Read Online Cartel by Chuck Hustmyre - Free Book Online Page B

cost $105,000.
    Immediately behind the front seats stood a black fiber-glass partition that sealed off the cab from the rest of the ve-hicle. Between the seats was a sliding hatch, three feet tall and eighteen inches wide, barely big enough for a man to crawl through, that allowed access between the cab and the rear of the vehicle.
    The rear compartment had been stripped clean, leaving nothing but empty space, and in that space, the retired spook had installed a state-of-the-art surveillance package: a bank of high-definition monitors, each one showing the view from one of the six cameras mounted around the Suburban's roof; a remote computer link that could pick up everything from live DOD satellite imagery to ESPN; GPS trackers; video and audio recording equipment, including a shotgun micro-phone for eavesdropping on distant conversations; a camera that popped up from a vent in the roof, like a periscope on a submarine, and could rotate 360 degrees and had a 20X zoom capability; a audio scanner and decoder that could pick up and record radio and cell phone traffic; a self-contained cooling and heating system that worked even when the vehicle's engine was turned off and the key removed; and a comfortable swivel chair mounted in front of the space-age, mission-control type console that operated everything. All of that and a small cot for naps.
    The back of the Suburban was Cyril's domain. Cyril was a geek, but he had survived Airborne School, Ranger School, and the Special Forces Q-Course. He knew how to kill, but killing wasn't his primary task. Cyril's job was watching and listening.
    Before joining Dynamic International, Cyril had spent several years with a U.S. Army and Joint Special Operations Command unit so secret it didn't even have a permanent name. Over the years the official name had changed from Field Operations Group, to Intelligence Support Activity, to Mission Support Activity; and some of the two-word code names the unit had used were Centra Spike, Tom Victor, Cemetery Ward, Gray Fox, and Intrepid Spear.
    The unit's job was to gather actionable intelligence from a variety of sources, but its specialty was signals intelligence, meaning eavesdropping on landlines, computers, cell phones, radios, even face-to-face conversations. To keep things simple, the few people who even knew of the unit's existence called it The Activity.
    Marcus adjusted the mouthpiece of his radio headset and keyed the microphone. The communications system they were using funneled all their transmissions through a com-puter scrambler that changed code keys every ninety sec-onds. Theoretically, the code couldn't be cracked, but Mar-cus doubted NSA would let private military contractors use a communications system that the agency's computers could not tap into. Still, the system was good, and there was no way law enforcement, terror groups, or drug gangs, no mat-ter how sophisticated, could intercept their transmissions. "Cyril, this Marcus, how do you read?"
    "Lima Charlie," Cyril's voice said in Marcus's ear, using military-speak for loud and clear.
    "You got eyes on?" Marcus asked.
    "Roger that."
    "Verify, please."
    "Beige stucco and brick," Cyril said. "Brick looks to be...ochre. Two vehicles in the garage, a Ford Explorer, green, and a Ford pickup truck...standby one." A couple of seconds later, he added, "The truck is a four door crew cab, an F-150, gray in color."
    "Did you say ochre?" Marcus asked.
    "Ten-four," Cyril said. "That's my call on the color, ochre."
    "What the hell is ochre?"
    "Light red. Kind of like rust."
    "Roger that," Marcus said, shaking his head. Whole company full of hardasses and he gets stuck with an egg-head. "Confirmed," he said. "You've got eyes on the target."
    "Okay," Dwayne said, "so now that we got that shit out of the way, seriously, can you tell me why we're going to spend the night sitting on this asshole?"
    Marcus said into his headset, "Boss, you want to field this one?"
    "Field what?" Gavin said over