Chapter 72

After talking more with my mates and looking at the next three months schedules, I was more relieved about turning the Horsey House into emergency office space.

There were no more large groups of new employees to be trained at Fort Smith for the three months. We did have several small groups of twenty men to finish out Vicky and Ching Lee’s security groups.

The brunt of the training was various police departments, including Harrisburg and several municipalities that had participated in the raid. Each session was two weeks. There were three month’s worth of those groups along with recurring training for the FBI, DHS and our own groups.

Those police departments always opted for five star motels in Washington and Annapolis for the nightlife. We would be able to get along OK without the rooms.

Another thing that was with Fort Adams, Fort Polo, and Fort Dean, the number of people coming here for recurrent training could be reduced dramatically. It was far cheaper and easier to add trainers as a permanent part of the staffing at those sites or fly them in for a month at a time and adding the equipment as part of the permanent fixture.

Another thing Andy and I needed to do was find a jumping off point close to the pipeline where it crossed the US border.

I wanted to have a basic plan in my head when I met with Andy about setting up the pipeline security plan. Andy was to plan the logistics and the manpower but I needed a plan to put all of it together.

The pipeline ran from Corpus Christi south-west a bit to miss Baffin Bay, then nearly parallel to Route 77 on the east side of it. It then continued south-east of Harlingen on its way to the border.

After it crossed the border it went south on the west side of Mexican Route 101, eventually crossing 101 north of San Fernando then straight south and hundreds of villages and towns that were the markets for the stolen gas. It was two hundred and fifty miles from the Texas border to the Mexico refinery at Tampico.

According to Mr. Garcia there had been no problems with tapping on the pipelines within fifty miles of the refinery. There were so many pipelines and so much pipeline activity the tappers wouldn’t risk it. That meant that we had two hundred miles in Mexico to patrol with around one hundred miles that were hot spots on the north-south pipeline.

The first air strip we needed to take control of was one half mile from the pipeline and two miles north of Valle Hermoso. The EIT group had pulled the night radar data from the Doppler radar located at Brownsville Texas for the last two weeks.

It had been easy for the EIT guys to do get the data; the FAA made the data available to law enforcement. I had the access because of the State Department.

What the data showed from the Doppler was that there were small airplane flights every night - sometimes four and five a night. Satellite data that I could look at showed that there were a number of vehicles meeting the airplanes.

By the infrared scans those cars were there before the planes landed and did not leave until after the planes left. My thought was that the headlights were to light up the runway.

Some went north to the Brownsville entry point and through. Others went north-west to the border and stopped. There people and materials started walking north. Some to be met by more people and ATVs or four wheel drive vehicles.

Drugs for sure but who were the people? They were important enough to be flown in to make it illegally across the border with cartel help or had paid a hefty price. Worse yet, were they part of the human trafficking that cartel supplied girls to the brothels scattered across the US? It seemed that every week there was a news story about another big bust in some city.

No matter how hard authorities tried they could never seem to put a dent in the oldest profession known to mankind.

I wondered why DHS and the border patrol was not seeing or stopping this. It was so obvious. But then I was not sitting in a room with hundreds of monitors to watch for hours. Your mind had to get numb after looking at that stuff week after week.

By the Google map the gravel grass runway was four thousand feet long, at least two hundred and fifty feet wide, cut out in a forest. It was unusually long and wide for an illicit strip that should have stood out like a sore thumb on anybody’s satellite pictures or U2 surveillance photographs. I knew there were those kinds of pictures of every square inch of Mexico.

But then its primary use was at night and there were no beacons or fixed runway lights for you to stay on the center line. Using car headlights was dicey and landing lights on small planes was even worse because they were terribly unreliable. Vibration was a killer of lights on piston engines and jet prop aircraft. Our shop was always replacing them, even on the jets that were nearly vibration free.

Then there was the second air strip one hundred miles further south - almost an exact copy of the first - and just as close to the pipeline. I wondered why? Then it came to me.

These strips were originally made by the pipeline companies during the construction of the line. Did the military use them in the Great War to protect the pipelines from sabotage? That’s why they were both so close to the pipeline. I would bet there were old roads to the pipeline right of ways. The cartel was just taking advantage of the past.