This is the first of several pieces on Operation Fast Track we'll be posting in the next 24 hours. Check back for more on the operation, details on the dark world of juvenile prostitution, and interviews with police.

It’s mid-afternoon, and Gang Unit Sergeant Jim Dyment sits hunched in the backseat of a van, parked at a Central District gas station, surveying the parking lot.

Dyment, along with more than 20 other officers, detectives, and sergeants, are waiting for a pimp.

Earlier today, police reeled in 11 men and women—including three suspected pimps and gang members—they'd baited with underage-looking undercover officers as part of a six-month investigation, Operation Fast Track, targeting the men who coerce, cultivate, and pimp out teenage girls and young women in Seattle.

"Who's the guy in the black Volkswagen?" Dyment calls out over his radio to the other officers circling the gas station, on the lookout for the suspected pimp, 41-year-old Jerry Smith.

Police say an undercover officer posing as a "17-year-old girl" met Smith and a number of other pimps out on "The Track" earlier this year.

The Track—a two-block stretch just east of the Seattle Center between Denny and Thomas St and 5th and Aurora—has, according to Dyment, become “one of the largest prostitution areas in the state."

According to Dyment, the Track has become "known to pimps and johns nationally" as "a place to make money."

In late January, after receiving information about frequent prostitution along The Track from numerous arrestees and street contacts, police began what Dyment calls a “pretty massive intelligence gathering phase" around The Track.

In January, police set up surveillance along The Track, and discovered that a number of pimps—many of whom belong to gangs like the 74 Hoover Criminals, Valley Hood Piru, and Hoover Crips—were recruiting young girls—some 15, 16, and 17-years-old—while they stood in line at nightclubs like Club Diamond and Club 131, which both sit on the outskirts of The Track. Police say younger girls are typically bigger money makers in the world of prostitution, pulling in between $500 and $1,000 a night for the men who exploit them.

Over the next few months of Operation Fast Track, police identified over 100 pimps, johns and prostitutes, and compiled a wanted list of more than 30 men and women.

Today, gang and vice detectives made their way down that list.

Sgts. Jim Dyment and Steve Jandoc look on as police bust their first pimp

At about 2:00pm, an undercover officer posing as a teenage girl called Smith, and told him she had just been released from the Youth Service Center, and was ready to come work for him.

Now, two hours later, Sgt Dyment, Sgt. Steve Jandoc, and the young female undercover officer (who police asked us not to identify) peer out the windows of an inconspicuous rented minivan—littered with bullet proof vests, police radios, and other equipment—parked in the lot of the AM/PM at 12th and Jefferson, just up the street from YSC, looking for Smith, who's on his way up from Renton.

“Their golden goose is calling them so they’re scrambling to get out here," Dyment says, adding that even with the promise of a "golden goose," getting a pimp to show up on time is still harder "than trying to set up a doctor’s appointment.”

All afternoon, police have traded phone calls with their suspected pimp, and kept an eye out for “intel gatherers”—associates of the pimp who will do reconnaissance in an area looking for police and a possible set up before calling in the pimp to pick up his prey.

Sometime after 3:00pm, the alleged pimp, Smith, calls and tells the undercover officer to walk several blocks from a parking lot near Seattle University to the AM/PM at 12th and Jackson.

This poses a problem for the operation. If the undercover officer walks the two blocks to the AM/PM, the pimp could try to pick her up en route, making it harder for police to observe—or “keep eyes on”—the undercover officer, potentially putting her in harm's way. “[There is] too much risk involved and just not worth it,” Dyment says.

A few minutes later, police manage to get the undercover officer to the gas station where she finds her suspected pimp waiting in a red truck. The undercover officer walks up to the driver’s side of the pimp’s red SUV and signals officers, letting them know to move in on the suspect. Within seconds, police swarmed the man’s car, boxing him in, as the undercover officer is rushed into a waiting van.

“That was an adrenaline rush,” she says, as she climbs into the van. “It was fun.”