It was indeed the cigarette smoker I’d seen on the dock earlier. Now, he was kneeling in a kind of low, camuflaje47 duck blind affair, with his suppressed Uzi muzzle pointed over the top of it directed toward the path, giving him a wide and relatively unobstructed field of fire. But he wasn’t alert. He wasn’t in Condition Red. Hell—he wasn’t even in Condition Yellow. The gun was still slung over his left shoulder. His right hand and arm rested lazily over the wooden stock of the weapon, his finger indexed along the trigger guard.
But he obviously had heard something: his attention was directed toward the opposite side of the path. That, of course, was where Boomerang was working his way toward the villa.
I watched. Señor Brut shifted his position slightly to give himself a better view over the top of his blind. That gave me the opportunity to move another two feet closer. Then, finally, he upped his threatcon from alpha to bravo, raising the Uzi, bringing it up toward his shoulder. But he was now doing what so many unschooled gunsels do: he was tunneling. His cone of vision, indeed, all of his audio/visual concentration was completely focused on Boomerang—a spread of no more than twenty degrees. Which meant, of course, that he was excluding every iota of sensory perception from the other 340 degrees around him. He was paying no attention at all to moi. So, of course Señor Brut didn’t sense my presence until it was far too late for him to do much about it. He kind of turned, wide-eyed and surprised, but by that time I was on him.
First things first: I wrestled the Uzi out of his grasp. Suppressed or not, I didn’t want his fingers impulsively squeezing the damn thing’s trigger and sending a burst of full-auto who-knew-where. I twisted, and the subgun came loose from his grip. But I couldn’t get the sling from around his neck. Why? Because Señor Brut was in reality a brute Señor, a wiry little man who was all muscle and no body fat at all, and despite the fact that I outweighed him by a hundred pounds or so he fought hard and he was determined to do me as much damage as I was about to do him.
We rolled around, which jammed the PDW strapped to my back directly into my kidneys and didn’t do me much good at all. So I popped him in the face, breaking his nose. He snorted blood at me and tried to make a snack of my left ear. I returned the favor. Then, from somewhere out of left field, the edge of his right hand came up and caught me like a hammer right in the Adam’s apple. I choked and couldn’t get any air. And he took advantage: he bit and clawed and kicked and kneed as best he could. And then, he started to open his mouth. I knew what he was up to: he was going to call for reinforcements.
I couldn’t let that happen. I slapped my hand over his lips—which is when the cockbreath bit me. Bit me good. I was gonna have to get a goddamn rabies shot after this evening’s festivities.
Fuck. Enough was enough. I rolled atop him and smashed his larynx with my forearm. His eyes went wide when he realized he was about to die, and he struggled even harder against the pressure of my body and my momentum. But it was too little, too late. I kept crushing until I’d choked off all his air. Then I took his head and gave it the Roguish three-sixty, listening with some satisfaction as I heard the bones separate and finally give way.
I laid him back on the ground, rolled onto my own back, and caught my breath. I thought I’d lain there for no more than a second or two, but obviously I’d been there longer—and unconscious for some of the time—because when I opened my eyes I saw Boomerang’s face looking down at me.
His expression was the kind of who-gives-a-shit look caregivers bestow on the drooling, dementia-ridden denizens of nursing homes when they’ve just shit in their Depends.
“Had a nice nap, Pibe?” he mouthed.
I looked up at him and let him read my lips: “Fuck you.” Then I rolled over and began to frisk the corpse. I stowed Señor Brut’s wallet—the name I read off his Colombian driver’s license was Luis Garcia—and his pistol in Boomerang’s knapsack, and handed the Uzi over, too. Then I started to move the body. I didn’t want to leave him where he was. I wanted to put him under water, where he’d be harder to find.
Yes, this probably meant I wouldn’t get to prowl and growl through the villa grounds as much as I’d hoped to. But I couldn’t leave such obvious evidence that we’d been here. If the asshole just disappeared, there was a chance Gwilliam’s people might think he’d drowned. Not much of a chance, to be sure. But it was certainly a better option than leaving Señor Brut’s corpse in the bushes, where he’d most certainly be found by his compañeros.
0002. We went through Señor Brut’s duck blind. He had it very well stocked, which told me he’d pulled all-night sentry duty and he wasn’t expecting a replacement. There were binoculars, and cigarettes, and a package of sweet buns, two extra magazines for the Uzi, and two thermos jugs of sweet coffee, all set neatly by a folding canvas stool. I decided to leave everything untouched—except for the binoculars, the Uzi, and the spare mags, all of which I could certainly put to good use tonight. I handed them off, and then Boomerang helped me heft Señor Brut’s corpse onto my shoulders. Carefully and, most important, quietly, I made my way down to the bank. I retrieved a fivemeter length of chain from the Patricia Desens and wrapped Señor Brut’s body in it. Then I dragged him into the water, muscled him out into midstream, and let him ease out of sight in the slow current. Then I stroked back to where Boomerang was waiting for me.
0012. We worked our way around the western side of the villa wall. The wall itself was pretty classic South American Villa: it was ten feet high, probably concrete block core reinforced by steel rebar, and faced with hand-applied stucco. At each corner, a post atop the wall held a pair of halogen floodlights focused down into the courtyard. The structure was topped with concertina wire, and shards of broken glass had been cemented into the crown of the wall to make an assault even more difficult. But not for folks like me. I simply scampered up a convenient tree, two of whose heavy limbs overhung the wall by five feet, to get a panoramic view of the compound.
Okay, okay: since this book is a novel, I don’t feel bad about admitting to you that what I just said was total fiction. So, let me be completely honest. I didn’t scamper. I far from scampered. I used every tired, aching muscle in my much-abused body and fought my way, foot by foot, inch by inch, centimeter by centimeter, up five or so yards of smooth bark, through thickets of unfriendly, thorny branches and razor-sharp-edged leaves.
Climbing a tree is not easy when your wrist is throbbing painfully. Nor is it easy if you do not have the right equipment, like a set of crampons, or a wide leather climbing belt and a soft rope to help you hold your position on the trunk. Climbing a tree in Argentina—where the leaves of the species of tree I happened to be climbing burned my skin every time I brushed against one of them, where the branches were filled with two-inch-long thorns that were as tough and as sharp as eight-penny nails, and where the bark was as slick as deer guts—was ANF2A, which, as you can probably guess, stands for Absofuckinglutely No Fun At All. Not to mention that my C248 was compounded by the fact that I was operating in hostile territory and couldn’t make any noise that might lead to my discovery.
By the time I settled my weight in the tree crotch, I was fucking shaking. My face and neck were on fire from the goddamn leaves and thorns. My sweatshirt was shredded. My right hand felt like I’d just picked up a handful of white phosphorus. And my left leg? Holy shit, my left leg hurt more than my fucking right hand. I fought the nausea and the burning, and worked to get my body under control, by which I mean I forced my brain to wall off the pain and injuries, and concentrate on GETTING THE FUCKING JOB DONE.
I did a Zen breathing exercise to slow my respiration. And then I checked the rest of me, because I still had an extreme, throbbing pain in my right thigh. I ran my hands over the fabric of the jeans, found the problem, reached down, and used my right thumb and forefinger to wrench a good-size thorn out of the meat of my sartorius muscle. Oh, that really felt good. By which I mean I was very much alive right then.
But there was no time to celebrate
life. I peered over the wall into the compound. To be honest, there wasn’t much to see, but there was a lot to see. Let me explain. The rear courtyard was deserted except for three vehicles: a shiny, black Land Rover, a fifteen-foot white FedEx delivery truck, and an all-too-familiar-looking, beat-up van that was anonymously dark in the dim light, but was probably painted chocolate brown. I recognized two of those three vehicles—and so, I hope, do you.
Gotcha, Gwilliam.
Remember what I told you about countersurveillance? You don’t? Then you are a shit-for-brains who needs to take one of those reading retention courses. But since you actually paid good money for this book I guess I’ll have to repeat myself. Okay: I told you that the core of countersurveillance is a matter of staying on the edge of the observational envelope. In a nutshell, that means remembering details and never becoming complacent. Complacency is at the root of every successful terrorist operation.
I saw what Gwilliam had in mind—and so should you, by now. Every day at the same time, a FedEx truck pulled up three hundred or so yards from the front of the embassy while the driver did his paperwork. The first time that had happened, the guards probably took notice of him. And the second and third and fourth times, too. But by the third week or so, he was just another part of the scenery around the embassy grounds. The FedEx truck was simply one more element factored into the embassy’s daily schedule. He had become, in fact, invisible.
That, my friends, is how real-life terrorists—the sorts of terrorists who really know their business—work. They do not act impulsively or run seat-of-the-pants ops. They understand how operations work. They gather intelligence. They do their homework. They lull you into indolence, apathy, and laziness. And then, when your guard is down, they strike. Remember: I’d told Gunny Jarriel all about the dog walker. I hadn’t mentioned the Federal Express truck, because I, too, had accepted it as just another regular element of the daily grind. I had broken my own SpecWar Commandment. Even I, whose understanding of counterterrorism is second to no man’s, had committed the sin of assuming.
The only thing I didn’t know is how they’d hit the embassy. Even if the fucking FedEx truck was filled to the brim with explosives, it would do only minimal damage to the embassy building because of the way the place was set back from the street. Even the most powerful truck bomb does no good if you can’t use the target building itself to increase the power of the explosion, and the embassy was a hundred yards from the curbside—which made it almost four hundred yards from where the truck parked every day. And I knew that they’d never shift the truck’s position for the attack, because shifting it just might give the attack away to the embassy’s security personnel.
Here is another factor I didn’t know: was the truck in this here courtyard the same truck I’d seen at the embassy, which made the driver an accessory or a participant, or was this a substitute truck that Gwilliam and his people would use only once?
0019. There was only one way to find out. And it involved a considerable amount of pain. But first, I wanted reinforcements. I silent-signaled Boomerang, talking with my hands until he understood what I wanted and what I needed. He answered with a single up/down nod, and then disappeared into the bush. I concentrated on scoping out the villa and the rear courtyard. I didn’t want us to be caught on video, or trip any motion detectors.
0024. I interrupted my eval, looked down, and saw Randy and Timex patiently standing at the base of the tree. I hadn’t heard them approach, which gives you some idea about their tradecraft. I let my fingers do the talking for a few seconds. Randy nodded, then removed the lightweight line out of his knapsack, worked on it for about a minute, coiled it up, tied off the ends, and tossed the line up to me. I caught it on the second pitch. Then, the line around my neck, I inched my way out onto the thick limb, balancing myself as best I could as the springy wood moved under my weight. As I inched out, Boomerang, with Randy’s PDW on his back, worked his way up the slick bark of the trunk a lot faster than I had, eased past the thorns, and settled into the crotch of the tree.
He was there by the time I’d just moved past the top of the wall and its nasty, sharp obstacles. Once clear of the razor wire and broken glass, I attached the line to the limb, tested the hitch to make sure it would hold, and then swung my body out, and down, my weight transferring to the line, on which Randy had improvised a series of climbing knots.
I lowered myself hand over hand until I stood on what the Kennedy clan of Massachusetts calls “terror firmer.” As Boomerang covered me I unslung the suppressed PDW from its stowed position on my back, and adjusted the sling so the weapon could hang in a CQC position around my shoulders. I dropped to one knee, extended and locked the folding stock, and put the subgun to my shoulder in low ready position to cover Boomerang’s insertion.
The courtyard was paved in patterned tile. It was perhaps seventy feet square. On the far side was a driveway, also of tile, that no doubt led to the front of the villa, the main gate, and the road. I say “no doubt” because there was no way any of these vehicles had been brought up from the dock. The path and the gate were too narrow, and the dock wouldn’t support the weight of the truck.
Boomerang lowered himself onto the tile and made his PDW ready. I looked up. Rotten Randy had pulled the climbing rope back up out of sight. He was sitting in the crotch of the tree, at the base of the limb we’d dropped from, Señor Brut’s silenced Uzi scanning the courtyard to give us suppressive firepower should we need it.
0028. Show Time. The villa was designed in the classic Spanish hacienda style. In other words, it looked something like a block-style capital letter U, all surrounded by a wall. There would be a front courtyard, probably gated. As you faced the U, straight ahead would be the house’s public areas: the living room, the dining room, and maybe a library or den. The kitchen and staff quarters would be in one of the vertical members of the U, in the front part of the house. On the opposite side would lie the private living quarters. In haciendas, the wide, formal corridor that joins the two wings generally contains a huge foyer and a small inner courtyard, as well as the living room and dining room.
I moved quickly along the portside of the villa, making sure not to cast any shadows, because the lights were still on in that part of the house. I made my way to a shuttered window. The lights inside were bright, but I could see nothing. I paused and listened. A group of men were talking sports and listening to a radio.
Hostiles be damned, I retreated the way I’d come, made my way past the Land Rover and all the way across the dark courtyard. In some haciendas, the rear courtyard holds a swimming pool. In this one, it was obviously where the vehicles were kept out of sight.
That meant the master suite was adjacent to the driveway. I checked, inching along foot by foot. There was a huge, double window, protected by a wrought iron grille. Behind the grille, I could see burglar-alarm sensors on the double panes. That, too, was normal for haciendas: the private wing can be completely sealed off from the rest of the house, giving the owners a secure area to retreat to. The private area is often alarmed, and entry is through a heavy steel door.
Okay, now that I had the layout in my mind, it was time to see whether I could break-and-enter. I snuck back along the driveway, made my way along the rear of the villa, and gingerly checked the French doors that led to the main corridor. The crenellated locks were all secured. I examined the locks and decided it wouldn’t take much to pick ’em. Quickly and silently, I moved away from the glass doors.
Boomerang handed me his PDW, then squirmed flat on his back, checking underneath the vehicles for booby traps with the red-lensed flashlight. He pulled himself out from under the dark van, gave me an all-clear signal, and wriggled beneath the Land Rover.
Fifteen seconds later he was moving under the FedEx truck. He emerged from the far side of the vehicle, and just like Yeoman Baker in Admiral Eamon’s office had done, he signaled that I was a Brazilian ass-hole.49 I thanked him by returning his weapon.
0029. The
van was unlocked. So was the Land Rover. And one important question was answered as soon as I hit the courtyard. The FedEx truck turned out to be a fake. It was an old panel truck that had been painted white. The orange and purple FedEx colors and lettering had been applied in all the right places. But the paint job was recent. The truck had originally been a dark color. That was obvious the minute I got a close look at the damn thing. But real or fake, the fucking thing was locked up tight. The doors were sealed, and the rear, roll-up gate was secured by an interior lock.
Meanwhile, we checked the unsecured vehicles to make sure there were no alarm systems in place, and then searched them one by one. We opened up the Land Rover first. I went to the driver’s side door, cracked it, reached inside, and turned off the interior light. Then Boomerang opened the passenger-side door and we went to work.
I slipped my hand under the driver’s seat and felt around. My fingers found cold metal. I retrieved a stubby Browning double-action .380. I dropped the magazine and then ran my fingertip across the loaded-chamber indicator just aft of the ejection port. I thumbed the pistol’s safety up, into the “fire” position, eased the hammer back, quietly slid the slide to the rear, ejected the chambered round, then pressed it into the magazine.
I slid the mag back up into the butt of the pistol with the heel of my palm until it seated with a click that was loud enough in the silence to bring a disapproving glance from Boomerang. Then I eased the slide back and chambered the first round in the mag. Holding tight, I eased the slide back just far enough to visually inspect the chambered round. Finally, careful to keep my right index finger indexed on the frame of the weapon, I held the hammer with the wounded web of my right thumb, dropped the safety with my left thumb, eased the hammer down, then manipulated the safety back up into the “fire” position. Satisfied with my efforts, I slipped the pistol into the back pocket of my jeans—it would make a nice souvenir of the night’s activities—and continued my search.
Detachment Bravo Page 19