Avery’s intuition told him that the Viper was long gone anyway. She already knew she was in danger. She wasn’t going to sit around in the middle of the desert waiting to be attacked, and he didn’t believe that she’d abort everything and fly out at the first sign of danger.
He reckoned she had a forty-five minute head start to the border, but maybe in her haste she’d left something behind at the airstrip, something to point them in the right direction. They knew from the aerial recon that there were still men at the airstrip. Maybe one of them could be convinced to talk.
With the others, Avery listened with bated breath to the radio transmissions coming into the command trailer from the assault team while staring intently at the feed from the Predators, watching the takedown play out in real time.
Part of him hoped that GAFE would find the Viper on the spot and end this.
A bigger part of him hoped that she’d gotten away, was getting closer north by the minute, closer to him, thereby giving him another shot at her. With lives on the line, he knew it was a selfish and shitty way to think, but that’s how he felt.
The Blackhawks arrived on target twenty-six minutes after takeoff. The squads of special ops paratroopers clad in gray and white camou fatigues and web harnesses, brandishing carbine assault rifles, expertly fast-roped to the ground at their designated drop zones and simultaneously hit the storage building and the garage.
A brief firefight ensued — on the monitor Avery saw the tiny figures running across the airstrip and take firing positions, and the exchange of muzzle flashes. But GAFE possessed superior numbers, training, and firepower, and they quickly overcame the cartel’s ragtag collection of hired shooters. Within fifteen seconds, four cartel gunmen were killed. Another was wounded, and another, a mechanic, was found cowering beneath a pick-up truck in the garage.
There was no sign of the Viper, which came as no surprise to Avery. He’d known it ten seconds after the Blackhawks were still in the air. If she or her agents were present with the missiles, those helicopters would have been knocked right out of the sky.
One of the prisoners reported that the Viper was headed toward the border. He didn’t know where or how Silva’s men intended to get her across, but he provided a description of the vehicles in which her party had left about thirty minutes earlier.
She was accompanied by a cartel lieutenant named Carlos, a four man Zeta escort, and two of her own men, one of which was described as a crazy Latino, the other an intense Caucasian who spoke like a North American.
Avery frowned upon hearing that particular update over the radio.
Caucasian? That was obviously the foreign operative Sean Nolan had reported, but he definitely didn’t sound like an Iranian operative.
The Predators scoured the surrounding desert immediately north of the airfield. Following the highways going in that direction, they worked their way toward the border. All police units in Tijuana were likewise given a description of the vehicles in which the Viper’s contingent travelled, and so were ICE, Border Patrol, and California police on the American side of the border, where additional drones were put to the sky. The FBI also deployed an assault element of its Critical Incident Response Group that had been in Houston that morning to resolve a hostage situation at a bank.
Twenty-six miles north of the airstrip, the Predators picked up two trucks matching the description provided by the captured cartel men exiting a highway and speeding along a rural back road. The drone pilot in the trailer stayed on the pair of dark blue Chevy Silverados with covered beds, and enhanced the zoom lens on the Predator’s 950mm spotter.
“It’s her,” Avery said. “Let’s move.”
“I will redeploy the GAFE element,” Padilla said.
Avery shook his head. “They’re almost fifty miles off target now. We’re closer, and we have the DEA choppers right here.”
“You don’t have jurisdiction,” Padilla protested, but then he saw the look on Avery’s face, and he thought again of the missiles the Viper carried. “My officers and I are coming with. Officially, it’s a Federal Police operation, with advisory and support from DEA.”
“Fine,” Avery said. “But the Viper’s mine.”
Slayton stepped up behind Padilla.
“If she crosses the border, then we vector ICE and Border Patrol to intercept her. No arguments.”
Slayton had more to say, but Avery had already left the trailer. Passing Aguilar and Diego on his way to retrieve his rifle from the Forerunner, he said, “We’re up.”
They grabbed their gear and jogged across the tarmac to the Bell UH-1s. They climbed aboard one of the choppers, waiting for Slayton and the DEA and Federal Police agents to catch up and pile into the second chopper.
Six minutes later, with the drone pilots vectoring them in, they were twelve thousand feet in the air over Tijuana, flying southwest on a course to intercept the target vehicles.
Strapped into the open cabin, with his M4 secured diagonally across his vest, Avery watched the city streets and highways whip by below. As they cleared the city, the terrain became flat, dusty, and brown, less developed and less populated, the way he liked it.
The net was closing on the Viper, but if she made it over the border, then Avery would lose his shot at her. Plus more American lives would be lost. Avery knew she wasn’t going to allow ICE or FBI to put the cuffs on her and read her rights. It was best to end this here, quickly.
From the front passenger seat of the lead Silverado, Benito Trujillo squinted against the rays of sunlight shining through the windshield. He craned his head to get a better look around the extended visor as the truck bounced along over the cracked, crumbling desert road.
There… as the road inclined slightly over a hill, he saw it again, a small black shape fluttering in the sky just off the horizon.
From the rear passenger seat of the extended cab, the Viper noticed that something caught Trujillo’s attention, and asked, “What is it?”
“I see a helicopter.”
Trujillo turned around in his seat to face the Viper and Sidran. Carlos drove, but Trujillo had the Mexican’s full attention now too. Carlos’s eyes searched the sky, but he saw nothing beyond the sun’s glare.
“I don’t see anything,” Carlos said.
“It’s there. Trust me. We’re being followed.” Trujillo set his gaze on Carlos and repositioned the Uzi in his hands. “Friends of yours maybe?”
“Not in a fucking helicopter,” Carlos said. “It’s the federales.”
To the Viper, Trujillo said, “We should have checked his phone. Maybe he already contacted the cops.”
Carlos began to sweat despite the air conditioning blowing against him. “I didn’t bring them here, I swear. Perhaps we should find a safe place to stay low, and try for the border later.”
“Keep driving,” the Viper ordered, wondering if Carlos forgot what was in those cases loaded on the truck’s bed. “Helicopters aren’t a problem.”
Carlos hit the accelerator, and the truck rapidly gained speed.
“They’re speeding up. I think they spotted us.”
“Move in,” Avery said in response to the DEA pilot. “We’ll intercept them on the road.”
“Hold on,” the pilot replied as he listened to instructions from the command trailer. Then to Avery, he responded, “That’s a negative. We’ll stay back and give them some room. There are civilian vehicles within the target’s vicinity. Besides, we still have the Predators on them. They’re not getting away from us.”