The Ransom of Black Stealth One

by Dean Ing

  "And you're going to take me at gunpoint," she added.

  "To fucking Cuba?"

  "You're not going to Cuba. You let me go so that I'd send them off in the wrong direction." Not in questioning tones, but a flat declaration.

  "Also," he said, "so you won't get killed if I make a mistake. I've made a few, you know."

  "And what I know, they'll soon find out. Because I'll damned well tell them, Kyle, I'll tell them everything I can think of if you break your promise now!" She was almost shouting as she finished, eyes blazing, breast heaving wonderfully, he thought.

  "What promise?"

  "I said I'd help you on one condition. You said yes. The condition is that you take me as far as I want to go."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it. I thought about it a lot last night." She folded her arms.

  "Would you mind telling me why?"

  She hesitated, looking from him to the softly purring aircraft, back to him again. "I can't. Too many reasons. I—well, if I'm in trouble, after last night I can't make it any worse by another day. Are you really going to turn that incredible machine over to someone else?"

  "And what if I do?"

  "You're crazy. I wouldn't. Whatever you get for it, it couldn't be better than keeping it." She saw something in his face, perhaps a recognition of sorts, and added, "You know what I fantasize, while I'm on a damn bridge design project? That it's my spaceship. I can land it on the moon, or the asteroid Vesta. Don't laugh, it's a feeling that just fills me up to bursting, something that could lift me away from everyday things, of, of—"

  "Freedom," he supplied.

  "Yes! I know I'm taking awful risks, maybe freedom is always risky. But dammit, I've been secure for twenty-two years, and I know what I want. I know you have it, and you owe me a little piece of it without treating me like a God-damned juvenile delinquent. At least for another day or so. Please, Kyle?"

  He saw that she was fighting back tears. "I'm giving you the freedom to get yourself seriously killed; you know that."

  "I'm of age, Kyle! If I wanted to drive a race car like my dad did, nobody could stop me."

  "Why don't you?"

  She thought about it a moment, wiped her eyes, and grinned. "Too many rules," she replied.

  "Shit," he murmured.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I was born thirty years too soon," he said, and cocked his head. "Don't move," he cautioned. "Here it comes."

  The next moment her eyes grew wide because she could hear its approach but she stood there immovable as the little Northrup F-5 howled overhead at perhaps two thousand feet, banking as it passed. Corbett looked up and waved for the few seconds it was in sight. "Don't worry," he said as his hands came down. "He'd need a mile of freeway to land that thing. We've got a few minutes, but if he takes up orbit over us, believe me, you don't want to go."

  "And if he doesn't, what do we do with lover-boy?"

  "I'll cut him loose and—no, he'd see the hellbug and his testimony might hurt you."

  "I won't let you kill him, Kyle, I don't know why but—"

  "I didn't intend to. Wait: in that bedroom there's a bottle of booze. I want you to stuff everything in the hellbug and wait for me. Don't forget toilet paper. And bring that damned old alarm clock near the cash register. I'm probably going to need it." He saw the elation in her face, tried to avoid thinking how that face would look after falling a mile, or taking a fifty-caliber incendiary slug.

  As they separated inside the store she asked, "What are you going to do to Bobby?"

  "I'm going to have a little drink with him. And he's going to have a big, big drink with me."

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The man who had shown a Finnish passport and the name Einar Fredriks to a customs official could have seen treetops in Chapultepec Park from the triple-glazed high window of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. Instead, Karel Vins leaned back in the swivel chair and placed his bootheels on the desk before him. "How do you like the pattern, Jorge?" Vins had trained these men and his Spanish was excellent.

  Jorge Ocampo's was better. Before the Soviets took him to Cuba he had been tenth-generation Mexican. His short, sturdy brown body and strong aquiline nose were pure Indio, though European stock had favored him with eyes that were not quite brown enough to be black. "May I sit?"

  "Of course, of a certainty," Vins exclaimed, smiling at Jorge and at Mateo Carranza, the scarred veteran whose reddish hair marked him, a Cuban, with his Castilian extraction. A few kilos lighter than Ocampo and only slightly taller, Carranza did not carry himself like a fighter. It had been known to give him an edge—and all Carranza needed was an edge. Men of the usual stamp—say, KGB— would have automatically favored Mateo Carranza over the swarthy peasant, Jorge. Vins was not hampered by such bigotry; and besides, Jorge had stood his ground with a Kalashnikov to cover the escape of his revered Lobo after Vins, some years before, had been wounded near the Nicaraguan border. Mateo was more of a loner, and probably would have deserted military life for armed robbery years before, were it not for his aged mother in Matanzas. She, it seemed, had thought the world of Mateo. So, in his way, did Karel Vins, alias Vawlk, alias Lobo. Vins had known both men in rough times, and knew what they were made of. He had chosen them carefully. "Sit, sit," he urged, smiling. He snapped the edges of his bootsoles together. "What do you think of these?"

  Mateo, whose slouching carriage and stolid face made him appear dull at times, was nothing of the sort. "I think they are yanqui boots," he said. Jorge merely looked and shrugged.

  "Exactly right. You remember a surveillance school session after all this time?"

  Mateo Carranza ran a forefinger under his nose to hide a smile. "No, but I remember how you think. To claim otherwise would be lying, Major."

  Vins dropped his feet and leaned forward. "No more rank, Mateo. Not this time. I am your lobo, if you like, and you will follow me as always. But this time, I think, we must consider ourselves more as equals, even brothers." He let it sink in, knowing the two latinos were not close, that Jorge did not really trust a man like Mateo. "Mateo: you recall the bar in Camaguey?"

  "He recalls many bars, many places," Jorge said.

  "But you were with me too, Jorge," Vins said. "I was standing you drinks for saving my pelt in Nicaragua."

  "Ay, Madre de Dios," Mateo said. "The money."

  "The marked money," Vins insisted, one finger raised.

  "Not here, if you please," said Mateo, looking around him.

  Vins beamed and stood up, stepping over to rap a wall which was surfaced with padded canvas. "Why not here, compadre? This is not an ordinary embassy room. This is a GRU room. I control the ears here. It is, in fact, the only room in Ciudad Mexico where we can speak as we like"—he paused and released another smile, prefabricated but always useful—"of the things we like. So: I saw the roll you carried was marked. And I knew how you had gotten it."

  "A man must eat," said Mateo, flushing. "His mother must eat, too."

  "And is your mother well?" asked Vins, who knew exactly how she had fared.

  "Among the saints in Heaven," said Mateo, crossing himself.

  "Lo siento mucho, it is much regretted," Vins replied. Nothing tied Carranza to his home now, and their interchange had stressed the fact. "But I mention Camaguey only to refresh you on certain things we discussed that night."

  "You burned the fucking money, is what you did," Jorge said, between awe and dismay.

  "To protect my friend against his error," Vins reminded him, now beginning to pace the floor. The pacing was important; it brought watching men to higher alertness, more readiness to pledge a risk. "But what did I tell you both?"

  "Something," said Jorge, "about the danger of a little money, and the safety of much money."

  "I remember. I was not that drunk," Mateo said, prepared to argue the point. "We spoke of the ways a man gains that kind of safety. We seemed to be largely in agreement."

  Vins stopped pacing and faced the two seate
d men, no longer smiling. "If you have lingering suspicions that this room has ears, listen now: how much money would it take for all of us to become disappeared ones, desaparecidos, on our own terms, with a villa and a complacent maid for the rest of our lives? But not, if we are wise, in Cuba."

  Now Mateo and Jorge did look at each other, more in puzzlement than friendship. Then Jorge named a figure. Mateo waited and named a higher one, which would have made Vins smile if he had been watching through one-way glass.

  "Then you would certainly do it for," he paused, and named a much higher figure. Jorge jumped. Mateo lost his slouch. Vins put his knuckled fists on the desk and leaned forward, letting the smile seem to arrive of its own volition. "The amount that could be yours is ten times as much."

  Jorge closed his eyes, shook his head, opened them again.

  Mateo, laconically: "And whom must we kill?"

  "Perhaps one man, perhaps none," said Vins, straightening, hands on hips, a commanding presence. "And it may turn out that we return empty-handed. It depends on some things we may not control—but each of us just may have the chance to retire among the anonymous rich. For a warrior, it is the opportunity of a lifetime."

  "Ten lifetimes," Mateo said. "But you, el lobo? Why?"

  Vins would not simply identify Maksimov by name, nor the power shifts initiated by the hated liberals of the Gorbachev regime. Too many "ifs" remained to talk politics with peons. But he could read a soldier's face, and he no longer doubted the wisdom of his choices for a team. "No man reaches the top by pushing; he must be pulled up."

  "For that, a thousand thanks," said Jorge.

  "For nothing, Jorge, but I was referring to myself. And what happens if the man who is pulling you up, finds himself pushed from behind?"

  "He breaks his ass and so do you," said Mateo, making Jorge smile.

  "And some men at the top actually jump," Vins told them. "And if another at the top even suspects he intends to. jump, that other man will push him."

  "There are too many pushers in this world and not enough pullers," Jorge observed.

  "No man pushes me," said Vins, with the wolfish grin that had inspired his sobriquet. "The only question is: may I pull you both?"

  Jorge was first, but Mateo stood too, both of them making a gesture Karel Vins had taught them as a part of esprit de corps, a very old gesture, older than Czars, as old as Caesars. They stood erect, proud, right fists clenched over their hearts.

  "I have already told you, but I repeat it now, and we will not speak of this again until we are driving on the last leg of this mission," Vins said, just a shade more somber than threatening. "We have a mission, and it requires the movement of a great fortune. All this is approved, just as you were approved."

  "As you, too, were approved," Mateo interrupted, smirking.

  Vins caught his snarl inside and inverted it. "As I too was approved," he agreed, perfectly aware that Mateo Carranza was already beginning to test the notion of equality. I may have to shoot this son of a whore yet, he thought. "We will pursue the mission, pay the money to a man for a piece of military hardware, turn that hardware over to certain authorities—and try to recover the money. All approved; what is not sanctioned is what we just might do with the money afterward."

  For all his faults, Mateo had his flashes of insight. "I do not see why, Lobo, if we control the money to begin with, we do not simply disappear immediately."

  "The hardware it buys," said Jorge, surprised.

  "Fuck the hardware," Mateo said with a smile.

  "Because that hardware is an aircraft of absolutely crucial importance to world socialism and the Soviet Union," Vins said tersely. "You will bear in mind that I am a patriot." And this time his smile was unfeigned, lopsided, and a little sad. "But not the kind of patriot to have my ass broken for nothing."

  TWENTY-SIX

  A night in Mazatlan had not improved the temper of Raoul Medina. He braced himself as Aleman, the driver of the Chevette, dodged another chuckhole on the winding road to Regocijo. The long bag with the tanks and flight helmet in Medina's side of the footwell slid again until he clamped it between his feet. To fly five thousand miles in a day and then trudge from a lagoon to a town at the end of the day lugging SCUBA tanks, only to be balked by want of a lousy car! "They should have known the rental places in Mazatlan wouldn't be open at night," he fumed. His Spanish was fluent, though a little rusty.

  Rodrigues, sitting in back with his long legs stretched at a slant, flicked the butt of his Delicado still smoldering from the open window. "I might have told them if anyone had asked me," he said.

  "Aleman, can't you punch this thing harder?"

  "Not if we expect to get there on four wheels," said Aleman with a trace of brusqueness. On such a road, forty miles an hour was good time; fifty, suicidal. They had turned south from El Salto a half hour earlier and after that the road had become worse, the pounding on the Chevette's suspension more fierce than Medina remembered— but then, old Julio's grandson had not been driving as hard as Aleman. Then, "Iglesia," said Medina, spotting the superstructure of the ancient church through the lacy shade of trees. "We're nearly there."

  He directed Aleman through the dusty whitewashed town of Regocijo even though the village was not the kind a sober man could get himself lost in, taking it slowly enough to avoid the dogs and barefooted children, then urged the driver on to the south. "Fifteen kilometers or so now," he said.

  "I understand miles, señor," said Aleman, easily wounded.

  "Certainly; my regrets, Aleman." After a night with these two, Medina knew that Aleman was older than he seemed, college-trained and insufferably proud of it. The lank Rodrigues claimed he had got his training in the jungles of Honduras and was well disposed toward the yanquis who had schooled him. Even better disposed toward the money, Medina thought, having known mercenaries in other countries. Rodrigues seemed typical of most of the breed, essentially a lazy man but tireless when he had to be, and he knew how to hide an Ingram submachine gun under his wind-breaker by a sling.

  Aleman's similar weapon, as well as Medina's, lay beneath the hood, wrapped in oilcloth and strapped to the engine oil filter with the ubiquitous black electrical tape. Half of all Mexican transport was literally held together with the stuff, Aleman had said. "I don't think we need to go waving our Mac Tens under old Julio's nose," Medina said now, beginning to recognize landmarks near the airstrip. "He's a good guy."

  "Mac Elevens," Rodrigues said. "Ingram Mac Eleven, señor." He snapped his weapon loose and popped its narrow, boxlike magazine down, displaying them separately as Medina craned his head to see.

  "Jesu Christo," Medina breathed, "don't tell me they're different. I haven't fired one in years."

  Rodrigues gazed fondly at the squarish, gray lines of the stubby weapon, with its wire stock folded so closely over its receiver that the entire murderous little brute could be slung between arm and rib cage with hardly a bulge. "This weighs less than a Ten, a little shorter. Less recoil. Safeties are the same."

  "That's good," Medina said.

  "It is unless you want to stop a man with one round," Aleman put in, always happy to show his technical expertise. "These are little short cartridges. Less energy."

  Rodrigues shoved the magazine home and resnapped the weapon, grinning as he caught Medina's eye, and raised his voice. "Ever shoot anybody with one, Aleman?"

  "I am happy to say I have not found it necessary," Aleman said, looking straight ahead.

  "Relax," Medina cautioned. "It won't be necessary today either," he added, proving himself tragically lacking in the gift of prophecy.

  "We should not linger here long," Rodrigues said. "It will take us hours to get to Llano Mojado. I do not think you want to arrive there before we do, Señor Medina."

  "I won't. If I'm delayed here, just wait there. I'll be along when I can." I can't hang around here waiting for Corbett more than two nights. I don't dare collect those gas canisters until he shows, either. If he doesn't show by
tomorrow, I'll have to go without him. Ullmer and that cold-warrior Weston think I have to sell the Sovs a fake in a hurry, and I'll bet my ass they think the real Black Stealth One is on the way to the same rendezvous, Medina told himself. What bothered him was that, the last time he'd talked with Ben Ullmer in San Diego, Ullmer was in a Learjet over Georgia—or said he was. And Ben wouldn't be there unless he had a good idea which direction to go. Was Corbett really bent on hiding the hellbug in Mexico? He seemed to be headed for the Gulf. It was a long watery way across, unless a man fueled up in southern Florida. Still a lot of miles—what, five hundred, six?—to the Yucatan. Kyle, you solitary self-willed bastard, why didn't you tell me you intended to steal the hellbug?

  And where would Corbett get his fuel? Medina could almost hear the gravelly voice say, as it had so many times during design forums, "A secondary concern. The primary question is, can it be done?" Well, can it? With luck, maybe. I could do it if tailwinds were with me. And if I could do it, that hardnosed old fucker could do it too...

  Which raised a spectre that Raoul Medina loathed and feared. What if Kyle Corbett really did intend to sell Black Stealth One to the Other Side? Maybe you couldn't much blame him, but you couldn't let him, either. It had not occurred to Medina, when he got himself into this fucking mess, that Corbett was actually capable of such a thing; or, worse, that Corbett might already have the KGB as a steady source of income. It was occurring to him now. Take the hellbug to Mexico and fiddle with it; crash it, burn it, fly it into the Langley parking lot, but don't let me down, Corbett.

  Medina realized that Aleman was repeating a question. "Oh, uh, if I get there first I can loiter overhead. Just tie a sleeve of your windbreaker on your radio antenna, and park where I can see the car from above," Medina advised the driver. "I'll be swimming in, maybe an hour after I ditch. And I'll walk north. Don't go within two miles of that landing strip."

  Aleman nodded. Medina looked back and saw Rodrigues nod as he lit another Delicado. He's starting to chain-smoke now, Medina thought. Not as cool as he acts. I'll have to watch him with that goddamn Ingram of his, until they leave.