Hunt the Falcon (14 page)

“Chávez is on life support. The rumor is that his family wants the doctors to pull the plug. Meanwhile, his VP, Maduro, is running the government, and everything seems to be the same as before—except the whole city is on edge.”

“The Iranians, too?” Crocker asked as the glittering skyline came into view.

“Are they on edge? Yes. Especially after what you guys did to them in Brazil.”

Crocker smiled to himself and thought,
Score one for us
. He knew he'd feel even better if they found Alizadeh's body in the wreckage in Foz do Iguaçu.

“You want me to stop somewhere so you can pick up something to eat first?” Sanchez asked, turning off the
autopista
.

“I'll be okay.”

Davis was the only member of the team still living at the La Florida safe house. He explained that Cal and Mancini had left with Neto that morning for the southwestern state of Barinas.

“Why?” Crocker asked.

“Because Unit 5000 is building a base there,” Davis answered, running a hand through his blond surfer hair, which didn't match the darker color of his beard.

“What about Ritchie? What's the word on him?”

“He's back home healing and feeling sorry for himself,” Davis reported. “He says he's sick of watching TV and eating applesauce and yogurt.”

Crocker detected torment in his young teammate's eyes. “What about you? You okay?”

“I'm fine,” Davis answered. “I just got off a Skype call with Sandy.” Sandy was his blond, former USC cheerleader wife. “She's freaking out because Tyler is running a 104-degree fever and she can't get hold of the pediatrician.”

Tyler was their one-year-old. “I told her to use a wet washcloth to cool him down, give him some baby aspirin, and let him sleep. He'll probably be better in the morning, right?”

Crocker said, “Tell her to check in on him every so often, and that kids bounce back fast. If he's still running a high fever in the morning she might want to take him to the hospital.”

“That'll reassure her. Thanks.”

Crocker unpacked, nuked some canned soup he found in the kitchen, then had Sanchez drive him over to the Banco Popular building, which looked deserted. It was the week between Christmas and New Year's, and a lot of people seemed to have left the city.

He rode up to the ninth-floor office and found Melkasian in a blue tracksuit and sneakers talking to someone on the phone. Crocker picked up a recent issue of
Time,
which had a smiling Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi on the cover. He didn't trust him. To his mind anyone whose political beliefs were determined by religious dogma, especially if it was Muslim, had to be carefully watched.

Melkasian put his phone away and threw Crocker a bottle of water. “How's your head?” he asked.

“Still seems to work, as far as I can tell. How's yours?”

“Heavy with concerns, problems. I heard about that wild stunt you pulled in Foz.”

“I'm still trying to remember the details,” Crocker said. “Anything new about the identities of the men on the plane?”

Melkasian shook his head. “Doubt if there ever will be,” he answered. “They were burned to a crisp. But we do know that the Iranians requested the remains.”

“But they haven't been ID'd?”

“No.”

Rappaport arrived, popped open his metal briefcase, and they got down to business. Crocker was shown satellite photos of a plot in Barinas where Unit 5000 was reportedly building a base and landing strip. There wasn't much to see, except for a couple of tin-roofed structures and a swath of reddish dirt carved into what looked to be a flat grassy plain.

“Where's Bolinas?” Crocker asked.

Rappaport snorted. “Bolinas is a town on the Northern California coast. Barinas is a state southwest of here.”

“What's this?” Crocker asked, pointing to what looked like a country club, with a large house and pool area, on one of the surveillance photos.

“That's the Hugo Chávez family estate, La Chavera,” Melkasian said. “He was born nearby in the house of his paternal grandmother, and grew up there until he came to Caracas at seventeen to attend the Venezuelan military academy.”

“Interesting that the Iranians decided to build their base there.”

“Also interesting is the fact that the Iranians are building a landing strip in Barinas, which is near the Colombian border and close to hundreds of cocaine labs.”

“How convenient,” Crocker observed.

“Exactly.”

C
rocker, Davis,
and Sanchez set out early the following morning in one of the white Toyota FJ Cruisers they had used the night they raided the shack in Petare. The four-lane “super” highway was paved and relatively new. Sanchez explained that the Chávez-Maduro government had removed all the tollbooths so that anyone regardless of their social or economic status could afford to take the country's best roads. This explained the heavy traffic. Crocker also saw disrepair in several places and wrecked, abandoned cars along the side of the road.

The sun was starting to set when they arrived at the state capital of Barinas, which featured open fields, groves of trees, and gated estates. Sanchez said that since they were close to the Colombian border, the area was frequented by FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) soldiers, and therefore considered dangerous at night.

“I've dealt with them before,” Crocker said, recalling past missions against FARC bases in eastern Colombia.

“The guerrillas cross the border to steal stuff and kidnap people. So all the ranchers in the area are armed and on alert. They lock up their cattle and equipment after dark.”

The FARC, which called itself a peasant army whose goal was to overthrow the Colombian government and establish an agrarian Marxist-Leninist state, financed its operations by kidnapping wealthy Colombians and foreigners for ransom, growing coca, and processing, trafficking, and transshipping cocaine. One of its leaders, Guillermo Torres, had been captured near Barinas in June of the previous year.

“Interesting place for Unit 5000 to establish a base,” Crocker said, thinking out loud. “They're in Venezuela, so they're protected, Barinas is in the middle of nowhere, and there's an endless supply of cheap cocaine that they can sell overseas to fund their operations.”

He was starting to understand how the Falcon thought.

“I was thinking the same thing, boss,” Davis said. “Instead of having to ship the drugs out of places like Ciudad del Este, they'll soon be able to fly it to Europe right out of here.”

“Good point.”

They stopped at a farmhouse with a big garden and were greeted by large barking dogs. The proprietor, Señor Tomás, looked like a wizened, white-haired Indiana Jones, complete with safari jacket and straw fedora. Crocker learned that he was a Cuban American cattle rancher and CIA asset. He also had two extra bedrooms, one of which was being used by Mancini, Cal, and Neto. Crocker, Davis, and Sanchez took the other one, which seemed to belong to a huge black dog named Chico, who slept in a large wicker basket under the window.

After washing up and unpacking, Crocker and Davis met the other members of Black Cell and Neto on the rear veranda, where they drank rum punch and beer, and listened to Señor Tomás talk about how the government was ruining the country by driving rich Venezuelans and foreign capital out, and thereby shutting down new business investment.

“You think Maduro will change anything?” Mancini asked.

“Probably not,” Tomás answered. “He's a fucking communist demagogue, too. Spends a lot of time with the Castro brothers in Cuba looking for ways to screw the U.S. As a matter of fact, he might be worse.”

After dinner of roast lamb and baby potatoes, their host showed them photos of his family's house in Havana, where he had been born in 1940. His father, he explained, had been arrested and shot by Che Guevara shortly after the Cuban Revolution. He himself had returned to Cuba as a teenager as part of the CIA-trained Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs Invasion on April 17, 1961. He was one of an estimated 1,202 Cuban anti-Castro rebels who were captured a few days later, after the Kennedy administration failed to assist the invading force with much-needed air support. He spent a year and a half rotting in a Cuban prison before he was released and returned to Miami.

He hated the Kennedys for their betrayal but said he despised Fidel Castro even more, which is why he had worked with the CIA to help defeat communists throughout Latin America ever since.

With his blond American wife humming along, Tomás played a guitar and sang plaintive songs in Spanish. One of them, “Guantanamera,” a love song to a woman from a country town in Cuba, caused tears to spill from his eyes. He wiped them away, ran into the yard, and starting lighting something with a torch.

“What's he doing now?” Crocker whispered to Mancini.

“He's setting off fireworks. It's about two minutes shy of the New Year.” With all the excitement, injuries, and activity, Crocker had lost track of time.

They watched rockets explode in the sky, drank champagne, and sang “Auld Lang Syne.”

After midnight, Crocker, Mancini, and Neto piled into the Toyota for a drive past the Unit 5000 base, which was a couple of miles west. All they could see from the narrow road was a high aluminum fence topped with barbed wire. Guarding the gate were Venezuelan soldiers armed with automatic rifles who were passing a bottle of whiskey.

Back at the house, Neto and Crocker examined the latest satellite photos. Neto pointed out that while all that had been built so far were two barracks and an admin building, construction on the airstrip, small control tower, and storage hangars was moving fast.

“How soon before the airstrip is operational?” Crocker asked.

“They're already landing smaller planes on this dirt strip over here,” Neto answered, pointing to another photo. “But the longer asphalt one probably won't be ready for another three or four months.”

Bush and field crickets chirped through the screened window and a string of firecrackers went off in the distance as Crocker sat down at a laptop in Señor Tomás's office and typed out a report on the Brazilian raid for Captain Sutter back at command. He still owed him one about his arrest of the major in Afghanistan, too. He thought,
Maybe I'll get to that tomorrow.

The white stucco walls and tops of the old credenza, desk, and bookcase were covered with framed pictures of Tomás's life and adventures—smiling in the back of a boat with a large sailfish in one hand and his arm around a beautiful woman; standing with a group of shorter Cuban-looking men; shooting skeet; waterskiing. One of the black dogs snored on the round faded rug near Crocker's feet.

He was starting to stand when he heard something move outside and he stopped to listen. The dog lifted its big head for a moment, then subsided. Another dog barked in the distance. It stopped, and all he heard were crickets again and the leaves rattling in the breeze.

Crocker looked at the watch he'd received from Akil: 0324. He was still wide awake.

He liked the house, the semitropical setting, the languid feeling in the air, the sense of being surrounded by memories. Projecting at least fifteen years into the future, he wondered what it would be like to retire to an outpost like this with Holly. If she didn't want to come with him, he might try living there on his own. Maybe find a younger Venezuelan family to help him run the ranch. Maybe learn to play the saxophone, which he'd always wanted to do.

He saved his document, shut down the computer, and was walking down the hall to the bedroom when he heard a vehicle enter through the gate and stop. Footsteps hurried over the gravel. The dogs barked.

Someone was pounding on the front door. He heard Tomás shout in Spanish and ran to see what was going on. A single gunshot reverberated down the hall, followed by the horrible yelp of a dog in pain.

More men shouted from the bedroom area. Crocker ran back to the office, grabbed the old .38 revolver he'd seen in the top drawer of the desk, and checked to see that it was loaded. With his back pressed along the wall, he made his way to the front room.

From the hallway, he saw Tomás wrestling with two men wearing black ski masks. Tomás punched one of them in the face; the other grabbed him around the neck and threw him to the ground. While the two masked men kicked him in the chest and groin, another man with a big belly watched. He laughed, then leaned over to smack Tomás in the face with the big black pistol he was holding.

Crocker stepped forward and heard the wooden floor creak behind him. He stopped and pivoted into the barrels of two AK-47s pointed at his head. “Drop your gun,” a masked man growled in Spanish-accented English.

Crocker bent down to lay the pistol on the floor, then threw himself at the men's knees. He was reaching around in the dark trying to locate one of the men when something smashed into the small of his back and a bolt of pain shot into his legs and up his spine to his head. His arms and legs went numb. Hands grabbed him by the neck and roughly pulled him to his feet.

He kicked and tried to pull away when something hit him in the stomach, forcing the air out of his diaphragm and striking the vagus nerve in his stomach, which made him want to throw up.

Gasping for breath and unable to summon the energy to fight back, Crocker was hog-tied at the wrists and ankles, his mouth was taped shut, and he was dragged outside past a dead dog and thrown into the back of a covered truck. He saw Cal beside him bleeding from a wound on his forehead. When he heard Mancini moaning, he tried to turn and look over his left shoulder, but a soldier kicked him back.

The truck they were in started moving and picking up speed. As Crocker sweated through his clothes, he counted the seconds in his head. Simultaneously he was trying to remember the route—down a straight road, right, up an incline, another right, past what smelled like a barn. They stopped when he reached 243-Mississippi.

Two soldiers dragged him across a dirt field and down fifteen concrete steps. A metal door creaked open. He was pushed into a little room that stunk of human waste and rot. It was completely dark and barely long enough to accommodate his long body.

Three soldiers wearing black masks entered. One used a large pair of scissors to cut his clothes off while another removed his watch, shoes, and the tape from his mouth. A third placed a large tin can filled with water on the floor, and all three left.

Crocker heard a muffled scream from another cell and thought it sounded like Cal. He wanted desperately to help him. His windowless room was completely devoid of light. With his wrists still tied behind his back, he measured the space with his leg and the side of his face. He found rough cement, a metal door with a one-inch gap at the bottom, human waste, and some bones in one corner.
Nice way to start the new year,
he said to himself as he saw a rat squeeze under the door and scurry around his cell. When it ran across his shoulder to his chest he shook it off, then used his knees to crush it against the wall.

Sitting naked with his back against the wall, he measured his breath. Square breathing, they called it in yoga—counting to four as he inhaled, holding his breath in his lungs for another four, exhaling in four, then counting to four before he inhaled again.

He tried to stay positive and chased out of his head all thoughts of long-term captivity, torture, and death.

They'll come and get me. Something will happen.
An opportunity will present itself, and I'll strike.

Hours passed before three men in olive uniforms with black hoods over their heads entered. They dragged Crocker down a dark, narrow hallway to a larger room with bright lights. The men sat him in a metal chair facing a long metal table.

The light burned his eyes as he waited for perhaps an hour, with soldiers standing guard behind him. Then a door to his right opened and three more men filed in, also wearing black hoods but dressed in civilian clothes. The one with the big belly carried a gray folder, which he slapped onto the table as the other two took their seats on either side of him. The guards moved forward to stand parallel with Crocker. He noticed automatic handguns in the holsters on their waists.

The man with the big belly opened the folder, grabbed a pen from his pocket, clicked it, and looking up at Crocker asked in English, “Name?”

“Thomas Mansfield.”

“Name?”

Crocker had volunteered for SERE (meaning Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training soon after he'd been assigned to SEAL Team One. At the age of twenty-four, he'd spent weeks in a mock POW camp in Warner Springs, California, where he was interrogated, deprived of food and sleep, and waterboarded. He had also served as a SERE instructor at the same camp a few years back. So he knew what to expect during an enemy interrogation, and had committed to memory the six articles of the military code of conduct.

Article Three stated: If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

“Name?” the man at the table barked again.

“Thomas Mansfield.”

“If you tell us the truth, we can make this easy,” the man said. “Name?”

“Thomas Mansfield.”

“Nationality?”

“Canadian.”

“Occupation?”

“Businessman.”

“What's the name of your company?”

“Balzac Expeditions.”

A shorter man at the left end of the table with a silver Swiss military watch on his left wrist cleared his throat and spoke with a Middle Eastern accent: “I know this criminal. His name is Tom Crocker, and he's an assault team leader with SEAL Team Six, also known as DEVGRU.”

Crocker focused on the voice and the silver watch. The man said he knew him.
Could it be Farhed Alizadeh, the Falcon?

The man with the belly asked, “Is this true?”

“No,” Crocker answered, trying to recall the names, faces, and voices of Iranian VEVAK and Quds Force agents he had run into during the course of his career.

“Mr. Crocker is a very dangerous man. A cold-blooded killer,” the man at the end of the table continued. “Why are you in Barinas, Mr. Crocker?”