by Mike Maden
Suppressed weapons aren’t silenced weapons; their sound is only dampened. When the guards by the pool heard the two dull shots on the far side of the estate, they leaped to their feet and scrambled into defensive positions, facing the eastern side.
Pearce engaged the western boat. The guards stood taller now and their fully exposed bodies glowed eerily on the video screen. Their heads lit up like flares as adrenaline and exertion raised their body temperature, the additional heat venting out of the tops of their scalps.
The reticle squared on the first man’s glowing head just a moment before a bright-white blotch of fluid flowered on the other side of his skull. His corpse dropped silently on the monitor.
The other guard threw down his weapon and dashed in the opposite direction, heading for the western slope leading down to the water.
The Spartan’s automatic rifle tracked him as he slipped and twisted down the steep incline.
Pop.
Blood exploded in white petals on the slope behind him. The reticle tracked the limp corpse as it tumbled down the hill.
It almost didn’t seem fair to Pearce, despite the fact they were cartel scumbags. Even the best human snipers he’d ever worked with missed their shots sometimes. But not the machines. They never missed.
Human snipers were bounded by human frailty; the weapons systems they used were always superior to the operator using them. Hitting a target was a relatively simple algorithm with known variables: distance, friction, target speed, wind speed, projectile weight. New onboard computational systems and “smart” guided bullets were even solving those equations for human snipers. The profession was quickly becoming a “point and shoot” proposition. But human snipers contended with other variables, too: stinging sweat, the need to breathe, beating hearts, nagging doubts, sick kids back home, lack of sleep, fears. Most missed shots were caused by one or more of these all-too-human frailties.
Pearce disengaged both Spartan weapons systems as a safety precaution, then powered up his own small boat and motored toward the quay, where he tied up his craft next to Castillo’s yacht.
Pearce scrambled up the winding path. There was a quarter moon out tonight and he didn’t need his night-vision goggles. His pack was heavy and he sweated fiercely. When he reached the house, he ducked inside, carefully scanning for guards he might not have accounted for, but there were none. It was strange that there had only been four men protecting the head of the entire organization.
Was Castillo that confident of his defenses?
Pearce was certain that Castillo was locked away in his panic room bunker twenty feet below the estate. His security protocol would have called for him to immediately escape into the bunker if shots were ever fired.
Pearce proceeded to Castillo’s lavish office with its 360-degree view of the gulf and opened up the hidden panel showing the live video feed of Castillo in his panic room bunker. The drug lord carried his favorite gun in one hand, a chromed .50 caliber Desert Eagle encrusted with rubies and diamonds. In his other hand he had a phone connected to a landline that led to a satellite dish on top of the house. Old-fashioned copper wiring was the only way to get a cell signal down in that hole.
Pearce pressed a button on the video console so he could listen in on the conversation. But whoever was on the other end never picked up. Pearce thought that was strange. Either the person on the other end of the line had been asleep on the job or else they weren’t following the security protocol.
Pearce watched Castillo rant like a demon, then finally give up. The raging drug lord slammed the phone receiver so hard against the wall it broke in his hands.
Pearce checked his watch. He estimated he still had fifteen minutes before he would have to evacuate. Plenty of time.
The problem with hiring one of the world’s premier architectural firms was that they designed everything on high-end CAD systems, then stored the digital blueprints on mainframes for reference on current and future projects. That was Castillo’s fatal mistake. Ian had pulled up Castillo’s palace blueprints in no time. It was the bunker on the property that convinced Pearce that Castillo would choose this location for his final stand.
Pearce located Castillo’s small safe and opened it easily with a computerized lock pick. He pulled out all of the contents and stuffed them into a dry bag. What really caught Pearce’s attention was a sandwich baggie full of SD cards, the kind used in video cameras. He couldn’t wait to find out what was on them.
Pearce dashed through the house to the kitchen area. According to the blueprints, the bunker’s air ducts were hidden behind the tiled walls of the villa, but an access door was located beneath the kitchen sink for duct inspections and repair. Pearce pulled on a gas mask, opened the access door, and snaked a long, thin plastic tube down into it, then he connected a small gas bottle from his utility belt to the line. After he emptied the bottle’s contents, he tossed the bottle aside and shut the access door.
After stripping off his mask, he jogged back to the bunker video monitor. Castillo paced furiously, a crazed, caged animal. Pearce held up his smartphone and recorded the monitor images. Castillo’s legs soon turned wobbly and he tripped, then stumbled, and finally fell to the floor, his eyes rolling into the back of his head. His arms and legs jerked wildly as his jaw clacked open and shut like a rapidly blinking eye. Seconds later, he was dead.
Satisfied, Pearce exited his phone’s camera function and pocketed it.
The last item on Pearce’s agenda was in the heavy rucksack he’d hauled up the hill. It contained a specially designed two-stage demolition device. He armed it and set the timer, then jogged back down to his boat.
When his boat and the two Spartans had sped out a couple of miles, he cut the engines and turned around just in time to watch the top of the island erupt with a deafening roar. A mushroom cloud of fire boiled up into the night sky, fueled by a canister of white phosphorus. It almost looked like a volcanic explosion. It lit the ocean surface for twenty miles in all directions. Pearce assumed that NORAD was going crazy right about now.
A gentle ocean breeze brushed against Pearce’s face. The phosphorus smelled a little like garlic. He fired up his engines and headed home.
24
Maiquetía, Venzuela
Sandwiched between the steeply rising mountains looming behind it and the vast Caribbean sea on its doorstep, the city of Maiquetía featured a deepwater port, an unlimited coastline, and the Simón Bolívar International Airport. There was also a secured compound that protected a safe house. Ulises Castillo had been its only guest for the last week. The last surviving Castillo was under the special protection of General Agostino Ribas, the defense minister of Venezuela.
Udi and Tamar were bored to tears. They had been floating off the coast of Maiquetía on a sixty-three-foot yacht for three days. Myers had forbidden Pearce to take out Ulises on Venezuelan soil so Udi and Tamar were reduced to babysitting.
The first day the Israelis arrived was the most exciting. They went onshore and planted spider drones equipped with microphones and pinhead-size cameras for data collection on Ulises, but they had been confined to the yacht at sea ever since. The boat was also equipped with long-range laser voice detection and video surveillance systems. They even had an RQ-11 Raven, a miniature unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could be launched by hand at a moment’s notice. But that was their only drone. They were too far away from friendly airstrips for ground-launched operations.
When General Ribas suddenly arrived at the safe house with an armed escort, Udi and Tamar scrambled into action. Ribas entered Ulises’s living quarters alone, leaving his two personal bodyguards outside the door.
Udi and Tamar tuned in to the conversation that was being recorded on video.
—
Ribas puffed thoughtfully on a fat cigar, clouding the small living room with blue smoke. The two men sat opposite each other on worn leather couche
s, separated by a glass coffee table.
“Your father and I have been friends for a long time. That is why he entrusted you to my care.” Ribas leaned forward and pointed his cigar at Ulises. “You know, I held you in my arms once when you were a small baby.”
“You and Papa ran Colombian cocaine together back in the ’80s,” Ulises said.
“Whores, too. We made good money.”
“Still do, from what he says.” Ulises smiled.
Ribas roared with laughter. “Just like your old man!” Ribas took a long, thoughtful drag on his cigar before stabbing out the butt in the ashtray on the table. “Look, I have some bad news.”
Ulises frowned. “My father?”
“Yes.”
“How?” Ulises demanded.
“It does not matter. I am truly sorry.”
“The Americans?”
“Yes, of course. Who else could it be? They are animals.” Ribas observed the ruthless young Castillo carefully.
Ulises stared at his enormous hands, emotionless. “It was inevitable, I suppose,” Ulises said. “The Americans are too powerful.”
“You are welcome to remain here, of course,” Ribas offered.
Ulises glanced back up, smiling. “I can’t kill Americans sitting here.”
Ribas laughed again. “Your father would be proud.”
“How soon can you get me back to Mexico?”
“How soon can you be ready?”
Ulises stood. “I’m ready now.”
Ribas stood as well. “I already have a helicopter waiting for you at the airport.”
“Helicopter?” Ulises knew that Mexico was too far away for a helicopter unless it had air-refueling capabilities.
“I have made arrangements for you with one of our agents in Aruba. He is making arrangements to smuggle you from there to Veracruz. We must be extremely cautious, hijo, if we hope to get you home alive.”
—
Udi called Pearce with the news, hoping that the kill order would take effect when the helicopter crossed into international waters. Every other team had killed their respective targets. He and Tamar wanted their shot, too.
“Wait until they are at least one hundred kilometers out” was all Pearce said.
“You got it, boss!” Udi beamed.
Thanks to Dr. Rao and the mosquito drones, the GPS implant in Ulises’s body still functioned perfectly, drawing energy from the static electricity he generated. Ulises traveled by car to Ribas’s private heliport at Simón Bolívar International. Moments later, a big ugly Russian Mi-35 Hind E helicopter landed. The airport was near the water, so Udi and Tamar repositioned their yacht a quarter mile off the coast, out of the flight path of commercial aircraft. Fortunately, there weren’t any Venezuelan Coast Guard patrol boats in the area so they could keep their surveillance gear up and running.
Tamar’s camera recorded seven Venezuelan commandos in combat fatigues exiting the helicopter. The unit commander was a sergeant according to his insignia. He saluted Ulises, then shook his hand with a curt smile.
Ulises turned and bear-hugged Ribas, then he boarded the chopper after the commandos had loaded back in. The door slammed shut, and the rotors cycled up. The big Hind lifted off the tarmac and swung lazily toward the ocean. Ribas stood below, waving good-bye until the chopper cleared land.
Udi stood on the aft deck of the yacht and watched the helicopter roar overhead through a pair of mil-spec binoculars while Tamar kept the video camera locked on it from inside the cabin. They obviously didn’t have the opportunity to place any surveillance equipment on board the military helicopter on such short notice, so they couldn’t hear or see what was going on inside.
“We shouldn’t follow them immediately,” Udi suggested. “No point in getting too close and alerting them. We have plenty of range.”
“I agree. But you’ll have to drive the boat.”
“Why?” Udi asked.
Tamar grinned. “Because it’s my turn to shoot the Stinger.” She kept the camera focused on the massive helo as it sped north out to sea. Udi started the engine and turned the yacht in the same direction as the helicopter, which had climbed to a thousand feet. A moment later, the Hind froze in space.
“Tamar—”
“I’m getting it, love,” she shouted from inside. Pearce needed everything recorded to video.
Tamar watched the helicopter door slide open on the video monitor. “What are they doing?”
A couple of seconds later, Ulises’s body tumbled out, falling like a bag of wet cement. Tamar followed his unmistakable corpse all the way down with the camera until it splashed. Udi focused his binoculars at the spot where Ulises’s body had hit. No movement in the water.
Udi glanced back up at the helicopter. It rotated 180 degrees on a dime, then roared away back toward the airport. Tamar followed it with her camera as it flew over the airport and then climbed over the mountains behind the city on a direct course for Caracas.
“Why?” Tamar asked.
“Why not? With his father dead, he became a liability.”
“And the idiot walked right into it.”
“That’s why Ribas had the armed escort. Just in case he came to his senses.”
Tamar radioed in to Pearce as Udi throttled up and sped toward the splashdown. He knew Pearce would want a DNA sample just to be sure.
JULY
25
Los Pinos, Mexico D.F.
“What do you mean Castillo’s dead?”
“Castillo, his son Ulises, his three brothers. All of them.” Hernán sliced his throat with his thumb.
“The Americans?”
“Who else?”
Antonio fell back into his ornately carved presidential chair, despondent. “If it weren’t for César Castillo, I wouldn’t be president.”
The Barrazas had cut to the front of the political line with cartel muscle and money. Hernán had engineered it all. He knew that many political dynasties had been midwifed by crime syndicates. The Triads in communist China, even the Kennedys and the mob. And God only knew if the rumors about Putin and the Russian mafia were true.
Hernán shuffled over to the credenza and poured himself a whiskey. He held up the bottle and glass to his brother, a silent offer of a drink. But Antonio waved him off. Hernán shrugged and tossed back the glass, then poured himself another.
“You needed Castillo to win the office. You don’t need him to keep it,” Hernán said. “Now that he’s gone, there will be a ‘peace dividend’ for you and Mexico.” He tossed back his second.
“Maybe it was the Bravos who finally took him out,” Antonio said. “Maybe we’ve been backing the wrong horse the whole time.”
Hernán poured himself a third glass, then another for his brother. He picked them up and carried them to the president’s desk.
“Americans? Bravos? It doesn’t matter who took Castillo out. The Bravos are in control now, either way. And you are still the president of Mexico. Sounds like a natural alliance to me.” He handed his brother the whiskey glass, then clinked his glass against his brother’s.
“Here’s to the end of the War on Drugs, and to the new peace for Mexico. Salut.”
“Salut,” Antonio said, halfheartedly. They both drank.
Antonio leaned forward. “Why do you think there will be a peace now? Won’t the Bravos come after us?”
“Why should they, if we leave them alone? Accommodations can be made, just like we had with the Castillo Syndicate.”
“With the Americans still breathing down our necks? We can’t suddenly stop enforcing all of our drug agreements with them.”
“We can put pressure on the little guys on the margins who aren’t falling in line with Bravo yet. Break up a few of their shipments. The Americans won’t know the difference, but Bravo will appreciate it. He won’t m
ess with us if we don’t mess with him. Still . . .” Hernán frowned with concern.
“What?”
“You might want to give Bravo something more. A token of friendship. An offering.”
“Like what?”
“Cruzalta and his Marinas have been harassing the Bravos for a long time. Pull all of their operations off of the east coast away from Bravo territory and let them go chase Chinese smugglers along Baja. And sack Cruzalta. He needs to retire anyway. That should make Bravo happy.”
“How do you know all of these things?” Antonio was genuinely curious.
“It’s my job to know them. I’ve already set up a phone call with Victor Bravo to see if we can work out some sort of an equitable arrangement. With your permission, of course.”
“Yes, of course. As you think best.” He drained his glass. “How about another round?”
Hernán nodded and picked up his brother’s glass to fetch a refill, adding, “And I have one more idea.”
Chichén Itzá, Mexico
Ali trudged up the steps of the Temple of Warriors. There seemed to be no end to the climb beneath the searing sky. He had read that the more famous Pyramid of Kukulkan had 365 steps cut out of the stone, one for each day of the year. But he had no idea how many steps this one had and he’d lost count. In the gross humidity of the day, it felt like it was taking a whole year to make the climb to the top. With each step he uttered silent prayers of protection to Allah against the foreign djinn he was certain inhabited this pagan shrine.
Ali was surrounded by a casual but nevertheless armed escort of Bravo’s most loyal sicarios, all of them former military men—defectors, mostly, from Mexican, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran units—who had swarmed to Victor Bravo’s organization a dozen years ago at the prospect of untold wealth. And they were loyal, Ali noted. In fact, more than loyal. Devoted to the man was more like it. Like religious disciples. Greed may have first drawn them to him, but Bravo’s revolutionary charisma was what kept them bound to him. Bravo valued them highly, but they lacked actual combat experience against Western armies. The kind Ali had in spades.