by Bill King
“Let’s get the hell out of this building before Cortez and his friends circle back and find us all clustered in their control center with our thumbs up our rear ends.”
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“My men should be arriving within the next few minutes,” said Schmidt after the last of the Americans had climbed out of the tunnel and into the near-term safety of the tool shed. “In the meantime, we should probably find a more defensible position to wait for them.”
They heard echoed noises coming from the tunnel.
“I think people are coming,” said Cortez. “Does anybody have a grenade I can borrow?”
“Borrow implies you intend to return it,” said Robideaux, smiling. “When employed properly, those things are good for one use only.”
Schmidt, smiling at Clarice’s lame joke, silently walked over to the hole into the tunnel holding a flash-bang.
“You all might want to step back and cover your ears,” he said before calmly before tossing the grenade into the hole.
The deafening sound from the explosion was probably amplified ten-fold due to the compressed nature of the concrete tunnel.
“That should take care of them,” he said as he turned to await Schmidt’s further orders. “Even if they survive that, they’re going to be out of the starting lineup for quite a while.”
“Let’s go find that SOB, Calderón,” said Cortez, his ears ringing from the explosion.
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“Damn this traffic,” said the leader of Flat Range’s assault team that was racing back to reinforce the beleaguered operations center.
Unfortunately, there had been a bad accident on East Bank Public Road and the traffic had not moved more than a hundred yards over the past five minutes. They were still about a mile from the Flat Range compound.
“Let’s pull the vehicles off to the side of the road,” said Carter. “We’re going to have to go the rest of the way on foot.”
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Ted Schmidt peeked out the window of the old tool shed they had just entered through the tunnel. He could see the operations building about seventy-five yards away.
“I don’t see anyone,” he said, pressing his nose almost against the window to broaden his field of vision of the open expanse between them and the building. “They must still be inside.”
“Let’s close in on them,” said Cortez, checking his pocket to make sure he still had an extra magazine for his Glock. He did not. Damn, I must have lost it while climbing out of the tunnel, he thought to himself.
“Yeah, there’s only two ways in or out of that building, not counting the tunnel,” said Schmidt, stepping back away from the window. “We should be able to keep them pinned down in there until our team arrives.”
With Schmidt leading the way, the five Americans slipped out of the tool shed and began to dart across an open field toward a stand of trees about thirty yards from the operations center.
The unmistakable sound of rifle fire caused them to dive behind the first available solid mass. Unfortunately for them, protective cover was hard to come by in the open expanse between the tree line and the big house.
Cortez managed to scramble to safety behind an old, rusty tractor, which by its appearance probably had not been operated in at least a dozen years. He began returning fire with his Glock in the general direction of where he thought the rifle shots had come from, forgetting for a moment that he had lost both of the spare magazines he had tucked in his pants pockets.
The effects from the flash-bang grenade that Schmidt had tossed into the tunnel a few minutes earlier had not yet fully worn off, severely diminishing his senses, including his normally acute hearing.
It took him a few moments to realize that he had been hit in the leg. He looked around to see how the others had fared.
“Robideaux, are you okay?” he called out.
He saw her lying on the ground, out in the open, her body completely still.
“I think she may have bought it,” said Leonard, who had managed to get behind a large locust tree about thirty feet away. “Schmidt is hurt bad. He took at least a couple of hits…I don’t know if he’ll make it or not. The drone operator is dead.”
“How are you fixed for ammo?” asked Cortez. The ringing in his ears was getting worse.
“I’m out. How about you?”
“I’m out, too.”
“Damn, Schmidt’s team should be here by now,” said Leonard, clearly in pain by the sound of his voice. “I wonder what the hell could be keeping them?”
Just then, he heard a familiar voice call out.
“Thank you for the status update, my friend,” Mateo Calderón shouted in a mocking voice. “You obviously don’t realize how far your voice carries.”
The Venezuelan cautiously stepped out from behind a concrete cistern a former owner had probably built a century ago to capture rainwater. He was followed by a second man who was shorter and perhaps ten years or so older.
The two men began to slowly walk toward Cortez, the Venezuelan’s nemesis, the man who had somehow managed to screw up his plans not once, but twice.
Marco carefully stepped around Robideaux’s motionless body. Calderón, on the other hand, stopped for a moment, as if mulling over whether to put another bullet into her, just for good measure.
Instead, he chose to spit on the CIA officer’s body and continued on.
Seconds later, Calderón stopped about ten feet away from Pete, the sun to his back. He just stood there silently for a while, saying nothing, while Marco dragged a badly wounded and disarmed Leonard over to where Cortez was now sitting up.
“I assume you’re still carrying that knife of yours, Pete,” the Venezuelan said finally. “The souvenir from your abuelo, if I remember the story correctly, so I think we’ll just keep our distance.”
Cortez used the palm of his hand to block the glare from the bright sunlight from his eyes.
“So, what now, Mateo?”
Calderón smiled. Even though the two men had grown up together in Caracas, that is where the similarity ended.
“You’ve been a pain in my ass for the past year, Pete, somehow always managing to disrupt my plans,” he said, a weary smile on his face. “I think we both know perfectly well what is coming next.”
Now that the adrenaline was finally beginning to wear off, the bullet wound in the FBI agent’s leg was beginning to throb. Not that it really mattered. It would all be over soon. Very soon.
“So, tell me, Mateo, what was the play? What is all this about?”
Calderón stood silently for what seemed like an eternity, perhaps searching for the right words, before finally speaking again.
“You know, Pete, I think I’ll just send you to your grave wondering about that.”
The Venezuelan shifted his stance, raising his MP-5 into firing position. Cortez just stared at him, defiantly refusing to give the man the satisfaction of seeing even the slightest tinge of fear in his eyes.
Two shots rang out, one right after the other.
Both Calderón and Marco slumped to the ground. Twenty feet behind where the two men had been standing, he saw Robideaux sitting upright, her body steadied by her left arm, a Glock 19 in her right hand, pointed directly at where the two terrorists had been standing seconds before.
He just stared at her for what seemed to be an eternity.
“I’m glad to see that you’re okay,” said Cortez finally, a broad grin breaking out across his face. “I hope you enjoyed your little nap.”
The gun dropped from her hand as her body went limp. This time, though, he could clearly see the strong, rhythmic breathing as her chest moved up and down while she lay on her back, looking up at the sky.
“You really know how to pick your friends, Cortez.”
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Epilogue
The unrest in Venezuela began to subside shortly after word of the death of Mateo Calderón began to spread around the world.
Without its charismatic lea
der, M-28 began to fade back into obscurity. Over a period of several months, the government of Venezuela, aided by their allies in the Colectivos, were eventually able to beat down the civil unrest, or at least the most violent aspects of it.
General Trujillo and Colonel Cuellar were arrested by the National Police and are currently undergoing questioning, perhaps not too dissimilar from what Mateo Calderón had undergone throughout much of the previous year.
The Maduro government replaced all the commanders in the Guayana Region. The lucky ones were simply drummed out of the army. The rest were spirited away for special handling. All, that is, except for Lieutenant Colonel Arturo Sanchez, who never returned to his headquarters following one of his regularly scheduled meetings with his Brazilian counterpart in Pacaraima.
He is rumored to now be living in Porto Alegre, in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.
Unfortunately, the misery and corruption in Venezuela continued unabated, as did the steady flow of refugees towards the borders of neighboring Brazil and Colombia. The day of reckoning was merely postponed, not averted.
Guyana was another matter entirely.
Two senior members of Parliament, Timothy Wilson and Jessica Carruthers, were arrested within hours of the incident.
Video evidence from the drone showing Wilson’s attendance at the morning’s summit at Morrison Plantation had been secretly passed along to both the president and the prime minister of Guyana. In return, there was no mention of Flat Range Energy—or of anyone associated with the United States, for that matter— in any of the official documents surrounding the subsequent investigation.
Unfortunately, a search for evidence at Morrison Plantation was complicated by a five-alarm fire that left the newly remodeled mansion in ashes well before the police could arrive to cordon off the area.
Lieutenant Colonel Cedric Bostwick was arrested two days later while trying to sneak across the border into neighboring Suriname. Three hours later, he was reportedly shot and killed while trying to escape custody.
As for Zachery Jellico and Paulo Mendes Almeida, there was no official record of them having been in Guyana during the time before, during or after the incident. According to attorneys for both men, the two had been enjoying a hunting trip at Almeida’s estancia in the mountains of Argentina, near Mendoza.
Margaret Donovan was not so fortunate. She was immediately suspended, with pay, from her official duties at the Agency pending the outcome of the investigation into her participation in the events in Venezuela and Guyana.
There was no mention of her role in the bloody breakout out of Mateo Calderón. Insiders predicted she would ultimately be allowed to quietly retire once the dust settled.
Sadly, she and her husband disappeared several weeks later in a boating incident on the Chesapeake. Their bodies were never recovered.
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Pete Cortez frequently looked back on the past several months and wondered if he would have been doing the world a big favor had he shoved Mateo Calderón out the open door of the helicopter that night a year earlier as they flew from Laredo to Dallas.
He liked to think his response would always be, No, of course not, because that would be wrong. The truth was much more complicated and was not something he would ever admit out loud. If given a do-over, he grudgingly acknowledged to himself, he probably would have tossed the Venezuelan from the helicopter.
There was no doubt that Mateo Calderón was an evil man. Personable, perhaps, but nonetheless evil. He deserved to have any and all traces of his miserable existence wiped clean. Scrubbed away with a steel brush and acid.
The amount of misery and pain the man had brought to people, almost none of whom he had ever even met, was staggering. He had very nearly set the world on fire twice in the past year. First in Dallas a year ago and now along the northern coast of South America.
As the old Texas saying goes, he deserved killing and, this time, he got exactly what he deserved.
Cortez didn’t fault Robideaux and kept that part of the story to himself. The Guyana police did not press the issue of why the Venezuelan’s body had two bullet holes in it—one in the center of his back and another through his forehead—both from the same gun…a gun with Clarice Robideaux’s fingerprints all over it.
He felt no obligation to help them answer a question they had not even bothered to ask.
Following the incident, Robideaux was rushed to a local hospital in Georgetown, where she was treated for gunshot wounds to the leg and shoulder. Twenty-four hours later, she was flown back to New Orleans for surgery and convalescence.
Cortez made the four-hour drive over to Breaux Bridge a month later to check up on how she was doing…not so much physically as mentally.
“I know it all ended for the best, but I’m still ashamed that I just lay there on the ground, playing dead, rather than returning fire,” she said in a melancholy voice.
They were sitting on the front porch of her grandparents’ house in the country, about five miles as the crow flies from the charred remains of the family’s hardware store in Breaux Bridge. Her body still ached, but the doctors assured her that she would fully recover and be able to return to work in a couple of more weeks.
“You would be dead if you had moved a muscle…or even twitched,” said Cortez, who like Robideaux was staring out at the acres of sugar cane that stretched on for miles. Planted the previous fall, it was still five months away from harvest. “You made the right choice...and you saved my life as a result.”
She reached over and gently touched his arm but did not shift her gaze away from the field.
“I know you’re just saying that to make me feel better,” she said softly before returning her hand back to her lap.
They said nothing for the next few minutes. Just stared into the distance. Finally, she shifted in her chair and looked him square in the eye.
“You’ve never mentioned the third shot,” she said. “Not even once. Why not?”
He turned his head toward her and took a deep breath before exhaling slowly through his nose.
“Our entire lives, we talk about hard decisions, but usually in regard to choices that really aren’t all that difficult,” he said finally. “The decision you had to make was truly a difficult one, just as my decision to not say anything afterwards was…and is. You did what you believed was right, as did I.”
She nodded her head somberly and went back to staring aimlessly out into the sugarcane field.
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Acknowledgement
I’d like to offer my sincerest thanks to Chuck Cogswell, Stu Crockett, Don Culbert, Fernando Gutierrez, Dave Herzik, Mike Kearney, Jared LoStracco, Ed Pool, and John and Tonie Welch, each of whom brought a different area of expertise and experience to their comments on the final draft of The Venezuelan.
Although this is a work of fiction, each of them was indispensable in helping make sure the details were reasonably accurate and that the story and scenes were at least plausible. While some of the background for this novel may occasionally touch on personal experience, any scenes that seem even remotely heroic or dangerous have all been made up. Trust me on that one.
It is probably worth noting that the first draft of this novel was written prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and I chose not to go back and try to weave that pandemic into the background of the story.
I’d also like to thank my kids, Alex, Tim, Ben and Maggie. I love each and every one of you and I am proud of the amazing people you have grown up to be.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Linda, w
hose support and encouragement throughout the entire process of writing this book was invaluable. I can always count on her for an honest opinion and, without her patience and encouragement, I’d probably still be in the back yard pretending to trim hedges rather than publishing novels.
Books In This Series
Pete Cortez FBI Thrillers
Porfirio "Pete" Cortez IV is the protagonist in a series of FBI mystery/thriller novels written by Bill King. Cortez is a fifth-generation Texan of Mexican heritage, whose great-great grandfather fled across the Rio Grande to Texas as a young boy during the chaos bubbling over from the Mexican Civil War more than a century ago.
The son of an American petroleum engineer, Pete was born and raised in Venezuela before returning to the U.S. for college, the fourth generation of his family to attend Texas A&M University.
Following five years in the Army, during which he served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Cortez left military service to begin a new career as an FBI agent. He is currently assigned to the Bureau's Houston office.
If you enjoy quirky characters by writers like John Sandford and Elmore Leonard, you’ll love Pete Cortez.
Rancho Buena Fortuna
Two criminal oligarchs—one Mexican, the other French—secretly join forces to make their extensive logistics and distribution networks available to global terrorists...with terrifying consequences.
Their instrument is a mercurial Venezuelan terrorist known as Fósforo, like the match you strike to spark a flame, while their orchestrator is a young Stanford-educated engineer named Graciela Montoya. Standing between them and the deaths of thousands of innocents is FBI Special Agent Porfirio "Pete" Cortez, whose career is on thin ice as vultures in blue suits circle in for the kill.
Set amid the gritty landscape of South Texas, between Houston and the border with Mexico, RANCHO BUENA FORTUNA straddles the delicate balance between modern and traditional Texas.
