Chapter 14

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 f•©k?” 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.