Birth of the Wolf (Wahaya)

by Peterson, J. B.

  * * * * *

  The police detectives met them at the airport. Nick and the general were taken directly to the crime scene. The detectives, irritated that someone else had been called in and they had been forbidden access to the scene, watched Nick in disgust as he approached the crime scene in his own way…as a Cherokee first, as a soldier second.

  It took only seconds to determine that the general had been correct. In the following seconds he determined that time was no longer a factor. He could smell the dead man in the car, and he knew that all the killing that had been intended had been accomplished.

  The two women could be anywhere by now. Anything he missed at this point could result in days of lost time. He must miss nothing.

  For the second time his eyes went to the bijao leaf crumpled on the ground, the juane mixture of rice, olives, and eggs spilling out of it. The odd shaped and textured bijao leaf placed the maker in the north, probably in San Martin province. Brown wrapping paper near the evidence tape smelled of ceviche, one of Peru’s national dishes.

  There had been four men, and someone had recently brought them food from home…indicating they had been in this area for some time.

  “Did anyone check with the uniformed security?” he asked glancing past the Detective Sergeant.

  “We talked to them, what did you want to know?”

  “Usually there will be a list, and I want to know if someone was supposed to be working on this yard this morning,” Nick said placidly, “and if there wasn’t supposed to be someone working here, who were these guys and where were they supposed to be?”

  Sergeant Winter smiled. He had anticipated and asked these questions already. He handed the paper with the answers on it to Nick. Nick looked at the answers briefly and handed the paper back to the Sergeant, having memorized the information on the paper already.

  “Have you put out a BOLO on the van?” Nick asked. Smugly, the Sergeant nodded in the affirmative.

  “You can leave it if you want to Sergeant, but you’re never going to find it, I’ll bet my next paycheck on it.” Nick pointed at his evidence and explained patiently to the Sergeant why he knew what he already knew.

  “There were four men,” he said, pointing to the rakes and the skid steer loader. “It apparently took quite a while for anyone to report this."

  Sergeant Winters looked at him is disbelief. Nick continued, "The rental tag hanging from the outside cage of the skid-steer loader shows it had been rented today. The ignition light is still on; therefore, a full tank of gas had been consumed sometime before the police had taped off the area.

  “You don’t have to look for the van anymore because it’s in a salvage yard or a crusher right now, you’ll never find it.

  "What you should do is get someone to checking all local airports capable of handling a business jet and see if any left this morning either directly or indirectly for Peru or bordering countries. They weren’t worried or in a hurry, so I’d say check first for direct flights.”

  He turned to the juane and then pointed at the ceviche wrappers, explaining to the Atlanta PD, and indirectly to the General, their significance and why he was focused on Peru.

  “There’s no sign of any kind of struggle, the women were unconscious or drugged when they were taken from the limo, and the van didn’t spin its tires leaving…they were calm and in no rush.” He looked at the dumbfounded Sergeant, who was perfectly aware that Nick had not crossed the Police tape.

  “Sergeant,” Nick said kindly, “these men were Peruvian professionals, probably from North Central Peru. In all likelihood they are members of an offshoot of the Shining Path Movement, a terrorist group that has in recent years become more interested in drug trafficking and kidnapping than in politics. The thermite burns on the door lock are distinctive, a trick learned quickly by the senderistas.”

  He turned, as if it was an afterthought. “There’s a dead man in the front of the car…the senderistas cut the throats of the useless victims to let you know they are ruthless. There will be prints all over the inside of the car, but they won’t be of any use to you unless these men come back.” He looked directly at the Sergeant’s eyes and the Sergeant, a thirty year veteran, felt a chill when Nick spoke next. “These gentlemen won’t be returning to the states.” The voice was flat, confident, and final.

  * * * * *

  The sleek C-37A streaked back to Fort Bragg. “We have a brand new G VI that DEA confiscated if you can find a place for it,” Swain said. “We have several confiscated properties available as well that you can buy. We can arrange it so that you are the sole bidder. It will be a totally legitimate purchase in your own name, no way to trace it back to us.

  "One last thing Nick…if you choose to add employees, their salaries will be added to your “consulting” contract with the Department of Agriculture. I’ve got a couple of men at the Special Warfare school getting ready to get out that are interested, even though they don’t have all the details.

  "With things winding down in the Middle East it’s the same old song…there’s no room in the Army now for warriors, they want politicians. I’m glad I won’t be around to see it.”

  For the first time, Nick heard something that surprised him. “You’re getting out too general?”

  “Yes,” said Swain, ”oddly enough I’m going to get a consultant’s job too.” He looked Nick in the eye. “I’m to be the facilitator for this operation. When you need something, I’ll just be a phone call away. It’s my job not only to find whatever you need, but to see that you get it in a way that can’t be connected to any black ops fund or unit.”

  Nick returned to his house. He entered his study and walked over to his desk. He picked up the letter that had bothered him so. "Was it really only this morning," He wondered.

  He picked it up in one hand and pulled out his zippo lighter with the other one. He watched as orange and red flames licked up the letter. He dropped it in a metal waste basket when it began to burn his fingers. When all that was left was black ash he leaned back in his chair and slowly looked around the room.

  His eyes went to the shadow box lovingly put together by his grandmother as a gift. All his awards, decorations, skill qualification badges and tabs were present.

  At his request, the only one that really mattered to him was on top, the silver on blue flintlock rifle with wreath and a star, the second Award of the Combat Infantry Badge.

  He had argued against the medals, feeling satisfied with the ribbons, but Grandmother had sternly told him that it was Cherokee tradition to display a warrior’s triumphs boldly and proudly, and she was counting coup.

  The top row included the Distinguished Service Cross with three oak leaf clusters signifying separate awards, a Distinguished Service Medal, a Silver Star with two oak leaf clusters, and a Bronze Star with three oak leaf clusters.

  The rows of ribbons were packaged together tightly, representing hours of labor and research for his Grandmother, who was determined that the ribbons should be in order. These indicated the campaigns he had fought in and ribbons representing service in the Middle East, Africa, and South America.

  The skill qualification badges included Airborne wings, Military Free Fall wings, Pathfinder, Scuba, and Airmobile Badges. The Special Forces patch and Ranger Tab were to the right side of the display. On the left side were the jump wings of no less than five foreign governments, showing he had trained and jumped with their paratroops, and the Mayflower Patch for the Jungle Operations Training course in the Panama Canal Zone.

  He was a warrior and he loved the Special Forces. He still did not know how he would like his new job as a "contractor."

  "The money will be good, though." He thought realizing that he had almost made up his mind to take the job offered by Swain. He was still bothered by acting outside of the protection of the US Government. If he got into trouble, there would be no one to sound the bugle and rush in to save him.

  "I need to go running." Nick said, startled that he spoke out l
oud. Running had always helped him to clear his head and decide what to do.

  As a child he had run everywhere on the reservation in North Carolina. Reservation Indians didn’t have a life as hard in North Carolina as the ones out west did, but life was still no picnic for them. Nick ran because he loved to run, but he also ran for his mother and his grandfather, carrying messages and packages, up and down the steep slopes and ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains.

  He continued to run in school for the track team. He won just about every race he competed in.

  He returned back home after 45 minutes sweaty but with his mind made up and a clear path in front of him.

  * * * * *

  “I’m told the going rate is one million dollars plus expenses for this sort of thing,” the even, measured voice of Phelps Dunn came across the encrypted cell phone calmly, as if they were discussing what to have for lunch. “I won’t ask you to do anything that violates your principles Mr. Harris, but I wouldn’t be averse to doubling that fee if our adversary were no longer around to commit this type of atrocity at the close of this operation.”

  “You realize, sir, that when the head is chopped off this particular reptile, there will be a hundred more just like him, ready to take his place?” Nick felt honor bound to point this out to his employer.

  “I understand that Mr. Harris, but as long as this particular snake is not around, the contract will be paid at double the normal rate,” Dunn said evenly.

  “I understand, sir,” Nick said.

  “You gotta stop with all that ‘sir’ shit Nick,” said Dave, “the customers are gonna be more impressed if you let them see you as a bloodthirsty heathen savage who speaks broken English!” Dave McGraw, former spit and polish Command Sergeant Major of the John F. Kennedy School of Special Warfare, home of America’s Special Forces, sat cross legged on the floor wearing only a gaudy, flower printed pair of Bermuda shorts, raised his hand palm upwards and said with a straight face, “How!”

  Nick looked at Dave and chuckled.

  The ranch was located just adjacent to the reservation where Nick had grown up, eight thousand acres of good ranch land, set up for raising horses. The drug lord who had donated the place had the good grace to leave all the breeding stock and accessories to keep the place running. As a matter of fact, the government had hired a handful of men off the reservation to run it until it was sold.

  Nick had known most of the men, and he had extended their contracts to keep working the ranch, just as if they needed to make a profit from it.

  The house was a fortress, designed and built of huge logs. It looked like some sort of rustic resort with all the modern conveniences built for wealthy honeymooners who wanted to “rough it.” Nick loved it.

  The master suite had two walk in closets, one for his clothes, and a concealed one more than twice the size of the walk in clothes closet that was chock full of goodies for the secret agent type. Weapons, ammunition, demolitions, timers, communication devices and gear, he had all the serious toys. Nick resolved to get inside it and take an inventory, but General Swain sent him one in an encrypted email.

  The ranch was just below the crest of a mountain sheltered in a draw. There were clear fields of fire in every direction, and a state of the art security center off the living room that could monitor the entire ranch with cameras, alarms, and even seismic probes. Best of all, there was a private jetport capable of handling the black G VI.

  Out of sheer guilt Nick had bid over a hundred thousand dollars at the auction, though he knew he was getting it for pennies on the dollar. The whole process had taken only two days, and the kidnappers had been heard from finally. Command Sergeant Major McGraw from the Special Warfare Center had showed up at the door of the ranch house with a travel bag in one hand and a sealed envelope of water soluble flimsies in the other. It took half an hour to wind up the G VI and get it in the air.

  “General Swain tells me you’re getting out Sergeant Major,” Nick said with a grin.

  “Are we gonna keep up this ‘Sergeant Major’ and ‘Colonel’ shit Nick, or do I get off at the next gas station? Dave McGraw asked with a grin of his own. “How’ve you been?”

  They didn’t shake hands, they hugged. The way men who’ve depended on each other for their very lives are prone to do. The men of Special Forces are different from other men, and the family is close knit. Most were closer to their comrades than they were to their own families.

  The two men had served together in both Gulf Wars and in South America several times over the years. Dave was two years older than Nick, and was as tough as they came. Nick was glad to have him. “How are Sharon and the kids?” Nick asked and was immediately sorry that he had. The Special Forces was notoriously hard on marriages.

  “Haven’t seen her or the kids in two years,” Dave said. “When I came back from Afghanistan that last time the house was empty and divorce papers were on the dining room table.” He took a deep sip of the sour mash bourbon he favored and sighed. “I can’t say as I blame her,” he said, “it’s no life for a woman…or kids either for that matter.”

  The G VI landed at a private airstrip in the cloud forest west of Tarapoto. The thick envelope stuffed with well used U.S. currency kept the customs officers from being too curious. An active duty Special forces type in undercover drag staged a brush pass in the terminal and Nick had another set of water soluble documents to scan.

  The two men checked into a nice hotel as tourists, and quickly laid out a plan based on the new information.

  Chapter 2

  Mrs. Dunn and Miss Cohen were being held by Armando Conde, a senderista deeply involved in cocaine trafficking. In his efforts to take his large band of senderistas mainstream, he had for the last five years been investing in legitimate businesses.

  An uneducated man, Armando sought out established companies with excellent earning prospects and purchased large amounts of their stock. Not enough to control the companies, but enough to have a major say in their day to day activities. He was not a smart man, but he was cunning as a fox.

  Armando had also taken to dabbling in local politics, where he had considerably less patience than he displayed with his foreign business partners. It was not uncommon for his political enemies to wake up to find their throats slit, or everyone in their home except them dead. It was an effective method of persuading people to think the right way.

  He took care of the peasants, making very small loans at low rates, passing out free food. If a child was sick and needed the foreign doctor, Armando was always there to help.

  Have a sickly parent or in-law having a hard time getting by? Armando was always there. His efforts on behalf of the poor cost him little or nothing. The peasants of the Huallaga Valley were not greedy, but they were extremely grateful, and highly loyal.

  Armando’s coca plantations and processing factories always had work for the poor and illiterate. If the Policia didn’t particularly like it, the peasants were not too concerned.

  Phelps Dunn had invested an enormous amount of capital into an electronics manufacturing company that could safely produce components with the available civilian workforce and only a minimal amount of training. The time and motion studies and the research required to design machines that could be operated by people of limited technical understanding and capabilities alone ran into the tens of millions of dollars. The investment had paid off abundantly for Dunn, and he had purchased four more factory locations with the intention of developing them.

  While the Government of Peru was ecstatic, Armando Conde was very unhappy. The last two places Dunn had selected for development were extremely near the coca processing plants Armando had painstakingly developed and hid near the river north of Tarapoto. The surrounding villages would send their labor force to the American, who would not require them to work seven days a week, who would pay them much better than the coca processing plant would, and who would provide them with housing and medical benefits.

  Armando tried to have the
permits revoked for the factories, all of them. He began a program of harassing Dunn’s existing plant workers, but it was too late. The peasants admired Armando Conde, but the American put more on their table. Armando could have provided better, but then all his businesses would have to pay better, and Armando was much too greedy for that.

  Through intermediaries, Conde tried to buy the four properties away from Dunn, and Dunn was totally unaware that he had run afoul of the local Shining Path leader.

  As Armando’s efforts became more overt, Dunn’s efforts at resolving new problems became more insistent. He was determined that his Peruvian plan was an effective model for other American companies.

  The direct threat that brought the two into open hostilities was conducted in private, away from the prying eyes of the Policia, the Government, and the populace. Dunn was a self-made man, one that didn’t easily bend to the demands of lesser men. Armando had always found that killing and torture were only necessary some of the time…as long as the occasional actual examples he made were messy and spectacular.

  For once, Armando was in a position that was going to require finesse more than force, because the Norte Americano bastard was highly popular both with the public and the Government.

  It was one of his most trusted henchmen who came to him with the kidnapping idea, the idea buttressed by a newspaper from Atlanta, U.S.A. that carried a story about the famous and generous Mrs. Dunn.

  The two women were delivered to Armando’s compound high in the mountains north of Tarapoto. His splendid villa overlooked a caldera lake, and his privacy was fiercely protected by his men. There was only one road leading into the caldera, hacked out of the jungle laboriously by his peasants and guarded by armed security personnel.

  Amanda Dunn was terrified but absolutely refused to show it. Cynthia Cohen was beyond caring who knew she was terrified. Cynthia had not been covered by the order that protected Amanda from the depredations of her captors, and she had been ill used by Carlos and Luis.