The Geronimo Breach (3 page)

Ernesto looked up and down the hall. It was temporarily deserted. Overcome by an impulse he didn’t completely understand, he leaned into the room and grabbed the nearest camera, hurriedly stuffing it into his bag before closing the lid on the camera container. He scanned the hall again. Nobody had seen anything.

He stood for a moment in the hall, internally debating his next move, when a man in one of the house ‘uniform’ windbreakers rounded the corner. The Gringo stopped when he saw Ernesto and spoke to him in rapid, clipped Spanish without any hint of an accent.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

Ernesto’s righteous indignation buckled, replaced by fear of being caught. “Er, nothing, sir...I was actually looking for Mister Stanley...”

“Stanley? He’s gone. Who are you?”

“Ernesto. The cook. I really need to speak with Mister Stanley...”

“He’s gone, and he’s not coming back…just like you.” He narrowed his eyes. “You shouldn’t be here. You need to leave the area right now.”

“But I–”

“I’m not going to repeat myself. Get out of here – now – or I’ll have you removed by the guards.”

Ernesto weighed his anger at his abrupt termination against the likelihood of being prosecuted for stealing an expensive piece of electronics.

Discretion won the day.

“All right,” Ernesto protested. “But you tell Mister Stanley the way he treated me isn’t right. It isn’t right.”

The man regarded him with a stony stare and pointed to the kitchen door.

Ernesto got the message. He turned and slunk back down the passageway, through the kitchen and out of the compound.

Eight years, and the bastards boot him out just like that.

Chinga tu Madres, Putas
.

Sam Wakefield sighed contentedly as the climate control in his Range Rover dropped the interior temperature to a comfortable 69 degrees. Late Spring was hellish around the equator. It was all he could do to make it from his waterfront Panama City high rise condominium into his car without sweating through his hand-tailored dress shirt. True, his condo and elevator were also air conditioned but the underground garage wasn’t. He dreaded the fifty yard walk from the elevator to his vehicle. It was bad enough being stationed in the tropics without having to suffer the heat and bugs like a local ditch digger.

When he saw Sam’s daytime headlights approach, the uniformed security guard raised the access gate so Sam didn’t have to slow before pulling onto the side street that ran alongside of his building. This was a daily ritual, as Sam was a creature of habit. Every morning at 9:45 he left home, making the drive to the embassy in exactly six minutes.

Sam hummed along with his stereo – he’d just had the latest satellite system installed to keep up on the latest tunes and news from the States. Panama wasn’t bad, overall, but he despised what passed for the culture; you’d have had to hold a gun to his head to get him to listen to the salsa that permeated virtually every location in the country. Let the natives dance around the fire to whatever jungle stomp floated their boats – he’d take Aerosmith or Brooks and Dunn every time.

His official title was Commercial Attaché but the closest Sam had ever gotten to anything commercial was watching ads on TV. As the top man in Panama for the CIA, he was chartered with overseeing the local efforts in the war on drugs, and keeping his other eye on the various narcotics cartel factions, along with ensuring the local DEA guys didn’t get too militant in their attempts to quash the inevitable cocaine traffic. He also spent a fair amount of time spying on the Chinese – who were everywhere since the new canal project had gotten underway.

He viewed his position as a springboard to greater things and secretly loathed anything to do with Panama, including his colleagues on the ground there. The country served as a backwater posting for losers and most of his peers with State Department credentials were has-beens and casualties rather than fast track achievers.

Sam arrived at the U.S. Embassy gates and honked. The marines on duty saluted and opened the gate. He roared into the walled parking area and skidded to a stop in his assigned spot by the side entry door. He’d connived for a full year to get that slot, in order to avoid having to walk across the lot. During the rainy season it was a pain in the ass, and he’d trashed several pairs of Johnson and Murphy loafers negotiating the puddles surrounding his old parking place on the far side. Thank God those days were over.

Once inside the building he strolled to his second floor wing of offices, enjoying as always the plush feel of the thick carpeting underfoot. As expected, his special blend espresso roast was brewed and ready when he entered his suite. His secretary, Melody, automatically brought him a cup, handling the tray with efficiency. Sam had drilled into his staff again and again that they were a bastion of American civilization; that it was important to get the small details right lest they slip down the slippery slope and become savages. In his mind, having coffee out of genuine china cups represented an important line in the sand, as was speaking English at all times, even to the locals, and even though his Spanish was fluent. Inside these walls lay American soil, and English was the official language of America. If you didn’t like it, the door was that way.

Sam scanned the daily briefing that had been deposited into his inbox and reviewed his itinerary for the day. Meetings all morning before lunch at the Boxer Club in the penthouse of the shiny new HSBC building, followed by several hours of conference calls with DC. The usual grind, in other words, and he secretly counted the days until he was re-stationed in three months. He’d been pushing Langley for a position on the Beltway, where all the power players gravitated to, and hoped his exile in mosquito-land would shortly be over. Sam understood that a few foreign postings were mandatory for a well-rounded Agency resume but that didn’t mean he had to like living in this cesspool. True, Panama City was cosmopolitan as they came and more akin to New York or Singapore than his preconceived image when he’d received the assignment – visions of Toucans and jungle huts abounded – but it was a far cry from Georgetown and he couldn’t wait to get the hell out. His wife felt much the same way; she lived as a virtual shut-in at their condo, spending her days glued to their 50-inch television watching U.S. programming and gobbling Vicodin for her non-specific back pain.

Reclining in his padded leather swivel chair, feet on the desk, he savored his coffee and contemplated his misfortune. Only a few more months and then it was
hasta la vista, baby
, and Panama could continue rotting without his skilled supervision. He would miss his mistress, but that was about it – anyway, there were plenty of available hotties on the Beltway circuit so any discomfort would be short-lived. Even so, he had to admit some of the local talent was top shelf – about the only thing this hellhole had going for it.

Sam was the ultimate paradigm of a mid-level bureaucrat. More than just petty and vindictive, he also possessed a unique exclusionary mechanism for his own weaknesses and lapses in ethics. Though a harsh judge of others, he had an elastic sense of right and wrong when his comfort or convenience were at stake. He lacked self-awareness to an Olympic degree, making him a perfect candidate for government work; especially when involving clandestine activities, because he had no messy internal barometer which might cause him to question his orders. Whereas many of his peers struggled with the toll their professional choices had taken on their personal lives and integrity, Sam remained blissfully devoid of introspection. He was selfish to the exclusion of all else, lacking any ability to empathize with his fellow man. He perceived others as extensions of his own desires and needs – like characters in his personal movie – worth no intrinsic value other than as objects within his cozy microcosm.

If asked about his philosophy, Sam would have launched into a long-winded description of an Ayn Rand-ian ‘heroic’ objective individual whose sole duty was to his own happiness. This amounted to nothing more than a rationalization mantra to justify his lack of concern for anyone but himself, though he’d learned to cloak his selfishness in a high moral tone.

In his youth, he could have gone either way – his temperament and psychological makeup were eerily similar to that of many serial killers. One of his greatest regrets in life was having never been in combat while in the service – not because of a desire to hurt others – but because he’d been deprived of an experience that would have made him a more attractive candidate for his chosen career. While still in high school, Sam had decided that he really, really wanted to be a spy. The primary attraction had been a lifestyle that valued and rewarded deception, together with his internal perception of the job – molded by a voracious diet of Le Carre and Ludlum novels. Other humans were boring, useless creatures – and here was a job that required one to be a consummate user of others, while affording the luxury of living in exotic locales.

Unfortunately, for all his ambition, Sam had gotten shortchanged in the intelligence department. Not that he was a stupid man – he just wasn’t a particularly smart one; beyond a certain ruthless cunning, bred from infancy, of habitually lying to everyone around him. Still, the CIA had embraced him with enthusiasm, just as he had selflessly committed to the Agency as though he’d finally discovered his real family.

But now, as he’d aged, Sam discovered that not only was he unsuited for field work, having been exclusively stationed in desk job roles from the onset, but his natural limitations were compromising his ambition of ascending to the upper tiers of the Agency. That was intolerable. Finally, after a string of postings to obscure locations in second and third world countries, he’d gotten the plum position of Station Chief in Panama, which signaled an opportunity to move up the food chain and take his rightful place back in the real world – once he was done here. The end of his Panamanian tour was approaching and he’d soon be off to DC for an enviable life in the fast lane.

He was so close he could taste it.

“Melody? Can you get the maintenance guys to adjust my chair so it doesn’t squeak? I can’t hear myself think,” Sam called to the outer office.

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “I’ll get someone on it while you’re at lunch. I asked yesterday as well, but they never showed up.”

Good Lord. How hard was it to get the locals to do their job? Their laziness was incredible – he was almost compelled to oil the thing himself, but he’d be damned if he would let them get away with shirking.

It was the principle, after all.

The commandos rehearsed the attack scenario for the seventh time that day. They functioned like an organism; a single entity with a single purpose, controlled by a single mind.

The elite group of two dozen hand-selected combat veterans, SEAL Team Six, was augmented for this operation by several veterans of a different sort – older men, hardened, who kept to themselves and didn’t waste words. While most of the team members were in their early thirties, the eight men who had been added – and who would be playing point – were a decade more seasoned.

They too checked and rechecked their weapons before the next rehearsal, though there was a different tone to their routine, and it wasn’t lost on the rest. These were serious bad-asses of a special caliber, unusual even among this most exalted of select operatives; who were used to being dropped alone behind enemy lines and left to fight their way out with only a handgun and a stiletto.

The obvious leader of the older men had worn the insignia of a colonel when he’d arrived at the rehearsal site – a rarity in itself; this rank would never usually enter the field on an active op. But this clearly wasn’t your typical mission, so nobody questioned that someone had called in the heavy artillery. They were all proud to have been chosen, even if the eight old dogs were going to do most of the heavy lifting.

All had specially designed earpieces through which communications would be handled. It was understood that once on the ground they’d be limited to hand signals but any detailed mission instructions would come via the com channel. It was highly irregular to have a strike force modified with new personnel for only one operation, however, the service always had its reasons, and part of being one of the elite commandos in this group was not questioning those reasons when you didn’t understand them.

They’d been joined by the veterans ten weeks earlier; when preparations for the mission had suddenly stepped up several gears. Nothing was left to chance and the operation notes and instructions ran to a length normally associated with novellas. But, unlike many SEAL Team Six operations, this one was being overseen by the CIA – it was tacitly understood that the new additions were CIA operatives. Maybe that would have raised eyebrows among most combat teams, but this was no ordinary team.

The rehearsals had taken on a deadly earnest quality as word had come down that they were going to load up and go active that evening. This was the culmination of hundreds of hours of training and there wasn’t a man among them that didn’t feel a certain quickening at the prospect of going live.

This is what they lived for. What they did. They ran the drill again, for the umpteenth time. Their com channel crackled into life. They were instructed to stand down and prepare to ship out.

It was show time.

They were ready.

Al sat in his ancient wooden chair, the nearly non-existent ventilation from the creaking overhead fan delivering scant relief from the oppressive stifle. Beads of sweat ran down his pallid forehead, collecting in his unruly eyebrows before continuing their descent down his face. He mopped his brow periodically with a cloth napkin he’d pilfered from the corner seafood restaurant. For the tenth time that day he cursed his fate.