Hunt the Falcon (8 page)

He listened to the smooth modal changes of “So What” from the Miles Davis–Bill Evans masterpiece album
Kind of Blue
. It was one of Crocker's favorites, and to his mind the best Davis ever recorded.

“You really like it?” he asked.

“It's cool and…like…helps me relax.”

He sat on a pink plastic stool across from her. “Sweetheart, let's talk about the letter that came from your counselor.”

“Oh that.…” As if the weight of the world had suddenly fallen on her seventeen-year-old shoulders.

He cut to the chase. “Is this about a boy, drugs, alcohol, or something else not related to school?”

“No, Dad,” she answered. “Is that what Holly told you?”

“No.”

“I'm not partying or fooling around,” she said. “Maybe I go out on the weekends with my friends, but I come home every day after school and study.”

“Then what's the problem?”

She sighed, “Dad, I'm trying. I'm just dealing with a lot of like…personal stuff.”

He wanted to believe that, and knew it had to be tough having a mother who couldn't deal with her and sent her to live with a father who wasn't around most of the time. He tried to be involved, the way he was doing now, asking her what was going on at school, patiently waiting for her to explain. According to her, things weren't as bad as they seemed. Teachers in both classes had failed to enter some of her assignments into the computer grading system. And there were some tests and quizzes that she was planning to retake.

In the end, she accused Holly of overreacting.

Crocker begged her to be understanding. Holly, he explained, was going through a difficult time of her own.

Jenny nodded. “I know, Dad. I think she still feels guilty about her friend who died.”

Both women were hypersensitive, especially with regard to each other.

He said, “I agree,” then kissed her, told her he loved her, and that he had to leave the next morning.

“You think you'll be back for Christmas?” Jenny asked.

The holiday was four days away. “I don't know,” he answered. “The odds aren't good.”

“But you'll call?”

“Every opportunity I get.”

“Thanks, Dad. I love you. Be safe.”

He closed the door behind him, and padded down the hall to his bedroom, where Holly lay in bed with the reading lamp on beside her. He splashed water on his face, brushed his teeth, pulled off the sweater he'd worn all day, and sat down on the bed beside her.

“Holly,” he whispered. “Sweetheart…”

She turned and he saw she'd been crying. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and tell her to snap out of it, but he knew that wouldn't work. So he wiped the tears from her eyes, told her he'd spoken to Jenny and she had assured him that her grades weren't as bad as they seemed. In fact, she thought she was getting A's in her three other classes.

“I can't help her, Tom,” Holly said, squeezing his hand. “I'm too busy trying to deal with my own problems.”

He kissed her on the lips. “I know, sweetheart. Don't be so hard on yourself.”

T
he six
members of Black Cell sat in the Corona Beach House in Terminal D of the Miami International Airport, watching the Heat-Jazz game on TV, sipping beers and snacking on nachos as they waited for their connecting flight. The last time Crocker had been in Caracas he'd been part of a security team guarding President George H. W. Bush back in 1990 and not too long after he graduated from BUD/S.

That was before Hugo Chávez had assumed power and become a thorn in the side of the United States. He even blamed the States for causing the earthquake that devastated Haiti in January 2010.

Crocker pulled Cal over to the salsa bar and asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just checking.”

Working with the men on the team was easier than dealing with people in civilian life. They bled, but they didn't complain. Their bones cracked, but they'd been trained not to break down psychologically.

He returned to the table as Ritchie was telling the others about a trip he'd made to New York City over the weekend with his fiancée, Monica, and how they'd enjoyed the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall, ice skating at Rockefeller Center, shopping at Barney's and Bergdorf's. Monica had expensive tastes, and Ritchie, who had grown up in a trailer park on the outskirts of Dallas, seemed not to mind.

The two of them were planning an April wedding in D.C., and Crocker wondered after they were married how much longer a strong-willed, financially independent woman like Monica would want Ritchie to continue in SEAL teams. She'd want to have him around to travel with her, ski, play, have fun. Even though the pay was decent (around $100,000 a year, including his E-6 base pay, special skills pay, imminent danger pay, special assignment pay, and reenlistment installments), the hours sucked. It was the most exciting and challenging work Crocker could imagine. But the many days away from home wreaked havoc on relationships and families.

He was more aware of this than ever as he watched people pass by on their way to spend the Christmas holidays with loved ones. They had a right to be happy, especially this time of year. And a right to be protected, too, which is where he and his team fit in—to guard the sheep from the wolves.

Across the table he saw Mancini tearing into a huge mound of salad.

“You become a vegetarian?” Crocker asked.

“Teresa put me on a diet,” the big man said, raising his thick eyebrows. “All the fresh veggies you can eat. A prescribed amount of protein. No rice, pasta, bread, cookies, or cake.”

“Good luck.” He had watched Mancini adopt and slip off numerous food regimens in the past. Not only was his wife an amazing cook, but the guy loved to eat.

“How many years you been on the teams?” Crocker asked him.

“Four years with Team Two. Eight fun-filled years now with Six—excuse me, DEVGRU. How about you?”

“Two years with Team One, three with Two, and twelve now with DEVGRU.”

“We're the old-timers,” Mancini said, glancing at Ritchie, Cal, Davis, and Akil sitting next to them, ribbing each other and cracking jokes. “Why'd you ask? You thinking of retiring?”

“Hell no,” Crocker groaned. The idea repulsed him. Even though he was in his early forties, he had no plans for slowing down.

“Me neither,” Mancini said, wiping salad dressing off his lips and beard. “And soon we're going to have some new toys to play with.”

“What do you mean?”

“I spent a day last week with the people of DARPA.” The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, was the most active and experimental military technology research facility on the planet.

“Yeah? What'd you see?” Part of DEVGRU's mission was to test the latest weapons and gear. For his part, Crocker tended to put more stock in the value of training and preparing first-class operators than in technology.

“They showed me some wicked cool new gadgets,” Mancini said, grinning like a kid on Christmas morning. “I got to fire a BAE laser cannon, which shoots a laser blast as far as a mile and a half. They're developing a version of it to deploy on navy ships, to temporarily blind pirates and other terrorists. I fired a handheld version that shoots out this green beam of light like something out of
Star Wars
.”

“No shit.”

“But the most radical thing by far was the invisibility cloak they're developing.”

“Invisibility? Really?” It sounded like something out of one of the Harry Potter movies he'd watched with his daughter.

Mancini said, “A couple years from now, you'll be able to wrap this cloak around you and walk into a building or enemy encampment completely unseen.”

“Are you serious?” Crocker asked, checking the score on the TV beyond Manny's shoulder. The Heat were ahead by seven points with four minutes to play.

“It only works for a fraction of a second now, but the engineers at DARPA expect to improve it soon,” Mancini explained.

Crocker feigned interest; his mind was elsewhere. “How's it work?”

“It's made of sheets of carbon wrapped up into tubes. Each page is barely the size of a single molecule, but it's hard as steel. The sheets are heated electronically, which causes light to bend away from the carbon nanotube sheet. It's basically the same as creating the pool-of-water effect you see when you're driving on a desert highway. They're also experimenting with metamaterials, natural materials that have a positive refractive index, to make tanks and ships invisible.”

“Amazing,” Crocker said, signaling the waitress.

“Isn't it?” Mancini leaned across the table and whispered in Crocker's ear. “And they gave me something for us to try out.”

“What?”

“You'll see. They're tiny little drones, the size of my thumbnail. I've got two of them taped into the lining of my suitcase.”

“Cool.”

They landed early Christmas Eve morning at the Simón Bolívar International Airport. A tall Russian Venezuelan woman named Zoya from the Tara-Omega travel agency met them at the gate and helped them through Venezuelan immigration and customs. They were traveling as survival experts under the employ of a Canadian company called Balzac Expeditions and were purportedly in Venezuela to organize a trek into the Amazon jungle.

“I've booked you for a one-week stay at the InterContinental Tamanaco Caracas, which is right in the heart of one of the city's most prestigious shopping and business districts, Las Mercedes,” Zoya said as her heels clicked down the terminal concourse. She seemed eager and efficient, and looked very young.

“If you need to extend your stay, you can continue at the same rate,” she explained in perfect English.

“Great,” Crocker said, half asleep. At 6 a.m. the terminal seemed vast and deserted. “And you got us a vehicle?”

“A one-year-old Honda Pilot. Will that meet your needs?”

“I don't see why not.”

She led them to the silver SUV, which was parked in a three-story lot near the terminal. “One last thing,” she said, handing over the keys. “The security situation in Caracas is deplorable. Currently we have an average of one murder per hour just in the capital. So keep your eyes open and don't travel alone, especially at night. Street gangs here like to rob and kidnap foreigners.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Crocker said.

She glanced at his biceps and added, “You guys look like you know how to defend yourselves, but be careful.” Then she handed him her card. “Call me if you need anything. That's my cell phone.”

“We will,” Akil said with a smile. “Maybe you can show us around later tonight?”

“Tonight is Christmas Eve,” she explained, holding her reddish-brown hair back and shielding her eyes from the early morning sun. “I'm spending it with my family.”

“Then have a Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too.”

Fog shrouded the emerald-green mountains on both sides of the Autopista Caracas–La Guaira. When it cleared, Crocker saw thousands of little shanties clinging to cliffs. The local government called them “informal settlements” but they were really enormous, sprawling slums. Modern office towers dotted the narrow valley ahead. The Garmin GPS map on the dashboard indicated that they were traveling roughly north to south, from the airport on the Caribbean coast to the capital city, which lay inland.

“Venezuela is a country of approximately twenty-nine million people,” Mancini reported. “About a fourth of them live here in Caracas, which as you can see offers limited space because of its topography. So the city has an enormous housing problem on top of the huge disparity between rich and poor.”

“Good to know,” Ritchie said from the rear seat.

“Despite Chávez's socialist Bolivarian revolution, which was supposed to redistribute wealth to the poor, the country suffers from double-digit inflation, soaring crime, chronic shortages due to government meddling, and the expropriation of successful businesses and ranches,” Mancini added.

Davis cut in. “Sounds like you're saying that despite Chávez's best intentions he's pretty much screwed things up.”

“He's helped the poor, no question,” Mancini answered. “But inefficient government management and expropriations have chased away local and foreign investment, and hinder the country from expanding past a single-resource economy.”

“Oil, in other words,” Davis added.

“Petroleum production. They pump something like 2.3 million barrels a day. Down from 3.5 million in '98 and continuing to plummet.”

The female voice on the Garmin instructed Crocker to turn off the highway. They entered what looked like an upscale residential community, but bags of garbage were piled along the side of the road, many of the shops seemed empty, and pro- and anti-Chávez graffiti covered the walls.

Four blocks farther on they reached the elegant Las Mercedes district and turned down an alley to a nine-story modern sandstone structure shaped like a hexagon. Part of the aboveground parking structure was roped off.

A young man in shorts and flip-flops who stopped them and offered to guard their car explained in Spanish that the roped-off area was occupied by squatters. He pointed out that he, his mother, brother, and three sisters lived in a twelve-by-twelve-foot wooden cubicle allocated to them by the Chávez government. His family and three dozen others shared a single bathroom with no hot water in the parking structure.

“How do you cook?” Crocker asked in broken Spanish.

“We have electricity, but no gas for cooking,” the skinny man explained. “So the government delivers three meals a day and provides beds and furniture. They even bus my younger brother and sisters to a school three miles away.”

Crocker handed the kid a five-dollar bill, parked the Pilot, and led the team down a flight of stairs to a modern lobby. Armed soldiers were stationed at either side of the front desk.

“What are they here for?” Crocker asked the male hotel clerk.

“They make sure we don't raise prices beyond those set by the government.” The clerk went on to explain that the country had two exchange rates. The rate set for “priority” imports was 2.60 bolívars to the dollar and for nonessential items 4.30.

“I assume we're getting the nonessential rate,” Crocker said.

“Yes you are, sir.” But most of the benefit of the better rate quickly evaporated when the clerk explained that room prices had just been raised 15 percent.

A sign on the marble counter carried more warnings. In addition to the rampant street crime they had already heard about, the SEALs now learned that the country was experiencing a temporary energy shortage, which meant that guests could expect regular power outages.

“That's ridiculous,” Ritchie commented as they rode up to the third floor.

“Especially in a country that's one of the top oil producers in the world.”

The rooms were big and nicely appointed, with king-sized beds, LCD TVs, desks, safes, and balconies overlooking the garden and pool. But the trash cans hadn't been emptied, the sheets were stained, and Crocker and Akil's toilet didn't work. They used Mancini and Cal's while they waited for the plumber, who came four hours later, just as they were getting ready to leave for dinner.

Outside, the sidewalks were packed with strollers, partyers, and last-minute shoppers, especially tree-lined Avenida Principal de las Mercedes and inside the huge, multilevel Paseo shopping mall. The six fit men passed fashion boutiques, galleries, restaurants, discos, pubs, and beautiful young women displaying lots of tanned flesh even though it was Christmas Eve. Akil's head swiveled so rapidly to take in all the pulchritude that Crocker thought it might fall off.

Stores offered everything from Japanese anime dolls to Chinese noodles, haute French fashion, Turkish-made hookahs, NFL jerseys, English toffee, Colombian coffee, and Indian cotton.

The city boasted a modern subway system, yet the streets were clogged with traffic—mainly U.S.- and Japanese-made cars. From one of them Crocker heard a rap song blaring in Spanish, “People from the barrio ready to fight for a better life…”

Mancini stopped to sample the arepas—warm cornmeal patties filled with melted cheese—from a sidewalk vendor, and then they entered a traditional English pub. Crocker ordered fish-and-chips washed down with Newcastle Brown Ale. They bantered about the football season, basketball, trucks, motorcycles. Then the subject, as it always did, turned to women.

Akil turned to Ritchie: “You hear what Tommy Lee from Mötley Crüe said about marriage?”

Ritchie: “I know this is a setup. What?”

“Marriage is the only war where one sleeps with the enemy.”