by Peter Nealen
He crept forward, keeping pace with the others. Wade’s gaze was focused on the lip of the wash, though he kept turning his head to scan their surroundings. His eyes never stopped for long on anything. Curtis, for all his flamboyant and noisy personality, was dead silent, moving in a half-crouch, his rifle in his shoulder, doubtless wishing for a belt-fed machinegun.
Wade and Flanagan had their cammies on, though they’d ditched their ghillie hood-overs. Curtis was still in civilian clothes, though his khakis and Carhartt jacket blended decently well with the reddish dirt around them.
He could hear the voices before he could see anything. The tracks went over the lip of the wash, furrows dug in the loose dirt, and disappeared. He got lower, dropping to a crawl, as he got closer. Finally getting flat on his belly, he eased up to the edge of the wash.
The GMC was nose-down in the loose sand of the bottom of the creek bed, the tailgate still high, pointed almost at the sky. Even if the front tires hadn’t dug mounded holes in the dirt, they were as stuck as if they’d high-centered. That truck wasn’t going anywhere without a winch.
Three of the gangbangers were out, two of them looking at the truck and arguing, the third looking straight at Flanagan.
He wasn’t in a good firing position, but the gangster started to lift his MAC-11. Flanagan took the snap shot, looking over his scope rather than through it, just pointing the OBR at the man’s general vicinity.
The report echoed down the wash like two boards getting clapped together. Flanagan hadn’t expected to hit, but the man’s head snapped halfway around, and he dropped like a rock.
The other two looked up in surprise at the sound of the shot, and they stared wide-eyed at their fellow, lying on his back on the ground, leaking blood into the sand. One of them grabbed for the AK-74 leaning against the hood, but another loud clap sounded, and he staggered, a red blossom spreading on his side, just as the third man’s head blew out with an identical noise. The man Curtis had shot in the side struggled to stay upright, clutching his ribs, until his legs folded under him and he smacked into the hood of the truck with a resounding noise. He slid out of sight against the bumper.
For a long moment, Flanagan stayed where he was, now with the rifle properly trained on the tableau a few yards in front of him, watching and waiting for anyone else to appear. The truck’s back window was gone, and there were drops of blood splashed on the fragments of glass still clinging to the frame. So, there’d been another one in the cab, who was either wounded or dead. And could be very dangerous if they came up too quickly.
The desert had gone very quiet after the shooting stopped. The faint noise of the wind in the brush was almost drowned out by the faint stirrings in the sand below, as the three narcos twitched out their death throes. He turned his attention to the man he’d shot. The guy was lying in a crumpled heap on the ground, but his head seemed mostly intact. He might have been moving a bit. Maybe I just grazed him. Maybe we got a prisoner after all. He knew that they were on dangerous ground; they weren’t exactly legally sanctioned, and they’d probably face equally heavy charges for holding a prisoner as they would for shooting him in the head and dumping the body on the Mexican side of the line.
But they were committed. He slowly rose to a knee, his OBR still held ready, and waited for another moment, ready to throw himself flat if anyone took a shot at him.
The man he’d shot in the head was still, motionless. No other movement could be heard from the front of the truck, either. Carefully picking his footholds, Flanagan started down into the wash. Off to his right, Curtis followed, while Wade got up on a knee, but stayed where he was. Smart. They should have overwatch.
Flanagan advanced on the closest man, his rifle leveled at his head. The man didn’t move. As he stepped over him, Flanagan lowered the weapon. The gangster, a young-looking guy with a pencil mustache, a shaved head, and wearing a blue denim jacket and black jeans, was clearly dead. He wasn’t breathing, and one eye was still half-open, filled with blood. It might have been a graze, but it had clearly been enough to kill him.
Curtis was circling around the front of the truck, his own rifle at the ready. He looked up at Flanagan and met his eyes. He shook his head. Flanagan nodded. He hadn’t expected either of the other two to have survived. Wade had blown half of one’s head off, and Curtis’ shot had clearly taken at least a lung.
“Look for phones,” he said. “If they’ve got contact lists, that might be useful.”
“Cash and weapons, too,” Wade called from the lip of the wash. When Flanagan looked up at him where he was kneeling against the sky, he shrugged. “They ain’t gonna need it anymore.”
Flanagan just shook his head slightly. He knew Wade was a pro, but he wasn’t exactly a nice guy, to put it mildly.
Slinging his rifle to his back, putting his own thoughts on the back burner, he rolled the dead man over and started going through his pockets. Just like any other terrorist you had to search after a raid in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Chapter 13
Bianco looked down at the thirteen cell phones that had been taken off the dead. Two had been unlocked when their owners had died, and had been set to stay “awake” for as long as possible. Santelli had made sure that they wouldn’t shut themselves off.
He was scrolling through one of them. They were all smartphones, most of the very latest models. He knew that Brannigan, looming at his shoulder, was hoping that he could do something sophisticated with them, but his own tech knowledge was mostly limited to some computer stuff. Mostly involving getting obscure games to work. He wasn’t a true code nerd, not in his view at least.
“Well, I’ve got a lot of phone numbers and emails here,” he said. “Most of it’s in Spanish; I don’t think it’s really in code. Looks like they were using an encrypted messaging app, but since the phone’s unlocked, we won’t have much of any trouble retrieving any of it. If we can read it.”
Gomez walked in the front door as he was speaking, and stepped up to the table. He pointedly didn’t look around. His family’s home had been shot to hell, blood spatter marring the furniture and the walls. He picked up one of the unlocked phones and started to scroll through it.
“It’s all in the clear,” he said. “No codes; they must have been relying on the app’s encryption.”
“Anything useful?” Brannigan asked.
Gomez kept reading, grimacing a little. “No grids or anything,” he said. “Just mentioning stuff like ‘the house,’ or ‘the hacienda.’ I’m not seeing any concrete locations.”
“They were thorough with their contacts, though,” Bianco pointed out, holding up the phone he was fiddling with. “Phone numbers and full names, in most cases.”
“Can we use that?” Brannigan asked. “Exploit the numbers, locate them through their phones?”
“I can’t,” Bianco replied. “Especially not from here. No way in hell.” He hesitated. “But I might know somebody who can.” He looked down at the phone in his hand, looking a little pained. “I don’t know if I can ask him, though.”
“I take it he’s still employed by the USG?” Brannigan asked quietly.
Bianco nodded. “I’m sure he can do it without using government setups,” he said. “He’s kind of a whiz at this stuff, and he got a lot of his current position from learning through hobby work. If you want to call it that. If he hadn’t covered his tracks as well as he did, he’d probably be in Leavenworth instead of an office.” He blew out a nervous sigh. “But he’s not going to jump at the idea of doing more of it on the side. He takes his clearance pretty seriously these days, and this could jeopardize it.”
“Get in touch with him,” Brannigan said. “But make it quick; we don’t want to linger here much longer. We’ve already been on the X far too long.”
***
Creedence Clearwater Revival broke the quiet of the hospital room yet again, and Hart dug into his pocket to pull the phone out as quickly as he could. Childress glanced up from the laptop currently sit
ting on the tray table set across his hospital bed as Hart looked at the screen.
“It’s Vinnie,” Hart said, answering it and turning the phone to speaker. “Hey, Vinnie.”
“Don, are you with Sam?” Bianco asked. His voice was a little muted and scratchy; wherever he was, cell signal clearly wasn’t great.
“Yeah, he’s right here, and you’re on speaker,” Hart replied.
“Make sure nobody else is listening in,” Bianco said. “I’m serious.”
Hart glanced around. They were in a solo room, so there was no one on the other side of a curtain. The door was slightly ajar, but there didn’t seem to be anyone right outside in the hall. “We’re good,” he said.
“All right,” Bianco said. “I’m going to email you a list and a phone number to call. The number belongs to a guy named Grant Roark. He’s going to be suspicious when you call him on that number out of the blue, so tell him that Vinnie Bianco gave it to you, and that I asked him when he’s going to burn that old character sheet. He’ll know the one I mean.”
The phone buzzed in Hart’s hand, announcing the email’s delivery. “We need him to start exploiting those numbers. If he gets a ping on one of them, then we need to know where it is. He can call you, and then you call us. You might have to leave a message; I think we’re going to be off comms for a while here. I’ll set comm windows every four hours starting at 0200. Don’t hesitate to call with info if you need to outside of the windows, though; I’ll have the phone turned off, but I’ll get the message during the window.”
He paused for a moment. “You guys got all that?”
“Yeah, Vinnie,” Childress croaked, then reached for the water beside his bed. “We’ve got it. We might have to be a bit discreet, doing this right here in the hospital, so we might miss a couple windows, too.”
“No worries,” Bianco replied. “We’ll get it sorted. But the more info that Grant can get us, the better.”
“How much do you trust this Roark guy, Vinnie?” Hart asked quietly.
“Meaning how much can you tell him?” Bianco replied. “As little as possible. He lives a compartmentalized existence, anyway, so he should understand. It might get a little sensitive if he thinks we’re doing anything illegal, and he’s got reason to; he’ll be risking his clearance. Just don’t tell him that.”
“Working a problem, can’t say what,” Childress said. “NDAs and all that. National security, border, blah, blah, blah.”
“Just don’t lay it on too thick, or he’ll really start to think we’re on the wrong side of the law,” Bianco said. Of course, we kinda are.
“Leave it to us, Vinnie,” Childress said. “We’ll get it done and get you what we can as soon as we can.”
“Awesome, guys,” Bianco said in reply. “I gotta go. Take care of yourselves.”
“Good hunting, Vinnie,” Childress said.
“Stay safe, brother,” Hart put in. The call ended.
Childress looked at Hart. He was looking a little better as the days went on, but he was still drawn and haggard, with too many tubes disappearing into the sheets gathered at his midsection. “You want to make the call, or do you want me to?” he asked.
Hart looked down at the phone in his hand, calling up the email that Bianco had sent. It was very bare-bones, with just the list of target numbers, and then Roark’s number beneath that, with “SecureVoice” in parentheses. Hart knew of the app, but he’d never tried it before. “I can do it,” he said.
He didn’t say it, as he downloaded the encrypted phone app, but it was good to see the change in Childress over the last couple days. With a renewed sense of purpose, the wounded man had thrown himself into the new work, learning as much as he could, to the point that Hart had needed to step in and tell him to knock it off and get some rest, before the nurses and doctors started asking just what the hell he was doing with so much of his time.
It took a couple minutes to get the app installed, and then he was punching in Roark’s number. He hit “Call,” and put the phone to his ear, waiting.
It rang several times before a slightly high-pitched, nasally voice answered. “Who is this?” the voice demanded. “You’ve got about ten seconds to tell me how you got this number.”
“I’m a friend of Vinnie Bianco,” Hart said evenly. “He said to ask when you’re going to burn that character sheet.”
There was a pause, during which Hart’s heart seemed to thud in his ears. Had the bona fides worked, or was this guy backtracking him right now and calling in the FBI? If he really worked for Cyber Command, or some three-letter agency…
“You just won another two minutes,” the voice, presumably Grant Roark, said. “What’s Vinnie want?”
“He said you could track phone numbers,” Hart said.
“That depends on what I’m tracking them for,” Roark replied. “What’s the job about?”
“Finding some bad people and the hostages they took,” Hart answered.
There was another pause, and even though he had no idea just what Roark looked like, Hart could imagine the man squinting at the wall in thought. “What kind of auspices are we talking?”
It took Hart a second to identify the word. “Can’t say,” he said. He almost added, “He said you’d understand,” but decided against it. It sounded a little too shady.
“I’m going to need more than that,” Roark said. “Do you have any idea how much trouble I could get into if this isn’t kosher?”
“I’m not the one calling the shots,” Hart said. “I’m just the messenger.” It was an advanced version of the age-old Marine Corps excuse, “Lance Corporal don’t know.”
“What I do know is that I can get in a lot of trouble if I don’t keep this thing as compartmentalized as possible,” he went on, hoping that his line of bullshit was going to pass muster. “This is extremely sensitive, and as soon as you see where the phones are located, I think you’ll understand why.”
Again, he thought he could almost see the other man’s narrowed eyes in the pause that followed. “Fine,” Roark finally said. “Vinnie’s never screwed me before, and I think I can do this quietly without too many questions being asked. But if this blows up in my face, you tell Vinnie that I’m rolling on him as soon as the men in black show up.”
“Fair enough,” Hart said. “You want the numbers now?”
Roark might have sighed. “Send ‘em,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee much for a couple of hours.”
“Fine,” Hart answered. “Just as long as you pass on the locations as quickly as you can. This is a bit time-sensitive.”
“Isn’t it always?” Roark asked dryly. “Give me the numbers.”
Hart read them off, one at a time, because he had to keep taking the phone away from his ear to read the email. When he finished, Roark asked, “Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll get on it,” Roark said. “Tell Vinnie he owes me. Big time. How often are you on this line?”
“All the time,” Hart answered.
“I’ll send what I’ve got when I’ve got it,” Roark said. “It might not be from this number. I trust Vinnie, but this isn’t something to take chances with.”
“Understood,” Hart said. “We’ll be waiting.”
“I’m sure.” Roark hung up.
Childress looked at him. “That sounded like it went okay,” he said.
“Hopefully,” Hart said, realizing that he felt a little sick to his stomach. They were in a hospital, and he was unarmed. He glanced at the door. He didn’t think that the call had been traced. If it had, there might be a SWAT team on the way. He hoped it hadn’t. He leaned back in his chair. “I guess now we wait.”
“Wait and read,” Childress said, pointing at the screen in front of him. “I’m finding some interesting stuff.”
***
Herc Javakhishvili wasn’t entirely sure about this mission. He didn’t really know most of the Blackhearts all that well; he had one mission out of four under his
belt, and several of these guys knew each other from the military. He’d been a Fleet Marine Force Corpsman, but he’d never worked with any of the Marines in the team. Jenkins was the only other Navy man, and, well…Jenkins was Jenkins.
It wasn’t that he had moral qualms about it. Javakhishvili considered himself a faithful Eastern Orthodox Christian, but he didn’t necessarily conflate governmental authority with morality. As far as he was concerned, the Espino-Gallo bunch needed to die, and an imaginary border wasn’t going to change that. If the law wouldn’t do it, he was fine with taking the role of executioner into his own hands.
It was that same comfort with violence and killing that had ensured he would never become an MD. He couldn’t quite bring himself to take the Hippocratic Oath. Not if it meant swearing off killing people who needed killing.
It wasn’t even the estrangement from the tight-knit group that he’d just joined that bothered him. That always came with joining a small team, and it was always gotten over. He had no doubt that it would be in this case, too.
But this just seemed all a little too ad hoc to him. It had been laid on fast, with the team barely having enough time to catch their breath once they got to Lordsburg. They didn’t know what, exactly, they were getting into, but here they were, only a few miles from crossing the border into Northern Mexico, hunting a group of mad-dog killers without knowing their numbers, firepower, support, or location. Sure, they had the phone numbers, but they weren’t waiting for locations on them. They were heading south, following the tire tracks that the attacking trucks had left.
In a way, his own reluctance bothered him. He’d gone into shithole countries in Africa, protecting missionaries, with far less information and far less firepower. So why was this different?
Maybe because that was a protection mission, acknowledged by everybody, even governments. There wasn’t much extra to do except keep an eye on the principals and make sure they didn’t get kidnapped or blown up. Tense, but routine. Well, aside from that one village in Uganda, anyway…