Long Allen - Smokescreen: A True Adventure

GLAMOUR PROFESSION

EMERALD COAST

Allen Long descended from a short line of American aviators. He in effect was the first. One morning off the coast of South America, as his DC-3, with the break of dawn, violated Colombian airspace, there rose before him, as palpable as the peaks of the Sierra Nevada hovering on the horizon, the probability that he might be the last.

Red to white, red to white, I have bad news for you, sir.

Bad news in Allen Longs business, of which aviation was only a part, was typically very bad news, and transmitted on an air-to-air frequency from a clandestine Colombian landing strip, the news had to be that much worse.

Sir, I am sorry, but you cannot land, squawked the voice over the cockpit radio. You must go back, you cannot land. Repeat, you must go back.

Long and his crew, who had been airborne for fifteen hours, stared stupefied at the source of this advisory, the three of them gazing at the instrument panel as if the radio itself were crazy.

Longs transmission was blunt. He keyed the microphone, and said: We cant go back.

Nor could they put the aircraft down in nearby Barranquilla or over the border in Venezuela. To say that the plane was not cleared for that was an understatement at best, but Long said it anyway, and short of announcing the choices they faced, that was about all he said.

We have to land and take on fuel, or were going to crash this airplane.

As it happened, they did both.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta rise out of the Caribbean in a sheer, almost vertical ascent to an altitude of 20,000 feet, the highest coastal range in the world, its perennial snowcaps dominating the tropical beaches of Colombias oldest city. From the fertile forests of Santa Marta the mountains run parallel to the shoreline and reach one hundred miles to the east. Here their north face terminates on a hot, semiarid peninsula, a flatland of hardscrabble and stunted vegetation that stretches to the northernmost point of the continent.

This inhospitable region into which the mountains decline, settled by Indians who survived the Spanish conquest and home to their descendants today, subsists outside the mainstream of Colombian life, sparsely populated, underdeveloped, historically bereaved of economic opportunity, and largely neglected by the federal government. Here in the northeastern desert is a Colombia untouched by the magical realism evoked by its finest literature, unenriched by the supernatural, a Colombia drained of its mystery, where the metaphysical happens only at night.

These are the Colombian badlands. This is the land beyond the Ro Palomino. Independent, if not autonomous, unregulated, virtually lawless...

This is the Guajira.

This is where Allen Long conducted business in Colombia, trading on what the regions inhabitants extol as its principal natural resource: that the Guajira is ruled by the gun.

In the fall of 1976, that morning as his cargo plane came within view of the mountains, Allen Longs business was booming. Up there, high in the foothills, waiting, lay the treasure of the Sierra Nevada. Up there, unburied, proliferating, was the Santa Marta Gold of legend. The finest marijuana in the world. And from there to the docks and the Mayday strips that were strung out along the Guajira, mule trains moved, by day, by night, in seemingly endless procession, under the weight of the find.

The gold rush was underway. Back home, 30 million American heads luxuriated in notions of getting twisted on nothing less than prime Colombian, and for almost a year now Long and his partners had been delivering it to them by the ton.

Among those partners were the pilots of the DC-3, Frank Hatfield and Will McBride. Allen Long American Flyer was really just a state of mind, his rating as an aviator being well, call it unofficial. As architect of the criminal conspiracy and operational leader of the enterprise, Long was more than just along for the ride, but even in a mind as rich with fantasy as his, there abided no doubt that his taking control of the aircraft unsupervised was the functional equivalent of suicide.

McBride, an erstwhile musician, had known Long for about five years, and like Long, whose own pursuit of a career in the record industry was presently being ignored, he had been operating on the fringes of the marijuana business for much of that time. It was not in support of his musical ambitions that McBride had decided to take flying lessons. McBride was co-pilot of the DC-3. It was Hatfield who ran the air show, and it was Hatfield, the professional, to whom the other two smugglers looked when the radio message came in.

They were flying with the surf, following the shore break, having descended to about 2,000 feet on making landfall at Punta Gallinas. Banking southwest from there and running along the coast at a speed of 110 knots, they had begun picking up omens one by one as day was breaking behind them. Everything was different this time. The air was not crisp, but humid and heavy, the sunlight murky not bright. The underbrush below them was green, not brown. Clouds obscured the mountains. And just northeast of Riohacha, as the aircraft descended to a thousand feet, raindrops hit the windshield.

The precipitation merely suggested itself, a grace note, nothing more. Still, it was something new.

Breaking clear of it almost instantly, the smugglers started searching for smoke. A billowing column of thick, black smoke would bring them in to the runway. Spiraling from the flames of a burning tire, the plume could be seen on a normal flight to rise 200 feet in the air. Long, this time, was the first to spot it, and this time it hit the ceiling at fifty. At Camarones, they made radio contact. Only then did the omens add up.

Sir, it has been raining here.

It had rained half the night. Torrentially. The downpour had ended only an hour before. Effectively, there