Border Crossed - Chapter 14 & Epilogue

Galveston, Texas

Seven hours later, Taylor and Whitaker were escorted up to the top floors of the Houston field office. They’d managed to get a nap on the short plane ride from El Paso to Houston, and it looked as though that was all the sleep they would get for now. The shipment was scheduled to go out in eleven hours, and there was a lot of work to be done before then.

Their first stop had been the office’s tech department, to drop the laptop off with someone who could watch for any new messages from the contact and to start working on trying to trace the guy’s account back to him, in case the entire plan to catch him with the shipment went south. They’d toyed with the idea of leaving the laptop in El Paso, but Whitaker didn’t want to be that far away from it, just in case something happened.

Besides, Houston was a larger office than the one in El Paso and had access to more technical services. There had been no reply so far from the contact, but it had been the middle of the night when the shootout had happened and they’d sent the original message, and it was only early morning now, so it wasn’t time to panic yet. Until that point, they’d start working on getting the personnel they needed for the operation in place.

It didn’t take long to get their answer. They’d barely gotten off the elevator three floors above when Whitaker’s phone buzzed with a message asking her to come back to the technician. Curious, the pair retraced their steps, finding themselves back in the office they’d left mere minutes before.

“We got a reply,” the technician said.

The technician turned the screen so they could see it.

I don’t like this change of plans. We agreed that we would keep everything at arm’s length so nothing would track back to me. You know what will happen if I’m caught, and I promise you if I go down, I won’t go down alone. If your clients don’t like what I’m selling, then sell it to someone else. I don’t care. The more people that have seen my face, the more danger I’m in. Figure it out.

“Well, that didn’t work,” Whitaker said.

“Maybe,” Taylor said. “Write this back. ‘My buyers want to meet you, and there’s no way around it. After everything that happened at the border this week, they think we set them up and that using them to sell everything to cover our tracks was a ruse to get in with them so we could shut them down. They aren’t sure who we’re working for, if it’s one of the other outfits or someone else, but they need a scapegoat, and they want it to be us. We need to show them something real, and we need to do it how they want it done. If you think they won’t be able to get your name out of me, then you aren’t giving these guys enough credit. You’re worried about the government? Be worried about having all your parts spread among hundreds of very small garbage bags. This shit is real. They want guarantees, and we’re going to give it to them.’ ”

“What the fuck?” Whitaker said. “You want to scare him underground?”

“He won’t run. Even if he doesn’t know the kind of reach cartels have, he has an imagination and having someone like Matthews sounding scared will spur him on.”

“We looked over all the messages. At no point did Matthews mention the cartels. What if this guy doesn’t know who the buyer is? What then?”

“He knows, but even if he doesn’t, there are enough clues in that message to get him there. And the tone will be enough to make him look. If he thinks Matthews is scared, he’ll be scared too.”

“He didn’t sound that scared of Matthews in his message.”

“It was put on. He was trying to play at being a big man, but you can see the guy shaking in his probably cheap white-collar shoes. Matthews may have been a scumbag and a liar, but he wasn’t a poser. The man was the real deal when we served together. This guy will know that. Trust me. This will work.”

Whitaker looked at the message the tech had typed out, back at Taylor, and then back to the message, clearly weighing things out.

Finally, she said, “Fine. Send it.”

The deed done, they took the elevator back up two floors, to prepare for the operation that now seemed less likely to happen than it had a few minutes prior. They’d already talked to the leader of the office’s tactical team while they were on the plane, a man named Roberts, but they hadn’t met him until they walked into the secured briefing room. Inside, a large man, who they both assumed was Roberts, stood in front of almost a dozen other men, all sitting in chairs, lined up to face him. If Taylor hadn’t been to a few of these meetings before, he would have thought this was some kind of seminar, and not a prep session for an operation.

They did the same kind of thing when he was in, but since ODAs were so small, it was just a few guys sitting around a sand table with their captain, and not something so formal.

Roberts looked their way, gave a nod, and then said to the assembled group, “Okay, you’ve got your mission assignments. Particulars of the area and our game plan will be laid out shortly. Get with your leads, check out what equipment you need, and start going over everything until we have the full brief ready.”

With that, everyone started to get up and head in a dozen different directions while Roberts made a beeline for the pair of them.

“Are we all set?” Whitaker asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and pointed to a table with a bunch of photographs on it. They followed him over to it.

The photos were of a pier in a port, presumably the port of Galveston. A mostly empty container ship sat next to a concrete pier, and long rows of pipes lay beside it, next to a series of rail tracks and what looked like a grain silo. It was a great spot for an ambush, Taylor thought. The area between the water and the grain silo was open, without a lot of cover, and well contained, with the solid silo boxing whoever was in the middle in pretty tightly.

“This picture is about eight hours old, but it gives us the basic layout of Pier Twelve, where your guy set up the meet. These pipes here are scheduled to be hauled away this morning, and the ship currently unloading is also scheduled to push off in an hour or so. By the time of the meet, there will be a new ship that will have been unloading for at least five hours by the time of the meet. They couldn’t give me any idea what was on that ship or how much stuff would be unloaded in this area. I thought about asking them to postpone any ships docking there, but I thought that might make your guy suspicious and turn him away short of the meet.”

“Good call. We’re already going to have a problem with no one there to meet him; we don’t want a big empty dock to add to his suspicions. He’ll be able to see that well before he gets to where we’ll be set up.”

“So you’re saying we won’t have any idea of what the area will look like until right before the time comes?” Taylor said.

“Correct. It’s not ideal, but I couldn’t think of any way around that. I did check with the port operations department, and the men assigned to unload that ship have a shift change around that time, which is probably why your guy picked it. There shouldn’t be a lot of people around that pier when the swap goes down, so no one to ask questions about why a couple of random guys are there when they shouldn’t be. I’ve asked the port master to hold back any crews for the next shift from this area of the port until we give them the go-ahead.”

“What reason did you give him?” Whitaker asked.

“Anti-terrorism training op. I talked to the head of port security, who’s about the most gung-ho guy I’ve ever met. It took some doing, but I managed to convince him that, for the first stage of our training op, we needed just our teams involved, but we’d invite his guys to participate in stage two. He bought it and should keep his men away. I also made it very clear that we needed to keep this quiet, as these kinds of training operations can make the locals very jumpy, since they’d read into it. It helped that I could point to that thing in Mobile last year where the local news freaked over a training op.”

“You know, if our guy picked this place because he has people inside port operations, we’re going to be blown in a huge way,” Taylor said.

“Yeah, but there’s no way we were getting a whole team in and set up ahead of time without anyone noticing. Better to keep everyone out of the area than have someone come check to see what we were doing.”

“I don’t love how many variables there are here. If this goes down, if he sees anything odd, how long will he wait before he starts getting nervous that Matthews didn’t show up?” Whitaker said.

“What option do we have,” Taylor asked.

“I …” Whitaker started to say when her phone buzzed again.

Pulling it out and looking at it, she said, “He responded. Agent Roberts, you’re doing good work. Set your men up as you see fit, but your number one priority is to keep everyone out of sight until I give you the go signal. Is that understood? I don’t want anyone on your team tipping our hand early.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said, and gave Taylor a wave to follow her back to the elevators.

“Show us,” Whitaker said as they walked into the technician’s office.

“It’s just three words,” the tech said. “Fine, we’ll meet.”

“See, no problem,” Taylor said.

“This isn’t over yet,” she told him before turning her attention back to the tech. “Keep working on tracking down where these messages are coming from and who this guy is. If this thing tonight doesn’t work, I don’t want to have waited for nothing. Finding him is your top priority.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the guy said, swiveling his chair back to his keyboard.

“Well, now it all depends on if he shows up for real or not,” Whitaker said as they headed back upstairs once more.

***

They were in position almost two hours before the meet. Concerned that the insider could have someone watching the port, she had the men move to their positions in ones and twos, with weapons and safety equipment such as helmets and the like hidden in large bags they carried until they got in position.

The assault team leader decided that, other than a command team at the far end of the pier in a trailer used by pier workers, and some assets on an adjacent pier, he was going to position his men on the boat and in the grain silo, which were the two places he could move his men and be completely out of sight. He would use the bridge of the docked ship as his command post, since it was difficult to see into from the ground, and it gave him a good view of the operational area.

Or, it would have. They encountered their first snag when they arrived at the pier. Instead of stacks of long pipes that went up maybe to half the height of a person, there were rows of stacked containers stretching two and three stories tall. It was obvious the second they arrived that this was going to be a problem.

For starters, it made any of the planned overwatch positions where snipers would be positioned completely useless. Each would only have visibility over maybe ten percent of the pier, and most of that was overlapping with the other overwatch positions. There would be large parts of the area that would receive no protection from those positions.

Taylor and Whitaker were in a trailer at the far end of the pier, opposite the entrance. It looked to be used by some kind of supervisor, or maybe a union rep. It was hard to tell from the brochures and material on the walls and left on the desks. Looking through binoculars from their vantage point, he could see straight ahead down several of the central rows of containers, although once the action started, that would be all obscured by a mass of bodies running around.

Until then, he had a better view than the men in the overwatch positions or the team leader up on the ship.

“Movement at the end of the pier,” a voice said in his ear.

Moments later, a small convoy of six SUVs came driving into view down the middle row of crates, stopping at sort of a perpendicular cross row that was probably to allow the cranes or forklifts or whatever to cross from one row to the other.

As soon as they pulled to a halt, the doors of the front three and rear two SUVs popped open and nearly twenty men jumped out, all dressed more or less in street gear. Some had sidearms, while a few carried a variety of rifles. This guy wasn’t playing games and had hired somebody to watch his back, although it was such a motley group, it was hard to say if they were just locally hired thugs, muscle for some more organized group, or actually mercenaries.

Whoever they were, it would have taken some real money for this much muscle, so this guy had either really been cashing in on his theft, was scared enough to be willing to lose money on this to make sure he was safe, or maybe both.

Taylor squinted through the binoculars at the middle car. These weren’t government or private security SUVs, with their incredibly dark windows. He could see a rental tag on it, speaking to the slapdash way this had been arranged, indicating that this guy was a house cat. Someone who’d never operated in the field. A paper pusher.

He could see four men in the middle SUV where no one had gotten out. A driver and another man in the front, both with the same bruiser look as the guys starting to spread out from the cars in an unorganized way. In the back was another one of those guys and then a guy in a suit that looked weaselly. Beady eyes, long nose, apparently thin under the suit. Taylor wasn’t enough of a suit guy to know if it was expensive or not, but either way, this guy was pure bureaucrat.

Between their seats, in the rear row of the SUV, was some kind of tub, one of those rubber things you might find at an organizational store for putting in the garage. It didn’t say ‘advanced weapons tracking system’ on the side of it, but it was hard not to assume that was what they were looking for.

“Do you see that middle car? I think what we are looking for is in the tub between the two seats,” Taylor asked Whitaker, who was standing next to him, also looking through binoculars.

“There’s no way you can know that,” Whitaker said after a moment, presumably finding what he was looking at.

“What else can it be? I mean, do you think they’re hauling around weapons in there? It’s secured, but not really accessible, and these are rental cars. I bet ones that were rented today. Whatever’s in those cars, they put it there themselves.”

“We don’t know what that is. We wait until we can confirm,” she said.

“There’s no one here for him to meet. Do you think he’s just going to get out of the car, take the circuit board out, and wave it around in the air, just in case someone’s watching?”

“No, I don’t think that’s what he’s going to do. I think he’s going to get everyone back in their cars, turn around, and leave. Look at him.”

Taylor had been watching the weaselly guy in the back, behind the driver. To say he was nervous was an understatement. He was practically squirming in his seat.

“This guy’s ready to bolt. He’s only here because he’s afraid the cartel’s going to chop him up and stuff him in garbage bags. When it becomes clear Matthews isn’t coming, he’s out of here.”

“Maybe,” Whitaker said, but they both knew he was right.

They were back in the US and working with her people again, which meant they were back to going by the book, which meant that assault teams had to hold until they could confirm their target was in the pocket.

After five minutes, Taylor was proven right as several of the guys touched their ears and then started moving back toward the cars. The insider had decided Matthews wasn’t showing and he wasn’t going to hang around any longer.

“We’re a go,” Whitaker said into the radio. “Take them. Package is in the third car from the rear.”

“Go, Go, Go,” the assault leader’s overly excited voice said over their earpieces.

The vehicles they had previously staged out of sight roared onto the pier, sliding to a stop in between each of the alleys between cargo containers, blocking the insider’s small convoy from their only route of escape. Agents poured down the ship gangplank and from the grain silo, as the sirens of the blocking force blared.

The mercenaries, which was how Taylor had decided to identify them for brevity’s sake, panicked. That was the only word he could think to describe the men running in all different directions. Some into the stacks, probably hoping to hide or get bypassed so they could run away, some toward the end of the dock where he and Whitaker were stationed, with only a handful moving toward the car holding the man they were supposed to be protecting.

Taylor burst from the trailer, Whitaker on his heels. Gunfire crackled through the rows of containers as the mercenaries, finally noticing the agents coming off the ship and from the grain silo, opened fire.

Taylor had just made it to the first container when a bullet flew past him, sending him and Whitaker diving behind a container.

“Here’s where the fun begins,” Taylor said, popping up and snapping off a shot at a barrel-chested gunman who was spraying rounds from a semi-automatic rifle.

The man stumbled back, a surprised look on his face before he dropped to the ground, his rifle clattering to the concrete.

“Let’s go!” Taylor said, sprinting forward.

At the next intersection, a mercenary leaned out and fired off a burst. Bullets ricocheted around them. Taylor snapped off two quick shots, hitting the man in the shoulder and neck. He went down hard.

They advanced quickly, using the containers as cover, every now and then having to stop and take cover or fire at a mercenary running through an opening between containers, or almost shooting at an agent before realizing he wasn’t a threat. It was a massive cat and mouse game, and a deadly one.

Coming around a corner, they almost ran head-on into two mercenaries coming the opposite way. Taylor was caught completely off guard, half-facing the other way, looking at someone who had run past them to the rear, who turned out to be one of their agents.

The only thing that saved them was that Whitaker had her weapon up and was pointing her weapon in the direction she was running, ready to fire. The first one was dead the second she cleared the container. The other managed to get his weapon a third of the way up before she drilled him in the chest.

“Nice shooting,” Taylor said.

“This is chaos,” she said, ejecting her empty magazine and slapping in a fresh one.

“We can’t be far. I can see reflections of the lights from the blocking force, and I swear he ran this way.”

Peeking around a corner, he saw a man in civilian dress holding what looked like a German rifle. Not one of theirs. Taylor didn’t give him a warning or try to arrest him, he put two bullets in the man’s back, dropping him to the ground.

Whitaker was right; this was chaotic, and dangerous. Not the kind of place to play fair. Trying to do things by the book would get them killed. Plus, Whitaker had been looking the other way, so he knew they wouldn’t end up in an argument.

“To the right,” he said, letting her take the lead as he kept watch behind them.

An agent ran by, and Taylor grabbed Whitaker, pulling her to the ground as the man let off two shots.

“Watch it,” Taylor said.

They were wearing vests that said FBI on them, and they’d been introduced to the whole team, so the man knew they were on his side. It was just the panicked kind of reaction that happened when men in extreme danger had their finger on the trigger.

“Jesus,” Taylor yelled, still covering Whitaker with his body.

“Sorry,” the guy said, and then dipped out of sight, either to continue the fight or just to keep out of trouble.

Covered as he was in tactical gear, Taylor couldn’t actually tell who the man was, so it was a good call. Besides, these things happened in environments like this. It’s why they usually tried to keep things from turning into this kind of chaos if they could help it. The containers, the lack of sight lines, and the gung-ho nature of the agents let this thing get out of hand.

As Taylor pulled Whitaker up, he saw something moving in the distance. They were at one of the intersections that allowed cranes to move between the stacks, and he could see clear down to the grain silo. He could also see a man in a suit and two of the mercenaries running toward it. Taylor would have thought one of the snipers on the boat or in the silo itself would have seen them, but as he watched, they covered a big chunk of the ground between the stacked crates and the silo without so much as a shot coming near them.

That was the problem with sniper positions. They were great when they had a single target to focus on, but whole areas, especially ones with very limited visibility, tended to keep them glued to their scopes, looking for a target to peek out. It’s why they had spotters, but sometimes the spotters went target blind as well, missing the entire field in favor of focusing on the area with all the action.

Taylor had gotten a look at him, but the guy knew he was blown. If he got through the silo and into the rest of the port, he would disappear. Fly out to some non-extradition country while Taylor was looking through thousands of pictures of government employees and employees with major defense contractors, trying to identify him.

He wasn’t letting him get away that easily.

“I see him,” Taylor said, taking off at a sprint, leaving Whitaker to follow in his wake.

Up ahead, Matthews’ man and his two guards were nearing the grain silo, a tall cylinder of corrugated metal that rose into the night sky. They were almost to the side entrance, a small door at the base. Taylor had walked through the silo when they’d looked over the overwatch positions and realized their sightline problems. It was a warren of catwalks and ladders that led to access points throughout the huge metal cylinders for holding grain or whatever they decided to store there. The sightlines were terrible on the catwalks as they wove in and out of the cylinders, and they weren’t much better from the ground.

If they got inside the building, the chase was going to get a whole lot more dangerous. Taylor poured on the speed, trying to close the gap, but one of the guards finally noticed they were being followed. The man skidded to a halt and swung his rifle around, forcing Taylor to dive behind a forklift. Whitaker, who’d been close behind him, slid behind cover with him as a burst of automatic fire raked the space where he’d just been, sending chips of concrete into the air.

“I’ll draw his fire,” she said. “You take the shot. Don’t miss.”

She waited until he got up on the balls of his feet, gun up, before she dashed out the other side of the crates, running for a stack of some kind of metal sheets about twenty feet away. Taylor gave it a one-second beat and popped up.

The gunman had taken the bait and was starting to turn his rifle toward Whitaker as Taylor’s head cleared the forklift. Taylor didn’t hesitate, firing before he was even standing all the way up. His motion threw his aim off a little bit, the impact hitting the man higher on his chest, right where the sternum met the collarbones. There was probably a name for that, but it didn’t matter to the gunman, who staggered back and started to drop his arms as the bullet ripped through him.

Reflexively, the man pulled the trigger of his rifle, sending a bullet into the ground between him and Whitaker before he collapsed against the concrete pier. He’d done his job, though. The other merc and the insider had reached the door. The merc pulled it open and hustled the suit inside. Taylor sprinted for the closing door, hitting it shoulder first and slamming it back open. He swept inside, gun up.

Dim light filtered down from the open top, forty feet above. Taylor could just see the foot of the suit disappearing up a ladder and out of sight, but his bigger concern was the merc three rungs up the ladder, who lifted his rifle with one hand and squeezed off three shots. Firing a rifle like that, one-handed while on a ladder, gave the first shot terrible aim and made almost every shot after the first one completely wild.

In spite of that, the bullet came way closer to Taylor than he would have liked. He could feel the round split the air by his cheek. He darted right, taking cover behind a structural beam. The merc’s rifle boomed again, the shots reverberating around the metal cylinder.

Whitaker entered behind Taylor, pressing herself against the curved wall.

“Federal agents!” Whitaker shouted, her voice echoing upward. “Drop your weapons and come down!”

The response was the clang of boots on metal. Taylor leaned out and fired a shot, but the man was on the first catwalk, dipping behind a railing.

“What’s the play?” Whitaker asked.

Taylor looked around the space, trying to work out his options. There was another metal ladder to his right, leading up to the same curving catwalk.

“I’m going up,” he said.

Before Whitaker could respond, he sprinted for the ladder. The merc saw the movement and sprayed rounds. Taylor felt a sharp burn slice across his upper arm, but he didn’t slow. He hit the ladder and scampered up, ignoring the pain.

Reaching the first cross-catwalk, he threw himself prone. The merc was thirty feet away across open space, guarding the suit who was cowering behind him.

Taylor’s arm was bleeding but still functional.

Sighting down his weapon, he yelled, “Last chance!”

Normally, he wasn’t one for giving anyone with a gun another chance, but he didn’t have a clear shot and he was a little concerned about hitting Matthews’ guy, who they wanted alive so they could find out everything he’d been selling and to whom.

The man’s response was to fire again. The rounds pinged off the grated catwalk by Taylor’s face. Taylor steadied his aim and squeezed the trigger. His shot took the merc high in the chest. The man staggered back against the railing before sliding down onto the catwalk, a smear of blood marking his path.

The suit was exposed now.

Taylor jumped up and trained his weapon on the man, shouting, “Hands up! On your knees!”

The man’s eyes were wide with fear. He started to comply, then in a burst of panic tried to run. He made it two steps before Taylor put a bullet in his leg, sending him collapsing to the metal grating, hands gripping his bleeding thigh.

Taylor moved in, kicking the merc’s dropped weapon away and rolling the suited man onto his stomach, dropping a knee on his back to hold him in place. The insider whimpered in pain.

Whitaker climbed up and joined Taylor, pulling a pair of cuffs out of her jacket.

“That was stupid,” she said, as she pushed Taylor back and pulled the man’s arms behind him so she could cuff him. “You were almost completely exposed.”

“It worked out. We got him alive, didn’t we?” Taylor said.

“This time. Next time, you might not be so lucky,” she said, pointing at the trail of blood dripping down his shirt sleeve.

“Let’s worry about next time later and get this guy to an ambulance. I don’t want him bleeding out before he can talk.”

She glared at him as she half carried the now crying man past him, but didn’t say anything else. Taylor just shrugged.

The job got done. That’s all that mattered.

Epilogue (short chapter, so I've combined them for you guys)

Washington D.C.

Taylor sat on the couch in the living room, watching as Whitaker gently rocked their six-month-old daughter, Grace, in her arms. The infant was fast asleep, pacifier bobbing rhythmically as she breathed.

Whitaker smiled down at the baby, brushing a finger over her soft cheek, “She’s so peaceful like this. Hard to believe that just an hour ago, she was screaming up a storm.”

“Tell me about it,” Taylor said wryly, leaning back against the cushions. “She’s got some lungs on her, that’s for sure.”

Before he could say anything else, Whitaker’s phone started ringing, buzzing loudly on the coffee table across from her. Taylor dove for it, answering before the sound of the phone could wake up the baby.

Seeing it was Joe Solomon, he turned the volume down and put it on speaker.

“Whitaker?” Solomon said when no one responded right away.

“I’m here, Joe,” Whitaker said. “Taylor’s with me.”

“I wanted to give you an update on the case. We’ve identified the DOD insider as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Sustainment, Frank Weston. It’s a big title, and he was a major player in all aspects of the DOD acquisition process, which gave him access to pretty much everything in our arsenal. The DOD has been conducting both a financial audit on him and a complete audit of that department, and we’re starting to see evidence that he’s been stealing and selling technology and weapons for years, including some classified stuff. Millions of dollars worth of materials walked out of the door because of him, and we don’t have any idea yet where most of it went.”

“There are going to be big repercussions from this,” Whitaker said.

“No kidding. The Under Secretary has already resigned and I’m hearing word that the Secretary himself might be handing in his resignation by the end of the week. This is going to be a huge shakeup.”

“Any leads on where else the pipeline extended?” Taylor asked. “Did they use the cartels as middlemen for everything, or were there others?”

“We don’t know yet, but it’s being looked into. With Weston caught and Matthews dead, the cartels’ operations on the border exposed, and their tunnel shut down, you two have just about closed your investigation out. Sullivan has sent a letter up the chain commending you for your good work, and we received thanks from the Mexican government for your assistance. Good work, both of you.”

“Thanks,” Whitaker said.

“Get some rest and spend time with Grace, because I’m sure we’re going to have more work for you both soon.”

“Will do, boss,” Whitaker said.

Taylor reached over and ended the call.

“Well, that’s that,” Whitaker said.

“I guess.”

“Don’t be like that. Can’t you just be happy we did our job? I mean, Matthews being an asshole isn’t a reflection on you.”

“I guess not, although the fact that he managed to get one over on me is.”

Grace stirred slightly, scrunching up her face. Whitaker gently shushed her, rocking slowly until she settled again.

“Is that what’s bothering you or is it her?”

“Who … oh, Bonnie? No, it’s Matthews. I just thought … you think you know some people. Why did you think it was Bonnie?”

“You were crazed about her, like a week ago, before we got this case. I thought maybe with this case all cleared up, you’d started thinking about her getting away again. You can go back to looking for her, if you want.”

Taylor reached over and took Grace from Whitaker, settling her in his arms.

“Maybe in a little bit,” he said.

The End