Hunt the Falcon

Chapter Eight

The 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.”

“And the enemy he got to sleep with was Pamela Anderson,” Davis added.

Mancini: “That’s before Kid Rock got hold of her and turned her into trailer trash.”

“Monica isn’t like that,” Ritchie said. “She’s classy, and we get along.”

Akil: “Just wait.”

“You know why marriage is like a violin?” Mancini asked. “After the music is over, the strings are still attached.”

As the SEALs bantered back and forth, Cal used his fingernail to peel the label off a Dos Equis bottle.

“Cal, you dating anyone?” Ritchie asked.

“Not really. No.”

“You keep in touch with that Thai girl?”

“Naw.”

“You live by yourself?”

“I’m sharing a house in Lago Mar with two young waitresses who work at Hooters.”

“Seriously?” Ritchie asked, raising his left eyebrow.

Cal nodded. “Yeah.”

“What are they like?” Akil wanted to know.

“Beautiful but messy as all get-out. Leave their clothes and shit everywhere. Walk around in their panties.”

“That’s all?” Akil asked.

“Sometimes even less.”

“And that’s a problem?” Ritchie asked.

Cal smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Naw.”

After dinner, he, Akil, and Ritchie ducked into a theater to catch the newest James Bond movie. Davis returned to the hotel to Skype his wife and year-old son. Crocker and Mancini entered a bar called Islands and found a young Hispanic man in a white polo with a Miami Dolphins logo on the front pocket sitting in a booth in the back.

“Ernesto Navarro. Most people call me Neto,” he said, offering a hand with a large burn scar.

Crocker asked, “You the guy who’s selling the beachfront property?”

“On Margarita Island. Yes.”

Having dispensed with the bona fides, the SEALs sat. The room was dark and noisy, with most of the young patrons crowded around the bar.

Neto, who was with the Caracas CIA station, asked, “You guys okay to talk here, or do you want to go somewhere else?”

“This is fine,” Crocker said, looking around and seeing that no one was seated close by. “Do we run any risk of being watched?”

“By SEBIN this time of year? About as much of a chance as the Wizards winning the NBA finals.”

SEBIN (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional) was the Venezuela secret police, previously known as DISIP. The Washington Wizards were the worst team in the NBA, with a record of two wins and fifteen losses.

“I assume you’ve been briefed on why we’re here,” Crocker said, cutting to the chase.

“Unit 5000,” Neto answered, pointing to his head. “I’ve become an expert.”

“Thanks for doing this on Christmas Eve.”

“Duty, man. Whatever needs to be done. My kids are already in bed dreaming about Santa Claus.”

“How many do you have?” Mancini asked.

“Two young boys. Total rascals.”

Crocker: “I hope Santa’s going to be generous.”

“He will be.”

The waitress, who wore a Hawaiian shirt tied above her waist, placed three bottles of cold beer on the table and smiled to reveal a metal ball in her tongue. She left behind a cloud of orchid-scented perfume.

“Here’s to getting lucky,” Neto said, raising his Corona.

Crocker leaned on his elbows and spoke directly into Neto’s dark eyes. “What’s the story with 5000?”

“It’s an interesting one,” Neto said, “with several new developments. Two things. One, we’ve been watching a house in Petare, which is one of the city’s two major barrios. It’s more like a shack on a hill. We’ve been tracking several known Unit 5000 operatives in and out of there for the past three weeks.”

“Sounds like a good place to start,” Crocker commented.

Neto said, “You’ll never find it on your own. I’ll have to show you.”

“When?”

“How about Wednesday?” That was the day after Christmas.

“How about tomorrow night?” Crocker countered.

Neto frowned, then consulted his BlackBerry. “Christmas night? That might work.”

“Good. We’re gonna need gear.”

“What, exactly?”

Crocker pointed to Mancini. “Talk to my colleague here.”

Mancini grabbed a napkin and started writing. He said, “I’ll give you a list right now.”

Neto continued. “The barrios are dangerous, lawless places. Something like sixty percent of the city’s population lives in them, and they’re run by gangs.”

“What kind of gangs?” Crocker asked.

“Primarily young punks who deal dope.”

“You tell us how you want to handle getting in,” Crocker said. “Maybe we’re from a humanitarian organization handing out medicine. Maybe we give the gangs money to look the other way. Maybe we kick their asses. We don’t care. We just want to get in and take a look at the house. Maybe grab a couple of the terrorists.”

“You’re talking about a raid, right?” Neto asked.

“Exactly.” Crocker finished his beer and set the bottle down. “We’re all about hitting 5000, capturing their asses, getting the guys we grab to talk, stopping them before they do more damage.”

“I got it.”

“What was the other thing?” Mancini asked Neto as he rubbed the stubble on his chin. “You said there were two.”

“Yeah…We’ve picked up something from a source close to the minister of the interior. Seems like the Venezuela side of the Unit 5000 operation is being run by one of the president’s top men-a colonel high up in SEBIN named Chavo Torres. A real shit-bag who we know is involved in drug dealing, prostitution, dogfighting, human trafficking, smuggling. Travels to Cuba frequently and hangs with the Castros. He happens to be the right-hand man of Nicolás Maduro, who is the current VP and will probably succeed Chávez when he croaks-which according to our sources could happen anytime.”

“Torres sounds like a charmer,” Crocker commented.

“A snake charmer, maybe.”

“Can we assume that this Chavo character wouldn’t be involved with Unit 5000 unless President Chávez and this Maduro guy approved?” Crocker asked.

“No question about it.”

“And what is this Chavo guy doing for U-5000?”

“We’re not sure,” Neto answered, “but there’s been a real marked step-up of activity now that Chávez is on his deathbed. I get the sense that they’re building up to something big.”

“A big attack, or a big expansion?” Crocker asked.

“Both.”

He dreamt the wind was blowing and snow was piling up at the door and on the windowsill. The sky outside was black. Embers glowed in the fireplace. Seeing yellow eyes looking at him through the window, he reached under his bed for his pistol but found a stuffed toy animal instead.

In the morning, Crocker called Holly and Jenny to wish them a Merry Christmas. They were getting ready to go to her brother’s house.

Holly said, “Your sister Karen called. She wants to talk to you about your dad.”

“Tell her there’s nothing I can do now. I’ll call her when I get back.”

He tried not to feel nostalgic but couldn’t help it, with the colored lights and Christmas carols playing everywhere in the hotel. Biting into the grilled chicken sandwich he’d ordered from room service, he thought of his family gathered around the dining room table, his dad saying grace in his red Christmas sweater, the mom he loved so much serving the roast turkey, brussels sprouts, string beans, and potatoes. He remembered going outside in the cold to play touch football with his cousins from Ohio, then hunting for quail and rabbits with BB guns.

At sunset, rain started to fall. Minutes before seven, Neto arrived with an older Hispanic man named Sanchez, who had a flat, unexpressive face like a mask.

He said, “Sanchez knows the barrio far better than I do. We’re probably going to need a four-wheel-drive vehicle in this weather, so I brought two Toyota FJ Cruisers.”

While Mancini went down to inspect the gear and weapons, Neto and Crocker drew up a plan.