“Cops? Courts?”
“The locals have tried. Lots of dead cops, lots of dead judges to prove it,” Larson said with a shake of the head. “Takes a lot for people to keep plugging away when they can’t see any results. Then toss in the money angle. How often can a man walk away from a suitcase full of tax-free hundred-dollar bills? Especially when the alternative is certain death for himself and his family. The cartel is smart, my friend, and it’s patient, and it has all the resources it needs, and it’s ruthless enough to scare a veteran Nazi. All in all, that’s some enemy.” Larson pointed to a gray smudge in the distance. “There’s Medellín. Drugs ‘R’Us, all in that one little city in the valley. One nuke could settle things, say about two megatons, air-burst four thousand feet AGL. I wonder if the rest of the country would really mind… ?”
That earned Larson a glance from his passenger. Larson lived here, knew a lot of these people, and even liked some, as he’d just said. But his hatred for them occasionally peeked through his professional detachment. The best sort of duplicity. This kid had a real future in the Agency, Clark decided. Brains and passion both. If he knew how to maintain a proper balance of the two, he could go places. Clark reached into his bag for a camera and a pair of binoculars. His interest wasn’t in the city itself.
“Nice places, aren’t they?”
The drug chieftains were growing increasingly security-conscious. The hilltops around the city were all being cleared of trees. Clark counted over a dozen new homes already. Homes, he thought with a snort. Castles was more like it. Walled fortresses. Enormous dwelling structures surrounded by low walls, surrounded in turn by hundreds of yards of clear, steep slopes. What people found picturesque about Italian villages and Bavarian castles was always the elegant setting. Always on the top of a hill or mountain. You could easily imagine the work that went into such a beautiful place – clearing the trees, hauling the stone blocks up the slopes, and ending up with a commanding view of the countryside that extended for miles. But the castles and villages hadn’t been built in such places for fun, and neither had these houses. The heights meant that no one could approach them unobserved. The cleared ground around those houses was known in terse military nomenclature as a killing zone, a clear field of fire for automatic weapons. Each house had a single road up to a single gate. Each house had a helipad for a fast evacuation. The wall around each was made of stone that would stop any bullet up to fifty caliber. His binoculars showed that immediately inside each wall was a gravel or concrete path for guards to walk. A company of trained infantrymen would have no easy time assaulting one of these haciendas. Maybe a helicopter assault, supported by mortars and gunships… Christ, Clark thought to himself, what am I thinking about?
“What about house plans?”
“No problem. Three architectural firms have designed these places. Security isn’t all that good there. Besides, I’ve been in that one for a party – just two weeks ago, as a matter of fact. I guess that’s one area they’re not too smart in. They like to show their places off. I can get you floor plans. The satellite overheads will show guard strength, vehicle garaging, all that sort of thing.”
“They do.” Clark smiled.
“Can you tell me exactly what you’re here for?”
“Well, they want an evaluation of the physical characteristics of the terrain.”
“I can see that. Hell, I could do that easy enough from memory.” Larson’s question was not so much curiosity as his slight offense at not being asked to do this job himself.
“You know how it is at Langley,” was the statement Clark used to dismiss the observation.
You’re a pilot, Clark didn’t say. You’ve never humped afield pack in the boonies. I have. If Larson had known his background, he could have made an intelligent guess, but what Clark did for the Agency, and what he’d done before joining, were not widely known. In fact, they were hardly known at all.
“Need-to-know, Mr. Larson,” Clark said after another moment.
“Roger that,” the pilot agreed over the intercom.
“Let’s do a photo pass.”
“I’ll do a touch-and-go at the airport first. We want to make it look good.”
“Fair enough,” Clark agreed.
“What about the refining sites?” Clark asked after they headed back to El Dorado.
“Mainly southwest of here,” Larson answered, turning the Beech away from the valley. “I’ve never seen one myself – I’m not in that part of the business, and they know it. If you want to scout them out, you go around at night with imaging IR equipment, but they’re hard to track in on. Hell, they’re portable, easy to set up, and easy to move. You can load the whole assembly on a medium truck and set it up ten miles away the next day.”
“Not that many roads…”
“What you gonna do, search every truck that comes along?” Larson asked. “Besides, you can man-pack it if you want. Labor’s cheap down here. The opposition is smart, and adaptable.”
“How much does the local army get involved?” Clark had been fully briefed, of course, but he also knew that a local perspective might not agree with Washington’s – and might be correct.
“They’ve tried. Biggest problem they have is sustaining their forces – their helicopters don’t spend twenty percent of their time in the air. That means they don’t do many ops. It means that if anyone gets hit he might not get medical attention very fast – and that hurts performance when they do run ops. Even then – you can guess what the government pays a captain, say. Now imagine that somebody meets that captain at a local bar, buys him a drink, and talks to him. He tells the captain that he might want to be in the southwestern corner of his sector tomorrow night – well, anywhere but the northeastern sector, okay? If he decides to patrol one part of his area, but not another, he gets a hundred thousand dollars. Okay, the other side has enough money that they can pay him up front just to see if he’ll cooperate. Seed money, kind of. Once he shows he can be bought, they settle down to a smaller but regular payment. Also, the other side has enough product that they can let him do some real seizures once in a while, once they know he’s theirs, to make him look good. Someday that captain grows up and becomes a colonel who controls a lot more territory… It’s not because they’re bad people, it’s just that things are so fucking hopeless. Legal institutions are fragile down here and – hell, look at the way things are at home, for Christ’s sake. I -”
“I’m not criticizing anybody, Larson,” Clark said. “Not everybody can take on a hopeless mission and keep at it.” He turned to look out the side window and smiled to himself. “You have to be a little crazy to do that.”
5. Beginnings
CHAVEZ AWOKE WITH the headache that accompanies initial exposure to a thin atmosphere, the sort that begins just behind the eyes and radiates around the circumference of one’s head. For all that, he was grateful. Throughout his career in the Army, he’d never failed to awaken a few minutes before reveille. It allowed him an orderly transition from sleep to wakefulness and made the waking-up process easier to tolerate. He turned his head left and right, inspecting his environment in the orange twilight that came through the uncurtained windows.
The building would be called a barracks by anyone who did not regularly live in one. To Chavez it seemed more of a hunting camp, a guess that was wholly accurate. Perhaps two thousand square feet in the bunk room, he judged, and he counted a total of forty single metal-frame bunks, each with a thin GI mattress and brown GI blanket. The sheets, however, were fitted, with elastic at the corners; so he decided that there wouldn’t be any of the bouncing-quarter bullshit, which was fine with him. The floor was bare, waxed pine, and the vaulted ceiling was supported by smoothed-down pine trunks in lieu of finished beams. It struck the sergeant that in hunting season people – rich people – actually paid to live like this: proof positive that money didn’t automatically confer brains on anyone. Chavez didn’t like barracks life all that much, and the only reason he’d not opted for a private apartment in or near Fort Ord was his desire to save up for that Corvette. To complete the illusion, at the foot of each bed was a genuine Army-surplus footlocker.
He thought about getting up on his elbows to look out the windows, but knew that the time for that would come soon enough. It had been a two-hour drive from the airport, and on arrival each man had been assigned a bunk in the building. The rest of the bunks had already been filled with sleeping, snoring men. Soldiers, of course. Only soldiers snored like that. It had struck him at the time as ominous. The only reason why young men would be asleep and snoring just after ten at night was fatigue. This was no vacation spot. Well, that was no surprise either.