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SEAL Team Six Hunt the Falcon(32)



“Cool.”



They landed early Christmas Eve morning at the Simón Bolívar International Airport. A tall Russian Venezuelan woman named Zoya from the Tara-Omega travel agency met them at the gate and helped them through Venezuelan immigration and customs. They were traveling as survival experts under the employ of a Canadian company called Balzac Expeditions and were purportedly in Venezuela to organize a trek into the Amazon jungle.

“I’ve booked you for a one-week stay at the InterContinental Tamanaco Caracas, which is right in the heart of one of the city’s most prestigious shopping and business districts, Las Mercedes,” Zoya said as her heels clicked down the terminal concourse. She seemed eager and efficient, and looked very young.

“If you need to extend your stay, you can continue at the same rate,” she explained in perfect English.

“Great,” Crocker said, half asleep. At 6 a.m. the terminal seemed vast and deserted. “And you got us a vehicle?”

“A one-year-old Honda Pilot. Will that meet your needs?”

“I don’t see why not.”

She led them to the silver SUV, which was parked in a three-story lot near the terminal. “One last thing,” she said, handing over the keys. “The security situation in Caracas is deplorable. Currently we have an average of one murder per hour just in the capital. So keep your eyes open and don’t travel alone, especially at night. Street gangs here like to rob and kidnap foreigners.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Crocker said.

She glanced at his biceps and added, “You guys look like you know how to defend yourselves, but be careful.” Then she handed him her card. “Call me if you need anything. That’s my cell phone.”

“We will,” Akil said with a smile. “Maybe you can show us around later tonight?”

“Tonight is Christmas Eve,” she explained, holding her reddish-brown hair back and shielding her eyes from the early morning sun. “I’m spending it with my family.”

“Then have a Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too.”

Fog shrouded the emerald-green mountains on both sides of the Autopista Caracas–La Guaira. When it cleared, Crocker saw thousands of little shanties clinging to cliffs. The local government called them “informal settlements” but they were really enormous, sprawling slums. Modern office towers dotted the narrow valley ahead. The Garmin GPS map on the dashboard indicated that they were traveling roughly north to south, from the airport on the Caribbean coast to the capital city, which lay inland.

“Venezuela is a country of approximately twenty-nine million people,” Mancini reported. “About a fourth of them live here in Caracas, which as you can see offers limited space because of its topography. So the city has an enormous housing problem on top of the huge disparity between rich and poor.”

“Good to know,” Ritchie said from the rear seat.

“Despite Chávez’s socialist Bolivarian revolution, which was supposed to redistribute wealth to the poor, the country suffers from double-digit inflation, soaring crime, chronic shortages due to government meddling, and the expropriation of successful businesses and ranches,” Mancini added.

Davis cut in. “Sounds like you’re saying that despite Chávez’s best intentions he’s pretty much screwed things up.”

“He’s helped the poor, no question,” Mancini answered. “But inefficient government management and expropriations have chased away local and foreign investment, and hinder the country from expanding past a single-resource economy.”

“Oil, in other words,” Davis added.

“Petroleum production. They pump something like 2.3 million barrels a day. Down from 3.5 million in ’98 and continuing to plummet.”

The female voice on the Garmin instructed Crocker to turn off the highway. They entered what looked like an upscale residential community, but bags of garbage were piled along the side of the road, many of the shops seemed empty, and pro- and anti-Chávez graffiti covered the walls.

Four blocks farther on they reached the elegant Las Mercedes district and turned down an alley to a nine-story modern sandstone structure shaped like a hexagon. Part of the aboveground parking structure was roped off.

A young man in shorts and flip-flops who stopped them and offered to guard their car explained in Spanish that the roped-off area was occupied by squatters. He pointed out that he, his mother, brother, and three sisters lived in a twelve-by-twelve-foot wooden cubicle allocated to them by the Chávez government. His family and three dozen others shared a single bathroom with no hot water in the parking structure.