Tier One Wild (39 page)

“Yes, sir.”

Seconds later, Major Kolt Raynor ran through Webber’s outer office on his way to the staff duty to initiate the squadronwide recall, passing Joyce by at a sprint.

*   *   *

Raynor stood behind his desk in his office. In front of him, a half dozen of his men sat on the other desks and leaned against the wall. These were the first group of squadron members to make it in, as they had been down at the range working some evening CQB—close quarters battle—training. The coded page went out to the entire squadron, of course, but many of the guys had already departed for team training across the country or signed out on leave.

But those available had come running or come calling. Even though they weren’t on alert anymore, when a Unit member’s beeper shows the real-world recall code, he is expected to drop what he is doing and make his way directly back to the compound.

They would not all be here in the next hour, so some would miss the movement and the aircraft taking the first group down, but Kolt hoped he could get a second plane of men down to McAllen posthaste, should the need come to cross the border.

To the six men already in front of him, Raynor said, “Word just came down from the colonel. We’re heading to Mexico.”

Slapshot had been leaning against the wall in the back. Although he knew from his boss’s demeanor that this meant there was trouble, he made a joke anyway. “Margaritas and nachos?”

Kolt did not laugh. “SAMs. Libyan SAMs.”

Slapshot pushed off the wall and said, “I’ll have a margarita when I get back. Let’s go get those SAMs.”

Raynor clarified, “We’ve got confirmation that a helo owned by the Mexican Navy was shot down yesterday by an SA-24. You may have seen something about it on the news today. We don’t know if these are the MANPADs that went to Yemen, or if AQ is involved at all. JSOC already pushed every available resource down there a few hours ago looking for them. When they are found, either the SEALs or us will go after them.”

“The SEALs?” One of Raynor’s men asked with a tinge of irritation.

“Yes, but white SEALs out of Coronado. Not Team Six. JSOC is doing the best they can working multiple ops and the SOUTHCOM commander must have pushed for it. We’re lucky as hell our sister squadron is already in Berlin at building training. That leaves only us.”

Nobody said anything; they just nodded in unison, letting Kolt know everyone understood the stakes. The group dispersed immediately to their team rooms to quickly repack their kit bags and into the weapons vaults for their weapons, contingency ammo, and secure radios.

Raynor then rushed down to the SCIF to talk to Kenny Farmer. He knew he could have called him from his office, but he felt he could make more of an impression if he showed up in person.

He found the redhead bleary-eyed, looking at his monitor in front of him. On it, real-time video feed showed roads and flat scrubland.

Kolt looked over his shoulder. “It that Yemen or Mexico?”

“Mexico,” Farmer said without looking up. “We’ve got a couple of Homeland Security MQ-1 UAVs out of Brownsville searching the highways north of where last night’s engagement took place.”

“No luck?”

“None. It’s low-probability. Big-ass area and, you already know, doesn’t take much to hide a shoulder-fired launcher. The J2 is working with the Mexicans to try and get some intercepts of known Zetas commander’s phones, which would be a better bet than just cruising overhead at twenty-five thousand feet, but still … these cartel bosses won’t be chatting on open lines.”

Kolt patted Farmer on the back. “Keep at it, brother. If anyone can find them, you can. I need to grab my kit. You need coffee?”

Farmer shook his head. “My bloodstream is ten percent Colombian dark roast already.”

THIRTY-THREE

David Doyle and Miguel rode together in the back of a red Ford Econoline van as they headed northeast on Mexico’s Federal Highway 85. With them in the back of the van were fourteen Igla-S systems. On the right-hand side of the highway, a huge reservoir, Presa Rodrigo Gómez, shimmered in the late afternoon sunlight, forcing Doyle to push the visor to the side to shield his eyes from the glare while he drove. David and Miguel just turned away from the blue water’s shine, and continued their conversation.

The three other vehicles hauling surface-to-air missiles through Mexico were spread out along Highway 85 over a swath of twenty-five kilometers. Interspersed throughout the small convoy of AQAP operatives were five SUVs full of armed security men from Los Zetas.

It was not in the original plan for the vehicles to be spread so far apart, but David and Miguel had been calling audibles all day, knocking the Zetas’ plan off-kilter and also, they hoped, preventing any double-crosses from their supposed allies here in Mexico.

After the shoot-out in Coahuila State early that morning they had all retreated to a ranch Los Zetas owned, and there they buried their dead in shallow graves, and stayed off the roads while the inevitable search began. At the ranch they’d found out that one of their trucks had taken some battle damage, and its radiator had leaked dry, so they dumped the truck in lieu of the van, fitting the fourteen weapons and three men in the Econoline.

David and Miguel discussed their new plans while Jerry drove. They had decided to divert from their original crossing point in Agua Prieta, just south of Arizona on the nation’s border with the United States, and instead head northeast, where the border with Texas was much closer. This would get them out of Mexico and into the U.S. much more quickly than their original plan, although they knew the Zetas would have to scramble to find a suitable location in which to hide them out tonight so that they could cross the following morning along with the regular flow of NAFTA-approved commercial traffic.

To that end they were heading up Highway 85, passing Santiago now, and soon enough they would be in Monterrey. By dark they planned on being out of Monterrey, still on 85, and, barring any major hazards, they would reach Nuevo Laredo by ten p.m.

Nuevo Laredo was the home base of Los Zetas. The cartel came closer to controlling the territory around it than any cartel controlled any major city in the nation. Henrico and David and Miguel had agreed that would be their destination this evening. There the Federales and the Navy and the Army and even the Americans could not reach them without being prepared to lose a lot of men.

It was not a perfect plan. If they were seen on the road to Nuevo Laredo it would be hard to slip away. The roads here were straight and flat and the options to get off the road and into cover were few and far between. But if they made it into Nuevo Laredo, David was confident they could remain undetected for a day or two until the Zetas could bribe border guards and they could slip into the United States.

Doyle looked at his watch. Three hours more and they would be on the border with America. He leaned over and asked Jerry to drive faster.

*   *   *

Kolt Raynor sat in a seat he found very familiar: a soft black fold-down bench bolted onto the cabin wall of a C-17 Globemaster. Heavy-strapped to the D-rings on the floor were four Little Bird helicopters, a pair each of MH-6Js and AH-6Js, from the 160th Special Ops “Night Stalker” Aviation Regiment out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Around Kolt were the eight pilots, along with nineteen men from his squadron—Twelve assaulters, five snipers, a medic, a communicator, and a dog handler with Roscoe, a Belgian Malinois.

A second wave of seven more assaulters and snipers would arrive in McAllen a few hours later, feeling like shit for missing the initial deployment and, Kolt also knew, hoping like hell that they had not missed their opportunity for a hit south of the border.

The Globemaster pilot had just reported they were over East Texas, having crossed over Alabama and then a piece of the Gulf of Mexico, and soon they would be landing at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. There the C-17 would taxi to an obscure end of the runway and the men would help the helo crews off-load and build up the Little Birds, and then they would climb aboard two vanilla UH-60s flown by the Texas Air National Guard. The Little Birds would fly slick on to McAllen and remain separated from the Black Hawks carrying Delta to minimize the signature and prevent being compromised by an alert and curious cattle rancher.

Using the National Guard helos had been no one’s first choice, but they were here and they were ready. There would be no 160th MH-60J Black Hawks for this op, as they had all been deployed overseas to support the alert squadron’s ops.

If the hit into Mexico was authorized, however, the Black Hawks would not be involved. Instead the men would load up on the skids of the Little Birds and head over the border.

At roughly the same time as all this, SEALs from California would be staging along the border to the west, no doubt following similarly chaotic and rushed procedures.

Even though his squadron was off alert status, Raynor felt good about the team he had with him, and proud that, within three and a half hours of Webber’s call, he was approaching Texas with a potent force of operators. And even though he knew the chance was low that his team, and not one of the several white SEAL teams deploying, would get the call to shoot over the border, he did not let that affect his thinking for one second. Major Raynor would prepare for this op as if it were a certainty that he and his men would be heading into harm’s way.

Operate any other way in a Tier One unit, Raynor knew, and he’d find himself in the black Chinook and heading home.

As he and several of his sergeants looked at a map of northern Mexico on a tablet computer, one of the C-17’s loadmasters appeared above him and handed him a headset connected to a long green cord. “We’ve got traffic for you.”

Kolt put his headset on and gave the loadmaster a thumbs-up. A moment later, Kolt heard the hissing and cracking of a satellite phone connection.

“Racer, this is Webber.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Understand you are twenty minutes from Randolph.”

“Affirmative.”

“All right, listen up. The SAMs have not yet been detected in Mexico, but we’ve gotten a lead over here.”

“A lead?”

“One of the crows Gangster rolled up ID’d Daoud al-Amriki as the cell leader running the training of one dozen AQAP operatives.”

Kolt took a moment to process this information. “Rolled up? I thought they smoked all the fighting-age males.”

“All but one, fortunately. Long story,” Webber answered.

“Hot damn! Any word where al-Amriki and his men are now?”

“Negative, but they left in a hurry six days ago.”

“That’s the day after we took down Saleh in Cairo. Did the crow say if al-Amriki had the SAMs with them?”

“He said they did not, but they trained on the system with some pretty elaborate mock-ups. This guy who’s singing is just a guard. He doesn’t seem to be dialed in. Didn’t know squat about the shipping container, or al-Amriki’s plans. They are still working him.”

“Sounds like we need to squeeze Saleh a little harder to see if he knows anything about David Wade Doyle.”

“Yep. I expect Langley is doing just that.”

“So are we linking all that to the SA-24 launch in Mexico?”

“No one has drawn that conclusion definitively just yet, but it could be the case.”

Kolt felt the C-17 begin its descent into San Antonio. “Sir, if Doyle has a dozen guys with SAM training, some of whom are dressing up in Western clothing, and AQAP has SAMs, and we know SAMs are in Mexico … it’s not going too far out on a limb to say Doyle is in Mexico, too. And if he’s in Mexico, he’s going to try to get himself and his boys into the USA.”

“Preaching to the choir, Racer. We are doing everything we can to find the missiles down there, so that you or the SEALs can go in and blow them, and whoever’s got them, to kingdom come.”

“Who’s the main effort down here? Us or the white SEALs?”

“SOUTHCOM is pushing hard for the mission. The CG is working it though with the SECDEF. Too early to tell, but it will depend on where the SAMs are.”

“Sounds a little political to me.”

“It always is,” confirmed Webber.

*   *   *

David Doyle’s red Ford Econoline pulled off Federal Highway 85 and onto a flat blacktop two-lane road. The van’s headlights illuminated little but blowing dust, hovering and leaping bugs, and brown-green scrub that ran off into the dark on either side of the track. Jerry drove east, following the directions he’d been given by Henrico, but he did not really know where he was heading.

They knew from the bright lights just to the north that they were near the southern suburbs of the dangerous and gritty metropolis of Nuevo Laredo, which meant they were just a couple of miles west of the U.S.-Mexico border. They also knew that they were heading out here, off the main highway, to hunker down for the night.

All the men in the van hoped there was something out here to protect them other than grasshoppers and rattlesnakes.

Soon Jerry saw the taillights of another vehicle ahead, and as they closed on it they were happy to see the yellow TerraStar. In front of that was the blue truck, and a pair of SUVs David and the men with him recognized as those belonging to Los Zetas. All the men in the Econoline breathed a quiet sigh of relief that they had exited the highway at the correct side road.

The Econoline followed the others through a gate in a high chain-link fence. Doyle saw a sign that read
ARROYO DEL COYOTE SUBESTACIÓN
, and inside the fence his van’s lights illuminated a massive field of metal towers, power lines, transformers, and outbuildings. They followed the Zetas past guards in black uniforms with ball caps with
CFE
above the bills. The guards wore pistol-gripped shotguns around their necks and, more important to Doyle, they did not look surprised by the new visitors to their facility.

They all drove to the back of this electrical substation, idling their vehicles under cover of long awnings that ran the length of the two largest buildings on the property. A large garage sat next to the buildings, and men opened the garage doors, then began driving green and white trucks marked
CFE
out of the garage. After a minute of this, the two TerraStars were waved into the garage, and the Econoline was directed around the side to a small parking lot.