The Geronimo Breach (19 page)

The group of eight older men who comprised the lead team traveled with each other in their own helicopter. The rest of the squad was fine with that – separation from the others had been the dynamic since day one, and was by now accepted as a perennial aspect of the mission. Once the ships touched down, they’d play out every step that had been choreographed and rehearsed for months. Nothing left to chance – except the fickle unexpected – and every eventuality carefully permutated. Barring their intel having gotten everything wrong, the confidence level, success-wise, was high.

As they came over the crest of the final hill before their target came into focus the pilot of the lead helicopter broke radio silence, “Thirty Seconds to Drop,” he announced, almost casually. The wind buffeted the chopper, knocking it around – they’d been warned to expect thirty to forty knot gusts; the forecaster had sure gotten that part right.

A villa nestled inside a high-walled courtyard, virtually impenetrable, as though designed to repel attackers. Razor wire circled the tops of the twelve foot walls, further fortifying this forbidding barrier.

Two of the ships touched down outside the compound and the nine men inside immediately hit the ground and quickly assumed their practiced positions along the perimeter. All wore night-vision goggles and had helmet cameras.

Nothing in the compound moved.

The third chopper dropped the eight lead team men inside the compound walls, along with several trunks of equipment. Temporarily out of sight of the soldiers outside the walls, they moved the gear into the nearest doorway and set charges on the main entry door.

The villa was quiet – not surprising given the extremely early hour of the raid. Little activity was anticipated at four a.m. on a Monday. Only this Monday morning was different.

A muffled explosion sent shockwaves from the villa’s front entrance before the eight men moved into the house in unison. After several minutes, shooting erupted from a lower floor, followed by silence. Four of the men returned to the front of the house, and carried a trunk back inside with them, quickly returning to gather up the other two.

Minutes went by.

Eventually one of the men sprinted from the main house to the front gate and opened it for the commandos waiting outside. In a practiced move, four took up positions at the front gate, two inside and two out.

The older team emerged from the house with their equipment trunks, as well as a body bag. The leader spoke into his com line – twenty seconds later a helicopter appeared over the courtyard. The men waited until it descended and touched down, and then loaded their gear – and the body – and all but two climbed aboard before it took off, disappearing into the night.

A second chopper was signaled and approached. As it hovered over the courtyard a random gust of wind swung the tail, ever so slightly, into one of the perimeter walls. The gunship immediately tumbled the remaining ten feet, crashing to the ground. The two lead men exchanged glances before climbing aboard to assess the situation.

After a brief discussion the pilot and co-pilot clambered out from behind the controls and jumped to the ground, running for the helicopters still waiting outside the perimeter walls. The two lead men murmured into their headsets and a few minutes later three commandos approached carrying heavy backpacks.

Five minutes later the leader gave the clear signal and all personnel returned to the remaining two helicopters. As they lifted off the ground he depressed the button on a radio controller and the grounded helicopter exploded, fragmenting into thousands of burning pieces. Satisfied, he gave a thumbs up sign to the pilot and the two airships flew off into the dark Pakistani sky.

~

Sam was just preparing to leave the office and go home for some well-deserved sleep when his desk phone chirped. He stabbed the line into active status and barked at it on speakerphone.

“Wakefield. What is it?”

“Sir, it’s Gomez downstairs.”

“Yes. What do you need?” Sam demanded.

“I have a woman here who says she has a drawing for you.”

Sam racked his brain. A drawing? Oh. The sketch artist. Well, it really didn’t matter any more now, did it?

“Just get the drawing and hold it for me until I make it down. I was just leaving. Give me about five minutes,” Sam instructed.

“Yes, sir,” Gomez said. Sam could hear a conversation in the background, and then he came back on the line. “Sir, apparently there’s an issue of payment. She says her services are three hundred dollars, and she was told she would be paid when she delivered the drawing.”

“Tell her I don’t have that kind of money lying around here on a Sunday,” Sam said caustically. “She can come back tomorrow for it during business hours.”

More muffled discussion.

“She says she will come back tomorrow with the drawing at ten in the morning – she’s been up since very early this morning working on it, but if it isn’t an emergency anymore she’ll come by when you have the money.”

“Whatever. Tomorrow’s fine. I’ll be in by ten, and I’ll have her lousy three hundred bucks for her then,” Sam declared dismissively.

Now that this mission had drawn to a close, Sam was again the top dog in Panama and wasn’t going to dance to anyone else’s schedule. He was exhausted, and with Richard gone or on his way to the airport there was no sense of urgency to tie up the last loose threads of a closed operation.

There was nothing more pressing at this moment than getting the stink of Richard’s aftershave off his chair back and going home for fourteen hours of shut-eye.

And because she was being such a bitch about it, he’d make sure that the sketch artist got a check tomorrow instead of cash. That way she’d have to go stand in the queue at the bank; an inconvenience any day of the week in Panama, where the lines tended to be serpentine and slow moving. He was so sick of everyone giving him ultimatums, it felt good to be able to dish out a little misery. He’d had an assfull of being told what to do for the last day by that Richard prick, and he’d be damned if he was going to have terms dictated to him by some local sketch artist.

Sam realized it was petty, but so what?

As he was so fond of saying, they all knew where the door was...

Al mushed on through the dense and wet jungle, following the burro, which presumably wasn’t just wandering to its favorite horsey hang-out spot, but rather was walking the path to Colombia as it had done so many times before. He occasionally checked his portable GPS and noted with at least slim confidence that they seemed to be making their way towards the banks of a river that descended from the mountains they’d need to cross to get over the border. Mountains was somewhat of a misnomer – more like tall hills; only a couple of thousand feet at their peaks. But scaling them was far more daunting a task than the elevations initially led one to believe.

The ever looming clouds burst open every two or three hours, which was good in the sense it enabled him to refill his water bottle and cooled him a bit, though bad in every other way. The moisture made the ground treacherous and ensured Al’s shoes were half submerged in muck most of the time, creating additional effort on an already brutal journey.

The burro, on the other hand, seemed completely happy to be moving away from the scene of the attack point, showing no signs of tiring or slowing. The dumpy little beast was relentlessly plodding forward with an unshakeable confidence Al found comforting.

At least one of them knew where they were going.

Al had retrieved the gun and had it strapped over one arm – another AK-47, which apparently was the VW of Central American assault rifles. Whatever – he was glad to have it, that was for sure, even though he recognized he was hardly a match for an armed group of seasoned jungle fighters.

So the plan, such as it was, centered on avoiding the jungle killers.

Step one: Dodge the homicidal gangs. Check.

Step two: Huh. What was step two again? Oh…right…follow the burro’s bottom.

Step three: Develop religion, and pray the burro knew its way to Colombia.

Al understood he hadn’t hatched a particularly richly evolved plan, nor one that was going to win any prizes for originality, however, at this point if he could make it to civilization alive he’d be glad he adopted it.

They didn’t stop except once in the next three hours, and that was for another of Al’s potty breaks. The burro seemed to share an affinity with Al’s toilet rituals and dutifully watched over him as he struggled to evacuate the malicious toxins that had poisoned his system.

At least I’ve got my new pal, Al thought grimly to himself as he cinched the belt on his cargo pants back and mentally steeled himself for more walking.

Al’s watch made it five o’clock in the evening, which meant this time of year he had maybe three more hours of light remaining. His goal was to reach the banks of the river and get to the lower foothills, thereby having covered almost twenty miles in one day. That would put him at the halfway point but with the hills to contend with
manana
. He was willing to push pretty hard to get the hell out of this mosquito-infested shit-swamp and figured he could make it to the Colombia side by sundown tomorrow if he really moved, and started by six in the morning – or whenever dawn broke.

He plodded along, fading in and out of a pseudo fugue state, wherein he played the day’s events through his head over and over. Al recognized he hadn’t done a whole lot with his life – not that he was ready to check out quite yet. Even if it was just more cheap rum and a few more by-the-hour romances, it beat the unthinkable alternative…

Al bounced, startled, off the burro’s solid rear-end – it had stopped abruptly and stood rooted in the mud.

Crossing the trail thirty yards ahead were two Kuna Indian men and a woman, wearing nothing but shorts and in the female’s case a
mola
: a traditional blouse/dress combination fashioned from a patchwork of colorful squares – at one time – now since faded to dull hues by the sun’s rays and the jungle’s acid embrace. Only one of the two men was armed, carrying an ancient bolt-lock rifle that looked like it belonged to another century. They acknowledged the burro and nodded at Al, who returned the gesture. They disappeared back into the brush surrounding the trail, their destination unknown.

After having seen nothing but spiders the size of bowling balls and occasional monkeys and birds, the silent passing at the intersection to nowhere was disturbingly surreal. Al knew there were small Kuna villages in remote areas of the Darien, but most had relocated to the coast over the last decades, after the fighting in the area had intensified.

The burro resumed its slow gait, and after swigging some more water, Al rejoined its steady pilgrimage to wherever.

Ten minutes later they heard the unmistakable popping of rifle fire in the distance – rapid machine-gun fire, lasting on and off for more than a minute. It came from the south-west, in the general direction the Kuna would have been moving through.

Al froze as the jungle went suddenly silent again.

The Indians must have walked into an ambush. Carlos had warned them about the tradition of shooting first and questioning later that formed the law of the land, and Al had just gotten a first-hand lesson of the reality of the threat. The Kuna had been virtually unarmed and only carrying small backpacks so there was no way they had anything of value with them or posed any sort of a threat. If the shooting signaled what Al figured it did then it was cold-blooded murder of innocents for recreation or practice.

He listened for any hints of pursuit but didn’t hear anything. After a few moments he thumbed off the safety on the old Russian assault rifle and nudged the burro into motion again. Every few minutes he stopped to listen attentively, no longer trudging mechanically behind his equestrian buddy. The donkey actually seemed to have better hearing than Al did, given the size of his ears, but Al wasn’t willing to bet the farm on his vigilance.

They eventually came to the banks of a wide brown river, which Al knew flowed from the cloud-blanketed hills. By his estimation they could make it to the five hundred foot elevation point before they would need to stop for the night.

They followed the river upstream, sensing the gradual increase in pitch of the surrounding terrain. As the sun set, Al took one last reading on his GPS and confirmed their location. Once satisfied, he ferreted around in the burro’s massive saddlebags for something to eat. It transpired the menu was beef jerky and pretzels.

The burro munched contentedly on grass along the bank of the river before returning to Al’s position in the undergrowth fifty yards from the river. Al didn’t want to accidentally be stumbled upon by anyone using the stream as their nocturnal smuggling guide, so a night with the ants, snakes and spiders was preferable to being sawed in half by a stream of super-heated lead.

At least they wouldn’t need to worry about temperature. Freezing wasn’t an option in the tropics. A fire was obviously out of the question, for any hint of light would be an open invitation for a hundred rounds of incoming as a bedtime story. Al preferred to take his chances in the dark, huddled next to the burro, waiting for the cool light of dawn.

~

The black helicopter transporting the commando lead team touched down on the deck of the aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea a hundred miles off the coast of Pakistan. The men quickly disembarked and their cargo was transferred into a secure area below.

The body bag was transported to a locked area of the hospital section, where a group waited. All were CIA staffers. They quickly removed the corpse from the bag, and began preparations. After thirty minutes, they were done.

Nobody was allowed in or out of the area. Even in the middle of the ocean on the most secure vessel in the United States Navy, this was a highly classified area.

Back in Langley, a press release had been crafted days before, and it was time to start leaking both the official version of the story, as well as control the unofficial spin that was sure to circulate over the next hours. The official release indicated that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by U.S. commandos in Pakistan early that morning in a daring raid behind Pakistani lines. It claimed that photographs had been taken proving it was Bin Laden who had been shot and whose body was seized, and it further claimed that DNA evidence had conclusively proved that the corpse was, in fact, Bin Laden.