Whatever might befall the Kremlin and the KGB, he had a private war to fight.
Panama City: December 31, 1989
President Bush might call it "Operation Just Cause," but from where Agent Hardy Gantt stood—a long block from La Comandancia, headquarters of the Panama Defense Force, breathing in cordite, hearing the blare of heavy metal music from American loudspeakers—it looked and sounded more like "Operation Saving Face."
Washington had coddled Manuel Noriega since he'd seized control of Panama in 1983, using him as a conduit in the dope-for-guns Nicaragua pipeline and ignoring his expansive private fortune until Noriega put a contract out on rival Hugo Spadafora, found tortured to death at La Concepción, his body stuffed into a U.S. Postal Service mail bag. Thus insulted, Justice had filed two separate indictments against Noriega, now dubbing himself "Maximum Leader of the National Liberation," on December 15th. Four days later, U.S. forces invaded to bust him, and Hardy had tagged along as Langley's eyes on the scene.
Noriega was still at large—or, rather, holed up with his troops, under the gun—and the blaring music was some shrink's idea of how to wear down his resolve. Gantt wondered if the guy was dancing to it now inside La Comandancia, either drunk out of his mind of flying sky-high on cocaine.
Whatever, short of leveling the PDF's headquarters, it would be a while before soldiers could root him out, and in the interim, the "Just Cause" body count was rising.
Gantt could say the same for Colombia, where Pablo Escobar was working overtime to slaughter all his many enemies. A car bomb had killed Antioquia's governor, Antonio Roldan Betancur, in July, and gunmen had slain Waldemar Quintero, commander of the department's police, in August. On the same day, in Soacha, shooters had murdered presidential candidate Luis Galán. Another August victim, Superior Judge Carlos Valencia, issued a murder arrest warrant on Pablo Escobar shortly before he was shot dead in Bogotá, his bodyguard and two passersby wounded. Within hours, a group representing 4,379 judges called for mass resignations in protest. Those complying included fifty of Bogotá's fifty-five appellate judges. Still unsatisfied, in November Escobar sent assassins after Jorge Pulido, a Bogotá TV broadcaster who'd denounced the Medellín Cartel.
El Salvador was much the same as ever, a rigged election touching off a November rebel offensive that seemed to catch the Salvadoran military napping. Belated government retaliation claimed another 2,868 lives—including ten killed by the Atlacatl Battalion at a guerilla field hospital, two of the nurses gang-raped before they were shot. Another 1,916 persons had been jailed without charges, and at least 250 "disappeared," according to the struggling Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. Vice President Dan Quayle visited San Salvador, warning that military war crimes had to stop, then flew back home before the laughter started. Privately, Langley's advisors urged death squads to stop dumping corpses along country roads, since "they have an ocean and ought to use it."
Death squads also targeted labor unions—planting a bomb at San Salvador's headquarters of the National Trade Union Federation of Salvadoran Workers, killing eight and wounding thirty-five—as well as Jesuit priests (murdering six in a midnight raid on Central American University in San Salvador). Regarding violence against labor organizers, U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, appointed by President Bush in February, told Human Rights Watch that it must be "justified," since the victims were "guerilla supporters."
Down here, Gantt thought, the "thousand points of light" were generally muzzle flashes.
Advanced stomach cancer had forced Salvadoran President Duarte to resign in June, handing power to Alfredo Cristiani, named by human rights groups as the mastermind of November's Jesuit massacre, which likely meant more of the same to come.
Stateside, while the School of the Americas now required a "sufficient" eight-hour course of study on human rights, Gantt knew for a fact that other instructors were still quoting chapter and verse from Langley's notorious interrogation manuals, sending police and army graduates back home convinced that Red subversion justified whatever means they saw fit to employ.
On April 13th the Kerry Committee had finally published its report on drug smuggling in Central America and the Caribbean, 1,166 pages that spared no criticism of U.S. official involvement. Concerning Nicaragua, the committee found "substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zone on the part of individuals Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, and mercenaries who worked with the Contras' supporters throughout the region," flagrantly conducted while Washington "failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua." In fact, said the report, some "senior policy makers" viewed drug money as "a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems."
The committee documented State Department payments of $806,000 to "four companies owned and operated by narcotics traffickers," money embezzled from congressional allotments for "humanitarian assistance." Speaking under oath about Contra leader Edén Pastora, the chief of Langley's Central American Task Force testified, "We knew that everybody around Pastora was involved in cocaine. His staff and friends were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling."
All that while con men in the Reagan-Bush administration told America about their "War on Drugs" and now staked their hopes on a "drug czar" to wipe out the traffic that still kept their Contra buddies well armed.
Nothing new under the sun, Gantt thought, as AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" blasted out of Army loudspeakers. And if it works, why should it ever change?
Chapter 7
One Police Plaza, Manhattan: June 20, 1990
Sergeant Payton Sawyer squared away his paperwork, preparing to clock out and make the ten-mile northbound subway ride back home to Harlem. It was quicker than driving himself, although train travel had its risks aside from dozing off and riding past your stop.
He heard a couple of the white BOSS officers talking in muted tones as they passed by his desk, the spoken name "Maddox" enough to tell him they were still rehashing the Tawana Brawley hoax. A month ago, one of Tawana's former lawyers, Alton Maddox, had skipped a disciplinary hearing where his conduct in that case was under review, and Brooklyn's Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court had suspended him indefinitely on May 21st. That hadn't stopped him from defending Al Sharpton against sixty-seven counts of fraud and theft, winning acquittal for his controversial client on July 2nd. Next up for Maddox was the libel lawsuit filed against himself, Sharpton, lawyer C. Vernon Mason, Tawana Brawley and her mother by Assistant D.A. Steven Pagones, whom they'd all falsely accused of rape three years ago.
These days, New Yorkers worried more about an unidentified serial gunman who called himself "Faust" or "The Zodiac," borrowing the latter name from California's famous one who got away with at least five murders—some said thirty-plus—in 1968 and '69. Like his namesake, Gotham's copycat taunted police and the press with coded messages, believed to be encrypted using international maritime signal flags.
Aside from that deviation, "Zodiac 2" wasn't as lethal as his predecessor. Sticking to a pistol, where his idol switched from guns to knives and back again, the latest incarnation had shot four victims since March but killed only one. The first, shot on March 8th, still carried a slug near his spine that surgeons chose not to remove. Number two, on March 29th, survived with liver damage from a shot to the torso. The madman's third victim—Joseph Proce—was also his first fatality, shot in a kidney on May 31st, dying at the hospital from complications on June 24th. During the interim, number four had a near-miss with death on June 19th, shot in the chest, the slug missing his aorta to exit through an armpit.
How many more would go down before the gunman made some inevitable mistake, like Richard "Son of Sam" Berkowitz in 1977, "Time Square Butcher" Richard Cottingham in 1980, or ".22-Caliber Killer" Joseph Christopher in 1981? Sawyer didn't care to guess but knew he wouldn't be assigned to hunt the freak—unless, of course, it meant serving as bait.
Birmingham, Alabama: October 7, 1990
Sixty-six years old and feeling every year of it, Dave Jordan knew the time was rapidly approaching when he'd have to make a change. Returning to New York was out, no point in tempting Gotham's winter cold to aggravate his ancient war wounds, but he thought he'd just about played out his string with Legal Aid in Birmingham.
Maybe a sunny place in Florida, as long as he could stay away from cousin Dominic and the Miami thugs he hung around with nowadays.
The problem: everywhere Dave looked, he saw no respite from the race-related troubles that had dogged him through most of his long career defending caged minorities and fending off the threats from white supremacists.
Washington had surprised him in April, Congress passing and George Bush signing the Hate Crime Statistics Act, but Jordan knew that was a baby step at best. As suggested by its title, the law required America's Attorney General—meaning, in this case, the FBI—to collect and publish annual statistics for crimes committed because of a victim's race, ethnicity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. Beyond that, no investigation was required, no punishment imposed upon offenders. Stranger still, while state and local law enforcement agencies were asked to furnish raw statistics from their jurisdictions, if they stubbornly refused to do so—as in Alabama and some nearby states—there was no penalty attached to their defiance.
Net result: not much, except a few more forests razed to furnish paper.
One surprising local change this year was the foundation of a Birmingham Islamic Society, supplanting the University of Alabama's chapter of the Muslim Students' Association. Operating from a 3,000-square-foot mosque near campus, the BIS hadn't been torched or vandalized yet, despite angry muttering from scattered Klan chapters and skinhead gangs statewide.
Nor had the Klan evaporated since its largest faction was bankrupted by the Michael Donald lynching case. Thomas Robb, a Detroit native and self-ordained "pastor," had inherited control of David Duke's old Knights from deposed and imprisoned Alabama "Grand Dragon" Don Black, moving headquarters to a "Christian Revival Center" in Arkansas, renaming his group the Knights' Party. The year had even spawned two Canadian offshoots, Manitoba's Knights of the KKK led by Bell Harcus, and Montreal's Longitude 74 Ku Klux Klan under Michel Larocque.
Modern Klan revivalist David Duke had left the movement under a cloud of corruption in 1980, moving on to greener pastures but still peddling the same old neo-Nazi bullshit through the NAAWP, while focusing on politics. He'd polled a miserable 47,000 votes running for president on the Populist Party ticket in 1988 but kept on trying. Voters elected him to Louisiana's House of Representatives in 1989, but likely wouldn't let him have a second four-year term. Meanwhile, he craved a U.S. Senate seat, hoping to depose Democratic incumbent John Johnston, but mainstream Republicans threw their votes to Johnston rather than support a Nazi in yesterday's nonpartisan blanket primary. Even so, Duke had run second, with 607,391 votes to Johnston's 752,902, while two longshot Democrats split the remaining 35,820 ballots.
Unfazed, Duke was already making noise about a gubernatorial race next year, and another White House campaign the year after. Where he'd wind up was anybody's guess—maybe in prison, Jordan thought, or walking into some nut's gunsights as George Wallace had.
And Dave couldn't help thinking, As ye sow…
FBI Field Office, Manhattan: October 10, 1990
Agent Erin O'Hara glanced up from her mound of paperwork in time to eyeball Stephen Barnes, drawing fresh coffee from the office urn. His mug was white, bearing the Bureau's seal on one side while the reverse, as she'd observed before, declared "THE FBI ALWAYS GETS ITS MAN.
Not strictly true, of course.
As a matter of fact, Erin knew that 431 fugitives had been posted to the "Ten Most Wanted" list between and March 1950 and January of the present year. Of those, nine were still at large, presumably alive and well. Four others had been cut form the list by headquarters, downgraded in the Bureau's view to runners who, if not already dead, no longer posed "a particularly dangerous menace to society." The most recent Top Tenner captured was Wardell Ford, wanted for robbery in Detroit and murder in Birmingham, busted in Connecticut on September 17th, after another TV profile on America's Most Wanted. The year's only addition to the list, so far, was Canadian Leslie Rogge, who'd escaped from an Idaho prison in 1985 and resumed his career as a bank robber, making the list on January 24th.
One bum who wouldn't wriggle off the hook anytime soon was FBI traitor Richard Miller, convicted yesterday at his second trial for spying on behalf of Moscow. Even so, he'd caught a break in court, his original sentence of double life plus fifty years being reduced to a mere twenty years. He was appealing for reduction of that shortened term as well, hoping to have some semblance of a life outside gray walls before the Grim Reaper caught up with him.
But Stephen Barnes…
O'Hara couldn't shake the feeling he was wrong somehow, a thought that had been nagging at her since they'd met with her assignment to Gotham's Counterintelligence Division. Instead of slacking off, that feeling had been growing over time, and Erin knew that if she didn't follow up on it somehow, without much more delay, she'd come to loathe herself for indecisiveness.
San Salvador: October 27, 1990
Hardy Gantt was starting to believe the killing in El Salvador might never end. He'd seen the same thing going on in Southeast Asia previously, and from conversations with his grandfather and father knew that nonstop bloodshed had been going on somewhere or other on the planet since the so-called "War to End All Wars" wrapped up, some thirty years before his birth. People became invested in the violence, as quoted from an Irish revolutionary who'd declared, "I once believed in dynamite to bring on social change, but now I just believe in dynamite."
Two weeks ago El Salvador had passed the twelve-year mark since the onset of civil war, and neither side showed any signs of giving up. Killing was in the people's blood—or anyway, enough of them to keep the shitstorm blowing loud and strong, despite a United Nations Agreement on Human Rights signed in July by President Cristiani and Sánchez Cerén, aka Commander "Leonel González" of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. One hopeful sign, just yesterday, involved criminal charges filed against the CIA-supported Atlacatl Battalion for the El Mozote Massacre of 1981.
How that action would fare in court was anybody's guess, and in the meantime, classes at the School of the Americas continued stateside, mostly at Fort Benning, although helicopter classes had been moved to Alabama's Fort Rucker. The curriculum on "counterinsurgency" remained unchanged, inevitably harking back to Vietnam as if repeating old mistakes would somehow yield a new result.
To Gantt, that was the definition of insanity—but hey, he only followed orders, after all.
At least the Panama invasion had proved successful, more or less. After forty-three days, Navy SEALs had captured Manuel Noriega in an operation they called "Nifty Package," losing only four men in the process, with another nine wounded. The "maximum leader" had surrendered on January 3rd, immediately flown out to the States, while military mopping up continued till the 31st. At that point, presto change-o, Operation Just Cause morphed on paper into "Operation Promote Liberty." In practical terms, that meant Guillermo Endara serving as president, while George Bush kept his fingers crossed, hoping for positive results. It helped that he seemed ignorant of Panama's failing economy and renewed political infighting, but what could you expect from a man who'd hired a "drug czar" to eradicate the cocaine deluge fostered and supported by the CIA under his very nose?
The Iran-Contra scandal might come back to bite Bush yet, but Gantt supposed the president wouldn't be held accountable. Indictments always seemed to land on others, farther down the ladder of command, and Hardy hoped he wouldn't end up being one of them.
FBI Field Office, Manhattan: November 30, 1990
"Still work working on the Arab thing?"
Stephen Barnes glanced up from the file he was reading to find Erin O'Hara standing to his left rear, peering down at him.
Although irritated by her presence, more so by the fact she'd managed to surprise him, Barnes still forced a smile and said, "It never ends."
"You got that right," she said. "How many hundred years have they been going at it now?"
"Don't get me started," Barnes replied.
"I hear you. Want some coffee while I'm getting mine?"
"No, thanks. I'm good."
" 'Kay, then. I'll let you get back to it."
As she walked away, Barnes wondered whether she was spying, checking up on him, or simply trying to be friendly. Lowering his eyes back to the file in front of him, he couldn't shake the feeling of suspicion that had dogged him since their first meeting.
A goddamned office snoop, he thought. The very last thing that I need.
She had been right about his reading on the Middle and Near East, but that was simple logic for another Bureau agent keeping track of Soviet involvement in the world at large. When the next war came—not if—it would occur somewhere within that region known in equal parts for oil and opium, along with its fanatical religious sects.
Momentous things were happening in Europe too, of course. The Bulgarian Communist Party had renounced its constitutional supremacy in January, followed by February's election that gave nationalist Sąjūdis a majority on the Lithuanian legislature. In March the dribble had become an avalanche: Lithuania's declaration of independence from the USSR; Russia's Communist Party losing its monopoly on power two days later; Latvia's Supreme Soviet ceding a majority of seats to the pro-independence Popular Front. In April, Hungary's Communist Party won only 8 percent of seats in parliament. June brought a Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, creating a new union from the USSR's ashes. In August violence flared in the Gaguazia and Transnistria autonomous regions of the Moldavian SSR, with the Gagauz people declaring a new republic. The sundered halves of Germany reunited in October and joined NATO. This very morning, in Paris, diplomats from twenty-two nations had signed a Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, officially ending the forty-six-year Cold War.
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