During his pursuit of this man, Ansara had found the Oz of pot farms in California — yet he and his colleagues were hesitant to bring down this operation because they hoped to use it to gather more intel on the cartels. It was clear to all that they needed to remove the lieutenants and bosses. If they struck too soon, the cartels would just plant another field a couple miles away.
As security tightened along the U.S.-Mexican border, the cartels expanded their growing operations in the United States. Ansara had spoken to a special agent for the federal Bureau of Land Management, who’d told him that just eight months prior, park rangers had confiscated eleven tons of marijuana in a single week. The agent went on to speculate on how much pot they did not confiscate, how much actually made it out of the fields and was sold …Mexican drug lords were operating on American soil, and there weren’t enough law enforcement officers to stop them. Like soldiers used to say in Vietnam,
Ansara lowered his binoculars and tucked himself deeper into the shrubs. He thought he’d seen one of the loaders do a double take in his direction. His pulse began to race. He waited a moment more, then lifted the binoculars. The men were back at it and had set aside some boxes whose lids were removed. Ansara zoomed in to find packages of toothbrushes and toothpaste, soap, disposable razor blades, and bottles of aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, and cough suppressant. Larger boxes contained small tanks of propane and packages of tortillas, as well as canned goods, including tomatoes and tripe.
A bird flitted through the canopy above. Ansara jolted and held his breath. Once more he lowered the binoculars, rubbed his tired eyes, and listened to Lisa in his head: “Yes, I knew what I was getting into, but it’s just too much time away. I thought I could do this. I thought this was what I wanted. But it’s not.”
And thus another long-legged blonde with a smoky voice and soft hands had escaped from Ansara’s clutch. But this one had been different. She’d sworn she could put up with his being away and had made a valiant effort for the first year. She was a writer and political-science professor at Arizona State and had told him that it was good when he was away, that she needed time to herself anyway. In fact, on the night of their first anniversary as a couple, she’d seemed completely in love with him. At a party she’d compared him to film and television actors like Jimmy Smits and Benjamin Bratt, and had once described him on her Facebook page as “a tall, lean, clean-shaven Hispanic man with a brilliant smile and bright, unassuming eyes.” He’d thought that was pretty cool. He couldn’t use words like that. But absence did not make the heart grow fonder — not when you’re under thirty. He understood. He let her go. But for the past month he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He recalled their first date; he’d taken her to a little mom-and-pop Mexican place way up in Wickenburg, Arizona, where he’d told her about his own time at ASU and about his work as an Army Special Forces operator in Afghanistan. He’d told her about leaving the Army and getting recruited by the FBI. She’d asked, “Are you allowed to tell me all this?”
“I don’t know. Does hearing top-secret stuff make you horny?”
She’d rolled her eyes and giggled.
And the conversation had gotten serious when she’d asked about the war, about his fallen brothers, about him saying good-bye to one too many friends. After dessert, she’d said she had to go home, and the implication was that she wasn’t really interested in him but that he should thank his sister for setting them up.
Of course, he’d pursued her like any good Special Forces/FBI guy would, and he eventually wooed her with flowers and bad poetry written in homemade cards and more late-night dinners. But it’d all gone to hell because of his career, and he was beginning to resent that. He imagined himself as a nine-to-fiver with weekends off. But then the thought of working in a cubicle or having a boss breathing down his neck made him nauseated.
Better to be up in the mountains with a pair of binoculars in hand and surveying some bad guys. Hell, he felt like a kid again.
The men finished their unloading, got back in the U-Haul truck, and pulled away. Ansara watched them go, then a few more men appeared outside and began filling up backpacks with materials they lifted from the boxes. They finished in about ten minutes and headed off in the direction of the garden.
Ansara waited until they were gone, then turned to head off.
Had he not matter-of-factly glanced down, he would be dead.
Right there, off to his right, was a small device with a laser cone jutting from its top. Ansara recognized the unit immediately as a laser trip wire, its companion unit located on the other side of the clearing. If he broke the laser, a silent alarm would go off. Ansara tightened his gaze, lifted his binoculars, and spotted several more laser units at the bases of trees. They came into view only if you knew what to look for, and the Mexicans had actually taped leaves and twigs to their sides to further camouflage them. Conventional trip wires and claymore mines had been set up all around the garden, but this was a new section of the park for Ansara, and he had not seen these detection devices before. Damn, if he came up here again, he’d have to be even more careful.
Shouting came from below. Spanish. The words:
4 THE GOOD SONS
Moore and his local contact Israr Rana had driven some two hundred ninety kilometers southwest into North Waziristan, one of seven districts within Pakistan’s FATA, or Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, which were only nominally controlled by the central and federal government of Pakistan. For centuries, mostly Pashtun tribes had inhabited the remote areas. In the nineteenth century the lands had been annexed by the British, during which time the British Raj tried to control the people with the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCRs), which became known as the “black laws” because they gave unchecked power to local nobles so long as they did the bidding of the British. The people continued with the same governance, right up through the formation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1956. During the 1980s the region became much more militant with the entry of mujahideen fighters from Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. After 9/11, both North and South Waziristan gained notoriety for being training grounds and safe havens for terrorists as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda began entering the region. The locals actually welcomed them because the Taliban appealed to their tribal values and customs, reminding them that they should remain fiercely independent and mistrustful of the government.
All of which reminded Moore that he was heading into a most dangerous and volatile place, but Rana had told him the trip would be worth the risk. They were going to meet a man who Rana said might be able to identify the Taliban in Moore’s photographs. This man lived in the village of Miran Shah, which during the Soviet invasion had housed a large refugee camp for displaced Afghans who’d fled across the border from Khost, the nearest village in what was a remote region of the country. In fact, many of the roads leading to Miran Shah were frequently impassable during the winter months, and the only electricity available to its inhabitants came from a few diesel- powered generators. To say they were entering a town stuck in the dark ages was an understatement, yet anachronistic evidence of Western influences took Moore aback as he spied tattered billboards for 7Up and Coke strung between a pair of mud-brick buildings. Dust-covered cars lined the streets, and kids chased one another along garbage-laden alleys. A man wearing a grease-stained tunic and leading a pet monkey by a leash shifted past them, along with a half-dozen other men wearing long cotton shirts draped over their trousers and bound at their waists by long sashes. Some of them carried AK-47s and broke off to examine a bombed-out building in the main market area where a whole group of men and women were still sifting through the rubble. Somewhere nearby a goat was being roasted over an open pit; Moore knew that scent quite well.
“Another suicide bomber,” said Rana, who was behind the wheel and tipping his head toward the building. “They were trying to kill one of the tribal leaders here, but they failed.”
“They did a nice job on the building, though, didn’t they?” said Moore.
At the end of the road they were accosted by two more riflemen, members of the Pakistan Army who’d been providing added security, since Miran Shah was suffering from more frequent attacks from pro-Taliban militants camped in the surrounding hills, no doubt the home of that suicide bomber. The government had been taking action against the “Talibanization” of these tribal regions, providing added personnel and equipment, but their efforts had
