Hunt Them Down
Simon Gervais
CHAPTER ONE
Chicago, Illinois
Special Agent Pierce Hunt was pissed. Whoever at headquarters had the bright idea to embed a big shot reporter like Luke Moore in his team was an idiot. He had enough on his mind without the additional chore of babysitting a prima donna. He shook his head in frustration.
“We’re two minutes out,” Hunt said into the microphone of his PRC-126 as his driver cranked the wheel of the Dodge Durango and accelerated out of the final turn.
Hunt and the rest of his rapid response team—RRT—had flown in from Stafford, Virginia, the night before. They were about to hit the stash of Ramón Figueroa, a midlevel associate of Valentina Mieles—also known as the Black Tosca—who controlled the heroin trade in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. Intelligence indicated they would find over a quarter of a ton of pure heroin hidden in the warehouse. It was an incredible amount. In the last few years, the Black Tosca’s cartel had gone from being a low-quality heroin producer to becoming the dominant Mexican drug cartel by refining opium paste into high-grade heroin that sold for much less than it used to. The other cartels quickly embraced the method, and in no time, unwitting people addicted to painkillers were switching to heroin because the prices were now lower than prescription pills.
Chicago—one of the United States’ largest interior cargo ports and the world’s third-largest handler of shipping containers—had become a huge drug distribution center. With over one billion square feet of warehouse property, it offered the traffickers plenty of space to hide their products.
“Are you nervous, Agent Hunt?” Moore asked.
Hunt ignored him. The man was a real pain in the ass.
“Agent Hunt, I asked you if you were—”
“Stop talking now, or I’ll tape your mouth shut,” Hunt warned him. When the reporter didn’t reply, Hunt continued, “You stay in the truck. You don’t move until I tell you to. Understood?”
A quick look over his shoulder told Hunt the reporter wasn’t used to being talked to like that. Still, the man nodded, which was the smart thing to do when flanked by two massive DEA special agents dressed in combat gear.
There were three other agents in the Dodge Durango and another thirty in seven similar vehicles. Hunt knew them well and trusted them to do their jobs and to watch each other’s backs. Six snipers were already in position and had been trained on the target for the last three hours. Hunt checked on them one last time.
“Sierra One from Alpha One.”
“Go ahead for Sierra One.”
“Sitrep, over.”
“Site is green. Traffic is light. No movement in and out of the building. The two panel vans are still parked in the open drive-in doors. Sierra Two is ready to cut the power on your order.”
“Ten-four, Sierra One.”
The protocol for operations such as this required linking with city officials in order to turn off the power grid in the area. There were approvals to receive, board meetings to attend, but Hunt didn’t trust anyone outside his team and his chain of command to keep their mouths shut, so he hadn’t mentioned anything about cutting power in the operational plan he had submitted to the brass. They’d do it manually. He was more than happy to get a reprimand if straying from the plan kept his men safe.
Built in the midfifties, the warehouse was located on Lawrence Avenue and was made of reinforced concrete. It had two drive-in doors with eighteen-foot clearances, a total square footage of just under twenty-five thousand, two floors, and two six-thousand-pound-capacity elevators. Hunt and his team had studied the blueprints and practiced their assault on a replica at their headquarters in Virginia. The warehouse’s office occupied less than 5 percent of the total square footage, so they were confident that the two floors would be large open spaces and not a cluster of small individual storage rooms. That didn’t mean it would be left undefended—hence the high number of RRT operators taking part in the raid.
A quarter of a ton of heroin—226 kilograms—represented a significant amount of money. The wholesale price of a single kilogram was $60,000. Cutting the heroin with vitamin B and other substances provided enough powder to fill twenty-five thousand single-dose envelopes that would be sold at $5 to street-level dealers, who in turn would sell them for between $10 and $15 to their customers. The DEA had done the math: each kilo brought in a $70,000 profit to the mill operator.
That’s over $15 million in heroin. Hunt wasn’t naive. To him and his men, $15 million was a fortune. But to the drug traffickers it was nothing, and it tortured Hunt not being able to hurt the damn cartels. He had seen firsthand the devastation and misery hard drugs left in their wake when his younger brother, Jake, had overdosed on the stuff fifteen years ago. Hunt might not be able to harm the cartels, but if his actions saved even just one life and spared a family the grief associated with the loss of one of their own, it was all worth it.
“Sierra One from Alpha One,” Hunt said as the driver turned onto Lawrence Avenue.
“Go for Sierra One.”
“We’re one minute out.”
“Copy that, Alpha One. You’re one minute out. Standing by to cut power.”
With the exception of the two drive-in bays, a standard-size windowless door was the only entrance. Hunt had no doubt the traffickers had reinforced the strike plate and the doorframe with a high-end dead bolt, so he had come prepared. A ram wouldn’t do here, nor would a thermal option. He didn’t want his two breachers to spend too much time exposed. Hunt was a fan of explosive breaching, and that was the method they’d be using today. One team would go through the door while his team would enter through one of the bays. With the power out, the simultaneous breaches would allow his team to deliver overwhelming force before any of the defenders could understand they’d been hit.