by Tom Clancy
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 dispat
ched 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.”