Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (23 page)

There was another one in the house, a suit. When the man walked in front of the open blinds in the living room with his coat off, Nino could see the shoulder harness and what looked like a Glock in the holster. Unless he missed his bet, they probably installed new security gear as well, silent alarms and the little pinhole cameras that you could never find. Nino would have to do a fan dance to keep his face off the video while he sprayed every crevice in the house with paint just to have a shot at getting in and out unseen. The place looked like a fortress and smelled like a trap. This told him that what he was looking for was no longer there.

Either the lawyer had it or the cops did. If it was the police, Nino could forget it. The game was over. He could go home. Assuming, of course, that they knew what they had. If the lawyer had it, that was another matter. In this case, the item was still in play. Getting it might be a little difficult, and it might mean a little blood. Nino didn’t particularly mind as long as it wasn’t his own. That was the price of doing business.

For the moment he was behind the wheel doing close to eighty, down the South Bay Expressway east of San Diego. It was a toll road with almost no traffic this late at night. It was almost ten. Nino was gambling that at this hour, with sparse traffic, the CHP wouldn’t waste much time on patrols way out here.

Ari had called him thirty minutes earlier thinking that Nino would have to haul ass just to get there on time. As it was, he’d have an edge on the Israeli, arriving early. The meeting site was a barren area of rolling hills out in the middle of nowhere. The change of venue away from a public place and the late hour could mean that they were going to give him bad news, no more attempts on the house. The job was over. Break my heart, thought Nino. Only the mentally challenged would go back into that place after what he had seen. Or it could be they had something else in mind.

Whatever it was, he didn’t like it. He wouldn’t have been here except for the fact that they owed him money. Ari said he’d have it tonight. Nino made a point of never leaving money behind. If you were gonna do that, then you had no business being in the business.

He took the San Miguel Ranch Road exit from the highway and followed the road. It wound up into the hills off to the right of the highway. Nino had already taken a good look at the terrain on Google Earth from his phone, so he had a heads-up as to the lay of the land.

When the asphalt road turned to dirt he flipped off his headlights, slowed down a little, and felt out the road with his parking lamps. It was dark, no moon. Without the light pollution from the city, he could see the Milky Way spread out overhead like a flickering blanket.

A few hundred feet farther on, the road forked. Nino went to the left. In doing this he bypassed the road to the meeting site given to him by Ari on the phone. He climbed higher into the hills. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he picked up speed. About a mile on he found the spot he was looking for.

It was a flat area off to the right of the road and as long as two football fields and about sixty yards wide.

At the far edge on the right, if the Google satellite image was accurate, the ground fell away at a steep incline. It was a ridge overlooking the location where Ari told him they were to meet.

He didn’t want to drive any closer to the overlook. The ground was flat enough, and hard, but he didn’t want to take the chance that someone down below might see or hear the car. For all he knew, Ari was already down there. He pulled to the side of the road, turned off the engine and the parking lights, and put the car in park. Then he got out, closed the door quietly, and walked to the rear. From the trunk he grabbed a large pair of binoculars and started to move in long, quick strides over the flat ground. Someone had graded the area with a bulldozer.

It took Nino less than two minutes to traverse the sixty yards, reaching the crest of the ridge where he could look down. He quickly scanned the area below with the thermal imaging night vision field glasses. If the little prick thought he was going to set him up, he had another thing coming.

From here he could see everything. The flat area below was mostly barren, and in places graded. It didn’t provide a lot of cover for hiding. That was good, or maybe it was just intended to make him feel safe. There were no vehicles, none that he could see, and no places he could see to hide them. Ari’s wasn’t there. He checked his watch. It was still early.

What he didn’t like was the road leading in. If someone came in from behind and blocked him, there was no way out. The possibility bothered him. If they tried it he could grab Ari and put a pistol to his head until they backed off, then take the little fucker for a ride. But that was a low-percentage play. And besides, the people with Ari might not care. They might shoot them both and sort it out later.

The smarter move was to wait until Ari arrived, watch him for a while, make sure he was alone, and then go down and block the road himself. When Ari got tired of waiting and tried to come out, he could grab him, get his money, and find out what was going on. At this point it really didn’t matter much to Nino whether they wanted to fire him or not. As far as he was concerned, Jimmie Pepper had pretty much used up his nine lives. It was time to move on, another identity, another name.

Nino studied the area carefully for several minutes but saw no sign of any green flares, heat registers from human bodies or hot engine blocks. There were little pockets of brush here and there, what the locals called chaparral, mostly sagebrush and manzanita. He was just about to lower the field glasses when something caught his eye. It was a flick of greenish light in a brush about three hundred yards to his right, halfway down the slope. Something had moved just enough to allow the glasses to pick up the glow. Nino focused in on it.

Whatever it was, it was putting out heat. There was no question about that. He could see it. But he couldn’t make out the shape. The object was stationary, unmoving. It could be an animal, like a dog or a deer. Or it could be a sniper set up in a blind, waiting for his target to appear.

Nino crouched down, then got flat on the ground, just in case it might be human with a thermal scope, something that could pick him off the ridgeline before he could blink. He watched the glowing image for several seconds, trying to make out the dimensions and the outline of the form. But the brush broke it up. He glanced at his watch. Unless he was late the Israeli would be arriving any minute.

Ari felt the wheels of his car as they left the pavement and ran onto the dirt. He left his headlights on as instructed and followed the road to the right. It was narrow, wide enough only for a single car until it reached an area where it widened out. It was the spot where they were supposed to meet. He took a deep breath, then turned off his lights and killed the engine. He waited for the dust to settle, then looked around. There was no sign of another car. He checked his rearview mirror for the glare of headlights coming up the winding road behind him. But he saw nothing. Ari wondered if he’d made himself clear regarding the directions.

The man he knew as Jimmie Pepper could be dense at times. But Ari knew now that was probably a ruse. Thanks to a flare sent up by the FBI, Israeli intelligence was aware that the American government believed that James Pepper was dead. The FBI had put out a bulletin notifying local law enforcement that Pepper was missing, believed to be deceased, and to be on the lookout for any person or persons using his identity. Tel Aviv picked up the bulletin almost immediately from Interpol and notified the consulate in Los Angeles.

Ordinarily the Israelis would have contacted the FBI and had Jimmie picked up. But these were not ordinary times. The man calling himself Pepper had managed to penetrate an Israeli intelligence operation. Israel wanted to know who he was, who he worked for, and what he was up to. On such matters the Israeli cabinet was no longer sure they could trust the American government.

So two days earlier the Israeli military had dispatched a Hercules C-130 from Nevatim Airbase in Israel directly to northern Mexico. It was refueled three times in flight by a KC-130 tanker. The plane carried thirty-two Israeli commandos and a four-wheel-drive pickup with California plates. The commandos were sufficiently well armed to protect the plane while on the ground, though if they had to leave in a hurry, they could be airborne within minutes. The plane landed at a private airstrip on a ranch a few miles from the Tijuana-Mexicali highway in the countryside east of Tijuana.

The commandos secured the area and sent a two-man sniper team north in the pickup truck. Both the driver and the passenger, sniper and spotter, carried valid US driver’s licenses and US passports, all of them good for the reason that both men held dual citizenship, US and Israeli. They crossed the border into the United States at San Ysidro less than two hours after landing. The Americans were right about one thing: their border was porous.

As Ari sat in his car and glanced at his watch he already knew that the Israeli sniper team was somewhere on the hillside above him. He had been in touch with them on a crypto-capable satellite phone that allowed him to communicate not only with the sniper and his spotter but with the plane on the ground in Mexico.

The plan was not to kill the man known as Jimmie, but to take him down with a dart, drug him, and then bundle him across the border, onto the C-130, where he could be flown back to Israel for interrogation. There were fears that he might be working for ISIS or possibly Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. If so, they needed to know if he was part of a broader network, and if he was, had they penetrated any other Israeli operations or the intelligence operations of any of Israel’s allies?

Ari checked his watch again. Jimmie was now running late. More than ten minutes. Perhaps the phone call had scared him off, made him wary due to the remote location. Under the circumstances it couldn’t be helped. It was a risk they had to take. Ari reached over and grabbed the satellite phone from the seat next to him. He punched in the number and waited. When the voice came over the line it was a hushed whisper. “Eagle here.”

“Eagle, this is Cable. Any sign on the road?” said Ari.

“Negative.”

“I don’t think he’s going to show.”

“Sit tight. Turn it off. Eagle out.”

Ari could tell from the aggravation in the man’s voice that the military pro up on the hillside did not consider Ari to be part of their team. Patience was the name of the game. Snipers and spotters could lie in the hot desert sun in camo gear and ghillie suits for hours, sometimes days, and barely take a breath, just waiting for a shot. Here he was, sitting in a comfortable car, sweating blood because the man was ten minutes late. He tried to calm down, took a stick of gum from his pocket, unwrapped it, stuck it in his mouth, and started chewing.

The instant the man stirred to adjust his headset, the brush moved and Nino got a good look at him. There were two of them. The spotter was bent forward low to the ground, kneeling on one knee, the spotting scope in front of him. The sniper was lying prone, the stock of his weapon just touching his shoulder.

Nino took a quick glance up the hillside behind the two men. It was immediately apparent why they had picked that location. A cleared firebreak ran up the hill behind them, all the way to the top of the crest, on the level where Nino was lying in the dirt. That’s when he saw it.

A dark vehicle that looked like a pickup was parked right near the edge of the crest, just at the top of the firebreak. Nino hadn’t seen it because, with the naked eye, in the darkness it was too far away. He was lucky. If the two men had stayed with their vehicle up on the ridge he would have run right into them. Walking across the open ground from his car they couldn’t have missed him. They would have nailed his ass.

He took another look at the firebreak. It had been graded by a bulldozer and wide enough for a good-size truck to drive on, though the grade was far too steep for anything but a tracked vehicle. Down the hill the break ended in a shallow gully where the team had set up. They were covered by the brush. Whether it was natural growth or if the two men had cut it and carried it in, he couldn’t tell. They were perhaps no more than twenty feet above the flat area where Ari’s car was parked. Anyone pulling up close to him would give them an easy shot.

He focused the glasses down on the car below. He could see Ari sitting there, behind the wheel, big as life, chewing gum, his cadaverous jaw moving up and down like a cow chewing its cud.

Ari wanted to pick up the satellite phone again and call them to see if they could spot anything out on the road coming in behind him. But he didn’t dare. The sniper might put a dart in his chest just to put him to sleep. He thought about turning on the car’s radio, some music, anything to calm his nerves, then wondered what the guys up on the hill might think when they heard it. Instead he fished in his pocket for another stick of gum.

He had it halfway out of the wrapper when the flash of light from the fireball up on the hill lit up the windshield of his car. Ari leaned forward over the steering wheel to see what was happening just in time to watch the flaming pickup truck start on its fiery trek down the hill. Fuel spilling from the vehicle’s gas tank left a blazing track behind it on the bare earth as the truck streaked down the steep firebreak on the side of the hill. It moved with the speed of a meteor, silhouetting the two figures as they tried to scramble from their nest under the brush. The flaming missile slammed into the gully at the bottom of the break and exploded like napalm as the gas tank ruptured. The kinetic energy of the impact crushed the front end and sent the truck into a slow end-over. The flaming mass peeled itself from the gully and landed in a burning tangle of metal at the bottom of the hill. The rubber from its tires flared like fireworks.

Ari sat behind the wheel slack-jawed, looking at the flames, his gaze glued on the two mangled and charring bodies stuck like gummy bears to the grill and the mangled bumper. His mouth open, he tried to breathe, but his heart was pounding so hard that he couldn’t. Finally he swallowed, looked away, and sucked in a deep breath of foul gasoline-scented air.