Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  Hardcastle loaded a fresh clip into his rifle. “Nice shooting, Roosevelt,” he said. The young seaman looked frozen in place, the smoking rifle in his lap, watching the spot where the transport had gone down. On the tactical channel Hardcastle said, “SLINGSHOT, that Shorts is down near our present location. Mark and record for a search team, then give us a vector back to that drop zone. We’ll—”

  “Admiral, this is McAlister. We’re getting a fluctuating oil-pressure, we may have taken some of that fire from the Shorts. I’m heading toward Homestead to check it out.”

  Hardcastle yanked the clip out of his rifle with a frustrated snap. But even as he and Roosevelt safed their weapons he realized they were very, very lucky that they were alive. One look in the young man’s eyes and Hardcastle realized that Roosevelt was thinking the same thing.

  “What was that gun they had on board, Admiral?” Roosevelt asked. “I could hear it clear up here.”

  “I don’t know,” Hardcastle told him, wiping cold sweat from his face. In spite of the wind still coursing through the cabin, he was burning up—the natural amphetamine, his adrenaline, wearing off. He closed the sliding cargo door and locked it. “Large caliber, maybe a twelve millimeter or even a fifty cal. We’ll find out when we get an investigation team in there.”

  “A fifty caliber? On a dope smuggler’s plane? I thought the smugglers saved every ounce of weight and room on a plane for product. These guys wasted about a hundred pounds on a huge machine gun—I’m no math genius but I figure that’s about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of uncut cocaine, or damn near a quarter million dollars of street shit.”

  Hardcastle stared out the window. “Heavy weapons—something big enough to take out the Black Hawk. Something very bad’s going down . . .”

  “A drug war? I mean, not just the usual inflow—a real drug war, sir?”

  Hardcastle was suddenly aware of the M-16 in his hands, felt the heat of the barrel, the cold metal of the clip. He had carried an M-16 for years through the jungles of Nam, yet the weapon still was as foreign to him as it was to Roosevelt.

  More Coast Guard and Customs agents were going to die. Roosevelt was right—drug smuggling was changing, and the men at the front of the escalating war—the Customs Service and the Coast Guard—were going to get killed unless something drastic was done.

  On a Yacht off the Coast of Curacao, Netherlands Antilles

  The yacht was a floating palace—and fortress. Armed guards with pistols hidden in beach towels or under waiter’s jackets strolled each of the massive craft’s four decks. Two huge radomes on the upper deck contained satellite transceivers that allowed the ship’s master to communicate world-wide—be it a bank in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands or assassins in Washington or Paris—as well as radars that could scan some fifteen miles in all directions for signs of pursuit. Jet propulsion could carry the one-hundred-foot-long yacht at forty miles an hour, faster than most naval vessels and patrol ships.

  Above the main salon and behind the master’s berth was an office that looked like something in a luxury penthouse suite or Fortune 500 office, complete with mahogany conference table, computer monitors, oak bookcases, liquid-crystal displays of satellite news and video services, paneled walls and crystal service sets. The entire room was secured by sophisticated electronic scramblers as well as round-the-clock guards posted at the salon’s two entrances.

  It was here that three of the world’s most powerful drug smugglers were meeting to divide up the United States of America.

  Gonzales Rodriguez Gachez was the oldest of the three at age forty-one. Short, wiry with a thin mustache over thin lips, he seemed never to blink—seemed to stare with the unnerving eyes of a reptile. Pablo Escalante, age thirty-eight, had movie-star perfect white teeth, a tall muscular body, black hair and trim features. Jorge Luiz Pena, the third member of the group, looked thirty years older than his thirty-five years, with a bulging abdomen, a smoker’s cough, thin graying hair and the bulbous red nose of a hard drinker.

  The three sat now in a circle in the lounge area of the salon, watching each other silently as waiters offered drinks—they had ignored, or chosen to ignore, the sight of bodyguards tasting the drinks. Pena knocked his down as soon as his chubby fingers surrounded the glass, ignoring Escalante’s upraised glass. Escalante smiled wearily as Pena’s glass was refilled, worried that the little bastard would ignore his host completely.

  Escalante turned to Gachez with his glass raised high: “To our gracious host, may you always sail in calm seas and under bright skies.” Pena mumbled a “salut” before finishing his second glass of cognac.

  “I thank you, Pablo,” Gachez said, sipping his cognac. “I am pleased you have decided to be with me on this cruise. You are both my dear friends.” Escalante nodded his thanks; Pena said nothing as he watched more of the amber liquid being poured into his glass. “Jorge, how is Medellin these days?” Gachez asked the short weasely man, watching as he downed another glass. “I have been away too long.”

  “The same,” Pena told him. “Hot and boring. The only good thing about it is that my wife is in Rio de Janeiro.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause as Pena went back to his glass— his appetite for liquor matched only by his hunger for women. That he found enough to satisfy him was a testimonial to the power of ilaho and money. “And how is business?” Pena asked Gachez. “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I would say it goes very well,” Gachez told him. “At least I am satisfied.” He paused, looking at his two guests with his maddening smile. “Ah, I see. So that is what this meeting is about? My two close friends from the foothills are not here on a friendly visit? A message from the cartel, perhaps?”

  “The other families are well pleased with you, Gonzales, well pleased,” Escalante said quickly. “We have all been feeling the pressure on us by the Americans and even the leftists in our own government. We have all been forced to cut down shipments and therefore production. But you . . . you do not. You have managed to maintain your production levels far above ours. How do you do this?”

  Gachez’s smile stayed fixed, but inside he was seething. These are the real cowards, he thought. He said, “Nonsense, Pablo, I have done nothing special . .

  “You’ve shipped six thousand kilos into south Florida in just the past month,” Pena said, with none of the fancy verbiage of Escalante. He took another gulp of cognac. “At a time when the cartel had thought that south Florida was closed to us you’ve breached it again. We’re sending token shipments in containers and overland by trucks through Mexico while you’re sending over a thousand kilos a week right in the American’s faces. Senor Escalante here prefers his flowery prose and Hollywood smile to charm the info out of you, Gonzales,” Pena bulled on. “I don’t need that. We pay a tribute to the cartel same as you, but you vacation all winter on this floating Taj Mahal while we sweat in the jungles bringing product to port. We have all shared the wealth—now, you must share your knowledge. How are you shipping your product into the heart of the American defenses?”

  There are no secrets between us,” Gachez said, spreading his hands. We are a family, I have always told you everything.” He turned to Escalante. “You remember, my friend. I introduced you to Jose eight months ago in Havana ...”

  Escalante thought for a moment, then an incredulous expression spread across his chiseled face.

  “You mean those children?” Pena said. “You’ve hired those es- cupiros to fly for you?”

  Aes, I have,” Gachez said, trying not to show his irritation. “I introduced them to you over a year ago and you thumbed your nose at them. I told you they had ideas, plans that could make us all rich. You chased them away like an old lady chases away chickens from her back porch.” He stood and began to pace around the conference table. “Now I am supposed to share their services with you?”

  Keep your Cuban brats,” Pena said. “I only wanted to know what your secret was. Now that I know . . .” But he was worried.<
br />
  “They were no more than children,” Escalante said. “They are the ones that have penetrated the American Coast Guard’s detection network?”

  “The Cuchillos are young, smart, resourceful—and loyal,” Gachez said. Their services, of course, are at the disposal of any member of the cartel, but they are in my employ. I will be happy to negotiate a fair and equitable price for their services.”

  “I thought so,” Pena murmured, motioning for more cognac.

  Gachez ignored him. “We can go up on deck and talk business,” he told Escalante, and they left without another word.

  Pena accepted another glass of liqueur. So Gachez had hired the Cuchillos. A bold step for Gachez, who usually surrounded himself with blood relatives, like some immigrant Italian mafioso. A bold step . . . but one that seemed to be working. How to argue with success? It would bear additional investigation. There might indeed be more to this than an experiment—this actually might be a move by Gachez to grab the initiative and move up to the head of the Medellin cartel.

  In spite of the occasional conflict between the families, the cartel’s strength was in part because no family actually ruled over the others. Most large shipments from Colombia included product from each of the families, so if the shipment was lost or intercepted no one family would overly suffer. The coca plantations in Peru and Bolivia were roughly the same size. The distribution networks were accessible to all members of the cartel, and each family head held an equal vote in all cartel matters. They shared the risks and the rewards equally .. .

  Crackdowns by the U.S. Customs Service and Coast Guard had put pressure on the families to maintain shipment levels, and in the past several months the families had answered the pressure with smaller shipments of cocaine paste through more risky smuggling routes such as overland through Mexico, and by riskier methods such as containerized cargo. Some shipments were out of the cartel’s hands for days, even weeks, which increased the risk of discovery and interception.

  But, Pena thought, if Gachez could get large shipments into the United States by air or sea drops, in spite of the crackdowns, he was for sure positioned to head the Medellin cartel. And since the cartel had rejected the Cuchillos several months earlier, they belonged to Gachez—he could legally contract their services out to the rest of the cartel. He could actually make a profit on the smuggling business without risking a proportional amount of his own product.

  Something like that could not be tolerated.

  Zaza Airfield, Verrettes, Haiti

  It was a short if solemn ceremony executed with military precision. At dawn eighty soldiers marched to the flagpole in the center of the small airfield’s headquarters building. With the Cuban national anthem blaring on loudspeakers, the four-man honor guard mounted the colors and, just below the flag, unfurled a small triangular black flag. The two flags were then hoisted and the soldiers saluted the colors until the last notes of the Cuban anthem, La Bayamesa, echoed away. The black flag would remain with the standard until dusk, signifying a day of mourning for all those at the small airstrip.

  The commander of Zaza Field, Colonel of Aviation Agusto Salazar, dropped his salute and listened to the crisp sound of his soldiers lowering their salutes in unison, then moved forward on the front porch of the concrete-and-stucco headquarters building and came to parade rest position, a signal to his adjutant to order his troops similarly.

  Salazar, looking very much the flying hero, favored riding chaps and tall black leather riding boots over a flight suit and flying boots. His shirt was covered with patches and cloth ribbons, crowned by the Soviet-style flying wings over his left breast pocket—Salazar was a graduate of the Soviet Union’s premier military flight training school and was qualified in a dozen different fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, including some of the USSR’s newest and most advanced weapons systems—from the MiG-29 fighter to the Antonov 225 heavy cargo transport to the Mil Mi-28 attack helicopter. It helped that Salazar was taller than most of his Latino compatriots by a head, with long dark hair and a thin neat moustache.

  Actually he might have been mistaken for a foppish Hollywood- style refugee from Central Casting, trying to look dashing and heroic, and indeed many of the young aviation cadets under his command at the flight training and support base had been known to call him “Colonel Pepper” or “Colonel Earhart” behind his back. They were wrong. Salazar’s dark eyes had their own message, matched by a black temper.

  “We have suffered a tragedy,” Salazar was now saying. “Loss of comrades is always a tragedy, the greatest for this unit since its inception a year ago. We shall never forget those who died at the hands of the murderous Americans in the service of their country.”

  Salazar was also an actor. These were children, he reminded himself. Only children would really accept this nonsense. But they were also skilled and fearless pilots. Extreme youth helped. Live today, for tomorrow we may die, and so forth.

  Salazar was the commander of the unit “Cuchillos,” Spanish for “knives” or “blades.” The Cuchillos was a unit of dropouts, men and women dismissed from Cuba’s regular flying training units in the Revolutionary Air Force. Because all had compulsory military duties to perform after graduation from high school, the dropouts were usually placed in reserve units close to their hometowns, where they were required to complete their military training—three years on active duty, ten years in the ready reserves and the rest of their lives in the inactive reserves or local militia.

  But becoming a pilot in Cuba was often a political decision—it had little to do with flying skills and more to do with who one’s parents were or how influential one’s family was in Castro’s regime. And the favored, well-educated kids were rarely motivated to spend much time in the military, which often meant that the best pilot candidates were discarded while the pampered kids became the pilots more skilled at kicking around enlisted men and going to all-night parties than dogfighting.

  But Salazar, although a fervent Communist and harboring an intense hatred for anyone or anything having to do with Americans, eventually found himself a willing member of a large cocaine and marijuana smuggling ring, run by the General of the Revolutionary Army Renaldo Ochoa Sanchez. At first the smugglers had the full cooperation and permission of the Castro regime—as long as Castro was getting his cut of the profits—but when Ochoa’s popularity and wealth began to match, then threaten to exceed Castro himself, Ochoa and his loyalists were executed. Salazar himself escaped the purge and fled to nearby Haiti with his secret bank accounts secure.

  Using his wealth and power as an ex-Cuban officer, Salazar bought an appointment as a district militia commander of central Haiti and placed in charge of providing air support for the corrupt, quasidemocratic regime. It was the perfect cover for a drug smuggler. With his new official credentials, he was able to procure military hardware from a variety of sources and equip his unit far better than the poor government of Haiti could ever afford. He took the washouts and rejects from the Cuban reserve units and placed them in his secret unit at Zaza Airfield. He trained them in dilapidated old turboprop and jet fighters, broken-down cargo planes and any other flying machine handy. Eventually he hired on experts in other fields like paratroopers, forward combat controllers, air traffic controllers, weapons and even demolition experts. In less than a year he had created an army air wing comprised of men and women who averaged only nineteen years of age.

  “Our brave comrades could have escaped with their lives,” Salazar went on. “They had accomplished their mission, they could have returned to base without further risk to themselves. But they saw that their comrades were under attack from American secret police units. They ignored the risk, turned their aircraft around and attacked, creating a diversion that allowed our freedom fighters to counterattack. They escaped, the mission was a success but our brothers took heavy ground fire and were shot down. I have reports that there were survivors but that they were tortured and then executed.”

  Their reaction was better
than expected. Even the few doubters in the group, the ones who otherwise recognized propaganda when it was being spoon-fed to them, could not help but be swept up in the tide of anger all around them.

  “American Coast Guard and Customs Service have declared open war on the men and women of Cuba, and on this organization, your family. The Coast Guard pretends to be a life-saving service. Not so. They are just another part of the military that rules the United States. The Customs Service pretends to be a peaceful government agency. In fact it is composed of armed thugs and mercenaries who extort tribute from citizens and collect bribes and payoffs from law-abiding foreigners. They are hired criminals with guns and badges. Remember, however, that they are well armed and tenacious, like hungry mongrels. Do not underestimate them. Learn their tactics and their weapons. The memories of our fallen comrades, of the horror of the way they died must not be forgotten.” Of course, putting the pictures of the dead Shorts crew up in every classroom and hangar in Ver- rettes would help, too.

  “You are the Cuchillos! Be proud and you will defeat your enemies and take control of the skies.”

  Salazar saluted the cadets, then turned and walked briskly back into headquarters to his office. He sat down at his desk and propped his jack-boots up on the smoothly polished desktop. His paneled office walls were decorated with all manner of weapons from Oriental swords to exotic machine guns—all fully functional—plus an entire wall of throwing knives. The knives, in fact, were his favorite. He withdrew one knife from his boot, hefted it for a moment, then hurled it at the door to the outer office. Right on target, as usual. To celebrate he pulled a nasal atomizer out of a pocket and took a quick snort of cocaine. High-grade. Not too much, he told himself. A tiny bit helped him to forget that he was stationed in the asshole of Haiti, in exile from his beloved Cuba.