22

 

Denver, Colorado

 

Roger Brinkman came early to his office and immediately asked for the latest position of Steve Spinner’s ship. Food and medicine for North Korea? The Preening Peacock’s deviation from course to the Panama Canal suggested it was up to shady business, and Raúl Ramirez had overheard Spinner making some kind of a deal involving chemical weapons. Brinkman had followed the ship’s position closely as it sailed eastward through the Straits of Florida, first past Cuba, then eastward past Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. One of the tracking devices went silent as the ship passed Hispaniola. There was no way to know whether the device simply quit or had been discovered by the crew. So Brinkman’s hope of finding the ship’s next port then depended on a single tracking device.

If the Preening Peacock continued on an easterly course, it might be that the captain was simply taking the long way around to North Korea. Traveling those extra miles through the Indian Ocean made little sense, but it was still a possibility. But then, just past Puerto Rico, the ship turned south into the Anegada Passage between the Virgin Islands and Antigua. Brinkman’s pulse quickened a bit then. This route suggested a possible rendezvous of the ship with the unidentified aircraft reported flying northeast from Colombia.

So this morning he called for the report. His man entered with a sad face. “Sir, that last tracker has gone dead. We have lost the Preening Peacock.”

Brinkman turned and studied the map on the wall behind him. Where was the ship headed? It could turn west to Saint Croix or east to Saint Christopher-Nevis. Or it could continue south. His eye traced the island chain: Montserrat, Guadaloupe, Dominica, Saint Lucia—even Trinidad. A hundred ports or more, and no way to choose among them.

How could he ever muster enough manpower to check them all?

 

****

 

At the factory, Colonel Kwasek greeted Sledge and his group with a hearty handshake and thanks for their work. “I’ll make sure you get full credit,” he said before handing the decontamination team over to his intelligence officer. Because of possible danger, no one would be allowed inside the factory until the decon team declared it safe. Kwasek also said a small medical aircraft would arrive soon to evacuate the wounded.

“We’ve taken quite a few prisoners,” he told Sledge and led him to a holding area some fifty yards away. Nearby, the bodies of guerrilla casualties had been collected. Sledge paused there, sickened as always by the continuing tragedy of wasted humanity. He himself had killed more than his quota of men, always as necessary dirty work in a succession of noble causes. But it still sickened him. He’d spent many hours thinking on this, and it always came out the same. His head told him that someone had to stand against the forces of evil. But doing it always made him heartsick.

Among the stiffening corpses lay that of Diego Contreras. Sledge viewed it with no emotion except relief. He’d wanted revenge but hated himself for wanting it. Now he felt grateful that the problem had been taken out of his hands. Justice had been done, but not by him in a moment of hatred.

“Someone you know?” asked Colonel Kwasek.

“Yes, sir,” Sledge said. “He got what he deserved.”

“Señor Sledge!” The call came from the prisoner holding area. The speaker was a bedraggled Latino Sledge had never seen before. The man sat cross-legged about thirty feet apart from the other prisoners, guarded by an airborne sergeant first class with a bruised and swollen face. The sergeant grinned at the prisoner and ran his fingers along the blade of an M9 bayonet which appeared to have been sharpened with a file.

“He says he’s Tomás Rodriguez, the guerrillas’ deputy commander,” Colonel Kwasek said. “Sergeant Gonzales there was part of the advance recon party. The guerrillas took him prisoner, but he turned the tables on them. He frightened one whole group into surrender, and he seems to have taken a personal interest in Señor Rodriguez.”

Gonzalez grinned wider and waved the bayonet in front of Tomás’s face.

“Señor Sledge, I must talk to you,” Tomás said. He glanced apprehensively at the sergeant with the bayonet.

Two sergeants from the prisoner interrogation team circled behind Tomás and took notes.

“I don’t remember you,” Sledge said. “How do you know me?”

“You were watched while you trained the Salinas family’s security force. That was before I was put in prison.”

“You were in prison?”

“Sí, señor.” Tomás lowered his gaze. “I was one of the three that Señor Serrano was going to prosecute when the comandante had him killed. I am sorry that his wife and daughter were also killed and you were wounded. I did not know about that until later.”

Sledge felt the familiar cannonball forming in his stomach, but he ignored it. He had a mission to accomplish. “Tell me about this building and what is done in it. Tell me about the men of Chozadolor.”

“You know about that?“ Tomás threw another apprehensive glance at the sergeant with the bayonet. “In the building we make a thing that kills in a terrible way. A man named Williams—I think he is English—made a deal with the comandante to make it here and send it by air to some place in the north.”

“Where in the north?”

Tomás raised his palms before his shoulders. “I do not know. The man Williams would not tell us. The comandante was most angry about that.”

Sledge tried not to let his disappointment show. “You didn’t send everything north. What about Chozadolor?”

“It was most terrible.” Tomás again looked down. “The comandante kept some of the chemical shells for an attack on our government. We planned to move the shells tomorrow and use them in Bogotá the day after. He would become the new presidente, and the weapons would make him feared all over the world.”

This information rocked Sledge back on his heels, but he kept his face expressionless. “What did this Mr. Williams say about that?”

“He did not know. He was most angry that one shipment was not complete, and he came here to complain. The comandante stared him down. Señor Williams threatened to send our supplies to another place, but that was all.”

“And Chozadolor?”

“Before the comandante could plan his coup, he had to know how the weapons would work. He dressed our soldiers as our enemies in the Autodefensas Unidas and took all the men from the village. From these he chose twenty for his tests and killed the others.”

Sledge gritted his teeth. The reports had spoken of dismembered bodies and wholesale butchery.

“The twenty we placed near here in a clearing where we set off three of the shells we had made. They died in minutes, so we knew the shells would work. Then the comandante finished his plans for the coup.”

“And the women who found the bodies?”

“They had to be held until after the coup. We used the kidnapping as a cover story. We would have let them go when the coup was complete, and the comandante spoke of returning Señor Spinner’s money then. They had worked together in Nicaragua.”

Sledge found the note about Spinner particularly intriguing. He could see that Tomás wasn’t telling the complete truth about something, but he couldn’t figure out what. He’d have to leave that to later interrogators.

Further questioning revealed that Tomás did not know the locations of any other factories, and all he knew of Williams was a phone number. Sledge and the other interrogators noted it down. It nettled Sledge that Williams must have been the dark-haired man he and Kristin had seen at the factory, and yet they had no means of tracing him. Not unless Brinkman succeeded in tailing the blond hulk they’d seen in the Bogotá terminal. Convinced that he’d milked Tomás for all he could get, Sledge left him with the bayonet-wielding sergeant, who grinned and stroked the blade lovingly. Sledge returned to the factory door, where the decontamination team and Colonel Kwasek’s intelligence officer had gathered.

“They’re definitely making chemical weapons,” the decon team leader reported. “We’re sure of a nerve gas—probably sarin—and some kind of blister agent. There’s a bunch of other stuff we don’t know about. As near as we can figure, they must have been putting all of it into the same mortar shell. I never heard of anything like that.”

“How about documents?” Sledge asked.

“Very few, and the ones we found don’t help. They log quantities of chemicals received and the number of shells produced and shipped, but they don’t say where the shipments went.”

Another dead end.

The intelligence officer jumped as a cell phone clipped to his belt began ringing. “We took that phone off the man you questioned,” he said.

He and Sledge exchanged glances. Should they answer or not?

“Can’t hurt,” the officer said and answered. He listened, then asked, “Who did you want to speak to?” He made a disgusted face and returned the phone to his belt. “They hung up.”

“No information?” Sledge asked.

“He told me to authenticate. The challenge was mananza, the Spanish word for apple. When I asked who he wanted, he broke contact. The only clue I have is that I think he spoke with a German accent. But with so few words spoken, I can’t be sure.”

Sledge walked back to the airstrip, where the medevac aircraft was taking off. His adrenaline rush from the firefight had changed to a deficit, leaving him weak and depressed.

They’d told him U.S. casualties were light. But still, good men’s lives had been lost. They’d taken out this factory, but apparently there were others in locations unknown. And behind it all, an unknown mastermind was dealing in a new and unbelievably dangerous kind of weapon. Sledge remembered Kristin’s photographs of the corpses in the clearing. His anger rose. Not flaming anger, but quiet, deep, and white-hot against the man who had made these horrors possible.

Sledge sighed. He’d fought his way through another valley up to another hilltop, and still he was not finished. The master villain represented yet another hill to climb, and Sledge would not know complete rest until that man was brought low.

But how?

Today’s attack on the factory had been necessary. Yet after so much expenditure of blood and treasure, what did they have?

Another dead end.