“I’m getting the picture, Colonel. I need to say that I’m no more pleased with this assignment than you are. But like you, I follow orders. My men will look at this as any other military assignment. We will make one major change. We will do this destruction without the loss of any Colombian lives. We’re not policemen, so we don’t know who is doing something illegally. We’ll go after the hardware, the processing equipment, the raw stock, and the finished product. The people involved will be safe unless they resist. Colonel, I’m sure you understand that if these people shoot at us, we will respond in kind with overwhelming firepower.”
“Yes, Commander, understood. Now, I have a lot of work to get done. I’ll see you here tomorrow morning at 0800 for a final briefing and to provide your contacts and guides.”
Murdock stood, came to attention, did a perfect about-face, and left the room.
It took Murdock two hours to brief his men on the situation and their new assignment.
“So we’re fucking drug cops?” Jaybird wailed.
“About the size of it, Jaybird.”
“Who sent us on this shit-faced job, anyway?”
“Who? Your boss, Stroh, the CNO, the President, and probably his drug-fighting czar, whoever it is this week.”
“Hey, Cap. Say we bust this processing plant and find some pure white cocaine,” Mahanani said. “We get to snuff a few rows before we leave?”
A cheering broke out, and Murdock grinned. “Sure, anybody can who wants to. All he has to do is hang up his trident and go back to the scrub-and-dub Navy.”
“No way out of this detail?” Ed DeWitt asked.
“Not a prayer,” Murdock said. “Which means we have some planning to do. Ed, you were right about the weapons. We need a selection on our trips so we can adjust our type of weapon for the job. The Pups wouldn’t have done the work inside that commo building today. But then the carbines wouldn’t have done the work the Bull Pups did with those twenty-mike-mikes. We’ll talk with the locals and then see what we can get brought in from the carrier. Ed, make out a list of what we need.”
“So what now, Cap?” Will Dobler asked.
“We just take it easy until tomorrow when we get back into action.” Murdock paused. When the men had dispersed, Murdock turned to his lead man and asked quietly, “Chief, you want to send an E-mail to your wife?”
Dobler hesitated, then shook his head. “No, I told her no special treatment. Better stick with it. I think those two ladies are going to help her stay straight.”
“Okay, Master Chief. You need anything, you let me know.”
A short way outside Cali, Jaime Pardo Leal drove the big stake truck through the track of a road. A bulldozer had been through there two days ago, but sometimes he couldn’t be sure where the trail went. He couldn’t guess. Not with ten fifty-five-gallon drums of ethyl ether in back. The price had gone up again. Now it was almost a thousand dollars a barrel. It took seventeen liters of ethyl ether to make one kilo of cocaine.
If his supply of ether failed, his plant would be out of business. After a four-mile run up the rough trail, he came to his operation and made a stop at the first shed. Six men came out of it and began to roll the drums down a pair of planks to the ground, then roll them inside the building.
It was little more than a shed with a raised wooden floor. It was one of fourteen sheds around the jungle site. There was no airstrip here. That made the plant too easy to find. Instead, all work came in and went out by truck.
He nodded at some of the people. Most were lavaperros, dog washers in Colombian slang. They had been street people in Cali and were brought here to work and get fed and were provided with a bed to sleep in. They were essential. He had fifty of them and could use another ten or twelve.
Jaime had a smooth-running operation. Every day, trucks came in and went out for the long run into the civilian airport near Cali. There was almost no control over the planes that landed there or took off.
He had been working here for more than three years. They had everything for a small city: food, clothing, washers and dryers, generators, a huge kitchen, and twelve tanks for processing the paste into cocaine.
He walked into his office in one of the sheds at the far end of the complex and made an entry in his log. He had brought in 550 gallons of ethyl ether. That would last him for some time.
He checked his entry of coca paste. So far, the total read 14.23 metric tons of paste he had taken in. Yes, it was going to be a good year. A makeshift trail circled the drug lab and buildings. Every ten minutes, a guard with an Uzi submachine gun on his back circled the area on a dirt motorcycle. Security. Twice he had caught men trying to slip into his complex. He had questioned them. Both had been dog washers, and he had put them to work. A third one a month later had been from a rival cartel, and when it was proved who he was, he was shot at once and thrown into a shallow grave. Security was a must.
Jaime called in his second in charge, a man who went by one name, Montanez. The man was short, solidly built, and had been a boxer in his youth. He had lost an eye years ago in a knife fight and now ran the lab with a delicate hand that was needed.
“Had to slap around two of our dog washers this morning. They claimed they were sick. After the lesson, they worked well all day. I’ll watch them.”
Jaime finished with Montanez and walked his domain. Not his, really, but he had come to think of it as his own. He worked for the people in Cali who used to run the Cali syndicate before the big brothers from Medellin had squashed them with twenty-three assassinations. His boss had been on vacation at the time and missed the party. Now he was making a comeback but keeping a low profile. All of his goods went out of the country by boat. Slower but safer, and there was no battle with Medellin regarding air space and landing facilities. At one time the two cartels had shared those things. No more.
He checked the shed where the finished cocaine powder was stored in thirty-three-gallon plastic garbage cans. He needed to make a shipment. His benefactor had told him never to have more than six or eight of the big cans filled in the shack at any one time. Medellin was not beyond raiding them if they knew where this lab was. Yes, he would set up a boat tomorrow and have the load gone within a week. Now with the old president holding court in Cali, he had to be more careful than ever. In this area his was still in an illegal business.
Back at the shack that held the ether, he checked his supply. The ten barrels brought him up to fourteen. He was definitely still short. He’d make another run into Cali tomorrow. His supplier said he had plenty now that the demand was down. This indicated to Jaime that there were not more than two big labs working around the area. Five years ago there were ten or more.
Jaime went to his quarters. He had assigned one of the dog washer women to keep his rooms clean and to cook for him. She was the only pretty one from the last batch. He had made her wash and cut her hair and brought her good clothes. Now she was almost presentable. When he came into the room, she stopped polishing his silverware and took off a colorful blouse so her breasts swung free.
“Is there anything I can do for you today, Mr. Jaime?”
She had learned quickly what he wanted after a hard day’s work, and she was always ready. This duty was much better for her than working in the factory on the vats of coca paste and the foul-smelling chemicals.