by Peter Nealen
I sighed. “I'm feeling some more mission creep come on here,” I said.
“No mission creep,” he assured me. “El Duque is still the objective. We're just gathering more information along the way to map out just how far El Duque's network might spread. It is starting to look like it might be even more extensive than we thought.”
I stared at the window, and the complete lack of activity at the SCC building. Maybe my hunch was right; I just didn't like running ops based on a hunch. That said, this entire job was getting into that territory, especially since so much of the promised support had failed to materialize. “You're sure about this information?” I asked.
“As sure as I can be under the circumstances,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I was able to verify what little I've told you mainly through open sources.” He sounded tired all of a sudden. “When I sent the photo to several people in the intelligence community, I got the door slammed in my face. Another one looked into it for about a day, then said he couldn't help me. You'd think it was nuclear-level secrets, but Xi Shang's face is all over the Fusang Group's website, so that can't be it.”
I didn't say what I was thinking. Chinese money could go a long way, and it wouldn't be the first time that it bought silence or cooperation. This can of worms was getting deeper.
“You're the man on the ground, Jeff,” he said. “I won't try to micromanage from up here. It's up to you. But yes, I think this is a tenable lead, especially if you don't have anything else.”
We really didn't. I thanked him and hung up.
“Who's getting named the Mission Creep now?” Nick asked.
I shook my head, ignoring the wisecrack. “Renton thinks we should follow up on the newcomers; he says that at least one of them is a major player in a Chinese company that some people suspect is a front company for the PLA.”
“What's that got to do with El Duque?” he asked.
“Good question,” I replied. I was thinking. I still wasn't willing to just drop everything and run after the Chinese until Larry and the rest of the guys out there had something more solid to go on. I shook my head again. “We're going to hold what we've got until the guys by the lake get some positive ID on something worth investigating down there.” I looked out the window again. “With our luck, we'll pack up, shift down there, and that's when Reyes will show up here—five minutes after we've pulled off-site.”
We wouldn't have that long to wait.
The sat phone buzzed, displaying a text message. It was almost dark. The message was from Larry. “Major meeting going on at Hacienda Puerta del Cielo. Eyes on Reyes. ATB multiple other VIPs. Jackpot.”
“Pack it up,” I said, immediately dialing the first of the other two OPs. “Larry's got eyes on our target.”
Now we just had to manage to get close enough to grab him without it turning into another costly shit-show like Jamapa had.
I've never liked the jungle. Granted, Nicaragua wasn't exactly jungle by some standards; it was nothing like the triple-canopy shit in places like the Amazon or Vietnam. But this crap was plenty thick enough, it was dark, and Larry had warned that there was a lot of security on the objective. We were getting way closer than I was generally comfortable with, just from long experience running recon in desert and urban environments, but sometimes, in the jungle, you didn't have much choice. Hell, I remembered reading about how the SOG teams in Laos and Cambodia had reconnoitered the Ho Chi Minh Trail by getting right on top of it. We just had to work harder to stay undetected.
It took fucking forever. Plant a foot, lowering it carefully to the forest floor, easing your weight onto it to make sure you didn't break any branches. Carefully move forward, weaving through the foliage, trying not to let any branches slap against gear or weapon, or even whip away from you as you pass. Stop and listen, waiting for any sign that you had made any noise that had been heard by the local security. Carefully lift the back foot and repeat.
It had taken almost three hours to go just five hundred meters, and it felt like twice that. I was drenched in sweat, had bits of bark and vegetation rubbing against parts of my anatomy that I didn't want to think about, and really just wanted to lie down and sleep. But there were still over three hundred meters to go to get to Larry's OP, and only so much darkness left to cover it in. Granted, there was enough vegetation that we could have moved in daylight, like the initial teams had, but I hoped that what noise we did make would go relatively unnoticed or dismissed by the security on-site, thanks to the night noises. The jungle gets noisy at night.
Holy hell, I was tired. And I didn't even have a large ruck on. Just an assault pack, my load bearing vest, my rifle, and my helmet, and NVGs. The helmet did make for even more potential noise, as branches tried to snag the NVGs or scrape along the hard shell of the helmet itself, but everything is a trade-off.
“Hillbilly, Monster,” Larry called over the net, his voice almost too low to hear. We were running throat-mics, so we could talk while barely sub-vocalizing, but it could get difficult to pick out the words sometimes. Fortunately, I'd already mostly stopped, so the transmission didn't get lost in the unavoidable noise of movement. “Hold what you've got; it looks like there's a patrol moving out.”
I stopped and slowly sank down to one knee, faintly hearing Nick doing the same a few feet away. I stopped as my knee touched a branch or fallen stick, shifted my weight, then finished moving before going as still as I could. There was plenty of night noise; insects and animals both. But there was no point in taking chances.
After a few minutes, that felt infinitely longer than that, I started to be able to hear the patrol. They weren't worried about noise discipline. They cracked and thrashed their way through the brush, letting out the occasional curse. At least that was what I assumed the occasional voice was doing; they were still a couple hundred meters away, so the noise they made was muted by distance, vegetation, and the night noises of the forest and the millions of critters living in it.
They weren't showing any lights, either, which suggested to me that they were wearing NVGs. It didn't come as a surprise anymore, not after Ernesto's security had used them. I wouldn't be surprised if they had other top-of-the-line equipment and weapons, too. I briefly thought of trying to get down flat, but at that point, they were close enough that I suspected that going prone would make too much noise. Besides, NVGs can't see through leaves, or even that much darkness—unless they had thermal attachments like we did, the tubes would only magnify the ambient light, and there wasn't much of that under the trees. Movement would still be a red flag, though.
We stayed there, as motionless as possible, soaked in sweat that was starting to chill as our core temperatures dropped with the lack of activity, our joints slowly tightening up from the cramped positions we held. Mosquito bites itched on my neck and ears, in spite of the bug repellent I'd liberally applied before we'd moved out. It felt like half the spiderwebs in the damned country were draped across my face, and I couldn't tell if there really were more insects crawling up my pant legs or if I was just imagining it amidst all the other itches and scratches. The swishing and cracking crossed in front of us, barely fifty meters away from what I could tell, then receded. I did a little bit of mental calculation. If I had our position figured right, then we were still about three hundred fifty to four hundred meters from the objective. That meant their patrols, or at least this one, were ranging out a good three hundred meters. They were serious about keeping anyone away from whatever was happening at that hacienda.
Only once I couldn't hear them anymore, and hadn't heard them for several minutes, did I start to move again. My knees protested as I got back up, and I almost stumbled forward. It took a real, painful effort to continue carefully planting my feet and weaving through the foliage. Another mosquito whined its way into my ear after I'd gone only a few feet, and I had to violently restrain the urge to swat at it. Too much noise.
Fuck the jungle.
Between stopping to avoid detection by the patrols, which seemed to go out every half hour to forty-five minutes, it took almost three and a half hours to cover close to eight hundred meters. Granted, from what I've read about some of the SOG patrols in Laos, that was fast for the jungle. Some of those guys could take all day to go five hundred meters. Compared to them, we were moving fast and noisy.
I finally slid into Larry and Eric's hide barely an hour before sunrise. The sky was already starting to lighten, though it was still pitch dark under the trees, with only the slightest bit of gray showing through tiny holes in the canopy.
The two of them had slowly and carefully burrowed into a tree's foliage right on the edge of the hacienda grounds, and, during the night, had moved branches to thicken the concealment around the base of the tree. We were very, very close to the resort; we'd have an excellent view of anyone who crossed into our line of sight, but the risk of compromise was also very, very high. But again, the jungle and the terrain didn't leave us with much choice.
Nick and I wormed our way into the hide, which was already plenty cramped, especially with Larry's big ass in there. We couldn't help but shake the branches a bit as we got into position, Nick joining Eric on rear security while I joined Larry watching the objective. I carefully pulled my pack off, stuck my helmet inside, and pulled out the small compact of cammie paint, applying it as hastily as I dared to take the shine off my face. We were all wearing green jungle fatigues, which should blend in well enough with the surrounding leaves. Of course, if the meeting went on long enough, we'd start to run into trouble with the extra branches dying and turning brown, but we'd deal with that when it became an issue.
The hacienda was not exactly what I would have expected from the name. It was definitely built with the stereotypical “tropical paradise” theme in mind; deeply overhanging thatched roofs, pole walls, and everything. It looked more like something I'd expect to see in Hawaii than in Latin America.
Larry already had a small digital camera set up on a lightweight tripod, aimed at the buildings. It was noticeably smaller and lighter than most of what we'd carried in the military. He looked over at me as I got settled, and pointed to his watch, then held up two fingers. I nodded, lay my head down on my forearms, and promptly fell asleep.
Larry and I switched off like that for most of the day, though by noon it was too hot to really get any rest. The bugs just got thicker and the heat climbed steadily. We had to reapply our camouflage a couple of times; the sweat kept washing it off. It was made more complicated by the fact that we were lying on our bellies, and couldn't move too much lest we shake the vegetation around us and give our position away.
We couldn't see any of the actual meeting in progress. I suspected that it was in that main hotel building. With the kind of security they had checking any vehicles that approached, the tourist ruse that Mia and I had used in Veracruz wasn't going to work; we watched at least three very expensive cars get turned away by men with rifles at the entrance to the resort.
But what we did see was still telling.
The two Chinese in suits appeared at one point, still surrounded by their PSC bodyguards, smoking and talking quietly. I saw three young men and an older, slightly fat man, all of them wearing the same type of tattoos and charms that we'd seen on the Los Hijos de la Muerte thugs in Zacatecas. Larry counted at least a dozen men and women wearing camouflage utilities and black berets, apparently there as both attendees and security; several of them walked the patrols on the outer perimeter. Fortunately, it didn't look like the security patrols knew much about tracking; none of them ever appeared to notice any sign of our passage into the resort. At least, there was never any sign of an alert being initiated.
Reyes showed his face a couple of times, talking to both the Chinese and a couple of pale, flat-faced Caucasians that I pegged as Russians. They weren't the only white guys there; I counted at least twenty. There was some kind of major summit going on here.
Late in the afternoon, I had just gotten off the watch, and was trying to rest, if not sleep, when Larry carefully nudged me. I slowly raised my head and looked.
There was a man standing there, with two guards flanking him, smoking. He wasn't talking to anyone, but just seemed to be taking a break. It wasn't what he was doing that had attracted Larry's attention, though.
I'd stared at the fuzzy, indistinct photos of the man believed to be “El Duque” for hours. They hadn't ever gotten clearer; all that could be made out was a prominent nose, deep-set eyes (or maybe that was just the light), and a thick, dark beard. None of them even really gave a good idea of how tall he was. But just about any of them could have been of this guy.
My heart rate rose. Could this be it? Could we have somehow stumbled onto our target at this resort in Nicaragua? After all this other shit, could it really be that easy?
My pessimistic side (which has been described as very...well-developed) said no. It couldn't be that easy. It never is. Still, this was the closest match, and if this really was what it looked like—and it looked like a high-level meeting of some very, very bad people—there was no reason that El Duque wouldn't be there.
I had to chance the comms. I pulled out my phone and hooked it up to the little satellite data hub, along with the camera. I sent the pictures of this guy to all of the other elements, and to Renton, along with the message, “Possible eyes on primary HVT. Priority target.” Once it was sent, which took entirely too long, thanks to the overhead cover of the trees fucking with the satellite signal, I broke it back down and we went back to our surveillance. There was only so much we could do at that point, and I didn't want to get sucked into a conversation. The information was disseminated. That was all we could do. There was way too much security to try to grab anyone there. We'd have to wait until the meeting broke up, and follow our target or targets from there.
Most of the day passed that way; long stretches of nothing but watching the resort staff move timidly around the buildings, security goons hanging out, bullshitting, smoking, or setting off on patrols, and the occasional bigwig showing himself during a break. Just before sundown, I hooked up the satellite comms again, to see if there was any weigh-in from Renton on the possible “El Duque.”
There was. It wasn't encouraging. “Unable to PID subject. Unable to determine if the same as the primary HVT. Advise maintaining contact and gathering more information.” So we had a “maybe,” but that was it.
The meeting didn't start to break up until the early afternoon of the second day. By then, I'd gotten enough elements out of the jungle and back onto the vehicles that we could hopefully keep the Chinese, the Black Berets, Reyes, and our possible “El Duque” covered as they left. We'd be spread out and spread thin, but if we could maintain contact, then we'd have less work to do to pick up the threads if any of them led to dead ends. I was going to have to see if Andy's team was ready to deploy. We needed more ass down here.
I was afraid that they might all leave in a mass exodus, which would make picking out individual targets for follow-up difficult. But fortunately, they were obliging and left in small groups, two to three vehicles at a time, and we were placed almost perfectly to ID which targets got into which vehicle, then talk the tracking teams in on them.
It took almost two hours for everyone to leave. After that, we waited until dark to move away, just in case someone on the resort staff saw or heard us moving and passed word along to their erstwhile guests. We kept track of the trailing operations over the radio.
Derek lost the Chinese fairly quickly. They were being more careful on the way out, and when he found himself faced with having to back off or definitely get burned, he backed off. We still didn't know what, if any connection the Chinese had with El Duque, and we had stronger leads to follow up.
Herman stayed on Reyes like a tick. They were heading south, toward San Juan del Sur. Ben stayed on the Black Berets, but was getting farther away, heading east. He might have to break off.
We were almo
st back to our vehicle cache, where we'd left two of the beat-up local pickups, backed into the trees and covered in branches, when Eddie's voice came over the net.
“Hillbilly, this is Geek. I don't know if you're in a position to respond to this, so just listen. We just watched our possible 'El Duque' walk into the Venezuelan Embassy like he owned the place. Even got saluted by the gate guards. We're holding on it, but we won't be able to maintain surveillance for long without being compromised.”
Well, that was a wrinkle. Venezuela had been a belligerent, socialist revolutionary state ever since Hugo Chavez took over in 1999, though aside from some chest-beating and saber-rattling, the country's ties with the FARC, Russia, and Iran were never that closely scrutinized, at least in public. It would have distracted focus from the Middle East and the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS.
But what if El Duque was a member of the Venezuelan government? It would definitely mean that the Venezuelans were getting even more serious about the “revolutionary” side of the Chavismo ideology. Serious enough to destabilize an entire hemisphere, maybe.
Looking around and considering how far we'd moved, I decided we were far enough away to speak. I acknowledged, and immediately stopped, pulled out the satellite data node, and sent Renton a message detailing the Venezuelan connection. He answered almost immediately; he'd have to do some digging.
The sat phone buzzed as we sat by the side of the road, several kilometers away from the turnoff that led to the resort. We were taking the chance to clean up and get looking like civilians again, while we waited for the word that would determine which target we concentrated our resources again. I dropped the baby wipe I'd been cleaning my face with onto the seat and grabbed the phone.