“Never mind that the reason people are staying away is because they’re afraid of the drug violence,” Brognola growled. “We have a line on which one of the drug gangs carried out the attack?”
“We will,” Price said, “once we process the prisoners. We’re taking them to a safehouse in Mexico City. They’ll be questioned by Mexican-born operatives. We’ll get their identification. I’m not too hopeful, however, that we will get any useful information about the source of the aircraft.”
“What have we learned from this, and from Able’s mess in Canada?”
Price frowned at Brognola’s referring to the mess as “Able’s,” as if they had caused it.
“Able reported that fuel leaked from the aircraft fuselage when it was compromised by a grenade,” Price said. “If they store fuel in the fuselage, it may make the aircraft extremely flammable, and that would explain why all the crashes we know of have resulted in nothing but melted plastic and burned components.”
“Flammable aircraft?”
Pryce shrugged again. “Maybe.”
She could tell that Brognola didn’t like what he was hearing. She was giving him a report that included a lot of incidents spread across a vast area, but she was not giving him any indication of progress. There were, at the very least, dozens of these small stealth aircraft in existence. They had come out of nowhere over a period of several days, perpetrating violence worldwide, invisible to radar, untraceable by any of the United States’s best technology. It was the kind of technology gap that the U.S. military did not like to have. And the United States was not accustomed to competing for military technology with South American drug gangs.
“We have got to get our hands on one of these damned planes,” Brognola complained.
“Able Team,” Price said, “is en route to Florida. There has been a surge of UFO reports, of all things, in Glades County, and that prompted some local investigation by the FBI. They believe that there has been stealth plane activity in the area—but no reports of attacks. If the planes are there, it is safe to assume they’re bringing in drugs.”
“They’d be perfect for it,” Brognola complained. “All but invisible. Quiet. Even the DEA drones haven’t been able to spot one.”
“Able’s going on-site. They’re going to try to track down one of the shipments and take control of the aircraft while it’s on the ground offloading cargo.” Price met Brognola’s eyes through their video feed. “It’s a long shot.”
“Fine,” Brognola said. “Anything else? Do you have any solid information that I can relay to the Man? The President’s asking for a report and I’d really like to be able to give him something.”
“You’ve got what I’ve got, Hal,” Price said.
“All right. Thanks, Barb.”
The plasma screen went dark.
CHAPTER SIX
Palenque, Mexico
The transport aircraft sat on the tarmac at Palenque airport. Inside, Jack Grimaldi was standing in front of the flat screen, as if watching the video from just a few feet away would help him understand it better. But he gave a shrug and sat at the conference table.
“I’ve seen this video twenty times and I still can’t believe it,” Grimaldi said. “It’s like the thing is made to burn up.”
Jack Grimaldi was the lead pilot for Stony Man Farm. He had flown almost every aircraft in existence, but these strange little jets had him baffled. He had been asked to join this conference call with Stony Man Farm. They were on board the Phoenix Force transport jet; once this meeting was concluded, Grimaldi would be piloting it back to the United States.
A second display showed the War Room at Stony Man Farm. Barbara Price sat at the conference table, along with Aaron Kurtzman, a powerful-looking man in a wheelchair. There were others working in various terminals in the room, among them a big, older black man in a suit and tie. A young Japanese man was pounding keys on a terminal in the corner with his right hand while his left hand worked, seemingly independently, on a second terminal on a portable cart.
On the main screen the three-minute video of the burning aircraft came to an end and restarted.
“Now look at this,” Jack Grimaldi said. “Right at the start, you see that the wings are dripping. The plastic is melting and dripping off, and it is burning.”
“I used to burn my G.I. Joe’s in the backyard, and they would melt like that,” T. J. Hawkins said. “It was kind of cool. Of course, when the show was over, you didn’t have a G.I. Joe anymore.”
“Yeah,” Grimaldi said, “but your G.I. Joe was made of thermoplastic. Cheap, easily moldable, flammable thermoplastic. You’re not supposed to make aircraft out of flammable material.”
“You don’t think that it was the self-destruct medium that was burning?” Price suggested.
“No. There’s too much of it. I wish I’d got there in time to witness it myself. By the time I came to pick up the boys, this thing was just a slag heap. But I’m telling you, it’s the plastic that’s burning. See the volume of material that is dripping off—that’s the actual wing, melting and turning to goo and burning up. That black smoke is what you get when you burn thermoplastic. Now watch what happens at 1 minute, 15 seconds.”
As the time marker reached 1 minutes and 15 seconds, something else began to pour out of the belly of the aircraft. It was another liquid, but it had the viscosity of water and it streamed on the ground, burning brightly.
“That, to me, looks like fuel.”
“Fuel tanks in the belly of the aircraft?” asked the big man in the wheelchair.
“Would that be more dangerous or less dangerous than making the entire aircraft flammable in the first place?” asked David McCarter.
“Now wait,” said Jack Grimaldi, watching the time marker again. “Okay, watch this right wing at this section here, along the roofline. Watch what happens.”
From the steady burning of the plastic erupted a tiny jet of bright flame that dripped to the ground. It came from the seam that Grimaldi had indicated in the wing. Another jet erupted on the roofline, and the bright yellow flame seemed to trickle along the burning body of the aircraft.
Grimaldi turned to his Phoenix Force audience. “Did you see that?”
“I saw, Jack,” Price said from the Farm. “Can you explain what it was?”
“Fuel. More fuel. If I didn’t know better I would say that there are fuel leaks coming not only from the belly of the aircraft but from the roofline and from the wings.”
“Whoa. There’s got to be aircraft-design best practices that say you don’t surround the passengers with fuel,” Calvin James commented.
“You bet there is,” Grimaldi said.
“It does correlate with the report from Able Team,” Price asked. “But why design an aircraft like that?”
“Save space, maybe?” Grimaldi suggested. “I’m just guessing here. But what else could be spitting out of the roof of the plane, of all places. You don’t keep any hydraulic fluid up there. If you’re smart you’re using fire-resistant hydraulic fluids, regardless. Phosphate esters. It’s stable and has a long performance life.”
Aaron Kurtzman was still glaring at the screen. Jack Grimaldi was certainly the most expert among when it came to aircraft engineering. Still, it seemed outlandish to suggest that this stealth aircraft was built to be a flying fuel tank.
“I assume that an attempt was made to track the second jet when it buggered out of Chilan,” McCarter said.
“Yes. For what good it did,” Kurtzman said. “We didn’t get a blip. Nothing. We looked at commercial air traffic control radar and they saw nothing. Our military monitoring saw nothing. It’s as though those aircraft were not even there.”
“How is that possible?” McCarter demanded.
There was no response from Grimaldi or from the conference table at Stony Man Farm.
Finally Kurtzman said, “We really need to get our hands on one of these things.”
“I’ve been told,” Barbara Price said.
DAVID MCCARTER HAD BARELY settled into his seat in the transport jet before he felt the change in direction. They had taken off from the small airfield outside Palenque in southern Mexico, disgruntled at their lack of success, and were heading north, back to the United States. And then, less than fifteen minutes into the flight, the plane banked. The aircraft was turning around.
McCarter poked his head into the cockpit. Jack Grimaldi was just straightening out the aircraft on its new heading. Alongside him was a U.S. Air Force copilot, currently serving a stint at Stony Man Farm. Like all the military and intelligence staff who served rotations at the Farm, he was sworn to absolute secrecy. Revealing anything about his time at the Farm—even to high-level commanding officers, at any time in the future—would be considered a crime worthy of immediate demotion and dismissal.
As Grimaldi handed the controls over to the Air Force pilot he turned to McCarter.
“We forget something?” McCarter asked.
“Just got word from the boss lady. She said forget D.C., head for Córdoba.”
McCarter thought for a second. “Argentina? Something new must have happened in the last half hour.”
“She said she’ll give you a call in a few to discuss it.”
In fact, as McCarter returned to the cabin he found the other four members of Phoenix Force gathering around a central monitor, and Barbara Price herself was on the screen.
“Afternoon, again, Phoenix,” she said. “I’ve just given Jack instructions to change course to Argentina. You are headed for the Córdoba province. We might have a line on two more of those aircraft.”
“That’s good news,” McCarter said.
“Emphasis on might,” Price warned. “It’s little better than a rumor at this point. I’m inserting you in the middle of what might be a transnational South American gang war. I hope you are okay with that?”
“Better than okay. We love transnational South American gang wars,” Rafael Encizo said. “Especially if it gives us another chance to snatch a plastic plane.”
“Specifically, I need you to be on hand to deal with a kidnapping. We think some of the players involved are the parties who shot up the hotel in La Paz.”
“Really?” Hawkins said. “That was a real ballsy move. I saw a network news animation of how it must have happened.”
“That attack had brought the existences of the stealth aircraft to the attention of the public worldwide,” Price said. “It’s causing some panic. No thanks to the news networks outlets speculating pretty wildly about the supposed capabilities of these aircraft. They have the people convinced these things can fly silent and invisible anywhere they want—and crash into any buildings they want.”
T. J. Hawkins looked across the table at the others. Encizo had the same expression on his face. They’d seen these planes. They didn’t think what Price had just said qualified as “wild speculation” at all. It was pretty close to accurate.
“They’re also beginning to piece together a list of attacks worldwide,” Price continued. “The number of attacks has escalated quickly in recent days. You should also know that we’ve just received word of another suspected stealth jet crash. This one in Thailand. Local news is claiming it was armed for an attack on the People’s Republic of China, but that’s likely just speculation.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything left of that jet?” McCarter asked.
“No,” Price said. “The news is describing the remains as a puddle.”
“So where are we headed?” McCarter said.
The image of the pretty blonde mission commander faded and on the screen was a picture of a vast, flat, white desert plain, with mountains in the distance—and row after row of neat piles of white rock.
“Oh. It’s the Salinas Grandes,” T. J. Hawkins said. “The salt mines.”
“Yes,” said the voice of Barbara Price. “The Salinas Grandes is a salt desert in central Argentina. The desert as a whole is bigger than Delaware, smaller than Connecticut, and it’s the site for numerous mining operations. Most just salt, but also potassium and even lithium. This particular salt flat scraping operation happens to be the agreed-upon handover site in the kidnapping case.”
“How’d this bit of intelligence come to us, Barb?” McCarter asked.
“Hal relayed it. Apparently he got it from one of his contacts in the CIA. It has come a long way from a phone call in a case related to the attacks on the high-rise in La Paz, Bolivia. It seems the CIA became interested in the disappearance of the man who was presumably the target of the attack. He was Adan Neruda, an industrialist and real-estate mogul in Bolivia, but he’s got his fingers in all kinds of narcotics distribution, as well. He was quite a financial success, but never quite corrupt enough to get himself in trouble with the government of Bolivia or with the CIA. Langley’s been keeping tabs on him, however.”
She explained that a South American CIA task force became intrigued by the attacks on the Neruda celebration at the Hotel Europa. It took them totally by surprise, and the CIA task force became worried that there was more to this Neruda than they had ever suspected. They examined one of the calling cards left at the party—ridiculous little bamboo tubes containing a message from someone Neruda had backstabbed decades before. The only problem was that the man was long dead. There was also a warning sent to the Bolivian government, claiming one of the wealthiest men in the country was about to be revealed as an international terrorist. Despite the government’s fast response to the attacks on the hotel, Neruda had slipped away and disappeared from Bolivia within the hour.
“But traces run on his cell phone records show that he received calls during the attack,” Price continued. “It took some work to trace the caller, but it appears to come from a man named Encina—a man who actually had some serious run-ins with Neruda years before. Whatever the conflict was, Encina was forced to flee Bolivia. He moved to Argentina and managed to make a success of himself by moving drugs, a large-scale fencing operation and in gambling.”
“So what is the connection between Encina and Adan Neruda now?” McCarter asked.
“None, as far as we can tell,” Price said. “There’s no evidence that they have communicated in a decade. And yet Encina struck out at Adan Neruda.”
“So is this just some long-simmering resentment?” Encizo asked.
“It looks like it,” Price said. “And I think we’re starting to see a pattern in this. These aircraft are giving a power boost to a lot of marginalized, midlevel criminals, smugglers and other gangs. It gives them leverage they never dreamed of having. A longer reach. And they’re using it in just this way. To settle old scores, to right perceived wrongs. There are a lot of feuds that are apparently being addressed with these aircraft. At least that’s the pattern we believe is emerging. And that would fit this time.
“If this man Encina has been stewing over his betrayal at the hands of Adan Neruda for all these years, and he finally gets a tool that will allow him to get revenge, why not use it? So he attacked Neruda during his party, killed several VIPs from within business and government and essentially left Neruda responsible for the whole mess by default. Everything that Neruda owned in Bolivia has been confiscated by the government and courts. Even if he was somehow cleared of all wrongdoing and then mounted a legal battle for return of his property, the power players and Bolivia’s court system would string him along for years or decades. Regardless, yesterday the CIA traced a call going out from Adan Neruda’s cell phone. He was calling back the number of the person who called him during the attack. They did a listen-in. They heard someone they believed to be Adan Neruda contacting this Encina and telling him that he had kidnapped his sister. He even transmitted a photo, taken with his phone, to Encina. Unfortunately, the CIA got only the voice.”
“I can imagine the response from Encina,” McCarter said.
“He flew off the handle. It was pretty clear that he did believe Neruda had his sister in custody. Encina went into somew
hat of a rage.”
McCarter shook his head. “Yeah, I can see that. The guy has been festering about getting payback against this Neruda for years and years, and he finally gets it in spectacular fashion, but his victory lasts only a few days before the guy is stabbing him in the back again. I would be a little ticked off myself.”
“Neruda was already in-country. In Argentina,” Price said. “His sister lives in the Córdoba region. She’s not involved in any of her brother’s illegal businesses—she’s a schoolteacher, and the conversation between Encina and Neruda made it sound as if she distanced herself from her brother a long time ago. But Encina said he’d pay.”
“What is the ransom?” McCarter asked.
“Five million U.S. dollars,” Price said. “Neruda claims that he wants enough money to live on for the rest of his life. He named the place for the exchange.”
“Neruda did?” Hawkins said. “He picked the salt flats, not Encina? It’s the perfect place for Encina to use his stealth jets.”
“And Neruda must know it,” McCarter added. “He’s baiting Encina further. He wants to humiliate him somehow.”
“Clearly, there’s more to this than meets the eye,” Price said. “We can assume that Neruda will have some built-in insurance. Something that will give him safe passage out of Argentina, if in fact he does get the five million dollars. On the other hand, we can assume that Encina is not going to make the exchange and let Neruda just walk away.”
“Can’t wait to see what happens when this pair of losers try to give each other the shank,” Hawkins said.
“Yeah,” Encizo said. “I’m sure it’ll be a real hoot. Now let’s talk about how we can keep the innocent schoolmarm from getting killed.”
“And how we can grab one of those stealth planes for ourselves,” McCarter added.
Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Page 11