Drone

37

The White House, Washington, D.C.

Another meeting. Myers felt better about this one, though. At least it was a smaller circle of trusted advisors.

FBI Director Jackie West reported the bad news first: still no leads on the Bravo commandos who blew up the oil storage facility and sunk the Estrella in its moorings.

“Bill, is there any chance the Bravos made it back across the border to Mexico?” Myers asked.

The secretary of homeland security hesitated. “Since we don’t know where they are, then technically we can’t be certain. But my best guess is that they’re holed up somewhere in the U.S., waiting to strike again.”

Myers sighed with frustration. After her meeting with Diele, she backed off of her idea to seal the borders. He was the worst kind of politician, but that didn’t mean he was stupid. The country was still euphoric after the “Drill, baby, drill!” speech and the surging stock markets. Her favorability rating peaked to its highest level ever. Jeffers had counseled her to hold off on the border decision because it would kick up a storm that would rob her of the momentum she now enjoyed, and she was going to need every ounce of political capital she had to weather the coming weeks. She had agreed, reluctantly. Now she was beginning to regret that decision.

“Any chance that more Bravos have crossed over to our side?” Myers asked.

“Again, no telling. They shouldn’t have been able to the first time. But with the heightened alert, I’m confident we’re probably okay,” Donovan said.

“Probably okay? That’s hardly reassuring.”

“I told you I’d always shoot straight with you. I never promised I’d always hit the target.”

“Fair enough,” Myers said. She turned to the rest of the group. “I’m rethinking the border closing. Thoughts?”

“My father taught me that you can break a man’s fingers one at a time,” Strasburg said, holding up a splayed hand and then clenching it. “Unless he first makes a fist and beats you to death with it.”

“Meaning?” Jeffers asked.

“It’s always better to present all of your controversial ideas at one time. It makes them much harder to unpack. If President Myers dribbles them out one at a time, they can each get broken, and the cumulative effect is devastating.”

Strasburg turned to Myers. “You’re about to make an address to the nation. That will give you an opportunity to show your enemies your fist. I suggest keeping the border question tucked safely away until then.”

Myers nodded in agreement, but her thoughts had turned somewhere else.

Yucca Valley, California

The high-desert altitude kept the nights cool, even during the summer months, and a good dusting of snow was common every now and again during the winters. Not like Palm Springs down on the valley floor where the humidity wrapped around your lungs like a hot, wet blanket this time of year, even after sundown.

Yucca Valley’s claim to fame—true or not, it didn’t really matter to the locals—was that an old Rat Pack love nest was located there, a Mid-century Modern that squatted on the very top of a hill on the edge of town. The helipad for the helicopter that flew in the girls and the dope was still visible from one of the main drags through the sleepy little desert town.

Old motor lodges, coin laundromats, and a dozen used-car lots littered the sides of Twentynine Palms Highway, which snaked north from I-10 out of L.A. up the steep mountain passes to the high desert. Yucca Valley was the perfect location for an enterprising drug operation, feeding the insatiable maw of Southern California addictions to the south or running shipments through the nearby Marine base, which, unfortunately, had a few bad apples willing to deal locally and transport globally.

Whereas the resort of Palm Springs featured multimillion-dollar estates, manicured private golf courses, world-class restaurants, and frequent visits by Hollywood celebrities, its uglier, deformed, and acne-scarred sister city up in the high desert had a slightly more modest appeal. It wasn’t the Pizza Hut, the Walmart, or even the Starbucks that had tempted so many to make this a permanent home. In fact, these civilizing institutions nearly killed the place.

The reason why most people found purchase in the stony ground was because of its desolate isolation. Joshua Tree National Park was nearby, but the land around it was equally beautiful, cruel, and unforgivingly dry. The area had long been home to survivalists, painters, ex-con bikers, dishonorably discharged vets, child-support deadbeats, religious fanatics, and other reclusives. There were even miners still working a few active claims up in the hills.

Pearce and Early alerted the county sheriff about a possible national security exercise occurring that night, but only at the last minute—a courtesy call, nothing else. Gunfire wasn’t entirely uncommon around here; the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base was just twenty miles up the road.

Castillo’s men had relocated to Yucca Valley to take over a meth lab situated in an abandoned silver mine up in the hills above the town. A pair of surveillance drones had been tracking the three of them for the past thirty-six hours. They normally lived in a big five-bedroom rancher with a saltwater pool closer to town, but tonight they were in the meth lab cooking up a new batch.

Sergio Navarro had actually located a schematic of the operation from an old U.S. Bureau of Mines microfiche that had only recently been digitally scanned and archived. The good news was that there was only one way to access the mine, a single point of entry and exit. Perfect for a napalm attack or even a mass burial beneath the rock and dust. But Cruzalta opted for neither. He and his handpicked team wanted bloody vengeance, up close and personal.

Cruzalta had invited Pearce to come with him on the mission, but only as an observer. Pearce accepted. He wanted to study Cruzalta’s tactics and small-unit operations firsthand. He knew there was always more to learn in the world’s most dangerous game, and Cruzalta was one of the best players around.

The Marinas utilized a German EMT Aladin drone for scouting, a battery-powered plane of similar design to the American RQ-11 Raven that was about the size of a large model airplane and flown with a remote control. The infrared camera indicated that no guards had been posted, but three scrawny coyotes were lingering within thirty feet of the mine entrance.

A Marina sniper took out the three coyotes with his suppressed rifle. They barely yipped as the slugs ripped through their emaciated bodies, shredding their internal organs in an instant. Cruzalta generally liked animals more than people, but he couldn’t take a chance on the feral canines barking once his men approached.

When the point man reached the mine entrance, he checked for trip wires and laser alarms. There weren’t any. He advanced twenty feet into the mine, taking position behind a large ancient Dumpster on skids. He whispered in his mic, “Claro,” and the rest of the squad followed him in.

A corporal set a modified Boston Dynamics RHex rough-terrain robot on the ground and guided the six-legged metal brick into the shaft. Fluorescent lights shone in the distance. Air-venting systems hummed, vacuum pumps rattled, and men occasionally shouted in Spanish above the industrial din. It was a good thing the shaft was noisy. The RHex’s six metallic legs—shaped in half circles and coated with rubber—thrummed like a washer with an unbalanced load. It made too much noise for Pearce’s liking, but the RHex was a reliable, battle-tested drone that could climb up, over, or through creeks, logs, sand, rocks, stairs, drainpipes, and just about anything else you threw at it—in both directions, upside down, or right side up.

The nearly two-foot-long scouting bot chugged along one of the rough-cut walls. Cruzalta and Pearce watched the operator’s face. With fore and aft cameras displaying both infrared and normal vision modes, it was easy enough to navigate the tunnel and locate a secure position from which to observe the occupants. The corporal signaled his target count with the world’s oldest “digital” display—holding up a finger or thumb each time he identified one of the Castillo men or another criminal associate in one of the rooms. They knew there were three Castillo men and seven associates and, judging by the lighting, three rooms in use. Cruzalta needed to know how the men in the rooms were distributed.

The little boxy robot scrunched its way over a pile of tailings on the way to the last lit room. The loose rock on the pile gave way and the bot tumbled down to the floor. Its thirty-pound metal body clanged sharply against a stone.

The voices in the third room suddenly stopped.

Pearce instinctively clutched his weapon tighter.

A shadow emerged out of the far room, a human form backlit by the lab’s fluorescent lamp. The gas mask on his head and his bulky chemical suit gave him an odd, otherworldly silhouette.

Cruzalta glanced over at his corporal.

The corporal signaled associate. He looked back down at his laptop.

The hapless investigator had just picked up the RHex and held it close to his face in the dark, studying its camera eyes.

On the corporal’s IR screen, the man’s face was a white glowing mask, heavily distorted by the lens in such close proximity.

The lab worker shouted over his shoulder to someone in the back room. His chemical suit squeaked as he turned.

“Hey! Look what I—”

Thwump-thwump. A silenced 9mm round tore out his larynx before he could finish the sentence and a second round severed his brain stem. His lifeless hands dropped the robot.

Cruzalta whispered commands in his throat mic before the meth cooker’s corpse hit the dirt. His men rushed forward, MP5s in front of their helmeted faces, silent as cats, tossing flash bangs against the walls that caromed into the rooms. Pearce and Cruzalta followed right behind. The targets screamed as the concussive explosions burst their eardrums and their retinas seared in the blinding light.

The Marinas dashed in. Pearce stood back. He heard six muffled pops—silenced pistols dispatching the remaining workers—and watched three men dressed in chemical suits being frog-walked out into the main shaft, black bags over their heads, howling muffled curses through mouths stuffed with cotton rags and duct-taped shut.

Cruzalta signaled Pearce into the first room. It was definitely a meth lab. Pearce wasn’t an expert but it looked to him like they were just about to begin a cook. Container barrels had been opened and plastic jugs full of clear liquids were stacked in rows on a tarnished steel table. Three corpses with their brains blown out lay crumpled against the far wall, red gore spattered on their bright yellow chemical suits.

“Two more rooms, two more labs. What do you want me to do with the bodies?” Cruzalta asked.

Pearce shrugged. “Leave them to rot. A lesson to anybody who wanders in here.”

Cruzalta nodded. “Food for the rats.” He then pointed at the barrel and jugs. “What about the chemical precursors? Those are very dangerous materials.”

“I’ll call Early. We’ll get a DEA hazmat team to pull them out.”

Cruzalta grinned at Pearce. “Aren’t you curious what I’m going to do with those three pendejos?”

“Not as curious as they are, I’m sure.”

A sergeant appeared out of the dark. He asked Cruzalta a question in Spanish. Cruzalta nodded.

The sergeant lifted a razor-sharp tomahawk, the kind the U.S. military first issued in Vietnam. He crossed over to one of the corpses, stepped on the lifeless forearm, and raised the ax high. The blade tinked on the rocky soil as it cleanly severed the man’s hand at the wrist. The sergeant snapped open a clear gallon-size evidence bag out of a pocket and tossed the hand in. He proceeded to the other body.

Pearce frowned a question at Cruzalta.

“That’s how we collect fingerprints in my unit,” Cruzalta said with a grin.

Two hours later, Myers got the call from Pearce.

“Cruzalta is a true believer now. He sends his thanks and is awaiting your instructions.”

“Once again, I’m in your debt. Good luck, and good hunting.”

38

The White House, Washington, D.C.

Myers was grateful for Pearce’s phone call but it was anticlimactic. Myers hadn’t been waiting idly for Cruzalta’s approval. She’d always suspected he’d throw in with her. She knew in her bones that a patriot like Cruzalta would do whatever it took to save his nation from its enemies. As soon as Myers and Pearce had broken their Skype connection four days ago, Myers began ramping up so that when Cruzalta did formally agree to join forces they’d already be running in full stride.

The overall plan was simple enough, at least in theory. The drug cartels had held Mexican society in a stranglehold for decades, corrupting the political system with either cash or violence. By wiping out the Bravo organization, Cruzalta and his compatriots would be able to push aside the Barraza regime and help assemble a new national government. It would be a dangerous and lengthy venture for sure, but it was the first and perhaps only chance Mexico would have to form a new and fair democratic government, free from the tyranny of narcopolitics.

To assist Cruzalta and his allies in the formation of a new Mexican government, Myers directed Attorney General Lancet to provide a secure means by which the hundreds of Mexican politicians, military men, and law enforcement officers who were living in official and unofficial exile in the United States could be safely vetted, contacted, and recruited for voluntary service in the Mexican project.

Myers also promised Cruzalta that the United States and Mexico would soon draft new trade, border, and security treaties subject to approval by both national legislatures. More than anything, the new treaties represented Myers’s sincere attempt to assuage any Mexican fears that the U.S. was somehow imposing a new kind of hegemony over Mexico rather than trying to form a genuine political and economic partnership.

That was the big picture. Myers knew there would be many smaller steps that had to be taken to begin this incredibly arduous journey. But given the scope of the undertaking and the breakneck timing, she couldn’t afford a linear approach. She had to attack several fronts all at once, putting her most trusted staff to work on each one independently. If all the pieces didn’t fall into place on time, the entire plan would fail.

After speaking with Pearce on Skype, Myers made three phone calls. The first was to Jackson, authorizing him to begin assembling a most-wanted list. The next morning, Jackson contacted the DEA, FBI, and DHS for recommendations. Twenty-four hours later, fifty names had been selected: twenty-five in Mexico, twenty-five in the United States. The trick now was to both find and track them all. Jackson focused DAS, RIOT, and Mind’s Eye operations on the task, particularly for the Mexican list. The American list would be easier to find and track, thanks to the NSA, which had warrantlessly recorded, sorted, and stored every e-mail, phone call, tweet, and Facebook post of every American for the last few years as part of the counterterrorism efforts of the federal government, often in contravention to FISA restrictions. The “big data” analytics that had been originally pioneered by American corporations like Google and IBM to predict consumer behavior were now being perfected and deployed by the federal government to secure the nation against future terrorist attacks. In fact, dozens of private companies were wittingly or unwittingly participating in the NSA’s global data-mining efforts.

An hour after Pearce called with the good news about Cruzalta, Jackson reported that all fifty targets had been identified and were being tracked. He couldn’t guarantee how long that would last, so time was of the essence.

Myers’s second phone call on the night of July 29 was to Attorney General Lancet. She was tasked with creating the legal framework for Drone Command. Lancet built organizational firewalls around Drone Command so that it would report directly to the president, completely insulating it from both the DNI and DoD command structures. Though a legal fiction, it was made an extension of JSOC, which operated with near impunity from congressional oversight and could invoke either Title 10 or Title 50 protections as needed.

Myers’s last phone call had been to Early. He immediately contacted T. J. Ashley with the Drone Command offer and she accepted it on the spot because it sounded “interesting,” knowing full well she would be shaping the future of U.S. drone warfare for the next decade—and maybe even changing the face of warfare itself.

Yes. Interesting.

Early brought her in to meet Myers six hours later. Ashley wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her first visit to the White House or her first meeting with the commander in chief. Myers immediately liked the self-possessed younger woman. So did Jeffers, yawning over a cup of coffee. Just over five feet tall, with short-cropped dirty blond hair and hazel eyes, the trim, athletic engineer was a firm handshake and all business.

“What do you think you’re going to need to begin operations in seven days?” Myers wanted to know.

“Depends on the targets,” Ashley said. “When will I have those?”

“Soon, including locations. Give me your best estimate.”

“More hours in the day and a boatload of money should do the trick,” Ashley said.

“Money I can find. More hours I can’t.”

“Then I’ll take the money and sleep less. Do you want to review the organizational plan I’ve put together?” Ashley opened a leather satchel and handed Myers an inch-thick document.

“How could you have possibly drawn up an organizational plan already?” Myers asked.

“I wrote it a year ago as a kind of thought experiment. It seemed to me that this was the natural direction our defense establishment would be taking in the near future. I just didn’t realize when I wrote it how near the future actually was.”

Myers mentioned Pearce’s suggestions for Drone Command organization. Ashley had already incorporated them. She and Pearce had discussed the essential concepts a few years ago when he was trying to recruit her into Pearce Systems.

Early grinned like a hyena. “Can Pearce pick ’em or what?”

Jeffers nodded. “He sure can.”

Myers dropped the organizational plan on her desk. “I don’t need to read this. You just be ready to jump when I give the go signal. The rest I’ll leave up to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Ashley couldn’t believe her good fortune.

“Mike will be your liaison with the attorney general. See her next. Any other details, run them past Sandy.”

“Anytime, day or night,” Jeffers said.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll take you up on that.” Ashley checked her watch. “Better get to work.” She glanced at Early and he nodded, grabbing his cell phone as they both exited the office.

“So far, so good, don’t you think?” Myers asked her chief of staff.

“Just one question,” Jeffers said, pouring himself another cup of coffee. “Have you thought about how you’re going to start building a coalition in Congress for this thing?”

“You played sports in college, didn’t you?”

“If you call intramural tennis a sport.”

“What do you know about old-school, smash-mouth football?” Myers asked.

“You know I suck at metaphors, especially at this time of day.”

“Give it a shot,” Myers said.

“I take it you mean a ground game with lots of mud?” Jeffers asked.

“No. More like a Hail Mary.”

Drone Command Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland

Having the most-wanted kill-list names and locations was one thing, but human targets had a nasty habit of moving around, especially if they ever got wind that they were on something like a kill list. With any luck, Drone Command would be able to take them all out in one fell swoop, but that was highly unlikely. Ashley needed to keep them under constant surveillance. For that she’d need to deploy the “persistent stare” technology of ARGUS-IS married to MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System provided live wide-area video images by employing a 1.8-gigapixel digital camera, itself a construct of 368 5-megapixel smartphone-camera CCD sensors. At high altitudes, the ARGUS-IS could track all of the movement within an entire city simultaneously, resolving objects as small as license plates. By storing almost three days of video imagery, analysts could replay suspicious movements and establish potentially threatening patterns of behavior.

ARGUS-IS was an ideal surveillance platform for battlefield commanders, but civil libertarians in the United States claimed that such “persistent stare” capabilities were the equivalent of warrantless searches of private individuals. Ashley deployed ARGUS-IS over her U.S. targets anyway because Lancet had drafted an executive order exonerating Drone Command from any such legal liabilities should the issue arise.

With the proven ARGUS-IS system in place, Ashley decided to experiment with two other systems. She paired the new Stalker drones that, in theory, could stay aloft forever by means of an electric battery that was recharged by either a ground-based or air-based laser, to the new Hitachi camera facial-recognition systems, capable of scanning 36 million biometric faces per second—equal to the entire population of Canada. A perfect combination for finding their target needles in human haystacks.

Ashley even managed to borrow one of NASA’s repurposed RQ-4 Global Hawks. With a range of over eight thousand miles and an integrated sensor suite of infrared, optical, and radar systems, the Global Hawk could provide reliable high-altitude surveillance capacity if needed.

All the data collected by these various systems would be bounced off of satellites and then pumped into a specially designated terminal at the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s massive, multibillion-dollar data collection, storage, and processing facility near Bluffdale.

Ashley’s strike plans also fell into place rapidly. Radar-jamming UAVs would provide electronic cover in Mexican airspace if needed. She was confident that Drone Command would be ready to launch by the time Myers gave her the command to strike. Once the first attack was launched, Ashley and her team had just sixty days to complete the mission in the unlikely event that War Powers would be invoked by Congress and funding withdrawn for operations. Her personal goal was to complete the mission in twenty.

39

Washington, D.C.

On the morning of August 11, the White House communications director made a surprise announcement to the networks, notifying C-SPAN and the other news media outlets that President Myers was going to make a major policy address that evening at the unusual hour of 11 p.m. EST.

When asked what the announcement was, or why it was being held at such a late hour, the director replied, “No comment,” because she did not, in fact, have any idea what the speech was all about, which was highly unusual, and even more startling was the lack of a written transcript of the speech, which was typically provided several hours before any presidential broadcast so that both pundits and producers could prepare. Speculation was rampant.

Myers had been famously frustrated by the petty politics of state government as a governor, but that was high school locker room stuff compared to what one female senator termed “the jail shower free-for-all cocksmanship” that was Washington, D.C. Perhaps Myers was tired of the whole mess and craved the simplicity of just being the CEO of her own privately held firm, or so the speculation ran.

“Distracted” was the word most frequently used to describe her of late, but the frequency of use was due primarily to the fact that journalists were among the least original thinkers on the planet. The pseudopsychologists suggested that the death of her son had taken a deeper psychic toll on her than she or anyone else had imagined and that she was entering into a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. They further speculated that the stress of the office hadn’t given her the time to grieve, but they were unaware of the fact that Myers had refused to allow her grief to be televised for political gain.

Vice President Greyhill was on a trade mission in Toronto when he was asked by the Canadian media about the president’s announcement, and he also issued a “no comment.” That was because he, too, lacked any insight, and his own attempts to secure a private meeting or even a phone call with Myers were politely rebuffed by Jeffers. Greyhill wondered if the oil rig catastrophe had finally overwhelmed Myers and her staff. He’d long felt that the office was far above her limited capabilities and had raised that very issue in the primaries. She was an ingénue when it came to international politics, and practically a rube off the turnip truck when it came to the Beltway.

Greyhill had inherited both his father’s patrician good looks and his Senate seat, but it was his late mother’s Calvinist conviction that he was predestined for greatness that drove him. Why was he standing in a hotel room in Toronto instead of in the White House?

He should have won the primary. Greyhill was the first one to label Myers “the Ice Queen” for the pain and suffering her budget freeze proposal would cause. Had caused, he reminded himself. But his handlers—the same tired old cadre of overpaid political hacks perennially hired by the GOP establishment—had told him to remain “above the fray” and trust their messaging. Meanwhile, Myers’s upstart campaign ran a series of brilliant TV ads that showed her sitting around a kitchen table with a single mom, or a widow, or a young family and letting them talk about how they had to balance their checkbooks at the end of every month no matter how tough times got. “Why can’t Congress do the same?” each of them asked at the end. Why hadn’t his team thought of that?

Greyhill had run against the Democrats in the primary while Myers ran against Congress. Ironically, Greyhill counted many liberal Democrat congressmen as his closest friends and colleagues, but he loathed Myers, never more so than now.

For the last several weeks Greyhill had been completely cut out of Myers’s inner circle and banished to the hinterland of international PR junkets, dignitaries’ funerals, and military base closings to get him away from her. He knew it was because she was hiding something from him. But what?

The banishment had sucked all of the juice out of him. He felt as dry and angry as old kindling. The secrecy of tonight’s speech fueled an irrational rage in him. Greyhill was determined to find a way to run Myers out of office before her term was up.

Senator Diele was forced to wait like the ordinary mortals to find out what Myers had in mind. He feigned a lack of interest to friends and colleagues during the day of the announcement, but when 10:59 p.m. rolled around, his keister was firmly planted on the leather sofa in his luxury suite at the Watergate Hotel, eyes fixed to his big-screen television.

Diele had been desperate to sway her to his way of thinking. He was a formidable ally and an unrelenting opponent. Like all congressmen, his reelection prospects hinged on what he could bring back home to his state, and like a dutiful milkman, he had been delivering the goods for over thirty years.

As any freshman political science major knew, the only way that every congressman could bring home the bacon was to be sure there were enough pigs at the trough to be slaughtered. Every Washington politician—liberal or conservative, urban or rural, Egyptian-American female or eighth-generation WASP—had the same goal: get reelected by giving their constituents whatever they wanted. Period. The cruel genius of the crushing national debt was that it was, in reality, the largest election campaign slush fund the world had ever seen. All of that borrowed money had one singular purpose: to keep incumbents in office. Every politician paid lip service to the crippling effect the escalating debt would have on the future generations who would be the ones forced to pay it all back. But the brutal fact was that most incumbent politicians couldn’t care less about future generations because future generations couldn’t vote.

Congressional constituents were nearly as corrupt as their representatives. All of the voter hand-wringing about the deficit faded once they were confronted with the possibility that their own fat subsidy checks, cushy government jobs, generous federal contracts, or arcane university research grants could all go away if the deficit was reduced by a single penny. Spend less and somebody got less, and that made voters mad, and mad voters scared the hell out of politicians.

Diele was happy to navigate those tricky waters for Myers, but for a price, of course. His state was disproportionately more dependent upon government spending—particularly defense spending—than other states. If she had been willing to preserve his piece of the rice bowl rather than demanding that everyone sacrifice equally, he would have gone to the mattresses for her. But she was a stone-cold bitch and she could rot in hell as far as he was concerned.

Diele took another sip of his Scotch. He kept the talking news heads on mute. They were just rambling about what the speech might be about. Or more precisely, the airheads were reading aloud from the teleprompter the opinions of the real news writers who were expressing what they thought the president might be speaking about but who were too ugly to appear on camera themselves.

The news anchor then ran a clip of Myers at the oil rig platform. Diele had to admit, she was a good-looking woman, even in a hard hat.

40

Washington, D.C.

At precisely 11 p.m. EST, President Myers appeared on Diele’s television screen. She wore an elegant but understated blue business suit. An American flag was draped prominently behind her as she sat at her desk in the Oval Office. A bust of Teddy Roosevelt was also conspicuously displayed off to one side.

“Good evening, my fellow Americans. I’m addressing you tonight because of a number of recent developments that, taken together, pose a significant security threat to our nation. Beginning with the cross-border assault in El Paso and extending all the way to the Houston oil fire, it has become increasingly clear that the United States faces a new strategic threat. The question is, what exactly is the nature of that threat and how should we deal with it?

“As most of you realize, our country is still wrestling with the economic and physical effects of fighting the War on Terror for more than a decade. There are any number of arguments for or against that war, but no one can doubt the bravery and sacrifice of our men and women on the frontlines of the battlefield, many of whom paid the ultimate price to help secure our nation against another catastrophic attack by Islamist extremists. Thousands of our soldiers have died and tens of thousands have been wounded, physically and mentally, by a seemingly endless war that has cost our nation two trillion dollars to prosecute so far, and perhaps another two to four trillion as we care for the brave men and women who have suffered for their service.

“I was elected, in part, to honor that sacrifice in blood and treasure, and to maintain constant vigilance against any future attacks by our enemies, but the American people have also made it clear that the era of sending American soldiers into battle in faraway lands is over. While we will always honor our treaty commitments with our allies, we are no longer willing to shoulder the primary defense burden for those who are capable of defending themselves.

“My administration is committed to what has been termed the Powell Doctrine, the tenets of which are well known. Is a vital national security interest threatened? Do we have a clear, attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? Have all other nonviolent policy means been fully exhausted? Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?”

Myers’s face softened.

“Please forgive me for what must sound like another long-winded political speech. But it’s terribly important that I share with you my thoughts tonight and that we speak honestly with each other. It’s the failure to speak boldly and clearly about the challenges that face us that has brought our nation to the brink of economic and social disaster. With your help, and with the help of the courageous congressmen and senators from both parties who have joined with us, we’ve finally managed to begin to put our fiscal house in order. The budget freeze that’s been put in place is projected to slow the growth of federal spending and eventually balance the federal budget within ten years. It will require constant vigilance and iron-willed discipline to maintain the freeze, but no more vigilance or discipline than many of you have been forced to exercise as a result of the devastating job losses and wage reductions of the last decade.

“Every single mother trying to balance her checkbook, every small-business owner trying to stay in business, and every freshman college student working a part-time job to pay for school knows that you can’t spend more than you take in without courting financial catastrophe. The fact that a generation of politicians has ignored this self-evident truth is one of the reasons our nation is in trouble. On that front, at least, we have made significant progress.”

Diele took another sip of Scotch. What was she getting at? He found himself literally sitting on the edge of his seat. The force of her voice, her earnest demeanor, the firm but calming cadence of her speech had riveted him. He wondered if she was having the same effect on everyone else.

Myers continued.

“But the single mother also knows that, while she must balance the checkbook, her children must still remain safe. And the truth of the matter is that America is not safe. We haven’t been for a long while. That truth was brought home to me in the worst possible way several weeks ago when my son and over a dozen of his students were brutally murdered by a Mexican drug cartel hit squad. I was overwhelmed by the sympathy, prayers, and many other kindnesses you bestowed upon me and my family during our time of grief. But that tragedy instilled in me a resolve to address an issue that we have been all too willing to ignore, let alone combat. The great irony is that while we have been willing to fight battles in distant fields like Afghanistan and Iraq, we’ve been losing a terrible war here at home in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas.

“It was President Nixon who first declared the War on Drugs over forty years ago. That was also at a time when we were winding down from a decade-long war on the Asian continent. For forty years, American law enforcement personnel at the national, state, and local levels have fought valiantly against drug dealers despite limited resources and imposed legal restraints. Billions have been spent. But the sad truth is that hundreds of thousands of Americans have either died or have been incapacitated mentally or physically over the decades as a result of our failed attempt to win the War on Drugs.

“But it doesn’t stop there. Even as I speak, over half a million people are incarcerated for drugs and drug-related offenses, including violent crimes and property crimes. Incarceration, in turn, imposes its own burdens and costs on inmates and their families, as well as an enormous cost to the society as a whole. Over half a million Americans will visit an emergency room this year as a result of drug abuse, costing billions to taxpayers and insurers. And more Americans will die this year as a result of drug overdoses than they will from car wrecks. That’s about the same number of soldiers who were killed in three years of combat during the Korean War.

“Simply put, illegal drugs are destroying too many of our citizens, our families, our neighborhoods, our communities. Illegal drug use crowds our prisons, floods our health care system, cripples our schools, and robs the futures of millions of people. We lose tens of billions of dollars each year in tax dollars and personal income that should otherwise have been spent on our families and our communities for schools and housing and retirement.

“And in the spirit of full disclosure, let’s admit our complicity in the horrific violence that has torn apart our neighbors to the south. Over fifty thousand Mexican citizens have been killed in the last several years as a result of the Mexican government’s attempt to battle the drug cartels on our behalf. Today, Mexico earns more American cash from illegal drug sales in our nation than from legitimate exports to our country. Mexican cartels produce the preponderance of hard drugs that are the primary sources of that revenue, and the great sums of money they generate have been the catalyst for the bloody turf wars that have also been the cause of many innocent Mexicans’ deaths. Mexican society has suffered greatly because of our addictions and we bear some of the responsibility for that suffering.

“To be perfectly clear, I believe it’s time to end the so-called War on Drugs.”

Diele couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Did she really just say that? He quickly rewound the DVR.

Yeah, she did.

Myers continued.

“Wars can be ended by quitting the battlefield—or by defeating the enemy. The reason why we’re losing the War on Drugs is because we have never really fought it like a real war. We must change course.

“While the future of the Middle East remains quite uncertain, what is positively clear is that we have not suffered another attack on U.S. soil like the one we suffered on 9/11 because of the sacrifices we have made and continue to make waging real war on our enemies in the War on Terror. In that sense, we’ve won that war—and continue to win it—and will always guard against Islamic terrorists who would destroy our nation.

“But there is another kind of terror. It takes more lives, causes more destruction, costs more money. We haven’t won the War on Drugs because we haven’t fought it like a real war. That has been our failure. We have two choices. Quit the war or really fight it. I choose to fight. Tonight, I am asking Congress to join with me to fight a real War on Drugs. It must be fought with the same intensity and clarity as any other war and in compliance with the Powell Doctrine I discussed earlier. Here is what I propose.

“First, is a vital national security interest threatened? The answer is yes. The extraordinary human and financial costs have just been explained. But let’s not miss the obvious, either. The recent attack on the Houston oil facility was conducted by members of the Bravo drug organization. The drug lords have long waged a war of terror on their victims—fear is one of their chief weapons. Burnings, beheadings, torture, kidnap, rape—these have all been used by the Mexican narcoterrorists against Mexican citizens. Increasingly, they’re being used against American citizens on American soil as well. As the commander in chief, I am responsible for the protection of American lives and property, and I intend to carry out my responsibility in full. It is my considered judgment that the narcoterrorists pose a national security threat. This is not a war on the government of Mexico or the people of Mexico. It is a war against the narcoterrorists, wherever they may be found.

“Second, do we have a clear, attainable objective? Yes, we do. Every patriotic American felt a justifiable sense of pride and accomplishment when SEAL Team Six put a bullet in the skull of Osama bin Laden, the man most directly responsible for the death of three thousand Americans on 9/11. We have destroyed al-Qaeda’s capacity to attack us at home because we have killed the leaders of that organization.

“I propose the same strategy that was employed by both the Bush and Obama administrations in regard to terrorists, which also enjoyed wide congressional approval. My administration has drawn up a most-wanted list of the fifty most powerful and violent drug lords and drug dealers in both Mexico and the United States. Eliminating the key leadership will cripple the production and distribution networks in Mexico and the United States, and serve as a warning to those seeking to succeed them.

“My policy is simple. You deal, you die—or you go away forever. For Americans, the choice is equally clear. Either you are for the narcoterrorists or you are against them. There is no middle ground.”

Diele fumed at the television screen. “You mean, either I support your militarized drug policy or I’m an enemy of the state? A narcoterrorist? Bullshit!”

Myers continued.

“I understand it’s not possible to completely eliminate the sale or use of illegal drugs but that is not our goal. Our goal is to curtail them significantly. History has shown that this approach is difficult, but effective. There is no drug dealing when the dealers are dead. Dealers are no longer considered criminals in my administration. My administration considers them to be enemy combatants and terrorists.

“Let me raise a few more salient points. Everything I’ve discussed tonight will be posted on my website, and I’m asking Congress to meet in an emergency session as soon as possible so that these new policies can be put into law. Until then, however, I will be using executive orders in the exact same way my two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George Bush, used them to prosecute the War on Terror.

“My first executive order is to declare the fifty members of the most-wanted list as terrorists and enemy combatants. That gives them the same legal status as Osama bin Laden, who killed three thousand Americans a decade ago. The fifty drug terrorists on the most-wanted list and their evil empires are responsible for ten times as many American deaths each year in our country as Osama bin Laden murdered on that terrible day.

“My second executive order is that no American service members will be put on Mexican soil. This would be a clear violation of existing bilateral and international treaties. However, just as we’ve used drones in Yemen to kill American-born terrorists, we will use them wherever we find the drug terrorists we’ve targeted. Because I am not deploying American troops on foreign soil, the War Powers Resolution does not apply. If Congress attempts to cut off funding of this operation in the future, I urge voters to contact any representative who is aiding and abetting the drug dealers that are killing our children and express their concern.

“My third executive order provides for an immediate review of federal prisons. Any prisoner who is guilty of only nonviolent drug-related crimes will have their case reviewed and, if possible, they will be not only released but also pardoned, and their records expunged if they are not arrested again for any other reason and they remain drug-free for three years. This will result in enormous cost savings for the federal government. I urge states to follow my example.

“My fourth executive order concerns the addiction problem itself. Through the cost-saving measures of the pardon program, my administration will make medical resources available free of charge to any indigent drug addict or hard-core drug user who genuinely seeks a cure through a program of strict and guided supervision.

“My fifth executive order is to end all federal regulations against the private use and possession of medically supervised marijuana for individuals over the age of twenty-five. This clears the way for states to decide for themselves what policies they want to enact in regard to private marijuana use. As a former governor and strict constitutionalist, I believe the federal government has exceeded its authority in regard to the states. States are the great laboratories of democracy, not federal bureaucracies. As an aside, as president, it is not appropriate for me to decide this issue, but if I were still a governor, I would have actively opposed the legalization of marijuana in any form in my home state of Colorado.

“My final executive order is in regard to our borders. Our long-term goal is to create a border that is open enough to allow for the free movement of capital, labor, and goods, but secure enough to prevent unwanted persons or materials from crossing. One of the primary ways to accomplish this balancing act is to keep track of who crosses our borders. I have authorized the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to begin immediate implementation of retinal, fingerprint, and DNA documentation for any person entering our country, and those records are to be maintained for future reference. Known criminals, undocumented workers, and former deportees will be denied entrance into our country. I am also activating National Guard units to enforce the current laws on the books already passed by Congress to secure our borders. I invite Congress to change the current laws if they deem them too restrictive or punitive.

“In conclusion, one of the most important tenets of the Powell Doctrine is that actions such as I have taken tonight should be supported by the American people. If you support this new War on Drugs, then I urge you to contact your elected representatives and tell them that you support our efforts to make our nation more secure and more prosperous.

“I know that some, or perhaps all, of what I have proposed this evening will not be popular, but I did not become president in order to be liked. I became president in order to do what is right for the American people. I came into politics because there is a conflict between good and evil in the world, and I believe that, in the end, good will triumph if we fight for it. Only the brave are free.

“May God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America. Good night.”

The camera lights shut off and Myers stood up from behind her desk, motioning to Jeffers to follow her to her private study.

“So that’s what a Hail Mary looks like,” Jeffers said, beaming.

“That was just the throw. Let’s wait and see where it lands.”

41

Toronto, Canada

Fifteen minutes after President Myers’s broadcast had concluded, Vice President Greyhill picked up his cell phone and dialed an unlisted number.

Senator Diele picked up after the first ring.

“Gary, we need to talk,” was all the VP said.

Washington, D.C.

Senator Diele stood at his picture window admiring the lights of the city. He was on his cell phone, grinning. Alliances were quickly forming. Myers had finally gone too far.

“Yes, Mr. Vice President. I suppose we do.”

San Pedro Garza García, Mexico

Target 03 lived in a quiet, tree-lined suburban city just southeast of the Universidad de Monterrey, one of Mexico’s finest institutions of higher education. Separated from the great sprawling metropolis of Monterrey a few miles to the east by the Rio Santa Catarina, it was a safe and tranquil place to raise his family away from the terror and carnage of the cartel turf wars.

Until tonight.

Target 03 had been visually acquired three hours prior. The drone operator was waiting for everyone in the sprawling house to settle down for the night. Infrared sensors onboard the MQ-9 Reaper verified his location and, more important, the location of the rest of the family. Drone Command orders were to minimize collateral damage if at all possible.

As soon as his wife and four children were bedded down, Target 03 stepped outside by the pool. The sharp flare on his image indicated he was lighting up a cigarette. He then dialed his cell phone. The call to his mistress was recorded for a voice confirmation.

The drone operator checked the time again. 10:59:57 p.m. EST. The president’s speech would begin in three seconds. She watched the seconds tick off, then armed the Reaper’s two laser-guided 70mm Lockheed Martin DAGR rockets, which were much smaller versions of the more famous Hellfire missiles and were intended to minimize collateral damage. The operator was given authority to fire at will.

She did.

The operator’s screen erupted in a halo of white-hot flame. When the halo dimmed, she recorded the result.

A smoldering crater.

Smashed concrete and tile.

Chunks of warm meat that glowed white with heat in the cold rectangle of the pool.

“Mission completed,” she added.

Twelve extended-range (ER) MQ-9 Reaper drones had been deployed that night, fanning out all across Mexico from private airfields just across the border. Mounting two extra fuel tanks on hard points originally designed for weapons, the modified Reapers had nearly double the range of their predecessors, allowing them to strike deep into Mexico. Most fired rockets, others were specially fitted with rotary weapons for low-altitude strikes. Both kinds of weapons systems proved equally effective, achieving similar results to the Target 03 mission, most within a few hours of one another.

A speeding convoy of three armored Chevy Suburbans racing for Nuevo Laredo was strafed with armor-piercing rounds. Targets 09, 11, and 13 were shredded in the assault along with a dozen unidentified armed associates.

In Guadalajara, a 70mm DAGR rocket smashed through the plate-glass window of Target 04’s twenty-fifth-floor penthouse suite. She and the two men she slept with were turned to smoking chum by the white-hot fléchettes of molten glass from the initial strike. Had they survived the first blast, the explosive round would have finished the job.

Incendiary slugs ignited the gas tank of a seventy-foot bay cruiser anchored a half mile off of the coast of Veracruz, burning Target 25 to death, along with his heavily armed crew.

Target 08 drowned, trapped inside his vessel when it sank to the bottom of Lake Chapala, strafed by radar-controlled gunfire.

Targets 05 (Campeche) and 20 (Durango) were believed critically wounded by separate Reaper strikes, but confirmation of death was still pending.

Squads of commandos handpicked by Cruzalta took out six more targets with old-school wet work (blades, garrotes, semiauto pistols) while off-duty Marina snipers transformed the brain pans of three other targets into puffs of pink mist.

But not everything went according to plan that night. Target 01—Victor Bravo—was located at a fortified compound in rural Chiapas. Two extended-range Reapers were dispatched for the high-value target; rockets were loosed. Bravo escaped, miraculously, when the first rocket misfired and veered off course, alerting him to the attack. Three unidentifieds were killed.

A total of nineteen of the twenty-five primary Mexican targets had been eliminated. The rest were on the run.

The attacks in the U.S. were equally successful. Seventeen of twenty-five primary targets were taken out with no civilian collateral damage, including Bravo’s top lieutenants in Washington State, Texas, and Louisiana. In the end, there was surprisingly little protest over the use of drones themselves against American citizens. The public understood that it ultimately made no difference if the American targets were killed with bullets fired from manned or unmanned vehicles. Bad guys were bad guys and dead was dead.

Pearce had selected a strike team for ground operations to take out targets not accessible by remote control. But he held his own people in reserve for a snatch-and-grab of Ali Abdi in the event they ever located him. Privately, Pearce was concerned that Ali had somehow slipped the net and made it back to Iran.

By any measure, the initial decapitation strike had been a brilliant success—better than they could have hoped. What it led to next, however, nobody could have foreseen.

San Diego, California

Pearce was stuck in traffic. Again. It fouled his already lousy mood.

“Still no leads on Ali?” Pearce grumbled. His tech wizard Ian was on the other end.

“The problem is too many leads. I can’t process the data flow fast enough.” The million-square-foot Utah Data Center was gushing a torrent of data—billions of bytes per hour—and all Ian had, comparatively, was a sippy cup to catch it with.

“Thanks. Call when you have something.” Pearce signed off.

The San Diego–Coronado Bridge was jammed in both directions and so was Harbor Drive. Unless he wanted to abandon his car in the middle of the road and walk over the bridge, he’d just have to sit here and enjoy the view. California dreamin’.

There were worse views in the world. God knows, he’d seen them. Had even caused some of them. But his frustration was at an all-time high. He knew that almost any code could be cracked given enough computing power and time. Ian had the computing power—backed by the limitless resources of the federal government. Unfortunately, it was Pearce who had the time on his hands, and waiting for a breakthrough was killing him. Ali Abdi must have been one hell of an operator. He certainly knew the first rule of the game.

They can’t hurt you if they can’t find you.

Pearce’s one consolation was the electronic billboard flashing up ahead. A slideshow of most-wanted listers, their faces, names, and stats rolling past, each slide ending with the promise of a $100,000 reward “for information leading to the arrest of…” He’d seen them all over Southern California. They’d been posted all over the country as well. There weren’t many names left. Right now, Pearce hoped that one of those asshats would get captured or turn themselves in and spill the beans on Ali Abdi. That was as likely as this traffic jam clearing up anytime soon.

42

Myers’s startling national address triggered several responses with astonishing rapidity. Of course, the radio talk-show pundits were gibbering about it within minutes after it had aired, and while the majority of those shows had conservative hosts and audiences, even they had mixed reactions, at least initially. Of course, few people actually saw or heard the live presidential telecast because it had aired so late.

The chattering classes went into overdrive the next day on television and radio; satellite, cable, and network stations were inundated with nothing but the Myers announcement. The Christian Right was particularly incensed at the thought of “legalized marijuana,” though technically, Myers hadn’t legalized it. In fact, it had been a rather cynical ploy on her part. Every governor she had ever worked with had demanded greater state autonomy from the federal government so she was only giving them exactly what they wanted. Besides, only Colorado and Washington had legalized recreational marijuana in 2012; every other state—including liberal California—still considered it an illegal drug outside of medicinal usage.

The few liberal talk shows that were still on the air teed off on just about every other issue she raised, but the idea of targeted killings was the hammer that rang the most alarm bells for them. Those self-same moralists didn’t raise an eyebrow when President Obama had taken credit for personally selecting human beings as targets for drone strikes—including the killings of four American citizens who had been neither tried nor convicted of any crime—nor had they complained when President Clinton had thrown cruise missiles around the Horn of Africa like a wobbly drunk playing a game of darts at the King’s Head pub back in the ’90s.

Cries of another Nixonian “imperial presidency” were leveled by liberal critics for Myers’s excessive use of executive orders to bypass Congress, conveniently ignoring the over one hundred EOs issued by President Obama. They also didn’t seem to mind President Obama’s use of dozens of unelected and unapproved “czars” who issued thousands of new regulations that carried the force of law.

Conservative pundits who applauded Myers’s use of executive orders to carry out her actions, however, were screaming tyranny when President Obama had used them previously. And where were they when President Bush had issued 291 executive orders during his two terms of office? But then again, Bush was a slacker compared to Bill Clinton’s record issue of 363 executive orders. If Myers was guilty of an “imperial presidency,” it was because she stood on the shoulders of the elected emperors from both parties who preceded her.

But that was just the beginning of the debate. Hours and hours of heated exchanges about sovereignty, globalism, executive powers, free trade, the causes of drug abuse, the failings of the criminal justice system, and just about every other aspect of modern American life were discussed ad nauseam. It was a national town hall, but most of the speakers seemed to suffer from political Tourette’s syndrome.

Within days, thousands of protestors had taken to the streets in larger urban areas. The Occupy Wall Street crowd had long since lost its original focus, but the president’s announcements gave them renewed purpose. They reemerged in their disorganized glory, a collection of unhygienic malcontents, bored trust-fund kids, unemployed anthropology majors, and D-list Hollywood airheads camping out on courthouse lawns and civic-center plazas on both coasts, smoking dope and swapping STDs in bouts of equally unorganized, angry, and pointless sexual encounters.

The only problem was that the OWS types often protested against themselves. The antiglobalists and legalized-dope advocates wound up in screaming matches with the borderless-world advocates and Ivy League romantics. The anarchists protested everybody and everything, merely on principle.

But the OWS rabble was only a tiny fraction of the turnout. The Tides Foundation, the SEIU, the reorganized and rebranded ACORN radicals, and a half dozen other left-wing groups had quickly mobilized their standing armies of professional “volunteers” in “spontaneous” rallies. Hispanic protestors were conspicuously absent from these initial events.

But the radical left’s response nevertheless prompted the various Tea Party, Posse Comitatus, and Minute Man factions to rally around their respective historic flags (national, state, and Confederate), mostly in suburban and rural areas, far away from the maddening urban crowds. All in all, it was as ugly and beautiful a spectacle of free speech and free assembly democracy as anyone could have hoped for in the morally hazardous climes of the twenty-first century.

American public opinion among educated people was strongly uncertain on the whole affair. Myers enjoyed incredible pluralities of public support for specific aspects of her announcements, but there was no clear majority that favored all of her actions. Two fault lines fractured public opinion: the need for security versus the protection of civil liberties. Most valued both, but not equally, especially when they were in conflict.

Even the most-wanted list couldn’t drive the needle all the way over in her direction, despite the fact it was posted on the FBI’s Most Wanted web page, the White House web page, and dozens of law enforcement pages, along with millions of private Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other social-media sites, not to mention the tens of millions of private e-mails blasting around the Internet daily. If anything should have won her overwhelming public approval, the most-wanted list should have done it, Jeffers had reasoned. The most-wanted list was a roll call of sociopaths who were deeply connected to the drug trade but also guilty of violent crimes far exceeding their involvement with drugs. And yet, a considerable plurality of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum were still troubled by the use of lethal force against American citizens without benefit of trial, whether or not drones were used, even if the threat was imminent and catastrophic.

At the top of the Mexican list were Victor Bravo and his top ten lieutenants, some of whom were Castillo bosses who now swore loyalty to the Bravos. The top of the American list included Bravo’s top ten lieutenants operating on U.S. soil. But dealers from other organizations, including Chinese Triads, Salvadoran gangs, Jamaican posses, and white power bikers, were also on the list. Fifteen of the targets were women charged with some of the most heinous crimes imaginable. None of the targets was under the age of twenty-one, as per Myers’s direction.

The one thing the targeted drug dealers all shared in common was that they were evil personified. In addition to drug dealing, each of them was guilty of at least one or more violent crimes, including murder, torture, rape, arson, armed robbery, or kidnapping. Victims were often innocent; too often they were law enforcement officers in Mexico or the United States, or even military personnel. Hispanics clearly dominated both sides of the list (on the Mexican side it was almost entirely Hispanic), but a number of Anglos, African Americans, and even a few Asians on the American side ensured that the list couldn’t be construed as anti-Latino, though that charge would be repeated over and over in the days and weeks to come.

The Mexican government’s official response was predictable: outrage. Mexican politicians raged on radio and television.

“A violation of international legal norms.”

“A betrayal of decades of mutual cooperation and trust.”

“A matter to be taken to the International Court of Justice.”

And so forth.

Mexican newspaper editorials were somewhat less restrained.

“Another yanqui stab in the back.”

“Naked hegemony!”

“A strange, cruel attempt to repeal NAFTA.”

“The end of history.”

But not every Mexican newspaper looked unfavorably upon what was being termed the “Myers Doctrine.” Stranger still, the Mexican public was mostly in favor of it. Anything to break the back of the narcotraficantes that had tormented them for so long.

President Barraza ordered the Mexican armed forces to the border “to prevent American terrorist and criminal elements from entering our country” and declared Mexican airspace “inviolable,” with solemn pledges to shoot down any American drones that dared cross into it. He also summoned Ambassador Romero to Los Pinos for an excoriating lecture on the megalomaniacal and dictatorial posturing of “that woman” before dismissing him unceremoniously from both his office and the nation.

Privately, however, President Barraza craved retaliation. Would it be possible to acquire drones of their own for operations within the United States? Was the Mexican military capable of engaging American troops along the border—snipers, short incursions, harassments? He raised these possibilities with his capo, Hernán, who counseled restraint.

“Let’s see how this plays out, Antonio. Nothing may yet come of it. We have options we can exercise later if we need to.”

“What options?”

“Trust me, brother. It’s better if you don’t know what they are.” Problem was, Hernán didn’t know either. He was just hoping Victor Bravo had something up his sleeve.

San Diego, California

Ali Abdi’s response to the whole situation was borderline despair.

What else must I do to provoke the effeminate Americans to invade these idol-worshipping Catholics?

If the Americans didn’t invade Mexico, then Ali’s plan with the Russians would be in jeopardy.

More important, his larger plan that even the Russians weren’t aware of would fail completely.

He had no choice.

Ali had hoped to hold the Bravo men and his own Quds Force soldiers in reserve, especially now that they were well hidden on American soil. His original intention was to use them in partisan-style actions, harassing American supply lines when the U.S. military finally invaded Mexico.

But the invasion never happened.

Ali would have to unleash his forces now if there was any hope of provoking a full-on American military assault into Mexico, and he had just the plan to do it.

43

Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.

Myers had called for an emergency session of Congress to codify into law what she had already initiated on behalf of American national security and sovereignty through a series of executive orders.

She got only half of what she’d hoped for.

Senator Diele had, indeed, called for an emergency session, but only of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chaired. It took several days for the vacationing senators and their staffs to return to the sweltering humidity of Washington, D.C., and for Diele to assemble and summon his witness list.

As both president pro tempore of that august body and as chairman of the committee, Diele had the authority to call his committee into emergency session, as Myers had publicly requested be done. That was a mistake, in Diele’s opinion, one of several she had recently made. It was the mistake that would lead to her impeachment if he had anything to do with it.

According to the U.S. Constitution, the vice president was the president of the Senate, but in practical terms this was a largely ceremonial function. Vice President Greyhill, in theory, could have called the Senate into session as well, but Diele and Greyhill had decided in private that it would be best if Greyhill kept his cards close to his vest for now. Diele had already been an outspoken critic of Myers and it might prove useful if Greyhill feigned allegiance to Myers on the off-hand chance she decided to pull him back into her inner circle. More important, once Myers was thrown out of office, the mantle of the presidency would fall upon Greyhill’s shoulders. He would lose legitimacy in the eyes of the American people if he was seen as having a hand in Myers’s downfall, which would be viewed for the naked power grab it obviously was. No, it was far better for Greyhill to keep his hands off of the whole affair until Diele handed him the office. That’s when Greyhill could afford to be demonstrably appreciative of Diele’s efforts.

The first day of the committee hearings featured a parade of witnesses selected by Diele. Members of his own party protested; several of them supported at least part of Myers’s agenda and wanted to help buttress her position, but Diele would have none of it. Even a few of the principled Democrats, some of whom also supported some of Myers’s positions, balked at Diele’s heavy-handedness. But Diele assured them that the administration and its supporters would have every opportunity to present their case. Diele wanted to be first out of the box because he knew the American people had very short attention spans and it was best to be the first shiny object in their ADD-riven fields of view.

A predictable collection of academics, civil libertarians, think-tank denizens, and Latino community organizers presented their arguments. Their positions varied from the idea that Myers was, at best, misguided and, at worst, guilty of international criminal and human rights violations. Savvy witnesses who dropped the best lines got the most play in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Some of these included:

Politicians want a costless war. Generals want a riskless war. Drones satisfy both and the collateral damage will be peace.

Violating Mexican sovereignty in defense of our own is an act of criminal irony.

President Myers has proven that taking humans out of war to reduce the cost of war only makes war more likely.

Drug consumption is an American problem. Killing Mexicans can’t be the solution.

If this president is so concerned about the drug war, maybe she should start by investigating the CIA’s long career as the biggest drug pusher in Latin America.

One word, ladies and gentlemen: Skynet.

But if there was one aria that Diele’s opera sang over and over, it was the War Powers Resolution. By not submitting herself to its requirements—basically, getting permission from Congress to attack other countries—she was destroying democracy and inviting tyranny both in the United States and around the world. She was violating the Constitution that she had sworn to uphold and defend. No one used the actual phrase but “an impeachable offense” hung in the air like a fart in church.

True to his word, Diele did permit administration supporters to testify. Attorney General Lancet was the last to testify, and the only cabinet member to do so. As such, she spoke for the president.

Diele fired the first salvo.

“How does this administration legally justify an attack on another sovereign state without congressional approval, as specified by War Powers, let alone without a formal declaration of war? This is, after all, a war, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, Mr. Chairman. And the president has asked Congress to commit wholeheartedly to fighting and winning it.”

“Then why didn’t the president come to us beforehand? If she truly considers it a war and was always planning on seeking our approval, then she knowingly began a war without a declaration of war. Her very actions testify against her as having violated the law.”

“A couple of points, Senator. First of all, this administration did not attack the Mexican government or its national institutions so we are not waging war against a sovereign state, any more than President Obama waged a war against Pakistan when he sent SEAL Team Six in to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.”

“So you’re suggesting that American drones aren’t operating in Mexican sovereign airspace?” Diele fired back.

“Of course they are. But they’re targeting individuals within Mexico, not the Mexican military or government, just as American helicopters ferried troops to OBL’s compound.”

“Osama bin Laden was a sworn enemy of the United States and was recognized as such by the AUMF. President Obama had the legal right to carry out that action. This cuts to the very heart of the matter, Ms. Lancet.”

“I agree. The al-Qaeda terrorists have been a threat to the United States, but far more Americans have been killed, directly and indirectly, by the Mexican drug cartels than by al-Qaeda. That makes the drug lords a bigger threat, in our opinion, a threat this Congress has failed to adequately recognize, let alone address.”

“Then why didn’t President Myers come to us and request an Authorization to Use Military Force in this case?”

“Why should she? AUMF is derivative of WPR and, as we’ve stated, we don’t believe that WPR applies. Which leads to my second point. President Myers believed this nation faced an imminent security threat from the cartels and their affiliates, and deemed immediate action necessary, as is her prerogative as commander in chief. The purpose of WPR is to prevent the United States from entering into another decade-long debacle like Vietnam. But the president has no intention of waging an extended conflict against the narcoterrorists. It’s a limited, well-defined action. So once again, the WPR doesn’t apply.

“Third, the WPR only requires the president to report to Congress the deployment of U.S. forces abroad within forty-eight hours, not request permission to deploy those forces. For the record, no U.S. military personnel have been dispatched to Mexico, only unmanned drone systems, so by definition, the WPR once again does not apply.”

“You’re splitting hairs on that one,” Diele insisted. “American drones are being flown by American personnel, even if they are located in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.”

“We’re both lawyers, Senator. Splitting hairs is what we do best.”

A laugh rolled through the gallery. Diele lightly tapped his gavel.

“But the most important point is this. President Myers did not seek the advice and consent of Congress prior to this action because she believes Congress is increasingly irrelevant to any of the solutions this nation needs, including the present crisis. In fact, Congress is the cause of many of the crises we face.”

The gallery exploded with cheers and applause, and a scattering of boos. Some senators threw up their hands in disgust; others applauded. A few grabbed their microphones and began shouting at one another. Diele gaveled the room into silence under penalty of expulsion.

“For the record, Ms. Lancet, you are aware of the doctrine of the separation of powers? The three separate and distinct branches of government? It comes from that pesky little document known as the Constitution of the United States.”

“I am indeed, sir. So is the president. Her desire is that the Senate and the House live up to the responsibilities of their respective institutions. Case in point. President Obama launched over three hundred drone strikes against Pakistan in his first term in office—also a sovereign, independent nation like Mexico—and not a single congressional vote was ever taken on any one of those strikes. In fact, since the first known drone strike in 2004, at least forty-seven hundred people have been killed.”

“Those drone strikes were conducted under the AUMF,” Diele insisted.

“But there was no AUMF for Libya when President Obama committed American drones to combat in Libya—another sovereign nation, by the way—for the purpose of helping to topple the existing government, which, ironically, was an American ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. The Libyan action was not an act of self-defense, no American lives were at risk, no treaty commitments to an ally were invoked. More to the point, no congressional approval was apparently needed, nor was congressional interest aroused in the slightest. By your definition, President Obama invaded a sovereign state and did it without a declaration of war, which, under the separation of powers doctrine, is your assigned constitutional responsibility.”

Myers’s supporters on the committee applauded, as did a number of people in the gallery. Diele gaveled them quiet. Lancet continued.

“The United States has not declared a war since 1941, but the litany of conflicts we’ve been in—‘wars’ by any other name that involve the loss of American lives—is incredible: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first and second Gulf wars are just the big ones. There were twice as many covert operations that were no less acts of war, including a dozen coups d’état in Asia and Latin America during the hottest years of the cold war. So the president’s question for you, Senator, is why has Congress been so interested in fighting wars over the past seven decades but not in declaring them?”

“The president should be worried about fulfilling the legal responsibilities of her office, not lecturing us on how to conduct our affairs.”

“Her legal responsibility is to protect and defend the nation. This nation has suffered grievously for a lack of leadership, particularly from Congress. She hasn’t tried to avoid the Constitution, Senator, she’s trying to invoke it. You know the numbers as well as anyone: drugs have killed far more Americans than any foreign enemy from any war we’ve ever fought. And what have you done about it?”

Diele banged his gavel.

“You will show respect to this committee or you will be held in contempt.”

“Mr. Chairman, you first came to Washington over thirty years ago. What was the national debt when you arrived? What was our balance of trade? What was the annual budget deficit? What was the price of the average home? How much did it cost to educate a child? How much was a gallon of gas? Please name for us, for the record, one significant social problem this Congress has not exacerbated, let alone resolved.”

Diele banged the gavel again and again as the gallery howled with delight.

“I am going to hold you in contempt, Attorney General Lancet, if you don’t control your tongue.”

“As every public opinion poll has demonstrated for the last twenty years, sir, the American people already hold Congress in contempt. For the sake of the Republic, and for the legitimacy of this institution, it’s time for you to help us fight and win this horrific war being waged against our cities, our culture, our children. Help us—or get out of the damn way.”

Lancet grabbed her satchel and stormed past the cheering gallery that stood and clapped for her defiant performance as she marched toward the exit.

Diele banged his gavel in vain, trying to call the hearing back to order. When his colleagues began to rise and quit the room, he banged the gavel again and announced the hearing dismissed until further notice, but the damage had already been done.

The television cameras caught everything, just as Diele had hoped. He just hadn’t planned on getting his ass handed to him by a Junior Leaguer like Lancet.

Fortunately for Diele, there was one man who had watched the entire scene with a great deal of interest. Ambassador Britnev had the weapon Diele needed to bring Myers down, and he was sure that the broken old man he saw on his television screen would be desperate enough to use it.

44

Yucatán Peninsula, near Peto, Mexico

Victor Bravo complained that he hadn’t had a beer in a week.

He and his men had been hiding from the American satellites swinging overhead in an abandoned mission compound and he couldn’t exactly run down to the local mercado and restock the refrigerator.

Eleazar Medina took Victor’s thirst as a sign from God.

Raised in a devoutly evangelical home in rural Guatemala, Eleazar was one of fourteen children of a lay Foursquare Gospel minister in a remote village in the north. All of the Medina children had been forced to memorize whole books of the Bible, but 2 Samuel was a favorite of Eleazar’s because it was the passage of the Old Testament from whence he had gotten his name. “Eleazar, son of Dodo” was one of David’s “mighty men of valor,” and little Eleazar’s skinny brown chest puffed out three sizes larger every time he recited it boastfully to his childhood friends.

But that had been a long time ago, and Eleazar was a different person now, one of Bravo’s most trusted lieutenants. He’d done terrible things for Bravo, things for which he’d often prayed for forgiveness, but the guilt always remained. He could never quite get the feeling that the blood on his hands had been washed off even though the blood he’d shed had been, well, necessary, hadn’t it?

As soon as Bravo had said he wanted a beer, a familiar verse came back to Eleazar: Y David dijo con vehemencia: ¡Quién me diera a beber del agua del pozo de Belén que está junto a la puerta!

Eleazar remembered that the verse was from 2 Samuel 23:15. And didn’t his father always say, God always makes a way of escape?

There was no question in Eleazar’s mind that God was opening a door for true forgiveness for him, if he would just have the courage to step through it. Just like Victor Bravo, King David was hiding in his wilderness stronghold in the midst of his enemies when he longed for a drink from a faraway well. And wasn’t Eleazar, son of Dodo, one of the three mighty men who fetched it for him?

“I’ll get you some beer, hermano. Leave it to me,” Eleazar said.

Victor’s eyes narrowed.

“No. It’s too dangerous. You might get killed.”

“I’d rather die trying to steal a cold beer than wait for a hot rocket to fly up my ass,” Eleazar answered cheerfully. Everybody in the room laughed, including Victor.

“Okay, then. Get me some beer. We’ll keep our asses locked up tight until you get back.”

The other men howled with delight and stared at Victor hopefully. He laughed again, reading their minds. “Get enough for them, too!”

Eleazar threw a sloppy salute and scrambled away with a grin plastered across his face. Moments later, he leaped on an ancient moped and gunned the lawn-mower-size engine, scrambling out of the walled compound and onto the dirt path that wound through the jungle back toward Peto. Eleazar hoped his cell phone still carried a charge.

Three hours passed. The heat of the day rose like a tide from hell, wrapping the compound in a shroud of suffocating humidity. The sentry stood underneath the stone portico of the abandoned mission. It kept the sentry out of the sun, but it didn’t help him cool off. He wished he was inside the sanctuary where it was cooler. Bravo and the others were enjoying their afternoon siesta, snoring in hammocks slung between the columns.

The sentry checked his canteen. Empty. He’d drained it an hour ago. But if he came off the wall to refill it, he’d be shot for abandoning his post. He’d just have to tough it out a few more hours and then he could get a drink of water and even get some shut-eye, too.

The sentry heard the whine of a truck engine approaching through the trees. He needed to check it out, but he was under strict orders to stay under cover if at all possible, just in case there was overhead surveillance. He stayed underneath the roof line and raised his binoculars. What he saw made him laugh.

That pendejo Eleazar.

A big beer delivery truck came lumbering out of the trees, rolling slowly over the deeply rutted dirt road. The logo on the side of the beer truck was a giant Mayan head, drawn in the traditional style, tilted back and chugging down a cold bottle of Sol. A local pop radio station blared inside the cab.

The sentry raced down the wooden ladder and ran across the compound to unlock the front gate. He could already taste the cold beer splashing in the back of his throat.

The truck stopped on the other side of the locked gate. Eleazar grinned inside the air-conditioned cab. He was gesturing Hurry up! through the cold windshield that was fogging up against the warm, damp air outside.

The young sentry unbolted the iron gate and swung it open on its rusty hinges. He jumped up on the truck’s running board on the driver’s side as Eleazar pulled in.

The sentry tapped on the cool glass. Eleazar rolled the window down. The truck’s refrigeration unit roared overhead.

“Where did you steal this from, hermano?”

“Back in Peto. It was at the Super Willy’s across from the zócalo. I don’t think they’ll miss it, do you?” Eleazar beamed with pride.

“If they do, too bad for them!”

Eleazar stopped the truck in the middle of the compound, several feet from the church. He leaned on the horn.

“What are you doing?” the sentry asked.

“Waking those lazy asses up. Time to drink some beer.”

“Let them sleep! More beer for us.”

“Don’t be such a greedy pig. We’re socialists now, remember?” Eleazar leaned on the horn again. A few bleary-eyed comrades stumbled out into the bright light. Their faces lit up when they saw the truck.

“Let me in the back,” the sentry begged.

“Not yet.”

“Give me the key or I’ll bust it open.”

“Just wait. Trust me.” Eleazar finally saw Victor emerge into the shadow of the front portico. He stood there, smiling, clasping his hands together and shaking them like a rattle by his head, the universal sign of approval.

“Fuck you, Eleazar. I want some beer,” the sentry said.

“Just wait a minute, will you?”

Victor ambled out into the harsh sunlight, making his way toward the truck.

The sentry dropped down onto the ground and headed for the back of the truck.

The first Bravo out of the church was just a few feet away from the truck now, licking his lips. But Victor was still too far away.

The thirsty sentry swung the back door open. He saw the muzzle flash from the suppressed end of a pistol. The hollow-point slug punched a small hole into his forehead, but the subsequent intracranial shock wave blew out the back of his skull and all of its contents while he was still on his feet. His corpse was knocked to the ground by the first soldier out of the truck.

Eleazar felt more than heard the squad of Marinas scramble out of his vehicle. Seconds later, they fanned out around the compound. Eleazar remained locked in the truck as ordered.

An eight-bladed Draganflyer X8 surveillance rotocopter zoomed over the compound. The drone was flown by another squad of Marinas that had followed Eleazar’s truck from Peto a half mile back.

The Marinas had told Eleazar to stay in the truck no matter what, out of concern for his safety, but as he watched Victor Bravo race unnoticed back into the church, Eleazar feared Victor would get to the escape tunnel and seal the entrance before the Marinas could reach him.

Eleazar couldn’t let the Devil get away. How else could he pay his debt to God?

Eleazar grabbed his pistol out of the glove box, leaped from the cab, and tore after him. An AK-47 opened up. Bullets clawed him from his groin to his belly.

Eleazar clutched his stomach. His hands were full of intestines, pink and wet with blood, like an offering.

Eleazar’s wobbly legs gave way. His eyes dimmed.

He felt himself falling into the darkness, afraid that God wouldn’t catch him.

45

Los Pinos, Mexico D.F.

Victor Bravo was dead.

Hernán drained his third glass of whiskey. He was worried.

Without cartel muscle behind them, the fragile web of Barraza alliances—strung together by fear and corruption—would quickly melt away. And then the mice would come out to play with their machetes, seeking revenge.

Hernán could run. He had a chalet in Switzerland, a flat in Paris, and a fat bankroll stashed in Paraguay. Life could be good.

His other option was to answer the damn phone. The one flashing Victor Bravo’s number, even though Victor was dead. Answer it, even if it was a mouse calling him.

“Yes?”

“Señor Barraza, I know you were a friend of Victor’s.”

“What do you want?”

“He was a friend of mine, too. My name is Ali Abdi. We need to talk.”

Ali understood Hernán’s situation perfectly. Offered the use of his trained men, fiercely loyal to him. “You know what they’re capable of doing.”

“Houston?”

“Of course.”

Hernán was intrigued. “Your services in exchange for what?”

Ali explained. The terms were acceptable. More than acceptable. Hernán agreed. They worked out a plan.

No need to leave Mexico after all.

Hernán smiled.

Poured himself another whiskey. Time to call in favors from his friends in Caracas and Havana. Start the plan rolling ahora.

He drained his glass.

Fuck the mice.

Two days later, one of the big media conglomerates began running a Victor Bravo memorial piece, extolling his virtues as an advocate for the poor, his charitable work among the campesinos, and the vast array of clinics, orphanages, and education centers he’d built around the country over the last two decades. The show featured glowing interviews with grateful farmers, Indians, admiring telenovela stars, and several staged “man-on-the-street” encounters, and all of it was scored with popular folk music that had been written about him over the years. The media conglomerate—a big supporter of the Barraza campaign during the last election—had already put it together even before the death of Victor Bravo. With orders from Hernán, they released it to any television station or cable satellite programmer that wanted to run it free of charge.

The hugely popular show was picked up immediately by the Spanish-language networks in the United States. Local news shows then ran their own follow-up programming, tying together all of the recent events, including the terrible border-crossing situation affecting so many Hispanics in both countries. Like their English-language counterparts, Telemundo, Univision, and the other majors had distinct political agendas that favored a particular point of view slanting against the Myers administration, which was increasingly vilified on these networks because of the new border regulations. What most Anglos didn’t realize was that Spanish-language news shows were the number one rated shows of any language in Los Angeles, Dallas, Phoenix, and Houston. The Victor Bravo mythology—and his death, which was now being characterized as a martyrdom—was spreading like wildfire on both sides of the border.

Bay of Campeche, Mexico

One hundred and seven miles offshore from Veracruz, a PEMEX oil rig, the Aztec Dream, was topping off a giant oil tanker with crude pumped directly from the gulf floor. Bill Gordon was the offshore operations engineer (OOE), which made him the senior technical authority on the PEMEX rig. The middle-aged Texan in the burnt orange UT Longhorns ball cap had worked on offshore oil rigs all over the world, including the Persian Gulf, before joining PEMEX.

Bill was finishing up a cigarette in the designated smoking area way up high near the rig office, right next to one of the emergency lifeboats, enjoying a million-dollar ocean view. He flicked the butt off the rail and watched it drift down the two hundred feet or so toward the churning gulf waters below, but he lost sight of it before it hit the waves.

A glint of silver caught his eye and he glanced up. Bill had seen plenty of drones when he worked in the Persian Gulf and easily recognized the one circling overhead. Flying low.

He supported Myers’s most-wanted-list policy wholeheartedly, but kept that opinion to himself, since his Mexican counterparts on the rig were mostly against it. When he saw the Reaper, his heart skipped a beat. He was damn proud to be an American, and that little piece of technology roaring around in front of that four-cylinder turbocharged engine up there was yet another proof of American technological dominance.

What he couldn’t quite understand was why it was flying around his rig. He scanned the water around him, searching for a renegade Zodiac or maybe some frogmen who might be trying to sabotage the vulnerable platform, but he didn’t see anything.

He wondered if the Reaper was on some kind of routine patrol. Whoever was flying it must have been new on the job, though, because the wings kept wobbling and the plane yawed back and forth, as if it were fighting a stiff crosswind. He guessed it was a training mission for a young pilot stuck in a trailer in Nevada somewhere.

The Reaper circled lower and closer until Bill could see the big American flag on the fuselage and the two antitank missiles slung under its wings. It was close enough that he pulled out his smartphone and zoomed in on the drone with the built-in video camera.

WHOOSH! A missile roared off of its rack in a jet of flame and smoke.

“Shit!”

Bill nearly dropped his phone. He watched the missile track until it slammed into the side of the big oil tanker, just above the water line. The thin steel skin of the tanker erupted under the force of a warhead designed to penetrate heavy tank armor. Flaming oil gushed out into the gulf, forming a fiery slick near the ship and the pumping boom that connected it to the rig.

Bill raced for the door of his office to call it in when he heard another WHOOSH! overhead. It sounded so different from the first one, he instinctively knew it hadn’t been fired at the tanker.

A massive explosion rocked the oil rig. The missile had smashed into the wellhead assembly, the worst possible location. High-pressure oil and gases from deep within the earth’s crust now burst free and caught fire, creating a seventy-foot-tall blowtorch of white-hot flame. Fire quickly spread onto the main deck, fueled by the fine mist of oil clouding the air. New explosions rocked the steel decking under Bill’s feet as gas welding canisters and storage tanks exploded like a chain of firecrackers, throwing shards of jagged steel whistling through the air.

Within moments, the lower decks were enveloped in a cauldron of fire. Men roasting alive screamed as they threw themselves over the rails toward the ocean below. Fire crews grabbed hoses and fire extinguishers, and charged toward the advancing flames, but it was too late. The rig’s installation manager sounded the alarm. Sirens wailed. The few surviving crew members who weren’t trapped or already dead raced for the bright orange lifeboats hanging in their stanchions, Bill among them, but the sea itself was on fire. Chances were that they would be boiled alive inside the boats like lobsters in a pot.

The Aztec Dream had become a nightmare of the damned.

One hundred and twenty-five miles away, the Iranian drone technician maneuvered the Reaper back toward a hidden Bravo landing strip, his mission with the hijacked American Reaper a complete success.

46

New York City, New York

Oil prices skyrocketed once again and stock markets roiled around the world on the news of the American drone attack on the Mexican offshore oil rig.

Despite her administration’s protests to the contrary, the world firmly believed that Myers had taken out the oil rig in retaliation for the attack on the Houston tank farm weeks before.

Privately, the oil-producing nations thoroughly enjoyed the price spike. Countries like Saudi Arabia had crested their peak oil reserves in recent years; sooner rather than later the tap would run dry. Any boost in revenues, for whatever reason, was seen as a huge benefit.

Publicly, of course, those same oil-producing nations—Venezuela the most vociferous among them—decried the attacks on the PEMEX facility as an attack not just on an oil facility, but on the entire global marketplace, driven as it was by the free flow of petroleum. The Venezuelans claimed that America was just another “fading superpower” that was simply lashing out in a vain, unbridled attempt to crush the emerging Mexican economy. Socialist, Marxist, and racialist explanations were soon forthcoming from the usual sources both inside and outside of the United States.

But it was the UN secretary-general who surprised everybody when he introduced a resolution approving the most recent findings of the self-appointed Global Commission on Drug Policy (GCDP), whose members included the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, along with luminaries from the entertainment and financial industries. Myers’s unilateral actions had struck a sensitive nerve with the secretary-general and he’d long sought a means to combat them. The Mexican oil rig attack had finally given him the opportunity. Privately, the Russian delegation encouraged the secretary-general in his efforts.

The essential finding of the GCDP was that the War on Drugs was not only a failure but actually fueled other social crises, including the spread of HIV/AIDS. The GCDP was distinctly “antiwar” in every sense and advocated that all international efforts to curb drug use must focus exclusively on the prevention and treatment of drug abuse. The UN secretary-general called for a vote. He wanted the United Nations to formally affirm the GCDP’s finding.

In other words, the UN was voting against the Americans’ highly militarized approach to the drug problems their nation faced. What was particularly stinging about the resolution was that the GCDP findings were presented to the General Assembly by two other GCDP commissioners: a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and a former secretary of state, both distinguished Americans. The nonbinding resolution passed with an overwhelming majority. Understandably, the United States protested and, ultimately, abstained from the vote.

The mainstream media picked up the UN story and ran with it, along with interviews with the oil rig survivors, including three Americans. Hospitalized in a medically induced coma, Bill Gordon was so badly burned that both of his arms had to be amputated above the elbows. But it was his video that had identified the Reaper as an American aircraft.

The Mexican government expressed its outrage in no uncertain terms. President Barraza, guided by Hernán’s counsel, began a national tour of historic sites, promoting Mexican nationalism and patriotic fervor. He was careful, however, to play up the victim angle, pledging to “resist as far as humanly possible the natural desire for justice and revenge that the Mexican people are calling for,” which was actually true after the oil rig attack.

The oil rig attack, coupled with the anti-Myers media blitz, fueled further protests in the United States. Whereas before the protestors had numbered only in the hundreds, the new protestors actually numbered in the tens of thousands. The biggest concentrations were in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, and New York, all cities with significant Hispanic populations.

Worse, the protests coincided with a “Day Without a Mexican” strike. As the day unfolded across the nation, America woke up to a new kind of “brownout.” Anglo America discovered that their yards weren’t being cut, their pools weren’t being cleaned, their cars weren’t being washed, and their burgers weren’t being flipped.

This strange rapture of cheap service labor wasn’t limited to the wealthy, either. Even middle-class families were hit by the startling phenomenon. Whole restaurant chains—from the high-end sit-downs to the lowliest fast-food drive-thrus—suddenly shut their doors. Busboys, valets, checkout girls, fry cooks, sous chefs, and managers hadn’t shown up for work, either.

In Texas, freeway construction ground to a halt. In Iowa and Arkansas, the meat-slaughtering plants shut down. Home building and city services (especially garbage, sewer, and landscaping) nearly collapsed in the major urban areas. In the rural areas, farms and food processors that depended on the backbreaking and mind-numbing labor of pickers, handlers, and sorters could no longer function.

The spirit of César Chávez, the long-dead Chicano community and union organizer who first coined the term Sí, se puede (Yes, we can) forty years before Barack Obama had used it, had revivified, at least among Hispanics, fueled by the organizational and financial support of the Venezuelan agitprop mastermind behind the strike. Spanish-language radio stations and social-media sites spread the word like wildfire: “Yes, we can send a message. You Anglos killed Victor Bravo, you’ve tightened up the border, and you’re harassing us for documents you all know we don’t have, and we’re not happy about any of this.”

The strike threatened to spread and linger through the week, if not longer.

Angry, frustrated, self-righteous middle-class people from both parties, concerned over the well-being of their Hispanic friends, of course, complained bitterly.

Myers’s public opinion polls plummeted.

Washington, D.C.

Myers met with Early over morning coffee minutes before the Presidential Daily Briefing was about to begin.

“We’re sure this wasn’t a Drone Command screwup? I’m not looking to chop off heads, I just need to know,” Myers asked.

“They think it was a hijack. It’s happened before. A few years ago, the Iranians pulled down an RQ-170 Sentinel drone that had been flying over Pakistan. They reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates, fooling it into thinking it was landing back at base when it was really landing in Iran.”

“But this is more sophisticated than just swapping out map coordinates, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s got Ashley in a real lather. Someone actually took control of the drone—flew it, fired its weapons.”

“What has she done about it? Or can this happen again?”

“She says they’ve put together a new, more sophisticated encryption package on the satellite uplinks. That should solve the problem. The fleet is grounded until you give the okay.”

“‘Should’ solve the problem? I need better than that.”

“Your only ironclad guarantee against another hijack would be to keep the drone fleet grounded, drain the fuel tanks, and lock them up in storage.”

“That’s not acceptable, either.”

“There’s no such thing as a perfect weapons system. They all have vulnerabilities. You just have to decide if the risk of the vulnerability is worth the mission profile they fulfill.”

“What do you think, Mike?”

“I say keep them flying. If it happens again, then ground them again. Otherwise, the bad guys have taken away our biggest asset, and you’ll be forced back to conventional warfare options if you want to continue the full-court press.”

“Why can’t we track the Reaper’s GPS now and find it?”

“Its GPS system isn’t responding. Probably disengaged.”

“You said the Iranians hijacked one of our drones before. Are they the ones behind this?”

“Maybe. But the Iranians aren’t the only ones with that kind of technical know-how.”

“You mean the Chinese? The Russians?”

“Yeah, or the Indians or the Germans or the French or a hundred private companies right here at home. There’s no telling where the technology came from. Who’s using it is another matter.”

“Cui bono?” Myers asked.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“It’s Latin. It means ‘Who benefits?’”

“As in higher oil prices?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a pretty short list of countries, but it also includes some Americans who stand to profit personally.”

“All right. Then who benefits from us getting tangled up in a war with Mexico or even all of Latin America?”

“That’s another list. Much longer, by the way.”

“And would some of the countries and names on the first list appear on the second list as well? Who benefits doubly from our predicament? That would be our third list.”

“That’s a very interesting question.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” She took a sip of coffee. “If Ashley feels good about it, keep the drones flying. I trust her judgment better than my own on this matter.”

“Will do. And I’ll keep my puzzler turned on. That third list is gonna be a humdinger.”

Galveston, Texas

Dr. Yamada punched in Pearce’s cell number.

“You okay, Kenji?” Pearce asked.

“I was gonna ask the same about you, brah. Lot goin’ down.”

“I’ve got my hands full.” Pearce didn’t tell him with what. He knew he wouldn’t want to hear he was hunting another human being. “How’s the beach down there?”

“Bah! Don’t call dat a beach. Air humid. Water hot like a bathtub, tar balls in there, too. Three-foot-high pile of seaweed all along the shore, and stinging sand flies. And worse? No waves!”

“You getting settled in okay?”

“Great facility. Everything arrived okay. Putting the puzzle pieces together. We’ll be ready to go for your oil-baron buddies next month.”

“Thanks, Kenji. Good to know there’s one thing I don’t have to worry about.”

“You keep safe, brah. Me and my whales need you.”

47

Hollywood, California

It was another beautiful late-summer evening in Southern California. It had been a warm day, but once the sun went down, a light breeze blew in from the Pacific and the temperature dropped to a pleasant seventy-four degrees.

The cool air was good for the Friday night tourists who packed the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard, still mostly dressed in shorts and flip-flops from their daytime adventures. But it wasn’t so good for Jacinto and his little paleta pushcart, still half full of rum, coconut, and arroz con leche ice cream bars that he had a hard time selling to the gringos, who seemed to want only chocolate and vanilla.

Jacinto wanted to finish the night by selling out his cart, a point of personal pride. Most of the other guys just worked their paletas until quitting time, but not Jacinto. He didn’t quit until he was sold out. Ever.

Except maybe tonight.

The sidewalk was so crowded that he pushed his cart out into the street. There was no parking on the street this time of day, so it was easier to do. The cops wouldn’t stop him with all of the crowds around, and it would cause too much of a traffic jam if they did stop to bother him. He jingled his little bell every few feet and flashed a gold-toothed smile. “Paletas, paletas,” he’d half sing as he made his way toward the big movie house.

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre faced Hollywood Boulevard. Jacinto knew it was probably the most famous movie theater in the world with its Chinese pagoda and all of the hand- and footprints of movie stars out front in the forecourt. Jacinto had been there many times before. He’d even put his hands down on the handprints in the cement to see which hands fit his. He found one once, but he couldn’t read the name.

Jacinto had never seen a movie at this theater because he only watched films made in Spanish, and even then, he could only afford to rent movies, not spend ten or fifteen bucks to buy a movie ticket in places like this one. He also knew he’d never be a movie star, or have his handprints or footprints in the cement out front. But that was fine with Jacinto. He had no desire to be famous.

There was a huge crowd in front of Grauman’s tonight, larger than usual. It was another big movie premiere. He wasn’t sure what the movie was about; he couldn’t read the newspaper, but not because it was in English. He could hardly read Spanish, either. He’d dropped out of school in the second grade to work in the fields with his father and never went back. But that was a long time ago.

The movie was some American movie, though. There were lots of American flags all around, and the movie posters showed American soldiers wearing their war paint and holding guns. Maybe that’s why there were so many people here tonight. Americans liked war movies as much as they liked war, it seemed to Jacinto. Maybe some of these gringos would like some of his ice cream while they waited in line.

Jacinto steered the little pushcart back onto the sidewalk in order to reach the theater. A man dressed like Superman stood in his way, and when Jacinto tried to move around him, a woman dressed like a cat blocked him again. So many of these gringos weren’t just strange, they were rude. It was very crowded and hard to push the cart into the forecourt. But he’d promised he’d try, so he was trying.

“Paletas, paletas,” he half mumbled, knowing that no one was paying attention to him. He was just another little brown ice cream cart pusher in a city full of little brown ice cream cart pushers. Still, it would be good if someone bought at least one more ice cream tonight. Maybe that would be a sign.

He nudged his cart and rang his little bell, and people would sometimes frown at him and sometimes cuss at him. He knew they were cussing because their faces turned so ugly, but it didn’t bother him because he couldn’t understand what they were saying. But sometimes someone would smile nicely at him, and he would smile back, a big toothy grin, flashing his front gold tooth.

Jacinto checked his watch. It was 6:58 p.m. If he could sell just one more coconut bar, that would be the best thing ever, he decided.

“Paletas, paletas. El coco. Muy dulce.” But no one wanted to buy a coconut bar from him.

He thought about Victor Bravo. It made him sad. He knew Victor. They were kids together, even friends. What the Americans did to Victor was wrong. Victor was a good man just trying to help the poor people. What did he ever do to the Americans?

When Jacinto’s wife got sick a long time ago, he took her to one of Victor’s clinics. It was her appendix, and they took it out for free. Very nice people, he remembered. And he remembered how surprised he was when Victor came in to see him and his wife. Mr. Bravo, everyone said. But Jacinto called him Victor, because they were children together, and they were friends. It made Jacinto very happy to see his old friend.

But his friend was killed by the Americans. God damn them, he thought.

A man came to Jacinto yesterday. He said he was Victor’s friend. That made Jacinto happy. Jacinto told him he was Victor’s friend, too.

“Really? That’s an amazing coincidence. It’s almost like Victor wanted us to meet,” the man had said.

Jacinto thought about that. The man was right. It truly was amazing.

The man talked to Jacinto about Victor for a long time, about what a good man he was. Then he asked Jacinto to push his ice cream cart to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre tonight.

“Why?” Jacinto asked. He didn’t push his cart in that direction very often.

“Because Victor would want you to. Aren’t you his friend?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then will you do this thing for Victor? He would want you to.”

Jacinto thought about it. “Yes. I will do this thing. For Victor.”

So Jacinto did it.

And when the man told Jacinto to push his cart into the crowd as far as he could go, he did. And when he told him to be there at seven o’clock, and not one minute later, he did that, too, didn’t he? Jacinto didn’t know why he was supposed to be there at seven. But he did it because Victor would want him to do these things.

Because Victor was his friend.

Jacinto checked his watch again. It read 7:03.

The sun exploded. At least that’s what it seemed like to Jacinto.

A blinding white light. And noise, like ice picks in his ears.

The explosion shredded Jacinto’s little ice cream cart. People were blown over in a big circle all around him, like cornstalks after the harvest.

Jacinto didn’t know that Victor’s friend had packed his cart with C4 embedded with hundreds of ball bearings that morning. When it exploded, it acted like a daisy cutter, mowing down everyone in its path, including Jacinto, who was cut in half at the waist.

The side of Jacinto’s face hurt where it was smashed against one of the cement squares with handprints. He couldn’t move, but he watched the blood filling up the handprint next to his face. The hand was much bigger than Jacinto’s. He wondered whose hand it was.

48

Washington, D.C.

Early Saturday morning, Bill Donovan briefed President Myers and her cabinet.

“At least a dozen attacks in as many states, with more reports coming in.”

“Sounds like they’re on the move,” Early said.

“Casualties?” Myers asked.

“So far, thirty dead, ten times that many wounded, mostly minor injuries. RPGs, drive-by shootings, grenade attacks. Bombs were detonated at a movie theater in Hollywood, a Walmart in Knoxville, and a rodeo in Oklahoma City.”

“And we think it’s Bravo people?” Myers asked.

“Printed flyers read ¡VIVA VICTOR! at several sites; Facebook posts and Twitter feeds say the same thing. Sure looks like these attacks were in retaliation for the death of Victor Bravo.”

“You can thank the damn Mexican television and radio stations in this country for that. They’re putting blood in the water,” one of Donovan’s assistant secretaries offered. “We can pull their FCC licenses right now, shut them down until they agree to stop running the Victor Bravo love letters.”

“Then they would just run them on the Internet,” West countered. The FBI director was clearly frustrated. “They’re already there anyway.”

“Then we shut those down, too, on the basis that they’re fostering terror attacks. The Patriot Act grants us that power.”

“I don’t think free speech is the enemy here,” Myers said. She turned to Donovan. “Question for you, Bill. The Hollywood and Oklahoma City bombings look like suicide attacks. Were they?”

“We’ve got security camera footage on both. Neither exhibited the classic signs—nervousness, eyes straight ahead, and the other telltale psychological markers. Locals ran fingerprints but no hits in our threat or crime databases. Probably illegals. We’ll know more about Knoxville in a couple of hours.”

“And we’re certain it’s the Bravos behind all of this?”

“Fans of Victor Bravo, for sure,” Donovan said.

“Or who want us to think they’re fans,” Early offered.

“What do you mean?” Myers asked.

“The voices on the Cruzalta tape. The Iranians are connected to this somehow.”

“If the Iranians were connected with anyone, it was Castillo, not Bravo,” Donovan said. “And there were only two voices on the tape. No way an operation this size could be carried out by just two assholes. I still think it’s the Bravos.”

“I do, too. But weapons, training—the Iranians have contributed something,” Early insisted. “The Iranians had uploaded the El Paso footage, too. Their finger’s in the pie somewhere.”

“What does that get us, Mike?” Myers asked.

“Not much at this point, especially if the Iranians are independent operators.”

“You mean like mercenaries?” Myers asked.

“Yeah. But if this is a state-sanctioned op, we need to know. Have the DNI put more NSA assets on the Iranians. Maybe we can pick up some chatter on that end and get a better handle on this thing.”

“Good idea, but it’s not enough. I want to know who’s on the ground right now killing Americans. What’s our best guess?”

“The Bravos who blew the tank farm in Houston never reappeared. Those are the best candidates, without question,” West said.

“What’s their next move?” Myers asked.

“No way of knowing,” West said. “The targets have been random and geographically diverse.”

“So we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop?” Myers asked.

No one said a word. The answer was obvious.

Grapevine, Texas

Six hours later, the other shoe dropped.

Construction on local highways and interchanges, particularly the 114, the 121, and I-635, had been going on for years, and still had years to go, thanks to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the billions of federal stimulus dollars that the “anti–big government” Texas congressional delegation had siphoned out of Washington coffers for their constituents.

Grapevine residents had grown wearily accustomed to the massive construction vehicles lumbering along on the crowded freeways, usually clogged by lane closures and traffic cones, as whole sections of the interstate were being rerouted to fit the new TxDOT master plan. The big vehicles often had to exit and cross over surface streets where freeway ramps had been closed, so it wasn’t unusual to see asphalt tankers, cement mixers, flatbed tractor-trailers, and the like running through the city.

That’s the reason no one paid any attention when a big rusty dump truck rattled into the back parking lot of the two-story Grapevine Christian Academy on a Saturday midmorning. In fact, the school had allowed construction vehicles to park there on more than one occasion. The school was just a mile or so from a section of Highway 114 that had been heavily renovated lately. The school parking lot was empty except for a late-model yellow Volkswagen Bug out front.

Tom and Barbara Cole were the high school drama teachers and they were inside preparing for an early afternoon rehearsal, rearranging some of the musical scores from Godspell that the kids would be putting on in the fall. The building was brand-new and well insulated from the brutal Texas heat. The heavy insulation also masked the sound of the roaring jumbo jets that flew directly over the school in their flight paths to DFW Airport just two miles away.

Barbara had just finished a particularly bawdy rendition of “Turn Back, O Man” on the big Yamaha piano when she and her husband both heard a giant whump coming from out back. It sounded like a big timpani drum was booming out in the parking lot. There were no windows where they were located so they couldn’t see what was going on, but it could well have been something connected with all of the construction. They were about to play the tune again when they heard another whump and then a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth in quick succession.

“What’s going on out there?” Barbara asked.

“Sounds like a pile driver,” Tom offered, only half believing it himself.

She stood up from the piano and the two of them crossed to the back wall where there was a big steel exit door. The whumping continued and, in fact, got louder the closer they came to the door.

Tom flung the door open and saw the big rusty dump truck parked just a few feet behind the building, but that’s the last thing he saw. A suppressed 9mm machine gun stitched bullets across his chest and into the wall behind him. He crumpled to the ground, blocking the doorway with his corpse.

That gave Barbara enough time to scream, turn, and run back inside, with the sound of the 120mm mortar rounds still whumping in the bed of the big truck behind her, but the man who had killed her husband leaped over his corpse and chased after her. The Bravo opened fire just as she reached the big Yamaha piano. He emptied his magazine in her direction, splintering the black lacquered wood into a thousand pieces and putting two bullets in her spine. The piano strings thudded in ugly half notes as the slugs split them in two.

The killer ran back out the door as the last of the sixteen mortar rounds arced into the air. It had taken the mortar crew just one minute and eleven seconds to loft all sixteen of the finned rockets.

A gray Chrysler 300 screeched to a halt behind the dump truck and all four men of the mortar crew—three Bravos and Walid Zohar, Ali’s trusted Azeri sergeant—piled into the vehicle and raced away. They left the Israeli-manufactured Soltam K6 mortar behind because they didn’t have any more shells left to fire, and when the Americans found it, they would only be able to trace the serial number back to the Nicaraguan army depot where it had been stolen from two years ago, along with the shells.

Dallas––Fort Worth International Airport, Texas

The first 120mm shell slammed into the tarmac just short of Terminal A right next to a parked American Airlines 737 being loaded with passengers through a movable jet bridge. The explosion instantly killed three bag handlers and shattered the big starboard Snecma/GE turbofan engine.

Mortar shrapnel ignited the fuel truck loading up the 737, which set off another explosion that immediately engulfed the aircraft and the jet bridge. Alarms began wailing.

The passengers in Terminal A dropped to the floor as security personnel scrambled to preplanned defensive positions. Automated TSA warning messages blared on the overheads. “Remain where you are, stay under cover. Remain where you are, stay under cover.”

Mortars kept falling. Accuracy wasn’t needed, just speed. The targets were thin-skinned commercial aircraft and fragile aluminum-and-glass airline terminals. Round after round slammed down within a quarter-mile radius of the terminal, each strike ripping the air like a thunderclap.

Inside Terminal A, passengers cowered beneath food-court tables or inside the terminal restrooms, alarms still blaring, survivors screaming, moaning, praying in the swirling dust and smoke.

And then the mortars stopped.

Able-bodied survivors finally screwed up the courage to look around. Some tended the injured. Most crossed to the big picture windows—or to what was left of them—shattered glass crunching beneath their feet.

The tarmac was littered with burning aircraft, smashed trucks, and scattered baggage carts, along with shoes, underwear, soda cans, styrofoam cups, golf clubs, and a thousand other artifacts.

And then there was the carnage. Corpses broken, twisted, burning. Limbs scattered like leaves. A few bodies still strapped in their seats, smashed into the tarmac.

It was hard to believe that so much damage could be inflicted in just one minute and eleven seconds.

49

Washington, D.C.

“Yes, I’m watching it now, on Fox,” Myers sighed into her phone. Donovan was on the other end. “It looks like Dante’s Inferno.”

The camera trucks were blockaded from the airport entrances so they could only manage long-distance shots. Black columns of smoke mushroomed into the bright blue Texas sky.

“We’re shutting down all outbound flights around the country until we’re sure this thing is over with,” Donovan said. “We’re also putting every surveillance helicopter we can lay our hands on—metro police departments, military units, executive shuttles, even news copters—on a five-mile radius sweep of every major airport in the nation. There haven’t been any other reports of similar attacks, but there’s no point in taking any chances.”

“Damn it. We’re still playing catch-up with these bastards. We’ve got to get ahead of them, right now.”

“I’m initiating Plan Orange,” Donovan replied. “Unless you’re ready to announce a national emergency.”

“Not yet. But I’m calling in all of the other National Guard units not already activated, just in case.”

“Understood,” Donovan said.

“Looks like we’ll be putting boots on the ground after all, Bill. I just never thought it would be in my own country.”

State of Veracruz, Mexico

Mo Mirza sweated like a pig.

He’d grown up in Westwood near UCLA, his alma mater. Beach weather mostly. Not the smothering heat of a Mexican jungle. But here he had privacy. And his own landing strip.

Mo was twenty-four years old, but looked like he was barely out of his teens. His thin beard was patchy and untrimmed, and his dark short-cropped hair was mottled with blue coloring. With his thick black-framed glasses, red high-top Converse basketball shoes, plaid Tony Hawk skater shorts, and a faded Ramones concert T-shirt, he looked every inch the quintessential American slacker.

He was anything but.

The jungle hangar was little more than a thatched roof on polls, but the natural material was perfect for thwarting optical and infrared surveillance. No walls, but plenty of room for the Reaper’s twenty-meter wing span and the big drums of aviation fuel.

The Bravo airfield was primitive by any measure, but sufficient for the task at hand. Four of Ali’s Quds men with automatic rifles were a grim comfort, but the airstrip’s extreme isolation was their best defense. The locals didn’t bother them. This was a Bravo camp and they knew to stay far away, even if Victor was dead.

Mo slapped at another mosquito on his neck and cursed as he ran another diagnostic check on the avionics package. The Chinese unit was a piece of crap, but he couldn’t risk using the American one. Either they’d track it or lock him out remotely. Both were bad news. He’d flown the Reaper with a portable ground-control station from a third-party vendor out of New York that played just like a video game, and the Israeli uplinks connected perfectly with Nasir 1, Iran’s global navigational satellite. But the Chinese unit sucked balls and made the Reaper hard to fly.

Mo’s phone rang.

“Will you be ready?” Ali asked.

“Rechecking everything now. Any luck on the Blue Arrows?”

Ali had a lead on a couple of the Chinese Hellfire knockoffs, designed for use with the CH-4, the Chinese Predator knockoff, also stolen from the U.S. arsenal. When Mo hijacked the Reaper, it only had two missiles left. Now it had none.

“They’ll arrive in three days.”

“Awesome. Then everything will be ready.”

San Diego, California

Pearce’s phone rang. It was his tech guru, Ian.

“Tell me you found him,” Pearce said.

“Not Ali. His uncle.”

“Where?”

Ian chuckled. “You’re not going to believe it.”

50

Washington, D.C.

Myers stood in the situation room of the DHS, studying the wall-length electronic touch-screen display map of the United States with Bill Donovan.

Previous attacks had been color-coded according to severity. Red markers indicated wounded; black indicated fatalities. Tapping on any of the markers pulled up a text window with all available data, including victim photos, crime scene information, agency in charge at the scene, etc.

The best shot they had to predict the future was to process the fire hose of data that was pouring in from the Utah facility as it daily analyzed petabytes—billions of megabytes—of images and data inputs it was receiving from all of the law enforcement agencies, along with the Domain Awareness Systems, which were linked to the thousands of security cameras guarding most public buildings. The only thing they were sure about so far was that the Bravos had split up their forces and spread their operations over the widest possible area. Soft targets were the norm.

Drone Command had continued to beg, borrow, steal, and lease several more drone systems as well, including the recently decommissioned Blue Devil 2 hybrid airship, which the air force had spent over $200 million to develop but had decided to mothball. The nearly four-hundred-foot-long airship was capable of carrying thousands of pounds of surveillance payloads and keeping them aloft for twelve hours at a time. Ashley had deployed the Blue Devil 2 with a Gorgon Stare wide-area surveillance package over Los Angeles just two days before the Hollywood attack and was eager to find out what evil the Mind’s Eye “visual intelligence” software had uncovered. Until they could discern an attack pattern, DHS had ordered a general mobilization of all LEO resources. State, county, and city law enforcement agencies were on high alert; police reserve units were called up; television and radio stations ran public service ads extolling citizens, “If you see something, say something. Don’t be afraid to call in anything suspicious.”

The unfortunate side effect of the extra security precautions was that the anxiety level of the average citizen shot through the roof; emergency rooms were filling up with as many heart attacks as panic attacks. Valium prescriptions were at an all-time high. Paranoia was increasing, too, and the number of concealed-carry permit applications had overwhelmed the ATF online application system. DHS urged the public to remain both calm and vigilant, but the number of cities declaring martial law rose daily. Racial and ethnic tensions were rising as well. Just like after 9/11, American flags were popping up everywhere, especially on cars. But now, so were Mexican flags, with the same intensity. Ironically, American Hispanics—many of whom had served in the U.S. military or had relatives on active duty—were flying the American flags. Mexican flags were most commonly flown on American university campuses like UC Berkeley by liberal Anglos and foreign-born nationals.

What stung Myers most was the right-wing militia and “prepper” groups harping about impending martial law. She actually shared that concern and had raised it with her attorney general. The 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (signed into law by President Bush) and the 2011 NDAA (signed into law by President Obama) gave Myers ample legal warrant to deploy U.S. armed forces in counterterror work on U.S. soil, in effect, turning them into cops on the beat.

It was getting harder and harder to tell the cops from the troops. More and more police brandished assault rifles and flash bangs, wore tactical vests and helmets, and rolled through town in armored vehicles. Civil libertarians wondered if they were local law enforcement or an occupying army.

For over a hundred years, the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act had strictly forbidden the use of federal military forces to perform police functions on American soil out of fear that future presidents would be tempted to use them to achieve their political objectives, suppress political opposition, or overthrow the government entirely. Two hundred years of Latin American history had proven those fears fully warranted.

But the twenty-first century posed global threats and challenges to the nation far beyond the scope and resources of the local city cop on the beat who polished his apple and swung a nightstick as a deterrent to local mischief. It was a slippery slope, to be sure, but a necessary one. Police were taking on more and more military-style operations.

The only alternative to the heightened security measures, as extreme as they appeared to be at the moment, was to do nothing and simply hope the violent chaos spree would just go away. Myers knew it wouldn’t, so the extra precautions and higher alerts were initiated. She’d do whatever it would take to guarantee public safety, even if the public didn’t like it.

Malibu, California

Pearce and Johnny Paloma sped along the Pacific Coast Highway in Johnny’s restored ’73 Stingray.

“So this writer guy is in on this mess?” Johnny asked.

Pearce pressed the release button on his Glock, checked to see that the .45 magazine was fully loaded.

“According to Ian, Babak Ghorbani is Ali’s uncle on his mother’s side. That puts him in it up to his neck until I find out otherwise.” Pearce slammed the magazine back into place and racked the slide.

Ten minutes later, Pearce and Johnny Paloma approached the high-walled beach house under cover of early morning darkness. The distant surf down below hissed softly in the sand as low tide ebbed away.

A former L.A. cop, Johnny easily disabled the civilian security system, then proceeded to the rear entrance while Pearce picked the front door lock. After Johnny had cleared the back slider lock, Pearce gave the signal and they both made their way in.

The house was silent. Pearce and Johnny met up in the living room. Minimalist modern furnishings. Hand-scraped hardwoods. Hell of a view of the Pacific through a big picture window.

They made their way to the master bedroom.

Two people slept beneath a white silk comforter. Pearce yanked it off, grabbed the middle-aged man by his silk pajama top, pulled him onto the floor, and shoved his Glock in the startled face.

“Please! Please! Don’t kill me!” Ghorbani screamed in Farsi.

Johnny snapped the bedroom lights on.

Pearce saw out of the corner of his eye that Johnny had a gun in the face of Ghorbani’s bed partner, also on the floor.

“Where’s Ali Abdi?” Pearce roared in Farsi.

“Who?” Ghorbani asked in English, blinking heavily. “My glasses, I can’t see.”

Pearce saw a pair of rimless glasses on the nightstand.

“Try something stupid, please. I’m begging you,” Pearce snapped.

The middle-aged man’s quavering hand reached up to the nightstand and found the glasses. He pulled them on. He frowned at Pearce in confusion.

“Is this a robbery? Please, take anything.”

Pearce jammed the cold muzzle of the gun barrel against the man’s deeply lined forehead. Ghorbani’s partner whimpered from the other side of the bed.

“I’ll ask one more time. Where’s Ali Abdi? Your nephew?”

“I don’t know.”

CRACK! Pearce whipped the steel barrel of the Glock against the side of the man’s head, knocking his glasses off. Ghorbani howled in pain and clutched at the wound, balling up into a fetal position on the floor.

Pearce kicked the man’s feet apart, then stepped on one of his bare ankles, bearing down with his full weight until the small bones cracked beneath his steel-toed boot.

Ghorbani shrieked with the new jolt of pain, completely forgetting his bleeding head wound, and clutched at his broken ankle. Pearce unsheathed his razor-sharp KA-BAR knife and stuck the tip of the blade into the left nostril of the bearded man’s face.

“Last chance. If you don’t want to whistle like a tea kettle every time you sneeze from now on, you’d better start talking.”

Ghorbani’s mouth opened and closed a few times, trying to form words through his panic and pain. The syllables finally caught in his throat, like a cold engine finally turning over on a winter morning.

“I… I haven’t seen him since I was last in Iran, twenty years ago. He hates me. So does his mother, my sister.”

“And why should I believe that?”

“Because it’s the truth!”

“Hey, chief, come take a look.” Johnny motioned with his pistol at the figure on the floor. Pearce frowned. Crossed over.

The simpering voice cowering by the side of the bed turned out to be a twenty-year-old Iranian boy, pretty and fey in a pink UCLA tank top.

“This your girlfriend, Babak?” Pearce asked.

Ghorbani nodded. “My sister’s family are religious fanatics. Ali swore he would kill me if they ever saw my face again.”

Pearce believed him. Homosexuals had a short life expectancy in the Islamic Republic of Iran these days.

“Does Ali know you’re here?”

“If he did, I’d be dead. Why?”

Pearce holstered his weapon, frustrated. “He might be in the neighborhood. If you do hear anything from him, better call the FBI.”

“Yes, of course.”

Pearce nodded at Johnny. “Let’s go.”

Turlock, California

Brian Heppner was sound asleep on his pricey adjustable air mattress. His alarm was set to go off in twenty more minutes at 4 a.m. for the first milking of the day, but he hadn’t gotten into bed until after midnight. Worse, he’d loaded up on NyQuil because he had a summer cold that he couldn’t shake and the coughing wouldn’t let him fall asleep.

A third-generation dairy farmer, Brian had grown up with the remarkable work ethic—and commensurate sleep deprivation—that went along with owning your own herd. Dairy sales had tanked in the last few years. That meant even more hours and less sleep just to stay out of bankruptcy.

Brian kept a twelve-gauge Mossberg 590 pump shotgun loaded with double-aught buckshot next to his bed because thieves had been breaking into isolated farm homes all over the valley for the last few years and budget cutbacks had kept county sheriff patrols to a minimum. He’d practiced grabbing it out of his sleep a hundred times so he wouldn’t have to think about it when the time came to use it. His wife hated the gun and joked that he slept so deeply that the thieves could steal the bed out from under him and he’d never even know it.

BAM! The bedroom door busted off of its hinges.

A squad of black-clad men stormed in, UMP9s ready, hollering in Spanish. Brian’s wife screamed.

Half awake, Brian lunged for the shotgun.

A machine pistol fired.

Three jacketed rounds ripped into Brian’s rib cage.

Two minutes later, the SWAT lieutenant called for an ambulance with Brian’s blood-spattered wife still screaming in the background.

Washington, D.C.

Donovan took the call. Another fatal shooting, this time in Turlock, California.

Damn it.

Some poor dairy farmer had been killed because somebody called in and said that they heard screaming and what sounded like machine-gun fire.

Brian Heppner had just been SWATed—a dangerous trick used by extremist crazies to harass political opponents back in 2012. The tactic was ugly and effective. Just call in a gun-related emergency to 911 and the dispatcher would automatically send in the SWAT team. That way you let the cops do your intimidation for you, and your opponents lived in sleepless fear of another break-in for the next six weeks.

The LEO community was on high alert. Every call was taken as seriously as possible. What else could they do but respond?

According to the reports he’d received, Donovan knew it was the Bravos behind all of it. There had been at least fifty-three SWATings across the country in the last hour, all of the emergency calls reporting the same thing. Thank God there had been only two fatalities so far.

So now the bastards were letting us do the terrorizing for them, Donovan thought. It was only 7:18 in the morning, but Donovan uncorked his bottle of Bushmills and took a sip anyway. It was going to be another long damn day and he dreaded calling Myers with this new round of bad news.

When was it going to end?