“Whoever they may be, what do you propose to do about them?”
“We will hunt them down and kill them, of course,” Cortez said matter-of-factly. “We need about two hundred armed men, but certainly we can assemble such a force. I have people scouting the area already. I need your permission to gather the necessary forces together to sweep the hills properly.”
“You’ll get it. And what of the Untiveros bombing?”
“Someone loaded four hundred kilos of a very high-grade explosive into the back of his truck. Very cleverly done, jefe. In any other vehicle it would have been impossible, but that truck…”
“Sí! The tires each weighed more than that. Who did it?”
“Not the Americans, nor any of their hirelings,” Cortez replied positively.
“But -”
“Jefe, think for a moment,” Félix suggested. “Who could possibly have had access to the truck?”
Escobedo chewed on that one for a while. They were in the back of his stretch Mercedes. It was an old 600, lovingly maintained and in new-car condition. Mercedes-Benz is the type of car favored by people who need to worry about violent enemies. Already heavy, and with a powerful engine, it easily carried over a thousand pounds of Kevlar armor embedded in vital areas, and thick polycarbonate windows that would stop a .30-caliber machine-gun round. Its tires were filled with foam, not air, so that a puncture wouldn’t flatten them – at least not very quickly. The fuel tank was filled with a honeycombed metal lattice that could not prevent a fire, but would prevent a more dangerous explosion. Fifty meters ahead and behind were BMW M3s, fast, powerful cars filled with armed men, much in the way that chiefs of state had lead- and chase-cars for security purposes.
“One of us, you think?” Escobedo asked after a minute’s contemplation.
“It is possible, jefe.” Cortez’s tone of voice said that it was more than merely possible. He was pacing his disclosures carefully, keeping an eye on the roadside signs.
“But who?”
“That is a question for you to answer, is it not? I am an intelligence officer, not a detective.” That Cortez got away with his outrageous lie was testimony to Escobedo’s paranoia.
“And the missing aircraft?”
“Also unknown,” Cortez reported. “Someone was watching the airfields, perhaps American paramilitary teams, but more likely the same mercenaries who are now in the mountains. They probably sabotaged aircraft somehow, possibly with the connivance of the airport guards. I speculate that when they left, they killed off the guards so that no one could prove what they had been doing, then booby-trapped the fuel dumps to make it appear to be something else entirely. A very clever operation, but one to which we could have adapted except for the assassinations in Bogotá.” Cortez took a deep breath before going on.
“The attack on the Americans in Bogotá was a mistake, jefe. It forced the Americans to change what had been a nuisance operation to one which threatens our activities directly. They have suborned someone in the organization, executing their own wish for revenge through the ambition or anger of one of your own senior colleagues.” Cortez spoke throughout in the same quiet, reasoned voice that he’d used to brief his seniors in Havana, like a tutor to an especially bright student. His method of delivery reminded people of a doctor, and was an exceedingly effective way of persuading people, particularly Latins, who are given to polemics but conversely respect those who control their passions. By reproaching Escobedo for the death of the Americans – Escobedo did not like to be reproached; Cortez knew it; Escobedo knew that Cortez knew it – Félix merely added to his own credibility. “The Americans have foolishly said so themselves, perhaps in a clumsy attempt to mislead us, speaking of a ‘gang war’ within the organization. That is a trick the Americans invented, by the way, to use the truth to deny the truth. It is clever, but they have used it too often. Perhaps they feel that the organization is not aware of this trick, but anyone in the intelligence community knows of it.” Cortez was winging it, and had just made that up – but, he thought, it certainly sounded good. And it had the proper effect. Escobedo was looking out through the thick windows of the car, his mind churning over the new thought.
“Who, I wonder…”
“That is something I cannot answer. Perhaps you and Señor Fuentes can make some progress on that tonight.” The hardest part for Cortez was to keep a straight face. For all his cleverness, for all his ruthlessness, el jefe was a child to be manipulated once you knew the right buttons to push.
The road traced down the floor of a valley. There was also a rail line, and both followed a path carved into the rock by a mountain-fed river. From a strictly tactical point of view, it was not something to be comfortable with, Cortez knew. Though he had never been a soldier – aside from the usual paramilitary classes in the Cuban school system – he recognized the disadvantage of low ground. You could be seen a long way off from people on the heights. The highway signs assumed a new and ominous significance now. Félix knew everything he needed to know about the car. It had been modified by the world’s leading provider of armored transport, and was regularly checked by technicians from that firm. The windows were replaced twice annually, because sunlight altered the crystalline structure of the polycarbonate – all the faster near the equator and at high altitude. The windows would stop a 7.62 NATO machine-gun bullet, and the Kevlar sheets in the doors and around the engines could, under favorable circumstances, stop larger rounds than that. He was still nervous, but through force of will did not allow himself to react visibly to the danger.
“Who might it be… ?” Escobedo asked as the car came around a sweeping turn.
There were five teams of two men each, gunners and loaders. They were armed with West German MG3 squad machine guns, which the Colombian Army had just adopted because it used the same 7.62mm round as their standard infantry weapon, the G3, also of German manufacture. These five had recently been “stolen” – actually purchased from a greedy supply sergeant – out of an army depot. Based on the earlier German MG-42 of World War II fame, the MG3 retained the older weapon’s 1,200-round-per-minute cyclic rate of fire-twenty rounds per second. The gun positions were spaced thirty meters apart, with two guns tasked to engage the chase car, two on the lead car, but only one on the Mercedes. Cortez didn’t trust the car’s armor quite that much. He looked at the digital clock. They were exactly on time. Escobedo had a fine set of drivers. But then, Untiveros had had a fine set of servants, too.
On the muzzle of each gun was a cone-shaped extension called a flash-hider. Often misunderstood by the layman, its purpose was to shield the flash from the gunner – to prevent him from being blinded by his own shots. Hiding the flash from anyone else is a physical impossibility.
The gunners began firing at the same instant, and five separate yard-long cylinders of pure white flame appeared on the right side of the road. From each muzzle flash sprang a line of tracers, allowing the gunners to walk their fire right into their targets without the need to use the metal sights on their weapons.
None of the occupants of the cars heard the sound of the guns, but all did hear the sound of the impacts – at least those who lived long enough.
Escobedo’s body went as rigid as a bar of steel when he saw the yellow line of tracers attach itself to the leading M-3. That car was not as heavily armored as his. The taillights wavered left, then right, and then the car left the road at an angle, rolling over like one of his son’s toys. Before that had happened, both he and Cortez felt the impacts of twenty rounds on their own car. It sounded like hail on a tin roof. But it was 150-grain bullets, not hail, impacting steel and Kevlar, not tin. His driver, well trained and always nervously alert, fishtailed the long Mercedes for a moment to avoid the BMW ahead, at the same time flooring the accelerator. The six-liter Mercedes engine responded at once – it, too, was protected by armor-doubling both horsepower and torque in a second and hurling all of the passengers back in their seats. By this time Escobedo’s head had turned to see the threat, and it seemed that the tracers were aimed straight at his face, stopped by some apparent miracle by the thick windows – which, he saw, were breaking under the impact.
Cortez hurled his own body against Escobedo’s, knocking him down to the floor. Neither man had time to speak a word. The car had been doing seventy miles per hour when the first round was fired. It was already approaching ninety, escaping from the kill zone more rapidly than the gunners could adjust fire as the car body absorbed a total of over forty hits. In two minutes, Cortez looked up.