Deadly Waters (23 page)
Authors: Theodore Judson
5/6/09 19:23 EDT
“The suspects are singing like canaries,” the FBI director told the president.
The commander-in-chief and his principal security advisors were holding another informal meeting in the Oval Office, one of the few islands of sanity in a capital city that had gone insane in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. Here inside the West Wing was the one place in town the president and anyone else of importance could go and not be accosted by reporters asking questions no one could answer.
“They were recruited in Calle, Bogota, Cartagena and Medellin,” the FBI director continued, glancing at the faxes he had received that afternoon. “Trained at a base near Montecuel, Venezuela, and we have people on the way to check that site out, sir. They were trained by a former East German Colonel named Max.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” inserted the president. “An old East German operative in South America?”
“They were paid by a Russian they identified as Vladimir Petrovski and a Mexican-American named Charles Corello,” the FBI man went on.
“Who, specifically, recruited them?” asked the chief security advisor. “Or do we know?”
“One of their own in Cartagena,” said the FBI director. “They’re not specific, yet. Honor between thieves holds them back and so on. We have every confidence we’ll soon have a name.”
“The civil war in Colombia has come here,” said the chief security advisor. “This is clearly an act of war.”
The president detested talk of this sort. Behind his back his staff and cabinet remarked that the only dove in the foreign policy establishment was the commander-in-chief himself. After the always troublesome Middle East, Colombia and its Andean neighbors had been the potential quagmire the president had feared the most during his four months in office. His dread was not so much based on ideological aversion to military interventions as it was on his certain knowledge that his administration lacked the congressional and popular strength to involve the United States in new adventures.
The elections in November 2010 looked to be a disaster for his party, and he felt especially weak in the face of these attacks in the Colorado drainage area. At the same time he was fully aware that the war between the Colombian government and two leftist guerrilla armies had been on the back burner of every think tank’s oven for more than two decades.
Hawks in Congress and the intelligence community saw Colombia as another place to exert American air power and teach the wanton rascals down there a lesson they would never forget. Law and order types saw Colombia as the place to win the war on drugs, because the leftists there got their financing from the narcotics traffickers.
American liberals viewed Colombia as another opportunity to expand democracy and were also in favor of bombing, so long as the bombing was done strictly for humanitarian purposes. The President wanted them all to shut up. He had avoided military service when he was younger, and in light of his perilous political situation, he did not wish to remind the nation of his less than heroic past.
“Until we know who is behind this cowardly act, we aren’t going to talk about war,” said the president. “We have to wait. Then we have to wait some more. No one should rush to anything. This recruiter in Cartagena,” he said to the FBI director, “do we have any leads yet?”
“The suspects are familiar with our legal system,” said the director. “They know about plea bargains and about turning state’s evidence. They’re tempting us with the little information they’ve given us so far. If we offer them a deal, they will give up the recruiter’s name in a New York minute.”
The president’s visage darkened at the mention of a possible plea bargain for the murderers of thousands of American citizens.
“Of course, we won’t do that,” the director quickly added. “That would be morally wrong.”
5/7/09 13:02 Atlantic Daylight Time
Earnest Gusman was at this apartment’s mailbox before the mailman was down the building’s front steps. He tore open the small box door and took out the rectangle package that weighed about a pound and was exactly the right size to hold Yankee dollar bills. Earnest ran up the five flights of stairs three steps at a time. So joyous was he, he did not contain his giggling when he hurried past his neighbors’ doors toward his dirty flat.
Let them know! he thought. They won’t see me again after tonight. Once inside his own little room, he set the package on his only table and walked about the apartment for a few seconds, softly clapping his hands together, and only then tore away the paper in hopes of seeing the lovely green, black and white cash pour onto the bare grains of the wooden tabletop. He lived long enough to catch a glimpse of the white plastique and some red and black wires. The eternity that followed was completely black for little Earnest Gusman. The blast tore away an entire corner of the brick edifice and scattered debris for a half mile in every direction.
*
Erin Mondragon was seated in a San Francisco bistro five thousand miles from Earnest’s tiny flat at the time of the explosion. He checked his watch and calculated the time in Colombia before he took another sip of cappuccino.
All the loose ends have been tied up, he thought, and at the same time asked himself if he should have another cinnamon roll with his coffee that morning.
5/7/09 15:40 Arizona Standard Time
Bob Mathers had waited a day and a half to speak to Margaret Smythe. As head of the FBI/Delta Force Special Task Group, Margaret had turned the airport’s control tower into her operational headquarters and was busy sending out orders to posts everywhere on the Colorado drainage. For reasons that escaped an outsider like Bob, Undersecretary Smythe had set up a supplementary radio transmitter on the ground outside the tower and an extra antenna on the tower itself. Around the building she had stationed enough armed men to take a medium-sized Pacific island during the war against Japan. Thus in her small fort she could not be bothered by intruders while she was directing rescue operations and overseeing investigations throughout the southwest.
Margaret had nonetheless found ample time in the past day and a half to meet with the hordes of media people who had also congregated on Page after the bombings. Each time she had emerged from the tower to face the banks of microphones and cameras Margaret had been dressed in a different color co-ordinated uniform.
At the same time, the FBI had occupied Page’s jail and police office and had grimly told the local officers: “Breathe the wrong way, and we’ll make you regret you were ever born.” Bob and the other sheriff’s deputies were ordered to the muddy remnants of Lake Powell to bring in any survivors still trapped in their stranded boats, for the federal operatives were too occupied with the management of the response efforts to do any menial work. A member of the Delta Force had to come to the lake to fetch Bob when it was at last his turn to be conducted into the task force commander’s presence.
She chose not to stay in the airport manager’s office and set up her command post at the top of the tower in the air traffic controller’s booth. Her portable telephones, copiers, laptop computers, and piles of maps and paper were stacked atop the unplugged radar monitors, a visual reminder that the normal business of the little airport had come to a halt and someone else was now in charge. The glass walls of the controllers’ room gave Margaret a view of some of what she ruled. The climb up the tower stairs put her visitors out of breath and allowed her to get in the first word in every conversation. She knew managers have to consider such seemingly minor details.
“What do you want? she asked Bob as he came in the door.
She was standing up and filling out forms as she spoke. There were always forms for someone in her position, and she had to do them all herself or else someone else would do them incorrectly. Taking the time to look up at Bob would have been a distraction she could not afford.
Bob explained he was a deputy sheriff in Coconino County and he had some information she needed to know. He started to tell her about Wayland Zah and why he knew Wayland was involved in the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam. Margaret lifted her face toward his and told him to stop.
“Mathers?” she said, rolling the word around in her mouth like a foul tasting piece of hard candy. “Deputy Mathers. Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
She answered her own question before Bob had time to reply. “You and some sheriff person wrote a letter...” she said, letting the words fall on the cluttered floor between her and Bob. “You went over my head.”
“I have to tell you,” said Bob, “about the false Corello and Petrovski.”
“We know about them,” said Margaret and went back to her forms. “I don’t care how you get out of here. Be sure you get out of here as quickly as your little legs can carry you.”
“Don’t you want-” began Bob.
“The sergeant outside is Special Forces,” said Margaret. “He knows one hundred and twenty-seven ways to kill a man.”
Bob did not stay around the airport tower for a demonstration of the soldier’s abilities.
5/7/09 23:54 EDT
“The place in Venezuela was completely empty?” asked the president.
He and the chief security advisor were alone in a small office inside the West Wing. The workday was running late, and the details of the conspiracy were drifting into the capital, including some details that had some basis in fact.
“The buildings were set afire,” said the security advisor. “The place had been stripped clean before that. Our people have found a few electrical parts in some places. Some of these items have been traced back to stores right here in America. It appears that they--the ones building the torpedoes--made them right there on the premises. We’ve found a barracks and a mess hall down there.”
“This East German, the Russian, the Mexican, the ones who supposedly led this outfit--they are where?” asked the president.
“At large,” came the displeasing answer. “One of the Colombians finally did give us another name, one Earnest Gusman, a resident of Cartagena, another career criminal. He was the recruiter. Unfortunately, this Mr. Gusman was killed this morning in an unexplained explosion. He and four others.”
“More deaths,” said the president. “What did the foreign markets do today?”
The financial markets were as gloomy a subject as the thousands of dead in the southwest. Three decades of economic growth had once pushed the Wall Street and oversees indexes to stratospheric heights. Such great success breeds great anxiety, and the terrorist attacks upon the dams had produced a panic more costly than the direct damage done by the torpedoes and the subsequent flooding.
On Wednesday and on Thursday (the day on which the president and the security advisor were speaking), the Dow Jones Industrials had closed early because the market had fallen five hundred points within an hour of opening. NASDAQ and the other markets had crashed much farther as investors abandoned stocks and put their money in bonds. On Thursday the Dow would fall another five hundred points, and on Friday, a day when the law would no longer require an early closing, it could well go into free fall.
London, Bonn, Hong Kong and Tokyo were likewise watching in disbelief as their stock markets followed the American lead. All day the president had been on the telephone listening to despairing heads of state who wanted him to do something, though none of them had any notion what that something might be.
The insurance settlements alone were going to run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps reach somewhere between two and three trillion when the lawyers got through. There was simply no way the economy could take a hit of that magnitude and keep chugging along, and the president’s economists were not factoring in the devastating hit to productivity the loss of electricity and water was causing.
Already there were brown-outs in southern California, and drinking water there was being rationed. Fruit and vegetable growers in the central portion of the state, the richest agricultural area in the nation, were going to have to forfeit much of their irrigation water to keep the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego alive.
Should the dams ever be rebuilt, construction and the subsequent recovery would take years, too late to save the president’s political future. His polls had been strong throughout the spring following his election. After the dam attacks his numbers had become so bad staff members no longer included news of the polls in his morning briefings.
“The FBI has the Russian and this character Corello in custody,” said the security advisor rather than saying anything about the financial markets.
The President recalled hearing of Petrovski and Corello before, during a conference with his security team and remembered there was something wrong with them. “Aren’t they fakes or something?” he asked. “The terrorists were merely using their names.”
“So we thought,” said the advisor, and took a deep breath, for he was about to launch into the sort of venture he would not dare to begin when other members of the president’s inner circle were present and able to contradict him. “We are at this time, Mr. President, at one of those historic moments every great leader must endure. Yes, we have been dealt a mighty, nigh fatal blow. In response we can either fold our tent and leave the battlefield or we can turn on the enemy at that juncture when they think they are triumphant and defeat them with a single master stroke.”
The president saw where this was headed. “I’m not bombing anyone, Henry,” he warned the advisor.
“We
have
to do something, sir!” insisted the chief advisor. “Something grand,” although he realized he had said something along the same lines the day before. “A grand gesture,” he said, reaching the limits of his descriptive powers. “The war in Colombia, in its present state, is unwinable. I concede that. A few surgical sorties down there will not decide the course of the fighting; that is a lesson we should learn from the last century, Mr. President. Air strikes won’t have any effect, except perhaps to enrage the people being bombed. Winning in Colombia isn’t what we have to be concerned about, sir. Our fight is here. Act and we will have the time we need. Time for the economy to recover. Time to rebuild. Time to steal a march on those bastards in Congress. I cannot guarantee success in this endeavor, Mr. President. I will guarantee that if you do nothing, those jackals in the House and Senate will eat us alive.”
The president stood and walked twice around the small office, his hands folded behind his back. He stopped at the window and gazed across the Ellipse to the Washington Monument, the likes of which he knew no future generation would be building for him.
Beyond the monument were the Potomac River and the George Mason Memorial Bridge, over which ordinary citizens in their ordinary cars were driving to their various homes as their commander-in-chief watched. For a few seconds the president wished he were in one of those cars and headed for a suburban residence in Arlington or Alexandria, to a wife and family to whom the attacks in the southwest were merely dreadful stories on the evening news.
“How much would I have to do?” he asked the security advisor with a sigh.
The advisor’s pulse rate increased at the prospect of this personal victory. He contained his emotions for the president’s sake.
“B-2s based in Missouri will fly round trip sorties against one hundred and nineteen targets we have identified in Colombia,” he said. “They will fly at fifteen thousand feet, well beyond the range of any weapons the insurgency groups may have. Three weeks of nonstop saturation bombing on rebel bases and known cocaine production sites, done in co-ordination with another round of financial assistance to the Bogota government and the arrival of another thousand Special Forces advisors, will definitely get the world’s attention. The Bogota government should last well past the 2010 elections. In the meantime, our economy will get better and we can have the show trials of the forty Colombian suspects.”
“Show trials?” interrupted the President, objecting to a phrase that brought to mind Stalin’s purges during the 1930s.
“Trials,” said the advisor. “Fair trails. Trials broadcast on television. Show trials in the sense that they would be shown to everyone. Wall to wall coverage, etc. Everyone in the whole world will see that we were the victims in this, and especially you, sir.”
“I’ll be the primary victim?” asked the president scornfully.
“Only for a short time,” said the advisor. “You will be soon thereafter be the savior of America. I think, sir--and I don’t want to press you on this--you should address the nation as soon as possible.”