“Tom, I’ve got a small package coming in, so I’ll be going to the airport. It’ll take a few hours to run over there and back. You need anything while I’m out?” Ron inquired.
“You mean like being transferred stateside or something?” Tom quipped sarcastically.
“Hey, even you have to admit, this isn’t that bad of a place to be bored!” Ron replied.
“If only we had satellite TV or something, then maybe,” Tom lamented. “What have you got coming in at the airport?”
“I’ve got some bugs coming in.” Ron grinned as he watched a confused look over take Tom’s face. “They’re a special kind. I’ll have Mike shoot them into place,” Ron explained, after letting Tom stare at him for a few moments. “They’re small, shaped like a bullet. You fire them into trees, wooden furniture, walls, railings—anything not made of metal. I’ve also got a half-dozen magnetic tracers coming, as well. We can just slip them onto Garza’s cars. They have a built-in microphone that will transmit the conversations in the car. It’s all cutting edge, high tech and first class,” Ron explained, the excitement clearly registering on his face and in his voice.
“Well, watch yourself! I don’t want to find you in a ditch somewhere,” Tom cautioned.
“I’ll take Pam with me,” Ron quipped.
“Just don’t tell her I said to take her. If you do, I’ll find a way to feed you to the crocodiles!” Tom warned, knowing how Pam would react. It wasn’t that she minded working with Ron. She just didn’t want to be trapped in any small spaces with him alone for hours at a time, like a car or a van.
“What do you think about my having Mike and Alex set up surveillance in town?” Tom asked as he turned towards the open French doors, through which there was a partial view of town. “So we can pass off the target and reduce the risk of being noticed? Plus, I’d like to get a fix on where the other SUV full of guards is staying, so that we know their response time and the possibility of cutting off that response.” Tom turned around only to realize that he was talking to himself. Ron had already left.
CHAPTER NINE
When Ron and Pam returned from the airport, Ron asked everyone to meet over at the villa he and Tom shared.
“I’ve got some bad news,” he stated once everyone had taken a seat and gotten their beverage of choice. “Terrorists have attacked Hamburg, Germany.”
“What kind of attack?” Alex asked quickly before Ron could explain.
“Bad! Very bad…” Ron stated, his face expressing his distress over the situation.
“Did they blow something up?” Mike asked.
“Yeah. The whole city!” Pam interjected.
“The whole city? How is that possible?” Tom blurted out.
“They nuked Hamburg?” Alex asked, jumping to conclusions.
“No. There weren’t any nukes. They blew up two LNG supertankers in the heart of the city on the Elbe River, in between the downtown section and the industrial section. The industrial section housed two LNG processing plants, a couple of pumping stations and six oil refineries. There were also several hundred acres of above- and below-ground storage facilities that also exploded. The Germans believe the city is a total loss. The first estimated death toll is over two hundred thousand, with as many as three million unaccounted for,” Ron explained.
“Holy shit!” Mike blurted out.
“When did this happen?” Alex asked.
“Three days ago.” Pam replied.
“Damn. There hasn’t been a single thing about it in the papers here. What’s up with that?” Alex complained.
“Government controlled media,” Mike explained.
“Oh, my God! I didn’t know that LNG tankers were that explosive! How’d they get a hold of them? Has anyone claimed responsibility yet?” Tom asked rapid fire questions, which caused Ron to just stare at him and not answer.
“It was rat bastards like Garza who caused it. They’ll do anything to make a buck or kill anyone for it. We’ve got to get the goods on this asshole and make it stick,” Pam blurted out uncharacteristically.
“Yeah, this should make all of us realize what we’re up against. If we don’t stop them, they will kill everyone except the Muslims back home,” Ron stated firmly, though barely at a whisper.
With the new bugs, the team hoped the slow and lazy first two weeks of watching Fast Eddie Garza would change for the better. Their whole mission was to find out as much as they could about Garza and his contacts, before helping him to have a tragic accident that would end his drug dealing and cut short his dealings with Al-Qaeda. Now, after Hamburg, the mission seemed that much more critical. Once they had gotten some intelligence on Garza, they’d be more than happy to send him to hell. Tom, however, didn’t care about getting any intelligence. The waiting was about to drive him crazy. Day after day, they sat watching the Garza villa and seeing next to nothing except Garza’s nudist girlfriend. Tom was very tempted to kill Garza simply because he was so boring.
In the two weeks spent watching Fast Eddie, they had taken photos of over twenty different golf buddies, most of whom had provided a briefcase to or received an envelope from Garza or his number two man before they hit the links. Garza’s number two man was Primo Ramos, a college educated street kid from Cali, Colombia. He handled the books and the money for Garza, and it appeared Garza used the golf course for an office as well as for money drops.
Mike and Alex had tried to listen in on the golf course conversations using parabolic dishes, but the sound didn’t come in clearly enough. The dishes just weren’t designed to draw in enough sound from a half-mile away. That was as close as they could get without being seen by the guards. So they next tried to place bugs at Garza’s villa.
The first attempt was clumsy. Alex tried to approach the villa as a delivery man for the local grocery and had almost gotten his ass kicked when he tried to walk into the compound. This near-disaster was the prompting for Ron to order in the new bugs, and now that they had arrived, the team set about placing them.
These new devices could be shot from a .30-06 rifle with a silencer, from a distance of up to three hundred yards, though the optimal range was half that distance. Once in place, the bugs would operate for several days on self-contained miniature batteries.
The device itself was only about a half-inch long, sharp enough to penetrate Kevlar, and used the latest in military strength super glue. It would penetrate and stick into any surface with which it came into contact, except solid metal surfaces. However, this also presented a few obstacles the team would need to surmount before they could get the intelligence they hoped for.
The villa was surrounded by trees that were heavy with foliage. This not only helped to shade the house from the tropical sun but kept outsiders from seeing anything in or close to the villa.
The only way to get a clear view of any part of the villa was to view it from the water. So after a short debate, Mike and Alex borrowed a small outboard boat at night from one of the local marinas and proceeded to plant devices around the villa. They placed ten microphones altogether, in the trees and on the walls surrounding the villa.
Then Tom and Ron slipped in close to the fence that blocked the beach access and fired an additional five bugs from each side of the villa into the open doors and windows of the villa. They were pleasantly surprised when Pam told them over their wireless comlinks that all twenty devices appeared to be working just fine. She’d bundled the feeds so that the sounds would be sectionalized and synchronized, so they wouldn’t have twenty separate feeds all talking at once.
Then Pam had another brilliant idea. She suggested that Mike and Alex slip onto the golf course during the night and place several parabolic dishes in the trees and bushes on the course, cutting the distance the sound had to travel. So Mike and Alex spent the rest of the night planting the parabolic dishes and mics in the trees and bushes of the golf course. When they were done, the team had managed to set up a first class listening network that would hopefully yield some valuab
le intelligence.
The next morning when the Garza villa awoke, the devices started providing intelligence right away. They quickly built a file that the Costa Rican Judge Advocate would be begging for. Then Garza threw them all for a loop by altering his schedule. Instead of starting off the morning with his usual swim, he stayed in bed and held a business conference call, while his girlfriend performed sexual favors for him. Several times, he practically screamed in ecstasy as she apparently performed above and beyond the call of duty. Ron was very impressed by his ability to remain coherent while she worked.
Later that day, they got a break when they picked up a conversation Garza had with one of his golf buddies on the fourteenth tee. Garza and the man talked about the trouble they were having getting product out of a small town in Panama. It seemed the chief of the Territorial Police, who supposedly worked for Garza, was still trying to impress the federal prosecutors in Panama City by cracking down on the smugglers who were moving Garza’s cocaine to market from his processing facility in the hills around this town.
The golf buddy was one of Garza’s lieutenants, who was charged with making sure the product arrived at the port for shipment and the right amount of money from the buyer was collected for each delivery. The lieutenant claimed he was short this trip because the chief of police was arresting the mules and requiring the lieutenant to pay fines to get them released. This slowed the movement of drugs to the port and resulted in less money from the buyers and less profit for Garza.
Garza loudly explained that the chief of police worked for him and was well paid for his services. Then Garza explained to the lieutenant that the next time the chief arrested one of his mules, the lieutenant was to kill him and his whole family. As Alex watched through his binoculars, Garza made that point extremely clear at the top of his lungs. Then, to emphasize his point, Garza grabbed a club from his golf bag, turned and whacked the lieutenant upside his head with what appeared to be his three iron. The blow drove the man to the ground where Garza continued to beat him as he screamed almost loudly enough to be heard by Alex a half-mile away.
“That man works for me! I pay him to do a job. I also pay you to do a job, and that job includes watching him. You should have handled this before now! Why do I need to get involved? Fix this. It’s your job!” Garza screamed as he hit the man with the club repeatedly.
Finally, Garza dropped the bloody club and had his bodyguards stand the man on his feet and then clean him up using a golf towel and a bottle of water to wipe the blood from his face.
Garza apologized to his lieutenant for losing his temper before once again instructing him to kill that son of whore chief of police as soon as he returned to Panama. If he didn’t kill the bastard, Garza told him, he would beat him with his driver until his balls landed on the green. Garza then offered the man a beer and went back to playing golf as if nothing had happened. The lieutenant was helped to another golf cart, placed in the passenger seat and was driven back to the club house. Garza finished the round with only a threesome.
Tom and Ron sent that information off to the boss right away. Through an anonymous tip, the chief of police in that small town in Panama got wind of the contract on his life, and he disappeared before Garza’s man could return and kill him.
An even bigger break came two days later, however, when Primo, Garza’s second banana, took a call from a man named Azzaam. He told Primo that he was going to stop by the villa in two days and that Garza needed to be available when he arrived—around eleven a.m. Primo told him that Garza played golf at that time, and he’d have to arrive later if he hoped to meet with him. This produced a very unpleasant response from Azzaam. He basically told Primo that Garza would be there unless he had a death wish.
Tom quickly sent off the recording of the conversation to the boss and waited for him to identify this guy Azzaam. Two hours later, the boss confirmed that he was a new player and told Tom to get as much info and pictures of this guy as possible when he arrived. That night, the team placed two parabolic dishes and eyebrow cameras in the bushes and on the walls of the villas on either side of Garza’s villa. They had also placed two of the small dishes and cameras in the sand dune that ran along the fences on the beach side of the villa, plus they fired five more listening devices into the open windows of the villa, with one being placed in the kitchen through a side window that Mike spent the better part of the night creeping up to and away from, right under the guard’s noses. When Azzaam arrived right at eleven o’clock the next day, they were ready.
CHAPTER TEN
The same morning as Azzaam’s arrival in Costa Rica, Jeff Karabon of Alexandria, Virginia received a package from his old friend, Jason Combs. He was startled to have received a thick overnight envelope from him because they had lost track of each other since college. They still knew what the other was doing, but they hadn’t hung out together in years. Plus, it seemed very strange to receive an overnight envelope from his old friend two weeks after he had been killed in a car crash.
Jeff worked for the Washington Post as a reporter. With the arrival of the overnight envelope, his curiosity was instantly piqued, and he quickly opened it, only to discover that inside was a letter and another manila envelope package with the words: “Open at Your Own Risk!” Jeff sat down at his kitchen table and looked over the envelope. On the underside of the package was another note. This note read: Deliver to Gen. Charles “Chip” Clarett c/o the Pentagon, or to Steven Howard, Chairman and CEO of Kilauea Corp., Richmond, Virginia. Now Jeff’s curiosity was really piqued.
He turned his curiosity to the letter, which was addressed to him. He opened it and began to read.
Dear Jeff,
It’s been long time, buddy. If you have received this package, I am dead. Probably, it’s been reported as an accident of some kind. It was not an accident. As you know, I am the chief of staff for President Starks. While I held this position, I was privileged to a number of state secrets. Well, at least that is what the politicians like to call them. What the words ‘state secret’ really mean is the information could get me impeached and sent to prison, so we won’t let anyone see it. This package is filled with state secrets. I know as a journalist, you want to break the story, but I am afraid that Roger Bascome and the president would, as they say in the movies, simply have you erased and confiscate the envelope that you now hold in your hands. This is the information that they thought they had taken from me, leaving them free to kill me because of my opposition to their agenda of installing Starks as dictator. They have killed men to keep secret the fact that they—and myself—have accepted bribes from foreign powers in the Middle East, through a shadow company called Solution Brothers Trust here in Washington. Our contact there is Hassan Saud, the nephew of the king of Saudi Arabia. I’m not talking a few thousand or even a few million dollars, but hundreds of millions. Close to a billion dollars, which Starks has used to bribe almost every Democratic senator and congressman, along with several Republicans. The money has also bought Starks’ cooperation in the devaluing of the dollar, leaving our southern border unprotected, failing to investigate the terrorist attacks on Houston and San Antonio, plus the troop pullout in Iraq and Afghanistan. I firmly believe that Bascome and Starks will try to have Steven Howard and Senator Bains of Georgia killed before the fall elections.
Enclosed in the manila envelope are the actual transcripts and tapes of conversations I had with both Bascome and Starks about these very issues. I am leaving it up to you to decide what to do with this information. I strongly suggest, though, you do not try to turn it in to Bascome and Starks, as you will then be a loose end they will have to eliminate, regardless of how friendly, polite and thankful they may appear to your face. Starks sold out the American people for thirty million in gold, and this package is a threat to that.
I recommend that you deliver the package to either General Clarett or Steven Howard because they have the clout to withstand any attack by Starks, and they will bring the son of a bitch to justic
e. Or you can try to run with it at the paper, but I believe the owner is a close friend of Starks or at least paid to appear to be. I’d check that out before handing over anything to your editor. If they are friends or even friendly, it could mean your death. I’m so sorry to have done this to you. You were a good friend and straight shooter. Perhaps you can get the inside scoop on the whole thing by helping Steven Howard and Clarett bring Starks down.
Good luck and God bless,
Jason
Jeff sat shaking as he reread the letter. Shit! Here he was with the biggest story since Watergate, and he couldn’t break the story without putting his life in danger. He already knew the owner of the Post was deep in Starks’ pocket. There was no way he’d allow him to run this story.
Jeff called in sick and quickly repackaged the envelope in a box. He decided to take a ride to his dad’s house in Norfolk and ask him what he would do. By the time he reached his car in the parking lot of the apartment building, he already knew what his dad would say. He didn’t bother his dad; he knew what he needed to do. He headed for Richmond.
As a newspaper man, it felt strange to be taking something this explosive to a businessman, even if that businessman was the richest—or nearly the richest—man in the world. Plus, the man was the president’s biggest and most outspoken critic. After reading the explosive letter from his friend, Jeff felt like a fool, since he had voted for Starks and had admired him up until this morning. His late friend was right, though. This was too hot for Jeff to handle directly, but if he played the cards right, he just might get an exclusive from Howard and Clarett about the whole affair. That was the smart call. Let the pressure fall on the other guy and then write about how he handled it. It was also the safe call.
Reprisal!- The Eagle's Challenge Page 7