Silencer (2 page)

He knew that guns and torture would not be enough to protect
their growing fortune. The pool around Medellín teemed with sharks, ever circling, always looking for the kill. They had to show they were capable of defending what was theirs. And, as the military memoirs he devoured had taught him, the best form of defence was attack.

Jesús and Pablo took terror to new levels. Women were raped as punishment for a crime by a family member – and every relative, children included, was rounded up to witness it. They made their victims beg and scream in front of their loved ones, and left their mutilated corpses on display. Sometimes he and Pablo put their heads on stakes and hung their intestines from trees. Male victims had their cocks chopped off and stuffed into their mouths. Women had their breasts sliced off with machetes, their stomachs cut open and their wombs stretched over their heads.

The Wolf soon perfected the signature dish that earned him his nickname: he’d rip open the throat of a victim and pull his tongue through the gash like some grotesque necktie – which went to show that your worst enemy was the psychopath with a library card.

The Wolf and Escobar wielded the raw power that only terror can bring. In its wake came so much wealth they offered to pay off Colombia’s national debt. Escobar even became a congressman, a respectable citizen, a representative of the people. His new status gave him judicial immunity, which meant he could no longer be prosecuted for crimes under Colombian law – and he made sure the Wolf couldn’t either.

Escobar also had a shiny new passport that gave him international diplomatic immunity. He took his family north of the border for their holidays, even posed for happy snaps in front of the White House. The DEA were pulling their hair out – not just because he could mince around his Miami mansions with impunity, but because they knew he planned to become president of Colombia and there was nothing they could do to stop him.

Ironically, it only went tits up for the congressman and his mate when some bright spark in the US discovered that everyday baking soda provided a simple, low-cost alternative for the
highly flammable diethyl ether used in the manufacture of freebase cocaine – and the new cocktail was also much more addictive. Crack spread like wildfire through the USA’s inner-city streets and was soon a social epidemic. Almost overnight, the white stuff lost its chic. It was no longer the recreational substance of choice for the well-heeled trendsetter. Washington had no choice but to grip the situation – and that meant gripping the cartels.

What had started as a profit bonanza was the beginning of the end for the dynamic duo. Their political platform disintegrated beneath them; they’d become plague-carrying rats, enemies of the state. Which was when the SAS was called in to help.

Me, Pablo and Jesús went way back.

Dino fired the infrared beam for the hundred and first time. ‘Four hundred and forty-seven,
hombre
. Don’t screw up, will you?’

His voice was too high-pitched for someone his size. It had been funny to start with, but now it was starting to get on my nerves even more than the fucking rain. The finger I invited him to swivel on was white and wrinkled, like I’d been in a bath all day.

Margaret Thatcher had been in Number Ten when crack cocaine appeared on UK streets, and she took it very personally indeed. I was a corporal in the Regiment at the time she offered us to Reagan as part of the First Strike Policy to stop the drugs at source. But it was easier said than done. With twenty thousand drug-related murders a year, Colombia, a country the size of Spain, Portugal and France combined, had become the most dangerous place on earth. A Colombian male between the ages of eighteen and sixty was more likely to die of gunshot wounds than any other cause.

We had flown down in 1988 to train the anti-narcotics police, first to penetrate the rainforest, then to find and destroy the manufacturing plants. The problem was, these guys were only on about a hundred US a month. For that, they risked getting killed – their families raped and murdered – by Pablo and the Wolf. So they didn’t give a shit if rich, overfed North American gringos were off their heads on coke.

Colombia, I soon learned, was all about self-interest. An airliner went down in the jungle while I was there. When the police arrived on the scene they found the local villagers scavenging through the wreckage. Quite a few passengers had survived, but were badly injured. The villagers didn’t give them a second glance in their rush to rip the watches, rings and wallets off the nearby corpses.

Life was cheap in this neck of the woods. And everyone had a price.

The village was dead – not surprisingly, beneath this weight of rainfall. Ahead of me was a solid wall of water, thumping into the ground with such force it created mini mud-craters. Even the scabby chickens and the pot-bellied pigs had got their heads down. Raindrops stitched the mud all around them like machine-gun fire. At least it washed the leaf litter off our faces.

I had the continuous fuck-ups by the Blocada de Búsqueda (Search Bloc) to thank for this. The Colombian Police unit’s sole purpose was to hunt down Orjuela and his mates, and if they’d done a proper job I wouldn’t have been turning into a human prune.

The US Army’s secret electronic surveillance unit, codenamed Centra Spike, crammed the small Beechcraft turboprop with high-tech gear that tracked mobile-phone and radio transmissions. The theory: pinpoint Escobar and the Wolf by finding their voices. It hadn’t taken them long – Jesús was always gobbing off about something – but high-level corruption and incompetence in Search Bloc meant they were too slow reacting. Its commanders didn’t know which of their two hundred officers they could trust not to alert the Wolf in time for him to do a runner.

I couldn’t blame them: there were life-changing amounts of money on offer. The bad guys had bags of the stuff stashed along every escape route so they could instantly pay their way out of
any drama. Even the low-tech drug-manufacturing plants in the rainforests had cash close to hand for the runners. They’d already cut tracks or tunnels to the riverbank where fast boats were hidden. The key was always to keep things simple – as they need to be when you’re under pressure.

But that didn’t mean I enjoyed being at the shitty end of the stick, getting pounded by the rain, while a bunch of Centra Spike geeks sat in cosy ground-listening stations all around Medellín or aboard Beechcraft at 30,000 feet as the USAF U2 spy planes buzzed about at twice that height in search of the other fat man, Pablo.

The Americans wanted Escobar’s head on their wall more than that of any other member of the cartel – which left me aiming for second prize, alongside a DEA newbie whose mind was per petually elsewhere, with a strong chance of getting banged up for murder.

As I lay there with the rain drumming through my hair, I thought, Why the fuck did I leave the Regiment? I was a K, a deniable operator, working for the SIS. I didn’t pay tax, everything was cash in hand, but even that wasn’t a perk – if I got caught, it meant they could deny I existed.

I kept my eyes on the Mauser’s back lens, hoping the Wolf was just waiting for the rain to stop. I wanted to get this thing over and done with. As Dino kept reminding me, the time it would take him to get the three or four metres from the veranda to his wagon would allow me one shot.

If I didn’t drop him with the first round, that was it, game over. He could have an M60 machine-gun in that shack for all I knew. And if he disappeared beneath the canopy instead, he’d be gone for good. We couldn’t chase him: we couldn’t risk our faces being seen. This was supposed to be a revenge killing by a rival cartel, not an assassination by a government-sponsored gringo and the grandson of a couple of Mexican wetbacks.

We’d pinged the target two days ago outside the grocery store in Jaco, loading bottled water and provisions into the back of the pick-up. And once I found the shack I knew why. He wasn’t in Costa Rica alone. I recognized them all – the three small children, two girls and a boy, and the much younger wife – from the Vauxhall photos. She had shoulder-length jet-black hair, high cheekbones and dark-brown eyes, the classic South American beauty queen. I reckoned Jesús would die a happy man.

If you take the knock-on-the-door option, there’s a decision to be made: do you wait until it’s fully open so you can ID the target before firing? That’s high risk. You’ll be in the killing area longer than is healthy, and whoever answers the door may take the trouble to check who’s delivering the good news.

So why not start blasting as soon as you hear someone approaching, then barge inside to check who you’ve hit? I didn’t want any of that. The Wolf was a player; he practically invented the game. But drop the family as well? That was the Wolf’s favourite trick, not mine.

Another option had been to wait until he went back into town for food and water. But drop him on the move or close up and in an urban environment? There’s always a third party with eyes-on. At least we had a concealed fire position in the jungle, a clear arc of fire, and the capacity to exfiltrate unnoticed.

I’d opted for a distance shoot and picked up the Mauser from
an embassy-sponsored dead letterbox. The weapon was used by hundreds of thousands of hunters around the world. The German Army still used them for ceremonial duties. Best of all, it wasn’t only quick for the spooks to acquire covertly when the Wolf was in-country, it was untraceable. And that’s harder to manage than you might think.

‘Still four hundred and forty-seven metres, is it, Dino? It hasn’t been scared off by that fucking haircut of yours and legged it down the valley?’

Dino turned to me and grinned. Flecks of the Spam he’d been munching speckled his teeth and its unmistakable aroma wafted towards me.

We were on hard routine. On the way in and all the time we were in the fire position, there was no cooking, no flames, no smoking – not that either of us did. Even our shit travelled with us in plastic bags. If the target didn’t show because we’d fucked up and missed him, or if for any reason I couldn’t take the shot, we might have to come back again. Nothing could be left to give away our presence, even after he’d been dropped.

Which was a pity, because right now I was quite tempted to stake Dino out on the ground and leave him to the insects that still hadn’t finished with me.

‘Mate, do you always dye your hair?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’

‘The chicks love it,
hombre
.’

‘Platinum blond? They obviously can’t see that what’s inside your nut is dark brown.’

He looked puzzled for a moment. Then his face collapsed into an enormous grin. His chin headed east and his nose headed west.

He’d been in a lot of fights, he said, and most of them were over women. He loved them all: any shape, age or vocabulary. His basic philosophy was that everything in life boils down to getting laid. And why not? He was in his late twenties with a cock instead of a brain: how else was he to think? Certainly not about this job. He didn’t seem to give a fuck if it was a success. He was wasting time here in the jungle, without an eligible woman in sight. ‘You take the shot,
hombre
. Then we bug out to Miami, right, and I show you some things.’

I knew what was going through his head as he got busy with the range finder again, and it had nothing to do with the target.

‘Not Toronto?’

He’d met a couple of Canadian tour-company reps in one of the Gulf-coast bars a couple of months back, taken them both to dinner, then back to his king-size bed. Or so he claimed.

‘My head might be full of shit, man, but those babes will be full of me as soon as you finish this job, you know what I’m saying?’ His shoulders shook with laughter. ‘Four-four-seven, man. No pressure.’

I wasn’t going to bite. ‘No, mate. No pressure.’

Your bones are your weapon platform. Your muscles are the cushioning. I made a tripod of my elbows and the left side of my ribcage. The Mauser didn’t have a stand so I had to use the conventional method of support: left hand forward on the wooden stock with my forearm resting on a log. A bipod would have allowed me to bring it across my body and into the butt, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

I peered through the sight, making sure there was no shadowing around the edges of the optic. I took aim at the centre of the door, emptied my lungs, stopped breathing, and closed my eyes. I relaxed my muscles slightly, started to breathe normally, and looked through the sight again. My point of aim had shifted to the left-hand edge of the door.

While Dino delved deeper into his can of luncheon meat and store of fantasies, I swivelled to the right to correct, then repeated the whole procedure until I was comfortably aligned to the target. It’s pointless trying to force your body into a position that it doesn’t want to adopt. The weapon has to point naturally towards the target.

Dino hadn’t given up trying to get a rise out of me. ‘That wife of his,
hombre
, she’s …
hot
… Hot – and
loaded
. She’ll be a vulnerable widow soon …’

My eye never left the optic. ‘Any wind out there?’

The spotter is like the co-driver in a rally car. All the heroic stuff
is done by the guy behind the wheel – changing gears and sliding round corners, waving to the girls; all that shit. But without the co-driver telling him what’s ahead, when to turn into the next bend, what sort of bend it is, they’d both be history. Under the canopy, there was no wind. But out there, on the edge of the village, there might be. And that would affect my round at this distance. I needed my co-driver. Even if he was the world’s biggest dickhead.

‘None out there,
hombre
. Only what’s leaving your ass.’

I glanced up as a shiny black thing with far too many legs for its size made its way along a leaf just above my arm in search of breakfast. It could smell me and was getting very excited. A raindrop knocked it onto my hand. It was probably still feeling pretty pleased with itself – right up to the point when I squeezed tight around its middle and broke it in two.