The Shooters

by W. E. B Griffin

  It hadn’t taken Timmons long to understand what was going on. Paraguay was bordered by Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. The drugs came from Bolivia, where the cultivation of the coca plant was as common as the cultivation of corn in Kansas. It was refined into cocaine in Bolivia. Some of the refined product went to Brazil, where some was consumed and some exported. Most of it went to—actually through—Paraguay to Argentina.

  Although there was a substantial, and growing, market for cocaine in Argentina—this explained Liam Duffy’s interest—most of the cocaine simply changed hands in Argentina. The coke then was exported by its new owners through the port of Buenos Aires, near downtown, and the international airport, Ezeiza, some twenty kilometers to the southwest, the bulk of it going to the United States, but a good deal to Europe, and some even to Australia.

  There were some imaginative ways of moving the cocaine, a crystalline powder, across borders. These ranged from packing it in caskets—or body cavities—of the deceased being returned home for burial to putting an ounce or more in a latex condom, which was then tied, swallowed by a human smuggler—or “mule”—and either regurgitated or defecated once across the border. (Unless, of course, one or more of the condoms were to rupture en route—which they often did—causing the mule severe toxicity…then death.)

  Most of the drug, however, was commonly packed in plastic bags, one kilogram—two point two pounds—of cocaine to a package.

  These sometimes were not concealed or disguised at all, if the shippers were confident the customs officials at the border had been adequately bribed. Or the kilo bags were hidden in myriad ways—in the tires of cars or trucks, for example, or packed in a crate with something legitimate—operative word myriad.

  The only way to interdict a “worthwhile” shipment was to know when it was to be made and/or the method of shipment. For example, that one hundred kilos of cocaine were to be concealed in the spare tires of a Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line carrying bagged soybeans, which would cross the border at a certain crossing on a certain date.

  This information could be obtained most commonly in one of two ways. It could be bought. The trouble here was that the U.S. government was reluctant to come up with enough money for this purpose and did so only rarely. The Paraguayan government came up with no money for such a purpose.

  Sometimes, however, there was money as the result of a successful interdiction—any money over a reasonable expectation of a truck driver’s expenses was considered to be as much contraband as any cocaine found—and this was used.

  The most common source of information, however, was to take someone who had been apprehended moving drugs and turn him into a snitch. The wheels of justice in Paraguay set a world standard for slow grinding. Getting arraigned might take upward of a year. The wait for a trial was usually a period longer than that. But when the sentence finally came down, it was pretty stiff. Paraguay wanted the world to know it was doing its part in the war on the trafficking of illegal drugs.

  The people who owned the cocaine—who arranged its transport through Paraguay into Argentina and who profited the most from the business—as a rule never rode in the trucks or in the light aircraft that moved it over the border. Thus, they didn’t get arrested. The most they ever lost was the shipment itself and maybe the transport vehicle. So basically not much, considering that the cocaine—worth a fortune in Miami or Buenos Aires or London or Brisbane—was a cheap commodity until it actually got across the Argentine border.

  What really burned the bad guys—far better than grabbing a hundred kilos of cocaine every week—was grabbing the cash after the Argentine dealers paid for it in Argentina. Even better: grabbing the cocaine and the money. That really stung the bastards.

  Timmons and Duffy were working on this. Step One was to find out how and when a shipment would be made. Snitches gave Timmons this information. Step Two was to pass it to Duffy.

  The Gendarmería Nacional had authority all over Argentina. They could show up at a Policía Federal roadblock and make sure the Federals did their job. Or they could set up their own roadblocks to grab the cocaine and/or turn the couriers into snitches.

  With a little bit of luck, Timmons and Duffy believed, they could track the cocaine until it changed hands, then grab both the merchandise and the money the dealers in Argentina were using to pay for it.

  The problem Timmons had with this was getting the information from the snitches to Duffy without anyone hearing about it. It wasn’t much of a secret that the bad guys had taps on both Timmons’s and Duffy’s telephones.

  The only way for Timmons to get the information to Duffy without its being compromised, and in time for Duffy to be able to use it, was to personally take it to him.

  Which, again, explained why Timmons was heartsick when he saw the Highway Police roadblock on the road to the airport.

  The information he had gathered with so much effort would be useless unless he could get it to Duffy in Buenos Aires tonight. If he missed his flight, the next wasn’t until tomorrow morning. Before that plane left, the Scandia eighteen-wheeler of the Jorge Manso e Hijos truck line, Argentine license plate number DSD 6774, which had two hundred one-kilo bags of cocaine concealed in bags of soybeans on the second pallet from the top, center row, rear, would be lined up to get on the ferry that would carry it across the Río Paraguay—the border—to Formosa.

  And all Timmons’s work over the last seventeen days would be down the toilet.

  What was particularly grating to Timmons was that he knew the moment a Highway Policeman saw the diplomatic plates on his embassy Chevrolet TrailBlazer, the vehicle would be waved through the roadblock. The Highway Police had no authority to stop a car with CD plates, and no authority of any kind over an accredited diplomat. The problem was to actually get up to the Highway Policemen.

  That had taken a long time, almost twenty precious minutes, but the line of vehicles moved so that finally the TrailBlazer had worked its way to where the Peugeot van sat with its door open.

  The embassy vehicle with CD plates, however, didn’t get waved through.

  Instead, two Highway Policemen approached.

  “Shit,” Timmons said.

  César remained silent behind the wheel.

  Timmons angrily took both his diplomatic passport and his diplomatic carnet—a driver’s license-size plastic sealed card issued by the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry identifying him as an accredited diplomat—and hurriedly held them out the window.

  “Diplomat, diplomat,” he said impatiently.

  “Please step out of the car, Señor,” one of the Highway Policemen said.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” Timmons demanded. Waving his diplomatic credentials, he added, “Don’t you know what these are?”

  “Step out of the car, please, Señor.”

  One of the Highway Policemen now pointed the muzzle of his submachine gun at Timmons.

  Timmons told himself not to lose his temper. He got out of the TrailBlazer.

  “Please take me to your officer,” he said politely.

  The muzzle of the submachine gun now directed him to the open door of the panel van.

  He went to it. He ducked his head to get inside, and as he entered the van he suddenly had the sensation of what felt like a bee sting in his buttocks.

  Then everything went black.

  One of the Highway Policemen pushed his body all the way into the van and the door closed. The other Highway Policeman ordered Timmons’s driver out from behind the wheel, handcuffed him, then forced him into the backseat.

  Then he got behind the wheel and drove off toward the airport.

  The Peugeot panel van followed.

  [TWO]

  Nuestra Pequeña Casa

  Mayerling Country Club

  Pilar, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina

  1645 31 August 2005

  “Sergeant Kensington,” Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo said, “if you say ‘un-fucking-believable’
one more time, I’m going to have the sergeant major wash your mouth out with soap.”

  Sergeant Robert Kensington—a smallish, trim twenty-one-year-old—turned from a huge flat-screen television screen mounted on the wall of the sitting room and looked uneasily at Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, who was thirty-six, blue-eyed, had a nice thick head of hair, and stood a shade over six feet tall and one hundred ninety pounds.

  Sergeant Major John K. Davidson, who was thirty-two and a little larger than Lieutenant Colonel Castillo, looked at him, smiled, and said, “With all possible respect, Colonel, sir, the sergeant is right. It is un-fucking-believable.”

  “He’s got you there, Ace,” a nondescript man in his late fifties wearing a blue denim shirt and brown corduroy trousers said, chuckling. “‘Un-fucking-believable’ fits like a glove.”

  His name was Edgar Delchamps, and though technically subordinate to the lieutenant colonel, he was not particularly awed by Castillo. Men who have spent more than thirty years in the clandestine service of the Central Intelligence Agency tend not to be awed by thirty-six-year-old recently promoted light birds.

  “Lester’s around here someplace,” Castillo said. “I don’t want Kensington corrupting him any more than he already has.”

  Delchamps, Davidson, Colonel Alfredo Munz, and Sándor Tor chuckled.

  Munz, a blond-headed stocky man in his forties, until recently had been the head of SIDE, which combines the functions of the Argentine versions of the FBI and the CIA. He was of German heritage and fluent in that language and several others.

  Tor, a Hungarian, was director of security for the newspaper Budapester Tages Zeitung. Before that, he had been an Inspector of Police in Budapest, and in his youth had done a hitch in the French Foreign Legion.

  “I cannot hear what that woman is saying over all this brilliant repartee,” Eric Billy Kocian announced indignantly, in faintly accented English. The managing director and editor-in-chief of the Budapester Tages Zeitung was a tall man with a full head of silver hair who looked to be in his sixties. He was in fact eighty-two years of age.

  Delchamps made a megaphone with his hands and called loudly, clearly implying that Kocian was deaf or senile, or both: “Billy, it looks like they’ve got a little storm in New Orleans.”

  Everybody laughed.

  Kocian threw his hands up in disgust and said something obscene and unflattering in Hungarian.

  But then the chuckles subsided and they all returned their attention to the television.

  In deference to Kocian, Munz, and Tor, they were watching Deutsche Welle, the German version, more or less, of Fox News. It was covering Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast of the United States and had just reported, with some stunning accompanying video, that eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded, some parts of the port city under twenty feet of water, its entire population forced to flee.

  Castillo stared at the images of one of America’s major cities in complete chaos, and at the collection onscreen of talking heads representing local, state, and federal government officials—all unequivocally with their thumbs up their collective asses while blaming one another for failure after failure—and heard himself mutter, “Un-fucking-believable….”

  Not much in Nuestra Pequeña Casa was what it appeared to be. Starting with the fact that Our Little House was in fact a very large house, bordering on a mansion. It was in the upscale Mayerling Country Club in the Buenos Aires suburb of Pilar.

  It had been rented, furnished except for lightbulbs and linen, just over three weeks before to a Señor Paul Sieno and his wife, Susanna. The owner believed them to be a nice and affluent young couple from Mendoza. They had signed a year’s lease for four thousand U.S. dollars a month, with the first and last month due on signing, plus another two months’ up front for a security deposit.

  The Sienos had paid the sixteen thousand in cash.

  Cash payments of that size are not at all uncommon in Argentina, where the government taxes every transaction paid by check and where almost no one trusts the banks.

  Both el Señor y la Señora Sieno were in fact agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, and what they had really been after was a “safe house,” which is usually defined within the intelligence community as a place nobody else knows about where one may hide things and people.

  Nuestra Pequeña Casa—the owner had named it—was ideal for this purpose.

  The Mayerling Country Club, which is several kilometers off the Panamericana Highway, about fifty kilometers north of the center of Buenos Aires, held about one hundred houses very similar to Nuestra Pequeña Casa. Each sat upon about a hectare (or about two and a half acres). It also held a Jack Nicklaus golf course, five polo fields, stables, tennis courts, and a clubhouse with a dining room that featured a thirty-foot-high ceiling and half a dozen Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers suspended over a highly polished marble floor.

  The entire country club was surrounded by a nine-foot-tall fence, topped with razor wire, and equipped with motion-sensing devices. When triggered, an alarm went off in the Edificio de Seguridad and floodlights came on where the intrusion had been detected. Then members of the Mayerling Security Force, armed with everything from semiautomatic pistols and shotguns to fully automatic Uzis, rushed to the scene on foot, by auto, and in golf carts.

  None of this had anything to do with intelligence, espionage, or even the trade in illegal drugs, but rather with kidnapping. The kidnapping of well-to-do men, their wives, offspring, parents—sometimes even their horses and dogs—was Argentina’s second-largest cottage industry, so the wags said, larger than all others except the teaching of the English language.

  Just about all of the houses within the Mayerling Country Club were individually fenced on three sides, most often by fences concealed in closely packed pine trees. They, too, had motion-sensing devices.

  Motion-sensing devices also prevented anyone from approaching the unfenced front of the houses without being detected.

  Nuestra Pequeña Casa was for Mayerling not an unusually large house. It had six bedrooms, all with bath; three other toilets with bidets; a library, a sitting room, a dining room, a kitchen, servants’ quarters (for the housing of four), a swimming pool, and, in the backyard near the pool, a quincho.

  A quincho, Paul Sieno explained, was much like an American pool house, except that it was equipped with a parrilla—a wood-fired grill—and was primarily intended as a place to eat, more or less outdoors. It was an extremely sturdy structure, built solidly of masonry, and had a rugged roof of mottled red Spanish tiles. The front of the quincho had a deep verandah, which also was covered by the tile roof, and a wall of sliding glass doors that overlooked the pool and backyard and which served as the entrance from the verandah into the main room of the building.

  The group had moved from the big house out to the quincho.

  Paul Sieno was kneeled down before the parrilla, which was built into one wall of the cocina, or kitchen. He worked with great effort—and as yet not much success—to get the wood that he had carefully arranged under the heavy black iron grill to catch fire.

  Susanna Sieno stood behind him, leaning against the polished marble countertop to the left of the parrilla, handing her husband sheets of newspaper for use as tinder.

  On the countertop, beside the stainless steel sink, was an impressively large wooden platter piled high with an even more impressively large stack of a dozen lomos, each filet mignon hand cut from tenderloins of beef to a thickness of two inches. Nearby were the makings for side dishes of seasoned potatoes and tossed salad.

  In the adjoining main room of the quincho there was a brand-new flat-screen television mounted on a wall that was identical to the one in Nuestra Pequeña Casa.

  The DirecTV dish antenna on the quincho’s red tile roof was identical to the one mounted on the big house. The television set in the quincho, however, was hooked to a repeater connected to the DirecTV antenna on the big house. This allowed for the antenna on the quincho roof to
be aimed at an IntelSat satellite in permanent orbit some 27,000 miles above the earth’s surface—and thus to be part of a system that provided the safe house with instant encrypted voice, visual, and data communication. It communicated with similar proprietary devices at the Office of Homeland Security in the Nebraska Avenue Complex in Washington, D.C., and ones in what had at one time been the Post Stockade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was now the headquarters of Delta Force and even more clandestine special operations forces.

  Most of the group was sitting in teak deck chairs that they had pulled inside from the verandah.

  The TV was now tuned to the English-language CNN, not because its nonstop coverage of the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina was any better than that of Deutsche Welle—it arguably was worse—but because DW was repeating ad nauseam the same footage and interviews. The on-air “talent”—both on location and in the various news bureaus—had long ago stopped offering any real reporting and had instead resorted to the basic equivalent of a live camera simply airing the obvious. And, while it was only a matter of time before CNN’s so-called in-depth coverage would begin to loop, at least for now the group was seeing and hearing something somewhat different.

  This same dynamic happened during the Desert Wars, Lieutenant C. G. Castillo thought with more than a little disgust. Sticking a camera crew out in the middle of a hot zone—with a clueless commentator, someone with no real understanding of what’s going on around them—is worse than there being no, quote, reporting, unquote, at all.

  Watching RPG rounds and tracers in a firefight—or people looting a flooded food store—without an educated source on screen to put what you’re seeing in context of the big picture only serves to drive the hysteria.