Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

Jennifer snapped daggers at me with her eyes, and I knew we were going to part ways on how this shook out. She wanted her brother, but we were operating on the mission profile that the brother would lead to the threat. If we couldn’t find him, then he wasn’t worth Taskforce time that could be better spent working the problem from another direction. It was a hard truth, but it was reality.

I said, “Jennifer, if this doesn’t pan out, we need to turn what we know about your brother over to the proper authorities. It’s been forty-eight hours. Let them work his abduction while we do what we do: find the threat.”

“What good will the authorities do? The US won’t conduct any investigation down here, and you just watched a Mexican federal agent get killed because he was working for the cartels. You really want me to go to them?”

I started to say something and was cut off by the pilot. “Loop complete. Dry hole.”

Jennifer closed her eyes, her lips set into a grim line.

End of the road.

I said, “Roger, Jim. Thanks anyway. Get back and work your cover. File a flight plan for the US tomorrow. We’ll contact the Taskforce and give you further guidance.”

Jennifer said, “Bullshit! This is bullshit. I’m not giving up. You can fly back, but I’m staying.”

She pounded her fist into the dash, frustrated. I reached forward, grabbing her wrists. “Jennifer! Stop it.”

She glared at me as if I was at fault, and the pilot spoke again, the line still open. “Pike, Pike, we’re getting something.”

We all stared at the phone. I said, “What?”

“A string of SMS on the line. Apparently the backlog that hadn’t gotten out yet.”

No way.

“You’re getting SMS texts? Right now?”

“We were getting a steady stream, but it just stopped midtext. It’s dead.”

Jennifer was pinging off the seat, wanting to talk. I held up my finger and whispered, “Call the Taskforce. Let them know it’s coming.” She started dialing furiously, and I said to the pilot, “Get that data to the Taskforce. Tell them it’s from me. They’ll know what to do with it.”

Five minutes later we had the plot. Fifteen separate pings that were all on the same house. The last one time-stamped five hours before, which was ominous. Clearly, the SMS stream had been interrupted by something before it could complete the backlog of updates. Hopefully it was a dead battery.

The good news was the target was about four miles away as the crow flies, and within two hundred meters of the phone trace. Inside the circle of probable error.

The Taskforce had already pulled satellite photos, complete with an imagery analyst’s description of what they thought we were up against, which was a fairly large estate in a neighborhood full of large estates, called Bosques de las Lomas. I gave the tablet with the downloads to Knuckles, telling him to come up with a plan for in extremis assault, then called the rest of the team to my location.

While they were coming, Knuckles said, “You want to hit it now? Or wait until we can get some detailed intel from a recce? We don’t even have our shooting package here. Body armor, breaching charges, long guns, all that shit.”

I looked at Jennifer, who was frothing at the mouth, and said, “I’m leaning toward hitting it. What do you think?” Giving him the out.

He stared out the window for a moment, then exhaled. “Yeah, we need to go. It’ll be a two-hour round-trip for the kit, and we don’t have that kind of time. That data stream shutting down could be because of the cop’s phone call. Which means they could all be getting packaged for transport right now. We know the stream was active as of five minutes ago.”

I saw the tension leave Jennifer’s body and said, “So how do we hit it?”

“Well, an explosive breach is out of the question. I say low-vis and slow. Get in through the pool area. It looks like a damn jungle. Get over the wall and start from there. Taskforce hasn’t identified any guards on the outside, so we can make it to breach unobserved. My bet is they’re hiding in plain sight, using the exclusive neighborhood as security. Hell, the cops probably know it’s a narco house.”

“What’s your take on the manpower? I’m thinking no more than five. Just guards for the kidnapped folks. Enough to run errands and provide twenty-four/seven coverage.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t like Jennifer’s show in Ciudad Juárez. We know at least two are in there—Jack and Felix—but there may be more, and they may not be able to move on their own. We’ll need to secure the entire objective before exfil.”

I said, “You think we have the manpower for that? Four guys?”

“Five. Jennifer comes in with us. We’ll do the clearing, but she can help with security, hostage screening, and other shit, freeing us up to take every room with four on assault. Overwhelming them.”

I said, “Whoa. She’s not an assaulter. She can pull security outside for anyone coming up the drive. Give us early warning and other things, but she’s not coming in. Anyway, someone needs to stage for exfil.”

Jennifer cleared her throat from the front seat. I’d forgotten she was there. She said, “I’ll do it. I can do whatever you want.”

I said, “Jennifer, I get you want to save your brother, but let us handle this.”

I saw the other team vehicles pull up, and Knuckles said, “Remember what I told you in Turkmenistan? Is that happening here? Because we need her inside the target. She doesn’t enter, and I can’t recommend assault.”

Am I trying to protect her? Jennifer wasn’t trained as an assaulter. She could shoot, no doubt about it, but she would only slow us down, and speed was the one edge we had. The one thing that would allow us to defeat everyone in the house, by moving faster than they could react individually. I saw Decoy and Blood get out of the cars and a thought sprang unbidden into my mind.

She’ll get hurt.

It was like a subconscious truth springing forth, clouding my deliberation, making me question my decisions. I trusted Knuckles’s judgment more than anyone on earth’s. Right now, more than my own. I asked, “You think she can handle it?”

He looked at her and said, “Yes, I do.”

In a weird bit of role reversal, Jennifer had finally made it to the inside, convincing Knuckles of her worth, and I was the one keeping her out of the action. Keeping her safe from harm. Protecting her because of what she meant to me.

Decoy opened the back door, looking at me expectantly.

I turned to Knuckles and said, “It’s your plan. Brief it.”

37

Jennifer came over the barrier last, being the only one who could scale the fifteen-foot brick wall without any help. When she landed, she was sweating profusely from helping to push all four of us up. I don’t know why, but I found that funny.

I’d gone up first and waited on the top, the wall being about a foot wide at the apex, but luckily not embedded with broken bottles or strapped with razor wire. Blood, the designated point man, came next. I pulled him up, then hoisted up Knuckles. Once he was set on top, Blood and I both went over, giving us two guns on the ground if we ran into trouble instead of one man on his own.

The foliage was extremely thick, reminding me of working in the jungles of Panama. Blood had moved only a few feet, but I had to look hard to see him. The pool area was still out of view, but I knew it was only about fifty meters away.

After we had everyone together, spread in a tight wedge, I signaled Blood, and we began moving like a patrol at Ranger school, only with suppressed Glocks instead of any type of long gun.

We went about twenty meters before I saw Knuckles take a knee and hold his fist in the air, a relay from Blood. I followed suit and took a knee, looking at Knuckles. He shrugged, telling me he didn’t know why Blood had stopped. I saw him lean into Decoy, who whispered something. He then leaned my way and hissed a word I didn’t understand. When he saw I wasn’t getting it, he held his left hand like he was mimicking a pistol, index finger out but with the thumb inverted and pointing at the ground. The hand signal for enemy.