Target Deck - 02 (14 page)

Frank winced as pain shot up his bum leg. He swallowed a few painkillers before tapping out a pinch of Copenhagen snuff that he packed into his lower lip. War is hell.

In front of him was the communications array that Sergeant Zhen's platoon had dismantled and taken off an objective with them. It had taken him a while to piece it together. The VHS receiver, microwave relay, and duplex were laid out on the floor the way it would have been when it was operational. It was a strange combination of communications gear to say the least.

After running recon patrols with the Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment, or RRD, for a number of years he had been recruited to the Intelligence Support Activity. ISA was perhaps the most secret, most compartmentalized asset within the Special Operations community. They conducted deep penetration missions behind enemy lines to gather intelligence for SEAL Team Six and Delta Force missions. Frank would go out with a partner, sometimes he'd go out alone, spending long stretches by himself in the mountains of Afghanistan.

His primary specialty within ISA was as a HUMINT, or Human Intelligence collector; however he had to cross-train with the knob turners as well. They taught him how to use bleeding edge signals intelligence equipment, how to break into communications networks, intercept enemy transmissions, and conduct traffic analysis. Although a knuckle dragger by trade, he had enough background to put together and understand what he was looking at presently.

The enemy they had faced in Afghanistan and Iraq had been tenacious to say the least. It was a case of military Darwinism. With SEALs, Rangers, and Delta grinding away at the terrorists, the dumb ones didn't last long. The smart ones were the mullahs and cell leaders who cynically used their followers for terrorist attacks. Those guys, the foot soldiers, were dangerous in that they often had no interest in actually surviving their attacks. ISA helped US Special Operations units in knowing where the bad guys were and sometimes helped them in the killing.

As the war stretched out over a decade the enemy adapted, countering American tactics, and forcing them to innovate on a daily basis. Frank had seen the enemy make some impressive moves but the Mexican cartels were in a category all their own. Their funding, equipment, weapons, and tactics, as well as their technical sophistication blew the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the water.

The cartels had established a pirate net that piggy-backed on the pre-existing telecommunications infrastructure in Mexico. The cartel had clearly done a cost to benefit ratio analysis and realized that they could save on costs by hopping across the civilian cell phone towers but then convert to VHF to make it harder to trace their calls and maintain their COMSEC.

The way it would work was that a cartel member would place a call with his cell phone to another member. The call would bounce across the commercial microwave relay towers used by civilian cell phone traffic. In addition, the cartels would raise their own microwave relays on communication masts in order to fill dead zones or help confuse anyone trying to track them. The signal would bounce across the network until it reached a specific repeater which would then use multiplexers and converters to convert the signal from CDMA to VHF.

CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, was the backbone channel access method used by civilian cell phone carriers while VHF, or Very High Frequency, was typical of ham radio operators. VHF was considered obsolete with the military having transitioned over the High Frequency and Ultra High Frequency so the mechanisms used to track VHF were being phased out. Because of this, American forces were unable to trace VHF signals. Al Qaeda knew this and adapted accordingly forcing Frank's unit and others to scramble for a solution.

That solution was found but now the cartels were using the same technique with a much more elaborate system. Factor encryption and frequency hopping into the mix and the cartels had a black cell phone network that would be damn difficult to penetrate. It shouldn't have come as a surprise. How else were the Colombians coordinating with dozens of cartels to smuggle drugs without having their communications intercepted by the DEA?

Frank spit some dip into an empty Gatorade bottle, going over it all in his mind.

The prisoners they had pulled off the same objective as the communications equipment were spilling their guts to Samruk interrogators. It was fortunate that the mercenaries had caught the cartel members off guard and by surprise. They had just arrived back in Mexico from a cartel training camp in Guatemala. Apparently Jimenez ran a training center off-site in the Central American country away from the prying eyes of other cartels and gringo spies. They sent their shooters down there for military training, including heavy machine guns, mortars, long range marksmanship, room clearing techniques, and explosives.

It only got more ominous from there. Jimenez had one hundred men in the new training complex he had built down there currently undergoing training. They were due to graduate, with certificates of achievement and everything in another week. With Samruk's assault on the cartel, Jimenez would be pushing to abridge the training or yank them out of it altogether in order to get some warm bodies into the fight.

If that happened it would be a disaster for Samruk and the people of Oaxaca. They had to intercept the cartel para-military soldiers before they could arrive back in Mexico. Their OPSEC was tight, the cartel men had been blindfolded and bussed down to the training center. None of them could locate it on a map.

But they did know that the hidden base had a VHF relay system to talk to the rest of the cartel in Mexico. In fact they had been adamant that the pirate net extended from Colombia all the way north, maybe even into the United States.

Now it was just a matter of figuring out how to back trace the signal and pinpoint the location of the training center. Then they had to get Samruk shooters to the camp.

Frank had a few ideas on both counts.

It was time to make some phone calls.

Kurt Jager supervised the packing of a deuce and a half truck full of weapons and ammunition. Samruk had inherited a sizable weapons cache from the Ortega compound and taken some more guns from Jimenez' boys. Now the mercenaries would be transferring them over to the Zapatista rebels they were to train. They could mothball their shot out rifles, but the guerrillas were going to need some more serious firepower for their so-called revolution.

The German was uneasy with Deckard's alliance with the communist fighters. On one hand, the locals saw communism as the only viable alternative to the cartels, the corrupt Mexican government, and western trans-national corporations invading their land. He didn't blame the people of Oaxaca and Chaipas for turning towards the Zapatisas but he was skeptical of their long term ambitions. Communism didn't have many success stories to brag about.

War was full of unsettling compromises. German, American, and other coalition forces had also trained and armed ambiguous groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seemed that this would be no different. Deckard was also hedging his bets.

Only train them to do the specific tasks that we need them to execute in order to defeat the cartel
, had been his parting advice to Kurt. He was to get them to a point where they could square off with the cartel but not duplicate the capabilities of Special Operations units. Not that they had time for that anyway. The former GSG-9 commando had a hasty program of instruction sketched out in his notebook. Some marksmanship drills and tactical training would probably be all they would have time for.

In the meantime he had selected three other contractors to accompany him. Thankfully they were former 7th Special Forces Group members. They spoke Spanish and had previous experience training soldiers in South and Central America. It was a good thing, too. They would need every edge they could find if they were going to be successful.

“Load up,” he ordered.

The four man FID cell jumped onto the deuce and a half and bolted the ramp shut. As the truck rumbled out the gate two assault trucks pulled up to escort them. They would be taken to a rendezvous point where the rebels would then take the four men and the weapons to their base somewhere in the jungle.

“Wait, wait,” Frank bust out as he stumbled alongside the truck.

The brakes squealed as the truck came to a halt.

“What is it?” Kurt asked.

“When you get out there and link up with the rebels I need you to pick a few and have one of your guys to be on standby for a mission.”

“What mission?”

“A recon down south!”

17

It was eight in the morning when Deckard walked across the tarmac in Cancun towards the half dozen heavies that were waiting for him. The sun was already beating down on his head and shoulders, the rising humidity hinting at the crippling heat that would come later in the day.

“No bags?” one of the Lebanese men asked as he approached.

“Nah,” Deckard said. “I figure I'll be shooting out on a flight later tonight anyhow.”

A thick necked gangster stepped forward with a metal detection wand in his hand. He wore a blue tracksuit and had a ghost of a beard that was supposed to be a substitute for his non-existent jaw line.

Deckard went along with the routine. He got wanded and then patted down. They quickly looked over his wallet and cell phone before handing them back. The passport was given slightly more scrutiny as the guy in the tracksuit flipped through the pages before returning it. They walked him into the terminal and straight through customs without having to submit any paperwork or have his passport stamped. The Lebanese men moved in a circle around Deckard as they escorted him through the automatic doors and out into the arrivals lane outside.

A black Ferrari waited for him.

“Over here,” the driver waved to him.

Deckard looked left to see the six man security detachment climb into a white panel van behind the sports car. He would be on his own with Bashir for at least a few minutes.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Deckard said as he opened the passenger side door. He was glad that it was a convertible with the roof off because it was difficult as it was to squeeze his frame into a car that rode so close the ground.

Bashir looked him dead in the eye as they shook hands.

“And you,” he smiled.

Shifting, the Lebanese money man stomped on the gas and they peeled out, accelerating down and out to the main strip of hotels at Cancun. The emerald green waters shot by on their left hand side while empty hotels flew past on the right. Deckard noted that they looked almost bombed out like some scene he had seen in the Middle East. They were half constructed in most cases, sitting empty. They only existed to launder drug money through.

“Staying long?” Bashir said taking his eyes off the road as they continued to accelerate to look at him.

“I'm afraid not,” Deckard said casually. “They want me back in Manhattan but I'm happy to stay as long as needed for us to come to an agreement that we are both comfortable with,” he forced a smile.

“I would love to do some business with your firm,” Bashir looked back on the road in time to swerve around a tour bus. “I've heard good things about McLaughlin and McLaughlin.”

“We have extensive experience in Central America,” Deckard confirmed.

It wasn't just a predisposition due to the information the Agency had given him. There was definitely something way off about Bashir. His mannerisms were overly confident, he looked at Deckard like a starving man would look at a bloody steak.