It was a suggestion from one of our tactical commanders. He says that hostage rescue has expertise and training in vehicle breeches, mostly buses. Its the same team that went in to try and extract Agent Mederios and the others from the bus. If we can locate the cargo truck, well use the HR team as the spear to gain access to the container, followed closely by the NEST team, to try and defuse the thing.
So all we need now is to find it, said Rhytag. He asked what kind of equipment was set up along the border in terms of detection.
Thats the problem, said Thorpe. None of our detection equipment does us any good if nothings moving. According to the people on the NEST team, it probably wouldnt do any good anyway. I talked with Llewellyn, he agrees. He says the fissionable material in the bomb is highly enriched uranium, and since its probably shielded, the equipment we have is next to useless. It could read plutonium fairly easily. But with uranium wed have to be right up against the carrier, no more than three or four feet away, to read anything. And wed probably have to be there for an extended period of time before we got a sufficient reading.
In other words, Nitikin and his friends are in a position to sit us out and wait, said Rhytag.
We could use thermal imaging, said Thorpe. Wed be looking for high-density anomalies, lead in the shield, for example. We could reduce the number of vehicles to be searched. The problem is, the bomb, from everything we know, is on the other side of the border. The Mexican government is not willing to allow us to use imaging.
Why not?
Theyre afraid if we find it, Nitikin and his cohorts will detonate the damn thing and turn Tijuana into a crater.
That would get rid of the cartel for them, said Rhytag.
No, that would get rid of the cartel for us. They dont seem to mind. Especially now. With oil down thats the only growth sector in their economy. Half of those factories on the other side of the border are shut down. What did they call those things? said Thorpe.
Maquiladoras, said Rhytag.
SIXTY
In the late nineties, politicians eager to pocket million-dollar speaking fees from foreign trade groups embraced the concept of a global economy. They teamed up with Chinese businessmen and Mexican manufacturers and carved out a zone along the U.S. southern border where trade restrictions were virtually eliminated.
American politicians sold the country on the concept of our being an information economy, that we no longer needed manufacturing or heavy industry, as if you could drive words and eat sentences. They shipped entire job sectors abroad and then railed at the demise of the middle class.
Places like Ensenada with its sleepy port suddenly boomed. In less than two years, vast amounts of commercial cargo moved off docks in Los Angeles and San Diego and landed instead in northern Mexico. China began shipping oceans of cheap component parts to ports along the Mexican coast, most of which were delivered to factories known as maquiladoras on the northern border. There the parts were assembled into finished products that flowed into the American market on trucks owned and operated by Mexican trucking companies.
It was a win-win situation if you were looking to buy a cheap television, or a politician collecting on IOUs from foreign constituents. But for those who once worked in the shuttered factories or drove trucks for a living, it was the end of the road.
For more than a decade, the maquiladoras flourished, until they fell on hard times, in a way a victim of their own success. Its difficult to sell televisions, even if theyre cheap, to millions of Americans who are out of work.
Liquida smiled at the thought as he wandered through the empty building, wondering why the raghead would want to meet him here. He got in by picking a small lock on a door at the rear of the building. The place was huge, cavernous, all under a single roof with overhead doors large enough to accommodate Noahs ark.
Like all of the maquiladora facilities, it was situated in the trade zone nestled right up against the U.S. border. While the Americans controlled their side with vast areas of vacant land and highly trained dogs, the Mexicans punched right up against the fence in many places. Both sides of the border were arid desert with rugged ravines and hills. The American side was only sparsely developed, mostly commercial warehouses and trucking facilities with a vast array of border checkpoints. With the downturn in the economy, some of the warehouses on both sides were now empty, chained-up facilities waiting for better days.
Liquida was sweating because of the long coat he was wearing. It was necessary to conceal the heavy item underneath. He checked his watch. He was two hours early. He had parked his car several blocks away and walked so that his early visit would come as a surprise to his employer.
He had gone to the port at Ensenada earlier that day. From the overview on the knoll above the highway, overlooking the harbor, Liquida could see police crawling all over the ship, so many uniforms he was afraid it would sink.
He had watched with heavy-duty binoculars for some time and was pretty sure that Afundi had gotten away. Because of all the ongoing interrogations the police were still looking for someone or something. There were enough squad cars parked along the dock with hoods up and batteries missing that the chief in Tijuana would have to call Delco to get them all home.
He was musing over the events at the harbor when suddenly he heard a noise from outside the warehouse. It was the sound of a heavy truck coming from the direction of the large fenced-in parking area.
Liquida sprinted over to the door and peeked through a crack. A man was unlocking the gate out on the street. There was a large container truck and another smaller box truck that looked like a rental vehicle behind it.
Liquida watched for a few seconds as the man unlocked the chain and pulled the double gates open. The two trucks started to roll through the gate, toward the warehouse.
Liquida retreated to a ladder in the far corner of the building and climbed to an overhead loft area, a kind of industrial catwalk where he could perch and take in the show without being seen. He made himself comfortable, took off his long coat, and set it and the object strapped under it on the catwalk next to him.
A couple of minutes later the large overhead garage door was lifted by someone outside. For the first time Liquida realized it hadnt been locked. The mammoth door was so delicately balanced that the man was able to hoist it with one arm and send it sailing along the track until it settled almost against the roof of the building.
Liquida wondered if anyone had been inside watching him. He was fairly confident there were no cameras. Those he had looked for. But the unlocked overhead door surprised him.
A minute later both trucks were inside the building. Liquida could smell the odor of diesel exhaust as it wafted up to the balcony where he lay. The engines shut off and four men climbed down from the two trucks. Three from the rental vehicle and the driver of the cargo-container truck. The fifth waited by the huge open door with one hand on the rope, as if he were going to pull it and close the overhead door. But he didnt. He waited for several minutes, looking out the open door as if expecting someone else, while three of the other men talked. Liquida couldnt understand a thing they said. They were speaking in a foreign tongue of some kind. The other man, the fifth one, stood not far from the rental truck and seemed to be off somewhere in his own world. He didnt look like the others either. He was older, fair haired, and though Liquida couldnt get a good look at him from up high, he appeared to be taller as well.
A few minutes later another vehicle, this one a small, dark sedan, came rocketing through the open door and hit its brakes inside the building.
The man pulled the rope and the large door came screeching down along the track until it hit the concrete floor with a bang. This time the man pushed the locking bolt into the slot, sealing it tight from the inside.
Two more men got out of the car, and the six of them, the three who were originally talking, the man by the door, and the two from the car huddle
d together some distance away from the sixth man, who was now wandering all alone near the rear of the rental truck.
Liquida watched as the five cohorts stood in a small circle near the container truck. One of them who seemed to be the leader was doing most of the talking while the others listened. The language was not something Liquida had ever heard before. He knew it must be Arabic and that the man talking had to be the boss man from Colombia. Language barrier or not, Liquida could clearly see that he was barking the orders and the others were listening. He got a good look at the man.
Liquida reached over on the platform next to where he was lying, opened the coat, and pulled apart the two snaps inside. Having freed it from the inside of the coat, he picked up the weapon. It looked like something from a space movie, with a silencer the size of an exhaust pipe on the muzzle end, and a box clip for the 5.56-millimeter rounds at the other end where it slipped into the receiver up inside the shoulder stock under the shooters armpit. The weapon had a strange-looking device mounted underneath the barrel and a small scope on top.
The modified bull pup had the advantage of a full-length rifle barrel in a gun that, without the silencer, was little more than twenty inches long.
He held the gun close as he continued to watch the conference down below.
The lone wolf wandering near the rear of the rental truck apparently saw something out of place. He approached the lift gate and played with the heavy latch for a moment. Apparently it wasnt closed. He lifted the gate a little, and then seemed to stand there for a moment as if he were frozen in place.
Afundi said something and one of the others hollered out in perfect Spanish, telling the man at the rear of the rental truck to leave it alone and come out where they could see him. The one who spoke Spanish separated himself from the others and walked toward the rear of the rental vehicle.
Before he could get there, the other man lowered the lift gate and quickly moved around the truck where he rapidly closed the distance between the two of them with his hands out, turning the other, fatter man around. It was nothing. A piece of wood caught under the door. I took care of it. Its fine.
The other man stood there for a second looking at him, and then pushed past him, walked to the back of the truck, and checked it out. The other, taller man was close behind him.
Liquida heard the metal of the hooked lever lock on the back of the truck as the fat man tested it to make sure that the catch was working and the door was sealed.
While the two of them were still standing at the back of the truck, the leader stopped talking, stepped away from the others, and started walking over to join them. By then the fat man was satisfied that everything was fine. He headed back the other way, said something to his leader, and the two of them joined their comrades in discussion once again.
Liquida thought about popping Afundi as he stood there talking, but that would be too easy. Besides, hed probably end up in a gunfight with the others, and taking rounds through the bottom of the catwalk was not something he wanted to think about. Liquida would wait them out. Hed whittle them down with the silencer a shot at a time, so they wouldnt know where it was coming from.
The conversation went on for a couple more minutes, until Afundi handed two of the men a piece of paper and began talking to them. He pointed to the sheet as if he was giving them directions of some kind.
They nodded, one of them took the sheet of paper, and the two men headed toward the car. But they didnt get in, instead they grabbed two assault rifles out of the backseat.
Afundi said something to one of them and pointed toward the back wall of the building. As he watched the man walk in that direction, suddenly the diesel engine on the container truck started up. Liquida turned to look back at the trucks as another of the men climbed up into the container truck. He closed the trucks doors and waited with the engine running. The other three men, including the tall one who didnt seem to fit, got into the rental truck and started its engine.
Liquida wondered where they were going. No one had opened the large overhead door. The fumes were beginning to build up. Suddenly an overhead door on the other side of the building opened up. It was being opened by a heavy electrical motor. Liquida looked at it and realized that the door was surrounded not by metal, but heavy concrete. The opening was cut into a retaining wall where the building backed up to an incline in the earth outside.
Once the door was fully up, Liquida could see that the concrete floor beyond the opening dropped off in a steep decline. It was ramped down. Within seconds the two trucks drove through the opening and down the ramp, disappearing in a blue haze of exhaust as the noise of their engines slowly receded into the distance.
SIXTY-ONE
After spending millions of dollars of his governments money, Alim was gratified by the results. It had taken seven months for the cartel to acquire the two buildings, one on each side of the border, to engineer and dig the tunnel, and to shore it up with concrete and steel rebar.
It had been a seamless operation. The cartel knew that the U.S. border patrol and customs watched the Mexican side of the border for unusual traffic volume and patterns. So the cartel purchased the trucks from the original maquiladora operator just as the manufacturer folded. They used the trucks to remove the earth from the excavation of the tunnel as well as to deliver the building materials. To anyone watching, the volume of truck traffic coming and going from the building never changed, as if the manufacturing concern was just humming along. The cartel greased some palms in the city government and no one ever looked.
The joint venture between Afundi and the cartel meant that a good portion of the cash Alim received from his government went to finance the tunnels construction. The cartel oversaw construction and built the tunnel. Alim then had an option for its exclusive use for thirty days, after which time the entire project would revert to the cartel, which could then continue to use it as a narco highway for as long as they could maintain the secret.
The tunnel was only a few hundred meters east of the Tijuana airport and less than three hundred yards long. The building on the Mexi can side was less than a hundred feet from the border fence. The tunnel, sixty feet underground where thermal imaging and motion and vibration detectors sealed off by the heavy concrete walls would never be able to detect a thing from the surface, spanned the distance between the two buildings. Alim smiled at the thought that the cartel had employed a retired engineer from the California Department of Transportation to design the whole thing, though the man never had a clue as to where it would be located or what it would be used for.
In a little more than a minute the trucks were on the surface once more, inside the building on the U.S. side of the border. They wasted no time opening the doors and exiting from the building to merge with the surrounding California traffic.
Alim looked at his watch. Amazingly, they were still on schedule. It was just after three in the afternoon. According to the news reports, festivities were not scheduled to get under way until just before five.
Though Nitikin didnt know it, Afundi had already installed the cordite and set the timer for five oclock, maximum effect. The Russian had been in the jungle for so long that he didnt know about the high-tech gadgets the world had invented in his absence. This included the tiny pencil-lens camera Alim had installed inside the wooden crate, through which he watched as Yakov pulled the safety device, arming the bomb. Alim now no longer needed him. He could have killed the Russian at any time, but he was saving that pleasure for later.
The haze of the exhaust hadnt even settled inside the building before Liquida centered the red dot on the first of the two men left behind in the building. As he squeezed the trigger, a crimson halo exploded around the first mans head as the mercury-tipped bullet did its job.
The second man never saw or heard a thing. With his back turned, he was smiling. He pointed toward the open tunnel and turned to share the wonder of the thing with his friend just as the next round transi
ted the top of his head. The exploding bullet blew out a sizable hunk of skull bone, now bouncing off the concrete floor behind him.
In seconds Liquida was down the ladder. He retrieved the sheet of paper Afundi had left for his men. It was a printed map of San Diego, with a route traced along the freeways. It had a dark pen mark at one location. Liquida didnt need the map. He knew the location well. He had been there only a few months earlier. But as he looked at the detail at the north end, near the end of the route, he had to wonder what the hell was going on.
He thought about his rental car half a mile away and decided Avis could probably find the vehicle by itself. The man whose wallet, credit card, and drivers license Liquida had stolen on his flight from Houston would probably get a whopping surprise on his credit card bill. He fished through the dead mens pockets until he found the keys to the small blue sedan. He jumped in the car and two seconds later disappeared down Alices rabbit hole to see where it went.
We have no idea where we are. Herman is flat on his belly on the bed of the truck, trying to release the catch on the lock outside with a pocketknife. He is using the light from the screen on my worthless encrypted cell phone to guide his probing with the blade under the crack of the door.
For the first several minutes the vehicle seems to bounce all over the place, first a steep decline and then back up. For ten minutes a lot of stop and go and then finally the constant hum and steady movement of a highway.
Herman finally gives up with the knife.
No use, he says. Blades too short. But the good news is, you were right about your father. He is looking at Maricela in earnest as he says it. Hes gotta be acting under duress. The way he closed the gate and protected us, kept his mouth shut. Otherwise, I dont know about you, but Paul and I would be dead right now.
Maricela seemed stunned and still in shock after the sudden appearance of her father at the back of the truck. The only one more surprised was Nitikin himself. From the look on his face when he saw her, I thought he would die. One thing is certain, we now have his attention, though none of us has a clue as to where we are or where the truck is headed.
Guardian of Lies: A Paul Madriani Novel Page 41