by Ted Bell
He’d had the head delivered in a piñata to the Soviet embassy. This spectacular crime, and the ensuing manhunt for Manso and his two brothers, had caused them to flee their homeland. They headed straight for their uncle’s village in the mountains of Colombia. Their mother, a Colombian, had a brother who was a coca farmer in a thriving little hamlet called Medellín.
In the long chain of lucky events that would mark his life, the murder of the Russian brought Manso to the attention of Fidel Castro himself. Normally, this would have resulted in his capture, torture, and execution. The Soviets wanted Manso’s head, that was certain. They’d even sent investigators and detectives all the way from Moscow in search of the murderous de Herreras brothers.
By the time the Russian investigators reached Cuba, Manso and his young brothers were in Colombia, at the forefront of a burgeoning new industry. They were using high-powered speedboats, committing acts of sea piracy, and running cocaine for a Colombian madman called el doctor.
9
El doctor, it didn’t take Manso long to discover, was not a doctor at all.
He was a murderous psychopath. A squat little man who’d gotten his start stealing headstones from the local cemeteries, sandblasting them, and then reselling them. El doctor was the honorary sobriquet given to the young drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in honor of the first man he murdered, a man who happened to be a doctor.
Murder was not an unusual way to earn a nickname in Colombia. But this particular murder would mark the beginning of a reign of terror that would end only when Pablo himself was murdered at age forty, in 1989. At the time of his death, the former tombstone salesman, Pablo Escobar, was the richest, most powerful criminal in the world.
Manso had found his role model.
Shortly after fleeing Cuba and arriving at their uncle’s farm in the tiny mountain village of Medellín, the three de Herreras brothers began learning the thriving new coca business literally from the ground up. They planted and tended the shrubs, native to the Andes, with the pretty yellow flowers. Among other alkaloids, the leaves of Erythroxylum coca yielded a miracle powder called cocaine.
They worked in their uncle’s fields at first, and then graduated to the corrugated tin labs where the miracle money dust was refined and processed.
It wasn’t long until the brothers’ ingenuity, intelligence, and ruthlessness brought them to the attention of el doctor himself. Six weeks after arriving, they had officially been taken under the wing of Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel. Pablo was the vicious but wily thug whose murderous assassinations of judges, journalists, and presidential candidates would one day almost topple the Colombian government. Eventually, he blew an Avianca jetliner out of the sky and rocketed to the top of the world’s most-wanted list.
Pablo Escobar was the first billionaire Manso had ever met. He was also a legend to his people. The Colombian Robin Hood took millions in drug money from the stupid norteamericanos and used a small portion of it to build villages and soccer fields for the poor campesinos of Medellín. To the terrorized and oppressed poor people of Colombia, Manso saw, Escobar was a national hero.
Neither a revolutionary nor an idealist, Pablo was merely an outlaw. But in a country where the laws are hated, a charismatic and benevolent desperado can find himself a figure of adulation. Even worship.
Manso kept a keen eye on every move Pablo made. He was mesmerized, like all the rest, by Escobar’s penchant for casually extreme violence. He watched the ruthless Escobar with endless fascination as he went about the daily business of creating and embellishing his own mythic stature.
Manso immediately understood what worlds were opened once a man decided to make his own laws, his own rules. The young Cuban machetero in the thrall of el doctor now had a philosophy to live by. It was simple. You accepted either Manso’s plata or Manso’s plomo. You took his silver. Or you took his lead. It made not the least bit of difference to him which one you chose.
Under Pablo’s tutelage, the three de Herreras brothers became ever more lethal and sophisticated assassins. Before you killed a man, for instance, you first made him scream and beg. Or, even better, before you killed him, you first killed those he loved most.
Before you raped, you assembled an audience. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers were forced to watch. It was work his two brothers took to with enthusiasm. Manso had far grander ideas.
A very bright and keen observer of things, he saw that the norteamericanos’ seemingly insatiable demand for the Colombian product was rapidly overcoming supply. He sensed that this was only the beginning. The American appetite for coca powder was proving to be enormous. Many billions would be made in the next five or ten years.
The demand was there. How to supply it became increasingly problematic. Pablo even built a fleet of remote-controlled submarines, each capable of carrying two thousand kilos of cocaine from the shores of Colombia to the waters off Puerto Rico. It wasn’t enough. Manso had an idea.
It was obvious to him that Pablo would need ever increasing numbers of pilots to ferry the huge loads of his product north. So, he’d learn how to fly. But Pablo’s pilotos were a close-knit group and shunned the young Cuban hothead. He begged the pilots for flying lessons. But, another pilot meant less money for them, so they resisted.
He finally persuaded one of the younger pilots to teach him to fly by abducting the man’s sister. The man took his case to Pablo, who applauded Manso’s audacity. The next day, Manso was airborne.
He soloed after only six hours of instruction.
Pilots were in fact paid a lot more than the mere sicarios, or paid assassins, that Pablo employed in ever increasing numbers. It was the happiest time of Manso’s life. He was a swaggering piloto in gleaming aviator sunglasses, playing the narcos version of aerial cat and mouse with the government troops on his weekly runs to Managua in his C-123 transport plane.
With his newfound wealth, he purchased an American Cigarette speedboat. When the weather was too bad for flying, Manso and his brothers took to the sea to make their deliveries. Once the product had been delivered, they went in search of isolated tourist yachts, robbing and murdering at will.
The de Herreras brothers had become the deadliest pirates in the Caribbean. But it was not to last.
After an ill-considered midnight run north to Cuba to see their mother, a bloody shoot-out with Cuban gunboats off the Isle of Pines finally ended in their capture. The three brothers were taken to Havana. They were whisked from the airfield directly to the Palacio de la Revolución and brought before el comandante.
Castro stood up behind his massive desk and stared at them, his hand on the sidearm that always hung from his belt.
“Ah,” Castro said. “The three little boys who murdered the Russian diplomat? Sí?”
“Sí, Comandante,” Manso said, smiling. “It was a great pleasure. The man was a pig. He insulted my mother in the street.”
“So, you cut his head off and sent it to the Soviet embassy in a piñata,” Castro said, walking around the desk.
Manso stiffened. Waiting in the anteroom outside the Maximum Leader’s office, under the guns of the elite guards, he’d concluded that they were all to be shot where they stood. “We will die like men,” he had told his brothers. Now, it was simply a matter of waiting for the bullets to come. He’d seen men die badly. He didn’t intend to disgrace himself.
“Sí, Comandante. I used my machete. It was a clean cut! I am a Machetero! So are my brothers. We are proud sons of Oriente!”
Castro walked up to Manso and stared hard into his eyes. Then his face broke into a grin and he embraced the startled boy in his two strong arms.
Manso was too shocked to speak.
“This man you killed. His name was Dimitri Gokov. We suspected the Russian of being a double agent, spying for the americanos. This very morning, another Soviet agent confirmed under torture that Gokov was part of a U.S. group plotting an overthrow of our revolutionary government.”
“Comandant
e, I don’t—”
“You are a brave boy. And you have an absolutely amazing sense of timing! Had we caught you yesterday, you would have been shot!” Castro said, and laughed. In Castro’s mind, Manso’s piñata had sent a brilliant, if unwitting, message to both the politburo in Moscow and his enemies in Washington. He embraced Carlos and Juanito and handed all three brothers small black boxes. The three brothers looked at each other, grinning. Inside each box was a shiny golden star attached to a red silk ribbon.
In time, he further rewarded Manso with a commission in the Air Force. He gave Juanito and Carlos commissions, too, in the Army and Navy. All three had shown surprising initiative and risen swiftly to the highest ranks.
Carlitos was now one of the highest-ranking officers in the Navy. Both he and Juanito, comandante of the Western Army, had also secretly returned to the lucrative narco trade they knew so well. Manso’s only fear was that Carlitos’s insatiable love of the product was increasing his already frightening instability.
Carlitos was valuable, but he would have to be watched. Pitting brother against brother, Manso gave that responsibility to Juanito.
Castro’s reprieve had been the beginning of a long, profitable relationship for all of them. Those closest to the leader always reaped the largest rewards. As Fidel himself had once remarked, “I bathe myself, but I also splash others.” There were rumors of hundreds of millions in Castro’s Swiss bank accounts. Manso grew adept at siphoning off his share and more.
In time, all three brothers grew immensely rich from many sources. It was far easier to export your product to America from Cuba than it was from Colombia. Juanito, through his vast drug-running operations in the Exumas, got the product into Cuba. Manso and Carlos got it out of Cuba and into the United States. There were rumors, of course, about narco traffic at the very highest levels of the Cuban military. But Manso’s private security force made sure it was all kept very quiet.
Even the leader, if he knew of the de Herreras brothers’ sideline businesses, never mentioned it. El jefe was famously antidrug, and had even been trying to negotiate some kind of crackdown with the U.S. for years.
Manso and his leader had grown ever closer over the years. The leader, who was never able to sleep at night, would roam the streets of the old city with Manso, pouring out his frustrations and fears. Time passed, and the two men became, not brothers, because their age difference was too wide, but something akin to father and son.
Fidel had been born in 1926 at Las Manacas, near Biran, in northeastern Cuba. Manso had been born twenty-five years later in Mayari, the nearest neighboring town to Biran. They shared a common loathing for the gringo imperialists who had exploited the natural resources and the peasants of their beloved Oriente. This had been one of the earliest bonds between the aging leader and the promising young Manso.
He looked at his leader now, red-faced and shaking his fists in the anger he seemed to summon so easily. Manso took a sip from the cup of the warm lemonade and tried to relax. He was going to need every ounce of his courage and strength of mind to do what he had to do.
It had been six whole months since he’d been to Telaraña. It had become too dangerous for him to be seen there. His brother Juanito had been flying down from Havana once a week, supervising most of the construction. His other brother, Carlos, had been put in charge of planning and organization. He was also in charge of Manso’s personal security force. Castro had an imperial guard said to number ten thousand. Manso’s guard, though not nearly that size, had grown exponentially in recent months.
Manso didn’t like to admit it, but his brother Carlos, who’d risen to the highest echelons of the Navy, was by far the smartest of the three and certainly the most politically astute. He was also the most unpredictable. A lifelong addiction to the poppy and the coca leaf had made him dangerously unstable.
But it was somewhere inside the scrambled brains of Carlos that the little seed of rebellion had begun to grow. Manso, with his limitless financial resources, had provided Carlos’s tiny seed with all the water and sunshine it needed to thrive.
Then there was his brother Juanito, a great general of the Army. There were in fact three distinct armies in Cuba. The army of the East, the Central army, and the army of the West. On pain of execution, the leaders of the three armies were not allowed to communicate with one another. This Manso and Carlos had used to their great advantage.
Juanito, in complete secrecy, had used his position as commander of the Western forces to turn Carlos’s little seed into the vast secret complex of bricks, mortar, missiles, and men called Telaraña. Manso had originally modeled Telaraña after Escobar’s own grandiose estate in the mountains of Medellín, Hacienda los Napoles.
Telaraña had become far more than the jungle pleasure palace, which, to a casual observer, it still appeared to be. An influx of many millions had turned Telaraña into a powerful military fortress that would soon be the birthplace of a new Cuba.
Manso looked at his chunky gold Rolex. Three-fifteen. The speech seemed to be winding up to a climax. Good. With any luck, they could be airborne in twenty minutes or so. If God was truly on his side, and how could He not be, the birth of a new Cuba was less than three hours away.
10
She lay about a half mile outside the channel markers for Staniel Cay and when she was lit up at night, as she was now, she was magnificent. The name, illuminated in huge gold type on her towering stern, said it all.
BLACKHAWKE.
Hawke’s yacht, completed in great secrecy just two years earlier at the Huisman yard in Holland, caused a unique stir wherever she went in the world. And the world, it delighted Hawke to know, had no idea just how singular a vessel this truly was.
At just over two hundred forty feet in overall length, she was a mammoth silhouette against the evening sky. Tonight, since there were to be guests, her gleaming black hull and towering white top-sides were illuminated with halogen lighting from stem to stern. Her crew, who, with the exception of the galley staff and the launch crew, wore simple summer uniforms of black linen, had been given the night off.
Congreve, who loved messing about in kitchens, had sent Slushy, the executive chef, ashore. He’d elected to do the cooking tonight himself. Local lobsters, fresh corn, and salad. In deference to the Russians, he was serving caviar and iced vodka before dinner.
Twilight had congealed into starlit darkness.
The two old friends sat conversing comfortably under the umbrella of stars, as their guests weren’t due for another half hour or so. They were all the way aft on the top deck. Quick, now disguised as a steward, was serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres.
Hawke had let his parrot, Sniper, out of his cage, and the big black bird was now perched in his favorite location on Hawke’s right shoulder. The bird had been a gift from his grandfather on Alex’s eighth birthday. Hawke had no idea how old Sniper was. Parrots, he’d learned, lived to be ninety to one hundred years old.
It was Hawke’s habit at cocktail time to feed the bird whatever hors d’oeuvres were being served. Sniper seemed to like everything except pigs-in-blankets. But he had an enormous fondness for Russian caviar. At the moment, he was making do with the cheese.
Congreve was busy trying to get his pipe lit again. They were sitting some fifty feet above the water and it was breezy out on deck.
“Another Dark & Stormy, Ambrose?” Hawke asked, feeding Sniper his fifth gob of warm Brie cheese. Dark & Stormy was his friend’s favorite cocktail, a heady mix of dark rum and ginger beer.
“No thank you, Alex. I anticipate a lengthy evening.”
“God, I hope not. I don’t want those two cretins aboard this ship one second longer than absolutely necessary.”
“Sketchy, aren’t they?”
“You have no idea.”
“Pity about that poor waitress.”
“You noticed,” Hawke said.
“Please,” Congreve replied with a withering stare.
“I forgot. You notic
e everything.”
“I don’t want to be an old Nosey Parker. But, I have to ask, what in the bloody hell are you going to do with a nuclear submarine?”
“You actually thought I was serious? That’s quite good.”
“You’re not?”
“Hardly.”
“I see. And your reasoning for subjecting me to life-threatening encounters with poisonous rocks and man-eating marine life?”
“Simple. Call from Washington. A Soviet Borzoi-class boomer disappeared six months ago from its pen pal at Vladivostok. It took me a while, back-channel, but I was eventually able to determine who might have stolen the damn thing. From there, it was fairly easy to identify who was peddling it. You remember Cap Adams. Middle East CIA station chap in Kuwait City? He finally put me on to the two human ferrets we went snorkeling with today. Pretty sure they sold it. The Americans are desperate to know who bought it. It’s my job to find out.”
“Borzoi? Never heard the name.”
“Not surprising. Last gasp of the Soviet Navy. A highly experimental sub. Only two were built. They used pilfered American stealth technology and some of their own to create the world’s first stealth submarine. Radical delta-wing design. Retractable conning tower. She carries forty warheads and, for all intents and purposes, the bloody thing’s invisible.”
“Good God,” Congreve said, leaning forward. “Anyone in possession of such a weapon could stick up the whole world.”
“I’m afraid you’re right. Global, reach-for-the-sky type hardware. She’s monstrous. Lethal. Undetectable. The pan-Arabic terrorist organization that first tried to buy the sub gave it the code name Operation Invincible Sword. My CIA friend Cap Adams spent a few tough weeks in Kuwait, making sure something went wrong with that plan, thank God.”