Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War

by David Monnery

  Soldier D: SAS

  The Colombian Cocaine War

  David Monnery

  Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Discover other books in the SAS Series

  Prelude

  Joss Wynwood reinserted the magazine into the Browning High Power 9mm pistol, and put the pistol back in the cross-draw holster at his belt. After checking that the two spare magazines were in his windcheater pocket, he leaned back on the bench and grinned at his partner.

  As usual Richard Anderson was struggling with the shoulder holster, which he, almost alone in 22 SAS Regiment, preferred to the cross-draw. Wynwood got up and helped straighten out the strapping across his back. ‘You need a mother,’ he added helpfully as he resumed his seat.

  ‘Don’t we all,’ Anderson agreed, zipping up his windcheater. ‘You know what this place reminds me of?’ he said, looking round. ‘One of those recreation-ground dressing rooms we used on Sunday mornings when I was a kid.’

  Wynwood followed Anderson’s gaze round the barracks ante-room. ‘We used to change behind a tree,’ he said, consciously exaggerating the Welsh lilt to his voice.

  ‘What, the whole team, behind one tree?’

  Wynwood laughed. His partner seemed in better spirits today, after spending most of the previous day bemoaning the fact that it was Christmas Eve and he was 10,000 kilometres away from Beth and the kids.

  The thought was premature.

  ‘What a way to spend Christmas Day,’ Anderson said, as if he’d read Wynwood’s mind.

  The Welshman sighed. ‘This was your idea.’

  ‘You agreed.’

  Yes, he had. After training the Colombian unit for six weeks it had seemed like a good idea to watch them in action. A sort of end-of-term master-class, with two SAS masters and the first Colombian Special Forces Anti-Narcotics Unit as the class. A practical exam. And then he and Andy would be homeward bound in time to welcome in the nineties, Hereford-style.

  It was not soon enough for Anderson. ‘It just doesn’t seem right, not seeing the kids on Christmas Day,’ he protested.

  ‘So you keep telling me,’ Wynwood said, letting a slight edge into his own voice. He could understand Anderson missing home, but he needed no reminding of what was probably going on in his own house on this particular Christmas Day.

  Anderson looked at him. ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ he sighed. ‘Happy Christmas.’

  ‘Yeah.’ It was Anderson’s turn to sigh. ‘Where the fuck is Gómez?’ he growled, getting up and stretching his arms above his head.

  As if in reply, footsteps could be heard coming their way.

  ‘I think Gómez the fuck is here,’ Wynwood murmured.

  The door opened to reveal a smiling officer. He was tall for a Colombian, with typical slicked-back raven hair and neat moustache, and a row of the neat white teeth which Anderson and Wynwood had come to see as the badge of the Colombian middle class. He was, the two Britons thought, an OK guy.

  ‘We’re ready,’ Wynwood said, getting up.

  ‘Un momento’ Captain Gómez said, holding his palms face forward. ‘I have to say something you may not …’ He searched for the right word. ‘Appreciate?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell us in Spanish.’

  Gómez nodded gratefully. ‘Señor Muñoz has expressed concern about your presence at the meeting … You must understand’ – the Colombian shrugged – ‘two gringo guards – it makes him look like a tool of the Americans, like he is only saying what he says for the sake of foreigners, that he does not really have the interests of this nation at heart …’

  ‘So what’s the score?’ Anderson interrupted.

  ‘He is happy for you to be there, provided you keep a – how you say in English – a narrow profile?’

  ‘A low profile. OK, we’ll be as invisible as we can. Can we go now?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The two Britons swapped grimaces as Gómez led them outside into the barracks yard, where the procession was coiled like a snake, its motorcycle head by the closed gate. Behind this three ordinary saloons were sandwiched between the two armoured personnel carriers (APCs) into which Gómez’s unit was being loaded.

  ‘You will travel in the third car,’ Gómez told them. ‘I will be in the first with Señor Muñoz.’

  ‘Which suckers are travelling in the middle car?’ Wynwood wondered out loud.

  ‘Oh, just some journalists,’ Gómez said absentmindedly. He ushered them into the Toyota’s back seat and closed the door.

  ‘Neat,’ Anderson said. ‘If it all goes well, the journalists will be full of praise, and it if fucks up there’s a fair chance they’ll all be dead. That’s what I call news management.’

  Wynwood grinned. ‘How did an Englishman get so cynical?’ he murmured.

  ‘Just paying attention, my son. You ought to try it sometime.’

  Up front the motorcycles burst into life, the barracks gates were drawn open and the convoy slowly unwound itself to emerge onto the streets of Cali. It was dusk now, the north-running Calle Ramóna deep in shadow, the fading glow of the sunset visible above the mountains to the east at each intersection. For the moment they were heading towards the centre of the city, but their ultimate destination was the sprawling slum barrio of Malverdes on the city’s north-western outskirts. There, in a local sports hall, Señor Muñoz would deliver an election speech to the downtrodden and the dispossessed.

  Wynwood examined the view through the open window. He saw lots of concrete, the occasional palm tree, shuttered cafés, rubble, children interrupting their play to watch the convoy go past. Colombia was unfinished, Wynwood decided. The thing about England was that they had had two thousand years to fill in all the spaces, to do the place up properly, to finish the job. Here they had only had a few hundred, and it had been a big place to start with. It would not be finished for a while yet.

  Thinking about England took his thoughts back, reluctantly but inexorably, to Susan. The thought of her and her boyfriend – whatever his goddamn name was – sent a shaft of anger surging from his stomach to his throat. It would be about eleven o’clock in England; they would probably be in the middle of a Christmas fuck, probably on his living-room carpet, under the Christmas tree he and Susan had successfully replanted last January. Well, he hoped the bastard got pine needles in his prick.

  Why did he think about her? Why torture himself? He didn’t want her back any more than she wanted him back. But it stuck somehow, stuck in his throat.

  Andy was jogging his arm gently. ‘Wake up,’ he said.

  The convoy was slowing down in the early evening traffic, making it an easier target. But the only immediate threat Wynwood could see was the plumes of toxic waste from the bus exhausts. ‘No one’s going to attack us before we pick up the Big Cheese,’ he said.

  ‘True,’ Anderson agreed. ‘You know, I don’t think I could ever get used to hot weather at Christmas. It’s perverse.’

  ‘It’s hot in Australia.’

  ‘Everything’s perverse in Australia.’

  ‘It was probably hot in Bethlehem.’

  ‘I’m talking Christmas here, not religion.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They were halted at traffic lights, and Wynwood was watching a young boy – he could not have been more
than six or seven – juggling balls between the cars on the front row. He had no sooner stopped juggling and offered his battered baseball cap for monetary reward than the lights changed. As they pulled away Wynwood saw first the balls then the cap escape from his clutch. And then the boy was kneeling on the street, tyres hissing past his ear, reaching for the silver pesos scattered on the tarmac.

  Wynwood did not know why he always felt moved by such obvious evidence of poverty. Maybe his mother was right when she said it was a good heart. Maybe it just tugged at memories of his family’s struggle to stay afloat when he was a kid in Pontarddulais. It did not matter either way, he concluded.

  They were threading the more prosperous avenidas of the downtown section now, passing rows of shops with armed guards where laundered cocaine money could buy you Japanese technology and French fashions. A few minutes more and the convoy came to a halt in the semicircular forecourt of the high-rise Hotel Torre de Cali. All save the lead car, which had dived down into the underground parking lot to collect its political cargo. It emerged two minutes later, resumed its place as the convoy rolled out onto the Avenida de las Americas, and they were heading north-west again, out of the city centre, towards the wall of mountains which marked the western side of the Cauca valley.

  The tropical night had fallen with its usual swiftness, and the dim yellow streetlamps were doing battle with a moonless sky. By contrast the occasional shrieking neon sign seemed to possess an eye-aching intensity. As always in Colombia, Wynwood found the change a forbidding one. Such a friendly place by day, but by night …

  Away to the left, as if to reassure him, the large white illuminated statue of Jesus which stood on the slopes above the city was intermittently visible through gaps in the buildings.

  The streetlamps grew rarer and seemingly dimmer, but it was still possible in the gloom to detect a progressive deterioration in the quality of life. Wynwood wondered what Señor Muñoz was thinking to himself two cars ahead. How did you come out to a place like this in a sharp suit and find something to say that anyone would listen to? It would be like Tory politicians turning up in Pontardulais the day a local mine closed down. Not that they had, needless to say.

  The lights seemed to be getting brighter. And there were more people on the sides of the road. They had reached another world.

  The convoy moved down a crowded street and came to a halt outside a large, garishly lit concrete hall. Across the street the words ‘Pool! Pool! Pool!’ were flashing in alternate yellow and green neon, and youths with cues were visible through the windows. Spanish-American pop music, which Wynwood had decided was easily the worst music known to man, was blaring overlapping rhythms from several different directions. Children were already gathering round the armoured personnel carriers, some open-mouthed, some happily taking the piss out of the disembarking soldiers. One child had discovered Wynwood and Anderson, and was clinging Garfield-like to the rear passenger window of their car.

  ‘What d’you reckon?’ Wynwood asked.

  ‘Sit it out a few minutes before we show our honky faces?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The two of them watched Muñoz hustled professionally past the welcoming horde and in through the doors of the sports hall. He seemed taller than they had expected from photographs, bespectacled, silvering hair glinting in the artificial light. His suit was sharp enough though.

  ‘What do you know about him?’ Anderson asked.

  ‘Not a lot. He doesn’t seem to have been around long. But he’s been gunning for the drug cartels for the last few months …’

  ‘So now they’re gunning for him,’ Anderson said dryly.

  Wynwood shrugged. ‘Who knows what makes those bastards tick. They may think they’re so fucking powerful that people like Muñoz here aren’t worth the time and trouble.’

  ‘Well, we’re probably going to get an earful this evening.’ He reached for the door handle. ‘Miss Brodie, shall we go and check out our pupils?’

  ‘Miss Brodie was a fucking Scot.’

  They clambered out into the warm air. Cali was slightly less than a thousand metres above sea level, high enough to take the edge off of the humidity, low enough not to get too cool at night. The smell of cooking filled the street.

  ‘Makes you feel hungry, doesn’t it?’ Wynwood murmured.

  ‘Anything makes you feel hungry. You’re going to spread like a balloon in a few years’ time.’

  Wynwood smacked himself in the stomach with both hands. ‘Pure muscle,’ he said. ‘At least I’m not a borderline anorexic,’ he added, eyeing Anderson’s willowy frame.

  Anderson grunted. ‘Ever feel you were in a Western movie?’ he asked, surveying the scene around them.

  ‘All the time,’ Wynwood said, ‘but I know what you mean.’

  The street they were standing on arrowed off into distant darkness in both directions, and the bustling, brightly lit restaurants across the street seemed to have nothing behind them. It felt like a film set.

  ‘Let’s get inside.’

  They went in through the main doors, exchanging grins with several of the men they had been training for the previous six weeks. In the main hall, wooden-floored and marked out for basketball, five-a-side football and other sports, several hundred plastic chairs had been arranged. Most were now occupied by a talking, shouting, laughing, screeching audience. Children roamed wild around and under the seats, though none had as yet got in among the ceiling beams. At the far end, on a raised platform made by pushing about twenty wooden tables together, Carlos Muñoz and a couple of local political heavies were sitting talking in another row of plastic chairs. The red, blue and yellow flags of Muñoz’s political party were draped everywhere that flags could be draped.

  The two SAS men made their way through to the area beside and slightly behind the stage, where another door led through to what looked like offices.

  ‘When the talking starts I’ll do the rounds,’ Anderson said.

  ‘You mean I have to listen to the speech?’

  ‘I shall expect a full report,’

  They did not have long to wait. One of the local men got to his feet, and after spending several minutes in a vain attempt to secure silence from the audience, finally managed to coax several ear-piercing shrieks from the PA system. That did the trick.

  A few introductory words elicited more catcalls, and then Muñoz was on his feet. He knew how to handle an audience, Wynwood soon realized. It was not so much what he was saying as the simple way he had of saying it. The content was mostly predictable – corruption in government, the evil of the drug lords, the malign hand of Washington. All three supported each other, no matter how much they wished or claimed to do otherwise. While the American banks controlled the Colombian economy, drugs were the only way to pay for development. While the drug lords controlled all the profits from the trade the politicians were powerless and even the best of them liable to become corrupted.

  In fact, Wynwood decided, Muñoz seemed to be arguing for the nationalization of the cocaine industry. Which did have a bizarre logic to it.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Anderson’s voice sounded in his ear.

  ‘What, the speech?’ Wynwood asked, knowing he meant something else.

  ‘Arsehole.’

  Wynwood waited for Anderson to say something else, but he didn’t. ‘Sixth sense?’

  Anderson sighed, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Which way did you go? I’ll take a look.’

  ‘Out the front, round to the right and through the back door, which brings you into the office beyond this one. The exits are all covered. I just …’ He shrugged.

  ‘I’ll do it in reverse,’ Wynwood decided. He walked through the offices to the back door, where Jaime Morales, one of the friendlier Colombians in the Gómez unit, was in charge of a four-man team. ‘No problems?’ Wynwood asked him in Spanish.

  ‘No.’

  Wynwood eased himself out of the door and into a dark, narrow street. Night goggles would have been u
seful, he thought. Not that there seemed to be anything to see, even with night goggles. Still, he took Andy’s sixth sense as seriously as he took his own, and any other SAS man’s. ‘The senses take in more stuff than the brain can deal with,’ the instructor had told them in one of Hereford’s classrooms, ‘so it comes back lacking clarity, more of a feeling than a thought. Don’t ignore something because you can’t quite work out where it’s coming from or what it is. It may be nemesis coming to call.’

  At which point Ben Young had asked whether nemesis wasn’t the first book in the Bible. Ben, a long time gone now, was one of those lost to the freezing South Atlantic waters during the Falklands War.

  You’re getting maudlin in your old age, Wynwood, he thought to himself. A true son of Owain Glyndwr.

  He gingerly turned the corner off the hall and padded down the alley which ran along its side to the main street. The latter looked the same, but it did feel different. Or was he imagining it because of Andy? There seemed to be a stillness in the air, a tension. The three cars shining by the front door seemed vulnerable, the group of soldiers smoking by the armoured patrol car complacently cocky. Wynwood couldn’t see anything, but …

  He went back indoors. Muñoz was still talking, the audience still listening with what seemed like interest.

  Anderson looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Yeah, I think we should talk to Gómez.’

  ‘And tell him what?’

  ‘That he’s going to need some help.’

  ‘Rather you than me.’

  ‘OK.’ Wynwood looked round. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Out the back, I think.’

  Wynwood walked through one office and into the other. Gómez was sitting on a table, talking on the phone to someone, and at that moment something happened, because he stopped talking, shook the phone and then tried listening. ‘It’s …’ he started to say, but the rest of his sentence was swallowed by the sound of the explosion.

  Anderson did not just hear the explosion – he saw it. And he had a pretty good idea what had caused it too – a rocket, fired from a mobile launcher, impacting on the front APC outside.