by Leland Davis
This made more sense to Ortiz. His boss only knew about the assassination plot, but he didn’t have many details. This was far more believable. Ortiz wondered for a moment who might be behind the attempt. No matter, he would worry about figuring that out after he warned his cousin about the attack.
“I will tell him.”
The line went dead. Moore hung his head for a moment, ashamed of what he’d just done but knowing that he had no choice. After a moment he got it together and headed back upstairs for another drink to dull the edge of his worries before the long drive home.
*
Samantha felt a little bit better. They had locked her in a small bedroom with an attached bathroom, and she had helped herself to the shower to rinse the sweat and vomit off. The chugging noise from a generator not far from her room aggravated her splitting headache, but at least it meant there was hot water. They had left her a flowing white Mexican dress to wear. Although it felt a little bit ridiculous under the circumstances, she had to admit that it was beautiful. A white ribbon secured her long blonde hair in a ponytail at the back of her head. She was still shaking a little bit, but the worst of the nausea was over. It gave her a bit of satisfaction that she’d puked in the back of the car on the drive. That little monkey would have a hell of a time getting the smell out of his car.
Once she was clean and dressed, there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find the man who had kidnapped her. She thought he looked ridiculous with his long ponytail, silk shirt, and cowboy boots, and she hated the smug look on his face as he ran his eyes up and down her body and appreciatively raised an eyebrow.
“Come with me,” he said finally in thickly accented English.
“Fuck you! I’m not going anywhere.” Sam moved away from him across the small room, trying to put the bed between them.
Héctor cursed in frustration. He chased her around the room and corralled her, warding off slaps as he tried to get ahold of the squirming girl. Finally he got one of her arms twisted behind her and lifted it until she cried out sharply in pain.
“Let’s go,” he told her, pushing her toward the door.
He marched her onto a stone pathway leading through thick jungle. Sam could hear the thundering of flowing water nearby. They emerged onto a stone patio perched right at the edge of a deep, vertical-walled canyon. Mist billowed over the rim, wetting the jungle foliage into a sparkling deep emerald green. To the right was a concrete house overlooking the precipice, and on the left was an open-air, thatch-roofed structure—essentially nothing but a cone of brown palm fronds perched on a widely spaced circle of white concrete posts. Two women worked at a fire inside the shelter, and the smells wafting from it caused an involuntary grumble from Samantha’s stomach.
In the middle of the patio, a table was elegantly set for two. A man sat at one end. He had short dark hair, intense brown eyes, and a thick moustache, and he was wearing a silly looking light pink polo shirt with the collar turned up. She immediately recognized him as the man who had held a gun to her head when she’d arrived. The man who had made a video addressing her father. She had no idea what this was about, but her blood ran cold at the sight of him and she took a hesitant step backward.
He scooted his chair back from the table and stood when he saw her.
“Samantha,” he called cheerfully. “Welcome! Please join me for some dinner?” He gestured expansively toward the other chair with one arm. “You must be hungry after the long journey.”
Although she was terrified of this man, she was hungry. She walked tentatively toward the table, the view of the canyon and waterfall opening up in front of her as she approached. It was breathtaking. Although she was several feet back from the edge, looking over the sharp drop-off with no railing gave her a nervous feeling of vertigo. The fear mixed with her sense of wonder and muddled her emotions, and she paused for a stunned moment of confusion and took it all in.
She noticed that her host was still standing expectantly, so she turned and sat down in the other chair. The man sat back down as well, and women appeared immediately from the nearby shelter with plates of food. The beans and rice were surprisingly good, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch the thinly-sliced meat. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was. She wolfed down the food in silence.
When she’d finished and had a moment to sit back, the man addressed her again.
“I am Vicente Cardenas. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you will be my guest here for a little while.”
Sam sized the man up. She had no idea where she was. She knew only that she was in the jungles of a Spanish-speaking country. Here was a powerful man with a gun who also had well-armed henchmen. They had transported her here on a plane, so they obviously had money and power.
“What are you,” she asked dryly, “some kinda drug lord or something?”
“Yes,” he replied matter-of-factly, almost drawing the word into two syllables. “I am a drug lord…or something.” He smiled widely, and she couldn’t tell if he was being charming or condescending.
“So you got any coke around here, or what?” Her tone was flat and direct.
Cardenas let out a surprised huff of breath and his eyes widened, then his face broke into another benevolent smile and he chuckled softly.
“Héctor!” He called to his man who was still standing nearby. “Please bring some proper refreshment for our guest.”
As Héctor took the stone path away from where they sat, Cardenas addressed Sam in a serious tone. “Your father would not be happy if he knew you were using cocaine, no?”
“You know my father?” She asked.
“We haven’t met, but we do a little business together.”
Sam was indignant. “My father would never do business with someone like you.”
“No, you are probably right about that,” he acknowledged frankly. “He didn’t know he was doing business with me. Nonetheless, he made a deal, and now he must stick to the bargain.”
Héctor reappeared and tossed a fat plastic bag of white powder on the table. Sam was stunned. Holy Shit! There must be at least an ounce in there. She had never seen that much before. It must be worth thousands of dollars.
As she stared in disbelief at the bag on the table, Héctor’s satellite phone began to ring. He stepped away from the table to answer it. After a few moments of terse conversation in Spanish, he suddenly began shouting something stridently. He ripped the stainless .45 from where it hung beneath his arm, jumped to the side of his boss and whispered something urgently in his ear. As Sam watched the dramatic scene unfold, four men with machine guns ran onto the patio and surrounded the table, grabbing all of them and hustling them back toward the path into the jungle. She barely had time to snag the plastic bag off the table before she was whisked away.
16
Sunday, November 20th
THE TEAM HUSTLED out of the truck and raced into the dawn mist. They had been crammed into one vehicle for the uncomfortable ninety minute drive, and all were relieved to be out and moving. They quickly ferried loads of equipment into cover among the tall stalks of sugar cane on the side of the remote dirt road. Less than two minutes later, Carlos pulled away and disappeared down the road while the team regrouped in the concealment of the nine-foot tall sugar cane plants.
Adrenaline zipped through Chip’s veins, brightening the morning into a palpable hyper-reality. He was excited but also a little bit terrified. Truth be told, this was the part he was most scared of. The low growth between the cane plants made it almost impossible to see where you stepped. On past trips, Chip had seen workers burning the fields before venturing in to harvest the cane by hand with machetes. Although the Mexican government was trying to stop the practice to improve air quality, he knew the workers wouldn’t enter the fields without first burning them for fear of the deadly ‘cuatro narices’—four noses—an extremely venomous pit viper more commonly known by Americans as the fer-de-lance. The team all wore heavy boots for the walk through the field—Ch
ip had warned them of the danger as they planned for the trip. He was careful to examine the ground closely before reaching a hand down to pick up his gear. He also had no idea whether the snakes could climb the sugar cane, and the thought that they might gave him a chill. At least he would be last in line.
The men set out through the cane with their packs, Chip dragging his kayak behind him with one hand and carrying his two-bladed paddle in the other. Ordinarily he carried the kayak on one shoulder to preserve the life of the plastic boat, but the brush here was too thick. He hadn’t paid for the thing anyway, and it only had to last for one more river. He struggled to keep up with the others. The rest of the group held onto the pistol grips of their suppressed Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifles, but Chip was forced to walk with his MP7 slung over his shoulder on a strap since he couldn’t spare a hand for the weapon.
It took them forty-five minutes to travel only a mile through the thick cane, and Chip slumped to a seat on his kayak for a break as soon as they entered the edge of the jungle. Everyone was sweating hard. They all took a few minutes to re-hydrate with water from their bottles and ate a quick snack of energy bars.
After less than ten minutes, they stood and began struggling against the steep slope, pulling themselves up by gripping jungle plants, tree trunks, and vines. In several places it was so steep that the gear and boats had to be hauled up with ropes. Chip was amazed by the elegant economy of the group’s motion. They swapped positions as if performing an elaborate dance, one man always in the lead checking for traps, another in the rear covering their back, all the while unfazed by terrain rugged enough to thwart the best efforts of ordinary men. It reminded him of the feeling he got when he was part of a solid group of paddlers on an unknown river moving steadily but cautiously into the unknown. Now that they were in it for real, Chip was reassured by the effortless grace with which his companions performed their jobs. It gave him some measure of confidence that they would succeed on this mission.
The top of the ridge afforded no view through the thick vegetation, but when they crested it they were encouraged to hear the sound of flowing water below them on the other side. The trip down went more quickly, and they found themselves sitting on the bank of the river a little after 9.
Chip was encouraged by what he saw. There was sufficient flow to float the raft easily, but the water wasn’t moving as swiftly as it had been the week before. It looked like they had timed it perfectly. They all began changing into their river gear and packing the rest of the equipment into waterproof bags. Chip had to smile. Amongst piles of alien-feeling military paraphernalia, the Watershed drybags were a welcome and familiar sight. The absolutely watertight bags the SEALs carried were the same thing he’d used for years to keep his warm clothes, lunches, and safety equipment dry on the river.
The raft was inflated from a CO2 canister and topped off with a hand-operated pump, then the gear was loaded aboard and lashed in tightly. Chip carefully stowed his weapons in his kayak before sliding into the cockpit and sealing the opening with his spraydeck. When everyone was ready, Chip slid his kayak into the water with the rest of the team close behind in the raft.
The river started out slowly with small rapids spaced intermittently along its course. A span of jungle trees formed a canopy completely across the slender stream with thick, woody vines dangling from their branches down into the water. Runners had descended from limbs of the bizarre trees and thickened over time into additional supporting tree trunks. Many of the trees had dozens of trunks connected by branches high above, and some even had trunks on each side of the narrow river. The small kayak moved easily through the labyrinthine growth, but the wide raft sometimes struggled to find routes through the tangled mess.
They were all somewhat relieved when the riverbed steepened and the canyon walls closed in toward the sides of the river. The trees thinned, unable to gain purchase in the swiftly flowing stream. The roar of the coming rapids echoed off buttresses of stone towering above the river’s banks. Chip moved ahead, carefully paddling from the safety of one eddy to the next, craning his neck for a view of the rapids below. Until the river became too steep, he would use this method of “reading and running” the unfamiliar rapids on the fly, signaling to the men in the raft which routes were best to avoid obstacles in their path. They fell into a rhythm, moving steadily but cautiously into the depths of the gorge.
As the river’s pace grew, Chip pulled over and removed a waterproof GPS unit from the chest pocket of his lifejacket. He had spent many hours poring over satellite imagery of the river during his time at The Woods and had programmed the coordinates of every major rapid into the GPS. The first waterfall was just around the next bend. He looked back upstream at the raft and raised one arm, elbow bent, and pointed his index finger at the sky. He then moved his finger in a tight circle. It was the signal for them to eddy out—to pull over for a pause. There had been initial confusion with some of the hand signals since the SEALs used many of the same motions to mean different things than they signified to river runners. It had been decided that rather than making up entirely new hand signals for use on the river, the men would learn the conventions that Chip had used for years.
They all stepped onto shore and secured their boats before walking downstream to have a look at the falls. It was a ten-foot-tall sliding cascade that turned out to be no big deal for their skills after the many days of training. Nevertheless, they were glad they had looked—better safe than sorry. They climbed back into their boats and paddled smartly over the edge.
This was the method for the rest of the day. Although it was usually possible to carry the boats around any rapid that they didn’t feel it was safe to attempt, struggling through the thick jungle with a heavy raft and gear would eat up a lot of time and energy. It was better to stay on the water as much as they could. Furthermore, this part was what Chip had come for—he planned to explore as many of the rapids from his boat as he could.
Chip could tell they were getting into the meat of the whitewater when the walls of the canyon changed from limestone to columnar basalt. While limestone was made from tiny silt particles deposited in an ancient sea bed, columnar basalt was formed by the cooling of a prehistoric lava flow. As it cooled, the rock split into hundreds of vertical columns roughly a foot wide. It almost looked man-made. While the relatively soft limestone was eroded easily by flowing water, the hard volcanic basalt withstood the test of time, causing the river to pour over each layer of basalt in a vertical waterfall. At 3 in the afternoon, the team arrived at the first such place on the river and pulled over to scout the falls. They walked along the rim of volcanic rock at the side of the precipice to get a view.
This was the falls that Chip had noticed on the satellite pictures which he knew was only a half-mile upstream of the larger falls at their target. He had guessed this one was about fifteen feet tall from the pictures and was surprised to find that it was more like twenty-five. His system gave him a little squirt of adrenaline just looking at it. The last major rapid of the day would be a good one. He was a bit concerned, however. If this falls was almost twice as tall as he’d guessed from the pictures, how tall would the larger one downstream be?
After only a brief look at the roaring falls Chip grinned, flashed a thumbs up at the rest of the men, and walked purposefully back to his kayak. He was stoked—a twenty-five footer that nobody had ever run before! It looked completely straightforward, with a lip that gradually rolled from horizontal to vertical and a large, deep recovery pool at the bottom.
Back in his boat, Chip slid into the water and peeled gracefully into the flow. He lined up for the gut of the falls, leaned forward, and savored the exhilarating feeling as the front end of the boat dropped. His view swung wildly until the tip of his kayak lined up like a gun sight on the point where the falling water exploded into the pool below. He moved his paddle off to the side so it wouldn’t break over his chest or crush his nose on impact and turned his head sideways at the last moment to lead
with the crown of his helmet, which crashed into the foamy water a fraction of a second behind the tip of his boat.
He surfaced a short distance downstream, resisting the tremendous urge to whoop with joy after his perfect descent. No whooping was allowed on covert operations, he reminded himself as he paddled to shore and hopped out to hold a rescue rope for the others. Harris waved him over, and Chip scrambled near the base of the cliff that paralleled the falls so that they could talk.
“The raft is pretty heavy for a rapid so big,” Harris called down. “There’s no easy way to walk around the falls, so we’re going to lower the equipment down to you before we run it.”
Good idea. Chip was sorry he hadn’t thought of that himself. They hadn’t considered the possibility in their planning sessions that the falls would be this tall. It took about ten minutes for the gear to be lowered with ropes to the shore at the base of the falls, then Chip went back to his position on the safety rope as Harris and the team took the plunge. Everything went perfectly. This crew had gotten really good. They regrouped on shore at the bottom of the falls.
Most of them didn’t speak as they opened up the bags to retrieve more gear. This is where the whitewater trip turned into a commando raid. They slid on earpieces that attached to their encrypted radios, and weapons were all double checked and left handy. Everyone pulled off their lifejackets and slipped into body armor and jungle camouflage BDUs. The goal was for them to be unidentifiable as Americans if they were caught or killed. Although the other men were all darkly complected and might pass for some other nationality, Chip knew he had little chance of that with his sandy blond hair. They all put their lifejackets and helmets back on over the fatigues. It would be awkward for Chip to kayak in this get-up, but there was no way he wanted to go without it.