Hostile Borders Read online

  The Home Team: Hostile Borders

  Command Master Chief Dennis Chalker, USN (Ret.) with Kevin Dockery

  Contents

  Prologue

  “Call me Ishmael.”

  Chapter One

  The long nose of the H-295 Super Courier aircraft stuck…

  Chapter Two

  “We’ve got a signal!” the pilot of the Super Courier…

  Chapter Three

  In the tandem rider position, strapped to Santiago, Falcon swept…

  Chapter Four

  Across the street, Santiago and Pena witnessed Falcon’s final seconds…

  Chapter Five

  Lieutenant Commander Foxbury on board the Coast Guard Island-class patrol…

  Chapter Six

  The sun shone down from the clear blue of the…

  Chapter Seven

  Within twenty minutes, the area was cleaned up and two…

  Chapter Eight

  When Hausmann opened his eyes the next morning, the first…

  Chapter Nine

  As far as the world was concerned, Placido Pena died…

  Chapter Ten

  As the two men headed out to the parking area,…

  Chapter Eleven

  The finger slowly slipped through the white stones piled inside…

  Chapter Twelve

  No matter how beat up the men were, there were…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early that evening Reaper was sitting at the table in…

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Reaper froze in position, the noise of the rattlesnake…

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Cristal Hacienda had once been a shining example of…

  Chapter Sixteen

  Once back at the ranch house, Reaper, Manors, and Hausmann…

  Chapter Seventeen

  The rock walls of the mine tunnel closed in on…

  Chapter Eighteen

  While Hausmann dug out his spotting scope to set it…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Though SEALs are trained to be able to go long…

  Chapter Twenty

  With Hausmann maintaining a communications watch on the phone and…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  With his SureFire light in the SpecOps light sheath, Reaper…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The morning after Humzan’s crossing, Daumudi got up, washed, did…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was late in the afternoon when Reaper finally pulled…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next morning was an organized blur of activity for…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Both trucks left the Dogbone Ranch and headed south together.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There was a dirt road running between the hacienda and…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As Reaper and Hausmann headed to the entrance to the…

  Epilogue

  Several days after their sudden return from Mexico, Hausmann was

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Dennis Chalker and Kevin Dockery

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  “Call me Ishmael.”

  “Ishmael? Who the hell is Ishmael? Have you gone dingy from the cold or something?”

  “Didn’t read the book assignments back in high school did you?” Ted Reaper said. “That’s the opening line in Moby-Dick.”

  “Who the hell cares about a book about a great white whale?” Mark Jenkins said.

  “Well,” Reaper said, “it feels cold enough that icebergs and a couple of whales could float by and it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Besides, Moby-Dick is a really big book.”

  “So?” Jenkins said.

  “It would burn for a long time,” Reaper said, as he hunched down.

  Shivering with the cold, the two SEALs sat with their Teammates in a pair of open Boston Whalers far out of sight of land. The boats were part of the Special Operations Command’s preparations for Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invasion of Panama. The SEALs were set to practice a takedown of a simulated Panamanian ship. Intelligence had stated that such a ship might be used to move valuables or personnel secretly from Panama prior to the invasion. It was going to be the mission of the SEALs from Lima Platoon of SEAL Team Four to quietly take control of such a ship.

  The SEALs were waiting offshore of the Florida panhandle, near Eglin Air Force Base, for their target ship to approach. Following the rule of “train as you fight—fight as you train,” the SEALs were equipped to take down a ship in tropical waters. The only problem was, their present situation was far from tropical in terms of weather.

  A cold front had moved down from the north and the offshore temperature on the water had dropped, dangerously so for the SEALs. They were all wearing the same uniforms, and carrying the same weapons and equipment, that they would be using on the Pacific Ocean side of Panama. The cold weather was knifing through the men, and each of them had suffered the cold before.

  “S-s-s-son-of-a-b-b-bitch,” Mike Nelson stuttered from his position crouching at the bottom of the boat, “just where in the hell is that target? I haven’t been this cold since BUD/S.”

  Each of the men in the two boats had suffered through what was considered the hardest course of training in the U.S. military—BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training. Passing the course was the only way to get into the Teams. And gutting out the cold was one part of the training that caused a lot of the students to quit the course and return to the regular Navy.

  “Shit,” Jenkins said, “I wasn’t this cold during BUD/S, and I was in a winter class!”

  “Come on,” Reaper said with a strained smile, “you think the steel pier wasn’t colder than this?”

  One of the trials of Hell Week, an unbelievable period of maximum output and suffering during the first phase of BUD/S training, had been known to generations of trainees as the steel pier. In the dark of the night, students were ordered to strip down and get into the water. Once they were good and soaked, they had to lie down on a pier that was made up of pierced steel planks. Not only would the cold metal just suck the body heat right out of a student, the instructors would spray the class with cold water from hoses and lawn sprinklers.

  A lot of men quit training, dropped out of BUD/S, because of the ordeal of the steel pier. The students who got through it, and completed even harder evolutions later on, knew they could endure cold conditions, painful, gut-rippingly cold conditions. But during training, experienced SEAL instructors were constantly watching the students, keeping a tally of their time in the cold and just what the temperature was. Those instructors made sure that none of the students actually suffered from hypothermia, a cold condition that was life threatening. But there were no instructors floating miles out to sea in the open Boston Whalers with the SEALs from Lima Platoon.

  The SEALs didn’t have instructors watching out for them, but they did have decades of SEAL experience watching them in the form of Chief Cousins, the platoon chief, in Boat One. In Boat Two with Reaper and his Teammates, was the platoon’s leading petty officer, Intelligence specialist first class Garcia Santiago. The platoon’s two officers had been intentionally left off the boats for the night’s operation. They would be acting the part of observers on board the target ship, if it ever arrived.

  Worried about his Teammate, Reaper moved over to where Santiago sat at the rear of the boat.

  “Santiago,” Reaper said, “I think Nelson’s in trouble. The cold’s getting to him bad.”

  “We’re all cold here, Reaper,” Santiago said. “But we have orders to hold our position until the target ship shows up.”

  “Y
eah, I know,” Reaper said, “but Nelson’s stuttering his words pretty bad. That’s not something he does.”

  “Nelson!” Santiago snapped. “Say bell, boat, and oar.”

  “W-w-what,” Nelson said, startled at the odd order.

  “You heard me,” Santiago said, “say bell, boat, and oar.”

  “B-b-b-bell, b-b-b-book, a-a-and, and…” Nelson’s voice faded in his confusion.

  “Jenkins, Reaper,” Santiago said, “tear up those pads in the bow of the boat. Get Nelson under them now, and you two crawl in with him.”

  “Chief,” Santiago called out to the other boat, “we’ve got a man going into hypothermia here!”

  “That’s it,” Chief Cousins growled. “Get him warmed up any way you can. I’m calling for a medevac and we’re calling off this damned goat-fuck.”

  While Chief Cousins had his radio operator call back to command to get emergency transport out to their location, the coxswains of both boats were firing up the engines. Hypothermia was a very serious condition. The fact that Nelson hadn’t been able to repeat the words Santiago told him to, and confused the ones that he did say, pointed out that the man was in real danger.

  “The nearest medevac bird is twenty minutes away,” Chief Cousins called over to Santiago.

  “That’s too long,” Santiago said, “Nelson’s in a bad way.”

  In spite of the emergency effort to warm the man, Nelson’s shivering hadn’t subsided. But the shakes were getting weaker and he was responding hardly at all to Santiago shouting at him.

  “I’m heading in to shore,” Santiago said. “The medevac can meet us partway if they get out here.”

  “Go,” Chief Cousins said. “Don’t talk, just go. We’ll follow.”

  It was a close race to get back to shore and a warming shelter before Nelson went into shock. As it was, the man was suffering badly from hypothermia when the Boston Whaler grounded its bow on the beach. Santiago had used his squad’s radio to call in rescue units and an ambulance was waiting for them when they arrived. Nelson was going to be all right and the rest of the platoon would recover quickly.

  The target ship had never shown up. Back at Special Operations Command, Lima Platoon’s mission had been changed—but none of the Army commanders had thought to tell the Navy element that the training operation had been scrubbed. The two SEAL officers from Lima Platoon hadn’t known that their men had been waiting out on the water, poorly equipped to deal with the cold. It had been the Chief and the leading petty officer of the platoon, Cousins and Santiago, who had kept the training op from costing the first casualties of the invasion of Panama—well before it even began.

  “Good call out there, Reaper,” Santiago said the next day when the platoon was in their assigned quarters at Eglin. “If you hadn’t noticed Nelson slipping, things could have been a lot worse for him.”

  “It was just the right thing to do,” Reaper said. “Now that we know he’s going to be okay, what’s the mission for the platoon?”

  “Don’t worry,” Santiago said, “we’ve still got a hot operation to go on. Just not one where we’ll be sitting out in an open boat freezing our asses off. And you’ll be partnered up with me. I need a good man I can depend on to keep his head on straight. Sometimes, we can only depend on each other.”

  Chapter One

  The long nose of the H-295 Super Courier aircraft stuck out into the night, the propeller a spinning blur as it cut through the darkness. Dressed in gray tactical Nomex flight suits with black balaclavas worn underneath their Pro-Tec helmets, the heavily laden grimfaced men sitting inside the plane were still. Only the pilot at the controls was moving as he shifted his arms and head while flying the aircraft.

  There was no talking among them, no joking or conversation. Voices would have been immediately blotted out by the roar of the engine coming in through the open side of the plane, the right side where the door was missing. The cold night air washed in through the opening as the plane continued on its flight.

  Late December is not the time of year that San Diego has the great weather that it’s well known for. At five o’clock on that Thursday morning, the sun wasn’t due up for another couple of hours. The overcast clouds blocked the moon and the stars, further darkening an already black night.

  A shrill whistle blast sounded out through the corridor, echoing off the hard walls as the lights along the ceiling came on. The area was silent after the blast of sound. Rows of individual six-by-nine-foot cells lined one wall. The facing wall was nothing more than a row of sealed windows, each one covered with heavy bars. It was the maximum-security segregation area of the Federal Building in downtown San Diego.

  The silence was explained by the almost total lack of activity on the floor. In all of the cells, there was only one prisoner. As the head of one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico, Placido Pena was considered a very important prisoner, as well as a high-security risk. He was kept isolated from the rest of the inmates held in the building while they underwent trial in the federal courts across the street. Pena was exercised and fed only in segregated circumstances, especially now that his trial was drawing to an end.

  “Do you have to blow that damned whistle every morning?” Officer Mitch Stevens said in the security control room just outside the isolation area.

  Sergeant Keith Munson looked up at his shift partner.

  “Look,” Munson said, “if that damned drug lord wasn’t on this floor, we wouldn’t have to be here the day after Christmas and we could be having a nice long weekend just like everyone else. They even let his jury go home for the holidays and kept him locked up here in isolation.”

  “Everyone in the building knows what you think of this guy,” Stevens said. “It’s not like you keep your opinion a great big secret.”

  “Never forget that six brother officers were shot taking this guy,” Munson said. “Both a DEA agent and a Highway Patrol officer were killed. He’s facing multiple counts of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder charges. If he hadn’t been suckered across the border to help his brother, we never would have gotten him. It’s not like the Mexican government ever would have moved against him. He has everyone across the border either in his pocket or so afraid of him they don’t dare move.

  “If I’m not going to be happy about being here, he sure as hell isn’t going to be either. That sonofabitch has more money than God and thinks he can buy his way out of here with fast-talking lawyers. Well, he’s going to learn that money won’t buy him a damned thing here. He’s supposed to get a minimum of two ninety-minute exercise periods a week. And he’s to be kept segregated from the rest of the population. So I guess we’ll just have to put him out early today.”

  Leaning forward at the desk where he sat, Munson keyed the microphone hanging on its long boom.

  “Okay, Pena, rise and shine. You’ve got fifteen minutes before your exercise period. I suggest you dress warm, it’s a bit chilly outside.”

  Placido Pena’s name meant “tranquil,” which was anything but his nature. He and his brother had risen to the top of a fiercely competitive business, drug trafficking across the border from Mexico. They had reached the pinnacle of their professional lives by being more ruthless than anyone else in their business, a field not known for its gentle work ethics. Even the vicious Colombian cartels had learned to respect the Pena family of northern Mexico—those who failed to learn that lesson died.

  Dark, cold eyes gleamed out from a square face—eyes that had seen streams of blood flowing in the streets at their owner’s order. That face had witnessed a lot of violence in Pena’s thirty-seven years of life. Thick coal-black hair and a full beard surrounded a calm face that could show intelligence, charm, and evil.

  In his orange prisoner’s clothing, Pena stood facing his cell door as Munson walked up. Back in the control room, Stevens watched through the heavy Lexan window as Munson approached the cell. Neither officer was armed, they only had the can of pepper spray and radio on their belts, bu
t they needed little more. There was no place for a prisoner to try to escape to on the floor. The Federal Building was twelve stories tall and they were on the ninth floor. Below them were secured floors that were normally filled with officers and other federal law-enforcement bureaucrats. Above them were the general prisoner-holding floors and the exercise yard on the top of the building.

  Escape from the exercise yard wasn’t considered a major problem, the long drop to the ground prevented that. Fencing and guard stations surrounding the exercise yard prevented suicides from climbing up and jumping. And the rooftop enclosure was too tight a spot for a helicopter to land. That area was where the two officers were going to escort their prisoner for his ninety minutes of exercise and fresh air before breakfast. By the time his exercise period was over, the few other prisoners in the building would have finished eating and have been returned to their cells for the rest of their early morning routine.

  “Okay, Pena,” Munson said, “time to go walkies.”

  Standing at the open door, Pena said, “I will not be spoken to like a dog.”

  “You’ll be spoken to in any way I feel like,” Munson said with heat in his voice. “You may have been something on the outside, but you’re just another inmate in here to me.

  “Oh yeah, you used to have quite a life. Fast cars, faster women, parachuting, scuba diving, horse racing, smuggling drugs, killing cops, I’ve read quite a bit about you.”

  “I’m surprised you read at all,” Pena said as he gazed at Munson. His dark brown eyes steadily looked at the man. The look resembled that of a cobra sizing up its next meal. It was the guard who first broke eye contact.