by Ward Larsen
Jorgensen ignored this, and said, “Just so you understand—I’m not actually controlling this drone. I have priority for tactical requests, but that’s it. I’m not sure the operators will give me more than twenty minutes on station.”
“Use your emergency authority,” argued McBain, already heading for the door with Davis behind him. “It’s a legal move. Tell them blue-force lives are at stake and they have to comply.”
“But there aren’t any lives at stake.”
“Not yet …” Davis said over his shoulder as he hit the threshold, “but give us half an hour.”
* * *
Kristin Stewart stood in front of the villa where she and Carlos had been staying. Roughly half the soldiers were milling in the courtyard, chain smoking and agitated like expectant fathers. The rest had departed with Carlos to oversee the delivery of their eagerly awaited payday.
The idea that she was to receive a share of the proceeds had once seemed satisfying, a small retaliation against the father who’d abandoned her. Now it seemed more repulsive every moment. Thomas Mulligan was dead, along with an entire planeload of innocent people—all because she had tried to lash out in revenge. Kristin was desperate to bring it all to an end. She wanted only to get home, see her mother, and put this entire horrific week behind her.
God, what have I done?
Pablo Ramirez, Carlos’ second in command, had been left in charge at the compound, and when his handheld radio crackled to life everyone watched him put the receiver to his ear. The message was a quick one-way burst, which, according to Carlos, was all that could be allowed—the government was getting better at homing in on their signals.
Pablo lowered the radio, and said to his men, “The courier is here. They will arrive in fifteen minutes.”
Kristin scanned the courtyard, but didn’t see Jen. She addressed Pablo. “Where is the other girl?”
The rough-hewn sergeant hesitated. She knew she was an enigma to the man, falling somewhere beneath Carlos in the hierarchy but above the rest of the soldiers. Roughly where he himself fit. When Pablo didn’t reply, she decided to press.
“The girl! Go get her, it’s almost time!”
Pablo’s silence turned to confusion. “But … she is not to go, señora.”
Kristin looked at him tentatively. “What do you mean? She’s leaving with me.”
Pablo shook his head.
“Are you saying Carlos’ father is going to demand a separate ransom for her?”
The sergeant shrugged. “I don’t know, you will have to ask him.”
With that, the big man retreated, heading for the warehouse on the far side of the compound. It was one of three buildings on the property, which, according to legend, was a hundred-year-old coffee plantation, some past settler’s dream conquered by the Amazon. Aside from the villa where she and Carlos had stayed, there was a main house whose roof had partially caved in, and a warehouse that drug lords had been intermittently repairing for years as a dry storage place for product. With ample floor space, and the only roof of the three that didn’t leak, the warehouse was where Pablo and his men had bivouacked.
By process of elimination, Kristin realized Jen had to be in one of the two viable rooms of the damaged main house. She made her decision. Once Pablo was out of sight, she would set out to find her. She’d had no contact with her former seatmate since arriving, Carlos insisting all along that Jen remain isolated. Tentatively—and if she were honest, to keep her complicity in the scheme a secret—she had agreed. Now she sensed a mistake.
She was overwhelmed once more by reservations about her lover, not to mention the plot they’d concocted. What began as a backhanded swipe to frighten her father, and perhaps earn a little cash, had morphed into a deadly military campaign. More disturbingly, Carlos seemed perfectly at ease with it all. He had twenty men under his command here, and sufficient connections to deliver a ransom demand to the vice president of the United States. Someone—Carlos?—had even bribed the pilot of the TAC-Air flight to take up their cause. Kristin wondered what had happened to him. Had he perished in the crash? How convenient would that be? Eliminated along with a planeload of witnesses? She shuddered, wondering if Carlos and his father could be that ruthless.
Kristin saw but one certainty. The man next to her last night was not the same college senior who’d seduced her so many months ago. These soldiers were ostensibly part of his father’s army, yet Carlos appeared perfectly at ease commanding them. Just as he was in answering her increasingly awkward questions. She finally relented to the facts: everything about the man was a lie.
Kristin looked over her shoulder, and seeing no sign of Pablo, she approached the remains of the old house. Only a few of the men were in sight, and none paid her any attention. She stepped through a doorless entryway and skirted what had once been a hallway, the outer wall no more than a collapsed heap of burnt brick. She reached the back, where two bedrooms remained largely intact, and found a lone guard posted at a door.
A guard. Something else Carlos had never mentioned.
Kristin steeled herself, and putting as much authority as possible in her voice, said in Spanish, “Open the door! Carlos wants me to question our prisoner.” She held her breath, wondering if she’d gone too far. Our prisoner.
The guard, who was probably two years younger than she was, regarded her uncertainly. When he opened his mouth to speak, Kristin went all-in. “Now!”
FORTY
McBain had them at the Bogotá airport ten minutes after leaving the safe house. The Comanche was kept in a hangar not far from El Centro, and as they passed the familiar façade Davis yelled, “Stop!”
McBain hit the brakes hard enough to cycle the truck’s anti-skid system. “What?”
Davis pointed to a familiar figure walking out of the building. “We need all the help we can get.”
“Who’s he?”
“A friend.”
“Is he a Marine too?” McBain asked.
“No, he’s French.”
McBain looked less than impressed.
“But he’s the next best thing to a Marine,” Davis reasoned, “he plays rugby.”
McBain relented, and two minutes later Pascal Delacorte sat shanghaied in the back seat. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“To an airfield like we talked about,” said Davis. “It’s a thirty-minute flight south of here, roughly fifty miles from the crash site.”
“Your daughter is nearby?”
“I think there’s a good chance. But there are also some people who might not welcome us.”
Davis watched the engineer give this due consideration, as if running an equation in his head. The most subtle of smiles creased his face.
“Yeah,” Davis muttered, “that’s what I thought.”
They reached the remote hangar, and while McBain went to retrieve the airplane’s key from an office, Davis silently surveyed the place. Aside from the Comanche, he saw three single-engine props and a big Learjet, all bearing Colombian government markings.
Delacorte noticed his distraction. “Are you looking for something?”
“I was hoping there might be an airplane that’s a better fit for what we need to do.”
“You would truly steal an aircraft?”
“Until my daughter is safe, every aircraft, bus, and main battle tank in Colombia is fair game.”
Together they kicked the chocks from under the Comanche’s tires and pushed the hangar door open. McBain came back with two keys, one for the airplane ignition and another for a thick steel bar that was secured to the control column. It looked like an aviation version of the locking bars used to secure car steering wheels.
“A lot of airplanes actually do get stolen around here,” McBain explained. He removed the locking bar and threw it in the back seat.
Minutes later they were all in place, Delacorte in back, McBain in the right front, and Davis acting as captain on the left.
Davis rolled his seat all the way back and stared blankly at
the instrument panel.
McBain stared at him. “You have flown one of these before.”
“Yeah, well …” Davis hesitated, “it’s been a long time.” He saw a leather pocket on the sidewall near his knee, and found what he needed inside—a normal procedures checklist. He ran a finger down the laminated card, past the exterior and preflight checks, and settled on a group of steps labeled “Starting Engines.”
McBain watched closely. “What about all that other stuff—what you just skipped.”
“Not important. You only do that stuff on checkrides.”
McBain didn’t look convinced. Delacorte was silent in back.
Davis talked himself through the pertinent steps.
“Master switch—on.”
“Fuel pump—on.”
“Mixture—rich, primed, cutoff.”
“Magnetos—on.”
“Starter—engage.”
The starboard engine began to spin and quickly chugged into a rhythm. He adjusted the throttle and fuel mixture. When everything settled he cranked the port engine, and soon they were clear of the hangar and taxiing across sun-hardened tarmac. The next impediment, Davis knew, was air traffic control. El Dorado International was a busy place, and he was taxiing with no flight plan, no clearance, and no code in his transponder. The last pilot to fly the Comanche had left ground control frequency tuned into the primary radio, and on the overhead speaker Davis heard heavy chatter, most of it in Spanish—controllers worldwide had to be able to speak English, but they were free to issue instructions in their native language to local pilots.
The hangar used by the DEA was in a remote corner of the airport, half a mile from the main passenger terminal, and at the far end of the field Davis saw the dinosaur walk—a long lineup of heavy-metal departures, Boeings and Airbuses mostly, that would take thirty minutes to clear. He decided it was time to add a new qualification to his curriculum vitae—air traffic controller.
He pointed the Comanche away from the main terminal, and noted a service road that intersected the taxiway. There wasn’t a vehicle in sight, no airfield operations car or facilities maintenance van. With one right turn, he’d have two thousand feet of black asphalt in a perfectly straight line. It was more than enough. He made the turn, checked the flaps were down, and shoved the power levers to the firewall. The little twin jumped forward with its relatively light load—seven hundred pounds of passengers and two fake guns in a nylon bag. Once airborne Davis kept low, clearing the trees at the far end of the airfield by no more than a few feet before banking into a valley between two apartment buildings. His maneuvers resembled those of last Sunday, only he wasn’t flying a seaplane or skimming low for amusement.
This was the most important tactical mission of his life.
He heard no alarmed voices on the radio, so Davis was reasonably sure his departure had not been noticed. It wasn’t particularly surprising—the air traffic controllers would all be looking the other way, concentrating on the big jets taking off and landing. Certainly a few local residents noticed his departure, catching a flash of white from their living room windows as he buzzed past apartments and skimmed over parking lots. Some of them would register complaints, and one or two might even snap a smartphone picture of a small twin-engine aircraft that was violating any number of rules. The Colombian authorities would look into it, in a day or a week, and the DEA might even get an official complaint, asking who had been piloting their Twin Comanche on this particular Friday morning.
As far as Davis was concerned, that could all be dealt with another day. The only important thing was the eighty miles in front of him.
He initially aimed for Monserrate, and just before reaching the mountain banked into a hard right-hand turn. He studied the navigation system, and after some trial and error managed to program the coordinates he’d memorized for the remote airfield. That done, he pushed the throttles up and flew a razor-straight course. In twenty minutes they would have decisions to make. All Davis wanted now was speed.
* * *
Jen was already on her feet when the key rattled in the lock. She’d been right—it was Kristin Stewart’s raised voice she’d heard outside.
Kristin stepped through the door and rushed her with open arms. Jen stood rigid as she took a hug from a girl she’d met less than a week ago, one whose fate seemed inseparable from her own. In the days since being hauled off the airplane at gunpoint, she’d begun to think of Kristin as something of a sister, a compatriot suffering the same hardships. That myth ended moments ago when she heard Kristin give the guard an order.
With the browbeaten guard standing in the doorway, Jen pushed away and looked at Kristin. “What the hell is going on?”
“It’s hard to explain,” said Kristin. “But I’m going to get you home.”
The guard said something that bypassed Jen’s second-semester Spanish. When Kristin didn’t answer, the guard shuffled away with his rifle drooping behind, like a dog with its tail between its legs.
“Home?” Jen said. It sounded wonderful, but things weren’t adding up. There was no relief in Kristin’s expression, no it’s almost over sigh of exoneration. Jen saw only worry. Or even worse, fear.
“It’s a long story,” Kristin said. “There’s no time to explain. Will you trust me?”
Jen looked at her doubtfully. “The last time you said that we were on the airplane together. You told me to say I was Kristin Stewart.” She looked obviously around her containment room. “You see where that got me.”
“It could have been worse. That airplane—”
“I know, it crashed.”
Kristin looked at her pleadingly.
Jen stared at the open door. It looked a mile wide.
* * *
Pablo watched the guard rush from across the compound. The young man skidded to a stop in front of him and explained that Carlos’ girl had insisted on seeing the other American.
“Did you let her inside the holding room?”
The guard said that he had.
“And then you left your post?”
A tentative nod.
Pablo’s ham-hock fist swept out, striking the guard squarely in the jaw and putting him on the ground, stunned and sitting on his rifle. “Imbecile!”
Pablo pointed to two other men, and they fell in behind him as he crossed the courtyard like a train gathering steam. At the entrance to the crumbling main house Pablo shoved aside a goat to reach the room where the girl was being held.
The door was open. The room was empty.
Pablo ran back outside and scanned all around. The only path of escape was the jungle, yet he saw no motion, no broken vegetation to mark the tracks of two American college girls. They couldn’t go far, he reasoned. The nearest village was twenty miles away through walls of rain forest. They wouldn’t even know which way to go.
All the same, Pablo felt a squirm of anxiety in his gut.
He turned and stared at the guard, deciding whether to execute the kid then and there. It would make a good example to the others, and might mitigate his own culpability. In the end Pablo decided against it. He needed every set of eyes because there was still a chance they could find the girls before Carlos returned.
He ordered his squad to fan out immediately. Twelve men went into the jungle with rifles at the ready.
FORTY-ONE
The girls were, at that moment, no more than thirty meters away. Jen heard every bellowed order, and in spite of her lack of fluency in Spanish, she caught enough to know that a search of the jungle was under way. That was where Kristin had wanted to run, but Jen had resisted the idea. To begin, it would have required a forty-yard sprint across open ground to reach the nearest cover. If they made it that far, neither of them had any idea which way to go. Jen had also thought the plan too obvious. She’d reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that it was the first place the Colombians would look.
She’d spotted the old cellar door under a pile of rubble, just out of view on the far sid
e of the house. Jen guessed it was a basement of some kind, and together they quietly pulled aside timber and chunks of plaster. When they finally lifted the door it was a disappointment—there was no more than a crawl space beneath, two steps disappearing into an avalanche of soil and rock. It seemed useless at first, but when the shouting began—a man named Pablo, according to Kristin—the space seemed suddenly larger. The girls had scrambled inside, laid down shoulder to shoulder, and lowered the door, doing their best to pull bits of debris on top as it fell closed.
Now Jen was flat on her belly, Kristin crushed beside her and peering through their only window to the world—a narrow gap offering a tunnellike view of the compound.
“Can you see anyone?” Jen asked in a hushed tone.
“No. Not in the last few minutes.”
“So you were actually dating this guy?”
“His name is Carlos. When I met him he was just a student like me. But he’s completely different now.” Kristin kept watch through the tiny gap, and at a whisper explained how everything had come to pass. She left only one thing out.
“Why did they kidnap you?” Jen asked. “Are your parents wealthy?”
Kristin sighed, and in the darkened shadows she twisted her head until they were face to face. “My mom and I have always been alone—I never knew who my father was. She told me he disappeared before she found out she was pregnant, and that she never tried to find him because he was a total loser. I guess in a way she was right.” She glanced to make sure no one had wandered near. “Two years ago my mom lost her job. When I started college we really needed money. Then suddenly, everything changed. Last year, right before Christmas break, Mom told me she’d moved. I went home expecting a tiny apartment, but out of nowhere we had a nice new house. She wasn’t looking for work anymore. She had new clothes and a new hairstyle. It was a good Christmas—tablet computer, gift cards, a car for college.”
“The Dad who abandoned you is rich?”
“Not so much rich as … connected. There’s seven million dollars in that suitcase out there. I can guarantee you not a penny of it is his.”