Deadly Waters (8 page)

XV

2/12/07 09:07 EST

Earnest Gusman brought Claudio Alexander Munoz and Claudio’s cousin Alfonso into the tiny Gusman apartment and closed the door. As was his habit, Earnest checked the street outside one more time before he spoke.

“Do you have the men I need?” he asked in Spanish.

“Yes,” replied Claudio. “Finding forty desperate men is not difficult in Colombia.”

“They are trustworthy?” asked Earnest.

“Absolutely not,” said Claudio. “They are thieves, mules, the filthy sparrows of the street, the same petty criminals I meet every day. They are worse than Alfonso.” Only the pockmarked Alfonso cracked a smile in response to his cousin’s words.

Earnest knew that he made Claudio nervous inside the small flat. Like all higher predators, Claudio did not enjoy being trapped in a confined space with two of his own kind. When Earnest stood upright, Claudio stood with him. When the other man walked about the floor, Claudio shifted his weight from foot to foot and felt for the gun in the back of his belt. Alfonso, the most dangerous criminal of the three, and the least vulnerable to thought, stayed put like a serpent coiled to strike.

“Corello wants everyone in Venezuela by the end of the month,” said Earnest.

“How can we travel?” asked Claudio. “We are not rich men.”

“I have pairs of tickets,” said Earnest, showing them two bundles bound in rubber bands. “The first will take them on an airplane to Caracas, the other will take them south on an autobus, deep into the forest.”

“We have forty-one men,” said Alfonso in his deliberate manner of speaking. “Forty-four, counting ourselves in his room.”

“I’m not going,” said Earnest. “Three others must also stay in Colombia. Better yet,” he said, turning face to face with Claudio, “you should kill them.”

“Everyone has a friend,” said Claudio. “I think therefore it is best to harm no one. That is my philosophy of living,” he glanced at Alfonso. “Others may disagree. The men we leave here won’t know where we are going; they will have no stories to tell.”

“Why Venezuela?” asked Alfonso. “Aren’t there places to hide in this country?”

“Because this crazy Mexican Corello wants you in Venezuela!” erupted Earnest, fingering the air with his suddenly energized hands. “I will eventually have to go, too. Everyone will go sooner or later. Do you think I want to? We could all be killed in the jungle.”

His outburst brought another smile from Alfonso.

Claudio acted before one or both of the other men did something foolish. “Everything is fine,” he said and tried to pat Earnest’s chest in the seconds before the other man had paced away from him. “No one is going to be killed. Give us the tickets and a little cash. Everything is fine.”

“Will the Russian be there?” asked Alfonso.

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Earnest. “Everything on that end is set. Everything here is going to fall apart. I can tell.” He dropped into a chair and folded his arms across his chest, holding his fears within his bosom.

“There was to be some money,” said Claudio,

“Yes, for expenses while you travel, yes,” said Earnest. He opened his closet and took out a new aluminum suitcase he flipped open atop the shabby table. Inside were forty manila envelopes, each stuffed with $2,000 in large American bills. The sight of that much money treated so casually made the two criminals gasp.

“$498,000 more apiece when the job is done,” said Earnest. “That was the deal.”

“This is how they do business?” asked Claudio. “They throw money around like old candy wrappers?”

“Petrovski is a Russian, almost a savage,” said Earnest, calming himself down once he realized how ridiculous he must have looked. “Corello has spent his entire adult life in the United States; you know how they are in Babylon. They say there may be another quarter million for every man, provided the job is done well.”

“May I always work with savages,” laughed Claudio, and closed the suitcase in order to carry it with him. "We would walk to Venezuela for such money.”

“You are going now?” asked Earnest, his voice sounding more relieved than he intended. “Of course, I would like you to stay, but perhaps it is best if you go.”

XVI

2/19/07 14:51 PST

John Taylor had accepted wearing a fake beard to look like a Russian butler in a play. That was something an actor had to do. He was less enthusiastic about growing a real beard and dying it gray to play Vladimir Petrovski, former KGB agent.

“Petrovski is older than you, John,” Mondragon told him. “You have to look the part. You are too tall and too thin to fool any of his friends. You have to at least resemble photographs of his face, or you won’t fool anyone.”

“His picture makes him look unkempt,” said Taylor, looking into his bathroom mirror and comparing his growing whiskers to the ones in the old file photo Mondragon had given him. “Is that a Russian look?”

“Slovenliness has always been fashionable amongst the eastern Slavs,” said Mondragon, gazing over Taylor’s shoulder as the other man looked at his face. “Comb and scissors are alien concepts to them. Not unlike incest is in Arkansas.”

He turned Taylor about and fixed the other man’s tie. “You can’t make a tight Windsor knot and be Russian,” said Mondragon. “Big and loose is what you want. They’re a spiritual people; they don’t care about material appearances. A little to one side is good too. Think of Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners; there was a man who could have tied a Russian tie. A touch of despair, a dash of disregard for order.”

Taylor fussed the cravat back into a straighter line and left the collar open.

“Good,” declared Mondragon. “You could be right off the streets of St. Petersburg.”

“Are we going to speak Russian all the time we’re around the Colombians?” asked Taylor. “You know I still make grammatical mistakes.”

“Keep it simple,” advised Mondragon. “The Colombians are uneducated men. They won’t know Russian from Cantonese. Just stay away from Spanish and English when any of them are present. If you run out of vocabulary and have to speak gibberish, do it loudly, with authority. Now, let me hear you ask about the torpedoes. Remember: when you are emphatic, gesture with the whole fist and don’t point the index finger.”

XVII

2/20/07 08:20 AST

Taylor, Mondragon, Col. Method, Eddie Harris, Abe Wilson the Machinist and Kenneth Greeley, the former Army aviator, stood in the rain at “the heart of the matter,” as Mondragon called the three large metal buildings outside Montecual, Venezuela, when the first of two buses carrying Claudio Munoz, his cousin Alfonso, and the thirty-eight other Colombians arrived in the compound’s muddy courtyard.

“Remember,” Mondragon had told the Americans, “every one of you, other than John and I, are Germans, disgruntled East German technicians. Keep your distance from the Colombians when you aren’t instructing them. Grunt a few guten Tags and auf viedersens, and don’t be afraid to speak a little bit of English to each other. Ed, Col. Method, and I can speak Spanish directly to them; the rest of you, don’t even try it. Here they are, look like you know something they don’t.”

“
Holla
,” Col. Method called to them as he would to a mustering squadron of soldiers, “I am Comrade Maximilian Schell,” he told them in Spanish.

“Maximilian Schell?” Taylor whispered to Mondragon.

“They are thugs from Cartegena and Cali and Bogota,” said Mondragon in Russian. “What do they know of European film stars?”

“Welcome! Welcome, comrades!” Mondragon shouted in Spanish to the confused Colombians. “We are overjoyed to see you here.”

He and Col. Method led the forty men into a large metal building that had been made into a barracks and contained forty small beds set against the structure’s two longest walls.

“This will be your home for the next six months, my friends,” Col. Method explained. “Each of you, choose a bed. The dining hall is over there.” He pointed in the direction of the middle building. “We eat at 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00 hours.” As perfect as his Spanish was, he did not realize the Colombians had no concept of military time. “Put your belongings in the foot lockers below your beds for now. Mr. Petrovski wishes to say a few words to you.”

Erin Mondragon brought Taylor to the space in the middle of the building amidst the two rows of beds. The forty men muttered among themselves that this was the Russian they were being paid to serve.

“My friends,” said Mondragon, his right hand on Taylor’s shoulder, “this is Vladimir Ivanavich Petrovski, a former general in the KGB. I regret to inform you he does not speak our tongue.”

John Taylor murmured “hello” in Russian, and Mondragon translated the greeting for the group. To the Colombians a general was a terrifying man to meet; to them generals ruled the police as well as the army and sometimes held sway over the entire government. In their country, generals sent their sort of people to prison.

“KGB is what they call the secret police,” Claudio whispered to his cousin Alfonso.

“He looks tough, for an old fellow,” admitted Alfonso. “How many men do you think he has killed in his time?”

“More than you and I could count together,” confessed Claudio, much impressed by the Russian’s disorderly grandeur.

“Today,” said Taylor in his very bad Russian, “we are in this place assembled...” He struggled to recall the vocabulary “...to do work. Every man doing his work... will be said to have done his work.”

Mondragon stepped forward and translated this as: “Comrade Petrovski tells us everyone that does his duty shall have an extra quarter million dollar bonus."

The men cheered and applauded the Russian’s generosity. Thereafter they were led to the building that served as a mess hall, where Bill Thorpe, a retired chef, and his wife Jessie had prepared a late breakfast. While the hungry men threw themselves upon their food, Mondragon explained to Taylor that Thorpe and his wife once owned a steakhouse in Sacramento, a smoke-filled old-style restaurant that had red leather booths and a jukebox that played any song as long as it was recorded by Frank Sinatra, a place that served ice-packed martinis and bacon-wrapped filets to men of a certain age like Erin Mondragon.

“Mr. Mondragon used to eat there three times a week,” Thorpe informed Taylor. “The people from the older, more established families were our best customers.”

“Why did you decide to quit the place?” Taylor asked

The suggestion that he had quit his steakhouse of his own volition upset the cook. “We were forced out!” he told Taylor in no uncertain terms. “I would never have quit. The new people in Sacramento!” he said with obvious disgust. “The poor ones wanted to eat garbage at McDonalds; the rich ones--from the new computer economy and the state government--they were too good for a steakhouse. We still had some old customers to get us by. That didn’t get us by the no smoking ordinances and the big spike in property values. Finally, what happened to Mr. Mondragon in a big way happened to us in a small one: the city re-zoned our whole neighborhood so some realtors could sell some yuppies some old buildings they could turn into townhouses. We sold out when we could still make enough money to cover our legal bills.”

The forty Colombian street toughs were not used to eating sit-down meals of nutritious food and were making noises more commonly heard in the barnyard than in a restaurant as they slurped down their ham and fried plantains. Two of them got into a fight over a desirable piece of meat, and Col. Method and Thorpe had to rush to their table to settle the dispute.

“Lovely folks,” whispered Taylor to Mondragon.

“They are like us on one level, the important level,” said Erin. “They are here to get even, my friend. Just as we are.”

XVIII

2/21/07 07:05 AST

Early the next day, as soon as the forty men had completed their second breakfast at the base mess hall, Col. Method and Abe Wilson the machinist led the Colombians a mile and a half into the jungle to a small lake on which floated a rectangular pontoon boat. Method took the men in groups of five at a time onto the boat so they could practice positioning empty oil drums in the cloudy water. The lake’s surface was covered with lily pads as big as an elephant’s ears, which slowed the boat’s progress and at times completely gummed up the two propellers. The ample vegetation presented a small nuisance compared to the clouds of mosquitoes that swirled around the men’s heads. The Colombians were swatting and swearing at the insects for the four straight hours they were on the lake that morning.

“Ignore your pain,” Col. Method advised them in Spanish. “Concentrate on your task at hand. Look at these barrels: one end, the end painted red, must point toward the shoreline. These empty drums, like the torpedoes, are semi-buoyant and will remain suspended in the water below the surface. This anchor and cable attached below the drum hold the apparatus in place.”

After lunch at the base, Col. Method divided the forty men into five teams. Seven men were assigned to group Fontenelle, seven to the Strawberry team, seven to each of the Flaming Gorge and Blue Mesa groups, and twelve men--led by Claudio and including his cousin Alfonso--were designated to the very important Glen Canyon squad. Method took the men into the largest of the three metal buildings, the workshop, which also contained the lodging quarters of the non-Colombians, and showed the forty how to set the dials on the real torpedoes. He explained that Harris and Greeley, whom he called Von Heilmul and Franz, had built the weapons on site from parts ordered from the USA.

“We will strike at the North Americans with the tools of North America,” he said. “Look. All we ask of you is to turn the timer switch to 50:00 before you lower the torpedo into the water. At the launch time, the torpedo will release itself from its cable and anchor. Using a television camera mounted in its nose, it will travel straight into its target. The entire operation will be very easy to perform.”

Later, after a dinner of rice and black beans, Col. Method gave the forty men their first lesson in English phrases. He set up his classroom in the barracks building and used a mobile blackboard, not an especially good tool on this occasion because many of the forty could not read. He had them repeat after him: “Where is the marina?” and “How much does this cost?” They spoke so poorly the colonel decided to teach only the smartest man in each of the five teams a few things to say, and hope that in the American Southwest there were enough Spanish speakers to help the teams reach their destinations.

“Tomorrow,” the colonel told the forty men, “we will practice lifting the torpedoes.”

He showed them the two steel eyelets that had been welded onto the torpedo shells along the dorsal spine of each machine.

“A typical World War II torpedo was about seven meters long and weighed over two metric tons,” Method told them. “The sailors needed wenches and other mechanical devices to move those monsters. Our torpedoes travel a very short distance and carry a warhead of only two hundred English pounds or about seventy-five kilograms. Each entire device weighs about two hundred and twenty-four kilograms or about six hundred pounds. Each torpedo is small enough to carry on your pontoon boats and small enough for four men to manhandle by putting steel bars through the two eyelets.”

He explained to them that the guidance camera and the first detonator occupied the

foremost seven inches of the torpedo; then came the shaped charge of plastique; finally, the last two thirds of the weapon were the electronic motor and the steering wires that moved the guidance fins.

“Before we take the torpedoes north,” Method said, “Senors Von Heilmul and Franz will charge the batteries in each of the motors. They will also install a canister of pure oxygen. None of you are ever to touch any part of the mechanism, especially not the pure oxygen. It is highly flammable. Your respective team leaders will set the timers on torpedoes’ backs. The rest of you will handle either the torpedoes or the anchor and cable. When the timer hits 00:00, that is, when fifty minutes are past, the motor will come to life, the cable will release, and the detonators will arm themselves.

“The team leaders will have to learn how to stagger the timers. In practice this means the leader will have to set the timers all at the same time before they are loaded into the water. Except for the Glen Canyon team. They will have to lay four torpedoes; everyone else will lay three. The Glen Canyon team will have to place their torpedoes end to end in a straight line and to set their timers so that the devices strike the dam in approximately the same place at two second intervals. At Glen Canyon the first torpedo will be set at 50:00, the second at 50:02, the third at 50:04, and the last one at 50:06. Confused? Good. We will practice again and again in the coming months until you understand.”

As Method lectured the men, John Taylor, playing the role of Russian agent Vladimir Petrovski, roamed about the workshop, nodding his head whenever he recognized a Spanish phrase and grunting some Russian words to Method and the others. He and Mondragon exchanged several entire sentences in Russian, which greatly impressed the Colombians.

“Russian is a bestial tongue, isn’t it?” a pick-pocket from Calle said to Claudio. “Listen to how they sound like pigs when they get going.”

“No, that’s German they’re using,” said Claudio. “When they talk Russian they bark like dogs.”