She was aware that the southern accent needed some work but she’d watched all the episodes of Dukes of Hazzard she could stand.
“I’m glad you like it,” Gonzales said, grinning. “I keep it just for ladies like you.”
“Well, thankee,” Katya said. “But you know the one thing here that’s wrong?”
“What?” Gonzales said, furrowing his brow. “Simply ask and it shall be yours.”
“You’re not having any fun!” Katya said, squeezing her tits together and pouring some of the tequila into the skin-lined cup. “Body shots!”
Gonzales grinned and leaned forward, sucking the raw tequila out of the crevice.
“WHOO-HOO!” Katya hooted, pouring in another shot.
This was a lot better than getting beat up.
Lilia frowned at the beeping. There were so many systems in the room and one of them was always beeping. But she couldn’t figure out which one it was this time.
She spun back and forth in her station chair, looking for the source then, when it wasn’t apparent, started hunting around the compartment.
“What?” Greznya said. She was compiling a report on known smuggling methods. Most of them related to drug smuggling, but people quite often tried the same methods without realizing they were reinventing the wheel.
“You hear that?” Lilia asked, turning her head from side to side.
“No,” Greznya said, looking around. But Lilia was a top voice analyst for a reason; she had phenomenal ears.
Lilia finally tracked the sound to a case, one of the many they’d used to bring the gear over. It was third down in a stack. After she’d gotten to it she popped the latches and looked at the laptop sized device. A blue light was flashing on the edge and every few seconds it let out a “beep.”
“Low battery?” Lilia asked, lifting the box out of the foam cocoon. The fact that she’d been able to detect the beeping through the foam was testament to her hearing.
“No,” Greznya said, coming over and taking it from her. “You weren’t on the Balkans op.”
“That’s Katya’s box,” Julia said from across the room. “What the hell is it doing?”
“I don’t know,” Greznya said, sliding a USB cable between the box and her computer. She brought up the communications software, then punched in her security code. Immediately, the data screen started to scroll.
“The reason it was beeping was that its memory was getting full,” Greznya said.
“We dumped it after the last mission,” Julia pointed out.
“Yes, but it’s been receiving for the last two days.”
“Katya’s here?” Mike asked.
“Yes, sir,” Greznya replied. “She is currently a guest of a man with a boat not far from us. Close enough that we’ve been getting her take for the last two days. We didn’t know that. Sorry.”
“Who?” Mike said, frowning.
“Juan Gonzales,” Greznya said, sliding over a folder. “Suspected cocaine smuggler. Known for all practical purposes, but nobody will arrest him due to lack of evidence.”
“Interesting,” Mike said.
“We’ve been worried about drug smugglers hooking up with Al Qaeda for a while,” Britney said. “One of the reasons we’ve got the Narc Shop. But if he’s actually working with them, well, that’s a first.”
“And one that we’re going to discourage,” Mike said. “Very directly. We know anything about his methods?”
“Various,” Greznya said. “Sometimes he’ll send shipments hidden in containers. Some have been caught, others… presumably not. He’s used planes in the past. A current method involves fast boats. They come in from offshore and drop bundles off. They’ve been caught with the bundles but Coast Guard and DEA have never figured out how they make rendezvous. And they don’t know where the cocaine comes from. The boats don’t have the range to make it all the way from Colombia.”
“Lots of islands around,” Mike said. “Famously. Lots of ways to transfer it, too. But transferring in closer… They probably rendezvous with boats offshore.”
“Won’t work,” Britney said, walking across the office. “Greznya asked me to sit in on this one.”
“Lieutenant Harder has experience in this area,” Greznya said.
“I thought you were Army?” Mike said.
“South American desk of SOCOM,” Britney replied, sitting down and crossing her legs. “We do a lot of counter drug ops. I spend more time in the DEA database than in Harmony.”
“So why won’t rendezvousing offshore work?” Mike asked, leaning back.
“You said you’d lived down here,” Britney said. “You’ve seen those big balloons they have a couple of places in the keys and such?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “They’re radar balloons, I know that. But one boat… There are a lot of boats around here, Britney.”
“Sure are,” Britney said. “The daily take is over forty thousand tracks including all flights. But the tracks are all dumped to a supercomputer, continuously, that has pattern recognition software. If a boat that heads inshore to the U.S. waters meets a boat that is from outside territorial waters or just coming out of Bimini or the Cut or whatever, that incoming boat is tagged. And the Coast Guard, nine times out of ten, does a ‘safety inspection.’ Boats running down the coast, outside territorial waters, have a lower tag rate. They could be going anywhere. Boats going out and coming in, lower still. Fishermen go out and come in every day, thousands and thousands of them. No way you can stop them all.”
“So what’s going on?” Mike asked. “Any theories?”
“Sure, lots,” Britney said. “Some of Gonzales’ boats have been stopped and found to contain illicit substances. Those are seized. There’s some of his and a bunch more of other cartels’ sitting in the Hollywood boat yard awaiting auction. Others were empty. They might have already gotten rid of their cargo; they might have just been testing the system. The Colombians do that, too. It’s a real cat and mouse game. If you want the number one theory, they’re dumping them, somewhere, and then other people pick them up.”
“Run a boat out,” Mike said, musingly. “Do a dive. Hey, it’s in the middle of nowhere, but maybe the guy found a new reef to spearfish…”
“Exactly,” Britney said.
“Hard as hell to figure out,” Mike said. “Even with the radar and supercomputer. Boats have got to cross tracks all the damned time. If you’re smart you drop a small buoy and the diver on the spot. The diver goes down, does his thing, comes back up, signals the boat. The current has already carried him away from the track. The boat comes back, picks him up, moves on. There’s a bunch of problems, though.”
“There are?” Britney asked, raising an eyebrow.
“They’re going to need to follow a general track,” Mike said, still looking at the ceiling. “So they’re going to have to have orders on what track to follow. And they’re going to need to know approximately where to drop on the track. Last, they’re going to have to tell somebody where, exactly, they dropped. And that information is going to have to be passed to whoever is fishing the shit out of the water. That’s bi-directional information flow. And you’re not going to be able to do much of it via straight transfer. That is, if somebody picks up a phone and says ‘The cookies are at x coordinates,’ eventually somebody is going to pick that up in an intercept. Then your shit gets fished up by a sheriff’s dive team.”