Killing Time

32

They waited five minutes, then, dressed in black, headed out into the dark and cut around to the back of the cabin. Eva had the Taurus tucked in her waistband and a Maglite in the pocket of her cargo pants. Mike opted for the M-4 in case they ran into a shitstorm. The mini NV binoculars were tucked in a pocket on the leg of his cargo pants. They hadn’t gotten two steps when he grabbed Eva’s wrist and dragged her back into the shadows.

“Patrol,” he whispered, pressing his lips to her ear.

She froze, and like him, measured her breath, barely blinked, and hugged the cabin until the guards passed not ten yards away from them.

“I don’t like this,” he whispered.

“What you don’t like is me going with you. I’ll be fine.”

She was right. He didn’t like it that she was out here. What he liked even less was the surprise Lawson had dumped on him tonight, about Ramon being on Lawson’s payroll. A major detail that Mike had left out when he’d filled Eva in. If she ever found out, it would kill her.

“It’s clear.” Her voice snapped him back. “Let’s go.”

With him in the lead, they headed out at a crouching run, ducking behind buildings, fences, trucks, whatever they could find for cover. While they couldn’t track the semis’ route, they’d figured out the path they had to take, based on the layout of the camp, and the direction the trucks were going when they rolled by. They were headed for the northern border of the meadow.

It was slow, treacherous going. They had to stop several times again and wait for patrols—which were double what he’d run into last night—to pass. Finally they reached the shooting range, cleared the earth berms built up behind the targets to stop the bullets, and headed out into the woods.

Using the edge of the tree line for cover, they worked their way slowly toward the northernmost quadrant… and stopped abruptly when they heard an idling motor and the murmur of voices in the distance.

Mike glanced at Eva. She nodded. She’d heard it, too. Slowing the pace and making sure they stayed concealed in the trees, they moved as quietly as possible toward the sound. A light materialized out of the dark. Then two. Headlights. Then several more lights. Flashlights. A diesel engine revved. Gears ground. Men shouted.

When they were within thirty yards of the activity, Mike dropped to his belly and dug out the binoculars. Eva was right beside him—a good soldier, alert, light on her feet, sensing instinctively what he wanted her to do.

“I count five… make that six men on the ground,” he whispered, adjusting the focus on the binocs.

“What are they doing?”

“Best guess? They’re directing the semi drivers to back up the trailers. Let’s get a little closer.”

Under the cover of the gunning engines as the powerful diesels’ gears engaged, they belly crawled, digging with their elbows and knees until they cut the distance in half.

Mike refocused the binoculars and scanned the area of activity. “What the hell?”

“What?” Beside him, Eva sounded anxious.

“They’re gone. The semis. They’ve fucking disappeared.”

He raised the glasses again, scanned slowly this time. All he saw were men milling around the pickups, talking, slamming tailgates, stowing gear. He couldn’t see behind the smaller trucks but there was a flurry of activity, then everyone piled in and they took off.

After the taillights disappeared back toward the encampment, Mike checked things out one more time. Satisfied that there was no one left behind, he pushed to his feet.

“Let’s go check it out.”

“I thought I was kidding about the vampire cave.” When he was satisfied that no one had been left behind on guard duty, Mike shined the Maglite through inch-thick iron bars that had been welded in six-inch squares to form two huge gates, padlocked together. Tire tracks in the dirt disappeared under the locked gate. “Wait. It’s not a cave after all. See those old timbers? This is a mine shaft. We need to get inside.”

He handed her the light and had her shine it on the padlock so he could check it out. “I don’t remember anything about picking locks on your bio,” he said, after inspecting it. “Don’t suppose that’s a hidden talent.”

“Sorry. Way above my pay grade. Can we break it?”

“Not without letting them know someone was here.”

He held out his hand and she handed back the light. He shined the beam around the perimeter of the opening, which was approximately twelve feet wide and fifteen feet high.

“Our lucky day.” Because the opening of the shaft was slightly rounded and the top of the iron gates were level, there was a gap about three feet wide and eighteen inches high at the apex. “It’ll be tight but I think I can get through it. You first.”

He watched as she easily scaled the grillwork, holding the light so she could see where she was going. Once she made it to the top, she kept low, swung one leg over, then the other, and a few seconds later, hit the ground on the inside of the mine shaft.

He passed the Maglite through the bars and she returned the favor as he climbed to the top of the gate.

“Can you make it through?”

He grunted as he worked his body through the narrow opening. “Kind of like trying to squeeze a watermelon through a keyhole, but yeah. I’m good.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got.” She handed back the light when his feet hit the dirt beside hers.

He shined the flashlight over the shored-up beams of the long horizontal shaft, then down to the very clear tire tracks that led to the three semis. The trucks were parked end to end down the length of the long, narrow tunnel that Mike guessed stretched a good one hundred feet. “So… the trucks arrive after dark and get tucked out of sight. Somebody doesn’t want anybody seeing these bad boys.”

“ ‘Anybody’ as in satellite surveillance?”

“That, too,” he agreed and shined the light along the first trailer. “This is a refrigerated box. They all are,” he added after trotting back and checking the other trailers.

“So why aren’t there any generators running?”

“Good question.”

They climbed up into the cab of the first semi, and Mike dug through the glove box until he found the manifest. “Check this out.” He handed her the papers. “This truck’s out of Canada and is supposedly carrying meat. I’m betting they all have the same papers.”

“Let’s go look in the back.”

They found keys for the trailer with the manifest. After making quick work of the lock, he swung open one of the rear doors.

“I’ll give you a boot up.”

Eva placed her foot in his cupped hands, grabbed onto the other door, and he lifted her up and inside. Seconds later he was right beside her, shining the flashlight into the dark.

Hundreds of boxes, about three feet by two feet, were stacked on pallets to the ceiling. All of them had PORK and an expiration date stamped on the outside.

“In a pig’s eye,” Mike said.

“Seriously?”

“Sorry. I never back away from a pun.”

He pulled out his Leatherman, flipped open the blade, and very carefully cut the tape on one of the boxes.

“Holy shit.”

“AK-74s?” Eva peeled back the plastic that was covering the rifles to get a better look.

“Yeah. About the same caliber as the M-16, but more controllable at full automatic than its older brother, the AK-47. Someone plans to start a war.” He shined the light up and down the inside of the trailer. “Let’s say this trailer’s around fifty feet long.”

“Sounds right.”

“Okay. Figure twenty-five pallets per trailer. But let’s say at one point there was some legal cargo to make this work—just in case they got stopped at the border.”

Eva saw where he was going. “So they place some pork loins here in the rear, making it look like the whole cargo was meat. Those boxes that actually contained the pork are probably in the back of the pickups that headed back to camp.”

Mike nodded slowly. “That would work. A constant stream of trucks drive back and forth between the States and Canada. There wouldn’t be a reason in the world to single one out and question if it was legit. Walks like, talks like, looks like refrigerated cargo, so anyone searching the trailer would hurry because the driver would be on their case about all that expensive meat spoiling.

“So,” Mike continued, frowning, “let’s say six decoy pallets—a couple on the back, the others on top, surrounding the boxes of guns.”

Eva started calculating. “One gun per box times twenty boxes per pallet times twenty pallets. That’s four hundred rifles per trailer.”

“I’m betting there’s ammo and mags tucked in here somewhere, too,” Mike added and worked the rest of the math. “So each trailer’s carrying around two hundred thousand dollars wholesale. Easily a half a mil per truck on the open market if they plan to sell them.”

“Wait.” Eva looked at him sharply. “Sell them?”

“Think about it. Lawson’s armory is already overstocked. I saw that firsthand. Even if he planned a siege on a major city, no way would he need this much firepower for an operation. So this isn’t about waging war. This is about supplying someone who plans to wage a war.”

He saw in her eyes the moment she reached the same conclusion that he had. “Oh, God. The Juarez cartel. La Linea is his buyer.”

“The ‘big deal’ that Lawson was hinting about going down.”

She lifted a hand toward the gun shipment. “So they’re storing them here until they decide it’s safe to truck them south?”

Mike shook his head. “Maybe. But try this out. Million and a half in weapons, right? If you were Lawson, would you risk delivering the goods before you got payment in your hot little fist? No, you wouldn’t. And if you were the badasses on the receiving end, would you fork over the cash before you received the shipment?”

“Whoa. You think the exchange is going to take place here?”

“If it was my deal, that’s what I’d do. It just makes sense. Just like it makes sense that if this is their first business transaction, all the key players are going to show up for the dance. Have a little face-to-face, you know? Cement the new relationship.”

Her eyes had grown wide. “Holy God.”

“And all his angels,” Mike added on a deep breath. “I’m not thinking just cartel members, either. Another big gun might be heading this way, too.”

“Lawson’s partner.”

Mike nodded. The man who had called the shots on OSD. The man who had put a hit out on Eva.

For a moment they both stood there, working through all the revelations. Finally, she looked at him. “We can’t let this exchange happen. We’ve got to call Gabe.”

Shit. She was right. Gabe and Green needed to be stopped so they could regroup.

“They need to contact ATF. Hell, contact DEA, Homeland Security, and the FBI. Get them all down here. We can’t let the cartel get their hands on these guns.”

She was right again. But if they called in the big guns, Mike’s chances of taking out Lawson himself shrank from slim to nonexistent.

His face must have shown his thoughts, because she put her hand on his arm. “Mike. This isn’t just about us anymore. It’s way bigger than that. It’s about national security.”

Life was so un-fucking-fair. “It’s ironic, right? I come back to the States to clear my name, and I end up fighting for the team that benched me.”

“It’s that patriot gene of yours. You can’t help but do the right thing.”

She had a lot more faith in him than he had in himself. And something about that faith made him feel like a better man.

But yeah, this was a game changer. Lawson could no longer be the primary target. Clearing his name, setting things straight for Ramon’s legacy… they had to let all that go, and stop the cartel from getting their hands on these guns. With Gabe’s help they just might be able to do it. But they had to reach him first.

Face grim, he shut the gun box, then maneuvered it in behind several others so no one would notice the shipment had been tampered with. “Let’s get out of here. That ticking clock we were working against just turned into a time bomb.”

“Phone.”

Jane’s groggy whisper penetrated his sleep from a distance.

“Your phone is ringing.”

Her hand touching his arm finally roused him.

Shaking himself awake, he groped for the switch on the bedside lamp and flicked it on. Squinting against the sudden glare, he reached past the clock that told him it was three a.m., and fumbled for his phone. The screen showed Barnes’s number.

“What?” he said.

“You said to call, no matter the time, if I had actionable information,” his cyber-security man said.

“Tell me you found them.”

“This is what I can tell you. Whoever is using the Salinas woman’s CIA access codes is not a traceable entity. I’ve tried everything. The system using her codes is hardened against external attacks—firewalls, RSA encryption… you name it, they’ve got a safeguard.”

“And this helps me how?”

“This helps because it tells me that whoever it is has major resources if they can protect themselves with this level of sophistication. We’re talking NSA kind of security here.”

He sat up, thought about what Barnes was saying. “So you think we’re dealing with a branch of the government?”

“Or a black ops unit.”

This was not good news.

“While I can’t pinpoint who’s using it or where the activity is based, I was able to capture and trace some of their search threads using a zero-day exploit in their browser.”

“Save the tech talk for someone who appreciates it and cut to the chase.”

“Lawson’s name came up a lot on those search threads. So did Afghanistan and UWD.”

Fuck.

“On a hunch,” Barnes went on, “I started monitoring cell phone transmissions out of the UWD camp.”

“And?”

“There’s been one text per day for the past several days, each time to a new phone number that was disconnected after it was used. Each number appears to have been forwarded to another phone or a series of phones. But the original numbers were all in D.C., and the phone exchange for each call was the Department of Agriculture’s.”

The bastards were real comedians. The Department of Agriculture was a standby beard. But they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

“Call Lawson. Find out—”

“I just got off the phone with him. He hasn’t contacted anyone in D.C. And control freak that he is, he’s the only one on base with a cell phone.”

“Then who made the call?”

“This is where it gets interesting. Seems Lawson got a couple new recruits this past week. A man and a woman. What do you want to bet the texts were sent by them?”

His heart rate picked up. “Did you get their physical descriptions from Lawson?”

“I did. It’s them.”