“Why?” Crocker asked.
“Because Unit 5000 is building a base there,” Davis answered, running a hand through his blond surfer hair, which didn’t match the darker color of his beard.
“What about Ritchie? What’s the word on him?”
“He’s back home healing and feeling sorry for himself,” Davis reported. “He says he’s sick of watching TV and eating applesauce and yogurt.”
Crocker detected torment in his young teammate’s eyes. “What about you? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Davis answered. “I just got off a Skype call with Sandy.” Sandy was his blond, former USC cheerleader wife. “She’s freaking out because Tyler is running a 104-degree fever and she can’t get hold of the pediatrician.”
Tyler was their one-year-old. “I told her to use a wet washcloth to cool him down, give him some baby aspirin, and let him sleep. He’ll probably be better in the morning, right?”
Crocker said, “Tell her to check in on him every so often, and that kids bounce back fast. If he’s still running a high fever in the morning she might want to take him to the hospital.”
“That’ll reassure her. Thanks.”
Crocker unpacked, nuked some canned soup he found in the kitchen, then had Sanchez drive him over to the Banco Popular building, which looked deserted. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and a lot of people seemed to have left the city.
He rode up to the ninth-floor office and found Melkasian in a blue tracksuit and sneakers talking to someone on the phone. Crocker picked up a recent issue of Time, which had a smiling Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi on the cover. He didn’t trust him. To his mind anyone whose political beliefs were determined by religious dogma, especially if it was Muslim, had to be carefully watched.
Melkasian put his phone away and threw Crocker a bottle of water. “How’s your head?” he asked.
“Still seems to work, as far as I can tell. How’s yours?”
“Heavy with concerns, problems. I heard about that wild stunt you pulled in Foz.”
“I’m still trying to remember the details,” Crocker said. “Anything new about the identities of the men on the plane?”
Melkasian shook his head. “Doubt if there ever will be,” he answered. “They were burned to a crisp. But we do know that the Iranians requested the remains.”
“But they haven’t been ID’d?”
“No.”
Rappaport arrived, popped open his metal briefcase, and they got down to business. Crocker was shown satellite photos of a plot in Barinas where Unit 5000 was reportedly building a base and landing strip. There wasn’t much to see, except for a couple of tin-roofed structures and a swath of reddish dirt carved into what looked to be a flat grassy plain.
“Where’s Bolinas?” Crocker asked.
Rappaport snorted. “Bolinas is a town on the Northern California coast. Barinas is a state southwest of here.”
“What’s this?” Crocker asked, pointing to what looked like a country club, with a large house and pool area, on one of the surveillance photos.
“That’s the Hugo Chávez family estate, La Chavera,” Melkasian said. “He was born nearby in the house of his paternal grandmother, and grew up there until he came to Caracas at seventeen to attend the Venezuelan military academy.”
“Interesting that the Iranians decided to build their base there.”
“Also interesting is the fact that the Iranians are building a landing strip in Barinas, which is near the Colombian border and close to hundreds of cocaine labs.”
“How convenient,” Crocker observed.
“Exactly.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.
– Clarence Darrow
Crocker, Davis, and Sanchez set out early the following morning in one of the white Toyota FJ Cruisers they had used the night they raided the shack in Petare. The four-lane “super” highway was paved and relatively new. Sanchez explained that the Chávez-Maduro government had removed all the tollbooths so that anyone regardless of their social or economic status could afford to take the country’s best roads. This explained the heavy traffic. Crocker also saw disrepair in several places and wrecked, abandoned cars along the side of the road.
The sun was starting to set when they arrived at the state capital of Barinas, which featured open fields, groves of trees, and gated estates. Sanchez said that since they were close to the Colombian border, the area was frequented by FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) soldiers, and therefore considered dangerous at night.
“I’ve dealt with them before,” Crocker said, recalling past missions against FARC bases in eastern Colombia.
“The guerrillas cross the border to steal stuff and kidnap people. So all the ranchers in the area are armed and on alert. They lock up their cattle and equipment after dark.”
The FARC, which called itself a peasant army whose goal was to overthrow the Colombian government and establish an agrarian Marxist-Leninist state, financed its operations by kidnapping wealthy Colombians and foreigners for ransom, growing coca, and processing, trafficking, and transshipping cocaine. One of its leaders, Guillermo Torres, had been captured near Barinas in June of the previous year.
“Interesting place for Unit 5000 to establish a base,” Crocker said, thinking out loud. “They’re in Venezuela, so they’re protected, Barinas is in the middle of nowhere, and there’s an endless supply of cheap cocaine that they can sell overseas to fund their operations.”
He was starting to understand how the Falcon thought.
“I was thinking the same thing, boss,” Davis said. “Instead of having to ship the drugs out of places like Ciudad del Este, they’ll soon be able to fly it to Europe right out of here.”
“Good point.”
They stopped at a farmhouse with a big garden and were greeted by large barking dogs. The proprietor, Señor Tomás, looked like a wizened, white-haired Indiana Jones, complete with safari jacket and straw fedora. Crocker learned that he was a Cuban American cattle rancher and CIA asset. He also had two extra bedrooms, one of which was being used by Mancini, Cal, and Neto. Crocker, Davis, and Sanchez took the other one, which seemed to belong to a huge black dog named Chico, who slept in a large wicker basket under the window.
After washing up and unpacking, Crocker and Davis met the other members of Black Cell and Neto on the rear veranda, where they drank rum punch and beer, and listened to Señor Tomás talk about how the government was ruining the country by driving rich Venezuelans and foreign capital out, and thereby shutting down new business investment.
“You think Maduro will change anything?” Mancini asked.
“Probably not,” Tomás answered. “He’s a fucking communist demagogue, too. Spends a lot of time with the Castro brothers in Cuba looking for ways to screw the U.S. As a matter of fact, he might be worse.”
After dinner of roast lamb and baby potatoes, their host showed them photos of his family’s house in Havana, where he had been born in 1940. His father, he explained, had been arrested and shot by Che Guevara shortly after the Cuban Revolution. He himself had returned to Cuba as a teenager as part of the CIA-trained Brigade 2506 during the Bay of Pigs Invasion on April 17, 1961. He was one of an estimated 1,202 Cuban anti-Castro rebels who were captured a few days later, after the Kennedy administration failed to assist the invading force with much-needed air support. He spent a year and a half rotting in a Cuban prison before he was released and returned to Miami.
He hated the Kennedys for their betrayal but said he despised Fidel Castro even more, which is why he had worked with the CIA to help defeat communists throughout Latin America ever since.
With his blond American wife humming along, Tomás played a guitar and sang plaintive songs in Spanish. One of them, “Guantanamera,” a love song to a woman from a country town in Cuba, caused tears to spill from his eyes. He wiped them away, ran into the yard, and starting lighting something with a torch.