by Tom Clancy
It was a revelation, an epiphany of sorts, that had come to him as his mind had drifted between the conscious and unconscious, because the problem of how their adversaries had gotten the explosives into the room had continued to burn in his head until a very low-tech solution took hold. All he needed to do was find evidence of it.
He walked along the edge of the rooftop, allowing his flashlight to slowly glide over the dust-caked concrete and steel …until he found it.
The Special Activities Division, operating within the National Clandestine Service, was manned by Paramilitary Ops officers recruited from the military who conducted deniable covert operations on foreign soil. The division was composed of ground, maritime, and air branches. Moore had originally been recruited for the maritime branch, like most Navy SEALs, but he’d been loaned out to the ground branch and had worked several years in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he’d conducted excellent intelligence operations involving the use of Predator drones to drop Hellfire missiles on numerous Taliban targets. Moore had not balked at being moved to the ground branch, and he knew that if he was needed for a particular maritime operation, he’d be sent anyway. Operational lines had been drawn by office staff, not field operatives.
SAD consisted of less than two hundred agents, pilots, and other specialists deployed in six-man or fewer teams, with more often than not a solo SAD operative conducting “black” and other covert operations with the assistance of a “handler” and/or “case officer” who often remained out of harm’s way. SAD operatives were extensively trained in sabotage, counterterrorism, hostage rescue, bomb damage assessment, kidnapping, and personnel and matériel recovery.
SAD owed its existence to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an agency during World War II that was organized under the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had direct access to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For the most part, the OSS operated independently of military control—an idea that raised brows and drew deep skepticism at the time. MacArthur was said to have been highly reluctant to have any OSS personnel working within his theater of operations. Consequently, when the OSS was disbanded after the war, the CIA was created under the National Security Act of 1947. Missions that could not be associated with the United States went to the paramilitary group of the CIA—the Special Activities Division—a direct descendant of the OSS.
Chief of SAD David Slater, a steel-jawed black man and former Force Recon Marine with twenty years in the military, joined the morning video conference with Deputy Director O’Hara. The two men stared up at Moore from his tablet computer as he sat in the kitchen of the safe house in Saidpur Village.
“Sorry we couldn’t hook up yesterday. I was in the air en route to CONUS,” volunteered Slater.
“It’s okay, sir. Thanks for joining us.”
O’Hara wished Moore a good morning.
“With all due respect, there is absolutely nothing good about it.”
“We understand how you feel,” replied O’Hara. “We lost some great people and years of intel.”
Moore grimaced and bit his tongue. “What do you know so far?”
“Harris and Stone have been recovered from the rubble. At least what was left of them. Gallagher, who was at Khodai’s house, is still missing. They must have him in a cellar or a deep cave, because there’s no signal from his shoulder beacon. The guy you chased was obviously well trained but still just a low-level guy.”
Moore shook his head in disgust. “Do you think Khodai was wired?”
“It’s possible,” said Slater.
“I thought he was, too. I thought the checkpoint in the lobby was a fake and controlled by them. The X-ray wouldn’t pick up anything, even if he was wired. So Khodai came through without triggering the system. Maybe they threatened him, said if he didn’t blow us up, they’d kill his family, which they did anyway.”
“That’s a pretty good theory,” said O’Hara.
Moore snorted. “But that’s not what happened.”
“What do you got?” Slater asked him.
“Hotel security is, for the most part, pretty good. I think they used housekeepers to get the bombs in the rooms next to ours.”
“Slow down,” said Slater. “How’d they get the bombs into the hotel in the first place? They didn’t haul them through the main entrance.”
Moore shook his head. “They got into the building next door, the tech center, where the sniper was. Less security there, and maybe easier to bribe. The bombs were passed across via a line and pulley from one rooftop to the next.”
“You got to be kidding me,” said O’Hara.
“I’m not. I went up on the tech-center roof and saw where they’d strung the ropes. Then I went over to the Marriott, found the same signs on the edge of their roof. I’ll be uploading some photos I took in a few minutes.”
O’Hara’s voice lowered in frustration. “That’s ridiculously simple.”
“And maybe that was our problem: We’ve got our eyes on the complicated when these guys are using sticks and stones. If they were really daring, they would’ve tried throwing the bombs across …” Moore just shook his head again.
“So those rooms around yours were registered to guests who were never there,” O’Hara concluded.
“Exactly. Someone on the inside made sure they looked occupied in the registration system while they remained vacant. The local cops should be able to nab the one son of a bitch at the front desk who hooked them up. I’ve got Rana putting out some feelers for me.”
“That sounds good,” answered O’Hara. “But at this point, we’d like to get you out of there.”
Moore inhaled and closed his eyes. “Look, I know you’re thinking I let this whole thing go south …a lapse in security, but this whole thing was clean. I’d checked everything. I mean everything. Now …just let me finish this. Please.” He wanted to tell them that he needed to do this for the people who died, and he needed to do it for himself, but the words wouldn’t come.
“We need you back home.”
His eyes snapped open. “Home? In the States?”
Slater broke in. “Yesterday afternoon several officers in Khodai’s battalion were photographed with a man we’ve identified as Tito Llamas, a known lieutenant in the Juárez Cartel. With them were two unidentified men, possibly Taliban. You’ll have those photos momentarily.”
“So we have corrupt Pakistan Army officers meeting with a drug cartel guy from Mexico and the Taliban,” said Moore. “That’s an unholy trinity, all right.”
Slater nodded. “Max, you know a lot of the Middle Eastern players. You’ve got the expertise we need. We want you to field-supervise a new joint task force we’re putting together.”
Moore’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Is this like a promotion—after what just happened? I mean, I’m oh-for-two in two weeks …”
“We’ve been discussing this for a long time now, and your name has always been at the top of the list. That hasn’t changed,” answered Slater.
But Moore kept shaking his head. “The two guys in the hall …I thought they were a couple of ISI agents controlling access to the fifth floor. They were just making sure the bombs went off …”
“That’s right,” said O’Hara.
O’Hara leaned toward the camera. “We need to know the extent to which the Mexican drug cartels are in bed with these Afghan and Pakistani smugglers. If it’s any consolation, you’ll still be working on the same case—just from another angle.”
Moore needed a moment to process all that. “So how do the Mexicans fit in, besides being middlemen and customers?”
O’Hara drifted back into his chair. “That’s the real question, isn’t it?”
Slater cleared his throat and consulted some notes. “Your primary task will be to learn if this connection between the Taliban and the Mexicans is just to expand the opium market or if it’s meant to foster something more problematic, like the Taliban recruiting in Mexico to develop a new base of operations and easier access into the U.S.”
“You said joint task force. What other agencies are involved?”
Slater grinned. “The whole alphabet: CIA, FBI, ATF, CBP, and a half-dozen smaller and local agencies to assist.”
Moore shuddered as he considered the enormity of what they were asking. “Gentlemen, I appreciate the offer.”
“It’s not an offer,” O’Hara pointed out.
“I see. Look, just give me a couple of days to follow up on Khodai’s killers and see if I can get some intel on Gallagher. That’s all I’m asking.”
“We’ve already got another team en route,” said Slater.
“That’s fine. But let me take one more shot.”
O’Hara winced. “We all failed here. Not just you.”
“They killed the colonel and murdered his family. He was a good man. He was doing the right thing. We owe him and his nephew this much. I can’t walk away.”
O’Hara mulled that over, then raised his brows. “Two days.”
MOVEMENT
Somewhere in the Jungle
Northwest of Bogotá, Colombia
JUAN RAMÓN BALLESTEROS cursed through his teeth and reached past his swollen beer gut for the cell phone lodged in the pocket of his cargo shorts. His sleeveless white T-shirt was already soaked in sweat, and the unlit Cohiba Behike jammed between his lips was soggy. It had been a brutal and unforgiving summer, the air so humid that it felt as though he were walking through loaves of warm bread.
Ballesteros was barely forty, but the heavy burdens of his position had drawn deep lines around his eyes, had turned his beard and curly locks gunmetal gray, and had left him hunched over with chronic back pain that struck like blows from a machete.
However, his physical discomforts were the least of his concerns: The four young men with gunshot wounds to their heads had his complete attention.
They’d been lying on the jungle floor for most of the night, and the early-morning dew had left a sheen on their pale bodies. The flies buzzed and alighted on their cheeks, their eyelids, and flew into their open mouths. Rigor mortis had already set in, and their bowels had released. The stench was ungodly and had Ballesteros turning his head away to gasp and swallow back the bile.
The team had come to set up another mobile cocaine lab, which was anything but high-tech and hygienic—only a few homemade tents covering mountains of coca leaves drying on the dirt floor. One tent was used for the production and storage of gasoline and sulfuric acid, among other chemicals necessary to manufacture at least one thousand kilos of paste per week. In years past, Ballesteros had given a few of his more powerful buyers tours of the camps, showing them the exacting and multi-stage process by which the product was produced.
While coca farmers all followed slightly different recipes, Ballesteros’s men needed one thousand kilos of coca leaves to get just one kilo of paste, about 2.2 pounds. For the tours they would demonstrate how to make one-tenth of that amount. His men fired up weed whackers to crush one hundred kilos of leaves and add to them sixteen kilos of sea salt and eight kilos of limestone. They would mix those ingredients together by vigorously stomping on them until they created a black, dirtlike mixture that was poured into a large drum. Twenty liters of gasoline were added, and the ingredients were left to sit for about four hours.
The men would turn to another drum that had already been soaking, and this liquid would be drained into a bucket so they could discard the pulp and leaves. The valuable product at this stage was the drug leached from the coca leaves and now suspended in the gasoline.
Next came eight liters of water and eight teaspoons of sulfuric acid, and this new mixture was scrubbed with a plunger for a couple of minutes, then decanted, leaving the sediment on the bottom. Sodium permanganate was added to the sediment, along with caustic soda in no specific amounts, just enough to drown the sediment. The liquid was now a milky white, the paste congealing at the bottom. The remaining liquid was filtered away via a rag, and the paste was left to dry in the sun until it turned a light brown.
The price for Ballesteros to produce one kilo was about one thousand U.S. dollars. When that kilo was processed into cocaine powder and transported to Mexico, the price jumped to $10,000 per kilo. Once that same kilo reached the United States, it sold for $30,000 or more to the street gangs, who then cut it with additives to reduce the purity and get more out of each stash. The gangs sold their product by the gram, and a single kilo could generate a street value of $175,000 or more.
Ironically, a buyer had once asked, “Why do you do this?” Didn’t he understand that some teenager in Los Angeles had just died by overdosing on the very substance he produced? Didn’t he realize that he was destroying families and ruining lives all over the globe?
He never thought about it and considered himself a farmer come full circle from his own family’s days working on the coffee plantations. He’d grown up in Bogotá, gone off to college in the United States, in Florida, and had returned home with a business degree to try to start his own organic banana farm, which had failed miserably. Some of his friends in the banana business introduced him to several drug traffickers, and as they say, the rest was history. It was, for him, a matter of survival. After twenty long years as a drug producer and trafficker, Ballesteros was reaping the benefits of his high-risk occupation. His family now lived among white Europeans in a wealthy northern suburb of the city, his two sons were doing well in high school, and his wife wanted for nothing, save for more time with him. He was away most of the week on “business” but returned home on the weekends for family gatherings, church, and time to attend soccer games with his sons. In truth, he lived in his jungle house about a quarter-kilometer away from this lab and had, thus far, an excellent relationship with FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a paramilitary group that helped him distribute and export his product. He hoped his men were not killed by FARC members; there had been some tension between himself and a FARC colonel named Dios, a simple disagreement over price. Now Ballesteros’s workers had been executed in their sleep with what had to be a silenced weapon.
He speed-dialed Dante Corrales, his contact in Mexico, and waited for the young man to answer.
“You only call me when there is a problem,” said Corrales. “But there’d better not be a problem.”
“Dios,” was all Ballesteros said.
“Okay. Now try not to bother me again.”
“Wait, I’m not sure it was Dios, but maybe …”
The kid had already ended the call.
Ballesteros had met Corrales only once, two years ago, when members of the Juárez Cartel had come down to both survey his operation and offer security forces and workers to help him increase production. Corrales was an arrogant young man, the new breed of narco-trafficker with no sense of history or respect for those who’d come before him. These young sicarios were more concerned with power and image and intimidation than with making money. They had fantasies of being in Hollywood movies, thought they were Al Pacino. Ballesteros had little use for them, but he’d been forced to accept the cartel’s assistance when the government had tightened its grip on his operation, and nowadays they were his primary buyers.
After another terse phone call with Corrales the week before, Ballesteros had learned that the cartel boss himself would be in the country very soon and that he should not delay the next shipment. He swore and went running back to his house, where he sent two more of his men back to the lab to collect the bodies.
Four old trucks whose flatbeds were covered with heavy tarpaulins had pulled up outside the house, and another team of men was loading the banana boxes filled with bananas and cocaine onto the trucks.
Ballesteros tried to hide his fury and disgust over the murdered men and shouted to his crew to hurry. The boat had already arrived at the dock in Buenaventura.
They drove over the potholed roads and were thrown hard against their seats in the hot cabs. None of the trucks had a working air conditioner, and it was just as well. Ballesteros didn’t wan
t any of his men to get too comfortable. They had to remain vigilant, and Ballesteros himself scrutinized every passing car and pedestrian along the route.
Because this particular shipment was large (seven tons, to be precise), and because his operation had just been struck a blow by the murderers, Ballesteros was wary of another attack and opted to follow this shipment at least until the second or third exchange point.
The crew of a ninety-five-foot Houston shrimp boat hustled onto the dock when Ballesteros and his men arrived. The teams of men began the swift transfer of the cargo, using a gas-powered forklift along with the boat’s inboard net boom to move the pallets of banana boxes from dockside to the shrimper’s hold.
Not far off, near the end of the dock, stood two FARC soldiers watching the entire operation. One gave a nod to Ballesteros, who hustled up the gangway, much to the surprise of the crew. Yes, he told them. He was coming along. And how far was he going? Far enough.
They headed west for about two hundred fifty nautical miles, nearing Isla de Malpelo, a small island with fantastic escarpments and spectacular rock formations glistening in the sun. They would remain in the area until nightfall, conducting routine “shrimping” operations while tailed by a school of silky sharks. Ballesteros remained quiet for most of the day, still haunted by the images of his men.
Finally, a dark shadow swelled like a whale or great white shark off the port bow. As the shadow drew closer, the men on the deck shouted to one another and got to work readying the lines. The shadow rose from the water, taking on a mottled pattern of blue, gray, and black, and then, with seawater washing off its sides, it fully broke the surface …
A submarine.
The vessel glided alongside them, and Ballesteros cried out to the captain, who was rising into the hatch, “This time, I’m coming along for the ride!”