Online Murder Syndicate: The Paranormal Mysteries & Adventures of Special Agent Lou Abrams (The Paranormal Mysteries & Adventure of Special Agent Lou Abrams Book 2)

by Thomas Craig

  The posturing continued. If they were talking, it was not with me as I heard no words from any of the Gods. Waiting for what seemed like several minutes as the Gods conversed, the Atahsaia and I remained quiet. Then, all glowing eyes were back on me again. I had a wave of uneasiness come over me.

  One of the Ahayuta Brothers stood again, the presumed disinterested one at first, and walked towards me. When it was about 10 feet away it morphed into a spectacular human form of a great Zuni warrior. There he stood now actually half a foot taller than me in human form but commanding the room and my full attention.

  He had a bow on his back with the drawstring across his uncovered but painted chest. His hair was long, and his headband was fashioned in a way that held five arrows fanned out at a 45-degree angle forward over his head. An odd-looking club was hanging from his right hip and a satchel of sorts on his left. His skin was dark, much darker than mine, and his stare was hardened.

  I had heard folk stories of the Ahayuta Bothers leading the undeveloped man out of the deep caverns to create a civilization, helping to form tribes that find their way in the balance of mother earth. Perhaps he was going to lead me topside and encourage me to be on my way.

  He then began to speak to me out loud. I had this compelling urge to kneel, like a football player listening to his coach. So I did.

  He stood above me speaking in Zuni, occasionally using his arms and hands in combination with words and phrases. He emphasized some words and hand movements. Some words were verbally choppy, while others were smooth and almost run together like one long word. At one point it almost seemed like he was either yelling at me or singing to me.

  How I wished I had learned my language. This moment. These words from a God. I became overwhelmed and could not hold back the tears that autonomously formed in my eyes as I listened to him either pardoning or condemning me. I hoped for the former, but it could have been him just lecturing me. When the War God paused, I looked to my enemy for answers.

  The beast did not look pleased and was shaking its head.

  The War God turned to the Atahsaia and waved the club at the beast while saying a few likely discouraging words.

  “Know this Lusio, they do not speak for Uhepono,” the beast muttered as it turned and disappeared down a dark passage.

  When I turned back to the Gods, they had disappeared.

  “Seriously?” I said out loud to an audience of one, self-included. How could they just disappear like that? What was this all for?

  I surveyed the room and all the riches left behind. I do love a good souvenir. Oh, it was tempting as I examined the gold and gem-encrusted knife on the altar in front of me. However, I would likely regret taking anything from this place of grandeur and worship.

  I would need light to find my way out of here. The torches on the walls would not budge. I tore my shirt up, twisted it, and tied it around the ancient knife closest to me. It took several seconds, but I held it to the torch until it caught fire.

  As I looked around for the very absent exit sign, I determined there would be no easy egress from this ancient place. Off I went, exploring ascending passageways, trying to find my way up and out.

  About 30-minutes later my makeshift torch was almost out and giving little light. I tried summoning the burning feeling in my gut and chest to give my hands enough energy to possibly glow, but once the Gods left, so did my energy.

  I was running on fumes. I paused for a second, reflecting on what I just thought. My hands being used as a light source. Flashlights for hands. I started to laugh out loud as the last bit of light quickly faded away from my makeshift torch.

  I pulled my phone out and saw how severely damaged it was from the fall. Amazingly, though, it turned on and the flashlight app and little flashbulb gave me the light I needed to finish my trek.

  I finally found what looked to be vines growing straight up a dark vertical shaft. I could feel air moving above me, and that was all I needed to motivate myself to climb hand over fist up these vines. My phone was in my mouth shining what seemed to be a slowly dimming light, barely allowing me to complete my climb.

  At the top was a small alcove full of dirt, vines, and plants. I had to do some gardening, uprooting growth, and displacing soil down the shaft to create a space to pull myself over the ledge. Once freed from the fear of the vine giving way and me falling to the bottom of the shaft, I started to dig and crawl through a small square opening.

  I emerged from the top of this magnificent pyramid, which barely peeked a few feet through the topsoil of the jungle it was hidden under.

  My phone light died and so did my phone. I could feel the deep scratches begin to itch and sting from squeezing through the vines, brush, and stone to unearth myself. Worth it! I was glad to be topside again.

  It was dark and not much moonlight made its way through the canopy above. I picked myself up and starting walking. After a few minutes, I noticed a flickering light up ahead and tracked it down. When closer it looked to be the area we fell into earlier, as trees were still burning, and the earth was displaced on the ground at the place of our impact.

  To my delight, I broke through to the small clearing and saw Holliday on belay manning a rope around a tree that led into the crater, where Arya stood looking down.

  “Nada!” The words traveled up from the crater.

  “Okay!” Arya shouted back.

  “Hey, buddy,” I calmly said to Holliday, as I passed him on my way to Arya.

  “What the hell?” he said back with a hint of astonishment in his voice, still hold the rope that secured the commando in the crater.

  “Hey Arya, can you come on down from there?” I said to her.

  She turned and looked confused as she sized me up. Through all the dirt, torn up pants, missing shirt, more dirt, she saw my eyes and knew the mysterious blue meant it was me.

  She ran down the small dirt hill made from the Sky Being’s impact earlier and crashed into me with such force we fell to the ground. She probably thought I would brace myself and catch her, but I was barely standing before she sent herself flying at me.

  “Oh my God! Thank you. Thank you for being alive,” she sobbed with her face tucked into my neck and shoulder.

  I enjoyed the reunion for a moment, then asked her to help me up before Holliday pulled the commando out of the black hole.

  She kissed me quickly a couple of times before helping me up. Then she got all business-like. Quickly briefing me on how she got the Blackhawk pilots to land, what was said and what was not seen to spin the story that I was with them the whole time.

  It was hard to believe neither Special Forces Commando nor the woman we picked up saw me drop out at 3,000 feet. I guess a little luck never hurt anyone.

  “Is that you, Lou?” I turned to see Lauren breaking through the woods with her mag light on me. “Holy shit! You had us worried. Especially Holliday,” Lauren shouted as she started to jog up to me.

  “Well, I mean, he fell 3,000 feet,” is all Holliday could come up with, as he used his weight to pull the commando up from the pit.

  “It’s really me. I have some interesting stories to tell later, but for now, I have been filled in by Arya on how to spin this detour,” I replied as she finished her journey over to me and gave me a quick hug. I noticed a little water in her eyes as she tried to play it cool seeing me alive.

  “Thank you. Thank you all. I owe you big,” I sincerely said to them as the commando emerged from the hole.

  The commando walked over to me wondering where I had been and why I looked so dirty, missing my shirt, and covered with scratches and fresh blood.

  “Jaguar,” I said to him, as I pointed to the woods behind him.

  “Jaguar?” he repeated as he snapped his head around to look. Then said to us all, “Vamonos!”

  We all agreed and headed back to the awaiting Blackhawk.

  There was no way for us to catch up to Tazario after taking this unplanned detour. The pilots were not even getting the incon
sistent bleeps on their radar anymore. Either he was gone, or too low to track.

  We were about an hour or more away from Bogota and the pilots decided to head back to the airport there for fuel, maintenance, sleep, and likely another commando or two to join us for the next leg of the manhunt.

  We would figure out our next move in the morning, which was only going to be a few hours away after we land.

  Chapter 34

  Festivals of Neiva

  As SAIC Cooley reviewed the previous day's action report from Arya’s team in Colombia, his level of concern grew, again. Each day in Colombia brought more unwanted action reports, gunfire, loss of life, loss of a multimillion-dollar helicopter. What would be next?

  The phone rang and Cooley reluctantly answered. What followed was a ten-minute ass-chewing by the Director of the CIA. He lost his best field agent in Colombia and wanted to know why. Unfortunately, any answer Cooley tried to give was only met with more harsh words and discontent from the CIA Director.

  The phone call finally ended and before he had a moment to recover, the phone rang again.

  “Jesus!” he blurted out. “Angela?!” he shouted to see if the admin outside his office was there to take the call.

  “Riley?!” he shouted, hoping his lead analyst was nearby. No luck.

  “Atlanta Field Office, Special Agent in Charge Cooley speaking,” he answered.

  To his surprise, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia Miguel Trujillo was on the line. Although a bit more civilized than the Director of the CIA, upset nevertheless as he went on and on about what this ‘collaboration’ was costing the Republic of Colombia, not to mention the injuries and deaths of Colombian’s finest Special Forces Commandos at every stop the FBI team asked to make.

  At this point, Cooley was done with the lectures and interrupted the Minister as politely as he could.

  “Sir, I understand, and I think there is more to discuss here. However, I must ask you to call the State Department or the Secretary of State himself and continue this with them,” he insisted until Mr. Trujillo finally took the direction and said his goodbye’s.

  Cooley sat for a few minutes reflecting and thinking he should have given this case to the International Operations Division and let the legal attaché do as they please with the teams’ information and leads.

  The phone rang again.

  “Judas Priest!” he swore out loud.

  “Atlanta SAC Cooley speaking!” he abruptly answered.

  “Sir, it’s Lauren O’Quinn,” Lauren announced.

  “Lauren. Good timing. What in the hell are you all doing down there?” Cooley asked rhetorically.

  “Well sir, I…” she was cut off.

  “I just got my ass chewed by people high up that should not know my name. What’s this I’m reading that you ordered a Blackhawk pilot to block a highway to pick up a woman and then order the same pilot to land in the jungle in the dark with no prep or terrain surveillance?” Cooley vented to Lauren.

  Lauren paused before speaking to see if the Director was done ranting. He was not.

  “I’m now getting daily reports from the Colombian Governments’ Military advisor, along with your reports. They don’t match up,” Cooley advised.

  “Like what sir?” Lauren asked.

  “Don’t ask me to tell YOU what the hell you are doing down there. That’s your job, Special Agent O’Quinn. What are you not telling me?” he demanded.

  “Sir, would you like to speak to Special Agent Shah about this?” Lauren suggested.

  “No, thank you. Out with it.”

  “It’s just that, well, this is something you would not want in a field update report or discussed on an open line,” she replied.

  “Then what can you tell me? I’m about to recall all of you immediately back to Atlanta. This trip is starting to look bad on paper and if something looks bad on paper it typically looks even worse in the press. This trip feels like a ticking time bomb.”

  “I understand, Sir. As you know, we are and have been in the thick of it this whole time. We have seriously crippled the Ibagué Cartel’s funds with the financial forensics I conducted on computers and phones at both locations we raided. Not to mention the women we freed. Hopefully, the pipeline in sex trafficking through this cartel has been seriously disrupted,” Lauren politely reminded him.

  “The reason I called, sir, is to let you know we are back on Tazario’s trail. Even though we had a slight detour last night, our legat Special Agent Redford gave us a great lead,” Lauren informed Cooley.

  “Wait, I thought she was shot, and in some Venezuela-Colombia border town hospital getting patched up?” He questioned her with some frustration in his voice.

  “She wasn’t hurt that bad, and she is a badass…I mean she is pretty remarkable at her job, and her connections down here are on point.”

  “Okay, what now?” Cooley asked.

  “We just handed off our witness to local authorities, the chopper is fueling, we are eating a quick bite now, showering in the hanger locker room next.”

  “Lauren! I don’t need a play-by-play.”

  “Sorry. In about an hour we will be on our way to Neiva, south of Bogota. Ibagué and Cali Cartel members meet there from time to time. Tazario’s parents live there and have been under surveillance. We have it on good authority they missed an important event this morning.” Lauren had some excitement in her voice as she gave the Director some good news.

  “What event did they miss?”

  “The judging of Sanjuanero,” she said as noise from a nearby cargo plane engine powering up started to drown out everything.

  “The judging of what? Lauren?!” She was no longer responding, and only the loud whining of an engine could be heard now. Oh my God, this team is going to be the death of me, he thought as he slammed the phone down on his desk and started to head out of his office to make his morning rounds.

  ◆◆◆

  We came up short the last few times trying to get Tazario but were rewarded by finding Miguel “Tiki” Contrera’s cell phone at the hacienda in Casuarito. The phone was under a patio chair in a pool of blood. We figured he was missing and likely dead, but thanked the bastard for not having the sense to lock his phone.

  Lauren was having a field day tracking contacts in the cartel’s network, finances, stash houses, and more through the phone directory and memos left in the calendar. How this guy rose to the top is baffling. He laid out the entire cartel for us. If executed correctly and swiftly, within days a few billion in assets and drugs could be scooped up by Law Enforcement Agencies, the Colombian Military, and Federal Police.

  DEA and some US forces were already organizing and partnering with Colombia’s Security Forces in counter-narcotics operations to sweep through these new target locations with speed and brute force.

  Lauren was supposed to relay this good news to Cooley, but the call got cut short before she got to the good details.

  From her hospital bed, Agent Redford was the real star here. She knew what the names, locations, and little memos in the calendars all meant. Most of it was in cartel lingo and code, but again, basic and sloppy of Tiki. Agent Redford put us back on the trail letting us know that Tazario’s parents had a second house the authorities did not know about. It was not in Tazario’s hometown of Salento, but rather much further south in Neiva.

  Agent Redford and CIA Abbasi, while alive, had developed assets watching certain Cali members in each key city in Colombia.

  Her resources were tracking Cali activity this week, and a few key Cali members met with a key Ibagué member in Neiva. When Agent Redford passed along the sketch of Tazario, they confirmed it. Tazario was in Neiva.

  Airborne once again by helicopter, we were only a couple of hours away from Neiva. I slept the whole time while the morning sun hit my face through the Blackhawk fuselage door window.

  Now, as the city came into view from our perch in the sky, we made a hard bank to the East. We crossed the Magdalena River
in our descent away from the approaching Benito Salas Airport, known to locals as “La Manguita airport” taken from the old ranch the airport was built on many years ago.

  The city formed 400 years ago, and quickly became an important location in the trade routes between Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela as we know them today. The city had always been south of the old ranch where the current airport resides today. Since the construction of the airport in 1943, the city had grown slightly around and to the north of the runways.

  “Are we not landing at the airport?” I asked Arya as I wiped my eyes watching us peel away from the airport.

  “No. We are avoiding announcing our arrival and swinging to the East to come in from vacant pastures, forest, and brush leading up to the Military Base, Artillery Battalion Tenerife. We can land there, and the local soldiers can likely see their first Blackhawk,” she said with a smile.

  In comparison to other larger cities in Colombia, Neiva had a modest 350,000 occupants and most were out crowding the streets for their annual festival. This would make it difficult to navigate the streets and for our contacts to keep an eye on Tazario Zapata.

  Once we landed at the base, we had agreed to divide and conquer. It was time to be one step ahead of Tazario for once. Arya and Lauren were in one jeep with two commandos. Holliday and I were in the other jeep with two commandos. Off we went our separate ways.

  Arya and Lauren were already on the Sat phone, coordinating with local Federal Police to surround Tazario’s parents house and arrest the occupants. They were also tracking down locations fit for a private helicopter to have landed last night other than the airport. Military and Police did not pick anything up on radar or through visual reports.

  As Holliday and I got closer to the center of town, every other block had showings of the folk dance Sanjuanero, where participants dressed in a variety of beautiful costumes and competed in pairs for crowds and prizes. Even over the slow-moving traffic, you could hear the unmistakable sound of the trumpets in the traditional Colombian Bambuco song.