by Jack Murphy
Kurt breathed a sigh of relief.
They had gotten lucky.
Very lucky.
“Contact rear,” Fedorchenko said keying up his radio.
“That's a friendly Blocking Position,” Pat announced over the net. “Wait one.”
The Kazakh listened to the onslaught behind him, wondering what was going on until their commander got back on the assault net.
“You're clear Zulu-One. The threat has been eliminated. Continue with the mission and give me a one minute warning before you initiate any demo.”
“Roger Alpha-One.”
Documents, laptop computers, cellular phones, and anything else that could yield any kind of intelligence value had been rounded up by the Samruk mercenaries and put into several kitbags to be transported back to Oaxaca.
As would the prisoner they had captured.
The assault squads had finished their sweep out behind the objective where perhaps another dozen bodies had been found. They had been attempting to escape the camp when the bullets of the Mk48 gunners chased them through the trees, creating a wall of lead that they ran right into. One of those that had survived was expectant, he would not live much longer with bullet wounds through both legs and his stomach. He was dully relieved of his misery with a single mercy shot.
Another had very serious extremity wounds through his lower leg, and a second that had nearly amputated his forearm. Using tourniquets, the Kazakhs got the bleeding under control and the platoon medic administered some pain killers. He was their trophy and they weren't going to let him die on them now.
Several blood trails had been discovered leading away from the kill zone, a few lucky ones who had escaped the camp but the amount of blood they had left behind cast serious doubt on how much longer they had to live. They would probably try to hide in the bush until dawn, quietly bleeding out until they succumbed to their wounds. At any rate, the mercenaries didn't have the time to follow up with a tracker team and were not interested. Whomever made it out of the camp would not be returning to Mexico to give them a hard time, that much was certain.
“Alpha-One this is Zulu-One.”
“Go ahead Zulu.”
“One minute.”
The mercenaries carried their dead, kit bags full of confiscated material and their prisoner off the objective with Corporal Maxim leading them back to the airfield. Corporal Abykeyev would remain in place with his weapons squad until Fedorchenko left as the last man off the objective.
Twisting the pin on his fuse igniter, he initiated the time fuse before putting his nose down and smelling it. In the dark it was sometimes hard to see if it was actually burning or not.
“Burning,” he announced into the radio.
All weapons and equipment found on the objective had been shoved into one of the cadre huts where they had strung out of ring main of detonation chord with five bricks of C4 plastic explosives tied into it.
Turning, Fedorchenko ran to catch up with his platoon.
Corporal Abykeyev watched with a smile as the gunner's faces were revealed for a second by the explosion that tore apart a second cadre hut.
They had burned through almost their entire supply of machine gun ammunition and each gun team had jumped with five hundred rounds distributed between them. With about one hundred rounds left per gun that meant that they had riddled the kill zone with 1,200 rounds of 7.62 ammunition.
With their task completed, he pulled one gun at a time off the Support By Fire line in case of the unlikely event that any more bad guys decided to show up. Once he pulled everyone back they got back into a squad wedge formation and went to meet up with the rest of their platoon at their rendezvous point back on the airfield.
Pat was kneeling, listening to his hand mic, when the platoon came humping back to meet up at their rendezvous which was conveniently co-located with his Control Point.
Their dead were laid down next to the CP, their weapons and equipment secured for transport back to Mexico. The former Delta operator looked down at the three men, one of whom was headless. They did not have any body bags and the frank reality of war simply would not disappear. The bodies were mangled, twisted forms of what had been living men just moments ago. There was no hidden message or soul shaking epiphany to be found in the corpses of the dead as found in Hollywood films. There was only an unshakable finality to be found that, as unsettling as it was, could not be undone.
“Fedorchenko?”
“Right here,” said a Russian accented voice from behind Pat.
“Detach two men to Sergeant Major Korgan to go and link up with our recce element then have the rest of your men start balling up and clearing parachutes off the runway. The Dakota has refueled and is already back in the air.”
“I understand.”
“Fedorchenko?”
“Yes?”
“Make sure your men knew they did good work out here tonight.”
“I will.”
As the Ground Force Commander, Pat had to be thinking several steps ahead. For instance, he had to set the conditions for Samruk to make a successful exfiltration from their area of operations. Sergeant Major Korgan would conduct his link up with Kurt Jager's recce element and then escort them to the Control Point to avoid any blue on blue incidents. If a couple Zapatistas carrying guns walked up on the airfield, there was a very high probability that one of the Kazakhs would shoot them dead, mistaking them for enemy combatants.
The rest of the Kazakhs slung their weapons and began recovering parachutes off the runway. They would have to be secured and bagged up in a black garbage bags that each troop had been handed before the jump. If even one parachute was unaccounted for, it could get sucked up into the Dakota's turbine upon landing, cripple the airplane, and leave them stranded in Guatemala. Once Fedorchenko gave him an up on getting the parachutes secured, Pat bumped up to the air net to talk to the pilot and instructed him that he was clear to land.
With the whine of the Dakota's engines buzzing through the night air somewhere off in the distance, Sergeant Major Korgan returned with the four-man reconnaissance element. Their lack of translators or any bilingual Spanish to English capability prevented them from interrogating the single prisoner that the Samruk mercenaries had captured. With Kurt and Pascal joined up, they could now engage in some tactical questioning while they waited for the Dakota to land.
“Kurt,” Pat said to the former GSG-9 operative. “See what you can get out of our prisoner.”
Kurt and Pascal knelt down next to the prisoner. He was hanging his head, partially in shame, partially in shock from his injuries. Even on painkillers, he was pretty tore up.
“What's that?” Kurt asked.
There was a white plastic stick between his lips.
“Fentanyl lollipop,” Pascal answered. “The medic hooked him up with some good shit.”
“You must be kidding,” the German said frowning.
“Not at all. We used them in Special Forces when one of ours or civilians would get injured. It helps keep the casualty calm and relaxed.”
“It's going to be hard to talk to this guy when he's high on opiates.”
“Wake up,” Pascal barked at the prisoner in Spanish.
The prisoner's head shot up, his eyes wide and blood shot.
“We need to talk,” Kurt told him as the Dakota came sweeping in over the rugged highlands.
“He says he was with the Kaibiles, Guatemalan Special Forces. He told us that he defected from the military last year when the Jimenez cartel established their training camp and offered significantly higher pay. He trained the cartel men in small unit tactics, urban warfare, and light and heavy weapons.”
Deckard crossed him arms in front of him while he listened to Pat send up his Situation Report. There were numerous news reports of the Kaibiles soldiers running rogue and working for the cartels so none of it surprised him much until Pat got to the end of his report.
“The prisoner is also telling us that they were waiting for
an explosives expert to arrive tomorrow so that they can begin learning how to construct IED's. The cartel is very interested roadside bombs apparently.”
Leaning forward, he and Frank listened closely. This was what they had been afraid of.
“This guy doesn't know the trainer's name, only that he is a specialist being brought on for the job. They called him, The Arab.”
Everything was quiet in the OPCEN. Deckard has suspected for a long time that insurgents, terrorists, and criminals across the world were sharing information and working together on a much more profound level than most people suspected. Part of it was a side effect of the inevitable spread of communication technology but he had a wakeup call many years ago in Iraq.
It had been early on in the insurgency but the Special Operations community was noticing that the Iraqi insurgent's IEDs were getting increasingly sophisticated. They were learning and evolving in leaps and bounds. The improvised bombs would be concealed in the road and painted over. Some would be detonated by cell phones so the coalition forces started using frequency jammers. It wasn't long before the insurgents were making bombs that detonated when a constant transmission had its frequency jammed as an American convoy came down the road.
Deckard and his team were given the task of hunting down and eliminating the IED training cell responsible for developing the technology and techniques involved. To their surprise, the men they were hunting down turned out to be former Irish Republic Army bombers who had gone freelance. Before Iraq, they had worked with FARC in Colombia and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
All the villains in Gotham city were ganging up on Team America.
For Deckard, it was no longer a question of whether or not these links between so-called non-state actors existed, he had seen it for himself. The real question was whether or not they were facing a global insurgency. Rather than isolated regional conflicts in Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, the Philippines, Burma, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, perhaps they were all the same conflict. Was it possible that all of these rebel movements were responding to the same economic and social inputs? The notion of the state was becoming increasingly obsolete with people losing faith in their own governmental institutions.
From Mexican drug cartels to Islamic groups like Hezbollah, their goals were not to take over and stage a revolution, rather they wanted to carve out their own version of economic free zones where they could pursue their own criminal activities. In some cases, groups like Hezbollah or even the Japanese Yakuza crime gangs often provided better social services than the government.
But Mexico was something different. It was a post-political conflict, a violent non-religious jihad for the sake of commercial business interests where the players were often contractors who didn't even know who their boss was much less have some kind of unified ideology. Unlike the Islamic extremists, the Mexican cartel wars lacked even a misguided cause to fight for, there was not much else but cold hard cash.
“Six, I have to break down the TOC. Our ride just touched down.”
“Roger that Alpha-One,” Deckard said into the microphone on Cody's desk.
“Six out.”
22
Cody's computer pinged as a new e-mail landed in his inbox. The computer technician's hands breezed across the keyboard, pulling up the message. It was from Grant, the CIA's Oaxaca man. He only offered a phone number and the words, call me.
Deckard was watching the UAV feed as the mercenaries packed onto the airplane, taking their dead and wounded with them. Of course the prisoner was being given free airfare as was Kurt Jager's recon element.
“HEY, THAT GRANT FUCKER WANTS YOU TO CALL.”
Deckard almost jumped out of his seat. Sometimes Cody could be smooth like sandpaper. He would have shitcanned the computer expert but his work was wired so tight that they would have to put up with the abrasiveness. He took the mobile phone that Cody handed him and started punching in the number displayed on the computer screen. Deckard wasn't exactly a pussycat himself so maybe he didn't have much ground to stand on with Cody to begin with.
“Oh, shit. What does Emperor Palpatine want,” Frank said sarcastically.
Deckard hit send and held the phone to his ear.
On the projector screen, he watched the Dakota lift off and turn north. The Predator UAV tracked the aircraft for another few seconds and then peeled off, heading back to whatever covert drone base the CIA flew it out of in Central America.
Grant picked up on the third ring.
“What happened to the smart phone I gave you?” he asked immediately.
“Had a bit of an accident along with your DVD's.”
“Did it?”
“Lucky I had them backed up while we were still in the air just in case those Mexican F-5s shot us down. Even without me, the mission could then continue, thank god.”
“Stop being a smart ass. We lost two pilots in the last twenty four hours, those guys were legends back here at Langley.”
“You are not the only one that has lost people.”
“No shit. Well, then you understand why this is personal for us now. That attack in the Caymans has everyone shitting bricks back here. That came out of nowhere and now everyone is running around trying to plug leaks that may or may not exist. No one is blaming you, not yet.”
“You better keep it that way Grant. We were clearly the targets. Your pilots were collateral damage, it isn't something I'm proud of. I'm responsible for this, but not in that way.”
“We know that Deckard. Just understand that everyone is on a razors edge right now and it doesn't help that it looks like Mexico is finally going to implode sometime in the next couple of weeks. We've got low-vis JSOC and DEA elements guiding the war way up north of you against the cartels but we just had another Mexican Infantry unit defect to the other side.”
“We can discuss my rates after I mop up this mess in Oaxaca.”
“I heard what your man was saying over the radio net.”
“Using the Pred to listen in on us, huh?”
“Don't act surprised. We have a jihadist suicide attack in Grand Cayman and then hours later we find out about an Arab bomb maker coming to train cartel gunmen in Guatemala. I don't believe in coincidences.”
“I was thinking along the same lines.”
“We want that prisoner, especially if he can get us to The Arab.”
“How about that thing you were supposed to do for me after I sorted out Bashir,” Deckard interjected. “How is that coming along?”
“It is already done. We showed those videos to select members of the PRI and PND political parties in Mexico City. You've got six or seven days. After that the political pressure on both sides of the border will overwhelm those assets altogether and you will be on your own. They will divert military forces down to Oaxaca at that point. Obviously, it would behoove you to be gone before that happens.”
“You can have the prisoner. We don't have any use for him, he leads us nowhere in our fight against the Jimenez cartel.”
“I'll be in touch.”
Deckard hung up.
23
Arturo huffed up the stairs, far more winded than a man his age should have been. To many nights meeting with contacts in smoke filled bars and strip clubs had resulted in his health declining over the last several years. He had been in peak physical condition when he had first joined Mexico's Center for Research and National Security, or CISEN.
Arriving at the top floor of the warehouse he punched in his pass code and passed through the door and into his offices.
Inside was his staff of three additional CISEN employees. They were shuffling around the office preparing reports and analysis to be forwarded up to Mexico City. The covert CISEN office included two full time analysts and one intelligence officer in addition to Arturo. They were responsible for keeping tabs on Oaxaca and acting as the federal government's eyes and ears. The bosses were not so interested in cartel activity but wanted a heads up if the Zapatistas movement ever started acting up again.
In the meantime, they could collect information on the Zapatistas to be ready for the moment when the government had the political will to send the Army back in and crush them once and for all.
The intelligence agent sat behind his desk and wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. It was a job, or at least it had been. It didn't pay that well but the fringe benefits were outstanding. It was an open secret at CISEN that the field agents were well compensated for staying out of the way of the cartels.
Since showing up in Oaxaca, he had developed a cordial relationship with Jimenez and Ortega. A few times he even acted as a source for back channel communications between the two cartels when it looked like they might have gone to war with each other. Arturo had helped keep the peace, and the tourist dollars continued to pour into Oaxaca.
Until now.
He resisted the temptation to reach for the bottle of whiskey he kept in his desk. He'd been buzzed for days and was now taking uppers just to be able to continue to function.
Both chiefs up at CISEN and the Jimenez cartel were locking his balls in a vise. They wanted to know what the hell was going on and they wanted to know yesterday.
Swallowing, he reached for his cell phone and dialed one of his American contacts.
“Are you in your office?” the voice on the other end of the line asked.
“Yes.”
“I found some of the information you wanted about your mercenary problem.”
“Who are they?” Arturo asked, completely exasperated.
Jimenez was going to kill him if he didn't start getting results. He listening intently as the voice began to talk about the gringo mercenary force that had arrived in Oaxaca.
“Deckard?” Arturo spat. “What is his first name?”
The voice continued.
“I see. How did they manage to pull that off?”
The sweat was beading on his forehead again.