“A hundred acres,” Shawn said, spinning around to answer Travis, and then striding forward toward a warehouse with a rounded roofline at the end of the road they were walking on, as if it was the big brother to the smaller Quonset huts around the base.

  They stopped outside of the building, Shawn facing all of them. “Anya has been here a couple of times, so she’s already heard my spiel. But you two jokers haven’t bothered to visit me before, so here it is. Base Tango Alpha is operational. We support whatever kind of plans the United States has to protect our borders, even if we are doing it from Mexico. The most highly trained, lethal operators our nation has to offer come through this installation on the regular. We outfit them, brief them with the help of their units, and get them on the road. We also scoop them up out of the ocean when they get back. We’ve got a full medical facility here, a canteen that makes some darn good grub, and five different helo pads.”

  Travis nodded. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but he was impressed. Base Tango Alpha seemed to have it all.

  Shawn continued. “Given the fact that we are operating as a joint task force for all of the military branches, including those newbies from the Space Force, though they never show their faces here, we keep all sorts of stuff under wraps. We’re a testing ground for new tech. And therein lies our problem for today.”

  Shawn walked toward the doorway to the warehouse building that was in front of them. He keyed in an eight-digit code on a keypad next to the door, laid his hand on the palm reader, and put his face up to a retinal scanner. A moment later, there was a pop and a click, green lights popping up on the console. Shawn pulled the door open and then led the group inside, giving a firm tug behind him double-checking it closed behind them. Bank after bank of lights popped on automatically, the industrial lights clicking into action sequentially, loud snaps of bulbs echoing through the space.

  Shawn rubbed his forehead, his shoulders slumping. “A little less than twenty-four hours ago, somehow, someone breached this weapons armory. We’re having trouble pinpointing the exact time. We keep everything in here, from pistols and rounds to rifles, shoulder-fired missiles, knives, detonation equipment, and even a few high-tech experimental things, some of which I just can’t talk about. What I can tell you is that a few months ago, the Department of Defense decided to send us a fleet of drones. Some of them are currently in use, some of them they sent us for testing. The newest ones launch vertically like an Osprey, so we can send them off our helo pads. They come with all sorts of different toys to go with them — everything from surveillance and jamming equipment, some high-tech junk I can’t even begin to understand, and some more traditional disaster-making payloads.”

  Travis raised a single eyebrow. “Like a nuke?”

  Shawn’s lips thinned before answering. “Yes, but a small one. The radioactive material they’ve released to us is in a tiny amount. Not what you’d use to replicate Hiroshima or Nagasaki, that’s for sure. They keep those bad boys under wraps inside some mountain somewhere. We’ve just got enough radioactive material to put a little scare in anyone who gets too close. Would devastate a quarter-mile area, but the majority of the damage would be from the explosion, not the fallout. It’s a sophisticated weapon. More surgical than anything else. The radioactivity provides enough heat to melt everything, but it’s not Chernobyl.”

  Anya shifted all of her weight under one of her hips. She frowned. “So, what happened? How did the drone go missing?”

  Shawn shook his head slowly. “Well, that’s a question for the ages. We’ve gone over all of our videos, surveillance, everything. All of our people are accounted for. The only explanation we have is that it was a highly coordinated attack from someone who had inside information.”

  “Like a leak?” Jace asked.

  At the mention of a leak, Travis’s attention snapped to Anya. It immediately occurred to him that that leak in the White House might go further than just the White House Chief of Staff. Barry Pratt. If the Chief of Staff was corrupted, then maybe others were as well.

  “We don’t know. My best guess?”

  Anya nodded.

  “If I were trying to get a drone out of here and I didn’t want anyone to see me, I’d either load it up on a truck and get it down to the water and put it on a boat, or I’d take the crate and I would get it out of here by rail.” Shawn sighed. “But the first issue is getting it out of the building itself. Believe me, every person on this base has been through more interviews in the last couple of days, and then we had getting into the service in the first place. As you can tell, the warehouse is highly secured. We’re still trying to figure it out.”

  Travis keyed in on one thing Shawn had said. “Rail?”

  “Yeah. There’s a pretty significant railroad line that runs down through California and Texas — several of them, to be exact. Trains bring most of our deliveries down here. There’s a depot about five miles away. We run routes up there regularly. The locals wouldn’t have thought a thing of seeing one of our trucks with a payload on the back heading up to the railroad. They see it all the time. They are disguised, of course — it’s not like we’re running crates up there that are marked bombs on the side of them.”

  “Crates?” Travis asked. “I thought we were talking about a drone.”

  Shawn nodded. “We are, sir. Let me show you what I’m talking about.”

  Shawn walked toward the back of the warehouse. As far as Travis could tell, the building went up about three stories, with enormous rack storage built into the sides and the center of it. The only noise in the building was the sound of their footballs on the smooth concrete floor. As they walked, Travis saw crates marked nine-millimeter, forty and forty-five caliber rounds, wooden crate after wooden crate of AR-15s, and an entire section designated for short barreled rifles, commonly known as SBRs. In addition to all of the weapons and rounds, there was an impressive array of diving and submersible equipment, including three different lengths of black rubber dinghies leaned up against the side of the building, fully inflated and ready for deployment, their engines neatly stowed on racks near scuba equipment and oxygen tanks. When Shawn said they were ready for anything, it seemed they were.

  As they got to the back of the building, Shawn pointed at a set of tall doors. Travis looked at them for a second. The seam for the doors was vertical not horizontal, like it would be for an overhead garage door. Shawn pointed. “These doors peel off to the side so we can get tall equipment in and out of here. He pointed to a set of enormous crates off in one corner. They were probably eight feet long, four feet high, and four feet wide. “Those, my friends, are the newest drones in production today.”

  Seeing the crate, it finally made sense to Travis. “They still need to be constructed, then?”

  “In a sense, yes,” Shawn nodded. “They come fully assembled. The wings are attached. They just need to be deployed once the drone is taken out of the box. The whole thing folds like a real bird. Honestly, it’s pretty cool.”

  Travis felt for the GPS tracker in his pocket that Sam had given him. “And the GPS trackers? Are they on all the time?”

  Shawn blinked. “Yes, they should be. That’s a manufacturer’s standard. When they roll out of the factory minus everything but their wings, they turn the GPS trackers on so that we can keep track of them from the time they leave the warehouse. The goal is to keep them under wraps.”

  Travis pulled the tracker out of his pocket. The screen was still green with nothing on it. “Well, this one doesn’t seem to be working.”

  He tossed it to Shawn, who looked at it. His expression became sullen. “We tried to track it with our tech, but nothing came up. Where did you get this?”

  Anya looked at Shawn. “From Sam.”

  Shawn’s face flickered with confusion. “I don’t know what to tell you. If they disabled the GPS, then it’s not going to show up on your screen, no matter how much you want it to. The other option is that it’s out of range. When it comes back in, you should be able to get an exact location on the drone.”

  Jace rubbed his chin. “Well, until it does, that’s gonna make finding this missing drone nearly impossible.”

  Travis shook his head. “Let’s hope not.”

  37

  Now that the customs and immigration people for the United States had disembarked from the train he was on, Leca Islamov got up out of his seat, checked the hallway in front of the private berths for anyone seeming too interested in him and walked to the back of the train. As he made his way, he realized he felt like he could breathe a little easier. They’d made it inside the country where his target was located. That was something, one step closer to his goal. He shoved his hands into his pockets. The truth was he knew he wouldn’t rest easy until his goal was completely accomplished. He stared down at the floor. This was a big mission, the biggest of his life. He had to get it done, whatever it took, even if it meant giving his own life. Nothing else had secured the future for the Chechens. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  As Leca walked slowly through the train, he glanced at the passengers. They were from all different walks of life. Harried businesspeople were working on their laptops in the private compartments, their tables in front of them spread with papers, their eyebrows furrowed in concentration. There were moms with young kids, elderly couples, single women, and single men, all traveling to different destinations, only sharing the experience of being on the train together for a short amount of time.

  Toward the back of the train, Leca passed through a set of doors, then out onto an enclosed bridge that connected two of the cars. He looked over his shoulder but wasn’t surprised to find he was alone. The regular passengers never came to the back of the train. It was where all the cargo was being hauled. Every passenger train usually had at least two to six cargo cars attached to the back of them. In Leca’s mind, it made sense. The railway companies could charge for not only hauling passengers but also for hauling cargo. The demand for moving goods was a lot more reliable than the whims of passengers. Even with bookings open months in advance, hauling cargo was more consistent. Goods always had to be moved to market.

  Even goods that were stolen.

  Entering the last car of the long train, Leca saw one of his men stiffen, seeing the door open. When he saw Leca, he relaxed, a smile pulling across his cheek. In total, Leca had three men in the back, hunkered down with a crate — Peter, Andrei, and Gus. They were a small team, but exactly what Leca needed to complete the operation. Too many people meant too many mouths to leak information. That couldn’t happen.

  Getting the crate on the train hadn’t been a big deal. Leca had simply offered a hefty sum in cash to the train’s scheduler to allow them to put the crate on board. Another bit of money ensured that the remainder of the train car staff stayed away from the car while they were en route. Cash always seemed to work, and he had plenty of it from the goods he’d managed to smuggle into Chechnya, not to mention the funds he had access to through his benefactor. Everyone had needs, the kind of ones that could be easily paid off. If there was anything Leca had learned through the years, it was that everyone had a price, no matter their position.

  That’s what had happened with Barry Pratt, the Chief of Staff at the White House. Flipping Barry was probably one of the finest hours of Leca’s career as a Chechen rebel. It didn’t take much, only needing a moment to corner Barry with pictures of the dalliance he’d had with not one but two prostitutes just outside of Boston. The pictures were damning, the women barely clad, Barry’s hands all over them. Barry’s position as a family man with four girls, a staunch Catholic, would have been severely compromised if those pictures came out or if they fell into the hands of his enemies who were eager to gather opposition research that could tank President Mosely’s administration.

  While Leca had initially offered the information in good faith, telling Barry that Leca only wanted to help protect the President, Barry now knew better. Leca was no friend. Barry was working for him whether he liked it or not.

  It seemed like most days it was a not.

  Leca lifted his head asking if things were okay without speaking. His men knew him well. They would know what his expression meant.

  The man closest to him, Peter, gave a single nod, answering in Chechen. “All as well, boss. All as well.” The other two men nodded without saying a single word.

  Leca walked over to the crate, running his hand over the top of the rough wood. They made a few critical alterations to the drone as soon as it was in their possession. While they were still on the boat, Andrei had cracked open the crate and disabled the GPS tracking module, tossing it in the water. Once they made it to land, the markings that identified the contents as a drone had been covered by stickers that Leca had purchased with pictures of oranges on them. Mexico was forever shipping fruit into the United States, their more arid, warmer climate producing citrus fruits and avocados long past what could happen in California’s shorter season. A crate of oranges was nothing to get excited about, that was for sure.

  Without seeing anything that seemed out of order, Leca turned on his heel and walked out of the cargo car and back toward the front of the train, where he slipped back into his private berth. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. Dialing a number, Leca waited for a second while the line connected. A moment later, he heard a voice come across the line.

  “Yes?”

  “We are on the move.”

  “Good, good.”

  Leca’s face reddened. “No, not good. This is taking entirely too long. We should have put our cargo on a plane.”

  There was a pause from the other end. “That’s not what we agreed to.”

  Leca narrowed his eyes. He needed to be careful. Very careful. He stood up and took two steps toward the window, standing near the edge of it, watching the miles unfold before him. “Agreed to? I told you that a plane would be better from the get-go. The longer we take to get there, the more opportunities we give for someone to find us. Speed is of the essence.”

  “So is staying hidden,” the man on the other end of the line growled. “This is the route I have paid for. According to our analysis, it is the best way for you to keep things under wraps. I expect you to keep to it.”

  Everything in Leca wanted to drop the phone on the floor, grind it to a pulp with his heel, and abandon the plan that his patron had insisted he follow.

  But he couldn’t afford to do that.

  The reality was that everything cost money. Even terrorism. There were certain people around the world who didn’t take kindly to the way that the United States did their business. Those people were more than happy to pay to have actions taken on their behalf, actions they otherwise wouldn’t be able to handle themselves.

  But the problem for Leca was that his services had been purchased by someone. He, in fact, now had a boss, an ultra-wealthy billionaire who had his own political aspirations. It all seemed fine at the time Leca signed on, the flow of money guaranteed, their political aspirations aligning perfectly, but there was one thing Leca hadn’t allowed for — the fact that the man sponsoring his actions had his own set of ideas about how the operation should be run.

  “You aren’t the one that’s on the ground,” Leca hissed. “You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve never gotten out of that big fat mansion of yours and actually tried to do something.” So much for being careful. The gloves were off. Leca didn’t care anymore. He had the drone. His men were on the ground. Did he need the billionaire anymore?

  Maybe. Maybe not. Only time would tell if Leca’s anger would get him into trouble.

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, Leca! I am the one who has funded this whole operation. Don’t you think I could easily turn it on its head? You aren’t the only game in town. I know the Americans are looking for their missing drone. A single phone call from me, and I can tell them exactly where it is.”

  Leca set his jaw. It was an idle threat. There was no way his own sponsor would out him, would he? He paused, then decided to relent for the moment. There was no point in winning the battle and losing the war. “We are on schedule. I’ll call you at the next checkpoint.”

  “Good.”

  38

  Travis, Anya, and Jace left Base Tango Alpha with fewer answers than they had hoped to get. Travis felt frustration nip at the muscles at the back of his neck. If no one could track the drone and Shawn didn’t have any idea how it escaped the base, they were looking at a highly prepared and trained group of mercenaries.

  Exactly the kind that would love to give the United States a black eye on the world stage.

  As the three of them gave the operatives guarding the entry gate a wave as they left, the four men emerging out of the woods to open the gate as mysteriously as they had the first time, Travis looked in the rearview mirror. In the blink of an eye, the men had disappeared again.

  Anya was taking a turn in the back seat. Travis glanced in the rearview mirror at her. “I think the next place we should go is the port.”

  Anya shook her head. “I don’t think they went that way, Travis. I think we should try the rail yard.”

  Travis swallowed. Was Anya being difficult just to be difficult? Kira had been that way. Somewhere, Travis had heard the saying, “Always seek to understand before you are understood. He swallowed once again, this time hard, and asked. “Okay. Why do you say that?”

  It wouldn’t do for all of them to be bullheaded. They’d never make any headway if they were arguing. Someone needed to ask the questions and keep a cool head. Might as well be him.

  Anya pulled her tablet from her bag and stared at it. “I was running some rough calculations in my head. I think the most direct route for anyone to get to major targets in the United States would be by rail. If you put that drone on a boat, you get to Houston and then fly it from there, but if you wanted to keep it on the boat, you’d have to go around the entire peninsula of Florida and then up the coast. That would take a mighty long time. Based on the intel that we have, the attack is forthcoming, like soon. They’re going to take the most direct route.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24