“¿Quando tiempo?” Murdock asked. The doctor frowned. A nurse going by paused. She said something to the doctor who brightened. He spoke to her and she nodded.
“He says he wants to keep your man here for at least three days to watch the healing,” she said in English. The wound was open for a long time.”
“Thanks, my Spanish is not good. Could I hire you as my personal interpreter?”
She was slender, in her mid-twenties, and with darting brown eyes. Her pretty face broke into a smile. “Afraid not. I have a lot of other work to do. Sick people, wounded men.”
The doctor spoke again. She listened and interpreted. “He says that your man will be fine, but he can’t go charging around like a wild man for a few days.”
She smiled. “Are you American SEALs wild men?”
“Does everyone in Colombia know that we’re here?”
She nodded.
“Well, to answer your question, usually we aren’t wild men. Now, I need to go see your Colonel Parades.”
She waved. “Hasta luego,” she said.
“That’s something about going in health. I’ll try.”
Murdock checked where a doctor had looked at Jaybird’s shot arm. He had cleaned the wound, treated it on both sides, and bandaged it again. He said Jaybird should check back in the hospital in three days.
At the colonel’s office, Murdock was shown in at once. Ed DeWitt and Jaybird Sterling sat in the outer office waiting for him.
“They stitched up Canzoneri. He’s on the shelf for three days.”
A lieutenant opened the inner door and ushered the men inside. One army major worked over the camp map at a side table.
“Gentlemen. Glad you’re back, and congratulations on your mission,” the colonel said. “I have sent condolences to Captain Orejuela’s wife. This new problem is a nasty one.
“Late last night, a small force broke through our exterior guards and attacked and captured our communications center. It is the heart of our operation. Without it we have only a few radios like the one we contacted you on.
“The insurgents may be rebels working with the federal troops or they may be an elite force of the federal commandos. We don’t know which. Come to the table.”
He waited for them to move over.
“The communications center is here in this concrete-block building. It is a fortress and was designed that way. It is three stories high, easy to defend, nearly impossible to penetrate.
“Heading the incursion is a man who calls himself Colonel Rafael Cardona. He is holding forty of our men and civilian employees inside the building as hostages. He has made demands, unreasonable demands. If they are not met, he says he will kill a hostage every four hours. This morning at 0800 he pushed a dead lieutenant out the front door and allowed our medics to pick him up. He had been shot. We’re not sure if he was killed during the takeover or executed.”
“What are the demands?” Murdock asked.
“First, he said I had to surrender my whole army to the legitimate president. I told him I didn’t command the army, President Ocampo does. Then he said I had to surrender Camp Bravo, at once.
“When I refused, he pushed the dead lieutenant out the door. That was almost four hours ago.”
An aide came in the room with a message. The colonel read it and he sagged against the table.
“I have word that a corporal was released by this Colonel Cardona. As he walked out the door of the communications center, he was shot in the back six times and died instantly. Cardona says the corporal is the second hostage to die. I must act quickly.”
“How many men does he have?” Ed DeWitt asked.
“He claims he has a hundred. Some of our people saw him enter the building late last night. They say they saw twelve men.”
“Is there any underground access to the building?” Jaybird asked.
“No, only the surface doors. It does have a small basement.”
“Are there windows?” Murdock asked.
“Yes, but now they have blinds drawn on all of them.”
“Metal blinds?”
“No, fabric.”
“You have a helicopter?”
“Yes, three of them. One will carry six men.”
“You have some tanks?”
“Yes, two.”
“Let us talk a minute,” Murdock said. He and the other two SEALs went to the corner of the room and threw out ideas. Murdock grabbed them and formed his plan.
They went back to the map.
“Colonel, bring your tanks up to the least sensitive part of the building, say where they keep records, files, the noncommunication part.”
“I can do that.”
“Order them up now and have them manned and ready to fire.”
The colonel nodded to his aide, who left the room.
“Now, we’ll want to get our equipment, then your chopper will put six of us on the roof. The rest of my men will be situated around the front of the structure. Where would he keep the hostages?”
“Probably in the basement behind a locked metal door.”
“Good. Our men will fire into the windows. I want you to put one tank round into this side of the building at the exact time that we land on the roof in the chopper. My men will fire special rounds through the window that will explode inside. Then we will come down from the roof through the access door and clear the building.
The colonel frowned. “Will this work?”
“Yes. The shot into the wall will confuse them. Our special twenty-mike-mike rounds exploding inside the rooms will paralyze them. Then we swing down the stairs with our submachine guns, and they will be easy targets.”
“Let’s give it a try. I don’t want to lose any more men.”
“We need an hour to get set up. Have your chopper land as close to our quarters as possible. We’ll also need a truck for transport.”
“Yes, easy. Right this way.”
An hour later, the chopper circled a block away from the communications building as the two tanks swung into place fifty yards from the back wall of the structure.
DeWitt had Bravo Squad in firing positions fifty yards from the front of the building.
“When we hear tank fire, we shoot out the windows with the 5.56 rounds,” Ed DeWitt told his squad. “Do your assigned windows. Then at once aim your laser through the broken window so the round will go inside and detonate there. Everyone with me?”
A chorus of yeahs came back.
Murdock saw the tank operator give the signal he was going to fire. The chopper wheeled and headed for the rooftop.
The tank fired one round that exploded against the back of the building. By then, Murdock couldn’t see the results. The bird had touched down on the roof, and he and his Alpha Squad boiled out of it. Bill Bradford was the first one to the roof access door. It was the built-up kind, probably with steps leading down. It was not padlocked on the outside.
Bradford caught the handle and tried to turn it. Locked. He blasted the area just below the handle twice with his MP-5 silenced sub gun and the door swung inward. He jumped to one side. No shots came through. He looked in, then stepped inside and vanished.
“Clear down here on the third floor,” Bradford said on the lip mike. “Looks deserted.”
The other SEALs went down the steps quietly. They heard shots from the outside, then muted explosions downstairs.
Murdock looked around. There was a staircase to the left next to the wall. They moved that way. He waved Jaybird to take a look. He carried a borrowed MP-5 submachine gun and eased down the steps one at a time. Then he swung the weapon around and pulled off a three-shot burst of silent rounds. He jolted down the rest of the way to the second floor.
“Hold fire on the second floor, twenty-mike shooters,” Murdock said on the lip mike. “Alpha Squad’s now on floor two near the back. Hold your twenty fire here.” The rest of the squad raced down the steps and found Jaybird checking out a man in green and brown cammies.
&nb
sp; “Dead,” Jaybird said. “Only one up here. The rest of them must be on the first floor. This one was a lookout, I’d guess. He doesn’t look more than about twelve years old.”
The stairs didn’t continue to the first floor. On the far side of the big room they found two doors and beyond them more space with desks and cubicles with snapshots of family on them. Through another door they could see a stairway leading down.
The squad checked three more rooms but found no one there. Murdock took the lead at the stairs. He edged up to them and looked down. There was a landing halfway down, then the stairs turned for the next run to the ground floor.
Murdock heard an explosion and lunged back away from the shrapnel of the 20-mike-mike. “Hold the twenty fire on the first floor,” Murdock said to the Motorola. “Alpha Squad soon to be in residence.” Then he surged downstairs to the landing. His MP-5 was on full auto, and he sprayed a dozen rounds in one direction, whirled, and fired six more the other way. Ching lunged down the steps to back him. He saw four men huddled in one corner. Their weapons had been abandoned and they held up their hands. Three men on the other side lay sprawled where the 20-mike-mike rounds had caught them in the open and laced their bodies with shrapnel wounds, killing them.
Two shots blasted into the silence from directly ahead of them. Both were high. Ching swung his MP-5 around and sent a dozen silent rounds slamming into a desk and thin partition where he had seen movement. A high, snarling yell pierced the big room, and slowly, a man stumbled out from the partition, a rifle falling from his hands as he took one look at his executioner and pitched forward on the floor.
“No dispare!” a voice called from behind them. Murdock turned to see a figure stand. She was short and he guessed no more than fourteen. She wore cammies and her long hair had been bound up and hidden under a floppy hat. She held both hands high over her head and she had no weapon.
Ching yelled something at her in Spanish, and she lowered her hands.
Ching asked her something and she shook her head. Then he shouted in Spanish, but there was no reply.
“The rest of Alpha Squad come on down,” Murdock said in the Motorola. “Let’s clear this place and find the hostages.”
The girl motioned to Murdock. “Hostages this way,” she said in English. She led them to the far corner of the room where a stairway went to a basement.
Murdock used the Motorola. “Holt, get the front door open, but be careful until we get this floor cleared. The rest of you get it cleared quickly.”
The girl pointed down the steps. He saw a steel door with a pair of steel bolts.
“Hostages down there,” the girl said. He motioned her forward. She went to the door and pulled back one of the bolts. Murdock opened the other one and swung the door outward.
People lay on the floor, sat against the walls. Two women cried silently, men sat talking. All stopped and looked up when the door opened. The girl spoke rapidly in Spanish and the people in the room began to cheer and cry for joy.
“Tell them to stay here until we’re sure the first floor is safe,” he told her. Then he ran back up the steps.
“Clear right,” Sterling said.
“Clear left,” Bradford chimed in.
“Clear front and back,” Ronson said. “All clear, Commander.”
As soon as the front doors opened, Colonel Paredes and a squad of heavily armed soldiers rushed inside. They took the four men in cammies prisoner and marched them outside. Murdock called to the girl to let the workers come up.
Later that day, Murdock found out that the four terrorists were executed by a firing squad on Colonel Paredes’s orders. The young girl sent to a women’s prison for six months. The commander of the raid, self-styled Colonel Cardona, was one of the men killed by the deadly shrapnel of the exploding 20mm rounds.
Murdock called for a radio check on casualties. There were none. They found the truck they came over in and drove back to their barracks.
“Damn, did those twenty-mike-mikes work good,” Jefferson said. “We could see the rounds go through the window and then explode inside. Must have been hell on wheels in there when we put ten rounds through the windows in less than a minute.”
DeWitt laughed. “Oh, yeah, those twenty-mike-mikes are going to be on my wish list for every mission we go on. I have a suggestion, though. We should get more weapons. We had to borrow some of the MP-5s you guys had. We need it so about half of us can use either the MP-5 or the Bull Pup. Those old widow makers still come in damned handy in a room-to-room situation like Alpha Squad had.”
Murdock agreed with him. Murdock had just finished cleaning and oiling the borrowed MP-5 when Holt came up with the SATCOM.
“Figured that I better leave the receiver on,” he said. “Seems Don Stroh has been trying to get us now for a day and a half.”
Murdock took the handset. Holt nodded. “Lost Sheep calling the Shepherd,” he broadcast and grinned.
“Lost Sheep? That you Murdock?”
“Not anymore, you found us. Thanks, Shepherd.”
“Quit clowning around on government time. Had some signals from the CNO. He wants a report. What the hell you doing in there with Colonel Paredes?”
Murdock gave him a quick rundown but didn’t mention the 20mm rounds.
“Yeah, sounds like you earned your keep. The CNO says he’s getting pressure for you to do something on the drug front. He says there are half a dozen big cocaine labs right near Cali that turn the coca paste into cocaine. That’s your next assignment. To tear up some of those labs and put them out of business.”
“Are the labs illegal?” Murdock asked.
“Damn right. At least they were under the old regime. This new bastard president is living off cocaine. We shrivel up their payroll, and they won’t have so much clout.”
“We need a contact who knows where these labs are.”
“Talk to Colonel Paredes. He works closely with Ex-president Manuel Ocampo. They can tell you.”
“Stroh, I have a bad feeling about this one.”
“Oh, yeah? You don’t get paid to feel, Murdock. I’ve got pressure on this I can’t even tell you about. Just get in there and blow up a few labs, and we’ll get you out before the locals lynch you.”
“We love you, too, Stroh.”
15
Camp Bravo
Cali, Colombia
Two hours after the talk with Stroh, Murdock had an order to report to the colonel’s office for a briefing. The message said to come alone.
Murdock took the jeep that they had left for the SEALs’ use and drove to the commander’s office. He was escorted directly to the colonel’s lair. Murdock saluted smartly.
“Lieutenant Commander Murdock reporting as ordered, sir.”
The colonel returned the salute.
“Sit down, Commander. This may take a while. First, our thanks for your good work on our commo center. It’s almost back to normal operation. The rebels didn’t try to smash the equipment. I’m not sure what they wanted to do. At least that’s over with, and we lost only two men. Did you have any casualties?”
“None, Colonel.”
“Good.” The colonel looked at the ceiling for a moment.
“Commander, we knew when we asked for help from you that there would be a favor or two we’d need to do in return. I received orders from my president an hour ago. I’ve been trying to make sense of them ever since.
“As you may know, Colombia has been the world’s leading processor of cocaine for years. It’s not a record that I’m proud of. Our president had worked as best he could to fight the drug problem. The drug cartels won when they trashed our recent election and, by fraud and outright hooliganism, took over the federal government.
“Now I’m instructed to help you find and destroy cocaine processing plants in the Cali area, and then plants in the Medellin area.” The colonel sighed. “This is most difficult for me. I’m a military man, not a social or political reformer. But when my president gives me an order,
I carry it out.
“What do you know about the cocaine trade, Commander?”
“Very little, Colonel.”
“Some basics. Cocaine is derived from the leaf of the coca tree. There are two varieties, and both are grown in the Andes mountains of Peru and Bolivia from altitudes of fifteen hundred to six thousand feet.
“Growing coca leaves is legal in these countries. The shrubs can grow to twelve feet tall, and after four years, they bear leaves, which are harvested four times a year. The leaves are then dried in the sun and taken to a processing plant.
“This initial processing breaks down the leaves and eventually leads to a product called coca paste. A thousand pounds of dry leaves yields ten pounds of coca paste.
“At this point, most of the Peru and Bolivia coca paste is shipped to Colombia where it is processed further into cocaine. It’s a complicated and intricate process that is used, with the end result producing crack cocaine or pure cocaine powder. This is the product that’s sold around the world on the black market illegally. Most of it goes to the United States.
“The key here is economics. The hill country farmers in Peru and Bolivia, the campesinos, can make four times as much growing coca leaves as they can any other product. Here in Colombia, the cartels have become so enormously wealthy that they have now bought themselves the whole nation. It’s obscene. It’s deadly. It’s almost certainly the worst state of affairs in a nation I have ever heard of.
“There are two keys to disrupting the cocaine traffic. One is to stop the processing plants from turning out the finished product. The other is to stop the flow of ether to the processers. Huge amounts of ether are used in the final stages of cocaine processing. Colombia produces almost no ether. All of it is shipped into this country through legitimate vendors. Stop those shipments for sixty days, and the cocaine industry is paralyzed.”
“My orders are to assist you in locating the incoming shipments of ether and the cocaine processing plants near Cali. I’ll need the rest of today and tonight to gather information, to locate guides, and to establish contacts.”
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