Hunt the Falcon (11 page)

Completely vulnerable as he hung from the branch, Crocker took a deep breath, shifted his weight to his left arm, and used his right to find the HK45CT pistol with full-sized Ti-RANT suppressor. From fifty feet away he aimed and squeezed three rounds into the soldier's back and watched him buckle at the knees and fall.

Letting go of the branch, he hit the ground and rolled. Ignoring the lightning bolt of pain from the base of his spine, he got up and crossed to Ritchie.

Ritchie's eyes were open, and his right hand held his jaw. When Crocker carefully pulled Ritchie's hand away, he saw his jawbone and a row of lower molars. The round had hit him near the chin and exited near his ear.

Crocker used his index and middle fingers to fish the shattered teeth and bone out of Ritchie's windpipe. The injury didn't appear life threatening, since the bullet hadn't hit a major artery. Nevertheless, Crocker quickly completed the last three steps of the medical ABCD checklist.

Ritchie's breathing was regular, his pulse was strong, and there appeared to be no damage to his spinal cord or neck. However, his tongue was probably fucked up, because he was trying to speak but having trouble.

Crocker held a finger to his mouth to tell him not to try, then pulled off his T-shirt and tied it around Ritchie's head. The wound, though ugly, was not likely to produce a great loss of blood because the injured vessels weren't large. Nor was there much risk of secondary hemorrhage, though it was important to keep his head elevated.

The next challenge was to get the two of them out of there alive.

As Crocker lifted Ritchie up and hoisted him over his left shoulder, a flash of pain ran down his spine into his legs. That was the least of his problems. He retreated to the shadows at the back of the house and quickly appraised his situation. Mancini had climbed onto the wall and was reaching for the tree. Crocker waved him back.

There was no fucking way he'd be able to lift Ritchie high enough, even if he put him on his shoulders, because the cedar branch was at least sixteen feet from the ground. His options were limited. Other guards had been alerted. He heard hurried footsteps approaching from his left and turned right with the HK45CT clutched in his right hand and an extra magazine in his left. With Ritchie's warm blood dripping down his chest, he crossed to the other side of the balcony and stopped. More footsteps were coming from the right.

Five feet ahead stood a white door leading to the bottom floor. He tried it. Locked. He kicked it in and entered, all his senses alert. Loud rock music reverberated through the narrow hallway—Lynyrd-fucking-Skynyrd singing “Free Bird.” It happened to be one of the songs he worked out to in his dad's garage.

He passed from a dark passageway to a brightly lit kitchen. A stout young woman in a white uniform stood at a giant sink washing dishes. She stopped midbreath when she saw the two men. Her eyes locked onto Crocker's. What a sight he was—bare-chested, with an injured, bleeding man slung across one shoulder, a pistol in the other. He grinned and raised the .45 to his lips as a signal to be quiet. She nodded.

He pushed through a swinging door that led to a formal dining room. The lights were out and the room was filled with shadows. He crossed quickly to another room, past a portrait of President Chávez as a young man, to a sitting room that opened through an arch to the front hall.

An ornate wooden stairway rose to his right. He was so pumped up on adrenaline that he considered climbing it, finding the colonel and his visitor, and finishing them off right then. But he had Ritchie on his shoulder moaning quietly, as if humming a song.

People were moving above. Angry voices drifted down. Crocker clutched the extra magazine of .45 rounds in his teeth, grabbed the front doorknob, turned it with his left hand, took a deep breath, and pulled it open.

It was as though his whole life and all of his training had been leading to this moment. In warp-speed time, he took in everything. To his left stood an armed soldier with his back to him. Beyond the soldier was a partially open metal gate with blue jeeps parked on either side of it.

The soldier turned in slow motion and opened his mouth. Before any words came out, Crocker fired three bullets into his side and chest. The soldier's eyes darkened, and he fell backward into a pot of white geraniums.

Crocker hurried down three steps, making sure to keep his balance, and turned sideways to squeeze through the half-opened gate. That's when he spotted another soldier crouched in front of one of the jeeps, speaking urgently into a radio. Crocker raised the HK45CT, ran to the front of the jeep, and fired until the gun was empty. Ejected the warm, empty mag and inserted the second. Another soldier standing across the street aimed his AK-47 and squeezed off a round that whizzed over Crocker's head and slammed into the wall and gate.

He knelt alongside the jeep. Ritchie was trying to whisper something in his ear. Tactical advice, no doubt, which amused Crocker in a graveyard humor kind of way.

“I got this one, Ritchie. Conserve your energy.”

On the other side of the jeep, in the driver's-side mirror, he saw the soldier run a few feet down the street, stop, and shout something over his shoulder. Desperate words in Spanish that ended when Crocker stood and fired a silenced burst from the pistol that took him down.

The alley was narrow, flanked by high walls covered with vines and ivy, and topped with brass owls. One direction led to the street; the other to more houses and a dead end. But he couldn't tell which one went where, so he had to decide which to take.

Eeny-meeny-miny.…

Getting out on foot was going to be a problem. Looking inside the jeep, he saw no keys in the ignition. Still, he sat Ritchie in the front seat and buckled him in. Crocker had hot-wired so many cars as a wild punk growing up in New England that starting it was relatively easy. After locating the access cover under the steering wheel, he smashed the plastic lid with the butt of his pistol and pulled it off. Then he reached behind the ignition switch harness, located two red wires, used his teeth to strip about an inch of insulation from both, and twisted them together.

He heard a vehicle approaching, but didn't look up. Finding the brown ignition wire, he pulled it out of its harness and touched it to the two red wires.

The jeep started with a growl. Now, which way to go? Ritchie raised his arm and pointed right.

“You'd better be correct,” Crocker whispered, gunning the engine, the pistol now clutched in his right hand.

Almost immediately he was blinded by headlights that swung into the alley. He turned the wheel sharply right, causing the side of the jeep to graze the wall and sending up a shower of sparks that cascaded onto Ritchie's head. The other vehicle passed, then screeched to a stop. He heard boots hitting the street, mags slamming into rifles, men shouting in Spanish.

“Alto! Alto!”

He turned sharply right onto Avenida los Cedros and floored the accelerator. The jeep swerved and skidded past another military truck. The driver stared at Crocker with big saucer eyes, then ducked as Crocker opened fire, shattering the side window.

Bullets sailed over Crocker's head as he shifted into fourth and sped past the entrance to the country club through a red traffic light, then burned serious rubber onto another street, then another and another, and stopped, breathless.

Ritchie moaned something that sounded like a question. Fishing a phone from his pocket, Crocker punched Neto's number.

“It's Crocker,” he said, out of breath.

“Where the fuck
are
you?” Neto asked urgently. “What happened? Where's Ritchie?”

“He's with me. He's injured. We need to get him to an emergency room ASAP!”

“What's your current location?” Neto asked.

“I'm in a stolen military jeep. I'm about a mile or so west of the country club.”

“Use the GPS on your phone and give me the name of the street.”

Crocker checked as sirens screamed in the distance and echoed off the walls around him. “We're on Calle Garcia, near Avenida Cuello.”

“All right, turn onto Cuello,” Neto said. “Take the first left. There's a restaurant on the corner. Pull into the parking lot. Find a dark corner in the back. I'll meet you there in five.”

T
he light
from the fluorescent bulbs burned Crocker's weary, bloodshot eyes. He leaned on the edge of a gurney at a comfortable angle for his aching back while a nurse with thick glasses used cotton swabs dipped in alcohol to clean the blood off his chest. His mind shifted to the golf course, to the meeting with Rappaport, to the fevered drive in the jeep, in no rational order, picking up speed. A voice in the background screamed,
Why did you do it?

He didn't have an answer. The green curtain parted and Mancini stuck in his head, looking like a cartoon criminal with his neck and face covered with a dense stubble of dark whiskers. He said, “Boss, they're about to wheel Ritchie into surgery. He wants to see you.”

“Where?”

The nurse tried to stop Crocker from pulling on a light blue robe and following Manny out of the room, but she failed. They trotted down a yellow hall to a little room where Ritchie sat in a wheelchair with a white bandage covering half his face.

“Ritchie?” Crocker whispered. “How's it hanging?”

He opened his left eye, tried to smile, mouthed the words “It's still hanging,” then pointed to a yellow legal pad and pen on the table to Crocker's right.

“You'll be fine,” Crocker said as he gave it to him and noticed Ritchie's dried blood all over his hand. Hiding it behind his back, he said, “There's no major structural or neurologic damage. They'll patch you up, fix that ugly mug of yours, and you'll end up looking better than before.”

Ritchie's concentration was focused on the pad and what he was slowly writing. He held it up for Crocker to read. The letters were thin, long, and slanted to the right. They read: “I saw Alizadeh, the Falcon. He was in the house.”

Crocker felt a sudden burst of energy. “Alizadeh? You sure it was him?”

Ritchie nodded and attempted to mouth the word “Yes.” He wrote, “I'd know his ugly face anywhere.”

Crocker wanted to hug him, but only said, “That's great, Ritchie. Very important. Good job.”

A doctor and orderly in white jackets arrived to wheel Ritchie away. He quickly scribbled one last message, which he handed to Crocker. It read: “Tell Monica we have to postpone the wedding, if she still wants me like this.”

“I'll tell her, Ritchie. Don't worry about anything. You'll be fine.”

Crocker wanted time to sit back, process, heal, and think, but events were moving too quickly. Seconds after Ritchie was wheeled into surgery, he telephoned Neto to tell him the news about Alizadeh. Neto spoke to Melkasian at the station, and a meeting was set for midnight.

Crocker grabbed a few winks in the car. He woke up remembering that he had never had a chance to do his Christmas shopping—an iPad for Jenny, a crystal-and-amethyst necklace he'd picked out for Holly at a Virginia Beach jewelry store. He hated being late with presents but couldn't help it this time.

As soon as they arrived at the office in the Banco Popular building, Neto ordered pizza with everything and sodas from an all-night fast food joint. They were chowing down when Rappaport and Melkasian walked in clutching briefcases and dressed in rumpled business clothes. It looked as though they'd been working all night.

Rappaport said, “You sure kicked up a shit storm, Crocker.”

“Couldn't avoid it.”

“Who authorized you to go into the colonel's house?”

Neto spoke up. “I did, sir.”

Crocker cut in, “That's bullshit. I did. I take full responsibility. I felt that it was important to try to identify the Iranian, and I ordered my man to scale the wall. Unfortunately, he had an accident and was discovered and shot. I deeply regret that now. But I'm also pleased that we've established that it's Alizadeh himself who is setting up the Unit 5000 operation here.”

“It often works that way, doesn't it, Crocker?” Rappaport asked. “The good mixed with the bad.”

“Yes it does, sir,” Crocker replied, struck by the sincere tone in his voice.

Rappaport reached across, laid a hand on Crocker's shoulder, and said, “I'm sorry about your teammate. I pray he recovers quickly.”

“I appreciate that, sir.” Maybe Rappaport wasn't a total asshole.

“As far as pissing off the Venezuelans, I say: fuck them,” Rappaport growled. “They had it coming. And as far as the Falcon goes, I'm ready to go to war.”

Crocker liked Rappaport's new attitude and nodded in agreement. “Me, too, sir. Let's kick his ass.”

Briefcases clicked open, pizza boxes were cleared from the table, and a secure phone line was opened to Langley, where an analyst named Sue from the Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC) reported that the names of three of the individuals mentioned in the Xeroxed documents captured in Petare had been matched to a computer printout of recent arrivals to Mexico from Venezuela.

“What's that mean?” Rappaport asked.

“I don't know.”

“Do you have any idea where they are now?” Melkasian asked, using a device to project a map of Mexico on the screen at the front of the room.

“Mexican PFM has tracked them to the town of San Miguel de Allende, which is about a hundred and seventy miles north of Mexico City,” Sue said over the speakerphone. PFM was the Mexican version of the FBI.

At the mention of San Miguel de Allende, Crocker smiled inwardly. Before they married he and Holly had spent a romantic week in that village in an inn overlooking the lake.

“What are they doing there?” Rappaport asked.

“We've been treating them as potential drug traffickers,” Sue answered. “They claim to be Venezuelan financial advisors looking for business investments. Their behavior is suspicious because they stick together, spend a lot of time in their hotel room, eat at cheap restaurants, don't drink alcohol, and are constantly looking over their shoulders to see if they're being watched.”

“Potential drug traffickers?” Melkasian asked skeptically.

“Yes, our intelligent operational probabilities computer program gave that a probability of forty percent, which is high. But it's possible they could be up to something else.”

“You mean some other sort of illegal activity?” Rappaport asked. “And you say Mexican PFM is keeping an eye on them?”

“That's correct, sir.”

“Can they be trusted?”

“Not really, no. That's why we've dispatched a two-person DEA team from Mexico City. They should be there within the hour.”

“Good,” Rappaport said, checking his watch. “We think these men might be Iranian members of the IRGC, so inform us immediately regarding their movements or anything else you learn.”

“I will, sir.”

“You have anything else?” he asked.

Sue said, “The names of two other individuals on the list you sent us—Jorge Alvarez Nazra and Raul Abaid Lopez—correspond to two men who recently passed the PPL and CPL exams in Venezuela.”

The speed of the new information was dizzying.

“What are the PPL and CPL?” Melkasian asked.

“Those are the exams required by the ICAO, the International Civic Aviation Organization, to qualify for private and commercial pilot licenses,” Sue replied.

The moment he heard “commercial pilot licenses,” Crocker traveled back to 9/11, an event that had profoundly changed his life. Prior to that time, the pace of ST-6 operations had been so slow he'd been thinking about leaving the navy and starting a private security firm. Following 9/11, ST-6 ops increased exponentially. He had been deploying overseas an average of 280 days a year.

Rappaport asked, “What do we know about the real identities of these men?”

“Practically nothing,” Sue answered. “Since we found them on the papers you recovered, we assume they are Iranians who have been granted Venezuelan citizenship and given new identities.”

Melkasian's cell phone rang. As he listened to the person on the other end, his forehead furrowed. He put his hand over the phone and, turning to Rappaport, said, “It's Sanchez. He says the Learjet the Iranian flew in on is getting ready to leave from Simón Bolívar Airport.”

“Excuse us for a minute, Sue,” Rappaport grunted into the speakerphone. Then, to Melkasian, “Is Alizadeh aboard?”

“Unclear.”

“Where's the plane headed?”

“According to the flight manifest, the destination is Ciudad del Este, Paraguay.”

“Why the fuck is he going there?” Rappaport asked, thinking out loud.

Crocker chewed on the same question. What business might Alizadeh or the other Iranians possibly have in that lawless, corrupt city?

Rappaport bid goodbye to Sue for the time being, and the four men spent the next forty minutes discussing possibilities. Then they called Reston, Virginia, and woke up the head of CIA's Quds Force Working Group, Sy Blanc. Though Sy was suffering from a fever and flu-related symptoms, his mind remained sharp. He pointed out that Ciudad del Este had approximately twenty-five thousand Shiite Muslim residents who had emigrated from Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the 1985 Lebanese Civil War. It was known that the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia had built an active smuggling network operating out of the remote tri-border region and that it funneled large sums of money to fund operations in the Middle East, also financing training camps, propaganda campaigns, and bomb attacks in South America.

“What kind of smuggling?” Rappaport asked.

“Cigarettes, marijuana, and cocaine. It's smuggled across the border to Brazil, then shipped to Europe,” Blanc reported. “Profits are huge, anywhere from an estimated two to four billion a year.”

It was the perfect place, Crocker thought, for Alizadeh to find money to support Unit 5000's activities. If he was looking for an illegal means for funding his new organization, what better place to look than the lawless tri-state border region of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina?

Blanc agreed, concluding that “Ciudad del Este is essentially a free zone for significant criminal activity, including people who are organized to commit acts of terrorism.”

“Great,” Rappaport said with a groan. “What should we do?”

Blanc pointed out that since Hezbollah terrorists operating out of Ciudad del Este had bombed several Jewish synagogues, killing more than a hundred people in nearby Argentina in the 1990s, Mossad had maintained a presence there. The CIA also had assets in Ciudad del Este.

Blanc said, “I'll make sure they're alerted to look for the aircraft and monitor Alizadeh's activities.”

“But we're not sure he's on the plane,” Melkasian reminded him.

“No, we're not.”

Crocker argued that he should travel there immediately to help support local CIA assets. Sy Blanc agreed.

Emergency visas were issued for Crocker and Akil (who spoke fluent Farsi) and tickets booked on a 6:37 p.m. flight to São Paulo. Crocker hurried back to the safe house, packed, instructed Mancini to coordinate with Melkasian and Neto regarding what they needed to do until he returned, then called a taxi to drive them to the airport.

Traveling as Tom Mansfield and Jerid Salam, they flew to Bogotá via Avianca Airlines, and after a six-hour layover, which they spent mostly surfing the Internet and drinking beer, the flight continued another six hours to Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo. They arrived just before seven the following morning, then transferred to a small TAM Airlines jet to Ciudad del Este.

By the time they reached Aeropuerto Internacional Guaraní, they were half asleep. A young Paraguayan customs official stopped them and asked where they had gotten their visas.

“Caracas, Venezuela,” Crocker answered.

“What were you doing there?” the official asked in accented English.

“We were there on business, organizing an expedition.”

The official explained that their visas hadn't been entered into the Paraguayan system, which meant that they couldn't enter the country without each man paying a hundred-dollar expediting fee. What system he was talking about wasn't clear. Akil pointed out that the computer screen he appeared to be looking at was blank.

They were traveling in alias, so Crocker didn't want to attract attention, but he didn't feel like being ripped off, either. A Brazilian man who stood behind them in line sweating profusely whispered, “I recommend that you pay it. Otherwise he will keep you here all day.”

Crocker handed the official twenty dollars, which he said should cover both men. The official shook his head no, he wouldn't accept it.

Akil reached into his wallet and produced three more twenties, whereupon the official stamped their passports and waved them through.

“Nice place,” Akil whispered.

“Yeah. Be alert.”

The baggage claim was packed with travelers from Europe and Asia who were going to visit the famous Iguazu Falls. Akil's suitcase, which he had had to check in São Paulo because of its size, was a no-show, so he filled out a form at the information desk.

“Good luck with that,” Crocker commented.

“Yeah, right.”

The woman working the desk had a message for Mr. Mansfield, which read, “This is DZ from the agency. Because of circumstances, I'm not able to meet you at the airport. Hire a taxi to take you to Hotel Casablanca. I'll see you there. Don't let the driver charge you more than $30.”

The only two taxi drivers stationed outside the terminal both demanded a fifty-dollar fare. Crocker and Akil chose the newer and cleaner-looking of the two cars—a fairly comfortable Toyota Corolla sedan. The overweight driver drove it as if it was stolen, tearing down the freeway at eighty miles an hour.

The air outside the window was hot and sticky, the ground dotted with mud-colored puddles. Storm clouds formed impressive towers of gray, white, and black, while the landscape was festooned with exuberant tropical foliage. Man's footprint could best be described as tacky—broken-down cars and buses, mud-encrusted shacks, large lurid signs advertising sex shows, casinos, electronics stores, and “five-star” Italian, Japanese, and Chinese restaurants.