As they spotted the plane, its door opened and a crewman stepped out onto the pontoon, waving at their arriving passengers. The first boat glided in next to the pontoon and the team immediately began working. Cascaes was up first, jumping on to the pontoon and holding the bow of the raft along with the air crewman, who held the aft. The men worked silently and quickly, moving every item aboard the plane and then themselves hopping out. Ripper, in the stern, pulled out his Ka-Bar knife and popped off a protected cover to reveal a cap that read “Emergency Scuttle.” He twisted the knob, then punched a few holes into the floor of the raft to speed up the quick process. The Emergency Scuttle had already activated two very small ballast tanks which flooded immediately. By the time he stepped on to the pontoon and followed the others inside the plane, his raft was already disappearing under the green water.
Moose repeated the process as the last man out of the second boat, and then quickly hopped aboard the plane. As large as it looked empty, the plane was quickly cramped with men and gear. The pilot stepped back from his seat and greeted the men, complimenting them on their extremely quick transfer from boat to plane. They pulled up their anchor, taxied slowly to the end of their little straightaway, then revved the engines and hydroplaned until they took off, turning north.
****************************
It took two and a half hours for the seaplane to make it to the private strip in Langley, landing on its wheels which were imbedded under the pontoons. The men piled out quickly and reassembled their gear neatly beside the runway as the black bus arrived to bring them back to their building. Dex Murphy was on the bus with them, having greeted them at the strip as soon as he arrived with the bus.
“Nothing personal guys, but your first order of business is the shower. Y’all smell pretty damn ripe.”
Raul Santos, one of the marines smiled and said, “Yeah, man—you better sell that plane. It’s never gonna’ be the same after three hours of our smelly asses.”
The jokes continued for another few minutes and the bus whizzed down the private road back to main building. Murphy looked at Mackey with a pained expression.
Mackey looked at him quizzically. “What is it, Dex?”
“You guys really do stink!” he said with a fake smile.
“Let’s see what you smell like after a few days in the fucking swamp. Sir.”
“No offense, senior chief,” said Dex.
“Chief petty officer, actually,” said Cascaes.
Dex smiled and stood up. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a collar pin of a silver anchor with a star above it. “Excuse me, everyone,” he said at the top of his lungs. The team went silent and looked at Dex, who stood up on the moving bus and held up the insignia of a Senior chief petty officer. “CPO Cascaes had been promoted as a result of his actions leading his team against enemy forces last year. You will now address him as Senior Chief Petty Officer Cascaes.”
The entire bus erupted into applause and few “ooras.” Dex signaled for quiet. “Wait—there’s more. In recognition of exceptionally meritorious service to the government of the United States of America in a duty of great responsibility, Senior Chief Petty Officer Christopher Cascaes is herby awarded the Navy Distinguished Service Medal.”
Dex pulled a box from his jacket and opened it to reveal the medal as well as the ribbon—navy blue with a stripe of gold. “Congratulations, senior chief.” He handed the box to Chris, who was dumbfounded.
“Thank you, sir, but it’s my crew that deserves the recognition.”
Dex smacked his shoulder. “From what I hear, your crew will be receiving the Presidential Unit Citation. Congratulations, men.”
The SEALs, who had all worked together for many years, hugged and high-fived each other, then sat quietly, feeling embarrassed in front of the others, who hadn’t been on that last fateful mission that prevented a nuclear holocaust.
Mackey shook hands with Cascaes, who sat looking at the new insignia in his palm.
“Too bad you won’t be wearing your uniform for a while,” said Mackey. “You deserve it, Chris. I’ll go to war with you any day.”
Chris finished the hand shake and said, “Good—because I think you are about to.”
Chapter 17
Langley
The team had arrived in time for showers, a change of clothes, and dinner. As soon as they had been well fed, they returned to the tiny auditorium which served as their briefing room. They were seated when Leah and her assistant walked in after Darren and Dex. Even though at forty-four she was old enough to be the mother of a couple of the men, she still brought a few very quiet comments. The men hadn’t been around women since Hawaii, and even a “well-preserved fossil”, as Santos called her, was eye candy.
Darren Davis was the first to address the room from the lectern up front. He pressed a few buttons and a satellite image of the tri-border region appeared, with an overlay of country borders and blue lines to highlight water features.
“Good evening, gentlemen. Sorry to pull you out of the mosquito infested, alligator filled. nasty swamps of Florida. But there is some good news—you will be going to the mosquito infested, alligator filled, nasty swamps of Brazil and Paraguay. Allow me to introduce Latin-America Desk Chief Leah Pereira. She covers all of Central and South America, and this will be a joint operation between her and my personnel.”
Leah stepped to the podium and smiled. “Good evening, everyone. This is my assistant desk chief, Connie Jones.”
Santos quietly leaned over to Earl Jones, who was sitting next to him, and whispered, “Yo man, you didn’t tell me yo’ momma’ worked here, too.” Earl just gave him “the look.”
Leah pressed a button and changed slides to show a half a dozen men. “Since 9-11, my department has been given greater authority in dealing with drugs and weapons smugglers. While in the past, this was strictly FBI, ATF, or DEA jurisdiction; the president recognized that drug and weapons dealings were typically connected with terrorist activity in this region. For the past eight years, we have been carefully monitoring activity between the Middle East and South and Central America. If you believe that only turban-wearing, Arab-sounding men want you dead, you would be incorrect.”
She walked around the podium and pulled out a laser pointer to discuss the six men on the screen. She pointed to the first one, who was in fact wearing a turban.
“This beauty is Ali Aziz. He is about sixty and originally a Saudi. He is Arab and turban wearing and he does want you dead. He has lived in Beirut and moved around in Syria and the West bank. He is Al Qaeda. He is also a weapons smuggler and a killer of women and children. Everything from buses in Tel Aviv to the assassination of Ambassador McKnight a few days ago. While we can’t prove the McKnight connection yet, we do know that he was in the region and was supposed to fly out of Paraguay to Syria, and we were prepared to pick him and these two up at the airport. They got spooked and never showed.” She pointed at the next face, much younger and harder looking.
“This man is Hakim Bin-Salaam. He is known to move around with this man, Raman Qasim. Bin-Salaam and Qasim are professional killers. We have been close a few times to grabbing them, but they have lots of help in South America. We have lost two good agents in three years trying to take them down. Remember those faces. If they see you before you see them, they’ll be the last faces you see. The list of their activities would fill ten folders, and of course we can’t prove anything to the satisfaction of to the South American governments. They are more scared of reprisals for cooperating than of losing our aid on a national level. And of course, the terrorists pay better than we do when it comes to bank accounts in the Caymans.”
She pointed to a grainy picture of a Latino man in Fidel Castro-looking fatigues. He even had the cigar in his mouth. “This is Enrique Antonio Vega. He is currently the largest exporter of raw cocaine in the tri-border area, and acts with total impunity. No
ne of the three countries will admit he is operating inside their borders. Brazil tried to cooperate a few years back, and it led to assassinations of their best and brightest. They want nothing to do with us now. We are not sure how high his payments go in the governments of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil—but we work under the assumption that no one can be trusted down there who isn’t one of us. And I mean no one.”
She pointed to two terrible pictures of two other men.
“These two men are known associates of Vega and work directly for him. We believe one goes by the name Carlos. We have no other information on these two, but assume that they are his captains down there.”
Leah turned off the projector and turned on the lights.
She paused and chose her words carefully. “Going into the jungle after Vega and these three terrorists will not be like anything you’ve done before. I know you are all highly trained professionals, but I have to ask—show of hands please, how many of you have ever been in the deep jungle before, not counting the Everglades trip?”
She was relieved when most of the hands went up.
“Well that’s a pleasant surprise. Although I can tell you that the area where Vega is operating will be much tougher than Panama, El Salvador, or Southeast Asia. Tomorrow morning, I will have a specialist here to discuss the jungle with you. You may only remember ten percent of what he tells you, but maybe that will save your life. There are animals, plants and insects where you are going that are not like anything you’ve seen before. I’m afraid Vega may be the easy part.” She paused. “Any of you know who the Guarani Indians are?”
Only Mackey and Cascaes had been briefed at all about them, the others sat expressionless.
“The Guarani Indians are the indigenous people of the area, like our own Native Americans. They were treated about as well, too. They were either enslaved or killed off by the Portuguese and Spaniards, who also shared their diseases with the Indians. Today’s Guaranis live like most conquered peoples—in poverty and neglect, with high rates of unemployment, suicide and alcoholism. One of the tribes, the Pampidos Guarani, returned to the deep jungle over forty years ago. They have gone back to their old ways—all of them.”
She paused and looked around the room. None of the men knew what she was hinting at.
“When Enrique Vega used his Guarani tribe as his personal army against the Cortez Cartel last year, his warriors not only killed everyone they saw—they ate most of them as well.”
Earl Jones couldn’t hold back his audible, “Holy shit!”
Eric Hodges, the marine sharpshooter quietly said, “You gotta’ be shittin’ me.”
“I am not kidding you, gentlemen. These Guaranis are basically a Stone Age people living among AK-47-carrying drug dealers and international terrorists. And while they have no political agenda, they are not to be treated lightly. They use basic bows and arrows, poison blow darts and wooden clubs—and they are fearless. They are known as the “invisible people” because they can move through the jungle quickly and quietly. I am not telling you all of this to scare you, merely to put you on your toes. We tried once before to get out into the jungle to gather intelligence on Vega. The one who made it out needed counseling for a long time. The other two, well, you don’t want to go out that way.”
Leah walked over to a chair and sat, then looked at Darren, signaling she was done talking for a bit.
Chapter 18
Vega’s Camp
Enrique didn’t have to say much to convince the Chief once he showed him the rum. Rum had been a bone of contention between the two. The chief constantly demanded it for himself and his warriors, and Vega constantly made stories up about not having any, or it having gone bad, or whatever he could think of at the time to avoid giving it the chief. The Guaranis, like the American Indians, were not good drinkers. Those Guaranis that lived “civilized” usually ended up as alcoholic day laborers, the very reason the Pampidos had returned to the jungle a few generations before. Apparently, Kuka had forgotten about that.
Kuka grabbed the bottle and Vega showed six fingers. Kuka mumbled something so fast that Vega wasn’t sure what to expect, but then the chief began pulling women out of the crowd that was celebrating and pushing them towards Vega. Vega then began handing them out to his men like beverages, keeping his favorite two for himself. One of them had known Vega from a month or so before, and was terrified when the chief grabbed her again.
While most people didn’t know it, the Guaranis had actually invented the ‘birth control pill’. They used plants that grew in the jungle to abort unwanted pregnancies, and had done so for hundreds of years. It had kept their bloodlines free from the white invaders, and made the business transactions less problematic between Vega and the chief.
The tribal medicine man, an ancient, ugly dog by the name of Manguk was constantly boiling something. Manguk supplied the poison for the darts, potions for remaining invisible in the jungle as well as the green paint, birth control potions, and hexes against enemies. He also oversaw executions of prisoners and the rights of cannibalism. It wasn’t just a meal—it was an event. Manguk answered only to Kuka, whose word was absolute and unquestionable. As scared as the Guaranis were of old Manguk, Kuka was still ‘the man.’
Vega took his two women by the wrists and escorted them roughly back to his cabin. His men each had their own way of dealing with their women. One had simply thrown a young girl over his shoulder, another had carried one under his arm like a briefcase, and the other two were simply walked back to the small huts of Vega’s men. There were more men than women, the bottle of rum having netted only six girls, which meant taking turns and a long night for the unfortunate young captives. As pissed as Vega’s men were for having to share women while Vega got two, they would never voice that, even to each other. Vega had once blown the head off of one of his men in front of the entire village and given the corpse to Manguk. The remaining men were “fiercely loyal” after that.
As usual, when Vega got back to his cabin, he pushed alcohol on the two young women to avoid them fighting back so hard. In his own mind, he was a porn star, and wished he could somehow convince the two young terrified girls that they were actually bisexual nymphomaniacs that just couldn’t get enough of him and each other. It never turned out that way, though, and Vega typically ended up raping them one at a time over the course of the evening, while the other was tied and forced to watch. Even drunk, the Guarani women wanted nothing to do with him.
His men, currently numbering an even dozen, were all doing relatively the same things in their own smaller huts, although several of them were slightly rougher than even Vega. For them, it had been many months since they had any kind of action at all with a woman, and had less respect for the Guarani women than even for the prostitutes they paid for in Paraguay or Brazil. Vega’s men were drunk and loud, although not quite as loud as Kuka and his warriors.
Back near the large campfires, Kuka’s warriors passed the rum and danced in a large circle around the campfire, waving spears and clubs and occasionally leaping over the fire. The women and children kept up their singing and dancing as well, as the jungle was turned into a scene from another world. As the sun began to set, shadows from the dancers around the fire leaped through the trees, making the jungle appear more haunted than usual. It wasn’t long before Kuka decided he needed more rum, and he ran up to Vega’s cabin.
Kuka walked through the curtain that was Vega’s front door to find him behind a young woman on all fours, her face buried in her arm as she suffered quietly. The other woman was curled up in a ball in a corner naked, trying to recover from Vega’s repeated rapes. The abrubicha demanded more rum, completely oblivious to Vega in the middle of his sexual escapades. Vega turned to face the chief, still on his knees gripping the young girl by the hips and told him to get the fuck out. That wasn’t a good idea. Kuka, now drunk, kicked over Vega’s desk and started screaming at Vega again for
more rum. He walked over to the girl Vega was raping and pulled her up by her wrists, leaving Vega on his knees with his erection standing in the middle of nowhere. Now Vega wasn’t happy either, and was equally drunk. He stood up, still erect, and began screaming back at Kuka, who pulled the girl away and pushed her out of the hut. She didn’t need to be asked to start running away as fast as her legs would carry her.
Kuka was screaming now, pointing at the cabinet where Vega kept his bottles of rum. In his drunken rage, he was speaking fast and slurring, making it hard for Vega to understand exactly what he was saying. When he started pointing at the other girl, who was backed into the corner and tied by the wrist to a beam on the cabin wall, Vega relented. He walked over to the cabinet and took a key from a small crack behind the cabinet and unlocked the door. He took out a bottle, this one at full strength, and slowly handed it to the chief. In his broken Guarani, he asked the chief not to allow his men to get too wild, referring to the fighting that occurred last time. Kuka, already wild eyed, snatched the bottle, told Vega he could keep the girl as long as he wanted, and ran back to his little soirée by the fire.
Vega grabbed another bottle, this one for himself, and took a swig. He pointed it at the girl, asking her if she wanted some, but she merely crawled back further into the corner, trying to become invisible. Vega was standing there bare-ass naked when one of his men banged on the wall near the curtain doorway and yelled to his boss inside.
“Fuck,” grumbled Vega. “What is it?” he yelled back.
“Sorry, boss, but I think you’d better come down to the ogas.”
Into the Jungle Page 7