Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

I whirled around and raced to the bowie wielder still under the body, now frantically trying to free himself. He raised his pistol and I stomped on his hand, the round going harmlessly into the wall. He screamed something in Spanish and I jabbed the barrel into his forehead.

He shook his head violently from left to right. I held for a second, then softly nodded up and down. And pulled the trigger.

I stood, coming to grips with the carnage, needing to think. I began searching for keys. I found them on the leader and went to the car that had carried me, seeing Jennifer’s purse in the front seat. I pulled out my phone and began dialing, leaving the parking lot with the battered tires of the sedan screeching, heading to the border.

Kurt picked up on the third ring, immediately asking why I was in El Paso and why I had left our mission early. I cut him off.

“Sir, it’s too hard to explain. Jennifer believes there’s a national security threat here on the border, and her brother’s wrapped up in it. I thought she was full of shit, but the cartels have just taken a huge gamble to capture us here, in America. She was correct, and I need a team right fucking now. Where is Knuckles? He should be CONUS with the bird.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Cartels? Capture you? What are you doing? I can’t even get to the Oversight Council until tomorrow. Forget about Knuckles and talk to me.”

I was flying down Interstate 10, headed back to the border bridge, and realized I didn’t have the facts to convince him. There was no way to get Oversight Council approval for operations in Mexico on a timeline that could save Jennifer. It just wasn’t what the Taskforce did. We were slow burn, not crisis management. Unlike in my previous life, we didn’t sit on alert.

I pounded the steering wheel and said, “Sir, is Knuckles in the United States? Is he here with a package in the aircraft?”

Kurt’s voice grew concerned at my shrill tenor, saying, “Yeah, he’s here. In Atlanta. What the hell is going on? You sound like you want a Prairie Fire.”

And his words broke free the best that the United States had to offer. Prairie Fire was the code phrase for the potential catastrophic loss of a Taskforce team and was used only under the most extreme circumstances on official missions, when everything else in the United States arsenal had failed. The words had been uttered a single time in the entire existence of the unit, but it was the one thing that Kurt could execute on his own, without Oversight Council approval, because Taskforce lives were not held to the same standard as Taskforce missions. I had never given the phrase serious thought, egotistically figuring that if I had communication and could utter the words, I could solve the problem on my own before the Taskforce could ever break anything free quickly enough to help.

Now I held the phone and savored the words. “I need Knuckles to divert to González airport in Ciudad Juárez. I’ll meet him there. I’m calling a Prairie Fire. I say again, I’m calling a Prairie Fire.”

He said nothing for a moment, and I saw the exit for the bridge. I coasted for a second before he came back on.

“You know what you’re doing, right? You got a real Prairie Fire?”

“Sir, listen to me closely. You and I have been through a lot, but nothing like this. I just saw a man get decapitated in front of me. I’m covered in blood from three dead men in a hotel. Jennifer is in the hands of fucking savages, and if I don’t get some help immediately, she’s going to be slaughtered. Or worse.”

I turned onto the bridge and heard, “You got them. Update me as soon as you can.”

23

The door at the top of the stairwell opened, spilling light into the room, and Jennifer knew someone was coming down. Finally.

She regretted the thought as soon as it came into her head. She knew whoever was on the stairs would offer nothing good, but she’d been shackled in the dark for over three hours, on top of the two-hour ride in the trunk, and the shock of the capture had worn off, leaving her wanting to see why it had occurred. Wanting to learn the fate of Pike and her brother Jack, even if it hastened her own demise.

Initially, when she’d been taken out of the trunk and brought down to the basement, she’d been dismayed to find it empty, expecting to see Jack bound and shackled like her. She’d been tossed unceremoniously on the ground, and the lights had been extinguished. She’d waited for Pike to join her. Waited for him to arrive so they could plan their escape. After some time in the dark, she realized he wasn’t coming and now wondered if he was still even alive. She thought so—hoped so—simply because of the way she had been treated.

The men hadn’t been unduly violent like she’d expected. She wasn’t smacked around or made to do anything lewd. There was little respect, but they hadn’t been overtly cruel either. They’d treated her more like a piece of livestock, prodding when she moved slowly and showing little concern for her welfare when shoving her in or pulling her out of the trunk.

In truth, after the fear of instant death had worn off, she’d become more concerned about carbon monoxide poisoning during the ride, the leaking exhaust fumes filling the trunk and making her nauseous. Taking solace in small comforts, she initially had just sagged in the dark of the basement and drawn in clean oxygen, trying to clear her lungs of the stench of the exhaust.

Left to her own thoughts, she’d reflected on the enormous risks her kidnappers had taken. Imitating police officers on United States soil and kidnapping two United States citizens was brazen, and she knew her brother had found something much greater than drugs. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but she knew enough about cartel operations to understand what the impact would have been if the mission had gone wrong. She was valuable for a reason she didn’t understand. She might not have known what was at stake, but she knew two things for sure: One, she had been captured by a cartel, and two, she was now in Mexico.

Trying to penetrate the feeble glow from the stairwell, she heard more than one person descending and sat up, using her shoulder against the wall to make up for her hands being shackled behind her back. The overhead light blazed on, and a man was thrown in front of her, hitting the ground hard. At first she thought it was Pike, her stomach clenching in fear when she saw the man’s battered face, only relaxing when she spotted a mustache.

Three other men followed him into the room, one in a business suit, two with jeans, rough shirts, and pistols in their hands. The business suit kicked the prostrate man in the stomach hard enough to lift him an inch off the ground. The man grunted, then began coughing. No one paid a bit of attention to her, conducting the actions as if she didn’t exist.

One of the guns reached down and pulled the man’s head up by the hair, and the suit began to interrogate him. They spoke in Spanish, but, having grown up in Texas, Jennifer could understand the gist of what was said. She visibly reacted when she heard the words reporter and phone, the suit waving a cell in front of the man’s face. He turned away, and the suit nodded at the gunman still holding his hair. The gunman cranked the man’s head until he could do nothing but stare at whatever the cell phone showed. The suit yelled again, and the target spit a glob of bloody phlegm onto the phone.

The suit jumped back, holding the cell away from his clothes. He shook it, like a man flinging filth off a shoe, his hands holding the phone between two fingers. Not able to get rid of the goo, he cursed and tossed it to the other gunman, eliciting a laugh from the enforcer holding the man’s hair. The suit began questioning again.