Read Online Guardian of Lies by Steve Martini - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Steve Martini
Tags: Fiction, General, LEGAL, Suspense, Thrillers, Mystery & Detective, California, Conspiracies, Murder, Trials (Murder), Madriani; Paul (Fictitious character)
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escape to their own press. Afundi was then certain that the Cubans would disclose it in concert with his own government. But strangely they did not.
Instead, six weeks after their escape from Guantanamo, Afundi and his men, along with an interpreter, boarded a Cuban military plane and flew west, away from the island and farther from their homeland, toward a rendezvous with armed allies in the mountains of Colombia. They carried twenty million dollars in cash from their own government and were told that they would receive their orders for their next mission as well as the training necessary to carry it out from the people in Colombia. The small area of that country, tucked up against the Pacific Ocean on the western approach to the Isthmus of Panama, had been controlled since the 1960s by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC.
Alim had learned much from his FARC hosts in the months he and his men had been with them. The organization operated within Colombia as a kind of government in exile. The FARC possessed an informal alliance with his own country as well as other nations. They participated in a complex web of international connections and subnational associations. These included people’s governments on nearly every continent, freedom fighters such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels that, along with kidnapping for ransom, the FARC used to derive most of its funding.
The relationships were complicated, but for Alim and his men it reduced down to a single common goal shared by all: the desire to annihilate the Great Satan, to eliminate the power of the American regime so as to shake its grip once and for all on the rest of the world.
To Alim, that the devil should die because of its warfare and interference in the affairs of others should come as no surprise. The irony was in the fact that after launching successive wars over oil in the Middle East, it should meet its fate because of a war on drugs launched in its own backyard, a war that most had already forgotten about.
In the 1980s and early ’90s the Americans had linked arms with the Colombian government in a decade-long war to drive drug traffickers from Colombian soil. The Americans succeeded, only to have the cartels reappear in an equally violent form in Mexico, directly across its own border in places with names that Afundi could barely pronounce, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.
The proximity of these forces to the huge amounts of money and armies of violence at their command had now caused Satan to try to wall himself in.
The Americans had planted new listening posts abroad in an effort to revive their human intelligence networks. They used technology to listen in on telephones and to read e-mail. But with all of this they were now more vulnerable than ever before. They had done nothing to alleviate the anger of millions, which carried on its wings the threat that soon Satan would face something he could not even begin to comprehend.
Elements of the plan were already under way. Money had been delivered to the cartel to begin work. They were not told the precise nature of the cargo to be delivered. They were told that the product of their labors would be theirs to use as they wished once it was completed and the delivery was made. The Mexican cartel was now a critical element in the plan.
And for the moment the cartel had saved both Afundi and his mission. For how long he couldn’t be sure. The problem arose because Alim had allowed the woman to come here into FARC territory in the first place. Because the old man was sick, he needed her. FARC had provided doctors, but the old man wanted his daughter. Alim was desperate. He would do anything to keep him alive.
The difficulty arose because the man he had assigned to watch her had not done his job, that and the fact that she should never have been allowed to leave. That was the blunder.
It had all started with an argument. When the old man told them how long it might
Instead, six weeks after their escape from Guantanamo, Afundi and his men, along with an interpreter, boarded a Cuban military plane and flew west, away from the island and farther from their homeland, toward a rendezvous with armed allies in the mountains of Colombia. They carried twenty million dollars in cash from their own government and were told that they would receive their orders for their next mission as well as the training necessary to carry it out from the people in Colombia. The small area of that country, tucked up against the Pacific Ocean on the western approach to the Isthmus of Panama, had been controlled since the 1960s by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC.
Alim had learned much from his FARC hosts in the months he and his men had been with them. The organization operated within Colombia as a kind of government in exile. The FARC possessed an informal alliance with his own country as well as other nations. They participated in a complex web of international connections and subnational associations. These included people’s governments on nearly every continent, freedom fighters such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels that, along with kidnapping for ransom, the FARC used to derive most of its funding.
The relationships were complicated, but for Alim and his men it reduced down to a single common goal shared by all: the desire to annihilate the Great Satan, to eliminate the power of the American regime so as to shake its grip once and for all on the rest of the world.
To Alim, that the devil should die because of its warfare and interference in the affairs of others should come as no surprise. The irony was in the fact that after launching successive wars over oil in the Middle East, it should meet its fate because of a war on drugs launched in its own backyard, a war that most had already forgotten about.
In the 1980s and early ’90s the Americans had linked arms with the Colombian government in a decade-long war to drive drug traffickers from Colombian soil. The Americans succeeded, only to have the cartels reappear in an equally violent form in Mexico, directly across its own border in places with names that Afundi could barely pronounce, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.
The proximity of these forces to the huge amounts of money and armies of violence at their command had now caused Satan to try to wall himself in.
The Americans had planted new listening posts abroad in an effort to revive their human intelligence networks. They used technology to listen in on telephones and to read e-mail. But with all of this they were now more vulnerable than ever before. They had done nothing to alleviate the anger of millions, which carried on its wings the threat that soon Satan would face something he could not even begin to comprehend.
Elements of the plan were already under way. Money had been delivered to the cartel to begin work. They were not told the precise nature of the cargo to be delivered. They were told that the product of their labors would be theirs to use as they wished once it was completed and the delivery was made. The Mexican cartel was now a critical element in the plan.
And for the moment the cartel had saved both Afundi and his mission. For how long he couldn’t be sure. The problem arose because Alim had allowed the woman to come here into FARC territory in the first place. Because the old man was sick, he needed her. FARC had provided doctors, but the old man wanted his daughter. Alim was desperate. He would do anything to keep him alive.
The difficulty arose because the man he had assigned to watch her had not done his job, that and the fact that she should never have been allowed to leave. That was the blunder.
It had all started with an argument. When the old man told them how long it might
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