W. Griffin - Covert Warriors

Heard about but not seen.

Fernando flew them here onto our strip, and Stefan told them to keep out of sight, which means they did.

Which means I’m being interrogated.

Does Juan Carlos think I don’t know that?

Or doesn’t care if I do?

“And now you’re a retired colonel.”

“Retired lieutenant colonel,” Castillo said. “I got passed over for promotion to colonel twice. That was when they sent me to Uruguay.”

“So what brings you to Hacienda Santa Maria?”

“I think you know, Juan Carlos.”

“I don’t have a fucking clue, Carlos.”

“The Army officer who was kidnapped, Jim Ferris, is a West Point classmate of mine, an old friend. I thought-Fernando told me you’re the commandant of the Policia Federal in Oaxaca Province-you’d be the guy who would know. Maybe even tell me how I could help to get him back.”

“You want some good advice, Carlos?”

“That’s what I came here for.”

“Get in your airplane and go home. Better yet, go back to Uruguay. Before you and your friends get hurt. You don’t want to fuck with these people, Carlos. They’re really bad news.”

“So I’ve heard. Fernando told me. But I figured my old friend, now a heavy-duty Federale, could protect me.”

“Your old friend has a tough time protecting himself,” Juan Carlos said. “You saw Lieutenant Gomez, the guy with the CAR-15?”

Castillo nodded.

“There’s two more guys with CAR-15s in my Suburban, and four more of them in the other Suburban. I call them the American Express,’cause I never go anywhere without them. Don’t you read the papers?”

“You’re talking about the drug cartel people?”

“You bet your fucking ass I am.”

“I’ve been in Uruguay. There’s drugs in Uruguay. The cops down there don’t run around with CAR-15s.”

Pena looked at him as if he couldn’t believe Castillo’s naivete.

Or stupidity. Or both.

“Well, Carlos, let me tell you about the drugs here,” Juan Carlos said. “As opposed to in Uruguay. Where the fuck is Uruguay, anyway?”

“On the other side of the river from Buenos Aires.”

Got you now, Juan Carlos, ol’ buddy!

Rule Seven in the Uncle Remus List of Rules for the Interrogation of Belligerent Bad Guys: “Make them think you’re stupid and then let them show you how smart and knowledgeable they are.”

“Let me try to sum it up this way, Carlos,” Juan Carlos said. “This stuff starts out when some campesino in Bolivia or wherever the fuck sticks his knife in a flower, a poppy, and collects the goo that comes out. Or boils down the coca leaf. The last stop is when some junkie in the States either sucks it up his nostrils, or sticks it in his vein. By then it’s either cocaine or heroin.”

“What are you telling me you think I don’t know?”

Juan Carlos held his now empty whiskey glass. The maid took it.

“Put enough in it this time,” he said in Spanish, and then switched back to English.

“Shut your mouth for a fucking minute, Carlos, and I’ll tell you what you don’t know. At every step, from processing that shit so it becomes heroin or cocaine, the price goes up, way up. You do understand that?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Juan Carlos.”

“You could have fooled me. Now, the same thing is true in every step between the fields and the junkie’s nose. The price goes up. Way, way up by the time it gets close to the States.

“Now, the people in this business, as you can imagine, are not very nice people. Dona Alicia would not invite them to dinner-and on that subject, thank you very much, but I can’t stay for dinner.”

“Why not? We haven’t even started walking down memory lane,” Castillo said.

“I got things to do, Carlos. The only reason I’m here is to try, because we go way back, to warn you what you’re fucking around with and to try to keep you alive.”

“I can keep myself alive, thank you very much.”

“Will you shut your fucking mouth and listen? Jesus Christ!”

Castillo hoped the look he made indicated his feelings had been hurt.

Proof that he had been successful came immediately.

“For Christ’s sake, Carlos, I’m trying to help you,” Juan Carlos said, almost compassionately.

“Sorry.”

“Okay. Now, except for what the junkies in the States pay for their one ounce-or less-little bags of this shit, it’s most valuable just before it’s sent over the border into the States. By then it’s in bricks, generally weighing a kilo-that’s a little over two pounds.

“Some of the people taking it across the border, after buying it at a stiff price from somebody who brought it from Venezuela or Colombia, and running the risk that we’d catch them while they were moving it from south Mexico to the border, decided it would be safer and a hell of a lot cheaper to just steal it from some other trafficker.

“And the way to do that was just kill the other trafficker; let their bosses just guess who stole it. And the way to keep the police from interfering with the movement, do one of two things. Pay off the police-Carlos, you have no fucking idea how much fucking money is involved here. We grab some of these people with two, three hundred grand, sometimes more, in their pockets.

“And then they realized that it would be cheaper to kill the police who were getting close than to pay them off.”

“No shit?” Castillo said wonderingly.

“No shit. So what we have is war here, Carlos. One ground of drug movers-they call themselves ‘cartels’-killing each other to steal, or protect the product, whether it’s cocaine or meth or heroin, and all of them perfectly willing to kill the police.

“I don’t know where it’s going to end. I know the good guys ain’t winning. Now, as to your friend. I heard two stories, and I don’t know which one to believe. The first is that they just got in the way. By that I mean they’d been responsible for us-the Policia Federal, or the American DEA, or Border Patrol grabbing shipments. Since these shipments are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars-sometimes millions-this made them mad, so they had to be killed.

“The second story I heard is that they want to swap your colonel for a man named Felix Abrego. He’s doing life without the possibility of parole in that maximum-security prison of yours. . what’s it called?”

The words Florence Maximum were almost on Castillo’s lips when he caught himself, shrugged, and asked, “Leavenworth?”

“No,” Juan Carlos said.

“Sorry, I was a soldier, not a policeman. But I do know, Juan Carlos, that it’s firm American policy not to do something like that. The Taliban tried it on us in Afghanistan, and it was decided that if we-”

“Florence,” Juan Carlos interrupted him. “The Florence ADMAX. It’s in Colorado.”

“Never heard of it.”

“What they do there, Carlos, is lock you up alone, around the clock, except for one hour a day, when they let you out of your cell to exercise, alone, in what looks like a dog kennel. You get a shower every other day.”

“Sounds like fun. What do you have to do to get sent there?”

“Abrego shot a few DEA agents,” Juan Carlos said. “In the States. Near El Paso. They caught him.”

“He didn’t get the death penalty? I always thought if you killed a cop, you got the electric chair.”

“Well, I’ll explain to you how that works in real life, Carlos. We haven’t had the death penalty in Mexico since 2005. If a Mexican in the States gets the hot seat, that’s bad for our friendly relations. Mexican politicians fall all over themselves rushing up there to save him.