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This would be a textbook annihilation operation—swift and complete. Teniente Coronel Óscar González, Ejército Nacional de Colombia, bent over a map table, making notes in various locations as the updates came in via encrypted radio. His short battalion of Brigada Especial Contra el Narcotráfico, or BRCNA, was deploying into launch position for a full-on armed assault on a large supply depot for the cocaine cartel known as La Cantaña. He had every enemy strong point zeroed in for mortar fire and every route in and out covered by anti-tank and heavy machine guns. Half a dozen snipers occupied elevated positions in the area. González was confident of success. His troops were the elite of one of the finest armies in South America and, at least in counterinsurgency operations like this one, among the world’s best.
This operation and the circumstances were very unusual these days. Large, heavily armed quasi-armies that characterized the cartels running the Colombian drug trade had mostly disappeared. The army pivoted and broke up the larger gangs after defeating the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC rebels. What remained usually followed such a low profile they were known as “the Invisibles.” Not that the trade itself subsided, quite the contrary. But these organizations had abandoned trafficking cocaine to the United States in favor of the more lucrative, and less risky and violent markets of Europe, China, and Australia. Plata no Plomo: Silver, not Lead, was the new business model. As long as these groups kept the violence among themselves and at a low level, the government was content to leave them alone.
La Cantaña was an exception. They had established a tightly coupled relationship with one of the European syndicates, whose increasing demand for product pushed the organization into a larger logistical frame. The more massive stockpiles and shipments and concomitant security escalated violence that moved beyond their competitors. After the ambush and murder of two police patrols that stumbled onto active operations, La Cantaña was no longer an “Invisible.” They broke the rules and would now pay the price.
Man-for-man, there was no comparison between his troops’ quality and their opposition this morning, but González took nothing for granted. These were his boys, and he wouldn’t waste one of them because of miserly allocation of force or shoddy preparation. His troops knew this and reciprocated confidence in the man whose martial skill and coolness under fire garnered the nickname Coronel Relajado. Most of the gunmen in these cartels were former FARC members, at liberty because of the Colombian government’s peace deal. González understood, in principle, the need to break the cycle of violence after fifty years of civil war. Still, he hated the idea that some of the most sadistic murderers in history had escaped justice. He smiled to himself. At least these three dozen La Cantaña murderers would meet God for judgment in about fifteen minutes, and his men would conduct the introductions.
González looked over at the American intelligence agent following the operation. Usually, he would not have had any Nord Americano anywhere near his headquarters. The duplicity and arrogance of the American Drug Enforcement Agency and Central Intelligence Agency men displayed in joint operations with the Colombian Army during the 1990s and 2000s cemented his resentment and contempt for those organizations.
This Defense Intelligence Agency man was different. He brought the first intelligence that contributed to the localization of this drug cache and much more about La Cantaña’s activities. Despite himself, González had become personally fond of the younger man in their two weeks together. Besides his “How can I help?” attitude, his Castilian Spanish was impeccable, and his knowledge of Cervantes and Unamuno, González’s favorite authors, led to several spirited and enjoyable discussions. The American would return to Washington this evening—González would be sorry to see him go.
“Any thoughts, professor?” González asked.
Peter Simmons smiled at the Colonel’s use of the nickname. It was not far off—Simmons held a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Princeton—but he had done nothing professorial in the six years he had been with the DIA. “Ah, señor, this is one area I would not dare to offer critique. I just create messes—it’s up to you professionals to clean them up.”
González chuckled. “Very well, my friend. Watch and learn.”
The last reports came in two minutes later: all units were in position and ready. González took one last, long look at the map and dispositions, then turned and picked up his rifle and helmet. “OK, let’s go,” he said as he climbed into his command vehicle with his radioman and Simmons. A short, five-minute drive later, they pulled up on one of the follow-on units. González wanted to lead the first assault troops into the compound personally, but accepted that it was no longer his place as a senior officer and commander. His men understood.
He stepped out of the vehicle and walked up to his second in command, Major Enrique Moreno, who turned and said, “All ready and awaiting your order, Coronel.” There were no salutes, standing at attention, or any other parade ground crap in the field. Not that BRCNA was an egalitarian unit, it was that such displays just made it easier for enemy snipers to pick who to shoot first.
“Thank you, Mayor,” González replied. He looked up at the clear, early morning sky. In a few minutes, the sun would clear the Serranía del Perijá mountains to the east, and soon after, it would become a typical, scorching hot lowland Colombia day. “Let’s get on with it. Wake up the bastards.”
“Si, señor.” Moreno held the handset to his ear and pressed the transmit button. “Mortar teams, on designated target, five rounds high explosive, commence, commence, commence!”
Six soldiers each dropped a twenty-seven-pound, 4.2-inch round down the barrel of an M30 mortar at virtually the same time. In the twenty seconds it took this first salvo to reach their targets, a second had been fired, and a third was in mid-launch. After the fifth distinct set of “crumpf” sounds from mortar explosions, Moreno turned to González and, after receiving a nod, pressed the transmit switch again. “Mortar teams, check, check, check! Assault teams, advance!”
Within half a minute, the sounds of distant automatic gunfire filled the air. After about two minutes, this tapered off to sporadic single shots. Moreno’s handset buzzed, and he put it to his ear, “Commandante. Si, stand by.” He looked up at González. “All objectives secure, señor.”
“Excellent! Pass on to all commanders well done and to remind their rookies to watch out for booby traps.” Turning to Simmons and the radioman, he continued, “Let’s roll.” The three mounted the Colonel’s vehicle and headed for the La Cantaña facility half a kilometer distant.
By the time the vehicle arrived at the target, the shooting had stopped, and soldiers were collecting the bodies at a central location. After the three had dismounted, a junior captain ran up and, in his excitement, barely stopped himself from saluting. “Coronel! We’ve just done a preliminary assessment of the amount of product in storage, and it’s three thousand, not one thousand tons!”
“Maravilloso!” González smiled. “This might break the back of La Cantaña—they’ll have the devil’s own time trying to recover. Well done, Capitán!” The smile then disappeared. “What are our casualties?”
“Three wounded, señor, none seriously. Our mortars really pasted them. The survivors were still stumbling around in shock, looking for their weapons, when our assault troops hit them. Only a few got shots off before being cut down.”
“Thank God for that!” The smile returned as he turned to Simmons. “An outcome far better than even I had hoped, my friend!”
“Indeed. Congratulations, señor!” Simmons nodded. “What will you do with all this product?”
“We were going to burn it in situ. Capturing three times the amount in the intelligence brief was not a situation I expected. I must arrange for transport and disposal now, dammit!”
“I’m sure your men will figure it out. There seems to be nothing they can’t do. With your permission, señor, I would like to go over and collect biometrics from the corpses.”
“Granted, with pleasure, but I caution you like my rookies—don’t go poking around the camp and take extreme care rifling the pockets of the dead. These bastards love leaving behind surprises.”
“I’ll be on my guard. Gracias, Coronel.”
As the American turned and walked toward the lengthening row of bodies, González motioned over Moreno and the young captain. “Gentlemen, let’s get the wounded evacuated and bring up the trucks for the dead. I want the Sargento Mayor and one officer supervising the contraband until we can get it transported away. In the meantime, set up a perimeter; I don’t want any survivors of La Cantaña or their competitors getting any bright ideas.”
“Si, señor,” both men replied, then turned to their duties.
González removed his cap and wiped his forehead. It was already getting uncomfortably hot, and, with the sun almost directly overhead this time of year, it was going to be miserable by noon. He watched as Simmons moved from corpse to corpse, taking electronic fingerprints and cellphone photos of faces, for those that still had hands and faces, that is. He envied that the young man would be on his way back home to the United States by nightfall while he would be here, guarding this poison. Still, the unexpected need to safeguard and transport the cocaine was a minor annoyance compared to the brilliant victory they had achieved. González was looking forward to getting home and telling his wife and children that the world was safer today than yesterday, thanks to his men.
He could not have been more wrong.
Anton Holtz was a very unhappy man, but not as unhappy as the man sitting before him. It was bad enough to be cooped up in this stinking tub with lousy food, cramped quarters, and no entertainment of any kind. Dealing with this sniveling brown wretch was just too much. Holtz slammed a fist on the table. “I don’t want to hear excuses. You promised us this product today! Where the hell is it?”
“It, it’s still in Colombia.” The man looked down and shifted in his seat. “The BRCNA raided our depot.”
“That’s unfortunate for you. When can you reroute the replacement product?”
The man shifted again and looked at Holtz with a pained expression. “There is no replacement. They got everything.”
Holtz could not believe his ears. “Everything? Did they raid your entire export network? How did they track all your locations? Your security must be shit!”
“We had it gathered in a single depot just over the border. It was too difficult to disperse and secure that much product. We didn’t have enough men. We had a secure place—it was one of our bases during the war. No one knew about it.”
“Stop!” Holtz interrupted. “I told you I wasn’t interested in excuses. What is your plan to fix this?”
“Um. We know most of the product is still there. With your help, we can launch a raid....”
“WHAT? You want us to invade Colombia and attack the best combat unit they have to fix your fuck-up? Are you insane? What else do you have?”
The man looked down and shook his head.
“Alright, here’s the deal. The only reason you are still alive right now is I need you to carry a message to your bosses. They will return every euro of our down payment within two weeks, plus twenty percent. Fifteen days from now, if we don’t have every bit of that sum, we will issue irrevocable hit contracts on every member of La Cantaña and their families. Questions?”
The man looked up in horror. “I don’t know if we can gather that amount. We have obligations....”
“I’m not interested in excuses. If you don’t have the cash handy, get it. Hit your competitors, rob banks, whatever. This is not negotiable. Pay us or die, you and your families.”
The man said nothing, just blinked and nodded.
Holtz turned to one of his men. “Show this piece of shit out.” After they had left, Holtz turned to his assistant, Fedor Dorshak, who was knowledgeable about the local drug trade. “Start a sweep. We need to get what we can together for the next rendezvous. Then I need options for future deliveries. We’ll be paying through the nose for this one, and that will lessen any negotiating power we have in Venezuela, at least for now. Is there anything we can work on in the north?”
“There are the Mexicans. They have the product and complete control of the supply chain.”
“No, not the damn Mexicans! We can’t go cap-in-hand to them—they’re too powerful already. What about Guatemala or Honduras, anyone young and hungry there?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve heard of a few, but they’re not the sort of people we normally deal with.”
“These are not normal times. Look into it.”
“Yes, Boss.” Dorshak got up and left.
Holtz was the head of the first large-scale operation in South America by the 252 Syndicate, a diverse criminal enterprise spread across much of the former Warsaw Pact countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The syndicate was founded by the worst of not only the Soviet KGB, but the East German Stasi, Romanian Securitate, and Bulgarian State Security. Named for the Warsaw Pact’s disbanding date, 25 February 1991, the 252s built a criminal empire of drugs, prostitution, extortion, and murder for hire throughout Eastern Europe in the decades following the collapse. Ironically, these former communist henchmen became some of the most aggressive entrepreneurs the continent had ever seen, recruiting former spies, counterintelligence agents, and mercenaries to increase their reach and power.
The 252s were the leading broker in the illegal opiate trade east of the former Iron Curtain—no one operated in the trade anywhere in the region who was not either a client or had reached some manner of reciprocity agreement with the syndicate. Their supply chains through Afghanistan were productive and resilient, secured by alliances with local chieftains and bribery of what passed for the government in the country. The cocaine trade was considerably more challenging, with the supply points laying over twelve thousand kilometers to the nearest seaport servicing 252-controlled territory. Just as critical, unlike Afghanistan, Colombia was not a geographic free-for-all with no effective government—the 252s could not just walk in and set up a supply depot.
Fortunately, Colombia’s neighbor, Venezuela, was an economic basket case approaching Afghan anarchy levels. Holtz had led the setup of a mobile headquarters aboard the Carlos Rojas, safe from the crime-ridden streets and focusing the overhead of bribery on a relatively limited set of port and customs officials. The ship herself was not used for smuggling—she was too small and slow for economic shipments. But, being a converted offshore construction vessel, she had plenty of space for staff and abundant internal electrical generation capability that made her ideal for coordinating the transfer of illicit cargo to larger ocean-going vessels.
The 252s had a preferred contractor for cocaine within Colombia, the La Cantaña organization, who could arrange for the short cross-border shipments required. Quantities needed were an order of magnitude higher than any set before, but the organization was confident they could meet the demand. The first shipment went as planned, but even with heightened security precautions, the movement of so much product drew the Colombian government’s attention, with the inevitable result.
Holtz was worried—the syndicate had made enormous investments in infrastructure and bribery to prepare for the large influx of cocaine. That La Cantaña was his boss’s choice, not his, would not count for much if the 252s fell behind in deliveries to their downstream suppliers and dealers. He had to find another source and get things up and running again before the boss found out. He grimly shook his head again when he considered what the alternative would mean: it would be a quick and relatively painless bullet in the back of his head if he were lucky.
Then there was his other problem: the mad scientist downstairs. The Carlos Rojas, besides providing a mobile command-and-control hub for the 252s, also contained a laboratory to support their research into exotic poisons supporting their murder-for-hire business. The security provided by having a tightly accessed, mobile platform with self-contained power and the ability to dispose of highly toxic waste without documentation outweighed the inconvenience of shipboard life. And the organization needed to keep this work a closely guarded secret.
Since their founding, the 252s operated a lucrative murder-for-hire business around Europe and Western Asia, eliminating anyone, men, women, even children, if the price was right. The organization’s reputation for brutality was supported by the remorseless pursuit of targets, regardless of the opposition or collateral damage. Gradually, civilization returned to former soviet block countries. The randomness of drive-by shootings and car and airliner bombings became too difficult for even the most corrupt officials and politicians to tolerate.
Like all successful organizations, the 252s adapted to the new reality. Impressed by the effectiveness and selectivity of the poisons developed by the former Soviet Union’s Foliant program, the syndicate hired several chemical researchers associated with the Russian intelligence services’ weapons development programs. Before long, 252 killers were equipped with the latest nerve agents of the Novichok family, and their targets started dropping dead without the headline-generating acts of explosive mayhem and gunfire.
The Russians were not amused. Their intelligence services used the Novichok variants sparingly since the West had obtained samples and knew what to look for when someone opposed to Russian interests suddenly and mysteriously died. They were reserved for the highest-value targets only. The application of 252 knock-offs for mere “thuggery” that left evidence pointing to Russia was an alarming development requiring corrective action. When ten 252 operatives met a violent demise at the hands of the Russian GRU within days every time a knock-off was used, the 252 senior management got the message and stopped their Novichok program. But the attractiveness of this assassination mode generated a new research and development effort for similar quick and clean weapons, so they built the lab aboard the Carlos Rojas.
The man running the lab, Dr. Piotr Gronkowsky, was probably among the top five biochemists globally. He was a genius in organophosphates and other nerve agents and was well along in developing a new line to replace the Novichok knock-offs. His history was mysterious—Holtz suspected the Russian GRU had recruited him as a student. Given that, it was somewhat surprising he was working for the 252s. Holtz suspected money was probably a factor, but he could see why the GRU was glad to see him go after meeting the man.
Gronkowsky was the creepiest man Holtz had ever met. He was utterly unemotional, dead-eyed, and laser-focused on whatever research occupied his attention at the time. Holtz’s charter was to keep him and his lab secret at all costs and otherwise provide him with whatever he needed, be it power, chemicals, or test subjects, including human ones. Gronkowsky was not a sadist—he derived no pleasure from the suffering and death of his human victims; he simply did not care about them. He was, by definition, a psychopath. Even Holtz, who had known some of the most ruthless killers in history, was chilled by his presence.
Holtz gathered himself together, then stood and headed down to the lab on the lower decks. He found Gronkowsky seated at his desk in the lab, typing furiously on his computer workstation with several machines humming nearby. He stopped and looked over when Holtz knocked on the bulkhead.
“Yes, Holtz?” he asked.
Holtz shivered as the cold, dead eyes fixed on him. “We will need to move the ship to another location. Our source of supply for cocaine has been disrupted.”
“How unfortunate for you. When do you plan on moving?”
“I don’t know. Probably between one and two weeks from now.”
“Make it twelve days.”
“Why twelve days?”
“Because I will complete testing and be ready for production by then. The testing requires a stable platform, whereas the production of the binaries does not.”
“You are ready for production?” Holtz asked in surprise.
“No, I am still testing. I expect to be ready for production in twelve days.”
Holtz blinked and smiled at the possibility of good news to help offset the setback with La Cantaña. “Well, this is great! How will it compare to Novichok?”
Gronkowsky tilted his head without changing his expression, as if he was confronting a stubborn problem. “Testing is required, but I expect it to be between three and five times more effective, with an environmental half-life an order of magnitude less.”
Holtz asked, “I don’t understand what half-life means. Is this a significant improvement?”
“Definitely. The biggest drawback of chemical weapons is their persistence in the environment and the difficulty of completely cleaning up. An area subjected to a chemical attack is uninhabitable indefinitely without an enormous effort to remove every trace of the agent from all surfaces. If this agent performs as expected, it would be self-cleaning to a safe level within days.” After a few seconds of silence, he continued. “This agent could revolutionize chemical warfare, making it a practicable alternative to other means of eradicating enemy forces that leave behind widespread destruction or contamination of infrastructure. The profits from marketing it could be immense.”
Holtz struggled to keep the horror from his face. He had grown up in what was then East Germany and was an apprentice with the Stasi when the Warsaw Pact broke up. Everyone in the Stasi knew the use of chemical weapons was assumed in a conflict with NATO and what that would mean for the population of East Germany. The costs of this outcome, like that of nuclear war, had kept the peace for decades. The idea that weapons of this lethality could be used without lasting consequences by anyone.... Not even the syndicate would market something like that, would they? Holtz honestly didn’t know. “I see. Well, the boss will be pleased.”
“I should hope so. Now, I need to return to my work. I have emailed you a list of my requirements for the testing and setup of production.” He turned back to his screen and began typing again.
Holtz turned and trudged back to his office. His sense of dread had returned, greatly magnified now as he contemplated what supplies would be required for testing. He was sure these would include a variety of human test subjects. It would not be easy, but he had contacts within the local law enforcement and criminal gangs he had used before for this sort of thing. Hopefully, this will be the last time, he thought as he stepped into his office and closed the door.
