Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

Sitting in the backseat of the BMW as Carlos sped us through the taxi and donkey-cart traffic of Cartagena, Amelia leaned her shoulder briefly against me and said in a low voice, “Why the special treatment? This guy’s acting like you’re a foreign dignitary and he’s known you for years.”

I cleared my throat before I answered, “I’ve been here a couple of times for conferences, research-things like that.”

She seemed unconvinced. “As a biologist?”

“Yeah. In Latin America marine biologists are highly respected. Seafood. It’s a very important industry here.”

When I opened the briefcase that Harrington had left for me, I stood back and whistled softly, surprised and not a little apprehensive. Mostly surprised.

Did he really think I’d have a use for this kind of firepower?

I left the briefcase open and walked to the window of our third-floor suite. We were staying at the Hotel Santa Clara inside Cartagena’s old walled city. Most of Colombia’s dangers were known to me long before receiving Hal Harrington’s briefing paper. I have tried to lock away a number of bad memories associated with the place. Even so, it is still one of the more interesting countries in the Americas, and Cartagena is my favorite city by far.

Cartagena is a Conquistador village built within a stone fortress six miles in diameter, and that fortress, in turn, is built within a perimeter of forts. The city was founded in the early 1500s. Gold and silver plundered from the Indians were stockpiled here prior to being loaded and shipped back to Madrid.

A city filled with gold attracted the attention of the world’s pirates. French pirates kidnapped the governor and held him for ransom. English pirates such as Hawkens and Drake infiltrated the city under cover of darkness, burned the houses, sacked cathedrals, and sailed away with shiploads of treasure. Spain continued to build the walls around the city higher and thicker, but the pirates still came-just as pirates still continue to come to Colombia today.

In those years, some say that what is now the Hotel Santa Clara was a convent-a treasure trove of a different sort. So it too has walls as thick as those of a fort, four stories high, raspberry-colored, and impenetrable from the outside. But step through the hotel’s double doors, and you enter a Castilian world that vanished three hundred years ago.

The ceilings are twenty feet high with rafters of black mahogany. There are gardens with palms, rare flowers, toucans, parrots, and fountains. The courtyards are tiled with bricks made by Indian slaves long dead. Today, the hybrid progeny of those dead, a hundred generations removed, wait and serve the descendants of the Castilians who enslaved their relatives. The hotel is built around a great plaza, and now there is a modern swimming pool in the middle of that plaza.

Amelia lay on a lounge chair by the pool, dozing in the afternoon sun. The garland sparkle of Christmas decorations seemed incongruous in the palms. She wore a green two-piece swimsuit, very modest. When I saw her naked for the first time, I’d realized that she was the type of redhead who tans.

She was out there tanning herself now. Which is why I could take my time with the briefcase, and its contents.

I turned back to the bed where the briefcase lay open and removed from it a small submachine gun. The weapon had a very fine balance and weight.

I have little personal interest in firearms, though I admire any kind of fine machinery. I’ve never been an outstanding marksman, and I seldom do much shooting anymore. However, because there was a time in my life when firearms were necessary tools of my trade, I possess a certain level of expertise.

The submachine gun I held was very familiar to me. It was, in the opinion of many, the most efficient and lethal hand weapon ever created. It was a Heckler amp; Koch MP5K submachine gun, a lightweight, air-cooled, magazine-fed weapon that, on full automatic, fires thirteen rounds per second with extraordinary accuracy. Ever needing to fire thirteen rounds per second accurately is an unimaginable situation.

Yet the weapon was tiny: only thirteen inches long, weighing slightly more than four pounds. You could hide it in the pocket of a trenchcoat, then clear an auditorium with it.

The H amp;K MP5 systems are modular, which means you can mix and match accessories for almost any need. Harrington had included a couple of interesting options. From the briefcase, I now removed a length of beautifully machined aluminum stock-an integrally threaded sound suppressor. Fire the weapon next to someone’s ear, he would hear a blowgun sound: Phutt! People fifteen meters away would hear nothing. There were also dual magazines that looked like twin twenty-eight-round magazines clamped together. But these would hold over two hundred cartridges. Squeeze the trigger on full auto and you could cut down a good-sized tree before having to reload.

Did the man think I was going into a war zone?

Perhaps that’s exactly what he was arming me for.

Finally, the briefcase itself was an option: Made out of some space-age polymer, you could clamp the little sub gun into position, close the cover, walk it down the street, squeeze the trigger built into the handle, and fire through a hole in the side of the case.

I got no delight in seeing the weapon, felt no illusion of authority because I now had that firepower in my possession. From the look and weight of the thing, I got only a sense of loathing, and of dread.

There is an implicit dirtiness to machinery designed to maim and kill. Participate even once, and that dirt can never be washed away.

Harrington had included a couple of more conventional weapons as well, pistols. There was a Colt. 380 semiauto Mustang, which was featherlight and smaller than the palm of my hand. It was a very easy weapon to hide in a boot or under a ball cap. There was also a much larger and more lethal SIG Sauer P226 9mm-exactly like the one I kept stored away in my old fish house back on Sanibel and had used over so many years.

It was no coincidence. Years ago, Harrington and I had been trained by the same people, on the same weaponry, and in the same way. Maybe he considered it a nostalgic touch.

I checked the magazine of each weapon. All were fully loaded. Inside the briefcase, I also found a “drop” weapon. A drop weapon is usually something silent and sharp that can be used in crowds. Walk up to your target, make the hit, and walk away, leaving the weapon behind.

There was a small plastic cylinder in which there were a dozen or more Fukumi bari needles. Ninja warriors would hide the needles on their tongues and blow them into the eyes of their enemy. I am no Ninja, so judging from the tiny skull and crossbones on the cylinder, these needles were dipped in something poisonous.

I broke the cylinder’s seal and sniffed. The needles had a fruity, vinegar odor. Probably sodium morphate. Attach the cylinder to the tip of an umbrella, touch the needles to the leg of your target as you pass, and within thirty minutes or so, he will begin to feel a terrifying anxiety, then cramps, and soon will collapse with all the symptoms of both a heart attack and a brain aneurysm. A very nasty weapon and also illegal, according to the Geneva Protocol of 1927.

“This is a dirty war!” Bernie Yeager had told me.

I had no doubt of that now.

Finally, there was a military SATCOM telephone. SATCOM is a satellite-based, global wireless personal communications network designed to permit easy phone access from nearly anywhere on earth. Sixty-six satellites, evenly spaced four hundred miles high, made it possible. The phone was compatible with cellular systems worldwide, if the phone being called was equipped with a cellular cassette.

Hal Harrington’s phone undoubtedly was.