Page 21 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
La Liga—“the League” in Spanish—was his brainchild.
Fierro had studied history as well as finance at Stanford and had even flirted with the idea of pursuing an academic career in the subject. The primary lesson history taught him was that power was themost important commodity, and that since 1648 the nation-state had the monopoly of raw power.
A few decades ago, it seemed as if non-state entities like terrorist groups and drug cartels had gained the upper hand against the increasingly dysfunctional liberal democracies as they acquired better weapons, communications technology, and access to financial networks.
But the nations of the West began to cooperate, and jointly deployed superior communications technologies and better armed police forces to combat their enemies, including the drug cartels. Pablo Escobar’s corpse, the fall of FARC, and a dozen other catastrophes proved state power was still supreme.
The only chance Fierro’s cartel had to survive was to acquire more power of its own. Through his towering intellect, force of will, persuasive skills, and the judicious deployment of Vargas against the most recalcitrant, Fierro forged an alliance of Latin America’s largest drug cartels.
Narcisco Tamacas had been his first and most reliable convert. As head of MS-13, he brought credibility to Fierro’s dream. Other drug lords saw the wisdom of his vision. Ultimately, the nine largest cartels and their subsidiaries in Latin America formed La Liga as a countervailing force to the Americans and their allies. The drug lords pooled their resources, shared intel, and jointly expanded their markets. Latin America seemed on the verge of falling under their complete control and the rise of a super narco-state was at hand.
But the Western nations pushed back yet again and deployed their vast war on terror instruments against La Liga. They froze banking assets, launched targeted satellites, and deployed military forces in devastating counterinsurgency operations. The power of the state seemed as infallible, and the demise of La Liga as inevitable as Caesar’s destruction of the Gauls.
Fierro had spent over a decade among the most brilliant minds in Silicon Valley, investing vast sums of his father’s money—and reaping enormous profits—in the most promising technologies of the day.Fierro had acquired a great deal of technological expertise and remained in contact with the brightest scientists and engineers. A plan began to form in his mind.
It was clear that power had always determined the course of history, but the nature of power was changing. Technology itself was becoming the primary source of power. Power that was available to anybody with the will and resources to acquire it.
Fierro had both.
And thus Project Q was launched. Fierro had convinced La Liga to invest tens of billions of dollars for the last few years into the project.
And in just ten days it would be unleashed upon the United States.
La Liga would become a superpower, just like thenorteamericanos.
Project Q would be a weapon that no nation could resist. Better still, La Liga would dominate the global drug trade, overwhelming its competitors while utterly defeating every prosecutor and police agency around the world.
And all without firing a shot.
But Narcisco Tamacas and his retrograde father could ruin everything. Fierro had to do something now before Narcisco broke his leash.
Fierro threw back the rest of his whiskey, relishing the smooth burn in the back of his throat before heading to his office. He knew just the man who could fix his problem.
11
Panama
The dark morning sky rumbled as it unleashed another torrent of rain, drenching the haggard parade of over a thousand migrants winding their way across the first river. They were heading for the line of towering trees demarcating their first steps into the dreaded Darién Gap.
Like hundreds of others, Franklin “Linc” Lincoln and Raven Malloy pulled on their cheap plastic ponchos against the deluge. The thick drops spattered against their hoods like pennies hitting a tin roof. It was so loud no one bothered to speak until the storm passed by.
The twoOregonundercover operatives were already drenched from earlier rains and their shabby clothes were salt-stained from the high humidity baking them like stuffed Chinese bao buns between the passing storms. The ponchos hardly mattered, but covering up their faces and forms added to their anonymity among the herd of humanity inching its way forward. In Linc’s case, every little bit helped. The African American’s muscular frame stood out from the other men, African or otherwise. He looked more like a bodybuilder than the hapless refugee he was posing as.
The poncho helped Raven, too, by dimming her smoldering good looks. Her Native American genetics endowed her with an exotic appearance that could play almost any dark-haired ethnicity, and hours in the weight room shredded her athletic physique. The last thing sheor Linc wanted was for her to attract undue attention. A brutal kidnapping—and far worse—was a real danger for every woman on this hazardous trek. The only nod to fashion she allowed herself were the brightly colored woven nylon bracelets she wore.
Linc and Raven had arrived in Colombia’s port city Necoclí without incident and on time. A local DEA informant put the twoOregonoperatives in contact with the Gulf Clan, the brutal gang controlling the passage from Colombia to Panama. Each migrant paid the thugs three hundred dollars, a fee about equal to the annual income for most Venezuelan migrants. The yellow plastic wristband they received proving they had paid also entitled them to the boat trip across the bay to Acandí, as well as armed guides through the Darién Gap inside Panama and protection—at least from their own organization.
God help the poor souls who couldn’t afford the fee and tried to hazard the Darién Gap on their own. CalledEl Tapón(the Plug) by locals, the Darién Gap was arguably the world’s most dangerous stretch of jungle.
Europeans had been trying to tame it since the Spanish arrived in 1501, but all attempts had failed. Nearly twelve thousand miles of impenetrable jungle, rivers, and mountains made up the Darién Gap, traversable only by foot and occasionally canoe. Even the Pan-American Highway, a continuous band of asphalt stretching all the way from Argentina in the south to Alaska in the north, was interrupted by the single sixty-six-mile stretch at the Plug. The world’s best engineers fielding the most advanced earthmoving equipment found it impossible to overcome the Darién’s natural boundaries.
Besides the Plug’s geographic challenges, there were venomous snakes, poisonous insects, man-eating jaguars, and swollen, flash-flooding rivers that took many lives each year. Another danger was the rival gangs and Indigenous thieves that preyed upon the travelers and, worse, the criminal cutthroats among them who raped, robbed, and killed as they migrated north.
Linc and Raven had learned in their pre-mission brief that a decade ago, two thousand migrants risked their lives annually to get throughthe Darién. Today that number had exploded to over eight hundred thousand.
Before the march began, the migrants were herded into a fenced area. The crowd’s mood was a mixture of excited expectation and terrified apprehension, much like the beginning of a marathon.
Lincoln and Raven circulated through the teeming masses of people, gathering intel. They noted the large number of young combat-aged males in the group, with the youngest and strongest crowding the front. The majority of migrants were Venezuelans and Cubans, both victims of the economic chaos inflicted by their respective socialist governments. Many others were mental defectives, hardened criminals, and the chronically ill. The socialist dictatorships were all too happy to empty their mental wards, prisons, and hospitals and dump their human loads onto the American taxpayer.
