Caesar the War Dog 4

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  ‘I remember seeing a movie about it when I was a kid,’ said Charlie. ‘Jim Bowie invented the Bowie knife, didn’t he?’

  ‘That’s the guy,’ De Silva said proudly.

  ‘And you say the Texans all died in the battle?’ Ben asked.

  De Silva nodded. ‘Uh-huh. The Texans lost the battle but won the war and established the Republic of Texas, before it became a US state. Santa Anna’s army was defeated by Sam Houston’s Texan army a little while later at San Jacinto. Only took them eighteen minutes to do it. These days, we got our hands full here in San Antonio with the invasion of the Mexican crime cartels.’

  ‘The cartels have a foothold here?’ Ben asked, surprised.

  ‘More than a foothold. If you drive south for five or six hours, you’ll be in Monterrey, the crime capital of Mexico. With more than half the population of San Antonio being Hispanic, and a lot of those folks having relatives in Mexico, it was pretty natural that the crime bosses would set up operations here, too. The Mexican Government is at war with those crime cartels – has been for years – and that war spills over into Texas all the time.’

  ‘You have your hands full, then,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Well, things aren’t out of hand here the way they are in Monterrey and other parts of the Mexican border states. But take it from me, guys, the Mexican cartels will stop at nothing. When they’re not fighting the police and the military, they’re fighting each other.’

  ‘How many Mexican cartels are there?’ asked Ben.

  ‘At last count, thirty-seven. And some of those cartels have thousands of people on their payrolls. The Mexican police are outnumbered by them. And the cartels used to be better-armed than the police. That’s why the Mexican Government brought their military into the fight against crime a few years back.’

  ‘Who’s winning?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘The Mexican Government has won back some control. But, like I say, there’s a war going on south of the border. IEDs have become a key part of the cartels’ weapons inventory.’ De Silva turned and looked at Caesar. ‘That’s why the seminar with your famous EDD has sold out. Everyone wants to have an edge on the bad guys when it comes to bombs. And a dawg as versatile as yours seems to represent that edge, Ben.’

  ‘Well, Caesar and I are happy to share our expertise, sir.’

  De Silva and Austin dropped the Australian trio off at a University of Texas accommodation wing in downtown San Antonio, arranging to collect them the next morning and take them to the seminar.

  Ben, Caesar and Charlie were met by Mrs Rosario, the superintendent of the university’s on-site accommodation. She was a tiny woman with bright red hair.

  ‘What a handsome dog you have,’ she said, smiling at the brown labrador with the wagging tail.

  ‘This is Caesar, ma’am. I’m Ben and this is Charlie,’ Ben said by way of introduction.

  Her eyes sparkled. ‘César? Why, this is a good Hispanic name. We have a hero here in San Antonio by the same name – César Chávez. He started the United Farm Workers and did great things for the rights of the people working in the fields. To get here, you would have driven along a boulevard named in his honour. Come, I’ll show you to your rooms, and where César can sleep.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, ma’am, Caesar will sleep with me,’ said Ben.

  Mrs Rosario looked surprised. ‘Such a large dog sleeps with you?’

  ‘On the floor beside my bed. Sometimes he does sneak onto the bed and snuggle up beside me. Don’t you, mate?’ Ben gave his four-legged companion a vigorous pat. Caesar, his tail wagging furiously, responded by licking him on the cheek.

  ‘I don’t agree with dogs in bedrooms,’ said the woman.

  ‘This is no ordinary dog, Mrs Rosario,’ said Charlie. ‘He’s more like Ben’s son.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Mrs Rosario clearly did not approve. ‘And what happens when his “son” wants to go to the bathroom?’

  ‘He’ll tell me and I’ll take him outside,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t worry, I always clean up after him.’

  ‘I see.’ The woman didn’t sound convinced. ‘We have very strict hygiene rules here, you know. This way.’

  Inside a garage in a rundown part of west San Antonio, surrounded by armed men with star tattoos on their necks and the backs of their hands, Antonio Lopez and Manny Diaz were inspecting two vehicles – a grey GMC Savana van and a battered 14-seat Toyota minibus. The front and sides of the minibus were emblazoned with the words ‘Texian Transit Company’ and an image of a big yellow star.

  ‘El Globo, you got the numbers Manny must call tomorrow?’

  ‘Sí, Patrón.’ A rotund, middle-aged man removed two small pieces of paper from his pocket. Each had a phone number written on it. ‘One for the first bomb. Another for the second.’

  ‘You memorise those numbers, Manny,’ Lopez instructed. ‘You memorise the numbers good and then you destroy the pieces of paper. Got it?’

  ‘Got it, Patrón,’ said Manny. He took the pieces of paper and studied the numbers. ‘You can rely on me. Memorise the numbers and destroy the pieces of paper. Simple.’

  Lopez looked at him fiercely. ‘I am relying on you, amigo. Screw up tomorrow, and your little ones will be looking for a new father.’

  Manny paled. ‘When have I ever let Estrella down, Patrón?’ He displayed the star tattoo on the back of his right hand. ‘My loyalty is more than skin-deep. It is in the blood. There is no lieutenant more faithful in all the world. Trust me, Rocky Marron is as good as dead. It will all go like the workings of a clock.’

  Lopez smiled. ‘Tick, tock, BOOM!’

  At precisely 7.30 am, the San Antonio Police Department’s Sergeant Austin collected Ben, Caesar and Charlie to drive them across town.

  ‘Captain De Silva will catch you later at the conference,’ the sergeant advised from behind the wheel.

  ‘Where is the conference?’ Ben asked.

  ‘The Sheraton Gunter Hotel, one of San Antonio’s oldest hotels – and the most haunted.’

  ‘Haunted?’ Charlie looked up from the speech he was to deliver. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Is it far?’ Ben asked, patting Caesar, who was sitting beside him.

  ‘No, it’s in the financial district – just four blocks from the Alamo,’ said Austin.

  They turned onto East Houston Street and passed a grey van parked outside the Texas National Bank. The Texian Transport minibus was parked only a block away. Both vehicles contained IEDs built around twenty kilograms of C-4 plastic explosive. And both IEDs were linked to detonation devices designed to be set off when Manny Diaz rang the mobile phones attached to them.

  A hotel doorman greeted Ben, Caesar and Charlie when they alighted outside the Sheraton Gunter Hotel. As the trio strode into the lobby, passers-by turned to take in the two soldiers in camouflage uniform and wearing the sky-blue beret of the United Nations. But most of the attention was directed at Caesar, who moved along at Ben’s side on his short leash, taking in the sights and smells of the busy five-star hotel.

  A grey-haired concierge hurried to greet the new arrivals. ‘Good morning. Are you here to attend the conference, gentlemen?’ he asked.

  ‘Sergeants G and F, and EDD Caesar,’ Charlie announced, shaking the man’s hand. ‘We are guest speakers at the conference.’

  ‘Yes, sir, we’ve been expecting you,’ said the concierge, resisting the temptation to make a quip about Caesar being a guest speaker who couldn’t speak. ‘You have asked to check out the conference room in advance?’

  ‘Roger to that,’ said Charlie.

  ‘This way, sirs. You will have to go through the metal detector, but that will be a mere formality for you military folks.’ Ahead, security personnel waited at a walk-through metal detector similar to the kind used at airports.

  As Charlie reached the detector, he turned to the security guard in charge. ‘You’ll have to take these into account,’ he said, then bent down and pulled up his left trouser leg to reveal
a Zoomer prosthetic leg. Composed of carbon fibre and various metal parts, it was attached to what was left of his upper left leg after a bloody battle in Afghanistan.

  The security guard’s eyes widened. ‘You serve in the military with a prosthetic leg, Sergeant?’

  ‘No,’ Charlie responded with a smile. ‘Two prosthetic legs.’ He proceeded to roll up his right trouser leg to show a second, shorter Zoomer attached to his lower right leg.

  ‘Wow!’ said the security guard. ‘How does that work for you?’

  ‘Pretty well,’ said Charlie, before he walked through the scanner.

  The metal fittings on his Zoomers set off a high-pitched alarm, and the security guards patted Charlie down to make sure that he wasn’t carrying a weapon or explosives into the convention. Charlie rarely travelled with commercial airlines where this sort of security check was the norm. He usually flew on military aircraft and was the one looking after the security of others. Patiently, he raised his arms and allowed the security guards to do their job.

  ‘All clear. Thank you, sir,’ said the chief guard.

  Next, it was Ben and Caesar’s turn to go through the metal detector. Before they did this, Ben had to remove Caesar’s collar and leash, which were handed around the detector by the guards. First, Ben instructed Caesar to sit in front of the detector and wait. Ben then walked through without setting off any alarms. All the while, Caesar sat looking intently at Ben, watching and listening for a hand signal, a whistle or a command.

  ‘Isn’t he cute?’ a passing woman said to her friends, nodding to the obedient labrador.

  Caesar barely even heard her. The focus of his attention was on his master.

  Ben now turned to Caesar. ‘Come on, mate,’ he called, patting his thigh.

  In an instant, Caesar was up. But instead of going through the metal detector, he skirted around it with a wagging tail and came to sit beside Ben. This brought laughter from the security guards.

  ‘He can’t do that, Sergeant,’ the chief security guard said with a grin. ‘That’s cheating. He’s got to go through, just like everyone else. Them’s the rules.’

  ‘Caesar, go back through,’ said Ben, pointing to the detector.

  Caesar immediately rose and went trotting through the detector, in the reverse direction. Then he turned and looked at Ben, his head to one side, as if to say, Now what, boss?

  ‘Come back through, mate,’ Ben instructed, waving him forward.

  Caesar did so, receiving a pat from Ben on the other side. Ben fixed Caesar’s collar back in place, and they continued down the corridor with Charlie to the main conference room, where they were met by the manager of the conference. The room was set up like a theatre, with row upon row of chairs, and a dais and lectern up the front. Projected on a massive screen behind the dais were the title of the conference – the North American Rapid Response Conference – and its flash logo.

  Ben unclipped the leash from Caesar’s collar. ‘Seek on, Caesar,’ he instructed. ‘Seek on!’ He pointed to the left side of the conference room. ‘Start this side, with the back row. Let’s go, boy!’

  With his nose to the ground, Caesar launched into a search for explosives. Ben directed him along row after row of empty chairs, and after several minutes they completed a thorough sweep of the entire room without finding anything suspicious.

  ‘What a goose I would have looked if we hadn’t checked the room and there was something planted here,’ Ben said to the manager as he snapped Caesar’s leash back in place.

  ‘We have another sniffer dog on the program tomorrow,’ said the manager. ‘He’s not famous like your Caesar, of course. This dog works in the local prisons, sniffing for the lithium found in mobile-phone batteries. Prisoners sneak the phones in to run crime from their cells, or to organise prison breaks.’

  ‘Lithium?’ Ben nodded. ‘Yes, you can train a dog to track down just about any scent. But a good war dog like Caesar does a whole lot more than track scents.’

  Caesar’s usual reward for a job well done was nothing more than a solid pat and an encouraging word from his master. Ben didn’t favour food rewards because a dog that always receives food rewards was bound to get fat. And a war dog can’t be fat. It has to be fit, for its own safety as well as its handler’s. But while they’d been in Washington, Toushi Harada had given Ben a packet of fish rice crackers, which were Caesar’s absolute favourite treat in the whole world. Reaching into a pouch on his belt, Ben took out one of the Japanese crackers and held it out to his EDD. Caesar gently took the biscuit and downed it in an instant.

  Meanwhile, Charlie was at the lectern, practising his speech. It was about the work of GRRR; in particular, the unit’s rescue of the Secretary-General of the United Nations after he had been taken hostage in Afghanistan by Taliban insurgents.

  Once Charlie had finished running through his presentation, he sighed. ‘I don’t like giving speeches,’ he said into the microphone, looking at the manager.

  ‘It’s part of the job, mate,’ said Ben. ‘You’re GRRR’s field commander, so people want to hear from you about our field ops.’

  ‘I’d rather be in the field on one of those ops,’ Charlie remarked, folding his speech and putting it in his tunic pocket. ‘Give me action instead of speeches any day.’

  Wearing a shaggy black wig, baseball cap and sunglasses, and perspiring with nervousness, Manny Diaz strode into busy Big Sam’s Restaurant and Bakery on East Houston Street. He found an empty table by the window, looking out to the street and the Texas National Bank on the corner opposite. The street was lined with parked cars, but one in particular caught Manny’s eye – a grey GMC Savana van parked directly outside the bank. He smiled approvingly to himself.

  When a young waitress came to him, Manny ordered a regular coffee and a doughnut. He checked whether his watch was working, then double-checked the time on the clock above the restaurant’s servery. He took out his phone and, after confirming that it was indeed on, placed it on the table in front of him.

  He could hear a man and a woman arguing behind him. After a time, the man turned around in his seat. ‘What do you think, buddy?’ he asked Manny.

  ‘Think about what?’ Manny responded distractedly. He shifted slightly to face the couple but kept an eye on the entrance to the bank.

  ‘My girlfriend says she’s an actor, but I say she’s an actress,’ replied the balding man. ‘A girl is an actress, right? Back me up here.’

  At this moment the waitress arrived with a coffeepot, cup and saucer, and a doughnut on a plate, for Manny.

  ‘You’re a waitress, right? Not a waiter?’ Manny asked her, thinking this would settle the matter.

  ‘I’m not a waiter, that’s true,’ said the young woman as she set cup and plate in front of Manny, then poured his coffee. ‘Here at Big Sam’s I think of myself more as a customer-service facilitator.’

  This only made the couple laugh and continue their dispute, but it got Manny off the hook. Turning his back to them, he took a sip and a bite, then reached into his pocket and pulled out two small slips of paper. Manny had read and re-read the numbers printed on them until one in the morning, when he was certain he knew them off by heart. But just to be on the safe side, he’d brought the pieces of paper along. If he had a sudden lapse of memory, he’d told himself, he could refer to them. Lopez had warned him he was a dead man if he screwed up this job. Whatever happened, Manny was determined that Rocky Marron would die today, just as Antonio Lopez planned.

  Manny checked his watch: 11.10 am. In fifty minutes’ time, Rocky Marron was due to arrive to make a deposit. It would take Rocky at least half a dozen paces to cross the broad pavement to the bank door. All Manny had to do was call one of the numbers. After a single ring, an electrical pulse from the phone would detonate the bomb. What could possibly go wrong?

  Four blocks away, at the Sheraton Gunter Hotel, Charlie Grover was two-thirds of the way through his speech in front of a packed audience. Senior policemen from across the U
nited States, Canada and Mexico had travelled to San Antonio to hear about the hostage-rescue work of the otherwise highly top-secret UN Global Rapid Reaction Responders. To protect his anonymity, Charlie was identified simply as Sergeant G. Delegates were also barred from taking his photograph.

  With five minutes to go, Charlie introduced Ben and Caesar to the audience, adding, ‘For security reasons, my GRRR colleague Sergeant F cannot be identified or photographed. But, because of the international fame of his explosive detection dog, you are free to identify Caesar.’

  As Ben led Caesar to the dais, the applause was thunderous.

  ‘Caesar is a highly trained and very experienced explosive detection dog, or EDD,’ Charlie continued. ‘A professor of English tells me that the title “explosive detection dog” is technically incorrect, because it literally means a detection dog which explodes.’

  This brought hoots of laughter from the audience.

  ‘Let me assure you, ladies and gentlemen,’ Charlie went on, ‘Caesar does not explode.’ He waited for the laughter to die down before he continued. ‘Caesar can detect even a hint of explosives with his ultra-sensitive nose. In the SAS he’s known as “the super-sniffer”. But, unlike a drug detection dog, a prison sniffer dog or a quarantine inspection dog, Caesar is put in harm’s way every time he and his handler go out on a job. A number of EDDs have been killed or injured while on operations. Dogs like Caesar operate in open country and indoors with equal skill. Increasingly, in urban environments, terrorists and criminals are using improvised explosive devices. Sometimes those IEDs are sophisticated, sometimes they are basic, like fertiliser bombs. Caesar can detect them all.’

  Caesar looked up at Ben each time Charlie mentioned his name, half-expecting a call to action. There was a look on his face that seemed to say, What’s happening, boss?