was all I needed right now, so I wasn’t about to frighten up a roaring fire. I might do that if I had to later. I wasn’t sure I’d make it back past the reservoir before last light, but there was a track that I could follow all the way along the ridge.
I fished out the Samsung and tried each of my new SIM cards in turn, selecting the network with the best signal, and tapped its number under ‘A’ in my iPhone address book. There was plenty of room for it. I never kept anyone’s contact details. The few I needed were already safely tucked away inside my head, and I didn’t need to advertise them. Old habits died hard.
I’d always thought these mountain refuges were brilliant. Some of them were originally constructed for itinerant workers during the Industrial Revolution. Now they offered shelter to dickheads like me and Trev if we took the trouble to find them on the map before setting out – or bumped into them by accident when we’d somehow managed to dig ourselves out of the shit.
We’d celebrated our escape that night by carving our initials into the mortar beside the chimney, as you do when you’re a thoughtless little prick who’s glad to be alive, but someone had got busy with the Polyfilla and whitewash long since, and covered them over.
As I sat and listened to the swollen stream cascading over the rocks outside, I wondered which route Trev had chosen for today, and what had made him so jumpy that he couldn’t just meet for a brew in Hereford.
6
Trev was a bit excitable at times, but he didn’t fuck about. And he was always there when you needed him. Before the Gulf we’d mooched around in Colombia together. In the late eighties and early nineties it had been responsible for providing the lion’s share of America’s multi-billion-dollar cocaine supply, and for fuelling a fearsome percentage of indigenous fatalities. The year we went, there were three thousand drug-related killings in one town alone – which was why the locals were almost as keen to nail the cartels as the DEA was.
A bunch of us had piled into a Hercules C130 and headed down there via Newfoundland. Once we were in country, we debussed into cattle trucks.
Our initial task was to train the Colombian militia, then to help them wipe out as many drug-manufacturing plants as we could ID and locate. Since it took two hundred kilos of leaves to produce one kilo of coca paste, the DMPs were thrown up as close as possible to the growing areas.
They were mostly hidden in jungle, heavily guarded, and crisscrossed by tunnels and escape routes, but our biggest obstacles were corruption and wholesale slaughter. A 12,000 per cent markup from production cost to street value buys a lot of informers, and in a world where you were either on the payroll or dead, fully operational DMPs had more often than not turned into ghost towns by the time we got to them.
Fair one. We were just visiting; the militia had to live there. We didn’t have to worry about our wives being raped and killed, and our kids being hosed down on the way to school. We had to become more proactive, and strike without warning.
Me and Trev spent weeks on hard routine, kitten-crawling through the undergrowth with a bunch of lads who all seemed to be called José or Miguel, coated with cam cream and mozzie rep, sweat leaking from every pore. Our combats were covered with so much slime we could no longer see the camouflage pattern.
We pinged a complex under the canopy not far from the Darién Gap and moved in for a close target recce, our bollocks and armpits stinging in the jungle heat. There was a heli pad, a processing plant, storerooms, a long, low-roofed Nissen hut where the coca paste was laid out on trestle tables to dry, and accommodation for the white-eyes – the Europeans and North Americans who took care of the chemistry – and the muscle.
Destroying the place wasn’t exactly going to bring the Medellín cartel to its knees, but our guys had enough PE4,
I fished out the Samsung and tried each of my new SIM cards in turn, selecting the network with the best signal, and tapped its number under ‘A’ in my iPhone address book. There was plenty of room for it. I never kept anyone’s contact details. The few I needed were already safely tucked away inside my head, and I didn’t need to advertise them. Old habits died hard.
I’d always thought these mountain refuges were brilliant. Some of them were originally constructed for itinerant workers during the Industrial Revolution. Now they offered shelter to dickheads like me and Trev if we took the trouble to find them on the map before setting out – or bumped into them by accident when we’d somehow managed to dig ourselves out of the shit.
We’d celebrated our escape that night by carving our initials into the mortar beside the chimney, as you do when you’re a thoughtless little prick who’s glad to be alive, but someone had got busy with the Polyfilla and whitewash long since, and covered them over.
As I sat and listened to the swollen stream cascading over the rocks outside, I wondered which route Trev had chosen for today, and what had made him so jumpy that he couldn’t just meet for a brew in Hereford.
6
Trev was a bit excitable at times, but he didn’t fuck about. And he was always there when you needed him. Before the Gulf we’d mooched around in Colombia together. In the late eighties and early nineties it had been responsible for providing the lion’s share of America’s multi-billion-dollar cocaine supply, and for fuelling a fearsome percentage of indigenous fatalities. The year we went, there were three thousand drug-related killings in one town alone – which was why the locals were almost as keen to nail the cartels as the DEA was.
A bunch of us had piled into a Hercules C130 and headed down there via Newfoundland. Once we were in country, we debussed into cattle trucks.
Our initial task was to train the Colombian militia, then to help them wipe out as many drug-manufacturing plants as we could ID and locate. Since it took two hundred kilos of leaves to produce one kilo of coca paste, the DMPs were thrown up as close as possible to the growing areas.
They were mostly hidden in jungle, heavily guarded, and crisscrossed by tunnels and escape routes, but our biggest obstacles were corruption and wholesale slaughter. A 12,000 per cent markup from production cost to street value buys a lot of informers, and in a world where you were either on the payroll or dead, fully operational DMPs had more often than not turned into ghost towns by the time we got to them.
Fair one. We were just visiting; the militia had to live there. We didn’t have to worry about our wives being raped and killed, and our kids being hosed down on the way to school. We had to become more proactive, and strike without warning.
Me and Trev spent weeks on hard routine, kitten-crawling through the undergrowth with a bunch of lads who all seemed to be called José or Miguel, coated with cam cream and mozzie rep, sweat leaking from every pore. Our combats were covered with so much slime we could no longer see the camouflage pattern.
We pinged a complex under the canopy not far from the Darién Gap and moved in for a close target recce, our bollocks and armpits stinging in the jungle heat. There was a heli pad, a processing plant, storerooms, a long, low-roofed Nissen hut where the coca paste was laid out on trestle tables to dry, and accommodation for the white-eyes – the Europeans and North Americans who took care of the chemistry – and the muscle.
Destroying the place wasn’t exactly going to bring the Medellín cartel to its knees, but our guys had enough PE4,
Similar Books
The Vespertine
Saundra Mitchell
The Alpha Prime Commander
Kelly Lucille
The Strong Silent Type
Marie Ferrarella
Big Pete (Privateer Tales Book 4)
Jamie McFarlane
Cheryl Reavis
The Bartered Bride
White Sister
Stephen J. Cannell
The Shadow Queen
Bertrice Small
Beautiful Bedlam
Ali Harper
Legacy
Jeanette Baker