Hunt the Falcon

Chapter Nine

Black Cell set out an hour later, with Mancini in the passenger seat of the first Toyota dressed up as Santa Claus, complete with white wig and beard. The backs of both vehicles were packed with toys Neto had gotten from a storeowner friend.

“Feliz Navidad!” Mancini shouted out the window.

“Don’t overdo it,” Crocker groaned back.

They drove past modern apartment towers, through an upscale residential area, then off a major street to a smaller road that led up a steep hill into the barrio, which was dense and surprisingly colorful despite the falling rain and the slapdash quality of the shacks. They were put together with wooden packing crates, scraps of lumber, metal, and plastic, and featured corrugated tin roofs. Precariously clinging to steep slopes, the primitive structures were painted bright red, orange, and blue. Some were decorated with Christmas lights. A few had beat-up cars and trucks parked in front or at the sides.

“Who lives here?” Davis asked.

“Poor people,” Mancini shot back.

“Many of them are refugees from other countries-Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia,” Neto explained. “The barrios also get a lot of people from Central America. They come here because of the relative prosperity.”

“Prosperity?” Davis asked skeptically.

“It’s relative, man. Chávez might have been a nut job who broke into song during televised speeches, but he treated the poor well.”

Crocker said, “He’s not dead yet.”

“Practically,” Neto shot back.

“You said he treated the poor well,” Mancini interjected. “How, in terms of specifics?”

“Land reform, improved public services like state-run grocery stores that sell discounted staple foods, soup kitchens, open clinics, free education.”

Crocker had an intrinsic distrust of politicians. “Socialism,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “justice” were words they twisted to justify different agendas.

Sanchez spun the SUV ahead of them up a steep turn. The road was now a river of muddy water and sewage.

Mancini was in a jolly mood, befitting his new role. “Did I tell you what happened to my next-door neighbor Sam?”

“What?” Crocker asked.

“He forgot his wedding anniversary, and his wife was really pissed. She told him, ‘Tomorrow morning, I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from zero to two hundred in less than ten seconds!’ The next morning Sam got up early and left for work. When his wife woke up she looked out the window and found a gift-wrapped box in the middle of the driveway. So she ran out in her robe, ripped open the box, and found a brand-new bathroom scale inside. Sam has been missing ever since.”

Crocker and Davis were still laughing when they arrived at a makeshift plaza where five narrower dirt trails converged. It was lined with a few little bodegas, two bar/restaurants, a bicycle repair stand, and a peluquería.

Neto said, “This is El Centro. We’ll distribute the toys here.”

Sanchez got out of the lead vehicle, and he and Neto walked into one of the bodegas. A few minutes later a half dozen boys and girls in shorts and dresses ran out into the rain. Seeing Santa Claus, they pounded aggressively on the Toyota’s doors and hood. Mancini got out “Ho-ho-hoing” and started handing out toys, one per kid.

The number of children grew exponentially-like the raindrops. They seemed to come from all directions, shouting with excitement. The SEALs couldn’t hand out the toys fast enough. When they ran out of gifts, they gave the kids dollar bills until they had no more.

It all happened in a fifteen-minute frenzy of hands, pleas, and squeals of delight. Then, shouting “Feliz Navidad!” the men piled back into the trucks and raced up one of the trails into the dark.

“What about the gangs?” Crocker asked, checking the SIG Sauer P226R 9mm pistol Neto had given him and concealing it in the inside-the-waist holster under his black shirt.

“Seems like they’re taking the night off.”

As they climbed, the shacks seemed to be packed closer together and the trail became so narrow they could barely squeeze through. Sanchez, who was driving the lead vehicle, braked at a steep turn that veered to the left and cut the lights.

Neto stopped behind him. With the wipers flapping frantically, he said, “It’s just ahead, at the top of this hill. We should get out here.”

“Okay.”

Mancini slipped out of the beard and Santa suit, and they armed themselves with handguns, a few MP7 submachine guns, and night-vision goggles.

“Do you think they’ve been warned that we’re coming?” Crocker asked.

“It’s possible,” Neto answered.

“Let’s move fast.”

Davis and Cal stayed behind to guard the vehicles. Sanchez led the way, with Crocker and Mancini behind him. Neto took Ritchie and Akil down another trail to cover the rear of the shack, which hung precariously on a ledge to the right of the trail at the top of the hill. The shack was little more than a patched-together wood-and-tin-siding structure with a big blue plastic tarp covering most of the right side. The whole thing was perhaps thirty feet wide in front, accessed by a door on the right side next to a narrow debris-filled dirt alley that separated it from the shack beside it. The left side of the building bordered the edge of a cliff, and though it was difficult to see, there appeared to be a whole slew of shacks behind it.

A pale yellow light shone through the soiled and cracked window. Crocker and Mancini took up preassigned firing positions as Sanchez rapped on the door.

A woman appeared, wide and dark-skinned, midtwenties, her dark hair pulled back, wearing what looked like panties and a blue sports bra. A very young boy and girl stood behind her. She held the screen door open and was waving her hands and explaining something in Spanish when Crocker heard the sound of scraping wood in the narrow alley, then footsteps. Turning to Mancini, he whispered, “You and Sanchez inspect the house. I’m going into the alley.”

He took off, pushing past Sanchez, and tried to find the object moving in the narrow space. Everything he saw was either black or shades of green through the night-vision goggles.

Hearing something being dragged across the roof, he looked up and saw a dark object the size and shape of a length of sewer pipe falling toward his head. There was no room to jump back and no time to lunge forward, so he tried to push it away with his hands.

The cement pipe grazed his left forearm, tearing away skin. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Crocker jumped back against the opposite wall so the pipe wouldn’t hit his feet. He wanted to scream, but focused on scooting around the big pipe and following the sound of feet scurrying across the tin roof, then jumping and landing farther down the alley.

He quickly reached the back of the house and, seeing a moving shadow to his left, turned and squeezed into a little passageway, past a latrine overrun with rats. As he stepped around them, he heard three quick gunshots from the house, followed by a woman’s screams.

Crocker had no radio. For a second he considered entering the shack from the rear, but decided to continue pursuing the person running away. He wondered what had happened to Neto and the others, then saw the back of his assailant’s head sliding down a ledge and disappearing from sight.

He ran fast, and when he tried to stop on the muddy ground, his feet slid out from under him and he fell off the cliff. He saw the tops of skyscrapers and clouds in the distance, and had enough presence of mind to twist his body and get his arms under him to break his fall. Still, he hit the wet grassy turf with a thud that jarred his neck and caused him to tumble sideways into the back of his assailant’s legs.

He realized it was a male when he saw a densely bearded face. Then he felt the man’s hot breath and fingernails digging into his neck. Crocker couldn’t reach his pistol, which had dislodged from his holster during the fall and landed somewhere in the high grass. Nor could he think clearly, because the abrupt landing had winded him.

His instincts took over, and his body carried out the unarmed defensive tactics drilled into his head fifteen years ago by an overweight, badass instructor named Al Morrel, who had been Elvis Presley’s personal bodyguard.

“At any point or any situation, there will be some vulnerable point of your enemy’s body open to attack,” Morrel had said. “Attack this point with all your strength-while screaming, if the situation allows. Screaming serves two purposes. One, it frightens and confuses your enemy. And two, screaming allows you to take a deep breath, which will put more oxygen in your bloodstream.”

It was hard to scream with the savage’s dirty hands around his neck, but still Crocker drew air through his nasal passages and tried. At the same time he drove the heel of his right hand into his enemy’s nose with a tremendous upward motion, shoving the nasal bone into the man’s brain. Crocker’s attacker groaned his final breath and loosened his grip, which allowed Crocker to bellow.

His roar echoed as the man’s body twitched. Crocker took a deep breath, shoved him off, then tried to move his own body to assess the damage he’d sustained.

Luckily, he hadn’t suffered an injury to his spinal column or broken any bones-just scratches, abrasions, a severely bruised left forearm, and a sore ass and lower back. Searching the dead man’s body, in the inside pocket of his gray plastic rain poncho he found a plastic pouch containing a Venezuelan passport and other documents. According to the passport, the man’s name was Octavo Alvarez.

Something about his thick black eyebrows and the shade of his skin caused Crocker to doubt he was an Alvarez, or even Venezuelan. The little gold pendant the man wore around his neck confirmed Crocker’s suspicions when Crocker ripped it off and examined it closely with the night-vision goggles he found nearby in the grass. It was stamped with the image of a hand raising an AK-47 with a globe in the background-the logo of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

Known as Sepah or IRGC, members of this militant Shiite Muslim group took their orders from the Iranian mullahs, whose authority they believed superseded those of the elected government. Contained under the umbrella of the IRGC was the Quds Force, a special forces element tasked with unconventional warfare (i.e., terrorism). Unit 5000 was the aggressive new Quds Force element run by Colonel Farhed Alizadeh-the Falcon.

“Makes sense…” Crocker said, looking down at the grimace on the dead man’s face, which was being pelted with rain. He stuck the plastic sleeve with the man’s passport and other documents in the front waistband of his pants and felt in the wet grass for his weapon.

Locating it, he wiped the action dry with his shirttail, and clicked off the safety so it was ready to use. Hearing people above, he crawled up the embankment and hid by the lip.

He recognized Akil’s voice whispering, “Let’s look down here.”

“Akil?” he whispered back.

“Boss?”

Akil slid down with Ritchie behind him, both clutching MP5s.

“Who the fuck is he?” Akil asked, pointing at the dead man.

“Some guy who called himself Alvarez but is really IRGC.”

“You get his Iranian name?”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Crocker whispered, grimacing.

“You hurt?”

“A couple bumps and bruises, but I’m fine.”

They reached the top, where Neto informed them that the Venezuelan police would probably be arriving soon.

“Let’s go then,” Crocker said. “Get in the trucks.”

At 0705 the next morning, the six members of Black Cell were back at the hotel packing their bags when Crocker got a call from Neto.

“What’s up?” he asked, swallowing two Advils with a glass of water to help ease the pain in his lower back.

“The chief wants to see you.”

“The station chief? When?”

“Now.”

“We’re in the process of moving to another hotel,” Crocker said, assuming this summons had something to do with the previous night’s raid. He’d handed the documents he had taken from the terrorist over to Neto. Maybe the Agency had gleaned some important info from them.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Neto said.

Plans always changed. Crocker was okay with that. “No problem, Neto. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

Neto explained, “We have an office not far from where you are. Go to Las Mercedes Avenue and turn right. You’ll see a tall Banco Popular building halfway down the street. Go up to the ninth floor and look for Global Partners Investments.”

“What time?” Crocker asked.

“ASAP. We’re here now.”

“You want me to come alone?” Crocker asked.

“Let me check,” Neto said, then put the phone on hold.

Crocker and his men had returned shortly after 0400, napped, and had ordered breakfast from room service. Now the two hours they had spent after they had left the slum of Petare replayed in his head, a movie of Caracas side streets, back alleys, byways and highways. Neto and Sanchez had made sure to shake off any SEBIN or Venezuelan police tails before dropping them off at their hotel.

Neto’s deep voice came back on the line. “Bring your deputy.”

“Mancini and I will be there in ten.”

Crocker didn’t have time to change his clothes or shave. He limped down Avenida Principal de las Mercedes in his dirty black pants and T-shirt, with Mancini by his side talking about the recent announcement that President Chávez had slipped into a coma.

“Any chance he’ll recover?” Crocker asked, scanning the street for plainclothes police and seeing men in brown uniforms throwing plastic bags of garbage into a large green truck.

“Unlikely,” Mancini answered. “Apparently he’s got stage-four colon cancer. He had a baseball-sized tumor removed several years ago, along with chemotherapy. During the recent election campaign he claimed he was cancer free, which turned out to be a lie.”

Another kind of cancer-lung cancer-had afflicted Crocker’s mother. But before it had taken her, she had died in a freak accident. Crocker’s sister hypothesized that maybe the accident was a blessing, which angered Crocker at the time. But now, as he pushed through the revolving doors of the modern Banco Popular building, he thought maybe his sister had been right.

He and Mancini rode up in the elevator with a group of men in business suits, then walked down the carpeted hall to the door at the end of the corridor. Crocker hit the buzzer on the call box and waited.

“Quién es?”

“It’s Tom Mansfield and his associate from Balzac Expeditions.”

A Hispanic woman in a tight black skirt and heels led them to a waiting room with a view of the city bathed in yellow sunlight. A tired-looking Ernesto Navarro shuffled in holding a stack of papers.

“This way, gentlemen,” he said.

They entered a generic conference room. The shades were pulled over the windows. Two men sat at the table, which was crowded with papers and coffee cups.

The thinner of the two looked up and said, “Gentlemen, my name is Chase Rappaport. I’m the chief of station here.” He pointed to a swarthier, thicker-built man seated across from him. “This is my deputy, Hal Melkasian.”

Melkasian looked over his shoulder at the SEALs. “Welcome.”

“Which one of you two is Warrant Officer Crocker?” Rappaport asked. He had a sharp, mean face and piercing blue eyes.

“That’s me.”

“Take a seat. Neto here will pour you some coffee. Melky and I, along with a number of analysts back at Langley, have been reviewing the packet of documents you recovered last night.”

“Yeah?” Crocker said, sipping the bitter coffee and running a hand through his thinning, close-cropped hair. “What’d you find?”

Rappaport pushed his chair back, placed his shoes on the edge of the table, then glanced at some papers in his lap. “You hear about the president’s condition?”

“Critical, right? My teammate and I were just talking about that,” Crocker said with a nod.

“It might seem unrelated, but I can assure you that it underlies everything we’re dealing with here,” Rappaport said ominously.

Crocker shifted his weight in the leather-covered swivel chair and fought off the feeling of fatigue. “I’m not sure what that means.”

Rappaport turned his Doberman pinscher-shaped face toward him. “It means that this program will be accelerated,” he intoned, pointing to the documents on his lap. “When Chávez dies, Maduro will take over. They’ll hold a special election, but the vote will be rigged. Maduro isn’t Chávez. He has none of his charisma. He’s a leftist labor organizer who never finished high school, loves Led Zeppelin, and worships a dead guru named Sai Baba. So nobody knows how long before the opposition rises and kicks his ass out.”

“What program are you referring to?” Crocker asked.

“The Iranian-Venezuelan program. Unit 5000. What did you think? Now that we know-”

Melkasian cut him off. “Chase, I don’t believe these gentlemen had a chance to peruse the documents in question.”

Rappaport looked at Crocker, confused. “You recovered them, didn’t you?”

“I did, yes,” Crocker answered. “But I immediately handed them over to Mr. Navarro. I expected that we would be leaving our hotel first thing this morning because of the violence that took place in Petare.”

In addition to the man Crocker had killed with his bare hands, another presumed terrorist had been gunned down inside the house-something the Venezuelans wouldn’t be too pleased about, especially if they found out that the men had been offed by U.S. operatives.

“Oh,” Rappaport said, cleaning his gold-framed glasses with the tail of his shirt, then placing them back on his nose. “Then Melky, you have some filling in to do.”

“Yes,” his deputy said, arching his spine and rubbing the back of his neck. He pointed to a pile of documents on the table. “From what I’ve been able to learn so far, it looks like Unit 5000 is in the process of organizing a substantial base here in Venezuela with the help of people in the Chávez-Maduro government.”

“Colonel Torres,” Mancini muttered.

“Yes, Colonel Chavo Torres. He’s helping the Iranians build a terrorist base in Venezuela capable of delivering attacks on the U.S. and other targets. The men you killed last night were Iranian Unit 5000 functionaries who had been given new identities and Venezuelan citizenship.”

As he tried to follow Melkasian’s train of thought, Crocker’s head hurt-a result of the trauma his body had suffered and the pain medication he had taken for his back. Mancini, seated beside him, poured another cup of black coffee and downed it. The skin around his eyes was swollen and gray.

“How big a base are we talking about?” Crocker asked, trying to appear alert.

“Let him finish,” Rappaport snapped.

Crocker wanted to reach across the table and punch him in the face. He used a paper clip to dig the dried blood from under his fingernails.

“The men you killed were probably lower-level people in charge of distributing money and documents,” Melkasian continued, picking a stack of Xeroxes off the table. “Couriers, basically. Inside the packet you recovered was a coded log and copies of visa applications and travel documents. From them we’ve been able to ascertain that the group contains at least a dozen individuals of Iranian origin who have been given Venezuelan citizenship and new identities, which allows them to travel throughout the region without raising suspicion.”

Crocker immediately thought of the Falcon, because this sounded like one of the devious plans he had cooked up in the past. The proximity of this new program to the United States alarmed him.

Then Melkasian said, “Obviously, they’re planning something, but we don’t know what.”

Crocker leaned forward and said aggressively, “We can’t sit back and wait.”

“We’re cross-checking recent immigration records and flight manifests, hoping to ID some of these cats,” Melkasian continued.

“Alizadeh is dangerous. You have to move fast.”

Rappaport shot back, “When we find out something, we’ll tell you what you need to know.”

Crocker felt his anger rise. He wanted to tell Rappaport that he didn’t appreciate his snippy attitude, but he was disciplined enough to know this would serve no purpose.

He asked, “What do you want from us?”

“You’re to stay in-country and await further orders,” Rappaport responded. “This thing is red hot. Insidious. We plan to give you a chance to do what you do, which is to kick some ass.”

“Excellent,” Crocker said. “I assume you’ve cleared this with my CO.”

“You can be sure about that. Captain Sutter, Jim Anders, Lou Donaldson-they’re all on board.”

“Good.”

“Melky and Neto will be your point men. Be ready to deploy.”