Drone

The Heron gave Stella Kang both eyes and ears on the ground and in the house. Phone intercepts of Castillo’s brother and his physician indicated that Napoleon was sick in bed. Advance surveillance had already identified several people inside the hacienda, including Napoleon’s young American-born wife, Suzanna, and his three American “anchor babies,” his preteen daughters Luisa, Carlita, and Victoria. Earlier, Stella had counted only two guards on the estate, but right now one was at the pharmacy and the other was in town, drinking.

Stella’s explicit orders from Pearce were to limit the strike to Napoleon only. With the drug lord hunkered down beneath his bedsheets with a fever, a missile strike was out of the question. Stella’s partner, Johnny Paloma, was a former LAPD SWAT team leader. He had parked himself behind a McMillan Tac-50 sniper rifle, but now that wasn’t an option, either. Time also wasn’t Stella’s friend. The other strike teams were already in motion and she desperately wanted to be the first team with a kill.

Stella fell on her backup plan and redeployed Johnny. Minutes later, he was ripping around the curving single-lane mountain road on a Yamaha YZ450F bike. When he reached the hacienda, he slowed down enough to reach into his backpack and toss the ten-pound surveillance drone onto the pavement, then he gunned the engine and raced away.

The iRobot 110 FirstLook drone was about the size and shape of an old encyclopedia, and was outfitted with tracks instead of wheels, along with cameras on both ends. It didn’t matter which way it landed when you tossed it because it could roll in both directions, and it had rotator arms that could right it without much difficulty if it flipped onto its back.

Stella was two miles away at her laptop control station. She was a very patient and stealthy operator, but the Heron overhead showed her the coast was clear. The drone scurried toward an open gate in the back and paused while Stella checked for an entry point. She found it. One of the sliding glass doors had been left open.

Once inside the house, the robot rolled along almost silently on the pink terrazzo tiles that covered all of the floors. It even climbed the staircase with relative ease. One of the cleaning staff, Rosa, saw it scrambling silently down the hallway. She laughed to herself, assuming it was some new toy that belonged to one of the girls. She didn’t watch it long enough to observe it duck into the master suite and take up position in Napoleon’s private bathroom.

Napoleon Castillo didn’t notice the drone when he came stumbling in. The iRobot was parked just behind the toilet when he pulled down his pajama trousers and lowered his flabby, sweating buttocks onto the cool porcelain seat. He was so preoccupied lighting a cigarette that he barely noticed the tracked drone when it rolled out from behind the toilet and parked itself between his feet.

Castillo didn’t hear the explosion.

His brain barely perceived the blinding flash, and that for only an instant. He was dead before the slower-moving sound waves could strike his eardrum and stimulate the aural nerve. In fact, his entire brain case, including the aural nerve, had been splattered like an overripe melon against the bathroom wall tiles, which were also a lustrous pink terrazzo.

But far down the hallway in another room, Rosa heard the explosion. To her, it sounded more like a thump. She shrugged and figured if there was a mess to clean up, Mr. Castillo would call her soon enough.

“Target down,” Stella reported to Pearce.

“Proceed to your exfiltration route, Stella. Tell your team they won the case of beer. You were first on the board.”

“Thank you, sir. Will do. We’re moving and grooving.”

“Roger that.”

Nogales, Mexico

ICE had discovered several smuggling tunnels leading from Mexico to the United States over the past few years by employing sophisticated ground-penetrating radar. The earlier tunnels they had uncovered were relatively shallow and crudely dug by unemployed local miners who carved small niches into the rock every hundred yards or so. The niches were crowded with plastic saints, melted candles, and strips of paper with prayers for protection for both the miners and the travelers, mostly smuggled migrants.

The more recent tunnels were somewhat deeper and more sophisticated by an order of magnitude, displaying a level of engineering prowess beyond the reach of day laborers. Sheer walls, wooden floors, and a lighting system were standard. It was unclear to ICE who had designed or built the tunnels, but they were definitely paid for by the Castillo Syndicate for running drugs and people under the heavily secured surface above. They were probably four to five times as expensive to construct as well.