9.
Meeting
Engagement
“So?” ESCOBEDO EYED Larson as coldly as a biology professor might look at a caged white rat. He had no special reason to suspect Larson of anything, but he was angry, and Larson was the nearest target for that anger.
But Larson was used to that. “So I don’t know, jefe. Ernesto was a good pilot, a good student. So was the other one, Cruz. The engines in the aircraft were practically new—two hundred hours on each. The airframe was six years old, but that’s nothing unusual; the aircraft was well maintained. Weather was okay all the way north, some scattered high clouds over the Yucatan Channel, nothing worse than that.” The pilot shrugged. “Aircraft disappear, jefe. One cannot always know why.”
“He is my cousin! What do I tell his mother?”
“Have you checked with any airfields in Mexico?”
“Yes! And Cuba, and Honduras, and Nicaragua!”
“No distress calls? No reports from ships or aircraft in the vicinity?”
“No, nothing.” Escobedo moderated somewhat as Larson went through the possibilities, professional as ever.
“If it was some sort of electrical failure, he might be down somewhere, but ... I would not be hopeful, jefe. If they had landed safely, they would have let us know by now. I am sorry, jefe. He is probably lost. It has happened before. It will happen again.”
One other possibility was that Ernesto and Cruz had made their own arrangements, had landed somewhere other than their intended destination, had sold their cargo of forty kilograms, and had decided to disappear, but that was not seriously considered. The question of drugs had not even been mentioned, because Larson was not really part of the operation, merely a technical consultant who had asked to be cut out of that aspect of the business. Escobedo trusted Larson to be honest and objective because he had always been so in the past, taking his money and doing his job well, and also because Larson was no fool—he knew the consequences of lying and double-dealing.
They were in Escobedo’s expensive condominium in Medellin. It occupied the entire top floor of the building. The floor immediately under this was occupied by Escobedo’s vassals and retainers. The elevator was controlled by people who knew who could pass and who could not. The street outside the building was watched. Larson reflected that at least he didn’t have to worry about somebody stealing the hubcaps off his car. He also wondered what the hell had happened to Ernesto. Was it simply an accident of some sort? Such things had happened often enough. One reason for his position as flying instructor was that past smuggling operations had lost quite a few airplanes, often through the most prosaic of causes. But Larson was not a fool. He was thinking about recent visitors and recent orders from Langley; training at The Farm didn’t encourage people to believe in coincidences. Some sort of op was about to run. Might this have been the opening move?
Larson didn’t think so. CIA was years past that sort of thing, which was too bad, he thought, but a fact nonetheless.
“He was a good pilot?” Escobedo asked again.
“I taught him myself, jefe. He had four hundred hours, good mechanical skills, and he was as good on instruments as a young pilot can be. The only thing that worried me about him was that he liked flying low.”
“Yes?”
“Flying low over water is dangerous, especially at night. It is too easy to become disoriented. You forget where the horizon is, and if you keep looking out of the windows instead of checking your instruments.... Experienced pilots have driven their airplanes right into the water that way. Unfortunately, flying very low is fun and many pilots, especially the young ones, think that it is also a test of manhood. That is foolish, as pilots learn with time.”
“ ‘A good pilot is a cautious pilot’?” Escobedo asked.
“That is what I tell every student,” Larson replied seriously. “Not all of them believe me. It is true everywhere. You can ask instructors in any air force in the world. Young pilots make foolish mistakes because they are young and inexperienced. Judgment comes with experience—most often through a frightening experience. Those who survive learn, but some do not survive.”
Escobedo considered that for a few seconds.
“He was a proud one, Ernesto.” To Larson it sounded like an epitaph.
“I will recheck the maintenance log of the aircraft,” the pilot offered. “And I will also review the weather data.”
“Thank you for coming in so quickly, Señor Larson.”
“I am at your service, jefe. If I learn anything, I will let you know.”
Escobedo saw him to the door, then returned to his desk. Cortez entered the room from a side door.
“Well?”
“I like Larson,” Cortez said. “He speaks the truth. He has pride, but not too much.”
Escobedo nodded agreement. “A hireling, but a good one.” ... like you. Cortez didn’t react to the implied message. “How many flights have been lost over the years?”
“We didn’t even keep records until eighteen months ago. Since then, nine. That’s one reason we took Larson on. I felt that the crashes were due to pilot error and poor maintenance. Carlos has proven to be a good instructor.”
“But never wished to become involved himself?”
“No. A simple man. He has a comfortable life doing what he enjoys. There is much to be said for that,” Escobedo observed lightly. “You have been over his background?”
“Sí. Everything checks out, but ...”
“But?”
“But if he were something other than what he appears to be, things would also check out.” This was the point at which an ordinary man would say something like, But you can’t suspect everyone. Escobedo did not, and that was a measure of his sophistication, Cortez noted. His employer had ample experience with conspiracy and knew that you had to suspect everyone. He wasn’t exactly a professional, but he wasn’t exactly a fool either.
“Do you. think—”
“No. He was nowhere near the place the flight left from, had no way of knowing that it was happening that night. I checked: he was in Bogotá with his lady friend. They had dinner alone and retired early. Perhaps it was a flying accident, but coming so soon after we learn that the norteamericanos are planning something, I do not think we should call it such a thing. I think I should return to Washington.”
“What will you find out?”
“I will attempt to discover something of what they are doing.”
“Attempt?”
“Señor, gathering sensitive intelligence information is an art—”
“You can buy anything you need!”
“There you are incorrect,” Cortez said with a level stare. “The best sources of information are never motivated by money. It is dangerous—foolish—to assume that allegiance can be purchased.”
“And what of you?”
“That is a question you must consider, but I am sure you already have.” The best way to earn trust with this man was always to say that trust did not exist. Escobedo thought that whatever allegiance money could not buy could be maintained with fear instead. In that sense, his employer was foolish. He assumed that his reputation for violence could cow anyone, and rarely considered that there were those who could give him lessons in applied violence. There was much to admire about this man, but so much also to merit disdain. Fundamentally he was an amateur—though a gifted one—who learned from his mistakes readily enough, but lacked the formal training that might have enabled him to learn from the mistakes of others—and what was intelligence training but the institutional memory of lessons from the mistakes of others? He didn’t so much need an intelligence and security adviser as one in covert operations per se, but that was an area in which none of these men would solicit or accept advice. They came from generations of smugglers, and their expertise in corrupting and bribing was real enough. It was just that they’d never learned how to play the game against a truly organized and formidable adversary—the Colombians didn’t count. That the yanquis had not yet discovered within themselves the courage to act in accordance with their power was nothing more than good fortune. If there was one thing the KGB had drilled into Cortez, it was that good fortune did not exist.
Captain Winters viewed his gunsight videotape with the men from Washington. They were in a corner office of one of the Special Ops buildings—Eglin had quite a few—and the other two wore Air Force uniforms, both bearing the rank of lieutenant colonel, a convenient middle grade of officer, many of whom came and went in total anonymity.
“Nice shooting, son,” one observed.
“He could have made it harder,” Bronco replied without much in the way of emotion. “But he didn’t.”
“How about traffic on the surface?”
“Nothing within thirty miles.”
“Put up the Hawkeye tape,” the senior man ordered. They were using three-quarter-inch tape, which was preferred by the military for its higher data capacity. The tape was already cued. It showed the inbound Beechcraft, marked as XX1 on the alphanumeric display, one of many contacts, most of which were clearly marked as airliners, and had been high over the shoot-down. There were also numerous surface contacts, but all of them were a good distance away from the area of the attack, and this tape ended prior to the shoot-down. The Hawkeye crew, as planned, had no direct knowledge of what had transpired after handing over the contact to the fighter. The guidelines for the mission were clear, and the intercept area was calculated to avoid frequently used shipping channels. The low-altitude path taken by the drug smugglers helped, of course, insofar as it limited the distance at which someone might see a flash or an explosion, neither of which had happened here.
“Okay,” said the senior one. “That was well within mission parameters.” They switched tapes again.
“How many rounds expended?” the junior one asked Winters.
“A hundred ’n eight,” the captain replied. “With a Vulcan it’s kinda hard to keep it down, y’know? The critter shoots right quick.”
“It did that plane like a chainsaw.”
“That’s the idea, sir. I could have been a little faster on the trigger, but you want me to try ’n avoid the fuel tanks, right?”
“That’s correct.” The cover story, in case anyone saw a flash, was that there was a Shoot-Ex out of Eglin—exercises killing target drones are not uncommon there—but so much the better if no one noticed at all.
Bronco didn’t like the secrecy stuff. As far as he was concerned, shooting the bastards down made perfectly good sense. The point of the mission, they’d told him during the recruiting phase, was that drug trafficking was a threat to U.S. national security. That phrasing made everything legitimate. As an air-defense fighter pilot, he was trained to deal with threats to national security in this specific way—to shoot them out of the sky with as much emotion as a skeet-shooter dispatched clay birds thrown out from the traps. Besides, Bronco thought, if it’s a real threat to national security, why shouldn’t the people know about it? But that wasn’t his department. He was only a captain, and captains are operators, not thinkers. Somebody up the line had decided that this was okay, and that was all he needed to know. Dispatching this Twin-Beech had been the next thing to murder, but that was as accurate a description of combat operations as any other. After all, giving people a fair chance was what happened at the Olympics, not where your life was on the line. If somebody was dumb enough to let his ass get killed, that wasn’t Bronco’s lookout, especially if he happened to be committing an act of war against Bronco’s country. And that was what “threat to national security” meant, wasn’t it?
Besides, he had given Juan—or whatever the bastard’s name had been—a fair warning, hadn’t he? If the asshole’d thought he could outfly the best fucking fighter plane in the whole world, well, he’d learned different. Tough.
“You got any problems to this point, Captain?” the senior one asked.
“Problems with what, sir?” What a dumbass question!
The airstrip at which they had arrived wasn’t big enough for a proper military transport. The forty-four men of Operation SHOWBOAT traveled by bus to Peterson Air Force Base, a few miles east of the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. It was dark, of course. The bus was driven by one of the “camp counselors,” as the men had taken to calling them, and the ride was a quiet one, with many of the soldiers asleep after their last day’s PT. The rest were alone with their own thoughts. Chavez watched the mountains slide by as the bus twisted its way down the last range. The men were ready.
“Pretty mountains, man,” Julio Vega observed sleepily.
“Especially in a bus heading downhill.”
“Fuckin’ A!” Vega chuckled. “You know, someday I’m gonna come back here and do some skiing.” The machine-gunner adjusted himself in the seat and faded out.
They were roused thirty-five minutes later after passing through the gate at Peterson. The bus pulled right up to the aft ramp of an Air Force C-141 Starlifter transport. The soldiers rose and assembled their gear in an orderly fashion, with each squad captain checking to make sure that everyone had everything he’d been issued as they filed off. A few looked around on the way to the aircraft. There was nothing unusual about the departure, no special security guards, merely the ground crew fueling and preflighting the aircraft for an immediate departure. In the distance a KC-135 aerial tanker was lifting off, and though no one thought much about it, they’d be meeting that bird in a little while. The Air Force sergeant who was loadmaster for this particular aircraft took them aboard and seated them as comfortably as the spartan appointments allowed—this mainly involved giving everyone ear protectors.
The flight crew went through the usual startup procedures, and presently the Starlifter began moving. The noise was grating despite the earmuffs, but the aircraft had an Air Force Reserve crew, all airline personnel, who gave them a decent ride. Except for the midair refueling, that is. As soon as the C-141 had climbed to altitude, it rendezvoused with the KC-135 to replace the fuel burned off during the climb-out. For the passengers this involved the usual roller-coaster buffet which, amplified by the near total absence of windows, made a few stomachs decidedly queasy, though all looked quietly inured to it. Half an hour after lifting off, the C-141 settled down on a southerly course, and from a mixture of fatigue and sheer boredom, the soldiers drifted off to sleep for the remainder of the ride.
The MH-53J left Eglin Air Force Base at about the same time, all of its fuel tanks topped off after engine warm-up. Colonel Johns took it to one thousand feet and a course of two-one-five for the Yucatan Channel. Three hours out, an MC-130E Combat Talon tanker/support aircraft caught up with the Pave Low, and Johns decided to let the captain handle the midair refueling. They’d have to tank thrice more, and the tanker would accompany them all the way down, bringing a maintenance and support crew and spare parts.
“Ready to plug,” PJ told the tanker commander.
“Roger,” answered Captain Montaigne in the MC-130E, holding the aircraft straight and level.
Johns watched Willis ease the nose probe into the drogue. “Okay, we got plug.”
In the cockpit of the -130E, Captain Montaigne took note of the indicator light and keyed the microphone. “Ohhh!” she said in her huskiest voice. “Nobody does it like you, Colonel!”
Johns laughed out loud and keyed his switch twice, generating a click-click signal, which meant Affirmative. He switched to intercom. “Why spoil it for her?” he asked Willis, who was regrettably straitlaced. The fuel transfer took six minutes.
“How long do you think we’ll be down there?” Captain Willis wondered after it was done.
“They didn’t tell me that, but if it goes too long, they say we’ll get relief.”
“That’s nice,” the captain observed. His eyes shifted back and forth from his flight instruments to the world outside the armored cockpit. The aircraft had more than its full load of combat gear aboard—Johns was a firm believer in firepower—and the electronic countermeasures racks were gone. Whatever they’d be doing, they wouldn’t have to worry about unfriendly radar coverage, and that meant that the job, whatever it was, didn’t involve Nicaragua or Cuba. It also made for more passenger room in the aircraft and deleted the second flight engineer from the crew. “You were right about the gloves. My wife made up a set and it does make a difference.”
“Some guys just fly without ’em, but I don’t like to have sweaty hands on the stick.”
“Is it going to be that warm?”
“There’s warm, and there’s warm,” Johns pointed out. “You don’t get sweaty hands just from the outside temperature.”
“Oh. Yes, sir.” Gee, he gets scared, too—just like the rest of us?
“Like I keep telling people, the more thinking you do before things get exciting, the less exciting things will be. And they get plenty exciting enough.”
Another voice came onto the intercom circuit: “You keep talking like that, sir, and we might get a little scared.”
“Sergeant Zimmer, how are things in the back?” Johns asked. Zimmer’s regular spot was just aft of the two pilots, hovering over an impressive array of instruments.
“Coffee, tea, or milk, sir? The meals for this flight are Chicken Kiev with rice, Roast Beef au Jus with baked potato, and for the weight-watchers among us, Orange Ruffy and stir-fried veggies—and if you believe that, sir, you’ve been staring at the instrument panel too long. Why the hell don’t we have a stewardess along with us?”
“ ’Cause you and I are both too old for that shit, Zimmer!” PJ laughed.
“It ain’t bad in a chopper, sir. What with all the vibration and all...”
“I’ve been trying to reform him since Korat,” Johns explained to Captain Willis. “How old are the kids now, Buck?”
“Seventeen, fifteen, twelve, nine, six, five, and three, sir.”
“Christ,” Willis noted. “Your wife must be some gal, Sarge.”
“She’s afraid I’ll run around, so she robs me of my energy,” Zimmer explained. “I fly to get away from her. It’s the only thing that keeps me alive.”
“Her cooking must be all right, judging by your uniform.”
“Is the colonel picking on his sergeant again?” Zimmer asked.
“Not exactly. I just want you to look as good as Carol does.”
“No chance, sir.”
“Roger that. Some coffee would be nice.”
“On the way, Colonel, sir.” Zimmer was on the flight deck in less than a minute. The instrument console for the Pave Low helicopter was large and complex, but Zimmer had long since installed gimbaled cup holders suitable for the spillproof cups that Colonel Johns liked. PJ took a quick sip.
“She makes good coffee, too, Buck.”
“Funny how things work out, isn’t it?” Carol Zimmer knew that her husband would share it with his colonel. Carol wasn’t her original given name. Born in Laos thirty-six years earlier, she was the daughter of a Hmong warlord who’d fought long and hard for a country that was no longer his. She was the only survivor of a family of ten. PJ and Buck had lifted her and a handful of others off a hilltop at the final stages of a North Vietnamese assault in 1972. America had failed that man’s family, but at least it hadn’t failed his daughter. Zimmer had fallen in love with her from the first moment, and it was generally agreed that they had the seven cutest kids in Florida.
“Yep.”
It was late in Mobile, somewhere between the two southbound aircraft, and jails—especially Southern jails—are places where the rules are strictly applied. For lawyers, however, the rules are often rather lenient, and paradoxically they were very lenient indeed in the case of these two. These two had an as-yet-undetermined date with “Old Sparky,” the electric chair at Admore Prison. The jailors at Mobile therefore didn’t want to do anything to interfere with the prisoners’ constitutional rights, access to counsel, or general comfort. The attorney, whose name was Edward Stuart, had been fully briefed going in, and was fully fluent in Spanish.
“How did they do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You screamed and kicked, Ramón,” Jesus said.
“I know. And you sang like a canary.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the attorney told them. “They’re not charging you with anything but drug-related murder and piracy The information Jesus gave them is not being used at all in this case.”
“So do your lawyer shit and get us off!”
The look on Stuart’s face was all the response either man needed.
“You tell our friends that if we don’t get off on this one, we start talking.”
The jail guards had already told both men in loving detail what fate had in store for them. One had even shown Ramór a poster of the chair itself with the caption REGULAR OR EXTRA CRISPY. Though a hard man and a brutal one, the idea of being strapped into a hard-backed wooden chair, then having a copper band affixed to his left leg, and a small metal cap set on a bale spot that the prison barber would shave on his head the day be fore, and the small sponge soaked in a saline solution to facilitate electrical conductivity, the leather mask to keep his eyes from flying out of his head ... Ramón was a brave man when he hac the upper hand, and that hand held a gun or a knife directec at an unarmed or bound person. Then he was quite brave. In had never occurred to him that one day he might be the helpless one. Ramón had lost five pounds in the preceding week. His ap petite was virtually nil and he took an inordinate interest in light bulbs and wall sockets. He was afraid, but more than that he was angry, at himself for his fear, at the guards and police for giving him that fear, and at his former associates for not getting him free of this mess.
“I know many things, many useful things.”
“It does not matter. I have spoken with the federales, and they do not care what you know. The U.S. Attorney claims to have no interest in what you might tell him.”
“That is ridiculous. They always trade for information, they always—”
“Not here. The rules have changed.”
“What do you tell us?”
“I will do my best for you.” I’m supposed to tell you to die like men, Stuart could not say. “There are many things that can happen in the next few weeks.”
The attorney was rewarded with skeptical expressions not entirely devoid of hope. He himself had no hope at all. The U.S. Attorney was going to handle this one himself, the better to get his face on the 5:30 and 11:00 Eyewitness News broadcasts. This would be a very speedy trial, and a U.S. Senate seat would be available in just over two years. So much the better that the prosecutor could point to his law-and-order record. Frying some druggie-pirate-rapist-murderers would surely appeal to the citizens of the sovereign state of Alabama, Stuart knew. The defense attorney objected to capital punishment on principle, and had spent much of his time and money working against it. He’d successfully taken one case to the Supreme Court and on a five-to-four decision managed to get his client a new trial, where the death sentence had been bargained down to life plus ninety-nine years. Stuart regarded that as a victory even though his client had survived precisely four months in the prison’s general population until someone who disliked child-murderers had put a shank into his lumbar spine. He didn’t have to like his clients—and most often he didn’t. He was occasionally afraid of them, especially the drug runners. They quite simply expected that in return for however much cash—it was generally cash—they paid for his services they would get their freedom in return. They did not understand that in law there are no guarantees, especially for the guilty. And these two were guilty as hell. But they did not deserve death. Stuart was convinced that society could not afford to debase itself to the level of ... his clients. It was not a popular opinion in the South, but Stuart had no ambition to run for public office.
In any case, he was their lawyer, and his job was to provide them with the best possible defense. He’d already explored the chances of a plea-bargain; life imprisonment in exchange for information. He’d already examined the government’s case. It was all circumstantial—there were no witnesses except his own clients, of course—but the physical evidence was formidable, and that Coast Guard crew had scrupulously left the crime scene intact except for removing some evidence, all of which had been carefully locked up for a proper chain-of-evidence. Whoever had briefed and trained those people had done it right. Not much hope there. His only real hope, therefore, was to impeach their credibility. It was a slim hope, but it was the best he had.
Supervisory Special Agent Mark Bright was also working late The crew had been busy. For starters there had been an office and a home to search, a lengthy procedure that was just the opening move in a process to last months, probably, since all the documents found, all the phone numbers scribbled in any of eleven places, all the photographs on desks and walls, and everything else found would have to be investigated. Every business acquaintance of the deceased would be interviewed, along with neighbors, people whose offices adjoined his, members of his country club, and even parishioners at his church. For all that, the major break in the case had come in the second hour of the fourth home search, fully a month after the case had begun. Something had told them all that there had to be something else. In his den, the deceased had a floor safe—with nc record of its purchase or installation—neatly hidden by an un-tacked segment of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Discovering it had required thirty-two days. Tickling it open took nearly ninety minutes, but an experienced agent had done it by first experimenting with the birthdays of the deceased’s whole family, then playing variations on the theme. It turned out that the three-element combination came from taking the month of the man’s birth and adding one, taking the day of his birth and adding two, then taking the year of his birth and adding three. The door of the expensive Mosler came open with a whisper as it rubbed against the rug flap.
No money, no jewels, no letter to his attorney. Inside the safe had been five computer disks of a type compatible with the businessman’s IBM personal computer. That told the agents all they wanted. Bright had at once taken the disks and the deceased’s computer to his office, which was also equipped with IBM-COMPATIBLE machines. Mark Bright was a good investigator, which meant that he was a patient one. His first move had been to call a local computer expert who assisted the FBI from time to time. A free-lance software consultant, he’d first protested that he was busy, but he’d only needed to hear that there was a major criminal investigation underway to settle that. Like many such people who informally assist the FBI, he found police work most exciting, though not quite exciting enough to take a full-time job for the FBI Laboratory. Government service didn’t come close to paying what he earned on the outside. Bright had anticipated his first instruction: bring in the man’s own computer and hard-disk.
After first making exact copies of the five disks using a program called CHASTITY BELT, he had Bright store the originals while he went to work on the copies. The disks were encrypted, of course. There were many ways of accomplishing that, and the consultant knew them all. As he and Bright had anticipated, the encrypting algorithm was permanently stored on the deceased’s hard disk. From that point it was merely a question of what option and what personal encrypting key had been used to secure the data on the disks. That took nine nonstop hours, with Bright feeding coffee and sandwiches to his friend and wondering why he did it all for free.
“Gotcha!” A scruffy hand punched the PRINT command, and the office laser printer started humming and disgorging papers. All five disks were packed with data, totaling over seven hundred single-spaced pages of text. By the time the third one was printed, the consultant had left. Bright read it all, over a period of three days. Then he made six Xerox copies for the other senior agents in the case. They were now flipping through the pages around the conference table.
“Christ, Mark, this stuff is fantastic!”
“That’s what I said.”
“Three hundred million dollars!” another exclaimed. “Christ, I shop there myself ...”
“What’s the total involved?” a third asked more soberly.
“I just skimmed through this stuff,” Bright answered, “but I got close to seven hundred million. Eight shopping malls spread from Fort Worth to Atlanta. The investments go through eleven different corporations, twenty-three banks, and—”
“My life insurance is with this company! They do my IRA, and—”
“The way he set it up, he was the only one who knew. Talk about an artist, this guy was like Leonardo....”
“Sucker got greedy, though. If I read this right, he skimmed off about thirty million ... God almighty ...”
The plan, as with all great plans, was an elegantly simple one. There were eight real-estate-development projects. In each case the deceased had set up himself as the general partner representing foreign money—invariably described as Persian Gulf oil money or Japanese industrial money, with the funds laundered through an incredible maze of non-American banks. The general partner had used the “Oil Money”—the term was almost generic in the venture capital field—to purchase land and set the project in motion, then solicited further development funds from limited partners who had no say in the executive management of the individual projects, but whose profits were almost guaranteed by the syndicate’s previous performance. Even the one in Fort Worth had made money, despite the recent slowdown in the local oil industry. By the time ground was broken on every project, actual ownership was further disguised by majority investment from banks, insurance companies, and wealthy private investors, with much of the original overseas investment fully recovered and gone back to the Bank of Dubai and numerous others—but with a controlling interest remaining in the project itself. In this way, the overseas investors speedily recouped their initial investment with a tidy profit, and continued to get much of the profits from the project’s actual operations, further looking forward to the eventual sale of the project to local interests for more profit still. For each hundred million dollars invested, Bright estimated, one hundred fifty million fully laundered dollars were extracted. And that was the important part. The hundred million put in, and the fifty million profit taken out were as clean as the marble on the Washington Monument.
Except for these computer disks.
“Every one of these projects, and every dime of investment and profits, went through IRS, SEC, and enough lawyers to fill the Pentagon, and nobody ever caught a sniff. He kept these records in case somebody ever burned him—but he must have expected to trade this information for a crack at the Witness Protection Program—”
“And he’d be the richest guy in Cody, Wyoming,” Mike Schratz observed. “But the wrong people got a sniff. I wonder what tipped them off? What did our friends say?”
“They don’t know. Just that they pulled the job of killing them all off and making it look like a disappearance. The bosses clearly anticipated losing them and compartmentalized the information. How hard is it to get one of these mutts to take a contract? It’s like filling out a girl’s dance card at the cotillion.”
“Roger that. Headquarters know about this yet?”
“No, Mike, I wanted you guys to see it first,” Bright said. “Opinions, gentlemen?”
“If we move fast ... we could seize a whole shitload of money ... unless they’ve moved the money on us,” Schratz thought aloud. “I wonder if they have? As clever as this stuff is ... I got a buck says they haven’t. Takers?”
“Not from me,” another agent announced. This one was a CPA and a lawyer. “Why should they bother? This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to—hell, it is a perfect plan. I suppose we ought to show some appreciation, what with all the help they’re giving our balance-of-payments problem. In any case, folks, this money is exposed. We can bag it all.”
“There’s the Bureau’s budget for the next two years—”
“And a squadron of fighters for the Air Force. This is big enough to sting them pretty good. Mark, I think you ought to call the Director,” Schratz concluded. There was general agreement. “Where’s Pete today?” Pete Mariano was the special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Field Office.
“Probably Venice,” an agent said. “He’s going to be pissed he was away for this one.”
Bright closed the ring binder. He was already booked on an early-morning flight to Dulles International Airport.
The C-141 landed ten minutes early at Howard Field. After the clean, dry air of the Colorado Rockies, and the cleaner, thinner, and drier air of the flight, the damp oven of the Isthmus of Panama was like walking into a door. The soldiers assembled their gear and allowed themselves to be herded off by the loadmaster. They were quiet and serious. The change in climate was a physical sign that playtime was over. The mission had begun. They immediately boarded yet another green bus which took them to some dilapidated barracks on the grounds of Fort Kobbe.
The MH-53J helicopter landed several hours later at the same field, and was rolled unceremoniously into a hangar, which was surrounded with armed guards. Colonel Johns and the flight crew were taken to nearby quarters and told to stay put.
Another helicopter, this one a Marine CH-53E Super Stallion, lifted off the deck of USS Guadalcanal just before dawn. It flew west over the Bay of Panama to Corezal, a small military site near the Gaillard Cut, the most difficult segment of the original Panama Canal construction project. The helicopter-carrier’s flight-deck crew attached a bulky item to a sling dangling from the helicopter’s underside, and the CH-53E headed awkwardly toward shore. After a twenty-minute flight, the helicopter hovered over its predetermined destination. The pilot killed his forward speed and gently eased toward the ground, coached by instructions from the crew chief, until the communications van touched down on a concrete pad. The sling was detached and the helicopter flew off at once to make room for a second aircraft, a smaller CH-46 troop carrier which deposited four men before returning to its ship. The men went immediately to work setting up the van.
The van was quite ordinary, looking most of all like a cargo container with wheels, though it was painted in the mottled green camouflage scheme of most military vehicles. That changed rapidly as the communications technicians began erecting various radio antennas, including one four-foot satellite dish. Power cables were run in from a generator vehicle already in place, and the van’s air-conditioning systems were turned on to protect the communications gear, rather than the technicians. They wore military-style dress, though none of them were soldiers. All the pieces were now in place.
Or almost all. At Cape Canaveral, a Titan-IIID rocket began its final countdown. Three senior Air Force officers and half a dozen civilians watched the hundred or so technicians go through the procedure. They were unhappy. Their cargo had been bumped at the last minute for this less important one (they thought). The explanation for the change was not to their collective satisfaction, and there weren’t enough launch rockets to play this sort of game. But nobody had bothered telling them what the game actually was.
“Tallyho, tallyho. I have eyeballs on target,” Bronco reported. The Eagle bottomed out half a mile astern and slightly below the target. It seemed to be a four-engined Douglas. A DC-4, -6, or -7, a big one—the biggest he’d yet intercepted. Four piston engines and a single rudder made it a Douglas product, certainly older than the man who was now chasing it. Winters saw the blue flames from the exhaust ports on the big radial engines, along with the moonlight shimmering from the propellers. The rest was mainly guesswork.
The flying became harder now. He was closing on the target and had to slough off his airspeed lest he overtake it. Bronco throttled his Pratt & Whitney engines back and put on some flaps to increase both lift and drag as he watched his airspeed drop to a scant two-hundred forty knots.
He matched speed when he was a hundred yards aft of the target. The heavy fighter rocked slightly—only the pilot would have noticed—from the larger plane’s wake turbulence. Time. He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers once around the stick. Captain Winters switched on his powerful landing lights. They were alert, he saw. The wingtips rocked a second after his lights transfixed the former airliner in the sky.
“Aircraft in view, please identify, over,” he called over the guard frequency.
It started turning—it was a DC-7B, he thought now, the last of the great piston-engine liners, so quickly brushed aside by the advent of the jetliners in the late fifties. The exhaust flames grew brighter as the pilot added power.
“Aircraft in view, you are in restricted airspace. Identify immediately, over,” Bronco called next. Immediately is a word that carries a special meaning for flyers.
The DC-7B was diving now, heading for the wave tops. The Eagle followed almost of its own accord.
“Aircraft in view, I repeat—you are in restricted airspace. Identify at once!”
Turning away now, heading east for the Florida peninsula. Captain Winters eased back on the stick and armed his gun system. He checked the surface of the ocean to make sure that there were no ships or boats about.
“Aircraft in view, if you do not identify I will open fire, over.” No reaction.
The hard part now was that the Eagle’s gun system, once armed, did everything possible to facilitate the pilot’s task of hitting the target. But they wanted him to bring one in alive, and Bronco had to concentrate to make sure he’d miss, then squeezed the trigger for a fraction of a second.
Half the rounds in the magazine were tracers, and the six-barrel cannon spat them out at a rate of almost a hundred per second. What resulted was a streak of green-yellow light that looked like one of the laser beams in a science-fiction movie, and hung for a sizable portion of infinity a bare ten yards from the DC-7B’s cockpit window.
“Aircraft in view: level out and identify or you’ll eat the next burst. Over.”
“Who is this? What the hell are you doing?” The DC-7B leveled out.
“Identify!” Winters commanded tersely.
“Carib Cargo—we’re a special flight, inbound from Honduras.”
“You are in restricted airspace. Come left to new course three-four-seven.”
“Look, we didn’t know about the restriction. Tell us where to go and we’re out of here, okay? Over.”
“Come left to three-four-seven. I will be following you in. You got some big-league explaining to do, Carib. You picked a bad place to be flying without lights. I hope you got a good story, ’cause the colonel is not pleased with you. Bring that fat-assed bird left—now!”
Nothing happened for a moment. Bronco was a little bit peeved that they were not taking him seriously enough. He eased his fighter over to the right and triggered off another burst to encourage the target.
And it came left to a heading of three-four-seven. And the anticollision lights came on.
“Okay, Carib, maintain course and altitude. Stay off your radio. I repeat, maintain radio silence until instructed otherwise. Don’t make it any worse than it already is. I’ll be back here to keep an eye on you. Out.”
It took nearly an hour—each second like driving a Ferrari in Manhattan rush-hour traffic. Clouds were rolling in from the north, he saw as they approached the coast, and there was lightning in them. They’d land first, Winters thought. On cue, a set of runway lights came on.
“Carib, I want you to land on that strip right in front of you. You do exactly what they tell you. Out.” Bronco checked his fuel state. Enough for several more hours. He indulged himself by throttling up and rocketing to twenty thousand as he watched the DC-7’s strobe lights enter the blue rectangle of the old airstrip.
“Okay, he’s ours,” the radio told the fighter pilot.
Bronco did not acknowledge. He brought the Eagle around for Eglin AFB, and figured that he’d beat the weather in. Another night’s work.
The DC-7B rolled to a stop at the end of the runway. As it halted, a number of lights came on. A jeep rolled to within fifty yards of the aircraft’s nose. On the back of the jeep was an M-2 .50-caliber machine gun, on the left side of which hung a large box of ammunition. The gun was pointed right at the cockpit.
“Out of the fuckin’ airplane, amigo!” an angry voice commanded over some loudspeakers.
The forward door opened on the left side of the aircraft. The man who looked down was white and in his forties. Blinded by the lights that were aimed at his face, he was still disoriented. Which was part of the plan, of course.
“Down on the pavement, amigo,” a voice said from behind a light.
“What’s gives? I—”
“Down on the fuckin’ pavement—right the fuck now!”
There were no stairs. The pilot was joined by another man, and one at a time they sat down on the doorsill, and stretched down to hang from their hands, then dropped the four feet or so to the cracked concrete. They were met by strong arms in rolled-up camouflage fatigues.
“Face on the cement, you fuckin’ commie spy!” a young voice screamed at them.
“Hot diggity damn, we finally bagged one!” another voice called. “We got us a fuckin’ Cuban spy plane!”
“What the hell—” one of the men on the cement started to say. He stopped talking when the three-pronged flash suppressor on an M-16 rifle came to rest on the back of his neck. Then he felt a hot breath on the side of his face.
“I want any shit out of you, amigo, I’ll fuckin’ blow it outa ya!” said the other voice. It sounded older than the first one. “Anybody else on the airplane, amigo?”
“No. Look, we’re—”
“Check it out! And watch your ass!” the gunnery sergeant added.
“Aye aye, Gunny,” answered the Marine corporal. “Give me some cover on the door.”
“You got a name?” the gunnery sergeant asked. He punctuated the question by pressing his muzzle into the pilot’s neck.
“Bert Russo. I’m—”
“You picked a bad time to spy on the exercise, Roberto. We was ready for y’all this time, boy! I wonder if Fidel’ll want your ass back ... ?”
“He don’t look Cuban to me, Gunny,” a young voice observed. “You s’pose he’s a Russian?”
“Hey, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Russo objected.
“Sure, Roberto. I—over here, Cap’n!” Footsteps approached. And a new voice started talking.
“Sorry I’m late, Gunny Black.”
“We got it under control, sir. Putting people into the plane now. Finally bagged that Cuban snooper, we did. This here’s Roberto. Ain’t talked to the other one yet.”
“Roll him over.”
A rough hand flipped the pilot faceup like a rag doll, and he saw what the hot breath came from. The biggest German Shepherd dog he’d ever seen in his life was staring at him from a distance of three inches. When he looked at it, it started growling.
“Don’t you go scarin’ my dog, Roberto,” Gunnery Sergeant Black warned him unnecessarily.
“You have a name?”
Bert Russo couldn’t see any faces. Everyone was backlit by the perimeter lights. He could see the guns, and the dogs, one of which stood next to his copilot. When he started to speak, the dog over his face moved, and that froze the breath in his throat.
“You Cubans ought to know better. We warned you not to come snooping into our exercise last time, but you had to come bother us again, didn’t you?” the captain observed.
“I’m not a Cuban—I’m an American. And I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the pilot finally managed to say.
“You got some ID?” the captain asked.
Bert Russo started moving his hand toward his wallet, but then the dog really let loose a snarl.
“Don’t scare the dog,” the captain warned. “They’re a little high-strung, y’know?”
“Fuckin’ Cuban spies,” Gunny Black observed. “We could just waste them, sir. I mean, who really gives a damn?”
“Hey, Gunny!” a voice called from the airplane. “This ain’t no spy-bird. It’s full of drugs! We got us a drug runner!”
“Son of a bitch!” The gunny sounded disappointed for a moment. “Fuckin’ druggie is all? Shit!”
The captain just laughed. “Mister, you really picked the wrong place to drive that airplane tonight. How much, Corp?”
“A whole goddamned pisspot full, sir. Grass and coke both. Plane’s like full of it, sir.”
“Fuckin’ druggie,” the gunny observed. He was quiet for a moment. “Cap’n?”
“Yeah?”
“Sir, all the time, sir, these planes land, and the crew just bugs the hell out, and nobody ever finds ’em, sir.”
As though on cue, they all heard a guttural sound from the swamp that surrounded the old airstrip. Albert Russo came from Florida and knew what the sound was.
“I mean, sir, who’d ever know the difference? Plane landed, and the crew ran off‘fore we could catch up, and they got into the swamp over yonder, and like we heard some screams, y’know ... ?” A pause. “I mean, they’re just druggies. Who’s really gonna care, sir? Make the world a better place, y‘know? Hell, it even feeds them ’gators. They sound right hungry to me, sir.”
“No evidence ...” the captain mused.
“Ain’t nobody gonna give a good goddamn, sir,” the sergeant persisted. “Just us be out here, sir.”
“No!” the copilot screamed, speaking for the first time and startling the dog at the back of his neck.
“Y’all be quiet now, we be talking business here,” the gunny observed.
“Gentlemen, I find that the sergeant makes a pretty good case,” the captain said after a moment’s contemplation. “And the ‘gators do sound hungry. Kill ’em first, Sergeant. No sense being cruel about it, and the ’gators don’t care one way or the other. Be sure you take all their IDs, though.”
“Aye aye, skipper,” the gunnery sergeant replied. He and the remainder of the duty section—there were only eight of them—came from the Special Operations Center at MacDill. They were Recon Marines, for whom unusual activities were the rule rather than the exception. Their helicopter was half a mile away.
“Okay, sport,” Black said as he bent down. He hoisted Russo to his feet with one brutal jerk. “You sure did pick the wrong time to run drugs, boy.”
“Wait a minute!” the other one screamed. “We didn’t—I mean, we can tell you—”
“You talk all you want, boy. I got my orders. Come on, now. Y’all want to pray or something, now be the time.”
“We came in from Colombia—”
“That’s a real surprise, ain’t it?” Black observed as he frog-marched the man toward the trees. “You best be doing your talking to the Lord, boy. He might listen. Then again, He might not....”
“I can tell you everything,” Russo said.
“I ain’t int’rested!”
“But you can’t—”
“Sure I can. What do you think I do for a livin’, boy?” Black said with amusement. “Don’t worry. It’ll be quick and clean. I don’t make people suffer like your kind does with drugs. I just do it.”
“I have a family ...” Russo was whimpering now.
“Most people do,” Black agreed. “They’ll get along. You got insurance, I ’spect. Lookie there!”
Another Marine pointed his flashlight into the bushes. It was as large an alligator as Russo had ever seen, over twelve feet long. The large eyes blazed yellow in the darkness, while the rest of the reptile’s body looked like a green log. With a mouth.
“This is far enough,” Black judged. “Keep them dogs back, goddammit!”
The alligator—they called him Nicodemus—opened his mouth and hissed. It was a thoroughly evil sound.
“Please ...” Russo said.
“I can tell you everything!” the copilot offered again.
“Like what?” the captain asked disgustedly. Why can’t you just die like a man? he seemed to ask instead.
“Where we came from. Who gave us the load. Where we’re going. Radio codes. Who’s supposed to meet us. Everything!”
“Sure,” the captain noted. “Get their IDs. Pocket change, car keys, everything. As a matter of fact, just strip ‘em naked before you shoot ’em. Let’s try to be neat.”
“I know everything!” Russo screamed.
“He knows everything,” Gunny Black said. “Isn’t that nice? Take off your clothes, boy.”
“Hold it a minute, Gunny.” The captain came forward and shined his light right in Russo’s face.
“What do you know that would interest us?” It was a voice they hadn’t heard before. Though dressed in fatigues, he was not a Marine.
Ten minutes later it was all on tape. They already knew most of the names, of course. The location of the airstrip was new information, however, as were the radio codes.
“Do you waive the right to counsel?” the civilian asked.
“Yes!”
“You willing to cooperate?”
“Yes!”
“Good.” Russo and the copilot, whose name was Bennett, were blindfolded and led to a helicopter. By noon the next day they’d be taken before a U.S. Magistrate, then a judge of the Federal District Court; by sundown to a remote part of Eglin Air Force Base, a newly built structure with a high fence. It was guarded by serious-looking men in uniform.
They didn’t know that they were the lucky ones. Five downed planes qualified a pilot as an ace. Bronco was well on his way there.