Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (27 page)

 
          
“How
much participation can I expect in planning and organizing the Hammerheads?”

 
          
“Full
and complete. As I understand it, Admiral Hardcastle’s plan initially calls for
two of these air-staging platforms, one on
Florida
’s east coast, the other on the west coast
in the Gulf. The platform we were on today will be the first one, the prototype
of the Hammerheads’ new base.

 
          
“We
are looking at the founding cadre of officers for the Hammerheads right here in
this room. I intend to nominate General Elliott as commander, Major McLanahan
as his deputy, because of his previous close association with the general,
Admiral Hardcastle, because of his extensive knowledge of the weapons, as
director of development and strategy, and you, Inspector GefiFar, as head of
the first Hammerheads air-staging platform, for good and obvious reasons. The
Admiral will take over the second platform when it comes on line.”

 
          
With
that, he made a quick exit, cutting off unwanted flak. He figured he’d done his
best by all concerned. Now it was time to get on with the program.

 
          
Valdivia
,
Columbia

 
          
Several Days Later

 
          
Seventy
miles north of
Medellin
,
Colombia
, on the main north- south
Sao Francisco
highway running from
Santa Maria
on
Colombia
’s north coast all the way to Ipiales on the
Ecuador
border, was the small town of
Valdivia
. Until some ten years earlier, Valdivia had
been known for its freshwater springs, its huge goat population— thirty goats
for every man, woman and child within fifty miles—and the shrine to the Mother
Mary at the place where she was reported to have visited a peasant family in
the late eighteenth century. The shrine still stood, and one could still see
crutches abandoned by pilgrims who came to be miraculously healed after tasting
the mountain spring waters, as well as the altar that housed Colombia’s most
prized relic, a rock with the imprint of a human foot that was said to be that
of the Mother Mary when she alighted in Valdivia from Heaven.

 
          
Now,
the secluded grove of the shrine to the Mother Mary was little more than a
prominent landmark for mysterious convoys of trucks driving north along the
Sao Francisco
highway from
Peru
and
Ecuador
. Go past the shrine out of
Valdivia
, follow the twisting, winding
mountain-valley road for four miles, find the barbed-wire fence gate carefully
hidden in the edge of the thick forest on the right, stop to open the gate.
Whoever was working the gate’s latch would find a warning totem—a goat skinned
from head to tail, bloody and torn, with a sword through its stomach, hanging
from a tree in plain sight. It was usually effective enough to deter curious
villagers and pilgrims, but if not, a gunner in a tree blind, armed with a state-of-the-art,
Belgian-made 5.56 millimeter FN Minimi automatic machine gun and night-vision
goggles would pick off intruders and their vehicles.

 
          
Once
admitted past the outer perimeter guards and fences, every visitor was tracked
electronically and visually every step of the way into the main compound. But
once one reached the main compound itself, the exterior of the plant looked
much like any other industrial park—a few row-houses for employees, schools for
the children, neatly kept facades for administrative centers and manicured
employee break-areas. All very normal, all very innocent looking.

 
          
All
a deceptive facade. In the first few years of business the plant’s owners had
found it necessary to develop a cover—they had made it into a small paint and
varnish manufacturing plant—and many of the props for that cover remained,
including barrels of pigments and delivery trucks with the paint factory’s logo
on the side. But as more and more officials were enticed by
plomo o plata,
lead or silver—a bullet
in the head or take the bribe—the cover was found no longer to be necessary
except for the rare and often well-announced government sweeps intent on
“eradicating” the cocaine laboratories, mostly to show the United States in
particular and the world in general their commitment to stopping drugs.

 
          
The
narcotics-distribution center at
Valdivia
was a sophisticated processing and
packaging center. Unlike other so-called laboratories, which were usually
nothing more than grass huts deep within isolated forests, the
Valdivia
plant was a full-scale, high-volume
operation. Coca paste, or base, processed by peasant farmers from
Bolivia
and
Peru
, was shipped or flown to
Valdivia
usually in the form of dark gray blocks
resembling builder’s bricks, or dried into a coarse gravellike mixture and
hidden in pigment barrels or cement bags. In the plant the coca paste was mixed
with ether and acetone, then dried to form the fine white power, the cocaine.
It took one ton of coca paste to make one hundred kilograms of high-grade
cocaine, and the plant produced upward of two thousand kilos every month. It
was the
Medellin
drug cartel’s number-one processing
facility.

 
          
Depending
on the client’s wishes, the prevailing price and the availability, the center
prepared various grades of product—from refined near-pharmaceutical-grade
cocaine to cocaine cut or diluted with other chemicals, sometimes leaving less
than a hundred grams of cocaine in a one-kilogram sample. The cocaine was
measured and packaged in airtight bags—usually one-kilo size easy to conceal
and transport—and prepared for shipment.

 
          
Security
at the
Valdivia
processing center was extraordinary. The private
Cartel soldiers were better equipped than the Colombian army, or most armies
anywhere in South America for that matter— they could even repel air attacks
with heavy-caliber, optically-aimed machine guns. Helicopters fitted with
infrared scanners patrolled the sprawling fifty-thousand-acre facility, with
troops especially trained and outfitted to search for any guerrillas trying to
infiltrate the outer defenses and sneak inside the compound. The plant’s owners
and security guards had access to the Colombian government’s custom’s files and
records notifying them who had been admitted across the borders and where they
were headed, so as to help them detect any intruders or possible pre-assault
operatives, especially from the United States. Even with occasional flurries of
activity-for-show, the Cartel barons had little to worry about from the
Colombian army. Most high-ranking government officials and military leaders
were on the Cartel’s payroll.

 
          
The
well-concealed, ten-thousand-foot reinforced concrete runway at the Valdivia
airfield could handle aircraft the size of heavy jet cargo planes, although
mostly small planes were used to transport the drugs to other airfields or
distribution points in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Nicaragua
and Brazil, for eventual shipment to the Cartel’s number-one customer—the
United States.

 
          
It
was transportation . . . getting the refined cocaine out of poorly patrolled,
lax areas into better-guarded (for all its weaknesses) North America that
Gonzales Rodriguez Gachez, the unofficial head of the Medellin drug cartel, was
concerned with this morning as he sat in his office in the plant’s
administrative center. Dressed in motorcycleracing leathers with tall
knee-topping boots, padded elbow and hip protectors—Gachez got his own kicks
from racing, not from cocaine—he bent to work adjusting the chain on his newest
toy, an Italian eight-hundred-cc cafe racer.

 
          
Before
the real money began pouring in his father had conducted business out of a hen
house, and gauged the character of his men— and, the young Gachez was to learn
later, even his children—by watching them watch the trained roosters fight. He
could find out which could stomach watching the blood, the violence, the death,
which tolerated it and which reveled in it; he could watch the men’s drinking,
gambling and womanizing habits.

 
          
Gachez
had never enjoyed the cockfights, had attended them because his father wanted
him to, but he always managed to hide behind his father’s three-hundred-pound
frame just as the feathers started to fly. But he was the youngest, and so not
expected to have the intestinal fortitude of his elder siblings.

 
          
But
Gachez learned well what else went on inside the hen house beside wagers and
prize roosters torn apart—deals. Deals of all kinds, from agreements to buy a
certain amount of hay for the coming winter months to marriage contracts for a
father’s unwed eighteen- year-old daughter to the murder of a Brazilian cowboy
trying to sell some stolen cattle. No matter how raucous it got, they always
seemed able to carry on a conversation between shouts of pain or pleasure.
Young Gachez watched them shake hands, pat each other’s shoulders and tip a
glass of tequila or corn whiskey. Somewhere in among all the noise, a deal had
been struck. And the youngest Gachez was fascinated. Along the way he also
learned about friendship, loyalty and the value of alliances. He knew who his
father’s enemies were, who seemed to be his real friends, though the
distinctions were not always clear.

 
          
When
the manufacture and sale of cocaine began to heat up, Gonzales Gachez’s older
brothers were quick to get into the business, but not very careful in forming
their alliances between the other wealthy families. Unlike the early West in
the United States, when a rich man could own a huge ranch with little outside
interference and seclude himself, owning acreage in tiny Colombia meant forming
alliances, like forming tiny states or principalities. Colombian ranchers held
onto their power and fortunes by banding together against rivals. The health
and welfare of the alliance was important, something to be nurtured. The leader
was usually the wealthiest member, but all had to profit or the alliance
collapsed.

 
          
But
the enormous wealth that Gonzales’ older brothers brought in from the
flourishing drug trade made them think they were beyond the alliance structure.
They tried to form their own private armies, bringing in Indian mercenaries
from
Peru
and
Ecuador
. The outsider’s allegiance went to the highest bidder. He was without
scruples, pagan, mostly not even Catholic, and Gonzales’ older brothers tended
to behave more like their hirelings than traditional Colombians. They seemed to
feel safer behind the guns and knives of these outsiders than with the
alliance, which was many times more powerful than any mercenary army they could
raise.

 
          
The
wars that followed took the lives of Gonzales’ older brothers, but before the
other landowners could wipe out the entire family Gonzales stepped in. He had
attended a European-style university in
Rio de Janeiro
, could speak three foreign languages and
had been in
America
and
Europe
. With shotguns literally pointing in his
face, the young, handsome, articulate Gonzales Gachez persuaded the alliance to
allow his family to rejoin. He did not beg, he did not plead for his life, he
did not offer them money or land or anything—except loyalty. He understood that
for these men loyalty, along with
machismo,
counted above all else.

 
          
This
was twenty years ago. Now Gonzales Gachez was just over forty years of age. He
had risen from that terrifying moment, standing at the business end of a
twelve-gauge shotgun, to leader of the Medellin drug cartel, or so the American
press liked to call it, stirring up images of strangling monopolies like the
OPEC oil cartel, the crime cartels of the Roaring Twenties, the
booze-and-gambling gangs of old Chicago. Gachez and his associates considered
themselves businessmen, Colombian ranchers. They were patriots, allies,
identifying a product, evaluating its market potential, fulfilling that need.
Americans were good for half-a-trillion dollars of narcotics yearly—surely it
was only smart business to see to satisfy the market of opportunity. That each
of these self-styled ranchers and businessmen conspired to kill judges, lawmen,
soldiers, legislators and competitors all over the world, including fellow
Colombians, to ship their cargo of death was the cost of doing business. Like
having a lawyer, Gachez liked to say.