They were silent. She lit another cigarette. Over the buildings, mountains filled the day with snowy grandeur and cheap irony.
“Say,” she finally said, “what is this all about anyway? Nobody gave a damn, and suddenly big actors from the FBI come to town, including this one here who doesn’t say a thing but has SWAT eyes.”
“I do talk,” said Swagger, “but not this time.”
“So you can’t tell me a thing?”
“We’d love to tell you the Bureau had opened a new project to examine crime against the homeless on a national scale,” said Nick, “but that wouldn’t be true. I can only say, this touches on a national security issue that demands immediate attention. Yours is the best break we’ve gotten. Thank you for paying attention and caring.”
“It’s just such a downer to see the waste. Most of them were something, could still be something, but they just somehow lost whatever will it takes to play the game. They floated until they went under.”
“Can you give me a little insight on the area?”
“Sure. Glad to help.”
Swagger said, “We’re looking for a certain place. It would be big and private. Someone rich would own it. It would be way out of any town. The owners would probably keep a real low profile. You could drive by it a hundred times and never notice it.”
“All the big rich are up 191 in Sublette country toward Jackson Hole. Forty miles up, maybe. Some historic spreads, like the Hanson Ranch. It’s now owned by some Southern California corporation for executive retreats, but it was built on coal-and-railroad money. Huge. Goes on and on and on. You could do anything there, and nobody’d know a thing.”
“Does the region have a name?”
“It’s called Pine Valley. Little town at the center, some posh restaurants. There’s a private airport where the haircuts jet in from their other places in the Caribbean or the South of France. They don’t hang out much at the 7-Eleven, so I can’t tell you too much more.”
“That’s very helpful, Detective. I’ll send your chief a letter.”
“He’d just throw it away. I’m a pain in the ass.”
* * *
• • •
The drones, flying at sunset high enough to disperse their engine noise, always out of the direct rays of the sun so they didn’t sparkle, came back with the goods, from five thousand feet that looked, under magnification, to be more like five hundred. Swagger went through the images at Hill Air Force Base, in Ogden, Utah, just west of Salt Lake City, which was the nearest spot with the necessary technology.
“Do you see it?” asked Neill, who’d masterminded the aerial recon with his usual nonchalant genius while making smart-guy comments the whole time.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Swagger. “I’ve got it down to two.”
He gave his two selections. Neill punched buttons at a keyboard, the two images came up side by side on a giant screen more usually given to the display of Russian bombers on Siberian tarmacs. To the uninitiated, it was just a blur and smear in odd shades, imprimatured by a digital display at one corner that expressed latitude and longitude, altitude, time, weather. But Swagger got it, homed in on one, homed in further on a specific area and requested the blowup.
“I’m seeing what looks like, um, a post? It’s not a natural structure. It’s clearly man-built. Is that what everybody else sees? Can you bring it up more?”
Neill diddled—clickety-click, clickety-clack—and selected the piece of picture in which the post-like thing was featured, brought it to center screen, and blew it up nice and big.
They were in the darkened theater of an air force room, decorated with photos of supersonic fighters, gray-haired generals, and flags. The screen was the only thing that differentiated the chamber from a Kiwanis Club.
Nick said to Colonel Nickel, who was the USAF representative at the meet, “Colonel, wouldn’t you have some guys who can read these things at a high level? Any chance you’d loan us their eyes for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” said the colonel. “Always happy to pitch in.”
He disappeared quickly, leaving the hard core alone.
“If we can get NSA on them hard,” said Nick, “maybe we can pick up some commo linked to a foreign intelligence service. With that, we can go to FISA. If we get a FISA warrant, we can go prime time on their asses.”
“That works,” said Neill.
“It better, because that’s going to be your job. Bob, tell me what you’re seeing.”
“The post is at the end of a meadow that’s over a mile long. It’s situated east-west, to make the sun less a problem. The trees and gentle incline work as a natural wind barrier. There are car tire tracks all over it, signifying recent activity. Somewhere in the far trees, there’s got to be a shooting platform. That’s key, because if we can measure the range from platform to target and weigh that against the possibles, we can find a match and identify the target. But I’m sure it’s a mile-long shooting range with a post at one end to mount targets.”
“So if your read is verified, we might raid.”
“You’d need two elements, in coordination. A chopper insert of aggressors and a simultaneous penetration off the highway, with backup, communications, more ammo, medical, all the necessities. It’s straight SEAL work. Too bad we can’t get ’em.”
“Sounds like Mogadishu,” said Neill.
“I hope we do better than Mogadishu,” said Bob.
Nick was thinking out loud. “We’ll start with Counterterrorism’s teams and fill in with SWAT people from a lot of field offices. Once we get FISAed up, we’ll get an okay to drop the airborne raid out of Salt Lake City, where we have the assets. I’ll get Ward Taylor involved, and, with Counterterrorism behind it, it’ll get moving. But it can’t happen tonight. Or tomorrow night. Or even—”
Staff Sergeant Abrahams arrived, in tow behind Colonel Nickel. Briefed, he laid his extremely gifted eyeballs on the two-dimensional imagery stolen from up above. He looked hard at the first image, then directed Neill to take him through the sequence so he could see it in the context of the larger plat of land upon which it was situated.
“Abrahams is the Da Vinci of photo interp,” said the colonel as Neill zoomed in on the image and then out. “He can tell you if the rubles in the bad guys’ pockets are heads or tails.”
“Sir,” said Abrahams, a rather dapper black NCO who looked like the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, “not knowing what you’re looking for—”
“By design,” said Neill.
“I get that. Okay, I’d call that identified structure a post of some sort, apparently of wood—wood has a unique reflect pattern, which I see here. Relating its shadow to the time of day, I’d make it about six feet tall. I can even make out what I’d call some kind of cement at the base. The tire tracks are SUV weight; I’ve seen that same tread all over the Mideast wherever service Humvees and Agency Explorers do their work. Too deep, too wide, for regular passenger vehicle.”
“Anything else?” said Swagger. “Assume we’re dopes and have missed everything.”
“Well, there is some reflect in the center of the meadow. Meaning wet. Meaning marsh. Meaning mud. Meaning moisture. Meaning humidity. If this is where they put it, they put it in such a position where access to it—visual, ballistic, laser, infrared, radar, whatever—dealt with differing air densities, the humid air over the marsh being heavier than the dry air over the prairie. I don’t know if that was something intended or just happenstance, but my guess is, given the amount of drier land available and the many other possible access angles on the target, that it was on purpose. For whatever reason, they wanted to track the effect of the heavier air on their effort.”
He’s shooting over water, Bob thought.
51
The Swamp
0430
It was a tangle of trees artfully positioned to give de
finition to an exquisitely landscaped garden that lay behind the main house, perpetually damp from water seepage, giving it the nickname The Swamp. Tactically, its great advantage was that it could be accessed on the crawl, unseen by any of the night sentries who roamed the property on predictable paths, which Juba had noted.
Thus, when he saw Alberto approaching, even on a night without a moon, he knew that the transaction went unobserved. And before the man reached the edge of the brambles, Juba attracted his attention with a small snort, diverting him yet again to the lee of a small tree.
“Nobody saw you?” he asked.
“No one. I don’t think there are security cameras in my wing of the house. His fear is, people coming in from the outside, not betrayal from the inside. But he is a very paranoid man.”
“Indeed,” said Juba.
“What is this about?”
“Your future.”
“Meaning?”
“That I suspect you want one. If that is so, you will have to perform certain tasks. Otherwise, you will be dead, cut to ribbons by the freak in the sock.”
“I have done nothing to—”
“It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you know. They will kill you within seconds after they kill me.”
The Syrian-Mexican could make no sense of this.
“What? Why would—”
“He cannot let me go on my mission. It’s too big a risk. Wichita changed everything. Suppose I am captured? Suppose the Americans offer me a deal to testify against him and identify him as the instigator of the Wichita thing? They offer me a new life, as opposed to sending me to some black site where Serbian mercenaries blowtorch my secrets out of me. That is now a more serious problem for him than any damage my people will do to him in suspicion of a betrayal. And, in any event, my murder will be disguised as some kind of mishap, a chance encounter with a policeman, an auto accident. He will pay an indemnity, but in that lies survival for him. He knows it. I know it. He just doesn’t know I know it.”
“I am only half Arab, so I lack your gift for cunning.”
“I need two things from you. First, I have to know when that screwball in the sock is out of the picture or indisposed in some way.”
“Easy. Two Mexican women come to him at six each evening. He must either have sex or kill somebody every single day or it is said he becomes irritable.”
“Six, then. And second: tunnels. These Mexicans, they make their living in tunnels. Illegals, drugs, whores—what have you—they move it underground. They are also escape-obsessed. They worry about the Americans, they worry about their competitors, and now that they’re involved with us, they worry about us. They fear surprise attack at any moment. When Menendez took this place over, the first thing he would have done is move his engineers and construction people in and had tunnels dug. Do you know about them?”
“I know areas I have been advised to avoid.”
“I need more than that.”
“And I need an incentive.”
“How about this? If you don’t help me, I’ll behead you.”
“Or, how about this? You take me with you. This whole thing is beginning to feel more and more fragile. When it collapses, many will die. I have no desire to be among them. Only with that in mind can I act . . . heroically.”
“I appreciate your lack of grandeur. No false idealism for the translator.”
“Call me what you will, I understand that translators have a short life expectancy around here.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“No. Too soon. My explorations must be tomorrow. I will have no results till the day after, maybe the day after that.”
“Work swiftly, little man.”
52
Staging area, Jackson, Wyoming
The NSA intercept, a garbled satellite pickup in which someone called a number in New Jersey, which was shunted to a serving station in Manila and on to a receiver in Gstaad, Switzerland, and appeared to be confirmation for “picking up a package” three days on, at “the ranch,” was pay dirt. It became an imperative, actionable at the utmost dispatch, when the ultimate address was linked via a computer deep-mining operation, with a drop site for Iranian Ministry of Intelligence operatives in Europe. It came together fast after that.
Nick got Counterterrorism’s number one and number two assault teams, plus the Bureau’s SWAT from L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, and Minneapolis to augment them. As a bonus, Ward Taylor himself was on the operation, so that the assaulters wouldn’t fidget taking orders from someone they didn’t know. Briefed with extremely revealing drone photos of the ranch, they put together a good plan, modeled on the SEAL raid on bin Laden, which was the gold standard. Nobody mentioned Mogadishu.
“Expect resistance,” Nick briefed them. “It will be hot. His security people are drawn from Mexican Special Forces. They are hardened professionals and, in the past, have fought to the death. Check the reports from Wichita, if you doubt. That’s why the full body armor, especially helmets. That’s why it’s shoot to suppress from the first encounter of fire and, if necessary, full automatic. Take a lot of ammo. Waste bullets, not men. That’s why night vision, for all tac advantage. But I say again, the point here is to take down one guy, not even Señor Menendez, though he would be a very nice bonus. Our guy is Arab, early forties, another extremely capable character. But he’s the bonanza. Prefer him alive, but I’d rather kill him than lose any of you. The point is to stop him, not interview him. That’s a good day’s work.”
Afterward, Nick and his team gathered at a National Guard Armory in Jackson Hole. Here, he’d assembled his ground component, mostly personnel from Salt Lake City and Denver. They would engage simultaneously with the air assault, crashing the fake gate, then the real gate, and hitting the compound as the commandos moved through the structures. Their task was perimeter containment, to stifle any escape, seal the place off and put it out of business in a hurry, under mandate from FISA, which allowed “any and all law enforcement activities deemed necessary to halt a terrorist threat.” A U.S. Attorney was along with them to issue legal advice on the fly, if need be, and to help move stretchers to ambulances.
“Have I forgotten anything?” Nick asked Bob.
“Yeah, me,” said Bob.
“Sorry, pal. You’re sitting this one out. Explicit orders from Washington.”
“Come on, Nick . . .”
“Nope. Believe it or not, they treasure your brain over your trigger finger. A first, I’m sure.”
Bob didn’t lose it marine NCO style, but his his gray face, his narrowed eyes and slit mouth, his measured breathing, all equaled rage.
“I am going along.”
“I guess you are. In a government sedan. We will need you to examine and make identification fast. I’m told he looks just like Dr. Zhivago, so that should be easy. Have you seen it recently?”
“I never saw it in the first place.”
“Maybe you’ll get to interview him. I hope, at least, that you get to ID the body. And following that, you’ll provide assessment on any sniper activities found in place and begin to assemble data for the after action report.”
Bob nodded without enthusiasm.
“Anyhow,” said Nick, “you will hold well behind the perimeter and will be reached by radio and notified to come forward when the area is secured. Tomorrow, at first light, we’ll be traveling to the shooting area to see what we can see. Hopefully, that’ll be more like a picnic than a mission, and we can draw on that for the after action report. Hopefully, it’s all over by tonight.”
“Sitting out the big fight don’t make me happy,” said Bob.
“You will hold on the perimeter until notified. Do I need to put a three-hundred-pound babysitter on you?”
“No.”
“That’s a good boy.”
* * *
• • •
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Disgruntled, he didn’t bother to listen to the radio commands tying the whole op together. He just climbed into the backseat of the last vehicle in the convoy, one of three sedans following the SUVs and armored assault trucks with FBI emblazoned on them. His driver was a rookie agent out of Denver, the guy next to him in the front seat was the U.S. Attorney, and not one of them had a thing to say to the other two, as each was in his own private stew. All wore body armor and Kevlar helmets and were linked by radio, and only Bob had his set to OFF.
The convoy left at 1715, proceeding south on Wyoming 193 from Jackson toward Rock Springs, by way of Pine Valley, where there were no pines. On the other side of the road, western scrub seemed to roll away, showing nothing, hiding nothing. To the west, farther, the crags of the Tetons could be seen, magnificent and artistic, the perfect ideal of The Mountains, as many art directors of the American western movie had discovered. Bob did not pay much attention. He was the eternal wallflower at an orgy, feeling both frumpy and invisible at once. The fun would be over by the time he got there. He didn’t even have a weapon.
The convoy did not proceed under siren or at high speed. It poked along, opening and closing like an accordion, trying to stay under the speed limit, though any passersby knew that it represented government action at its apogee of force. That was the information truckloads of men in armor carried.
It took about an hour of stop and start, and when they approached, Wyoming State Police set up the roadblocks to halt civilian traffic just before and after the ranch entrance.
“Should be any second now,” said the FBI driver, pulling to a stop on the road at the rear of the convoy, which had halted.
Bob flicked on the radio just in time to hear a last-minute checklist run by Nick, each vehicle okaying its position and status.
“Hammer Fifteen, green for go,” said the young driver.
“You got it, son? You pull up at the inner gate, and we hold there, waiting for the all-clear.”
Game of Snipers Page 28