The Shooters

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Most of the other eight or nine percent is grown—and converted to heroin—in Colombia and Bolivia. This is sold, primarily, in the East Coast cities here. Most of the stuff consumed in Hollywood and other temples of culture on the West Coast is grown and processed in Mexico, and is not nearly as pure as what’s sold on the East Coast.

  “Quality, as well as supply and demand, determines price. Will you take my word for it, Colonel, that there’s a hell of a lot of money being spent on heroin on the East Coast?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “One—I guess several—of the good guys I mentioned before took a close look at the business and came up with several questions. Some were pretty obvious. Why are the heroin people in Bolivia sending their product south, into Paraguay and then Argentina, when the market’s in New York City, in the other direction?

  “The Colombians send most of their product into Mexico. The Mexicans don’t seem to be able to stop much—if any—of that traffic. It has been suggested that the authorities have been bought. But whatever the reason, getting their product into Mexico and then across the border into the United States doesn’t seem to pose much of a problem. Possibly because our overworked Customs and Border Protection people working the border-crossing points just can’t inspect more than a tiny fraction of the thousands of eighteen-wheelers coming into the country every day.

  “Or an even smaller fraction of the cars of the tourists returning home from a happy holiday south of the border. You have that picture, Colonel?”

  “Ed calls me Charley, Mr. Weiss.”

  “I thought he called you Ace? You don’t like being called colonel, Colonel?”

  “Not the way you pronounce it.”

  “That’s probably because I’m having trouble thinking of you as a colonel; you don’t look old enough to be a colonel. When Ed and I were running around together, the colonels we dealt with had gray hair—if they had hair at all—and paunches. No offense was intended.”

  “You won’t mind, right, Milton, if I don’t believe that?”

  “You are a feisty youngster, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Charley?”

  “Better, Milton. Better.”

  “Getting back to the subject at hand, Charley. On the other hand, Argentina does have a working drug-interdiction program. They even have a remarkably honest—honest by South American standards—police organization called the Gendarmería Nacional.

  “So why run the greater risk?

  “Looking into it further, the good guys learned a little more about the flow of drugs through Argentina and into the U.S., and the manner of doing business. Normally—you’ve seen the movies—it’s a cash business. The farmers sell the raw material—that stuff that oozes out of the poppy seed pods—to the refiners. They don’t get much for it, but they get paid in cash. Next step, normally, is for the refiners to either sell what is now heroin to someone who shows up at the refinery and carries it off. That is also a cash transaction. Or they take it someplace away from the refinery and sell it there. That’s where you see those briefcases full of money in the movies.

  “Every time the product changes hands, in other words, so does cash. Usually.

  “This didn’t seem to be happening with the drugs coming out of Paraguay into Argentina, either when it arrived from the refiners, or when the movers got it into Argentina, or when it left Argentina. The first time money changed hands was when the movers had it in the States and turned it over to the wholesalers. Then we had the briefcases full of hundred-dollar bills.

  “So what could be inferred from this? That it was being operated in what the Harvard School of Business Administration would call a vertically integrated manner. The whole process—from initial receipt of the product from the refiner, through the movement to Uruguay, to Argentina, to the United States and the sale there—was under one roof.

  “The refiners, the movers, the smugglers, and the transporters, rather than being independent businessmen, were all employees.”

  “What’s the purpose of that? What difference does it make?” Castillo asked.

  Weiss held up his hand, signaling he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  “Another problem businessmen involved in this trade have is what to do with the money once they have sold the product. It cannot be dropped into an ATM machine, for obvious reasons. And, to get it into one of those offshore banks we hear so much about, it has to be transferred through a bank; no cash deposits allowed.

  “Unless, of course, the bank is also in the vertically integrated system.”

  “You mean they own the bank?”

  Weiss nodded.

  “And that raised the question, among many others, in the good guys’ minds, ‘Where did all this come from?’ Drug dealers are smart, ruthless, and enterprising, but very few of them have passed through Cambridge and learned to sing ‘On, Fair Harvard!’

  “That suggested something very interesting,” Weiss went on, “that it was not a group of Colombian thugs with gold chains around their necks who were running this operation, but some very clever people who may indeed have gone to Harvard and were employed by their government. Two governments came immediately to mind.”

  “Which?”

  “The Democratic People’s Republic of Cuba and the Russian Federation.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!”

  “Another thing needed to run this operation smoothly, Charley,” Delchamps said, “is discipline. The employees—especially the local hires—had to completely understand that any hanky-panky would get them, and their families, whacked.”

  “Lorimer told me that Timmons’s driver—”

  “Timmons?” Weiss interrupted.

  Just as Weiss had a moment before, Castillo held up his hand imperiously, signaling he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  Delchamps chuckled, and Weiss, smiling, shook his head.

  “—was garroted,” Castillo finished, “with a metal garrote.”

  “Interesting!” Weiss said. “Stasi?”

  “And that might explain what Major Vincenzo and the others were doing at Shangri-La,” Castillo said. “Maybe he didn’t come from Cuba for that. Maybe he—and the others—were already in Paraguay.”

  “And,” Delchamps added, “since Lorimer wasn’t involved with drugs—they wanted to shut his mouth about what he knew of the oil-for-food scam—and Vincenzo was, that suggests there’s a connection. Somebody who wanted Lorimer dead was able to order Vincenzo and company to do it.”

  “And we have the two dead FSB lieutenant colonels,” Castillo said.

  “Ed somehow neglected to mention two dead FSB officers,” Weiss said.

  “I didn’t think you needed to know,” Delchamps said.

  Weiss rolled his eyes.

  “Who were they?”

  “One of the colonel’s crack pistol marksmen, a chap named Bradley,” Delchamps said with a straight face, “took down Yevgeny Komogorov—”

  “Of the FSB’s Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight Against Terrorism?” Weiss asked drily.

  Delchamps nodded as he went on: “—in the Sheraton Hotel garage in Pilar, outside Buenos Aires. Colonel Komogorov was at the time apparently bent on whacking a fellow Russian by the name of Aleksandr Pevsner—”

  “Pevsner?” Weiss asked, incredulously.

  With an even more imperious gesture than Castillo had given, Delchamps held up his hand to signal he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  Castillo laughed.

  Delchamps went on: “—when Bradley put a .45 round in his cheek”—he pointed to a spot immediately below his left eye—“and then Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Zhdankov was found beaten to death in the Conrad Casino and Resort in Punta del Este.”

  Weiss’s face showed surprise, and perhaps revulsion.

  “Not by us, Milton,” Delchamps said. “Do I have to tell you that?”

  “By who?”

  “He was found in the company of a man named Howard Kennedy, who also had been be
aten to death. There’s a rumor going around that Kennedy was foolish enough to have tried to arrange the whacking of his employer, Mr. Pevsner.”

  “Either one of them could have been running Vincenzo,” Castillo said thoughtfully.

  Weiss considered that, then nodded.

  “All of this seems to fit very nicely together,” Weiss said. “But the bottom line is that nothing is going to be done about it. The Cubans—if they said anything at all—would say that Vincenzo hasn’t been in the Dirección General de Inteligencia for years. The Russians will say they never heard of either Zhdankov or Komogorov.”

  “What’s your point?” Castillo asked.

  “The name of the game is to make the other guys hurt,” Weiss said.

  “Okay. But so what?” Castillo said.

  “Let me return to Basic Drugs 101,” Weiss said, “since bringing these bad guys before the bar of justice just isn’t going to happen. Neither of you has any idea what happens to the heroin once it gets to Argentina, do you?”

  Delchamps and Castillo shook their heads.

  “The intellectually challenged station chief in Asunción has figured that out,” Weiss said. “Has either of you ever wondered how many filet mignon steaks are in the coolers of a cruise ship like, for example, the Holiday Spirit of the Southern Cruise Line? I’ll give you a little clue. She carries 2,680 passengers, and a crew of some twelve hundred.”

  “A lot, Milton?” Delchamps asked innocently.

  “Since she makes twelve-day cruises out of Miami about the sunny Caribbean, each of which features two steak nights, and filet mignon is an ever-present option on her luncheon and dinner menus, yeah, Edgar, ‘a lot.’

  “And has either of you ever wondered where they get all this meat—or the grapefruits and oranges from which is squeezed the fresh juice for the 2,680 breakfasts served each day, etcetera, etcetera?”

  “Argentina?” Castillo asked innocently.

  “You win the cement bicycle, Charley,” Weiss said. “And have either of you ever wondered how all those filet mignons make their way from the Argentine pampas to the coolers of the Holiday Spirit and her many sister ships?”

  Castillo and Delchamps waited for him to go on.

  “I left out the succulent oysters, lobsters, and other fruits of the sea sent from the chilly Chilean South Pacific seas to the coolers of the Holiday Spirit and her sister ships,” Weiss said.

  “You’re forgiven,” Delchamps said. “Get on with it.”

  “Air freight!” Weiss said. “Large aircraft—some of them owned by Aleksandr Pevsner, by the way—make frequent, sometimes daily flights from Buenos Aires to Jamaica loaded with chilled but not frozen meat and other victuals for the cruise ship trade.”

  “Jesus!” Castillo said, sensing where Weiss was headed.

  “We all know how wonderful Argentine beef is, and how cheap. And most cruise ships—just about all of the Southern Cruise Line ships, and there are four of these, the smallest capable of carrying eleven hundred passengers—call at Montego Bay or Kingston, or both, on each and every voyage. Kingston is served by Norman Manley International Airfield, and Montego Bay by Sangster International.

  “While the happy tourists—is there a word for the people who ride these floating hotels? Cruisers, maybe?—are wandering through the picturesque streets of Kingston and Montego Bay, soaking up culture and taking pictures for the folks back home, the hardworking Jamaican gnomes are moving loins of Argentine beef from refrigerator plants, and occasionally—if yesterday’s flight from Buenos Aires was delayed for some reason—directly from the airplane to the coolers on the cruise ships.”

  “And under the ice is that day’s shipment of heroin,” Delchamps said.

  “Edgar, you’ve always been just terrible about thinking such awful things are going on,” Weiss said, mock innocently.

  “And how do they get it off the ship in the States?” Castillo asked.

  “There are several ways to do that,” Weiss said. “One is with the ship’s garbage and sewage, which now has to be brought ashore, rather than as before, when it was tossed overboard, thereby polluting the pristine waters of the Atlantic. Or, in the wee hours of the morn, as the vessel approaches Miami, it is dumped over the side, to be retrieved later by sportfishermen. Global Positioning System satellites are very helpful to the retrievers.”

  “And where is the DEA, or the Coast Guard, or whoever is supposed to be dealing with this sort of thing while all this is going on?” Castillo asked.

  “So far they don’t know about it,” Weiss said, and Castillo sensed that suddenly Weiss had become dead serious, that his joking attitude had just been shut off as if a switch had been thrown.

  And he made some remark before about Montvale—who was supposed to be on top of everything going on in the intelligence community—not knowing about an “important operation.”

  What the hell is going on?

  Weiss met Castillo’s eyes for a moment, and Castillo was again reminded of Aleksandr Pevsner.

  “And we don’t want them to know about it,” Weiss went on.

  “Are you going to tell me about that?” Castillo asked carefully.

  “That’s why I’m here, Castillo. I told you, you’re in a position to fuck up an important operation. But before I get into that, I want you to understand this conversation never took place.”

  “I can’t go along with that.”

  “You don’t have any choice,” Weiss said. “I’ll deny it. And so will Delchamps.”

  “That leaves out the Secret Service guy you ran off,” Castillo said. “He saw you here.”

  “He saw Delchamps and me taking a walk down memory lane. That’s all. Paraguay and Timmons never came up.”

  Castillo looked at Delchamps.

  “I gave him my word, Ace. Not for auld lang syne, but because it was the only way I could get him to come.”

  “I’m not giving you my word about anything,” Castillo said. “And that specifically includes me not going to Montvale and telling him you’re withholding intelligence I should have.”

  “Before this gets unpleasant, let me tell you about the important operation,” Weiss said. “The bottom line, Castillo, is that it’ll be your call.”

  “Tell me about the operation,” Castillo said.

  “There’s a hell of a lot of money involved here,” Weiss said. “A goodly share of the proceeds go to support the Dirección General de Inteligencia, which means the FSB doesn’t have to support it as much as it has been. And that’s important, because the FSB’s ability to fund clandestine operations, Islamic extremists, etcetera, has been greatly reduced since we went into Iraq and cut off their oil-for-food income.

  “And the DGI is supporting its sister service in the Republic of Venezuela, which I presume you know is about to become the People’s Democratic Republic of Venezuela under Colonel Chávez, whose heroes are Fidel Castro, Josef Stalin, and Vladimir Putin.

  “And the profits left over after the DGI gets what it needs go to the FSB’s secret kitty, which supports, among other things, all those ex-Stasi and ex-ÁVO people who are causing trouble all over.

  “Another way to put this is that if it wasn’t for all this drug income they’re getting, the FSB would have its operations seriously curtailed.”

  “Then my question is, why don’t you confide in the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, whoever, what you know about this operation and have them stop it?” Castillo said.

  Then he saw Delchamps shake his head, and then the look on Delchamps’s face. It said, Not smart, Ace!

  “Because,” Weiss said, his face and tone suggesting he was being very patient with a backward student, “even if they did find a cooler full of coke on the Holiday Spirit—and their record of finding anything isn’t very good—all that would happen is that we would add a dozen or so people to our prison population.”

  “So what’s the alternative?”

  “International Maritime Law provides for the seizure of vesse
ls—including aircraft—involved in the international illicit drug trade.”

  “You want to grab Pevsner’s airplanes?”

  “That, too, but what we want to grab is the Holiday Spirit and her sister ships. Do you have any idea how much one of those floating palaces costs?”

  Castillo shook his head to admit he didn’t, then asked, “How are you going to do that?”

  “Prove their owners were aware of the purpose to which they had put their ships.”

  “How are you going to that? They’re not registered to Vladimir Putin.”

  “They’re registered to a holding company in Panama,” Weiss said. “And proving that Putin controlled that would be difficult, but that doesn’t matter. All we have to prove is that the owners knew what was going on; that it was illegal. The owners lose the ship. The Holiday Spirit cost a little over three hundred and fifty million.”

  “And how are you going to prove the owners knew?”

  “The operation could not be carried on without the captain being aware of what was going on.”

  “But the captains don’t own their ships, do they?”

  “No. But they don’t get command of a ship except from the owners.”

  “Okay.”

  “The FSB was not about to entrust a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar ship to some stranger. They wanted their own man running things, and they didn’t want him to come from the Saint Petersburg Masters, Mates, and Pilots Union because people might start wondering what the Russians were doing running a cruise ship operation out of Miami.

  “So they provided reliable, qualified masters with phony documents saying they were Latvians, or Estonians, or Poles.”

  “That sounds pretty far-fetched.”

  “You’re a pilot, right? You just flew a Gulfstream Three to Argentina and back, right?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “Anybody ask to see your pilot’s license?”

  Castillo shook his head.

  “Anybody ever ask to see your pilot’s license?”

  Castillo shook his head again.

  “You’re flying an eight-, ten-million-dollar airplane, you’re given the benefit of the doubt, right?”