The Shooters Read online

  THE

  SHOOTERS

  ALSO BY W. E. B. GRIFFIN

  HONOR BOUND

  HONOR BOUND

  BLOOD AND HONOR

  SECRET HONOR

  BROTHERHOOD OF WAR

  BOOK I: THE LIEUTENANTS

  BOOK II: THE CAPTAINS

  BOOK III: THE MAJORS

  BOOK IV: THE COLONELS

  BOOK V: THE BERETS

  BOOK VI: THE GENERALS

  BOOK VII: THE NEW BREED

  BOOK VIII: THE AVIATORS

  BOOK IX: SPECIAL OPS

  THE CORPS

  BOOK I: SEMPER FI

  BOOK II: CALL TO ARMS

  BOOK III: COUNTERATTACK

  BOOK IV: BATTLEGROUND

  BOOK V: LINE OF FIRE

  BOOK VI: CLOSE COMBAT

  BOOK VII: BEHIND THE LINES

  BOOK VIII: IN DANGER’S PATH

  BOOK IX: UNDER FIRE

  BOOK X: RETREAT, HELL!

  PRESIDENTIAL AGENT

  BOOK I: BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT

  BOOK II: THE HOSTAGE

  BOOK III: THE HUNTERS

  BADGE OF HONOR

  BOOK I: MEN IN BLUE

  BOOK II: SPECIAL OPERATIONS

  BOOK III: THE VICTIM

  BOOK IV: THE WITNESS

  BOOK V: THE ASSASSINS

  BOOK VI: THE MURDERERS

  BOOK VII: THE INVESTIGATORS

  BOOK VIII: FINAL JUSTICE

  MEN AT WAR

  BOOK I: THE LAST HEROES

  BOOK II: THE SECRET WARRIORS

  BOOK III: THE SOLDIER SPIES

  BOOK IV: THE FIGHTING AGENTS

  BOOK V: THE SABOTEURS (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  BOOK VI: THE DOUBLE AGENTS (with William E. Butterworth IV)

  THE SHOOTERS

  W.E.B. GRIFFIN

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  NEW YORK

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by W. E. B. Griffin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Griffin, W. E. B.

  The shooters / W. E. B. Griffin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-1533-3

  1. United States. Army. Delta Force—Fiction. 2. Undercover operations—Fiction.

  3. Drug dealers—Uruguay—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R489137S47 2008 2007038587

  813'.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  * * *

  26 July 1777

  The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged.

  George Washington

  General and Commander in Chief

  The Continental Army

  * * *

  FOR THE LATE

  WILLIAM E. COLBY

  An OSS Jedburgh first lieutenant

  who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  AARON BANK

  An OSS Jedburgh first lieutenant

  who became a colonel and the father of Special Forces.

  WILLIAM R. CORSON

  A legendary Marine intelligence officer

  whom the KGB hated more than any other U.S. intelligence officer—

  and not only because he wrote the definitive work on them.

  FOR THE LIVING

  BILLY WAUGH

  A legendary Special Forces Command Sergeant Major

  who retired and then went on to hunt down the infamous Carlos the Jackal.

  Billy could have terminated Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s

  but could not get permission to do so. After fifty years in

  the business, Billy is still going after the bad guys.

  RENÉ J. DÉFOURNEAUX

  A U.S. Army OSS Second Lieutenant attached to the British SOE

  who jumped into Occupied France alone and later

  became a legendary U.S. Army counterintelligence officer.

  JOHNNY REITZEL

  An Army Special Operations officer

  who could have terminated the head terrorist of the seized cruise ship

  Achille Lauro but could not get permission to do so.

  RALPH PETERS

  An Army intelligence officer

  who has written the best analysis of our war against terrorists

  and of our enemy that I have ever seen.

  AND FOR THE NEW BREED

  MARC L

  A senior intelligence officer who, despite his youth,

  reminds me of Bill Colby more and more each day.

  FRANK L

  A legendary Defense Intelligence Agency officer

  who retired and now follows in Billy Waugh’s footsteps.

  OUR NATION OWES ALL OF THESE PATRIOTS

  A DEBT BEYOND REPAYMENT.

  I

  [ONE]

  Airport Highway

  Asunción, Paraguay

  1625 25 August 2005

  When Byron J. Timmons, Jr., saw what was causing the airport-bound traffic to be stopped and backed up for at least a kilometer, he muttered an obscenity that was absolutely not appropriate for an assistant legal attaché of the embassy of the United States of America.

  The twenty-nine-year-old—who was six feet one and weighed two hundred five pounds—had a reservation on the Aerolíneas Argentinas five-thirty flight to Buenos Aires and it looked to him to be entirely likely that these bastards were going to make him miss it.

  Timmons looked at the driver of his embassy vehicle, a lightly armored Chevrolet TrailBlazer.

 
Franco Julio César—a quiet thirty-nine-year-old Paraguayan national who was employed as a chauffeur by the U.S. embassy—was silently shaking his head in frustration. He, too, knew what was going on.

  These bastards were officers of the Paraguayan Highway Police and they were running a roadblock. There was a Highway Police car and a Peugeot van on the shoulder. The van had a sliding side door—now open—so that it could serve as sort of a mobile booking station. Inside was a small desk behind which sat a booking sergeant. He would decide whether the miscreant caught by the roadblock would be simply given a summons or hauled away in handcuffs.

  There were three police forces in Paraguay. In addition to the Highway Police, which was run by the Minister of Public Works & Communication, the Minister of the Interior had a Capital Police Force, which patrolled Asunción, and a National Police Force, which patrolled the rest of the country.

  The opinion Timmons held of all three was as pejoratively vulgar as the obscenity he uttered when he saw the Highway Police roadblock. His opinion was based on his experiences with the various police forces since arriving in Paraguay, and his criterion for judgment was that he thought of himself as a cop.

  He actually had been a police officer, briefly, but the real reason he thought of himself as a cop was that that was what the Timmons family did—be cops.

  His paternal grandfather, Francis, used to say that he was one of the only two really honest cops on the job in Chicago. He refused to identify the other one.

  Francis and Mary-Margaret Timmons had five children, three boys and two girls. Two of the boys—Aloysius and Byron—went on the force. Francis Junior became a priest. Dorothy became Sister Alexandria. Elizabeth married a cop, Patrick Donnehy. Father Francis, who was assigned to Saint Rose of Lima’s, spent most of his time as a police chaplain.

  Aloysius and Joanne Timmons had four children, all boys. Three went on the force and one went in the Army. Byron and Helen Timmons had five children, three girls and two boys. Two of the girls married cops, and Matthew went on the force.

  Byron Junior skipped the third grade at Saint Rose’s, primarily because he was much larger than the other kids but also because the sisters understood that he already knew what they were going to teach him in the third grade—he never seemed to have his nose out of a book.

  The sisters also got him a scholarship to Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. His Uncle Francis and his mother were delighted. His grandfather and father were not. They quite irreverently agreed that The Goddamn Jesuits wanted him for the priesthood.

  At age sixteen, Junior, as he was known in the family, graduated from Cristo Rey with honors and without having felt the call to Holy Orders. He immediately became a Police Cadet, although you were supposed to be eighteen. Before the summer was over, the Society of Jesus reentered the picture.

  Loyola University (Chicago) was prepared to offer Junior, based on his academic record at Cristo Rey, a full scholarship. This time his father and grandfather disagreed. His father offered another quite irreverent opinion: that you had to admire those tenacious bastards; they never give up when they’re trying to grab some smart kid for their priesthood.

  His grandfather disagreed, and suggested that Junior had two options.

  One was to spend the next nearly four years in a gray cadet uniform riding in the backseat of a patrol car, or filing crap in a precinct basement someplace—he couldn’t even get into the academy until he was twenty years and six months old—or he could spend that time getting a college education on the Jesuits’ dime.

  For the next three years, Junior studied during the school year and returned to the police cadet program in the summers. On his graduation, cum laude, he immediately entered the police academy. Three months later, he was graduated from there and—with most of the family watching—became a sworn officer of the Chicago Police Department.

  He had been on the job doing what rookies do for six months when Grandfather Francis reentered the picture.

  “Go federal,” Grandpa advised. “The pay is better. Maybe the U.S. Marshals or even the Secret Service.”

  To which Byron—no longer universally known as “Junior” after he made good on a promise to knock his sister Ellen’s husband, Charley Mullroney, on his ass the next time he called him that—replied that he’d already looked into it, was thinking of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and going down that road, was really thinking of getting a law degree.

  He told his grandfather he’d talked to people at Loyola, and they not only were going to let him in the law school but had arranged for him a job as a rent-a-cop on campus. Christ knew he couldn’t go to college if he had to change shifts on the job every three months.

  Byron graduated, again with honors, and passed the bar examination on his first try. By then he had just turned twenty-eight and had seen enough of the FBI to decide that wasn’t for him. The Border Patrol looked interesting, but then he met a guy from the Drug Enforcement Administration whom his brother-in-law Charley Mullroney had been working with in Narcotics.

  Stanley Wyskowski said Byron was just the kind of guy the DEA was looking for. He’d been a cop, and he had a law degree, and he spoke passable Spanish.

  Actually, he spoke better than passable Spanish. He had the grammar down pat because he’d had Latin his last two years at Saint Rose’s and his first two at Cristo Rey, and then he’d had two years of Spanish at Cristo Rey—somebody had tipped him that if you had Latin, Spanish was the easiest language—and four more years of it at Loyola. And he had polished his colloquial Spanish with a young lady named María González, with whom he’d had an on-and-off carnal relationship for several years when he was at Loyola.

  Wyskowski said if Byron wanted, he’d ask his boss.

  Byron J. Timmons, Jr., entered the Federal Service two weeks later, as a GS-7. On his graduation from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, he received both his credentials as a Special Agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration and a promotion to GS-9, because of his law degree.

  He was initially assigned to Washington, D.C.—the DEA is part of the Department of Homeland Security—where, he understood, they wanted to have a look at him. Two months later, they offered him his choice of the Legal Section (which carried an almost automatic promotion to GS-11 after two years), or The Field.

  He had seen what was going on in the Legal Department—pushing papers held absolutely no appeal—so he chose The Field.

  That wasn’t the answer they wanted.

  They reminded him of the automatic promotion that came with the Legal Section, and told him that the only vacancies in The Field were in El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Mexico City, and Asunción, Paraguay. Timmons didn’t like the sound of El Paso, Mexico City, or Los Angeles, and had only the vaguest idea of where in hell Asunción, Paraguay, even was.

  So, when he said “Miami,” he was not very surprised that they sent him to Asunción, Paraguay. They were really pissed that he had turned down the Legal Section—twice.

  No regrets, though. He wanted to be a cop, not a lawyer preparing cases for prosecution by the Justice Department.

  Specifically, he wanted to be a drug cop.

  In Byron’s mind, there wasn’t much difference between a guy who did Murder One—roughly defined as with premeditation, or during the course of a Class One Felony, like armed robbery—and some guy who got a kid started on hard drugs. In both cases, a life was over.

  If there was a difference, in Byron’s mind it was that the drug bastards were the worse of the two. A murder victim, or some convenience store clerk, died right there. Tough, but it was over quick. It usually took a long time for a drug addict to die, and he almost always hooked a lot of other people before he did. If that wasn’t multiple murder, what was?

  Not to mention the pain a drug addict caused his family.

  Another difference was that dealing in prohibited substances—even for the clowns standing on a street corner peddling nickel bags of crack—paid a lot bett
er than sticking up a bank did.

  And that was the problem—money. It was bad in the States, where entirely too many cops went bad because they really couldn’t see the harm in looking the other way for fifteen minutes in exchange for a year’s pay, and it was even worse here.

  Byron knew too much about the job to think that when he came to Paraguay he personally was going to be able to shut off the flow of drugs, or even to slow it down very much. But he thought that he could probably cost the people moving the stuff a lot of money and maybe even send a few of them to the slam.

  He’d had some success—nothing that was going to see him named DEA Agent of the Year, or anything like that—but enough to know that he was earning his paycheck and making the bad guys hurt a little. Making them hurt a little was better than not making them hurt at all.

  And that was why he was pissed now that it looked like the goddamn Highway Police were going to make him miss his plane.

  He was going to Buenos Aires to see an Argentine cop he’d met. Truth being stranger than fiction, an Irish Argentine cop by the name of Liam Duffy. Duffy’s family had gone to Argentina at about the same time as Grandfather Francis’s parents had gone to the States.

  Duffy was a comandante (major) in the Gendarmería Nacional Argentina. They wore brown uniforms, not blue, and looked more like soldiers than cops. Most of the time they went around carrying 9mm submachine guns. But cops they were. And from what Timmons had seen, far more honest cops than the Policía Federal.

  That was part of the good thing he had going with Liam Duffy. The other part was that Duffy didn’t like drug people any more than he did.

  Even before he had met Duffy, Timmons had pretty well figured out for himself how the drugs were moved, and why. There had been briefings in Washington, of course, before they sent him to Asunción, but that had been pretty much second-or third-hand information. And he had been briefed when he got to the embassy in Asunción, although he’d come away from those briefings with the idea that Rule One in the Suppression of the Drug Trade was We’re guests in Paraguay, so don’t piss off the locals.