The Viking Funeral ss-2

by Stephen Cannell

  Sawdust's face was drained of color, but his denim shirt was drenched in red. "This ain't good back here," Shane said. "Sawdust looks bad."

  The SUV was losing speed, coughing and bucking.

  "We gotta get to that garrison at the end of town," Jody said. "We'll deal with it then."

  "No!" Paco said. "No militia."

  "I'm through listening to you!" Jody shouted, spinning the wheel to avoid another wandering Hereford grazing on garbage in the middle of the street.

  They headed back through town. The Toyota was barely moving when the garrison finally came into view.

  Shane could see out the back window that Santander's jeeps had gotten turned around and were now behind them, closing fast. "They're four blocks back," he announced.

  The SUV was lurching badly as it bucked and coughed down the street. Shane pried the Colt out of Lester Wood's hand and emptied it out of the broken back window.

  "No! No militia!" Paco shouted again. Jody ignored him and lurched the Toyota onto the paved road leading into the military base. The two gate guards swung their weapons down on polished shoulder straps, aiming them at the Toyota as it pulled to a stop at the main gate.

  "Police," Jody said, yanking out his LAPD badge and holding it out the window. "American policia. "

  "Necesitamos socorro," Lester Wood rasped.

  Santander's trucks pulled into the driveway behind them but slowed down fifty yards away and inched forward like jackals at the edge of firelight.

  "Fuck this," Jody said, watching them in the one remaining side mirror. Then he hit the gas. The Toyota bucked forward, smashing the wooden bar arm across the base road, shattering it.

  "No!" Paco screamed.

  An alarm started ringing, and almost immediately fifteen soldiers ran out of a wooden building slamming banana clips into a variety of automatic weapons, clicking off safeties as they approached. In seconds, they had the Toyota surrounded.

  Jody got out of the vehicle with his hands up and his LAPD badge held high. "American policiahe repeated to the soldiers, who were staring in disbelief at the bullet-riddled vehicle. Shane looked back at Santander's trucks parked just a few feet outside the garrison. At first it seemed they were afraid to come closer. Then Shane began to wonder if perhaps they were parked there to block a possible retreat.

  "Sawdust, tell this guy we demand political asylum," Jody said. "Tell 'em. Tell these guys we're American cops on a U. S. government mission. Go on, do it!"

  Shane was studying the dusty look in Lester Wood's vacant eyes. "We're gonna have to find a way to tell 'em ourselves. Sawdust didn't make it."

  Chapter 43

  THE WHITE ANGEL

  IT WAS AN empty structure: no windows, a tin roof, wooden shelves, and a poured-concrete floor. It looked like a supply locker. Once the door was locked, Tremaine sat glumly on the floor while Jody and Shane began pacing.

  "What now?" Tremaine challenged, his low voice turned flat and cold as slate.

  "Okay, look, this is a Colombian military unit," Jody said slowly. "America has diplomatic relations with Colombia, so we try and get a message out to the U. S. embassy, get them to cut through all this, get the embassy to release us into U. S. custody." He looked up into Tremaine's angry, disbelieving stare.

  "You're kiddin' me, right?" Tremaine glared at Jody. "Didja forget, we're supposed t'be dead."

  "We're also laundering fifty million in Colombian drug cash," Shane said. "If we call the U. S. embassy, we're not gonna get released; we're gonna get extradited."

  "Okay, Hot Sauce, then you tell me… Whatta you wanna do?"

  "I'll tell you one thing," Shane said. "There's something very wrong about this military base. Did you see the weapons those troops were carrying?"

  "Yeah, what of it?" Jody growled.

  "Some of it was prototype stuff, brand-new Beretta 92s. But I also saw some twenty-year-old Chinese assault rifles. I think one of those guys even had an antique Lee Enfield. He'd be better off using that thing as a club."

  "So what?"

  "Doesn't the army of a sovereign nation generally issue standardized equipment?" Shane continued. "Doesn't the Colombian government supply its soldiers with unitized ordnance? These guys are packing everything from auto-mags to slingshots."

  "He's right," Tremaine said, looking up with concern.

  "So what am I supposed to do about it?"

  "Nothing. I'm just wondering why. And what happened to Paco Brazos? They pulled him outta the car with us, but they didn't put him in here. How come?"

  "Maybe he drinks beer with these assholes. Who the fuck knows." Suddenly Jody didn't have very good answers.

  "This afternoon we rolled in here with almost a billion contraband cigarettes, right past those guards," Shane said. "Nobody gave a damn. You saw that building of Paco's… How much contraband had to go past this base, unobstructed, to fill up that warehouse, not to mention all the other San Andresitos?"

  "Okay, so somebody's getting paid off," Jody said, frustrated. "Stop asking all these dumb questions."

  "Let the man talk," Tremaine said, turning toward Shane. "Whatta you thinkin'?"

  "You were saying that Jose told you about the political situation in Colombia. I've read some department one sheets about it-it's supposed to be treacherous," Shane said, still pacing slowly in the locked room. He stopped and looked over at Jody, who was a few feet away, a strange expression on his face. "What is it? Do you know something?" Shane prodded.

  "Yeah, that's what Papa Joe told me, too," Jody said.

  "What'd he say?" Tremaine demanded.

  "To tell you the truth, when he told me, I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. He said something about-"

  "What? Come on, man," Tremaine rose off the floor, moved across the room, then grabbed Jody's shirt and yanked him up close. "What did Jose tell you, man?"

  "Get your hands off me, Inky Dink. Who the fuck you think you're pawing?"

  "I wanna know who those green jackets out there belong to." "Then get your fuckin' hands off me!"

  There was a long, electric moment before Tremaine finally let go of Jody's shirt and took a step back.

  "What did Jose Mondragon tell you?" Shane asked again.

  "I don't remember, exactly. I'd been drinking. Something about two Marxist armies fighting with the government, or some shit. He said there's a lot of kidnapping out here. These Marxist guerrillas snatch people, mostly U. S. oil-company executives working on desert drilling rigs, or any Anglo they can get their hands on. They ransom you back to your family or your company-whoever will pay the most money to keep you alive. He was telling me about this insurance you can buy, kidnapping insurance. He said nobody from Blackstone or All-American will set foot inside Colombia without it."

  "You tellin' me we coulda got kidnapping insurance?" Tremaine said. Now he was right in Jody's face.

  "Inky Dink, you put your hands on me again, I'll knock your lights out. How we gonna buy insurance? We're all supposed to be dead."

  "We got aliases. We coulda worked somethin' out through Jose," Tremaine shot back.

  "We're not a bunch a fucking oil-company pussies. Nobody's got the stones to kidnap us." "Am I just imagining this, or are we all locked in a goddamned windowless room here?" Tremaine glowered. "Fuck you," Jody growled. Shane stepped between them. "What else did Jose tell you?"

  "Just that there are these two leftist armies that prey on the San Andresitos and on each other. All the San Andresitos pay a percentage of their black-market profits to the guerrillas so they'll let the contraband go on into Colombia-a political contribution made at gunpoint."

  "Who are the two armies?" Shane asked. "They've both got acronyms… One is like RAFC. Stands for something like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. And the other is NLA, the National Liberation Army."

  "Sounds t'me like you paid more than a little attention. You got all this down pretty good," Tremaine challenged.

  "What're you tryin' to say?" Jody threate
ned softly. "You got something on your mind, lay it down, asswipe."

  "How 'bout we focus on the damn problem," Shane said. "If these guys aren't regular army, then is that good for us, or bad?"

  "One other thing Jose told me… There's another guy up here. It's probably not important, but Jose said he's the joker in the deck, an ex-Argentine army colonel who leads a death squad-a right-wing fanatic with white-blond hair. He supposedly trained in the U. S. at the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia."

  "Never heard of it." Tremaine glowered.

  "It's some kinda counterterrorist school, run by our Pentagon. Latin American army officers from OAS get nominated by their governments to go there. Instructors from the Pentagon teach greaseball commandos how to get info out of captured commies, how to pull out fingernails with pliers-shit like that."

  "I love it," Tremaine said.

  "Papa Joe told me this Argentine colonel gets off by torturing and killing."

  "What's his name?" Shane asked.

  "Don't know his name, but they call him the 'White Angel.' Papa Joe said The Hague finally charged him with war crimes committed while he was in Argentine Intelligence. He was sentenced to death in Argentina, but he escaped and fled to Colombia. He settled up here, in the desert."

  "So I guess we got two choices," Shane said. "If these guys are regular Colombian army, we play the American embassy card. If they're Marxist guerrillas, we get down on our knees, start begging, give them a cut of what we got in the bank in Aruba."

  "And if we been captured by this other dude, the White Angel?" Tremaine asked.

  "It's not him," Jody said. "He's a right-wing extremist… An outlaw hiding from the government in the desert."

  "But isn't the Colombian government a right-wing democracy?" Shane asked. "Wouldn't the White Angel be closer politically to them than to a buncha Marxist guerrillas?"

  Nobody answered Shane's question. Finally Tremaine changed the subject.

  "You're an asshole, ya know that, Jody?" he said. "We coulda had insurance. We had us some insurance, then we coulda got the fuck out of here."

  Jody took a swing at him, knocking Tremaine back hard against the brick wall. In an instant, the two were at each other, snarling like animals.

  "This is great," Shane muttered.

  They came hurtling back toward him. Shane tried to get out of the way, but the room was small, so he was pinned as the two crashed hard against him. He caught an elbow in the head and went down under a pile of flying fists and sweating bodies. He finally managed to roll free and get up. He grabbed Jody, who had gained control and was now on top of Tremaine, pummeling him with both fists.

  Shane yanked Jody off and threw him against the far wall. "We got enough trouble without this!" Shane shouted.

  Tremaine wiped some blood off his mouth with the back of his hand, while Jody slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

  "You fucking jerk-offs," Jody mumbled. "How'd I get stuck with such pussies?"

  "You picked us!" Tremaine shot back.

  They sat on opposite walls of the room, all staring at their feet.

  An hour later the door opened and a tall, handsome Hispanic man they had never seen before entered the room. He was wearing a perfectly cut tan suit and a red silk ascot. He kept his jacket buttoned despite the oppressive heat inside the windowless, metal-roofed room. There were two armed guards beside him, but they weren't adolescent teenagers with bristling chin whiskers-these men had expressionless eyes like dark holes cut into cardboard.

  "Good evening," the man said. His English was perfect, and he spoke with an American accent. "My name is Santander Cortez and I'm sorry you have been forcibly detained. I know you probably think that because of our business difficulties, I mean you harm, but let me assure you this is not the case. I hold Paco Brazos responsible for leaving me out of your cigarette transaction."

  "You got that right," Jody said, standing.

  "And you, I wager, are Mr. Dean?"

  "Yes."

  "I would like to discuss options with you, if that is convenient." He was smiling warmly.

  "Sounds good."

  "You other two gentlemen, if you'll please bear with me, I think everything can be amicably arranged. I'm sorry if this has been stressful. I'll be back to you two shortly." He motioned to Jody. "Mr. Dean?"

  Jody moved across the room and exited with the tall, handsome man. The door was locked behind them.

  "Maybe we finally caught us a break," Tremaine said.

  "Yeah," Shane answered. But one thing troubled him about Santander Cortez.

  The man had a full head of snow-white hair.

  Chapter 44

  CHAT

  FOUR HOURS PASSED, but Jody never returned.

  The more Shane thought about it, the more he was sure that Santander Cortez was the White Angel. He sat in the dark, running their predicament over in his mind, studying it from every possible angle. The first thing he needed to do was pick up some coordination with the man silently brooding a few feet away.

  "Tremaine…," he said.

  Tremaine raised his head and glowered at Shane.

  "You and I need to work together if we plan on staying alive. We've gotta stop fighting and do some thinking."

  "We' re fucked," Tremaine said softly. "What we gonna do to change that?"

  "For starters, how about the answers to a few questions?"

  Tremaine stared at Shane but didn't respond.

  "I still wanna know how come you're not inked… Why you didn't get that Viking tattoo like the rest of us."

  "I don't buy into that. That's white-boy shit."

  "That's one reason, but you wanna hear another?"

  Tremaine didn't answer.

  "I think you're a department mole. Internal Affairs, or something."

  Tremaine's lip curled into a snarl… Or was it a grin? It was hard to tell in the dark room.

  "I know you came aboard late, after Jody had already set up the Vikings," Shane continued. "Wanna hear my theory?"

  Tremaine still didn't answer, so he went on.

  "Somehow, you or somebody in IAD found out about the Vikings, so you got yourself assigned to SWAT. Then through your friendship with Rodriquez, you put a move on Jody and got picked to be the last Viking. But since you were workin' undercover, you weren't listed in Medwick's log. Cops hate tattoos. You didn't want a tattoo, 'cause you weren't really a Viking. You were only there to find out what they were doing and bust 'em. You were the only one in the unit who wasn't on drugs-same reason. How'm I doing so far?"

  "You got a big imagination."

  "Jody isn't coming back. He's gone. You and I are next. We're all gonna die. There's no police to protect us up here, and there's no government to save us, just criminals, flies, and garbage."

  "You doin' fake jacks on me now. Tryin' t'fuck with my mind."

  "I'll tell you something else that doesn't quite stack up. Your jive ghetto bullshit reads like street cover to me. Every now and then when you get surprised, it slips. I think it's just camouflage for Jody, but Jody's gone, so you're wasting this hot-shit performance on me."

  "Zat right?"

  "Yep. And laugh this one off if you can…" Shane paused. "I'm workin' undercover, too. I think we're both department plants running games on each other. Problem is, there're no Vikings left to bullshit. So maybe we oughta come clean with each other-start from there."

  "I saw you cap Sergeant Hamilton… Saw her bleed out. No fuckin' way you're workin' undercover."

  "It was rigged. She was wearing a vest."

  "Ain't no vest gonna stop a Black Talon."

  "You're wrong. It's called a level-three tactical vest… Developed by the Pentagon. I'm working a special undercover assignment for Chief Filosiani."

  "Bullshit."

  "Listen, Tremaine, whether you're Internal Affairs or not, we still need to work together. There used to be six of us. Now it's just you and me."

  "Okay, smart guy… So let's hear
your plan."

  Shane glanced around the room. "You suppose those shelves will come down? We could pry loose those heavy two-by-four supports underneath."

  Tremaine looked up at heavy wooden shelves and the two-by-four frames holding them. "Yeah," he said. "So?"

  Then he gave Tremaine the rest of his plan.

  Chapter 45

  CAT AND MOUSE

  THE DOOR OPENED an hour later, and two of the hardened mercenaries entered the room. Shane and Tremaine were pressed flat against the wall. Each swung a three-foot-long two-by-four at his man. The two Colombians doubled over and went down. Shane and Tremaine sprung out and searched them for weapons but found none. Suddenly a volley of machine-gun fire exploded through the door from four backups positioned outside. The bullets whined and ricocheted around inside the small enclosure, sparking off walls like manic fireflies.

  Shane felt hot pain sear in his thigh, then another slug hit him in the side of his neck.

  A moment later he was pounced on by three men and went down in a pile. Their blows rained down on him; he was clubbed with a gun butt until his vision blurred. Consciousness hovered against a black mist that finally descended and swallowed him.

  When he awoke, everything ached. He was alone in the room; Tremaine was gone. He pulled himself into a sitting position and took a quick, fuzzy-headed inventory of his bruised, bleeding body. He had a nasty-looking through-and-through on his upper thigh that was still leaking blood and had completely numbed his left leg. The slug was close to his abductor canal. Karmic payback.

  The second bullet had grazed his neck, and he had a furrow an eighth of an inch deep running across the right side of his throat. The blood had crusted, but that wound had stopped bleeding. His lip was split and two front teeth were loose; his head ached, and everything else felt horrible.

  He slumped onto the floor, and for the next hour felt the temperature slowly drop as the desert night cooled the tiny tin-roofed room until he was freezing. Then he sat with his arms wrapped around him, his teeth chattering. He didn't know how long he waited. He dozed off once but awoke with a start when the door flew open.