Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  With its thirty-one-foot wingspan and high-rev Lycoming engine, the Tiger had been designed to be feather-light and fighter-powerful. And so it was as Salvetti piloted the little four-seater over an irregular terrain of jutting peaks, pine-forested upper slopes, and arid, shadow-splashed foothills and depressions studded with thickets of dryland scrub, all of it visible in panorama below vaporous white swags of low-altitude clouds.

  Quiet since they had gone wheels-up, Ricci sat behind Salvetti trying to match what was depicted on the USGA map across his lap to what he saw through the aircraft’s wide canopy and windows, occasionally glancing at the digital ground image on the avionic panel’s navigational display for additional comparison. In the copilot’s seat, Lathrop also kept his words to a minimum, but had seemed not once to look at the ground as he gazed outward into space.

  Ricci observed this by chance and filed it away in his mind without particular inference.

  Half an hour after takeoff, Salvetti pointed out the lined, wattled necks of the buttes projecting between the walls of a shallow valley or basin to his left.

  “You’re going thereabouts,” he said, and then nodded his head toward the forward curve of the canopy. “Look out and you’ll notice the land flatten in front of us almost like it’s been smoothed over by giant rollers. A kind of dark rim around its edges, see?”

  Ricci leaned forward.

  “Shadows,” he said.

  Salvetti nodded.

  “They outline the mesa’s plateau, give you an idea how it barely rises over the plain,” he said. “If this was around noontime instead of three in the afternoon, you’d have the bright sun overhead and might not even notice that it mounts.” He paused, adjusted himself behind the controls. “You fellas better strap in—I’m going to drop down and run a couple of passes to scout a landing spot that won’t throw our spines out of whack.”

  Lathrop reached for his seatbelt buckle.

  “We hope,” he said to finally break his long, staring silence.

  It wasn’t exactly easy. But it could have been much worse.

  The Tiger grooved out of the sky to land with a jarring bump and then rumbled shakily on across the mesa’s open table for several hundred feet, its propeller whipping up a cyclonic cloud of dust, its treaded wheels scraping out corrugated channels of parched earth and pebbles that tacked like hail against the underside of the airframe.

  Inside the cabin, Salvetti had his lips puckered into a spout as he gripped the control column. Ricci couldn’t hear him through the noise, but looking around his contoured headrest thought for a second that he might have been whistling.

  Then there was another, lesser jolt. Ricci lurched forward against his seatbelt, and back against the leather upholstery, deceleration slapping his stomach like an iron hand in a furry mitt. Moments later the grating bombardment of dirt abated and the prop’s blurry rotation slowed until its separate twin blades were distinguishable at the nose of the plane.

  Salvetti rolled to a halt and exhaled a surge of breath, his mouth wide open now, his knuckles relaxing around the column.

  “Did it again,” he said in a half whisper.

  Then he took his hands off the controls, leaned back, and briefly closing his eyes, tipped a finger toward the heavens and crossed himself.

  The five guerrillas came midway down the trail, where they could see the bend of the sluggish creek it followed winding away from the buttes. Then they took cover, three hiding in the snarled vegetation that bordered the trail on its right, two splitting off to its left.

  They dumped their knapsacks, put their weapons down at their sides, and settled into position.

  “There are still hours until sundown,” one of them said to the man beside him in Spanish. He extracted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook a couple out. They were unfiltered American Camels. “Nothing to fucking do but wait.”

  The man beside him nodded and accepted the cigarette that had been offered.

  “It should be cooler soon,” he said.

  “Yes,” said the other man, putting the rest of his cigarettes away and reaching for his Zippo lighter. “But then the biting flies come out.”

  “They are hateful creatures.”

  “Yes, that is the word. Hateful.”

  “I wish I could kill them. Kill every last one.”

  “I wish I could kill them all, too,” said the man with the pack of smokes. He fired the cigarette in his mouth, then held the lighter to the tip of his companion’s. “And I would like to kill both those fools who come for the girl.”

  “For making us sit out here in these bushes?”

  “Yes. I ask you, what extra pay will we get for it?”

  “Nothing.” The man who’d been given the Camel puffed to get it started. “You have a point, but we can only kill the one.”

  “Yes.”

  “We are, unfortunately, limited.”

  “Yes, limited, I agree,” said the man with the lighter in his hand. “That is another very good word.”

  He spit a fleck of loose tobacco from the tip of his tongue and then lapsed into silence, smoking and waiting for the dusk.

  Outside the plane, Salvetti got their packs and other gear from the luggage hold and handed them off as they waited.

  Ricci took his duffel, reached for his rifle case, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he turned to where Lathrop was on his haunches studying one of the maps, and walked over to him.

  “We’re basing what we’re doing on something some small fry Quiros ringleader south of the border told you,” he said. “You sure you weren’t duped?”

  Lathrop glanced up at Ricci. He had put on dark mirrored sunglasses that gleamed in the sunshine.

  “It’s late to be asking again,” he said.

  “Not too late yet.”

  Lathrop continued looking into the brightness.

  “He knew what was at stake,” he said. “I knew he was too scared to have lied.”

  Ricci stood there.

  “Still haven’t told me how his stake paid off for him,” he said.

  “And maybe that’s how I want to keep it,” Lathrop said. “But if I’d gone to Juan with anything besides the goods on Marissa Vasquez, he’d have laughed in my face. Instead he confirmed every piece of information I got and filled in blanks I left to see how it all fell in line.”

  “Because he thinks I’m the man who did whatever you won’t tell me you did to his cousin down there in Baja,” Ricci said.

  Lathrop nodded.

  “And because he thinks I hired you to help me grab the Vasquez girl back for her father,” Ricci said.

  Lathrop nodded.

  “And because he thinks you’re pulling a double-cross on me,” Ricci said. “Setting me up for an ambush on that Indian trail. Dumb blanco that I am.”

  Lathrop nodded again.

  “Except,” Ricci said. “It isn’t me who’s being set up.”

  Lathrop’s head went up and down a fourth and final time, the sunlight slipping across his lenses like quicksilver.

  “Role reversal,” he said. “With a twist.”

  Ricci looked at him awhile without saying anything more. Then they both heard Salvetti slam the door of the Tiger’s baggage compartment.

  Rising from his squat, Lathrop folded the map, stuffed it into his shirt pocket, and lifted his packs off the ground.

  “We better get on the move,” he said.

  Sunset, the western sky bleeding red across the horizon. Ready now, the guerrillas increased their vigilance, the stocks of their HK G36 submachine guns tucked against their arms.

  A last Camel was ground out in the scrub, dirt kicked hastily over its charred remnant.

  The smoker cleared his throat of phlegm and swatted helplessly at the tiny winged biters as they swirled in, attracted to some chemical in human sweat.

  “God damn this job,” he said in a hushed tone. “I only want it to be over.”

  The man beside him nodded.

 
“What spares Lafé from coming out here?” he whispered. “Or even Manuel? It’s as if his softness is being rewarded.”

  “He’s already gotten his reward, or haven’t you taken a look at the girl he seduced?”

  “Of course I have. And between us, Pedro won’t be satisfied until he takes his turn with her.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed.”

  “He’ll have it before all this is done, too, I would bet.”

  “Yes. You can see how he waits. In his eyes, you can see. It could happen very soon.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes,” said the man who’d brought the cigarettes. “Yes, I do. While we’re out here getting eaten up by bugs.”

  The other man frowned.

  “You’re right when you say this job stinks and must be gotten over with quickly,” he said.

  “And,” said the man with the cigarettes, “keep in mind it hasn’t even really begun.”

  Lathrop scuffed down the embankment, Ricci taking the moderately steep grade a little to his side, the two of them pausing there to orient themselves and catch their breaths, the weight of their gear pressing their backs and shoulders. Rocks and grit lay scattered around their boots. Within a few dozen feet of them to the left, the creek bed, more mud than water, serpentined north and east over the humped terrain. Straggly plants grew in a kind of apron around its banks, and higher up the valley ridges through which it wound its slow, undulant path away into the distance, ponderosa and blackjack pine grew in intermingled and surprisingly dense terraces.

  Not for the first time since they had left the mesa, Lathrop pulled his map out of his shirt pocket, studied it, then studied the ground. The paper was damp with his perspiration.

  Several moments expired. Ricci waited in silence under the lengthening shadows of the buttes as Lathrop raised his eyes from the map and stared out toward the creek, his lips slightly parted.

  Then Lathrop turned to him, his finger pointing at a slight angle from the languid waterway.

  “Over there through the brush,” he said. “That’s where I think we’ll find the trail.”

  On inspection minutes later, he proved to be correct.

  They didn’t take it.

  Crouched above the trail with his heels deep in a carpet of pine needles, Lathrop peered down between the evergreen trunks with his binoculars, then handed them off to Ricci.

  “How many men you see?” he said in a hushed voice.

  “Five,” Ricci whispered. “Three on this side, two on the other. Bunched close together.”

  Lathrop nodded.

  “Checks with what I saw,” he said.

  Still holding the binoculars, Ricci brought their focus up from the stony Indian trail, swept them across the cut it followed through the blunt hillcrest. Then he dropped the lenses from his eyes.

  “You were on the money about the guns they’d be toting,” he said. “They’re HK carbines. Five point five-six mills.”

  Lathrop nodded. “Good thing I told you to bring one of your own, isn’t it?” he said.

  Ricci looked at him, then motioned to the cleft’s opposite shoulder.

  “I’ll make my way around this rise, take out the two from over there,” he said. “You stay back and handle the three.”

  Lathrop nodded again, lowered the strap of his rifle case, tapped the face of his wristwatch.

  “We’d better synch up before you move off for your boys,” he said. “Does that UpLink watch you wear tell time, or is it only for communicating with Moon Maiden in her space coupe?”

  Ricci was impassive.

  “I’ll need ten minutes,” he said.

  One minute and counting, Ricci thought. His eye was against the scope of his carbine, taking advance measure of his targets.

  Down below in the near twilight, their backs to him, the pair of men in camouflage outfits was barely hidden from sight in the thicket. Your boys. The trick for him was to nail them exactly when Lathrop sniped the others. Do it in a couple of accurate bursts, three at most, and mask Lathrop’s rifle shots from however many of the kidnappers had remained behind with Marissa Vasquez. If the plan worked the way it was intended, they would mistake the sound of Ricci’s HK firing at the ambushers for that of their guns shooting him as it echoed through the valley, think that Lathrop had led him into their ambush and he’d been the one who was erased.

  He checked his watch now. Thirty-five seconds. Thirty-four, thirty-three . . .

  Ricci’s jaw tightened. A plan for success, he thought.

  Except he did not like how it felt to kill men, and especially did not like how it felt shooting men in their backs. Not even men who had set themselves up to kill him.

  Your boys.

  His watch again. Its digital second readout ticking down the seconds.

  Eleven left. Ten. Nine. Eight.

  His heart pumped. He breathed through his front teeth. His finger steadied on the trigger.

  Six, five, four, three, two . . .

  His eye to the sight, the carbine rattled in Ricci’s hand, its stock bucking against his shoulder.

  Your boys.

  Beneath him, his bullets ripped into their bodies, knocking them forward into the dirt, snuffing out their lives before they could have possibly known what hit them. And as he fired, Ricci could hear coordinated shots from the opposite slope.

  But then, he was listening for them.

  On his belly in the dirt, Lathrop relaxed his grip on the sound-suppressed SIG-Sauer SSG’s trigger.

  It had been neat and precise, just how he liked it. Three cracks of the rifle, three more pieces of dead meat to feed the crawling, wriggling, and buzzing local scavengers.

  And making it all the more perfect, he’d ended up with a leftover round of ammunition in his clip.

  Moments after he heard the stutter of the rifles, Pedro entered the hut and glanced knowingly at César. Then he let his eyes sink slowly down to Marissa Vasquez and meet her own disconcerted gaze.

  “Gunfire,” he said. “Do you recognize the sound of bullets spat from a gun?”

  She kept silent.

  “Perhaps you have never heard it in your town’s favored streets. Or at the university you attend, eh?” He grinned, reached for his tin of whiskey, and uncapped it. “Let me know, mi hermosa, are such places too sheltered from the world’s ugliness for such disturbances to their peace and quiet?”

  She looked at him.

  “I told you your father sent a rescuer,” Pedro said. “And now I can tell you the rescuer is dead.”

  Marissa’s gaze, filled with increasing dismay and confusion, finally lost its determined steadiness.

  “No,” she said, finally averting it from him.

  Pedro’s own eyes stayed on her, roving up and down, lingering in places. Then they went to César.

  “Go outside and tell the men to bring their bloody carcass in here when they arrive,” he said, and swigged deeply from the flask. “After that I want to be left alone . . . The other gringo can wait, am I understood?”

  César nodded, left the hut, and Pedro turned back to Marissa.

  “You would not believe me when I said someone was coming for you, but now you’ll have a dead man for proof . . . and to keep us company,” he said, taking another long drink, his eyes studying her again. “Who knows what may occur before his unseeing eyes? What acts we will perform that his mouth cannot speak of? Who, indeed, knows, hermosa, for the dead can tell no tales of what pleasures the living will soon enjoy.”

  “What’s happening?” Manuel asked César. He had emerged from one of the other thatch shelters upon hearing the submachine gun salvos.

  César paused on his way toward the brambles screening the trail head.

  “They’ve got the one her father sent,” he said. “El jefe wants his corpse brought into the hut.”

  Manuel looked at him.

  “Why in there?” he said.

  “I don’t think about it,” César said. “You shouldn’t either.
”

  He started forward, but Manuel reached out and grasped his arm.

  “Let go of me,” César said.

  “Pedro’s lost his mind,” Manuel said. “He’s turned this into something it wasn’t supposed to be.”

  César’s eyes bored into him.

  “It isn’t up to me what he does,” he said. “I told you to let go.”

  Manuel held onto his elbow another moment, sighed, and then released his grip.

  “We’re all bastards,” he said.

  “And well-paid ones,” César said, shrugging away from him to step toward the fold of brush.

  As he did there was a muffled pop from behind it, another.

  César grimaced and collapsed to the ground dripping blood, Manuel going down inches behind him.

  And then the brush parted.

  Pedro turned from Marissa Vasquez the moment he heard what he recognized as silenced shots outside, instantly reaching for the gun holstered on his belt.

  His eyes landed on the two white men standing in the hut entrance, widened. One had a rifle strapped over his shoulder and, more importantly, a pistol in his right hand aimed at Pedro’s chest. The other held a submachine gun.

  Pedro straightened, staring at them, his fingers clenched around the butt of his own weapon.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and spat. “You might as well do it.”

  Lathrop centered his Glock on Pedro’s chest, fired a third round from its barrel, and looked over his body into the hut as it fell.

  “There’s our girl,” he said to Ricci. “Safe and sound.”

  Ricci saw Marissa Vasquez shackled on the floor at the rear of the hut and rushed through the entrance a half step behind Lathrop.

  Then he noticed Lathrop drop back and halted, not thinking about why, or consciously thinking about why, just turning to look at him.

  A cell phone had appeared in Lathrop’s left hand.