Drone

What the ICE teams hadn’t figured out yet was that at least half of the shallow tunnels were meant to be found in order to absorb ICE’s scarce investigative resources, while the deeper tunnels continued sluicing major profits back to the syndicate. These latter tunnels were highly sophisticated cement structures, designed and built by a Chinese engineering firm specializing in military construction projects for the People’s Liberation Army. One even contained a small rail-car system.

The most important smuggling tunnel in the network was also linked to an underground meth lab, as well as to sleeping quarters and offices for Alejandro Castillo and his lieutenants. Pearce and his team had found it almost by accident. Ian had intercepted a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers geological survey recently conducted in the area that speculated about the existence of a new smuggling tunnel network. The report hadn’t made its way up the chain of command yet, let alone into the interagency data stream.

August Mann was in charge of this operation. He based his plan to take out the tunnel complex on a similar job he’d carried out in Ukraine last year before taking on the Dungeness project. He even flew in the same group of subcontractors he’d used to pull it off. Twenty-four hours earlier, his intel team had flown a miniature 3-D mapping camera drone through the underground maze that had generated a perfect image of the tunnel complex. Two hours ago, the same drone cameras had located and identified the tunnel occupants, all of whom carried weapons. That made all of them fair game.

August stationed an insertion team at the tunnel exit on the American side, and an insertion team at the tunnel entrance on the Mexican side. The American exit was located inside of a Castillo-owned tire warehouse; the Mexican entrance was located inside of a blue stucco Assemblies of God church, also owned by the Castillo organization. Both ends of the tunnel were lightly guarded by a few armed men stationed aboveground.

When the six tunnel occupants had bedded down for the night, August signaled both teams to take out the tunnel guards. August didn’t want the robots to have all of the fun. He let his human team members drop the tunnel guards with suppressed rifle fire.

After cutting all of the power down in the hole, each insertion team lowered two Talon SWORDS tracked robots into their respective entrances. The large suitcase-portable tracked vehicles were loaded out with similar packages. In addition to video optics, two of the tracks were mounted with 6mm grenade launchers and 5.56mm semiauto rifles; the other two tracks were outfitted with breaching devices and smoke delivery systems.

One of both types of drone was dropped in each entrance, along with signal relay boosters to ensure continuous video feeds and radio-control operation of the Talons from the surface.

August watched the green, ghostly night-vision images of the chaos wrought by the robots with scientific detachment. Groggy, blinded in the dark, and choking on smoke, the defenders shot wildly at the mechanical sounds they heard in the lightless void, but within minutes, the first five targets had been gunned down or shredded with grenade fragments.

The lone survivor, Alejandro Castillo, had miraculously escaped into an office space and bolted the heavy wooden door. It took August another ten minutes to breach it. The Talon SWORDS had been used extensively in bomb disposal and bunker-breaching missions during the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. A simple wooden door was no match. The SWORDS blew off its hinges, revealing Alejandro cowering in the dark. Thirty rounds of steel-jacketed ammo broke his torso open like a crab hammer.

“Sehr gut, August,” Pearce whispered in the German’s earpiece.

“Danke.” August switched channels and barked orders to his team. They had to pull those units out and evacuate the area before the federales showed up, which Mann estimated would be in fifteen minutes.

They left behind a timed demolition charge that collapsed the entire tunnel structure minutes after they egressed. Forty-five minutes after the operation had begun, August, his men, and his robots were all safely back on American territory.

23

Tijuana, Mexico

A black Cadillac Escalade rocketed down the parking garage ramp, skid plates throwing sparks as it banged over a speed bump.

“There!” Julio Castillo screamed as he pointed at the exit turn.

The driver threw himself into the sharp left-hand turn, slamming his chest against the shoulder belt with the centrifugal pull. The big SUV tires shrieked on the slick concrete floors of the empty parking garage, still under construction.