked her spot to the north. She had discovered the concrete foundation of a house that had never been finished and had lain behind one of the low walls. The huntress did not have any specific intelligence that someone would be watching for Hernandez, but he had enough respect for the DEA—and enough mistrust of his new allies—to be prepared for an ambush. From here, she had been able to watch the mule train’s progress from the Santa Rosa Plateau. Another member of Hernandez’s personal guard had been eyes-on from the Mexican border tunnel to the plateau, not watching the group but scanning any and all aeries as they made their way.
While the man before her died, the young woman checked his phone. She knew it wouldn’t be locked. If Hernandez had changed his plans, someone would have had to pass that information along, and the man wouldn’t have wanted to waste time typing or swiping a password.
There were a lot of names in the phone, and a lot of e-mail addresses with government domain names. Hernandez’s tech team would find a great deal of value here.
The young woman took a photo with the phone. By the time anyone found the man, animals may have discovered him first. She wanted a record of the moment of death. She looked through the man’s e-mail contacts, found one from Homeland Security, attached the photo but did not yet send. That was for Hernandez to decide: the photos of the dead man with the shaft projecting from his bloody cheek, the knife in his back, would cause a lot of DEA agents to get hot and want revenge. When they cooled, though, or went home to their families, they would have second thoughts about the business they were in. In the end, there would be more of them than any men and women roused to vengeance by the murder. And of those who did want revenge, their need for immediate gratification would cause them to make mistakes.
She turned off the phone and put it in an aluminum-lined pocket of her crossbow carrying case. If the phone had a GPS signal, the metal would block it. Then she took off her leather gloves. She did not want them to be bloodied. Abejide bent and yanked out the carbon-tipped arrow. Though she made her arrows herself in their Mexican armory, she did not want to leave any evidence behind. For all she knew, dirt particles from Jalapa could have been trapped in the fletching, or pollen from a plant that only grew in central eastern Mexico. Why give American law enforcement a road map?
The young woman said a few more words in Zulu. She had commended the dying man’s courage before taking his life, a tradition among her people. She did that even though Hernandez and his creatures found it amusing. It kept her from becoming cocky and letting down her guard. All enemies were formidable until they were returned to the earth. Even a dying skunk could choke the throat of a lion.
Abejide did not want to linger. She did not know if the man was supposed to check in with anyone, or they with him. She zipped up her case and slung it over her left shoulder. She had her own hunting knife in a sheath on her right leg. Taking a look through her night-vision binoculars, she did a full 360-degree turn to make sure no one had observed her, was observing her, or might observe her—in which case there would be more bodies on the mountaintop before she departed.
There was no one. That was one reason the agent had selected this spot. He could wait for his target in privacy.
Already the nocturnal predators smelled blood. While scanning the horizon she had spotted a mountain lion on the ridgeline to the east. She heard coyotes coming closer in the tall grasses. Insect scouts were beginning to make their way over and even mice were emboldened to leave their shelters under rocks. She wondered if the cat and coyote would fight for the corpse or whether the cowardly prairie wolves would wait until the superior hunter had finished. That was how it worked in South Africa. It probably worked that way here, too.
She glanced back as the big cat approached, alone and uncontested. She smiled. It would be easy to kill it. But that was not her way, as it was with so many so-called hunters. She enjoyed her work, the challenge of her work, and she did not do it for sport.
The hunt was orderly and respectful. It was not only about might and cunning and a complete awareness of one’s surroundings. It was devoid of ego, of revenge.
That was why she was alive and this man was dead.
That was the way with true hunters.
Abejide shouldered her gear and set out to keep an eye on her employer’s party as they headed for their rendezvous at Lake Elsinore at the foot of the mountains. She was looking forward to the next part of the mission, which would be a much bigger challenge with a far greater impact.
PART ONE
THE TARGET
CHAPTER ONE
BAGHDAD, IRAQ
Dina Westbrook hated the place. From the moment the door of the C-130 had opened two days before and the first wave of diesel-smelling air to now, there was nothing good about this place. Not even the intel she had come here to collect.
Scholars called this region the Cradle of Civilization. To the forty-four-year-old senior agent with ICE, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—and to many of the military personnel who had served here, whose worldview no one ever asked—a different c word applied: the cesspool of civilization. That was not a reflection on the people but on the inhospitable terrain, fly-infested humidity with deep sandstorms the color of rust, streets often filled with bomb-sprayed blood and torn flesh that clung to the cobbles and asphalt, their odors baked in by the sun, and hatreds that dated back more than a thousand years.
It was not just a hothouse. It was a madhouse.
She knew she should be grateful that she was here in December and not July when the heat would have felt like rippling waves from a barbecue pit. However, her temporary office, in the section of the Green Zone fortress left to the CIA by departing embassy employees, was only a few hundred yards from the impossibly polluted Tigris River. Even with temperatures in the sixties, she was still being plagued by mosquitoes. The insects didn’t keep twilight hours like their American counterparts. The air was quieter during the day and better for flight. The undersized bugs squ
eezed through the screens and tried to mass hungrily around her face and hands. She could only close the windows for a half hour before a dankness she detested turned the air of the room to soup. She slapped at a bug in the bangs of her short-cropped blond hair, then watched it fly giddily away.
There had been two days of waiting around, confined to the Green Zone because of security concerns. She’d refused to watch DVDs she could see back home. She was unwilling to talk to the remaining embassy personnel and other agents who could not tell her what they were doing any more than she could tell them why she was here. Two days of cursing the interrogations skill set and intuition that had made her reputation. She had almost completely transitioned to working on the American side of ICE’s international counternarcotics operations, but her track record still ensured several trips per year to pits like this. Two days of looking online to see what type of work she might find in the private sector when she got back home. Two days of increasing claustrophobia.
Now, at last, Dina had permission to see the detainee she had come to Baghdad to interrogate. It was red tape that had held her up. The Iraqi Special Operations Forces had brought the man in. Their umbrella organization was the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service. However, the Service still had not been approved by the Iraqi parliament after years of attempts, so whenever the Service had a major find of international significance to report, the question of whom to report it to had to be debated all over again. The Iraqis had become increasingly disinclined to share information with the Americans because of, according to the CIA’s suspicions, a drip-feed infiltration of the Iraqi military by Al Qaeda. Their old enemy was newly reorganized in Iraq and loaded up with weapons filched from the Syrian conflict on the northwest border.
However, the CIA had allies in the Service, too, and Dina was about to benefit from them.
Threatcon Delta Page 2