SEAL Team Six Hunt the Falcon(56)
Crocker detected torment in his young teammate’s eyes. “What about you? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Davis answered. “I just got off a Skype call with Sandy.” Sandy was his blond, former USC cheerleader wife. “She’s freaking out because Tyler is running a 104-degree fever and she can’t get hold of the pediatrician.”
Tyler was their one-year-old. “I told her to use a wet washcloth to cool him down, give him some baby aspirin, and let him sleep. He’ll probably be better in the morning, right?”
Crocker said, “Tell her to check in on him every so often, and that kids bounce back fast. If he’s still running a high fever in the morning she might want to take him to the hospital.”
“That’ll reassure her. Thanks.”
Crocker unpacked, nuked some canned soup he found in the kitchen, then had Sanchez drive him over to the Banco Popular building, which looked deserted. It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and a lot of people seemed to have left the city.
He rode up to the ninth-floor office and found Melkasian in a blue tracksuit and sneakers talking to someone on the phone. Crocker picked up a recent issue of Time, which had a smiling Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi on the cover. He didn’t trust him. To his mind anyone whose political beliefs were determined by religious dogma, especially if it was Muslim, had to be carefully watched.
Melkasian put his phone away and threw Crocker a bottle of water. “How’s your head?” he asked.
“Still seems to work, as far as I can tell. How’s yours?”
“Heavy with concerns, problems. I heard about that wild stunt you pulled in Foz.”
“I’m still trying to remember the details,” Crocker said. “Anything new about the identities of the men on the plane?”
Melkasian shook his head. “Doubt if there ever will be,” he answered. “They were burned to a crisp. But we do know that the Iranians requested the remains.”
“But they haven’t been ID’d?”
“No.”
Rappaport arrived, popped open his metal briefcase, and they got down to business. Crocker was shown satellite photos of a plot in Barinas where Unit 5000 was reportedly building a base and landing strip. There wasn’t much to see, except for a couple of tin-roofed structures and a swath of reddish dirt carved into what looked to be a flat grassy plain.
“Where’s Bolinas?” Crocker asked.
Rappaport snorted. “Bolinas is a town on the Northern California coast. Barinas is a state southwest of here.”
“What’s this?” Crocker asked, pointing to what looked like a country club, with a large house and pool area, on one of the surveillance photos.
“That’s the Hugo Chávez family estate, La Chavera,” Melkasian said. “He was born nearby in the house of his paternal grandmother, and grew up there until he came to Caracas at seventeen to attend the Venezuelan military academy.”
“Interesting that the Iranians decided to build their base there.”
“Also interesting is the fact that the Iranians are building a landing strip in Barinas, which is near the Colombian border and close to hundreds of cocaine labs.”
“How convenient,” Crocker observed.
“Exactly.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for.
—Clarence Darrow
Crocker, Davis, and Sanchez set out early the following morning in one of the white Toyota FJ Cruisers they had used the night they raided the shack in Petare. The four-lane “super” highway was paved and relatively new. Sanchez explained that the Chávez-Maduro government had removed all the tollbooths so that anyone regardless of their social or economic status could afford to take the country’s best roads. This explained the heavy traffic. Crocker also saw disrepair in several places and wrecked, abandoned cars along the side of the road.
The sun was starting to set when they arrived at the state capital of Barinas, which featured open fields, groves of trees, and gated estates. Sanchez said that since they were close to the Colombian border, the area was frequented by FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) soldiers, and therefore considered dangerous at night.
“I’ve dealt with them before,” Crocker said, recalling past missions against FARC bases in eastern Colombia.
“The guerrillas cross the border to steal stuff and kidnap people. So all the ranchers in the area are armed and on alert. They lock up their cattle and equipment after dark.”
The FARC, which called itself a peasant army whose goal was to overthrow the Colombian government and establish an agrarian Marxist-Leninist state, financed its operations by kidnapping wealthy Colombians and foreigners for ransom, growing coca, and processing, trafficking, and transshipping cocaine. One of its leaders, Guillermo Torres, had been captured near Barinas in June of the previous year.