Levine Triangle of Death

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9852386-3-6
Verlag: Sentac Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 560 Seiten

From the man 60 Minutes called 'America's top undercover cop' comes a gripping companion to his bestselling books, Deep Cover and The Big White Lie. Drawing on the most dangerous deep cover assignment of his DEA career, TRIANGLE OF DEATH, is a mystery/thriller that takes the reader undercover on the international hunt for those responsible for the torture and murder of his former partner. Publisher's Weekly said TRIANGLE OF DEATH was 'as mean and rapid-fire as dope dealer's Uzi.' New York Times called it 'compellingly authentic.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levine, Michael

Leseproben

1

POSITOS, ARGENTINA

The day I got sucked into the events chronicled here, events that should have ended civilization as most of us know it, I was in a place the Argentines called Positos— a place I called Hell.

The town of Positos was a scattered sprawl of crumbling adobe and cinder block structures beneath a barren ridge of the Andes on Argentina’s northern border with Bolivia. It had one semipaved street, about a block long, in the middle of which sat a decaying combination hotel, bar, restaurant, called La Mujer—the Woman—as a reminder to travelers who knew the place, that there, weren’t any there. At the end of this street stood the only reason for the town’s existence—a decrepit bridge over a dry riverbed that quietly acknowledged the border crossing.

Few maps show Positos. No one goes there out of choice.

Even though I figure that whatever I did to deserve being sent to Positos was my own fault and that the same could be said for all the tragedy that followed, I still feel that my derelict father should bear some of the blame.

My father was an ex-boxer, a very street kind of guy who abandoned my mom, my brother, and me in the South Bronx to pursue a career as a Miami loan shark. Dad—who married and divorced six times—was not too successful at being either a loan shark or a father. But the last time I saw him, when I was thirteen years old, he did leave me with what you might call a legacy.

“Son,” he said, “always remember this: If somebody’s gonna beat the shit outta you—get their dinner off you— you gotta make sure you get your breakfast. You fucking hurt ’em. Make ’em pay a price. If you don’t get your breakfast, they’re just gonna keep gettin’ their dinner off you. You hurt ’em, they’re gonna look to get it off somebody else, somebody who don’t fight back. Nobody fucks with a guy who gets his breakfast.”

I guess had he told me those words when I was a little older and understood the ways of the world a little better, they might not have affected me as much as they did. My old man had programmed me to fight back even when any sane person would’ve waved a big white flag. Basically— and I have to admit this—he had created some kind of a kamikaze nut. Not the kind of guy who gets along very well in a government bureaucracy.

I had worked undercover for a couple of years to bust a particularly deadly group of drug dealers. The only problem was that the CIA claimed that their freedom was important to national security. The dopers were released, all charges were dropped—including ones for the murders of a journalist and a half-dozen witnesses—and I was told to just keep my mouth shut, that “our government has other priorities.” I didn’t like the answer.

I could hear my father’s voice: Hey, these guys just got their dinner off you. So I decided to fight back. I wrote memos. I complained. I threatened to go to the media. This brought my already plunging popularity with the suits and political hacks who run DEA, to an all-time low.

So the suits decided to show me what an insignificant flea I really was and how easily I could be swatted. In December of the preceding year, after twenty years of working deep cover assignments from Bangkok to Bogota, they yanked me off active duty and sent me to Positos on an indefinite assignment. Meanwhile, in the States, the shooflies investigated every piece of paper I’d ever signed as a government agent—every expense voucher, every report, every leave slip—to see if there was any reason they could jail or fire me. And while they kept me in Positos there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, but wait.

Typical of my life, though, unexpected changes were about to happen.

“Lay-vee-nay. Like the Wild West, no?” said Colonel Adolfo Martenz in English. A hot gusty wind buffeted us as he limped ahead of me, trim and wiry in his olive-green uniform and spit-shined combat boots, toward the middle of what was called the Positos International Bridge.

Adolfo always walked either ahead of me or behind me. Partners cover each other from front and behind. Side-by-side is vulnerable. An intelligence officer who had survived two ambushes—one by political terrorists, the other by Bolivian cocaine traffickers—would think that way.

“Pretty good, Adolfo,” I said. It was about the third or fourth time in the five years I’d known him that he’d spoken to me in English.

“You sound a little like Clint Eastwood.”

Adolfo didn’t crack a smile. As he walked his right hand brushed the handle of his Smith & Wesson Model 460 in its hand-tooled western holster, the only gift he’d ever accepted from a gringo—me. He loved American westerns and hated Americans. Actually, I wasn’t sure what he thought of me, other than that he owed me big time and that both of us were uncomfortable with that debt—a debt he took as seriously as the U.S. betrayal of Argentina during the Falklands war in 1982—and that was serious business.

Adolfo was born shortly after the end of World War II, which put him in his early forties—a year or two younger than me. His German family escaped the Nazi hunters by running to Buenos Aires, while mine escaped the death camps by running to the Bronx. There were a lot of kids in Argentina who’d been named Adolfo after Der Führer. I doubted that any of them would want to owe his life to a Jew.

Earlier that day Adolfo had made a seven-hour surprise trip from his office in Buenos Aires, by plane and helicopter, just to have a drink with me. Or so he said. But I knew better. The head of the Covert Intelligence Unit of Argentina’s 27,000-man Gendarmeria National—border police—didn’t sweat without a good reason. And as was Adolfo’s way, he would let me know what it was when he was good and ready.

Adolfo paused beneath the blowtorch sun, leaned his back on the rail, and considered the procession of grim-faced Indian women in heavy layers of colored skirts and black bowler hats as they slow-shuffled their way across the bridge from Bolivia to Argentina.

“There’s the enemy,” said Adolfo. “Every one of these women is carrying coca leaf.”

“Hey, that’s no joke, Adolfo. My report goes right to the North American Congress. I’m going to tell them how you’re helping to protect all the kids in the South Bronx from the white death. They might even put your statue in the Bronx Zoo.”

The fact was, the Indians were the official reason I was there. Chewing the leaf from which cocaine is made had been in their culture for thousands of years, yet they were counted, in statistical reports to Congress, among America’s worst enemies—drug smugglers. The suits claimed they wanted me to make an assessment of how much coca leaf trafficking was going on between Bolivia and Argentina, as if this would really have some effect on kids living in America.

Reality didn’t mean shit anymore. After twenty years, I had finally decided I was through fighting. I had two kids in the States to support and alimony to pay, and Keith, my oldest, was a rookie New York City cop. It wouldn’t look too great if his dad was fired or prosecuted.

Martenz eyed me with his almost colorless gray eyes.

“Did you ever consider what your bosses might do if they really get fed up with you, Lay-vee-nay?”

“Yeah, send me to Positos.”

Martenz shook his head in purse-lipped silence, which was his way of laughing. I’d never even seen him smile. I wondered whether he had always been that way.

Five years earlier he had just been promoted to the position of chief of the Covert Intelligence Division of Argentina’s Gendarmeria Nacional—one of the most powerful military police officials in the country. As DEA’s Country Attaché to Argentina, I was assigned to win him over, to put him on an American payroll—by any means possible.

Our having a man of Martenz’s position in our pocket meant he would do Black Ops for us: illegal wiretaps, bugging, kidnapping, torture, assassinations—whatever was needed. After all, they were killing off their own people by the thousands for politics; imagine what they would do for money.

Every spy in the American embassy wanted a piece of Martenz—DEA, DIA, FBI, State Department Security, the CIA with a black budget big enough to buy Manhattan Island back from Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley couldn’t even get a meeting with him. The CIA station chief, Forrest Gregg, a man who would have sacrificed a thousand Cambodian virgins to put Martenz on his payroll, was astounded when the colonel granted me, a “DEA cowboy,” a courtesy visit.

“Keeping drugs out of Argentina,” Martenz told me on the phone, “is a personal interest of mine.”

Gregg—rare for a CIA station chief—was friendly toward me. He let me know that Martenz was recuperating from an auto accident. His wife and two children had been killed, Martenz had been driving. “He’s an odd duck,” Gregg had said, which to me meant that the Agency had gotten nowhere with him. “Just keep me up-to-date if you make any progress.”

There was nothing to report. Martenz was not a man who could be bought or conned in any way. To get a man in your pocket you had to offer him a choice between a hammer over his head or a pocketful of money. Plata o plomo, as the Mexican dopers say—silver or lead. Some scared easier than others and some sold out cheaper. But a man who has suffered the loss of his children has no fear of death—his children are already there. And the only thing in heaven or on earth that can buy him—that he...