In fact these days the further he got from reality the better Estrada liked it. So he was not particularly pleased when his Filipino houseboy brought news that his Minister of the Interior had arrived to see him on urgent business.
‘I suppose you’d better show him up,’ the President said reluctantly, freezing the video on the Miss Ellie who had come back from the dead. He smiled to himself.
Luis Quintana was not smiling. ‘Juan,’ he began, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your Christmas, but this couldn’t wait.’ He looked across at the drinks tray. ‘Can I help myself?’ he asked.
‘What can’t wait?’ Estrada asked.
‘Carlos Muñoz has been kidnapped.’
A faint smile appeared on the President’s face.
Quintana poured himself a large neat whisky. ‘In Cali. He was out in some slum barrio, talking to the poor, and …’ He shrugged. ‘They snatched him.’
‘Who?’
‘Not sure. But it looks like either the Escobars or the Amarales. Whoever it was, they managed to kill about twenty people in the process.’
Estrada grunted. ‘Ransom, you think?’
‘Probably.’ Quintana took a large hit of whisky.
‘Who’d pay?’
‘His family,’ Quintana suggested.
Estrada grimaced. Muñoz was standing against him in three months’ time for the Party’s Presidential nomination. And as matters stood lately it looked like the bastard had a chance of winning, regardless of the fact that Estrada was the incumbent president of the country. ‘I could always pay the bastards to keep him,’ he said sardonically.
‘Some people may think you paid the bastards to snatch him,’ Quintana replied mildly. ‘And there’s more. One of the two English Special Forces people was taken with him. You know, the ones your favourite Mrs Thatcher let you borrow.’
‘She’s not my favourite! I just enjoyed annoying the Americans by taking English soldiers as advisers.’
‘Well, she’s not going to be pleased.’
‘So she won’t be pleased.’ He thought for a moment. ‘What about the other Englishman?’
‘He’s missing.’
‘Wonderful,’ Estrada said wryly.
‘Anyway, in a few hours your favourite will probably be on the phone asking you what steps are being taken to find one soldier and release the other.’
‘I’ll take the phone off the hook.’
Quintana sat down opposite Estrada. ‘Juan, I agree it doesn’t matter a damn what the British want or think. But Muñoz is another matter. You know as well as I do that this nation is like a house of cards. Take one out, any one, and the whole thing’s liable to come down on our heads. Muñoz is the acceptable face of our system. You know and I know that he’s just a stupid dreamer who wouldn’t recognize the real world if it bit him …’
‘It looks like it just has,’ Estrada interjected sourly.
‘Maybe. As far as Washington and a lot of our own people are concerned, the Muñozes are the only reason they give us any credibility at all. Muñoz is proof that the cartels don’t run the nation.’
‘They do, near as damn it.’
Quintana suppressed his exasperation. ‘Yes, but as long as it looks like they have some opposition the Americans are not going to turn the country into a free-fire zone to protect their bored children from cocaine and our own people are still going to pay taxes to us as well as the cartels. We may not need Muñoz but we need people like him, and it has to look like we’re trying to get him back.’
‘It’d be nice to fail.’
‘I agree we could find a more satisfactory opponent for you for the election, but …’
‘So, find me the biggest idiot of a general you can and we’ll send him off.’
‘No. It would have to be our best people. But anyway I have another idea. Why not let the British do it for you? Their men need rescuing too, and if they fail we have a convenient scapegoat, no?’
‘Could they even attempt such an operation so far from England?’
‘The Malvinas?’ Quintana said dryly.
‘That was a full-scale military operation.’
‘I know. But they have the capacity, believe me.’
‘They might refuse.’
Quintana laughed. ‘They are far too arrogant to refuse. Particularly when it’s pointed out – tactfully of course that their men’s incompetence was responsible for the success of the kidnap attempt.’
‘Was it?’
‘They trained the unit who were supposed to be protecting Muñoz.’
Estrada thought about it. ‘You said if they fail we have a scapegoat. What if they succeed?’
‘We’d be no worse off. In fact, when I think about it, we’d be better off. Who will be able to claim the credit for bringing them in? You. What selflessness! All that ingenuity and effort, just to rescue your main opponent from the cartels. Everyone will be impressed.’
Estrada shook his head. ‘I still think I’d rather have Muñoz in a box.’
Quintana was looking at his watch. ‘It’s 5 a.m. in London. No point in waking them up. You can talk to your favourite first thing in the morning.’
‘OK,’ the President agreed. ‘Now go away and let me watch TV.’
With almost infinite patience Wynwood eased his head out through the top layer of fetid rubbish. For at least a minute he held the same position, not moving his head, eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, ears straining for any sounds of human activity. There seemed to be none. With the same patience he slowly swivelled his head. There was darkness all around. Tilting his head upwards he discovered, thankfully, that the stars he would need for navigation were still twinkling in a clear sky.
Still conscious of the need to make as little noise as possible, he eased himself out of the flank of the rubbish mountain and gingerly descended to the firmer ground around its base. To his surprise he could hardly smell it any more. Doubtless anyone else would be able to smell him a mile away.
There did not seem to be a shower handy.
He brushed himself off as best as he could, thinking it had been worth it. Several times over the last eight hours he had heard dogs not far off, but no dog alive would have been able to trail him through the mélange of smells in this place.
His watch, guaranteed to withstand two hundred metres of water – so useful for a time-conscious manta ray, Wynwood thought – had managed to survive one metre of Colombian refuse. It was four after four, which gave him around two hours more of darkness. He had decided against going back into Cali – there was just no way of knowing who could be trusted. No, it had to be Bogotá, where at least the presence of embassies induced a notional sense of one law for everyone. And anyway, it was on the way home to Blighty.
So which way? Memory told Wynwood that Malverdes was north-north-west of the city centre, and that the main north road out of Cali actually ran due north-east across the valley before heading due north along the bottom of the mountains. So, eight kilometres north would take him clear of the city, then the same distance east should bring him to that road. Sixteen kilometres in two hours should not be beyond him, not travelling as light as he was. Keeping one eye on the Pole Star, which nestled close to the horizon this far south, he started wending his way through the valley of rubbish.
It covered another two kilometres before giving way to a stretch of bare hillside presumably earmarked as an extension. Beyond this he found himself pushing through steeply sloping cornfields, the tumbledown shacks of their owners often visible as a dim square of black in the valley below. These in turn gave way to less broken slopes, mostly bare, which reminded him, in the dark at least, of the Brecon Beacons.
For once his SAS training seemed almost too apt. His thoughts went back to that day in Initial Training almost ten years before, crawling on all, fours through the trench filled with water and sheeps’ intestines and God knew what else. At the end of that day they had pulled the trick of having the waiting lorries drive off just when
you thought the agony was over. He had been almost swinging his arm back to belt the officer when someone else had beaten him to it. And had of course been RTU’d – Returned To Unit. Not SAS material.
Wynwood grinned to himself. First the Brecon Beacons, then Mount Kent in the Falklands campaign, now the fucking Andes. Next year, Nepal!
He walked on, gradually swinging his line of march east of north and downhill. Over the next few kilometres he crossed several small dirt roads, passed many small homesteads and one larger-looking estancia, reaching the shallow banks of the River Cauca at almost exactly 05.30. To the east he thought he could make out the faintest seepage of light above the mountains. Full daylight was less than an hour away.
As he sat on his haunches a light crossed his line of vision to the east. A car or truck. As he watched another glow moved in the opposite direction. It had to be the main highway, three kilometres away at most.
Wynwood slid into a river for the second time that night. This one seemed even colder, but the current was leisurely, and he had no difficulty traversing its thirty metres with the two guns held above his head. After examining the lie of the land on the far side – an orchard stretching off into the distance – he left the guns on the bank and went back into the water to thoroughly wash himself and his clothes.
He climbed out feeling a lot cleaner. Hot water would have been nice, not to mention a bar of soap, but beggars can’t be choosers. Especially after dark in Colombia. He picked up the two guns, thought for a moment, then turned and hurled the MP5 up and out into the centre of the river. It was just a trifle conspicuous for daylight.
A long walk up through orchards and more cornfields eventually brought him to the side of the highway. He waited in the half-light for a few minutes, watching two cars, one bus and one truck go by, then hurried across and up the opposite slope. While the invisible sun rose beyond the mountains he followed a course out of sight of, but parallel to, the highway. After about five kilometres he found what he was looking for – a roadside eating-place. On the slope above it he stripped, laid his clothes out to dry in the sun, and settled down to wait and watch. It was just past nine o’clock.
In London it was already four in the afternoon. Barney Davies was not sorry to leave the house in Bloomsbury where his wife, their three children and her new husband were celebrating Boxing Day. In fact the mixture of polite chatter, unserious drinking and repressed anger was likely to give celebration a bad name. It was all for the kids, of course, and predictably enough they had shown their appreciation of this sacrificial get-together by disappearing into the remotest corners of the house. Happy families.
It was a cold day, and not exactly bright, but the clouds were high enough to ward off a depressing gloom. And at least it was a pleasure to drive through London’s near-deserted streets. The city had an almost post-holocaust feel to it – all that was really needed was a few cars skewed across the pavement, the odd body.
You cheerful bastard, Davies told himself, guiding the BMW down the half-empty Strand. He wondered if any more news of Joss and Andy had come in, and whether their disappearance was the reason he had been summoned to the Whitehall conference room. He would soon find out.
He parked off Horse Guards Road and walked through the maze of buildings and covered walkways towards the back of Downing Street. His pass was examined three times, the final time by a doorkeeper who recognized him from his last visit. That had been several years ago, and his lads had ended up taking back an African country for its rightful government. Whatever that might be in Africa.
He climbed the stairs to Conference Room B, wondering, as last time, where Conference Room A might be. Two men he did not know were already sitting on one side of the table. Unlike him they were wearing suits and ties. He smiled at them and sat down. Half a minute later a more familiar figure arrived – one of the Foreign Office ministers, Davies knew, though he could not remember the name. And on his heels the Prime Minister, who treated them all to a wide smile and a hint of gardenia.
She took her seat at the head of the rectangular walnut table, and introduced everyone. Across from Davies were Pennington (young and studious-looking, from the Foreign Office’s Latin America section) and Spenser (fair and harassed-looking, from MI6). The tall, patrician man he had recognized was Alan Holcroft, a junior minister at the Foreign Office.
‘And you all know who I am,’ the Prime Minister added without apparent humour.
‘Very well,’ she went on, ‘I’m sorry to have to drag you all in here on Boxing Day’ – she looked about as sorry as a cat with a bowl of fresh cream, Davies thought – ‘but something has come up that requires immediate attention. All of you, except perhaps Lieutenant-Colonel Davies here’ – she gave him a brief smile – ‘have some idea of what this is about, but for the Lieutenant-Colonel’s sake I’ll summarize what we know for certain at this moment. Please correct me if I make any mistakes.’ She glanced around, as if daring anyone to show such temerity.
‘Two of Lieutenant-Colonel Davies’s men, Sergeants Wynwood and Anderson, both I believe of 22 SAS’s Training Wing …?’ She gave him a questioning look.
‘That is correct,’ Davies agreed. So it was about Joss and Andy.
‘These two men have been on secondment in Colombia, training a new Anti-Narcotics Unit at the express invitation of the Colombian President. As you know, this is the sort of job the SAS has fulfilled, with great success, in many parts of the world over the last thirty years. And of course it’s in all our interests to strengthen the forces fighting against the drug trade in South America.’
She paused for breath. ‘Their ten-week term of secondment was due to end this coming weekend. However, yesterday – Christmas Day – they accompanied the Anti-Narcotics Unit on an operation. This had nothing to do with drugs apparently – it involved ensuring the security of a prominent politician’ – she checked the memorandum in front of her – ‘one Carlos Muñoz, at a meeting in the town of Cali. This meeting was attacked, either by guerrillas or gangsters of the drug trade, and at least fifteen people have been killed. Muñoz and the two SAS men were apparently not among them. They have simply disappeared, and the presumption is that they have been kidnapped.
‘Are there questions at this stage?’ she asked.
‘What do we know about this Muñoz?’ Holcroft asked his minion from the Latin American section.
Pennington adjusted his glasses and started off on what seemed a prepared speech. ‘He is a prominent member of the Colombian Liberal Party, and the signs are that he intends to challenge Juan Estrada, the current national President, for their Party’s nomination for the next Presidential election this summer. He’s a liberal with a small “l” too, almost a social democrat by Colombian standards, so he’s critical of the current Government, and he’s also talked a lot about the need for stronger action against the drug cartels. In fact, more than once he’s hinted at high-level connections between the current Government and the cartels …’
‘How do the Americans feel about him?’ Holcroft interrupted.
‘Er … That’s hard to say. They distrust him because he’s rather left-wing, but they like his anti-drug stance, so …’
‘So they haven’t got a clue,’ Holcroft half sneered.
The Prime Minister frowned at him.
‘If he’s such a threat why wasn’t he simply killed?’ the MI6 man asked Pennington.
‘He may have been by now. But there’s a long history of kidnapping politicians for ransom in Colombia. They – whoever they are – may just want money. Or they may want to use possession of Muñoz as a means of exerting pressure on his liberal friends.’
‘And our SAS men?’ the Prime Minister asked, taking the words out of Davies’s mouth.
‘Again they may simply want money. Or perhaps they intend to use the SAS men as bargaining counters. We have several minor cartel people in prison here. They may want them released.’
‘Well, they can forget that idea,’ the Prime Min
ister said, half to herself. ‘Thank you, Mr Pennington. Now, there is one further fact of which you are all unaware. This afternoon, an hour or so after the first news had come through from our embassy in Bogotá, I received a personal call from the Colombian President. He expressed his regrets, but doubted whether the forces at his disposal would prove equal to the task of rescuing either Muñoz or our men …’
‘That seems likely,’ Pennington muttered.
‘… and then, well, not to put too fine a point on it, he invited us’ – her glance came to rest on Davies – ‘to go and get our men back ourselves.’
‘What?’ Holcroft half spluttered.
She shot him a withering glance. ‘Before we ask whether this should be done, I’d like an opinion on whether it could be done. Lieutenant-Colonel Davies?’
All Davies’s military instincts revolted against giving a snap judgement. He knew next to nothing about either Colombia in particular or South America in general. But he also knew this was a crucial moment, that the Prime Minister expected a yes, perhaps even needed one to get the possibility past people like Holcroft. And damn it, if anyone could do it, 22 SAS could.
These thoughts occupied about two seconds. ‘Yes, it could be done,’ he said. ‘With one obvious proviso – we’d have to know where they’re being held.’
‘What base would you use?’ Holcroft asked.
‘Belize,’ Davies said, almost without thinking. It was probably close enough. If not, they would have to think again. But in the ops room at Hereford, not in Conference Room B with the PM looming over the table.
‘Will finding them prove a problem?’ the Prime Minister was asking the MI6 man.
‘Hard to say,’ he said diffidently. ‘We have a reasonable network in Colombia, and our friends have an even better one.’
‘I wouldn’t like to be the one to tell the Americans we’re envisaging military action in Colombia,’ Holcroft said.
The Prime Minister stared at her memorandum for a few seconds. ‘Very well,’ she said at last. ‘Let us assume it could be done. What do we risk and what do we potentially gain, apart from the rescue of our men, by trying? Alan, could you describe the risks. Then perhaps Mr Pennington could describe the potential gains.’ She smiled at the latter, as if to encourage him.
Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War Page 3