Target Deck - 02 by Jack Murphy Page B

over in the mirror one last time. Running a hand through his hair he found it coarse and thick despite the impromptu washing. His face was drawn, he had lost some water weight over the last few days. His eyes were sharp even if his body wasn't back to full capacity. Grabbing a bottle of water from the on board refrigerator, he downed half of it in one gulp.
    When the plane halted the co-pilot came forward and dropped the folding stairs down to the ground.
    “Good luck bud. We've done of a few of these that turned out to be one way trips for our passenger.”
    “Just keep the engines running,” Deckard said dryly. “This shouldn't take long.”

    Frank winced as pain shot up his bum leg. He swallowed a few painkillers before tapping out a pinch of Copenhagen snuff that he packed into his lower lip. War is hell.
    In front of him was the communications array that Sergeant Zhen's platoon had dismantled and taken off an objective with them. It had taken him a while to piece it together. The VHS receiver, microwave relay, and duplex were laid out on the floor the way it would have been when it was operational. It was a strange combination of communications gear to say the least.
    After running recon patrols with the Ranger Reconnaissance Detachment, or RRD, for a number of years he had been recruited to the Intelligence Support Activity. ISA was perhaps the most secret, most compartmentalized asset within the Special Operations community. They conducted deep penetration missions behind enemy lines to gather intelligence for SEAL Team Six and Delta Force missions. Frank would go out with a partner, sometimes he'd go out alone, spending long stretches by himself in the mountains of Afghanistan.
    His primary specialty within ISA was as a HUMINT, or Human Intelligence collector; however he had to cross-train with the knob turners as well. They taught him how to use bleeding edge signals intelligence equipment, how to break into communications networks, intercept enemy transmissions, and conduct traffic analysis. Although a knuckle dragger by trade, he had enough background to put together and understand what he was looking at presently.
    The enemy they had faced in Afghanistan and Iraq had been tenacious to say the least. It was a case of military Darwinism. With SEALs, Rangers, and Delta grinding away at the terrorists, the dumb ones didn't last long. The smart ones were the mullahs and cell leaders who cynically used their followers for terrorist attacks. Those guys, the foot soldiers, were dangerous in that they often had no interest in actually surviving their attacks. ISA helped US Special Operations units in knowing where the bad guys were and sometimes helped them in the killing.
    As the war stretched out over a decade the enemy adapted, countering American tactics, and forcing them to innovate on a daily basis. Frank had seen the enemy make some impressive moves but the Mexican cartels were in a category all their own. Their funding, equipment, weapons, and tactics, as well as their technical sophistication blew the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of the water.
    The cartels had established a pirate net that piggy-backed on the pre-existing telecommunications infrastructure in Mexico. The cartel had clearly done a cost to benefit ratio analysis and realized that they could save on costs by hopping across the civilian cell phone towers but then convert to VHF to make it harder to trace their calls and maintain their COMSEC.
    The way it would work was that a cartel member would place a call with his cell phone to another member. The call would bounce across the commercial microwave relay towers used by civilian cell phone traffic. In addition, the cartels would raise their own microwave relays on communication masts in order to fill dead zones or help confuse anyone trying to track them. The signal would bounce across the network until it reached a specific repeater which would then use multiplexers and converters to convert the