Chapter 23

 

Inside the Airbus H160, having just gone through for the fourth time the same routine he’d performed on Cade before giving him the green light to jump, Swarr found something to hold onto and leaned into the slipstream. Everything on the ground was rendered in a thousand different shades of green. He quickly acquired the steadily blinking IR strobes attached to the back of each of the Pale Riders’ helmets. Viewed through the older-gen NODs, the bright rapidly moving lights were easy to track against the darker background.

Cross had been the last of the team to leave the bird. Seeing the final strobe lining up with the others, and that all four beacons were now moving steadily in unison, rocketing straight for the U.S./Mexico border, Swarr let the pilots know that the team was safely away. Closing the door, he disconnected his safety tether and took a seat in the middle of the cabin. To keep from being thrown around while Ari hot-rodded the helo to the next waypoint, Swarr belted in. Feeling himself suddenly going weightless, he snatched the Pelican case containing his rifle off the floor, laid it across his legs, and trapped it in place with his elbows.

The dive was steep and rapid, the helo finally leveling out at what looked to Swarr to be a scant twenty or thirty feet above treetop level. To prepare for his part in the hastily thrown-together op, the former Marine sniper flipped up the Pelican case’s latches, lifted the hinged lid, and extracted his Remington M40A5 rifle from the precision-cut foam liner.

 

Thirty seconds into the freefall the needle on the altimeter on Cade’s wrist was coming up fast on the one-thousand-foot hash. Lifting his gaze to the quartet of lights framing the target, he grabbed ahold of the ripcord and gave it a sharp tug.

There was a soft pop and rustling of fabric and the ram-air canopy filled out over his head. As the equal and opposite component of Newton’s Law kicked in, the shoulder and crotch straps digging in deeply during the rapid deceleration, he took his hand off the rifle strapped to his chest rig, reached over his head, and grasped the steering toggles.

The change in temperature was notable. No longer was he shivering. Tugging on the right toggle had him turning in that direction and started a ripple to course through the wing-like canopy. Once the target was again in sight, he focused his attention on the swath of ground just inside the southernmost wall. He concentrated hard. If he missed the X, most likely the others would too.

Passing through five hundred feet, he was back to being able to discern even the finest of details with the NODs. He saw the angled ridges of the red tile roof. The beige stucco walls inset with darkened windows. The landing zone, a driveway and motor court constructed with rectangular pavers arranged in a herringbone pattern, was occupied by a lone pickup truck. It wasn’t the flashy 4x4 rig one would expect to see at a place reportedly used by the cartel. It was utilitarian, the load bed half full of a dark material he presumed to be fertilizer or topsoil. A place used to train bomb makers, he presumed, would have more than one rig in the drive. Also troubling was that he didn’t see any guards or dogs patrolling the grounds. Put together with the lone truck, he was beginning to think Desantos’ DEA guy’s usually reliable informant had finally shit the bed.

Circling the compound clockwise afforded Cade a long hard look at the rear of the garage looming large underfoot. A quick scan of the southern sky revealed the rest of the team. Their spacing wasn’t perfect. Nor were they all moving at the same speed. Still, what they had just accomplished was damn impressive, especially considering advanced freefall was a rapidly diminishing skillset.

With twenty feet to go to the steeply pitched garage roof, Cade pulled evenly on the steering toggles to flare his chute. As the MC-5’s individual cells captured air, filling out the canopy and rapidly slowing his descent, the perimeter lights winked out. True to his word, Swarr had come through. Somewhere on one of the poles lining the main road, thought Cade, an electrical transformer just fell victim to a .308 Winchester round fired from El Swarro’s M40A5.

Cade’s ten-thousand-foot jump ended on the herringbone pavers twenty feet from the loaded-down pickup. He was already down on one knee, rifle unclipped from his chest rig and actively scanning the home’s front elevation, focusing mainly on the blind corners and bushes growing near the wall, when Lopez made a textbook landing a dozen feet off his left shoulder. A second later Griff entered the picture, skimming low over the garage, knees bent to keep his feet from dragging along the red tile roof. As he cleared the rooftop and gutter without making contact, it was obvious to Cade the former SEAL wasn’t going to make it as far down the driveway as he had. In fact, Griff’s trajectory had him tracking straight for the pickup’s load bed. Cade was afraid no amount of flaring or tucking or contorting of the body was going to change what was about to happen to Griff.

Lopez had already manipulated the quick ejector snaps on the chest and leg straps and was stepping out of his parachute harness when Griff came down feet first in the pickup’s unknown cargo. There was nothing Cade could do but watch. It was like a slow-motion trainwreck—minus the carnage.

Arms outstretched in a futile attempt to break his fall, Griff face-planted in the dark material. Emptying of air, the canopy spun clockwise, the suspension lines twisting like saltwater taffy. He was pushing himself up and going to his knees as the empty canopy fluttered down around him.

As discussed before the jump, the mansion’s lights snapping out was Cross’s cue to slow his descent and look for any reaction to the sudden loss of electricity. With a couple of hundred feet to go to the ground, he steered the chute into a lazy figure eight. Drifting slowly now, he walked his gaze over the property, beginning at the boathouse south of the garage and ending at a plat of tilled earth flanked by a half dozen different types of farming equipment.

The only thing moving below was Griff. He came out from underneath the canopy spitting and swiping at his NODs. They were a bit askew, but he had them sorted and was legging over the pickup’s bedrail by the time Cross was back on solid ground.

“Alpha Lead, Bravo Two. Grounds are clear, front and back,” Cross called over the comms. “No movement detected at the boathouse.”

“Alpha Lead. Good copy,” Cade said. He didn’t need to prompt the SEALS on what to do next. As he and Lopez covered the front of the house and blind corner by the garage, Cross and Griff collected the discarded chutes and stashed them underneath the pickup.

Seeing the last chute disappear, Cade said, “Form up on me.” Once they were stacked, with Lopez behind Cade and Griff taking the number three slot, Cade went on, saying, “There’s a door at the midway point of the garage’s south-facing wall. Me and Lopez will breach. Griff will cover the east corner and wall to our right until we’re in. Cross is watching our six for the duration.” None of it needed to be said; however, seeing as how they were all many months removed from their respective teams, and the four of them hadn’t worked together as a unit for a couple of years, Cade didn’t want to allow any room for error.

Following Cade’s lead, the four operators advanced to the three-car garage’s southwest corner.

Halting at the corner, Cade took a quick turkey peek. Nothing. “Clear,” he called, then rolled around the corner, the HK’s deadly end leading the way.

Reaching the door, a windowless item inset into the wall equidistant to the garage’s two southernmost corners, Cade craned and looked for locks. There were two: a deadbolt chest-high to him, and the one integral to the doorknob.

Lopez pulled up a couple of feet from Cade and placed his left hand on his teammate’s left shoulder.

Feeling the contact, a silent assurance that the stack was good to go, Cade reached out and tried the knob. Unlocked. It turned freely. Aware the deadbolt might be thrown, he pushed gently on the knob. The door moved inward by a degree. The deadbolt wasn’t in play.

Nudging the door in a hand’s width, Cade trapped it open with the toe of his boot and peered inside. The door opened to a mudroom that ran away to the right, all the way to the garage’s rear wall. On the vinyl flooring beside a mat was a single pair of work boots. There was semi-dry mud on the toes and soles. Aside from the boots and a broom and mop left propped up against the left wall, the six by twenty room was empty.

The door opening into the garage from the mudroom was a cheap, windowless, hollow-core item. The doorknob turned freely. Opening the door slowly, Cade saw that no lights burned in the garage. Which made sense because it was 4:45 in the morning and there was no power coming in over the lines.

Parked side by side, front ends facing the right-side wall, was a pair of SUVs. The one nearest Cade was a white Toyota Land Cruiser. It was a newer model and wore a thick coating of ochre dust. In the next stall over, its yellow paint blindingly bright in the NODs, was a Lamborghini Urus SUV. Cade remembered hearing about a white rapper piling one up uninsured and declaring that its quarter-million-dollar replacement cost to him was “walking around money.” The statement, with so many out of work or working less than they’d like and having to rely on unemployment or government stimulus checks to survive, showed just how out of touch with reality the “Haves” had become. The action, discarding something so valuable, so casually, while hundreds of thousands of homeless Americans lived in vehicles or tents erected on city sidewalks, was no different than what had happened recently in Afghanistan. The politicians did not care how much of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money they squandered on partisan causes or gave away to foreign governments thousands of miles away, and they cared even less about the eleven Marines, Navy corpsman, and Army Staff Sergeant who had made the ultimate sacrifice guarding the airport in Kabul. The latter had been on full display at Dover as POTUS seemed more interested in the position of the hands of his watch than the flag-draped caskets filing by just yards to his fore.

Cade gritted his teeth at the thought and poked his head into the garage, sweeping his rifle right to left. “Clear,” he called, stepping over the threshold and padding off to the left, in a combat crouch, with Lopez following close behind.

Following the others through the mudroom, Cross closed and locked the door to the outside. Shutting the inside door behind him, he pushed around to the right, close on his fellow SEAL’s six.

Separated by fifteen feet, simultaneously Cade and Griff craned around their respective end of the Land Cruiser.

Cade saw all the way to the far wall. Nothing stood in his way. He guessed he had at least fifty feet to traverse to get there. On his left were the three windowless rollup garage doors that opened to the motor court. Propped on kickstands in the far stall were five motorcycles. Three were motocross bikes that looked suitable solely for offroad travel. The other two were Suzuki Hayabusa crotch rockets—one red, one white.

Simultaneous to Cade hearing Griff declare that his side was clear to the far wall came the rattle of a doorknob turning. A half beat later the lone door from the garage to the mansion proper was sucking inward. As Cade went to one knee, displaying a clenched fist to alert Lopez to do the same, a bright conical beam of light swept haphazardly across the ceiling, performed a crazy figure eight on the garage door nearest the dirt bikes, then tracked back across the wall to their fore. The sound of bare feet slapping the floor came next. When that finally subsided, the shaft of light was parked on something of interest in the corner opposite Cade’s position.

A soft click and grating of metal on metal came next.

The shaft of light shifted again, its oval spill growing smaller. Whoever was holding the flashlight was concentrating the beam on something.

Next came a series of clicks, each separated by a brief pause and follow-on exclamation in Spanish that sounded to Cade like garbled curse words. Knowing that his basic grasp of Spanish, and total lack of accent, would not pass scrutiny if he advanced on the person, Cade waved Lopez forward. As the former Delta operator slid by on the left, all the communication that passed between the two was silent, with Cade opening and closing the fingers on one hand—Make him talk—and then drawing a finger slowly across his neck—Neutralize him quietly if he puts up a fight.

Lopez nodded. Understood. As he crept past the Urus, heel and toeing it to keep the soles of his shoes from squeaking on the smooth concrete floor, he caught a whiff of something he knew all too well: the residual odor of food cooked in hot oil. It reminded him of his mother: always in her kitchen and whipping up the kind of traditional Mexican food he and his daughter were hard-pressed to replicate. It told him they were in the right place; he had never been in a gringo’s home that smelled like his mother’s cooking.

Rounding the Urus’ swooping rear end, Lopez spotted a man in the far corner and froze in his tracks. The middle-aged Hispanic was facing the left-side wall, the open door to a breaker panel partially obscuring his face. He was clad only in blue boxer shorts and a white wife beater tank stretched to its limits by an ample beer gut. In his mouth was a small tactical light, its beam vibrating slightly as he struggled to keep it trained on something inside the open door.

Sensing an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, Lopez rose from the combat crouch, aimed his HK at the partially open door, then crept slowly forward, craning as he did so to see what lay beyond. As he had already suspected, the door opened to a kitchen and, beyond it, what looked to be the home’s great room, the massive wall-mounted television the dead giveaway. The rooms were unoccupied. Nobody was waiting for the man to restore power. First bird down. Pointing at the open door, Lopez flashed Cade the all-clear thumbs-up. No tangos in sight.

Moving on, he threaded through the motorcycles, rifle muzzle never wavering from the man at the open panel. With two strides to go, and the proverbial second bird still troubleshooting the power outage, Lopez let the HK dangle on its single-point sling and slipped his fighting knife from its sheath. Then, in one fluid motion, he closed the remaining distance, knocking the flashlight away and clamping a gloved hand down hard over the man’s gaping mouth. A fraction of a second later, his right arm having come up and around, he pressed the cold, razor-sharp blade to the man’s neck.

First instinct on the man’s part was to lock his knees, arch his back, and, concurrently, to recoil from the blade and target his assailant’s face with a reverse headbutt.

Arching his own back to avoid the blow, Lopez tightened his grip over the man’s mouth. In Spanish, he said, “Fight me and I open your throat.”

The man tried stomping Lopez’s toes in the dark, the bare heel making wet slaps with each miss. The blade being drawn lightly across the man’s bobbing Adam’s apple, slicing skin and leaving a thin trail of blood in its wake, totally adjusted his attitude.

“Who else is here?” Lopez demanded, giving the knife a firm press. “You get one chance to answer my questions truthfully. When we are done here, I’m going to tie you up and leave you alone while I search the casa. If I find out that you’ve lied to me, I will return. For every hombre that you failed to tell me about, I will take something of yours, beginning with your eyes.”

The man’s shoulders slumped. Clearly, the specter of going Stevie Wonder informed his next action. Hanging his head, he raised one hand, four fingers extended.

“Are all four upstairs?”

The man’s answer was a slow, sullen nod.

“Are they sleeping?”

Another subtle nod from the defeated man.

Whispering into the open comms, Lopez said, “Alpha Lead, Alpha Two. I got him to talk. We have four more asleep upstairs. Wait one.”

“Alpha Two, Alpha Lead. Good copy,” answered Cade. “I’m moving to you.”

“Good copy,” replied Lopez. Back to questioning the man, he said, “Are any of the men Arabs?”

The man shook his head. No. But the way his body had tensed when he was hit with the question contradicted the non-verbal answer. The obvious attempt at deceit spurred Lopez to say, “Bullshit,” and to repeat the question.

The man shook his head vehemently.

“Tell me now and you’ll spare yourself a long, slow death,” Lopez hissed.

During the questioning, Cade had moved past the open door and had given the home’s interior another quick look. Determining they were still alone, he formed up beside Lopez, just outside of the detained man’s peripheral vision. He was peering over the SUV’s roof and motioning for Griff and Cross to move forward when the detainee mounted a mad struggle to get the knife blade turned away from his neck. Fearing the man was going to squirm out of Lopez’s grasp and scream for help, or that Lopez would be forced to slice a second mouth in the man’s neck prior to a proper Q&A session, Cade turned his HK around and gave the man’s exposed left temple a solid butt-stroke with its collapsed stock.

There was a meaty thunk and all struggle ceased. Eyeballs taking a tour of the insides of his lids, the man went slack-jawed and rubber-legged and nearly slipped from Lopez’s arms.

Placing the limp form on the garage floor next to the Urus, Lopez gagged the man with a shop rag taken from a nearby bench. Dragging a half dozen zip ties from a pocket, with Cross helping, he trussed the man’s legs and arms together behind his back.

“He’s going nowhere,” Griff said, stepping over the man as he was just beginning to come around.

Still kneeling near the man, Lopez scooped the fallen flashlight off the floor, directed its beam on his NOD-and-balaclava-clad-face, then moved in until mere inches separated his face from the man’s. Meeting the wide-eyed gaze directed up at him, Lopez said, “Hang tight. We’ll be back.”