Then he traced his finger along a sketchy line that had to be the old man’s back road. It wasn’t even an official road. It had not been since the 1950s, when the county stopped maintaining it. He’d sure never seen it on a map before.
“And this is how we got to your house. And here’s the town of Muse.”
The old man was trying to make sense of the riot of pale colors, shadings and lines. “Yeah,” he said.
“So, where would we go if we wanted to look for one of those planes?”
The old man raised his eyes from the sophisticated topographic map and looked at the wall behind the one with the wire-rimmed glasses. Then the old man got to his feet and shuffled to the junk drawer. He pulled out a composition notebook that he had been keeping there since at least the 1990s. And a pencil. Because if you leave a pencil in a drawer for ten years at a time, it’ll still work every time you put the point to paper. And he sat, putting his composition book on top of the sophisticated map, and began to draw circles and rectangles and squiggly shapes. And then he drew a dot. It took him under a minute to do it.
He poked the dot with the pencil lead. “We’re here, young man. This is Muse.” He trailed the pencil lead to a sloppy square.
“This is the highway that you came into town. This is the intersection. This and this and this, these are all undeveloped roads. You might be able to get through on them, and maybe you can’t. I don’t know what your shiny new car can do. If you take this one here, you go this way, you go maybe six miles, and then stop and wait at the place where there’s a curve in the road like this.”
He drew the curve, almost a horseshoe in the road.
“You wait there. If I was trying to find one of those planes, that’s where I would hope to see one. You think you can read this map, young man?”
The one with the wire-rimmed glasses grinned. “You better believe I can.”
“But the question is,” the old man said, “is how long you have to wait. Started seeing those planes a few weeks ago. And I see them maybe every few days. Fair warning. I’d pack a deck of cards if I was you.”
“I carry them with me,” said the one with the wire-rimmed glasses, still grinning.
* * *
CARL LYONS WAS FEELING the frustration. Stony Man Farm had not been able to get its hands on one of these planes. Until that happened, there was no way to find the source. Four times there had been a plane in their clutches. Four times they had come up empty-handed.
Able Team had just spent a long day wandering pointlessly around the back roads of Glades County. Finally they seemed to have a lead on a location. Lyons wasn’t sure how much faith they could put in the old man’s observation skills—but it was all they had to go on.
While you needed antiaircraft weapons to take down such aircraft, that weaponry wasn’t very portable. It was the kind of hardware that works best when stationary, when you can let the plane come to the gun. The second-best option was to mount the thing on some sort of a military vehicle—which was a little too conspicuous, even in the Florida swamps.
Still, Carl Lyons felt like somewhat of an idiot standing knee-deep in swamp water blasting 40 mm grenades at the belly of a swift little jet that was one hundred feet above his head and already starting to blend with the clear Florida sky. Not one of their grenades had scored a hit on the jet.
The plane had been a surprise, despite the fact that they been driving all over the county hoping to spot one. After spotting the aircraft—with some help from the bait-shop owner—they careened around the back roads for the better part of an hour before spotting it again.
It materialized over the trees in front of them, moving whisper-quiet and helicopter-slow just over the tops of the cypress trees. Schwarz had slammed on the brakes, and they had piled out of the SUV and begun to fire everything they had at the underside of the stealth jet.
The pilot of the stealth jet probably never even noticed them. He continued on at his steady, slow speed, making almost no noise, and camouflaged almost perfectly against the clear sky of South Florida. He was gone over the treetops within seconds. Able Team had filed back in the SUV and raced off in pursuit.
But they never saw it again.
* * *
“WE’VE GOT TO DO BETTER this time,” Carl Lyons said.
The three men of Able Team were sitting in their SUV in a shady spot alongside an unimproved road. As near as they could tell, they were a good five miles from any homes or businesses or people. The night was almost misty with millions of mosquitoes, and without even opening the doors or the windows a few of them had managed to worm their way inside the vehicle.
It was a long night spent waiting and hoping for something to happen. Price stayed in regular contact from Stony Man Farm, and when she failed to report frequently enough they called her, hoping for some indication of activity in their vicinity. But there was nothing. No blips on the radar indicating the identified aircraft. Nothing from air traffic control. Nothing even on the local police bands.
Blancanales had his own eyes on the area. The brightly colored display on his tablet computer showed him the status of several external sensors. He had slipped out of the car in the middle of the night, wearing night-vision goggles. Moving quietly, he had marched up and down several miles of the road, planting sensors. He attended closely to the area they had nicknamed the Runway.
If the old man had been correct in his estimation that the planes were operating in the vicinity of this old stretch of road, then there was just one place where they could be landing. Not that the road didn’t have several stretches straight and long enough for the small jets, but they were all overgrown, with trees and shrubs crowding the old road. There was just one stretch of road that was clear enough to allow for a landing.
There the pavement emerged from the heavy undergrowth of the swamp into a wide flat area. The vegetation fell away, and there was open water on either side of the road. It stretched straight for many hundreds of feet. The road had been built on top of landfill when a failed mining operation was originally building its infrastructure here in the 1960s. They had made the road so straight that Blancanales wondered if they had intended for it to be used as a runway.
Blancanales had planted, among other things, audio sensors, far enough away from the Able Team vehicle that the sounds from the car wouldn’t interfere with its monitoring of the ambient sound.
The pickup was so extremely sensitive that Blancanales would probably have been able to record their conversation in the car, even from a distance, if he pointed the thing at them more directly. But he aimed it above their heads, into the sky, with a companion sensor pointed in the other direction. They were, in fact, highly directional, which made it more accurate, and could only be utilized because they were assuming that the plane would be coming in from one specific direction or another, lined up with the pavement.
If they were coming in for a landing, they would be coming in low and slow, and using flaps and landing gear, all of which would agitate the airflow over the craft and make it noisier than usual. And it should be noisy enough for Blancanales’s devices to pick up well in advance and give them at least some warning.
The app on the tablet was actively analyzing the signals coming in from both of the pickups and isolating them into predetermined frequency ranges, then processing each range for signatures that might indicate an aircraft.
The data was being transmitted back to Stony Man Farm, where it could be reanalyzed later, if need be. If Able Team was lucky, if they got a recording of this aircraft as it came in for a landing, they would be able to use the same system to identify it again later. Perhaps there would be other information that they could glean from the recording.
* * *
BLANCANALES DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been dozing when he heard the soft whisper of a woman in his ear.
“Able, this is Stony,” said Price. “Are you reading this?”
“Yeah, I see it,” Hermann Schwarz answered. He had the t
ablet computer now and was watching the app, which showed agitation coming from the sensors. There was something out there causing sound. Hitting one sensor hard, another one just barely.
“It would be a very good thing,” Barbara Price reminded them, “to get our hands on one of those aircraft.”
“Understood,” Carl Lyons said.
Blancanales was blinking away the sleep, dragging on his equipment, getting prepared for whatever might come.
And then the aircraft was just there—settling on the road in front of them.
It was like watching a silent movie. Inside the vehicle, with the windows closed against the bugs, there was only the faintest rush. It didn’t make sense that an aircraft, a jet no less, would be able to move as slowly and quietly and touch down on a short stretch of road that quickly.
It came to a rest on the pavement and coasted just a few hundred feet before stopping. It had landed without landing lights, and the aircraft itself was dark.
“Stony,” Lyons advised, “it just landed.”
“It did?” Price asked. “We didn’t see a thing.”
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
AARON KURTZMAN was shuffling through the display options offered by the drone aircraft that Stony Man Farm commanded at this moment over Glades County, Florida. He was looking down on the scene, right where Able Team was waiting. He could see the beacon from the Able Team SUV, pinpointing their presence, and he could see the road in front of them. The road was still radiating some of the heat it had absorbed from the sun during the day. The waters around it were comparably cool. He glared at the display, bringing his face close, and finally saw the shape of a small aircraft now sitting on the road. The heat signature was barely discernible from the road itself.
He heard Lyons communicate with Barbara Price. “Please tell me we don’t need to wait and see who shows up to meet this aircraft.”
“No way,” Price said. “Let’s secure that aircraft now.”
“Too late,” Kurtzman interrupted. “I see another vehicle approaching now.” The thermal display showed him the unmistakable image of a pickup, warmed by its engine.
“From which direction?” Lyons asked
“From east of your position,” Kurtzman responded. “Looks like they are pulling up on the other side of the aircraft.”
“They will unload, then taxi back in this direction to take off,” Lyons said.
“It would be far better,” Price said, “if you could take control of that aircraft before it moves again.”
“We’re way ahead of you, Stony,” Lyons said.
* * *
BLANCANALES LEFT THE SUV first, slinking across the road in the blackness, keeping his eye on the dim and distant shadow where the aircraft now sat. He stepped into the marshy weeds on the far side of the unmaintained road and approached the personal watercraft that they had staged there hours ago.
The watercraft had been arranged for Able Team. If their first day of searching the county by road yielded no results, the plan had been for them to spend the second day hunting the swamps. There were stretches of dry ground that were not accessible by road but still had the potential to serve as landing strips.
The wide-open water in this location gave them a use for the watercraft, which was secured to the bank using lines staked into the ground—and was covered in a camouflage tarp. Blancanales uncovered it and stepped aboard, then shoved himself away from the shore. He drifted into the open water alongside the road, his night-vision goggles giving him enough detail to see where he was going. He used a small boat paddle to propel himself, dipping it gingerly into the water and gently sweeping himself forward. He was not in a big hurry yet. Quiet was more important than speed right now.
He saw the headlights approaching from behind the aircraft. They swung out of the trees close behind the parked aircraft, creating a silhouette momentarily. Blancanales was struck again by the size of the thing—the plane looked like a toy. How could such a thing be causing so much trouble in the world? Then the pickup went black, as well.
Blancanales eased himself along the waterway, staying parallel to the road, and he could already hear the conversations from around the aircraft. The pilot and the driver of the pickup were greeting each other as if they were old friends. They were speaking English. No South American accents here. They were talking about a shipment, and Blancanales heard mention of twenty bales.
“Okay, let’s unload,” one of the voices said.
Okay, good. That would take them several minutes, which would give Able Team enough time to get into position. Schwarz would be making his approach on the other side of the road, in his own watercraft.
The challenge was to get this aircraft under control, without burning it up. These aircraft were becoming notorious for their flammability. There were theories that these aircraft were built with fuel housed in their bodies and wings, providing more interior space, but also making the aircraft easy to ignite. Able Team had to stop this aircraft—gently.
The small alert came in from Lyons over the headset. Fifteen seconds. Blancanales counted them down in his head, fingered the starter, and when the countdown reached zero he thumbed the switch. The watercraft roared to life. The lights blazed on, illuminating the scene in front of him. Schwarz’s watercraft came to life at the same moment on the other side of the road.
Blancanales twisted the throttle and accelerated alongside the road, closing in on the aircraft and the pickup and the surprised-looking pair of men standing in the road. They both were carrying shrink-wrapped bales, which they had been busily moving from the cargo bay in the aircraft to the storage bins in the bed of the pickup.
Blancanales laid down cover fire, triggering the M-16, cutting into the road at the feet of the two men. Both of them shouted, dropped their bales and dived for cover behind the front end of the pickup. Blancanales’s rounds bounced over the pavement, wiggled underneath the pickup, and scored one of the tires. A front corner of the pickup abruptly sank to the pavement.
The smugglers opened fire with their weapons, but Blancanales was faster and more decisive, and his rounds found the top half of the man exposed over the hood of the pickup, about to trigger a shotgun. The man flopped back onto the road with his weapon unfired. It clattered on the pavement, then into the grass on the far side of the road. The second gunner adopted a firm, two-handed pistol stance, triggering a 9 mm handgun into the water at Schwarz. Blancanales stitched him across his shoulders and the man collapsed.
Then Blancanales saw unexpected movement. The aircraft was moving silently, its engines too quiet to hear over the splutter of his own watercraft. There was a pilot still inside and he was eager to make an escape. Blancanales was just as eager to make sure that it didn’t happen. He cut a tight circle on the surface of the water, and again paralleled the road, and unloaded his M-16 at the tires of the aircraft. There was no effect. There seemed to be some sort of a shielding over the wheels. Flimsy plastic shells, it looked like, but maybe it was enough to keep out rounds from his automatic weapon. The aircraft was accelerating rapidly, and the hatch cover wobbled and slammed down into place.
Blancanales cursed—he was going to have to target the body. He aimed at the wing tips. The aircraft accelerated, pulling away from him.
At least one of Blancanales’s rounds penetrated the wing, and Blancanales glimpsed a pockmarked blossom in the plastic, but then the aircraft was pulling away from him, and he was out of speed. He noticed the angle of the wings—almost impossible to see in the wild swaying of the only light source—his headlight. The aircraft seemed to be limping.
Blancanales had taken out a tire after all. He throttled up again, trying to stay hot on the tail of the accelerating aircraft. Now it seemed as if the rear tire was shredded, and the rear end of the aircraft might even be fishtailing slightly. Yes, the aircraft was compromised. No matter how short its taxi distance was, it was going to have a hard time making a safe takeoff with its rear tire blown.
“Chri
st, Ironman, get the hell out of there,” Blancanales said into his mike. “This guy may be cracking up any second.”
* * *
LYONS HAD ANTICIPATED this. He started the SUV and dragged it into gear and slammed his foot on the pedal, steering the thing out of the bushes and onto the road. For a fraction of a second he envisioned himself turning to face the aircraft and driving directly into it. Maybe he could head-butt it into the water. The more likely result would be to immerse himself in the aircraft’s conflagration. He spun away and fled the coming crash.
The aircraft was struggling for speed. The blown tire was slowing it down. At the end of the open water the long straight stretch of swamp road curved gently to the right. That was the end of the line in terms of taxi distance for the aircraft. Blancanales managed to stay close enough to see the thing fishtail again, and then the pilot must have given it an extra jolt of fuel, desperate to get the thing off the ground, as the curve came under his wheels. The aircraft, unbelievably, left the ground and seemed to grab at the air. The trees came up underneath it, and Blancanales thought the thing was getting away from them.
Then, unbelievably, he watched the side of the aircraft open up—it was the unsecured hatch cover flopping open. Bales of plastic-wrapped narcotics tumbled out and the turbulence ripped off the hatch. The wind buffeted into the hatch and the aircraft’s aerodynamics became wildly unstable. The aircraft twisted on its side and descended to the ground, unbelievably adjusting its flight to match the curve of the road. It touched a wing tip on the pavement and the wing was wrenched off. Instead of cartwheeling, the aircraft settled on its side on the pavement and slid, maintaining its integrity for a hundred feet, shredding parts and sending up sparks, until a buckle in the pavement sent the aircraft bouncing a full yard into the air. It landed on its nose and disintegrated in earnest.
And there was the Able Team SUV, right in its path. Carl Lyons must have felt he was far out of the danger zone, unprepared for the chance that the aircraft would crash into the road again, and now the thing was chasing him down. Lyons slammed the SUV into Reverse and backed away fast from tumbling wreckage.
Perilous Skies (Stony Man) Page 15