by Peter Nealen
“Then we'll regroup and figure out where to go from there,” he replied. “El Duque's too dangerous to just give up.”
I looked around for a notepad. “How do I contact this janitor?”
I could almost hear him wince over the line. “You don't.”
“What?” My tone was flat and very, very not-happy.
“No direct contact,” he said. “That's coming from my associate. He won't even give me the information to make contact with him. He insists that his man stay a remote contact only. I can give you locations of the major SCC buildings in Managua to watch, but that's it.” That alone told me a lot. Janitor, my ass.
Biting back my anger, I asked, “What can you give me? We need some more support out here.”
“Very little, I'm afraid,” he said. “I'm working on getting some logistical and intelligence support, but Nicaragua's not an area where I've got much of any experience or contacts, and I'm getting stonewalled by a number of associates who do have resources in Central America. I'm working on it, but there's going to be very little, at least to start with.
“Be careful,” he added. “Nicaragua's a lot less violent at the moment than Mexico is. You're going to have a lot less cover for action. All of the major cartels have elements there, but they're keeping most of the fighting north of the border. There are still some Contras, or people calling themselves Contras, in the jungle, but overall, it's a lot quieter than where you are now. So when you act, you're going to have to be ready to hit fast, hit hard, and get the fuck out as quickly as possible.”
“Preaching to the choir, Renton,” I told him. “Get us those locations. I've got to start getting us ready to move.” I hung up and handed the phone back to Mia.
I didn't like it. It felt thin. It felt thinner than the threads we'd followed in East Africa, and those had almost led us to disaster. Hell, they had led us to disaster in Kismayo. I wondered if we were somehow getting drawn into an immense trap. It felt like we were flailing in the dark, alone and cut off. If Renton and his people had intended to make us all disappear, using the legendary method of sending the knight off to kill the unkillable monster, they couldn't have done it more smoothly.
I was afraid we were out of our element and one step away from being just another set of corpses in the ongoing narco-war.
Chapter 14
This job was definitely making us well-traveled. I took a good look around through the window as we approached the Aeropuerto Los Brasiles, just northwest of Managua. It was a substantial change even from Veracruz.
Volcanoes reared their cone-shaped summits over the jungle surrounding Lake Managua. A lot of that jungle had been hacked back to make way for fields to the north and Managua itself to the south. Everything was very green. I could almost feel the heat and humidity already.
The airport wasn't much to speak of. One runway and a parallel taxiway were flanked by run-down sheet metal hangars, and there was no tower that I could see. On the far side of the runway was a line of shacks nestled among the trees. There was a single beat-up Land Rover parked near the end of the runway, and a Cessna was sitting just off the taxiway that actually looked like it was in working order, rather than a rusting hulk. Other than that, there was no sign that the airport was even in use.
Sam set us down without much difficulty, though, the tires squeaking a little as they hit the tarmac. We taxied over to stop next to the Cessna. As soon as the bird had stopped rolling, we started getting out.
This was going to be difficult. We didn't have a support base set up here, there was no contact to meet us...we were flying by the seat of our pants. I would have preferred, my own distaste aside, to jump in; we could have been more deniable. But we were going to have to work inside the city, and there wasn't a more isolated strip that we had pinpointed.
Still, it wasn't the first time we'd infiltrated a country in plain sight. We'd have to make it work, lubricated with plenty of cash. Raoul had told us about how bribery was a part of daily business in Nicaragua. With the amount that Renton had supplied, as long as we didn't get into any scrapes that we couldn't shoot or pay our way out of, we should be all right.
Raoul had gone in search of a taxi. It looked like there were a couple of them down by the end of the runway, but then they might just be local cars. Once he had one, he, Jim, and Herman would head into town to find some beater vehicles for us. Rentals were out of the question.
No sooner was Raoul out of sight than a man in a National Police uniform came out of a ramshackle building down at the end of the line of hangars and sauntered over toward us. He had a pistol on his belt, though it was being forced slightly sideways by his belly. He had a thick mustache and was sweating heavily as he made his way over.
Eddie and I waited for him, rather than go to meet him. I wasn't interested in speeding up this encounter. There were any number of ways it could go wrong.
“Buenos dias, señores,” he said as he came up, pulling his ball cap off to wipe the sweat off his forehead. He continued to rattle on in Spanish, but I couldn't follow it. I gathered that he was asking the usual questions, like where we were from and what we'd come to Nicaragua for, but he was talking too fast and I knew too little Spanish. Glancing over at Eddie, I could tell that he was getting lost quick, too, and Eddie was better at languages than I am.
It was Mia who came to the rescue. She stepped around me, holding out a pack of entry letters—I wondered where she'd gotten those—with an envelope just barely peeking out from underneath. She spoke to the cop in fluent Spanish, rattling along almost faster than he did. He shuffled through the papers, nodding absently, obviously just biding his time until he could get to the envelope.
When he did, and peeked inside, his eyeballs almost fell out of his head. Mia hadn't offered a “stamp the visas and don't ask questions” bribe; she'd offered a “you work for us now” bribe. There was probably enough cash in that envelope for him to live off of for a year.
The cop started talking again, even faster, and Mia translated as he went. “He says that we need to be careful. He can get us some cars; he knows the right people, but we're still going to have to be careful to stay off of certain routes. He can show us which ones. He says that he can get us drivers, too.” She interrupted him to say something negative. “I told him that's not an option, but he's insisting that we're going to have trouble with the police if we don't have a local driver. Since we're white, they'll assume we're tourists, so we have money, so they're going to stop us to extort bribes at any chance they get.
“He knows someone who can find us a house in the city to work out of, no questions asked.” She fired another question at him. He shook his head as he replied. “Staying in a hangar isn't a good idea here,” she translated. “Nobody else does, and they're not really livable.” I nodded at that. If it was going to look odd, better to avoid it. She talked to him at length then, and had him nodding, a conspiratorial look on his face. He said something else, then pointedly pocketed the envelope of cash, nodded to the rest of us, and turned to waddle back toward the building.
“I told him that we were working as part of a joint project at the request of the Director General himself,” she said, “and that nothing could be said about the project because of narcos embedded in the National Police. He said that he fully understands, and won't breathe a word about it to anyone. He went on at some length about how bad the problems with the narcos are getting here in Nicaragua.”
“Do you believe him?” I asked.
“As long as we're paying him that much, mostly,” she replied. “That was definitely 'stay bought' money. I wouldn't trust him all the way, though. He doesn't seem to be the type to start digging too deeply when he's got a year's pay in his pocket, but we can't get too loose-lipped around him, either.” She smiled faintly. “Not that any of us are likely to do that, though, are we?”
I didn't say anything as I watched the cop make his way back to his hut. So far, so good. Now if that luck just held...
The house that the cop, whose name was Mario Zavala, directed us to was a small, cinder-block house in the Barrio Memorial Sandino. It was a couple of blocks from the main road, surrounded by trees and set back from the dirt road that led to the main Pista Suburbana. There were steel grates over all the windows and both doors. Apparently it was not a low-crime neighborhood.
We had waited until evening to move in. Even if we hadn't been a pack of gringos inexplicably moving into a house in a poor barrio of Managua, the bags of kit and weapons would have been remarked upon. Not necessarily to the police; we saw a couple of police cars and a motorcycle with National Police markings on the way in, but the barrio did not seem to be that thoroughly patrolled. But we knew that MS-13 and M-18 were making inroads in Nicaragua, and the old Sinaloa Cartel had been fairly entrenched, at least until it started fracturing. The cops were not the only ones we needed to be concerned about.
Jim and Herman got security set at the doors. Nobody was coming in the windows without announcing themselves well in advance. Eddie and I looked over the street maps of Managua we'd scrounged up; we didn't have the kind of photomaps that we might have otherwise used, but what we had was going to have to do. “We don't have a precise time for this meeting,” Raoul said. “But Reyes was only supposed to hit town today, so we should have enough time to get eyes on him before he goes to it. Something like that isn't going to happen at the drop of a hat.”
“That depends on how his associates react to the news about the attempted kidnapping in Jamapa,” Eddie pointed out. “That's not easily dismissed. I'd be willing to bet that there are some people dropping everything and getting flights out here right now. If Reyes is as important as his money and his contacts suggest he is, we just put a shot across the bows of El Duque's network. That won't be ignored.”
“No, it won't,” Raoul admitted. “But even when there are emergencies, things on this scale rarely move that quickly.”
“We'll get eyes on the SCC buildings in the morning, before the sun comes up,” I said wearily. “It's the only lead we've got right now, so we'll follow it. If Reyes is on-site and we can spot him, then we proceed as planned. If he isn't...” I dragged a hand over my face. I was feeling every minute of stress and violence since Tucson. “Well, then we're back to square one. It wouldn't be the first major manhunt that ran up against a dry hole and had to start over. It took ten years to pin down and kill Bin Laden, remember.”
The words kind of hung in the air, along with the reminder that there had been a hell of a lot more resources devoted to finding Bin Laden, stretched across multiple continents. We didn't have the satellite surveillance, the cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, the black sites for interrogation...hell, we didn't even have our own intel agency to back us up; we just had our little stable of trained spooks at the Ranch and whatever sporadic and unreliable support we got from The Network.
We were deep in denied territory, in the dark, unsure if we were pawns, bait, or just a half-assed attempt at dealing with a problem on the cheap. On that happy note, we turned in. The days ahead were going to be long as hell.
As it turned out, finding an OP, at least in a position to observe the first two corporate SCC buildings on the target list, was as easy as renting an office.
I'm entirely serious, too. There was a block of low-rent office buildings just across the street from the main SCC office where we figured we had the best chance of spotting Reyes, and there happened to be an office for rent with a good view of the front entrance. Of course, we were assuming that Reyes was going to go in the front, but we had limited options and limited manpower, so we took what we could get.
Raoul had made the deal, meeting with the office building's manager and offering the rental money; easily enough to cover a month of use. I wasn't expecting to be in place that long; while it was certainly possible—I knew of surveillance coverage that had been in place for up to six months before a hit—it probably wasn't advisable. Gringos going into the same office space every day for months and not visibly doing any business was going to stand out, especially to Reyes' security after Jamapa.
Fortunately, when Larry and I got there, we found that there were doors on both sides of the low, L-shaped building, so we could park on the far side and move in without being observed from the SCC offices. The only thing that really would have been noteworthy, granted, was the fact that we were two gringos, one of us being Larry, carrying large bags of equipment, and we were going in pretty early for a Managua morning. There had been very little traffic going in, and no one was stirring in the more industrial part of town, either, aside from a couple of night watchmen making their rounds.
The office space was completely empty, with bare white concrete walls and an equally bare concrete floor. The ceiling was green. Large windows faced the street in front of us, and the view of the entrance to the SCC building was completely unobstructed.
Leaving the lights off, so that the only illumination came from the morning light out on the street, we started getting set up. We didn't plan on staying there overnight, but we had supplies in the equipment bags just in case. Sheets of black mesh went over the windows to keep the interior dark and act as a sort of hard-to-detect tint, keeping anyone from looking in and seeing us. We had come prepared to set up a camera on a tripod and a spotting scope, but from only a few meters away, that was pretty much unnecessary. So we hunkered down to watch and wait.
And wait. And wait. And wait some more.
Many years ago, one of my old commanding officers said, “Recon ain't fun.” I've had reason to repeat that phrase many times. When it's not painful, it's boring. Really boring. You spend hours, even days, staring at the same target area, waiting for someone to do something, or in this case, waiting for someone to show up.
Being inside, even only a few meters away from the objective, we could talk, but under the circumstances, we didn't really. Larry and I had long since passed the point where we felt the need for small talk. And it wasn't like there was that much to catch up on, anyway; we'd been in the same damned vehicle together for weeks now. We were also well inured to the grind of recon and surveillance. We'd done it many times before.
So while one of us watched the objective, the other leaned against the kitbags, facing the door we'd come in, rifle close by, and thumbed through one of the handful of paperbacks we'd brought south. I was into my fifth reading of one of Larry's favorites, about contractors—not unlike ourselves—hunting vampires and werewolves and such things with even more firepower than we had. Great stuff.
The satellite phone buzzed. I had the ringer turned off, but it was vibrating. I snatched it up. The only reason it should be ringing was either an emergency at the safehouse, or eyes on Reyes at one of the other OPs.
It wasn't eyes on. “Jeff, it's Eddie,” I heard. “I hope you've got room for a team plus at your OP, because we're coming to you. All of us.”
“What happened?” I asked, sitting up and putting a hand on my rifle. A completely unnecessary gesture, but it was somewhat reassuring. Larry turned his head just enough to make it clear he was listening, without taking his eyes off the objective.
“Our little buddy at the airport sold us out,” he said coldly. “I'll fill you in when we get there. No shots fired, no casualties, but the safehouse is gone. The bird is, too; I told Sam to get the fuck out, whether he had clearance or not. I don't think the Nicaraguan air force is going to cause too much trouble before he's outside their airspace.”
“Motherfuck,” I cursed. Larry actually glanced back for a second at that. “Where are you now?”
“We're passing Universidad del Valle,” he said. “I've got everybody split up between three different vehicles, and we're taking different routes. We'll be there within thirty minutes. Keep your eyes out.”
He hung up. I shrugged into my vest and scooped up my rifle before going to relieve Larry on the objective side so that he could get kitted up. There were no indicators of any active threat to our position,
but it always paid to be ready anyway.
As I peered at the SCC offices, I could see nothing out of the ordinary. A group of five men in slacks and polo shirts walked up the steps and went inside, but Reyes wasn't among them, and they didn't appear to be anything more than just regular employees.
We waited, silent and watchful. Nothing happened. No hostiles appeared. I began to sweat under the vest, in spite of the anemic air conditioning.
Tires crunched on the dirt outside. Larry peered out. “It's Eddie.”
“What the fuck happened?” I asked, opening the door and ushering them in. Eddie had Jim, Derek, and Lee in tow. All were carrying their kit in bags, though their shirts showed the telltale bulk that said they were all wearing plates.
“About an hour ago, we started noticing young men watching the house,” Eddie explained, finding a spot against the wall to put his gear. “Only a couple at first, but after about fifteen minutes, there were more. They had the look, you know? That kind of nose-in-the-air, vato sort of look. They weren't flashing any weapons, but I started to get a feeling. I told everybody to start packing up and getting ready to move.” That can't have taken long; we don't tend to spread out much once we're on-site. Old habits mean we tend to be ready to move on very short notice. It even tends to happen back home, when it doesn't really need to. After East Africa and Iraq, some of us couldn't quite switch it off anymore. I was as prone to it as anyone.
“I was just about to say, 'fuck it,' and go ahead and move when who shows up but homeboy from the airport, along with his cousin who owns the house. Seems like we can't stay in the house anymore. I ask why, playing along. He's hemming and hawing, trying not to say. He won't give a reason; we just can't stay. Meanwhile, I'm seeing more of these bad boys showing up in the shadows around the front. They weren't wearing any particular gang colors, so I don't know who the fuck they were, but he seemed to be waiting for them. So finally, I start pressing him. He gets this sly sort of look on his face; I think he figured we were trapped by then. He shows me this.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, handing it to me.