by Peter Nealen
I unfolded the crumpled flier. It was a reward poster, for lack of a better term. The denomination was in Nicaraguan Cordobas. The number was impressive; one hundred thirty-five million. Roughly ten million dollars even in the worst of times.
We were the target.
While there weren't good photos of any of us, the descriptions were pretty clear. Americans, mercenaries, approximately twenty men and a woman. The reward was for proof of our deaths. There was no identifying information as to who had put out the reward, there was only an email address to contact.
It wasn't the first time I'd had a price on my head. The IRGC had put one out on us in Basra. But then Eddie pulled out another one and passed it to me. “He had this one, too. Seems they've been going around for a bit.”
This one was in Mexican pesos, seventy-two million. And it was just for ten men; no woman was described, and neither was Eddie's team. I stared at it for a second, then looked up at him. “What the fuck?”
“That's about what I said,” Eddie replied. “That one has to have been going out about the time you guys crossed the border.”
I looked back down at it, a chill going up my spine. This was bad. I remembered the certainty I'd had that somebody had leaked our route before we were even in Mexico. MS-13 couldn't have been in position to ambush us three times otherwise. Now it looked like someone even knew who we were, at least in general.
“I took those from him and we bulled our way out,” Eddie continued. “I guess they weren't ready for us to move; they just watched us as we left. We didn't even have to point guns, though we had 'em out and we weren't exactly shy about our willingness to kill some people if we had to.”
The other two vehicles had arrived as Eddie and I were talking. As soon as Mia came in, her own go-bag over her shoulder, I beckoned her over. She found a spot in a corner, away from the rest of us, dropped her kit, and came to join Eddie and me. I could already feel the eyes on us.
I held up the fliers. She nodded. “I've seen them,” she said. “The same time Eddie did.”
“Do you by chance have an explanation?” I asked tightly. “Since I know that none of my people are talking out of school.”
Her eyebrows went up. “What, you think I leaked something? In case you hadn't noticed, I'm on the later one, too. Why would I put a bull's-eye on my own back?”
“Not you,” I said, “but what about your boss?”
“Renton?” She shook her head. “No way. He's many things, but he's not the type to sell out his assets. Not me, not you. I get that you're not that trusting, but why would he hire you just to sick the wolves on you?”
“I'm wondering that myself,” I said. “A little over a year ago, we get introduced to this mysterious Network of sneaky patriots. They've got people everywhere, assets all over the globe. But as soon as we come down here, those assets start drying up. Aside from you, we've gotten zero support since we crossed the border. We were ambushed three times in Sonora alone, leading me to believe that somebody had spread our route around. And now this.” I held up the fliers again. “What the fuck am I supposed to think?”
She shook her head. “I don't know,” she said tiredly. “I really don't know what to think. Renton hasn't told me much more than he's told you.” That wasn't entirely true, I thought, listening to her. She knew more than she was letting on. “He's worried about something, though, that much I can tell you. This might be it.”
I just studied her for a long moment. She met my gaze coolly. She was good, I had to give her that. If she was hiding something, she wasn't going to let it slip accidentally.
And she had a point. She was the only one who could be specified on the Nicaraguan version of the flier, that said twenty men and one woman. She was standing on the gallows platform along with us.
So where did that leave us?
Short-term, it left us on the ground, without any air support, in the middle of Nicaragua, with a target still at large. And with somebody hunting us.
“Did that fat fuck know about where our OPs might be?” I asked Eddie.
He shook his head. “Fuck no. We didn't tell that little fuckstain shit, and we sure as hell didn't let him see anything. All three vehicles were running SDRs on the way here, too.” Surveillance Detection Routes were something we'd had to learn as more of our ops started taking place in cities, on vehicles. If they'd been done right—and I had no reason to believe they hadn't—then nobody should have followed them from the barrio to the OP.
I looked around. “All right. As much as I'm about half a second away from canking this entire shit show, we've still got a target to watch for. Now we've got more eyes.” I waved to indicate the rest of the office space. “Space isn't a premium, so we'll settle in here for the moment. I might have a few of you move out to the other OPs tonight, if only to spread the footprint out a bit. We'll wait until the wee hours of the morning, though; no sense in taking any more chances of getting caught 'driving while Caucasian' during the daytime than we have to.
“Meanwhile, I'm going to have a talk with Tom.”
“None of Renton's contacts that we investigated put up any particular red flags,” Tom pointed out.
“No, but those were just the ones he wanted us to know about,” I replied. “We still have no fucking clue about the full extent of this so-called 'Cicero Group,' do we?”
There was a pause, during which I could almost see Tom taking a drag off of one of the cigarettes he chain-smoked constantly. “No, we don't,” he admitted, “which is why I was nervous about taking this job in the first place. The fact that Renton backed up every promise he made in Iraq was the only reason we agreed to take it. But it sounds like that's not necessarily the case here.”
“It's not shaping up that way,” I said. “Have you got any way of looking into what's going on? Something's not right about this job, and I have a feeling that part of it is north of the border.”
“I will be casting my net wider,” he assured me. “In the meantime, I've got the Frontier Rose heading your way. She won't be in position for a while, but when she is, you'll at least have an escape route to the sea. She's going to be more use to you in Central America than she is to Alek in Kurdistan.”
“Has she got the Hueys or the Ranger?” I asked.
“One of each,” he replied. “Short lift, I know, but it's the best we've got at the moment. She's got boats, too, if you can get to the shore.”
“It'll have to do,” I said. “ETA?”
“About four weeks.” I cringed. Even though he couldn't see it, Tom said, “I know. They might be able to shave off a day, but it just takes time to cover that much ocean. They've got to get through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean, and then cross the Atlantic.”
“Do we have any other options before then?” I asked. “We need a backup strip where we can park the bird.”
“I'm working on it,” he said. “There are a couple that might be doable, but with that price on your heads, it's going to be difficult. We don't have that kind of money to throw around these days. We've put too much of our income as a company back into company assets.”
“Find Renton and hold a blowtorch to his feet until he coughs up the cash,” I said. “That's one thing he can provide, and he's demonstrated it already. His other assets might be drying up, but he can get us the money we need to make this work without him.”
“I'll see what we can do,” he said. “Watch your six down there.”
The rest of the week went by like watching a snail cross a sidewalk. There was no traffic in or out of the SCC building that came remotely close to pinging as a target. Reyes never showed his face. If he was in there, he wasn't budging. We got the same reports from the other two OPs.
There wasn't a shower in the office, so after a few days it started to smell like ass and feet. We couldn't really go outside, so we had about six guys and one woman cooped up in the same space for days on end. We could do calisthenics to keep from going completely stir-crazy, but Mia's presence s
tarted to threaten to send that spiraling out of control, too. Consciously or not, guys started to push harder to impress her. All it did was make the stink worse.
“I'm about ninety-five percent sure that Renton's 'contact' is full of shit,” I grumbled to Nick as I sank down next to my kit after getting off door watch. “He's not here.”
“Maybe he is here, but he's staying away from his business because he knows that we'd connect him with it,” Ben suggested from across the room. “If he's hiding, it would make sense not to go where his name's on the front of the fucking building.”
Before I could say anything, though, Jack spoke up from the front. “Jeff, come here and look at this. I think something's happening.”
I moved up and knelt down next to him. There were two dark sedans sitting on the street in front of the SCC building. Two guys got out of the rear car, while one got out of the front.
They were dressed in contractor chic; cargo pants, 5.11 cover shirts, tan ball caps, the works. Two of them were Hispanic, while the one up front was noticeably Asian. All of them had the muzzles of what looked like some kind of stubby, black submachine gun or PDW poking out slightly from under their cover shirts.
“Who the fuck are these guys?” Jack asked.
I turned slightly. “Two guys, grab your shit and get mounted up. I want a tail on these guys if they leave.”
Jack glanced at me as I watched the newcomers. “You got an idea?” he asked.
“A hunch, that's all,” I said. “This is the first change in the pattern of life in a week. It might be nothing, or it might lead us to Reyes. Worth checking out.”
One of the Hispanic contractors stepped forward and opened the back door of the front sedan. A short man in a suit got out and went up the steps to the SCC building. He didn't turn to face us, so I couldn't get a good view of him, but the other man, who got out on the street side, was definitely Asian. My first thought was Chinese, but I couldn't be sure.
The two of them went inside, accompanied by all three contractor-types. These guys were professionals; they kept their eyes and weapons out, and appeared to be alert and watching everything. All three of them scanned our window, but with the mesh in place we should be invisible.
After a very short time, maybe twenty minutes, they came back out, got into the cars, and drove away. Eric and Larry had been waiting, and followed in trace after a short interval.
The rest of us sat back down to wait. If it turned out to be something, they'd call.
I tried not to pace too much.
Chapter 15
The other two OPs slowly sent pairs out to join up with Eric and Larry, moving out to shadow the mysterious pair of sedans. Just one trail vehicle was too likely to get burned. People start to notice patterns, especially if they're on the lookout, and from the looks of those contractor types, they definitely would be.
I listened in on the radio chatter as Eric talked the other two vehicles in and handed off. Unfortunately, the leapfrog sort of handoff we'd become quite practiced at became impossible as they got out of the city and headed southeast on Highway 4. There weren't the kind of side routes that would let a vehicle back off and get ahead. They had to follow at a distance.
It got worse as they got off the highway, turning onto winding dirt roads in the countryside. From what I started to gather from listening in, they started to follow for a little ways, then the lead surveillance car would pull off on a side road, letting the next vehicle back pull up to catch the target cars. It meant they were losing line of sight for brief periods, but it was the best they could do.
It sounded like they were trying to juggle which vehicle would pop up on the road next, trying to avoid setting a pattern. Some kind of pattern was unavoidable under those circumstances, but the longer they could put off getting identified as a shadow, the better. It helped that the vehicles were all fairly nondescript.
It was inevitable, as they weaved through the southern Nicaraguan jungle, on a road that, according to the map I had, was anything but straight, that they would eventually lose the targets.
“Nigerian, Ringo,” Johnny called. “I've got no eyes on the targets. How far ahead of you were they when you turned off?”
“Maybe seventy-five meters,” Eric replied. I checked the map. If I was following them right, then Johnny and Sid should have been able to see them.
“I've got nothing,” Johnny said. “There's a turnoff here, but I can't be sure that they took it. We're going to keep pushing to see if we can catch up, in case they just sped up and kept going straight.”
“This is Hippie,” Derek called. “We'll investigate the turnoff.”
The radio went silent for a few minutes. Then Derek came back on again. “I think we've hit the jackpot. There's a hacienda down that turnoff, overlooking the lake. There's a lot of security there; we got stopped, but were able to talk them down as a couple of lost tourists. I'm pretty sure that's where our boys went.”
“All right,” Johnny called. “We're circling back around. We'll set up an ORP and start getting set to get eyes on.”
Now I had a decision to make. We'd been sitting on these target buildings for a week with no activity to suggest that we were doing anything but killing time. Sure, we were getting paid, but we weren't getting any closer to our objective. Still, we didn't have anything solid that linked Reyes to the mysterious Asians, aside from their suspiciously high security and the fact that they had showed up at one of Reyes' company's buildings. With limited resources, I had to decide which trail to follow.
The sat phone buzzed while I was considering the problem. I scooped it up and answered it.
“How the hell did you get a photo of Xi Shang?” Renton asked immediately.
Nick had used one of our little compact satellite data links to send Tom and Renton the photos of our unknown guests. Apparently, we'd struck a nerve. “Who the hell is Xi Shang?” I asked.
“Xi Shang is a major player in the Fusang Group,” he explained.
“That still doesn't tell me anything,” I said flatly.
“So give me a chance to explain it,” he replied. “The Fusang Group is a new Chinese company; it just cropped up a year or so ago. It has been throwing a lot of money around, but there is almost no information about them, their background, or even what exactly they do that's available publicly. They're an enigma. They only do business with certain people, usually ones that have common interests with Hutchison-Whampoa.”
That name I recognized. Hutchison-Whampoa was the Chinese-owned logistics company that now operated the port facilities in the Panama Canal as well as most of the deep-water ports in Latin America. It was also believed to be majority-owned by the People's Liberation Army.
“The lack of information has got a lot of China watchers interested in the Fusang Group,” he went on. “They might be legitimate, or they might be a front. You might be interested to know that one of the majority shareholders—though this is pretty deeply buried—in your erstwhile employers, Harmon-Dominguez, is, in fact, the Fusang Group.”
“You think they're a front.” It was as much a statement as a question.
“Honestly, we don't have nearly enough information to say,” he replied, a note of frustration in his voice. “If they are, they've covered their tracks very, very well. There isn't any publicly accessible link between the Fusang Group and any actors on our watch lists, but that doesn't mean it's not there. They are extremely good at information security.”
“Has there been any link that you know of between Reyes or his holdings and this Fusang Group?” I asked. “Aside from this Xi Shang character showing up at one of Reyes' offices?”
“The only link we've seen so far is through Harmon-Dominguez,” he said. “But having him show up there...he's got to be there to meet with Reyes. Xi Shang is not small fry; he wouldn't be meeting with underlings.”
“What about the other guy?” I asked. There had been two men in suits.
There was a long pause. “We have no po
sitive ID on the other man,” he replied slowly.
“But...” I prompted.
“But, he does somewhat resemble a PLA Colonel named Zhao,” he said, sounding as if he was reluctant to even say it. “One of my associates worked China for a few years, and thought he recognized the face. The problem is, he can't be sure. It's been eight years since my associate was in Beijing, and from what I've been able to find out, no one has seen Zhao in six. So it's far from a positive ID. It kind of looks like it might be him, but there's no way to be sure.”
“What did Zhao do?” I asked.
“That was never clear, either. My friend said he had heard that Zhao was Second Department, or possibly involved in the Zhōngguó nánfāng zhī jiàn, one of the PLA's Special Operations Groups.” He actually was able to rattle off the Mandarin name without a stutter. I'd had no idea Renton could speak Mandarin.
“So he's a spook,” I supplied.
“Maybe,” was the answer. “Provided it's him. Provided he's still in the PLA. Provided my associate's information was even correct. It might not have been.”
“Do we follow up on this or not?” I asked. “Do you think that these guys are connected to Reyes alone, or somehow with El Duque? What does the PLA have to do with El Duque? I thought the big worry with him was connecting the Caliphate or Hezbollah with the Mexican cartels to launch terror attacks across the border?”
“I don't know what, if any, connection they do have,” he admitted. “But the Chinese have been supplying Iran and its proxies, at the very least, for years now. I know you've reported yourself on the growing number of Chinese weapons that were floating around Iraq last year.” He paused for a moment, as if thinking it over. “I think it's probable that if Xi Shang was showing up at an SCC office, he was looking for Reyes. Wherever he's gone is probably where Reyes is. So yes, I think it's a good bet that following up on Xi Shang should lead you to Reyes.”