by Jack Shane
Another drag from his cigarette. Weir looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“I’ve got your full orders in my laptop,” he went on. “But, I’ll tell you this here and now: This one really has to be done under the radar. You can’t go down there and start any trouble, Bobby. There’s enough crap going around these days to last us for years. Our friends in Washington have emphasized that while this is important, they don’t need another headache. So really be ghosts this time. Low profile. No risks. Stay invisible, get your shit done, take your pictures, whatever—but do it as quietly as possible, and then get the hell out of there. Capeesh?”
Weir finally finished his cigarette and flicked the butt overboard. Autry studied him for a moment. The CIA agent was usually a calm, collected individual. But now he seemed worried—and that was unlike him.
“I’ve got to tell you, you look like you swallowed a mouse,” Autry said frankly.
Weir began to protest, but then stopped. He couldn’t prevent his shoulders from sagging. “I’ve been in this business twenty-five years,” he said almost wistfully. “Just as long as you. And I’ve seen the D.C. crowd worried before. Shit, I’ve seen them worried and very pessimistic. And I’ve seen them very confused too.”
“But?” Autry prompted him.
“But,” Weir said. “With all this weird shit happening now, stuff they can’t figure out, and their precious communications net all goofy. It’s like a heavyweight who’s taken so many blows he doesn’t know where the next one is coming from—and that might be the knockout punch. What I’m saying is, it’s the first time I’ve seen them not just concerned or confused, but actually a little scared. And I don’t like it.”
Autry glanced at his watch again.
“Neither do I,” he said.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 7
THE DAY DAWNED HOT AND STICKY OVER LOS TRIPOS.
The small river port was located deep in the tropical rain forest of the Orinoco Delta region, close to the eastern border of Venezuela. A year before, a trench had been dug in the nearby Matcelona River allowing ocean-going vessels to transit to Los Tripos, some forty miles in from the coast. However, only the Venezuelan military, and ships cleared by them, could use this artificial channel. Everyone else was barred from going near the tiny jungle harbor.
Atop the highest hill nearest the port was a ten-by-thirty prefab construction trailer. Delivered here by a Venezuelan air force helicopter, the trailer had its own power supply, radio, TV, and most important, air conditioning. Even at midnight, the temperature in this part of the jungle could top 100 degrees. Air conditioning was not just a luxury out here. It was essential for survival.
The well-appointed construction trailer was the command hut of Captain Raul Zampata. Overweight and prone to heavy sweating, Zampata had been in Los Tripos for about a month. Much of that time he’d spent in the cool comfort of his home away from home.
Down the hill from the construction trailer was a vast field of camouflage netting. It stretched for as far as the eye could see in some places. Made in China and presented as a gift from Beijing to the military command in Caracas, the netting was in place to hide from spy planes and satellites what was going on below: a construction project that involved nothing less than ripping up nearly a thousand acres of dense rain forest and replacing it with enormous concrete slabs.
Zampata was the officer in charge of this top-secret construction project, known only as Area 13. Few people in Venezuela knew what was going on out here; even the president’s top cabinet officers had no idea this place existed. Even less had been written about it. There were very few documents or plans or drawings having to do with the work site, a miniscule paper trail, if one at all. In the history of Venezuela, Area 13 and a few others like it were probably the country’s most closely guarded secrets ever.
Zampata had started his career as an engineering officer in the regular Venezuelan army. After he’d taken part in coups and counter coups in support of the present government, he was asked to join a secretive military unit known as the Special Intervention Brigade, or SBI. Originally organized as a counterterrorism force, those elements in Caracas who were obsessed with both suppressing internal dissent and bringing Venezuela to the brink of war with the United States, had secretly turned the SBI into a kind of shadow army—and a nasty one at that. Numbering close to five thousand highly loyal soldiers, the SBI had been known to commit acts of savage brutality and even genocide to further its aims. They were easily identified by their black camo uniforms with red berets. And though they were supposed to operate in secret, every educated Venezuelan knew about them, at least by their vile reputation. There was a saying that went, if you ever actually saw an SBI soldier face to face, it was probably the last thing you would ever see.
This massive project was being run by the SBI and it was Zampata’s first assignment for them. Work had progressed rapidly since his arrival at the hidden jungle site, even though the actual labor wasn’t being done by bulldozers or front-end loaders or dump trucks and graders. Rather it was all being done by hand. Zampata’s work force was made up not of soldiers or civilians, but hundreds of local natives, slave laborers forced by the SBI to lay concrete in the middle of the forest.
The use of slave labor had a long tradition in Venezuela; even today it was at the top of the list of countries violating this type of human right. In the case of Los Tripos, the concept was beneficial in several ways. First, the laborers weren’t paid. Second, the labor supply was nearly infinite. There were several large Indian tribes scattered along the border with Brazil and Guyana and they contained many able-bodied men and women, free for the taking. And because the natives were both docile and easy to terrify, just a handful of well-armed SBI troops was needed to control them.
Most important though, using local indigenous people insured the highly secret Area 13 project remained that way. The natives had no idea what they were building, meaning no word of the construction site could leak out to the civilized world. What’s more, the natives were being fed only minimum rations and were being afforded no medical care. Once they were used up and dropped dead from exhaustion or starvation or both, they were thrown into the nearby Los Tripos River, a waterway that boasted more piranha-like fish per mile than any other in South America. Thus, disposal of the natives’ bodies was cost-free and extremely efficient. The massive schools of flesh-eating fish even devoured their bones.
The last two weeks at Los Tripos had been near perfect: all goals had been met, and security was still intact. This was good for Zampata. In addition to being highly paid by the SBI, he was also working on an incentive program. For every building milestone he passed, Zampata received several thousand shares of Citgo, the worldwide oil giant owned by the Venezuelan government. If he completed the Area 13 project successfully and on time, Captain Zampata would become one of the richest people in all of Venezuela.
IT WAS EIGHT IN THE MORNING WHEN ONE OF ZAMPATA’S aides knocked on his door. The aide was bearing Zampata’s morning pot of coffee as well as the overnight progress report for the camouflaged work site. Six more acres had been dug up, and the crude framework for three more concrete pours had been set in place. Fourteen of the work force had either died or become too weak to work during the night. All had been thrown into the river for quick disposal.
Still in his bedclothes, Zampata took his first sip of coffee and looked out his window to the construction site below. His army of workers had already begun their day—not that they ever really stopped. Some had picks, some had shovels. Still others had wheelbarrows and crude wooden baskets. Looking out at them now, he thought they did resemble ants.
“Anything else?” Zampata asked the aide.
“We also had an entry in the security log,” the aide replied, choosing his words carefully as the bulbous Zampata was known to fly off the handle at unpredictable times.
But the officer remained calm, casually drinking his coffee. “Please explain,” he s
aid.
“Around 0100 hours,” the aide explained, “two of the workers informed a guard that they’d seen something flying low out on the western edge of the work site. They said it was a bird, but described it as a very large, mechanical bird. And it made no noise as it flew. It frightened them to the point where they refused to work until the guard went to the area where they claimed they saw it.”
“And what did the guard see?” Zampata asked.
“Nothing, sir,” the aide responded.
“Then nothing happened,” Zampata told him. “These natives are crazy with their superstitions and they’re always seeing things. Such foolishness should not be entered into the security log. Do you understand?”
The aide bowed. “Understood, sir.”
Again, Zampata looked out the front window of his quarters, down the hill, to the hidden work area. It was already 90 degrees—and the temperatures were expected to top 110 today. This meant more of the workers would be dropping dead from heat and exhaustion.
“Losing fourteen slaves is a problem, however,” Zampata said, sipping his coffee again. “We have a need to further supplement our labor.”
This was convenient as his main task today was to meet an SBI strike force about twenty miles downriver at a village known as Acupa. It was estimated they would find more than two hundred able-bodied natives here, ripe for the picking. Zampata liked these weekly forays in search of free labor. A successful search meant more workers for him, which meant a better shot at meeting his timetable and collecting his stock bonus.
But the labor raids also enabled him to use his specially adapted Riverine patrol vessel. Part gunboat, part river yacht, it was his pride and joy.
ZAMPATA FINISHED HIS MORNING BUSINESS AND checked the time. It was now 0900 hours. He had to get going.
He made his aide carry his travel bag down the hill, to Los Tripos’s only pier. The assembly line of slave laborers was moving like clockwork down here, unloading baskets of cement from a tramp steamer tied up at the dock and moving the material up to the construction site, all under the watchful eyes of their heavily armed SBI masters.
Tied up next to this steamer, Zampata’s Riverine boat was ready to cast off when he arrived. It was thirty-five feet long, done in black mahogany and steel. It was armed with four 50-caliber machine guns and had an array of navigation equipment that allowed it to prowl the narrow waterways that ran like lacework through this part of the rain forest.
Zampata climbed down to the dock, then reminded his aide not to forget to call Zampata’s broker in Caracas at exactly noon to get Citgo’s opening stock price. Then he boarded the gunboat, and along with his ten-man crew and personal bodyguards, set off.
The craft’s engines kicked in smoothly. It was coaxed to the middle of the river and pointed south. Heading toward the luxury section on the rear deck, Zampata gave his aide a mock salute.
By the time the boat rounded the first turn, Zampata had already settled into his chair and had a mango and vodka drink in hand.
AT PRECISELY 0945 HOURS, THE THREE RUSSIAN-MADE Hip helicopters landed about a quarter mile outside the village of Guapa.
Their LZ was a clearing next to a bend in the Los Tripos river. As soon as the copters set down, three squads of the SBI’s highly trained and ruthless First Team poured out. Their specialty was “cleansing” native villages—that is, looking for slave laborers to work at projects like Area 13 and killing everyone else. The deeper into the rain forest they went to do this dirty work, the more brutal their methods became.
The one-sided battles between the First Team and the unsuspecting villagers were always swift. The stiffest defense put up by the natives involved hurling axes and the occasional poison arrow. Usually the Indians were so stunned by the sudden arrival of the SBI squads they simply went into shock. Not only had many never seen anyone from outside their village before, a lot of the local tribes believed they were the sole inhabitants of Earth. To have the strange and sinister black-suited soldiers suddenly pounce upon them, arriving in machines from the sky yet—it was enough for many villagers to go mad, right on the spot. And while the idea was to bring as many of the able-bodied workers as possible out alive, it was not past the SBI soldiers to kill a few natives immediately, tribal elders usually, to send a message to the rest of the villagers and further traumatize them. The Indians usually went pretty quietly after that.
That was the plan today. The field commander of the First Team was Colonel Perez Spano. He was in his late forties, lean and mean, and another veteran of the various coups in Venezuela over the past two decades. Spano was the el jefe of ruthlessness when it came to cleaning out native villagers. He too was in line to grow a mountain of oil stock if he met his quotas. He was an important cog in the whole process. His supply of able-bodied labor to the various secret projects around the country was in many ways the key to their success.
Spano’s men were armed with AK-47s and machetes—all except him. The only weapon he carried into these forays was his laptop. His entire life was locked away in the small computer—all his reports, all correspondence with his superiors, everything down to the disciplinary reports for his men, and most important, the number of free laborers he’d provided for the SBI’s secret construction sites. This last figure was his score card of sorts—and his most precious possession.
Spano was also very anal, especially about starting and ending things on time. At the moment, he was growing very angry.
Area 13’s project commander, Captain Zampata, should have been there five minutes ago. The plan called for the two SBI officers to consult and coordinate their efforts before the attack on the village was launched. From the beginning, Spano had believed this to be nonsense—and Zampata’s lateness was only adding to his annoyance now. Unlike Spano, Zampata was an irrelevant link in this chain. The engineering officer was simply a glorified work foreman. He was certainly not the battlefield hero Spano imagined himself to be. For Zampata to be on hand for this raid—as he had for several others in the region—was superfluous.
And now he was late.
Spano stood alone in the clearing, his noncoms waiting a respectful distance away. His eyes were glued to his watch. At 0955 hours, when Zampata was exactly 15 minutes late, Spano decided to start the raid without him.
With one curt hand motion, he ordered his troops forward. Already lined up in two ragged columns, the three dozen men eagerly began advancing on the village, hidden by a vine-covered rise a few hundred yards away. Only Spano and two of his sergeants stayed behind.
Two minutes after the troops left, the opening sounds of the battle were heard. The gunfire was wild at first, but if the past was any example, it would quiet down quickly. Spano and his sergeants could also hear shouting, screaming, the sound of angry feet rushing about. One minute went by. Spano was still absorbed by his watch, still counting the seconds that Zampata was late, to the point that he didn’t notice the firing from the village had not subsided as it had in previous raids. Nor did he hear what his two sergeants could: the rumble of distant thunder, even though the skies above were clear.
Two more minutes went by. Spano’s sergeants were now realizing that the sound of gunfire and chaos coming from the village was not only continuing, it appeared to be getting louder. After three minutes had passed and still the noise from the village had not subsided, one of the noncoms stepped forward and boldly pointed this out to Spano.
But the high-strung officer took it the wrong way. Instead of being mystified as to why the one-sided battle seemed to be going on much longer than it should, he began cursing his own troops.
“The idea is to take most of these monkeys alive!” he roared at the sergeants. “It sounds like those fools are shooting everything that moves. Go tell them to knock it off and start herding people out of there.”
But the sergeant standing before him did not move. Instead, his eyes had become fixed on a point directly behind Spano’s left shoulder. The man could not speak; all he co
uld do was point toward something in the river.
Spano turned toward the river and saw what he knew was Zampata’s elaborate river boat. It had come around the nearby bend, engine sputtering, radio crackling, sitting very low in the water.
It was empty.
At first, Spano thought this was Zampata’s idea of a bad joke. But after his two sergeants braved the shallow water and pulled the boat to shore, they found much evidence to the contrary. The interior of the boat was slippery with blood. Pieces of rope still tied to several of the deck chairs indicated someone had been held captive aboard the vessel before disappearing. The boat itself was full of holes, possibly bullet holes. There were so many, it was a wonder it was still afloat.
As they were studying these baffling remains, the noise from the nearby village once again increased in volume. Finally it caught Spano’s attention. He closed his laptop and reached for his sidearm. His sergeants drew their AK-47s up and nervously checked their magazine loads. Even the copters’ pilots had gone into the village, just to have some fun, leaving Spano and his noncoms alone. If anything had happened to the pilots, the rest of them might be stuck out here for a very long time.
Spano’s first impulse was to make a call to headquarters up in Caracas. At the very least he had to report what seemed to be Zampata’s disappearance. But he stopped before his emotions got the better of him. A success in the village would erase whatever the hell had happened to Zampata—Spano suspected Zampata’s own men had for some reason turned against him. Getting warm bodies out of the village was the priority; everything else was a detail. Spano gave the signal to his men. The three of them began walking toward the village.
