Oath to Defend Read online

  “Okay. Then how about getting Special Agent Cooper to talk with him? DEA has a legitimate interest in whatever he might know.”

  “I’ll ask the Secretary and let you know. When will you be back in Portland?”

  “Tomorrow, why?”

  “The Secretary got a call from a firm that’s having a problem with cyber attacks. It’s developing technology to protect our infrastructure, mainly our electrical grid. They don’t want the FBI charging in and making waves. He thought you might be able to help them, like you did at Martin Research last month. Are you available?”

  “Is this what he had in mind when he offered me a retainer to be his private trouble shooter?”

  “Outsourcing is the future of ‘limited’ government… so yes, this is what he had in mind. The CEO of the company is an old friend who doesn’t want to lose the confidence of his shareholders if they learn he can’t protect their research.”

  “Okay,” Drake said. “Send the information to my office. I’ll go see him if you’ll keep looking for Barak.”

  “You know we will. Stop by sometime and meet the team, and I’ll treat you to dinner.”

  “The dinner would be a treat, but I need to get home. Rain check?”

  “Sure, any time.” She paused. “I have a meeting in a few minutes, I should go.”

  She sounded disappointed, he thought, but he wasn’t ready to cross that line, not even with someone as attractive as Liz Strobel. It just didn’t feel right. He wasn’t sure when or if it ever would. No one could replace the love he had just lost a year ago when Kay died, and right now he had no interest in trying. He was interested in only one thing at the moment, and that was finding the terrorist David Barak.

  When Casey finally sauntered into the restaurant, Drake had already finished his second cup of coffee and was ready to order without him.

  “If you were Barak,” he asked before his friend was even seated, “where would you go?”

  “Let me guess,” Casey replied. “You couldn’t sleep and you decided to make sure my morning was ruined, too.” He signaled to a waitress. “Could I get some coffee, Miss? Extra strong please.”

  Drake grunted. “No reason for us to waste the day waiting for something to happen. I talked to Liz this morning. DHS doesn’t have a clue where he might be.”

  “Well, maybe we can order breakfast first. Let my mind catch up with my grumbling stomach. Then we can discuss the possibilities. I find it hard to think when I’m hungry.”

  While Casey studied his menu, Drake watched a foursome of golfers getting ready to tee off outside. Stretching, taking their practice swings, and preparing to enjoy four hours on a picture-perfect day, they were enjoying themselves in a way he hadn’t been able to for a long time. Perhaps not since the day after 9/11, he thought, when he had enlisted in the Army or since his time in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Especially not since the day Kay was diagnosed with cancer. There was a war going on that men like those golfers didn’t think about, because no one was willing to call it a war.

  How, he wondered, did a country forget that one of its first wars had been fought against Muslim pirates off the shores of Tripoli during the administration of Thomas Jefferson? How did a country forget that Muslim terrorists had brought down the barracks in Lebanon in 1983 and Pan Am 103 in 1988? Or that Muslim terrorists had bombed the World Trade Center two decades before they attacked the Twin Towers, and had vowed to destroy us every day of every year since then?

  Drake knew who the enemy was, and he wasn’t afraid to say so. Nor was he afraid to do whatever had to be done. He was no longer a soldier, but his oath to defend and protect his country hadn’t expired when he left the Army.

  He looked up. “Mike,” he said, “Barak was hiding in plain sight in Cancun and protected in Tijuana by one of the cartels. He knows we’re looking for him. Where does he go?”

  “Why would he need to go anywhere? The cartel obviously has the cooperation of the police and the army. I’d stay in Mexico,” Casey said as he waved the waitress over. “Huevos rancheros, an order of ham, a fruit bowl, toast with some strawberry jam, and a refill on my coffee, please. I might also save room for a pastry later. What are you having, Drake?”

  “Scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast, and grapefruit, thank you.”

  “If he stays in Mexico, we’ll get him sooner or later,” Casey added as the waitress left. “We’ve had to be patient before. We’ve waited days for our target to appear.”

  “I know. But this guy is different. He thinks big. I don’t see him backing off. He could have fled to anywhere in the world, so why Mexico?”

  A few minutes later, when Casey was enjoying the huevos rancheros, Drake answered his own question. “Because it’s easy to get back here from Mexico. He’s not running away, Mike. He’s taking a time out. He’s waiting over there to hit us again.”

  He took out his cell phone and opened his contact list to call DHS. He wanted to tell Liz to watch the border. Barak was coming at them again. He was sure of it.

  19

  As the Bell 429 approached the building site for the cartel’s new marina and hotel development in Rosarito, just south of Tijuana, Barak looked down and saw his team of eight men faced off against an equal number of cartel men. Both sides had their SUV’s and trucks positioned for a quick getaway.

  At least they were able to agree to the number of men each side would bring, Barak thought as he considered the obvious truce both sides recognized.

  “Verdugo,” he called from the rear passenger seat of the helicopter, “make sure your guys know we’re friends. They may be afraid of you, but you have many more reasons to be afraid of me. Make sure they don’t act stupidly. I will forgive your one stupid act, but not another. Comprende?”

  “Don’t insult me,” Verdugo said without turning around. “They’re here to make sure I return safely. Once they see I’m safe, and you’re on your way, there will be no trouble. I am a man of my word.”

  “As I am. Remember my promise. If I find you have tried in any way to interfere with my work, you and your entire family will regret it. Now let’s get down there and be on our separate ways.”

  When the helicopter touched down on the improvised landing site, they waited until the dust settled, then got out, saying their farewells with tight smiles and handshakes. While Saleem stayed inside with the pilot to make sure he didn’t lift off with their precious cargo, Barak waved his men over and gave them instructions on how to carefully unload his nuke to secure it for transport.

  “Saleem,” Barak said, as they stood together and watched four men lift the crate into the back of the waiting Suburban, “how do you put up with these cutthroats?”

  “I put up with them because they serve our purpose. They have learned to make vast amounts of money in America. We need to do the same. They use their money to indulge their vulgar ways, while we use the money we take from America to buy the weapons we need.” He gave an elegant shrug. “It works for both of us.”

  “Well, watch your back, brother,” Barak growled. “They remind me of Jews. The only thing you can trust is their greed. How long will it take us to get to your tunnel?”

  “From here, two hours. We use a distributing business and its delivery trucks to move things to the warehouse. We’ll transfer the crate to one of the trucks in south Tijuana and then drive along the truck’s regular delivery route until we get to the warehouse.”

  When Barak’s men were ready to leave, he signaled the helicopter pilot to take off and joined Saleem in the lead Suburban for the ride up the coast to Tijuana. The town of Rosarito was trying hard to remake itself into a classy resort by drawing tourists to the Pacific Baja coastline. It was beginning to look as if the effort was paying off. Tall hotels were being built and new golf courses lined the highway to the east. How much of the cartel’s money was involved was unclear, but he guessed a substantial amount was being washed clean in these new developments, just as it had been in Las Vegas when organized crim
e built its oasis in the Nevada desert.

  But Tijuana was another story, he saw as they passed through the ugly border town’s industrial district a short time later. Even though it was one of Mexico’s largest cities, it lacked character and any semblance of class. Like so many of the creations in the Western world, it was just another spot on the earth without purpose, without soul. Barak wasn’t a devout Muslim, far from it, but when Islam had ruled the world many centuries ago, great cities had been built and great inventions had been made. What did the West have to show for its two hundred years of supremacy? Disneyland? Television? Texting and Twitter? He wouldn’t be around to see the world change, but it was worth fighting and dying for.

  At the distributing company’s headquarters, Saleem directed them around the building to the loading dock and a delivery van parked beside the cyclone fence surrounding the back lot.

  “Back up to that truck and unload the crate,” Saleem said. “The drivers are out making other deliveries, so no one should see you. I’ll go in and let my manager know I’ll be using the truck for a while.”

  Barak watched his men move the crate from the SUV to the delivery van. He beckoned them to gather around him.

  “When we head to the warehouse,” he said, “one of you drive the delivery van. We’ll let Saleem lead in one Suburban with me, and the other Suburban will follow behind the delivery van. I trust Saleem, but we’re still in cartel country, so stay alert. If anyone tries to stop us, we’ll fight our way through, understood? Allah has entrusted us with this work. We will not fail him.”

  Eight of his best men stood silently in front of him until Walid spoke.

  “Malik, why are we using Hezbollah men to get this crate across the border? We have our own ways. Why them?”

  Barak appreciated that Walid, the youngest of the eight men he had chosen for this part of the mission, used the honorific Malik, or Leader, when he asked his question. He was disappointed, though, that a question had been asked at all. He wasn’t prepared to explain how the Alliance was using Hezbollah to create chaos in the world they would profit from once the devastation they were planning was blamed on Hezbollah. And he wasn’t about to tell Walid why he wanted the crate to be smuggled into the country by someone else in case they were caught. All he could do in front of the others was put Walid in his place.

  He stepped in front of the young man and slapped him in the face. “Don’t ever question me again. I trained you better than that. You’ll sit in the van with the crate until we get to the warehouse. Don’t make a sound. We’ll talk when this is over.”

  When Saleem returned, the convoy of the delivery van and two SUV’s set out and drove for an hour, taking the same circuitous route the delivery van took every day until it reached a metal building located north of the main runway of the Tijuana International Airport.

  “Honk three times, then three times more,” Saleem directed the driver. “A guard will come out. When he waves us in, drive to the far end of the warehouse.”

  Barak watched from his Suburban as a guard dressed in combat fatigues walked out, carrying his assault rifle across his chest, and motioned for Saleem to lower his window. After a quick exchange of Farsi passwords he recognized, the guard spoke into his lapel mic and the overhead door slowly opened, revealing a concrete floor and largely empty warehouse.

  At the far end, another guard stood next to an enclosed office, waiting for them.

  “The stairs down into the tunnel are in the office,” Saleem said. “Back the van up to the office and get your men to carry the crate inside. There’s a hydraulic lift they can use.”

  At the bottom of the tunnel entrance, forty feet down and next to a hydraulic lift, a flatbed cargo car sat on railroad tracks hitched to what looked like a small locomotive engine. The tunnel had electric lighting and cool air circulating through it.

  When the crate had been lowered and secured on the cargo car, Barak asked the guard how long it would take for it to reach the warehouse across the border in the Otay Mesa industrial district of San Diego.

  “The mule, as my men call it, travels at thirty miles an hour. Your crate will be across in a couple of minutes.”

  Barak nodded. “And when it reaches your other warehouse, how long before the crate will head north?”

  “You and your men will drive the crate through San Diego to the meeting place we agreed upon. As soon as we load up, I’ll leave with my men and head out. It should take thirty minutes or so.”

  “Excellent. We should go now.” Barak waved to his men and sat on the front of the cargo car beside Saleem. “Take me across.”

  20

  When Casey dropped him off at the Hillsboro executive airport in Oregon the next morning, Drake bailed his Porsche 993 out of the long term parking lot and headed south to his farm in the rolling hills west of Dundee. He’d been gone four days, but with all the miles he had traveled searching for Barak, it seemed longer.

  The familiar purr of the engine behind him and the sense of control the car provided him as he wove in and out of traffic were a sharp contrast to how he felt about his life in general. He hadn’t been in his law office in weeks. The imams of Portland were still crying for the head of the man who had killed three young Muslim men, even though they were assassins sent to kill him, and he wasn’t sure how far the FBI would go to keep his name a secret. And despite his fondness for his long-suffering secretary, Margo, he wasn’t even sure how much longer he wanted to work as a lawyer. He’d been in a fog of sorts since Kay died, and nothing seemed important anymore. Maybe it was because without Kay, nothing was important anymore.

  He was still driving, lost in his thoughts, when his cell phone vibrated on its hands-free, black leather KUDA mount on the dash.

  “Drake,” he said.

  It was Liz Strobel. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Checking up on me, Strobel? Worried that I’m still in San Diego, waiting for you to find Barak for me?”

  “Checking to see where you are, yes. Worried about you, hardly. But I am worried. Border Patrol detected a nuke coming across the border in San Diego yesterday. They found the tunnel the thing came across on, and then NEST—that’s the Nuclear Emergency Support Team—located a deserted van that was hot. We don’t have any idea who’s behind this or where the thing is now.”

  “Tell me about the tunnel.”

  “New, costly, the kind of tunnel the Border Patrol thinks Hezbollah has been building for the cartels. They build them in a month, use them for about that long before they’re found, and then they just build another one.”

  “Where did they find the deserted van?”

  “They found the van,” she said, “a rented U-Haul, in a field near the San Diego Polo Club.”

  “Anyone see anything?”

  “We’re working on that. There was a celebrity polo match there yesterday, a cancer fundraiser, so there were a lot of people in and out. Our investigators are taking statements from everyone we can find who attended.”

  “Are there any big events there that terrorists are likely to target?” Drake asked.

  “None that stand out, but San Diego is a pretty good target. Drake, we’re only guessing at this point. There’s no chatter about a big strike, nothing to suggest something’s in the works.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She paused for a second, then, “I’m clutching at straws, okay? Is this something that Barak could be involved in?”

  “He was—is all about assassinating America’s leaders. Nothing that I know about him suggested he wanted to use WMDs or cause mass casualties, but the guy’s a terrorist. It’s possible, I guess.”

  “Look, I’ve got to go. Things are pretty hectic here. Call me if you think of anything, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. “And you do the same.”

  It was just a matter of time before someone smuggled a nuke into America. So far, they had been lucky, checking at border crossings and monitoring shipping containers at the
ports. But there were too many ways to bring things into the country. Ways like tunnels under the border in San Diego.

  The country’s resources, he knew, would be on full alert by now. Once the NEST response team got a hit on the deserted van, the FBI would be in charge of the search for the nuclear device, whatever it was, and they had full legal authority to kill anyone in the unauthorized possession of a nuclear weapon. But intelligence that helps to locate the nuke is the key to success; without it, Drake knew, you truly are looking for a needle in a haystack. Detection was only possible when gamma and neutron detectors came within twenty to thirty feet of the device.

  But without information about the terrorists behind the threat, it was next to impossible to head off the threat. Like the type of information Liz had been hoping he might have about Barak.

  There was something, though, something he couldn’t quite identify, buzzing for recognition in the back of his mind. What had she said about San Diego? He tried to focus on her words, but he couldn’t quite pull the something to the front of his mind. He knew it would come to him in time, but he needed to remember it now.

  For the next few miles, he let his mind wander as he enjoyed the familiar glimpses of snow on the upper reaches of Mt. Hood in the distance, and the green rows of grape vines on the hillsides along the highway. He was thinking about stopping to buy produce at the Red Horse Farm roadside stand for dinner when the stand came into view. And then it hit him.

  Horses. The San Diego Polo Club. The brochure for the celebrity polo event in Bend. An Argentine polo star.

  Was there a connection between Barak, the smuggled nuke, and a polo match or the polo star? Coincidences happened. Usually, they were just that, random events that appeared to be connected but weren’t. But, he said to himself, this might be one to take seriously. He didn’t remember the date of the polo match in Bend, but he knew where to find it. He had kept the brochure and when he’d gotten back to Mike’s Gulfstream, he’d put it in his duffel bag that was now in the bonnet of his Porsche.