There was one word that Ross used twice, a dirty word that Kozak never liked to hear prior to a mission:
Booby trap.
Triggering one would blow the team’s cover and get themselves killed without permission. ‘Don’t do that,’ Ross had said. They’d all seen too many good men lose their lives or get maimed because the enemy wasn’t man enough to face them.
When Ross was finished, Kozak called him and said, ‘Ghost Lead, I have one more idea. I think our primary drone is stuck in a tree — which gets me thinking: let me park the secondary up in a tree near those buildings.’
‘I like your style, Kozak. Do it,’ he ordered.
Kozak grinned inwardly, then reached back into the drone holster attached to his utility belt and hanging from his right hip. The secondary UAV’s rotors were folded inward, shrinking the craft into a Frisbee-size package that was deployed in nearly the same fashion.
‘Okay, baby, don’t let me down,’ he whispered.
And with that he tugged out the UAV and tossed it into the air. The quadrotors automatically expanded and activated, and the drone lifted off, veering chaotically into the night. Kozak plugged in the target zone, and now the drone would fly automatically to that area and hover, awaiting its next command — if it didn’t crash first.
‘Ghost Lead, the drone’s deployed,’ he said, then he jogged up behind 30K, who was already slipping furtively into the jungle. ‘Hey, bro, you ready for this?’
‘What do you think?’
‘If anything happens —’
‘Dude, now you sound like Pepper,’ said 30K. ‘We only need one prophet of doom on this team.’
‘Pepper’s not like that.’
‘You ain’t been around him long enough. Trust me.’
‘Well, if anything happens to me —’
‘Look, we’re going in there to get our package and get out. These punks with water pistols don’t stand a chance. They’re waiting on line to get some from the United States Army. You read me?’
‘Hell to the yeah,’ said Kozak.
He knew exactly how to draw a pep talk out of 30K, one that always made him feel better before the first shot was fired.
And speaking of first shots, Ross had been emphatic about that. No screwups. The captain had even painted the post-op picture for them:
Later on, after the raid, when the rebels found their dead and dying comrades, one of them — about to die himself — would look up into the burning eyes of his commander, shudder, and say, ‘We never saw them.’
ELEVEN
Ross and Pepper were tucked so tightly into the tangled roots and thickets of the mangroves that their optical camouflage could remain off.
Recon time.
En route to this position, they had encountered two trip wires and had quietly avoided them while marking the surrounding trees with tiny, LED-lit sensors that transmitted each trip wire’s location via the Cross-Coms. Those coordinates were placed on the team’s operational map. They had then spotted a series of planks creating a path through the jungle, one assumedly used by the drug gangs, but Ross and Pepper kept about three meters to the left, sticking to the mud, noting and marking yet three more trip wires at ankle height, above the aforementioned path. Several more calls came over the Cross-Com, with more booby traps IDed and avoided, and then, each team called in to report they were in their recon positions.
Their approach had gone down by the numbers — and while that should have comforted Ross, it didn’t.
The dry dock warehouses were situated on the north side of the river, about ten meters from the shoreline, and they must have been there for some time. The vines, shrubs and other aggressive weeds had moved up along their walls and were spreading across their roofs like a dark green rash, while other vines hanging down from the trees and draping across the warehouses helped disguise their man-made angles. Ross was certain that the FARC and Los Rastrojos troops had given Mother Nature a helping hand, shifting foliage so that it would help with the overall effect, and the outcome was impressive. You had to stare hard to discern the buildings.
Opposite the warehouses stood a rickety-looking dock, about a meter wide and ten meters long, with a few of the pilings leaning unnervingly to the right. The narcosub, whose hull was painted a flat olive drab, sat moored to the dock, bobbing as the wind whipped waves up to her sail.
Ross switched to night vision, and the lens mounted on his helmet turned his Cross-Com’s HUD to phosphorescent green. He confirmed the locations of the four guards standing at the larger dry dock, and the two others huddling beneath a small awning near the second.
The rain was magic and had driven a larger contingent of the Rastrojos and FARC troops inside, seeking cover, and if they’d moved the package into the submarine, there was no clear evidence. Ross deployed a sensor, noting more than twenty individuals inside the structures. The sub was here. The package was most likely here …
So what the hell had they been waiting for?
His answer came in the next breath.
Two late-model SUVs appeared from another trail leading down from the north, and they rolled up alongside the warehouses, the beams of their headlights filled with rain.
‘Well, look at that,’ muttered Pepper. ‘It’s a real party now.’
Ross called the team: ‘All right, everybody, listen up. Two vehicles just arrived. Hold your positions.’
A storm would hardly delay the departure of a submarine; in fact, the sub captains preferred to launch at night, with no moon, and in bad weather to help cloak their exit. While it was true that high seas could wreak havoc once the sub hit open water, the real reason for the delay became unsurprisingly clear:
The drivers of the SUVs jumped out, ran around to the backs of their vehicles, lifted the tailgates, and after a loud whistle, they were joined by about a dozen men from the warehouses. These men formed two lines and began moving plastic milk crates stacked with bricks of cocaine from one man to the next, a ‘brick brigade’ to deliver the cocaine from the trucks and across the dock, where the gunman from the submarine had jumped down to receive each crate and hand it back to another man standing in the sail. The bricks themselves were about the size of a trade paperback book, and the crates were square and small enough to squeeze through the sub’s tight hatch.
‘They’re killing two birds,’ said Pepper. ‘Figured they’d move their hostage along with their drugs, but they were waiting on these guys.’
‘And waiting for the second storm to move in,’ said Ross. ‘Bad move all around.’
Pepper snorted. ‘Yeah, it’s almost Biblical. Greed gets you every time.’
‘Amen,’ said Ross. He took in a deep breath to clear his thoughts. ‘Okay, we gotta move now. If he’s in the warehouse, they’ll bring him out as soon as they finish.’
‘No doubt,’ said Pepper.
Ross called the team and the AFEUR troops: ‘This is it, guys. Point team is moving out. Get into your secondaries.’
The river’s surface was alive with a billion dimples from the falling rain as he and Pepper drifted out from the gnarled roots and submerged. With their heads just a few inches beneath the surface, Ross suspected they were already well hidden. Being in the water felt perfect, natural, and holding his breath was a skill he’d honed for more than twenty years, beginning with the old drownproofing test during his BUD/S training. Hands bound behind your back, they tossed you into a pool, and the fun began. No reason to panic, right? He’d done well. Some of his colleagues couldn’t make it that far, had freaked out, and had rung the bell to drop.