by Dan Kelly
Abby gave him the bad news and then spotted something that gave her an idea that had a decent chance of working. “Pete, isn’t that the housing that held the guts of the bomb found at the exit of the tunnel sitting over there on that patio table?”
“It looks like it. The bomb squad must have forgotten to take it with them when they cleared out of here with the C4 explosive and the rest of the trip wire mechanism. It’s not dangerous by itself. Without its innards, it’s nothing but a worthless piece of scrap.”
“Yeah, we know that, but the guys in the hangar won’t know that. I think we just found our backup.”
Chapter 43
- Bogota, Colombia –
Pete had no idea what she was up to, but he sensed it was going to be something really off the wall and it was going to be something he wasn’t going to like. A few minutes later he found out that his sensor was right on.
After grabbing the bomb housing off the patio table and running into the house, Pete could hear her opening and slamming draws. A few minutes later, Abby came out carrying a roll of electricians tape, a pair of scissors, some batteries, a roll of string, some copper wire, something wrapped in dark green cellophane and sporting a big smile on her face.
“Abby, what are you up to?”
“A little trickery that should scare the hell out of those guys in the hangar. I’m going to make what will look like a bomb if not examined too closely.” Without any warning, she pulled her Glock out of its hip holster and fired a round into the ground. Pete’s looking at her like she’s lost her mind, but his curiosity is getting the best of him so he keeps his mouth shut.
A half hour later Abby said, “Done. This should keep them from making a move on us.”
It was definitely off the wall, but Pete had to admit it looked like a real bomb with a detonator cap and everything. Now he knew why she had fired her Glock into the ground earlier. The shell casing looks like a detonator cap. “Abby, if you pull this off you should consider playing poker for a living. This has got to be the bluff of all bluffs and I’m nuts for going along with it.”
“This’ll work, Pete. I’m sure some or all of those mechanics knew about that tunnel before Manny and his guys suddenly appeared in that hangar. I’m betting that some or all of them have also been warned about the bomb and have probably seen it. Just follow my lead when we get there and it won’t take long to see if we can shake somebody up enough to start talking.”
“Okay, Abby, I’ve got your back, but I still think I’m nuts for going along with this.”
Ten minutes later they had made their way through the tunnel and were face-to-face with a runt of a man with a huge attitude. “Who the hell are you two and how did you get back here?”
Abby’s thinking, “Well, if attitude is your strong suit little man get ready to be taken down a peg or two, although in your case a peg will probably have you dragging your ass on the ground.”
In perfect Spanish, Abby laced into the guy with, “We are agents with the Policía Nacional de Colombia and you’ll watch your mouth if you know what’s good for you. We’re here to talk with all of the people who work here about that tunnel and what’s been going on at the farmhouse at the other end of that tunnel during the past two days. Show me some ID.”
It’s clear that Abby has blindsided him because he didn’t immediately come back at her with any lip, but he wasn’t forthcoming with any useful information either. He showed her some ID and said, “I just work here lady. I know nothing about nothing except farm machinery.”
“Perhaps if we take you into our offices in Bogota and question you there your IQ will improve.”
Abby’s going on a hunch and has guessed right about this tough guy wannabe. She’s thinking there’s a good chance that he’s been there and done that before and knows that it can be a very unpleasant experience. He’s not going to want to be taken in for questioning. Although some of his belligerence has returned, he’s nowhere near as feisty as he was just a minute ago. “Hey, I haven’t done anything. Why are you hassling me? You can’t haul me off without a good reason. Ask your damn questions and then get out of my life.”
Abby did but got nothing useful until the very last question. “What do you know about the four dead men at the farmhouse?”
“I know nothing about any dead men being shot at the farmhouse.”
“Then how did you know they’d been shot?”
Realizing that he’d screwed up he tried to cover up his slip of the tongue with, “I just assumed they were shot. That’s how most people get killed in a house these days.” He was quick with a response, but the fluster in his face gave him away. He was a lousy liar.
Abby pummeled him with questions for another fifteen minutes, but except for his admission that he knew about the tunnel it was a waste of time.
However, by this time the rest of the mechanics had become aware of the intense conversation taking place between their co-worker and the two strangers and started to wander over to see what was going on.
Abby gave them the same spiel she had given their co-worker as to who they were and why they were there, but that didn’t fly with one of the bunch, a big man with even a bigger attitude than the little guy, but with a little more intelligence. “Let’s see some ID from you.”
Abby tried to deal with their lack of ID by offering the explanation that they had been working under cover and therefore didn’t have any ID with them, but no one was buying it. The big man asked, “What have you got under that sheet?” He reached for a corner of the sheet to pull it away, but Pete had his gun in the man’s face before the guy’s fingers could grasp it
Pete said in the most menacing voice he could muster, “Back off now!”
This got everyone’s attention along with a bunch of angry snarls and the situation quickly deteriorated from there. The big man said, “There’s ten, twelve of us and only two of you. What makes you think you’re holding the winning hand here?”
Whipping the sheet off the ‘bomb’ she was holding Abby said, “This!”
The gasps from the group answered one of her questions. They had seen this housing before and
knew what it contained. Opening the top of the housing and tilting it slightly so they could get a
brief look at what was inside she said, “If anyone makes a move on us, I’ll pull this cord and
we’ll all be blown sky high.”
Someone else from the crowd said, “I don’t think you'll do it. You’re not going to kill yourselves just to kill us.”
“If you people get your hands on us, I think our chances of staying alive are nil anyway, but if you think I’m bluffing try me. Oh, by the way, when we leave here via that tunnel we just came out of, if you don’t play nice I can toss this bomb out into the hangar from the tunnel entrance and pull this long string and blow you to smithereens while we’re safely making a hasty retreat.
“So, do any of you feel lucky this morning? No? Well then, since I now have your undivided attention, how about we play a little game of twenty questions? I’ll ask and you’ll answer.”
Pete’s thinking, “I’ll be damned if she isn’t pulling this charade off. They’re all shaking in their boots even more than I am.”
An hour later they didn’t have all the answers they were looking for, but after a lot of threats and Let’s Make A Deal finagling on Abby’s part, they had learned a lot about what Juan Fuentes had been doing at the farm besides farming. To Pete and Abby the entire group appeared to be nothing more than grunts in Fuentes’s operation here at the farm, but they had access to knowledge they that they were willing to use in negotiations for leniency and Abby led them to believe that she could make things go easier on them without Fuentes knowing about their complicity. Abby was a much better liar than any of them.
The runt had an interesting piece of information to share regarding who might have killed the men in the farmhouse. “Juan has a cousin who often handles situations that require a physical remedy. I only kn
ow his first name is Francisco. I don’t know his last name.”
From what they picked up from these men, they had confirmation that their mission had erected a gigantic blockade in one of Fuentes’s major avenues for moving merchandise and money around.
The cherry on top of everything was that one of the men on the day before the assault had seen and overheard Juan talking with a stranger about arranging travel to and accommodations in Maracaibo, Venezuela for an extended stay. When they saw him they moved away to another part of the hangar.
Abby figures she’s gotten all the info she’s going to get from these people so she ends the encounter with, “Okay, I’m finished here and I thank you for your cooperation. As we make our way out of here through the tunnel, I hope you will continue to cooperate and not try to stop us.”
Abby began to back up towards the tunnel entrance and motioned to Pete to follow suit. They both back pedaled as quickly as they could without falling on their backsides and as soon as the group of men was out of sight they ran like hell to the other end, jumped into their car and split. No one followed them.
Chapter 44
- Bogota, Colombia –
When they got back to the villa, the first thing Abby did was call Dave to pass along what they had just learned in the hangar, bracing herself for the tongue-lashing that was sure to follow.
She wasn’t disappointed. “Somewhere along the line, you’ve gotten it into your head that you can play by a different rule book than the rest of us when it suits you. That ends now. The number one rule in my team’s rule book is I give the orders and you obey them. I know that there are situations that come up when you’re in the field where you have to fly by the seat of your pants, but this wasn’t one of them.”
He went on like this for another ten minutes and then lightened up some with, “Well, at least you accomplished what you set out to do. You did good in that respect. Now you and Pete get on that plane of Aloncia’s and get your butts back here before I really get mad.” This last was said with a little chuckle in his voice which took a little bit off the edge of the ass chewing.
“Do you want us to try to track down this Francisco guy before we leave?”
“No, an iceberg couldn’t cool down the amount of boiling hot water you two are in with the surviving factions of the syndicates and lesser criminal elements. The rumor on the street is the reward for your demise has been raised to $1,000,000 each. The two of you will be safer back here than roaming around down there without anything to keep the heat at bay. I’ll get some of our people working out of the embassy in Bogota to track him down and bring him in for questioning. When you two get back here, I’ll set up a conference call with Phil to discuss how we should approach the Maracaibo situation. Call me again when you’re airborne.”
When she hung up Pete said, “Wow, he kept you on that phone for a long time.” With a sympathetic smile on his face he asked, “Would you like a pillow to sit on?”
“That wasn’t my first time in the hot seat. I’ve developed a nice set of calluses. Although, I think I really pushed the envelope this time and I’ve been reminded that I shouldn’t forget that there are people in the higher echelons that have some very powerful callus remover. Another name for it is the axe, like in winding up in the unemployment line.”
“That’s one of the reasons I left the Coast Guard, too many bosses telling you what to do. Abby, you did good out there today. Initially, those mechanics weren’t intimidated by the two of us and were willing to talk with us, challenge us. You were able to manipulate the situation and we learned a lot in the process. If we had waited for backup and we all barged into that hangar, everybody would have been overwhelmed and clammed up. There would have been no dialogue because they would have been outnumbered and not the other way around.”
“Thanks, Pete. I know you thought I wasn’t playing with all my marbles and didn’t want to go into the hangar without backup, but you did and I’m glad you did. Things might have gone down differently if you hadn’t pulled your gun on that guy when you did.”
“Well, now what? Where do we go from here?”
“Back to Miami. I have to go find Aloncia and ask her to arrange for a pilot to fly us back ASAP.”
Abby went off to find Aloncia, leaving Pete to ponder what role Sea Wasp was going to play in his life when he got back home, if any, and what he was going to do with his life going forward if Sea Wasp wasn’t to be a part of it. Being a yacht captain in the Caribbean doesn’t hold the same appeal it held before a price was put on his head. He could do the same thing in the Mediterranean or he could go back to trying to develop a career in oceanography. Uncertainty is a mood he hasn’t had to deal with for a long time and it’s bothering him.
Then he started thinking about Abby and how he was going to miss her and his mood took a nose dive into melancholy, a mood he’s had no experience dealing with. “Shit, Scrounger, if you hadn’t dragged me into all of this I’d still be a happy camper cruising around the Caribbean without a care in the world.”
Aloncia had a delicious going away dinner prepared for them which they devoured with gusto because it was back to fast food take out and microwave dinners tomorrow and at eight o’clock that evening they were wheels up and heading for Miami.
Chapter 45
- Miami, FL –
They arrived at Miami International Airport at a little past midnight EST, shared a cab home with an agreement to meet for breakfast at Pasqual’s Pantry at 8:00 a.m. and by 1:00 a.m. both were in bed and out like a light. They were exhausted because the mission had created havoc with their sleep patterns as they took two to three hour naps most of the time instead of a solid straight seven or eight hours. They were just too eager to attend to business, too wound up to pull that off.
At 8:30 in the morning, they were in the middle of decimating huge stacks of blueberry pancakes drowning in butter and Canadian maple syrup when Abby’s cell went off. It was Dave. Without any preamble he said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is we found out that Fuentes’s cousin’s full name is Francisco Diaz and we found out where he lives. The bad news is when our people went to his house to question him they found him lying dead on his kitchen floor. He’d been shot twice. He took one in the back and one in the thigh. We’re assuming the guard that was seriously wounded managed to get off a couple of shots as Diaz was moving away from him, thinking he was dead. Diaz might have survived if he had immediately gotten medical treatment, but he apparently was more concerned about not getting caught at the scene with four dead bodies and hightailed it to his house instead.”
“So, we can probably assume that he only had one accomplice, the guy that we found dead near the surviving guard. If he had any other accomplices, they would most likely have taken him to a doctor on the cartel’s payroll.”
“We can assume all we want. The only one who might be able to tell us what went down at the farmhouse is the surviving guard and he isn’t in any shape to talk with us.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s hanging in there. He fell into a coma soon after they brought him into the emergency room and he’s still comatose. The doctors say his vital signs are stable, but he’s lost a lot of blood and his immune system isn’t up to snuff, so he could take a turn for the worse in the blink of an eye.”
“Well, at least there’s two less low lifes amongst the living.”
“When will you and Pete be back in the office?”
Right now we’re in the middle of breakfast at Pasqual’s Pantry. I figure we’ll be there in about 45 minutes.”
“Let me know when you arrive. I want to set up a conference call with Phil to develop a strategy for implementing a citywide manhunt in Maracaibo for Fuentes and Christensen.”
“Will do.”
Just as she hung up who walks in but Pete’s brother Paul.
“Hi, bro, what brings you to this neck of the woods?”
“You. Dave told me where I could find you.”
