by Tom Clancy
With the Agency’s satellites focused on the home, Moore and Towers, wearing security guard uniforms, drove their golf cart into the driveway at five p.m. local time. Towers went around the side of the house to check on the power: Still on.
Moore plugged in the code on the lockbox, removed the key, and worked the lock. The main building had three security keypads: one in the entrance foyer, one in the garage, and another in the master bedroom. The door opened. No warning tone to indicate the alarm was about to go off or beeping to indicate the door had simply been opened. There was no sound at all, as though the alarm had not only been turned off but dismantled. Moore was right. The keypad’s status light was unlit. Wires had been cut. Odd.
They moved quietly inside, across mosaic tile that formed a zodiac wheel in the center of the grand foyer. This main house was still fully furnished in a fusion of contemporary and Southwest designs, which was to say that everything looked damned expensive to Moore. From somewhere within came the faint sound of a television.
Moore gave Towers a hand signal. Towers nodded and held back. He was recovering well from his shoulder and arm wounds, but it’d be another year before he entered his next Ironman competition. Moore clutched his suppressed Glock with both hands and took point.
A hallway ahead. A mirror on the wall, television images flashing in that mirror. He took two more steps. The bedroom door to the left was open. He smelled food …Meat? Chicken? He wasn’t sure. He glanced to his right, back into the mirror, and froze. He looked back at Towers, emphatic: Don’t fucking move! Then he faced the mirror once more, calculating distances, his own reaction time, how quickly he thought his opponent might move. He’d call on muscle memory and sheer aggression honed by years of fieldwork.
He finished plotting his advance, rehearsed it in his mind’s eye, and knew that if he thought about it anymore, he’d get the shakes. Time to move.
A toilet flushed. The master bathroom lay just inside the suite, and a woman’s voice came from within: “I’m so drunk now!”
Moore flicked a look back at Towers, pointed, and mouthed the command: You get her.
And then Moore bolted into the bedroom, where on the other side of the broad room sat a most familiar man in his boxer shorts and with a bag of tortilla chips balanced in his lap.
Bashir Wassouf — aka Bobby Gallagher — arguably one of the most ruthless traitors in the history of the United States of America, gaped at the man standing in his bedroom.
Gallagher had a Beretta sitting on the table beside his recliner. Moore had already seen it and had anticipated which hand the traitor might use to grab it. Gallagher’s mere presence suggested that he didn’t know Borja had been arrested — a grave error on his part.
He was already reaching for his pistol as Moore shouted, “Hold it!”
At nearly the same time, the girl screamed and cursed behind them. Towers hollered at her to freeze.
In the next heartbeat, Gallagher ignored Moore’s command and snatched up his gun.
Expecting to be shot, Moore fired first, hitting Gallagher in the shoulder, then putting a second round in his leg, but it was already too late.
Gallagher had the Beretta in his mouth.
“No, no, no, no!” Moore screamed, lunging toward the man as the shot rang out.
Within the next hour, the local police arrived, the woman (a prostitute) was taken into custody, and Moore and Towers tore apart the entire estate.
Sitting atop a nightstand in one of the back bedrooms were eleven Hershey’s Kisses wrappers rolled into eleven silver balls.
Ministerial Federal Police Headquarters
Mexico City
Six hours later, Moore and Towers were sitting in their rental car in the parking lot, about to go inside to question Borja. They had nothing to lose. Gallagher had taken Samad’s location to his grave. The only other living witnesses were three of the six terrorists who’d boarded the planes, and they’d all repeated the same story: They knew only their mission, nothing else, and Moore tended to believe that, because the Taliban most often used compartmentalized cells. One terrorist was pulled from the wreckage of the San Antonio flight and had been so badly burned on his face and neck that he couldn’t have talked even if he had wanted to.
But Borja …He had to know something. He was involved with Gallagher. Samad had left those Hershey’s Kisses wrappers at his house. The connection was there. He couldn’t deny that anymore.
Moore spoke to Slater, who agreed. A deal must be brokered.
Borja was much younger than expected — mid-thirties, perhaps — with a shaved head and enough tattoos to earn him the admiration of most sicarios. But when he’d opened his mouth, his cadence, diction, and inflections were those of a well-educated businessman, and that was auspicious, because they were about to get down to some serious business.
The interrogation room smelled like bleach. Apparently, the last guy who’d been questioned there had been, according to the police, “sloppy.”
Moore narrowed his gaze on Borja and began abruptly: “Gallagher’s dead. He killed himself at your house in Las Conchas.”
Borja folded his arms over his chest. “Who?”
“All right, let me explain this very carefully. You’re going to jail for the rest of your life. I’m willing to help broker a deal between our two governments. If you know anything about where Samad is, you tell me. And if you’re telling the truth, I get you full amnesty. Clean fucking slate. You walk away. Let me say that again very slowly …You …walk …away.”
“Who’s Samad?”
Towers interrupted Moore by sliding over his laptop so that Moore could glimpse the screen. Their colleagues at Fort Meade had come through once again: cell-phone calls between Borja and Rahmani picked up by the NSA’s satellites, the evidence finally collected and confirmed only hours ago.
“You were talking to Rahmani, too, huh?” Moore asked. “There’s no point in lying now. We know.”
Borja rolled his eyes.
“Were you helping Samad escape?”
Borja leaned forward on his chair. “If you’re going to get me full amnesty, I want it in writing from the government. I want my lawyers to go over it to make sure it’s legitimate.”
“Okay, but that’ll take time. And I’m sure our buddy is on the move. I promise you, you give me what I want and I get Samad, you’re free.”
“I’m not going to believe one fucking gringo.”
Moore rose. “Your choice.” He turned to Towers. “Let’s go …Start extradition papers. We’ll deal with this asshole in the States.” They headed for the door.
Borja slid back his chair and stood, his hands still cuffed behind his back. “Wait!”
Gulfstream III
En Route to Goldson International Airport
Belize
Borja, like any good heir to a Mexican drug cartel, feared extradition to the United States more than the wrath of his own government, and so his shoulders had slumped and his mouth had worked to spin the yarn of how he’d been commissioned by Rahmani to form a new smuggling alliance and how he’d been charged with helping Samad and two of his lieutenants to reach a safe house in San José, Costa Rica. Samad and his men had been hidden in Borja’s vacation home, where they’d remained until just the previous night. They’d been flown in one of Borja’s private planes to Goldson International, then driven out into the jungle to a safe house on the New River Lagoon in Belize. Borja said the house was used by mules moving Colombian cocaine into the vacation areas of Cozumel and Cancún, where the coke was sold primarily to American college students. Lovely. Borja had hired a Guatemalan pilot with an R44 Raven single-engine helicopter to pick them up and fly them down to Costa Rica, with one refueling stop in Nicaragua.
Moore questioned the man about every detail, including the type of helicopter being used, the name of the pilot, the pilot’s phone number, everything and anything.
For once, their timing might be favorable. Samad and his men were scheduled
to be picked up at midnight, local time, and the chopper was going to set down in one of the clearings near the ruins of Lamanai (a word that meant submerged crocodile in the Mayan language). The Mask Temple, High Temple, and Temple of the Jaguar Masks were frequented by tourists during the day but closed in the evenings. The safe house was about nine miles south down the river, and Samad and his men were supposed to take one of several Zodiacs up to the rendezvous point. Borja had given Samad two bodyguards, so Moore and Towers were expecting a party of five.
They would move in on the safe house as a team of two, but Slater was already working on some creative backup forces for them, should the need arise. He’d already arranged for weapons and transport.
Moore’s watch read 9:12 p.m. local time when they landed at Goldson International Airport, just north of Belize City. The plane was met by two vehicles: a four-wheel-drive Jeep Wrangler and another vehicle, a local taxi.
“Welcome to the armpit of the Caribbean,” Towers said, lifting his shirt against the stifling humidity.
Moore snorted. “You’ve been here before.”
A young man no more than twenty-two, with a crew cut and dressed in black T-shirt and khaki pants, hurried out of the cab, opened the trunk, and tossed a big duffel bag into the back of the Wrangler, even as the Jeep’s driver, a man who could be the first man’s brother, left the Jeep and hurried into the back of the cab. Moore approached.
“You’re all set here, sir,” the kid said, his British accent unmistakable. “Night-vision goggles on the front seat. Garmin GPS has been programmed. Just listen to the nice lady with the sexy voice, and she’ll tell you how to get there.”
Moore shook the kid’s hand. “Thank you.”
“It’s not over yet, right?” He thrust a satellite phone into Moore’s hand.
Moore nodded and hopped into the Jeep, with Towers coming around the other side.
“Great service around here,” he said.
Moore threw the Jeep in gear. “I was just trying to impress you, boss.”
“I’m duly impressed.” Towers tapped a couple of buttons on the GPS, and the sexy lady with the British accent told them they had 30.41 miles to their destination. “Now, then, I’ve just got one more question: What if Borja lied?”
“You mean we get to the safe house and no one’s home? They’re already gone or they weren’t there in the first place?”
“Yeah.”
“I just checked before we got off the plane. The National Reconnaissance Office has had eyes on the house since we called it in. NASA and a whole group of universities are always using satellites to map the ruins here, so the NRO’s got access to quite a few sources. They already spotted two individuals out on the dock. They’re there. And remember: Borja knows he doesn’t get shit if we don’t get Samad. That punk in jail is our number-one fan.”
The sexy GPS lady told them to take the left fork in the road, which Moore did, and they bounced over several potholes and continued on, the headlights pushing out through the swirling bugs toward the narrow passage, the power poles like those grave markers in San Juan Chamula. The dense jungle occasionally grew alive with the shimmering eyes of troops of baboons watching them from the trees. They had to go through a police checkpoint, but the officers there had already been informed of their presence by their British contacts and waved them through.
When they reached the sign for the Howler Monkey Resort, Moore donned the night-vision goggles and switched off the headlights to cover the last eight miles to the house. After they passed the main lodge and cabins, the road grew a little more rutted and uneven, and Moore veered twice around dead turtles taken out by other motorists, although they had yet to see another car.
While it felt like he and Towers were alone, thousands of miles from home and driving deeper into the Belizean jungle, Slater, along with analysts in the counterterrorism and counterintelligence centers, was at this very moment monitoring them, reporting their every move, and he and the analysts were holding their collective breaths.
He and Towers drove on in silence, each man mentally preparing for the raid to come. Moore wondered if Towers was a religious man, or maybe he chalked it all up to fate or a merciless universe. For his part, Moore thought in more simple terms: It was time to say thank you to all the people who’d made the ultimate sacrifice. It was time to capture this bastard Samad and do it for them, in their name.
And yes, the trail had finally grown warm. Very warm.
Within one mile of the safe house, Moore pulled off the road, threw the Jeep into park, and turned off the engine. He and Towers looked at each other, banged fists, then climbed out.
It took a few seconds before Moore realized that his boss was humming a familiar rock-and-roll anthem: Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” Moore smiled weakly as he wrenched open the Jeep’s tailgate, and they got to work.
45 THE WATER WAS THEIR HOME
New River Lagoon
Central Belize
After Moore and Towers had gone through the duffel bag, had changed into their black cargo pants and shirts, and had donned their Kevlar vests, web gear, and balaclavas, Towers scrutinized the weapons they’d been provided. The inventory included two bolt-action sniper rifles — the L115A3 (.338) with Schmidt and Bender scopes and five-round magazines — a couple of Browning 9x19-millimeter Parabellum semiautomatic pistols, a very sweet pair of Steiner 395 binoculars, and two Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knives with double edges and ring grips.
Towers held up his blade. “These Royal Marines have some nice toys.”
Moore agreed, and it was fortunate that 45 Commando, a battalion-sized unit of the Royal Marines, frequently had platoons training in the area. Slater had arranged to use them as a backup force. All the Brits knew was that Towers and Moore were CIA agents hunting down some drug smugglers and that they might need a little muscle. The Brits would be happy to oblige.
Moore held up the satellite phone. “Those guys are just a phone call away.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need them,” said Towers.
They slid into their backpacks, then started off, both wearing NVGs against the utter darkness. The grunts, chirps, and rustling noises coming from the jungle beside them were not the most reassuring sounds, and if they were accosted by, say, a baboon, howler monkey, or something, ahem, worse, it was not the animal that Moore feared so much as the racket created by such an encounter.
Consequently, they kept to the edge of the jungle, off the road but not too far, thankful the Brits had included bug spray against the mosquitoes, doctor flies, and chiggers. New operators would call their seasoned colleagues wimps for worrying about bugs, but Moore had been taught in both the SEALs and the CIA that an annoying itch could cause a distraction — and cost you your life.
His brow was already damp with sweat, and he tasted the salt on his lips by the time they reached the water’s edge, where the ground turned muddy and unstable, and roots breached the surface like varicose veins. He led Towers to a stand of trumpet trees, where they dropped to their haunches. He warned Towers to avoid touching the trees, because they were home to wasplike ants called pseudomyrmex. The ants felt vibration and would swarm to attack invaders with painful stings.
About thirty meters north stood the house, no more than a thousand square feet constructed on two-meter-high stilts, with a small porch beneath a gabled tin roof and windows covered by heavy wooden shutters for full privacy. There were no vehicles in sight. The wooden dock was barely ten meters long, with a pair of Zodiacs tied to the north side. Each boat with inflatable tubes around the sides was equipped with an outboard motor and could carry three to five passengers. A trail that the late Michael Ansara would have described as an “excellent single track” for mountain biking wove away from the road behind them and up toward the house. Another path wide enough for a four-wheel-drive cut through the jungle to the north and linked back to the main road. Were they back in the States, a house like this would be mistaken for a fishing camp,
not a drug-smuggling way station.
Moore’s watch read 10:44 p.m.
He wrenched off the NVGs and the balaclava in order to wipe more sweat from his face. Towers cursed and did likewise, then he took up the binoculars and scanned the dock. He regarded Moore with an urgent expression and handed over the binoculars.
A man had come out onto the dock with a small kerosene lantern. He was carrying a plastic five-gallon jug of gasoline. He might be one of the sicarios that Borja had assigned to Samad. Hell, it could be Samad himself. Moore couldn’t be sure, even after zooming in.
The man, bare-chested and wearing a pair of tan shorts, climbed carefully into one of the Zodiacs and proceeded to fill the outboard’s external fuel tank seated just beneath the motor.
O’Hara had been adamant: Take Samad alive.
So they’d put gas grenades on their wish list, and the Royal Marines had come through with a dozen, along with two gas masks that they’d stowed in the packs. Kick in the door, throw in the grenades, gas them out, stand back, and capture them.
But Moore now saw an opportunity too good to ignore.
“I’ll take this guy, then I’ll meet you around back. We move a lot faster now.”
“You sure?”
Moore nodded.
With Towers’s help, he stripped quickly out of his gear and vest, and was down to his skivvies and belt holster within thirty seconds. Instead of taking one of the pistols the Brits had given them, he chose his Glock 17, which he’d packed upon hearing they were jungle-bound. The pistol was equipped with maritime spring cups for use in water environments. The cups were placed within the firing-pin assembly to ensure that water passed by the firing pin within the firing-pin channel. This prevented the creation of a hydraulic force that could slow the firing pin and cause light primer strikes. The NATO spec ammo Moore used had waterproof sealed primers and case mouths, which of course further increased the weapon’s reliability.