with the home’s two luxury pools and Trane air-conditioning system, it was too unbearable to live there this time of year. So he had made the annual trek up north to his “eagle’s nest” on the side of the mountain.
Normally at this time of day, the short and stocky man, who shared the same anatomical shape as his infamous younger brother, would have been standing outside on the veranda smoking an excellent cigar. Had Napoleon been outside, he might have accidentally caught the glint of sunlight on a wing high above the canyon floor. It’s doubtful, however, that he would have accurately identified it as a Heron, an Israeli-manufactured, medium-altitude, long-endurance drone similar in capabilities to the more famous U.S.-manufactured Predator. The Heron contained a standard video optical surveillance package, but it had also been equipped with forward- looking infrared radar and ELINT (electronic intelligence) packages. But Pearce Systems had modified the surveillance drone, weaponizing it with two hard points on the wings for missile racks.
The Heron gave Stella Kang both eyes and ears on the ground and in the house. Phone intercepts of Castillo’s brother and his physician indicated that Napoleon was sick in bed. Advance surveillance had already identified several people inside the hacienda, including Napoleon’s young American-born wife, Suzanna, and his three American “anchor babies,” his preteen daughters Luisa, Carlita, and Victoria. Earlier, Stella had counted only two guards on the estate, but right now one was at the pharmacy and the other was in town, drinking.
Stella’s explicit orders from Pearce were to limit the strike to Napoleon only. With the drug lord hunkered down beneath his bedsheets with a fever, a missile strike was out of the question. Stella’s partner, Johnny Paloma, was a former LAPD SWAT team leader. He had parked himself behind a McMillan Tac-50 sniper rifle, but now that wasn’t an option, either. Time also wasn’t Stella’s friend. The other strike teams were already in motion and she desperately wanted to be the first team with a kill.
Stella fell on her backup plan and redeployed Johnny. Minutes later, he was ripping around the curving single-lane mountain road on a Yamaha YZ450F bike. When he reached the hacienda, he slowed down enough to reach into his backpack and toss the ten-pound surveillance drone onto the pavement, then he gunned the engine and raced away.
The iRobot 110 FirstLook drone was about the size and shape of an old encyclopedia, and was outfitted with tracks instead of wheels, along with cameras on both ends. It didn’t matter which way it landed when you tossed it because it could roll in both directions, and it had rotator arms that could right it without much difficulty if it flipped onto its back.
Stella was two miles away at her laptop control station. She was a very patient and stealthy operator, but the Heron overhead showed her the coast was clear. The drone scurried toward an open gate in the back and paused while Stella checked for an entry point. She found it. One of the sliding glass doors had been left open.
Once inside the house, the robot rolled along almost silently on the pink terrazzo tiles that covered all of the floors. It even climbed the staircase with relative ease. One of the cleaning staff, Rosa, saw it scrambling silently down the hallway. She laughed to herself, assuming it was some new toy that belonged to one of the girls. She didn’t watch it long enough to observe it duck into the master suite and take up position in Napoleon’s private bathroom.
Napoleon Castillo didn’t notice the drone when he came stumbling in. The iRobot was parked just behind the toilet when he pulled down his pajama trousers and lowered his flabby, sweating buttocks onto the cool porcelain seat. He was so preoccupied lighting a cigarette that he barely noticed the tracked drone when it rolled out from behind the toilet and parked itself between his feet.
Castillo didn’t hear the explosion.
His brain barely perceived the blinding flash, and that for only an instant. He was dead before the slower- moving sound waves could strike his eardrum and stimulate the aural nerve. In fact, his entire brain case, including the aural nerve, had been splattered like an overripe melon against the bathroom wall tiles, which were also a lustrous pink terrazzo.
But far down the hallway in another room, Rosa heard the explosion. To her, it sounded more like a thump. She shrugged and figured if there was a mess to clean up, Mr. Castillo would call her soon enough.
“Target down,” Stella reported to Pearce.
“Proceed to your exfiltration route, Stella. Tell your team they won the case of beer. You were first on the board.”
“Thank you, sir. Will do. We’re moving and grooving.”
“Roger that.”
Nogales, Mexico
ICE had discovered several smuggling tunnels leading from Mexico to the United States over the past few years by employing sophisticated ground-penetrating radar. The earlier tunnels they had uncovered were relatively shallow and crudely dug by unemployed local miners who carved small niches into the rock every hundred yards or so. The niches were crowded with plastic saints, melted candles, and strips of paper with prayers for protection for both the miners and the travelers, mostly smuggled migrants.
The more recent tunnels were somewhat deeper and more sophisticated by an order of magnitude, displaying a level of engineering prowess beyond the reach of day laborers. Sheer walls, wooden floors, and a lighting system were standard. It was unclear to ICE who had designed or built the tunnels, but they were definitely paid for by the Castillo Syndicate for running drugs and people under the heavily secured surface above. They were probably four to five times as expensive to construct as well.
What the ICE teams hadn’t figured out yet was that at least half of the shallow tunnels were meant to be found in order to absorb ICE’s scarce investigative resources, while the deeper tunnels continued sluicing major profits back to the syndicate. These latter tunnels were highly sophisticated cement structures, designed and built by a Chinese engineering firm specializing in military construction projects for the People’s Liberation Army. One even contained a small rail-car system.
The most important smuggling tunnel in the network was also linked to an underground meth lab, as well as to sleeping quarters and offices for Alejandro Castillo and his lieutenants. Pearce and his team had found it almost by accident. Ian had intercepted a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers geological survey recently conducted in the area that speculated about the existence of a new smuggling tunnel network. The report hadn’t made its way up the chain of command yet, let alone into the interagency data stream.
August Mann was in charge of this operation. He based his plan to take out the tunnel complex on a similar job he’d carried out in Ukraine last year before taking on the Dungeness project. He even flew in the same group of subcontractors he’d used to pull it off. Twenty-four hours earlier, his intel team had flown a miniature 3-D mapping camera drone through the underground maze that had generated a perfect image of the tunnel complex. Two hours ago, the same drone cameras had located and identified the tunnel occupants, all of whom carried weapons. That made all of them fair game.
August stationed an insertion team at the tunnel exit on the American side, and an insertion team at the tunnel entrance on the Mexican side. The American exit was located inside of a Castillo-owned tire warehouse; the Mexican entrance was located inside of a blue stucco Assemblies of God church, also owned by the Castillo organization. Both ends of the tunnel were lightly guarded by a few armed men stationed aboveground.
When the six tunnel occupants had bedded down for the night, August signaled both teams to take out the tunnel guards. August didn’t want the robots to have all of the fun. He let his human team members drop the tunnel guards with suppressed rifle fire.
After cutting all of the power down in the hole, each insertion team lowered two Talon SWORDS tracked robots into their respective entrances. The large suitcase-portable tracked vehicles were loaded out with similar packages. In addition to video optics, two of the tracks were mounted with 6mm grenade launchers and 5.56mm semiauto rifles; the other two tracks were outfitted with breaching devices and smoke delivery systems.
One of both types of drone was dropped in each entrance, along with signal relay boosters to ensure continuous video feeds and radio-control operation of the Talons from the surface.
August watched the green, ghostly night-vision images of the chaos wrought by the robots with scientific detachment. Groggy, blinded in the dark, and choking on smoke, the defenders shot wildly at the mechanical sounds they heard in the lightless void, but within minutes, the first five targets had been gunned down or shredded with grenade fragments.
The lone survivor, Alejandro Castillo, had miraculously escaped into an office space and bolted the heavy
