Target Deck - 02 (36 page)

The leader exhaled a cloud of smoke. Finally, the Arab ran his thumb across his neck.

“Kill them,” he told the gunmen in Arabic.

Eight men racked the actions on their Sub-Machine Guns and fired.

31

“This is what failure looks like,” Deckard said to himself.

Pat stood behind him as they both looked up at the metal frame road overpass for foot traffic. Counting from side to side, Deckard got a total of thirteen bodies hung underneath the overpass by their hands or feet. The corpses were bloated, their eyes lifeless. Wire and ropes were used to hang the bodies, where it now tugged tightly into the dead flesh of necks, wrists, and ankles.

Many showed obvious signs of torture. Some were disemboweled and others were missing fingers.

This was the fate of cartel snitches. By tapping into the telecom system in Oaxaca, Jimenez had been able to analyze the cellular phone traffic throughout the entire province. It was normal for intelligence operatives to give their sources cellular phones so that they could keep their clandestine activities separate from their personal life. Cell phones that only called one number, in this case a number belonging to Samantha or Aghassi, stood out like a sore thumb. It was a completely unnatural way to make phone calls. From there, the drug lord just had to match the suspect phone calls to the person in his organization who was making them.

This had probably been done through a combination of Direction Finding equipment purchased by the cartel through European defense companies and good old fashion human intelligence. Since Jimenez controlled large portions of the telecom network it was easy for him to listen in on phone calls. Once a suspect phone number was dialed they could listen in and find out where the source would meet his or her handler and a surveillance man could be detailed to stake out the site. From there the snitch could be identified and targeted for death.

Samruk had thrown the entire Oaxaca operation together on the fly, there was never any time for a high level of planning, rehearsals, or setting up of contingencies. Samantha had been doing the best she could with what contacts she had inherited from her father. Aghassi had taken over those contacts and cultivated a few of his own in just a few days. It was all done on an ad hoc basis and now they were paying the price. They had gotten sloppy and now people had died for their errors.

Only the one source that Deckard had gotten a hold of the previous night had come out intact or his family would be laying dead in an arroyo somewhere and he'd be hanging under the overpass as well. Currently, the family was secured inside the Samruk compound.

Also back at the compound were black bodybags waiting to be flown back to Kazakhstan. The bodies inside belonged to those who died defending the compound and those killed during the recovery operation, including the seven men killed by the IED strike. Deckard had picked up pieces of Sergeant Zhenis to fill one of the body bags.

“Boss,” Sergeant Major Korgan called out to Deckard.

The Sergeant Major sat in the passenger seat of one of the four assault trucks guarding the approaches to the overpass.

“What is it?” Deckard asked.

Korgan paused.

“Aghassi found something.”

Thirty minutes later the Samruk patrol rolled up to a white building with a cross hanging over the door.

Aghassi and Nikita stood outside the front gate. Aghassi held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. The Kazakh sniper looked up at the sky absently. Carrion eaters were circling overheard, riding the warm thermals and orbiting around the Christian mission.

Deckard jumped down from his vehicle and walked towards his two reconnaissance specialists. Aghassi had sounded breathless over the radio. He told Deckard where he was and said that there was something he needed to see for himself.

“What's up?” Deckard asked.

“Around back,” Aghassi replied, dropping the handkerchief for a moment. “One of the locals told me this is a hospital for recovering addicts and the mentally disabled.”

The front gate looked undamaged but the front door had clearly been caved it with a battering ram or something similar. Turning around the corner of the building, he spotted an old chicken coop. His nose crinkled at an old familiar smell. It was the stench of death.

He was already numb by the time be turned the corner to the rear side of the building, he knew what to expect. He heard the steady buzz of the flies before he ever saw the corpses.

Bodies lay on top of bodies, maybe twenty of them murdered in cold blood.

At his feet was the body of a young woman, her face turned black with a layer of flies. She had been stripped naked, both arms hacked off at the elbows with a machete.

On top of the splatter of gore created by the execution were words written in blood on the concrete wall with the woman's severed arms.

Go home, Gringo.

Half an hour later the convoy rolled into the Samruk compound. It was a mess, several of the roofs were caved in, rubble was strewn everywhere. Plastic film and white wrapping from medical bandages and gauze blew across the courtyard.

The assault trucks turned around and shotgun parked, preparing for the next mission. The drivers got out and attached the hand pump to a 55 gallon drum of gasoline and began cranking it to refuel the vehicles. It was still early morning and the heat of the day had not yet arrived. Deckard felt sore in his joints as he walked towards the OPCEN.

Inside, he grounded his gear and weapon before taking a seat.

“You okay?”

Deckard blinked as he looked up at Pat. He hadn't realized that he had been staring into space.

“Yeah, I'm just weighing our options.”

“You did the right thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I could see that old familiar look in your eyes when we left the Christian mission. I thought for sure that you would order us back into the city to start hitting whatever targets we could scrounge up, the kind of scorched earth policy that you usually opt for.”

“It wasn't because I didn't want to. If we get baited into a second ambush we won't have enough soldiers to fight with and win against Jimenez. One more night like the last one and Samruk International will no longer be combat effective. We're running out of bodies.”

“Jimenez must have ordered the execution of those hospital patients. The message was clearly directed towards us. He wanted to provoke a response. He wanted to bait you into another ambush that would finish us off. But we are also running out of time,” Pat remarked. “Before long, the Mexican Army will reorient their forces to Oaxaca. Not every General and politician is involved in your sex, lies, and videotape scandal.”

“If we go charging back into that city we'll get put through the meat grinder again. This isn't like Iraq, we don't have
AC-130
gunships providing air support.”

“And Jimenez is dug into his compound up in the mountains. It would take over a month to flush them out of there.”

“Aghassi and Nikita could try to get in the same way as before, maybe they'd even get to take a shot at Jimenez but it wouldn't change anything. Another lesson from Iraq. We kill HVT number one and HVT number two takes over. The organization survives. If we kill Jimenez then Ignacio takes over the cartel. If we kill Ignacio then number three takes over and so on.”

“We need to dismantle the entire network, the cartel has to be systematically taken apart.”

“But we need strong intelligence information to do that,” Deckard said while rubbing his eyes. “And all of our sources except one are dead and even he is out of circulation for his own protection.”

“We are inside his communication network,” Cody said, interrupting for the first time, having been mesmerized by his computer screen. “But we don't have the resources to do a comprehensive traffic analysis and connect every phone number belonging to a bad guy and then figure out where he is. There are too many.”

“Yeah,” Pat said. “Jimenez had it easy, our sources were not hard to track because the way they used their phones was so unique.”

“So what are our options?” Deckard asked.

“We have almost twenty prisoners chained up in the other building that we can squeeze for additional information. Who knows if it will be actionable or not,” Pat added as an afterthought. “We also took a prisoner last night, one of the guys who attacked the compound. He's a babbling mess though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know if he is in shock or just schizophrenic. He keeps mumbling to himself about the beast or something like that.”

“Okay, line up interrogations with each of the prisoners. I'm going to sit down with the source we brought in last night and have a talk with him.”

“This is the deal,” Deckard told the source that they had rescued the previous night. His name was Cezar. They sat on one of Ortega's imported leather couches in what had been his bedroom. The large man-sized holes in the walls marked the entry points that Deckard and his crew had blasted just days ago.

“I have a contact back State-side. We will keep you and your family safe for the duration of our stay in Oaxaca but that isn't much longer. We need to get you set up with something more permanent, even if we take Jimenez out.”