Ted Bell - Spy

He vaguely remembered she’d told him she was a nurse in Manaus. That explained a lot. Harry had a thing for nurses.

After a while, he stopped whipping his head from side to side and banging his wrists against the bed-frame because (A) it hurt, (B) it wasn’t doing him any damn good at all, and (C) it felt so good when you stopped. Harry was so happy about being relatively pain-free he tried to smile but found that it was tough to do with the muzzle of an oily snub-nosed .357 scraping the roof of your mouth.

Relax, Harry told himself. Be professional about this for crissakes. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was another of life’s endless lessons. Today’s lesson: stay the hell out of backstreet bars in towns where life was exceedingly cheap and you had a huge price on your head. Stay sober and avoid strange women at all costs, even gorgeous ones.

He took a few deep breaths like he was trained to do, holding each for a count of six, and tried to stabilize his heart, slow everything way down.

Get your bearings, Harry. He was going to say get the lay of the land but he’d already done that. She was sitting right on top of him. Christ, what a woman. He would kill to know her name but he felt at this point introductions would be awkward. Even if she removed the gun from his mouth, what was he going to say?

Focus, Harry. Okay. He had to be somewhere in the little shitburg town of Madre de Dios. Yeah. He’d wandered into this Brazilian backwater yesterday afternoon because a hungry, pushing forty-year-old guy with back problems just gets tired of not eating and sleeping out in the rain under a different tree every night. It had been a week since he’d taken shelter under an actual tin roof, and the last real bed he’d actually slept in, he had gotten out of about two minutes before Las Medianoches rapped on his door and knocked it down.

What finally happened was, how he came to be here in Madre de Dios, about a week ago he’d started seeing a bad Xerox of his face plastered all over the charming town of Barcelos on the Rio Negro. Printed under his mug was a rather large round number calculated in both pesos and dollars. He’d been deeply depressed with how little he was worth until he remembered that in this part of Brazil you could buy a Mercedes E55 AMG with a sticker price of $81,000 for less than $10,000. Dom Perignon was three bucks a magnum, and you could snag a fresh pair of Nike Air Jordans (he had) for a dollar.

Hell, that meant his life was only worth about a thousand pairs of Michael Jordan sneakers. Seemed a little on the low side.

This was a tiny spot on the map, but it was the central city in what is known as the Mato Grosso, where about $12 billion, that’s billion with a B, worth of cocaine passed through every year. Harry had asked around, dropping a few names and discreet amounts of cash here and there, and managed to hook up with a big time guy named Osvaldo Sanchez.

Osvaldo, who was president of one of fifty-five international bank slash laundries operating here in town, liked to siphon off a hundred million or so every now and then to buy bargain basement surface-to-air missiles for the glorious pan-American revolucion Hugo and Fidel were dreaming about. Because Harry was pretty savvy about the illegal arms business and both men knew the names of a lot of heavy hitters, he and Osvaldo had hit it off and actually developed a good working relationship.

Good enough for he and Señor Sanchez to arrange a confidential meeting where they would talk turkey and Harry would find out who some of the key players were in what was shaping up as the major drama currently unfolding down here south of the border. Rumors were rampant. Massive terrorist armies moving north to invade Central America. Stuff like that.

But, wouldn’t you know it, at the last minute Harry had had to cancel due to a prior commitment (staying alive) and instead of talking turkey with Don Osvaldo he was running for his life and hopping into the back of a poultry truck crossing a bridge to nowhere. Once safely across the Paran River, he’d taken to the jungle, sleeping rough for a week until, good luck, the heat died down. Hiding in jungles is hot, thirsty work. Harry finally succumbed to his baser desires and hitched a ride with a busload of poppy growers to his current residence, a less than idyllic village called Madre de Dios.

All he’d really wanted was a couple of cold cervezas and a warm bed. Was that too much to ask? Before Saladin Hassan had left to go find the Xucuru tribe that was holding Alex Hawke for ransom, he had given Harry the address of a place (an abandoned mosque) he could use to hole up in, but only, Saladin had emphasized, in a dire emergency. Saladin, reluctantly giving Harry the key to an upstairs room, said, don’t use it. As it happened, he had used it, although in hindsight, maybe that wasn’t a really good idea.

It was a scruffy little town he’d slipped into. Losing himself in the horde of merchants, peddlers, and smugglers hoofing it at a snail’s pace over the Puente de la Amistad (the bridge of friendship) he thought there was something a little incongruous about the sight of golden domes and spindly minarets rising up out of this lush jungle. But what he found out was, back in 1975, after the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon, the Islamic population of this region had swelled rapidly and was now somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand in this one town alone.

Why were they here and what the hell were they up to, you might well ask yourself. Well, money. The more the United States shut down the terror networks’cash flow, the more these guys had to turn to alternative sources of income. And what better source of income than drugs? Human trafficking and guns? Not too shabby either.

What Harry was picking up on was a whole infrastructure in this part of Latam, locally known as the Mafia-Araby, who had taken over all the weapons and narcotic sales and distribution channels down here. This was because the badass Arab sin sheikhs made the local toughs look like a bunch of drugstore gauchos.

And the Mafia-Araby was using all this ill-gotten lucre to finance their Latino terrorist operations. In this region alone, the number of guerilla training camps had to have risen exponentially. And high-tech weaponry was flooding in, some of it experimental technology stolen from the U.S. and Britain.

Now, you had to wonder, as Harry did on a regular basis, how come his bosses at the Pentagon, Langley, and NSA had missed all these interesting developments in Latin America. Just by walking around, looking at faces, you could see there was not a lot of love for the norteamericanos down here, no matter what the race, color, or creed of the people on the streets. What there was a lot of, if you asked Harry, was trouble.

Trouble wasn’t brewing, like Milwaukee’s finest, it was fully brewed. And, some day real soon, somebody around here was going to pop the top on a whole six-pack of shit.

The funny thing was, all this snooping around he was doing wasn’t even Harry’s assignment. He’d been ordered down here with a couple of other CIA guys for one specific reason: find Alex Hawke and if he was still alive get him the hell out. Harry had gone to his boss, Charley Moore, at the JCS and volunteered for this assignment when he’d heard about it. He owed Alex Hawke a big favor.

He had met Hawke a year or so ago. Hawke had pulled him off a Chinese steamer just before it sailed Harry back to the Chinese prison hellhole where he was scheduled to spend what was left of his life begging to die. He owed Hawke big time and had planned to repay that debt if he ever got a chance. Now, he had it.

This town was busy, busy, busy. Really hopping. In addition to the group of young Shiite Muslims he’d seen outside a mosque (raising money for the imminent jihad, no doubt), there were countless good citizens packed into the narrow streets, hawking everything from designer jeans and leather jackets to plasma TVs, computers, and laser tools. There was some other stuff, too, including tons of choice Colombian marijuana, hashish, and cocaine for the guys who made a living transshipping the stuff to Puerto Paranagua over on Brazil’s Atlantic coast.