The Threat

Usually the trackers applied sorting criteria to determine if a given aircraft was “suspect.” That meant off a legitimate air route, not filing a flight plan, not squawking a valid code, or flying an erratic course near shore. But they’d lock up Nuñez’s new twin-jet Falcon the moment it popped above five hundred feet over Palonegro Airfield. The over-the-horizon radar in Texas would hand off to a Perry-class frigate, USS Gallery, loitering off the Venezuelan coast. Gallery would add its track data to the information flow. At this point the Falcon would be designated an “air target of interest,” or ATOI, and handed off to a Navy E-2C command and control aircraft as Air Force fighters launched to intercept and identify.

By the time Nuñez’s pilot realized he was getting special attention, he’d have F-16s from the 125th Fighter Wing to port and starboard. They’d escort him to Homestead Air Force Base, where an arrest team from the FBI, DEA, and the Florida State Police would be waiting.

Dan got the impression of a showboat operation, involving as many agencies as possible. But it sounded workable. Unless he aborted before he left Colombian airspace, Don Juan Nuñez — the biggest trafficker in Cali, kingpin, locus, famed for years for his slipperiness, ruthlessness, and implacable vindictiveness — was American meat.

* * *

He checked in at the combined billeting office at the naval air station, showered, shaved, and tried to close his eyes for a couple of hours. Instead he stared at the popcorn finish of the ceiling. Wondering now if Hot Handoff was as airtight as it had sounded.

Considering when Nuñez’s plane was scheduled to leave the ground, the intercept would take place well after dark. Would that be a problem? He didn’t think so, considering the radar and ELINT assets that would be tracking him. On the other hand, he’d never seen an operation where everything went down as planned.

If it worked it would be an enormous coup. If President Tejeiro was serious about rooting out drug-based corruption and violence in Colombia itself, taking Nuñez down now could wreck the whole cartel.

The phone woke him minutes after he’d finally dropped off.

* * *

The sun was going down in flames over the Gulf. Lights popped on above the barbed wire. Armed sentries patted him down before letting him into the operations center. He approved. This headquarters would be a prime target for a bomb or raid.

The duty officers, analysts, operations specialists, sat absorbed at their consoles. The air was icy. Quintero was stretched out in one of the big elevated chairs. He pointed to the one beside him. Dan looked around for Bloom, and located him heads-down with another agent over some printouts. He checked his watch against the wall clock—2115—and tried to relax.

The big flat-panel display showed the whole transit zone, with air routes and boundaries of national seas and airspace. Dozens of aircraft flowed down the airways, each tagged by a data readout. The western boundary was the coast of Yucatán; the eastern, the scattered arch of the Lesser Antilles, Grenada, Barbados, the Grenadines, Martinique, on up to the U.S. Virgins. Colombia and Venezuela pushed up from the south, the tip of Florida down from the north. It was a godlike view of two million square miles of continent, island, and sea.

Quintero probed as to the administration’s plans for the aerostats and the Customs boat fleet, since seizures were declining. “It’s easy to quantify seizures. Impossible to quantify deterrence.”

“We can put numbers on it,” Dan said. “That’s what I’ll try to do.”

“But it doesn’t give you the public support. You can’t take pictures of cargos of cocaine not being seized because they’re going overland.”

“The classic dilemma of deterrence. But if we can take down Nuñez, that’ll give Tejeiro a chance. What about control? Any hard spots there?”

“Tactical control here works pretty well. We’ve got the joint bugs worked out and we’re smoothing things out with the Brits and the Dutch. But nobody coordinates activity between me and JIATF West or South.”

“How much attention do you need? Hourly? Daily? Weekly?”

Quintero said he didn’t need hourly coordination. Handoff procedures were established for tracks and intel that crossed the JIATF boundaries. But there were issues it would be nice to pass to a higher level, rather than trying to negotiate with his opposite number.

“We’re going to start running those out of my office,” Dan told him. “I don’t want to set up another command center. We’ve got enough command centers. But somebody’s got to have the big picture.”

Quintero seemed about to say something, but didn’t. Instead he started describing the data, secret Internet protocol, and covered voice circuits they were guarding. He was saying the primary coordination voice net would be UHF satellite voice link 409, when Bloom came over and cleared his throat. “He’s off the ground.”

“Nuñez?”