by Peter Nealen
Brannigan wracked his brain. He wasn’t ready to lie down and die. And he’d be damned if he let a bunch of druggie Communist thugs be the end of him.
There had to be a way out, a way to turn this to their advantage. He just had to think of it.
In the meantime, the Green Shirts started to move, the gun trucks beginning to edge their way up the sides of the cornfields. A burst of machinegun fire from Curtis shattered a windshield and discouraged that approach.
They could hold their own for a while. But as soon as their ammo ran out, they were dead.
***
Abernathy had indeed been waiting when Van Zandt and Santelli arrived at a small business park in Arlington, Virginia. While Santelli suspected that Abernathy was deeply involved in the dark side of special operations, there was nothing about the plain blue Ford Explorer that screamed “government” or “operator.” Abernathy himself, sitting in the passenger seat, was wearing a flannel shirt and jeans, far more casual than Santelli had ever seen him.
“Get in.” It was early in the morning still, but the old man was as keen-eyed as ever. “He won’t leave the house for another hour, so we’ve got time, but let’s not push it.” He jerked a thumb at the big blond man in the driver’s seat. “This is Hauser. He’s one of mine. He’ll provide security if we need it.”
“What about the client’s security?” Santelli was still a little hazy as to who their client was—Van Zandt hadn’t wanted to say over the phone, and it had been a very short drive from the airport. They’d covered more logistical matters than who their target was.
Abernathy snorted. “Senator Briggs treats his security like dirt. And I’ve already spoken to his detail lead. They won’t interfere.” He smiled coldly. “After all, we’re just there for an early meeting.” He nodded to Hauser, who’d already put the Explorer into gear, and they pulled away, heading toward the far more upscale part of Arlington.
***
Senator Alford Briggs lived in a massive, two-story, sprawling stone mansion that filled most of its one-acre lot. Built in a roughly Victorian style, it could only be described as “ostentatious.”
Two black, up-armored Yukons sat in the driveway, just inside the small, landscaped island in the center. Neither appeared to be occupied at the moment, as the considerably older and more beat-up Ford Explorer pulled up and stopped between them, right in front of the front door.
“You need me to come in, Clay?” Hauser scanned the entire front of the building.
“I don’t think we’ll need you inside, Cole, but on the other hand, we might want to leave in a hurry.” There was a hard gleam in Abernathy’s eye. “I’m pretty sure we’ve got Briggs’s balls in a vice, but he might not take kindly to that fact, and he’s not known for being particularly circumspect when he gets agitated. And we’re about to agitate the hell out of him.”
Abernathy led the way, swinging out of the passenger seat and striding up the steps. He shoved through the carved double doors, and pinned the young security staffer who was hurrying across the massive, two-story foyer with a glare. “Where’s the Senator, son?”
The kid knew authority when he saw it, even though Abernathy was wearing civilian clothes. Neither Santelli nor Van Zandt looked like a hit team, but they didn’t look like aides or staffers, either. Van Zandt still carried himself like a Marine officer, his back straight and shoulders back. Santelli looked slightly dumpy next to the other two, but at the same time, he had the build of a gorilla and almost the strength.
“He’s… uh… he’s upstairs. You were the ones who called? General…”
“General Abernathy, yes.” The hard-eyed old man kept moving toward the huge, grand staircase at the far end of the foyer. “Which room?”
The kid hustled to catch up. “I’ll show you, sir.” Santelli watched the young man with some sympathy. The kid looked like he was in his mid- to late-twenties. He was probably either former law enforcement or former military—that was a tossup, given Briggs’s documented prejudices toward both professions—and he took his responsibilities seriously. He had a wedding ring on his finger, so he was probably more worried about keeping his job and maintaining his family’s lifestyle than any loyalty to the senator.
From what Santelli knew about Briggs, any such loyalty would have been strictly one-way, and the men and women who worked directly for the man would know that even better.
They reached the top of the stairs and the kid led the way to the right. The hallway that encircled the foyer was high-ceilinged, with white walls and molding along the ceiling, deep, gray carpet on the floor, and dark wood doors leading to the rooms off the central foyer. A wrought-iron handrail kept anyone from falling back down the stairs, and a massive crystal chandelier hung over the base of the steps.
The kid stopped at one of the gleaming, walnut doors, and knocked. He leaned in to listen to the muffled voice from inside. “It’s General Abernathy, sir. He called ahead last night.”
Another muffled word came from inside, and the young man opened the door and ushered the three of them inside.
The room was apparently Briggs’s home office, or something of the sort. A massive oak desk stood in the center of the room, and the walls were lined with bookshelves. The shelves didn’t hold many books, but a lot of photos of himself with various celebrities, other politicians, and world leaders, along with various extremely expensive souvenirs. The few books that Santelli could see were all brand new, untouched, and whatever was currently considered “important” in the media and political circles.
It was the most carefully arranged façade that Santelli thought he’d ever seen.
Briggs himself was in his mid-sixties, but his slicked-back hair was still entirely brown. His chiseled face was starting to show some wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, but every bit of his appearance seemed carefully manicured, down to his polo shirt and khakis.
“Well, this is certainly somewhat unexpected, General.” Briggs came around the desk with his hand extended, until he glanced at Van Zandt. He stutter-stepped, ever so slightly. Santelli saw the flash of uncertainty, even fear, in his eyes.
“Oh, I don’t think it really is, Senator.” Abernathy ignored the proffered hand and sat down in one of the leather armchairs across from the desk, pulling a cigar out of his pocket. “I believe you know General Van Zandt.”
Briggs tried to play it off. “I… I think we might have met. Some Pentagon function, or maybe a Senate hearing.” He stepped back toward the desk as if seeking cover, ignoring Santelli altogether.
“Look, Senator, I’m a busy man and I don’t like bullshit, so I’m going to cut to the chase. I know that you hired a team of operators through General Van Zandt here to intervene in a nasty little situation down in Colombia. Not a bad thing, on the surface, especially considering that there’s some fishy stuff happening in the background that’s keeping the Colombian National Army out of it. Except that some of the strictures you put on the mission raised some eyebrows.”
Van Zandt settled in the second chair, while Santelli leaned against the wall by the door with his arms folded. “When you called me last night, Senator, you made some references to events happening on the ground that even Sergeant Major Santelli here—” he jerked a thumb back toward where Santelli was leaning against the door jamb “—hadn’t been apprised of. They were confirmed later, but that raised the question of just how you’d gotten those details. How did you know that the team had gotten involved with the local resistance, instead of simply following the canned operational plan you handed me?”
Briggs had gone a little pale, but he leaned against the desk and folded his arms. “So, you admit that your little team of contractors has already gone off the reservation?”
Abernathy snorted. “Only a moron would use a canned op plan put out by a politician without question. Only the crown prince of the kingdom of morons would go in to set up an ambush on an insurgent leader without prior reconnaissance. And from what I’ve been able to glean,
that reconnaissance confirmed that there was no follow-up plan at all.”
“I don’t recall reading you in on the operation, General.” Briggs’s voice was cold.
Abernathy lit the cigar, daring Briggs to object with his eyes. The senator couldn’t meet that stare for very long. “I read myself in. If you’re on the Senate Intelligence Committee—which I know you are—you know that there is very little that happens in the special operations world that I don’t know about. Which also means that I know that there are no other teams in the area, none of our units assigned to look into this little revolutionary problem right on the Colombian border with Venezuela.” He kept Briggs pinned with an unblinking stare through a cloud of tobacco smoke. “So, the question once again arises, how did you know the details about events on the ground that are otherwise not being publicized or reported on by American assets?”
Briggs wasn’t giving up yet. “You seem to have a theory, General.” He leaned back, his arms still folded, looking defiant.
“Oh, I’ve got more than a theory. I’ve got call records.”
Briggs blanched, but held his peace.
“See, there’s an individual down there that my operation’s had an eye on for a long time. Hell, we’ve been trying to kill him for more than a decade. Does the name Diego Galvez ring a bell? No? How about Adolfo Aguirre? Or maybe El Verdugo?” Abernathy inspected his cigar as he blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Don’t play coy, Senator. I know you know who I’m talking about.” He glanced over at Van Zandt. “Nobody’s entirely sure what his real name is—he switches aliases fairly often. But we’re pretty sure they’re all the same guy. He’s been active for the last fifteen years, and we’ve been actively hunting him for the last ten. He’s a slippery bastard, though. One of the most cunning terrorists I’ve ever gone after. He’s like a nightmare mashup of Carlos the Jackal and Che Guevara. And he’s bound and determined to surpass both of them.”
He turned his gaze back on Briggs. “Well, he did get a little sloppy, recently. He’s used the same phone for a bit too long. And we’ve been tracking some of his calls. Still can’t quite listen in—there are some legal issues there, for one thing—but we can tell who he calls, and when.” He took another long puff, still staring Briggs down. The senator looked suddenly ill, and couldn’t meet Abernathy’s eyes.
“Care to explain why you’ve been talking with a terrorist on the Most Wanted list, Senator? We know which numbers are your ‘secret’ phones, too, by the way.” Abernathy watched the senator as he took another deep puff on the cigar. “And we know that you’ve been using the same phone to talk to your worthless, coke-dealer cousin, too.”
Santelli watched the play of emotions cross Briggs’s face. Shock turned to fear, to anger, to cunning, and back to fear as he watched Abernathy’s face.
“Don’t even think about it, Briggs,” Abernathy snapped. “I’ve got copies and copies of copies. And while some of those are in the hands of otherwise disinterested parties who will dig into something that smacks that heavily of serious compromise, others are ready to be delivered to political opponents of yours, who don’t really give a damn about the ethics of the situation, but would love to see you go down.”
Briggs’s face had gone still and gray. “What do you want? You wouldn’t be in here talking to me if you didn’t have something in mind.”
“I want to know what the game is. I want to know how thoroughly compromised you are. I want to know how deep this goes. What was the deal? Cocaine for a dead rival? What?” Abernathy sat up, leaning forward through the cloud of cigar smoke.
Briggs looked around the room, meeting Van Zandt’s and Santelli’s eyes, if only for a moment each. He turned back to Abernathy, as if he was trying to judge whether the old man was serious.
He was. And Briggs knew it. He seemed to shrink a little. “It was nothing like that. After I found out about the coup, I started to speak out about it. Some of my constituents were getting a little heated—after all, there’s supposed to be a peace deal with the FARC. And that was part of the problem. The situation there is very delicate, and I recognized that. I warned against destroying the peace with the FARC, and antagonizing the Venezuelans.
“Then he reached out to me. I never learned his name. He said he was one of the revolutionaries, and that he was concerned about the way things were going. He said that Clemente was losing his mind, that he didn’t really stand for the revolution anymore.” Briggs seemed to wilt a little bit more. “He promised that if I managed to quietly take Clemente out of the picture, he could bring things under control. I could hint at some black operation that of course I couldn’t talk about openly, score some political points, and he’d at least tone things down for stability’s sake.”
“And you believed him.” Contempt dripped from Abernathy’s voice. Contempt, and something more. He didn’t believe Briggs for a second.
Santelli suddenly remembered Abernathy’s reference to Briggs’s “worthless, coke-dealer cousin.”
“There’s a fine line that statesmen have to walk to make things happen!” Briggs was getting some of his bluster back.
“Oh, right. I forgot about how you never met a dictator you didn’t like to bargain with.” The old general took another long puff. “It’s a nice act, Senator, but don’t forget that I know that you’ve been covering for your cousin’s drug-running for a while. I’m sure that has nothing to do with this.” Abernathy sneered. “Well, here’s a slightly less morally compromised bargain for you. Since you did hire General Van Zandt’s associates to take down a Communist/narco dictator, some good is going to come out of it. So, on the condition that you don’t even think about or mention said associates ever again, and certainly don’t initiate any action to retaliate in any way for messing up your little sweetheart deal, then the information about your association with Galvez need never become public.” He took another puff. “Believe me, Senator, you’re getting off light this way. I can bury you, and I will if you cross me.”
Santelli wasn’t entirely sure what to think about this little byplay. Abernathy had certainly always struck him as a hard old cuss, but this was a level of ruthlessness that he hadn’t quite imagined. And he wasn’t sure if he liked it.
On a fundamental level, Carlo Santelli was a simple man, with simple and clear ideas of what constituted justice. And that this corrupt bastard, who had made a deal with a terrorist—and while he certainly hadn’t said as much, Santelli suspected that the Blackhearts were supposed to get sold out somewhere along the line as part of this deal—was going to walk, scot free, bugged him. Deeply.
But if there was one thing that he’d learned in almost three decades in the military, most of them as a Staff or Senior NCO, it was that sometimes you had to take the little victories and ignore the little defeat that was the tradeoff.
Briggs stared at Abernathy for a moment, almost as if he were in shock that he—Senator and Important Person that he was—found himself at the mercy of an old soldier who was even more ruthless than he was. But he hadn’t gotten where he was by being a complete idiot when it came to this sort of thing. He knew when he’d been outmaneuvered. And he knew what he had to lose if Abernathy wasn’t bluffing.
He nodded, but behind the fear and the defeat, there was a little flicker of hate in his eyes as he acquiesced.
There would be a reckoning for this. And from the look in Abernathy’s eye as he stood up, he knew it, and he was ready for it.
“Let’s go.” Without another word to Briggs, Abernathy led the way out of the room. As he headed for the stairs, he pulled a phone out of his pocket and brought it to his ear. “Cole? Get the boys moving. I think John could probably use some help.”
Chapter 23
Galvez stared at the carnage and cursed viciously, directing every bit of hatred and venom up toward the mercenaries and their bourgeoise allies huddled in the battered farmhouse. It looked almost like half his force was dead, dying, or gravely wounded and moaning in pain.
And he would do just that. Already he was picturing the bloody spectacle, and it raised his spirits as he savored the images. He didn’t even know what most of the mercenaries looked like, but that hardly mattered. They wouldn’t be all that recognizable, anyway, not when he was through with them.
“Spread out, salvage the machineguns, and lock that building down. No one gets out.” He thought a moment, then grabbed Lorenzo by the arm. “Go round up some of the local farmers. Preferably those who have grumbled or caused trouble. We’ll give them empty weapons and drive them up through the fields, force the gringos to waste their ammunition.” A lot of bullets had been expended that night. Once the resistance was out of ammunition, taking the farmhouse and dragging them out would be easy.
He stared up at the farmhouse again. The eastern sky was getting lighter. The sun would be up in the next half hour. Soon, this would be over.
Then he’d have to deal with Clemente himself. He cursed again, glaring his hate toward the farmhouse.
***
“Hey, Colonel? You see that guy down there, just behind the least-shot-up gun truck?” Wade was squinting over his sights, having taken his turn at one of the southern windows. Since the Green Shirts had fallen back and the fight had died down to the occasional sporadic burst of fire from a distance, the weary and beleaguered mercenaries and their local allies had dropped to fifty percent security.
In reality, that had meant that the Blackhearts were up on guard, while the locals mostly collapsed. Pacheco seemed to be the only one who was alert and ready to fight. The rest—even though they were farmers and used to long hours of hard work, they weren’t used to the stress of combat—had just sort of slumped to the floor, staying low and away from the windows and doors, especially since the enemy fire had never completely stopped.