by Dean Ing
Jorge saw the thing come out of the sun five minutes later, settling low over the water, awesome in its silence. El lobo stood waving. This time the vast wings seemed almost to flap as the aircraft banked away in a long, slow circle over the marsh, returning a minute later, passing almost over Karel Vins who seemed to be shading his eyes before he ran forward toward something that fluttered to the ground after the monster began to climb into the heavens.
It seemed to Jorge that this whole operation was turning to muck under his feet. He thought perhaps el lobo had begun to hold the same opinion when Vins, trudging back like a peon with the ransom of a king over one shoulder, whistled a familiar old call. He did not feel much like taking any more orders but, "A sus ordenes, Lobo," he said as he and Mateo reached the shed.
Vins flashed another piece of torn cardboard, brightly colored on one side, gray on the other. On the gray side were four letters: a single word. "He wishes us to wait," Vins grumbled in Spanish, dropping the money into the car's trunk and slamming the lid.
Now Mateo spoke up. "He will return, then."
The eyes of el lobo searched the sky. "I am certain he saw the money; who would not return for that? But he has turned very, very cautious for a man who has dared so much. He could force a change in our tactics. And our tactics may depend on just how long we have to wait." Jorge studied the Russian's face and saw no duplicity there, but simple frustration.
FORTY-THREE
Corbett's face remained impassive until he had studied the terrain thoroughly from three thousand feet, but once he had made his choice, the corners of his mouth began to develop smile lines as he pursued his stratagem. Some of that grass in the salt marshes stood higher than a man could reach, thick as cattails and sharp-edged enough to slice a man's skin unless he moved carefully. To go touring through that stuff, a man had to be highly motivated. The grass was capable of supporting a very light load if it were well distributed—across, say, sixty feet of ultralight wing. It would compress a bit. Well, so much the better, up to a point. He wafted Black Stealth One in its pixel mode over the protective sandbar, almost grazing the surface, keeping a dunelike rise of ground between himself and the distant landing strip. The hellbug nosed deep into dense marsh grass less than a hundred feet from shore, roughly a mile from that scabrous little landing strip.
He reasoned that the man his IR scanner had picked up out in the scrub would probably be the Russki's ace in the hole, maybe a sniper. He'd been on the other side of the landing strip, though, on foot; certainly not in a position to see the hellbug slide into its grassy nest.
The Russians had two small cars in that shed. Corbett had seen two other cars within a few miles of this spot, one an abandoned hulk close by near the road, the other a windowless old VW a mile or so out in the scrub, perhaps dumped years before from the look of it. He had hoped for, but not really expected, one or two men; if more than three or four, the risk would have been unacceptable. So quit worrying about what you might've done; too many ifs and you might chicken out. This bunch puts your chances on the very margin of sweet reason. The access road stretched away to his left, and the vintage Chevy lay just beyond the road. From the distant shed, a man would not be able to see the old car unless he walked to a nearby rise of sandy turf. Without that obscuring rise, Corbett would have had only the dry brush for cover.
He feared at first that the hellbug's nose would settle too far, and if the forward exhaust diverter entered the water he was in serious trouble. But with nobody aboard, I could cut brush and shove it beneath to free the diverter. Still he held his breath as the impeller spooled down, waiting for a jolting slap into salt water. When that did not happen, he set the pixel program to fool a watcher from near the road, and smiled at the result. Amid this thicket, the chameleon effect was startlingly good.
He took the old Westclox and two small wire-filled cardboard tubes from his bag, rewinding the clock, then smashing the cover glass. He removed the minute hand because it would only get in the way. He slipped folded bundles of insulated wire from the protective cardboard tubes, working quickly because he did not want time to regret what he was doing, and uncovered pencil-thin copper dynamite caps from inside the wire bundles. One cap, marked for a two-second delay, he placed behind his seat track. The other, which would detonate with no delay, he wedged between the base of the fuel tank and the flexible cockpit housing after he broke its wires off to the lengths he needed. It was always possible that the first cap would split the tank without igniting its fuel, but the second would detonate into a mist of fuel and fumes. The devastation that would follow was not an event Corbett wanted to think about.
After trimming the wire ends, he spliced the cap wires together and wrapped one long lead gently around the clock's hour hand so that the bare end would move imperceptibly with each stolid tick of the clock. Then, using spare wire he had broken off, he jammed one wire end into the energized side of the circuitbreaker panel and routed its other end to the clock, which he shoved carefully beneath the copilot's seat. The final adjustment of that energized wire was not a thing to be done until he was ready to leave the hellbug. He decided that three hours would be enough. Whatever happened, no damned Russian would ever find more than debris from Black Stealth One.
The cockpit had not been designed to let a man remove his shoes, socks, and trousers, but he managed. He had a moment of near-panic when, after counting four mauled but serviceable cigarettes in their packet, he could not at first locate the paper matches Elfego Velarde had given him. Finally he found them, stuffed everything into his leather bag, but left his wallet. He gave special thought to his ammunition, dropping one round into each jacket pocket because Dar Weston had once recounted field agent tricks to him. The Weston giveth, and the Weston taketh away. The son of a bitch.
He placed the leather bag and his plastic fuel bladder in the footwell, made a final placement of the energized wire with utmost caution, then eased himself down outside to avoid grass cuts on his naked legs, the hellbug rocking gently. Silted water lapped at his knees, and the patina of gray salt on grass stalks told him this was not high tide. Christ, that's all you need, to have this thing float out to the sandbar, he thought. One thing you never thought you'd need was a bloody boat anchor.
He solved his problem with most of his remaining duct tape, begrudging every inch he had to use. Torn lengthwise and spliced, it reached from the thrust diverter pivot to a group of stalks he bound together as a living anchor. It did not look any too dependable to Corbett. From this point onward, life itself would not be all that dependable.
He reached over the cockpit sill and retrieved the bag, then the fuel-filled bladder, using them to shield his face as he moved to shore. A tuft of the rattan-stiff grass made a passable broom, sweeping away his footprints at the water's verge. Yeah, but it still looks funny. However, from a hundred feet away the hellbug itself was visible only as a vagrant gleam of canopy, which might have been water reflection, and outlines that appeared as wire-thin dotted lines among the luxuriant growth of marsh grass.
Within minutes his legs had dried, and he donned his trousers. He brushed away his tracks again one-handed as he moved steadily toward hummocks topped by lower, stiff beach grass. Once there, he put on his socks and shoes, then looked himself over. This is not a man who has waded ashore, he decided, and moved from hummock to driftwood to hummock until he reached turf that did not accept a footprint.
The twin-rutted path of the road curved around the shoulder of the rise of dunelike mounds that lay between him and the landing strip. Moving cautiously forward, sweating with his thirty-pound fuel load, he began to hunker down when he saw the outlines of the long-abandoned Chevrolet near the road. The bad news was that its seats were gone. The good news lay in the ceiling and rear seatback upholstery, strips and tufts of stuff that he could gather with ease.
Best of all, the Chevy's fuel tank did not leak as he poured a few cupfuls of fuel in. He could see fumes rising from the sunbaked tank as he began
moving away from the hulk, strewing bits of upholstery below the spiny underbrush, trying to follow the outline of a swept, sixty-foot wing. Much of the brush was crackling dry, and that would help too. Before dousing that same area with his remaining gasoline, he sat down and built his timers.
He tore the paper match packet into two roughly equal packets, laying one match aside, then bent the protective covers backward, each lower flap standing edge-on against the heads of the matches. When he grasped each pack by its striker strip, match heads downward, the outline of each was a perfect numeral 4 in cardboard. He did not use the spare match to light cigarettes yet, but spent two minutes feverishly dousing all the shreds of upholstery and leafy shrubs in a shallow, sixty-foot V. He wanted a half-hour to circle around the airstrip but knew the cigarettes would burn down in less time than that.
Placing a small pile of cloth shreds on the Chevy's trunk near the tank opening, he wetted them thoroughly, cursing as he waved to dry a splash of fuel from one hand. Then he moved away with his figure-4 timers, lit two cigarettes, and wedged the unlit ends between the match-heads and the impinging covers. He approached from upwind, then, setting the deadly little timers within inches of the fuel-soaked detritus so that the cigarettes pointed toward the sky. One timer, he knew, was 90 percent certain. Two provided extra assurance. While a cigarette's glow rarely ignited liquid fuels, the sudden flare of a dozen paper matches almost always did.
Corbett did not realize he had been trembling until he began to run, bent almost double, through the thorny brush. More than once he stopped, then stood up slowly and carefully to check his position with respect to the distant shed. Sudden movement on his part when standing erect, he knew, might be disastrous.
When he was still a half-mile from the shed, he saw that the little team was leaving it, spreading out into the brush on recon. Evidently they were more interested in the sky than their immediate surroundings, for the blond man stopped several times as he moved off in the general direction of the shoreline, shading his eyes, scanning the heavens as he disappeared into the underbrush. Getting nervous, pal? Wondering if the bird will make another pass? Making just one more little patrol? Well, you just keep going while I have a look around.
Corbett had lost sight of the other men long before and realized that they must all be out of touch with each other. Another five minutes, he begged, already nearer that shed than any of them—but his own diversion put an end to that, when the old Chevy's gas tank went up with a mighty, subterranean cough that was not quite an explosion.
Almost instantly, he saw the lick of flames above heavy brush and heard someone whistle once, twice. He began moving directly toward the shed now, hoping to see men converging toward the distant flames that grew more smoky as he watched. He froze in dismay and astonishment, then dropped to a squat, as he heard footsteps and heavy breathing very near and getting nearer by the second. The man was running hard, his gaze on the smoke, and he held an Uzi before him to sweep branches from his face as he appeared. Intent on his horizon, the lean, swarthy man burst into Corbett's view only five paces away. He must have seen Corbett squatting because he tried to snap the Uzi around as Kyle Corbett leaped into him in a dusty collision.
Any gunfire now would be a pointed announcement and Corbett battered at the man's temple with the barrel of his sidearm, tearing the man's trigger hand from the Uzi with his free hand. Both men went down, the lean latino grunting as Corbett's elbow slammed into his diaphragm. The Uzi clattered onto sandy soil and, now using both hands, Corbett rained punishment against the man's head. Corbett finally connected with a clean, unimpeded blow on the point of the man's chin and then watched him lapse from consciousness.
He had no time for niceties, kneeling within a hundred yards of the shed. The man's bootlaces took an infernally long time coming out, but they were sturdy enough to bind wrists and ankles. Corbett wrenched one of the loose boots off, then a sock that had seen better days, and stuffed that sock into the man's mouth. When Corbett moved forward to scan the airstrip again, he could see the blond man standing in the open, calling orders in Spanish and waving his assault rifle toward the distant smoke with an air of command. Corbett did not see another man at first, but finally spotted a small figure on the other side of the airstrip in the edge of the brush as it set off toward the flames at a dead run.
The blond still seemed preoccupied with the sky but did not take Corbett's diversionary bait himself, moving instead until he was striding back and forth in front of the shed as if unconsciously guarding a command post. Well, I'll just have to come to you, Corbett decided, tucking the Glock away, holding the Uzi at his side as he moved around to keep the shed between himself and the sentry. He needed precious minutes to cover the distance without snapping a branch, but as he stepped to the rear of the shed's salt-corroded tin wall, he heard the blond curse aloud, not in Spanish or English. The man took several paces toward the airstrip, shading his eyes with one hand, an Uzi cradled across his chest as he turned his back to the shed.
Corbett said it in Spanish because the blond had given orders in the same tongue: "If you move, you are a dead man."
The blond moved, but only to flinch, his shoulders drooping slightly. He did not look around. "I should have known," he replied in Spanish.
Corbett stayed behind the shed, stepping into shadow, knowing that at any moment the man investigating the fire might come within sight. "Hold the gun by its barrel and put it over your shoulder," he demanded. "No whistles, no sudden moves." As the blond obeyed, Corbett could see him trying to eyeball his captor from the edge of his vision. "No, look toward the fire. And show me the money."
The blond shrugged. "It is on the runway, where your pilot could see it," he said.
"How far?"
"Four hundred meters."
Corbett hesitated. He needed a car for an immediate escape, but he would have to pass at least one armed man who could shoot from cover. And the instant a car started up, the sound could be as revealing as gunfire. Better if he collected the money before that happened, but only an idiot would expect this stalwart blond to simply go and retrieve the money for him. "Put your gun down by its barrel. I'm going to walk with you to the money, and you're going to stay between me and that smoke." As the blond eased the rifle down, placing it flat on a tuft of grass, Corbett came forward, holding his own rifle in a way that might not seem threatening to a distant watcher.
As the blond began to walk toward the airstrip, Corbett strode two paces wide of him, cradling the rifle so that he need only move it slightly to bear on his captive. "And where is my team now?" the blond asked rhetorically, glumly.
"They're around," Corbett said. "Walk faster. If you get me into a gunfight you'll be the first one to go down." The pace picked up. Corbett's eyesight was as good as any man's but he could not see a telltale lump that might be cash among the dirt and wiry tuftgrass ahead. Presently, when they had covered three hundred paces: "Point to the money, damn you," he insisted.
The blond hesitated, then pointed ahead. "There, I think," he said, not sounding any too certain. "Near the end of the runway. It would be obvious from the air," he added and then, in genuine anxiety: "Did your pilot crash the aircraft?"
"Maybe, maybe not," Corbett said. "I'm the pilot. I'm the guy who dropped those notes on the cardboard from a box of Hi Ho's. Medina had a little trouble. What the fuck do you care? What you'd better care about is that it's getting late, and I'm getting jumpy, and I don't see the goddamn money."
"All this is unnecessary," said the blond, "if you have the aircraft. I expect you to take the money. It is planned," he insisted.
"You bet it is," Corbett said. After another minute he quit walking. "Stop right here." Unbidden, the blond turned to face Corbett with a gaze of frank assessment. Corbett's accusation was equally frank: "The money isn't out here."
"Maybe it is," shrugged the blond in a way that was almost pure Mexican.
The man's feet were planted just so, and Corbett judged the
moment correctly. "Don't. I'd just as soon kill you as not," he warned.
The man released a carefree sort of smile. "The money must be somewhere out here," he said, seeming to relax as he turned away. From somewhere in the distance a thin, two-note whistle floated on the breeze.
"You're too damned sure of yourself," said Corbett. "Put your thumbs in the back of your belt and keep looking away." As the blond did it, Corbett unholstered the Glock and put down the Uzi. He stuck the sidearm's muzzle into the man's ribs and began to pat him down; sleeves, jacket pockets, beltline, trouser pockets. No firearms. "Well, you sure keep up a cheerful front, I'll give you that much," Corbett said. "Now get back to those cars on the double." I slipped up, this fucker was just buying time. But I did see the money out here! Shit, shit, shit...
They were three hundred paces from the cars when two figures stumbled from the brush behind the shed. Only one was armed. The blond cursed and began to limp, Corbett falling in line behind him, doing his own cursing in English. The blond staggered and fell on hands and knees, Corbett dropping to a crouch because it was now obvious that he needed a hostage.
"Twisted it," grunted the blond, sitting now, rubbing an ankle.
"Stay right there," Corbett snarled. "Tell those men to walk away with their hands in the air or I'll kill you. I mean it."
"I am sure you do," said the blond, turning, an ugly little snub-nosed revolver coming out of its ankle holster like a melon seed pressed between fingers. "But in dying, I could not miss you."
Corbett said nothing at all, but continued to point the Uzi. Without refocusing his eyes he could see two men fanning away from the shed in a flanking maneuver, and now they both carried weapons.
"You were already in place," said the blond, "when that diversion went off. And since you are the pilot, it was not an airplane crash."
"Tell them to stop or I'll blow you away," Corbett said tightly.
"And if I only wound you, still you must deal with my veterans," the blond said, very quietly, not moving. "No wounded man could do that." Then, in tightly controlled passion, "It is expected that you take the money! You are throwing your life away, second by second."