by Tom Clancy
“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.”
2 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 th
e 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 want 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!”
The sub was diesel electric-powered, thirty-one meters long, and nearly three meters high from deck plates to ceiling. It was constructed of fiberglass and could cut through the water via twin screws at more than twenty kilometers per hour, even while carrying up to ten tons of cocaine. The vessel had a three-meter-tall conning tower with periscope and the ability to dive to nearly twenty meters. It was a remarkable feat of engineering and a testament to the creativity and tenacity of the leaders of their operation. The submarine belonged to the Juárez Cartel, of course, and it cost more than $4 million to construct inside a carefully hidden dry dock beneath the triple canopy of the Colombian jungle.
Although two other submarines had been discovered and confiscated by military forces before they could be deployed, the cartel had plenty of money to keep building these vessels, and this was one of four they had in continuous operation.
Ballesteros remembered the days when they’d used slow-moving fishing boats, sailboats, and if they were feeling bold, a few cigar boats here and there. But now they’d made huge strides in payload capacity and stealth. The old semi-submersibles could sometimes be detected from the air, but not this submarine. He was helped onto the deck and would exchange places with one of the sub’s crew members. They would rendezvous with yet another fishing vessel about a hundred nautical miles off the coast of Mexico, offload the cargo, then turn back for Colombia. Ballesteros would not sleep until he knew the shipment had arrived. He descended into the submarine and found himself in a narrow but air-conditioned compartment while the men outside began the transfer.
Mexican Border
Brewster County, Texas
Two Days Later
U.S. Border Patrol Agent Susan Salinas had parked her SUV along a small ditch, shielding it from view across the open desert that swept out toward the curving horizon of mountains. The sun had set about two hours ago, and she and her partner, Richard Austin, had crawled up on their bellies to survey the border with their night-vision goggles, the desert now a fluctuating course of shimmering green. They’d received a tip from one of the local ranchers, who’d seen a truck cutting across the valley, heading toward his land, and that truck had tripped one of the remote electronic sensors put in place by the CBP (Customs and Border Protection).
“Could be those kids four-wheeling again,” said Austin, issuing a deep sigh as he panned to the right while she surveyed the southeast side.
“No, I think we’re going to score big tonight,” she said slowly.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I’m looking at the bastards right now.”
A slight dust trail swirled out from behind a battered F-150 whose flatbed was piled high with banana boxes tied down with bungee cords and partially covered by torn canvas. No, those guys were not transporting produce through the rough and mountainous terrain of Brewster County, and yes, they’d done a piss-poor job of concealing their stash. Either that or they were just too brazen to care. She zoomed in, saw three men jammed into the front bench seat with movement behind them in the cab. There could be as many as six.
She calmed herself. Salinas had been with the CBP for nearly three years now, and she’d caught hundreds of people attempting to illegally cross the border. The truth was, she’d never imagined she’d be out here on line watch and carrying a gun. She’d considered herself a “girly girl” in high school as the captain of the cheerleading squad and had ambled her way through those locker-lined halls with low B’s. She’d then wandered her way into community college, where she couldn’t get excited about any of the majors. When a friend’s brother had joined the Border Patrol, she’d done s
ome research. Now she was twenty-seven, still single, but loving the adrenaline rush of her job.
The position had not come easily. She’d spent fifty-five days in Artesia, New Mexico, taking courses in immigration and nationality law, criminal law and statutory authority, Spanish, Border Patrol operations, care and use of firearms, physical training, operation of motor vehicles, and antiterrorism. And no, they hadn’t let her fire a gun at community college. This was by far the most exciting thing she’d done in her short life. And now, as her pulse rose, she had further confirmation of that.
“What did you think? We were the puppy patrol up here?” she asked one sicario she’d busted last week. “They just handed me a gun and told me to stop the bad guys?”
Ironically, her mother wholeheartedly approved of her job and expressed how proud she was that her daughter had become a law enforcement officer, especially since, as Mom put it, “There’s always been such a fuss about protecting the border.”
Her father, on the other hand, was about as thrilled as a football fan without beer. Dad had always been a quiet man who’d spent a quiet life as a tax attorney in a quiet office on the outskirts of Phoenix. He enjoyed quiet weekends and was the antithesis of the alpha male. He just couldn’t see his daughter handling a weapon when he never would. At one point he’d even quoted Gandhi and gone so far as to tell her that men would no longer view her as feminine, that she’d have trouble dating, and that some might even question her sexuality. And then, of course, she’d get fat. All cops did. Border Patrol officers included. She had never forgotten those words.
Austin was a lot like her: single, pretty much a loner, with a strained relationship with his parents. He was a workaholic and a by-the-book kind of guy, except when it came to their relationship. He’d already hit on her, but she wasn’t interested. His facial features were severe, his body just a bit too doughy for her taste. She’d gently let him down.