by Ross Sidor
“You didn’t say anything about murdering noncombatants.”
“You told me that you were willing to go as far as it took.”
“They killed a fucking kid!”
Hearing the outburst, one of the Colombian troops sat a little straighter on the edge of his seat, looking from Avery to Daniel, and reluctantly relaxed when the latter waved him off.
“How many times have you done shit like that, Daniel?”
“More than I care to think about. But I am completely willing to trade a couple lives to save hundreds, or thousands. I don’t make the rules, I only play by them. If your conscience is troubled, you might want to remind yourself why we came here in the first place. If you want, I can show you the passenger manifest of Avianca Flight 224. There were several children onboard.”
Daniel refilled his glass after downing the rest of its contents in one gulp.
“Our world is an ugly place, and there’s no room for moralizing, especially not by men like us. We are not moral men. You should understand better than most. The masters you serve collaborate with killers and butchers in Iraq and Syria in the name of freedom, liberty, and protecting the innocent. How many wives and children has your government killed in drone attacks?”
Avery’s first inclination was to say that this was different, but then he stopped himself. He averted his gaze forward and rested his head back against his seat. It was all he could do to stop himself from getting up and wringing Daniel’s neck.
___
They returned to Bogotá an hour later, with the Fokker making a jarring corkscrew landing into El Dorado, a necessary security measure after the Viper’s attack less than three days earlier. They arrived in time to make the afternoon session in the Bunker.
Walking in, Culler immediately looked to Avery and said, “Where the hell have you been?” Then he lowered his voice. “Rangel’s been on my ass all day. He isn’t happy.”
Avery kept his mouth shut and took a seat without even looking at Culler, who didn’t press the matter further after seeing the look on Avery’s face.
Keeping vague as far as sources and methods, Daniel outlined the newly acquired intelligence from Medellin. Culler and Slayton both knew better than to ask pernicious questions about where this lead originated. Frankly, they didn’t want to know. It was better that way, professionally and personally.
But Rangel didn’t see it that way.
“I have to ask, because it’s going to come up somewhere at some point, and I’m going to be held accountable. Where the hell did this intel come from, guys?”
The question was directed to Daniel, but Rangel’s eyes bore into Avery.
“Sources and methods,” Daniel said, providing the vague, offhanded explanation often thrown about by CIA.
But Rangel wouldn’t have any of that. Rangel was fuming.
“I suppose it’s just coincidence that overnight, without explanation, you two are suddenly unavailable and then this morning we receive reports from National Police sources that Cesar Rivero’s mutilated body was discovered in a warehouse, along with a goddamned child and four dead Black Eagles? Police called it a blood bath, and that says a lot coming from Medellin cops. And why should this particular incident come across my desk? Because people are afraid this means that the Black Eagles will consider breaking the ceasefire. I’ll tell you right now, if anyone from the Agency was involved, it will not go well for them. The State Department will be making inquiries amongst prison authorities about how and when Rivero was removed from Bellavista.”
Avery knew that Rangel didn’t give a damn about Rivero’s human rights, and he certainly didn’t care about a dead kid. People like Rangel never did. He was worried about word of Rivero’s torture reaching the ambassador’s office or the Seventh Floor, and creating a new scandal for CIA in Latin America under his watch. He was willing to keep the matter quiet, long as the Colombian police were able to do so, or some reporter or human rights activist didn’t pick up on the incident and publicize it.
“If anyone in this room knows anything about what went down in Medellin overnight, now’s the time to say something,” Rangel said, still staring down Avery.
Avery stared right back at the station chief with unblinking eyes, daring Rangel to threaten him. After what he saw in Medellin, there wasn’t anything Rangel could say or do to affect him. Even now, the scenes from inside the warehouse replayed in his mind. The screams and terror of the girls were clear as the moment it happened, less than twelve hours ago. He knew this shit was going to stay with him for a long time.
“Whatever took place in Medellin is clearly a mystery,” Daniel said, “but I have full faith in the National Police to find those responsible. Now, perhaps we can move on to the topic at hand. We have a name: Sean Nolan, a member of the Viper’s inner circle.”
“I know that name,” Slayton said. “Nolan’s popped up before in past DEA investigations. He’s a big player in the cocaine market, and the British want him for terrorism charges.”
“The Bunker’s databases confirm that Nolan is known to operate out of Cali, facilitating drug deals and arms shipments, and acting as a go-between for various gangs,” Abigail Benning said. “He’s also known to have worked for FARC in the past, but we were never aware of any connections between him and Moreno.”
Abigail Benning was thirty-one years old and of medium height and slight build with pale complexion. Unmarried, socially awkward, with black-framed glasses, her hair tied back, and no cosmetics applied to her long, angular face, she looked like a stereotypical chronic videogamer or outcast who rarely saw the light of day. Most men gave her little attention, and she wouldn’t have had time for them anyway. She kept mute and timid until the subject of SIGINT, metadata, cell phone towers, and Internet networks came up. Then she became suddenly animated and excitedly relayed technical information, putting it into comprehensible layman’s terms for the others.
Avery found her to be one of the more curious inhabitants of the Bunker.
Many JSOC kills and drone strikes came about as a result of people like Benning. Often, the NSA spooks that did the tracking had no idea where their intelligence went, and were unaware that their efforts would directly lead to someone’s death. But Benning was fully aware of the end she was working toward, and she had no qualms about it. In fact, she was rather pleased to finally have something to do. Now she had a name and a general location, and that was all her team of hackers and trackers needed.
ANIC kept a sparse file on Sean Nolan, and it offered little insight as to where to find him. Known contacts and friends were either dead or had dropped off the grid, likely in the US or Canada under aliases or in Ireland. Most of the Colombians’ information was several years old and came secondhand from the British embassy’s intelligence station.
Nolan spent seventeen of his forty-three years as a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), eventually heading up an active service unit in Belfast. He was known to be particularly adept with an RPG and homemade mortars, and he’d received training at Gadaffi’s terrorist camps. He survived numerous attempts by MI5 and 14th Intelligence Company, the British army’s undercover surveillance unit in Northern Ireland, to capture or kill him, becoming one of the most elusive targets for the British services.
Nolan rejected the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent ceasefire. He was also believed to have planned the Omagh bombing that killed twenty-nine people the same year. Later, Nolan tortured and killed an undercover MI5 agent and two Irish police officers in County Tyrone.
He fled to Colombia by way of Cuba and went to work as a mercenary for FARC and the cartels. MI5 had intelligence that Nolan was sending money and drugs back home to the Real IRA, a group that recently threatened renewed violence in Northern Ireland and followed through by ambushing a police Land Rover with a roadside bomb.
The file photos provided by MI5 depicted a tall, lanky, clean-shaven Irishman with a soft, pale complexion, crooked posture, youthful fe
atures, and wavy reddish-blond hair. Most distinctive, a hairline scar ran vertically above his left eyebrow, the result of a bar fight in Derry several years ago. Recent reports, however, indicated that Nolan may have undergone plastic surgery in Brazil to alter his appearance.
Colombian police originally made finding and extraditing Nolan to the United Kingdom a top priority, but the years passed with no leads and no results. These days, Nolan was believed to do business for the North Valley cartel, the drug gang that rose to power after Colombian police dismantled the Cali cartel several years back. Colombian sources didn’t know any of Nolan’s current aliases and had no current photos of him.
After the meeting in the Bunker, Daniel and Slayton tasked their agents and informants in Cali with keeping their eyes and ears open for any sighting or word of the PIRA renegade. Within thirty-two hours, a DEA agent reported that a man vaguely but not quite matching Nolan’s description, with a subdued south Belfast accent and sporting Nolan’s trademark scar, was spotted in the coastal city of Buenaventura meeting with a North Valley cartel facilitator the previous week.
Abigail Benning then started her hunt by tasking the NSA section at the embassy with targeting all calls in Buenaventura and in the greater Valle del Cauca department. There wouldn’t be many Irish accents in western Colombia. The vast majority of Buenaventura’s population of 400,000 was of African descent, with only fifteen percent of the population coming from Spanish or European descent.
The HUMINT acquired by DEA was critical.
Frequently in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen, NSA tracked unconfirmed targets by metadata collection and by tracking cell-phone activity for JSOC interdiction or drone-launched Hellfire missile strikes, sometimes resulting in the deaths of misidentified or unknown civilians around the target. Rarely does human intelligence play a role in eliminating the names on the Disposition Matrix, the official, innocuous-sounding term for the White House’s kill list. Cognizant of NSA’s methods, the Taliban have taken to randomly re-distributing their SIM cards to villagers to trick the Americans into killing civilians.
The NSA Geo Cell, accompanied by a DEA FAST unit, soon received the green light from the embassy and the Colombian government to deploy to Buenaventura.
A Colombian Air Force C-130 carried the specially equipped-surveillance vehicles. These were brand new Ford E-150 cargo vans converted into mobile surveillance command centers. The vans were equipped with Stingray, a controversial IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) catcher that forced all cell phones within a given area, including those with encrypted data, to connect to Stingray’s base station. The vans also carried computers equipped with GPS mapping software, other SIGINT and ELINT gear, and a connection to the Bunker’s Real Time Regional Gateway.
At Gerardo Tobar López Airport, a small airport eight miles outside Buenaventura serviced only by the government-owned SATENA airline, the National Police commandeered a hangar. Here, while Benning’s people physically and electronically scoured the streets of Buenaventura, Avery remained on call, with Aguilar’s squad and the FAST team acquisitioned by Slayton and headed by DEA Special Agent Tom Layton.
FAST stands for Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Team. Specially trained by the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and the marines, FAST is tasked with special enforcement operations around the globe. Based out of Quantico, there are five FAST units on rotating deployments. One is always deployed to Afghanistan.
Layton was already a familiar face to Slayton, so he required little time being brought up to speed on the current situation, and he and Avery got along well from the start.
Abigail Benning’s ELINT spooks took up pre-planned routes to cover different sectors of the city in their surveillance vans, with Stingray active and intercepting all calls on their way from cell phone users to local towers.
It was early-afternoon with humidity at ninety percent. Dark gray rain clouds hung low in the air over Buenaventura, unleashing a seemingly endless downpour onto the city. Buenaventura is one of the world’s rainiest cities, and a week straight of almost non-stop rain wasn’t uncommon. Rusty buckets and cans were lined up everywhere to collect rainwater, the only source of water for most of the city’s residents. Benning was glad to spend the day dry inside the van, stepping outside only once to stock up on snacks at a local market.
Aside from the rain, Buenaventura is also known for being Colombia’s most violent and impoverished city. Street crime is high, and gang activity is rampant. Two dominant and rival gangs—Los Urabeños and La Empresa, both originally paramilitary groups formed to combat FARC—fight each other in the streets for control of territory in the drug market.
Both gangs are well armed and many of their members have military training, veterans of the Colombian military or the country’s various paramilitary groups. La Empresa especially ranked high on DEA’s target list. DEA agents have pursued Empresa members across Nicaragua, El Salvador, and as far as Spain.
The dueling gangs are unconcerned about the numerous civilians that enter their crossfire. Mutilated and dismembered bodies, taken apart in so-called chop-up houses, regularly washed up on the beaches. Anyone suspected of cooperating with the police or affiliating with a rival gang disappears or turns up dead, often along with their entire family. Armed men run checkpoints on the main streets that serve as borders between neighborhoods, stopping motorists and pedestrians, occasionally executing them in the street.
The situation in Buenaventura has deteriorated so badly that President Santos ordered the deployment of six hundred army troops to keep the peace, but the army’s primary focus is the security of businesses around the docks and safe passage for commercial traffic on the highway. The soldiers have done little to curb the gang violence. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon to see soldiers on the streets openly fraternizing with gang members.
The city’s unemployment is at thirty percent. Most of the Buenaventura’s residents are poor and uneducated, many of them immigrants looking for manual labor jobs. Ports and foreign trade are managed and taxed by the national government, while the local economy reaps little benefit. The population lives in small, overpopulated apartments or tiny wooden shacks built on stilts on newly-formed marshland where the coastline is moving gradually inland. Those with the means to do so have fled the city. Those without are trapped in this urban hell and stay barricaded indoors. Several thousand residents of the outlying villages have been forced out of their homes by corporations seeking to expand the port facilities and drill for oil.
The roads are narrow, many unpaved, and are obstructed by broken down and stripped vehicles, all manner of garbage and debris. Streets are often flowing with raw sewage, mud, and filth. Many buildings are pock marked from bullet strikes and adorned with colorful gang graffiti.
Benning’s team was given a complete brief on the security situation in Buenaventura. Both Daniel and Slayton had ventured into the city before to meet informants and agents, and Tom Layton’s FAST team had conducted raids here before. They gave Benning’s team, and their security escort, a complete rundown on how to stay safe and discrete, and the routes to take through neighborhoods to avoid being stopped or ambushed by gangs.
Benning’s surveillance vans were each accompanied by a chase car—armored Lincoln Navigators with blacked out windows—carrying CIA security contractors wearing armored vests and carrying MP5 submachine guns or HK413 assault rifles. These men had done time in Iraq and knew how to maneuver through and stay alive in hostile urban environments. Still, they were on edge the whole time, trailing the Geo Cell’s vehicles through the rundown ghettos. Some sections of the city were patrolled by armed gangs, while in other areas there were Colombian soldiers. Daniel had informed the army and police that ANIC units were conducting operations in the area, so that Colombian forces would not stop Benning’s team.
At one point, one of the surveillance units was forced to make a detour, because a gun battle was in progress between rival gangs, and the army had cordoned off t
he area.
Despite their security teams’ concerns, Abigail Benning’s crypto-spooks seemed unfazed by the bleak, violent conditions around them. Their focus was set entirely on analyzing the ceaseless stream of cell phone activity. They worked intently at their stations in the backs of the vans; occasionally cursing out loud as their fingers slipped on a keyboard or coffee was spilled when the driver made an abrupt turn or braked suddenly or the van bounced along over potholes and poorly maintained roads.
Sorting through all of the calls was time consuming and tedious work. But the undercover DEA source had been able to provide the cell phone number of the North Valley cartel facilitator believed to have met with Sean Nolan, and within four hours, that number appeared on the network, instantly providing Stingray with its IMSI. Benning hacked into the phone and obtained the numbers listed in the contacts and the recent calls history. A couple of the numbers had North American codes, but most of them were local.
Two numbers appeared on the network within the hour. Both were Colombian numbers and the calls were made between Colombian and Spanish speakers. One call was to Mexico, the other to Bogotá. The former was drugs related, the latter a personal matter; and neither appeared related to Sean Nolan or the Viper.
An hour later, another of the targeted numbers registered on Stingray’s network for a ninety-seven second conversation with the cartel facilitator. The number had a Cali area code, and the caller spoke English with the hardened consonants and soft drawn-out vowels of an Irish accent. The accent was feint, the speaker seeming to try to sound American, but it didn’t fool NSA’s voice recognition algorithms. More important, the cartel facilitator directly addressed his caller as “Sean,” and the Sean Nolan voiceprint provided by Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was a 94% match with Abigail Benning’s intercept.
The conversation between Nolan and the cartel lieutenant was terse and innocuous, concerning shipment of unspecified cargo aboard a freighter called La Orca that was set to leave the Buenaventura docks early the next morning.