Chapter 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 two Oregon undercover 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 she or 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 two Oregon operatives 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. Called El 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 through the 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.
The third largest group were Haitians, currently under the murderous sway of men like Jimmy Chérizier, a former police officer turned “revolutionary” whose nickname, “Barbecue,” referenced his treatment of his political opponents, not his culinary expertise.
Raven and Linc also passed by clusters of Peruvians, Ecuadorans, and a surprisingly large number of Africans.
The well-heeled Chinese arriving in Necoclí opted to take a shorter “VIP” route in exchange for much higher fees.
Just before dawn, a series of whistles blew, and the gates were opened.
The crowds surged through the openings. The young bucks raced ahead like kids rushing into a rock concert arena.
The families burdened with children and worldly goods shuffled forward uneasily like cattle negotiating a stock alley on the way to the slaughterhouse.
Linc knew that, in short order, the mass of people would sort themselves out, forming a long line pouring toward the border.
The elderly, weak, and young would drift to the back of the ragged line and join the unfortunate who broke their ankles or succumbed to the polluted waters.
These stragglers would become like the weakest animals on the savanna, and most likely to fall prey to the predators waiting to snatch them away.
Raven and Linc shared a furtive glance beneath their poncho hoods. The Oregon operators had just begun a marathon.
A marathon through hell.
★
Initially, Linc and Raven kept to themselves, staying in the middle of the pack, fully aware of the very real challenges ahead.
Despite the hazards they were about to face, neither felt particularly brave.
Both were highly trained operators with years of armed combat and fieldcraft experience under their belts.
Linc had been a Navy SEAL sniper and Raven a highly decorated military police officer before joining the Oregon crew.
The truly heroic among them were the young families and grandmothers carrying small children, all risking their lives, bodies, and sanity on a long trek through the Darién Gap in hopes of finding a better life up north.
What broke Lincoln’s heart was the realization that most of these people had been sold a false dream of America’s golden riches by the very people now putting them in harm’s way for a fee.
The criminal gang running this operation was a La Liga subsidiary, and earned over eight hundred million dollars each year from this humanitarian nightmare.
But Linc wasn’t a social worker, and his mission wasn’t to save these people.
The mission he and Raven had been assigned was crystal clear: find the Iranian Quds Force base rumored to be operating in the Darién Gap.
Once fully trained, the Iranian unit would head north to stab across the soft underbelly of the American southern border to wage war on the Great Satan.
Tens of thousands of American lives could be at risk. Maybe more.
Their only responsibility was to find and geolocate the Quds Force base and report back. If possible, they were to determine the nature of the planned attack, and if the Iranian fighters intended to deploy weapons of mass destruction. It was strictly an intelligence-gathering assignment—no combat.
Raven and Linc paid special attention to three separate groups of approximately fifty combat-aged Middle Eastern men, origins unknown.
They didn’t seem to be in communication with each other, and the few innocuous Arabic conversations Raven managed to catch were inconclusive.
The Iranians weren’t stupid. Speaking Farsi would have given them away.
There was plenty of time to suss them out in the days and nights ahead. With any luck, one or more of those groups were Iranian and would lead them directly to the Quds Force camp they sought. If not, Linc and Raven would cut their own trail through the unforgiving jungle when the time was right.
Raven was the perfect fit for the mission, being fluent in Farsi, Arabic, and Spanish.
Linc volunteered to provide her security.
They had to go in unarmed if they wanted to remain undercover.
He would need every ounce of his massive wall of muscle to protect his partner.
Their DEA contact warned them they would be searched, and if guns, knives, or even radios were discovered they would be turned away, at best, but more likely killed before they could board the boat in Necoclí.
The two operators posed as a couple. Raven’s carefully doctored paperwork indicated she was a Tunisian woman and Linc played as Senegalese, generally the tallest men in West Africa.
Both nationalities were poorly represented on the migrant trail, which meant the two Oregon operators were unlikely to be questioned or challenged by natives.
Linc had considered posing as a Haitian, but he had never been to the country and didn’t know the language.
He had a passing familiarity with Creole patois after spending countless hours with his fellow Oregon Gundog, a Cajun named Marion MacDougal “MacD” Lawless.
But Louisiana Creole was vastly different than the Haitian variety.
However, Linc could hold a decent conversation in French.
Though he never studied language while in the SEAL teams, one of Dr. Huxley’s lectures on the connection between improved brain health and language acquisition drove him into French.
He chose the language because of the Oregon’s record of operations in Francophone Africa.
He wasn’t ready for graduate studies at the Sorbonne, but he could hold his own in casual conversation and, better still, listen in on at least some Haitian conversations if needed.
Since Raven didn’t speak French, Linc took the extra precaution of wearing a neck bandage, feigning a throat injury, and his only verbal communication with her was a low, gravelly whisper in English that only she could hear.
In the last two days, their covers had worked.
In order to complete their assignment and to blend in with the other members of the group, Raven and Linc had acquired second- and even thirdhand clothing and shoes, just like all the other refugees.
On a hazardous overland route like this one, both operators would have preferred mil-spec equipment, or at the very least, high-end performance gear and Salomon hiking boots.
They also couldn’t bring proper medical kits.
They were posing as desperate, ill-prepared refugees, not yuppie American tourists.
The other challenge they faced was that the trek would take at least ten days, according to the reports they had studied.
Many of the migrants had been told by their gangster handlers on social media that the hike was easy and only lasted a few days.
Because of these lies, most of the migrants carried only two or three days of water and food.
It was clear to the Oregon operators that many would run out of supplies long before they reached their destination.
Lincoln and Raven had acquired the same overpriced, low-quality food supplies at the port city as had most of the other refugees.
They couldn’t pack enough for ten days without revealing they had prior knowledge of what lay before them.
They would just have to go hungry like the rest if it came to that.
Two special provisions they had brought along were sewn inside the straps of their packs.
These included a string of antibiotic and water-purification tablets, and the micro components of a single-band emergency radio secreted throughout their clothing.
The radio parts would be quickly assembled and comms established with the Oregon once the Quds Force camp was located.
A third provision was attached to Linc’s thick wrist, a scratched-up, raggedy-banded Timex wristwatch—the kind of thing you’d pick up at a thrift store for a couple of bucks.
The watch was designed by Kevin Nixon, and besides the fact that it kept pretty good time it was also a GPS device that helped them navigate as well as to record the Quds Force camp location with precision.
Perhaps the brightest light they encountered was the Brazos Abiertos open tent just outside Acandí swarmed by hundreds of chattering migrants.
“Open Arms” was a nongovernmental organization, its tent staffed by a few local nurses and aid workers, who handed out liters of water, cheap plastic ponchos, mosquito repellent, and packets of aspirin.
They didn’t bother trying to dissuade the weakest and most vulnerable from making the trip—nobody was there for a holiday adventure.
But few migrants really understood the risks.
The Brazos Abiertos people promised legal and financial help once anyone crossed the American border.
What the harried aid workers couldn’t promise was that any of them would actually make it there alive.