Chapter 5.
Two days after Corpus Christi we were called to the airport manager's office about the flight we back-seated that violated multiple airport and FAA rules. Our pilot taxied and took off without clearance and he was trying to pressure us to take responsibility for what the pilot did. We suggested he forget about it, which would be best for his career.
The flight was part of a high-level Pentagon/DOD authorized operation and not within his jurisdiction, we were not obligated to even talk to him and only did it because their office was down the hallway from ours. We wanted to give him a chance to scold us but when he didn't seem to cool off we whispered that we were wasting our time and decided to leave while he was reading us a list of regs 'we' broke.
Of course our lack of fear only made him angrier so I told him to call the Coast Guard General Command at the Pentagon since they were in charge. David asked if the ELP control tower received advanced notice that an emergency flight was taking place, but he refused to discuss it. We stood up and left while the manager was still ranting loudly.
Some people believed that in a tiny military jet everyone was a pilot. But when those jets were modified to carry Pentagon VIPs they removed all controls from the back seats, but since they're secret nobody knew that. That's why he threatened us because he thought we also had control. We never corrected him because we didn't want to confuse him with facts, but seated behind his desk he certainly looked like an uninformed fool.
We both knew if he pursued the matter he'd be working at Taco Loco next month, but that was the last we heard of it. Yes, rules were broken, nobody was endangered, nobody was harmed, no property damaged. What that pilot did was a victimless crime, sort of like growing marijuana and smoking it in your basement in 1969 when it was a felony.
In all honesty El Paso International was not the busiest airport in the country, it usually went all night without any flights. We apologized to the manager dude and left acting sarcastically remorseful and scared. End of story, for his sake. As we walked out of his office David whispered to me: `He reminds me of my first college roomie.' After we cleared his office we both laughed loudly walking down the hallway to our office door. I remembered meeting Okie a few times, now he played defensive tackle in the NFE somewhere, maybe the Jacksonville Jaguars.
While the quiet spell continued we searched for a house, but our criteria eliminated most homes on the market. We attended almost twenty open house shows on the northeast side of El Paso and a couple way up north in new subdivisions that were really too far from the airport to be considered but David wanted to look anyway.
We wanted a suburban house in a neighborhood with no broken windows and no gang graffiti. It had to be a three bedroom home with a full basement (which was uncommon in El Paso), two car attached garage, and a walled-in back yard big enough for a pool someday. The house had to have 200 amp 220v service, cable internet, natural gas, termite inspections, 1,800 sq ft or larger, nearby parks, and less than six miles from ELP. We met a realtor that seemed like an older gay man (70s with white hair) and gave him our list and told him: no rush, keep in touch. Our search started in August of our first year in west Texas, or as some people jokingly called it: `The arm pit of Texas.'
We both agreed, El Paso should be the Texas Panhandle, not Amarillo.
During the quiet time we spent a few days up north at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) for training on our weapons and comms gear. We were also involved in the next-gen design work being done there. There were lots of secret things going on at WSMR, it wasn't just rockets. But it felt neat walking around in the same buildings as the famous rocket scientists that escaped Germany in the 1940s and went on to build the Saturn-5 rocket engine. They had a display of old rockets outside, like the old German V2 and the 1950s Nike Hercules ABM with nuke warheads.
We got to know several interesting guys that worked there that were younger eggheads like us. One of them lived in Alamogordo and invited us to go camping with him and his wife at a place 45 miles north of WSMR called Three Rivers Campground, it was a New Mexico state park and was very small and not widely known. We agreed but needed to set a date, that and we also needed to buy basic camping gear. During our discussion we made it clear that it was just the two of us, there were no wives. I'm sure he understood our point that time but didn't seem to care. It was always funny to see the expression on faces when it clicked in their head that we were married to each other, not two women. I whispered to David that we needed to hire a hot young fag-hag to make appearances with us. He replied with, `Good luck finding one.'
The guy from WSMR sort of gave me the impression of being an outdoorsy macho aggressive type.
We sort of got the impression listening to them talk about the history of White Sands in the late 1940s when it was called White Sands Proving Grounds that they mostly worked to understand the German rocket research during the war, but the development of US rocket motors was mostly done in Alabama and Florida.
During that time our first bonus payment arrived as cashier's checks, we cashed 'em and kept the money at home in a box in the little bedroom closet, up on the shelf.
David reminded me on the way home that I told you I'd explain how we learned to use the spiders at the school in Nevada:
Spider School.
We called it Spider School, (they called it: Bug-U) the sign by the door said: Micro Devices Agency. We were like, `Whatever dude!' but that was before we knew the spiders would end up being our most used device on nearly every mission.
The magic of the spiders truly came from their software. They were intelligent drones that could function independently or as a swarm. They had wireless access to a combat management computer inside our pelican case. They had several modes and functions built-in and the management system added many more. We could control them remotely by voice (via our glasses), by joystick, by arrow keys on our forearm keyboards, and the Pentagon could drive them too, but theirs worked with a delay due to the distance.
Our spider training started in a simulator, seated at a large screen with a joystick and keyboard. The display looked like the old computer game called Doom or Quake. The spider had a machine gun and a grenade launcher and went on missions indoors and outdoors. As you advanced to different levels the spiders became more advanced. They also got progressively smaller but with the same firepower. The scenarios changed with each level and by the third level we were trying to stop the bad guys robbing the bank or robbing the coin-op Laundromat dollar bill changer. During the earliest simulations the goal was to kill monsters and zombies, kill or be killed.
They had so many almost funny and sad scenarios we started to lose interest. We even had search and rescue ops, like wildfires in rural towns in California and Colorado. We also did simulated rescue ops in toxic waste facilities in Colorado and Washington State.
As the hours went by our scores improved and our control of the spiders improved too. We advanced to both of us piloting smaller spiders going into police situations together, by then they were shrunk down to the size of a can of soup instead of the first levels which were the size of a large dog. The perspective also changed, at first we saw from head height but by the fourth level we saw everything from inches above the floor.
As days went by they kept adding more semi-auto functions so we no longer had to tell it to do everything we could set a destination and it would go there without steering, then we could pay attention to what the on-board sensors detected, at that point we'd switched from pilots to gunners and observers. If enabled we could guide it by looking at a spot on the screen and telling it to go to that spot.
By the sixth day of training ops the spiders were down to the size of a salt shaker and had no weapons except toxic gas, knockout gas, and incendiary gas that would explode like a five gallon bucket of napalm. As the spiders decreased in size the battery life also shortened so we had to learn to be efficient with their use. We also learned to use flying drones to deliver ourselves replacement spiders so we could keep moving across a situation.
During week three of spider school we toured another building in the Nevada DOD facility where all the employees were little old ladies that wore nice flowered dresses and sat at work benches with microscopes hand building actual spiders using micro robotic tools (like robotic surgery).
We were shown how they were built, the tiny computer chips and batteries, the components that made each spider: the legs, the body parts, the connections. We were shown individual legs being tested after they arrived in a small box from the manufacturer. A tiny bin of legs contained enough to build hundreds of spiders.
The spiders had no motors, they used electrically fired plastic muscle fibers that contracted like living muscle fibers. The advantage was they were silent and used tiny amounts of electricity to function, the disadvantage was they gradually warmed up and lost strength/speed, but with the short battery lifespan that was usually not a problem. They also had highly advanced software on board as well as 3D cameras, sensors, wireless comms but for short range only. You could hold four spiders on the palm of your hand. The legs folded up against the body and they slipped inside a tiny cardboard box which fit inside a heavy canvas pack that mounted on a belt.
You opened the box, shook out the spider onto your palm, turned it over, and with the edge of a fingernail slid the switch to ON, and it did the rest. The default mode (for spiders in our service) was surveillance/reconnaissance. If you took one out of its box and set it on a table or the floor it would sit for a few seconds then would begin to surveil the immediate area. They developed maps, located and identified targets and possible threats as well as radio signal sources, power sources, utility lines, heat sources, magnetic and radiation sources. If I released one spider inside our small house it would have it mapped and marked within six minutes, without being seen by the occupants.
They could walk on almost any surface, vertical and even upside down. But they were nearly useless in water for longer than several seconds. They were nearly defenseless and relied on stealth for protection. They could run across the floor at 12mph but not very far. They could survive a drop to a hard floor from about nine feet but not much more than that. They also had a built-in self-destruct routine that automatically worked when left to perform some task until their power was depleted. The batteries were not replaceable but you could add a second one inside the rear compartment where the gas pellets were inserted. They could not carry anything heavier than a small post-it note. If set on a smooth flat surface it could run almost 290 feet on a new battery, nearly the length of a football field.
We could wirelessly send them a type of floor plan file and they could follow it perfectly. There were also pre-made combat scenarios available we could upload to them wirelessly to alter their functions and priorities.
The reality of the situation started to register in our brains, these amazing little drones were going to be our primary tools in stopping bad guys. We both thought it was somewhat odd that they were hand made by eight little old ladies with microscopes and robotic tools in a factory near Laughlin Nevada. Each employee could build two spiders a day.
When they first started production they gave each one a name, it was hand written with fine point markers on the bottom but after a year they ran out of names and switched to numbers. The spider they built with us watching was #198. They cost the USA $110,000 each and came ready to turn on and use right out of the box. They were the most advanced weapon produced in the USA for several years.
The lady we watched was assembling spider legs, she sat on a stool working two hand sensors that controlled robotic arms. Above her was a large video display and on it we watched what she saw in her goggles. She was taking muscle fibers and connecting them to spider leg segments, eight legs per spider, and six segments to each leg. The segments snapped together with a tiny ball and socket joint. She took the muscle fibers that looked like tiny pieces of thread and pressed them into clips on each segment. Attach the fibers then test the leg for function, if it passed it went into the bin, if it failed it went into the trash to be incinerated. Each leg segment was actually the same size (and looked like) as the [ key on your computer keyboard. The projections were where the muscles attached, like people they had muscles that pulled in two directions.
That's the part of the Spider story we were allowed to discuss with the public. No other government agency had them but NASA had early (larger) prototypes. We liked to say that if they had existed in the late 1930s world history would be a lot different today.
Another big thing about using spiders was how to put ourselves near where spiders were needed because of their limited power and range. We had to learn how to crawl, slide, swim, and slither into tight spaces to deploy the spiders without compromising our safety. Sometimes it felt like the spider was the true asset, all we were was the human delivery mechanism. This was a big part of the reason for going to Seal school, because the art of placing explosives in unusual places was nearly the same as placing spiders where they were needed.
The group that built the spiders also constantly sought suggestions for new features or improvements. Our first suggestion was they should be able to grip their legs around cables and wires and cut them, maybe using a tiny explosive charge that fit in the pellet compartment. Or maybe it could be a specialty spider, made for cutting wires. The only way they could shut down electronics now was using their conductive legs to short out circuits by joining two wires that should never be joined, like 5v DC to GND.
`Out in the west Texas town of El Paso...'
Our next mission was closer to home, across the border and fifteen miles south into `Old Mexico.' We were advised quietly in the boss's office it was not a rush job. It would require development of special plans and back-up plans. In fact, he admitted to us this mission was totally optional, we could decline it for any reason. Others had tried and failed and paid for their failure with their lives.
He said the FBI got a tip there was a major Interpol wanted fugitive supposedly enjoying retirement and living at a tourist horse ranch on the southern outskirts of Juarez, in a mountain valley southwest of town. He was a Mexican man who had worked in the military weapons theft/smuggling industry around the Mediterranean. Interpol wanted him dead more than they wanted him to stand trial because no jail ever held him very long. There was a condition that part of his body had to be retrieved after death that returned a DNA match to the samples taken the last time he was jailed. He showed us a video with lots of images of the suspect captured by cameras at ports in Libya, Albania, Syria, Romania, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Liberia. They declined to even tell us his name because it was top-secret to Interpol.
Next, we were shown satellite photos of the ranch, and shots of him riding horses on the mountain trails. They also showed photos of the suspected outdoor cremation site for people they killed. This guy (they called Marco) was partnered with the Chihuahua Cartel that managed immigrants walking into Texas and New Mexico, as well as Meth and Fentanyl sales in that region (the entire border with New Mexico and Texas down to Big Bend). The video said he was part owner of the ranch and a meth factory near Los Mochis Mexico. He was enjoying his semi-retirement and spending his days doing what he enjoyed the most, riding horses and fucking women in their private prison.
The Interpol reward was one mil in US cash in exchange for proof of his execution and a blood or tissue sample or both (they recommended two fingers). After it was confirmed, the reward would be paid in person in US currency. All previous attempts by the CIA to capture him ended badly for the agents. Even one of England's best MI5 agents died trying too. This was why they opted for a lower profile team, one with Seal training.
Our task was to develop a plan to locate, identify, kill (on video), collect samples, and return them to our airport office with minimal contamination and degradation.
We went home and discussed the mission and decided if we wanted the job, the reward definitely influenced our decision.
We asked our boss to find out what equipment was available and three days later he said a standard four engine battery quadcopter, our spiders, possibly a small toy-sized remote control truck, and maybe a custom spider or two. We asked if we could get the latest Predator type recon aircraft assigned to circle over that part of Juarez to surveil for several days and were told he'd find out. We also asked for something like motion activated wildlife cameras that sent images via satellite, several agencies used them.
Two weeks later we were told a long duration predator class craft could be orbited over that area as long no military conflicts erupted in the Americas. They had one with a tremendous 3D camera that photo'd a span of ground, roughly two miles by two miles with a resolution down to 1cm, day and night, but not during storms. It could hover over that area for five days then return to Holloman Air force Base in New Mexico, without human intervention. It could orbit 1,900 feet above the ground and remain unseen by the naked eye and not heard from the ground, except maybe by dogs.
Our next step was to map the area and log his daily outdoor activities. For part of that we'd need to go there and place some Spy vs. Spy hardware around the ranch. Our boss already spoke to two agencies about getting nature cams. We also spent time discussing the situation based on our limited knowledge. Their assumption seemed to be that nobody would notice him or care since he was no longer active in the arms or narcotic business, just a fat rich old man riding a horse with the tourists. We guessed he felt he was enough of a nobody now that he was safe to prowl the mountain trails on horseback and he'd be perfectly safe, all his sins were forgotten and nobody but his mom would recognize him now.
Our guess was somebody that visited the ranch recognized him. Even retired CIA and Interpol employees liked to ride horses, our guess was that was the source of the tip. Maybe the target had sort of given up on caring about his life and wanted his last days to be fun and didn't care how long they lasted. Either way there were people in Belgium that wanted him very dead, and hadn't forgotten about the agents he killed during his career. That didn't even include the number of missing females in that part of Mexico they attributed to the ranch, people used for sex entertainment, perhaps even killed for entertainment. They supposedly had females ranging in age from children up into their forties, and sometimes males too but they were a special order.
The first thing we got started was the drone surveillance of the area to detect routine patterns of activity and clothing, horses, trails, vehicles, that sort of stuff. During that time we did our own research and found out some amazing things even the CIA didn't include in their report.
The big thing we learned was that entire mountain range southwest of Juarez was full of hiking trails, mountain bike trails, and horse ranches. Despite the drug wars going on in the city, outside the city in the hills it was tourism as usual, and a lot of it too. We thought tourism (nature trail cardio-hiking) might be the perfect cover for us too, but it was clear when the time came it would have to be done quickly and quietly: grab, kill, and dash.
We learned the reputation for the horse ranch was that they catered to wealthy older tourists. Their customers were mostly city people wanting quiet time away from traffic, congestion, and smog. For a price they got a rustic cabin with basic room service, three hot meals, twice daily horseback riding on well trained horses. Some vacationers volunteered to work in the stables while others explored miles of their mountain trails.
Some people paid hundreds per night for accommodations and some paid extra for a prostitute. We heard some even paid for the option to beat or torture the prostitute. The FBI report said they kept prisoners on-site for that purpose, usually young people they kidnapped around Juarez and possibly down in Chihuahua too. The place had its own winery too and its own label red wine.
Next, we mapped a route across the mountains. It seemed we might have to go there twice, once for surveillance data and lastly to capture the target. David hinted the best evidence would be his right hand, or maybe both hands on ice. We also learned the CIA had a few assets in the Juarez area we could utilize for transport if needed but doubted we would due to trust issues.
We wrote our plans on the computer, the first trip would be easier. The goal on trip #1 would be to learn the route across the mountain and see how long it took to cardio-hike the trails to the ranch. Then we would place the nature cams and snoop around, see if we could locate their prison. And look for places to stash a body, remove its hands, and see if they had any security devices around the perimeter. The actual ranch property was large and had been there for over 100 years. Rancho de las Montanas was its name and they had a web site and took reservations online too.
For our first trip to the ranch we crossed the border at Santa Teresa NM, about twelve miles west of downtown El Paso, out in the desert. The crossing was a highway that served as a bypass around Juarez for trucks heading into the USA. We drove a rental car from the airport so it didn't have our license plates. We drove south across barren sandy desert (on Highway-2) to the sign for one of the oldest tourism sites in the mountains near Juarez.
The place we drove to was called La Hermita, which was a historic religious site with a tiny cave chapel partially made of rock, partly in a cave in the mountains, but it was drive-up all the way. When we arrived there were two cars, two trucks, and several horses. All the Mexicans were older men with cowboy hats and very dark skin from working in the sun all year. We went there with the pretense of hiking above their site. The chapel was not very far from the TV broadcast towers for the local TV stations. But the good part was it was only three miles from the highest end of the horse ranch property on the other side of the mountains. The bad part was those three miles were hilly-rocky terrain, none of it was flat.
The religious site was originally a cave full of bats, someone saw a vision of the Virgin Mary one day and then healed people in town. Over the decades the locals slowly built a small chapel out of stone onto the cave entrance until today, when it was a religious historical site that many said cured them of incurable disease. People from all over Mexico came for miracle cures and to pray to the Virgin. The chapel today was big enough to seat 40 seekers on Sunday mornings. It was made entirely from stone and mortar except the roof.
On the day we arrived the Predator was still silently orbiting overhead 24/7, flying a two mile circle taking one 3D photo every two minutes. Using a handheld GPS we left the car and hiked up to the peak then down the other side into the valley. The guys that welcomed us wanted ten bucks to park near their chapel, but never said anything about private property in the area, nor did they ask how long we'd be gone or where we were going. One of them warned us in Spanish to be very careful, watch for snakes, and drink lots of water. The forecast high for today was 94 degrees, sunny, almost no wind, and humidity around 7%.
We used a trail we marked in the GPS heading towards trees in rows in their valley. The mountains were thick with trails but they branched and forked so often you had to use a GPS to follow the right one. We programmed our route at home using Google Maps and a brochure for the mountain area. The area was nothing but sand, rocks, boulders, hills, cacti, weeds, and short trees but the trails were usually easy to see because some of them were over 100 years old.
It took us four hours to reach the ranch's perimeter fence and sometimes we jogged when the trail was well worn. Luckily this mountain range was not very steep, maybe 2,500' above the desert at its highest. The desert floor was 3,200 feet above sea level. We were hiking on the south end, the GPS said we never went above 1,600 feet but it was hot and dry with no shade anywhere. We felt the eyes of a thousand crickets, scorpions, buzzards, and snakes watching for us to fall so they could feast on our corpses.
Our first stop was the actual water well. This valley benefited from a natural spring that ran all year, it made the vineyard possible, and maintained life across the valley. They stored every drop that bubbled from the ground via a steel pipe, some of it dribbled into a trough for the horses. We stopped and drank from the horse trough but the water tasted metallic. While I cooled off in the shade David mounted the first motion activated camera in a tree to image anything with body heat that came near the water.
The area around the spring had lots of trees so the ground was always shaded and was mostly covered with small rocks, sand, and tiny lizards. The clearing was an area about 80'x80' with trees throughout, some were oak, others were desert trees like mesquite, willow, and Palo Verde.
Next, we followed the path down towards the vineyard and mounted another camera that looked down the trail towards the big house and the cabins. The entire ranch sat on a slope, the well sat about 120 feet above the big house.
We passed the vineyard and mounted another camera on the opposite side that had a good view of a group of buildings behind the main building. I noticed something odd, but some of the outback buildings reminded me of hidden factories in Germany in the 1940s. The Germans built replicas on the roofs of factories so they looked like farmland from an airplane. We saw the same thing here: cactus, sand, rocks, and fake trees on the roofs of some of the buildings. We suspected the largest one was the prison we were warned about.
The main building was too large to monitor with one camera and we only had one left so we used it to watch the area behind the main buildings and the trails. We also saw the blackened pit we heard about from the CIA, David saved GPS coordinates of all those places. One thing that didn't show up in the aerial photos was in the center of the pit; a stand like hunters hung an animal carcass to bleed-out, then skin and cut into large quarters. I had visions of an occasional human being hung by their ankles and bled out while drunks watched and cheered.
As we prowled the ranch we spent most of our time low to the ground because we didn't know exactly what time the horseback riders came by except that they were due soon. We stayed crouched low and crept from tree to tree, behind bushes and between boulders.
While we mounted the last camera a line of eight people on horseback approached. We hid in that tree and were never seen. All of the people riding horses looked like American tourists, and after they were gone and we were about to climb down a lone rider went by. He was an older guy, kind of fat, white cowboy hat, holster and revolver, boots, jeans, white shirt, canteen. David whispered he thought he was our target. Unfortunately we were unprepared to grab him. We finished our tasks and left the ranch and hiked back across to the other side with one long stop at the spring. After that we hiked non-stop back across the mountains and drove back to the border.
We crossed into New Mexico at 7:04pm. I was very thirsty and we were hot, sweaty, and stinky. The most important part was that we dressed and looked like real mountain hikers, fitness enthusiasts, young men with excess sperm pressure and excess testosterone.
Our driver's license records clearly indicated: `never detain or question.' When crossing the border we should not be detained for more than a few minutes, and our stuff should never be searched.
I told David to stop at the first gas station so I could buy some water for us, two really tall cold bottles. We sat on a curb outside that store and guzzled our water bottles.
One question he had while researching the mission was why so many people were driving down to Juarez to run and mountain bike in the mountains when we had plenty of mountains around El Paso. We learned that nearly all the mountains around El Paso were former (WW2, Korean War) artillery ranges and had thousands of unexploded shells on the ground, so they were closed to the public and often too steep, but Mexico never bombed their mountains and the slopes weren't as steep, therefore they had fantastic places to run, hike, and mountain bike. The mountains west of Juarez had hundreds of well established trails, some over 100 years old and some were well marked too.
All along the west side of the mountains were tourist places to hike or mountain bike that sold food, water, first aid services, and other resources for American and Mexican tourists. It was a very popular area that drew thousands of people every year during cooler weather.
The next day we downloaded half of the images from the drone, the rest would be available after it landed at Holloman AFB and got connected to wifi. The camo style nature cams we mounted high in trees were already sending photos and data via satellite to the Pentagon, we had their streams copied to WSMR so we could download them locally. The nature cams were set to self destruct 72 hours after their batteries ran down. The cases might survive but the insides would be destroyed beyond recognition. If the horse ranch people saw one and brought it home and opened it they would be in for a surprise when self destruct was triggered without warning.
We spent six long days closely examining the images and clearly identified our target. Since he dressed the same every day it made him easier to spot and eventually we followed his routines day after day. Basically he got on the same brown horse and followed the tourists for their morning and late afternoon trail rides around the ranch, he followed behind them like a rear guard. He also seemed to check certain spots around the property every day, like a perimeter check. We could not identify what part of the ranch he bunked in but we discovered that he went to one of the camouflaged buildings every afternoon, we suspected he fed and checked on their prisoners, maybe fucked one or more, then rode back to the main building.
Life was good for old Marco, too bad the good times were about to end.
I was already having nightmares about what we were going to do to his corpse.
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail