In the Crosshairs

8

Thousands of years before the birth of Christ, opium seeds bloomed in the warm, dry, welcoming lands of Mesopotamia. The poppy seemed almost magical in its dual gifts of being a pain reliever and a bringer of great pleasure. Once that genie of easy joy escaped, it would never be capped back in the bottle. Wars would be fought over opium and its derivatives, and thousands upon thousands of addicts over hundreds of years would pay or do anything to maintain their habit. In places such as the Wakham Corridor of Afghanistan, farmers of the twenty-first century planted the little flowers as their primary crop, and every spring their fields sprouted with the pink-and-purple blossoms that were the basic building blocks of the incredibly lucrative dope chain.

Farida Mashaal had had an excellent year with his four acres on the slopes of the Corridor, thanks to late rainfall that had cleared just in time for the poppies to dry. Using his own family and itinerant workers, he had gathered the harvest without a problem. The Afghan government’s army had reduced its impotent campaign of eradication, and the Taliban not only left him alone but even furnished extra men to help milk the rubbery drops of raw opium from gentle slices on the pregnant bulbs. So today he stood in his field beside a bearded man carrying an AK-47 slung over his shoulder and scribbling in a notebook. A battery-powered calculator made by Texas Instruments did the math.

“I make it probably very close to ninety pounds,” declared the Taliban taxman. “An excellent crop.”

“Allah be praised,” replied the farmer. “I can feed my family for another year.”

“Cash or product?” With the figuring done, it was time to collect the tax. “Four hundred American dollars or two bags.”

The ill-educated Afghan farmer did some number-crunching of his own, playing the futures market for this strange gold. Farida didn’t need a calculator because he had been doing these calculations for years and could feel the answers in his bones. Prices had shot up, almost doubling, in the past year, and raw opium of the purest, virginal kind was currently selling for about $150 per kilogram. There are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram, so his 90 pounds worked out to roughly 41 kilos. He grimaced as he did the multiplication—41 times $150—and the grimace gave way to a smile. His harvest so far would be worth more than $6,000, a small fortune for the humble farmer. A hundred dollars per cultivated acre.

“I will pay money this time.” His decision was not hard. He was betting that the price of opium would continue its steady climb. The farmer pulled a clump of hundred-dollar bills from a pocket of his baggy trousers and counted off four for the Taliban taxman, who made a note in his book.

“Do you still need our men for your harvest?”

“No. You can take them now, with my thanks for the assistance.”

“It is our wish for you to succeed,” said the taxman.

Farida remained silent. Of course you do, he thought. You support your crazy revolution by taxing me for something that is not yours, and your men in the fields spin tales of battlefield glory to recruit a few workers before the season is over. Just take the money and the boys and leave. The farmer gave a small bow and backed away. He had to load bags of his pasty product aboard his truck and get it to the village before nightfall. At least the Taliban could provide protection along to Girdiwal.

Kyle Swanson wore caution like an outer layer of skin, as strong and protective as the shell of a Texas armadillo. Think. Analyze. Plan. Take care. Look at what the enemy sees. Remain flexible. Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.

He was being pushed toward something. He didn’t know what the destination might be, but his sails were filling and the wind was fair and he was being moved, though not by his own hand. The Cornwells had no answers, not that he expected any, because the full extent of the problem was unknown. Swanson thought that by talking about it with them some moment of clarity might shine through. Two days of talking, looking at it every which way, and they’d found nothing.

In his room, the sheets were fresh, the pillows soft, and he had some jazz playing softly to counter the sounds of the big city. Any metropolis is filled with nighttime traffic, abrupt screams or loud laughter, the animal sounds of cats and dogs, and piercing automobile alarms. Swanson wanted sleep. He would fly back to Washington tomorrow, and go out to CIA headquarters and make a decision concerning Luke Gibson. Coastie would be arriving soon. Nicky Marks might come creeping around. He turned off his mind and closed his eyes.

As he slid deeper into the unconscious abyss, a heavy darkness engulfed his mind, with ominous gray clouds that rolled about the sky like volcanic marbles. A screen of raindrops dappled an unseen ocean, followed by the roar of thunder and a thirty-knot wind of an instant storm that ground the surface into waves that blotted out the horizon and swallowed the little sky that was faintly visible. The smells of sulfur and ash came to him. He was about to get clobbered, and he didn’t even have time to batten down the hatches. Oh, no. I don’t want to do this; I don’t want to see the Boatman.

But there he was, stringy in dirty rags and standing at perfect ease aboard a long, narrow boat that bobbed in a puddle of calm while the maelstrom roared about. “We need to talk,” came a hissing whisper from the nightmare figure.

“You are not there. You are just a PTSD hallucination.” Swanson saw himself standing at the end of a long pier, soaked by the waves that surged up all around. He was in uniform, with an M27 IAR across one shoulder and his boonie hat tilted low.

The figure gave an evil smirk. “Of course I’m a hallucination. You really should get some help from a psychiatrist about seeing me all the time.”

“So why are you bothering me?”

“Because, as usual you’re in trouble and you’ve summoned me to prepare for what’s ahead.” The Boatman leaned on a long oar to keep his craft steady and waved a bony arm. “My little boat is empty for now. You will bring me some souls to ferry across.”

“I don’t think so.” Swanson shifted the machine gun. Maybe he should just rip a couple of bursts of 5.56-mm. rounds through that stack of rags and be done with him. But you cannot kill something that is not alive.

“I know it’s true. You’re already on the path.”

“I’m going after only one man. You don’t even have to make a separate trip for him. Leave Nicky Marks here to rot for a while after I kill him. Let the crows work on his eyes and innards. He’s a worthless piece of shit.”

A cackle of laughter. “This cannot be done alone. You can keep the body. His soul belongs elsewhere.”

Swanson stiffened. “I’m not alone. I will have help.”

The black hood shook from side to side. “No. Again, you see the signs, now I have told you, but you neither listen nor see.”

“How, then? Why? Tell me how this comes down.”

The winds spiked the surrounding waves into sharp peaks of foam. The Boatman’s black robes spun out like wings as he leaned on the oar and pointed the bow back into the storm. Over his shoulder, before the darkness swallowed him, he called out, “I will save a place for you.”

“Wait! Don’t go yet! Tell me more. Give me something!”

The little craft vanished, and Swanson tossed and turned in the bed, sound asleep and troubled.

Nicky Marks had a fine time showing his American lawyer lover around the treasure domes of France. From the Louvre to Versailles to churches and élite collections, she was dazzled by the gold, jewels, and masterpieces.

When the emperor Napoleon went trekking about conquering countries, he assigned teams of experts to accompany the armies. For centuries, the common practice of a conquering power was to loot the victims. However, Napoleon wanted more than just money hidden in a farmer’s potato bin. When the dust of battle settled, the French specialists had first crack at the important thievery. Their systematic gathering of valuable plunder brought back paintings by the Masters and scientific wonders spawned by foreign genius. The result was a France awash in antiquities. That lasted until the Nazis came along and stole most of it for themselves. One thing that was left behind by both of them was an established illicit trade in antiquities.

While the Alabama attorney took a long shower back at their hotel after a grueling day of sightseeing, Marks logged onto her laptop, as he had done every day that they had been together. Using her IP address, he went to an international search-engine site that specialized in fine art and was given a choice of more than thirty million possibilities. The top-tier index was a long list of paid placements by museums and auction houses, and Marks quickly filtered out items being offered by private parties. With hundreds of kilobytes per second, it did not take long.

There it was, in plain sight, the header line in dark blue:

It was a bogus, nonsense ad that any serious collector would dismiss out of hand, because it contained no dates, no price, no details, and no verification of any sort. An obvious forgery. Many scam artists sharked the art world, and they were very adept at gulling rich amateurs.

The ad had been created by a talented hacker to draw little attention, but, just in case, it had some specific defenses. An embedded malware virus switched any potential customer without a password to a hard-core porn site. The simple, nondestructive shield virus easily discouraged most of them from going further. Any attempt to break through that firewall would result in a meaner virus attacking the snooper’s system.

That was fine. The advertisement was aimed only at him. Using the password, he went through the corrupted site to a relay point that bounced him to another site.

Up popped up a generic picture of the marketplace in Kabul. He recognized it instantly. No words, only the single color photograph. It meant that Marks had to go back to Afghanistan.

When he heard the shower stop in the bathroom, Marls cleared the laptop’s recent browser history, logged off, closed it up, and replaced it on the table.

Sylvia stepped out wearing only a fluffy towel, and said, “My feet are killing me.”

He smiled at her and flipped down the bedcovers. “We have some time before dinner, my dear. How can we possibly waste a few hours? Come and let me massage those poor feet.”

Mickey’s marines were the scouts and protectors as the señora went about her bloody rampage of revenge on the men who had taken her husband’s life and violated his rest. Almost every night, Beth shed her natural sparkling personality and went on the prowl to exterminate another target. When the sun set, her mourning dress became a black commando outfit. Her dead husband’s private armory provided the weaponry.

They watched her work with a quiet, growing pride. They were all tough men, most had known her for several years, and none had suspected that this Jekyll and Hyde existed. The colonel had never talked about his American bride’s past. Now their own eyes gave irrefutable proof that the señora knew exactly what she was doing.

The commandant of the Policía Estatal de Yucatán, the state police based in the capital of Mérida, was at a loss to explain what was happening in the drug world. The peninsula had long been divided into zones of control by the various cartels in a live-and-let-live arrangement. There was plenty of money to go around, as long as a proper share filtered up to the real chieftains. In recent days, the show of equitable sharing had been destroyed. This morning, he had gotten the news that the second of the Beltran brothers had also been murdered — that coming on the heels of a lawyer for the Villareal Organization being gutted like a catfish. The two cartels were heading for war, and he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t even investigate it! Neither side would talk to cops. That wasn’t totally true, for the deadly crime boss Maxim Guerrera was demanding to know why his people were dying when he was paying so much in protection money to the police.

The government in Mexico City also wanted answers, and all the commandant had was another unexplained dead druggie almost every morning.

The señora had chosen an interesting job for what she wanted to be her final outing for a while. Two marines in an old SUV took her over to the coast and south to a quiet inlet. A warm wind caressed the dunes and the waving high grass provided concealment in the darkness. Tonight, all three of them carried Fire Snakes, the Mexican-made FX-05 assault rifles fitted with thirty-round box magazines.

From their vantage point, the raiders had a clear view of a busy pier on which men were loading packets of cocaine from a covered truck into a sharp-bowed, high-performance Cigarette boat tied at the pilings. Four powerful Mercury outboards hung on the stern. Beth actually smiled. She knew this sort of vessel well. Her first real job in the Coast Guard was stopping these speedy drug runners by shooting them from a helicopter out over the Gulf of Mexico. She knew their strong point was speed, while their weak point was the fact that they were just flimsy boats. On an ordinary mission of yesteryear, she would just take out the motors with a couple of shots, and the classy vessels, worth half a million dollars when empty, turned into a drifting fiberglass hulks filled with drugs. Tonight, she wanted more. She wanted to poke the bosses themselves with a branding iron.

The laborers worked beneath a pair of large lights on the pier, unafraid of being seen. The coke was stowed neatly in waterproof containers inside the hull, so the cargo would arrive nice and dry somewhere along the Gulf coast in the U.S.

“Jamie, you take the truck. Leo, you do the boat, and start by shredding those motors. I take the center.” Her voice betrayed no excitement. She checked the automatic rifle. “On a three count, boys. Uno… dos… tres!”

The Fire Snakes erupted in three-and four-round bursts that hit with extraordinary effect. The fiberglass boat was ripped beneath the repeated impacts of the military-grade rounds, and the fast engines were reduced to junk. The truck bucked and jumped, and gasoline spewed onto the wooden pier. While the marines changed magazines, the señora stood with the Fire Snake at her hip. Her boys would do the machinery; she would do the men.

Beth walked steadily toward the pier, giving the surprised workers and crew time to respond, and they went for their guns. She kept moving forward, the sand pulling at her boots, until they opened fire. Her marines were screaming for her to get down. Instead, she started working calmly as bullets zipped around her and splatted in the sand and grass and water. The drug workers toppled like bowling pins as she nailed them with head shots and chest wounds, changed magazines, and swept the deck. She screamed with rage as her rifle barked and she moved inexorably closer to the targets. With a final two-shot burst, she hit the gasoline refueling drums and the pier caught fire. She reloaded and emptied another full clip on automatic into the inferno.

Elizabeth Ledford Castillo stopped moving as the bright cloud bloomed and finished the devastation. She dropped her rifle into the dirt, and for the first time, the marines hurrying up to her saw the señora cry. She fell to her knees in the sand, sobbing, and her entire body shook. Leo gathered all three rifles, and Jamie scooped her into his arms. It was over, and they took her home.

The following day was Sunday, and after church Beth was driven to the airport. The blond hair was neatly brushed and glowing again, her skin was smooth and tanned, and her cornflower-blue eyes showed no sadness. She was actually feeling pretty good by the time she boarded the plane to embark on her trip to Washington.