Threatcon Delta

 

 

 

 

 

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

I
t was the kind of dusk that made millennia melt away.

Sitting on a boulder on the side of the cliff, 2,100 feet above the Temecula Valley, it didn’t feel to Victor Yerby like it was December 4, 2014. A mild wind blowing at his back from the west made the palm fronds rustle above him, a low and lazy, slightly brittle sound. The chill in the clean air was common to nighttime on the edge of a desert, but warmer than usual for December. There was the slightest musky taste to it, the remains of a late-afternoon dust storm that blew through the fringes of the Inland Empire. Yerby had just been waking up when he saw it rolling below, big and billowy, just like it was pictured in the movies.

Now the cloudless black sky was already showing crisply marked stars. He could not hear the sounds of the thinning traffic on the distant Highway 15. On one end of the freeway, about ninety minutes west, was San Diego. Travel three and a half hours east and you were in Las Vegas. Here, well south of Los Angeles in mountains close to the border with Mexico, there was nothing but horse country and remnants of the Old West. Just now there were no planes, civilian or military, passing overhead. There were no sounds on the private road that dead-ended at a cliff. It seemed to him that this dark night could have been plucked from the pioneer days or even further back. It could just as easily have been 2014
B.C.E.
in some Middle Eastern desert. The few lights could easily be torches or campfires instead of homes.

Dressed in layers under a black sweater with leather elbow patches he had sewn on himself, with a black baseball cap turned around, the slender six-footer kept his eyes on the target zone toward his right, southeast, while his mind enjoyed the transporting nature of the environment. His borrowed house was a little farther down the hill behind him and all he could see on three sides were boulders, all he could hear were the fronds and the gently swaying high grasses with an occasional off-syncopation sound that he knew was a coyote moving through the brush. For the week he had been here he had not bothered the coyotes and they had not approached him. Perhaps it was the understanding and respect of one predator for another that made them circle wide.

Yerby wondered if someone in earlier times, sitting under the evening canopy, had thought about an even older era. Did people back then think past the generation of their parents or grandparents? Without machines, their days were probably more or less as quiet as their nights. And
night
meant when the sun went down. For most of history, that life had been the norm. This life, a life of electricity, was a relative novelty.

Yerby didn’t know if he would have been an officer of the law back then, a Texas Ranger in the Old West, a spearman in the
B.C.E.
Or was it his skill with firearms that had simply led him where he was? No, there was a bowie knife in a leather sheath attached to his belt. It felt right there. It always had. Maybe he just liked justice. Maybe he liked seeing one less bad guy in the world. After all, it wasn’t the gun that sent him to the DEA recruitment office when his hitch was done. There had been a—

His thoughts snapped back to the present.

Don’t let your mind roam too far,
he warned himself. He knew from long experience that snipers on stakeouts had to keep from getting bored, but they also couldn’t let their attention wander. He remembered one marksman in his army group, “Swamp Water” Andrews, who used to train in the Okefenokee where he grew up. He’d go into the swamp at dusk and let mosquitoes bite the hell out of him all night while he waited for deer that he knew wouldn’t show up until morning. He never allowed himself to swat the insects or scratch and was still motionless and focused when dawn brought his prey.

Yerby did not have that kind of obsession even when he was green. He was not like some Marines he knew who went around thrusting out their chests and admonishing strangers, “Hit me! Hit me!” He was a professional who got the job done without living the part. Even here, he was cautious enough to use a leafy branch to wipe out his tracks. There was no deep, secret part of him that longed for a face-to-face confrontation.

He continued to study the sky as he listened for a sound that was not flora or fauna. He didn’t know which of the lights above him were planets; the brightest was Venus, he guessed. He had always meant to get a telescope for the month he was out here in the mountaintop house. He had an NVWS-4 tactical medium-range night-vision Gen3 scope on his M40 but he only removed that when he was servicing the sniper rifle. He had been tempted to use it to look at the full moon when he first got here but the light might glint off the optics, off the weapon itself, and be seen by someone lower down on the mountain. He had selected this place because he didn’t want anyone to know he was here.

The house, a single-story structure built in the Mediterranean style, was at the very top of a gated community adjoining the Santa Rosa Plateau. It had been empty since the California real estate implosion over a decade before. Members of the property owners’ association cut the grasses back one hundred feet from the structure as mandated by local fire laws, but that was all they did. Field mice and insects had made the attic and chimney their home, respectively. Rattlesnakes and tarantulas moved unchallenged along the cracked concrete of the driveway.

But Yerby did not care. He slept in a sleeping bag during the day, had a well-stocked pantry for a month’s stay, and kept the lights out at night when he came out to watch the valley. This was not the desk job a twenty-year DEA man would have been entitled to had he wanted it, but Victor did not want that. He wanted to be in the field, doing what he had vowed to do ever since his older sister, Ginny, died of a heroin overdose: fight drugs, from the cartels to the mules who ferried the goods across the Mexican border to the dealers who gave them to kids to sell in schools. That wasn’t just the situation in Texas, where Yerby grew up; it was the same everywhere.

Satellite surveillance and a series of drone flyovers out of nearby Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton pinpointed this small town in Riverside County in Southern California as a pinch point for drug trafficking. Immigrants came right through the mountains. The Immigration and Naturalization Service didn’t bother them: that was considered profiling. Individual property owners had to make specific complaints against anyone, and they were loath to do that with suspected illegals. Most of the four hundred families who lived on the mountain had kids who stood at bus stops or chased monarch butterflies through the fields or rode horseback or ATVs on the trails. This was also a fire zone. One spitefully flicked cigarette could burn an area the size of Rhode Island. It was better to just look the other way.

Unless you were Victor Yerby.

Yerby sat on a low, flat rock, his rifle lying on a leather carrying case on the ground. Now and then he flexed his hands to make sure they were limber and ready. He watched the ridgeline to the south. That was where storms, fog, and illegals came in. He would see them plainly as they passed, blocking the lights of the spotty homes situated on minimum five-acre lots.

This was where one man in particular was supposed to be coming through: Danny Hernandez. The DEA had tracked him from Veracruz to Mexico City and that was where they lost him. He had gone silent when his private jet landed in the capital city: no electronics, no tickets, no credit card use. But the DEA knew where he was likely to come through since this was the route his mules took. Neither the DEA nor any other federal agency was willing to authorize a legal takedown. An arrest would get them nothing, given the lack of hard evidence against Hernandez. He was careful to keep his hands clean and no one ever ratted him out.

Until now. A tip from a worker in a drug field in Jalapa, the capital of the Mexican state of Veracruz, had brought them here. The worker had needed the cash and got it. Within twenty-four hours the money and the headless informant turned up in several canvas sacks in a Dumpster.

But Danny Hernandez was here on a special mission—special because it would make him an international political player, not just the head of a leading cartel. Intelligence suggested that he was here to negotiate using the mule train to smuggle bioweapons into the United States. Hernandez had hooked up with pro-Islamic radicals in Iran thanks to the orchestrations of Ricardo Ramirez, a Venezuelan mobster whose international ambitions had progressed further and faster than those of his old friend Hernandez.

The Iranians were cautious, however. If they were going to spend millions of dollars to send materials with Hernandez, they wanted to know the goods would be safe. They wanted him to prove the security of the route by taking it personally.

From the government’s perspective, this event was too big to risk official intervention. Yerby was with the Special Operations Division, the black-ops group of the DEA. They were the only ones who risked off-the-book activities. It was easier to insulate these players from discovery—and from leaks—if they were all in one secure place.

For Yerby, that place was not Washington, D.C., with the rest of his colleagues. It was El Paso, Texas, from which the war on border incursions was being waged with an eye on arrest and prosecution. That never sat well with Yerby, a bounty hunter at heart who had grown up in Laredo, Texas, in the late 1960s. That was long before
terrorists
became the default word for religious and racial sociopaths. He had seen what fear could do to communities—fear of outsiders who brought desperation instead of hope, who brought illegal substances to stoke the rebelliousness of youth, who looked to infiltrate and erode instead of join and build. People on the outside, the well-meaning citizens in big cities, wanted to embrace and rehabilitate all the floundering souls whoever they were and however they entered the land. That was a nice thought, but that took time and money. And while a few souls fleeing monstrous poverty in Mexico might be saved, a greater number of young in America were lost: All it took was one desperate illegal with a backpack full of heroin to ruin a few dozen lives—not just the junkies but the people they robbed to feed their habits or enlisted to share their addiction.

Yerby had escaped from the memories and impotence he felt by enlisting in the army. He had been raised by a widower auto-mechanic father who had a big home garden and taught him to put the eyes out of jackrabbits. Yerby displayed proficiency with long-range firearms and was one of the first snipers to be trained as such. Before that, according to the old-timers who had served in Vietnam, marksmen were just guys who could shoot really, really well. Most of them were singled out for sniping missions only after they were in-country. That changed in the mid-1970s when, following the trail blazed by the Marines in 1969, snipers were recruited, trained, and put in special units. Yerby served in one of those units. He spent time in the Sinai in 1980 as part of Operation Bright Star, training with Egyptian armed forces as a result of the Camp David peace accords signed the year before. There, he readily volunteered to help Egyptian officials capture a hashish boat smuggling along the eastern coast. Yerby liked that work. He liked it a lot. He liked seeing the men tried and hanged for their crime.

After that, he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

As far as everyone in his office knew, Yerby was on vacation right now. He had just turned fifty and no one begrudged “the geezer” the ample downtime his seniority had earned him. Of course, he was rarely on a real vacation. He preferred stakeouts like this one, where he could wait to take out some of the nastiest smugglers on earth.

Only DEA administrator Ryan Beit and deputy administrator Deborah Brook knew what he was really doing—and even that, unofficially. There were no e-mails, no phone conversations that could be recorded. Brook met Yerby at a roadside diner in Las Cruces, passed along what intel she had, and that was it. Yerby made his own “vacation” arrangements and every expense went on his own credit card, from the gas it took to drive here to renting the mountaintop aerie.

The world was so quiet here, so remote. Yerby wondered if this was the kind of place to which he would someday retire, a place where golden eagles soared and field mice jockeyed for survival.

If you ever retire,
he thought. Bad people preying on the vulnerable or innocent would always rouse him from an easy chair—

All his senses sharpened as his eyes, adjusted to darkness, noticed motion on the ridgeline. He saw a short, stubby caterpillar of black, a crawling silhouette of humanity against the slightly dimmer black behind it.

He slid from his rock perch, picked up the rifle, and leaned forward on the boulder. He peered through the scope. Yerby melded almost organically with the weapon. The joints of his fingers, the skin of his fingertips, all found their familiar places on their own. His eye was on the green-tinted figures nearly one mile distant. Ironically, this was how he knew Hernandez: from grainy night-vision images obtained by the Mexican army—remarkably, the only group in that country waging a war on the powerful cartels. And that was really no more than a holding action, since the cartels were growing exponentially in wealth and power, and in the ruthless execution of that power.

Yerby watched the illegal immigrants move slowly. These were not the poor ones who paid an outrageous fee to be stuffed into trucks or the holds of boats. These were the poor ones who agreed to work for the Hernandez Cartel in exchange for safe passage. They were shown where the underground tunnel border crossings were. They were escorted by armed guards into the United States. They were met by guides who transported them to safe houses. Once they were shown the route they were expected to make three years of crossings, carrying drugs. During that time their families were watched back in Mexico. If the drugs did not arrive, the families were made to pay for the loss. Especially the daughters, whose mothers were given a choice: watch them be raped and killed, or have them sent into prostitution. If a mother chose the latter, she was spared having to witness the rape.