Senator Diele stood at his picture window admiring the lights of the city. He was on his cell phone, grinning. Alliances were quickly forming. Myers had finally gone too far.
“Yes, Mr. Vice President. I suppose we do.”
San Pedro Garza Garcia, Mexico
Target 03 lived in a quiet, tree-lined suburban city just southeast of the Universidad de Monterrey, one of Mexico’s finest institutions of higher education. Separated from the great sprawling metropolis of Monterrey a few miles to the east by the Rio Santa Catarina, it was a safe and tranquil place to raise his family away from the terror and carnage of the cartel turf wars.
Until tonight.
Target 03 had been visually acquired three hours prior. The drone operator was waiting for everyone in the sprawling house to settle down for the night. Infrared sensors onboard the MQ-9 Reaper verified his location and, more important, the location of the rest of the family. Drone Command orders were to minimize collateral damage if at all possible.
As soon as his wife and four children were bedded down, Target 03 stepped outside by the pool. The sharp flare on his image indicated he was lighting up a cigarette. He then dialed his cell phone. The call to his mistress was recorded for a voice confirmation.
The drone operator checked the time again. 10:59:57 p.m. EST. The president’s speech would begin in three seconds. She watched the seconds tick off, then armed the Reaper’s two laser-guided 70mm Lockheed Martin DAGR rockets, which were much smaller versions of the more famous Hellfire missiles and were intended to minimize collateral damage. The operator was given authority to fire at will.
She did.
The operator’s screen erupted in a halo of white-hot flame. When the halo dimmed, she recorded the result.
A smoldering crater.
Smashed concrete and tile.
Chunks of warm meat that glowed white with heat in the cold rectangle of the pool.
“Mission completed,” she added.
Twelve extended-range (ER) MQ-9 Reaper drones had been deployed that night, fanning out all across Mexico from private airfields just across the border. Mounting two extra fuel tanks on hard points originally designed for weapons, the modified Reapers had nearly double the range of their predecessors, allowing them to strike deep into Mexico. Most fired rockets, others were specially fitted with rotary weapons for low-altitude strikes. Both kinds of weapons systems proved equally effective, achieving similar results to the Target 03 mission, most within a few hours of one another.
A speeding convoy of three armored Chevy Suburbans racing for Nuevo Laredo was strafed with armor- piercing rounds. Targets 09, 11, and 13 were shredded in the assault along with a dozen unidentified armed associates.
In Guadalajara, a 70mm DAGR rocket smashed through the plate-glass window of Target 04’s twenty-fifth- floor penthouse suite. She and the two men she slept with were turned to smoking chum by the white-hot flechettes of molten glass from the initial strike. Had they survived the first blast, the explosive round would have finished the job.
Incendiary slugs ignited the gas tank of a seventy-foot bay cruiser anchored a half mile off of the coast of Veracruz, burning Target 25 to death, along with his heavily armed crew.
Target 08 drowned, trapped inside his vessel when it sank to the bottom of Lake Chapala, strafed by radar-controlled gunfire.
Targets 05 (Campeche) and 20 (Durango) were believed critically wounded by separate Reaper strikes, but confirmation of death was still pending.
Squads of commandos handpicked by Cruzalta took out six more targets with old-school wet work (blades, garrotes, semiauto pistols) while off-duty
But not everything went according to plan that night. Target 01—Victor Bravo—was located at a fortified compound in rural Chiapas. Two extended-range Reapers were dispatched for the high-value target; rockets were loosed. Bravo escaped, miraculously, when the first rocket misfired and veered off course, alerting him to the attack. Three unidentifieds were killed.
A total of nineteen of the twenty-five primary Mexican targets had been eliminated. The rest were on the run.
The attacks in the U.S. were equally successful. Seventeen of twenty-five primary targets were taken out with no civilian collateral damage, including Bravo’s top lieutenants in Washington State, Texas, and Louisiana. In the end, there was surprisingly little protest over the use of drones themselves against American citizens. The public understood that it ultimately made no difference if the American targets were killed with bullets fired from manned or unmanned vehicles. Bad guys were bad guys and dead was dead.
Pearce had selected a strike team for ground operations to take out targets not accessible by remote control. But he held his own people in reserve for a snatch-and-grab of Ali Abdi in the event they ever located him. Privately, Pearce was concerned that Ali had somehow slipped the net and made it back to Iran.
By any measure, the initial decapitation strike had been a brilliant success—better than they could have hoped. What it led to next, however, nobody could have foreseen.
San Diego, California
Pearce was stuck in traffic. Again. It fouled his already lousy mood.
“Still no leads on Ali?” Pearce grumbled. His tech wizard Ian was on the other end.
“The problem is too many leads. I can’t process the data flow fast enough.” The million-square-foot Utah Data Center was gushing a torrent of data—billions of bytes per hour—and all Ian had, comparatively, was a sippy cup to catch it with.
“Thanks. Call when you have something.” Pearce signed off.
The San Diego–Coronado Bridge was jammed in both directions and so was Harbor Drive. Unless he wanted to abandon his car in the middle of the road and walk over the bridge, he’d just have to sit here and enjoy the view. California dreamin’.
There were worse views in the world. God knows, he’d seen them. Had even caused some of them. But his frustration was at an all-time high. He knew that almost any code could be cracked given enough computing power and time. Ian had the computing power—backed by the limitless resources of the federal government. Unfortunately, it was Pearce who had the time on his hands, and waiting for a breakthrough was killing him. Ali Abdi must have been one hell of an operator. He certainly knew the first rule of the game.
They can’t hurt you if they can’t find you.
Pearce’s one consolation was the electronic billboard flashing up ahead. A slideshow of most-wanted listers, their faces, names, and stats rolling past, each slide ending with the promise of a $100,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest of…” He’d seen them all over Southern California. They’d been posted all over the country as well. There weren’t many names left. Right now, Pearce hoped that one of those asshats would get captured or turn themselves in and spill the beans on Ali Abdi. That was as likely as this traffic jam clearing up anytime soon.
42
Myers’s startling national address triggered several responses with astonishing rapidity. Of course, the radio talk-show pundits were gibbering about it within minutes after it had aired, and while the majority of those shows had conservative hosts and audiences, even they had mixed reactions, at least initially. Of course, few people actually saw or heard the live presidential telecast because it had aired so late.
