Sandy was glad that Linda Farragut convinced her to give up an evening, to slip off work early for a change and enjoy herself. Linda was the only one at CedarTech who seemed to be any fun at all. She told her about this party so it had to be worth the drive. And not a second too soon. Sandy’s social life was for shit. It had been that way ever since she graduated head of her class from Iowa City Community College. “Number one nerd!” the yearbook had dubbed her beneath a horrid photo from back when she wore black-rimmed glasses and her hair in a tight, prim bun. So be it. The associate degree in computer science was supposed to be her ticket to success in high-techdom. So far, though, it had been nothing but a drag.
“Stock options! Stock options!” the screen saver on the computer monitor in her cubicle shrieked at her all day, a constant reminder of why she did what she did.
Now it was finally time for this nerd to let her hair down. The hormones had been hemmed up for too long. Nobody knew her here. Linda had even begged off at the last minute. Sandy would be as anonymous as she had ever been in her life.
There it was! Lake Street. She made the turn abruptly with no signal and the guy with the bright headlights angrily blew his horn at her. At least his high beams were gone from her mirror and she could see much more clearly as she searched for the house.
Now, what was it? Two blocks up, large brick on the left.
OK, that's it. Cars in the drive and parked up and down both sides of the street. There was obviously a party there. Good to have a VW. Slide it right in there in that half-a-parking-space, behind the Lexus. She felt her heart beat a notch faster. Time to party.
Maybe there would be a nice guy there that Mom would like. Better still, maybe one she would absolutely hate.
She slammed the car door behind her. Sandy noticed for the first time in a while how fragrant the air was. One good thing about all the rain, the way the air always smelled clean and electric here. In the dark she could see that the aspen leaves had gone golden while she wasn’t looking and the maple leaves burning scarlet just behind them seemed to color the gray night. She was convinced she could even smell the sea, feel the fresh salt air, even though it was many miles to the west.
Sandy Holmes felt as alive as she had in months as she boldly strode up the walkway to the neat Victorian house. She punched the doorbell. Someone cracked it open it a couple of inches, as far as the chain would allow. She could see only one eye and a deeply black face, topped with wildly spiked blonde hair. There was a dog collar around the man’s neck.
"Yes?" he hissed.
“I…ummm…am Sandy, Linda's friend," she answered. He looked like plenty of other twenty-somethings she saw around Seattle. This one scared her, though.
“Linda?”
“Linda Farragut.”
He eyed her up and down through the crack in the door. She checked the house number again without backing off the little porch to make sure this was the right place.
"Yeah, I know Linda. But I don’t know you."
There was someone else behind him, someone with an easy, friendly voice, soft but still audible over the sound of a party that drifted out from somewhere toward the back of the house.
"Wait a minute, Jason. Where are your manners? Let the little lady in. She says she's Linda's friend. That's good enough for me."
Jason obeyed immediately, unchaining the door and opening it wide, beckoning her in with a regal sweep of his hand and a demented grin that showed chapped lips and bad teeth.
The disembodied voice behind him turned out to be a young, dark man with big, sad, brown eyes. He had a welcoming demeanor, a handsome smoothness that instantly had her weak-kneed. He took Sandy’s hand, nodded slightly, and welcomed her to his party.
“I’m glad you could make it, ‘Sandy-Linda’s-friend.’ Please, make yourself at home. I’m Carlos…Carlos Ramirez…and I’m delighted to meet you. Come on back and let me show you off to the other guests.”
There was something almost hypnotic about the man. He made her feel as if he was, indeed, profoundly happy that she had come. He held her hand in his, his arm around her shoulders as he gently guided her through the expensively but tastefully decorated home.
They reached the source of all the noise. There were at least a hundred other people milling about the big room at the rear of the house, but Carlos seemed to be playing host only to her now. For that moment, the pretty blonde computer programmer from Iowa City was the most important guest at Carlos Ramirez’ party.
He led her down the steps into the big open room. The other guests fell silent and looked his way.
“Everyone, welcome Sandy!”
They all raised their cocktails to her in a friendly enough gesture. After a polite pause, they resumed their chatter. Sandy couldn’t believe the crowd. It was as if someone had called Central Casting and asked them to send over a hundred “beautiful people” to populate the most glamorous party Sandy Holmes had ever seen.
A drink appeared in her hand from nowhere. She put it to her lips and took a sip. It tasted sweet, strangely cool on her tongue, but warm and spicy as it went down. Carlos ushered her into the midst of the guests and soon she was talking to someone tall and dark-haired and wearing a suit that cost as much as her VW Bug.
Thank you, Linda, she thought. Thank you for delivering me right into heaven!
She soon lost track of Carlos Ramirez. He was standing on the party’s fringes, occasionally acknowledging one of his guests, but mostly watching this new arrival with a small smile playing at his lips.
His dark eyes were no longer sad. They had gone stone cold evil.
Beautiful white trash, he thought. Look how shyly she flirts. How innocent she tries to look. Soon she’ll be snorting with the rest of them. And taking back word of the delights available here to the others, just as her friend has done for her.
I may have her before she is too wasted to appreciate it. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll allow Jason to enjoy her first. These blondes are especially good, his favorites, and he deserves the perks of the job.
Carlos watched her as she laughed. He watched as her self-consciousness left her as she sipped the last few drops of her second drink. She was deeply involved in conversation, cozying up to one of those prancing, WASP, captain-of-industry types that he so despised. Despised even after they inevitably became his best customers. He observed the way the slight, pink flush was spreading its way up her throat now, coloring in her cheeks, adding starlight to her eyes as the alcohol did its work on her.
That was nothing. He would soon have another refreshment to serve her and the rest of his guests. And it truly was magical.
The plan is going precisely as Juan de Santiago promised it would, he thought.
“Give them a taste of the new powder,” de Santiago had urged. “Once they have tasted, they are yours from now on. Yours and ours, Carlos.”
And if the new powder worked as predicted, it would be gold.
A snort or two and hooked for life! How was such a thing possible?
Carlos didn’t care about the specifics. The scope of what de Santiago and the others were doing was much too big for him to comprehend. He only knew how it affected him. Basic supply and demand. This new product would take care of the demand and de Santiago swore he and the others would soon have the supply problem solved.
It’s finally my time, Carlos thought.
After the struggles of the last few years, the small-time marijuana business, the miniscule-margin cocaine distribution, he was ready to reap the bounty this new, powerful powder of de Santiago’s promised.
The noise level in the room confirmed that his party guests were ready, too. Carlos stepped through the double doors and signaled to Jason.
It was time to bring in the new refreshment.
FINAL BEARING: Chapter 1
Juan de Santiago was a man who insisted that his world rotate smoothly on a well-oiled axis, that his organization operate as a properly maintained machine. He knew how the tiniest overlooked
detail could derail an operation. The smallest unobserved defect in a propeller could crack a bearing and seize up a perfectly good engine. A minor flaw in an otherwise perfect plan could doom the efforts of hundreds.
And Juan de Santiago was not a man who would tolerate imperfection.
Now, on this beautiful morning here in his beloved mountains, he could only watch helplessly as the awful result of some unknown minor flaw in an otherwise faultless plan played out below him.
“Bastard Americans!” he spat, his hot, angry words barely audible over the strident buzzing of the giant black insects that danced above the mountain field below him. “And that son of a dog, El Presidente Guitteriz!”
The smaller man standing beside him took a short, strategic step backward. He wanted to be out of his leader’s reach. He could feel the heat of the man’s fury. He knew only too well how that rage could sometimes manifest itself.
Roaring flames raced through Juan de Santiago's best coca fields. The crop, mere weeks from harvest, was now little more than a fog of thick, black smoke, being shoved up the mountain slopes and into the jungle by a gentle tropical breeze. That breeze would usually bring him the fragrance of the wild orchids that grew among the trees below the field.
Not today. There was the foul odor of the imperialists’ destruction.
The fragrance was one reason de Santiago loved to make the long, treacherous hike through the mountains over the ancient Inca trail from his base camp. This was his boyhood home. It rejuvenated him to come here.
He would often trek to this high clearing just before the harvest. He could see for himself the bounty God had sent him to help him free his people. He could watch some of those people as they worked below. He would go down and join the peons, walk among them, honor them with his presence, embrace each of them, thank them for their sacrifice and loyalty.
He now watched as a half dozen Black Hawk helicopters reloaded the Colombian troops and their American advisors. Their morning's work was completed. There was no mistaking where the choppers came from. The U. S. flag unashamedly marked each of them. Four Apache ‘copters still buzzed overhead. Guarding the men below, they scouted about in the surrounding jungle for any rebel troops that still lurked there.
Most of de Santiago’s men had fled at the first thumping of the approaching helicopters. They had taken to the thick underbrush. Their loyalty to the Marxist cause and to their leader had given way to self-preservation. Their leader angrily kicked at the dirt. His perfectly polished boots now covered with dust, he spouted a continuous litany of deep-throated oaths. His swarthy face grew even darker with rage as a tic contorted his right cheek and eye.
That was not merely a cash crop going up in smoke down there. The fields represented the financing he needed to continue the revolution. It was a war that he was convinced would eventually return this beautiful land to him, to his people.
The Americans and their “war on drugs” had taken on a ferocious new intensity in the last year. It seemed El Presidente had unlimited resources. With the help of the yanqui military and their fancy machines, the president seemed to have the strength to break both of de Santiago’s backbones, his revolution and the coca fields that financed it.
He had received the reports from Cartagena. He had heard the breathless reports from the mouths of those who had seen it for themselves. The Americans filled every wharf with their heavily laden ships, unloading more troops, more weapons and more supplies every day. In only a few months, their advisors had transformed El Presidente's ragtag troops into an effective fighting force, putting the rebels on the run as they torched the coca fields. Even more disheartening was the word of the surveillance satellites overhead that were now trained on de Santiago’s precious jungle mountains, never blinking, never missing anything.
De Santiago would build a processing factory. Build it even in the most remote jungle clearing, and the government troops would be there before the first shipment of silvery powder was prepared. Government troops and their American advisors met many truckloads of ammunition as if they had been sent an invitation. Or if the rebels sowed a field in some remote mountain valley and carefully nurtured it, they would soon see the fine coca devoured by flames when it was so tantalizingly close to harvest.
His people in Bogota whispered of some new organization he had never heard of. Something called the Joint Drug Interdiction Agency, a seamless coalition of the imperialists who had finally come together to fight those who would use the coca to win the righteous war of the people. Beyond the name, little was known about this alliance. If it weren't so obvious that the Americans and their allies were doing something radically different, de Santiago would have dismissed this JDIA as simply a myth. If one could not see it, feel it, smell it, it likely did not exist.
Juan de Santiago stared at the choppers. He felt the heat of the flames they had set loose. He smelled the stench of the smoldering revolution this JDIA seemed hell-sent to destroy.
“JDIA must be stopped! But how?” de Santiago muttered to himself.
They had no idea where its headquarters might be, its communications facilities, or its leadership.
De Santiago had been certain this series of fields, high in the Colombian Andes and down a narrow mountain valley, was safely hidden. No roads approached here. Only a steep path over the mountains that he and his bodyguard and a small cadre of his men had just hiked. Even the damned satellites should not have been able to find these fields. They were almost always shrouded in clouds.
De Santiago's experts had told him that the ridge was too high for a helicopter to cross. The only way one could approach these high fields, they had maintained, was to wind their way up the narrow valley. That’s why the lookouts were deployed down that way. That’s why the thin but strong cables had been stretched across to snare them like a spider’s web should they venture up to the high fields. But the helicopters had unquestionably flown over the ridge three hours ago, dead certain of their target. They had come in fast, over the high ridge to the northeast, as surely as the sun had topped the mountains that morning.
De Santiago’s proudest venture had been caught completely off guard. That was not the mark of a flawless operation.
The surprise and the overwhelming firepower had been too much for the rebel peons who had been working in the fields. Most of them took to the jungle. The few who stayed to fight quickly gave their lives to the cause. The firefight was short and intense. The Apaches scurried back and forth across the valley, their 20mm chain guns beating out a staccato tattoo aimed at anything that moved.
El Presidente's troops fast-roped out of the Black Hawks into the fields below, showing more professionalism than de Santiago had ever seen from them before. On the ground, the government soldiers fanned out smartly and efficiently to establish protected landing zones for the choppers that were still hovering overhead. By the time the first Black Hawk flared out to land, the fight was over. They set to torching the crop, shouting to each other and laughing like truant schoolboys up to some kind of mischief.
“It is most difficult to kill a snake if its head cannot be severed,” de Santiago said aloud but to himself.
Juan de Santiago and Guzman, his trusted bodyguard, had been approaching the nearest mountainside that overlooked the field, a half-dozen troops close behind. They followed the narrow trail to this serene, beautiful overlook, to observe the crop, to watch the peons work, to maybe smell the perfume of the orchids. They heard the attack as it began. They knew immediately what the hellish racket was. There was no mistaking the yakking of those guns, the rhythmic flutter of the ‘copter blades, the anguished screams of the brave peons. In awful frustration, he and the others had run to the overlook and watched most of the three-hour operation from the cover of jungle.
De Santiago knew he was the most hunted man in all of Colombia. If those bastards down there on the valley floor only knew he was there, on the side of this mountain watching them the whole time, they would be in hot pursuit. Th
ey would not be laughing, boasting to each other of their victory. Now they climbed back into their helicopters and prepared to leave behind all the damage they had done. Not only to the crop, but to the people’s struggle.
Spurred by their sniggering, de Santiago’s anger reached a new pitch. He stomped the ground again. Guzman could hear him grinding his teeth. He clenched his jaw even tighter as he spoke, forcing the words out one at a time as if he was biting them off and spitting them out.
“I will show these damned dogs that I do not scamper away and hide in fright like a rabbit!”
He spun on a heel and, in one quick motion, snatched the Starburst missile launcher from Guzman's back before the bodyguard even realized what was happening. He locked the optical sight on a Black Hawk down below that was just lifting off and pulled the launch trigger. Flame shot out the back of the launch tube, scorching the dense vegetation on the slope behind him while the troops standing nearby scattered to get out of the way.
The British-made anti-aircraft missile burst out the front of the tube and flew arrow straight toward the hovering chopper. Despite his rage, de Santiago knew what he was doing. He kept the site locked onto the chopper as it rose and banked, ready to climb and head back over the ridge. He kept the reticle locked on, the launcher sending tracking data down the thin copper filament that still connected him to the missile.
“Madre de dios!” the startled Guzman shouted.
His leader's sudden crazy move had caught the seasoned warrior totally by surprise. Guzman…everyone knew him only by the one name…tended to always fight and defend using logic, and de Santiago’s totally emotional and completely illogical response to what he had been watching had been unexpected. Now, Guzman was forced to react instinctively, impulsively.
He turned to see the scorched vegetation on the uphill slope smoldering, already sending up thin tendrils of smoke. He ripped off his campaign hat and began to beat out the flames before the Apache pilots with their infrared sights could spot the smoke and retaliate.
Operation Golden Dawn Page 30
