Hunt the Falcon

Chapter Ten

First, he and his men checked out of the InterContinental Tamanaco Caracas and moved their gear to a safe house in the nearby La Florida section of the city. Then they slept.

Crocker dreamt he was swimming against a strong current with a huge white shark close behind. When the beast opened its mouth, he saw teeth made of serrated steel. The shark closed in on his legs and snapped its jaws, causing Crocker to wake with a start and grab his cramping right foot. Sore from head to toe and running a slight fever, he downed two more Advil with a glass of H2O and then met his men in the kitchen, where they were feasting on takeout from a local Taco Bell.

Through the large patio door he watched two big green parrots sail through a bolt of sunshine and land in the backyard. He thought he might be dreaming but realized he wasn’t when Neto walked in, leaned on his shoulder, and whispered, “I need to talk to you alone.”

Crocker took a last bite of the cold beef taco and wiped his mouth. As he walked over cool tiles in his bare feet, he noticed he still had on the same black polo and pants he’d worn on the raid last night.

They sat on a back patio with a view of big flowering hibiscus bushes. The last couple of weeks were becoming a blur.

“Did I tell you about the Iranian official who arrived two days ago?” Neto asked, his dark eyes searching Crocker’s face.

Crocker thought back to the conversation they’d had in the bar on Christmas Eve and the waitress with the metal ball in her tongue. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Rappaport didn’t mention it?”

“He might have, but I don’t remember. No.”

“Well, this Iranian big shot has been meeting with Colonel Torres and other Venezuelan officials. In fact, we think he’s staying at the colonel’s house.”

“Do you know the Iranian’s identity?” Crocker asked, standing and lowering his head in an attempt to get blood into his brain.

“All we have is what we assume is a fake name from the flight manifest. Cy Norath.”

“You get a photo of him?” Crocker asked, stretching his arms over his head.

“No, he arrived on a private jet.”

“He’s here in Caracas now?” Crocker asked, bending from the waist.

“Yeah, staying at Torres’s residence, which borders the Caracas Country Club,” Neto answered. “We’ve got a surveillance team stationed outside.”

“He could be important. Show me the house.”

“Now?” Neto asked.

“Give me a minute to shower and change.”

Crocker left Akil and Davis behind to coordinate with the station chief and inform him about new developments. He took the four Spanish speakers on his team-Cal, Ritchie, Mancini, and himself. Cal and Mancini were fluent; his and Ritchie’s version was rudimentary but good enough.

With Neto at the wheel of the Pilot and the GPS guiding them, they drove east along the autopista and entered a very upscale neighborhood of gated mansions, stately cedar trees, and manicured gardens. Colonel Torres’s estate stood on a small road off Avenida los Cedros. The red-tiled roof of the two-story house was visible from the street, but they couldn’t see the front gate because the access road was blocked by two jeeps and half a dozen uniformed soldiers.

The level of security was fitting, given that Colonel Chavo Torres was Chávez’s man in charge of SEBIN’s external operations, and the whole country was on alert. As he drove past the estate, Neto explained that Torres and Chávez had graduated from the Venezuelan military academy and served in that army’s counterinsurgency unit together.

“Back in the late seventies the enemy was local Marxist insurgents. But when Chávez read the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong, he took a sharp turn to the left and founded a revolutionary movement,” Neto explained. “Colonel Torres followed in lockstep behind him. Unlike those of the president, it’s hard to determine the colonel’s true politics. What we do know is that he’s an opportunist who loves power and wealth, likes to inflict pain on people, and like Chávez and Maduro hates the United States.”

“Let’s go get him,” Ritchie said.

“We’re not here to start a war in Venezuela,” Crocker reminded him. “Our mission is to track and disrupt the activities of Unit 5000.”

“I know.”

A tall sandy-haired woman and a bald man from the station sat in a Toyota Camry parked at the end of the block, approximately four hundred yards from the house. While the man waited in the Camry, the woman got into the Pilot with them. Neto turned right at the corner and parked at the intersection of Avenida Lecuna, next to a man with a bicycle who was sharpening knives and scissors.

“The visitor has been inside since last night,” the female officer reported. “Colonel Torres left about an hour ago, but the visitor didn’t accompany him.”

“You sure about that?” Crocker asked.

She nodded. “Not only have we maintained twenty-four/seven visuals on the front entrance, but we also had someone attach a tracking device to his briefcase at the airport.”

“There’s no other exit?” Crocker asked.

“No, there isn’t.”

“What’s the best possible way to clandestinely access the house?”

She had soft green eyes and an easy smile. “If I were trying to get in, I’d approach from the back, the side that borders the golf course.”

“Thanks,” Crocker said.

Neto added, “Stay on the radio. Let us know if you see the visitor exit.”

“Sanchez is relieving us in an hour,” she reported. “He’ll be on a motorcycle and get a flat, which he’ll take his time to repair. We have another team following after him.”

Crocker liked her immediately. “Good,” he said. “Pass on the message about informing us if the visitor leaves the property.”

“Yes, sir. I will.”

“Let’s go,” Crocker ordered.

“Where?” Neto asked.

“Inside the club.”

“How?”

“We’ll figure something out.”

It turned out to be not all that difficult. Neto flashed his diplomatic credentials to the guard at the country club gate and said they were meeting the American ambassador for lunch. An outright fabrication-luckily, the guard didn’t bother to check.

They entered through luxurious grounds past strolling peacocks, flowering plants, and women in golf carts, and parked near the stately sand-hued clubhouse.

“Classy setup,” Ritchie commented as he got out.

Mancini, who was carrying a black briefcase, said, “It’s the opposite side of the social spectrum from what we saw last night.”

“How many of the residents of Petare would you guesstimate have memberships here?” Crocker asked facetiously as they walked past the pool, which overlooked the city.

“Zero,” Neto responded with a grin.

He led them to the edge of the golf course, along a stone path to the fifteenth tee. The fairway was a beautifully cared-for brilliant green carpet bordered by bushy twenty- to thirty-foot trees. A mustached man in a blue blazer stopped them and asked where they were going.

Neto told him that Crocker, Mancini, Cal, and Ritchie were golf course engineers from California who were inspecting the layout of the greens.

“Es esplendido,” Crocker said in gringo-accented Spanish.

“Gracias,” the man responded, then sent them on their way.

They waited for a foursome of men to tee off and drive away in their carts before they entered a grove of trees to the right of the fairway. Approximately a hundred feet down where it doglegged left, Neto pointed out a large two-story house past the trees on the right. It was separated from the golf course by an eight-foot stone fence topped with metal spikes.

Mancini snapped some digital photos. Ritchie determined the best place to climb the wall. Crocker took mental note of the deep second-story balcony facing the fairway, the lone soldier with a submachine gun lazily patrolling the yard, the antennas on the roof, and asked, “How sure are you that the visitor is lodging here and not in a hotel?”

“About eighty percent,” Neto answered.

“Let’s grab some surveillance equipment and return after dark.”

There was no problem entering the club this time, because Neto got an embassy officer who was a member to invite them to dinner. The four SEALs, Neto, and the officer-a man named Skip Haffner-sat outside on a patio near the pool feasting on carne asada and shrimp.

Not a bad life, Crocker thought, watching the sun set beyond the mountains.

“Skip here used to be a professional golfer,” Neto said out of nowhere.

“I was on the team at Duke,” Skip offered with a smile. “Right after I graduated, I joined the amateur tour, then turned pro.”

“You must have been good,” Crocker said.

“Good wasn’t good enough, but I had fun.”

Ritchie asked, “You ever party with Tiger Woods?”

“Closest I got to him was in 2002, when he entered the clubhouse at Congressional as I was being escorted out.”

“What’s the highest you ever placed in a tournament?” Cal asked.

“I won some amateur and college tournaments, but the highest I got in a PGA event was twenty-fourth.”

They waited until the city lights glittered in the distance and stars shone above. Crocker checked his watch, which read 9 p.m.

He said, “Thanks, Skip. It’s been fun.”

“If any of you guys want to play tomorrow, I’ve got a tee time at eight fifteen.”

“Thanks, but we’re busy.”

“Another time, then.”

While Skip settled the bill, Neto moved the Pilot to an empty lot near the golf course, and the SEALs stripped off their shirts to the tees underneath. Dressed all in black, they geared up and deployed, seeking cover in the trees along the fifteenth fairway and behind the high wall separating the course from Colonel Torres’s house.

Neto used a handheld radio to check with CIA surveillance out front, which reported that the colonel had returned and the visitor was still inside.

Light glowed from both floors, but the brightest space was the room behind the second-story balcony. The door was open, and strains of music drifted out.

Cal snapped together the twenty-inch parabolic dish of a KB-DETEAR listening device, aimed it at the open balcony door, and listened through headphones. Even though the room was approximately 150 feet away and well within the device’s 300-yard range, he wasn’t able to hear past the water splashing in the balcony fountain and the easy-listening jazz playing inside.

Meanwhile, Mancini launched the two experimental nano quadrotor drones that DARPA had given him to test. They ran on tiny lithium batteries, were the size of human fingernails, and looked like little metal insects. Manny succeeded in maneuvering them through the balcony door via a handheld wireless joystick but was unable to get the video they beamed back to appear on the eight-channel portable DVR monitor he had set up on the ground.

“What’s the problem?” Crocker whispered over his shoulder.

“The software’s not working,” Mancini answered, adjusting the knobs on the DVR. “It’s always the software.”

Mancini had also brought an RQ-11 Raven, a bird-shaped unmanned aerial vehicle used by the U.S. military, but because its wingspan exceeded four feet he didn’t think the Raven could hover in front of the window without being seen.

Crocker was willing to try anyway.

Monitoring the dials on the gadget in his briefcase, Manny replied, “Probably won’t work anyway. The house is protected by a spectrum analyzer and signal process block.”

“What’s that mean in plain English?” Crocker asked.

“Any type of digital or analog-based surveillance we launch will be interfered with and risks being detected.”

They were too close for Crocker to even think of giving up. Noticing a low-hanging tree branch that was reachable from the top of the wall, he decided to access the house the old-fashioned way-by climbing into the yard.

Neto, however, had reservations. “I don’t know about this, Crocker,” he said. “There’s too high a risk you’ll be discovered.”

“Don’t worry. We do this shit all the time.”

“What happens if you’re discovered?”

“Blame it on me.”

Although Crocker was the team’s lead climber, he was moving awkwardly because of his injured back, so Ritchie volunteered. They armed him with a silenced subcompact SIG Sauer P239, smeared black nonglare cammo on his face, handed him a small digital camera, and wished him luck.

As he was ready to launch, Neto whispered, “Establish a quick ID and pull out.”

“Yes, sir,” Ritchie said.

Crocker watched Ritchie scale the wall and from the top of it jump and grab the branch. He shimmied along it and dropped into the yard.

The wall prevented them from observing Ritchie roll on the lawn, hide behind a bush, and spot the lone guard standing with his back to him sixty feet away. He appeared again in their line of vision using a trellis and a drainpipe to climb to the balcony. He vaulted over the balcony railing, entered the house, and disappeared from view.

Crocker counted the minutes on his watch. Three…five…ten…his anxiety growing. He was starting to think that this might have been a bad idea when he saw a black shape scurry over the balcony rail and reach with his foot for the trellis. Ritchie paused to flash them a thumbs-up, then slipped and fell.

Crocker heard a sickening thud when Ritchie hit the ground, then footsteps running across the yard. He was already halfway up the wall, ignoring Neto’s anxious whispering at his back. Within three seconds he had jumped up and grabbed the cedar branch, pulling himself toward the yard.

Hearing a gunshot and then a man shouting in Spanish, he looked down and saw a Venezuelan soldier standing over Ritchie, pointing an AK-47 at his head.

Completely vulnerable as he hung from the branch, Crocker took a deep breath, shifted his weight to his left arm, and used his right to find the HK45CT pistol with full-sized Ti-RANT suppressor. From fifty feet away he aimed and squeezed three rounds into the soldier’s back and watched him buckle at the knees and fall.

Letting go of the branch, he hit the ground and rolled. Ignoring the lightning bolt of pain from the base of his spine, he got up and crossed to Ritchie.

Ritchie’s eyes were open, and his right hand held his jaw. When Crocker carefully pulled Ritchie’s hand away, he saw his jawbone and a row of lower molars. The round had hit him near the chin and exited near his ear.

Crocker used his index and middle fingers to fish the shattered teeth and bone out of Ritchie’s windpipe. The injury didn’t appear life threatening, since the bullet hadn’t hit a major artery. Nevertheless, Crocker quickly completed the last three steps of the medical ABCD checklist.

Ritchie’s breathing was regular, his pulse was strong, and there appeared to be no damage to his spinal cord or neck. However, his tongue was probably fucked up, because he was trying to speak but having trouble.

Crocker held a finger to his mouth to tell him not to try, then pulled off his T-shirt and tied it around Ritchie’s head. The wound, though ugly, was not likely to produce a great loss of blood because the injured vessels weren’t large. Nor was there much risk of secondary hemorrhage, though it was important to keep his head elevated.

The next challenge was to get the two of them out of there alive.

As Crocker lifted Ritchie up and hoisted him over his left shoulder, a flash of pain ran down his spine into his legs. That was the least of his problems. He retreated to the shadows at the back of the house and quickly appraised his situation. Mancini had climbed onto the wall and was reaching for the tree. Crocker waved him back.

There was no fucking way he’d be able to lift Ritchie high enough, even if he put him on his shoulders, because the cedar branch was at least sixteen feet from the ground. His options were limited. Other guards had been alerted. He heard hurried footsteps approaching from his left and turned right with the HK45CT clutched in his right hand and an extra magazine in his left. With Ritchie’s warm blood dripping down his chest, he crossed to the other side of the balcony and stopped. More footsteps were coming from the right.

Five feet ahead stood a white door leading to the bottom floor. He tried it. Locked. He kicked it in and entered, all his senses alert. Loud rock music reverberated through the narrow hallway-Lynyrd-fucking-Skynyrd singing “Free Bird.” It happened to be one of the songs he worked out to in his dad’s garage.

He passed from a dark passageway to a brightly lit kitchen. A stout young woman in a white uniform stood at a giant sink washing dishes. She stopped midbreath when she saw the two men. Her eyes locked onto Crocker’s. What a sight he was-bare-chested, with an injured, bleeding man slung across one shoulder, a pistol in the other. He grinned and raised the.45 to his lips as a signal to be quiet. She nodded.

He pushed through a swinging door that led to a formal dining room. The lights were out and the room was filled with shadows. He crossed quickly to another room, past a portrait of President Chávez as a young man, to a sitting room that opened through an arch to the front hall.

An ornate wooden stairway rose to his right. He was so pumped up on adrenaline that he considered climbing it, finding the colonel and his visitor, and finishing them off right then. But he had Ritchie on his shoulder moaning quietly, as if humming a song.

People were moving above. Angry voices drifted down. Crocker clutched the extra magazine of.45 rounds in his teeth, grabbed the front doorknob, turned it with his left hand, took a deep breath, and pulled it open.

It was as though his whole life and all of his training had been leading to this moment. In warp-speed time, he took in everything. To his left stood an armed soldier with his back to him. Beyond the soldier was a partially open metal gate with blue jeeps parked on either side of it.

The soldier turned in slow motion and opened his mouth. Before any words came out, Crocker fired three bullets into his side and chest. The soldier’s eyes darkened, and he fell backward into a pot of white geraniums.

Crocker hurried down three steps, making sure to keep his balance, and turned sideways to squeeze through the half-opened gate. That’s when he spotted another soldier crouched in front of one of the jeeps, speaking urgently into a radio. Crocker raised the HK45CT, ran to the front of the jeep, and fired until the gun was empty. Ejected the warm, empty mag and inserted the second. Another soldier standing across the street aimed his AK-47 and squeezed off a round that whizzed over Crocker’s head and slammed into the wall and gate.

He knelt alongside the jeep. Ritchie was trying to whisper something in his ear. Tactical advice, no doubt, which amused Crocker in a graveyard humor kind of way.

“I got this one, Ritchie. Conserve your energy.”

On the other side of the jeep, in the driver’s-side mirror, he saw the soldier run a few feet down the street, stop, and shout something over his shoulder. Desperate words in Spanish that ended when Crocker stood and fired a silenced burst from the pistol that took him down.

The alley was narrow, flanked by high walls covered with vines and ivy, and topped with brass owls. One direction led to the street; the other to more houses and a dead end. But he couldn’t tell which one went where, so he had to decide which to take.

Eeny-meeny-miny…

Getting out on foot was going to be a problem. Looking inside the jeep, he saw no keys in the ignition. Still, he sat Ritchie in the front seat and buckled him in. Crocker had hot-wired so many cars as a wild punk growing up in New England that starting it was relatively easy. After locating the access cover under the steering wheel, he smashed the plastic lid with the butt of his pistol and pulled it off. Then he reached behind the ignition switch harness, located two red wires, used his teeth to strip about an inch of insulation from both, and twisted them together.

He heard a vehicle approaching, but didn’t look up. Finding the brown ignition wire, he pulled it out of its harness and touched it to the two red wires.

The jeep started with a growl. Now, which way to go? Ritchie raised his arm and pointed right.

“You’d better be correct,” Crocker whispered, gunning the engine, the pistol now clutched in his right hand.

Almost immediately he was blinded by headlights that swung into the alley. He turned the wheel sharply right, causing the side of the jeep to graze the wall and sending up a shower of sparks that cascaded onto Ritchie’s head. The other vehicle passed, then screeched to a stop. He heard boots hitting the street, mags slamming into rifles, men shouting in Spanish.

“Alto! Alto!”

He turned sharply right onto Avenida los Cedros and floored the accelerator. The jeep swerved and skidded past another military truck. The driver stared at Crocker with big saucer eyes, then ducked as Crocker opened fire, shattering the side window.

Bullets sailed over Crocker’s head as he shifted into fourth and sped past the entrance to the country club through a red traffic light, then burned serious rubber onto another street, then another and another, and stopped, breathless.

Ritchie moaned something that sounded like a question. Fishing a phone from his pocket, Crocker punched Neto’s number.

“It’s Crocker,” he said, out of breath.

“Where the fuck are you?” Neto asked urgently. “What happened? Where’s Ritchie?”

“He’s with me. He’s injured. We need to get him to an emergency room ASAP!”

“What’s your current location?” Neto asked.

“I’m in a stolen military jeep. I’m about a mile or so west of the country club.”

“Use the GPS on your phone and give me the name of the street.”

Crocker checked as sirens screamed in the distance and echoed off the walls around him. “We’re on Calle Garcia, near Avenida Cuello.”

“All right, turn onto Cuello,” Neto said. “Take the first left. There’s a restaurant on the corner. Pull into the parking lot. Find a dark corner in the back. I’ll meet you there in five.”