Alex Berenson: The Secret Soldier

NOW WELLS TUCKED HIS wallet, thick with twenties, into his shorts and followed Gaffan out of their hotel room. “Where do we start tonight?”

“Margaritaville.” Part of Jimmy Buffett’s empire, which stretched over Florida and the Caribbean like an oversized beach umbrella. The Montego Bay outpost featured water trampolines and a one-hundredtwenty-foot waterslide that dropped riders into the Caribbean. Each night it filled with tourists who would prefer to visit another country without seeing anything outside their comfort zone, exactly the type of unimaginative dopers who wanted to score from white dealers.

The night before at Margaritaville, Wells had watched a guy in a tropical shirt work the room. He sat with a table of frat boys for ten minutes before he and one of the guys got up. They came back five minutes later, the frat boy rubbing his nose, his face flushed. The coke must have been pretty good. An hour or so later, the dealer pulled the same trick with another table. But the dealer couldn’t have been Robinson. He had blond hair and was a decade too young.

Margaritaville was on the southern end of Gloucester Avenue, separated from the street by high walls. Wells and Gaffan paid their cover and walked past three bouncers, each bigger than the next. They gave Wells a not-very-friendly look, letting him know that his shorts and especially his boots barely passed muster.

“Welcome to the islands,” Gaffan said. “Nicest people on earth. Want a beer?”

“Red Stripe.”

The inside of the bar was empty. The drinkers had migrated to the decks over the bay, getting ready for another subtropical sunset. The sun had turned the sky a perfect Crayola red, and a satisfied hum ran though the crowd, as though the world had been created solely for its amusement. The dealer stood in the corner, in a different tropical shirt today, his hair pulled into a neat ponytail. Wells edged next to him.

“Nice day,” Wells said.

“They all are this time of year.”

“Peak season. Business must be good.”

The dealer shook his head.

“I saw you last night.”

“Looking for something?”

“I might be.”

“I’m not a mind reader. Ask away.”

“It’s more a someone than a something.”

“That’s gonna be impossible. Something, difficult. Someone, impossible.”

“You don’t even know who.”

The dealer pulled away from the rail, turned to face Wells. He looked like a surfer, tall and lanky, with a craggy, suntanned face. He lifted his sunglasses to reveal striking blue eyes.

“What I know is that you and your bud, you couldn’t look more like cops if you tried. Him especially.”

Gaffan walked toward them, holding two Red Stripes. Wells raised a hand to stop him. “We’re not cops.”

“You don’t fit, see. There’s several kinds of doper tourists. The frat boys, bachelor-party types, they just wanna buy some weed, coke, not get ripped off too badly. You’re too old to be frat boys. The old heads, retired hippie dippers, they were in Jamaica back in the day, man, back in the day. Probably once for about a week, but they still talk about it. Now they have kids and they came on a cruise, but they want to get high for old times’ sake. That definitely is not you.”

“True.”

“Then you have the true potheads, the guys who subscribe to High Times and argue on message boards about Purple Skunk versus Northern Lights. Amateur scientists. At least they would be if they weren’t so damned high all the time. They come down here two or three at a time. Mostly they don’t look like you, they’re fatter and their eyes are half closed. But let’s say you two have kept yourself up better than most. Except they don’t hang out here. They go straight to Orange Hill, like wine connoisseurs in Napa doing taste tests. And believe me, they’re equally annoying. So what are you, then? You look like cops. Or DEA, but why the hell would the DEA be buying ounces on the Hip Strip?”

“We’re not DEA. We’re not cops. We’re looking for someone. Nobody fancy. Nobody like Dudus”—Christopher Coke, a dealer who had run an infamous gang with the unlikely name of the Shower Posse.

“That’s good. Seeing as he’s in Kingston”—the Jamaican capital. “And seeing as you wouldn’t get within a mile of him. Let me tell you about Jamaica. Seventeen hundred murders reported last year, not counting a couple hundred bodies that never turn up. Dumped in de sea to feed de fishees, mon. Four times as many murders as New York City, and New York has three times as many people as Jamaica.”

The dealer stopped talking as a woman splashed down the waterslide and into the bay with a pleased scream. “Watch this. Her top’s going to come off. Yep.”

Shouts of “Tits!” erupted from the deck. “Tits! Tits! Tits!” The woman happily raised her polka-dotted bikini in the air as the crowd cheered.

“The whole country is a warehouse for coke and pot. From here you go west to New Orleans, east to the Bahamas and Florida. The politicians are owned by the gangs lock, stock, and barrel. They don’t even try to hide it. The cops just play along. Don’t let the dreads and the Marley songs fool you. This place is Haiti with better beaches.”

“So how do you get by?” Wells found himself intrigued.

“These frat boys? They’d pay by credit card if they could. They like a friendly face. And by friendly I mean white.”

“And you keep the locals happy.”

“I take care of the people who take care of me. In and out of this bar. I understand my place in the ecosystem. I don’t have aspirations. And understand, please, that whether it’s white or green, it’s so pure that I can step on it two, three times and still make my customers happy. In fact, I have to, or they’d wind up OD’ing. And trust me, you don’t want to see the inside of a Jamaican hospital, any more than a Jamaican jail.”

Around them the deck was filling up.

“It’s getting busy,” the dealer said. “I appreciate the chance to chat, but I gotta go.”

“How do we prove we’re not cops? Get high with you?”

“I believe you. You’re not cops. But you’re trouble. Whatever you want, it’s trouble.”

The sun touched the edge of the horizon. A long collective sigh went up from the crowd beside them.

“Gonna be a beautiful night,” the dealer said. “Do me a favor. Get lost. I see you and your boy hanging around, I’m gonna talk to my friends. You don’t want that. These dudes, they won’t care even if you do have a badge. They do sick stuff when they’re stoned. Most people get relaxed when they smoke, but these guys, they just dissociate. They won’t even hear you screaming.”

“We’ll be going, then.”

The dealer nodded. Two minutes later, Wells and Gaffan were on the street.

“So? He know where Robinson is?”

“He didn’t say, but I have a feeling he might.”

“And he’ll help us?”

“He doesn’t think so. But we’re gonna change his mind.”

THE SIRENS FROM THE STREET COULDN’T HIDE THE WOMEN SCREAMing from inside the bar, their high voices begging in a language Omar couldn’t understand. What had he done? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was in a tunnel with death on both ends, and the only way out was the rifle in his hand.

Fakir peeked through the front door, stepped inside, fired a blind burst to keep the troublemakers down. He hefted a grenade, pulled its pin, flipped the handle. “Wahid, ithnain—” he said. One, two—

He tossed the grenade high and deep, aiming at the back edge of the bar. It spun end over end and disappeared. The explosion came a half-second later, and the screams a half-second after that, not even words, pure animal keening. Another wave of shooting began outside, the quick snap of pistols against the rattle of AKs. Amir and Hamoud defending their posts. “Time to go in,” Fakir said. “Finish this.”