Fathers dream, p.13
Father’s Dream, page 13
With his night vision lens, Fredo was able to take fairly closeup pictures, however, the black tinting on the windows made it impossible to identify who was inside there. He took pictures of all of the guard stations on the outside of the compound, the turrets that were guarded inside, the guards crossing back and forth the courtyard which served also as an equipment staging grounds and turnaround, and the guards maintaining order in the cages that were open to the elements, tarps thrown over them in the hot part of the day. It was squalid conditions, humans being kept like zoo animals. Add to the fact that several of them were young children, it sickened Fredo’s stomach.
Barely an hour transpired before one of the black limos took off from the gate and after checking with the powers in San Diego, it was determined that the SEALs should stay in place and not go after what could be a decoy. They would find out soon enough if Ochoa had made his escape with the first Suburban, and if that were the case, well there still was the issue of where they were taking the semi and how they could interdict and stop them, so that any hostages inside could be freed.
Fredo knew Kyle was calculating every scenario, even the almost impossible scenario that all this was a decoy or diversion and what was really going on was some main operation elsewhere.
As the light of day descended upon the camp compound what became evident was that the semi-truck was not going to be bringing human cargo, but bushels and bushels of drugs. White plastic bags were loaded into the back floor to ceiling. Fredo couldn’t tell if it wasn’t farm supplies, flour or sugar. So possibly Ochoa had negotiated a deal to expand his operation to include drug trafficking in addition to human trafficking. It was unlike him, and with the way he reacted to drugs being given to him as payment for passage, it sort of surprised Fredo. But he let it be.
Instructions were given to follow the large truck, even if it meant not following Ochoa. It was thought that this was an even greater prize, and since it had entered and exited the Ochoa campground, could be proof enough that he had expanded his operation and might be enough to get the Mexican government to capture him and turn him over.
That was the theory. Now came the execution.
As the semi pulled out of the gate, the team noticed that the two blacked-out Suburbans remained behind.
“Boy that’s odd. It’s just not like what I expected at all,” said Kyle.
“You think it’s a trap?” Cooper asked.
“I don’t know. I just never know with these guys. You know that the average lifespan of a cartel head is less than five years after they join?”
“You’re kidding,” said Fredo.
“Nope. They get involved, they get used up, it’s like fish eating the fish eating the fish and finally the whale gets them all right? You’ve seen that cartoon.”
“Oh, yeah. So what are we doing? Which fish are we?” Fredo asked.
Kyle looked through his binoculars again. “They’re still in the cages. They don’t look like they’re getting ready to be transported, and with all those bags, it’s almost like this is a warehouse, a truck’s here to pick up goods and then deliver it to wherever. My hunch and my guess is perhaps somebody paid Ochoa to be giving them safe passage across the border, using one of his routes and all of his guys. And they told us to expect to find his guys on both sides of the border.”
“Yeah, saw a program once they’ve infiltrated the police in LA and San Diego. Can you believe it? Gang members and cartel bosses as cops?” Coop said.
“If I can get closer I could probably get license plates, maybe make out some faces, what do you think?” Fredo asked.
Kyle shook his head. “Nah, it’s not that important. I think we just go when they say to go.”
Kyle spoke into his INVISIO and gave the team orders to prepare themselves to leave on a moment’s notice. The day camp was pulled down, all the supplies stored back in the vans, all evidence that they had ever stayed there was removed, even to the point of someone doing one last sweep with large branches tied to his feet, swishing over the rocks and sand and small cactus brush, even removing tiny pieces of paper with tweezers, paper that the SEALs probably never left. But except for the tire tracks which they could do nothing about, everything was put back into its original position.
Finally, they got the orders to track the truck. A whole fifteen minutes had gone by and no further action was seen from the compound. Coop had launched his drone carefully, and notified Kyle that the truck was headed straight for the highway west, and did not meet up with any other vehicles. But it was coming to a major village.
“Before we take off can you run it by the compound, the prisoner area there?” Asked Kyle. “I want to get some pictures, and they probably won’t be good enough for facial recognition, but they might be able to digitally recognize people that have been reported missing or we know have been kidnapped before. I’d like to be able to send that off before we leave.”
Coop responded, “Will do. I’m on it right now.”
Coop always scrunched up his mouth while he manipulated the bird, like how somebody would stand and move and make noises while they were using a pinball machine. If you jerked the machine around too much of course it would go tilt, but people tried to do it anyway, and never affected the outcome of the game. Coop was using his extra-long neck, his six-foot-four-inch frame and long fingers to arch himself, push forward and back and bite his lower lip when he placed the drone close to the perimeter of the compound hovering just far enough out of eyesight. He even let it hover behind a tall pine tree that had been partially denuded, getting shots of the compound from two angles that they couldn’t see from their lookout. All the footage and there was quite a bit of it, was uploaded. Kyle was on the phone while he looked at Cooper’s monitor, discussing what they found with one of the officers back in San Diego.
“Yes sir, we’re ready to go whenever you let us know. The truck’s got about a twenty-minute advance on us, but Coop’s drone has determined that they haven’t hooked up with anybody else and they are on their way to the highway. My guess is they’re going to enter fairly quickly in Texas or someplace remote.”
He listened while he was given instructions. Nodding his head, Kyle signed off.
“So we’re to follow. How much life do you have left in that bird Coop?”
“Oh, I got about six hours maybe. I’ve got the rapid recharge though, all I need is about thirty minutes of downtime and she’s good to go again. What’s the question for?”
“They want us to just follow but not be detected. We have to follow enough behind them so they don’t see us. And we’re to look for drones, when we get to the Managua Flats village, that’s when we need to close the gap, and pay close attention to where the truck goes. It’s possible it’ll be offloaded to another vehicle. I really don’t know. But we’re to watch and report.”
“Okay got that.”
Kyle again turned on his comms, notified San Diego they were leaving, and then to his men gave instructions to load up in the vans in the same order they came in, and get ready for a several-hour drive.
About an hour later, the truck started to speed up, and if they hadn’t had the drone they would’ve missed the fact that the truck turned off just before the village. It rounded a small mountain that looked more like an extinct volcano crater. In the next few minutes, all they could do was follow the curve of the road around the mountain, heading the opposite direction of the village. The roadway then traveled straight north, toward one of the border crossings.
“Son of a bitch!” Fredo said. “Where the hell is he?”
Several of the other team members in Kyle and Fredo’s van swore openly. Everyone was searching the horizon everywhere, and there was no trace of the vehicle.
“It just disappeared into thin air?” Kyle said. “Did you get drone footage, Coop?”
“I got nothing, Kyle. She went for the village. I’m calling her back.” Then he had an idea. “Why don’t you head back the way we came, and I want to take a look at the side of the hill. We might have missed something.”
There being no other vehicles on the three paths they could take, for as far as their eyes could see, they agreed, and turned around and headed back in the direction of their villa. As they rounded the curve, which is where they lost the truck, everybody looked out the left side of the van. What was almost perfectly camouflaged, was a large seam in the mountain, an actual door made of stone, even planted with trees, and apparently they had some kind of mechanism to open that door and store the truck inside. The fact that they had followed, lost the truck and then come back and found the entrance, probably meant that the team had been discovered as well.
Kyle notified San Diego about what had occurred and asked about their surveillance. He was told they had missed the pass of a satellite overhead, so had no record of the vehicle turning off anywhere. Kyle was given orders to return to the villa.
Fredo wondered why they would go back to that villa especially if they were suspecting that they’d been discovered. Perhaps they were going to be readying for a firefight as maybe the militia from the compound mobilized and were going to greet them when they tried to arrive. Or, they could get there and find everyone gone, including the prisoners that they all had seen.
There were so many things that could have happened, and he wondered also why all of a sudden the operation had changed from something that had been done day in and day out practically like clockwork, into a rather unusual operation involving a semi that drove into a mountain for camouflage. And if they were going to be selling the material in the back of the trailer, why would they hide out in a mountain?
Coop let the drone fall back so they’d be notified if some convoy came from the direction of the semi to overtake them. It was dead as dead could be, in fact there weren’t even any animals out prowling around, dead ones either on the roadway. That was very unusual.
They made it all the way to their compound but before traveling up the private drive, Kyle directed Fredo to turn off and take a back road where a small hill would give them a good view of their compound and Ochoa’s in the distance.
“You’re thinking we just need to wait a bit and see what turns up? Are we playing like bait now?” Fredo inquired.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I certainly don’t want to put you guys down in the middle of it there, I mean there’s no cover. They could bring in jets for all I know. It could be rigged to blow up, I just think we better stay here where we know Ochoa comes back to very frequently, and watch what he’s doing and not go chasing off after black Suburbans and large semis. And now I’m wondering what’s in those bags?”
Danny piped up and added his two cents. “You know they could have been bags of fertilizer, Ammonium Nitrate, like the stuff they make bombs out of? My uncle back in Arizona puts bags of that stuff trying to get his fallow field to grow, but it has to be applied constantly every year, and they go through a ton of it. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it’s just for farming or maybe it is for bomb-making.”
“Interesting,” Kyle said.
“You know Kyle, if they were making bombs, that would be the perfect place for them to do it. I don’t think there’s anything that could penetrate that mountain, as far as radar, and except for the few times when the truck’s going in or out, it just looks like a normal hill, very expensively put together,” noted Coop.
“So we’re thinking maybe it’s a bomb factory, not a delivery to the US?” Asked Fredo.
Several of the guys agreed with this assessment.
“I’m going to run that up the ladder and see what they say,” said Kyle.
Fredo pulled up into a small thicket of trees barely taller than the van and a large flat area next to it, covered with tire tracks, where he could park and they could surveil their own digs. Kyle motioned for him to stop while he talked to his LT back in San Diego.
“Sir, we’ve kind of looked at how all this feels to us, and I’m just going to float a suggestion or a what-if in front of you. You tell me what you think.”
He listened for his instructions.
“Well, the bags we saw loaded into the semi could be farm supplies, fertilizers. It also could be something fairly easy to get, but could also be used for making bombs. And so we kind of wondered what if that was not just a storage facility, and that truck was not taking those supplies north of the border, but was delivering it to a bomb-making facility.”
Kyle listened as the rest of the team in the van stayed silent.
“Understood. I’ll let them know.”
“Guys, I think you are geniuses. They’ve just received word that there had been deliveries made to the compound in just small delivery vans for weeks, we thought it was food and supplies for the prisoners and the militia staying there, but apparently they were also being delivered ammonium nitrate, and we know what they like to do with that don’t we? So I think we’re on the money here. It’s not drugs, and that would make sense based on Ochoa’s proclivities, but it is indeed a staging or a bomb factory, and it’s closer to the border than his compound which would make his discoverability lessen. Nobody could accuse him of doing it at his place. I think it’s a smart move, but we saw them.”
Fredo said next what had to be said. “What we don’t know is do they know that we know?”
Chapter 16
Mia woke up in an ambulance, screaming, while going like a bat our of Hell. She had a tube in her arm and it appeared they were only giving her fluids. She checked her body to see if there was any pain and other than a bruised lip and a small cut on her ear, she was fine. She had a bit of a headache but otherwise she was fine.
She opened her eyes and stared into the face of a paramedic.
“Ma’am, we’re headed to the hospital and we’ll be there in just about five minutes. Do you have any medical conditions I need to know about?”
“Where was I?” She was confused and couldn’t remember what happened. Then as she put her hand up to her forehead she remembered that she had passed out and that she had apparently shot somebody.
“Did I kill someone?”
The two paramedics in the back chuckled. “Were you going for that, or were you just trying to scare him?” the other paramedic said.
“Stop fucking with me, did I kill him or is he wounded?”
“Ma’am, he died in his own blood. He’s being transported to the coroner. Apparently there were lots of witnesses at the store. Was this man chasing you? Do you know who he was?”
“Absolutely no idea. But I think I know who sent him. I’ll give you a complete statement. But first, I need you to call someone for me. I’m supposed to be over at Scripps by 1:00 to pick up a patient who’s going to be living with us. I need to go do that.”
“No can do, and it’s already quarter to 1:00. You aren’t going to make it.”
“Then I need you to call over there or better yet do you have my purse?”
One of the medics handed her the bloodied purse. She looked at it incredulously. “Whose blood is this?”
“The guy you shot, he almost made it over to you. At least that’s what the witnesses said, and he grabbed your purse and then was going for you.”
“Okay well inside the purse and you can go ahead and open it there’s a card of a Special Agent Gutierrez. I need you to call him and let him know what’s happened. And then I need you to call the surgery ward at Scripps. And let me talk to the head nurse there. I’m supposed to be picking up a patient and I’m going to be late.”
“Ma’am, they may admit you.”
“That’s horseshit. I’m not going to stay in any hospital, I’ve got to go get Ivan. And I’m going to bring him home no matter what you guys say. Nothing is going to keep me from doing that. Now if you’re not going to take me to Scripps, because I’d agree to be seen at Scripps, then you better release me as soon as we get to the hospital. I’ll say what I have to say so the doctor lets me go. But this is a life and death situation and you have to let me do this.”
“So where’s your car?”
“At the grocery store where this guy fell. I left it there, the keys are probably still in it.”
“No, the police probably took the keys, and they’re probably going to impound the vehicle as well as the gentleman’s vehicle.”
“Crap. Something else I have to straighten out.” She tried to calm herself, and then added, “Would you please call and get permission to take me to Scripps? I got to get there right away.”
After checking, they did receive permission to have her taken to the emergency room at Scripps, and they arrived at roughly ten minutes after 1:00. It was late, but she’d made it.
As they rolled her into the emergency room lobby, she recognized several of the orderlies she had seen before on other occasions when she’d brought the children in for various things. They smiled and nodded looking concerned, but finally she recognized the smiling face of her neighbor, Anson Hernandez.
“Anson, Anson. It’s Mia here.”
The young attendant quickly made it to her side.
“Mia, what are you doing here? What happened?”
“There was an incident, some man tried to kidnap me from the parking lot, and—”
“That was you?”
“Of course it was me. I told you it was me. Why?”
“The guy that was killed today a few minutes ago?”
“Yes, I guess. Unless there was another shooting.”
She watched him tell her that it had been all over the news reports as an alert, and they’d sent alerts to all the area hospitals looking for anyone who knew anything about it, any eye witnesses.
“I am surprised that you were involved.”
It was turning out to be that kind of a day.
“Why, you don’t think I look like a serial killer? Well, it’s not like I went after him. He came after me. He was going to take me in his car, and I found a pistol and I shot him. That’s all there is to it. But Anson, I have another problem, I’m supposed to take a patient upstairs back to my house and then I’ve got to go pick up the kids at school. I was supposed to bring them, but I was on my way to the store and never made it. So I’ve got my kids at the school soon waiting for me, and I’ve got the little boy I’m supposed to take home upstairs in the …”
