Hostile Borders Read online

  It wasn’t quite anger that Munson felt at Pena’s insult. It would have been hard for him to put a name on exactly what his feelings were just then. They weren’t quite fear, but, for a moment, he definitely felt out of his depth with the man he was facing, in spite of the bars between them. He shook off the feeling and fell back into the morning’s routine.

  “Open Cell Six,” Munson called out loudly. He knew that Stevens could hear him clearly over the PA system that covered the area.

  Back in the control room, Stevens pressed the button that electronically opened the door Pena was standing behind.

  “I’ve read enough,” Munson said, “to know that you won’t be doing much of anything for a while, other than rotting your life out behind bars. But that life might not be all that long. If the Feds don’t give you the death penalty for that DEA agent you killed, you’re still not off the hook. They’re going to turn you over to California as soon as they finish with you next month. Then the state of California will have its shot at you for killing that officer during your capture. And California has the death penalty, too. Somewhere down the line, they’re going to stick a needle in your arm. And the only way you can get out of it is to be as dead as your brother.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to leave your gracious hospitality before that happens,” Pena said coldly. “And my brother was killed because of a traitor we both believed was a friend. That is the person who will be punished for his crimes, not me.”

  “Move out for exercise, inmate,” Munson said roughly, and he stepped back so that Pena could go down the hall ahead of him.

  As they stepped up to the control room, both Munson and Pena stopped in front of the locked door leading to the elevator. Stevens pressed the button that unlocked the cell-side door. There was only room for a few people at a time to fit inside the cage into which the cell-side door opened. Only when the inside door was closed and secured could the outside door be opened. That kept any chance of a group of prisoners rushing the door pretty much at zero.

  As Stevens unlocked the outside door, he stood up and left the control room.

  “You going with us?” Munson asked.

  “I want a smoke,” Stevens said. “Besides, there’s no one else even on the floor. There’s nothing for me to watch besides a bunch of empty cells.”

  “It’s colder than hell out there,” Munson said. “You sure you need a cigarette that bad? You should stay in here in case something comes up.”

  “Just what could come up this early in the morning the day after Christmas?” Stevens said. “None of the other prisoners are going anywhere today, the courts aren’t open, and they’re not on our floor anyway. Besides, with the observation cameras being out of order in the exercise yard, we should be following the two-man rule.”

  Munson looked as if he was going to argue further about Stevens coming along for Pena’s exercise period. Then he shut his mouth and appeared to think better of it.

  “Suit yourself,” Munson said finally. “You’re probably right anyway.”

  The elevator that the three men rode up to the roof was very limited in its travel. Besides the roof exercise area, the elevator could stop at all of the prisoner-holding floors, the mess hall floor, and the processing area down near the first floor of the building. The stairwells were all secured at each floor and were well covered with security cameras. Munson and Stevens knew they were under the watchful eyes of their fellow officers down in the main control area. At least they were being watched until they got to the roof area.

  “It’s a bitch that the cameras are still out,” Stevens said as the men rode the elevator.

  “Well, it’s not like the Feds or the city would spring for someone to come out over Christmas to fix them,” Munson said. “This is the first dry day we’ve had in a while. Probably just some rain got into one of the junction boxes is all. It’s happened before. The rooftop system is shit and no one is going to shell out any money to upgrade it.”

  “Not when they have guys like us to go stand out in the cold,” Stevens said.

  “Hey,” Munson said, “you can always just stay inside where it’s warm.”

  “What, and miss your sparkling company?”

  Munson didn’t bother answering Stevens’s comment as the elevator stopped at the top of the building. The elevator doors opened and Stevens and Pena stepped out into the holding pen leading to the exercise yard. The small building that housed the elevator machinery and guard shack was on the west side of the enclosure. When the elevator doors closed, Munson used a key from his belt ring to turn a switch on the elevator control panel. That switch opened the doors on the back side of the elevator, doors that opened onto a small guard room.

  The guard room had a heavy Lexan window looking out onto the exercise yard. Below the window was a desk with a small control panel on it as well as a telephone and microphone setup. Through the window, a guard could watch the yard and be able to call for help or lock down the area without leaving his seat. At the back of the guard room was a set of stairs leading up to the top of the small structure. Those were the stairs Munson used to climb up to the open guard position on the roof of the structure.

  Pena and Stevens stepped out into what they called the cattle chute. The area was a short corridor of steel fencing that controlled the prisoner’s access to the elevator door. An electronically locked gate at the far end of the chute opened out into the exercise area proper. Punching a code into the numerical pad next to the gate, Stevens unlocked it.

  “Go on out and get some fresh air,” Stevens said. “It may be your last chance until Monday.”

  Pena walked out into the exercise yard. The area was well lit from the floodlights pointing down into it from around the raised wall. A line of eight-foot-high fencing surrounded the entire roof. Inside the outer fence line was a walkway the guards could use to patrol all around the exercise yard. Bordering the inside of the walkway was another eight-foot-high row of chain-link fencing completely surrounding the exercise yard.

  The ten-foot-high walls around the exercise yard kept any of the prisoners from being able to look down into the area surrounding the building—not that there would have been much for Pena to see at that time of year. At nearly 5:30 in the morning, the streets of downtown San Diego were completely deserted. Even the street people who normally camped around outside had moved indoors to seek shelter from the cold. For most of the rest of the country, the local fifty-four-degree weather would have been a balmy heat wave for late December. For the people who lived in Southern California, it was downright cold.

  As he walked out into the exercise yard, Pena turned and started trotting. There was a small running track that led around the basketball courts that took up the center of the area. At the north end of the machinery structure was the air-conditioning housing. Up against the wall, right in front of the air conditioner, was a workout area for the prisoners, complete with weights and benches. To the south of the structure, on the outside of the holding pen leading to the elevator, were several tables and chairs, all of them secured to the roof of the building.

  For Pena, his normal exercise routine would consist of a half hour of jogging followed by a forty-five-minute workout on the exercise machinery. In the world of the jail and prisons, being fit and hard kept you from becoming a target to the rest of the predators. Pena wasn’t worried about becoming a victim of jail-house life. He never intended to join the regular prison population. He kept in shape for his own reasons. Besides, in his orange prisoner’s jumpsuit, keeping moving was the only way he could keep warm in this weather.

  Up on top of the machinery structure, Munson stood watching Pena jogging around the basketball courts. He was standing next to the small guard shelter, a short, six-sided booth with windows on all sides where a guard could stand under cover and watch the prisoners. On top of the shelter was a flagpole with the American flag flying from it. A pair of spotlights illuminated the flag so that it could fly twenty-four hours a day.
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  As he stood and watched Pena, Munson spoke quietly to himself.

  “A half-million dollars,” he said. “Enough money to start again anywhere. And it’s not like the courts would convict him, not with all of his money. Fucking lawyers.”

  Reaching into his shirt pocket, Munson pulled out a small plastic bag wrapped in his handkerchief. Spreading the handkerchief out over his hand, Munson dumped the contents of the bag onto it. Tumbling out of the bag was a nine-volt battery and a small plastic cube about half the size of the battery. Though he didn’t know it, the cube was an IR-15 model Phoenix infrared flashing beacon. What Munson knew was that he was supposed to snap the terminals on the bottom of the cube onto the top of the battery and drop it to the rooftop.

  Holding the parts inside of his handkerchief to keep his fingerprints from the battery, he snapped the two pieces together. Invisibly, the light inside the Phoenix beacon began to flash. Though Munson couldn’t see anything happening, under good conditions, the flashing infrared beacon could be seen for twenty nautical miles by anyone looking for it through a night-vision device.

  Dropping the beacon to the rooftop, Munson reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a cell phone. Like the parts to the beacon, the cell phone had been given to Munson by one of Pena’s lawyers inside an envelope that held a page of instructions and a thick wad of cash. The money had been a down payment to Munson for a promised half-million dollars. All he had to do to earn the rest of the money was follow the directions on the sheet. As an added incentive, the sheet also listed a secure Web site for an offshore bank along with an account number and a set of codes. On a computer at the San Diego Public Library, Munson was able to pull up a bank account, a secret account in the Grand Caymans. Not even the IRS could check this account without the long strings of numbers and letters that made up the access code.

  Staring at him from the computer screen was his own name followed by a huge number, $450,000.00. More money than he could ever expect to make in his whole life. Enough money to drop a job where he was spit at and ridiculed by the prisoners he guarded. And when he retaliated to the abuse, the higher-ups in the federal system looked down on him. They even took the side of the prisoners most of the time. This much money was freedom, and he wasn’t going to let it go.

  Assembling and dropping the beacon was only part of what Munson had to do. Before he burned the envelope and the instruction sheet to ashes, he had memorized the few lines on the sheet. Once Pena was away, Munson would be able to access the money in his account. How the man intended to get out of the building, Munson neither knew or cared. He was just supposed to act as if everything was normal, even to giving Pena a hard time. And, he was to make sure that Pena was exercised early in the morning.

  There was nothing about the cell phone that looked at all unusual. Flipping up the cover on the phone, Munson watched as the small display lit up. Punching in the numbers 999-999-999, he pushed the little green-phone symbol. When the light on the screen went out a moment later, he dropped the phone back into his pocket.

  Though his heart was still beating as if he had just finished a hard run, Munson’s hands had stopped shaking. Now he would just see what was going to happen next.

  Inside his pocket, the Global Positioning System locator beacon disguised inside the cell phone sent out a steady, coded signal up into the night sky.

  Chapter Two

  “We’ve got a signal!” the pilot of the Super Courier said into the boom microphone of his headpiece.

  “Where away?” Garcia Santiago asked from his seat behind the pilot. The heavy load of equipment bags Santiago had resting on his lap, attached to his parachute harness, kept him from being able to lean forward easily. He could just see the visual display the pilot had mounted to the top of the control panel of the Super Courier.

  “Just to our west,” the pilot said as he pointed to the display. There was a Palm O.S. 5.0 personal digital assistant open in a holder attached to the control panel. The PDA was connected to an NMEA–018 GPS receiver. A map of San Diego was programmed into the Fly in-flight navigation system and was showing on the screen. A small flashing dot showed where the GPS locator hidden in Munson’s cell phone had been activated.

  The navigation and tracking system in the plane was simple, accurate, and made up of off-the-shelf components. Using the satellite system of the GPS network meant that the display was showing the position of the locator to within a meter of where it was lying on the rooftop. And the system was completely anonymous.

  “We’re less than five minutes away,” the pilot said, “make ready.”

  Santiago turned to the other two men in the plane with him. They were both ex-members of the Mexican Grupo Aerotransportado de Fuerzas Especiales (Airborne Group of Special Forces) the GAFE. Both men had been in some of the Mexican GAFEs that had operated death squads against the guerrillas and the peasants who supported them in Southern Mexico during the 1990s. The massacre of civilians during the suppression of the guerrilla bands had led to a number of GAFE troops being forced to leave the Mexican military. Those men included Franco Reyes and Alano Falcon, the other men in the plane.

  Neither of the ex-GAFE troopers were physically large men, but Garcia Santiago knew very well not to judge the measure of a man by his physical size. Before he was forced to leave the United States rather than face drug charges, Santiago had been a Navy SEAL. In the Teams, he had seen men complete physical acts you would not have thought possible by just looking at them.

  During a more recent career working for the leaders of the Colombian drug cartels, and gradually moving north toward the border of the United States as his reputation grew, Santiago had developed a number of contacts in the criminal underworld as well as in the international mercenary community. He had been able to pick and choose his men for the mission. The two men with him were some of the best available and had been training with him for over a month.

  Franco Reyes was an experienced parachute jumper with nearly eight hundred jumps to his credit. At five feet, seven inches tall and weighing 150 pounds, he was a slender man. But Reyes was big compared to the man sitting in his lap. Alano Falcon was only an inch or so over five feet tall and weighed only 115 pounds. But Falcon had a “won’t-stop” attitude that kept him going in the worst of situations. Both men were in excellent physical condition, hardened by tough hours training with Santiago. Theirs was going to be a particularly unique part of the upcoming mission. As far as they all were concerned, they were about to conduct an airborne infiltration well behind enemy lines. Only this mission was going to pay much, much better than anything they had ever done before.

  It was 0537 hours in the morning, Pacific time, as the Super Courier maintained its turn toward the locator signal. Below them were clouds that started from a base of nearly 3,000 feet and extended upward to rolling domes at 10,000 feet. The plane moved along above the clouds, maintaining an altitude of 13,500 feet.

  At that time of the morning, none of the local airports were operating. Even the large naval air base on North Island, to the west of San Diego Bay, had no ongoing operations. The skies were clear, and there were no special radar signals painting the plane.

  They were operating at a normal altitude for local civilian aircraft and had approached from the east to appear to be just another plane. Having slipped north across the border several hundred miles away in Arizona some time earlier, the Super Courier had drawn no attention from any U.S. Border Patrol assets during its flight toward San Diego. They were even following a registered flight plan that would take them from their takeoff point in Arizona out to sea to the Channel Islands and the airstrip on Santa Catalina Island. But the passengers on board the plane had no intention of going all the way to the islands.

  The men were dressed to conduct a very specialized airborne infiltration. Each of them was wearing additional protective equipment besides his helmet, balaclava, and flight suit. Impact-resistant ESS Profile NVG goggles covered the upper part of each man’s
face. They all had on black Hatch Centurion nylon-and-foam knee and elbow pads, Kevlar-cloth Operator Tactical padded gloves, and Han Way Fly 2000 boots. The boots were specially made for paragliding with especially strong ankle support.

  They all were carrying weapons, though none of the men appeared heavily armed. On the right hip of each man was a Omega VI Airborne model assault holster holding a Glock 19 9mm pistol. Reyes had an additional long pouch strapped to his left hip, opposite the leg holding the holster. Falcon was wearing a bulky padded chest pack over his harness, a pack that extended from his lower right hip almost to his left shoulder.

  On his back, Santiago was wearing an all-black Vector 3 M-series skydiving harness/container. Inside the container on the back of the harness was a Performance Designs PD-193 main canopy. The canopy was a seven-cell construction made of low-porosity fabric and capable of being very precisely handled by an experienced jumper. In case there was a problem with the main canopy, there was a pack holding another PD-193 canopy in reserve below the main container. Like almost all of the rest of his equipment, both canopies were dyed black.

  Normally, Santiago would have been using his personal Katana 120 canopy. That elliptical rig only had a surface area of 120 square feet as compared to the 193 square feet of the PD canopies. But he needed the larger canopy to properly support the heavy load he was carrying. Also, the larger canopy would let him descend at roughly the same rate as Reyes and Falcon.

  The other two men were only wearing one parachute rig between them. Falcon was sitting in Reyes’s lap because he was attached to the man by a tandem rig. Instead of jumping with his own parachute, Falcon would be hanging from Reyes, attached to his harness at the shoulders and hips. During the descent under the shared canopy, Falcon would have his hands free while Reyes controlled the chute.

  For his rig, Reyes was wearing an RW Sigma tandem parachute system. Inside the main container of the system was an Icarus 400-square-foot canopy. There was a special drogue chute on the end of a long tether that would be deployed to help keep the tandem jumpers properly oriented in a stable position for the drop. While Reyes would be working the system and paying attention to the altimeter attached to his left wrist, Falcon would be sitting back in the Sigma tandem harness. The harness went around Falcon’s shoulders, chest, waist, and thighs, holding him in a partially sitting position.