Cortez had been less than two hundred meters from the explosion, but being downhill from it saved his life since most of the fragments sailed well over his head. The blast wave was bad enough, hurling his windshield backward into his face, where it fractured but didn’t shatter, held together by the polymer filler of the safety-glass sandwich. His car was flipped on its back, but he managed to crawl free even before his mind had decided what his eyes had just witnessed. It was fully six seconds before the word “explosion” occurred to him. At that his reactions were far more rapid than that of the security guards, half of whom were dead or dying in any case. His first considered action was to draw his pistol and advance toward the house.
Except that there wasn’t a house there anymore. He was too deafened to hear the screams of the injured. Several guards wandered aimlessly about with their guns held ready – for what, they didn’t know. The ones from the far corner of the perimeter wall were the least affected. The body of the house had absorbed most of the blast, protecting them from everything but the projectiles, which had been quite lethal enough.
“Bravo Whiskey, this is Zulu X-Ray requesting BDA, over.” BDA was bomb-damage assessment. Larson keyed his microphone one last time.
“I evaluate CEP as zero, I repeat, zero, with high-order detonation. Score this one-four-point-oh. Over.”
“Roger that. Out.” Jensen switched his radio off again. “You know,” he said over the intercom, “I can remember back when I was a lieutenant I made a Med cruise on Kennedy and us officers were afraid to go into some spaces because the troops were fuckin’ around with drugs.”
“Yeah,” the bombardier/navigator answered. “Fuckin’ drugs. Don’t worry, skipper. I ain’t likely to have a conscience attack. Hey, the White House says it’s okay, that means that it’s really okay.”
“Yep.” Jensen lapsed back into silence. He’d proceed on his current heading until he was out of El Dorado’s radar coverage, then turn southwest for the Ranger. It really was a pretty night. He wondered how the air-defense exercise was going…
Cortez had little experience with explosions, and the vagaries of such events were new to him. For example, the fountain in front of the house was still running. The electrical power cables to the casa were buried and unharmed, and the breaker box inside hadn’t been totally destroyed. He lowered his face into the water to clear it. When he came back up, he felt almost normal except for the ache in his head.
There had been a dozen or so vehicles inside the wall when the explosion happened. About half of them were shredded, and their gas tanks had ruptured, illuminating the area with isolated fires. Untiveros’ new helicopter was a smashed wreck against the fractured wall. There were other people rushing about. Cortez stood still and started thinking.
He remembered seeing a truck, one with huge wheels, parked right next to… He walked over that way. Though the entire three-hectare area around the house was littered with rubble, here it was clear, he saw as he approached. Then he saw the crater, fully two meters deep and six meters wide.
Car bomb.
A big one. Perhaps a thousand kilos, he thought, looking away from the hole while his brain went to work.
“I think that’s all we really need to see,” Clark observed. He made a last look through the eyepiece of the GLD and switched it off. Repacking took less than three minutes.
“Who do you suppose that is?” Larson asked while he put his backpack on. He handed the Noctron over to Clark.
“Must be the guy who showed up late in the BMW. Suppose he’s important or something?”
“Don’t know. Maybe next time.”
“Right.” Clark led the way down the hill.
It was the Americans, of course. CIA, without doubt. They’d made some financial arrangements and somehow managed to place a ton of explosives in the back of that monstrous truck. Cortez admired the touch. It was Fernandez’s truck – he’d heard about it but never seen it. Now I never will, he thought. Fernandez had loved his new truck and had kept it parked right in front of… That had to be it. The Americans had gotten lucky. Okay, he thought, how did they do it? They wouldn’t have gotten their own hands involved, of course. So they must have arranged for someone else… who? Somebody – no, more than one, at least four or five from M-19 or PARC… ? Again, that made sense. Might it have been indirect? Have the Cubans or KGB arrange it. With all the changes between East and West, might CIA have managed to get such cooperation? Unlikely, Félix thought, but possible. A direct attack on high government officials such as the Cartel had executed was the sort of thing to generate the most unlikely of bedfellows.
Was the bomb placement here an accident? Might the Americans have learned of the meeting?
There were voices from inside the rubble pile that had once been a castle. Security people were nosing around, and Cortez joined them. Untiveros’ family had been here. His wife and two children, and a staff of eight or more people. Probably treated them like serfs, Cortez thought. The Cartel chieftains all did. Perhaps he’d offended one greatly – gone after a daughter, maybe. They all did that. Droit du seigneur. A French term, but one which the chieftains understood. The fools, Cortez told himself. Was there no perversion beneath them?
Security guards were already scrambling through the rubble. It was amazing that anyone could be alive in there. His hearing was coming back now. He caught the shrill screams of some poor bastard. He wondered what the body count would be. Perhaps. Yes. He turned and walked back to his overturned BMW. It was leaking gasoline out the filler cap, but Cortez reached in and got his cellular phone. He walked twenty meters from the car before switching it on.
“Jefe, this is Cortez. There has been an explosion here.”
It was ironic, Ritter thought, that his first notification of the mission’s success should come from another CAPER intercept. The really good news, the NSA guys reported, was that they now had a voiceprint on Cortez. That greatly improved their chances of locating him. It was better than nothing, the DDO thought as his visitor arrived for the second time today.
“We missed Cortez,” he told Admiral Cutter. “But we got d’Alejandro, Fernández, Wagner, and Untiveros, plus the usual collateral damage.”
“What do you mean?”
Ritter looked again at the satellite photo of the house. He’d have to get a new one to quantify the damage. “I mean there were a bunch of security guards around, and we probably got a bunch of them. Unfortunately there was also Untiveros’s family – wife, a couple of kids, and various domestic servants.”
Cutter snapped erect in his chair. “You didn’t tell me anything about that! This was supposed to be a surgical strike.”
Ritter looked up in considerable annoyance. “Well, for Christ’s sake, Jimmy! What the hell do you expect? You are still a naval officer, aren’t you? Didn’t anybody ever tell you that there are always extraneous people standing around? We used a bomb, remember? You don’t do surgery with bombs, despite what all the ‘experts’ say. Grow up!” Ritter himself took no pleasure from the extraneous deaths, but it was a cost of doing business – as the Cartel’s own members well understood.
“But I told the President -”
“The President told me that I had a hunting license, and no bag limit. This is my op to run, remember?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way! What if the papers get hold of it? This is cold-blooded murder!”
“As opposed to taking out the druggies and their shooters? That’s murder, too, isn’t it? Or it would be, if the President hadn’t said that the gloves were off. You said it’s a war. The President told us to treat it as a war. Okay, we are. I’m sorry there were extraneous people around, but, damn it, there always are. If there were a way to bag these jokers without hurting innocent people, we’d use it – but there isn’t.” To say that Ritter was amazed didn’t begin to explain matters. This guy was supposed to be a professional military officer. The taking of human life was part of his job description. Of course, Ritter told himself, Cutter’d spent most of his career driving a desk in the Pentagon – he probably hadn’t seen much blood since he learned how to shave. A pussycat hiding in tiger’s stripes. No, Ritter corrected himself. Just a pussy. Thirty years in uniform and he’d allowed himself to forget that real weapons killed people somewhat less precisely than in the movies. Some professional officer. And he was advising the President on issues of national security. Great.