Midnight Trust

by M. L. Buchman

  After trekking back upriver to the boats and calling for a pickup by the Night Stalkers, their team worked their way back to Medellín. At least she assumed they were a team again—in their minds. Being shot twice in the same day, once in the shoulder and once in the motorcycle transmission, made her feel less friendly than she had been.

  Kyle led them to a suite high on the hills overlooking Medellín. It was in one of the new high rises that were popping up faster than bamboo all over the area. The city was growing by a quarter of a million or more per decade and had been doing it since the 1950s. With the smashing of the big cartels in the 1990s, it was a much quieter and safer city and developers were pouring in capital.

  The safe house was the top, third floor of an apartment building perched on the edge of Comuna 13. This particular barrio had been the worst neighborhood of the Comuna, which meant of the entire city. It had been owned by the gangs until very recently. The outside was only moderately rundown and its walls were covered in brilliantly creative blue-and-gold graffiti.

  Inside, she could have been in her King David Tower condo in Tel Aviv overlooking the Bograshov beach. It had been a long time since she’d been there. Perhaps too long, but the work in South America never seemed to stop.

  She leaned back in the armchair and tried not to groan when her shoulder rested against the back cushion. Every muscle was sore from the last thirty-six hours. The shootout, the waterfall, infiltrating into position was much harder work than it sounded, and then, of course, Chad forcing her to crash into the rocks.

  After three days awake, she felt a little empathy for Chad—who groaned just as deeply as he eased onto one of the couches—but not much. If he was a little closer, she’d kick him again, but he was smart enough to keep his distance.

  The voluble CIA guy had spread out a proper Colombian breakfast. Arepas de choclo—corn cakes with soft white cheese, a breakfast that she’d taken a long time to become used to, but now missed when she was out of the country—along with massive cups of rich Colombian hot chocolate. There were also spicy chorizo sausage tamales with red and green bell pepper, onion, an egg, and almost enough zing to wake her up.

  “You bring me the first-ever confirmed siting of la Capitana,” Fred Smith sighed happily. He looked like on over-tall cherub with brilliant red hair. “No one, but no one has ever positively identified her. When we processed Chad’s surveillance photos from his recon, all we got when we ran her ID was ‘female unknown.’ Isn’t that amazing?”

  It was amazing that this was a CIA guy. Clearly not a field agent, but he appeared to be the one running this team’s assignments, which said something of his credentials if not his manner.

  “I never said I was confirmed it,” Tanya finally found the brief gap in his words to insert her own.

  “Seriously? Seriously?” Smith didn’t appear to be the least bit less excited. “The instincts of a Mossad field agent aren’t wrong that often.”

  Tanya’s glance at Carla revealed only a tiny shake of her head. Good, she wouldn’t like the CIA knowing who she really was. Oddly, she’d always been comfortable with Carla knowing. And what Carla knew, the rest of the team did. Then why had Chad shot her?

  He’d already explained his reasoning on that. Renata’s changed routine. Tanya racing off close behind her. Maybe she’d have made the same assumption if she was in his boots, but maybe not. Like her, he was suspicious of absolutely everyone. Unlike her, he was part of a team that he trusted and protected. A very different frame of reference—to Chad, you were either on the team or you were suspect. Her life was much simpler: everyone was suspect.

  Perhaps she’d forgive him…in a lifetime when her shoulder didn’t hurt so much.

  “And Sofia, you confirmed it,” Fred continued.

  Sofia shook her head, “I only said that it made sense. It was a good guess, perhaps even a valid one. It fits what little is known about her.”

  “You realize that is a better, clearer lead than our entire history on her. Everything else is rumor and innuendo. We only last month managed to confirm some such person existing at all.”

  “So,” Chad leaned in for another tamale, then grunted and raised a hand tenderly to his face. She’d really landed it—the black and blue spread all over that side of his face. Good!

  “Two Face.” That’s what he looked like and it was hard not to laugh in his wounded face.

  “Two Face?” Richie’s attention zeroed in on Chad said he was suddenly surprised by the thought.

  “Always wanted to be a Batman villain,” Chad grinned at him then winced as that pulled on his purpling cheek.

  “You know, Tanya, if you dyed your hair dark and wore a trench coat and hat, you could pass for Harvey Dent’s girlfriend and aide, Renee Montoya.” Richie began painting a picture with wide hand gestures.

  “Who’s Harvey Dent?”

  Richie merely looked at her aghast.

  “Batman villain,” Melissa whispered to her as she patted Richie’s knee to console him.

  Tanya had never read or seen this Batman. She’d meant to refer to Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings. Or even the thespian masks of comedy and tragedy. To one side the easygoing blond funny man, always so buddy-buddy with his teammates. And to the other, the lethal Spec Ops soldier revealed by his garish battle wound purpling around his swollen-shut eye. She flexed her hand into a fist and, more slowly, back out. Scheisse but he had a hard head. Tanya let him have his moment, but didn’t smile back.

  “So,” this time he moved much slower as he completed the gesture to fetch his tamale from the low coffee table between them. “What do we know about this bitch?” His tone sounded like he was talking about la Capitana. But the free hand he laid gently on his face and the half smile he aimed her way said that he was pleased to be aiming at two targets for the price of one.

  Tanya gave him the finger, which, she could see with her two good eyes, he took completely the wrong way with his one bad one.

  Chad smiled at the gesture and ignored the sting that caused.

  He’d been feeling pretty shitty about shooting Tanya now that he’d found out what she’d really been doing. But if she was willing to tease him by flipping him off, she must have decided to take it in stride.

  Carla rolled her eyes at him. Everyone else except Duane was watching the big-screen TV as Smith turned it on and connected his laptop.

  “What?” He mouthed at her, but Carla just looked away.

  “Aw, dude,” Duane mouthed back with pity. Chad didn’t like that somehow Duane knew something he was missing. If it was so obvious, why wasn’t he seeing it?

  “First, some background you already know.” Fred Smith loved his little lectures and they’d all learned there was no turning him aside. He kept them interesting, and always delivered stuff even Sofia didn’t know, which was pretty impressive.

  Chad chomped down on his tamale and ignored the pain of chewing. Tanya was very studiously not looking at him. What the hell was up with the woman? He’d barely shot her and she’d landed a punch as sweet as he’d ever seen—nobody except Tanya was good enough to get so far past his guard. They were even, weren’t they?

  “Colombia was a small mess before we sent General Yarborough here back in 1962 to turn it into a big mess.”

  The general glared at them out of the TV. Looked like a major sourpuss—actually a General Sourpuss. Though maybe that was how Yarborough looked each time he thought about the mess he’d caused in the name of democracy.

  “The Colombian government was fighting communist guerillas with little success. But with our help, the military set up and funded a lot of paramilitary groups to fight ‘the communist threat.’ What had started as a friendly little battle for social ideals rapidly became a screwed-up disaster. The guerillas were now under real pressure for the first time, so they needed another avenue of income. Drugs, kidnapping, and extortion rose rapidly in the back country.”

  “The blame-it-on-the-commies era,�
�� Duane commented.

  “We were always good at that,” Chad added, but his heart wasn’t in their normal back-and-forth ribbing.

  “Americans. You do it everywheres,” Tanya sounded actively disgusted, which killed even the little bit of fun they usually found heckling the CIA agent.

  “Everywhere,” Chad whispered to her. For a second he thought she was going to pummel the other side of his face. Maybe he should just back off for a moment. Too bad he so rarely followed his own good advice.

  “Then,” Fred continued as unperturbed as always, “the pressure caused the communists to form into the two revolutionary armies—the FARC and the ELN. To combat them, the paramilitaries started financing themselves in a similar fashion while the military studiously looked the other way—anything that pressured the commies was good in their eyes. The rural folks got sandwiched between the two. For aiding the communists, they were slaughtered. For defying the brutal paramilitaries who now wanted their own plantations for coca cultivation, they were driven out or also slaughtered.” He flicked through slides of the Alto Naya and Betoyes massacres along with others, revealing chainsaw executed bodies, peasants digging their own mass graves, and so on.

  “Hence the DTOs,” Sofia was never one to be outdone by a mere CIA guy.

  “Right. The birth of the drug trafficking organizations,” Fred took no offense even though he was meant to.

  Why couldn’t Tanya be more like that? It wasn’t like he’d killed her or anything.

  “The paramilitaries went vertical and built massive organizations. The DTOs—reaching their pinnacle in the Cali and Medellín cartels—built empires that controlled everything from coca growth to processing and shipment, even end-market distribution in the US and Europe.”

  “And Israel,” Tanya added in her sourest tone yet. She glared at him as if it was his fault.

  “Until we killed their asses,” Chad wasn’t going to just sit here and take shit from everyone. Delta had been there for the Escobar takedown and a whole list of others. Neither Duane nor Sofia picked up the cue to add something.

  Tanya just clamped her mouth shut.

  To hell with you too, lady.

  “Until we killed their asses,” Fred agreed, flicking to a slide of Pablo Escobar shot dead on the roof he’d been attempting to escape across. The terra cotta curved Spanish tiles dripping from the neat double headshot that had taken him down.

  Too neat to have been done by the local forces who’d bothered to show up. Go Delta! Chad cheered quietly to himself.

  “The neo-paramilitaries have never achieved the huge power of the old DTOs, but they’ve gotten even dirtier. No longer claiming any ideals, they’re just living for the drug trafficking with a little kidnapping on the side.”

  “And the gold,” Chad wasn’t a slouch either. “Don’t forget all that pretty gold they’re stripping the country for.”

  “Major issue,” Smith agreed. “More money than cocaine for some operations. Their methods have continued to drive the massive exodus from the countryside to the cities.”

  “Colombia does have the second highest rate of internally displaced population after The Sudan,” Richie offered one of his endless supply of factoids.

  “Like our buddies along the jungle river, who we just set up to kill each other.” Except he hadn’t been there to do his part. Instead, he’d been off in the jungle chasing a woman who was chasing a ghost. “What does all this have to do with this Capitana?”

  “Almost there,” Fred flashed up a photo of Daniel Rendón Herrera’s ugly mug taken shortly after his arrest. His people had abandoned him to live like a squatter in the jungle after being one of the wealthiest post-Escobar leaders.

  “So much for loyalty.”

  “He had it coming, bro.” At least Duane was back on board.

  “El Clan del Golfo, formerly Los Urabeños, is the most successful of the neo-paramilitary organizations. They use strict military discipline and structure, which makes for a minimum of infighting and a resiliency of operational structure. They subcontract hit men, informers, and distributors. And they pay well.”

  “Maybe when we’re done with Delta we should sign up, bro,” Chad tried to wink at Duane and then wished that some bitch hadn’t punched him in the eye.

  “Got me some wine waiting,” Duane winked back and draped his arm around Sofia’s shoulders. Sofia was a major wine heiress before she turned Activity then Delta; her sister was running the outfit until Sofia retired. Suddenly his best friend had this whole future staked out: lounging in the Oregon hills and tending damned grape vines. Be a nice change after the Loony Tunes attacking coca fields guarded with claymore mines and machine guns, but it just didn’t seem right.

  Next thing he knew, the women would all get pregnant, the guys would retire to “less dangerous circumstances,” and he’d be left to dangle in the wind with Tanya Punch-you-in-the-face Thank-you-so-much Zimmer. He’d seen it happen before in the Rangers—good guys, tough fighters, giving it all up to become family men. Of course the guys who stayed in didn’t seem to have the best answer either. Typically their family lives imploded. Soon they were worrying about alimony and the kid they only got to see while supervised on weekends until they became such basket cases that they got sloppy and stepped in front of a round or on a mine and solved everyone’s problems.

  Not him. No how. No way. Growing up on the Detroit streets had taught him just what civilian life was all about. He was in this until they put him six feet under. So, time to pay some attention.

  “You saying that la Capitana is one of the three aliased leaders of the Gulf Clan?”

  Fred shook his head and put up his next slide.

  Everyone leaned forward to read the flyer there. It was hard to read through all of the blood stains.

  “We took this off a bounty hunter. One who’d lost his head moments before we arrived. Machete, by the look of it.”

  Four men were pictured on the bloodied flyer. There were names under each picture. The print across the top said simply, “$10M US—each.” One had a large red X over his face—Herrera. There was nothing else, except for the three gold stars of a Colombian captain’s rank clustered at the bottom.

  “The guy on the left is Otoniel, their Number One—the leader of el Clan del Golfo. Numbers Two and Three went down sometime after this flyer was issued—the latter practically turned himself in to get away from the bounty. We had never seen them before, but once we ran profiles on them, it fit.”

  “We’re going after Otoniel,” Chad was more than ready.

  “You were. But now I think that he is best left to the bounty hunters. He’s recruiting new leadership, but the price on their heads is apparently causing him problems. There’s a reason I showed you this flyer. Did you notice the three clustered gold stars across the bottom? They’re distinctively shaped—the rank symbol of a Colombian military captain. La Capitana appears to have declared war on el Clan del Golfo. It is the first proof we’ve ever had that there even is a la Capitana though we’ve heard rumors for two years now. She came out of nowhere and, if real, is fast becoming the most powerful player in all of South America.”

  The silence in the room was echoing. So quiet that for the first time he noted the distant sound of the city wafting in through the open balcony door.

  Then Fred flashed to Chad’s surveillance photos, including the one he’d had the sense to snap when she was so close to where he and Tanya had been laid up.

  Duane let out a low whistle, “Damn, dude. She’s hot.” Then he appeared to choke when Sofia glared at him.

  “You should go for her, Chad,” Richie totally missed the dynamic. “La Capitana and Sleeping Beauty—like one of those romance novels but with a gender role reversal.”

  The room burst out laughing. Only after everyone was howling did Richie get what he’d just said—calling Chad a little girl. It was a good moment and Chad just cuffed him on the back of the head, careful not to jar Melissa, who was kissing Richie on t
he temple.

  Chad turned back to inspect the photos as the predictable round of “Chad the Princess” ran around the room.

  “You know, Colombia allows same sex marriage between the two little girls.” “Which one of them do you think would wear the pants in the family?” “Gotta see you in a princess dress, dude. Though I’d have to burn out my eyes afterward.”

  Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

  Renata was a serious piece of work. At least five-ten, with a damn serious chest. The knotted tails of her jungle-green blouse revealed flat abs and that her smoky-dark skin went all the way down. Her hair was a teasingly dark tangle that brushed over her shoulders and always seemed to hide her face. She probably did that on purpose, along with the highly distracting cleavage reveal. If he hadn’t watched her for four days, he’d be hard-pressed to describe her face.

  He remembered the Expediter—Analie Sala. Her face had been narrow, as slender as the woman herself. The few times she removed her sunglasses, her eyes had seemed as narrow and dark as she was. She’d ended up as shark food a hundred miles off Panama, and if he hadn’t seen the body himself, he’d have wondered which would win. The battle seemed fairly even.

  In sharp contrast, Renata’s face—if it was ever revealed all at once—would be as open as her blouse: broad cheeks, wide eyes that could suck a man into their dark depths until he could never swim free. There was a smooth beauty of confidence and a shapely chin. Imagining what it would be like to bed such a woman was part of how he’d kept himself awake on the long watches. Now he suspected it would be a fast way to end up dead.

  Male drug runners were lethal, amoral, vicious bastards. He’d met more than a few—typically in the last minutes of their lives—and it was like walking into a meat freezer. The chill that came off those guys was nasty. Even a chill bitch like Analie hadn’t radiated that kind of cold.