“‘If possible’?”
“I’m not prescient, Crawford. I don’t know what my orders will be if Timmons isn’t turned loose and turns up dead. At that point, someone will decide what’s important and I’ll be told what to do. If this cruise-ship-grabbing operation of yours is so important, maybe you should start doing more than you have so far to get Special Agent Timmons back.”
Crawford sat up in his chair.
“Just who the hell do you think you are, Castillo, to waltz in here and question what I’ve done or not done?”
Castillo did not immediately reply. He thought, That took me a little longer than I thought it would to make him lose his temper.
“Like you,” Castillo then said, “I’m just a simple servant of the public, hoping I can make it to retirement. So tell me, what have you done, Crawford, to get Timmons back? Anything at all? Or have you placed your faith in the honesty and competence of the Paraguayan law enforcement community?”
With a little luck, he will now say, “Fuck you, Castillo.”
Crawford glowered at him for a long moment, then said, “Is there anything else I can do for you tonight, Mr. Castillo? I really have to get back to my guests.”
“By ten o’clock tomorrow morning, Crawford, I need a list of the things you’ve done to get Special Agent Timmons back. My boss said I was to get that to him as soon as possible. Give it to Lorimer.”
Maybe now a “Fuck you!” or a “Kiss my ass!”?
“Very well, Mr. Castillo,” Crawford said. “But you’ll really have to excuse me now.”
He stood up and smiled, then gestured toward the door.
“I’ll have to check you out with the Marine guard,” he said.
[TWO]
Hotel Resort Casino Yacht & Golf Club Paraguay
Avenida del Yacht 11
Asunción, Paraguay
2120 11 September 2005
Just as the elevator door was closing, a tall, good-looking, olive-skinned young man stopped the door and got on. He wore his shiny black hair long, so that it covered his shirt collar. And on his hairy chest—his yellow shirt was unbuttoned almost to the navel—there gleamed a gold medallion the size of a saucer.
“Thank you ever so much,” he said, smiling broadly. “Muy amable.”
Castillo, who had automatically classified the Spanish as Mexican, managed a smile, but not without effort.
I don’t feel very amiable, asshole.
The last thing I need right now is a Mexican drunk breathing charm and booze fumes all over me.
The door closed and the elevator started to rise.
As Pevsner had done in Llao Llao, the Mexican manipulated the control panel and stopped the elevator.
Castillo felt a rush of adrenaline, and then the Mexican drunk said in English, “Welcome to the Hotel Resort Casino Yacht and Golf Club Paraguay, Colonel. Master Sergeant Gilmore, sir.”
“Gilmore?” Castillo asked, incredulously.
“Yes, sir. My mother’s the Texican. She married a gringo. If the colonel will give me a look at his room key?”
Castillo held it up.
“Sir, if the colonel will wait until they deliver his luggage, and then flick his lights three times, and then leave the lights off, repeat off, and unlock the balcony sliding door, Technical Sergeant Bustamante and I will be able to report properly without attracting attention.”
“You don’t just want to walk down the corridor and knock on the door? Who are we hiding from?”
“There have been some unsavory characters, Colonel, who seem fascinated with Bustamante and myself. Bolivians, maybe. Maybe Cubans. But what would Cubans be doing here?”
“I’ll explain that when you surreptitiously appear in my room. But give me a couple of minutes. I’ve got some people with me. I want them to be there.”
“Yes, sir. Corporal Bradley told me.”
“He did?”
“Mean little sonofabitch, isn’t he?” Master Sergeant Gilmore said, admiringly. “I was having a surreptitious look at what looked like an AFC case in his room, when all of a sudden there he was, with his .45 aimed at my crotch. He got me hands down, Colonel. It was five minutes before he’d let me get off the floor. If I hadn’t been able to tell him who Sergeant Major Jack Davidson was, I’d probably still be there.”
“Never judge a book by its cover, Sergeant. You might want to write that down.”
“Should I call him and the German guy and tell them you want to see them right now?”
Castillo nodded.
“And I’ll call Lorimer and Mullroney,” Castillo said.
“Okay,” Castillo ordered when everyone was in the room, “unlock the sliding door, then flick the lights three times and leave them off.”
Then he firmly grasped Max’s collar. He didn’t want to surprise the shooters when they came into the darkened suite.
“I’ll be curious to see how they do this, Charley,” Munz said as the lights blinked. “These places are supposed to be burglar-proof. And we’re on the third floor.”
“I have no idea,” Castillo confessed.
Corporal Bradley’s voice in the darkness explained, “They’re using a rubber-covered chain with loops every foot or so for handholds. And it has a collapsible grappling hook at the end, sir. Sergeant Gilmore showed me when he came to my room. I’d never seen a system like that before.”
Ninety seconds later, there was the sound of the sliding door opening and then closing.
“The drapes are in place,” Master Sergeant Gilmore said. “Somebody can hit the lights.”
When the lights came on, Castillo didn’t see any kind of a chain on either Gilmore or Technical Sergeant Bustamante, who looked like Captain D’Elia’s younger brother.
“You used a chain, Sergeant Gilmore?”
Gilmore pulled a thin chain from a deep pocket on the hip of his trousers.
“Clever,” Castillo said.
“Well, you know how it is when you’re in the stockade, Colonel. You’ve got nothing to do but think up things like this.”
Castillo laughed.
The Army’s elite Delta Force—and some other, even more secret units—were housed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in what at one time had been the post stockade.
“Isn’t a stockade a military prison?” Sergeant Mullroney asked.
“Yes, it is, Mullroney,” Castillo said, mock seriously. “It’s where we keep people like these two chained up when they’re not working.”
He went to Bustamante and offered his hand.
“My name is Castillo, Sergeant. We’re glad to have you.”
“I’m glad to be here, sir.”
“That’s because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” Castillo said.
“Can I ask another dumb question?” Mullroney asked.
Castillo thought, Not “no” but “hell no,” and was about to say exactly that when Mullroney asked anyway.
“Maybe I’m out of line, Colonel, but was pissing off that CIA guy the way you did smart?”
You bet your ass you’re out of line.
Who the hell do you think you are, calling me on that?
But, actually…
“Actually, I’m glad you brought that up. What I was trying to do with Crawford was make him think I’m a wiseass out of my league.” Much like you, Mullroney. “I think I managed to do that, but I couldn’t make him lose his temper, and I tried. Okay?”
Mullroney nodded.
Castillo looked at the others and went on: “Crawford is dangerous. I still don’t know what he’s up to, but he’s not on our side. Everybody got that?”
There were nods.
“Okay, the burglars are Sergeants Bustamante and Gilmore, from Captain D’Elia’s team. This is Colonel Munz, who works for me; Lieutenant Lorimer, who also works for me; and Sergeant Mullroney, who is a Chicago cop and Timmons’s brother-in-law. And Corporal Bradley, our designated marksman.”
Castillo looked at Gilmore.
“So what have you got?”
“I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for, Colonel,” Gilmore said. “But there is a very strange setup on the river a couple of miles downstream from the hotel. You have a laptop, sir?”
“What are you going to do, Google Earth it?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got the coordinates on this, sir.” He held up a USB flash memory device that recorded data. It was the size of a small disposable butane lighter. “I thought I’d start with the big picture.”
Within a minute, everyone was looking at the laptop computer screen, which now showed a composite aerial photograph of the river south of Asunción as it would appear from an airplane at five thousand feet.
“What exactly are we looking at?” Castillo asked.
“I finally learned how to add my own data to the imagery, Colonel. Hold one, sir.”
He plugged the flash memory device into one of the USB ports on the side of the laptop. An icon of it immediately popped up on the screen. Thirty seconds later, after he touched several keys, a more or less circular ring of tiny flashing spots appeared on the map on the Paraguayan side of the river.
“I still don’t know what I’m looking at,” Castillo said.
“Bustamante found it, sir. We were fishing.”
“Fishing?”
“Yes, sir, I even caught a couple,” Gilmore said with a grin, then sighed. “We had covered a lot of water before we came across it. We noticed something wasn’t right.”
“How’s that?” Castillo said.
“There was something about the riverbank, sir,” Bustamante offered.
“What?” Castillo said, gesturing Give it to me with the fingers of his right hand.
Bustamante, anticipating the reaction his answer was going to cause, shrugged. “The grass was too green, Colonel. Twelve feet or so of green grass. The rest was all brown.”
“Suggesting?” Castillo asked.
“I didn’t know, sir. Maybe it was near a stream. Maybe somebody was watering it. But I figured it was worth a look, so we took one as soon as it was dark.”
“How?
“He swam, sir,” Gilmore said.
“You brought wet suits with you?”
“No, sir. We have night goggles.”
“It was a little chilly,” Bustamante admitted.
“Why Bustamante?”
“He found the green fucking grass, Colonel,” Gilmore said, reasonably.
“And what did you find?”
“It was planted,” Bustamante said. “Plastic boxes, maybe three feet by a foot, four of them, and all mounted on a heavy timber, so they could be moved out of the way and put back easy. I figured somebody wanted access to the river and didn’t want anybody to see it.”
“And farther inland?”
“Well, there was also a motion sensor on the boxes of grass—I almost set it off—so I went kind of slow. I called Gilmore and told him he ought to have a look, so he came in with the boat.”
“You have radios?”
“We bought throwaway cell phones in the airport,” Gilmore said. “They work fine.”
“And?”
“Well, we reconnoitered, Colonel,” Bustamante said. “The place is crawling with detection devices, and put in by somebody who knows what he’s doing.” After a moment, he added: “Damned near got caught.”
Castillo turned quickly and looked at him.
“‘Caught’?” Castillo parroted. “By who?”
Bustamante shrugged. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Some big sonofabitch moving like a cat,” Gilmore offered. “At least one guy, maybe more.” He shrugged. “If he was a perimeter guard, he sure as hell didn’t act like one.”
Oh, shit! Castillo thought. Is this a repeat of our run-in at Estancia Shangri-La?
Who the fuck can this guy be—another ex-Stasi?
Or…maybe one of Duffy’s goons going in ahead of us?
Who the hell knows?
With drugs and money, anything is fucking possible.
“I swam the hell out of there just the same,” Bustamante said. “I was more afraid this guy was going to trigger one of the sensors.”
Gilmore moved the cursor on the screen to one of the blinking dots, the one closest to the river. An inset appeared, a photo.
“You can barely see the device,” Bustamante said, “but if I had stepped over the grass boxes—or even touched them—it would have gone off.”
Gilmore moved the cursor to another of the flashing dots and another inset photo appeared, this one of a trip wire.
“I couldn’t tell if it would do anything but set off a Claymore,” Bustamante said. An inset of a concealed, barely visible Claymore mine appeared. “But I guess that would be like an alarm bell, right, a Claymore going off?”
“That’s about all we were able to do, Colonel,” Gilmore said. “We worked our way around their perimeter. I figure there’s probably five, six acres of protected terrain. We just didn’t have the stuff to try to penetrate it. Sorry.”
“You couldn’t penetrate it?” Castillo asked, in mock shock. “A couple of trip wires and some Claymores and you just quit? Turn in your Ranger tabs. You’re a disgrace to the Hurlburt School for Boys.” Then he smiled and finished: “Great job, guys. I never expected anything like this.”
“You think that’s the place you’re looking for, sir?”
“Unless it’s some pig farmer worried about piglet rustlers,” Castillo said. “What else could it be?”
“The Claymore was made in East Germany,” Bustamante said. “I thought that was sort of interesting.”
“Roads?”
“One. A couple of clicks from this highway,” Gilmore said, pointing. “You want us to have another shot at penetration, Colonel?”
“Absolutely not,” Castillo said. “As clumsy as you two are, that would let them know we plan to do terrible things to them.”
Both smiled. Neither spoke, but there was a question in their eyes.
“Are we up, Lester?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get me Major Miller.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Put the GPS coordinates on the screen so I can read them,” Castillo ordered.
The legend on the handset read: AGNES FORBISON.
“I was beginning to worry that you’d been stolen by gypsies,” she said as she opened the conversation. “Where are you, Charley?”
“In Paraguay. Where’s Dick?”
“He’s arranging Ambassador Lorimer’s trip down to the estancia. Oh, hell, I cannot tell a lie, Charley. He decided he’s up to flying the Gulfstream as copilot, and in the absence of the only one who could have told him no, that’s what he authorized himself to do. Shall I call him and tell him you said no? They probably are still in the country.”
Castillo considered that for a moment.
“No. He would know you ratted on him. It’ll be all right; all he’ll have to do is work the radios. But it poses a problem right now.”
“What do you need?”
“Continuous satellite surveillance starting yesterday—using every sensing technique they have—of a small piece of Paraguayan real estate.”
“You found where they have this guy? God, that was quick.”
“Where we strongly believe he is,” Castillo said. “Two very good shooters from the stockade did it. I was going to have Dick set up the surveillance—”
“You don’t think I can?”
“I think we have to go through Montvale, and I’m not at all sure that Montvale will produce what he promises to produce. I was going to send Dick to Fort Meade or Langley—wherever this stuff will come in—to watch what he does and make sure that it doesn’t slip through the cracks and that no copies are passed around the intelligence community. I can’t afford any tracks, either.”
“I can go to Meade or Langley and do that as well as Dick could. And he’s not here. Unless you don’t want me to…”
“With profound apolog
ies for not remembering that you are, of all of the merry band, the best one to deal with the ambassador, Agnes, get the SOB on the line. And listen in, of course.”
“You’re forgiven,” Agnes said.
“White House.”
“Colonel Castillo needs Ambassador Montvale on a secure line, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ambassador Montvale’s line, Truman Ellsworth.”
“This line is secure. Colonel Castillo calling the ambassador.”
“The ambassador’s not immediately available. Will the colonel talk to me?”
“Ellsworth,” Castillo jumped in, “when the ambassador becomes available, tell him that when I couldn’t get him, I called the President and that he’ll probably be hearing from him.”
“Hold one, Castillo.”
“And how are things in the Southern Cone, Charley?”
“Looking up, Mr. Ambassador.”
“What can I do for you?”
“Got a pencil? I want to give you some coordinates.”
“Coordinates of what?”
Castillo began to read the coordinates from the laptop screen.
“Wait, wait a moment, Castillo…okay, I’m ready. Start again.”
Castillo did, then said, “Would you read those back to me, please, so we know we have them right?”
Montvale’s exasperation was evident in his voice as he read back the coordinates.
“Okay?” Montvale asked, finally.
“Okay. Now what I need, starting immediately, is satellite surveillance of that area. I want everything: photographs, infrared, electronic emissions of all kinds, everything those clever people have and I probably don’t know about.”
“What are they looking for?”
“Whatever they can find.”
“What’s there, Colonel?”
“I think Special Agent Timmons is there, but before I go after him, I want to make sure.”
“Go after him?”
“That’s what I’ve been ordered to do, you’ll remember. But I’ve been thinking about the sensitivity of the operation.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“So what I want you to do, please…” His voice trailed off in thought, then he said, “Where is the first place the imagery will go? Langley or Fort Meade?”
The Shooters Page 48