summer.
“Yuma, Unit Eighteen, intercepted a group of twenty,” the officer radioed. “Requesting additional transportation.”
“Looks like we might finally be getting some decent intel again,” the second officer said. “They were exactly where we were briefed.”
“Yeah, and remember, they briefed us that we might run into more OTMs,” the first officer said. “Let’s see if this was the group they talked about.” They had been seeing a lot more OTMs — Other Than Mexicans — on these intercepts lately — some were from as far away as China and Africa.
With the van’s headlights and spotlight still shining in their faces, the agents had the migrants move away from their belongings except for one bottle of water each, then sit apart from one another. All complied silently. Since it was too dangerous for just two agents to try to handcuff and search twenty migrants, it was better if they just waited for their backup to arrive, so they took their shotguns and stood, walking up and down the line, keeping watch.
The first officer stopped in front of one migrant. Most of them made occasional eye contact with the officers, but this one seemed to purposely look away all the time. Something about him didn’t seem right. He was in his midthirties, with several days’ beard growth, but somehow he looked out of place. Many migrants wore knit caps even in summertime — at night temperatures in the desert could drop sixty degrees from daytime highs — and many wore layers of clothing so they wouldn’t have to carry them. But this one looked… different, like a guy
“Jim, I’m going to have a chat with this one,” the first officer said.
“What’s up?”
“A feeling. Maybe an OTM.” He motioned to the man and said in Spanish, “Stand up, sir.” The man looked up and pointed at his chest, then did as he was told when he saw the officer nod his head. “Turn around, hands behind your back.”
“Wait for backup, Pete.”
“Just this one.” He was the more experienced officer, so the other agent demurred, but rattled the ammo bandolier on his shotgun to remind the others that he was covering them.
The officer named Pete pulled out a set of plastic handcuffs and locked the migrant’s wrists together in a control hold. “Just relax, sir,” he said in Spanish. “What’s your—”
All he saw was a blur of motion, and suddenly he felt a hand drive into his face just below his nose. He tried to yell, but it came out a bloody gurgle. He then felt a knife-edge hand slam into his throat, then nothing.
… then, at a nod from the first migrant, began shooting the officers and the migrants on the ground, one shot each to the head.
“Twenty more miles to the pickup point,” the leader of the hit squad said in Russian. “I don’t know how far away the other Border Patrol vehicle is, but if they’re coming from Yuma, we should be good. At the pickup point we split up, then rendezvous as briefed. Let’s go.” The four assassins picked up their packs and piled into the Border Patrol vehicle. Before driving off, one of them activated a small device that would scramble the GPS tracking signal from the van.
It was truly an amazing thing to watch, Patrick thought: a five-hundred-thousand-pound aircraft that seemed to float through the air as gracefully as a blimp. The C-57 Skytrain II — named after the military version of the Douglas DC-3 from World War II fame — was a flying-wing transport plane, resembling the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber but with a thicker bulbous midsection and its three turbofan engines mounted on pylons atop the rear of the fuselage. Originally designed to be a stealthy cruise-missile launch aircraft and aerial refueling tanker, today it could be adapted to various missions by uploading different mission modules in its two large internal cargo bays.
The Skytrain floated across the numbers on Battle Mountain’s shortest runway, stopped within two thousand feet, and turned off at the first taxiway. Thanks to its advanced engines and mission-adaptive wing technology, with which tiny computer-controlled micro-actuators could make almost the entire fuselage and wing skin a lift or drag device, the huge aircraft could fly close to the speed of sound at gross weight, as well as half as slow as any other aircraft of its size. The massive plane taxied directly into an empty hangar, and the doors closed behind it as soon as the engines shut down. Patrick parked at his assigned spot on the ramp beside the hangar and waited inside at the Skytrain’s belly entry hatch.
“Patrick! Hey, long time no see!” Jonathan Masters exclaimed as he climbed down the entry ladder and emerged from the plane. Jon Masters was chief engineer of Sky Masters, Inc., a high-tech military-systems design firm that invented much of the technology used in the C-57. Just a few years younger than Patrick, Jon Masters still looked like a punkish twenty-year-old whiz kid — tall, skinny, with unkempt hair and gangly features. He shook hands with Patrick with the same limp “cold fish” handshake that always made Patrick smile — it was as if Jon purposely used that weak handshake just to make the other person uneasy, even a longtime associate. “How have you been, my friend?”
“Not bad, not bad,” Patrick said. “How’s the biz?”
“Believe it or not, hanging in there,” Jon said. “Bunch of canceled contracts, like everyone else, but we’re in negotiations on a few that might keep the company afloat.” He patted the C-57 on its smooth, seamless composite carbon-fiber side. “They gave us funds to finish building the two ‘Losers’ we had half assembled on the floor, and they might give us money to build a few more if we can demonstrate full mission capability of a few more mission modules.”
“Then it’s not a ‘Loser’ anymore, is it?” Patrick said. Jon had called the C-57 the Loser because it had lost the Air Force’s Next Generation Bomber competition, which was eventually canceled anyway. “It survived because it’s a good multimission design.”
“We could still use you down in Vegas, my friend,” Jon said. “You’d be flying, not sitting around on your ass in this dust bowl. This place is closing down in less than a year. The Air Force is actually talking about building bombers again, and I know you’re more than a little interested in those things. And I might even give you something you’ve probably had very little of in the past few years: something called
Before Patrick could respond, another person exited the C-57, and Patrick turned to greet him. “Welcome to Battle Mountain, Colonel,” he said.
“Thank you, sir,” U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jason Richter responded, shaking Patrick’s hand with a surprised look on his face. Richter was a full head taller and twenty years younger than Patrick, trim and athletic, with dark good looks and an air of supreme confidence… and an attitude to match. “I wasn’t told you would be part of this project.”
“I’m not part of your project,” Patrick said, “but I’m granted access to the flight line when certain special air-mission aircraft come in, and the arrival of one of Jon’s monstrosities qualifies. Besides, the doc here and I go way back.”
“Patrick!” a female voice shouted happily. A young, lithe, strawberry-blond woman sprang out of the Skytrain’s belly and fairly leaped into Patrick’s arms. “Oh my
“Same here, Charlie,” Patrick said. Charlie Turlock — her real first name, not a nickname — was Jason Richter’s longtime assistant design engineer in the Army’s Infantry Transformational Battlelab, designing high-tech infantry-soldier enhancements, mostly in the field of robotics. Charlie had left the Army to work with Jon Masters, but Jason had elected to stay in the Army. “Have a nice flight?”
“Very nice flight — until I wandered up to the cockpit and found
“That’s the wave of the future, Charlie,” Patrick said. “Transport, reconnaissance, surveillance, air-defense suppression, resupply, long-range strategic strike — all unmanned. Half the planes that fly in and out of here these
