Hunt the Falcon (12 page)

Out of the corner of his eye, Crocker saw a motorcycle tear out of a side street toward their car and screamed, “Watch out!”

The driver, who was speaking nonstop Spanish into a cell phone and didn't see the motorcycle until the last second, swerved to avoid a head-on collision. From the backseat, Crocker watched the young rider's face smash into the passenger-side window. Then the bike and rider flew into the air.

The driver slammed on the brakes, got out, examined the scratches on the side panel of his car, and started cursing. Crocker ran over to the motorcycle rider, who wasn't wearing a helmet and was lying facedown in the dirt. He assumed he was dead, but as Crocker knelt to examine him, the long-haired kid got up, rubbed his dislocated kneecap, which appeared to be his only injury, then limped over to the bike, picked it up, and wheeled it to a footpath. Crocker tried to stop him, but the kid was intent on confronting the driver. The two men stood nose to nose, shouting at each other.

A crowd of onlookers gathered and stared. Crocker wandered back to the taxi, where Akil asked, “What do we do now?”

“Let's find alternate transportation,” Crocker answered as flies started to form a moving halo around his head.

When he asked the driver to pop open the trunk so he could retrieve his suitcase, he threw his arms up in disgust, walked back to the car, and started the engine. Neither man had insurance, he explained.

“What a shock,” Akil whispered.

Once again they were flying down the highway at eighty. Approaching the city, traffic slowed to a crawl. The streets narrowed and became clogged with people carrying boxes containing TVs, stereos, and DVD players, and huge sacks of what looked to be newly purchased goods on their backs. The driver said that smugglers made a very good living by purchasing goods made in China and Japan on the Paraguayan side of the border, then crossing the Ciudad del Este Friendship Bridge into Brazil and selling them for a two hundred percent profit.

How they were able to do that, he didn't say. Instead, he pulled over to the curb and started asking for directions to the hotel. Nobody seemed to recognize the name of the establishment or know how to get there. Vendors approached the taxi windows and offered to sell the two Americans see-through panties, porno videos, Viagra, and tool sets.

“Unbelievable,” Crocker said.

“Maybe we should tell the driver to turn this thing around and beat it out of here,” Akil suggested.

“That's not gonna happen,” Crocker said, examining the map he had picked up at the airport. On it he found a small ad for the Hotel Casablanca, which was part of something called the Parana Country Club.

They continued ten more minutes to a gate, where a guard wrote down their names and passport numbers, and gave them directions to the hotel, which was past another golf course.

“We should have brought our clubs,” Crocker joked.

Neither of the big men played golf.

They walked through the open front door and found no one at the desk. A man with short dreadlocks and a Real Madrid soccer jersey sauntered over sipping a can of coconut water, offered his hand, and said, “My name's David. Call me DZ.”

“Tom Mansfield and Jerid Salam.”

“Cool, man. Follow me.”

The room was clean and large, with a magnificent view of the Guaraní River. Crocker and Akil were more or less the same size, six feet two and 210 pounds, so Crocker lent him some underwear, a pair of black chinos, and a black T-shirt, which Akil said looked a hell of a lot better on him.

A half hour later the three men were in town, sitting at an outdoor café across from something called the Jebai Shopping Center. It could have been lifted out of Beirut, Cairo, or any other Middle Eastern city. Stands sold hummus,
shawarma,
and roasted lamb; Lebanese flags hung everywhere. Pasted over walls and windows were slogans from the Koran: “The curse of God on the infidels!” “Take not Christians or Jews as friends.” “Fight for the cause of God!”

They drank coffee, then Crocker and Akil followed DZ into a store with high aluminum shelves packed with bottles of J&B, Johnnie Walker, Marlboros, portable CD players, and cell phones. Watching them through a cracked glass partition was a guard cradling a pump-action Mitchell Escalade 12-gauge shotgun.

Two Middle Eastern–looking men sat behind a high counter. One read a newspaper and puffed on a hookah. The other measured bags of pistachios on a scale.

“I'm looking for Hamid,” DZ said in Spanish.

The man operating the scale pushed a buzzer that unlocked a door to a stairway and held up three fingers. At the third-floor landing they entered a door covered with Arabic script. An old man with a jeweler's loupe on his eyeglasses looked up.

DZ pointed to Crocker and said, “My friend here wants to buy a bracelet for his wife. I was hoping that Hamid could help us.”

The jeweler pushed a button, spoke into an intercom on the wall beside his desk, and nodded at four dirty black leather chairs, indicating that they should take a seat. Two minutes later a short, skinny young man bounced out of the back room in a ball of energy. He looked liked a grown-up kid, with yellow streaks in black hair worn in a pompadour, tight black jeans, and a tight blue shirt with skull and crossbones printed on it.

“Hamid, this is my friend Tom Mansfield,” DZ said. “He's looking for a bracelet for his wife. I told him you could hook him up at a reasonable price.”

Hamid pointed to the room behind him. “Step inside, Mr. Mansfield. I think I can help you.”

It was small, with a high ceiling and a large frosted window along one wall. At the back sat an old wooden desk. On either side of it were tall cabinets with rows of little drawers.

“What did you have in mind?” Hamid asked, meeting Crocker's eyes.

“I'm not sure.”

“They're the ones who are looking for a Learjet that landed yesterday from Caracas,” DZ explained.

“Which side of the border?” Hamid asked, rubbing his sharp chin.

Crocker: “We don't know.”

“Walk around and meet me at the Pietro Santo for lunch at one o'clock,” Hamid said. “DZ knows where it is.”

“Thanks.”

Once they were outside, DZ whispered in Crocker's ear, “Hamid works for Israeli intelligence.” Crocker had worked with Mossad in the past, and had found it overrated.

The restaurant was appropriately dark and foreboding. Glass-covered red-checked tablecloths, an old map of the boot of Italy on one wall, faded frescoes of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Michelangelo's
David,
and Mount Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples decorating the others. They sat eating breadsticks and kalamata olives, and talking sports. Crocker thought finding the Iranians in a place like this would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

But when Hamid arrived twenty minutes late, he said he had a lead. Two men who had arrived last night from Venezuela had met up with two other men. The four of them were staying in a guesthouse behind a Shiite mosque and religious center called Ali Hassam. The Learjet they had arrived in had left early in the morning and returned to Venezuela. He didn't know whether it was carrying cargo or passengers.

“Do you know if any of the men is named Farhad Alizadeh?” Crocker asked.

“I didn't get names, but I believe the men are Iranian,” Hamid answered.

“Let's go visit the mosque.”

T
hat night
the two SEALs sat alone in the rear of the hotel lobby watching a rebroadcast of the Barcelona-Athletico Madrid soccer game on a big-screen TV. Crocker didn't follow international soccer, but Akil was a fan. He explained that Barcelona was one of the greatest teams in the history of the sport, led by two of the most talented forwards who had ever played the game, Lionel Messi (an Argentine) and Andrés Iniesta (a Spaniard).

Barcelona had just pulled ahead 2 to 1 when Hamid, wearing a gray hoodie and jeans, waved at them from the front desk. They met him out front as a steady rain started to fall, lowering the temperature and producing a relaxing calm.

“Reminds me of summer showers in northern Virginia,” Akil remarked as they climbed into Hamid's dark green Ford Explorer.

“DZ is gonna meet us there,” said Hamid as he navigated the SUV through dark, narrow streets.

The rain evoked Crocker's childhood memories—sitting on the back porch at night listening to the owls, exploring the woods behind his parents' house, catching fireflies with his brother.

The mosque sat in a high-walled compound in a residential part of town. There were two entrances, front and back.

Hamid volunteered to watch the back, while Crocker and Akil joined DZ, who had arrived in a Volkswagen Jetta that was now parked across the street and down the block from the front gate.

Once Hamid was in position, Akil walked to the blue gate and, standing in a pool of light from the lone streetlamp, rang the bell. A short stooped man with a short white beard and a long dark robe appeared looking like he'd just walked out of the Arabian desert. Akil addressed him in Farsi. The old man nodded, looked left and right along the street, then stepped aside and let him in.

Akil returned twenty minutes later to report that the guesthouse stood at the back left corner of the compound. He had walked by the one-story structure and seen through a window three men smoking cigarettes and drinking tea at a table.

“You recognize any of them?” Crocker asked.

“I only saw the sides of their heads.”

“What did you tell the old man at the gate?” Crocker asked.

“I told him I wanted to pray.”

As they sat in the car waiting for the men to leave or others to arrive, the conversation drifted to James Bond movies.

“Who's your favorite Bond girl?” Akil asked.

“Ursula Andress in
Dr. No,
” Crocker said. “I was a kid when I first saw her coming out of the water wearing that white bikini. Suddenly a whole world of fantasies opened up to me.”

“I bet.”

“What about the orange bikini Halle Berry wore?” DZ asked.

“Outstanding as well.”

Crocker watched an old dog with sagging tits cross the street and disappear in the shadows next to the walled mosque. The rain had subsided to a gentle spray when he heard Hamid's voice over the push-pull radio in DZ's lap. He said, “Four men have just exited the back gate and are getting into a black Ford Ranger.”

Akil leaned over the back of the front seat and said, “That might be them.”

“What do you think?” Crocker asked Hamid over the radio.

“They have suitcases with them. Looks like they're leaving.”

“Let's follow,” Crocker said.

They did, in both vehicles—Hamid and Akil in the Explorer, DZ and Crocker in the Jetta—over the rusting iron International Friendship Bridge to the Brazilian border, where they were stopped by four Brazilian Federal Police officers wearing jeans and bulletproof vests who asked to examine their passports, then waved them in. DZ pointed out that they were in Foz do Iguaçu now, which seemed to be a slightly more upscale version of what they'd seen on the Paraguayan side.

They followed a hundred feet behind the Ford Ranger down a two-lane highway through a field of sugarcane. The half moon hung off kilter to their right, peeking through cumulus clouds.

The rain stopped and the wind picked up, whipping the high cane on both sides of the road. Crocker saw the brake lights on the Ranger light up, then the vehicle take a right past what looked like a little farmhouse.

“Where are they going?” he asked.

DZ shook his head. “I don't know this area.”

The road narrowed and circled behind long, dilapidated, industrial-looking buildings to an unmanned gate. They lost the Ranger in a grove of mature avocado trees. Hamid's voice over the radio barked, “Cut your lights!”

Crocker, in the passenger seat, spotted the Ranger two hundred feet ahead. “They're turning left,” he said urgently.

DZ drove past the intersection, parked the Jetta off the road under a big tree, and got out.

“Why are we stopping here?” Crocker asked.

Hamid hurried over and spoke through the open driver's window, the wind playing with his hair. “There's an airstrip back there that's used by Brazilian charters,” he said. “It's not sufficiently lit, and closes after dark.”

Crocker said, “Let's hide the vehicles and take a look.”

“Yes.”

They armed themselves with pistols, then Hamid led the way through a sea of high sawgrass. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped around them. Two hundred yards along, he raised his right hand, pushed the foliage in front of him aside, and pointed. “There they are, over there.”

Crocker saw a runway with portable klieg lights powered by a generator and an old aluminum 737 with “Aero Tetra” stenciled in black on its tail. Two large covered trucks were parked beside it. Men in short sleeves were tossing suitcase-sized bales of something wrapped in clear plastic from the back of the trucks into the jet's forward and aft cargo doors. An empty jeep sat fifty feet behind the jet.

“Aero Tetra? Never heard of it,” Akil said.

“They couldn't get away with calling it Aero Terror,” DZ commented.

“Who couldn't get away with calling it that?” Akil asked.

“The Iranians, man, the Iranians.” There was no time to explain.

Crocker counted eight guards in shorts, armed with AK-47s, standing near the airplane and trucks.

“You think it's cocaine?” DZ whispered to Crocker.

“If it is, they're hauling hundreds of millions of dollars' worth.”

“Where do you think they're planning to take it?” Akil asked.

“Europe, probably.”

Akil: “What do we do now?”

“We stop it,” Crocker answered.

“The aircraft? How?”

An excellent question. Armed only with pistols, they were grossly outgunned and outnumbered, had no body armor or backup, and there was a strong probability that Brazilian authorities had been paid off.

Crocker stuck out his chin and looked to his right along the runway to the terminal, which was completely dark. Then he pushed a button that illuminated the dial on his watch. It read 2308 hours.

The men loading the plane were moving quickly. The cockpit lights were on, which meant that the pilot, copilot, and navigator were inside and probably doing a preflight instrument check before they started the engines. That gave Crocker and the three men with him ten to twenty minutes to stop the plane from taking off.

The time it would take to alert the CIA stations in Asunción, Brasília, or Buenos Aires didn't seem worth it. Besides, all three cities were far away.

Turning to Akil, Crocker whispered, “Grab one of the radios and come with me. You guys wait here and stay alert,” he said to DZ and Hamid.

“What are you gonna do?” DZ asked.

“Don't know yet, but I'll keep you informed.”

He led the way through the sawgrass with his head tucked down and arms in front of him so the serrated blades wouldn't cut his face to shreds.
We've got to stop it. Somehow we've got to stop it,
he repeated over and over in his head.

After two hundred feet the field opened onto a large cement parking lot. A one-story terminal topped with a seventy-foot-tall control tower stood to his left. No lights. No sign of people inside. Akil breathed heavily behind him.

“What do you see, boss?” Akil whispered, sweat running down his forehead.

“Nothing. Follow me.”

Crocker readied his 9mm Glock, dashed to the six-foot chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the runway, climbed it, and landed on the other side. He knelt on the concrete and scanned the area. On the tarmac on the runway side of the tower rested two trucks with “Petrobas” painted on them. One was a fuel truck; the other was a flatbed. Judging by the height of the tank above its suspension system, the fuel truck was empty.

“See if that one has keys inside,” Crocker whispered, pushing Akil to the flatbed.

Neither of them did.

Akil joined Crocker near the cab of the tanker. “Boss, what are you thinking?” he asked.

“I checked, and the tank is empty.”

“So?”

“I'm considering hot-wiring this baby and driving right at 'em. See how close we can get.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know.”

“If we drive at 'em, they're going to shoot us to shreds,” Akil warned. “I counted eight armed guards, another half-dozen loaders. They could be armed, too.”

“What's your gut say? You think Alizadeh's on the plane?” Crocker asked.

“My gut's not working.”

He wanted this guy so bad he could feel it in his bones. No fucking way he was going to let him slip away again, even though he wasn't sure he was on the plane. It was a chance. A shot. That's all you got. Bold action was always clouded with danger and uncertainty. He said, “Radio DZ and tell him and Hamid to get ready. We're gonna need them to support us when the guards open fire.”

Akil nodded. “Whatever you say, boss.”

Crocker climbed into the cab and reached under the steering column to locate the starter wires. Access to the ignition switch involved removing the panel and cover around the ignition tumbler, which was directly below the lock. He located the wires and stripped the ends, then looked up as Akil hopped in the passenger-side door.

“What?” Akil asked, reading the uncharacteristic uncertainty on Crocker's face.

Crocker whispered, “We'd better wait.”

“Wait for what? A miracle? An act of God?”

“That would be nice.”

A fatalistic grin spread across Akil's wide face. “We launch now, it's a suicide mission, which I'm okay with if that's what you choose. But we gotta hope some vestal virgins are waiting for us.”

“Shut up. I'm thinking.…”

“Think hard.”

Crocker twisted the ends of the two red wires together. “When I give the signal, you touch these to the end of this one,” he said, pointing to the brown ignition wire.

“You want me to drive?” Akil asked.

“Yeah, you're driving. I'm gonna hide on top of the tank.”

“I wish we had a Blackhawk about now, armed with Hellfire missiles,” Akil whispered.

“And I wish I was Superman.”

They sat in the stillness and watched from approximately two hundred yards away as the men continued loading. When the pilot fired up the 737-300's twin CFM56 turbofan engines, Crocker was jolted to a higher level of readiness.

The loading stopped. Someone inside the fuselage pulled the cargo doors shut. The jet engine revved higher, screaming into the night, burning into Crocker's head, demanding that he do something fast.

The tension in the cab grew. “Now?' Akil asked.

“Not yet,” Crocker whispered back.

He wanted to act, but the eight armed guards were still ranged in a perimeter around the trucks. Someone leaned out the cockpit window and was shouting something to one of the men on the ground. He threw him a packet. The man who caught it flashed a thumbs-up to the cockpit and ran to one of the trucks. Four guards jumped in, leaving another four standing around the jet. The trucks backed up and started to leave.

“Let's go!” Crocker said.

Akil gritted his teeth and nodded. He shifted into the driver's seat as Crocker opened the door and got out.

“When I slap the top of the cab, that's the signal to launch.”

“Got it.”

“I want you to drive straight toward the jet. If the guards stop you, talk to them in Farsi. They probably won't understand, but they might get confused and think you're with the men flying the plane.”

“Okay.”

“See if you can get all four of the guards to come over to you. Keep your pistol ready on the seat. I'm going to try to take out as many as I can.”

“Then what?”

“Then you take out the rest and we stop the plane.” At the very least it was an illegal flight carrying Iranians holding Venezuelan passports and trying to leave under cover of night.

“Sounds like fun.”

“Start the engine, now!” Crocker said.

He scurried up the ladder and lay belly down on the front of the cylindrical tank. The trucks that had carried the drugs were gone. All that remained was the jeep, the 737, which was in the process of swinging its nose toward the runway, and four AK-47–wielding guards who were backing away from the jet.

Crocker reached out and slapped the cab of the tanker. Akil put it in gear. The truck lurched forward, and Crocker held on.

He was trying to fix the location of the guards, but the powerful wing lights on the 737 blinded him. He thought he heard shots above the noise of the grinding truck engine and the whine of the jet.

Hamid and DZ?

As the truck picked up speed, a hot wind hit his face, causing his eyes to water. The gunfire was coming from his left, somewhere in the high grass, maybe near the road where they had parked. What was transpiring there, he didn't know.

He had to focus on what was in front of him—the jet, the jeep, and the armed men. The tanker truck was now sixty feet from them. He heard Akil shouting out the window in Farsi and waving. One of the guards fired into the air. Akil slammed on the brakes and the tanker screeched to a stop. Crocker had to hold on with all his strength to prevent being thrown forward over the hood.