The Avenger got the biggest definition maps he could find and blew them up even larger. Right at the bottom of the lizard-shaped isthmus of land that links North and South America, the broad mass of the South begins with Colombia to the west and Venezuela dead centre.
East of Venezuela lie the four Guianas. First is the former British Guiana, now called just Guyana. Next comes former Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. Farthest east is French Guiana, home of Devil's Island and the story of Papillon, now home to Kourou, the European space-launch complex. Sandwiched between Suriname and the French territory, Dexter found the triangle of jungle that was once Spanish Guiana, named, post-independence, San Martin.
Further research revealed it was regarded as the last of the true banana republics, ruled by a brutal military dictator, ostracised, poor, squalid, and malarial, the sort of place where money could buy a bucket of protection.
A week into August, the Piper Cheyenne II flew along the coast at a sedate 1,250 feet, high enough not to arouse too much suspicion as little more than an executive proceeding from Suriname to French Guiana, but just low enough to allow good photography.
Chartered out of the airport at Georgetown, Guyana, the Piper's twelve-hundred-mile range would take it just over the French border and back home again. The client, whose passport revealed him as U. S. citizen Alfred Barnes, now purported to be a developer of vacation resorts looking for possible locations. The Guyanese pilot privately thought he would pay not to vacation in San Martin, but who was he to turn down a perfectly good charter, paid for in dollars?
As requested, he kept the Piper just offshore, so that his passenger, sitting in the right-hand copilot seat could keep his zoom lens ready for use out of the window if occasion arose.
After Suriname, and its border the Commini River, dropped away, there were no suitable sandy beaches for miles. The coast was a tangle of mangrove, creeping through brown, snakeinfested water from the jungle to the sea. They passed over the capital, San Martin City, asleep in the blazing soggy heat.
The only beach was east of the city, at La Bahia, but that was the reserved resort of the rich and powerful of San Martin, basically the dictator and his friends. At the end of the republic, ten miles short of the banks of the Maroni River and the start of French Guiana, was El Punto. A triangular peninsula, like a shark's tooth jutting from the land into the sea, protected from the landward side by a sierra or cordillera of mountains from coast to coast, bisected by a single track over a single mountain pass. But it was inhabited.
The pilot had never been this far east, so the peninsula was, to him, simply a coastal triangle on his nav-maps. He could see there was a kind of defended estate down there. His passenger began to take photographs. Dexter was using a 35mm Nikon F5 with a motor drive that would give him five frames a second and get through his roll in seven seconds to change film, but he absolutely could not afford to start circling.
He was set for a very fast shutter speed, due to the aircraft vibration, which at any slower than five hundred per second would cause blurring. With 400 ASA film and his aperture set at F8, it was the best he could do.
On the first pass he got the mansion on the tip of the peninsula, with its protective wall and huge gate, plus the fields being tended by estate workers; rows of barns and farm buildings; and the chain-link fencing that separated the fields from the cluster of cuboid white cabanas that seemed to be the workers' village.
Several people looked up, and he saw two in uniform start to run. Then they were over the estate and heading for French territory. On the pass back, he had the pilot fly inland so that from the right-hand seat he could see the estate from the landward angle. He was looking down from the peaks of the sierra at the estate running away to the mansion and the sea, but there was a guard in the mountain pass below the Piper who took its number. He used up his second roll on the private airstrip running along the base of the hills, shooting the residences, workshops, and the main hangar. There was a tractor pulling a twin-engined executive jet into the hanger and out of sight. The tailfin was almost gone. Dexter got one brief look at the fin before it was enveloped in the shadows. The number was P4-ZEM.
21 The jesuit
Paul Devereaux, for all that he was confident the FBI would not be allowed to dismantle his Project Peregrine, was perturbed by the acrimonious meeting with Colin Fleming. He underestimated neither the other man's intelligence, influence, or passion. What worried him was the threat of delay.
After two years at the helm of a project so secret that it was known only to CIA director George Tenet and White House antiterrorist expert Richard Clarke, he was close, enticingly close, to springing the trap he had moved heaven and earth to create.
The target was simply called UBL. This was because the whole intelligence community in Washington spelled the man's first name, Usama, using the letter U rather than the O favoured by the media.
By the summer of 2001, that entire community was obsessed by and convinced of a forthcoming act of war by UBL against the United States. Ninety percent thought the onslaught would come against a major U.S. interest outside America; only 10 percent could envisage a successful attack inside the territorial United States.
The obsession ran through all the agencies, but mostly through the antiterrorist departments of the CIA and the FBI. Here the intention was to discover what UBL had in mind and then prevent it.
Regardless of presidential edict 12333 forbidding "wet jobs," Paul Devereaux was not trying to prevent UBL; he was trying to kill him. Early on in his career, the scholar from Boston College had realised that advancement inside the company would depend on some form of specialisation. In his younger days, in the blaze of Vietnam and the Cold War, most debutantes had chosen the Soviet Division. The enemy was clearly the USSR; the language to be learned was Russian. The corridors became crowded. Devereaux chose the Arab world and the wider study of Islam. He was regarded as crazy.
He turned his formidable intellect to mastering Arabic until he could virtually pass for an Arab, and studied Islam to the level of a Koranic scholar. His vindication came on Christmas Day 1979; the USSR invaded a place called Afghanistan and most of the agents inside CIA headquarters at Langley were reaching for their maps.
Devereaux revealed that apart from Arabic, he spoke reasonable Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and had a knowledge of Pashto, spoken by the tribesmen throughout Pakistan 's Northwest Frontier and into Afghanistan.
His career really took off. He was one of the first to argue that the USSR had bitten off far more than it knew; that Afghan tribes would not concede any foreign occupation; that Soviet atheism offended their fanatical Islam; that with U. S. material help, a fierce mountain-based resistance could be fomented that would eventually bleed white Gen. Boris Gromov's Fortieth Army.
Before it was over, quite a bit had changed. The Mujehadin had indeed sent more than twenty-five thousand Russian recruits back home in caskets; the occupation army, despite the infliction of hideous atrocities on the Afghans, had seen their grip pried loose and their morale gutted.
It was a combination of Afghanistan and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev that between them put the USSR on the final skid toward dissolution and ended the Cold War. Paul Devereaux had switched from Analysis to Ops, and with Milt Bearden had helped distribute one billion dollars a year of U. S. guerrilla hardware to the "mountain fighters."