“Why the connection to Middle Eastern Terrorists? They don’t usually meddle with drugs,” asked Darren.
“Convenience. Vega gets weapons and supplies to run his operation and control the entire area. The terrorists groups get to undermine local governments, kill law enforcement personnel from all over the area, keep the flow of drugs heading to the US, ensure continued violence in the region and force us to spread our resources even thinner,” said Director Holstrum.
Darren looked at Leah. “And we’ve been operating there?”
“Not much,” she said with a frown. We have one asset currently working in Paraguay who is very familiar with the area and knows how Vega operates.”
“But he can’t get close enough to take him out?” asked Davis.
“He’s a she, actually,” she said flashing a fake grin. “And no, she isn’t a commando, which is what you would need to get anywhere close to that man. She works for a local charity that helps the Guarani Natives who live on the fringes of society down there.”
Director Holstrum said, “Leah is correct, of course. It would take commandos to get anywhere near Vega. The problem is none of those countries will send troops, and they won’t allow us to operate inside their borders. Our ambassador to Paraguay, Jim McKnight, is addressing The Americas Trading Partnership next week. He also has a second meeting scheduled with the Paraguayan Vice President to talk about joint US-Paraguayan efforts to go after Vega. If he is successful in convincing Vice President Ortega, the FBI would work with Homeland Security and head south.”
“So if it’s the Bureau’s gig, why are we talking about it?” asked Darren.
“Like I said, if the Vice President goes along with his pitch. Frankly, I don’t trust Ortega any more than the rest of them down there. If Jim can’t get them to play ball, the president may request other options.” He folded his arms and looked at the two of them.
“My people down there can supply operational intelligence that would be fairly current, but not much else. I don’t have active teams in place there for wet work,” said Leah.
“That’s where Darren comes in. He may be asked to use a new team for this operation. We won’t get ahead of ourselves, though. We’ll wait and see how McKnight makes out first. If the ‘Fibbies’ take the job, then we drop it and go on to something else. But if the Feds don’t end up getting a green light, I want you two working together to come up with an alternative for the president. Schedule a meeting with me for next week when you have something to show me. And whatever it is, it will have to be invisible both in and outbound.”
Chapter 6
CIA Training Facility
The team had taken a break for lunch and the men were enjoying a little downtime when Dex Murphy arrived, unannounced. As soldiers, they stiffened and waited for an “attention on deck,” but none came so they continued eating. Mackey and Cascaes, who had been sitting together, both got up.
“To what do we owe the pleasure, Mr. Murphy?” asked Mackey.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said. “You too, Chris.”
They left the small dining hall and walked to a small conference room where they found seats.
“So how’s it going? The training I mean,” asked Dex.
“I’d say very well. The physical part is too easy, and I’ve been pushing the guys to do more, but the new toys have been interesting, to say the least,” said Mackey.
Dex smiled. “I heard your team set a course record. Training Director Perretti was a little pissed when your guys took out his team in record time. You even made it back to the bus on time. Nobody gets back to the bus on time.” He was grinning broadly.
Mackey pointed to Cascaes. “We have an excellent navigator.”
“Good. You may need one,” said Dex, now serious.
The two Chrises looked at each other then back at Dex. “Do we have a mission, sir?” asked Cascaes.
“Not yet, but you will begin preparing tomorrow for a possibility. Davis came in my office last night after a meeting with the director and Leah Pereira, the Latin American Desk Chief. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that this conversation is classified.” He was looking at Cascaes when he said it, having known Mackey for over twenty years.
“Sir, I am at CIA, and I assume everything is classified Top Secret.”
“Good assumption. Now, the American Ambassador to Paraguay, Jim McKnight is heading over for a Summit next week with economic leaders from the region. He also has a private meeting with the Paraguayan Vice President, Hernando Ortega, to try and arrange for an FBI-Homeland Security Taskforce to work with local forces. Seems there is a drug lord down in the jungle, armed by Al Qaeda and other Middle Eastern terror groups that is running his own army down there. We aren’t sure that McKnight will be able to convince the vice-president to cooperate.”
“What’s the matter, we don’t pay as well?” asked Mackey, more than a bit cynically.
“Could be. I trust very few people south of our own border. In any case, you are currently the ‘Plan B’. Starting tomorrow, you will shift gears and begin preparing for jungle warfare. Your team will be flying down to Florida to go play in the swamps for a few days.”
Cascaes actually smiled.
Dex was surprised by his reaction, and Chris could see it in his face.
“No offense, sir, the training here has been beneficial and I’ve learned some new tricks. But we are fish out of water, sir. My men can’t go a month sleeping on clean sheets and eating three meals a day. They’ll get soft. A week in the jungle is just what the doctor ordered.”
Mackey shook his head. “Yeah, his guys will love it, and I’ll probably have a heart attack.”
Dex frowned. “So anyway, now you know. There will be a full mission briefing tonight at twenty hundred down in the main conference center where you came in the first day. Have your men packed and ready to go. As soon as the briefing is over, you are heading out. That’s all, gentlemen.”
They all shook hands and started to head out, but Dex took Mackey by the arm and told him to stay a moment. After Cascaes left, he sat on the desk and faced Mackey.
“Chris, what you said a minute ago, about having a heart attack—Darren and I discussed that as well. If you end up flying in as a baseball team, you’ll go as the coach, of course. But we’re not sure you should be going on the actual mission. The last time you fought in the jungle, Jimi Hendrix was playing Woodstock.”
“Thanks for your concern, Dex, but I’m fine. I ran the course, same as everyone else. If my team is going into the jungle together, I’m going with them.” He turned and headed towards the door, then looked back at Dex. “You tell Darren I said thanks, but this old man still knows his way around a jungle. And somebody has to keep an eye on these kids.”
Chapter 7
Jungles near Ciudad del Este, Paraguay
The Arabs left the camp after the weapons arrived and were paid in full. As promised, they had been most generous in their weapons shipment this time. Besides twenty-four more AK-47s and eight thousand rounds of ammunition, they had also included several blocks of C-4 with remote detonators and three shoulder-fired anti-armor missiles.
Raman and Ali had gone over the travel routes and targets several times with Enrique and three of his best men. The Guaranis would lead a small team of his men through the jungle back to Ciudad del Este to help carry the weapons. Once there, Enrique’s regular security force would set up the ambush near the designated building and wait for the convoys to arrive. They would give the Arabs the “show” they wanted and get back into the jungle as fast as possible, where the Guaranis would be waiting to guide them quickly back to their camp.
Enrique smoked a cigar and sat in his hut looking at the timers. He looked at Carlos, his second in command and asked, “You sure you know how to use this stuff?”
“No problem, boss. These remote triggers
give us more range than last time. We can place the charges the night before and be half a kilometer away when we set them off. I’ll set them off myself, and Felipe will be set up across the square with the rockets. Your friends want a big mess; we’ll give them one. Once the explosions go off, it shouldn’t be hard to get away. There will be people running everywhere. You want us to hose the crowd too, or just the convoy?”
Enrique rubbed his scruffy chin and thought a moment. “Don’t stay too long, but maximum damage.”
Carlos grunted. “You have any more of that rum?”
“Yeah, help yourself, but keep it away from the Guaranis. They get too crazy when they’re drunk. And make sure your men don’t get sloppy. You leave tomorrow morning.”
Carlos happily helped himself to one of the bottles of rum that Enrique kept in a small footlocker by his cot. He offered a swig to Enrique, who threw back a shot of the golden liquid, followed by another puff of his cigar.
“Don’t get killed, Carlos, I need you here. And make sure no one follows you back here either.”
Carlos grunted again and left with the bottle to go find his men. They would drink and clean weapons, and prepare to kill a few hundred people who thought it was going to be just another day.
Enrique followed him out and headed in the opposite direction, down a small path to a large wooden longhouse, similar to the ogas used by the Guaranis as houses. Two of his men sat lazily outside with AK-47s across their laps. They nodded when their boss approached and he ignored them and walked inside.
Long tables and benches stretched from one end of the dirt floor longhouse to the other, and women sat facing each other stacking the dried leaves into bundles that would eventually become hundred pound sacks. Men would come and go from the same door that Enrique had entered through—the only one in the building. They carried large woven bags of the whole dried leaves from a large pit, where they were dried in the sun for two or three days. Once dried, they were brought inside and the women would separate the leaves from the twigs and other botanicals, and then chop them up to uniform size to be wrapped in small square bundles that would then be put together en mass until they had accumulated a hundred pound sack.
Enrique didn’t process the cocaine any further than that. He wasn’t a chemist, merely a provider of the raw materials. While there would have been much more money in refined cocaine, it would have also required a much more sophisticated operation. He left that to the Columbians and Americans. He was very happy making huge amounts of money while exacting very little effort or risk. The fact that he would have to hit an American target, which would be the riskiest thing he’d ever done, left him very uneasy. Of course, he wouldn’t be there himself, but still, he’d hate to lose his men or worse yet, have his men followed back to his operation. He had impressed the chief as best he could, in his very poor Guarani vocabulary, that they needed to be invisible and leave no tracks. Kuka seemed to understand and gave quite a speech to his warriors as they prepared for their trip to “The City of the East”, Ciudad del Este.
Enrique walked around the group slowly, watching the women, who wore only small loin clothes. He was eyeing one of the younger ones, perhaps sixteen or so, whose breasts were still standing up perfectly. She caught his stare and immediately began chopping leaves even faster. He approached the older one, the one he called Nanni, and handed her a strand of white plastic beads worth less then a decent pencil. She smiled, showing the gaps in her worn white teeth. He pointed to the young girl. Nanni smiled and spoke rapidly to the girl, who looked somewhat terrified.
While the Guarani women were generally off limits to his men, Enrique took whatever and whoever he wanted in this part of the world. Kuka and he had ‘worked it out’ a few years earlier with large amounts of gifts to the chief. There were maybe ten women in the village that were off limits—Kuka’s two wives and one daughter, and his nieces. Enrique could live with that. He took the young girl by the wrist and led her out of the longhouse. Some of the older women looked concerned, but no one spoke a word. The girl said nothing, although she was scared of what she knew must be coming. The two guards laughed as their boss led her out, walking so quickly she almost had to run to keep up. They commented to each other loud enough to draw a, “Shut up!” from their boss who never broke stride.
Enrique brought her back to his hut, where the girl sat on the floor, backed into a corner. Vega drank some more rum and forced her to drink some. She coughed and her eyes quickly glazed as she drank alcohol for the first time. It had the desired effect of loosening her up, and as soon as she looked calmer, he undressed and unceremoniously raped her. Guarani women were not taught that they had much say in life, so the young girl closed her eyes and tried not to cry as Enrique thrust into his young virgin. He grunted and tried to kiss the unfortunate girl, who squirmed and cried, trying desperately to keep her mouth away from his scruffy face. Guarani men had no facial hair, and she found him physically revolting. His rum and cigar breath nauseated her as he pounded away at her, kissing and biting her smooth skin. She finally began screaming and fighting as he grew rougher, yelling words in Guarani he didn’t understand, but was sure meant that she loved every minute of it. He finished a moment later and rolled off of her. She scrambled out of the hut, running into the jungle in tears. Vega slept for almost an hour.
Chapter 8
The Glades
The team flew by private jet from Langley to a small deserted airstrip in the Florida Everglades. They were in the Mangrove swamps just north of a small tributary that led into the Broad River. The Broad River flowed west, out towards the Gulf of Mexico, but not before it meandered through some of the toughest swampland a human could have to navigate through. The Alligators along the river were almost as numerous as the snakes, mosquitoes and flies, and humidity of ninety-percent was not uncommon. Moss hanging from the trees gave the area around the airstrip the eerie feeling of a haunted forest out of some B Horror movie.
Dex had given Mackey and Cascaes a fictional mission along the river to practice for the Parana River in Paraguay. Although the flora and fauna was different, the misery of the climate and difficulty of navigation was the same. It wasn’t that the team needed practice doing what they had done a thousand times; rather it was that they were given new equipment and needed experience using it. Their new bag of tricks was amazingly lightweight. For soldiers in the field, the weight of their packs was always a problem. It had been that way for hundreds of years. But the CIA had deeper pockets “per soldier” than the armed forces did. Their night vision equipment wasn’t much bigger than a pair of sunglasses and would neatly fit in a breast pocket. It was much more convenient than the standard issue for the armed forces, but at twenty times the cost, a regular grunt wouldn’t be seeing one for a while. Their new computer equipment was all miniaturized with satellite uplink and communication capabilities better than they had ever used prior. The hardware was waterproof and shockproof and designed for combat in water environments. Even their weapons had been upgraded to new machine guns that were mostly polymer, making them lighter and smaller. To a man, they had spent years of training learning to be invisible. They could move silently, kill quickly, navigate blindly and push their bodies way beyond normal endurance. A week in the swamp would sharpen them to a razor.
As they unpacked their crates of gear, Mackey walked to the edge of the old cracked runway and smiled. He had been here before, but it had been many years. Cascaes caught his gaze and asked him what was up.
“Been a while, Chris, but I’ve been here before. The original training courses were for operations in Cuba that never happened, then for Latin America. Actually did some work in Nicaragua after training here once many years ago. The swamp here is as nasty as it gets—until you get to the real one filled with people trying to kill you.”
“Yeah, SEAL training was pretty rough, too. Funny how you think your instructor is trying to kill you until you are out wor
king for real. Then you realize they taught you how to stay alive. How many times has some little trick from training saved our ass, huh?”
“Well, maybe this little excursion will be for nothing. If McKnight gets a green light for the FBI to go in and work with the Paraguayans, we’ll be back off to the dessert again. That would be typical SNAFU—do jungle training in the river for a week, then ship out to the desert,” said Mackey with a laugh.
“Yeah, no shit,” said Cascaes with a laugh. “I remember doing training in Alaska for two weeks in the most miserable conditions of all time. I mean totally frozen, man. We were doing insertions from helicopters in zero viz, with winds blowing thirty knots at twenty below zero. The following week we were sneaking on to the beach in Iraq to take out some command and control targets in a desert. Typical.” They both chuckled.
“Chief! We are good to go!” yelled Moose from the runway near the rear of the plane. The team had uncrated their gear and assembled themselves like a proper platoon.
Mackey looked back at them and smiled. “Chris, your guys are good. They’ve rubbed off on everybody else, too. Those guys from the Company—you think they ever stood at attention before?” He laughed out loud.
Mackey pulled his encrypted satellite phone from his breast pocket. He punched in the numbers for Dex Murphy’s hotline and within a few seconds he had him on the line.
“Chief, jungle cruise is away at oh-six thirty. We are opening the mission pack now.”
Into the Jungle Page 3