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.