29.

Fill-ups

IT HAD STARTED with the President’s warning. Admiral Cutter wasn’t used to having to make sure his orders had been carried out. In his naval career orders were things that you gave and that other people did, or that you did after being told to do so by others. He placed a call to the Agency and got Ritter and asked the question, the one that had to be an unnecessarily insulting one. Cutter knew that he’d already humiliated the man, and that to do so further was not a smart move—but what if the President had been right? That risk called for further action. Ritter’s reaction was a troubling one. The irritation that should have been in his voice, wasn’t. Instead he’d spoken like any other government bureaucrat saying that yes, the orders were being carried out, of course. Ritter was a cold, effective son of a bitch, but even that sort had its limits, beyond which emotion comes to the fore; Cutter knew that he’d reached and passed that point with the DDO. The anger just hadn’t been there, and it ought to have been.

Something is wrong. The National Security Adviser told himself to relax. Something might be wrong. Maybe Ritter was playing mind games. Maybe even he’d seen that his course of action was the only proper one, Cutter speculated, and resigned himself to the inevitable. After all, Ritter liked being Deputy Director (Operations). That was his rice bowl, as the government saying went. Even the most important government officials had those. Even they were often uncomfortable with the idea of leaving behind the office and the secretary and the driver and most of all the title that designated them as Important People despite their meager salaries. Like the line from some movie or other, leaving the government meant entering the real world, and in the real world, people expected results to back up position papers and National Intelligence Estimates. How many people stayed in government service because of the security, the benefits, and the insulation from that “real” world? There were more of those, Cutter was sure, than of the ones who saw themselves as the honest servants of the people.

But even if that were likely, Cutter considered, it was not certain, and some further checking was in order. And so he placed his own call to Hurlburt Field and asked for Wing Operations.

“I need to talk to Colonel Johns.”

“Colonel Johns is off post, sir, and cannot be reached.”

“I need to know where he is.”

“I do not have that information, sir.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have that information, Captain ?” The real wing operations officer was off duty by now, and one of the helicopter pilots had drawn the duty for this evening.

“I mean I don’t know, sir,” the captain replied. He wanted to be a little more insolent in his answer to so stupid a question, but the call had come in on a secure line, and there was no telling who the hell was on the other end.

“Who does know?”

“I don’t know that, sir, but I can try to find out.”

Was this just some command fuck-up? Cutter asked himself. What if it wasn’t?

“Are all your MC-130s in place, Captain?” Cutter asked.

“Three birds are off TDY somewhere or other, sir. Where they are is classified—I mean, sir, that where our aircraft happen to be is almost always classified. Besides, what with that hurricane chasing around south of here, we’re getting ready to move a lot of our birds in case it heads this way.”

Cutter could have demanded the information right then and there. But that would have meant identifying himself, and even then, he was talking to some twenty-something-year-old junior officer who might just say no because nobody had told him otherwise, and such a junior officer knew that he’d never be seriously punished for not taking initiative and doing something he’d been told not to do—at least not over a telephone line, secure or not. Such a demand would also have called attention to something in a way that he didn’t want....

“Very well,” Cutter said finally and hung up. Then he called Andrews.

 

The first hint of trouble came from Larson, whose Beech was circling the FEATURE LZ. Juardo, still fighting the pain of his leg wound, was scanning out the side of the aircraft with his low-light goggles.

“Hey, man, I got some trucks on the ground down there at three o‘clock. Like fifteen of ’em.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” the pilot observed, and keyed his microphone.

“CLAW, this is LITTLE EYES, over.”

“LITTLE EYES, this is CLAW,” the Combat Talon answered.

“Be advised we have possible activity on the ground six klicks southeast of FEATURE. Say again we have trucks on the ground. No personnel are visible at this time. Recommend you warn FEATURE and CAESAR of possible intruders.”

“Roger, copy.”

“Christ, I hope they’re slow tonight,” Larson said over the intercom. “We’re going down to take a look.”

“You say so, man.”

Larson extended his flaps and reduced power as much as he dared. There was precious little light, and flying low over mountains at night was not his idea of fun. Juardo looked down with his goggles, but the tree canopy was too heavy.

“I don’t see anything.”

“I wonder how long those trucks have been there....”

There was a bright flash on the ground, perhaps five hundred meters below the summit. Then there were several more, small ones, like sparklers on the ground. Larson made another call:

“CLAW, this is LITTLE EYES. We have a possible firefight underway below FEATURE LZ.”

“Roger.”

 

“Roger, copy,” PJ said to the MC-130. “Aircraft commander to crew: we have a possible firefight at the next LZ. We may have a hot pickup.” At that moment something changed. The aircraft settled a touch and slowed. “Buck, what is that?”

“Uh-oh,” the flight engineer said. “I think we have a P3 leak here. Possible pressure bleed leak, maybe a bad valve, number-two engine. I’m losing some N_f speed and some Ng, sir. T₅ is coming up a little.” Ten feet over the flight engineer’s head, a spring had broken, opening a valve wider than it was supposed to be. It released bleed air supposed to recirculate within the turboshaft engine. That reduced combustion in the engine, and was manifested in reduced N_f or free-power turbine speed, also in Ng power from the gas-producer turbine, and finally the loss of air volume resulted in increased tailpipe temperature, called T₅. Johns and Willis could see all this from their instruments, but they really depended on Sergeant Zimmer to tell them what the problem was. The engines belonged to him.

“Talk to me, Buck,” Johns ordered.

“We just lost twenty-six-percent power in Number Two, sir. Can’t fix it. Bad valve, shouldn’t get much worse, though. Tailpipe temp ought to stabilize short of max-sustainable ... maybe. Ain’t an emergency yet, PJ. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Fine,” the pilot growled. At the valve, not at Zimmer. This was not good news. Things had gone well tonight, too well. Like most combat veterans, Paul Johns was a suspicious man. What his mind went over now were power and weight considerations. He had to climb over those goddamned mountains in order to tank and fly back to Panama....

But first he had a pickup to make.

“Give me a time.”

“Four minutes,” Captain Willis answered. “We’ll be able to see it over that next ridge. Starting to mush on us, sir.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” Johns looked at his instruments. Number One was at 104 percent rated power. Number Two was just over 73 percent. Since they could accomplish their next segment of the mission despite the problem, it went onto the back burner for now. PJ dialed some more altitude into his autopilot. Climbing ridges would be getting harder now with greater weight on the airframe and less power to drag it around.

“It’s a real fight, all right,” Johns said a minute later. His night-vision systems showed lots of activity on the ground. Johns keyed his radio. “FEATURE, this is CAESAR, over.” No answer.

“FEATURE, this is CAESAR, over.” It took two more tries.

“CAESAR this is FEATURE, we are under attack.”

“Roger, FEATURE, I can see that, son. I make your position about three hundred meters down from the LZ. Get up the hill, we can cover. Say again, we can cover.”

“We have close contact, CAESAR.”

“Run for it. I repeat, run for it, we can cover you,” PJ told him calmly. Come on, kid. I’ve been here before. I know the drill.... “Break contact now!”

“Roger. FEATURE, this is Six, head for the LZ. I repeat, head for the LZ now!” they heard him say. PJ keyed his intercom.

“Buck, let’s go hot. Gunners to stations, we have a hot LZ here. There are friendlies on the ground. I say again: there are friendlies on the ground, people. So let’s be goddamned careful with those fucking guns!”

Johns had wished a hundred times that he’d had one of these over Laos. The Pave Low carried over a thousand pounds of titanium armor which went, of course, over the engines, fuel cells, and transmission. The flight crew was protected by less effective Kevlar. The rest of the aircraft was less fortunate—a child could push a screwdriver through the aluminum skin—but those were the breaks. He orbited the LZ, a thousand feet higher and two thousand yards out, traveling in a clockwise circle to get a feel for things. Things didn’t feel good.

“I don’t like this, PJ,” Zimmer told him over intercom. Sergeant Bean on the ramp gun felt the same way but didn’t say anything. Ryan, who hadn’t seen anything at any of the landing zones, also kept his mouth shut.

“They’re moving, Buck.”

“Looks like it.”

“Okay, I’m spiraling in. AC to crew, we’re heading in for a closer look. You may return fire directed at us, but nothing else until I say otherwise. I want to hear acknowledgments.”

“Zimmer, acknowledge.”

“Bean, acknowledge.”

“Ryan, okay.” I can’t see anything to shoot at anyway.

 

It was worse than it looked. The attackers from the Cartel had chosen to approach the primary LZ from an unexpected direction. This took them right through the alternate extraction site selected by FEATURE, and the team had not had the time needed to prepare a full defensive network. Worst of all, some of the attackers were those who had survived the fight against KNIFE, and had learned a few things, like the way in which caution was sometimes improved by a speedy advance, not diminished by it. They also knew of the helicopter, but not enough. Had they known of its armament, the battle might have ended then and there, but they expected the rescue chopper to be unarmed because they had never really encountered any other sort. As usual in battle, the contest was defined by purpose and error, knowledge and ignorance. FEATURE was pulling back rapidly, leaving behind hastily arranged booby traps and claymores, but, as before, the casualties were less a warning to the attackers than a goad, and the Cartel’s veterans of Ninja Hill were learning. Now they split into three distinct groups and began to envelop the hilltop LZ.

 

“I got a strobe,” Willis said.

“FEATURE, this is CAESAR, confirm your LZ.”

“CAESAR, FEATURE, do you have our strobe?”

“That’s affirm. Coming in now. Get all your people in the open. I say again, get all your people where we can see them.”

“We have three down we’re bringing in. We’re doing our best.”

“Thirty seconds out,” PJ told him.

“We’ll be ready.”

As before, the gunners heard half of the conversation, followed by their instructions: “AC to crew, I’ve ordered all friendlies into the open. Once we get a good count, I want you to hose down the area. Anything you can see is probably friendly. I want everything else suppressed hard. Ryan, that means beat the shit out of it.”

“Roger,” Jack replied.

“Fifteen seconds. Let’s look sharp, people.”

It came without warning. No one saw where it originated. The Pave Low was spiraling in steeply, but it could not wholly avoid flying over enemy troops. Six of them heard it approach and saw the black mass moving against the background of clouds. Simultaneously they aimed at the sky and let loose. The 7.62mm rounds lanced right through the floor of the helicopter. The sound was distinctive, like hail on a tin roof, and everyone who heard it knew immediately what it was. A scream confirmed it for the slow. Someone had been hit.

“PJ, we’re taking fire,” Zimmer said over the intercom circuit. As he said so, he trained his gun down and loosed a brief burst. Again the airframe vibrated. The line of tracers told the whole world what and where the Pave Low was, and more fire came in.

“Jesus!” Rounds hit the armored windshield. They didn’t penetrate, but they left nicks, and their impacts sparked like fireflies. On instinct, Johns jinked to the right, away from the fire. That unmasked the left side of the aircraft.

Ryan was as scared as he had ever been. It seemed that there were a hundred, two hundred, a thousand muzzle flashes down there, all aimed straight at him. He wanted to cringe, but knew that his safest place was behind the thousand-plus-pound gun mount. The gun didn’t really have much of a sight. He looked down the rotating barrels toward a particularly tight knot of flashes and depressed the trigger switch.

It felt like he was holding a jackhammer in his hands and sounded like a giant was ripping a canvas sail to bits. A gout of flame six feet long and three across erupted before his eyes, so bright that he could barely see through it, but the tight cylinder of tracers was impossible to miss, and it walked right into the flashes that were still sparkling on the ground. But not for long. He waved the gun around, assisted in the effort by the gyrations of the helicopter and the incredible vibration of the gun. The line of tracers wiggled and wavered over the target area for several seconds. By the time his thumbs came up, the sparkling of muzzle flashes had stopped.

“Son of a bitch,” he said to himself, so surprised that he momentarily forgot about the danger. That wasn’t the only incoming fire. Ryan selected another area and went to work, this time holding to short bursts, only a few hundred rounds each. Then the chopper turned fully away and he had no more targets.

On the flight deck, Willis and Johns scanned their instruments. They’d allowed themselves to be surprised. There was no critical damage to the aircraft. The flight controls, also protected by armor, engines, transmission, and fuel cells were impervious to rifle fire. Or supposed to be.

“We got some people hurt back here,” Zimmer reported. “Let’s get it over with, PJ.”

“Okay, Buck, I hear you.” PJ brought the chopper back around, looping to the left now. “FEATURE, this is CAESAR, we’re going to try that again.” Even his voice had lost its icy calm. Combat hadn’t changed very much, but he’d grown older.

“They’re closing in. Move your ass, mister! We’re all here, we’re all here.”

“Twenty seconds, son. AC to crew, we’re going back in. Twenty seconds.”

The helicopter stopped and pivoted in the air, not continuing its majestic sweep, and Johns hoped that those who were watching would be unprepared for that. He twisted the throttle control to max power and lowered his nose to dive in hard on the LZ. Two hundred meters out he brought the nose up and yanked the collective to slow down. It was his usual perfect maneuver. The Pave Low lost forward airspeed exactly at the right place—and dropped hard on the ground because of the reduced power from Number Two. Johns cringed when he felt it, half expecting it to set off a booby trap, but that didn’t happen and he left it there.

It seemed to take forever. Minds and bodies pumped up with adrenaline have their own time, the sort that stops the ticking of watches. Ryan thought that he could see the rotor blades spinning individually at the top of his peripheral vision. He wanted to look aft, wanted to see if the team had gotten aboard yet, but his area of responsibility was out the left-side gunner’s door. He realized at once that he wasn’t being paid to bring ammunition home. As soon as he was sure that there were no friendlies in front of him, he punched the gun switch and hosed down the treeline, sweeping his fire about a foot off the ground in a wide arc. On the other side, Zimmer was doing the same.

Aft, Clark was looking out the back door. Bean was on his minigun, and he couldn’t shoot. This was where the friendlies were, and they moved toward the chopper, their legs pumping in what had to be a run, but seeming to be slow-motion. That was when the fire started from the trees.

Forward, Ryan was amazed that anyone could be alive in the area that he’d just hosed, but there it was. He saw a spark on the doorframe and knew it had to have been a bullet aimed right at him. Jack didn’t cringe. There was no place to hide, and he knew that the side of the aircraft was getting hit far worse. He took an instant to look and see where the shooting was coming from, then trained on it and fired again. It seemed that the blast from the gun must push the aircraft sideways. The exhaust flames from the gun bored a hole through the dust kicked up by the spinning rotor, but still there were flashes of fire from the treeline.

Clark heard the screams inside and out over the low howl of the miniguns. He could feel the rounds hitting the side of the aircraft, and then saw two men fall just at the tail rotor of the helicopter while others were racing aboard.

“Shit!” He leapt to his feet and ran out the door, joined by Chavez and Vega. Clark lifted one of the fallen soldiers and dragged him toward the ramp. Chavez and Vega got the other. There was dust kicking up at their feet from the fire. Vega fell five feet from the ramp, taking his burden down with him. Clark tossed his soldier into the waiting hands of his team members and turned to assist. First he took the team member. When he turned, Chavez was struggling with Vega. Clark grabbed the man’s shoulders and pushed backward, landing on the edge of the ramp. Ding grabbed Oso’s feet and swung them around, leaping over them to grab the base of the minigun as the helicopter started lifting off. Fire came straight through the door, but Bean now had a clear field for his weapon and swept it across the area.

It was slow getting off. The helicopter had several tons of new weight, was at over five thousand feet of altitude, and trying to fly with reduced power. Forward, PJ cursed the balky machine. The Pave Low struggled up a few feet, still taking fire.

On the ground around them the attackers were enraged that the men whom they wanted to kill were escaping, and ran for one last attempt to prevent it. They saw the helicopter as a trophy, some horrible apparition that had robbed them of success and their comrades of their lives, and each of them determined that this should not be. Over a hundred rifles were trained on the aircraft as it wavered, halfway between ground and flight.

Ryan felt the passage of several rounds—they were coming right through his door, going he knew not where, aiming for him and his gun. He was past fear. The flashes of rifle fire were places to aim, and that he did. One at a time he selected a target and touched his trigger, shifting rapidly from one to another. Safety, what there was of it, lay in eliminating the danger. There was no place to run, and he knew that the ability to respond was a luxury that everyone aboard the aircraft wanted, but only three of them had. He couldn’t let them down. He moved the gun left to right and back again in a series of seconds that stretched out into hours, and he thought that he could hear each individual round the minigun spat out. His head jerked back when something hit his helmet, but he yanked it back and held the trigger down, spraying the area in one continuous blast of fire that changed as he realized that he had to bring his hands up and the muzzles down because the targets were dropping away. For one brief contradictory instant it seemed as if they and not he were getting away. Then it was over. For a moment, his hands wouldn’t come off the gun. He tried to take a step back, but his hands wouldn’t let go until he willed them to. Then they dropped to his side. Ryan shook his head to clear it. He was deafened by the noise from the minigun, and it took a few seconds before he started hearing the higher-frequency screams of wounded men. He looked around to see that the body of the aircraft was filled with the acidic smoke of the guns, but the rapidly increasing slipstream from forward flight was clearing it out. His eyes were still suffering from the gun flashes, and his legs were wobbly from the sudden fatigue that comes after violent action. He wanted to sit down, to go to sleep, to wake up in another place.

One of the screams was close by. It was Zimmer, only a few feet away, lying on his back and rolling around with his arms across his chest. Ryan went to see what the problem was.

Zimmer had taken three rounds in the chest. He was aspirating blood. It sprayed in a pink cloud from his mouth and nose. One round had shattered his right shoulder, but the serious ones were through the lungs. The man was bleeding to death before his eyes, Ryan knew at once. Was there a medic here? Might he do something?

“This is Ryan,” he said over the intercom line. “Sergeant Zimmer is down. He’s hit pretty bad.”

“Buck!” PJ responded at once. “Buck, are you all right?”

Zimmer tried to answer but couldn’t. His intercom line had been shot away. He shouted something Ryan couldn’t understand, and Jack turned and screamed as loudly as he could at the rest of them, the others who didn’t seem to care or know what the problem here was.

“Medic! Corpsman!” he added, not knowing what it was that Army troops said. Clark heard him and started heading that way.

“Come on, Zimmer, you’re going to be all right,” Jack told him. He remembered that much from his brief few months in the Marine Corps. Give them a reason to live. “We’re going to fix this up and you’re going to be all right. Hang in there, Sarge—it hurts, but you’re going to be all right.”

Clark was there a moment later. He stripped off the flight engineer’s flak jacket, oblivious to the screech of pain that it caused from the wrecked shoulder. For Clark, too, it was too much a return to years past and things half-remembered. Somehow he’d forgotten just how scary, how awful this sort of thing was, and while he was recovering his senses more rapidly than most, the horror of having been helpless under fire and helpless with its aftermath had nearly overpowered him. And he was helpless now. He could see that from the placement of the wounds. Clark looked up at Ryan and shook his head.

“My kids!” Zimmer screamed. The sergeant had a reason to live, but the reason wasn’t enough.

“Tell me about your kids,” Ryan said. “Talk to me about your kids.”

“Seven—I got seven kids—I gotta, I can’t die! My kids—my kids need me.”

“Hang in there, Sarge, we’re going to get you out of here. You’re going to make it,” Ryan told him, tears clouding in his eyes at the shame of lying to a dying man.

“They need me!” His voice was weaker now as the blood was filling his throat and lungs.

Ryan looked up at Clark, hoping that there was something to be said. Some hope. Something. Clark just stared into Jack’s face. He looked back down at Zimmer and took his hand, the uninjured one.

“Seven kids?” Jack asked.

“They need me,” Zimmer whimpered, knowing now that he wouldn’t be there, wouldn’t see them grow and marry and have their own children, wouldn’t be there to guide them, to protect them. He had failed to do what a father must do.

“I’ll tell you something about your kids that you don’t know, Zimmer,” Ryan said to the dying man.

“Huh? What?” He looked confused, looked to Ryan for the answer to the great question of life. Jack didn’t have that one, but told him what he could.

“They’re all going to college, man.” Ryan squeezed the hand as hard as he could. “You got my word, Zimmer, all your kids’ll go to college. I will take care of that for you. Swear to God, man, I’ll do it.”

The sergeant’s face changed a bit at that, but before Ryan could decide what emotion he beheld, the face changed again, and there was no emotion left. Ryan hit the intercom switch. “Zimmer’s dead, Colonel.”

“Roger.” Ryan was offended by the coldness of the acknowledgment. He didn’t hear what Johns was thinking: God, oh God, what do I tell Carol and the kids?

Ryan had Zimmer’s head cradled on his lap. He disengaged himself slowly, resting the head down on the metal floor of the helicopter. Clark wrapped his burly arms around the younger man.

“I’m going to do it,” Jack told him in a choking voice. “That wasn’t a fucking lie. I am going to do it!”

“I know. He knew it too. He really did.”

“You sure?” The tears had started, and it was hard for Jack to repeat the most important question of his life. “Are you really sure?”

“He knew what you said, Jack, and he believed you. What you did, doc, that was pretty good.” Clark embraced Ryan in the way that men do only with their wives, their children, and those with whom they had faced death.

In the right-front seat, Colonel Johns put his grief away into a locked compartment that he would later open and experience to the full. But for now he had a mission to fly. Buck would surely understand that.

 

Cutter’s jet arrived at Hurlburt Field well after dark. He was met by a car which took him to Wing Operations. He’d arrived entirely without warning, and strode into the Operations office like an evil spirit.

“Who the hell’s in charge here?”

The sergeant at the desk recognized the President’s National Security Adviser immediately from seeing him on television. “Right through that door, sir.”

Cutter found a young captain dozing in his swivel chair. His eyes had cracked open just as the door did, and the twenty-nine-year-old officer jumped to his feet quite unsteadily.

“I want to know where Colonel Johns is,” Vice Admiral Cutter told him quietly.

“Sir, that is information which I am not able to—”

“You know who the hell I am?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you trying to say no to me, Captain?”

“Sir, I have my orders.”

“Captain, I am countermanding all of your orders. Now, you answer my question and you do it right now.” Cutter’s voice was a few decibels higher now.

“Sir, I don’t know where the—”

“Then you find somebody who does, and you get him here.”

The captain was frightened enough that he took the route of least resistance. He called a major, who lived on post and was in the office in under eight minutes.

“What the hell is this?” the major said on the way through the door.

“Major, I am what’s going on here,” Cutter told him. “I want to know where Colonel Johns is. He’s the goddamned CO of this outfit, isn’t he?”

“Yessir!” What the hell is this ... ?

“Are you telling me that the people of this unit don’t know where their CO is?” Cutter was sufficiently amazed that his authority hadn’t generated immediate compliance with his orders that he allowed himself to bluster off on a tangent.

“Sir, in Special Operations, we—”

“Is this a fucking Boy Scout camp or a military organization ?” the Admiral shouted.

“Sir, this is a military organization,” the major replied. “Colonel Johns is off TDY. I am under orders, sir, not to discuss his mission or his location with anyone without proper authority, and you are not on the list, sir. Those are my orders, Admiral.”

Cutter was amazed and only got angrier. “Do you know what my job is and who I work for?” He hadn’t had a junior officer talk to him like this in over a decade. And he’d broken that one’s career like a matchstick.

“Sir, I have written orders on this matter. The President ain’t on the list either, sir,” the major said from the position of attention. Fucking squid, calling the United States Air Force a Boy Scout camp! Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on—Admiral, sir, his face managed to communicate quite clearly.

Cutter had to soften his voice, had to regain control of his emotions. He could take care of this insolent punk at leisure. But for now he needed that information. He started, therefore, with an apology, man to man, as it were. “Major, you’ll have to excuse me. This is a most important matter, and I can’t explain to you why it is important or the issues involved here. I can say that this is a real life-or-death situation. Your Colonel Johns may be in a place where he needs help. The operation may be coming apart around him, and I really need to know. Your loyalty to your commander is laudable, and your devotion to duty is exemplary, but officers are supposed to exercise judgment. You have to do that now, Major. I am telling you that I need that information—and I need it now.”

Reason succeeded where bluster had failed. “Admiral, the colonel went back down to Panama along with one of our MC- 130s. I do not know why, and I don’t know what they’re doing. That is normal in a special-ops wing, sir. Practically everything we do is compartmented, and this one is tighter than most. What I just told you is everything I know, sir.”

“Exactly where?”

“Howard, sir.”

“Very well. How can I get in touch with them?”

“Sir, they’re out of the net. I do not have that information. They can contact us but we can’t contact them.”

“That’s crazy,” Cutter objected.

“Not so, Admiral. We do that sort of thing all the time. With the MC-130 along, they’re a self-contained unit. The Herky-bird takes maintenance and support personnel to sustain the operation, and unless they call us for something, they’re completely independent of this base. In the event of a family emergency or something like that, we can try to contact them through Howard’s base ops office, but we haven’t had to do so in this case. I can try to open that channel now for you, if you wish, sir, but it might take a few hours.”

“Thanks, but I can be there in a few hours.”

“Weather’s breaking down around that area, sir,” the major warned him.

“That’s okay.” Cutter left the room and walked back to his car. His plane had already been refueled, and ten minutes later it was lifting off for Panama.

 

Johns was on an easier flight profile now, heading northeast down the great Andean valley that forms the spine of Colombia. The flight was smooth, but he had three concerns. First, he didn’t have the necessary power to climb over the mountains to his west at his present aircraft weight. Second, he’d have to refuel in less than an hour. Third, the weather ahead was getting worse by the minute.

“CAESAR, this is CLAW, over.”

“Roger, CLAW.”

“When are we going to tank, sir?” Captain Montaigne asked.

“I want to get closer to the coast first, and maybe if we burn some more off I can head west some more to do it.”

“Roger, but be advised that we’re starting to get radar emissions, and somebody might just detect us. They’re air-traffic radars, but this Herky-bird is big enough to give one a skin-paint, sir.”

Damn! Somehow Johns had allowed himself to forget that.

“We got a problem here,” PJ told Willis.

“Yeah. There’s a pass about twenty minutes ahead that we might be able to climb over.”

“How much?”

“Says eighty-one hundred on the charts. Drops down a lot lower farther up, but with the detection problem ... and the weather. I don’t know, Colonel.”

“Let’s find out how high we can take her,” Johns said. He’d tried to go easy on the engines for the last half hour. Not now. He had to find out what he could do. PJ twisted the throttle control on the collective arm to full power, watching the gauge for Number Two as he did so. The needle didn’t even reach 70 percent this time.

“The P3 leak is getting worse, boss,” Willis told him.

“I see it.” They worked to get maximum lift off the rotor, but though they didn’t know it, that, too, had taken damage and was not delivering as much lift as it was supposed to. The Pave Low labored upward, reaching seventy-seven hundred feet, but that was where it stopped, and then it started descending, fighting every foot but gradually losing altitude.

“As we burn off more gas ...” Willis said hopefully.

“Don’t bet on it.” PJ keyed his radio. “CLAW, CAESAR, we can’t make it over the hills.”

“Then we’ll come to you.”

“Negative, too soon. We have to tank closer to the coast.”

“CAESAR, this is LITTLE EYES. I copy your problem. What sort of fuel you need for that monster?” Larson asked. He’d been pacing the helicopter since the pickup, in accordance with the plan.

“Son, right now I’d burn piss if I had enough.”

“Can you make the coast?”

“That’s affirmative. Close, but we ought to be able to make it.”

“I can pick you an airfield one-zero-zero miles short of the coast that has all the avgas you need. I am also carrying a casualty who’s bleeding and needs some medical help.”

Johns and Willis looked at each other. “Where is it?”

“At current speed, about forty minutes. El Pindo. It’s a little place for private birds. Ought to be deserted this time of night. They have ten-kay gallons of underground storage. It’s a Shell concession and I’ve been in and out of there a bunch of times.”

“Altitude?”

“Under five hundred. Nice, thick air for that rotor, Colonel.”

“Let’s do it,” Willis said.

“CLAW, did you copy that?” Johns asked.

“That’s affirm.”

“That’s what we’re going to try. Break west. Stay close enough to maintain radio contact, but you are free to evade radar coverage.”

“Roger, heading west,” Montaigne replied.

In back, Ryan was sitting by his gun. There were eight wounded men in the helicopter, but two medics were working on them and Ryan was unable to offer any help better than that. Clark rejoined him.

“Okay, what are we going to do with Cortez and Escobedo?”

“Cortez we want, the other one, hell, I don’t know. How do we explain kidnapping him?”

“What do you think we’re going to do, put him on trial?” Clark asked over the din of the engines and the wind.

“Anything else is cold-blooded murder. He’s a prisoner now, and killing prisoners is murder, remember?”

You’re getting legal on me, Clark thought, but he knew that Ryan was right. Killing prisoners was contrary to the code.

“So we take him back?”

“That blows the operation,” Ryan said. He knew he was talking too loudly for the subject. He was supposed to be quiet and thoughtful now, but the environment and the events of the evening defeated that. “Christ, I don’t know what to do.”

“Where are we going—I mean, where’s this chopper going?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan keyed his intercom to ask. He was surprised by the answer and communicated it to Clark.

“Look, let me handle it. I got an idea. I’ll take him out of here when we land. Larson and I will tidy that part of it up. I think I know what’ll work.”

“But—”

“You don’t really want to know, do you?”

“You can’t murder him!” Jack insisted.

“I won’t,” Clark said. Ryan didn’t know how to read that answer. But it did offer a way out, and he took it.

 

Larson got there first. The airfield was poorly lit, only a few glow lights showing under the low ceiling, but he managed to get his aircraft down, and with his anticollision lights blinking, he guided the way to the fuel-service area. He’d barely stopped when the helicopter landed fifty yards away.

Larson was amazed. In the dim blue lights he could see numerous holes in the aircraft. A man in a flight suit ran out toward him. Larson met him and led him to the fuel hose. It was a long one, about an inch in diameter, used to fuel private aircraft. The power to the pumps was off, but Larson knew where the switch was, and he shot the door lock. He’d never done that before, but just like in the movies, five rounds removed the brass mechanism from the wooden frame of the door. A minute later, Sergeant Bean had the nozzle into one of the outrigger tanks. That was when Clark and Escobedo appeared. A soldier held a rifle to the latter’s head while the CIA officers conferred.

“We’re going back,” Clark told the pilot.

“What?” Larson turned to see two soldiers taking Juardo out of the Beech and toward the helicopter.

“We’re taking our friend here back home to Medellin. Couple of things we have to do first, though ... ”

“Oh, great.” Larson walked back to his aircraft and climbed up on the wing to open his fuel caps. He had to wait fifteen minutes. The helicopter usually drank fuel through a far larger hose. When the crewman took the hose back, the chopper’s rotor started turning again. Soon after that, it lifted off into the night. There was lightning ahead to the north, and Larson was just as happy that he wasn’t flying there. He let Clark handle the fueling while he went inside to make a telephone call. The funny part was that he’d even make money off the deal. Except that there was nothing funny about anything that had happened during the preceding month.

 

“Okay,” PJ said into the intercom. “That’s the last pit stop, and we’re heading for home.”

“Engine temps aren’t all that great,” Willis said. The T-64-GE- 7 engines were designed to burn aviation kerosene, not the more volatile and dangerous high-octane gas used by private planes. The manufacturer’s warranty said that you could use that fuel for thirty hours before the burner cans were crisped down to ashes, but the warranty didn’t say anything about bad valve springs and P3 loss.

“Looks like we’re going to cool ’em down just fine,” the colonel said, nodding at the weather ahead.

“Thinking positive again, are we, Colonel?” Willis said as coolly as he could manage. It wasn’t just a thunderstorm there, it was a hurricane that stood between them and Panama. On the whole, it was something scarier than being shot at. You couldn’t shoot back at a storm.

“CLAW, this is CAESAR, over,” Johns called on his radio.

“I read you, CAESAR.”

“How’s the weather ahead look?”

“Bad, sir. Recommend that you head west, find a spot to climb over, and try to approach from the Pacific side.”

Willis scanned the navigational display. “Uh-uh.”

“CLAW, we just gained about five-kay pounds in weight. We, uh, looks like we need another way.”

“Sir, the storm is moving west at fifteen knots, and your course to Panama takes you into the lower-right quadrant.”

Headwinds all the way, PJ told himself.

“Give me a number.”

“Estimated peak winds on your course home are seven-zero knots.”

“Great!” Willis observed. “That makes us marginal for Panama, sir. Very damned marginal.”

Johns nodded. The winds were bad enough. The rain that came with them would greatly reduce engine efficiency. His flight range might be less than half of what it should be ... no way he could tank in the storm ... the smart move would be to find a place to land and stay there, but he couldn’t do that either.... Johns keyed his radio yet again.

“CLAW, this is CAESAR. We are heading for Alternate One.”

“Are you out of your skull?” Francie Montaigne replied.

“I don’t like it, sir,” Willis said.

“Fine. You can testify to that effect someday. It’s only a hundred miles off the coast, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll use the winds to slingshot us around. CLAW, I need a position check on Alternate One.”

 

“You crazy fucker,” Montaigne breathed. To her communications people: “Call up Alternate One. I need a position check and I need it now.”

 

Murray was not having any fun at all. Though Adele wasn’t really a major hurricane, Wegener had told him, it was more than he had ever expected to see. The seas had been forty feet, and though once Panache had looked like a white steel cliff alongside the dock, she now rode like a child’s toy in a bathtub. The FBI agent had a scopolamine patch stuck to his head below and behind his ear to combat motion-sickness, but it wasn’t fighting hard enough at the moment. But Wegener was just sitting in his bridge chair, smoking his pipe like the Old Man of the Sea while Murray held on to the grab-bar over his head, feeling like the man on the flying trapeze.

They were not in their programmed position. Wegener had explained to his visitor that there was only one place they could be. It moved, but that’s where they had to be, and Murray was distantly thankful that the seas weren’t quite as bad as they had been. He worked his way over to the door and looked out at the towering cylinder of cloud.

“Panache, this is CLAW, over,” the speaker said. Wegener rose to take the mike.

“CLAW, this is Panache. Your signal is weak but readable, over.”

“Position check, over.”

Wegener gave it to the pilot, who sounded like a girl, he thought. Christ, they were everywhere now.

“CAESAR is inbound yours.”

“Roger. Please advise CAESAR that conditions are below margins. I say again, it is not good down here at the moment.”

“Roger, copy. Stand by.” The voice came back two minutes later. “Panache, this is CLAW. CAESAR says he wants to try it. If he can’t do it, he plans to HIFR. Can you handle that, over.”

“That’s affirmative, we can sure as hell try. Give me an ETA, over.”

“Estimate six-zero minutes.”

“Roger, we’ll be ready. Keep us posted. Out.” Wegener looked across his bridge. “Miss Walters, I have the conn. I want chiefs Oreza and Riley on the bridge, now.”

“Captain has the conn,” Ensign Walters said. She was disappointed. Here she was in the middle of a goddamned tropical storm and having the time of her young life. She wasn’t even ill from it, though many of the crew were. So why couldn’t the skipper let her keep the goddamned conn?

“Left standard rudder,” Wegener ordered. “Come to new course three-three-five. All ahead two-thirds.”

“Left standard rudder, aye, coming to new course three-three-five.” The helmsman turned the wheel, then reached for the throttle controls. “Two thirds, sir.”

“Very well. How you feel, Obrecki?” the skipper asked.

“Hell of a coaster, but I’m wondering when the ride is going to stop, sir.” The youngster grinned, but didn’t take his eyes off the compass.

“You’re doing just fine. Let me know if you get tired, though.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Oreza and Riley appeared a minute later. “What gives?” the former asked.

“We go to flight quarters in thirty minutes,” the captain told them.

“Oh, fuck!” Riley observed. “Excuse me, Red, but ... shit!”

“Okay, Master Chief, now that we’ve gotten that behind us, I’m depending on you to get it done,” Wegener said sternly. Riley accepted the rebuke like the pro he was.

“Beg pardon, Cap’n, you’ll get my best shot. Put the XO in the tower?”

Wegener nodded. The executive officer was the best man to command the evolution from the flight-control station. “Go get him.” Riley left and Wegener turned to his quartermaster. “Portagee, I want you on the wheel when we go Hotel Corpin. I’ll have the conn.”

“Sir, there ain’t no Hotel Corpin.”

“That’s why you’re on the wheel. Relieve Obrecki in half an hour and get a feel for her. We gotta give him the best target we can.”

“Jesus.” Oreza looked out the windows. “You got it, Red.”

 

Johns held the aircraft down, staying a scant five hundred feet above ground level. He disengaged the automatic flight controls, trusting more to his skill and instinct now, leaving the throttle to Willis and concentrating on his instruments as much as he could. It started in an instant. One moment they were flying in clear air, the next there was rain pelting the aircraft.

“This isn’t so bad,” Johns lied outrageously over the intercom.

“They even pay us to do it,” Willis agreed with no small irony.

PJ checked the navigation display. The winds were from the northwest at the moment, slowing the helicopter somewhat, but that would change. His eyes flickered from the airspeed indicator to another one that worked off a Doppler-radar aimed at the ground. Satellite and inertial navigation systems told a computer display where he was and where he wanted to go, a red dot. Another screen held the display of a radar system that interrogated the storm ahead, showing the worst sections in red. He’d try to avoid those, but the yellow areas he had to fly through were bad enough.

“Shit!” Willis shouted. Both pilots yanked up on the collective and twisted to maximum power. They’d caught a downdraft. Both pairs of eyes locked onto the dial that gave them vertical velocity in feet per minute. For an instant they were headed down at over a thousand, less than thirty seconds of life for an aircraft at five hundred feet. But microbursts like that are localized phenomena. The helicopter bottomed out at two hundred and clawed its way back up. PJ decided that seven hundred feet was a safer cruise altitude at the moment. He said one word:

“Close.”

Willis grunted by way of reply.

In back, men were strapped down to the floor. Ryan had already done that, and was holding onto his minigun mount as though it would make a difference. He could see out the open door—at nothing, really. Just a mass of gray darkness occasionally lit by lightning. The helicopter was jolting up and down, tossed like a child’s kite by the moving masses of air, except that the helicopter weighed forty thousand pounds. But there was nothing he could do. His fate was in the hands of others, and nothing he knew or did mattered now. Even vomiting didn’t make him feel any better, though he and others were doing that. He just wanted it to be over, and only intellect told him that he really did care how it ended—didn’t he?

The buffeting continued, but the winds shifted as the helicopter penetrated the storm. They had started off from the northeast, but shifted with measurable speed counterclockwise, and were soon on the port quarter of the aircraft. That increased their ground speed. With an airspeed of one-fifty, they now had a ground speed of one-ninety and increasing.

“This is doing wonders for our fuel economy,” Johns noted.

“Fifty miles,” Willis replied.

“CAESAR, this is CLAW, over.”

“Roger, CLAW, we are five-zero miles from Alternate One, and it’s a little bumpy—” A little bumpy, my ass, Captain Montaigne thought, roller-coastering through lighter weather a hundred miles away “—otherwise okay,” Johns reported. “If we cannot make the landing, I think we can try to slingshot out the other side and make for the Panamanian coast.” Johns frowned as more water struck the windshield. Some was ingested into the engines at the same time.

“Flameout! We’ve lost Number Two.”

“Restart it,” Johns said, still trying to be cool. He lowered the nose and traded altitude for speed to get out of the heavy rain. That, too, was supposed to be a local phenomenon. Supposed to be.

“Working on it,” Willis rasped.

“Losing power in Number One,” Johns said. He twisted the throttle all the way and managed to get some of it back. His two-engine aircraft was now operating on one of its engines at 80 percent power. “Let’s get Two back, Captain. We have a hundred foot per minute of ‘down’ right now.”

“Working,” Willis repeated. The rain eased a little, and Number Two started turning and burning again, but delivered only 40 percent. “I think the P3 loss just got worse. We got a shit sandwich here, Colonel. Forty miles. We’re committed to Alternate One now.”

“At least we have an option. I never could swim worth a damn.” PJ’s hands were sweaty now. He could feel them loose inside the handmade gloves. Intercom time: “AC to crew, we’re about fifteen minutes out,” he told them. “One-five minutes out.”

 

Riley had assembled a group of ten, all experienced crewmen. Each had a safety line around his waist, and Riley checked every knot and buckle personally. Though all had life preservers on, finding a man overboard in these conditions would require a miracle from an especially loving God who had lots of things to keep Him busy tonight, Riley thought. Tie-down chains and more two-inch line was assembled and set in place, already secured to the deck wherever possible. He took the deck crew forward, standing them against the aft-facing wall of the superstructure. “All ready here,” he said over the phone to the XO in flight control. To his people: “If any of you fuck up and go over the side, I’ll fucking jump overboard an’ strangle you myself!”

 

They were in a whirlpool of wind. According to the navigational display, they were now north of their target, traveling at nearly two hundred fifty knots. The buffet now was the worst it had been. One downburst hurled them down at the black waves until Johns stopped at a bare hundred feet. It was now to the point that the pilot wanted to throw up. He’d never flown in conditions like this, and it was worse than the manuals said it was. “How far?”

“We should be there right now, sir!” Willis said. “Dead south.”

“Okay.” Johns pushed the stick to the left. The sudden change of direction relative to the wind threatened to snap the helicopter over, but he held it and crabbed onto the new course. Two minutes later, they were in the clear.

“Panache, this is CAESAR, where the hell are you?”

 

“Lights on, everything, now!” Wegener shouted when he heard the call. In a moment Panache was lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Goddamn if you don’t look pretty down there!” the voice said a few seconds later.

Adele was a small, weak, disorganized hurricane, now turning back into a tropical storm due to confused local weather conditions. That made her winds weaker than everyone had feared, but the eye was also small and disorganized, and the eye was what they needed now.

It is a common misconception that the eye of a hurricane is calm. It is not, though after experiencing the powerful winds in the innermost wall of clouds, the fifteen knots of breeze there seem like less than nothing to an observer. But the wind is unsteady and shifting, and the seas in the eye, though not as tall as those in the storm proper, are confused. Wegener had stationed his ship within a mile of the northwest edge of the eye, which was barely four miles across. The storm was moving at about fifteen knots. They had fifteen minutes to recover the helicopter. About the only good news was that the air was clear. No rain was falling, and the crew in the pilothouse could see the waves and allow for them.

Aft at flight control, the executive officer donned his headset and started talking.

“CAESAR, this is Panache. I am the flight-operations officer, and I will guide your approach. We have fifteen knots of wind, and the direction is variable. The ship is pitching and rolling in what looks like about fifteen-foot seas. We have about ten or fifteen minutes to do this, so there’s not that much of a rush.” That last sentence was merely aimed at making the helicopter’s crew feel better. He wondered if anyone could bring this off.

“Skipper, a few more knots and I can hold her a little steadier,” Portagee reported at the wheel.

“We can’t run out of the eye.”

“I know that, sir, but I need a little more way on.”

Wegener went outside to look. The helicopter was visible now, its strobes blinking in the darkness as it circled the ship to allow the pilot to size things up. If anything screws this up, it’s going to be the roll, Wegener realized. Portagee was right about the speed. “Two-thirds,” he called back inside.

 

“Christ, that’s a little boat,” Johns heard Willis breathe.

“Just so the oars ain’t in the way.” PJ took the helicopter down, circling one last time and coming to a straight course dead aft of the cutter. He leveled out at one hundred feet and found that he couldn’t hover very well. He lacked the power, and the aircraft wavered left and right when he tried.

“Hold that damned boat steady!” he said over the radio circuit.

“We are trying, sir,” the XO replied. “We have the wind off the port bow at the moment. I recommend you come in from the portside and stay at an angle to the deck all the way in.”

“Roger, I can see why.” Johns adjusted power one more time and moved in.

 

“Okay, let’s move!” Riley told his men. They divided into three teams, one for each of the helicopter’s wheel assemblies.

 

The deck, Johns saw, was not quite large enough for a fore-and-aft landing, but by angling his approach he could plant all six wheels on the black surface. He came in slowly, fifteen knots faster than the ship to start, and sloughing that off as he closed, but the wind shifted and turned the helicopter. Johns swore and turned fully away to try again.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I have some power problems here.”

“Roger, take your time, sir,” the XO replied.

PJ started again, a thousand yards out. The approach this time went well. He flared the aircraft a hundred yards aft to drop off excess speed, then flattened out and eased forward. His main gear touched just where he wanted, but the ship rolled hard and threw the aircraft to starboard. Instinctively PJ hit power and collective to lift free of the deck. He shouldn’t have, and knew it even as he did so.

“This is hard,” he said over the radio, managing not to curse as he brought the chopper back around.

“Shame we don’t have more time to practice,” the Coast Guard officer agreed. “That was a good, smooth approach. The ship just took a bad roll on us. Do that one more time, you’ll be just fine.”

“Okay, one more time.” PJ came in again.

The ship was rolling twenty degrees left and right despite her stabilizers and bilge keels, but Johns fixed his eyes on the center of the target area, which wasn’t rolling at all, just a fixed point in space. That had to be the trick, he told himself, pick the spot that isn’t moving. Again he flared out to kill off speed and inched forward. Just as he approached the deck, his eyes shifted to where the nosewheels had to hit, and slammed the collective down. It felt almost as bad as a crash, but the collective held the chopper in place.

Riley was first up and rolled under the aircraft at the nosewheels. Another boatswain’s mate followed with the tie-down chains. The master chief found a likely spot and hooked them in place, then shot his arm out and made a fist. Two men on the other end of the chains pulled them taut, and the chief rolled free and went down the portside to get to work on the main gear. It took several minutes. The Pave Low shifted twice before they had it secured, but soon they had two-inch line to back up the chains. By the time Riley was finished, it would have taken explosives to lift it from the deck. The deck crew entered the helicopter at the stern ramp and guided the passengers out. Riley counted fifteen people. He’d been told to expect more than that. Then he saw the bodies, and the men who were struggling with them.

Forward, Johns and Willis shut down their engines.

“CLAW, CAESAR is down. Return to base.” Johns took off his helmet too soon to catch the reply, though Willis caught it.

“Roger. Out.”

Johns looked around. He didn’t feel like a pilot now. His aircraft was down. He was safe. It was time to get out and do something else. He couldn’t get out his door without risking a fall overboard and ... he’d allowed himself to forget Buck Zimmer. That door in his mind opened itself now. Well, he told himself, Buck would understand. The colonel stepped over the flight-engineer console. Ryan was still there, his flight suit speckled from his nausea. Johns knelt by the side of his sergeant. They’d served together on and off for over twenty years.

“He told me he has seven kids,” Ryan said.

Johns’ voice was too tired for any overt emotions. He spoke like a man a thousand years old, tired of life, tired of flying, tired of everything. “Yeah, cute ones. His wife is from Laos. Carol, her name is. Oh, God, Buck—why now?”

“Let me help,” Jack said. Johns took the arms. Ryan got the legs. They had to wait in line. There were other bodies to be carried out, some dead, some only wounded, and they got the understandable priority. The soldiers, Jack saw, carried their own, helped by Sergeant Bean. The Coasties offered help, but it was declined—not unkindly, and the sailors understood the reason. Ryan and Johns also declined the assistance, the colonel because of the years with his friend, and the CIA officer because of a duty self-imposed. Riley and his men stayed behind briefly to collect packs and weapons. Then they, too, went below.

The bodies were set in a passageway for the time being. The wounded went to the crew’s mess. Ryan and the Air Force officers were guided to the wardroom. There they found the man who’d started it all, months before, though none of them would ever understand how it had all happened. There was one more face, one which Jack recognized.

“Hi, Dan.”

“Bad?” the FBI agent asked.

Jack didn’t respond to that. “We got Cortez. I think he was wounded. He’s probably in sick bay with a couple of soldiers keeping an eye on him.”

“What got you?” Murray asked. He pointed to Jack’s helmet.

Ryan took it off and saw a gouge where a 7.62 bullet had scraped away a quarter inch or so of fiberglass. Jack knew that he should have reacted to it, but that part of his life was four hundred miles behind him. Instead he sat down and stared at the deck and didn’t say anything for a while. Two minutes later, Murray moved him onto a cot and covered him with a blanket.

 

Captain Montaigne had to fight the last two miles through high winds, but she was a particularly fine pilot and the Lockheed Hercules was a particularly fine aircraft. She touched down a little hard, but not too badly, and followed the guide jeep to her hangar. A man in civilian clothes was waiting there, along with some officers. As soon as she’d shut down, she walked out to meet them. She made them wait while she headed for the rest room, smiling through her fatigue that there was not a man in America who’d deny a lady a trip to the john. Her flight suit smelled horrible and her hair was a wreck, she saw in the mirror before she returned. They were waiting for her right outside the door.

“Captain, I want to know what you did tonight,” the civilian asked—but he wasn’t a civilian, she realized after a moment, though the prick certainly didn’t deserve to be anything else. Montaigne didn’t know everything that was behind all this, but she did know that much.

“I just flew a very long mission, sir. My crew and I are beat to hell.”

“I want to talk to all of you about what you did.”

“Sir, that is my crew. If there’s any talking to be done, you’ll talk to me!” she snapped back.

“What did you do?” Cutter demanded. He tried pretending it wasn’t a girl. He didn’t know that she was not pretending that he wasn’t a man.

“Colonel Johns went in to rescue some special-ops troopers.” She rubbed both hands across the back of her neck. “We got ‘em—he got ’em, most of ’em, I suppose.”

“Then where is he?”

Montaigne looked him right in the eye. “Sir, he had engine trouble. He couldn’t climb out to us—couldn’t get over the mountains. He flew right into the storm. He didn’t fly out of it, sir. Anything else you want to know? I want to get showered, get some coffee down, and start thinking about search and rescue.”

“The field’s closed,” the base commander said. “Nobody gets out for another ten hours. I think you need some rest, Captain.”

“I think you’re right, sir. Excuse me, I have to see to my crew. I’ll have you the SAR coordinates in a few minutes. Somebody’s gotta try,” she added.

“Look, General, I want—” Cutter started to say.

“Mister, you leave that crew alone,” said an Air Force one-star who was retiring soon anyway.

 

Larson landed at Medellin’s city airport about the same time the MC-130 approached Panama. It had been a profane flight, Clark in the back with Escobedo, the latter’s hands tied behind his back and a gun in his ribs. There had been many promises of death in the flight. Death to Clark, death to Larson and his girlfriend who worked for Avianca, death to many people. Clark just smiled through it all.

“So what do you do with me, eh? You kill me now?” he asked as the wheels locked in the down position. Finally, Clark responded.

“I suggested that we could give you a flying lesson out the back of the helicopter, but they wouldn’t let me. So looks like we’re going to have to let you go.”

Escobedo didn’t know how to answer. His bluster wasn’t able to cope with the fact that they might not want to kill him. They just didn’t have the courage to, Clark decided.

“I had Larson call ahead,” he said.

“Larson, you motherless traitor, you think you will survive?”

Clark dug the pistol in Escobedo’s ribs. “You don’t bother the guy who’s flying the goddamned airplane. If I were you, señor, I’d be very pleased to be coming home. We’re even having you met at the airport.”

“Met by whom?”

“By some of your friends,” Clark said as the wheel squeaked down on the tarmac. Larson reversed his props to brake the aircraft. “Some of your fellow board members.”

That’s when he saw the real danger coming. “What did you tell them?”

“The truth,” Larson answered. “That you were taking a flight out of the country under very strange circumstances, what with the storm and all. And, gee, what with all the odd happenings of the past few weeks, I thought that it was kind of a coincidence ...”

“But I will tell them—”

“What?” Clark asked. “That we put our own lives at risk by delivering you back home? That it’s all a trick? Sure, you tell them that.”

The aircraft stopped but the engines didn’t. Clark gagged the chieftain. Then he unbuckled Escobedo’s seat belt and pulled him toward the door. A car was already there. Clark stepped down, his silenced automatic in Escobedo’s back.

“You are not Larson,” the man with the submachine gun said.

“I am his friend. He is flying. Here is your man. You should have something for us.”

“You do not need to leave,” said the man with the briefcase.

“This one has too many friends. It is best, I think, that we should leave.”

“As you wish,” the second one said. “But you have nothing to fear from us.” He handed over the briefcase.

“Gracias, jefe, ” Clark said. They loved to be called that. He pushed Escobedo toward them.

“You should know better than to betray your friends,” said the second one as Clark reentered the aircraft. The comment was aimed at the bound and gagged chieftain, whose eyes were very, very wide, staring back at Clark as he closed the door.

“Get us the hell out of here.”

“Next stop, Venezuela,” Larson said as he goosed the throttles.

“Then Gitmo. Think you can hack it?”

“I’ll need some coffee, but they make it good down here.” The aircraft lifted off and Larson thought, Jesus, it’s good to have this one behind us. That was true for him, but not for everyone.