Cybernarc (7 page)

Chaco straightened, folding his jackknife and stuffing it in his pocket. "Watch our friend here, Arturo,” he said. "I’d better see if Ramon and Julio need any help with the
putas
!
” He winked cheerfully at Drake, rubbing his crotch, then walked out of the room whistling, his MAC-10 casually slung over his shoulder.

Arturo stood there, watching Drake incuriously for minute after agonizing minute. The SEAL could hear the sounds from one of the bedrooms, just a short way down the hallway out of the dining room, and wished to God that he could not. Stacy crying, Meagan pleading. One of their captors laughed, a harsh bark filled with malice.

"Look, Arturo,” Drake said. "You know you can’t get away with this. Help me, and I’ll make it worth your while!”

"Oh shit,” Arturo said, smirking. "Gimme a break, man!” He watched his prisoner for several more minutes as the sounds from the bedroom grew more strident, more desperate.

"Hey, Chaco!”
a voice called.
"This one’s prime, hey?”

Suddenly Arturo seemed to lose interest. He sniffed loudly, then walked back to the dining room table, sitting down with his back to the helpless SEAL. He seemed more interested in the cocaine than in guard duty, and for that, Drake was very, very grateful.

His eyes on Arturo’s back, Drake began squeezing his shackled wrists down past his buttocks. His head still throbbing from the earlier abuse, he fought back tears and dizziness as he tried not to make any noise.

"Leave her alone!
’’Meagan screamed in the bedroom.
"For God’s sake, she’s just a baby!”

"Silencio, puta!”
There was another scream, wordless this time.

Drake’s wrists slid behind his knees. Arturo had his face down close to the table. He inhaled, snorted, then leaned back, wiping his nose with a finger. An Ingram was lying on the table beside his elbow. Drake could see it, could see a tri
ckle of sweat on the back of
Art
uro’s
neck.
Oh, help me, God! Help me help me help me ... !

He would kill them . . . kill them all with his bare hands if he had to. He tried the tape on his ankles. It was tough, like plastic packing tape. He would never free it with his hands.

Arturo was seated perhaps fifteen feet away, his back still turned to Drake. Silently, using every ounce of skill in stealthy movement available to the SEAL, Drake pulled himself toward the lanky gang member. The screams from the bedroom were subsiding now, but they still were loud enough to cover the rasp of his trousers dragging across the carpet.

"Hey, hurry it up, compadre! I can’t wait much longer, man!”

Three feet away now, Drake steadied himself on his hands, drawing his legs beneath him, rising unsteadily to his feet. His eyes still on Arturo’s back, he saw the man’s shoulder muscles bunch, as though he was suddenly aware of movement behind him.

Drake’s hands snapped out together, grabbing Arturo’s hair in viselike grips on either side of his head, just above his ears. Using all his strength, he slammed the cokehead’s face forward, onto the glass tabletop.

There was a loud pop as glass cracked. Drake hauled Arturo’s head back, the face a mask of blood, then slammed it forward again . . . and again. Blood dissolved smeared lines of white powder in the
spiderweb
cracks in the glass. Gently, Drake lowered the body to the floor.

Quickly now. He took Arturo’s knife and freed his ankles, then grabbed the MAC-10. He checked the magazine, a bit clumsily with his hands still cuffed. The mag felt full, and one round was already chambered. Idiot. . . carrying the vicious little auto weapon around with a loaded chamber . . .

Weapon at the ready, Drake sprinted down the hall. The door to one of the bedrooms—his and Meagan’s— was closed, the sounds from behind it much weaker now, interspersed with laughter and a heart-sickening grunting noise that whipped Drake to a trembling fury.

It was not vengeance that drove him so much as survival. Training and experience both had taught him long ago that the choreographed firelights staged on Hollywood’s screens had little in common with reality. Taking them one-on-three was an act of pure desperation, but it was either try ... or he, Meagan, and Stacy were going to die. His one hope was that they’d put down their MAC-10s, that he could catch them unarmed. He’d have a chance then, unless something terribly wrong happened.

It happened five paces from the door. "Whee-oo!” someone called from inside. "Hey, Arturo! Get the fuck in here and have some!” Julio banged through the door, Ingram pointed at the ceiling, hitching up his jeans with his free hand. "These honeys are
sweet!”
There was no time to think, no time for anything fancy. Drake’s finger tightened on the MAC-
10
’s trigger, snapping a short, buzzsaw burst into the drugger’s sleeveless undershirt.

Drake plowed over the man’s body before it had time to fall, bursting into the bedroom and a scene of nightmare horror.

They’d torn this room apart, too, overturning the dresser, slashing the big queen-size mattress. Stacy and Meagan were tied to the bed side by side, naked, spread-eagled by strips of cloth cut from their clothing. Ramon was between Meagan’s legs, obscenely naked, grossly fat, rising to his knees at the sound of gunfire in the hall. Chaco was on the far side of the bed, next to Stacy. He had just snatched an Ingram from the bedside table and was swinging it up to cover the door.

Drake fired again. The man with the gun was the threat, the primary target, but 9mm rounds slammed into Ramon’s quivering bulk as Drake dragged the muzzle around, straining to hit Chaco before the gunman was able to fire. Too late! Chaco fired at almost the same instant, the muzzle flash stabbing from his weapon in the mercifully dim-lit bedroom. He’d not had time to aim. Chaco’s first shots hammered into the bed as he screamed.

"No!”
Drake’s own scream of denial and rage and terror mingled with Chaco’s agony. Ramon pitched backward off the bed, blood from three wounds splattering ceiling, walls, and floor as he fell. Chaco was slammed against the wall, leaving bloody tracks where the fingers of one hand clawed at the paint. The MAC- 10 in the gunman’s other hand kept firing wildly, slamming rounds into the door, the wall, the bed. . . .

He collapsed facedown across Stacy, the Ingram spilling from his grasp.

For one horrible moment, Drake stood there in a room suddenly gone death silent. There was blood everywhere ...
everywhere,
painting the walls in slashes of scarlet, pooling on the bed, drooling from Ramon’s chest. His Ingram, the magazine empty, dropped to the floor, the clatter unbearably loud in the sudden quiet.

Meagan had turned her head toward him as he entered the room. Her eyes were glassy now, unseeing, the luxuriant spill of black hair across the pillow matted with blood and pieces of skull. The side of her head nearest Drake had been blown away. Next to her, Stacy lay still with eyes closed. When Drake rolled the corpse off her body, he saw the savage wounds cratering her chest in a neat, straight line where Chaco’s unaimed fire had walked across her, puncturing heart and lungs like the vicious stabs of an ice pick.

Drake’s scream of anguish and pain rang from the bloody walls, echoed down the hallway.

He did not leave their bodies for a long, long time.

©
Chapter Six

It
WAS SUNDAY.
The Salazar family had just returned from Mass at
La Catedral
in Santa Marta, but the big, midday meal was still several hours away. The rich aroma of
cazuela de mariscos
—a thick stew of various
seafoods
—hung heavy in the humid air. The sun was bright and hot, but there was just enough breeze off the sea to make the partially shaded patio attractive.

Above the pool, the Verdant rise of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rose in towering splendor to the south, the tallest peaks capped with snow glistening in the noon sun. The northern slopes of those mountains grew some of the finest marijuana in the world, and much of that land belonged to the Salazars.

That marijuana had been the beginnings of the Salazar empire, back before the world had gone crazy for coke.

Jose Salazar walked onto the pool-side flagstones, a cup of coffee in hand. His uncle Roberto was already on the patio, leaning back in a lounge chair with a glass of
aguardiente,
watching the antics of three naked girls splashing in the pool. The girls were not regular residents of the hacienda, but Roberto occasionally had
them flown in from Bogota, as entertainment for certain guests. A special visitor was arriving, one who had enjoyed Roberto’s hospitality on several earlier occasions. The aircraft, an old C-123 Provider air transport, had swept low over the hacienda, circled, and touched down at the airstrip to the east only minutes before. Jose had just come from the hacienda’s radio room, where he’d spoken with the pilot and given orders for the loading of the cargo.

"Que ha hecho, Tio Roberto,
” he said, sinking into a chair at his uncle’s side.

"Hello, Jose. Our friend is down?”

"Si, mi tio.
He will be here shortly.” Jose frowned. "I do not trust this
norteamericano. ”

"And you think that I do? Still, it is a remarkable thing that we have achieved here, nephew.
Que puteria!”
The expression, a vulgar Colombian expletive, could refer to something either very good or very bad, but in any case, wildly fantastic or improbable. It was clear that Roberto was pleased with himself. He laughed. "Did you see the look on old Don Fabio’s face when I told him that American SEALs were coming to the party the other night? I thought he would have a stroke, right there on the spot!”

"I enjoyed watching their faces the next day, Uncle. When we took them out to the jungle to see the bodies.” Jose grinned. "You were showing off, Uncle Roberto. Shamelessly.”

"I made my point, no?” He gestured toward the hacienda. "That the Salazars have the advantage in what the army would call military intelligence. I think we will be able to do business with them now.”

Jose watched the girls in silence for a while. He did not agree, but it was never politic to contradict the old man, not directly, at any rate.

It was Roberto’s dream, Jose knew, to unite the mutually hostile Colombian cartels under one family. A self-proclaimed expert on criminal history, Roberto was fond of pointing out that the splintered, battling Chicago gangs of the twenties had gone nowhere until they were united, working together in a true syndicate instead of fighting among themselves. Jose, who had traveled in America, who had done business with the ruling mafiosi of Chicago and other cities, knew that the truth was more complex, and brutal: it was the gang wars that had united the American syndicates in the first place. The modern-day Mafia empire of Chicago’s Tony Ac- cardo was a direct, lineal descendant of the gangland mobs of Alfonso Capone and Frank Nitti.

And more than that, the gang battles continued to this day. It was simply that the killings received little national attention in the press. Not like the bloodletting in Colombia, where
El Espectador
published lists of the victims each week and demanded that the government take action.

How long, he wondered, before the killings in the United States grew to match the proportions of the slaughter in his own country? It was not that Jose enjoyed the killings. For him, the murders, the hits, the kidnappings and tortures were simply business.

It was a matter of economics. Coca leaves sold in Colombia for perhaps fifty cents a kilo, a price that fluctuated with government attempts—never more than marginally successful—to burn or capture the crops.

A thousand kilos of leaves were required for one kilo of eighty-percent-pure cocaine . . . but that kilo sold on the streets of Miami or New York or Chicago for anywhere from twenty to sixty thousand dollars, depending on availability.

That made cocaine, gram for gram, up to four times more valuable than its weight in gold.

It made cocaine worth killing for, as rival families struggled to control the pipelines into the United States. America’s demand for the white powder seemed inexhaustible, but there were only so many ways to get it past Customs agents and the Border Patrol, Coast Guard cutters, and AWACS radar planes. It was the pipelines that made the drug lords vulnerable, the pipelines that they fought and died for. It was the pipelines that the enemy, the DEA and other antinarcotics organizations, kept trying to penetrate.

The cocaine trade in Colombia was dominated by several major syndicates, or cartels, of
narcotrafficantes.
The largest, without question, was the Medellin cartel, with the Cali organization a close number two. Like the Sicilian Mafia, the cartels tended to be dominated by particular families—security was less of a problem when you were dealing with sons and nephews and cousins—and as with the Mafia, terror and money were the two principal weapons that kept them secure.

Terror
guaranteed that witnesses would not testify, prosecutors would not take cases, jurists would not sit, judges would not convict. The terror had reached the proportions of all-out war and generated a new word:
narcoterrorist.
In Medellin alone, a city with a population of two million, there had been over five thousand drug-related murders in 1990.