Broken Borders, page 8
He found a large sapling and tied the lasso around the top, bending it back so it was parallel to the trail. He quickly tied the fishing line across the trail to one tree and set it down on the other side. He grabbed some small pine sticks and whittled them into sharp points and lashed them onto the end of the sapling with pieces of fishing line. He then cut a notch into one small tree and stuck the sharpened end of one of the sticks into it, which was tied off to the lasso. He cut another stick, sharpening both ends, and made a Figure Four out of it, the notched tree, and the stick with the rope attached. He carefully tied the fishing line across the trail onto it and inserted it between the two stick to complete the Figure Four.
Boom brushed out his tracks and hid uphill behind some scrub oaks. No sooner was he there than he heard a noise down the trail. Sure enough, along came Tom Smith, wearing sweaty camouflaged coveralls and a deer-in-the-headlights look. Boom drew his knife and waited. Right at the line Tom stopped, sides heaving. Boom thought he had spotted the line, but the man set the rifle against a tree and pulled out a canteen, drinking deeply, and pouring some over his head. He looked behind him nervously, as he put the canteen away and picked up the rifle, slinging it over his shoulder.
He took two steps when his thigh hit the trip wire. Feeling it across his thighs, he looked down and got a look of sheer horror on his face; then he saw the big sapling whipping at him from alongside the trail. It was too late. Tom Smith screamed in pain, as Boom’s expedient Malayan Gate swept across the path at high speed and one pine punji stake tore into the flesh of his upper thigh and the other went into his hip, breaking as it stuck into his hipbone. Tom dropped the rifle, and Boom sprang forward from the trees before Tom could react.
Tom Smith felt the knife at his windpipe and his life flashed before his eyes.
He sobbed in pain and abject fear. “I’m sorry, Sergeant Kittinger. Please don’t kill me?”
To his relief, and the total relief of his bladder and bowels, Boom responded, “I’m not going to, idiot. I am a warrior, not a murderer. I am making a citizen’s arrest. Yer going to jail, not passing go, and sure as hell won’t collect two hundred dollars. Now, ya son of a bitch, I have to make a travois so I can haul your sorry carcass to the cops. Wish they’d invent small radios people could carry, like the army has, so people could call each other from anywhere.”
Months later, Tom Smith pled guilty to felonious assault in exchange for a dropping charge of attempted first-degree murder, criminal trespass, and aggravated menacing, and ended up losing what money and property he had left and spending six and half years in the Colorado State Penitentiary, where he was told daily how lucky he was he’d attacked a Green Beret and was still alive.
Bobby remembered going into town a couple days later with his dad and Boom, and men tried to buy both men drinks, but both refused and settled for handshakes. Now Bobby understood why.
One good thing that came out of it was that Tom Smith’s oldest son became very close with his mother and entered the priesthood, vowing to only do good the rest of his life.
5
VILLAINS
Bahiy Udeen’s name meant Magnificent of the Faith, and he often impressed young members of al Qaeda, because it was known he was personally trained by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the AQ’s number-two man, but more importantly, he held one singular honor that he never spoke about. For a period of two years, Bahiy Udeen was a primary bodyguard of the “Sheik,” “the Director,” Osama bin Laden himself, but during that time he also had a homosexual relationship with bin Laden. In fact, he was the man who Abdul Baari had seen in the cave with bin Laden when he and the “Sheik” were fellating each other. Abdul was also the terrorist Bo Devore shot and sent flying into space in Colorado.
Bahiy Udeen was also the man responsible for starting the al Qaeda program in Mexico. He was a graduate of Universidad Nacional Autonoma Mexico, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Founded in 1551, the second oldest university in North America, it has over 269,000 students, but more important to Bahiy Udeen was that after receiving his bachelor’s in Mexico City, he did graduate work on his master’s at the big branch of UNAM located within the U.S. border at San Antonio, Texas. A university that produced four Nobel Laureates would not seem to house a major al Qaeda operative, especially on American soil, and that was exactly their plan.
During his time in Mexico and Texas, Bahiy Udeen extensively studied the problems along the U.S. border. Like most other members of al Qaeda, he felt the infidels were extremely stupid, and even further, he felt our arms-open attitude could be exploited to become our downfall.
The way he saw it, the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States did everything they could to destroy each other, and he could not understand why they did not work together to protect the country as a whole. Divide and conquer: That would be easy enough.
He also saw that many Americans were spoiled and lazy in his view. They could hire Mexicans to work for them as maids, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners, and cheap laborers for their businesses. Because of this, nobody seemed to care about the constant stream of illegal immigrants coming from and going back into Mexico. This could be exploited.
As time went on, and he studied the situation further, he figured that many al Qaeda could be smuggled across the border, if they simply learned to speak a little Spanish and posed as illegal Mexican workers, migrants and domestics mainly, so even if caught, they still might not be detained.
After presenting all of this in meetings in Pakistan, he was praised, and it was discussed much further. The infidels were fools, they figured. He explained that in his view, the Democrats in America constantly told minorities how oppressed they were, and the minorities always believed them, so most of them would vote for Democrats. This Hispanic voting block seemed very important to the Democrats, so they courted it. The Republicans seemed in his view to be in favor of big business, and their lobbyists and corporate donors wanted the cheap labor the illegals provided, so the Republicans, too, did not want to upset the apple cart and encouraged looking the other way when people crossed into the U.S. In the mind of al Qaeda it was ridiculous anyway and the U.S., they felt, would be much better off with a theocracy.
The main thing that came out of the meetings was a plan to carry out the long-term goal of Osama bin Laden. For years he stated he wanted to create an American Hiroshima. Specifically, Osama bin Laden wanted to detonate two nuclear devices simultaneously in two major American cities with large Jewish populations, and even more specifically, during daylight hours to multiply the terror factor.
The al Qaeda leadership frequently laughed about how the American news media and Democrats attacked Bush for not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and everybody knew they had been moved to Syria by plane and convoy, very easily in fact. On top of that, meeting with black-market arms dealers in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, representatives of al Qaeda purchased a truck containing several suitcase nuclear bombs, a backpack nuclear bomb, and two nuclear artillery warheads, all left behind when the muhajideen defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The Soviets, before their country crumbled, confessed to losing twenty nuclear devices left behind in Afghanistan, but U.S., British, and Israeli intelligence forces secretly estimated that the number was actually well in excess of fifty devices, with most being backpack and suitcase nuclear bombs with blast capabilities ranging from one all the way to five kilotons. Then in 1997, Retired General Alexander Lebed, Russia’s former security chief, admitted publicly that eighty-four nuclear devices were missing from Russia’s arsenal and could not be found or accounted for.
Specifically, a “suitcase” bomb is an extremely portable nuclear weapon, and some have the dimensions of only twenty-four by sixteen by eight inches. The smallest possible bomblike object would be a single critical mass of plutonium (or U-233) at maximum density under normal conditions. Most of the suitcase nukes from the Soviet arsenal were one to two kilotons and weighed just over fifty-seven pounds each. It doesn’t take much more than a single critical mass to cause significant explosions ranging from ten to twenty tons. The warhead consists of a tube with two pieces of uranium, which, when rammed together, would cause a blast. Some sort of firing unit and a device that would need to be decoded to cause detonation could be included in the “suitcase.”
The “backpack” nuclear bomb is even smaller. The Soviet nuclear backpack system was made in the 1960s for use against NATO targets in time of war and consisted of three “coffee-can-sized” aluminum canisters in a bag. All three must be connected to make a single unit in order to explode. The detonator is about six inches long and had a three-to-five-kiloton yield, depending on the efficiency of the explosion.
Further research by Bahiy Udeen revealed that the very vicious MS-13, an El Salvadoran-based street gang, had pretty much taken over the drug-smuggling trade between Mexico and the U.S. It was decided, for lots of money, that al Qaeda might get them to smuggle the nuclear devices into the U.S. and take the fall if caught. The idea was nixed, however, because there had even been television news stories about the MS-13 gang, so they figured the FBI or DEA had probably already infiltrated undercover agents into the gang.
Udeen reported, however, that a little known but equally vicious Rio de Janiero-spawned street gang had had no press at all so far, and would be better to utilize. O Grupo Grande was ruled with an iron bloody fist by a dark-skinned seven-foot-tall muscle-bound giant named Ramiro Maureo. All intelligence reports indicated he was psychotic and very much a sadist.
One American DEA agent grew up in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires, the son of a U.S. tire executive, so he spoke fluent Portuguese and was olive-skinned and black-haired, as he was the offspring of a Sicilian-born mother and father whose family came from Naples.
The Portuguese-speaking Italian-American cop did not last a week undercover, maybe because he was simply a newcomer. Ramiro broke most of the bones in the cop’s body with a two-by-four, then personally sliced the man’s entire groin off with his pocketknife, and packed a bag of ice on the wound, so the man would stay awake and the bleeding would subside. He then crammed the genitalia into the officer’s mouth and pinned the officer’s upper and lower lips together with ten large safety pins. He left the man sitting in his office in the corner for two days until he finally died of shock, and the whole time Ramiro conducted business as if the American was just a piece of furniture. At one point, with the dying man moaning just a few feet away, the cold-blooded killer even shared a romantic interlude with his main woman, Paola Mirari, a beautiful seductive murderer herself.
With the blessings of the al Qaeda leadership, after separate meetings with Osama bin Laden in his most frequent hideout in the NWFP tribal area in Pakistan, and al-Zawahiri, who was at that time very near the Khyber Pass almost right on the border, Bahiy Udeen was officially put in charge of what al Qaeda secretly referred to as Iid Min Mawt, the Festival of Death, the simultaneous daytime nuclear attacks on New York City and Miami, Florida. Funding came from an initial outlay of American money, and more would be delivered to him by courier, mainly already implanted cells in the host country he was in at the time. Funding for this aggressive but highly secret program was unlimited, with most coming from very wealthy private backers in both Riyadh and the Ash Sharqiyah province of Saudi Arabia, as well as one in Kuwait.
He initially met with Ramiro Maureo and Paola Mirari in San Antonio at The Longhorn Café, as all three wanted a really good American hamburger and were told that was where they would get one. Bahiy lusted after the beautiful seductress, and secretly lusted even more so for the dark, muscular seven-footer, but notwithstanding, they did not like each other. If not buddies, they were all three very mercenary. O Grupo Grande would indeed smuggle any of the al Qaeda personnel across the border, as they wanted at $20,000 a pop, and arrangements were made to take the backpacks and nuclear suitcase bombs across the border using horses at $50,000 for each device. They would go in a rocky area along the Arizona-Mexican border not too far from Willcox, which was rough enough that they could get through with surefooted horses but not four-wheelers or dirt bikes, so the Border Patrol would only be able to apprehend them with helicopters, a rare commodity.
Ramiro even asked for reassurances from Bahiy Udeen that, whatever the AQ was planning, he wanted to know his grandmother in Miami would be totally safe. Bahiy gave his word, not caring about doing so, because in his mind, Ramiro and his bitch were also infidels just as much as the Americans. Infidels were “unbelievers,” and it was perfectly all right to lie to them.
The stage was set and arrangements were being made to smuggle the “nukes” into Mexico for transport into the U.S.
Ramiro Maureo was very well suited to the task. He became the leader of O Grupo Grande in a rapid fashion. In fact, his ascension to power in the gang was immediate. The founder of O Group Grande was Duarte Liberio, who could best be described as one mean son of a bitch. Duarte’s father trained and fought alongside Che Guevara in the rain forests of Bolivia and high mountains of Chile. He was a revolutionary and the cause was usually not important to him. He was simply fascinated with killing, and this fascination was passed on to his son Duarte. Duarte killed his first man when he was twelve in the streets of Rio. He grew up as a murderer, robber, rapist, extortionist, and all-around bad guy. Then one day, he saw he could expand or actually multiply his criminal prowess by forming O Grupo Grande. In a psychological sense, it was like getting a penis extension.
Then along came Maureo. O Grupo Grande really started developing a rep around Rio and money was flowing for protection alone, besides all their other criminal activities. Ramiro Maureo saw the potential and power base and was very used to taking whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. The gang was meeting at a large abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Rio. Ramiro invited himself into the group meeting, and there was a total hush when he entered the building. One reason was because he was an outsider, but more pronounced was the fact that he stood seven feet tall but was built like an NFL defensive end who enters bodybuilding competitions in the off-season. Adding to that, he removed his shirt and entered the building holding an American-made bowie knife in his big right hand. The fact that Uzis, MAC 11s, and other guns were leveled at him as he approached Duarte did not seem to faze him. In actuality, he decided in order to carry out his plan, he would have to be totally fearless and merciless.
The leaders of the gang were seated at a table that was fashioned by connecting four old doors together and placing them on legs. Duarte sat in the largest chair at the head of the table. Ramiro never broke stride, just walked rapidly right up to Duarte, who, shocked at the intrusion and boldness of the newcomer, was not sure how to react.
Ramiro Maureo looked him in the eye and in Portuguese said, “You are sitting in my chair.”
Duarte did not like this.
Boldly, he challenged, “Who are you? You pup! I am the leader of O Grupo Grande. The only way you could ever sit in that chair would be to kill me first, and you would find that a very difficult job.”
Ramiro smiled, saying, “No, it would be easy. Watch.”
He grabbed Duarte by the throat with his left hand and lifted him off the floor, then viciously thrust the bowie knife into Duarte’s abdomen and twisted it over and over while Duarte screamed and twitched in pain, eyes wide open in horror.
Before Duarte died, Ramiro smiled at him, saying, “See, I told you it would be easy.”
When the body went limp, Ramiro dropped him on the concrete floor. He bent over and wiped his blade off on the dead gang leader’s pants, then stood erect and looked at all the shocked leaders.
The first words out of his mouth were: “I am your new leader. Now, you will all start making very much money. If any of you wants to be the leader, just kill me, like I have done. Who wants to fight me to the death?”
One by one, after looking at each other, the leaders sat down in their chairs.
6
12 STEPS
Retired Sergeant Major Brand “Boom” Kittinger called Bobby as soon as he arrived in Washington.
Bobby answered and Boom said, “I’m in town. You still park your car in that same lot?”
Bobby said, “Yes, but I—”
Boom interrupted, “Hop on the metro and meet me there ASAP. I’m in a white rental SUV. I’ll wait.”
Bobby showed up twenty minutes later. He hopped in Boom’s car, and they shook hands.
Bobby said, “Boom, I can’t believe you hopped a jet and flew across the country.”
“Look, kid, yer SF and yer Honey Samuels’ son, period,” Boom said.
Bobby said, “Yeah, but you dropped everything and flew all the way across the country—”
Again, Boom interrupted. “Look, this doesn’t mean you and I are going to share a sleeping bag and play reach-around or share meaningful moments of midnight magic together. I will help get you headed in the right direction, and you will listen and learn, or I’ll hop on the next jet back. Fair enough?”
Bobby said, “Affirmative, Top.
“Where we going, Boom?”
“You’ll see,” Boom said,
A short while later, Boom pulled into a church parking lot. He pulled a note out of his pocket, and glanced at it.
“This is it,” he said, “We need to find the basement.”
Bobby said, “Boom, I don’t have time to go to AA meetings.”
Boom opened the car and got back inside.
Bobby jerked his door open, saying, “What are you doing?”
