Arauca: A Novel of Colombia Read online

  1330, Monday, 8 July

  Monroe Corporation, Colombia Headquarters

  El Dorado Airport

  Bogota, Colombia

  A glass wall faced the runway so that each office could view the aircraft taking off and landing. Sunlight normally bathed the area. But the morning sun had given way to an afternoon drizzling rain, so the office seemed more like a funeral home, hushed and dark. George Allen stood in the shelter of the second story smoking porch drinking his coffee and watching it rain. He puffed on his Cuban cigar and noted with detachment as the secretaries and managers moved around almost like zombies, lost in their grief over Pete’s death. Pete had been with the program over 12 years. Some here even remembered him from the beginning days when the operation was based in Lima, Peru.

  George only knew him for the last five years, and never that well. Besides, George learned in the Army to insulate himself from the death and injury that accompanied Special Forces operations. Several of his teammates perished in helicopter crashes, fire fights, and training accidents. Dozens more had been injured on parachute jumps and during hostage rescue simulations.

  The rest of the office managers and secretaries, however, were not used to losing anyone. The ERAD operation had only lost five pilots over the twelve years of operations. Those were pretty good odds, as far as George could see. Especially considering that the spray pilots all made over a hundred grand a year--and most of it tax-free. Even so, it was always bad to lose a man.

  George knew the ETA of Beethoven from the position report on the half-hour, so he went to the balcony to watch it come in. George never tired of seeing aircraft approach and land. Beethoven was the nickname of the C-27 transport aircraft that rotated the crews in and out of the forward bases. The crews rotated every two weeks. Rotations were staggered over different days so that, while there were over 400 contractors working on the two projects, there was never a need to move more than thirty personnel at one time.

  That morning, when George first heard the news about the crash and the bullet hits, his neck hairs prickled up. Then the call from Ann Snyder brought up the slight nausea.

  From the days of jungle fighting in San Salvador, he knew to trust that hunch. Something was rotten. So, he called Larandia and talked with the pilots involved before they loaded up for the flight home. He called on the land line, trusting it more than his cell phone. He first interviewed the OV-10 pilots who were hit. The spray pilots saw nothing, just heard the thumps when they got hit. When he got Pup, the SAR helicopter pilot, on the phone, and heard his story, George became even more worried.

  “No shooters? You didn’t see no shooters?” George had asked.

  “No, George, for the third time, nobody was there. It was like…puff!…And they were gone. We could see the smoke and some tracers from all the shooting. Judging from the number of tracers, there must have been 40 shooters. By the time we got over there, less than three minutes, everyone had vanished into the bush.”

  “Now, where exactly were they?” George inquired. “On the south edge of the field?”

  “Oh, no. They were a good two hundred meters or more before the spray run started.” Now George really felt uncomfortable.

  Afterwards, he studied his notes, trying to make some sense of the episode other than what he suspected. The SAR pilot had been a Cobra gunship pilot in Viet Nam. He knew his stuff, and would not be rattled by a firefight. A less experienced pilot might have flown to the wrong place. But this guy had the spots where he saw the fire. And he would know how to search the area for the shooters. This was a professional job, not just a bunch of farmers trying to protect their crop of coca.

  George took a deep breath though his nose and got up from his desk. He strolled down the hall and into the office of the new site manager, Ken Whitworth. One of the few people who could go directly to the site manager with a problem, George tapped on the door and walked inside. The office suited the leader of one of the largest aerial operations in the world: opulent furniture, original paintings, and a large wall filled with diplomas, citations, pictures with presidents, and letters of appreciation. Scattered around the room artifacts and mementos spoke of other operations in Pakistan, Peru, and Angola.

  “Sir, I been talking with the people at Larandia who were flying today’s mission,” George said measuring his words. “I believe that we have an intel problem. Someone’s got to be passing coordinates to the FARC for our aircraft to be getting so many hits.”

  “Now, George, don’t you think that you are just jumping to conclusions?” Ken Whitworth was a political animal who understood the explosiveness of his security chief’s statement. He leaned back in his large leather chair.

  George knew the risk he was taking. There was a good chance that Whitworth and Washington would blame him and perhaps even fire him as scapegoat without ever trying to plug the leak.

  “No sir, I don’t. I know what it takes to shoot down an aircraft. Those gunners have got to be pre-positioned to get that many hits on one pass.”

  “I think you’re just overwrought. All of us loved Pete.” A long pause as Keith looked out the window. “But you are the Security Chief, and if you think that you need to spend some time on this, go ahead. It won’t do a bit of harm to recheck our internal security.”

  No one in management wanted to admit that they had a security leak. That would make them look bad to Monroe and the State Department, like admitting that they had venereal disease. George saw this mentality in the military, especially in Third World militaries, but never as bad as in this office. For the last year, George had been trying to get management to tighten up on operational security, encrypt emails, and convert to secure fax machines. Just normal stuff, but they resisted. It was inevitable that something like this was going to happen.

  George waited for Beethoven because one of the men on board was the MDIS puke for the last rotation. The Multi-Spectral Digital Imagery System was the type of camera mounted in the Cessna Caravan. This camera took images of the coca fields, and the coordinates were taken and used to plot the spray paths for the crop dusters. MDIS (pronounced “Em-Dis”) had become the common name for the department. The man rotating out today aboard Beethoven was responsible for loading those coordinates onto cards for each aircraft, and downloading the data after the missions for transmission to the main office at Patrick Air Force Base. Perhaps he could shed some light on any weaknesses in the system and where they had been compromised.

  ******

  The noise aboard Beethoven assaulted Gerald Minor. He hated the loud aircraft. Everyone else aboard read, slept, or even tried to carry on a conversation above the din. The racket was the worst part of the job. Just off of the airstrip, his office vibrated with the constant roar of engines being rigged for max power and the wup-whup of rotor blades being tracked and balanced. The ear piercing whines and the pounding thumps almost drove him to quit several times in the past few months. But he couldn’t quit. He had to support his mother. And he knew what the job market was like back in the states for a mediocre student who had majored in geography.

  He lowered his head between his knees and hoped than no one aboard could see him weeping. Pete had been his best friend. Maybe because both of them were short and slight. Maybe because Pete reminded him of his father. Oh, God, it was all my fault. It was never supposed to come to this. The armor was supposed to protect the pilots. They were only going to scare the pilots off from spraying their crops. Sobs wracked him. Pete should have been sitting right next to him on this rotation home. He felt the comforting arm of one of the spray pilots on his back, and he quieted down.

  How could I have gotten in so deep, so fast?

  Gerald Minor, a slim, short young man of 26, grew up in eastern Nebraska where his parents were farmers. Poor at sports and never popular with the girls, he hated high school. Using all of his parent’s savings, he graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in geography. He picked geography because he thought it would be easy.
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  “Just graduate,” his father had said. “It doesn’t matter what your degree is in; these big companies are going to train you anyway. You just need a college degree.”

  Boy, had he been wrong. After graduation, there were no jobs. He couldn’t even get an interview with the big guys like Microsoft, IBM, Honeywell, Exxon, or Boeing. They were all looking for computer science grads, business majors, engineers, and science nerds. He knew that he had to find something or go back to the farm. Love of the ocean and hatred of the cold motivated Gerald to move to Florida and take a job as a manager trainee at a Taco Bell in Satellite Beach, Florida.

  He made surprisingly good money as the assistant manager at Taco Bell. Plus, he could walk across the street from his tiny rent house and go surfing almost every afternoon. One day, a surfing buddy, J.B., told Gerald about his job mapping coca fields in Colombia.

  “How do you get so much time off?” Gerald asked.

  “I work two weeks on, two weeks off, taking pictures from an airplane over Colombia.” J.B. judged the gap in traffic on Highway A1A, and jetted across, carrying his long board under his left arm.

  When Gerald caught up with him, he waited a moment to let a bikini-clad beauty pass, and then asked, “What are you taking pictures of?”

  “Well, we make maps of the areas where they grow coca so the spray planes can go and kill it,” he said with a huge smile.

  “Coca? What’s coca?”

  “That’s the plant they use to make cocaine.”

  “I know about maps. My degree is in geography. Do you guys use ArcView?” Gerald asked.

  “Yeah! You know ArcView? We need you, man. We’re really short right now. You know my office is just up the street. Why don’t you apply?”

  Monroe Corporation offered Gerald nearly twice his current salary to rotate every two weeks to Colombia. His parents were delighted that he was finally going to use his degree, and “make something of himself”.

  After being on the job for just two rotations, the news of his father’s death at 52 due to a heart attack devastated Gerald. Apparently his father had the attack while plowing on his tractor. He called 911 on his cell phone, but the ambulance was over half an hour from the field. His father died soon after the ambulance arrived. To Gerald, an only child, his mother and father were not just his parents; they were his best friends as he was growing up. He never had the rebellious times that most teens experience. He worked and hunted with his father, his mother taught him how to cook, and they took vacations together to Florida every Christmas.

  Gerald got two weeks bereavement leave from Monroe, and he went home to Nebraska to bury his father and move his mom into town. His mother was stoic when her husband died, like so many other farm women over the centuries. She also had her own plan.

  “Son, I want to go right on living out here on the farm. I’m planning to die in this house.”

  “But Mom, you’ll be so much closer to church and all your friends.”

  “No Son. I’m staying right here.”

  “There’s no way that you can farm eight hundred acres by yourself, Mom.”

  “I was hoping that you would come home and run the farm, Son. Find a nice girl at church and settle down.” She reached out and put her arm on his shoulder, staring hard into his eyes. Gerald could not hold his mother’s gaze, and looked down and to his right.

  Having tasted freedom and life in Florida, Gerald knew he could never live in Nebraska again.

  “I can’t, Mom. I’ve got a job and house, and a life in Florida. I’m sorry.”

  When he looked up from the floor, his mother was smiling at him.

  “I know, Son. I’m proud of you.” Then she hugged him, and they cried in each other’s arms.

  After the funeral, Gerald went through his father’s books and papers. From what he could decipher from the handwritten ledger sheets, his father was in a deep mess. He borrowed money to buy equipment several years before, and he had been unable to pay it back. Furthermore, he borrowed more money each year to cover operating losses. It seemed he was behind on all his bills. There were collection letters, and the check register showed that he was only paying portions of his car payment, silo storage fees, and feed bills.

  Finally, Gerald found what he was looking for: the life insurance policy. The face value was only 500,000 dollars, but it was enough to pay off all debts and give his mother a little to put in the bank. Calling the toll-free number, Gerald told them that his father had died, and asked to speak to the appropriate person.

  “Claims Service,” the sweet voice said.

  “I’m calling because my father died.”

  “We’re so sorry for your loss. Could you give me the policy number?”

  Gerald heard her typing the number into her computer. Then a long silence.

  “That policy is for Adrian Minor?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m sorry Mr. Minor. Your father ceased paying premiums on that policy over a year ago. We have a letter in our file that we sent out to him on Oct 23, warning him to make a payment within 10 days or we would have to cancel the policy. Our notes show that we followed up with a phone call. Your father said that it was just impossible to make a premium payment at that time.”

  Gerald had argued, pleaded, and talked with a manager. But his father had not kept the life insurance current.

  “Thank you,” Gerald said. Now what am I going to do?

  Gerald told his mother that there was no life insurance, but that he would handle it. The next morning he drove to Norfolk, Nebraska, the nearest town with any shopping, and the home office of the bank that held his father’s notes.

  “Mr. Minor, I’ve been expecting you,” said Mr. Shipley, the surprisingly young man who was the bank president.

  “So sorry to hear about your father.” Blonde, handsome, and thirty-four years old, he was dressed in khaki pants with a light blue button down, long-sleeved shirt with no tie. Standard business attire for this community.

  “Yes, thank you. Mr. Shipley, I’ve come to see about restructuring my father’s debts.”

  “I just happen to have his file right here,” Shipley said smoothly. “Mr. Minor, your father has been delinquent several times on this loan. I have continued to extend credit for the last three years, but I told your father that this was the last year. He had to make a crop, or I would be forced to foreclose on the farm. I cannot restructure the debt again. My board has made it clear that I need to get this loan back into a regular paying status or I must foreclose.”

  Gerald saw the greed flash in the eyes of the banker. Why, you son of a bitch. You want to take our farm! A $450,000 loan on a farm worth over two million dollars, not counting the house.

  “I know that your father let his life insurance lapse,” Shipley continued, on a roll. But we allowed that due to the collateral of the farm, the house, and his equipment. So, Mr. Minor, we must have this month’s payment plus last month’s, or we will have to foreclose.”

  Gerald stood up, walked out of the office, and went outside and sat in his car. His mind churned. Four hundred acres of farmland and four hundred in pasture for cattle, his father’s beautiful house, built during the good years, and all of the tractors, implements and tools. That slimy bastard wants it all. That is my inheritance. The more he thought about it, the angrier he got.

  No wonder my father had a heart attack. Having to work under all this pressure, plus deal with that shark at the bank. Dad never told Mom anything, just that they couldn’t afford a new car this year. All those problems bottled up inside must have caused the stress that brought on the heart attack. He cursed and slammed his fist against the steering wheel. I’ll pay off that slimeball banker if it is the last thing I ever do.

  For the first time in his life, Gerald felt needed, alive, and focused. The numbing grief for his father retreated for a while as he planned his campaign against this evil banker. His father owed just under $450,000. Each time the bank had refinanced, they ha
d bumped his interest rate up. So, now the monthly payment stood at $3,758.00. Gerald earned just over $4,500 a month after taxes. He would just have to make the payments until he could refinance to a lower interest rate. His mother could live by renting out the land to other farmers. He could work at Taco Bell on his two weeks off to augment his salary.

  But how was he going to get $7,516.00 plus late fees? He didn’t have enough money in savings, and the interest was too high to take a cash advance on his credit cards. What about his bank? They were always sending flyers in his statement saying that he was pre-approved for a personal loan. It was 110 miles to Omaha, and they had a branch of his bank there. He would drive to Omaha and get the money for the payments out of his bank.

  A few calls on his cell phone, and he had the address of the bank. An hour and a half later, he parked, and walked into the lobby. Having called ahead, the loan officer was waiting for him. He filled out a short loan application. They confirmed his good credit, the $1,781.07 in his checking account, and the $4,457.90 in his savings account. A phone call to Monroe Human Resources Department confirmed his employment. In a total of 41 minutes, Gerald walked out to his car with a cashier’s check for $10,000 dollars. The interest was a reasonable 7.25 percent, but he had to pledge his savings account until the loan was paid down below $5,000.

  Now just after noon, he sped back to his father’s bank in Norfolk, and deposited the cashier’s check before the 2 p.m. cutoff. He walked past the protesting secretary and went right into Shipley’s office.

  “I got the money for the payments,” he said angrily, pointing his finger at the bank president. "It’s in my father’s account. I suppose you can draft out the payments, or do I need to go home and get a check.”