The Peruvian Exchange (Jack Barr Thrillers Book 2), page 2
But it was enough to get him steady. Between gravity and maneuvering his body against it, he finally righted himself. Now he was falling on his belly toward the ground, arms and legs splayed out.
And he was reminded then that this was no skydiving trip. He had wasted most of the free-fall spinning around like an idiot, and now the trees were only a few hundred feet below him.
He panicked, yanking the ripcord. The parachute unfurled behind him and pulled his body upward, as if a giant had grabbed his shirt and yanked him straight back toward the plane.
The impact of it nearly took his arm off — he had forgotten to clip the chute over his chest and belly, and his hand and arm had almost slipped completely out of the loop. His fingers grasped the shoulder strap at the last possible moment. He clenched it tightly, white knuckling the strap as the parachute started to slow his descent.
He was still moving very quickly, the chute not intended for a low-altitude landing like this. With more space, he could come in diagonally, working with the unfurled canvas.
Now, it was more like a straight shot.
He winced as the first branches of the emergent layer of the rainforest canopy rose to meet his feet. He kicked his legs, trying to break anything that might get in the way and arrest his fall. But he knew it was going to be a hard fall.
He forced his arm forward, sliding the stray shoulder strap back over his shoulder while working against the reverse pull of the chute.
He flew through the canopy at speed and reached the understory layer, a ball of kinetic energy that impacted loudly with everything in its path. Branches and limbs snapped, leaves smacked against his face and arms and legs, and he pulled his hands over his eyes as he waited and braced for impact with the forest floor.
The parachute caught on something, and he lurched backwards once more, this time expelling everything in his stomach. He vomited all over the ground, which he saw was still eight or nine feet below him. A few animals skittered away, and he heard birds and monkeys squawking their displeasure.
He finished heaving and craned his neck around to see what he had been snagged on. The chute had caught on a tree and was shredded, individual lines twisting and becoming a spider web as he fell.
The entire mess looked like a giant cat had unspooled a ball of yarn in and around the tree.
But he was on the ground, alive.
Well… not on the ground yet. Jack grabbed the knife from his belt and sliced the remaining lines of paracord. He worked inside-out, holding the blade out to his side so he wouldn't accidentally fall on it when enough of the line had been severed.
With one final tear, he braced again and closed his eyes as he was weightless once more. His feet hit the leaves below him.
…and then kept going. His legs were overextended, and he fell straight through this ground cover another five feet and landed, his left knee screaming in agony as he hit the dirt hard. He rolled to the side, already holding his left knee.
One minute into the mission and I’ve torn a meniscus. It wasn’t the worst form of the injury — just a shock trauma, nothing major, but it would hurt like hell. He would be walking with a limp for a day two, but it was a pain he could work through.
He lay on the ground for what seemed like an hour before urging his joints and muscles to sit up. He examined his body for damage. Besides the knee, there wasn’t any trouble. Enough cuts and scrapes to drain a full-size tube of topical ointment, but he had exactly that in his pack.
My pack.
He felt the weight of it on his back and immediately felt reassured.
Your pack is your lifeline. It had been drilled into him at the Farm — a firehose of force-fed training and ‘rapid experience acquisition,’ as they had called it. He was Army, so he had not gone through the Farm when he had started at the Company twenty years prior, especially since he had gone into a career under the Directorate of Intelligence.
But all that had changed after a fateful cruise seven months ago; now, after a quick career change to the Directorate of Operations, he needed a new skill set.
Jack reached up and grabbed onto a thick vine — liana — clinging to the side of a massive tree behind his head, and pulled himself up. He brushed off his butt and his legs, worked his left knee a bit to make sure nothing was broken, then spat out a tooth from the back of his mouth that had become dislodged.
Pulling his pack in front of him, he unzipped it and pulled out his new tool: the Taurus Raging Judge 513. Firing either .45 or 454 Casull rounds, it was a powerful force that would handily deal with anything hostile that got too close.
He pulled it and its belt holster out and put it on. His shirt was loose-fitting, and plenty long enough to conceal the weapon at his side. It wasn’t perfect, but anyone looking that closely at him would likely be concern enough to actually use it.
He looked back in the direction he thought Estrada had fallen, squinting, trying to see clearly through the trees and luscious growth.
Jack Barr, Jr. was now in the Amazon rainforest, completely alone.
FOUR
JACK
The first body Jack came across was the pilot’s.
He had seen the chute from afar, as he’d stepped into an open space beneath the canopy. A small stream collected into a shallow pond at the base of this ravine, and Jack followed the trickle upward until he saw a speck of white cloth hanging high above.
It took him half an hour to climb over the rotting trees, logs, and slippery algae-covered rocks, but he saw even before he got close that the man was dead.
The pilot’s parachute had gotten caught similarly to how Jack’s had, but rather than arresting his fall quickly it had acted like a pendulum, changing direction and smashing the pilot full speed — and headfirst — into a boulder.
The side of the man's skull had caved in upon impact, killing him instantly.
Jack sighed, taking a moment to allow the loss of life to center him, and also to use it as a reminder of how fleeting that life could be.
There was nothing the pilot had on his person that Jack didn't already have strapped to his back. His loadout pack contained enough gear for one man to survive two weeks in the Amazon, or longer if he got creative and used his survival training to extend it. Basics for constructing single-use shelters, MREs in case food proved difficult or impossible to catch — likely not a problem in a place like this — and weapons and equipment for trapping and fishing.
And weapons for defending himself, should he come across any of the beasts of prey the Amazon boasted.
Estrada had joked with Jack as they put the packs together back in Columbia. "The guns are for humans, Jack," Estrada had told him. "Don't bother trying to shoot the black panthers.”
“I thought a few Casulls could kill a panther?"
"But you'll never see them coming. They stalk their prey. They attack from behind. One minute you're walking through the jungle, and the next —" he snapped his fingers. “No more walking.”
Jack smiled, but got the sense that Rudy had not been joking. The man had been in and around the jungle nearly his entire life — growing up in the Peruvian Amazon, spending time on fishing boats and with indigenous peoples and learning to hunt and trap. Public education in the region these days even taught kids basic jungle survival skills, and gave them crash courses in flora and fauna. The jungle and its lessons had never left him.
Jack had taken numerous classes on similar subjects over the past few months, getting a rapid yet thorough education in what he might expect down here. He knew that most of the dangers they would encounter were dangerous not because of their size, but in spite of it. There were at least seventeen snakes alone that could kill a man here, and even smaller creatures that could do the same damage. Many of them were nearly impossible to see with the naked eye.
Over one hundred species of poison dart frog — many smaller than a quarter, packing enough venom to kill a grown man.
Even a butterfly — the Heliconius erato, or Red Postman — was venomous.
And that was just the members of the animal kingdom that had a bone to pick with humanity. Plenty of plant life in the rain forest had evolved with their own built-in nasty defense mechanisms, and many were packed enough of a punch to knock a man on his ass.
Or kill him outright.
For that reason, the most important thing they had in each of their packs was a massive first-aid kit. They were heavier than a typical ultralight field pack’s kit, but they were a piece of gear Rudy told him would saved their life. “Ten extra pounds is a cheap insurance policy against an excruciating death in the jungle,” Rudy had said.
Jack had already leaned heavily on the older operative. Rudy Estrada was a 30-year veteran of the CIA, mostly working low-contact assignments that required him to go deep cover for extended periods of time. Deep cover was reserved for the men and women who had decided there was no better way to spend their life than by defending the nation against international clandestine threats. They spent months undercover, their statuses unknown even to other operatives.
Estrada, like Jack, had a family. He had told Jack he didn’t like to be away for months at a time, though he did it when required. His family knew he worked for the government, but he had never given anyone close to him the specific details. Most operatives like Rudy Estrada wanted to keep their ‘blue badge status’— literally being issued a blue badge and listing in the Central Intelligence Agency's employment verification office — as a way to prove to anyone else in the intelligence community that they were not deep cover.
Being made as an operator was the last thing anyone — operative or employer — wanted. And being made as a deep cover clandestine agent was a surefire way to put one's family and close friends and acquaintances in danger.
So Estrada did what many Operations Officers did: they kept their blue badge, checked into headquarters in-person a few times a year, maintained the ruse of having a semi-remote office job, and took missions when required.
Jack was modeling his career after Estrada's — he had not set out to be an operator. In fact, he still wasn't sure he wanted to be one. He knew now that if it involved jumping out of airplanes into hostile territory, he'd likely rather ride the desk back at Langley, as he’d done for so many years.
But the decision hadn't been entirely his. His wife of fifteen years, Kate, had urged him to look into fieldwork. After an incident on their last family vacation, Jack had surprised himself — and everyone around him — by being far more useful in the field than he'd ever thought possible. It hadn't been fun work, but it had awoken something in Jack.
Though the perpetrator had gotten away, Jack had helped put bad men behind bars and helped his government pinpoint the leadership of a known drug cartel and arms-smuggling operation in Venezuela.
Jack had come here to finish that work.
He had come here to find the man who had nearly killed his children.
FIVE
JACK
The operation itself was simple: find Victor Elizondo, one of the top leaders of the Vínculos drug cartel, and track him along their new route. Learn the flows of the region. Observe, record, report.
The CIA had been keeping tabs on Victor Elizondo and the Vínculos cartel for years — ever since it had shown up as a veritable force in South American drugs and arms trafficking.
Jack understood the assignment perfectly well. They were there to collect HUMINT — human intelligence. It was the most reliable form of intelligence-gathering a covert operation had. Together with the SIGINT — signals intelligence from sources including computers, emails, credit card transactions, and any number of other formats — collected from the cartel, the information would provide a detailed overview of how black market smuggling activities operated in the region.
For over a hundred years, the Amazon rainforest had been perfect cover for operations large and small to conduct illicit business. Everything from illegal logging, drug cultivation, creation, or growing, and the running of illegal contraband was easy under the thick jungle canopy and the sparsely populated area that spanned almost the entire square mileage of the continental United States.
Based in Venezuela, Victor's cartel had struck new deals with third world countries and guerrilla armies. Each buyer was hoping to overthrow some particular government in some backwater of the globe, but the Vínculos didn’t care — as long as their buyers paid.
Each of their customers needed weapons, as did Victor's own growing army, and there was no better way to get hands on these weapons than moving them through Victor’s crew in South America.
Victor was not the head honcho, but was considered second-in-command. The main cartel boss was aging, but still held supreme authority over the goings-on of his cartel, asserting his influence through Victor himself. Intel had told Jack that the man was reclusive, holing up in a castle-like compound near Caracas, where he ran his empire by proxy. There were at least four men capable of running the cartel, but everyone knew Victor was the ‘golden boy’ who would be chosen to lead.
Sources in the intelligence community believed Victor would be the de facto leader if and when there was a coup in the cartel, or a successful assassination attempt on the boss.
And while it was not part of Jack's mission, his papers from the DI told him that an assassination would, in fact, be happening.
Jack's mission seemed simple enough. The CIA could cause unrest and disorder by taking down one of its main leaders, before Victor was ready to take the reins. Every organization of a certain size became fractured, fragmented. Factions of smaller, close-knit groups would be vying for power, trying to get their man in charge of the entire operation. Jack's boss believed that by taking out Victor’s boss — the head of the Vínculos — would throw the entire region into chaos and disarray, but ultimately it would have the effect of loosening the cartel’s stranglehold on South American drug and armaments shipments.
It would allow Victor to usurp the throne earlier than intended, and they could possibly catch him off guard then.
US Army intelligence had informed the CIA that they had assets in place and were prepared to both remove the current leader of the cartel in Caracas, as well as ensure the new faction that rose to power would be a puppet of the US government itself — someone who was not Victor Elizondo.
Since most of the guns and ammunition that were making their way through South America by way of the Vínculos had been manufactured in the US anyway, the thought was that the US government should at least have some say over where these shipments eventually went.
It was an age old game of political maneuvering and sleight-of-hand, but none of that had anything to do with Jack.
All he had to do was find Victor.
All he wanted to do was find Victor.
His op parameters were to get eyes on Victor, then get a read on his cartel’s new route through the Amazon. Once satisfied he knew the flows well enough, the CIA's paramilitary forces could come in and finish the job, working alongside U.S. Army intelligence and Green Berets.
But Jack didn't had no interest in what happened after his mission. He wanted to be done with this entire thing in three days’ time — the allotted mission timing before his extraction — when the assassination o of the cartel boss in Caracas would take place.
He would have no part in that — Victor Elizondo was his mission, and that was here in Peru.
Six months ago he and his wife and two daughters had embarked on a seven-day cruise to Jamaica. In port, an explosion had rocked the ship and caused it take on water, stranding it in the bay. Everyone had been evacuated.
Everyone except for Jack and his kids. Victor had staged the entire thing, coming aboard with a group of his cartel men to figure out who was siphoning money from his operation. He had used the boat as his place of business.
And he had used his girls and about thirty other children as leverage. He had killed innocent people and attempted to blow up a lifeboat full of kids.
It was only because of quick thinking and a good dash of luck that Jack had been able to prevent a devastating loss of life.
But that was not good enough for Jack. Victor was still out there — still terrorizing innocent people. Jack had almost failed to stop him once before.
There was a question of whether Jack wanted to spend the rest of his career doing fieldwork as an operative, but there was no question in his mind about his desire to take on this mission.
Jack wanted to find Victor Elizondo.
SIX
WYMAN
Diane Wyman, chair of the House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence, slammed the phone down onto the receiver. She kept the phone on her massive oak desk to take certain calls that needed to stay private.
Plus, she loved slamming the phone — it was a throwback to a bygone era.
Her assistant, Kenneth Ma, poked his head in. "Everything okay, ma'am?” he asked.
The permanent scowl on her face barely changed as she looked up at the young twenty-something. "I just got off the phone with Senator Nichols," she said. “He’s worried once again about the new IC report."
Ma frowned. She knew it was impossible for the kid to have already read the 325-page report that had been released only this morning, but it was part of the unofficial rulebook of Washington politics to make the younger staff and assistants feel bad for spending their free time sleeping rather than stuffing their brains full of useless information.
The only reason she knew what the report said was that she had just gotten off the phone with one of the men who had written it.
She also knew that the report had not been written so much as pieced together from copy-and-pasting other pre-existing documents, with a quick two-page abstract written up by one of the countless assistants roaming the halls.
