Grayman Book Two: The Ratings War

Part One: Safe for Democracy

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"…that the top story of the day worldwide is the beginning of Operation: Safe for Democracy, as the newly-formed United Nations Tactical Force initiates surgical military sanctions against terrorist targets across the globe. From time-zone to time-zone, moving like yesterday’s New Year celebrations, we began to receive news of attacks beginning in east Asia in the early hours of this morning, complete with high-quality video footage directly from the aircraft and helmet cameras of the UNACT special operators involved. So far—in only a handful of hours—over a dozen operations have been carried out with intimidating efficiency, capturing or killing scores of known terrorists or their logistical supports in seven different countries, with no casualties yet reported among the UNACT forces, or any collateral civilian fatalities.

This success rate is not so much due to the cutting-edge SENTAR Corporation weapons and heavy body armor that the strike teams are equipped with, but is more a result of the target-tracking and battlefield-coordination abilities of the Datascan system, the new Tactical Artificial Intelligence designed by the McCain Foundation. This becomes clear in the mission feed, as we can watch the Datascan rapidly and accurately identify targets—even inside structures using advanced imaging technologies—and direct personnel to intercept them. This up-close face-to-face tactic not only ensures positive identification of the enemy, but also provides opportunity for evidence and intelligence gathering; to confirm the targets’ guilt as well as identify other potential threats. And, best of all, UNACT’s policy of absolute and timely disclosure allows all of us to fully bear witness to their operations, to praise or condemn what they do in the name of freedom and justice, and to protect us all from the threat of violent extremists…

1

January 2nd, 2021.

Major Mike Ram, Commanding Officer, UNACT North American Operations:

What happens in Vegas… Lieutenant Biggs digs up an old sentiment for the occasion, as our dropships lift off the deck at McCarran.

…will be all over the news nets in thirty minutes or less, so keep it professional, soldier, Major Powell—who’s stuck riding the M-Tac Monitor from San Clemente—slaps him down when you don’t bother to. You’re sure Powell would rather be out here in your place—it is in his operations theater, after all—but the Committee insisted this show required a personal appearance by the Grayman.

The wind that whips in through the open bay doors is a mild sixty degrees, assuming any of us could feel it inside our armor. At least you get some of it on your face: around the edges of your interface goggles and filter mask, up under the brim of your hat as it tries in vain to rip it off your head (it has a snug leather sweat band—the thing won’t come off in a gale). Everybody else has to stay inside the full protection of their helmets, visors down so they can get full feed, sealed because we’re facing radioactive material. But you: the wind makes you feel the vulnerable gaps, reminds you that you don’t get to wear a helmet (again) because being recognized is apparently more important than the risk of lethal head trauma.

And somehow you’re okay with that. Maybe just because your programming makes you okay with it.

Our destination has been easily visible since the transport that carried us here came in on approach: It’s impossible to miss, and not just because it’s pretty much right next to the airport. Black pyramid against a clear noon sky, dominating the other monoliths to conspicuous consumption (or obscene asset disposal) that make an intimidating gauntlet out of The Strip.

Luxor.

Probably chosen by our enemies on such an auspicious day because it not only represents American Sin, but also the blasphemous idolatry of a pagan religion (however amusement-park commercialized).

Now we get a travelogue view of it as we get air and fly the wrong way—north first, making a low circle so they won’t see us coming (or so that everybody else on The Strip will—but Dee won’t admit how much the grand entrance is part of the mission objectives, at least big-picture, just like your costume is).

We fly north as far as Sands Boulevard, where they’re building their new vision of that old icon to the Rat Pack days. It’s supposed to be historic immersion, a live action and CG time tunnel back to simpler times when smoking, drinking and stylish misogyny were all good things.

It isn’t the only massive construction site we pass, of course, even on our short tour: The city continues to remake itself constantly, multi-billion-dollar super resorts getting torn down every few years to make way for even bigger and more outrageous contenders for tourist attention. Throwaway monoliths to marketing.

As we fly, Dee fills our heads-up displays with more essential facts:

According to hotel security, there are currently almost four-thousand guests inside the main pyramid alone, and almost half again as many visitors milling in the casinos, shops, restaurants and theaters. Dee is quietly hacking the resort’s security grid to initiate a discreet lock-down protocol, sealing the guests in their rooms and alerting the wetware security to begin quietly herding civilians out of some of the common areas, hopefully without alerting our identified targets. (They’ve been flashed file-images of the bad guys, so hopefully they won’t cue them in to the evacuation or get stupid and try to engage.)

We also have Homeland Security onsite, trying to move on the intel themselves, however poorly.

It’s not any insult to their skills or professionalism. It’s just that we have an unfair advantage. And they’re at far greater risk. (We did offer them the use of our interface gear. Their local director rather rudely declined, and is apparently risking lives to prove his people can do just fine without our Hollywood Army.)

TARGETS LOCKED, Dee announces with its usual cool drone, using a combination of satellite tag tracking and what it’s hacked from the hotel’s internal security to light up four blips on a 3-D map of the structure. Then it picks out the DHS agents: They’ve got two dozen bodies fanning out through the facilities, trying not to look like Federal guns. Then the civilians: the place lights up like a galaxy of stars.

Shit, I hear Melendez grumble in her helmet.

As if we haven’t been studying since Dee put the targets on the move for today, Dee flashes their profiles on our HUDs: Four Egyptian (how appropriate—you wonder what they think of this amusement park version of their history) Wabs, all conveniently tagged (probably when they came through customs on well-forged tourist visas).

According to the hotel’s security feed, two are dressed as hotel maintenance, coming through one of the less-traveled main-floor corridors, delivering their primary device: enough powdered uranium to fill the resort, slowly killing anyone who breathes it and contaminating the structure for the next century (and leaving it as a monument to their victory). You remind yourself that the DHS agents are only wearing minimal vests under their civilian clothing, not full BCM-certified Tactical suits like we are.

(Well, like most of us are. At least they gave you the mask, just in case.)

Target Three is loitering in the main lobby, likely wearing a mart vest to take out as many innocents as he can if Plan A gets interrupted. So far hotel security have been keeping well-clear of him, so he still looks oblivious.

Target Four is twenty (out of thirty) floors up in the pyramid, holding the ground they’re planning to use to detonate their dispersal charge. The pyramid is unfortunately ideally designed for such an attack: hollow inside, filled with lobbies, shops and attractions, with the guest rooms stacked up the inner walls, each floor overlooking the open interior, accessed by special inclined elevators. All they have to do it airburst their device from somewhere relatively high inside the structure, and all that will take is renting a room (done) and getting the weapon to it and armed. (Actually, they could do enough damage just throwing the powder over the railing.)

Target Four also has another high-ground advantage: he can loiter on the corridor balcony outside his suite like he’s enjoying the impressive view, keeping watch for anything that looks like official interference, and warn his cohorts to go early. (Dee made sure not to lock him in or out of his suite, so hopefully he won’t notice anything’s amiss until we let him know it is.)

Hacking the DHS channels, their agents haven’t locked eyes on any of them yet, and Dee doesn’t seem eager to share.

Shouldn’t we let the Feds know we’re here? Captain Wise asks innocently (if not entirely seriously) from the other dropship.

I think they’ll figure it out soon enough, Powell gives up some rare humor.

We’re flying low enough to pass between the towers of the bigger hotels, and we’re certainly not invisible. Everybody knows what day this is, what day we’ve made it. Our ops started before sunrise hit Japan, and the mission video feed started hitting the news nets thirty minutes after our first strikes.

You can see people look up, point, track us, start taking stills and videos: two wasp-like VTOL dropships, all black except for the bright blue UNACT logo on their tails: the still-shocking irony of the UN Globe-and-Laurel with a sword stuck through it.

(No, not stuck through it: it’s supposed to be a coat-of-arms—according to those better at marketing than you are—the UN Peace Globe is the shield, the sword standing behind it is, well, us.)

But they don’t look panicked, scared. They should be. Because if we’re here in force, it means there are bad men who want to kill them close by. And there’s going to be shooting.

Maybe they think it’s all just a show (it is Vegas, after all), some stunt to mark the occasion: January Second, Twenty Twenty-One. The official start of Operation: Safe for Democracy. The day the UN declares war those it’s so neatly defined as terrorists.

And you—the one who started this war for them, who called the world to arms and made the nations of the world believe this was the right thing to do (and then capped it off by gunning down a child assassin who tried to shoot the President of the United States with an undetectable weapon he could only have obtained through very well-connected channels)—you get to lead the first and most visible charge on US soil.

The dropships turn south and come at the Luxor low behind the resorts on the west side of the Strip, and our lift-fans create some brief but shocking storms as we skim barely a hundred feet above their massive swimming pools. You wryly note the last structure we’ll pass before we arrive: The Excalibur, a monument to brave knights in shining armor from a time that likely only existed in fantasy. Perhaps you should have brought your sword.

The quickest route to the primary threat makes us drop poolside: Melendez and Biggs flank you in their bulky black suits as you drop fast on your rappeller lines, and we stride into the hotel without pause, like we’ve simply stepped out of the sky. The down-blast from the fans have already cleared us a space, but the uniformed staff and barely-clothed guests don’t retreat far: we’re too interesting to run from. Cell cams and cards come out to record souvenirs.

…that new UN army… you hear them gawk. "Omigod! Is that Mike Ram?!!"

Again, they don’t seem to even consider the obvious (at least not as first-reaction): if we’re here, there’s big scary danger. They should be running, not spectating. (But Dee can’t PA such a warning without alerting the bad guys.)

The ship and its twin circle to drop the rest of your Tacticals in position. After that, they’ll slide back into hover just in case any of the targets should manage to run for daylight, at which point Dee’s control over the turrets will shred them surgically out of the pedestrian traffic, no matter how much living cover they try to grab. All we’ve really got to do it get their WMD away from them. Anything else is gratuitous.

You feel your conditioned rage begin to burn in your blood on cue, and you fill your gauntleted hand with four-and-a-half pounds of stainless steel.

Dee flashes us a shortcut and makes it happen, popping the security locks on the Employees Only doors. It gets us out of crowd visibility before we really make a scene, and gets us in behind a handful of DHS suits just as they’re bearing down on the two terrorists lugging the device.

They’ve got it in a duffel-sized bag slung between the two of them, and they can’t move very fast because of the apparent weight of their burden. Dee’s radiation-detectors confirm the deadliness of their package.

FEDERAL AGENTS!!! the DHS guns shout, pointing their SIGs and PDWs. FREEZE!!!

They don’t, of course. One reaches into the bag, either for a weapon or to detonate, as they both try to make a run for the lobby.

The Feds don’t shoot—maybe worried about stray-shot collateral damage, maybe just used to their law-enforcement ROEs. We have neither burden.

You step through the middle of the Federal guns, raise your automag and fire. Twice.

The blasts light up the dim corridor like flares, and the shockwave and magnified noise of the 11mm Magnum makes the Feds flinch. The first round hits the bag-carrier on the right—the one reaching in the bag—neatly in the face, and you see the familiar spray appear behind his head as it jerks like he’s been hit with a bat. The second round catches his partner somewhere below the ear as he turns to run, and his head bobbles like it’s come loose from his neck before he falls.

The Feds all look dumbly at what you’ve done for maybe two seconds, then turn their guns on you. You see their eyes process the apparition:

Long gray trench coat. Wide gray fedora. Black armor down to your boots underneath. Goggles and mask (just in case) hiding most of your famous face. The gleam of your Major’s clusters and UNACT emblem on your high armored collar.

You just stand there and look at them like they’re being stupid, and they stare back, at least until Dee hacks into their channels and gives them their official orders to stand down and they realize two more suits of full UNACT Tactical armor are covering them with computer-controlled ICWs.

HOSTILE TARGET INCOMING, Dee breaks the tension, distracting us with a battle-map graphic: The bad guy in the lobby is running our way, maybe deciding he needs to try to recover the device, or maybe figuring a modicum of revenge on the Feds is worth more than taking a few tourists with him. (He tried calling his leader upstairs for orders, but his cell’s been jammed.)

Melendez, Biggs, you order casually, watching him come, Gel him, please.

Dee’s already given them their firing solutions and spun the Bomb Gels into chamber before Target Three comes running pretty much right into us. Dee is confirming his vest payload on Terahertz scan just as Melendez and Biggs pop their charges at him: The Gels hit him center-of-mass and immediately begin to swell into beach-ball-sized polymer globs, like some amoeba-monster is trying to swallow him.

"ALAHU….!!! he tries to shout the Rads’ go-to war cry, but only gets halfway done before he realizes how ‘raqed he is and detonates (or maybe the Gel’s swallowing him made him lose his grip on the switch). The Gels contain and redirect the blast, so all he manages to do is blow himself in half amongst the bodies of his fellows. And you impulsively smile your lopsided animal grin because his final words wound up being: God is BOOM!"

The gunfire and the blast have effectively let the remaining target know he’s been left to improvise alone (and without his dirty bomb). That, and the guests all starting to bang on their sealed room doors, get him wound-up and moving with purpose.

You step out into the lobby—out of the residual smoke of his comrade’s impotent martyrdom—and look up in time to see him looking down over the twentieth floor balcony at you. He has a pistol in his hand—you recognize even at distance the familiar shape of a synthetic full-auto Fletcher. You can’t resist waving up at him, the little finger wave of a child. He glares at you for an instant, then smartly gets out of sight.

Captain Wise, you call into your link gear.

Outside, Major, she lets you know, and Dee shows you: she and Samuels are anchored on their rapellers to the outside of the pyramid, standing on the slope of bronzed glass like abstract mountain climbers.

Party’s inside, you tell her.

Wonder how much these windows cost? she asks idly as they stick their charges, step back and blow themselves into unoccupied rooms on either side of our last objective.

Then Dee flashes you a warning and feeds security video into your goggles.

HOLDFIRE TARGET.

Best laid plans… One of the housekeeping staff had blocked open a room door with her cleaning cart so she didn’t get sealed in. She comes out to check the commotion just in time to get grabbed by our last stander. He uses her as a shield and starts looking for an exit (or at least a target more worth dying for than one low-income service worker). Then he’s got Wise and Samuels on either side of him, keeping him from the elevators.

Dee flashes directions at you, apparently wanting to be gratuitous. You tilt your body as indicated and Dee blows your main rappeller. One line won’t reach twenty floors up, but Dee takes you skyward for a stopover on the twelfth floor. Then you point your left arm as Dee lets go your main hook. Your secondary blows, grabs the bottom edge of the twentieth, and slings you like a human yoyo.

You’ve practiced this move on the Challenge Course enough to be almost graceful at it. The end result swings you up and over onto the balcony railing and you manage to get enough boots on to step down off of it and onto carpet without falling on your face or slamming into wall. What it must look like to your target and his human shield you can only guess: monster dressed like an old movie gangster just hopped up twenty floors like Superman, coat billowing like a cape.

He drags her back and wedges himself into the shallow alcove of a room doorway, just enough to block Wise and Samuels’ shot (not that their ICWs couldn’t just peg him through the wallboard), shoves his pistol against her temple and decides to be less than original:

DROP YOUR WEAPONS NOW OR I…!!!

You answer his demand prematurely, advancing into him, raising your automag and blowing a single round into his face. Thankfully the maid flinched away, sparing her eyes the blast. He’s dead on his feet but you step in, grab his pistol and twist it up and away from his intended victim, then shoot him again just to make sure his nervous system is finished. The maid twists away, falls, crawls, screaming all the while. The back of her pristine white uniform is sprayed with blood (and you’ve probably made her temporarily deaf in the bargain).

Dee scans her to rule out any physical injuries, then checks her assailant as he slumps against the door you’ve just punched his brains through. He seems to have no other weapons or bombs, but his hands, clothes and lungs glow with more than just trace radiation from handling their device.

It’s a good kill. All four were good kills.

But for some reason you feel nothing. No relief. No victory. If anything, you feel like you’ve just done some unpleasant chore. Your programmed rage is just gone, burned out, shut off. Unsatisfied. You realize you feel vaguely ill.

Checking in with the rest of your team, Biggs and Melendez have managed to secure the bag with the weapon, ignoring the DHS protests of jurisdiction. They find two more Fletchers in the bag. You collect the one dropped by the man you’ve just so mercilessly killed, and Wise brings you an evidence bag to preserve it in. Dee has already signaled our waiting SI team to come in to collect the bodies, the device, and scan the suite our targets had paid for.

Wise offers to take the synthetic pistol from you, but you tell her you’ll deliver it to Rick yourself—the question of who’s been supplying these things has been on your mind since a troubled teenager got one from someone (still a frustrating unknown) who sought him out online, then encouraged him to use it to try to kill the President (conveniently while you were standing right next to him). Now you’ve just found three more in-country. A sign of things to come?

Despite all of our assets, we don’t even know exactly how they’re getting in-country. Maybe Dave will have more luck with that, given what he should be doing on the other side of the country about now.

You wander back to the railing and look out over the vast open space inside the pyramid. Starting from the lower floors, the hotel staff are going door-to-door, personally assuring their guests that the threat has passed, but to avoid the areas that the Feds—however begrudgingly cooperative—are helping to tape off.

Below you, staff and security and the stragglers that they couldn’t get out of the building before the shooting started mill around the lobby floor. They look up at you and point and snap more pictures and video, and one by one start clapping, applauding you like you’re some kind of hero.

The Feds don’t clap. They know what you are, what you mean.

2

Major Matthew Burke, Tactical Operations Officer, UNACT NAO:

Michael is all over the Nets within five minutes of shooting up Vegas. We get fed the headlines as we fly over the Rio Grande and into Mexico.

…that Mike Ram himself led the operation, intercepting a terrorist cell that was attempting to detonate a dirty bomb inside the popular Las Vegas Resort and Casino. All four terrorists were reported killed and the bomb was safely secured by Major Ram and his teams. No civilians were injured during…

Uncountable images of him in his fucking costume flood every news site, managing to overwhelm every other hot-story victory we had today. He looks like a combination of Dick Tracy and The Shadow (definitely more Shadow—all dark and scary big-ass guns blazing). The best shots are the ones where he looks like he’s flying through the air on his rappeller lines like a real goddamn superhero.

My brain spins the obvious questions but knows better than to ask them: Why didn’t we just share our intel and let the Feds handle an inept little cell of would-be mass murderers? Why—if our intel is so unbelievably good—did we wait until they’d dragged forty pounds of radioactive death into their crowded target? And why did they have Michael march into a toxic gun battle with no fucking helmet?

The answer is pretty much the same for all of them: It’s all about the show. How we promised the big Shock-and-Awe bullshit would start today. (Actually we originally said it would start yesterday, but decided to give ‘em the benefit of the holiday to either give up or get right with their God. What it probably looked like to the Rads is that us decadent Western Infidels would rather sleep off our hangovers and watch football than go meet them face-to-face like we said we would.)

And that also answers why we’re sending a dozen teams into Mexico to mop up not terrorists but drug dealers.

Not that they don’t deserve what’s coming. Cuidad Juarez is still a fucking murder zone, and the Federales remain outgunned and out-corrupted. Even bringing their army into the game has only resulted in vestigial victories and expensive casualties—the cartels have too many local supports, too many assets, and they can afford to lose ridiculous amounts of men, facilities and product and barely suffer.

Our excuse for assisting the Mexican government is thin at best: that drug money may help fund terrorists (even though most of it stays in the various family businesses, which keeps them all richer and better-armed than their official opposition).

Bigger picture is that we get to show off the new war toys, visibly shoot up some globally unpopular bad guys to help mark the start of our Hollywood War, stoke our precious ratings with easy media attention with minimal risk of criticism—no one’s gonna miss these guys except their families and maybe their cartels. And all the better that the cartels focus any desire for revenge on us than local officials and law enforcement—we’re ready for worse, and eager for them to try. (The only downside is it will probably solidify an alliance between the terrorists and the cartels—the enemy of my enemy and all that—but then that just gives us more excuse to come out and shoot them up again if our ratings begin to slip. Which means what they are is an easy target, both tactically and politically.)

Dee’s excuse (and none of this works if our precious digital general doesn’t agree this is justified): they fit its child-simple definition of fair-game bad guy because they pretty regularly kill civilians in the course of doing business, sometimes very much on purpose.

But I know what we’re doing is going to be about as effective as trimming weeds towards actually winning the so-called War on Drugs. The money’s too good. Even if we wipe out a whole cartel to the last man, another will just move in or spring up fresh. The only way to break this beast is to kill demand, or at least the illegal market. But no politician who cares about re-election is ever going to make that stand.

Reason 237 of Why I’ll Never Be In Politics.

But I still shoot my gun when they tell me too. The rage has to go somewhere, and these fuckers are fair game.

At least they decided to do this in the winter. Despite the AC in our suits, it still gets sauna-ish fast when the ambient hits triple digits, and the plan is we’re going to be down here for a while. It’s a clear and pleasant fifty-five today.

The actual city of Juarez is a sprawl just across the river from El Paso, where we did our staging and dusted off. Dee lights up a dozen first line targets: Some are buried in the urban landscape, some are more remote in the surrounding scrubby desert hills. We fly low so they won’t see us coming (or so everybody else in town will), break formation, and start promptly with the Shock and Awe, our helmet and dropship cams rolling to capture it all for the news. I almost feel like someone should be playing Ride of the Valkyries.

Our first wave is only six ships, each packed with two teams. Part of today’s mission will be to prove how quickly and easily we can hop targets—hit one and then on to the next as fast as our lines can drop and recover us. The other big brag is how well Dee can coordinate half-a-dozen different attacks all at once. (Actually, Dee’s running a good hundred ops today on the global scale, but seeing so many in one place is probably gauged to sell the locals on buying SENTAR gear as soon as they’re ready to sell to regular military units.)

Today’s targets include four urban warehouses, five assorted safe houses for cartel manpower, the Mexican end of a not-so-secret border tunnel, and two fortress haciendas just outside of town—one for each of the two most contentious regional cartels.

On the US-side of the border, a joint operation of DHS, DEA and ICE are hitting a number of known players and distribution sites (including the other end of said tunnel). Overtly, this just looks like we’re working in harmony with the Feds. What it’s going to look like in the news is that it took three times as many of them to do a fraction of the job, and—most tragically—some of those brave agents are going to get shot in the line. The worst we’re likely to walk away with are a few nasty BFT bruises (no bravery required if you’re wearing full-body Class V protection with an omniscient AI covering your back).

Rock and roll… Lieutenant Carter says lazily as her flight comes up on their first target.

"’This ain’t rock and roll…’ I mutter my favorite lyric for the occasion, then almost expect Michael to pipe in and finish it for me, Terrible Twosome that we are. ’…this is…genocide…’"

I watch most of it happen on my heads-up feed.

We swoop down, line drop, blow in doors, wait for our targets to prove hostile intent by trying to shoot us, then massacre the poor bastards. Too bad they don’t have their own AI to aim their guns and hit them through whatever they try to take cover behind. And anyone who tries to run gets picked off by our dropship guns (after Dee scans and confirms they’re armed, of course).

Like some stage show, all I have to do is wait in the wings and step out into the action on cue: Jump out of a perfectly good aircraft, trust Dee not to drop me too painfully fast, pop rounds and grenades where it points me, run and duck when it tells me to, then get in position to get jerked back up into the sky and on to the next action scene. It’s just like the training sims, just like the wargames, just like all the trial live ops we ran before we got our Charter Amendment pushed through. Not a damn thing goes significantly wrong.

It’s pathetic.

I personally shred a handful of probably very young men at the first warehouse we crash, and that’s only because I’m being less than enthusiastic. All told, Dee counts off thirty-two kills before we set fire to a city budget’s worth of coke (we don’t stick around for seizure). Most of my team had a lot more fun, blowing in through the roof, blasting escaping trucks with grenades, hitting the bad guys from all sides. And as predicted, we line-out with only two notable injuries: Potter sprained his ankle coming through the roof and Kaneda looks like he cracked a rib getting shot point-blank with a twelve-gauge slug. (Neither wound will fully take them out of play—they’ll just shift jobs and play sniper from the ship.)

Carter got somewhat hotter action killing the smuggler’s tunnel. They had RPGs, only to learn that Dee is really good at shooting them down incoming. Still, one of her men—Hansen—took molten frag in the leg because he jumped out of the bay too soon. Dee shifted tactics and gave them more of a preemptive pounding from the air, so Carter had more of a mess to dig through once her boots were on the ground. A few well-placed charges and five years’ worth of digging under the border gets undone.

Simmons and Keir got their teams through their urban shoots with just a few bruises, crashing buildings from above and below, perforating anyone who shot back, leaving a few still alive for the locals to collect (assuming they don’t bleed out first).

Lee and Smith took only minor ground fire coming up on their rural targets, but the shacks proved poor cover, and they barely had to get out of their ships (one site did have an impressive basement weapons’ cache, but it didn’t take more than two minutes to clear it, what with Dee being able to see through walls and floors and all). They only had to chase after three fleeing vehicles and a handful of runners who tried to disappear into the hills on foot. Nothing with a heat signature got away.

In less than fifteen minutes, Juarez looks like it’s been bombed: smoke is