by L. J. Martin
And ahead of us we see the Potong, identified by the few running lights on boats moving up and down her.
Su is back on the radio with Constance, who’s trying to bring the icons on her screen to merge together, giving Ji Su constant corrections.
“Less than a half-click,” Su says. “Let’s get a visual ASAP.”
She’s dropping down to fifty feet when Pax, who has eyes out the port side, says urgently, “We’ve got company. Another bird, a half-click and closing fast.”
“And there’s Bo and two passengers,” I say, seeing the repeated flash of a mag light.
“I’m going to do a fly-by and see what the bird is,” Su says and turns into the path of the oncoming chopper.
We pass with them on the port side so quickly it would be hard to identify the other ship were it not for the machine guns and rockets.
“You strapped in?” Su yells to Pax over her shoulder.
“Secure,” he answers. She shoves it to the wall, and we’re pinned in the seat as she climbs. I wonder if she’s ditching Bo and the asset when she hits two thousand feet altitude. Then I know better when she rolls hard and goes completely inverted, doing what in a fixed wing would be a split S, and we must be exceeding three hundred knots by the time she levels out at a couple of hundred feet altitude and I see the bogie is a half-click dead ahead of us. He must be doing a hundred fifty knots, but we’re closing on him as if he’s standing still.
From three hundred yards out, she hits the trigger on the Vulcan, and the bird rattles and shakes. We pass over the top of him, clearing him no more than ten yards, before he even knows he’s dead. Behind us, which we can’t see, an explosion lights the night.
“I’m not setting down,” she says as she comes around to head back to Bo. “A rope ladder behind the rear bench. Recessed rings in the deck. Hook it up and deploy when I begin to hover.”
In no more than three minutes, she’s over the SDV, and Pax has the ladder out. It has hard plastic rungs so it’s easily climbed.
Pax and I position ourselves flanking the ladder and are both a little surprised when the first face we see is a very good-looking Korean woman, nicely showing off her body in a wet, clinging jogging suit. The next up is a middle-aged man, also in jogging attire. Then Bo, smiling as if he was the cat who just ate the canary. As soon as his butt hits the deck, he yells at us, “Close that damn freezer door,” and we shut the slider.
And none too soon, as Ji Su rolls a hard port turn and an RPG or some kind of rocket roars by, so close it lights the cabin and would likely have singed our eyebrows had we still had the slider open.
“Hang on,” Su says, and this time, the turn is to the starboard. “Let’s solve this crap,” she says, and as soon as she levels out, I return to my forward seat and see there’s a large patrol boat a couple of hundred yards dead ahead. A second after seeing the problem, and we’ve closed a hundred yards, our own rockets streak away from the cowlings on either side of the ship, and she’s taking no chances as we close to no more than sixty yards, and she fires two more before she peels it to the port as green tracers fill the air all around us — as well as flying rubble from the exploding patrol boat. But this time, we clear it.
I figure we clear the collapsing superstructure of the boat by no more than a few feet.
Su drops the chopper back near the surface of the river and as she gains speed, rises to no more than fifty feet over the water.
“Poke something in that hole,” she yells at me, and I see why my face is suddenly washed in freezing cold. A hole, at least a 50mm, is in the now spider-webbed windscreen, luckily splitting the difference between us.
I turn quickly to see that no one in the rear is hit, and see Pax picking plastic shards out of his face.
“Bad?” I ask.
“I’m pretty enough. A few more chicken-shit little scars won’t keep the women away.”
I just shake my head. The boy never ceases to amaze me. The other three are huddled together, trying to get warm.
“A little more heat in the back,” I suggest to Su, who adjusts a dial.
In eighteen minutes, I see the lights of Black Gold ahead.
“Son of a bitch,” I say, loud enough for all to hear.
“What?” Pax asks, a little apprehensively.
“I think we’re going to make it.”
Epilogue
I almost want to go back and see if I can scale the ramparts of the Dear Leader’s — Dick Licker’s — palace and see if I can make a capon out of the chicken-shit. They have displayed Butch’s body in a parade, with no mention of the Pueblo, to demonstrate what happens to American spies who try to infiltrate the motherland. The State Department has disavowed any involvement in the incident.
And, of course, the NK press reported that the Pueblo was subject to a terrible accident. Unfortunately, a propane explosion at an inopportune time while preparing lunch for some visiting dignitaries from the northern regions. No mention of losing several of their leading nuclear engineers, or a number of visiting Iranians of the same stature. We only hope the Iranians take umbrage and bomb the hell out of NK, but they know deep in their black hearts who killed their people and sunk the ship.
However, our own press has reported the truth — of the explosion, not the cause — and, as we’d hoped, a dozen prominent Koreans and a half-dozen Iranian engineers and scientists are among the missing.
That would please Butch, but not so much as the fact the Pueblo is sucking scum off the bottom of the Potong. I’m confident he’s perched on the edge of a silver-lined cloud with his old man, laughing and chortling about the successful mission and the culmination of decades of wishing and planning.
We're back in Vegas, after a week of debriefings in Okinawa, and then a week of chores: visiting with Butch’s sister, and handing her a check, taxes forgiven, for a cool million, and then to Gun’s mother and father in Santa Ana, delivering the same. After more than a dozen missions with his SEAL team, Gun bought it during an unofficial foray into a pissant country with exemplary service for which he’ll never get credit, nor of which his parents will learn of his contribution to his country. If things change in North Korea, I’ll return and tell them their son’s story. But I’m forbidden, and I abide by my agreements.
I know the million-dollar check I hand them, along with the assurance that it’s not necessary to report it on their income tax and an accompanying letter from the IRS affirming same, won’t assuage their grief. But they have some assurance their son did something of great value for his country.
The oldest steakhouse in Vegas is The Golden Steer, and Pax and I have been there so often more than one waiter and bartender know us by name.
And we’re pleased to introduce the joint to the two ladies who’ve flown in to spend a few days with a couple of beat-up Marines.
A couple of Jack rocks, a fat T-bone and a baked, and I’m in the middle of dessert, looking at CIA agent Constance Nordstrom and hoping she’s my after-dinner treat, while Pax and Ji Su eye each other like the other one is dessert, when my phone vibrates in my pocket.
I’m tempted not to dig it out, but I know my newly fattened bank account won’t last nearly as long as I’d like.
“Reardon,” I answer.
“Word is you take jobs no one else will touch,” the rather sexy but worried-sounding voice on the other end says.
“This is my last easy day, I guess,” I reply, and Pax stops eyeballing the beauty and turns his attention to my conversation.
X
The Blue Pearl
Contents
Untitled
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chap
ter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Bible: Samuel 13:19-20
Now there was no blacksmith to be found throughout all the land of Israel, for the Philistines said, “Lest the Hebrews make themselves swords or spears.” But every one of the Israelites went down to the Philistines to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, or his sickle.
Quran 3:56
As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.
1
Being a recovery expert is a little like being a cop, a soldier, or a mercenary. You spend a lot of time waiting and watching, like I’m doing now. Then at times, it’s assholes and elbows and you do your damnedest to keep from losing your head…and I mean literally. And the guys I’m coming up against at the moment are famous for delivering that severed appendage back to friends and family.
It does discourage retribution.
“What the hell are you doing?” Pax asks. It’s loud and clear in my earbud. “You’ve been in there a half hour.”
“What do you think I’m doing, dip shit?” I respond. “I’m in the friggin’ rafters covered with spider webs, flying the drone, dodging black widows, trying to spot Fenderson’s Maybach. I’ll get it. There are a hundred or more Mercedes below, but it looks like ninety percent are C Class and a few E’s, an equal number of Audis, and a couple of dozen Infinitis. These guys are picking the low hanging fruit, stuff easy to deal off.”
Pax is stationed atop a massive water cooler tower at the Quesadilla Potato Chip plant across a two-lane surface street from the warehouse I’ve broken into. He’s watching my back, making sure I’m not busted by the Fu Chong Snake Tong, some very bad boys who’ve stolen these luxury rides for export to China. A stack of shipping containers is mounded at the rear of the warehouse, stacked three high by ten wide and a half dozen deep—one hundred eighty of the giant steel boxes by my count. Enough containers for three hundred sixty cars. They’ll average fifty grand apiece in Macau and Hong Kong. That’s an eighteen-million-dollar haul, so you can see why this L.A. tong is in the biz.
Our drone, which is now two hundred feet or more from my perch in the rafters—I broke in through a roof-mounted vent—is a tiny devil, the size of my palm, with an excellent high res camera that transmits in real time to the app on my iPhone. Al Fenderson’s Mercedes is top of the line, a twelve-cylinder Mercedes-Maybach which he claims set him back a quarter million. It’s distinctive, but still the drone must dip close in this low light to make out make and model.
We saw a pattern in Beverly Hills and Hollywood stolen luxury cars. Most were boosted from five-star restaurants or shortly after they’d left same—a dozen of them by blatant car-jacking. I guess they figured it was easier if the driver’s nerves were calmed by a few glasses of pinot grigio.
Not having sworn to protect and serve, and not being constrained by legalities, we acquired fifty trackers the size of your thumbnail. We placed the little magnetic gizmos in the fender wells of Beverly Hills Mercedes-Benzes—paying parking attendants at four different five-star restaurants ten bucks for each placement—then sat back in my partner’s Las Vegas office and waited until a couple of them showed up as being in the same location. After three false alarms, voila, we zeroed in on a Long Beach warehouse near the harbor where not two, but three, showed up in close proximity. And here I am. The cops can’t take such liberties without warrants.
Eight hundred thousand cars are boosted in the USA every year, so our odds weren’t bad when we learned Beverly Hills and Hollywood were providing more than their share to the thieves.
“I got it,” I say, spotting Fenderson’s custom maroon and gray paint job and press the home button, the * sign, on my phone so the drone will return automatically to the exact place from which it was launched.
“Trouble!” he shouts into the handheld Motorolas we use. “Two cars, no three cars, full of bogies, turning in.”
“I’m backing out toward the vent.”
“Move it, they’re hustling like they don’t want to be late to the party. One car is heading to the back.”
“We’re dicked,” I say, with a moan, “the damn drone ran into a cross member and went down like a duck that took a load of buckshot and is not responding.”
“Screw the drone. Get the hell out of there.”
Easy for him to say. It was my two-grand laid out for the toy. I can see the big double sliding doors at the front of the warehouse, and one’s sliding open, flooding the area in the front with sunlight.
As I back to the exhaust-air vent I’ve pried open, I see two big black Mercedes-Benzes cruise in and slide to a stop. Eight guys, all Asian I imagine, pile out and spread out. And they are expecting trouble as each have palmed a weapon—more than one carry AR’s.
Looks to me like the caca is about to hit the fan and the odds aren’t good. Eight inside, another car at the rear, probably with four more. I checked for an alarm system before prying off the vent cover but saw nothing outside. And I set off nothing audible when I dropped in on the huge truss, but these are the kind of dudes who’d have silent alarms as they’d like to catch you in the act, not scare you off. If they catch you, they can convince you to never come again, probably with concrete boots and a trip to the bottom of Long Beach Harbor. That ensures never again.
And me with only my Springfield .45 and two spare magazines. However, my partner, Pax, is in position a hundred yards from the front of the warehouse, has the high ground and is a Marine Recon trained sniper. He’s hell on wheels with the .338 Lapua he has in hand.
I don’t think I’ve been made, manage to back out and reseat the vent and am on the roof, but thirty feet above the paved driveway. Whatever the plant was used for prior to becoming a repository for stolen luxury vehicles required a huge tank, twenty feet in diameter and four stories high. The steel ladder up the tank, which is nestled against the building, serves both it and roof access. I can get down, but where the hell are the guys in the outside vehicle? I’ll be like the flop-down metal rabbit in the shooting gallery if I’m spotted half-way down.
I get to the edge of the nearly flat roof, with the ladder only feet from my position, but don’t want to be spotted, so I go to my other pair of eyes.
I radio Pax. “Hey, dingus, I’m at the ladder. Where are the guys in the last car?”
“They parked at the rear. I saw them exit, but they’re out of sight now. Let’s hope they went inside a rear door.”
“I don’t want to get back-shot while I’m descending the ladder,” I say.
“And I don’t want to have to console that new girlfriend of yours. We’ll hold hands as we cry and scatter your ashes.”
“Chuck you, Farley,” I snap at him. He’s
not funny at the moment. “I’m starting down.”
Since we’re private operators, we really don’t want to spill blood as it would be a long-drawn-out courtroom affair if we did. Even if the blood was that of bad guys caught red-handed with over two hundred luxury vehicles they’ve boosted—this is California after all. As we discovered, this is the third warehouse full they’ve packed in ocean containers for shipment to China. Of course, the containers are marked agricultural equipment. I guess you could plow with a Mercedes?
Pax goes to serious mode. “I got you, move it.”
I don’t do the ladder a rung at a time, rather plant my insoles hard against the outside railings and slide. I have on driving gloves, otherwise I’d bark my hands with the rapid sliding descent.
My .45 is holstered at the small of my back, and I’m only two thirds of the way down when a goombah boy, built like a barrel, rounds the back corner no more than one hundred feet from me. He looks a little like a charging hippopotamus.
The bad news is, when I make the pavement, I’ll be out of Pax’s view, hidden by the tank.
The Asian guy with a face as round and flat as a salad plate is ambling my way and has a revolver in hand that would shame Dirty Harry’s .44 mag.