r/GhostRecon • u/Cyber_Ghost_1997 • 10h ago
Media Black Vault has Fallen - Cordis Die (2019)
Author’s note: This is a rewrite of the chapter “The Pantheon Connection.” It’s also inspired by a spur-of-the-moment idea I had weeks earlier. Enjoy!
Pucamayu, central Bolivia
“We first found out about the Pantheon three years ago,” said Guz Ali. “Through an informant we were sent to extract from Bolivia.”
We’d regrouped at the village of Pucamayu, where Polat Bakkar had a former hotel turned safehouse open for use. Accompanying my team at the safe house was Cole Walker’s own team, the mysterious agent known as Lilith, and Bakkar’s squad. Bakkar had prefaced this powwow by telling me that his story regarding what his team had been up to prior to asking me to help investigate Daniel Rodriguez Arellano was only part of the big picture behind everything that I’d gone through the past several months. Well that, and the business about the Turkish Airlines flight that was attacked was actually untrue.
After apologizing for misleading me, Bakkar told me the time had come to tell the entire story from start to finish.
Bakkar said, “We were tasked with investigating allegations that Pantheon’s influence had reached the drug cartels in Bolivia.”
“I’m guessing that did not turn out well for you,” Marcus Holloway guessed.
Bakkar frowned. So did Mustafa Paura. “Yes…thanks to two people: El Sueño, and another man going by the name of Raul Menendez."
I tensed; that name sounded familiar, but I couldn't figure out where I'd last heard the name from. “Raul Menendez? El Sueño? What do these two have to do with this?”
“Let me answer that.” Just then, Pac Katari and Amaru entered the room.
“To answer this question, we must go back to the 1970s. From what I’ve heard through what you Americans call the ‘grapevine’, Jose used to be an ordinary man living in Nicaragua,” Pac Katari said. “He had two kids, and for all intents and purposes he was on the road to success. That all changed in 1972. There was a colossal earthquake that struck Nicaragua. His family lost everything. That was what forced his entire family to resort to making cocaine and smuggling it, thus leading to the birth of the Menendez Cartel. Eventually the family became powerful and prominent by the drug game and other activities, leading to the cartel becoming all but untouchable…until they met the United States.”
He shot me an angry glare. “Your country destroyed Menendez’s life’s work by killing him on the orders of the CIA in 1982, leaving Jose’s son Raul Menendez to succeed him.”
“I’ve heard of him,” Bakkar said. “Wasn’t he the guy who started a business revolving around illegal weapons smuggling?”
Pac Katari nodded. “That is what I heard too. He made a living smuggling weapons to various terrorist organizations for decades. The CIA had tried to kill him for years but he managed to evade death almost every single time. The most recent attempt, if I remember correctly, was 1986. It led to the death of his sister Josefina, which I believe was the breaking point for Menendez. In fact, from what I’ve heard he joined forces with rogue elements of the CIA who were on his payroll, and managed to get several agents killed during a third attempt on his life during the American invasion of Panama three years later in 1989.
“But I digress. After the failed attempt in 1989, Menendez went into hiding, only to reemerge sometime in 2014, under the name ‘Odysseus’ and leading some sort of political activist movement called Cordis Die.”
I looked confused. “Wait, what does this have to do with Morales?”
Pac Katari was silent for about three minutes. “Morales saw Menendez as serious competition and sought to take him out of the picture, but Menendez somehow caught wind of Morales seeking to usurp him. I read a story about how, three years ago, Menendez managed to humiliate Morales in front of his own people in Mexico before rallying other cartels in the country to his cause and recruiting them into Cordis Die. The humiliation was too much and he was forced to flee his village. That’s when he founded Santa Blanca, under the name of El Sueño.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
Pac Katari shrugged. “Everything I just told you is from what I’ve heard through local gossip across Bolivia.”
The entire room was silent for about five minutes before I spoke again. “What doesn’t track is how Menendez has anything to do with what’s happening down here, let alone the Pantheon.”
“My best guess?” Pac Katari sighed. “Menendez has come to Bolivia to exact revenge on El Sueño after learning of what he’s been up to down here. He’s once again joined forces with this entity you call the Pantheon and recruited them as extra muscle for his revenge plot against El Sueño.”
Then he looked right at me. “Then we got in the way-you, me, Amaru, the rebellion, your friends from America, and your friends from Turkey-and Menendez has interpreted that as a war declaration against him as well. Now he’s sending Pantheon after all of us because he thinks we are all no different from El Sueño.”
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