Travis Starnes
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Border Crossed - Chapter 6
🕑 Added 2023-11-03 16:36:00 +0000 UTCWhitaker pulled out her phone while Taylor began to walk the room. He wasn’t doing an in-depth search yet, but getting a sense of anything that might be important or notable. While he didn’t normally expect anything incriminating or useful to be just sitting out in the open, considering the tunnel he saw, it wasn’t like they were able to just hide their illegal activities anyway.
Besides looking through the room, Taylor was also keeping an eye on the garage building itself through the window. He had to assume the tunnel ended on the Mexican side of the border, and who knows how many people were over there. There had been plenty of time for the guys on this side of the border to radio in that there were cops here and to call for reinforcements. The last thing he wanted, until the cavalry arrived, was to be surprised.
“Captain Sullivan? It’s Agent Whitaker,” Whitaker said, putting her phone on speaker.
“What is it, Agent Whitaker? Thanks to the two of you, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I have a lot of work to do today. I know you two get to do whatever you want, but my task force has an actual job to do.”
“We need your team out here ASAP with search and recovery people, plus the coroner. We’re at the location we talked to you about last night, it’s a farm purchased around the time the increase in drugs started. There were seven hostiles. Cartel members armed with pistols and automatics moving what looks to be repackaged narcotics. Unfortunately, all seven are down, so we don’t have anyone to question, but the scene is full of intel that we need to recover. More importantly, we discovered what looks like a tunnel, dug deep, going towards the Mexican side of the border with tracks going down the center, probably so they can move large amounts of product at a time. This operation is a lot bigger than anyone thought.”
“You’re at least ten miles from the border,” Sullivan said, incredulously.
“I know, but it’s here and it goes deep enough and in the right direction. It explains why the number of drug seizures has gone down. If they load cars here, they don’t have much to worry about.”
“Stay where you are. I’ll get locals dispatched now, and I’ll have my team and everyone else on the road in ten.”
“We’ll be here,” Whitaker said, hanging up.
“Now he believes us,” Taylor said, sarcastically, as he flipped through papers.
“It was a tough sell,” she said. “Hell, you found this place, and even you weren’t one hundred percent sure about it. Imagine building something like this.”
“Well, it’s here,” Taylor said, setting the papers down and looking back at the large garage. “We need to check that out.”
“It’s quiet at the moment. Maybe we should wait until backup arrives before we check it out.”
“I don’t want to be surprised by a bunch of guys bursting out of the door. I’d rather have them backed into the tunnel where I have a better shot at them, then us hiding in here while they surround us.”
“Fine,” Whitaker said, checking her weapon. “But if you get us killed, I’ll never forgive you.”
Taylor led the way out of the house, past the scattered bodies, and approached the garage. Although it had been empty when Taylor had shut the doors, Whitaker still stood back and off to the far-right side, so she could have a clear line of sight to anything on the left in the garage. Flipping the latch off, Taylor held his gun up with one hand and pulled with the other, stepping back as the door slid aside so he’d at least have cover from the side of the room Whitaker was clearing.
Thankfully, no one was inside. The tunnel was still wide open like they left it, with tracks still leading off into the black void.
“If it goes all the way to the Mexican side, it’s unlikely anyone would hear anything that far away. Maybe there wasn’t anyone at the bottom of it at all.”
“Maybe not. Or maybe they’re just waiting down there for us to go exploring,” Taylor said.
“I doubt it. They have to know if the firing here was law enforcement, that we would have called it in and this place would be swarming in an hour. If anything, they would have made a run for it as soon as the shooting started.”
“They could have thought it was another cartel,” Taylor said and then shrugged. “You’re probably right. Still, I want to make sure we don’t get jumped when we start going through this place. Let’s go down a bit and see where it goes.”
“You want to go in there?”
“Sure. It’s a tunnel. They’ll be in front of us, right?”
“We don’t have any kind of night vision gear, and we’ll be easy to pick off if we shine flashlights around.”
“Did you see anyone in here with night vision gear? They probably have lights down there or use flashlights. NODs aren’t exactly common cartel gear,” Taylor said, referring to active night vision gear commonly used by the military.
“You’d be surprised how well these guys are armed. Fine, we’ll check it out, but I don’t want to go far. The locals will be here soon, and I want to be around when they show up.”
“You think they’ll cause problems? Maybe dirty?”
“I doubt it. Even if they’re dirty, they know federal response is on its way and they’re not going to put themselves in danger of getting caught on the take. But they might screw something up, either accidentally or on purpose, and I don’t want that to happen. This is a solid bust that Joe will want his hand in.”
“Gotta make the boss look good,” Taylor quipped.
“You like the free hand we’re given? This is how we get it. Showing results. Now, are we going down there or not?”
Taylor gave another shrug and pulled out his flashlight, crossing his wrists to use his flashlight arm as a brace in case he needed to fire. The pair walked down the incline, each hugging the wall. They didn’t get nearly as far as either thought they would.
About a hundred feet down, the tunnel more or less ended, except for a four-foot-high, four-foot-wide square opening, which the tracks continued into.
“What the hell,” Taylor said. “What, they crouch the whole ten miles? Shitty way to make a tunnel.”
“I don’t think so,” Whitaker said, bending down to look at the tracks. “Huh, that’s clever.”
“What’s clever?” Taylor said, looking at them but clearly not seeing what she saw.
“You see these two thick chains in the middle of the tracks? I think this is some kind of pulley mechanism.”
“Run by what? The tracks just kind of stop at this end.”
“I bet there’s a winch mechanism at the other end so they can send the container, or more likely containers, of drugs through and then pull them back when the guys here call and tell them they’re empty.”
“Why the hell would they do that? Seems like a lot of trouble and a lot of stuff that can break down when they could just put the containers a dolly track and have some guys push them. Muscle power is cheap.”
“That’s why I said it’s clever. One of the ways our guys check for tunnels is ground-penetrating radar. The ground, though, it’s not exactly solid. There are all kinds of burrows and stuff made by animals and vegetation and whatnot, and radar is not that finely tuned, not the way they use it. They don’t have the manpower to run one of the more sophisticated devices over each section of the border, so they use less sensitive radars from drones or placed sensors. They’re good for finding bigger areas, like say something large enough for a man to go through. Four feet by four feet, going this far? Even if a drone picked it up, they’d write it off as a false positive since, like you said, who’d crawl ten miles every time they wanted to deliver drugs?”
“Hopefully, once Sullivan gets out here, we can dig through everything in that house and see if we can find something to answer our questions. I’m sure he, or Agent Chavez, has contacts in Mexico’s federal law enforcement to check the other end of this tunnel and see what they have there.”
It took almost ten more minutes before the first locals showed up. Whitaker immediately went to work, getting them set up in places to close down the scene, without letting any of them alone in the house or the garage until more federal officers showed up.
While there was no guarantee that any of them were compromised, it was a distinct possibility, and Taylor was happy to see that some of his paranoia had rubbed off on her. The local boys didn’t exactly love having a woman boss them around, but Whitaker was in her element and had a lot of experience dealing with their type.
It was almost an hour before the first federal agents arrived and almost two before Sullivan and his team pulled up, their convoy of squad cars and SUVs with lights flashing, came tearing down the dirt road that led to the farm.
“Finally,” Whitaker said, pushing off the local cruiser she’d been leaning against.
She’d given the job of watching the farmhouse and the garage to the first feds who’d showed up, which at least let her move around the site, but they were both ready to hand the scene over to someone else.
The vehicles pulled up in a semicircle around the front of the house, officers piling out, hands resting on sidearms like the site hadn’t been cleared for hours.
Sullivan emerged from the lead SUV, his habitual scowl deepening as he took in the bullet-ridden house and bodies littering the ground. His gaze landed on Taylor and Whitaker.
“Give it to me,” he said, in his standard no-nonsense manner, but without the undercurrent of annoyance he’d directed at Whitaker and Taylor every other time they’d dealt with him.
“After finding out about this property and its unusual traffic in and out, we made our way down here, coming cross country through that field, trying to get a good view to observe it. Just as we got up to the house, two men came out of the house, and we announced ourselves. They went for their weapons, so we had to put them down, which is when all hell broke loose. At least a dozen men poured out of the house and garage. We finished up the guys out here, then moved in to clear the house. After checking to make sure there wasn’t anyone hiding, we called you and waited for reinforcements,” Taylor said, giving a very abbreviated summary.
“Why didn’t you call it in and wait for backup?” Sullivan asked.
“It happened too fast. We didn’t actually know anything illegal was happening here until they pulled their weapons, at which point there wasn’t time to call it in until it was all over.”
“You’re telling me the two of you took down a dozen men armed with automatic weapons by yourselves?” Sullivan asked.
“They were amateurs,” Taylor said. “Not bangers, and they didn’t have any formal training. They just kind of charged us, hoping if they threw enough bullets, they’d eventually get us.”
Sullivan gave him a hard look before turning his attention to several of the agents following him.
“Go to the house and start inventorying everything. I want every piece of paper you find, I don’t care if it’s a takeout menu,” he ordered, before turning back to Taylor and Whitaker. “Show me the tunnel.”
They led the way to the garage with most of the task force trailing in their wake, stopping at the bottom of the slope where the railroad tracks disappeared down into darkness. Sullivan took it in with widened eyes.
“Jesus. This is …”
“Where all your drugs have been coming in,” Whitaker said, finishing his thought.
Sullivan turned to Chavez and said, “Call Diez in Mexico and have them start trying to track down their end of the tunnel. Send someone crawling the whole length if you have to, but I want the other end in their hands by tonight. Clear?”
Chavez nodded and pulled out a phone, stepping away from the group while Sullivan turned his attention to Rodriguez, the FBI liaison to the task force.
“I want drones and ground-penetrating radar sweeping the area for other access points. Just because it seems like a straight line to Mexico doesn’t mean it is. It could branch off or do who knows what. Have them dial their radar into this area, and then follow the tunnel out to wherever it goes.”
As he went on barking orders, Matthews walked over and clapped Taylor on the shoulder.
Grinning, he said, “Hell of a find here. You two just busted open the whole damn operation.”
“Well, part of it,” Taylor said. “This is only one end of the operation, and it had to take more than just some cartel guys to set this up. The amount of work to put something like this together is massive, more than the handful of guys that were here could handle. No, this is just part of it.”
“Take the win, man,” Matthews said. “You called this well before anyone else. We all had the same info as you, but you saw through it, and tracked it down.”
“He’s right,” Sullivan, who’d finished barking orders, said. “I owe you an apology. You told me this is what we’d find, and I completely ignored you. Hell, I tried to put roadblocks up to stop you. I was being territorial and pigheaded. I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong, and I was definitely wrong.”
“You were just doing your job,” Whitaker said. “We can’t fault you for that.”
Taylor had to fight to keep the scowl off his face. He could damn well fault Sullivan for that. It was that exact attitude that enabled all of the bureaucrats who were promoted above their level of usefulness. He’d met dozens of men like him, more interested in protecting their asses than getting the actual job done.
He did have to give Sullivan some credit. Unlike most of the others, he at least could admit when he was wrong. That, in itself, was a surprise. Usually, they moved the goalpost, tried to find another reason to claim they were really right all along.
“I appreciate the admission, Sullivan,” Taylor said, his expression neutral. “But you’ve got a bigger problem here.”
“What do you mean?” Sullivan asked, furrowing his brow.
“The cartel knew your task force’s actions well in advance. The timing and location of the bombings make that clear,” Taylor said, crossing his arms. “As I pointed out when we asked you to send men out here, the bombings happened any time you were about to send men into the area, getting too close to their tunnel or this end of it at least. They escalated right before you were going to move. They predicted everything you were going to do, always a step ahead of you.”
“You’re suggesting my team’s compromised? This isn’t a foreign intelligence agency, it’s a drug cartel. They don’t operate like that.”
“They also don’t set up strategic bombings either. It’s always gunmen or something else equally direct. You’re here because they changed tactics. Maybe you should accept they’ve changed more than just when and where they’re sending drugs through.”
“I trust my people. They’re all experienced agents, all have exemplary records, and were recommended by their chiefs. The Attorney General was serious when he called for this task force to be put together. If you’re going to accuse someone of consorting with criminals, you need more than your intuition,” Sullivan said, his expression turning stony.
“I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” Taylor said, meeting his glare. “I’m simply pointing out that the timing is too convenient to ignore. Your operations line up perfectly with the cartel’s movements. That points to a leak.”
After a moment, and a look from Whitaker telling him to be more diplomatic, Taylor said, “I’m not questioning your team’s loyalty. It might not even be on purpose. Someone could be feeding intel without even realizing it. They could have someone in your support staff, or are using tech somehow latched onto your communications. A leak doesn’t have to be a person, although I’d suggest you investigate every possibility. Because you’re definitely compromised somewhere.”
Sullivan’s frown didn’t abate, but Taylor could see him turning over the possibilities, unable to dismiss it out of hand.
“Look, I get it,” Taylor said, trying one last time. “No one wants to believe they’ve got a problem in-house. Your people are working hard on this, but you’re doing them a disservice by not investigating fully.”
Sullivan exhaled heavily; his shoulders lowered a fraction.
“All right. I don’t like it, but you’re right,” he said, and then considered Taylor almost thoughtfully. “If there is a leak, I’m going to need some outside observers to look into it. Someone I can trust who isn’t part of my team. You two came with just about the best recommendations an agent can get, reporting directly to the director and being friends with the president.”
Taylor held up his hands and said, “Whoa, we did our job here already. Whitaker and I need to get back to DC.”
“This was your idea,” Sullivan pointed out. “Clearly, I can’t rely on my own people for this. If it does turn out one of them is compromised, it’s going to be harder for the people who’ve worked with them for months to spot it.”
“You realize this is going to cause some serious tension, having these two nosing around your people, making accusations,” Matthews pointed out.
“If they’re right, it won’t matter. The team will be more pissed they let someone compromised get that close to them. If they’re wrong, we can send Taylor and Whitaker back to DC with their tails between their legs, another example of politicians and their underlings meddling in the real work being done in the field. And I can blame them for causing disruptions with my team, keeping anyone else from being sent in their place. It’s a win-win.”
“For you,” Taylor said.
“That’s the way it goes,” Sullivan responded, shrugging unapologetically. “What you have to decide is, do you want to risk this getting out of hand again? Which we both know it will if you’re right and there’s someone compromised on my team. You were really confident just a minute ago, so you’ll get to come out looking like the hero again. Unless you’re not as sure as you sounded.”
Taylor hesitated. He knew he was being trapped, and Sullivan was playing on his own ego. Whitaker was no help. She didn’t care about proving him right, but he knew she’d want to stay and do it because it was the right thing to do. Sullivan had caught him in a neat little trap with his own words. Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as Taylor had pegged him to be.
“Fine,” Taylor said with a tight smile. “We’ll stay on and investigate.”
“Good,” Sullivan said, satisfied. “We’ll take over the scene here and get with our counterparts over the border, see if we can find the other end of this thing. Keep me in the loop, and if you need anything, come to me.”
“At least he’s finally on board,” Taylor thought as he and Whitaker made the walk back to their SUV.
