“Give ’em more of the spiel before we get asphyxiated,” he told Koch. The FBI agent gave the Miranda warning yet again, this time adding a Spanish translation.
“Movement?” Karr asked Rockman.
“Negative.”
“You see a booby trap on the door?”
“I would’ve told you if I did.”
Karr slid out his PDA and did a scan anyway, looking for a magnetic field that would indicate an electric current. Then he tried the knob. It was indeed locked.
“You want us to force the door?” asked Koch.
“Just a second. I need some air,” said Karr.
He slipped back and went outside the barn. “Lia — start looking around the perimeter for a tunnel or something like that. I think these guys have flown the coop.”
Lia radioed the state police backup units in, spreading them out along a road that ran along the southern and eastern perimeters of the plantation property. In the meantime, her helicopter pilot spun toward the west, giving her a better view of that side of the target area. The Dauphin hovered to the north.
“I think we have some movement fifty yards west of the small house,” said Rockman, examining the infrared from the overhead army plane. “Yeah — two figures running through the woods there, in the direction of that creek.”
Lia sent a police unit up the road to a bridge over the water. She scanned the area near the creek without seeing anything.
“You see them, Lia?” asked Rockman. “They’re cutting across the creek. Three of them.”
Lia caught one shadow as it slipped up the embankment. By now men from the assault team were in pursuit, moving toward the water.
“That field over there,” Lia told the pilot, pointing to an open area beyond the woods. “We’ll let them get into that about halfway, then buzz down in front of them and tell them to surrender. If we can slow them down, our people on the ground can surround them.”
The shadows popped from the woods sooner than she expected; the troopers hadn’t gotten up to the road yet.
“Get down there,” Lia told the pilot.
“What are we going to do if they shoot?”
“I’ll take care of that,” said Lia, taking out the two pin grenades she had in her belt. “Get us between them and the road.”
The pilot pitched the Bell practically onto its side, skidding in the direction of the road. Lia cracked open the door, pulled the pins on the grenades, and dropped them into the field. Then she picked up the mike for the PA system.
“The next grenades will be high explosives,” she said. “Throw down your weapons and put your hands up.”
Two of the men complied. The third began running toward the road.
A contingent of troopers reached the side of the field and began approaching the two men who’d stopped. But they were too far to catch the third man, who continued across the field toward the road. A thick patch of junglelike woods sat on the other side. The vegetation was thick enough that even their infrared vision gear would have a hard time picking him up.
“Put me down on that road,” Lia told the pilot.
“What?”
“Go. I have to get that guy,” she said.
Not designed for quick exits, the helicopter door slapped against Lia’s arm as she pushed out, throwing off her balance just enough that she fell to the ground. As she rolled to her feet, she saw the man cutting toward the road about twenty yards away. Lia scrambled after him, guided by the spotlight from the helicopter. The ground was uneven and the brush seemed to bite at her as she ran. She barely gained ground, but just as he was about to reach the road, the helicopter descended in front of them, sending a spray of dirt and herding him back to her right. The man seemed to have forgotten her, or at least lost track of where she was, and within a few seconds she was close enough to hear his huffing breaths. Just as she reached out to grab him, he cut back toward the road. Lia lunged; she got hold of his pant leg and shoe, tripping him up. He tumbled free, but as he rose she leapt onto his back, her forearm smacking his head.
To Lia’s surprise, the man not only managed to get to his feet but continued running. He flailed his elbows as she tried pulling him down; finally he tripped over something and they both sprawled to the ground.
Lia had had enough of this. She pulled her pistol from its holster near her ribs as she got to her feet.
“I’ll blow your ankles apart if you move,” she warned the man.
Either he got the message or was too exhausted to run any more.
The FBI team used a shotgun with special metal slugs to blow off the hinges and lock; three quick blows and they were inside.
The room was empty, a trapdoor open on the right. Three of the walls were filled by large shelves stocked with boxes and large bottles; the fourth was bare, with a padlocked door at the center. The smell here was more chemical than barn-yard, and Karr finally realized what they’d found.
The HRT men scrambled downward and began working their way through the passage out to the plantation’s southern field.
“Big-time drug factory,” said Koch. “Methamphetamine. That’s sulfuric acid, rock salt — that’s probably the lab room in there.”
He pointed at the padlocked door. Karr went over and examined the lock.
“We don’t want to blow that door down,” the FBI agent added. “We’re going to have to call a hazardous materials team. We’ll probably need a new warrant, given that the door there is locked and this doesn’t look like a terrorist setup, at least not—”
“Well, look at this,” said Karr loudly, slipping his lockpick back under his belt, “the door is unlocked.”
He bumped his shoulder against the jamb and the door swung wide open.
The room was better stocked than most high school chemistry labs and could have given a few college classes a run for the money as well. Rather than simply extracting ephedrine from over-the-counter cold medicine and making methamphetamine from it as most meth labs did, this operation apparently produced the illegal drug using raw ingredients obtained from Mexico. Sometimes called crank or speed as well as meth, methamphetamine was an illegal stimulant popular with bored suburban youth, rural yahoos, and people seeking a high to accompany sex.
The lab also had the ingredients needed to made ecstasy and mescaline as well.
“This is a huge haul,” said Koch. “Might be a record, at least for this area. Congratulations.”
“Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be much consolation for the folks back home,” said Karr.
CHAPTER 112
“I wasn’t really a friend, not really,” Muna Lufti told Dean. “Kenan — he was kind of strange, you know?”
“Did you ever go to a mosque with him?”
The girl made a face, then glanced at Elsa Williams before turning back to Dean, as if she thought the black police detective was somehow on her side. “First of all, women and men are usually, you know, separate. Right? And second, it’s
“Which masjid did he belong to?”
“I don’t know.”
