Hazardous Duty - PA 8

by W. E. B Griffin

  “But then we told them there was no sixteen million dollars in bearer bonds in his safe.”

  “And somebody tipped the Uruguayan cops to what the Hungarians had done, and where to find them.”

  “And Alejandro brought us the bearer bonds,” Raúl said. “Getting the picture?”

  “Brilliant!” General Murov said.

  “The Oil-for-Food people were not about to make a stink. They would have gotten the important part of what they wanted—Lorimer dead—and the money wasn’t that important to them. The money those rag-headed Iraqi bastards made from Oil-for-Food is unbelievable, except it’s true.”

  “So that’s what happened,” Murov said.

  “No, that’s not what happened,” Raúl said. “What happened was this goddamn Yankee Castillo killed Alejandro and killed the Hungarians and made off with our sixteen million dollars. The notion of that thieving Yankee sonofabitch sitting naked in a cell in Lubyanka getting sprayed with ice water—I presume that’s what you have in mind for him—has a certain appeal. I don’t like it when people steal sixteen million dollars from me. Tell me what you have in mind, Sergei.”

  “Well, so long as they were in Argentina—”

  “‘Were in Argentina’?” Cosada interrupted.

  “Jesus Christ, Jesus, for Christ’s sake stop interrupting my friend Sergei,” Raúl snapped.

  “As I was saying,” Murov went on, “so long as the three of them, ‘the Unholy Trio,’ so to speak, are in Argentina, we can’t get at them. Not only are they protected by Aleksandr Pevsner’s private army, but that goddamn Irish cop Liam Duffy has my photograph on the wall of every immigration booth in the country.”

  “So what are you proposing?” Raúl asked.

  “Just as I got on the plane to fly here—”

  “Speaking of flying, Sergei,” Raúl said, “we have to talk about the Tupolev Tu-934A.”

  “What do you mean, ‘talk about it’?”

  “Fidel wants one. He told me to tell you his feelings were hurt when you gave one to the late Fat Hugo…”

  “I did not give one to Fat Hugo.”

  “. . . and didn’t give one to him,” Raúl said. “And I can see his point.”

  “Read my lips, Raúl. I did not give a Tupolev Tu-934A to Fat Hugo.”

  “That’s not what we heard,” Cosada said.

  “If you didn’t give one to Fat Hugo, what was that airplane our friend Castillo stole from him? A Piper Cub?” Raúl challenged.

  “What Castillo stole from Fat Hugo’s island was General Vladimir Sirinov’s Tupolev Tu-934A,” Murov said.

  “I don’t think Fidel’s going to believe that,” Raúl said.

  “Raúl, listen to me. I don’t want this to get around, but we don’t have that many Tupolev Tu-934As. We don’t have enough for us. Do you think I would have come here on that Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet 100-95 if I could have talked Vladimir Vladimirovich into letting me use a Tu-934A? That so-called Superjet is a disaster. I didn’t uncross my fingers until we landed here, and I’m going home on Air Bulgaria. They’re flying DC-9s that are as old as I am, but their engines don’t fall off.”

  “Well, I’ll tell Fidel what you said, but if I were you, I’d try real hard to get him a Tupolev.”

  “Can we get on with this?”

  “You’d be in a better bargaining position, Sergei, if you got Fidel one of those Tupolevs, but go ahead.”

  “I thought you were the president now.”

  “I am, but Fidel is still Fidel. He just doesn’t come to the office as often as he used to.”

  “I found out just before I got on the plane to come here that Castillo and his fiancée, the former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva, and a couple of Castillo’s people, the Merry Outlaws, just left Bariloche for Cozumel.”

  “Couple of questions, Sergei. Castillo’s fiancée?”

  “He’s going to marry her. That’s what ‘fiancée’ means.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Unbelievable! He’s not a bad-looking guy. And no offense, Sergei, but every female SVR podpolkovnik I’ve ever seen looks like a Green Bay Packers tackle in drag.”

  “This one doesn’t. Believe it.”

  “Merry Outlaws?”

  “That’s what President Clendennen calls Castillo’s people. If that’s good enough for him…”

  “What are they going to do in Cozumel?”

  “I gave that a good deal of thought before I understood.”

  “Understood what?”

  “What they’re going to do in Cozumel. It’s going to be a great big wedding. All the OOOR—and there’s a hell of a lot of them.”

  “All the what?”

  “Like ROCOR, which, as I’m sure you know, stands for Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Raúl confessed.

  “Me, either,” Cosada said. “What the hell is it?”

  “We don’t have time for that right now, maybe later. OOOR stands for Oprichnina Outside of Russia.”

  “And what the hell does Oprichnina mean?” Castro asked.

  “I really don’t have the time to get into that with you either, Raúl. But trust me, there’s more of them than anybody suspects and they’ll all want to come to the wedding. The Berezovsky family—and Svetlana was Svetlana Berezovsky before she married Evgeny Alekseev and became Svetlana Alekseeva—is one of the oldest, most prestigious families in the Oprichnina.

  “If anybody in the OOOR gets invited to the wedding, and they all will, they’ll go. Just the Oprichniks in Coney Island would fill a 747. And they’ll all bring their security people, now that I think of it. So two 747s from Coney Island alone.”

  “Where the hell is Coney Island?” Cosada asked.

  “In New York City. You know the place where they have—or had—the parachute tower? For ten dollars, you got to make sort of a parachute jump?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cosada said. “I think the parachute tower is gone, but I know where you mean.”

  “Don’t take offense, Sergei,” Raúl said, “but I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Aleksandr Pevsner’s La Casa en Bosque in Bariloche is big, but not big enough for all those Oprichnik wedding guests. And there’s only a few hotels there. And Aeropuerto Internacional Teniente Luis Candelaria couldn’t handle one 747, much less a bunch of them. So what are they going to do? A cruise ship—maybe two cruise ships—is what they’re going to do. A cruise ship is sort of a floating hotel.”

  “Where are they going to get a cruise ship?”

  “The last I heard, Pevsner owned twelve of them,” Murov said. “Most of them are like floating prisons, but a couple of them, I understand, are very nice.”

  “I’m an old man, Sergei,” Raúl said. “Not as swift as I used to be. You want to explain this to me in simple terms?”

  “Aleksandr Pevsner owns the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort. Which—Cozumel—is also a stop for cruise ships. So they hold the wedding in the resort and put up the guests who won’t fit in the resort in one of his cruise ships. Or two of them. That’s what Castillo and Svetlana are going there for, to set this up.

  “Dmitri Berezovsky didn’t go along with them to Cozumel now, but he’ll be there for the wedding. He’ll probably give the bride away; he’s her brother. So we go there now, and get set up ourselves. And when everybody is jamming the place, there’s all the wedding excitement, we snatch the three of them, load them onto an Aeroflot airplane conveniently parked at Cozumel International—”

  “For a nonstop flight to Moscow,” Raúl finished.

  “Where your boss will tie the Yankee sonofabitch who stole our sixteen million in bearer bonds to a chair in Lubyanka,” Co
sada furnished.

  “And spray him with ice water,” Raúl picked up.

  “Until he is an ice sculpture,” Cosada said.

  “How many men are you asking for, Sergei?” Raúl asked.

  “Ten or twelve should do it.”

  “General Cosada,” Raúl said, “make twenty-four of your best men available to General Murov immediately.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

  “As a matter of fact, Jesus, I think you better go with him,” Raúl added.

  [THREE]

  The Imperial Penthouse Suite

  The Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort

  Cozumel, Mexico

  0945 11 June 2007

  Castillo’s CaseyBerry vibrated and rang—the ringtone actually a recording of a bugler playing “Charge!”

  “And how may I help the comandante on this beautiful spring morning?” he answered it.

  There was a reply from Comandante Juan Carlos Pena, el Jefe of the Policía Federal for the Province of Oaxaca, to which Castillo answered, “Your wish is my command, my Comandante,” and then broke the connection.

  Castillo then turned to the women taking the sun in lounge chairs beside the swimming pool. There were three of them: Svetlana Alekseeva; Susanna Sieno, a trim, pale-freckled-skin redhead; and Sandra Britton, a slim, tall, sharp-featured black-skinned woman.

  “I’m afraid it’s back to the village for you, ladies,” Castillo said.

  “What did you say?” Sweaty asked.

  “El Comandante just told me to put my pants on and send the girls back to the village.”

  Sweaty threw a large, economy-size bottle of suntan lotion at him and said some very rude and obscene things in Russian.

  Max leapt to his feet and caught the suntan lotion bottle in midair. But to do so he had to go airborne himself, which resulted in him dropping from about eight feet in the air into the pool. This caused the ladies to be twice drenched, first when he entered the water—a 120-pound Bouvier des Flandres makes quite a splash—and again when Max, triumphantly clutching the bottle in his teeth, climbed out of the pool and shook himself dry.

  With a massive and barely successful effort, the men attached to the ladies—Castillo; Paul Sieno, an olive-skinned, dark-haired man in his early forties; and John M. “Jack” Britton, a trim thirty-eight-year-old black-skinned man—managed to control what would have been hysterical laughter.

  “Over here, girls,” Castillo said, as he went to the side of the penthouse and pointed downward, “you really should see this.”

  Curiosity overwhelmed feminine indignation and they went and looked twenty-four floors down. So did Jack Britton, Roscoe J. Danton, and Paul Sieno.

  They saw four identical brown Suburbans, each roof festooned with a rack of what is known in the law enforcement community as “Bubble Gum Machines,” approaching and then disappearing beneath the canopied entrance to the Grand Cozumel Beach & Golf Resort.

  “American Express is here,” Castillo said.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Roscoe asked.

  “Juan Carlos calls them that because he never leaves home without them,” Castillo explained.

  “Your friend has a CaseyBerry?” Britton asked.

  “I could do no less for the only honest police officer in Mexico,” Castillo said. He turned to former Marine Gunnery Sergeant Lester Bradley.

  “Lester, stand by the door. Our guests are about to arrive. The rest of you are cautioned not to make any sudden moves when they arrive.”

  Three minutes later the doorbell chimes bonged pleasantly. Lester pulled the door open. Three burly police officers came through the door, each armed with an Uzi submachine gun. They quickly surveilled the room, and then one of them gestured for whoever was still outside that it was safe to enter.

  Jack Britton was impressed. During his career with the Philadelphia Police Department, he had once served on the SWAT team. His professional assessment of these people was that they really knew “how to take a door.”

  A short, stocky, unkempt olive-skinned man in a baggy suit and two more uniformed officers carrying Uzis came through the door.

  Max dropped the suntan lotion bottle, rushed toward the man, put his paws on his shoulders—which pinned him to the wall—and then enthusiastically lapped at his face.

  “Carlitos, you sonofabitch, you taught him to do that to me!” Juan Carlos Pena said.

  “No, it’s the remnants of your breakfast on your unshaven face,” Castillo said.

  Pena pushed Max off him, and then he and Castillo approached each other and embraced.

  When they broke apart, Pena asked, pointing to the Sienos, the Brittons, and Roscoe J. Danton, “Who are these people? Excuse me for asking, but I have learned to be very careful when I’m around you.”

  “Dr. Britton, Sandra, is a philologist,” Castillo said. “Her husband, Jack, is not nearly so respectable. He used to be a cop. The Sienos, Susanna and Paul, have an even less respectable history, and Mr. Danton is a practitioner of a profession held in even lower prestige than being a congressman. He’s a journalist.”

  Pena smiled.

  “Well, he must like you. Carlito only insults his friends,” he said. “Which means I can move on to Question Two: What brings you to beautiful Cozumel? White-sand beaches and the sun setting over the sparkling Caribbean will not be a satisfactory answer.”

  “We come to offer you a unique opportunity,” Castillo said.

  “I’m afraid to ask what that might be, but I suppose I don’t have a choice, do I? Tell me about my unique opportunity.”

  “Very few men are ever offered, as you are about to be, the opportunity of advising the President of the United States, Joshua Ezekiel Clendennen, vis-à-vis how he should handle the Mexican drug cartels.”

  “You didn’t have to come all the way down here—or up here; my guy at the airport said you came from Argentina—to ask me that. You already know the answer.”

  “And what would that be, Señor Pena?” Susanna Sieno asked, in Spanish.

  “Get people in the U.S. to stop buying illegal drugs,” Pena said.

  “Ouch!” Castillo said.

  “Carlitos, you know I’m right. If you Americans were not buying drugs, we Mexicans wouldn’t be slaughtering each other for the profitable privilege of moving them through Mexico and then across the border.”

  “You’re right, Juan Carlos, but that’s not an answer the President will like.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let me tell you what we’re really doing here, Juan Carlos,” Castillo said, and did so.

  “You’re telling me,” Juan Carlos asked when Castillo had finished, “that the President of the United States is not playing with a full deck?”

  “I wouldn’t want this to get around,” Castillo replied, “but I estimate there are no more than forty-two of the normal complement of fifty-two cards in his deck. He doesn’t think he’s Napoleon, and he doesn’t, so far as we know, howl at the moon. But…”

  “So why hasn’t he been moved out of the Oval Office and into a padded cell?”

  “We’ve already forced one President—Nixon—to resign or face impeachment, and actually tried to impeach one—Clinton—in the Senate. Both times, it nearly tore the country apart; we don’t want to do that again.”

  “‘We’?” Pena asked softly.

  “I meant ‘we Americans,’” Castillo replied. “The decision to—how do I say this?—live with Clendennen and try to keep him from doing real harm was made primarily by the secretary of State, Natalie Cohen, Generals Naylor and McNab, and a few others in pay grades much higher than my own. I’m just a simple old soldier obeying orders.”

  “You didn’t make that up,” Pena said. “You stole it.”

  “What?”<
br />
  “I saw that movie, Carlitos. George C. Scott, playing General Patton, was trying to lay some crap on Karl Malden, who was playing General Omar Bradley, and when Bradley called him on it, Patton said, smiling, what you just said, ‘I’m just a simple old soldier obeying orders,’ and Malden/Bradley said, ‘Bullshit.’”

  “I can’t imagine General Bradley saying ‘bullshit’ under any circumstances,” Castillo said prissily. “General Bradley marched in the Long Gray Line and was an officer and a gentleman.”

  “Oh, God,” Pena said, laughing. “What you are, Carlitos, is an idiot with a death wish. Only an idiot with, say, twenty-two cards in his deck would come back here the way you have.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? There’s a big sign in the airport that says ‘Welcome to Cozumel!’ That didn’t mean me?”

  “Juan Carlos,” Svetlana asked, “what do you mean ‘death wish’?”

  It took Pena a moment to frame his reply, and when he gave it, his tone was dead serious.

  “About six weeks ago, Svetlana,” he said, “specifically on April twenty-second, eleven men were shot to death at KM 125.5 on National Road 200. That’s near Huixtla, in the state of Chiapas.

  “One of the bodies remains unidentified, but there is reason to believe that it is that of a Russian, an agent of the SVR. Two bodies were identified as those of Enrico Saldivia and Juan Sánchez, both known to be members of the Venezuelan Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención, commonly referred to by its acronym, DISIP. The remaining bodies were all Mexican nationals. Two of them belonged to the Zambada Cartel, which is run by Joaquín Archivaldo. These bodies were further identified to be former Special Forces soldiers—Mexican Special Forces, trained and equipped by American Special Forces—who changed sides.

  “The other six men are known to have been members of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is run by Joaquín Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García.

  “Those two cartels are normally at each other’s throats, but in this case were working together. What they had done was kidnap an American Special Forces officer, Lieutenant Colonel James D. Ferris, with the idea of exchanging him for a man named Félix Abrego, who had been convicted in the U.S. of the murder of several American DEA agents. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and was then confined at the Florence Maximum Security Prison in Colorado.