“A tunnel?” Senator Stone McBride’s irritation couldn’t be concealed. Gripping the telephone too tightly, he continued. “And nobody knew about it?”
Leaf Watson hesitated before answering. “I’m afraid not, sir. I think it’s fair to assume if Special Agent Ortega has seen it, he would’ve reported it.”
Stone had sent Watson out to California on a red-eye for a firsthand report. Now he couldn’t help but wish he’d gone along with him.
“I have FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Larry Gifford with me. We’re on speaker, Senator.”
“Nice to meet you, ASAC Gifford, even under the circumstances.”
“Thank you, Senator,” Gifford said.
“Any sign of James Ortega?”
“No,” Watson said.
“I want the entire property searched. Bring in whatever resources you need. I want that compound torn apart. Dogs, whatever it takes. I want James Ortega found.”
“Yes, Senator. I’ll see to it personally.”
Stone rubbed his eyes. “What about the Semtex?”
“I’m looking at several pallets of wooden crates stacked head high.”
“How much?”
“Just over sixteen hundred pounds.”
“Did we get all of it?”
“We’re pretty sure ten crates are missing. About four hundred pounds.”
“So, let me get this straight,” Stone said. “The raid nets us over three-quarters of a ton of Semtex and the youngest Bridgestone brother, but in the process we lose one of your men, four hundred pounds of Semtex, and the operation’s two ringleaders. Not a great trade-off, I’m afraid.”
An uneasy silence hung on the other end.
Larry Gifford broke it. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”
Waiting for Gifford to continue, Stone said nothing.
“We had a sniper team on the south rim of the canyon. They saw a compound member with a radio remote, put two and two together, and fired a shot out in front of my SWAT team. Fortunately when the claymores blew, we were on the ground. We could’ve lost a dozen more agents.”
“Is that the official story?” Stone asked.
“Yes.”
“Good, let’s keep it that way.” Stone knew the truth and knew that both Gifford and Watson also knew the truth. His son fired that warning shot. Chalk up another victory for cold-blooded snipers.
“Tell me about this damned tunnel.”
Gifford continued. “Before storming the main building, we fired flash bangs and tear gas, but they were long gone. On the inside west wall of the main building, the concrete had been saw cut, then removed with a jackhammer. We found a small room below the slab reinforced with railroad ties. It connects to nearly a mile of thirty-inch diameter concrete pipe. Must have cost a small fortune. They attached skateboard wheels to the undersides of water skis and used them like toboggans to traverse the tunnel.”
“They didn’t haul four hundred pounds of Semtex through that tunnel yesterday.”
“We think it was moved several days ago, just after Special Agent James Ortega went silent. The tunnel ended in the tree line to the west of the compound nearly a mile away. We followed their footprints another half mile and found camouflaged netting they’d used to cover off-road quad-runners. The tire tracks extended to the west down the valley. We think someone met them on a logging road about fifteen miles away. The quad-runner tracks ended there. They probably loaded them onto a trailer or hauled them into the bed of a truck. We’re checking that angle, asking at every gas station and convenience store in the area if anyone remembers seeing them, but it’s a fairly common sight-quads in trailers, I mean. We’re doing our best to piece together the chain of events.”
“Keep after it.” Stone paused a moment before asking, “Did you see my son during the raid?”
“Yes, he approached our teams after the claymores went off.”
“What did you think of him?”
“I’m… not sure what you’re asking me?” Gifford asked
“What was your impression of him?”
“He was definitely in his environment. He seemed comfortable in a high-stress situation. I’m glad he was on our side, that’s for sure.”
“That sounds like Nathan.”
“He’s an incredible soldier. Was an incredible soldier. He’s given a lot for his country, more than I’ll ever know.”
“That’s true, he has.”
“I offered him another job.”
“Oh?”
“I need someone to talk to the Bridgestones’ cousins living on the outskirts of Sacramento. They’ve been in and out of jail most of their lives. A week before the raid, we put their farmhouse under surveillance. They might know something or the Bridgestones might call them or show up there. It’s a long shot, but it’s worth pursuing.”
“So Nathan’s to talk to them?”
“Yes, a friendly fireside chat.”
“Uh-huh. And I suppose he can talk to these Bridgestone cousins in a way your people can’t? Is that about the long and short of it?” Stone knew Gifford wouldn’t respond, so he continued. “I see. Then this conversation we’re having never took place.”
“I think that would be best, Senator.”
“Nathan’s your man, then. Anything you need, Special Agent Gifford, you talk to Special Agent Watson directly.”
“Thank you, Senator, I will.”
Stone had one last question for Gifford. “Do you believe James Ortega is dead?” He waited through a brief silence.
“I want to believe he’s still alive, but it’s unlikely. The Bridgestones tried to frag my entire SWAT team. If James Ortega was discovered, they would’ve interrogated him and killed him outright. I can’t see any reason they’d keep him alive. My people have searched every building within a five-mile radius of the compound, but he’s nowhere. We’ve also set up roadblocks on every road leading in and out of here. We’re bringing in cadaver dog teams tomorrow in case he’s buried up here. Later today, I’ll have two FBI helicopters searching the area out to a twenty-mile radius coordinating with CDF and Lassen County Sheriffs’ horseback teams on the ground. We’re doing everything possible to find him with the limited resources we have available.”
“I’ll call Sierra Army Depot’s commander, see if he can muster a couple of platoons for you. Maybe a Black Hawk or two.”
“That would really help. The more people we have up here searching, the better chance we have of finding him.”
“If it’s any consolation, Special Agent Gifford, I’m going to nail those Bridgestone brothers to a cross.”
“Thank you, Senator,” said Gifford. “I’ll be there with the hammer.”
It promised to be another long day for Nathan and Harv. Yesterday, after speaking with ASAC Gifford, they’d received some stitches and small field dressings on their legs. Sitting on their wounds hadn’t been especially pleasant during the flight back to San Diego, but other than that, the flight had been uneventful. They’d arrived well after dark. Then, early this morning, they met with the Ortegas at a coffee shop in Mission Valley and given them a complete update on the Freedom’s Echo raid, including their latest phone updates from Gifford. Although disappointment was evident in their voices and body language, they seemed encouraged by the new assignment Nathan and Harv had accepted.
After the Ortegas, they again went their separate ways and agreed to meet back at Montgomery Field at 1800 hours for the return flight to Sacramento. Harv told Nathan he needed to make a brief stop at the office to follow up on some potential contracts before heading home to say happy birthday to his oldest son, Lucas.
Nathan needed sleep. He could barely concentrate. One rule he’d taken to heart while in the Marines: Sleep when you can. He’d had less than six hours of shut-eye in the last two days and he faced another long night of flying. He needed to call Mara and find out if Toby had caused any additional problems. He dialed her cell number from memory.
“Any sign of our problem child?”
“No, nothing at all. I really think he’s gone for good this time. Karen said to say thank-you for the money. A handyman’s there now, fixing the walls and replacing the sliding glass door. Karen said she wants you to upgrade the security system with that new mobile link stuff.”
“That’s a good idea. Tell Karen we’ll hook her up.”
“You’re a gem.”
“Take care, Mara.”
“Bye, Nathan.”
Maybe he’d read Toby right after all. A few miles later, his phone rang. It was Harv. “What’s up?”
“I just had the damnedest conversation with the office.”
“And?”
“Gavin said a big guy came in and applied for a job yesterday. I believe she used the word gorilla. She said his right arm was in a cast, and he looked like he’d gone ten rounds with George Foreman. You know anything about him?”
“I might.”
“You didn’t…”
“I did.” Nathan listened to the sigh on the other end.
“Think he can pass a background check?”
“I have no idea, probably not.”
“You must really hate me.”
“Consider it a personal challenge.”
“I’ll run the check myself. You could’ve told me.”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
“Do me a favor and get some sleep. I don’t want you nodding off at the stick tonight. Waking your ass up is hazardous business, especially in a helicopter.”
“It’s called a cyclic, not a stick.”
“Whatever.”
“How was your son’s birthday party?”
“I missed it. I was tied up with a national security issue up north in Lassen County.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Well, let’s see. You want the long or short version?”
“Short.”
“No surprise there,” Harv muttered. “I spent an hour removing toilet paper from my trees in the front yard. After that, I drained the pool. The water had mysteriously turned pink. But you know what the worst thing was?”
“Do tell.”
“His friends wrote Happy Birthday Lucas with gasoline on the front lawn and lit it on fire. Can you believe that? It wasn’t dangerous, but honestly. Today’s youth.”
“Well, he is a teenager.”
“Don’t remind me. I’m making him replace all the burned grass. A pallet of sod’s coming tomorrow morning. Should keep him busy for most of the day. Candace grounded him for a month.”
Nathan chuckled.
“Oh that’s right, laugh it up. This is what happens when I turn my back for a few days.”
“If that’s worst thing he ever does, consider yourself lucky.”
“That’s not very reassuring.”
“What, you never did anything like that during your formative years?”
“Point taken.”
“See you at eighteen-hundred.”
At close to midnight, Nathan set the helicopter down at Sacramento Executive Airport in the exact same spot where they’d landed before. They were both suffering from major cases of flight fatigue and needed head call. A plain four-door sedan was parked near the hangars to the south. It looked dark blue or black, Nathan couldn’t tell which under the bland sodium light. Its headlights flashed once.
“Our FBI friends,” Harv said, removing his flight helmet.
“Yep.”
“You ready for this?”
“Not really.”
“Come on, it’ll be just like old times.”
“That’s what worries me.”
While Nathan went through the shutdown procedure, Harv retrieved a duffel and two overnight bags from the baggage compartment. The duffel held their gun belts, spare ammunition, night-vision visors, two Fox USMC Predator knives in ankle sheaths, a roll of duct tape, and two LED flashlights.
They climbed out and Nathan gave the helicopter an obligatory pat on her fuselage before locking her up. A man and a woman slid out of the sedan and walked toward them. The male agent was perfectly tailored in a dark polo shirt, pressed slacks, and expensive-looking shoes. The woman wore new blue jeans, hiking boots, and a white-buttoned shirt. Secured in waist holsters, they both wore Glocks on their right sides. The woman looked like the real deal, but her partner looked a little forced-like the picture of a fast-food burger on a menu board.
“Mr. McBride, Mr. Fontana? I’m Special Agent in Charge Holly Simpson of the Sacramento field office. This is Special Agent Bruce Henning.” Handshakes were made all around, and it was agreed to use first names. As they walked toward the sedan, Nathan evaluated his escorts. SAC Simpson was small and compact, but her demeanor said otherwise. She had a firm handshake and an aura of confidence surrounding her. Her black hair was shoulder length, not too long, not too short. It was… Just right. And she hadn’t reacted to the scars on his face. Henning had stared way too long, and Nathan got the distinct impression he resented outsiders being involved in bureau business. An understandable attitude, but too damned bad. The guy was medium height and build with perfect, blow-dried hair. There was intensity in his dark eyes and something else harder to pinpoint. Nathan didn’t like him.
“I’m very sorry about your man up at the compound,” Nathan offered to Holly.
“I appreciate that,” she said.
“What exactly are you authorized to do with the Bridgestones’ cousins?” Henning asked.
Nathan stopped walking and faced the man. Henning’s statement and tone were clearly designed to put him on the defensive. Not on my watch and not from the likes of you.
Nathan leaned forward and locked eyes. “We’re authorized to torture them, Bruce. Do you have a problem with that?”
Henning stared for a few seconds. “There’s no evidence they had anything to do with Freedom’s Echo. They’re just a couple of hayseeds.”
“Well, that’s what we’re here to find out.”
“Look,” Holly said, “the bureau’s in debt to you for firing that warning shot at the compound. You saved a dozen lives, but you need to understand we’re uncomfortable with this kind of thing. The FBI doesn’t condone it. It’s a serious breach of ethics for us.”
“That was you?” Henning asked. “You were the sniper at Freedom’s Echo?”
“We were,” Nathan said, nodding toward Harv.
Harvey jumped in. “We’re retired. We don’t do this anymore. It’s a personal favor for an old friend.”
“Frank Ortega,” Holly Simpson said.
Harv nodded.
She issued Henning a glance. “Let’s get going.”
“Nice helicopter,” Henning said. “Yours?”
Nathan ignored the question and tucked himself into the back of the sedan.
Henning muttered something and opened the sedan’s trunk with a key. Harv placed their bags inside and let Henning close the lid before getting in next to Nathan.
“Can we stop somewhere for a head call and coffee?” Nathan asked.
From the driver’s seat, Henning looked at Holly Simpson as if the request was a royal pain in the ass.
We just spent four hours in a helicopter, you dumb ass. Nathan was sorely tempted to smack the guy in the back of the head.
“We passed a Denny’s about a mile from here,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
Henning drove through the automatic gate of the airport’s transient aircraft parking area and waited for the gate to close before pulling away. Holly Simpson began briefing them on the Bridgestones’ cousins’ background and the layout of their farmhouse. Basically, these guys were your garden-variety, petty-criminal losers. Most of their adult lives had been spent in jail on a variety of offensives against society. Drunk driving. Drug possession. Larceny. Vagrancy. Poaching. Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it. Both of them were currently on parole and probably would be for the rest of their lives. A matched set, Nathan thought. Give ’em a six-packand a TV and they’re happy as clams in mud. They lived together on the outskirts of Sacramento and took odd jobs when they could, mostly as auto mechanics for mom-and-pop garages. Their father, Ben Bridgestone, was currently serving a life sentence in Pelican Bay for his third strike.
Henning pulled into the Denny’s parking lot and killed the engine. No one spoke. Nathan exchanged a glance with Harv.
“Do you guys want anything?” Harv asked.
“No, thank you,” she said.
Henning stared straight ahead.
They got out and walked the short distance to the Denny’s entrance.
“Henning’s an asshole,” Nathan said.
“Don’t bust his balls, okay?”
“Keep him out of my hair.”
“I don’t think he’ll be a major problem. He just doesn’t like outsiders being involved in bureau business. If the situation were reversed, we’d feel the same way.”
Nathan grunted. One of the fluorescent tubes over the entry was flickering with an annoying electronic buzz, a result of absent management. He caught the nasty smell of a Dumpster nearby. Once inside, Nathan used the head while Harv ordered two black coffees to go. Then Harv used the head while Nathan paid for the coffee with a twenty-dollar bill. He told the server to keep the change. Graveyard shifts could be lean and he, like Harv, had a generous nature, even when in a foul mood.
Four minutes after stopping they were on the road again, heading east on Highway 50. The drive took just over thirty minutes, the last ten in silence. The geography gradually transformed into dark country roads lined with barbed-wire fencing. The foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains were mostly horse and cattle country. To the west, Nathan could see barns and small houses backlit by the orange glow of Sacramento. As the sedan slowed, Henning flashed his high beams twice, pulled behind a plain gray van parked on the shoulder of the road, and killed the engine.
“Please wait here,” Holly said. She climbed out and approached the surveillance van. The rear doors opened, and she disappeared inside. Nathan had a brief look at the wall-to-wall black boxes and video monitors.
“The bureau doesn’t condone this sort of operation,” Henning said.
“Actually, it just did.” Nathan yawned. “And we aren’t with the bureau.” He stared out the window, bored with the conversation. “You’re following orders. Can’t we just leave it at that?”
“So that makes it okay? Just following orders? Sounds like Nuremberg to me.”
Nathan ignored the comment.
“Who are you, McBride, some kind of has-been CIA interrogator? Some burned-out spook for hire?”
“You’re in the FBI, check me out for yourself.”
“Your service record is classified top-secret by the Department of Defense.”
“And?”
“And I don’t like not knowing who you are.”
He leaned forward and whispered, “We’re legitimate businessmen with a successful security services firm. We can provide you with customer references if you feel you really need them.”
“That’s cute, McBride.”
He nudged Harv’s leg.
“What exactly do you want to know about us?” Harv asked. “And what would that information mean to you? Suppose we gave you our colorful background, then what? How are you better off by knowing it?”
“For one, I’d like to know who I’m getting in bed with. I need to know I can trust you if the shit hits the fan out here.”
“Did it occur to you we might be wondering the same thing about you?” Harvey asked. “We’re on the same side here.”
“The hell we are.”
Nathan sighed. The man lived in a fishbowl. If you weren’t FBI, you weren’t jack. In Nathan’s limited experience with the bureau, he hadn’t found that a common attitude. Every FBI agent he’d ever met-granted, there hadn’t been that many-had been reserved and professional. He supposed every law enforcement agency had its share of gung-ho types. But deep down, he respected the FBI and what it stood for or he wouldn’t be here, debt or no debt to the Ortega family.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Nathan asked.
“And that would be?” Henning asked.
“Four hundred pounds of missing Semtex. Don’t you want to recover it?”
Holly Simpson emerged from the back of the van and walked over to Nathan’s window.
He rolled it down.
“You’re on,” she said. “We haven’t heard anything but snoring for the last two hours. We have bugs in every room. They’re both crashed out in the living room just inside the front door.”
As Nathan and Harv climbed out, Henning opened the trunk and stepped back. Harv grabbed their duffel bag, set it on the asphalt, and unzipped it. He removed two pistol belts and handed one to Nathan. Harv strapped on a small black waist pack containing their LED flashlights and two rolls of duct tape.
“Dogs?” Nathan asked.
“None,” Holly answered. “I doubt they could handle the responsibility.”
“I only have one condition,” Nathan said. He retrieved two sets of night-vision visors from the duffel bag.
“It’s a little late for conditions,” she said.
“None of it gets recorded. I don’t care if you listen in, but the black boxes aren’t running. Deal?” He strapped his Predator knife to his ankle.
Harv did the same.
Nathan placed his NV visor on his head. “I mean it. We’ll have… unresolved issues otherwise.”
“Are you threatening us?” Henning asked.
He ignored Henning and stared at Holly, his eyes unwavering. “Do we have a deal?”
Henning took a step forward. “Nobody threatens us.”
Without taking his eyes from Holly, Nathan pointed at Henning’s face.
“Get your finger out of my face.”
“Holly? Do we have a deal?”
She looked at Henning, then back to Nathan. “Yes.”
He turned toward Harv. “Let’s go.”
After they left, Holly faced Henning. “You’re out of line, mister. I’m in charge of this operation. Are we crystal clear on that?”
“I just-”
“You just nothing. Don’t ever test me again.”