Free Oath to Defend by Scott Matthews Page A

cooperate simply disappeared.
    The cartel’s leader, El Verdugo, wasn’t what Barak had expected. In appearance, he was ordinary, a short, thin man with thinning hair who wore round, wire-framed glasses that made him look like a professor. Behind those modest glasses, his eyes burned with a cruel ferocity that was intimidating, even if you didn’t know his reputation. Those eyes softened slightly only when he smiled, which was infrequently. As a host, however, he was as gracious as a desert sheik welcoming a weary traveler into his tent.
    When they landed in front of a concrete block house at the end of a row of four metal Quonset huts, El Verdugo waved for Barak to follow him as they climbed out of the helicopter.
    “Come inside, my friend,” he said. “We’ll have a drink while I see if we’ve learned why the army came for us.”
    Inside the block house that was part office, with desks, computers, and phones, and part laboratory, with fish tanks, metal trays of specimens, and microscopes, Barak examined a wall of underwater photos of brilliantly colored fish and other sea organisms. If this research station was just a front for a smuggling operation, he said to himself, it was a very convincing front.
    When El Verdugo got off the phone, he joined Barak in front of the photo wall. “The beauty of this is getting paid by the government to study global warming and its effect on abalone,” he said with a smile. “The abalone have not been good here for a long, long time, or the village would not be deserted. They pay us anyway to find out why. Science is a beautiful thing, no?”
    When Barak nodded, El Verdugo went on. “My men tell me the army was looking for you, Señor Barak. They say you are a terrorist. That must be worse than a criminal. They never raided my villa before and like you, I have killed.”
    “Were Americans involved in this raid?” Barak asked.
    “One DEA and two others. You know them?”
    “Maybe, they could be the ones from Cancun.”
    “Then the sooner you are on your way, the better. I know when our army is coming, but America’s president likes to use his drone missiles, and I won’t know when they’re coming.”
    “Don’t worry,” Barak assured him. “When I have my merchandise from Venezuela, I’ll be on my way. Besides, you work with Hezbollah. You already have a target on your back. But America won’t strike here. They can’t even stop your violence along the border.”
    El Verdugo laughed. “They are afraid the ACLU will sue them if they shoot us.” He took a bottle of tequila out of a locked cabinet and raised it in a toast. “I salud the ACLU, my American friends.”
    Barak accepted the shot glass he was handed and raised it in a second toast to the ACLU. It was true, he thought. America was afraid to use its power. If he ran the country, every drug smuggler he caught would be executed, every person critical of the government would be in jail, and homosexuals would lose their heads on TV every day until their abomination was erased from the face of the earth. How America remained powerful for as long as it had baffled him.
    When he had the device he was waiting for, he would be the one to show America that its days were numbered. One small demolition nuke the size of a small refrigerator would blow a hole in America’s confidence and cripple it forever. He would soon have this device. All he needed was a couple more days to get the nuke across the border. He also had to make sure the Mexican didn’t try to snatch it for himself.
    He sipped and swallowed. “My friend, when do you expect your helicopter will return from the oil tanker?”
    “It will be back before daylight. You should get some sleep.” El Verdugo put the bottle away. “We’ll sleep in the Quonset hut next door and leave in the morning. You go ahead, I’ll call the pilot and make sure everything is okay.”
    Barak left, but he had no intention of sleeping. There were only six people that he knew