Allies

by Wolf Riedel

  “She up yet?” asked Teddy tactlessly. “I’ve got a nine o’clock divorce client.” Roxy wordlessly threw an elbow into Teddy’s ribs.

  “Shit. What was that for?”

  “She’s just finished her shower,” said Mark. “She’s usually out for breakfast right after that.”

  “Throw some eggs and bacon in a skillet and she’ll be in here before you know it,” Roxy said. Mark smiled. Kristin had obviously shared with Roxy Mabel’s fondness for being served hand and foot.

  Teddy gave her a disapproving look.

  “Be kind!”

  Roxy shrugged it off. She knew Mabel much better than Teddy ever would.

  A door down the hallway opened and Mabel’s voice carried down to them.

  “Is breakfast ready yet?”

  Roxy threw Teddy an I told you so look; Teddy, in response, shook his head in mock surrender. He’d learned long ago not to question Roxy’s judgment but kept slipping up regularly.

  Mabel strode into the kitchen with a vengeance but came to an abrupt halt when she saw Teddy and Roxy.

  She looked at Mark. “Who are these people?” The scorn embedded in the word these made it plain that she knew that something was up; something not positive for her.

  “Ms. Hill. I’m . . .” Teddy started.

  “Mrs Hill. I’m Mrs Hill.”

  “Mrs Hill then. I’m Theodore Brevard, the attorney for Mr and Mrs Winters and I’m here to ask on behalf of the legal lessees of these premises that you depart them by noon today.”

  Mabel stared at him as if he was some form of blithering idiot.

  “I most certainly will not leave. I’ve been invited here by my daughter and there’s no way on God’s Earth that she would ever throw me out.”

  “Madam. I am the attorney for both Mr Winters as well as your daughter and these instructions come from both of them.”

  “I refuse to believe that and I refuse to leave.”

  “I thought that might be the case,” Teddy reached into the breast pocket of his suit and took out a piece of paper folded in half down its length. He handed it to her. Caught by surprise, Mabel took it.

  The first few words caught her eye:

  LETTER OF TRESPASS

  Florida State Statute, § 810.08(1) & § 810.09(1)(a)(1)

  March 21st, 2007

  To:

  Name: Mabel Hill

  . . .

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “You’ve been served, Madam,” replied Teddy. “It’s a Letter of Trespass indicating that you have until noon to vacate these premises voluntarily. After that point in time you will be trespassing here. At that point, if you have not left, I will be attending at the offices of the Lakeland Police Department and filing trespass charges against you so that you can be forcibly removed by their officers.

  Mabel looked at Mark with a mixture of confusion and hate.

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  Mark looked back at her. He’d been wanting to use this line for quite some time now.

  “Frankly Mabel, I don’t give a damn.”

  Mark had left all thought of Mabel behind him as he turned into Sal’s driveway to pick him up for the drive to the Tampa PD’s offices. Sal was waiting.

  “How’s it goin’?” Sal asked.

  Mark had a momentary twinge that Sal should know about Mabel but figured that there probably wasn’t as much attorney-client privilege as between practitioners of the law and their spouses as one might like. Besides he had awakened Roxy from her sleep with his call and shouldn’t be surprised if Sal had asked her what it was about.

  “As well as can be expected, I guess. Teddy served her with a trespass letter telling her she had until noon to leave.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sal staring at him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mabel. Teddy and Roxy served Mabel. Told Mabel she had until noon to leave the house.”

  “Like I said. What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Mark had to reassess his opinion of legal assistants. Apparently they didn’t share everything with their husbands. He let out a long sigh.

  “When I got home last night Kristen was pretty much beside herself. Mabel had been riding her the whole time we were gone and Kristin pretty much had a breakdown so I called Roxy for some help this morning.”

  “Shit! That was you. That’s why she called Teddy and went in early to work this morning. So what’s the old hag doing? Is she gonna leave?”

  “I sure as hell hope so. Teddy’s going to check in on her at noon to see if she’s gone. If not he’s going to get the cops involved.”

  “If she doesn’t burn the house down out of spite.”

  “Shit Sal. Don’t even joke about that.”

  Mark’s Blackberry vibrated with an incoming email. He pulled it off his belt and handed it to Sal.

  “Check to see if that’s about this morning’s meeting.”

  “Sure . . . Nope it’s from Richter. He still in Zabul.”

  “Not sure. What’s it say.”

  “Let’s see. It’s just to you. No other addressees. He says: CID Kandahar has completed its first day of interviews regarding possible drug dealing at the ODA at PB POWDER. Evidence brought out today confirms that: 1. the leadership of the ODA were involved with drug trafficking channeled through Pakistan; 2. The primary leader of the operation is MSgt McLean. Capt Lesperance and WO1 Roper are accomplices; 3. McLean was involved in co-opting other SFG members into the operation; 4. PO Fletcher had definitely been co-opted into the gang; 5. McLean’s initial indoctrination into illegal activities most probably happened when he was attending intelligence training at Ft Huachuca; 6. ODA is being withdrawn from Zabul to Kandahar; and 7. Investigation is ongoing under SSgt Galloway, CID who you can contact for more details. My team will be leaving Kandahar later today. Interesting shit but not much in the way of detail.”

  “We can get that from Galloway. We can get the thirty-eight eighty-ones from him. Send him an email requesting that and let him know that his investigation and ours are joined at the hip. Copy Sykes on that cause he’s gonna have to get this whole thing coordinated at Group. Oh and see if you can find out if Cabello ever had a jump course.”

  Sal and Mark were the last to arrive. The others were seated around the conference table. Mark took a quick inventory: Sage sat with her partner Ben Whitlock and their supervisor Sgt Bill Sexton; next to them sat Ollie Platt from Tampa Guns and Gangs and Sgt Wayne Harris from Ocala; across from them on the other side of the table were MSgt Paul Hurley from AFOSI and Tony DiAngelo. Several chairs were open next to them for Mark and Sal.

  Couldn’t be more we versus them if we tried, Mark thought.

  Sexton seemed to have elected himself unofficial leader before their arrival.

  “So where do we all stand on this?” he asked.

  “I guess it might as well be us,” said Mark. “Sal why don’t you start us on what we got out of Mexico?”

  “Sure. We have tracked—you guys all know we were down in Mexico and did a raid on a Los Zumas armory?” He looked around the table and got nods all around except from Harris who gave a what the hell shrug. “Anyway Mark and Sage and I were in Mexico where we worked with the local feds at a time when they were doing a raid on a gang called the Los Zumas in a border city called Reynosa. We did an inventory of everything that was captured there—both weapons and documents—and married it up with records of previous seizures in the state of Tamaulipas—that’s on the northeast corner next to Texas—as well as the records we took from Lewis’s house. Bottom line we got a lot of matches both by way of serial numbers and by way of manufactured parts for AR-15 full auto conversions. There were clearly semi-auto AR-15s that went through Lewis’s hands that ended up being in Mexico as full auto.”

  Sal turned to DiAngelo.

  “Tony. How’d you make out in Wauchula?”

  DiAngelo looked over at Harris.

  “For t
hose of you who don’t know,” DiAngelo said, “another Special Forces reservist, guy by the name of Segundo Noda, was shot to death in the town of Wauchula a few days ago. He was with Company C of the 3rd of the 20th SFG, same battalion but different company as Lewis, and worked in the sports department of the local Walmart. I went down and visited with the Hardee County Sheriff’s detectives—they got a funny little gerrymandered city boundary down there and Noda lived in a little county enclave within the city and not the city itself. Anyway turns out Noda also did a lot of AR-15 purchasing at the Walmart but so far there’s no evidence as to him ordering any conversion kit. So far it looks more like he was just buying them and then passing them on to someone else, but three of the rifles he purchased showed up in Sal’s Mexico records. I’ve only just gotten hold of some of Noda’s banking records and there’s a lot of similarity in the way of the accounts and the accounting as we saw in Lewis’s case. We’ve got some help from Noda’s missus here cause unlike in Lewis’s case the wife and kids were spared. Tied up and traumatized but spared so the Sheriff’s trying to be gentle about it.”

  “Any evidence as to the shooter?” asked Harris.

  “Nada. Sorry Wayne.”

  “But you figure it was the same guy?”

  “My more than a wild ass guess is that Noda was part of the same outfit as Lewis so if it wasn’t the same guy that hit him it was surely the same outfit. Too much of a coincidence otherwise.”

  Mark took up the briefing.

  “We’ve gotten some word in from Afghanistan as well as having pulled together some records. We think we’ve figured out where all this comes together. Our boy Cabello was stationed at Fort Huachuca which is on the border in Arizona and about three hundred miles from Ciudad Juarez.”

  “Big Juarez cartel territory,” interjected Platt. “Their territory is in some flux with Sinaloa pressure but generally did extend as far west as Agua Prieta which is maybe fifty miles southeast of Huachuca.”

  “And by extension their enforcers the Los Zumas who themselves are moving eastward into Tamaulipas and into direct conflict with the Gulf Cartel,” Mark continued. “So we figure Cabello is the start of things. Cabello knows the cartel needs guns—and was probably involved in the gun trade in Arizona. Then we get McLean who goes on an intelligence course at the Army Intelligence Center at Huachuca and meets Cabello. McLean’s got a little drug business going with pot and opium. Last thing Mexico needs is marijuana but opium or heroin is always useful so there’s some opportunity for corporate synergy here. McLean gets Cabello hooked into a fine network of soldiers who are in and out of Afghanistan. Then Cabello gets transferred here to CENTCOM where he finds himself a machinist—Silvera—with a fine shop who can do conversions. He ramps up a few of McLean’s stateside SF guys as straw buyers to increase output. And just to round it out McLean recruits the sailor Fletcher who, when he gets back from the sandbox, goes over the hill and joins up with the gang’s shipping line.”

  “We found some records in Reynosa,” interjected Sal, “that had one of the Zumas’ leaders in Ciudad Juarez, guy by the name of Jose Running Horse Tabares, sending an email to this guy in Reynosa who’s looking after the armory and logistics there . . .” Sal flipped through his note pad. “. . . guy named Marco Mesquite Yanez. Anyway the email was complaining about inventories and payments for guns from the Los Paras making a specific reference about their man in Tampa. Incidentally Cabello took a jump course once.”

  Hurley chimed in. “Our surveillance of Silvera’s made it pretty clear that she’s making gun parts after hours. We got more than enough to take her down.”

  “Sounds like we have enough for search warrants but we’re way short of anything that would sell in court,” said Sexton. “Mark. Do you guys need search warrants for your military people?”

  “We get search authorizations through the chain of command. Pretty much the same legal standard as warrants. We’ll need to work with you and get warrants for any off-base searches.”

  “So we need to search Cabello’s house, his workspace and all computers, same for Silvera. Where’s she live anyway?”

  “South Tampa. She’s in your jurisdiction,” said Hurley.

  Sexton turned to Sage.

  “How about your side, Sage?” he asked. “Anything from that Sandoval guy in St. Pete’s?”

  Sage looked worn out to Mark and the fact that it seemed as if Sexton didn’t yet know what had come up out of the interrogation made him think that things must have gone late last night and that she’d only just gotten to the meeting herself.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “A couple of things. As an aside we got a lead on some MQ-27 underage prostitution sites. Ollie’s guys are spinning up an op to hit them.” She nodded along the table to Platt who nodded back.

  “Sandoval said that the rumors within the gang are that Herrera was killed by the gang itself. Basically no one in the gang has been given any orders to look for or seek any revenge. The most likely candidate is a young apprentice from MacFarlane that was being brought along by Herrera. Guy supposedly goes by the name Antonio with a nickname of Tuffy.” She again looked to Platt. “You get anything more on that, Ollie?”

  “Yeah. I think we got a good lead through some shake cards the patrols in District 1 have put together. There was one a couple of years ago for a juvenile associate by the name of Antonio Fierro Juárez going by the moniker Tough Guy living in the area of MacFarlane Park Elementary. We’re doing some more digging on family and known associates. You might want to get involved in the interviews when we get a location for them.”

  “Bet on it,” she said.”Ben and I will be up there right after this meeting.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Bazaar-e-Panjwayi, Kandahar, Afghanistan

  Wednesday 21 Mar 07 1800 hrs AFT

  Norowz walked along the main street that ran the length of Bazaar-e-Panjwayi puttering amongst the stalls. He had agreed to meet Tofan here and was merely putting in some time. The sun was already down in the west behind the razor back ridge that was Ma’Sum Ghar thereby leaving the town in shadow while the two crags to the east, Mar Ghar and Bedvan Ghar, were bathed in a golden light that glowed in the late day. Soon the rows of lean-to stalls that ran the length of the road with their fluttering multi-colored flags would be closed up. Their products taken inside; their people abandoning the streets to take their evening meals.

  For now the street was still crowded with shoppers trying to wheedle out a late-day bargain. bicycles, motorcycles and pickup trucks wound their way about. One—a tri-motorcycle with a gigantic load of yellow and blue water cans and a wheelbarrow on top—skirted close to him almost hitting him with a can.

  Norowz smiled and turned back to the stall before which he stood. Below its awning were crates standing on end on top of which sat baskets filled with nuts and dried fruits. He took a handful of dates and popped one into his mouth to chew.

  Behind him—following down the road from where the trike had come—came a heavy rumble and a cloud of dust which quickly disclosed itself to be a patrol of the heavy eight-wheeled Canadian armored cars that were returning from a patrol to their base on the slopes of Ma’Sum Ghar. He stood and watched as they passed by. Up close the grey-green machines—festooned with water cans, packs, ration boxes, stowed camouflage netting, picks and shovels and cleaning rods, tow cables, all covered in a thick layer of the tan dust of the fields—were monstrous. Norowz’s eyes, however, were on the men. The driver whose head barely extended above his hatch, the commander whose shoulders were exposed as he manned the machine gun on top of the turret and the two soldiers who were in hatches on the vehicle’s rear deck manning two light machine guns there. The men exuded more menace than the vehicle. Their faces wrapped in shemaghs, their body armor, their helmets over the ballistic lenses that covered their eyes, all once again covered by the thick dust of the road. There were no smiles from men like them for men like him, obvious fighting age males who neither smiled nor waved but merely stare
d at each other sullenly. They knew him for what he was but the lack of any weapon made him a non-target.

  The armored cars rolled past him, four of them escorting two of the four-wheeled armored and turreted SUVs and three unarmored Ford Ranger pickups with a handful of ANA soldiers in the back.

  As the dust started to clear, Tofan walked up to him.

  “As salaam alaikum,” he said.

  “Wa alaikum salaam,” Norowz replied. “How are you this evening my brother?”

  “I am well.”

  “You know Tofan it has come to me that I can walk through this town completely unarmed and be at peace but those people for all their weapons and armor will never be safe here.”

  “Like the Soviets, brother.”

  “Yes very much like the Soviets although these people are smarter and more adaptable. The Soviets were cannon fodder. They never learned.” Norowz offered Tofan some dates and pulled a few Afghani out of his pocket to give to the vendor. He pointed at several of the baskets of nuts and fruit and the vendor bundled them into folded paper cones he handed to Norowz. Norowz tucked them into a pocket in his kameez.

  “Come,” he said. “Let’s meet the whore’s son and get this over with.”

  Bazaar-e-Panjwayi wasn’t all that big as towns go, maybe five thousand people all told, but nevertheless it was the largest community in the district and, as far as Norowz knew, the biggest between Kandahar City and Lashkar Gah in Helmand. As such it had a few houses that were more affluent than the run of the mill farmer and tradesmen compounds that littered rural Afghanistan. It was to one of these to which he had been summoned to tonight.