“Wait, wait, wait,” she says. “Is this an emergency? Is someone injured?”
“No,” I tell her. “But a lot of people are going to be dead real soon if you don’t send somebody out here now.”
“I don’t understand. Slow down, calm down, and tell me one more time,” she says.
I take a deep breath and then in a calm voice tell her about the plane, the bomb, the camo netting, and the grassy airstrip. I tell her what we know about Thorn and, halfway through what must sound like an incredible tale she stops me and says, “Who are you? What’s your name?”
I tell her.
“Where are you right now?” The way she says this makes me wonder if she’s about to dispatch a few male nurses from a local mental institution to come and pick me up.
“We’re standing on a hillside about fifteen miles south of Ponce, just off the main highway.”
“And you’re telling me you’ve seen all of this?”
“Yes, damn it!”
“Just a minute,” she says. She puts me on hold.
Herman, Joselyn, and I stand by the car.
“What are they saying?” says Joselyn.
“Nothing. I’m on hold.”
In less than half an hour, Thorn and the two Madhi pilots had buttoned up the plane, turned it around, and were jetting down the runway, leaving the welder to load up his equipment in the back of Thorn’s pickup and disappear.
The jet had enough fuel for about three hours of flight time. Thorn intended to make the most of it. He needed a cover story, one that would fit like a glove into everything his visitors were about to report to the cops. If it worked, it would put a quick end to the search for the plane.
As soon as the wheels cleared the runway, he lifted the landing gear, started to climb to altitude, and reached down and turned on the mode C transponder. He dialed in a number at random.
This immediately gave away their location. The instant the plane showed up on radar in the control tower at Mercedita Airport, three miles outside Ponce, the controllers in the tower went nuts.
Thorn was flying directly into the approach pattern of incoming planes and he knew it.
Frantically they tried to reach him by radio using the squawk number from the transponder. “Unidentified 2416, come in! You are entering controlled air space. Come in!”
Thorn ignored them as the two Mahdi pilots looked on, fear and puzzlement written all over their faces.
“Not to worry,” said Thorn. “I thought you were prepared to die.”
The 727 continued to climb. Off in the distance Thorn could see a large wide-bodied jet, its wheels and flaps down, its landing lights on. It was descending, steaming this way on a clear approach to Mercedita.
Thorn gently eased the 727 to the right until it was virtually nose on to the incoming plane. By now the chatter on the radio was frantic. “Do me a favor, turn that off,” said Thorn.
Ahmed, the Saudi flyer now sitting in the right-hand seat, looked as if he was about to wet his pants. He reached over and turned off the radio, then turned his gaze, his eyes wide like saucers, back toward the front windscreen.
“Put your hands on the throttles,” said Thorn.
Ahmed looked at him and tentatively reached for the throttle controls.
“Gimme full power, when I tell you. Not before! You got it?”
Ahmed said nothing. He was frozen with fear.
“Answer me. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Ahmed’s fingers turned white strangling the plastic tops of the throttle controls as the nose of the giant wide-bodied plane suddenly filled the glass panel in front of him. He looked down and winced, and hunched up his body for the impact as Thorn yelled: “Now!”
Ahmed pushed the throttles all the way forward as Thorn pulled the yoke back hard. The nose of the 727 soared upward. The colliding air turbulence from the massive jet hit them like a brick wall. It rattled the old airframe and shook it nearly to pieces. Thorn could feel the pressure on the foot pedals as the two rear elevators flapped like bird wings. “God damn, that’s a rush!” he yelled. The old plane jolted as if it were strapped to the back of a bucking bull.
“They don’t make ’em like that anymore, hey, Ahmed?” He looked over at the Saudi. “What am I asking you for? You wouldn’t know.”
Ahmed glared at the infidel and then gave him a ghost of a smile and nodded. It was always best to humor those who were insane. God often protected them.
“I talked to my supervisor. We can dispatch a squad car from Ponce but it will take a while for them to get there,” she tells me.
“We don’t need a squad car!” I say. “We need a tactical unit. You send a cop out to that field alone, he’s going to get killed.”
“Are you telling me that they’re armed?” she says.
“Lady, they’ve got a bomb. What do you call that?” I ask. As I am talking, I hear the jet engines approaching from the distance.
“You don’t have to yell,” she says. “I’ll see what I can do. But I will tell you that the nearest tactical unit is in San Juan. It would take them at least an hour to get there, maybe longer.”
“Isn’t there a military base at this end of the island that can scramble planes?”
“There was, but no more. There’s a DEA unit at Ramey,” she says.
“Well, then, damn it, tell them there’re drugs on board that plane,” I tell her.
“You didn’t say nothing about drugs before.”
“I am now.”
“Listen,” she says. “It’s a serious matter to make a false report. You can get into a lot of trouble. Do you understand?” As she is talking I see the giant airliner already in the air heading straight up over our heads. I can no longer hear her on the phone. For almost half a minute the noise of the jet engines drowns her out.
“Yes, and if there’s a tape of this conversation and Thorn drops that bomb on a population center, somebody is going to want to boil you and your supervisor in oil,” I tell her. “Never mind, it’s too late.”
“We have limited resources. There’s only so much we can do,” she says. “And as I tol’ you, we don’t have no tactical unit at that end of the island. I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you,” I tell her. “In the meantime, do you have the local number for the FBI?”
“You can get that through information,” she says. She tells me that we should wait out on the highway for the police to show up.
I hang up and tell Herman what’s happened and he laughs. “Maybe we should just go home,” he says.
“At least one of you is beginning to talk sensibly,” says Joselyn.
FORTY
By the time the cops show up and we get to the airfield, everything is gone, including the plane, Thorn, and his comrades. All that is left is some abandoned equipment—a generator, a compressor, some spray rigs, and a lot of trash.
I try to show them the photo taken on my cell phone but they are not impressed. You have to use your imagination to make out the plane, and the bomb is virtually invisible.
There is a large empty wooden crate marked MACHINE PARTS. I try to convince them that the bomb must have been shipped in it. The crate looks about the right size.
The cops tell me it could have been drugs. They will bring the dogs out in the morning and have them sniff around. If there are drugs or munitions, the dogs will pick up the scent.
They tell us they will make a report and conduct an investigation.
Before they could even get started, a call comes in on their radio that a large multiengine jet has gone down out over the ocean following a near collision with another plane.
I look at Herman. “There goes our only lead to Liquida.”
“Look at it this way,” says Joselyn. “At least Thorn’s dead. And that bomb is gone.”
“There was no bomb,” says one of the cops. “According to the tower, the pilot admitted there were drugs on board.”
“If you say so,” says Joselyn.
A half hour of driving, and an hour of paperwork, filling out and signing reports at the police station in Ponce, and we finally make it back to the Hotel Melia. The steady flow of adrenaline has left us exhausted, strung out, and depressed.
We put everything we saw in the police report, though the cops virtually dismissed any thought of a bomb. They told us that the Coast Guard would search the waters until dark and go back out in the morning, but that hope of finding anything was slim. The plane had gone down over the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the deepest areas of ocean in the world.
Joselyn, Herman, and I sit around in the bar downstairs having drinks, trying to figure out what to do next. It was a stone wall. With no leads, there was nothing left.
“I’m gonna have to call Sarah and tell her,” I say.
“Tell her what?” says Herman.
“I don’t know.”
“You think it’s safe to bring her home?” he says.
“No.”
“Then what are you going to do?” says Joselyn.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I know what I have to do,” says Herman. “I’m not sleeping over at the Belgica after what’s happened today. Is that extra room still open upstairs?”
“Yeah,” I tell him.
“I gotta go over and pick up my stuff,” he says.
“I’m going to head up and take a shower,” says Joselyn.
I give her the room key. “Guess I’ll go with Herman to pick up his bags.”
“Where are you sleeping tonight?” she says.
“I don’t know, any ideas?” I ask.
“See you upstairs,” she says.
“Bless you,” says Herman.
She laughs and heads the other way.
Herman finishes his drink and we head for the car.
From years of experience Thorn had learned that in his line of work, you never did anything without a backup plan. And if you were smart, you had more than one.
After the near midair collision Thorn took the plane up to twenty thousand feet and flew due west until he was about thirty miles out over the ocean. He turned on the radio and called in a mayday. He reported damage from the near collision and acknowledged that there were drugs on board. He told the air-traffic controllers he was having engine trouble and reported a hydraulic leak.
A couple of minutes later Thorn nosed the plane into a steep dive, but not before lowering his flaps and dropping his wheels to slow his speed. At a thousand feet he turned off the transponder and leveled off. With his speed still reduced and watching his fuel, Thorn lowered the ramp at the back.
The bomb was bolted in place. The rollers that released it from its cradle wouldn’t move unless the safety bolts were pulled and the two metal straps holding the bomb in place were removed.
The drag on the plane from the shifting weight and the air resistance from the lowered ramp were considerable. Thorn put the plane into a mild turn, dipping the port wing and adjusting the throttles to give the plane enough power to keep it in the air. Thorn checked the altimeter.
He turned the flight controls over to Ahmed and told him to maintain altitude at five hundred feet and to hold the turn.
Over the horizon and under the radar, the controllers in the tower at Mercedita would assume that the plane went into the water.
“Okay?” He looked at Ahmed, who glanced at him nervously and nodded as he gripped the controls.
Thorn watched him for a few seconds until he was satisfied, then he and the other pilot went to the back of the plane. They gathered all of the brown paper masking panels from the paint job and tossed them out through the open airstairs in the back. The empty paint drums followed. Thorn was careful not to allow any of them to strike the area near the tail of the bomb where the snap-out fins deployed.
Finally he grabbed the two fuel cans and poured enough diesel fuel out the back end of the plane to leave a sheen on the surface of the water below. Then he tossed the two empty fuel drums out. He took one last look to make sure everything was floating nicely on the surface of the sea down below. “Good!”
Then he went back up to the flight deck and closed the airstairs, bringing up the ramp. Thorn lifted the wheels, brought up the flaps, and took over the controls again. Checking his fuel, he goosed the throttles and brought the plane onto a heading due south.
He hopped the waves, hugging the water for more than eighty miles, and didn’t turn on the transponder. He did turn on the radio and listened while the tower at Mercedita called in the Coast Guard and launched a search and rescue for the downed plane.
Thorn stayed under the radar and didn’t pop up again, not even when he reached his destination. It was the small island of Vieques, off the southern tip of Puerto Rico. There was a fair-size general aviation airport on the eastern side of the island. From there Thorn could take one of the twin-engine commuter flights to San Juan and catch a direct flight to D.C. in the morning. But at the moment that wasn’t where he was headed.
On the western side, near a beautiful cove, the azure waters and white sand beaches concealed a deadly secret. The island was badly polluted. For fifty years the western side of Vieques had been a bombing range for the U.S. Navy. Tons of high-explosive ordnance had been dropped all over the island, and heavy metals, including mercury and lead, now contaminated large parts of it.
The people who lived there were territorial subjects. They lacked the wealth and political influence to launch the kind of “not in my backyard” movements that had shut down most of the military bombing ranges on the U.S. mainland. It wasn’t until the base closure commissions began shutting down military facilities across the country that a coalition of environmentalists and islanders finally waged a successful battle to oust the navy. The old bombing range was turned over to the Department of the Interior, while bureaucrats argued over who was going to clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, the buildings at what had been the navy’s old Camp Garcia lay abandoned. All that remained was a five-thousand-foot runway and a small unmanned weather station. It was the perfect location for stashing the plane.
All Thorn needed to buy two nights, two days, and a load of Jet A fuel from the airport on the other side of the island was a plausible story. The empty jet was under a lease arrangement, a replacement craft deadheading from Houston to San Juan to carry freight. The partially completed paint job would enhance the story, and they painted the logos on the side of the plane as they waited. The story would be that they had developed a serious engine problem and that Thorn had to set it down on the abandoned runway when he found it available on his charts. No one would be looking for him there. It would be at least a day or two, maybe longer, before they realized there was no real wreckage in the waters west of Mercedita. By then the plane would be gone, the mission completed.
Ten minutes before landing, just off the southern tip of Puerto Rico, Thorn checked his cell phone for a signal. When he got one he made one phone call, to the front desk at the Hotel Belgica.
FORTY-ONE
The Belgica is one of those cozy boutique hotels you often find tucked away in the old world cities of Europe, only this one has a Latin flavor to it.
When I walk through the front door behind Herman, I see that the lobby is small, and at the moment there is no one at the front desk.
Herman and I go up to his room. It takes him five minutes to throw his dirty underwear in his bag and gather his shaving kit and other toiletries from the bathroom. He does one last check of the closet and looks around to make sure he hasn’t left anything, and we head out.
As I turn toward the stairs, Herman is behind me.
“Hold on a second,” he says.
I turn. “Did you forget something?”
He shakes his head, puts his finger to his lips in a sign of silence, and then points back behind us down the hallway. “That’s Thorn’s room,” he whispers. The door is wide open and the light is on.
“You think maybe the cops?” I’m up close in his ear.<
br />
He shakes his head. Herman’s not sure.
We move slowly down the hall toward the open door. When we get there we see some luggage assembled on the floor, a large black roller and a smaller one. The bed’s been stripped, all the sheets and towels in a pile on the floor. The closet door is open and there is a light on in the bathroom but no sign of anyone inside.
Herman slowly steps into the room, looks one way and then the other. He doesn’t see anyone. I step in behind him. He checks the closet. There are two shirts hanging inside.
While he’s doing that, I check the luggage tags. They are only temporary, paper, the kind of tags you get from the airlines when you check your luggage. The name on them is Charles Johnston, 113 Calle Once, Havana, Cuba.
I look at the smaller case, reach down and start to unzip it.
“Excuse me! What do you think you are doing?”
The voice sends me out of my skin. I turn around and there’s a guy standing in the bathroom door looking at me. “Who are you?” he says.
Herman steps out of the closet. The guy looks at him. “Oh, señor, it’s you.” The guy in the doorway seems relieved.
Herman says: “Ah, my friend. This is the young man I was telling you about.” Herman looks at me and smiles. “Pablo, correct?”
“That’s right,” says the kid.
“This is the young man at the desk,” says Herman. “Very enterprising fellow. This is one of my associates. Pablo, meet Paul. Two Pablos, how about that?” he says.
I laugh and step away from the bag that I was about to rifle, so that I can shake his hand. Perhaps for a smile and a few dollars he’ll let us search the bags.
“Were you able to deliver your papers to Señor Johnston?” asks Pablo.
“Sadly, no,” says Herman.
“That’s too bad, because I’m afraid he’s checked out.”
PM11-The Rule of Nine Page 28