perfectly capable of looking for a truck. We’ve also got clear skies and some satellite coverage. But someone’s going to have to tell us how to differentiate a refrigerated truck from a regular one.”
Rapp nodded. “Claudia. Have Irene pull together all her Spanish speakers. If we spot a truck that looks like a good candidate, we’ll phone in a plate number and description. Then Irene’s people can call the company that owns it, confirm it’s theirs, get a final destination, and make sure it’s where it’s supposed to be. How much time do we have?”
“If you’re right about where they are now, it’ll take them at least ten hours to cross into the U.S.”
Rapp finally turned away from the map. There weren’t many things that could make the sweat running down his back turn cold, but this was it. They were trying to cover thousands of square miles in a country where they’d never operated with a team made up of people who had little or no operational experience. No military support. No support from local law enforcement. And a Mexican government that vacillated between useless and openly hostile.
“Should we be putting U.S. authorities on alert that they might have to close the border?” Coleman asked.
Rapp thought about it for a moment and then shook his head. “Once that word goes out, how long until the press gets hold of it? We’ve already had one leak and we know how Halabi reacted. If he gets spooked and turns those people loose in Mexico, we’re screwed.”
“What about additional inspections for refrigerator trucks?” Claudia suggested.
“Same problem,” Rapp said. “There’s no way ISIS doesn’t have people watching the border crossings, and it’s hard to imagine they’d miss our guys going over every refrigerated truck with a fine-toothed comb. Halabi desperately wants to believe this is working. All we have to do is not convince him otherwise.”
“So let’s say we get lucky and find that truck,” Coleman said. “We’ve got RPGs, but that’s going to make a mess. We’ll have half-burned bodies and thawing frozen food all over the place. There’ll be civilians, cops, maybe army. Can we control that?”
Rapp didn’t answer. He’d had a number of strategy sessions with Kennedy on his drive, and neither one of them had come up with a workable plan to keep this in Mexico. It went against every instinct he had, but he’d finally had to resign himself to the fact that the border was just a meaningless line on a map. Attia and the six terrorists he was transporting weren’t the enemy. It was the billions of germs they carried.
“No,” Rapp said finally. “We can’t control it. And that’s why we’re going to let them through.”
“Repeat that?” Claudia said, obviously thinking her less than perfect English had failed her.
“Gary Statham’s got a team standing by in New Mexico. We need that truck to roll across the border without any fireworks. He’ll be waiting for it on the other side.”
CHAPTER 49
WEST OF MONTEMORELOS
MEXICO
RAPP held the hand pump on top of a fifty-five-gallon fuel drum while Coleman worked it. Their pilot had the nozzle inserted in their rented chopper and was encouraging them with nonstop updates on their progress.
They’d set down on a remote dirt track fifteen minutes ago and, after a fair amount of searching, located the fuel cache left for them. The foliage was thicker and the terrain more undulating than Rapp had expected in this part of Mexico. Mountains were visible in the distance and they’d flown past cliffs that looked to be more than a thousand feet high. Population centers were pretty spread out and largely connected by two-lane rural highways. Road surfaces weren’t bad, but inconsistent enough that the myriad transport trucks traveling over them were doing so at fairly conservative speeds.
The phone in his pocket started to vibrate, and he squinted at the screen through the midmorning sun.
“Go ahead,” he said, picking up and leaving the former SEAL to complete the job.
“We’ve got a good candidate,” Claudia said.
“Another one?”
They had nine cars on the road, looking for refrigerator trucks, supplemented by two private planes and the chopper they were currently refueling. At first he’d thought it wasn’t enough, but now he was wondering if it was too many. Passing plate numbers and transportation company names to Agency analysts had turned out to be an inexact science. They’d already had three false alarms—one caused by some misfiled paperwork in Guadalajara, one by a simple transposition of a numbers, and one that probably was