“Nice and flat,” Chavez agreed with a yawn. “Gonna be a hot fucker down here, though.”
“Have one o’ these, ‘mano.” Vega passed over an envelope of Gatorade concentrate.
“All right!” Chavez loved the stuff. He tore open the envelope and dumped the contents into his canteen, swishing it around to get the powder mixed in properly. “Captain know about this?”
“Nah – why worry him?”
“Right.” Chavez pocketed the empty envelope. “Shame they don’t make instant beer, isn’t it?” They traded a chuckle. Neither man would do something so foolish, but both agreed that a cold beer wasn’t all that bad an idea in the abstract.
“Flip you for first sleep,” Vega said next. It turned out that he had a single U.S. quarter for the task. They’d each been issued five hundred dollars’ equivalent in local currency, but all in paper, since coins make noise. It came up heads. Chavez got to stand watch on the gun while Vega curled up for sleep.
Ding settled down in the position. Julio had selected a good one. It was behind a spreading bush of one kind or another, with a shallow berm of dirt in front of him that could stop bullets but didn’t obstruct his view, and the SAW had a good field of fire out to nearly three hundred meters. Ding checked that the weapon had a round chambered, but that the selector switch was also on “safe.” He took out his binoculars to survey the area.
“How do things look, Sergeant?” Captain Ramirez asked quietly.
“Nothing moving at all, sir. Why don’t you catch some Zs? We’ll keep watch for ya’.” Officers, Ding knew, have to be looked after. And if sergeants didn’t do it, who would?
Ramirez surveyed the position. It had been well selected. Both men had eaten and refreshed themselves as good soldiers do, and would be well rested by sundown – over ten hours away. The captain patted Chavez on the shoulder before returning to his own position.
“All ready, sir,” the communications sergeant – Ingeles – reported. The satellite-radio antenna was set up. It was only two bits of steel, about the size and shape of grade-school rulers, linked together in a cross, with a bit of wire for a stand. Ramirez checked his watch. It was time to transmit.
“VARIABLE, this is KNIFE, over.” The signal went twenty-two thousand miles to a geosynchronous communications satellite, which relayed it back down toward Panama. It took about one-third of a second, and two more seconds passed before the reply came down. The circuit was agreeably free of static.
“KNIFE, this is VARIABLE. Your signal is five by five. Over.”
“We are in position, Checkpoint RASP. All is quiet, nothing to report, over.”
“Roger, copy. Out.”
In the hilltop communications van, Mr. Clark occupied a seat in the corner by the door. He wasn’t running the operation – far from it – but Ritter wanted his tactical expertise available in case it was needed. On the wall opposite the racks of communications gear was a large tactical map which showed the squads and their various checkpoints. All had made them on schedule. At least whoever had set this operation up had known – or listened to people who did – what men in the bush could and could not do. The expectations for time and distance were reasonable.
That’s nice for a change, Clark thought. He looked around the van. Aside from the two communicators, there were two senior people from the Directorate of Operations, neither of whom had what Clark would call expertise in this particular sort of operation – though they were close to Ritter and dependable. Well, he admitted, people with my sort of experience are mostly retired now.
Clark’s heart was out there in the field. He’d never operated in the Americas, at least not in the jungles of the Americas, but for all that he’d “been there” – out in the boonies, alone as a man could be, your only lifeline back to friendly forces a helicopter that might or might not show, tethered by an invisible thread of radio energy. The radios were far more reliable now; that was one positive change. For what it was worth. If something went wrong, these radios would not, however, bring in a flight of “fast-movers” whose afterburning engines rattled the sky and whose bombloads shook the ground fifteen minutes after you called for help. No, not this time.
Christ, do they know that? Do they really know what that fact means?
No, they don’t. They can’t. They’re all too young. Kids. They’re all little kids. That they were older, bigger, and tougher than his own children was for the moment beside the point. Clark was a man who’d operated in Cambodia and Vietnam – North and South. Always with small teams of men with guns and radios, almost always trying to stay hidden, looking for information and trying to get the hell away without being noticed. Mostly succeeding, but some of them had been very, very close.
“So far, so good,” the senior Operations guy observed as he reached for a coffee mug. His companion nodded agreement.
Clark merely raised an eyebrow. And what the hell do you two know about this?
The Director, Moira saw, was excited about TARPON. As well he might be, she thought as she made her notes. It would take about a week, but already the seizure notices were being scratched in. Four Justice Department specialists had spent more than a day going through the report Mark Bright had delivered. Electronic banking, she realized, had made the job much easier. Somewhere in the Department of Justice there was someone who could access the computerized records of every bank in the world. Or maybe not in Justice. Maybe one of the intelligence agencies, or maybe a private contractor, because the legality of the matter was slightly vague. In any case, comparing records of the Securities and Exchange Commission with the numerous bank transactions, they had already identified the drug money used to finance the projects in which the “victim” – at least his family had been real victims, Moira told herself – had sought to launder it. She’d never known the wheels of justice to turn so quickly.
What arrogant people they must be, thinking they can invest and launder their dirty money right here! Juan was right about them and their arrogance, Moira thought. Well, this would wipe the smiles off their faces. There was at least six hundred million dollars of equity that the government could seize, and that didn’t count the profits that they expected to make when the properties were rolled over. Six hundred million dollars! The amount was astounding. Sure, she’d heard about how “billions” in drug money poured out of the country, but the actual estimates were about as reliable as weather reports. It was plain, the Director said in dictation, that the Cartel was unhappy with its previous laundering arrangements and/or found that bringing the cash directly back to their own country created as many problems as it solved. Therefore, it appeared that after laundering the primary funds – plus making a significant profit on their money – they were setting up their accounts in such a way as to establish an enormous investment trust fund which could legitimately begin to take over all commercial businesses in their home country or any other country in which they wished to establish a political or economic position. What made this interesting, Emil went on, was that it might presage an attempt to launder themselves – the old American criminal phraseology: “to go legit” – to a degree that would be fully acceptable in the local, Latin American political context.
“How soon do you need this, sir?” Mrs. Wolfe asked.
“I’m seeing the President tomorrow morning.”
“Copies?”
“Five, all numbered. Moira, this is code-word material,” he reminded her.
“Soon as I finish, I’ll eat the computer disk,” she promised. “You have Assistant Director Grady coming in for lunch, and the AG canceled on dinner tomorrow night. He has to go out to San Francisco.”
“What does the Attorney General want in San Francisco?”
“His son decided to get married on short notice.”
“That’s short, all right,” Jacobs agreed. “How far away are you from that?”
“Not very. Your trip to Colombia – do you know when yet, so I can rework your appointments?”
“Sorry, still don’t know. It shouldn’t hurt the schedule too much, though. It’ll be a weekend trip. I’ll get out early Friday, and I ought to be back by lunch on the following Monday. So it shouldn’t hurt anything important.”
“Oh, okay.” Moira left the room with a smile.
“Good morning.” The United States Attorney was a thirty-seven-year-old man named Edwin Davidoff. He, planned to be the first Jewish United States senator from Alabama in living memory. A tall, fit, two hundred pounds of former varsity wrestler, he’d parlayed a Presidential appointment into a reputation as a tough, effective, and scrupulously honest champion of the people. When handling civil-rights cases, his public statement always referred to the Law Of The Land, and all the things that America Stands For. When handling a major criminal case, he talked about Law And Order, and the Protection That The People Expect. He spoke a lot, as a matter of fact. There was scarcely a Rotary or Optimists group in Alabama to which he had not spoken in the past three years, and he hadn’t missed any police departments at all. His post as the chief government lawyer for this part of Alabama was mainly administrative, but he did take the odd case, which always seemed to be a high-profile one. He’d been especially keen on political corruption, as three state legislators had discovered to their sorrow. They were now raking the sand traps at the Officers’ Club Golf Course at Eglin Air Force Base.