The Shooters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yeah, Byron, I know it ain’t much, but you just got all I have.

  “I have no fucking idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. They don’t pass out a schedule, for Christ’s sake.

  “Yeah, I’ll call you whenever I have something.”

  Mullroney took the cell phone from his ear and looked at it.

  “You sonofabitch,” he said, “you hung up me!”

  “Perhaps he didn’t hang up on you, Sergeant Mullroney,” Castillo said.

  Mullroney jumped.

  “Perhaps you just lost the connection,” Castillo went on, evenly. “Cellulars are not very reliable out here.”

  “You scared me, Colonel,” Mullroney said after a moment. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  I didn’t scare you, I don’t think.

  But I think I embarrassed you.

  “Was there something wrong with the telephone in your room, Sergeant Mullroney? Couldn’t get a dial tone?”

  Mullroney didn’t reply.

  “Or was it because you didn’t want us to know you were making your report to Captain Timmons? Is that why you sneaked out here to use your cellular?”

  Mullroney looked at him almost defiantly.

  Not really “fuck you” defiant. He’s worried.

  Now let’s see how far I can push him.

  Castillo held out his hand and wiggled the fingers in a Give it to me gesture.

  Mullroney looked at Castillo’s hand and then his face and back at the hand.

  “Give me the phone,” Castillo ordered.

  Mullroney looked again at Castillo’s face, as if trying to understand.

  So what do I do now? Try to take it away from him?

  “Give me the phone,” Castillo repeated.

  Mullroney didn’t move or respond.

  “Give the colonel the fucking phone, asshole, or I’ll throw you and it off the mountain.”

  The voice in the dark startled Castillo. He hadn’t heard anyone walking up on them. He now saw that Lorimer was standing beside him.

  “I’m not going to tell you again,” Lorimer said.

  Mullroney put the cellular in Castillo’s hand.

  Castillo threw it down the mountain.

  “What the fuck?” Mullroney protested, incredulously.

  “You are not permitted to have a cellular telephone,” Castillo said calmly.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Mullroney demanded.

  There wasn’t much conviction in that indignation.

  “The next time you say something like that to the colonel, I’m going to break your arm before I throw you down the mountain.”

  “Fuck you, soldier boy,” Mullroney said.

  Five seconds later, Sergeant Mullroney found himself on his stomach.

  His arm was twisted painfully behind him, his cheek was pressed into the rough ground, and Lieutenant Lorimer’s knee—the titanium one, Castillo saw—was pressed painfully into the small of his back.

  He howled in pain.

  “Permission to dislocate his shoulder, sir?” Lorimer asked.

  Castillo waited five seconds—long enough, he judged, for Mullroney to have time to consider that he might actually be about to have his shoulder dislocated—before replying: “Put him on his back, Lieutenant. If he even looks like he’s considering trying to get up, kick some teeth out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ten seconds later, Sergeant Mullroney was lying absolutely motionless on his back. Lieutenant Lorimer was squatting at his head, pulling Mullroney’s chin back with one hand, and holding the eight-inch blade of a knife against his throat with the other.

  “Permission to speak, sir?” Lieutenant Lorimer said.

  “Granted.”

  “Let me toss him down the mountain, sir.”

  “I don’t want to kill him unless I have to,” Castillo said.

  “Just let him get busted up a little, sir,” Lorimer argued. “Break an ankle, a leg, an arm.”

  “How would we explain his accident?” Castillo asked reasonably.

  “Well, everybody knows he’s a boozer. I’ll call Captain Timmons and tell him he got drunk, was wandering around the mountain and fell off.”

  “Is that a credible scenario?”

  “Yes, sir, I think so. Who are they going believe? The family drunk, or you and me?”

  “The problem with that is they would just send somebody else to snoop on us,” Castillo said.

  “That’s true, sir,” Lorimer acknowledged. “But we could deal with that situation as it came up. And we could probably be long gone before they could send someone else.”

  “True. Okay. Sergeant Mullroney, you have ten seconds to tell me why I should not permit Lieutenant Lorimer to throw you down the mountain.”

  “You people are out of your fucking minds!” Sergeant Mullroney said.

  “Possibly,” Castillo said. “But I don’t see that as a reason not to send you down the mountain. Five seconds.”

  “I’m a cop, for Christ sake! You can’t get away with this!”

  “Time’s up,” Castillo said. “Carry on, Lieutenant.”

  “What we’re going to do now,” Lieutenant Lorimer said, touching the tip of the knife blade to the throat to discourage any sudden movement, “is very slowly get to our feet….”

  “Jesus, what the fuck do you want from me? You don’t want me to call Chicago? All right, I won’t call Chicago. I swear to God! I swear on my mother’s grave I’ll never call Chicago! Jesus Christ! Please! I’ve got a wife—Junior’s sister—and kids…”

  “He doesn’t get the picture, does he, Lieutenant?”

  “No, sir. It would appear he doesn’t have a clue.”

  “Explain it to him, please.”

  “Yes, sir. Asshole, we don’t care if you call Chicago every hour on the hour. But what we can’t have is you running at the mouth to somebody else who’ll run at the mouth and blow this operation and get people—including my pal Byron—killed.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Sergeant Mullroney said, more than a little righteously. “Junior’s my brother-in-law, for Christ’s sake. My wife’s brother.”

  “I’ve always wondered what a brother-in-law was,” Castillo said. “Thank you for clearing that up for me.”

  “What?” Mullroney asked, visibly confused.

  “Have you anything else you want to say to us?” Castillo asked.

  “What the fuck do I have to say to make you understand I’d never do anything to hurt Junior?”

  “Byron told me he told you not to call him ‘Junior’ and you wouldn’t stop until he knocked you on your ass,” Lorimer said. “And we have a similar situation here, wouldn’t you say, Colonel?”

  “I’m afraid it looks that way to me,” Castillo said.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”

  “Exactly as it was necessary for Byron to knock you on your ass to get you not to say the wrong thing, it looks to me that I’m going to have to put you down the mountain now to keep you from saying the wrong thing. We’re talking about people getting killed because of your runaway mouth.”

  “I’d never say…” Sergeant Mullroney began, then he had a sudden inspiration. “What if I told you what I was going to say to Jun…Byron’s father before I said it. I mean, before I called. And you could tell me if there was something I shouldn’t say. And I wouldn’t. And you could listen to me making the call….”

  When there was no reaction from either Castillo or Lorimer, Mullroney added, somewhat plaintively, “Jesus, guys, we’re on the same side here.”

  “You don’t call the colonel ‘guy,’ Asshole,” Lorimer said.

  “Sorry, Colonel, sir.”

  “That might work, sir,” Lorimer said. “Operative word might. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to kill him unless it’s really necessary.”

  “Give me a chance, and I promise you’ll never regret it,” Mullroney said.

  “What do you want to do, sir, flip
a coin?” Lorimer asked, his tone serious.

  “As he points out, Lieutenant, he is Special Agent Timmons’s brother-in-law. If it could be avoided, I would prefer not to get Special Agent Timmons back only to tell him that we had to terminate his brother-in-law in order to guarantee the security of the operation….”

  “For your consideration, sir, Special Agent Timmons is not all that fond of the asshole.”

  “Nevertheless, I think that we should take the chance.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Lorimer said, his voice showing his deep disappointment.

  “Let him up, Lieutenant,” Castillo ordered. “Get him on his feet.”

  “You heard the colonel, Asshole. Stand up.”

  “Sergeant,” Castillo then said, “I want you to understand that I am authorizing your immediate termination should you ever get close to a telephone without Lieutenant Lorimer or myself being present. Understood?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lorimer barked, “Say ‘yes, sir’ when you’re talking to the colonel!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are dismissed, Sergeant. Please stay in your room until you are called for breakfast.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Castillo made a motion as if brushing away a fly, and Sergeant Mullroney started quickly walking up the path to the house.

  Fifteen seconds later, Colonel Castillo whispered, “If you are about to have the giggles, Lorimer, and Asshole hears you, I’ll throw you down the mountain.”

  Lieutenant Lorimer acknowledged the order by bobbing his head.

  He didn’t trust himself to open his mouth, the bottom lip of which he was biting as hard as he could.

  [TWO]

  Lieutenant Colonel Castillo leaned over Lieutenant Lorimer, who was sprawled on a chaise lounge by the side of the swimming pool, and very carefully topped off Lorimer’s glass of Famous Grouse with more of the same.

  “Lieutenant Lorimer,” Castillo said, “I am a lieutenant colonel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, you may have noticed, I wear a green beret.”

  “Yes, sir, I did notice that.”

  “And, as I am sure you know, while some lieutenant colonels sometimes make mistakes, and some Special Forces officers sometimes make mistakes, when a Special Forces lieutenant colonel makes a mistake, it is truly a cold day in hell.”

  “So I have been led to believe, sir.”

  “That being understood between us, there is sometimes an exception to the rule just cited.”

  “I find that difficult to accept, sir.”

  “Nevertheless, I think perhaps—as difficult as this may be for you to accept—I made a mistake about you.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Frankly, Lieutenant, when you approached Mullroney and me with stealth worthy of the finest Comanche, I really had no idea how to deal with the sonofabitch.”

  “With respect, Colonel, sir, I believe his name is Asshole. And I think the asshole is now under control, sir.”

  “The knife at his throat when you rolled him over, Lieutenant—don’t let this go to your head—was masterful. I would not be surprised to learn that Sergeant Mullroney soiled his undies.”

  “I would be disappointed to learn that he didn’t, Colonel.”

  “The problem of a police officer being embedded with us having been solved—I devoutly hope—let us now turn our attention to the big picture. How do we get your friend back?”

  “Yeah,” Lorimer said, and exhaled audibly. “How the hell do we do that?”

  “To get him back, we have to know a lot of things, starting with who has him. And where. Your thoughts, please?”

  “May I infer from the colonel’s question that I am now regarded as part of the team, so to speak?”

  “From this moment on, you may regard yourself as the psychological warfare officer of the team. You seem to have some skill in that area.”

  “I am humbled by that responsibility, sir, and will try very hard to justify your confidence in me.”

  “Where do these bastards have him, Eddie?”

  “Well, he could be in Asunción, but I don’t think so. If I had to bet, they’ve got him in the boonies somewhere. Either in Paraguay or across the river in Argentina.”

  “Bearing in mind that you’re betting with a man’s life, why?”

  “That’s boonieland up there, Argentina and Paraguay. You can raid a house in a city a lot easier than you can in the boonies.”

  “Meaning that if you’re holding somebody in a remote farmhouse, you can see the good guys coming?”

  “If there’s only one road going someplace, they know you’re coming long before you get there. You’ve got somebody in the bag, you just march him off into the woods, and look innocent when somebody shows up at the door.”

  “So what we have to do is not only find where he is—I’ll get back to that in a minute—but come up with some way to get enough people in there with the element of surprise.”

  “Yeah,” Lorimer said. “And that won’t be easy.”

  “I’m going off at a tangent here, Eddie.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Something was said about Timmons’s driver being taken out by these people. I want to make sure I heard it right. Tell me about that.”

  “They found the embassy car parked against the fence of the airport. It’s called the Silvio Pettirossi International Airport—you want all the details like that?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “Anything that comes into your mind, Eddie. My data bank is pretty empty.”

  “Typical Third World airport,” Lorimer went on. “It used to be called the Presidente General Stroessner Airport, and you can still see signs with his name on them. He was the president, read dictator, for thirty-five years. Apparently a world-class sonofabitch—”

  “Presidente General Alfredo Stroessner,” Castillo interrupted, “was exiled to Brazil in 1989 after a coup by General Andrés Rodríguez. I don’t know where the hell I got that, but the data bank apparently isn’t completely empty. And, I just remembered, he was cozy with the Nazis, the ones who fled to South America after World War Two. Interesting.”

  “Why? Is that important?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. And the next time we have a little chat like this, I’ll have to remember to bring the laptop so I can write all this down. I tend to forget things I hear when I’m drinking. Go on, please, Eddie.”

  “The embassy car was parked against the fence across the field from the terminal. The driver was on the floor of the backseat choked to death.”

  “Strangled, you mean?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the word. He had a gizmo around his neck, like those plastic handcuffs the cops use, but metal.”

  “With a handle?” Castillo asked, quietly, and mimed how the handle would be used.

  Lorimer nodded.

  “It’s called a garrote,” Castillo said. “One of them was used to take out a friend of mine, Sergeant First Class Sy Kranz, who was a damned good special operator, when the Ninjas jumped us at Estancia Shangri-La.”

  “I never heard that you lost anybody.”

  “We lost Sy Kranz,” Castillo said. “And taking him out wasn’t easy, which told us right off that the Ninjas we took out were pros.”

  “How much about that operation are you going to tell me, Colonel?”

  “We later found out that one of the people we took out was Major Alejandro Vincenzo of the Cuban Dirección General de Inteligencia. We think the others were probably either ex-Stasi or ex-ÁVO or ex-ÁVH, probably being run by the FSB.”

  “Colonel, except for the FSB, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who was the FSB running? Jesus, what was going on at that farm?”

  “Estancia,” Castillo corrected him without thinking. “Estancia Shangri-La. This much we know: Jean-Paul Lorimer, an American who worked for the UN, was a—probably the—bagman in that Iraqi Oil for Food cesspool. We know he set himself up with a phon
y identification and name on the estancia. We know he had sixteen million dollars. Whether he earned that as the bagman or stole it, we don’t know. We know that a team of pros was sent to the estancia. We think their basic mission was to whack him to shut his mouth. They may have been after the money, too. And we’re pretty sure the others were ex-Stasi….”

  He stopped when he remembered Lorimer didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Stasi, Eddie, was the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—Ministry for State Security. ÁVO—Államvédelmi Osztály—and later ÁVH—Államvédelmi Hatóság—did about the same thing when Hungary was still under the communists.”

  “And they were involved in that oil-for-food business?”

  “They were hired guns, we think, for people who were involved in it,” Castillo said.

  “Like who?”

  Castillo ignored the question.

  “The one thing the Stasi and the Hungarians had in common, Eddie—aside from being some very unpleasant people very good at what they did—was using the garrote as the silent whacking weapon of choice.”

  “You’re saying you think these people are involved with what happened to Timmons?”

  “I’m saying it’s very interesting that Timmons’s driver was garroted with the same kind of garrote they used on Sergeant Kranz, and tried to use on Eric Kocian.”

  Lorimer considered what he’d heard, then said, “I don’t think anyone in Asunción thinks we’re dealing with anything but drug dealers.”

  “And maybe we’re not,” Castillo said. “But to finish filling you in on what happened at Shangri-La, the official version—the Uruguayan government version—is that it was a drug deal gone wrong. They know better, but apparently have decided it’s best for them to sweep what really happened under the rug. This is made somewhat easier for them by our ambassador, who can’t believe that a special operation could happen without his knowing about it. He decided that Lorimer was shipping cocaine in antique vases and a deal went wrong. The Uruguayans decided to let it go at that.”

  “So you came out clean?”

  “For a while, I thought we had.”

  “But?”

  “We were at the safe house in Pilar, just about to wind up putting things together—Inspector Doherty called it ‘an investigation to determine what has to be investigated’—when Max caught you sneaking through the bushes.”