Which turned out to be basically fruitless. The Land Rover contained nothing but a plano50 of the Capital Federal. I was just about to ease its door shut when I felt the pistol in my pocket. I took an instant and gave the matter some thought. Then I retrieved the piece, dropped the mag, unchambered the cartridge, emptied the mag, dropped the rounds in my pocket, replaced the magazine, and set the pistol back where I’d found it.
Why did I do that? I did it because all operations are like chess games: you have to think eight, nine, ten moves ahead or you may be a dead motherfucker before your time. I did it because, on the one hand, I didn’t want some fucking asshole busting out onto the patio in the middle of the night because he’d forgotten his pistol in the car, and when he found it missing he’d get suspicious. And I pocketed the cartridges because, on the other hand, if a Colombian actually did come bursting out onto the patio looking for his pistola, I didn’t want the damn thing loaded and lethal to mí when he found it.
0032. I pressed on the Land Rover’s door until the latch clicked audibly. Then Boomerang and I progressed to the van. Just as we did, a bunch of lights in the bedroom wing of the hacienda came on.
Okay, who the fuck out there just kicked the trash can over and awakened Mister Murphy? Boomerang looked at me for further instructions. My expression told him to keep on keepin’ on, because it was probably just Gwilliam or his VERB taking a midnight piss-call (I hoped).
Boomerang followed the instructions I’d given him. He opened the driver’s side door, turned the interior light switch off, climbed behind the wheel, clicked the door closed, then began his search. I cracked the rear right-hand door, pulled myself inside, and shut the door behind me. The van smelled of dogs, sweat, oil, and dust. There was a three-foot-high pile of old rags—towels, mats, and other fabric detritus—through which I was rooting when the courtyard lights came on.
14
WTF—HAD I MISSED ALL KINDS OF WARNING SIGNS? I guess I had, because all of a sudden it was like fucking DAYLIGHT, and yet, not a single hair had stood up on the back of my neck; no red light had gone off in my brain; no Klaxon horn went oougah-oougah. Talk about having a Senior Moment (well, here in Argentina, I guess it’s called a Señor Moment).
Looking through the grimy windshield, I could see lights coming on all over the house. And then, the French doors opened up. I ducked under a foul-smelling remnant of furniture pad. I heard machine-gun Spanish—two voices with Colombian accents told me the boss and his VERB had finally finished fucking and so it was time to move. I hoped that the travel they were talking about didn’t include the van.
Boomerang snaked his long torso through the space between the front seats and just like me, burrowed into the pile of old mats. We tried like hell not to wobble the van as we worked to make ourselves invisible. Well, almost invisible. Our PDWs, butts collapsed, were in our hands, business end pointed outward, safeties off. No way was anyone going to get into this fucking van without being vaporized. I knew that unless we’d set off some kind of sensor—and I doubted that, because I hadn’t seen anything suspicious—we still had the upper hand: we controlled the element of surprise. And I also knew that we had supporting fire from Rotten Randy, who was invisible up in that fucking tree, because to see him the bad guys would have to stare directly into their own halogen floodlights.
But in truth, I didn’t want to make a ruckus. I wanted to take a look inside the FedEx truck, then get the hell out of Dodge. And no, I wasn’t anxious to kill anybody either, because I didn’t want any of these folks to know I’d even been here.
So, what about the boat I was about to steal, you ask? Well, I hoped Gwilliam would believe that the captain of the Patricia Desens had made off with his missiles and whatever else was in the waterproof crates—a case of simple smuggler’s greed.
I worked on slowing my breathing and heartbeat, because my fucking heart was pumping at about 180. I settled my back up against Boomerang’s, and thought about all the possibilities. It is the anticipation, my friends, that gets to you. The inoculation itself isn’t so bad—it’s watching the fucking doctor approach with the goddamn needle in his hand.
My field of vision was severely limited. I could see a narrow swath through the windshield. From the sounds of the voices, there were only two of ’em. And they were headed for the Land Rover. One of ’em complained about having to take the long way into town. The other said it didn’t fucking matter because Gwilliam would spend the whole trip finger-fucking, which made both the Colombians laugh. I heard the heels of their shoes clatter on the courtyard tiles. Then a vehicle door opened and slammed shut. A second door did the same. And then the vehicle’s engine started. It was revved violently once, twice, thrice, and then the fucking thing screeched out of the courtyard.
I chanced a quick peek and watched the Land Rover’s bright taillights disappear down the narrow driveway alongside the house. And then the courtyard lights went off, and we were plunged into semidarkness again.
But the lights in the house were still on, so Boomerang and I just sat tight. At least they hadn’t been coming for us. That was the good news. The bad news was that we had to sit in the van until things got quiet.
0047. Twelve minutes is a fucking lifetime when you are in a vulnerable position. It is amazing, however, to realize how sensitive one’s senses become when you are deprived of outside stimuli. Your senses compensate for deprivation. For example, we couldn’t see very much at all. But we could certainly hear. And there was nothing our ears didn’t pick up. Including, after eight minutes of silence, the sound of light and stealthy footfalls approaching the van.
I pressed my back tight against Boomerang’s. How many Colombian assholes were in the house? We had no idea. Had someone seen something when they came for the Land Rover? Had I left a wet footprint or some other form of pecker track and now the security force was coming back to double-check the situation? Had someone missed Señor Brut and decided to recon the area?
I didn’t have to answer any of the above questions, because the next thing I heard was muffled tapping on the van’s rear-door panel. The tapping was in Morse code, and the signal meant all clear.
The van’s rear door cracked and Rotten Randy’s shaved head appeared in the crack. “Olly-olly oxen-free,” he stage-whispered. “You pussies can come out and play now.”
I got a quick sit-rep as soon as I emerged. Timex had gone around to the front of the villa to recon. Gwilliam and his VERB had piled into the back of the Land Rover with two of the Colombians and driven off, down the single lane of gravel that led to the road to BA.
“For a night on the town?”
“Timex said it didn’t look that way, Skipper. The stooges tossed a pair of suitcases into the back of the Land Rover.”
That left a bunch of Colombians in the house. Randy said that Timex had managed to get “eyes on” on half a dozen armed and dangerous Colombians. He’d snuck a look through the window off the service pantry and discovered that as soon as Gwilliam and the VERB had left, one pair of well-armed, house-bound pelotudos51 headed for the well-stocked bar. He watched as another quartet pulled a double-X-rated video out of a yard-long shelf of S&M porn pix, then dropped their Uzis on the sofa and settled down for a long evening of la paja con ron.52 Timex even heard them laughing about all the fun someone named Luis was missing.
That sit-rep, plus the fact that I’d gone through Señor Brut’s wallet and already knew his name was Luis Garcia, told me these assholes weren’t going to check up on their teammate. Not tonight. Not when they could spend the next six hours watching bajar al pozo53 in living color and surround sound on a six-foot-wide-screen TV.
I looked up into the tree. Timex took his right hand off the Uzi and waved, somewhat forlornly I thought, from the limb. He was now our entire rear guard.
0052. Time to go to work. Boomerang and Rotten Randy checked the FedEx truck stem to stern to make sure there were no passive security devices in place. While they did, I pulled myself underneath t
he chassis and double-checked the frame for booby traps. The only unexpected things I came across were the bright heads of three heavy carriage bolts that had been recently sunk upward, through the cargo area decking. Recent? Yes, recent: the bolts themselves showed no signs of weathering. I rolled over and examined the ground. There were fresh shavings from the truck’s wood decking lying on the tiles. No—this trio of bolts had been installed since the FedEx truck had been parked here.
Okay, that meant breaking into the truck had gone from crucial to critical. But breaking in surreptitiously was going to be harder than it might appear, since we didn’t have such car-boosting implements as a slimjim, the long, flexible piece of steel that professional car thieves, spies, and SEALs use to run between the window and the frame to jimmy the lock, or the set of skeleton keys bought from a willing locksmith or crooked car dealer. And then, I thought about it for a second, and decided that subtlety was something I didn’t need. I mean, what the fuck. If the goddamn truck was loaded with explosives, we were going to have to make some noise anyway because there was no way I was going to leave it around for the bad guys to use.
And so, to hell with tact. I jammed my knife blade into the passenger’s side door lock and simply muscled the fucking door open. I pulled myself into the cab, broke the hasp on the lightweight door panel that hid the cargo compartment from prying eyes, turned the red-lensed flashlight on, and stepped through into the truck’s cargo hold.
Where I just about shit. Now I saw the reason for the carriage bolts. All but two of the package racks had been removed. One remaining shelf held a twenty-or-so-pound charge of Semtex plastic explosive, a pencil detonator, and an M1 spring-tripped firing device; the other rack held four dark fiberglass cylinders. The rest of the rear compartment of the truck contained a heavyweight tripod bolted to the truck bed, and a three-container system package for what’s known in my trade as the M220A1 TOW (for Tube-launched, Optically guided, Wire-command link) missile system. Yeah: we’re talkin’ TOW antitank missiles.
TOWs were introduced in the early 1970s. They have a range of almost four thousand meters, and the latest versions of these wire-guided missiles are so-called fire and forget weapons that can penetrate thirty inches of the most advanced reactive armor plating. Those of you old enough to remember the Iran-Contra scandal during President Reagan’s second term will recall that it was TOW missiles that the U.S. government sent to Iran as baksheesh54 to induce the mullahs in Tehran to release the American prisoners that their allies, Hezb’allah (or, the Party of God), and the Islamic Jihad Organization, or IJO, were holding hostage in Beirut. The Iranians wanted TOWs back then because the wire-guided missiles were devastatingly effective against the Soviet armor used by the Iraqi Army, and this took place during the Iran-Iraq war.
Later, during the Gulf War, when a U.S. Army thermal imager picked up Iraqi armor waiting in ambush behind a two-yard-thick sand berm, a TOW gunner shot right through the six-foot berm and decimated the armored personnel carrier behind it. In another Desert Storm incident, a TOW passed through one Iraqi tank, pierced the armor of a second tank, and only then detonated.
What I had here was a basic TOW system, circa mid-1980s or early 1990s. Total weight for the launcher, the guidance set package, and three missiles was less than five hundred pounds. Broken down it could be carried by a single platoon. Not far—but it still came under the category of “man-portable.” I was just about to take a closer look at the missile containers when Mister Murphy siphoned off all the energy in the rechargeable battery, the red-lensed flashlight died, and I was left in total darkness. Shit. I felt my way to the stern end of the truck, pried the hasp off, released the interior rear gate security lock, then oh, so q-u-i-e-t-l-y slid the door up until it retracted into the roof, so I could see what model TOW Gwilliam had laid his hands on.
The missiles in their containers weren’t the most advanced. These were A1s, which had been replaced in the mid-1990s by the TOW A2 and the TOW 2B. Still, unlike the 1970s version TOW, whose reload time was slow, this upgraded model was probably capable of firing three missiles in less than ninety seconds. And even without the 2B’s stand-off probe, the TOW A1 is no pussy-ass weapon. It can penetrate about two feet of armor (or concrete) before the seven pounds of high explosive detonate. All you have to do is keep the target in the launcher’s crosshairs, and the missile does the rest. We are talking about a portable, effective, and reliable weapon here.
You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to put this deadly scenario together. There are countermeasures available for TOW attacks, but the embassy didn’t have any of them. So it would be easy: the real FedEx truck would be waylaid. This fake one would be substituted. It would pull into its accustomed parking spot, four hundred yards from the embassy. The tangos would raise the rear gate. And then, a TOW would be fired—probably right at the ambassador’s office on the second floor. The missile would defeat the bulletproof glass and the anti-rocket-propelled-grenade netting, penetrate the office itself, and then explode. Seven pounds of high explosive isn’t a lot—but it would be more than enough to make rubble of anything within the ambassador’s suite.
By the time the folks at the embassy realized what was happening, a second round would be already away, maybe heading for the fourth floor, where the embassy had all its communications facilities. That round would damage equipment and kill communicators and code clerks. The third round could be put anywhere. It really didn’t matter. And then, using the Semtex and the M1 trip wire detonator, the tangos would booby-trap the fucking truck and haul ass. After all, they’d fired three rounds in a minute and a half, and they knew that the fucking cops wouldn’t arrive for another two and a half minutes because they’d been there to gauge the response time. And when the cops did arrive, and tried to open up the fucking truck, it would go boom, destroying the evidence and also killing any cops, security people, Marines, or rubberneckers who’d been stupid enough to get close.
The more I thought about it, the hotter I got. Frankly, I’m fucking tired of assholes like Gwilliam and his brother. I’m even more tired of political pukes who keep people like me from going proactive and doing it to the bad guys before the bad guys do it to us. It makes no fucking sense at all. I mean, why do we always have to wait for innocent people to get killed so that we can react? I’d rather go proactive and save lives.
But we don’t work that way. One reason, I guess, has to do with America’s preoccupation with fairness. I call it the Lone Ranger syndrome. It seems to me that we Americans always believe we have to wear a white hat and only fight fair. Like in all those 1930s and 1940s western B movies starring cowboy heroes like Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson and Bob Steele and Roy Rogers. You remember ’em: when the bad guy pulled a knife, the hero threw away his gun and fought him with a knife. If the bad guy lost his knife, the hero tossed his knife away, too, and used his bare fists to subdue the black-hatted villain.
Well, pardon me, but screw that philosophy. If some motherfucker comes at me with a knife I’m gonna shoot the cocksucker. And if he loses the knife and attacks me with his fists I’m still gonna shoot the cocksucker. I don’t fight fair. I fight to WIN. And that is how we should conduct ourselves in this big and mostly unfriendly world: we should fight like we want to win, not like we’re some prissy, pussy-assed, holier-than-thou Goodie Two-shoes.
I’ve already told how well sound carries at night. A human whisper can be heard sixty yards away. So just imagine how loud the throaty growl of the Patricia Desens’s diesel engine was as it sputtered to life, coughed twice, and then growled to full throttle.
Oh fuck oh damn oh Doom on Dickie. Had I patted the goddamn captain down? Obviously I had not, because he’d been able to cut his bonds, slip his moorings, start his boat, take whatever the fuck the cargo was—not to mention the crates we’d retrieved and stowed on deck—and head off into the night. Timex reacted as if he were about to jump and run toward the dock. I cut him off with a hand signal. I needed him—and his firepower�
��right where he was.
Why? Because it didn’t take more than fifteen seconds for the courtyard lights to come on, and the pelotudos to come-a-running is why.
PNU—Pelotudo Numero Uno—came through the doorway, an Uzi slung over his shoulder, a huge, 45-Cal. Glock 21 in his hand, its red-dot laser sight sweeping the area in front of him. It didn’t take more than half a second for him to see that the rear gate of the FedEx truck was open and his TOW was showing.
He stopped. He froze. He swung the pistola to port, and then to starboard, the red beam of the laser seeking a target. Sure, it was a Bad Move to stand there in the open. But then, that’s why he was a pelotudo, and I am the Rogue Warrior®.
Because by the time he’d arrived, Boomerang, Randy, and I had already dropped behind cover, careful not to cast any shadows that would give us away. Notice, by the way, that I did not say we had concealed ourselves.
There is a big difference between cover and concealment. In Hollywood movies, you always see the hero conceal himself behind a wall, or a doorway, or something similar when there’s a gunfight. Concealment is good, because people can’t hit what they can’t see. But guess what, friends: in these days of cheap dry-wall and hollow-frame construction, bullets can and do go right through walls, and doors, and even cars. Moreover, out here in the real world, where most bad guys are of the “spray and pray” school of firearms, they’ll let a whole mag go at a door or a wall or a car. And it’s probable that one of those rounds, aided by Mister Murphy, is gonna hit you either directly or because of a ricochet.
So the best thing you can do is to find the sort of cover through which a hostile round will not penetrate. Boomerang, for example, had flattened himself against the rear end of the van. To hit him, a round—even one of PNU’s big, fat, 230-grain .45 rounds—would have had to pierce the van’s front end, travel through the front firewall, penetrate the engine block, and continue all the way through the rear doors.
Detachment Bravo Page 20
