Hunt the Jackal

Chapter Nineteen

At six-fifteen Friday morning, thirty-eight-year-old Gloria Maldonado stood before the closet in her small two-bedroom Guadalajara apartment, studying her figure in the mirror and trying to decide what to wear to work. She asked herself whether or not she should wake up her thirteen-year-old son, Ernesto, before she jumped in the shower, when she heard the doorbell ring.

“Ernesto, my love,” she called, glancing at the clock and wondering who it could be at that early hour. Holding the bodice of her nightgown shut, she had turned and started out when she heard the front door open and her son call, “Mom, it’s for you.”

“Who?”

“Some colleagues from work.”

She didn’t know what that meant. Alarmed, she grabbed a robe from the closet and put it on as she hurried to the front door to see who it was and what they wanted.

The three well-dressed sicarios told her that they had been sent by Nacho Gutierrez and needed her help with something immediately. She noticed dried blood on the sleeve of the good-looking one’s shirt. Understanding that if Nacho wanted something, you didn’t mess around, she threw on a blouse and skirt, combed her hair back, handed her son fifty pesos, and told him how much she loved him and that she wanted him to buy his lunch at school and take the bus.

The sicarios walked her to the Escalade, which was parked outside the entrance, and drove her to her office at Inicio, which was a division of Mexican Immigration. As they waited in the lobby, she hurried to her cubicle, turned on her computer, logged in to the system, and pulled up the immigration card that had been filled out by Thomas Mansfield, a Canadian who had arrived in Guadalajara a week ago with three other business associates. She printed out their passport photos and records and gave them to the sicarios, who discussed them in hushed tones as they escorted her back to the Escalade.

They didn’t seem pleased or angry, so Gloria kept quiet. She didn’t know if they were going to shoot her in the head and desecrate her body or shake her hand. After they drove her back to her apartment, they handed her seven thousand Mexican pesos (approximately $544.44) for her time.

She thanked them profusely and got out.

The sicarios turned the Escalade around and took off in the direction of a Zetas safe house near the University of Guadalajara campus. There they watched in wonder as a young one-armed computer hacker named Miguel X used various programs to search databases to try to locate someone named Thomas Mansfield who was or had been a Navy SEAL. When Miguel’s efforts failed to produce a match, he tried the name of one of the men who had arrived with Mansfield, Manny DaSilva. That didn’t work, either.

Miguel X, who tended to get hyper when he got stressed, offered the sicarios coffee and told them not to worry. He explained that he was going to load Mansfield’s photo into a very advanced facial recognition software program called PicTriev and try to match it with visual images from various large databases on the Web.

The process took time, during which the sicarios fidgeted, bit their nails, checked their phones, riffled through Miguel X’s collection of comic books and pornography, and smoked.

Twenty minutes later, Miguel X jumped up from his desk, boasting that he had found an 89 percent match with the photo of a U.S. Navy SEAL named Thomas Crocker, whose picture was published four years ago when he placed eighth in an Ironman competition in Lake Placid.

According to PeopleFinders.com, a man named Thomas Crocker, in his early forties, currently resided on Cherry Oak Lane in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Manny DaSilva, whose photo matched that of another Navy SEAL named Joseph Mancini, lived a quarter of a mile away on Palmetto Drive.

The sicarios rewarded him with ten thousand pesos and ten grams of high-grade cocaine.

Armed with the information about Crocker and Mancini, Guapo, Osito, and Stallone drove to Don Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla International Airport, where they texted Nacho Gutierrez, then caught a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. Once they arrived in Dallas, they purchased tickets for a connecting flight to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., then called a Zetas contact in northern Virginia and told him to meet them with an SUV when they arrived at 5:15 p.m. local time.

At eight the same morning, Crocker, Mancini, Akil, and Suárez arrived at Tocumen International Airport, after a short, sleepy ride from Panama City. They had just passed through Security and were buying coffee and sweet rolls from a vendor when they heard a message in Spanish and English over the PA telling a Thomas Mansfield to report to the airport information desk immediately.

“That’s you, boss,” Akil said.

“I remember my alias. Thanks.”

Crocker found a Copa Airlines attendant, who pointed him in the direction of the info desk. There a dark-skinned woman wearing thick glasses examined his passport, then pointed to a green phone at the end of the counter.

“Hi,” he said into it. “It’s Tom Mansfield.”

“Tom, this is Anders,” the CIA officer answered. “I need you and your friends to meet me out in front of Terminal Muelle Norte a-sap.”

“Some of us checked our bags.”

“Forget about your bags. I’ll have someone recover them for you.”

“Okay. We’ll be there in five mikes.”

He found Akil chatting up two blondes near the departure gate. Leaning close to him, he whispered, “We’re leaving.”

Akil put his arm around Crocker’s shoulder and winked at the girls. “This is my buddy Tom.”

“Hi, Tom.”

“Lisa and Tammy are surfers. They just got back from an island on the Caribbean side.”

“Isla Bocas del Toro,” the taller and blonder of the two girls said. “A real chill spot.”

“Why is surfing like sex?” Akil asked.

“Don’t know.”

“When it’s good, it’s really, really good. And when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”

“Yeah,” Crocker said, smiling at the girls. “But you gotta excuse me, because I’ve got to borrow my friend for a minute.”

“No problem.”

Crocker pulled Akil ten feet closer to the departure desk and said, “Forget the chicks and the surfing and grab your gear.”

“Now?”

“Anders wants us to meet him out front. Something important has come up.”

Akil looked back at the two blondes and said, “This better be good.”

Outside the most modern of the three terminals, Crocker and his men found Anders standing beside a new black Chevy Suburban. They squeezed in. Before the female driver even pulled away from the curb, Anders started to speak.

“There’s been a change of plans,” he said. “Based on some of the medical data you seized from the house in Tapachula and phone intercepts from the NSA, we believe that Olivia Clark is with the Jackal in a nearby country, and about to become an unwitting organ donor.”

The information hit Crocker like a slap to the head.

“An organ donor?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Fuck,” Akil grunted. “Is that why he kidnapped her in the first place?”

“We believe so. Yes.”

“So all that other people’s liberation stuff is bullshit?”

“That’s our current thinking. Seems like someone hacked into her doctor’s medical files two weeks ago, so we believe the whole thing was planned,” Anders explained.

“Sick.”

“Which organ?” asked Mancini.

“The liver.”

Akil: “Makes sense.”

“Why?”

“He’s a fucking drug dealer. Isn’t he?”

“Where’s Olivia?” Crocker asked as the vehicle accelerated.

“NSA traced the plane’s flight path, then zeroed in on the cell phone of one of his doctors,” Anders explained from the passenger seat. “It seems the transplant is scheduled to start tomorrow morning, so we’ve got to move fast.”

“Okay. But where?”

“Havana, Cuba.”

Suárez let out a hoot of joy from the backseat.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah, holy shit,” Mancini echoed. “This is an interesting turn of events. I thought we were about to get court-martialed.”

“You guys are going to have to go in scrubbed clean,” Ander continued. “Completely black. No IDs, no phones, no documents or pictures or wallets, no jewelry, no names, nothing.”

“I always wanted to go to Havana. How are we gonna get in?” Akil asked.

Anders directed the female driver to cross the Bridge of the Americas to the west side of the Panama Canal and the former U.S. Army base Fort Kobbe, which was now under Panamanian control.

Turning back to Crocker in the middle seat, he said, “We’re going to use some assets we have here to drop you off the coast.”

“When?”

“As soon as we get you geared up and prepped.”

“How will we get out?” Crocker asked, thinking ahead.

“That’s more problematic. We’re working with some local assets we have in Cuba. It won’t be easy. We figure there’s about a twenty percent chance of success. Your call.”

Crocker took a moment to consider the grisly alternative. When he turned to check with them, all three men nodded.

“We’re in,” he said.

“Good.”

“Has this op been cleared by the White House?”

Anders grinned. “Officially, they know nothing about it. Nobody in the U.S. government knows anything about it. Unofficially, the president finds the organ-harvesting scheme reprehensible and wants us to do anything we can to save the girl.”

“Good.”

“But if anything goes wrong, he’s going to deny he’s ever heard of you or the mission.”

“Understood.”

“You can’t be captured. That can’t happen. If any or all of you are killed by the Cubans and they’re able to ID your bodies, we’ll say you went rogue. Won’t be too far from the truth, with the way you’ve been handling ops recently.”

Crocker nodded to indicate that he understood. “Where’s Captain Sutter? Does he know about this?”

“He just landed in Miami. I spoke to him a few minutes before I contacted you and filled him in. He’s okay with it, if you are.”

“You said Olivia Clark’s in Havana. Do you have a fixed location?”

“Yeah. The Cira García Clinic, which is a private hospital that caters to rich foreigners. It’s located on the west side of the city, not far from the coast, a couple blocks from the Almendares River. There’s a big park there where you can land. I’ll show you a map.”

They were passing over the canal now. Crocker had never been to Cuba, but he’d heard a lot about it over the years and had always been intrigued. The prospect of sneaking into Havana and rescuing a hostage right under Fidel and Raúl Castro’s noses appealed to the daredevil in him.

“How’s this gonna work?” he asked.

“We’re planning to drop you in the Straits of Florida and having you swim in, up the Almendares River,” answered Anders as the female driver turned off a road on the other side of the bridge and stopped at a gate guarded by Panamanian soldiers.

“According to the latest phone intercept, the transplant’s scheduled to start at 0600,” Anders continued. “So we’re thinking of launching at around 0200.”

A soldier checked the driver’s credentials, recorded the number of passengers and the license plate number, then waved to another soldier, who opened the security barrier.

“We’re gonna need a jump platform, fixed wing or rotor, parachutes, a Zodiac, Drägers, black skin suits, masks, fins, watertight bags, compasses, and weapons,” said Mancini.

“We’ll take care of all that now.”

Guapo descended the escalator to the baggage claim area at Reagan National Airport with his two compatriots and spotted a stout, no-necked man on the left holding up a sign with his name scrawled on it. He stopped in front of the man and said in English, “I’m Guapo. Who are you?”

“Lionel Mendoza,” the man said. “Nacho sent me.”

“A pleasure to meet you. You have a vehicle for us?”

“Yes, it’s parked outside. You need to pick up your luggage?”

“We don’t have luggage,” Guapo answered.

“Then I’ll show you where it is.”

They followed the man’s short legs into a parking structure and rode the elevator to Level 4. There he led them to a silver Toyota RAV4, reached into the pocket of his shirt, and handed Guapo the keys.

“Here.”

“Equipment?” Guapo asked.

“Three hush puppies”-Smith and Wesson M39s with detachable suppressors-“with ammo, incendiary grenades, gaffer’s tape, rope, ski masks, three prepaid cell phones. Programmed into each cell phone is a number. You need anything, or when you’re finished with the vehicle, call and we’ll pick it up. The SUV has a full tank of gas and is equipped with a Garmin GPS. Those were my instructions. Anything else?”

Guapo thought for a moment and said, “I think we’re okay.”

“Good.”

“You want us to drop you off somewhere?” Guapo asked.

“No thanks. I have a ride. Good luck.”

Twenty minutes later, they exited the Washington Beltway onto I-95 South. The female voice on the Garmin instructed them to take Exit 84A and merge onto I-295 South.

Approximately three and a half hours after they left D.C., the three sicarios arrived in Virginia Beach. It was almost 9 p.m., so Osito used his iPhone to consult Yelp.com and find a place to eat. He chose the Abbey Road Pub on Twenty-Second Street, because his older brother was a Beatles fan and Abbey Road was one of the CDs that played over and over in the bedroom they shared growing up. The three men ordered shrimp cocktails to start, followed by the prime rib au jus.

A quartet of middle-aged gringos played Beatles songs on a little stage at the end of the room. Osito thought their rendition of “Blackbird” with mandolin accompaniment was particularly good. He sang along on the final verse, and when they left, tipped the quartet twenty dollars.

An hour later, their bellies full, the Garmin directed them to Tom Crocker’s residence on Cherry Oak Lane. They found a dark street with two-story gray clapboard houses spaced at least fifty feet apart, surrounded by tall trees and backed with marshland.

“Quieto,” Guapo commented.

“Muy quieto. Sí.”

Number 2040 was set a hundred yards back from the road behind a patch of oak and poplar trees. As they passed, Guapo glimpsed yellow light glowing on either side of the front door and inside the house on the first floor. He parked farther down the street near some tall trees and got out. He saw no sign of people, just trees swaying in the breeze, and the moon playing hide-and-seek behind high clouds.

A dog barked vigorously from inside Crocker’s house when he rang the bell. No one answered. Glancing at the houses to the left and right, he noticed that both were completely dark and there were no cars in either driveway.

Guapo glanced at his watch, which read 10:16, then circled to his left to the garage, which was empty. Continuing to the back of the house, he peered through a glass door and saw a single light on in the kitchen and a German shepherd barking from a doorway behind it.

Returning to the SUV, he said in Spanish, “No one’s home.”

“We should break in and wait inside,” Osito suggested. “That way we can drink his beer.”

“Gringo beer tastes like piss. We’ll wait here.”

The copilot of the unmarked C-23 Sherpa turned to Crocker, sitting on a bench along the fuselage, and held up ten fingers. Crocker nodded and looked at his watch. It was 0220 and the altimeter indicated that they were flying at 8,223 feet.

The SEALs had used the thirty-odd minutes of the flight to don their jump gear and conduct riggers’ checks on the parachutes to make sure they were folded and packed properly, then inventory their first-, second-, and third-line gear.

Each man carried a watertight weapons bag with Heckler & Koch 45 automatic pistols with Ti-RANT suppressors, MP7A1 submachine guns with extended forty-round magazines, optics, flashlights, and four-inch silencers. Also included in their first-line gear were wet suits, NVGs, pocketknives, Leatherman knives with some 550 cord wrapped around the handles, handheld radios, dummy cord, compasses with self-luminous tritium light sources, Phoenix IR strobe beacons that issued a personal combat identification (CID) that was invisible to the naked eye but could be spotted through NVGs at twenty miles away, Oceanic OC1 Titanium Dive Computer watches, and Rockwell PSN-11 Precision Lightweight GPS receivers.

The secure (Y-code) differentials on the GPS units allowed the users to receive 24/7 2-D and 3-D positioning anywhere on the planet with the help of twenty-two military satellites without giving up the users’ location. They were accurate to within less than a yard and weighed a mere 2.7 pounds each with batteries installed.

As the lead swimmer, Akil also wore a special miniature underwater GPS (MUGR) with position and navigational information that would allow the team to enter the Almendares River without coming up to the surface. It was preprogrammed with charts of the river and maps of the city that showed the target location (Clínico Central Cira García) and the exfil point a block and a half away.

Second-line gear carried in their backpacks included rebreathing Drägers, dive masks, fins, six extra magazines for each weapon, grenades (M18s and M67s), strobe lights, blowout patches, MREs, gloves, and water purification tablets.

Each man also carried third-line gear appropriate to his specific role on the team. Crocker, as the corpsman, packed an emergency medical kit, which included multi-trauma dressings and a needle for a possible thoracentesis. Suárez, as the team breacher, had various explosives, timers, detonators, and fuses.

In his pack, Mancini lugged a high-tech pneumatically fired grappling hook called a Rescue Air Initiated Launch (RAIL), which consisted of a black cannon about the size of a man’s arm that could launch a metal grappling claw attached to a nylon-jacketed line over 150 feet.

Crocker helped Akil secure the F47OU Combat Rubber Raiding Craft (CRRC or Zodiac) to the wooden platform, which involved inflating the 75-inch-wide by 185-inch-long boat with CO₂ cartridges, then tying the IR chemical light to the bow and stern, fastening three paddles to the side, and stowing the air pump and hose in the pockets in the right front and left rear. Next they placed a thirteen-by-thirty-six-inch piece of honeycomb on the floor of the boat and stowed and secured the engine and fuel tanks. Finally they lashed the CRRC to the platform, secured a G-12 cargo parachute with the rise compartment facing up, then installed a 5,000-pound M-1 release.

Once that was accomplished, Crocker huddled the men together in the rear of the fuselage and went over last-minute details.

“We’re gonna deploy our chutes low, at two thousand feet. The CRRC is going down first. Hopefully it makes it intact. If it goes down like a lawn dart and disappears into the water, the aircraft will drop us at an alternative DZ and we’ll have to swim in turtle-back.”

“Why didn’t we bring an extra rubber ducky?” Akil asked.

“Because they didn’t have one,” Mancini growled.

“Assuming the Zodiac makes it,” continued Crocker, “we’re gonna ride to within fifteen hundred yards of the coast and swim from there. Akil is carrying the MUGR. He’ll lead the way. Once we enter the river, we’re gonna swim over two tunnels, then under the Calle Eleven Bridge. The river will bend sharply to our left. That’s where we surface, in the vicinity of Parque Almendares.”

“Currents and tide could be an issue, so if we reach a second bridge, the Calle Forty-Two Bridge, we know we’ve gone too far,” Akil pointed out.

“Correct,” Crocker shouted over the engines. “The clinic is four blocks west of the park on Avenida Forty-One. Akil will be primary point to and from the target.”

“What do we do if we’re compromised by dogs, guards, or policemen?” Mancini asked.

“We take ’em out. We can’t risk capture. Each of us is carrying a couple kill pills. I don’t need to tell you what they’re for.”

“What about civilians?”

“Situation dictates. Use your judgment.”

“What are our actions at the objective?” Suárez asked.

“We conduct a thorough search for the hostage. It’s a three-story structure. CIA believes that the operating rooms are on the third deck. We find her, secure her, kill the fucking scumbag Jackal if we can find him, and get the fuck out of there. Then we hightail it to the exfil point, which is in front of a small park a block and a half southeast. We’re supposed to rendezvous with a guy named Flores, who will be driving a small blue-and-white tourist bus with ‘Vizul’ written on it.”

“Flores.”

“Yeah, Flores. He’s gonna put us on a DHL cargo jet that will take us to Miami.”

“How come we’re not flying FedEx?” Akil asked.

“Because FedEx is an American company, and they don’t like Americans. The Cuban authorities fucking hate us. DHL is German owned.”

“They gonna seal us in a box?”

“I don’t care what they put us in. Neither will you at that point. Get jocked up and ready for the jump.”

Guapo, Osito, and Stallone sat in the RAV4 taking turns watching Crocker’s driveway. When no one arrived by 2 a.m., they took a vote and decided to try Mancini’s house, which was a couple of blocks south. Palmetto Drive was even more desolate-a two-lane country road with modest one-story ranch houses on large plots of land. Number 1005 featured a front lawn half the size of a football field, with an American flag hanging from a pole in the middle next to a family of ornamental deer. To the left of the deer stood a dark blue Real Estate Group FOR SALE sign.

Guapo parked the vehicle in a church parking lot across the street. From that vantage, they saw a late-model blue Mustang resting in front of the two-car garage. Lights shone through the front windows.

The sicarios tucked Glocks into the back waistbands of their pants and crossed together. Through sheer white curtains they saw the profile of a man sitting in a brown recliner watching TV. The theme song from Friends wafted under the front door.

Guapo indicated to the other two men to hide in the bushes on either side of the door; then he rang the bell. Ten seconds later, a hand pushed aside the curtains, and a bearded face peered out at him. Guapo smiled, waved, and pointed to the door.

Mancini’s young brother, Paul, opened it a crack and spoke past the safety chain. “What d’you want?” he asked.

He’d been living there for three weeks now and planned to stay until either the house was sold or he traveled to College Park, Maryland, to start engineering school in the fall. His brother’s wife and two young sons had recently moved to a new colonial-style house farther south on Dam Neck Road.

Guapo flashed his friendliest smile. “Sorry to bother you,” he said, “but my car broke down, and my cell phone is out of juice.”

“You live nearby?” Paul asked.

“I drove down from New Jersey. I’m visiting my cousin.”

Twenty-three-year-old Paul, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless Terrapins T-shirt, gave him the once-over. “Wait here,” he said, “while I get you the cordless.”

“Thanks.”

Half a minute later, when Paul reached through the door to hand Guapo the phone, Guapo grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him forward abruptly. Though Paul was strong enough to have won several fights as a UFC light heavyweight before he ripped the rotator cuff in his left shoulder, he was caught off guard, fell forward, and slammed his forehead against the doorframe, which caused him to drop the phone. Guapo aimed the silenced Glock through the crack in the door and shot him once in the side of the head. Paul groaned, “What the fuck did you do that for?”then slumped to the floor.

Guapo instructed Stallone to run back to the Toyota, bring it around to the front of the property, and keep the engine running.

Then he and Osito entered the house and searched the bedrooms. In a closet they found old camouflage boots and uniforms. Aside from clothes, some furniture, and a few items in the kitchen, the house was empty.

Miguel X had told them that the SEAL named Joseph Mancini was married. But the two sicarios saw no evidence of a woman or any other person living in the house. So they dragged Paul’s big body back to the recliner, sat him in it, wiped the butt of the Glock clean of fingerprints, and placed the pistol in his hand.

They used rolled-up newspaper to set the curtains and rug on fire before they exited.

“One gringo down,” Guapo announced when he returned to the RAV4 and flames lit up the night sky. “One more to go.”