Brown, Dale - Independent 02

by Hammerheads (v1. 1)

  “Once again, Dr. Pereira,” the President said, “will you help us?”

  Pereira paused, returning the powerful stare of the President of the United States. She took a breath, averted her eyes and moved back to the sofa beside the telephone . . .

  Over the Turks Island Passage, Turks and Caicos Islands,

  West Indies

  That Evening

  “Nassau Flight Following, Nassau Flight Following, this is Carmen del Sol Flight seven-seven-victor, over CABAL intersection, Alpha eight-six, at zero-four-one-one Zulu, altitude one-niner thousand feet, expecting point CROOK at zero-five-two zero Zulu. Weather report follows: IMC above and below, temperature forty degrees Fahrenheit uncorrected, estimated winds from the north at thirty gusting to forty-five, occasional light to moderate chop. Over.” There was a long loud hiss on the high-frequency radio band when the pilot completed his mandatory overwater flight-following position report. Then a half-British, half-Jamaican-accented voice replied: “Carmen del Sol Flight seven-seven victor, Nassau Flight Following copies all. You are still very weak but readable. Contact Nassau Center on frequently one-two-four point seven at CROOK intersection. Have a safe flight.” The voice melted into the eerie hisses and pops of long-range radio.

  “Roger, Nassau. Thank you. Out.” The pilot put the mike back in its holder—likely it was the last time he would use it for the entire trip. This was the big one. They carried one thousand kilograms of cocaine destined for the Turks and Caicos Islands, a small island nation north of Haiti, and the Bahamas. Their plane, a Cessna Caravan high-wing single-engine cargo plane, was not at nineteen thousand feet as they reported—it was at five hundred feet above the water, and had been there now for the past thirty minutes. Which was the reason for the bad transmission quality—with the high-frequency radio antenna mounted on the plane’s belly, they were firing most of the transmitter’s energy right into the sea.

  From the very beginning the pilots knew this flight would be a bitch. Each had gotten only a few hours’ sleep during the last twenty- four hours, and they still had at least six hours of flying to go. The Caravan’s autopilot was not working, which meant that the plane had to be hand-flown, and in the tricky winds and turbulence of a passing Caribbean storm, it was a nightmare come true.

  They had stayed on flight plan course from Uribia, Colombia, across the Caribbean Sea up the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti into the Turks and Caicos Islands chain, with a planned stop in Nassau. But instead of going directly to Nassau from their present position they would detour under surveillance radars on Caicos Island and make two two-hundred-fifty-kilo drops along the ridge of tiny islands south of East Caicos Point. They would then head northwest, make another two-hundred-fifty-kilo drop south of Mayaguana Island in the Bahamas, head further west and pick up their flight plan near Crooked Island.

  With seven hundred fifty kilograms of cocaine delivered, they would then divert to Arthurs Town on Cat Island in the Bahamas, claiming engine trouble, and land on a preselected road north of town. Waiting there was a heavily armed six-man crew that would secure the landing site, recover the plane, remove the last two hundred fifty kilos and the fuel bladders, scrub down the plane’s cargo hold, spray it with a bovine hormone, phrenopherone, that was odorless to humans but concocted to desensitize a dog’s sense of smell—in the Bahamas even traces of cocaine detectable only by trained drug dogs was enough to get a conviction—and load the plane up with a few hundred pounds of Colombian coffee and a few “passengers.” They would then call Bahamian customs—if they hadn’t already arrived by then—who would come out and inspect their “disabled” aircraft. In a few minutes everything would appear perfectly normal.

  That was the plan . . . but, being tossed around like a kite in a stiff March breeze only a few seconds from crashing into the Caribbean

  Sea, feeling strength sap from his body as fast as his precious fuel was diminishing, it seemed to the Caravan’s pilot the ambitious plan could never work. He was also fighting off sleep as he watched the radar altimeter and monitored his plane’s performance. He caught only five hours’ sleep in Valdivia after an exhausting eleven-hour flight from Mexico to Colombia, had dinner and then was off once again. The short two-hour flight from Valdivia to Uribia in northern Colombia for refueling was better—for some reason he felt charged- up, wide awake and alert as a panther, and he thought the rest of the flight would be the same. Not so. After the third hour of flight, as they neared Haiti, he felt his body tremble and his skin alternate between ice cold and feverishly hot. He couldn’t get to sleep and he couldn’t stay awake.

  Now he felt as if he was being dragged into a dark pit of sleep, and he was using every trick in the book to stay awake. The old fighter pilot’s trick of tickling the roof of his mouth with his tongue wasn’t working anymore. The heat had been turned off long ago. Cold water down the pants didn’t seem to help. “Take the controls for me, Jorge,” he told his copilot. It took a moment for the copilot to respond—obviously he was feeling the same exhaustion—but he soon felt the copilot’s hands on the controls. The pilot got up to find some coffee and stretch his legs.

  The starboard cargo door was open, and the drone of the Caravan’s single four-hundred-horsepower engine was deafening. What the pilot saw in the back of the Caravan sent him into a rage. The two crewmen were sound asleep, snoring loudly enough to hear over the windblast and engine noise. When the pilot gave the first man he reached a not-too-gentle side kick, he slumped over as if he was dead, hit his head on a fiberglass case full of cocaine and snapped awake as if a gun had been fired on him.

  “Wake up, you idiot,” the pilot told him. “We’re only a few minutes from the drop.” The other crewman got to his feet as well, rubbing his face and windmilling his arms to try to get himself going. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the first crewman said. “We were okay until just a few minutes ago. Now, we just . . . conked out. We’ll be okay.”

  “The time for napping is over. Stick your head out the cargo door or pinch yourself, but get ready or you’ll go out the door with the dope.”

  “Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again. We were just—”

  “I’m not interested in your excuses. Just get back on headsets and stand by.”

  “You don’t have to yell, sir,” the loadmaster retorted. “We’ve been at this for nearly thirty hours. We would have responded on interphone if you—”

  “Dammit, I said keep silent and do as you’re told,” the pilot snapped. “One more word out of you, and you’re on report.” The two men faced each other, both refusing to back down, both ready for a fight. But at a sudden swerve and precipitous dip in the Caravan, the pilot took a firm hold on the cargo-bay roof and quickly made his way to the cockpit.

  “What’s wrong up here?” he asked the copilot.

  “Sorry,” the copilot replied. “I tried to engage the autopilot and I thought it was working again. We lost a few hundred feet. But I got it—”

  “Like hell.” The pilot slipped into his seat, strapped in and took the controls. “What is going on here? You knew we red X-ed the autopilot hours ago. We’re acting like amateurs. Manuel and Lidio were sleeping in the back, and you—”

  “I know. I’m just very tired, that’s all.”

  “Everyone’s got an excuse tonight.”

  The copilot did not continue the argument. He checked his navigation charts with the LORAN long-range navigation receiver. “I show about ten minutes to go until the first drop.”

  The pilot checked that the correct frequency was set in the WET SNOW radio beacon receiver mounted on his dashboard, then flicked on the coded attention-signal switch. He left it on for five seconds without receiving a reply, then flicked it off. “No reply yet. Are you sure of our position?”

  “The LORAN is running fine,” the copilot replied. He began dialing in several ADF ground-navigation stations and triangulating their position on a chart.

  “We
ll?”

  The copilot turned toward the pilot but thought better of saying anything. A few moments later he said, “The LORAN is within two miles of our position. The pickup crew must be asleep.”

  “More likely you turned us to the wrong heading,” the pilot said.

  “Screw you.”

  “What . . . ?”

  “Look, I’m working my butt off here. I said we’re on course and I goddamned meant it.”

  Without warning, the pilot reached over with his right hand and grabbed the copilot by the throat. He was much smaller and weaker and was simply too tired to put up much of a fight. But a few moments later, the pilot withdrew his hand, shaking his head in puzzlement.

  “What am I doing? What the hell is going on?” He put both his hands back on the control wheel, rubbed his eyes and stared straight ahead into the darkness. “If I didn’t know better I’d say we were hypoxic. But we’re only at five hundred damned feet.”

  “I’m exhausted. We all are,” the copilot said.

  “We’ve had longer and tougher missions than this before. The strain must be getting to us.” He shook his head once again, then clicked on the code-transmit switch once again. This time he received a green “REPLY” light immediately. The WET SNOW receiver indicated the relative bearing to the beacon, and the pilot set the bearing in his directional gyro and flicked the code switch back to “STANDBY.” “Beacon received. Bearing is three-zero-zero, range thirty-two miles.”

  “Roger,” the copilot acknowledged. On interphone he announced, “Crew, ten minutes to first drop. Load canisters for drop one and stand by.” To the pilot he said, “Inbound course for first drop is three-five-zero. We’ve got a five-canister drop coming up. Planned ripple is set for fifty feet at one-hundred-twenty knots groundspeed.”

  “Turning to heading three-five zero, descending to one hundred feet, slowing to one-fifty,” the pilot responded. He slowly moved the control wheel right and pulled off a little throttle. “We’ll get an update on the bearing every five to six minutes, then every minute within ten miles, then continuously inside three miles.”

  “Roger,” the copilot replied. “I’ve got a stopwatch running. Groundspeed looks good. Cockpit check and fuel log ...”

  The pilot finally began to relax as the copilot ran through the pre-drop checklists. At last, everything sounded as if it was coming together.

  The pilot flipped on his WET SNOW beacon receiver again and took another range-and-bearing reading. Unlike the Cuchillos’ radar- equipped aircraft, he had only a bearing needle to guide him to the drop point. The crews who used radar with the WET SNOW system could usually make a drop within a few meters of a target. He would be satisfied with being within one or two hundred meters. He flicked the switch off.

  “Bearing set. Correcting for a few degrees drift . . . five miles to go.”

  In the cargo department the load crew had arranged the first five canisters on the sled ready for the drop. The first one-hundred-kilo canister was set on the sled’s rails, aimed out the right cargo door. At the drop signal the first canister would be released. The canisters were roped together with twenty meters of nylon rope. At the preplanned drop airspeed and altitude, the rope gave the drop crew just enough time to haul the next canister onto the sled before the preceding canister yanked it into the slipstream. This would continue until all five canisters were out. This way they could deliver the canisters with speed and precision without scattering drugs all over the drop zone.

  “One minute to go.”

  The pilot nodded and switched on the WET SNOW beacon, then left it on. Now he would make continuous corrections all the way to the drop point. He settled the big Cessna down to fifty feet on the radar altimeter and tried his best to peg one hundred twenty knots groundspeed—the occasional buffets of wind and up- and downdrafts made that practically impossible. “Thirty seconds. Load crew, stand by.”

  “Load crew ready.” The first canister was on the sled, and the two crewmen were holding the handles on the second, ready to lift it onto the sled’s rails as soon as the first was released. They stood, tensed and ready to go, looking out through the cargo doors into the inky blackness beyond . . .

  When suddenly a shape appeared out of the night sky like a huge, dark spectre. It was as menacing as a hornet with its long pointed tail and nose. Seconds later a brilliant beam of light emanated from the apparition’s nose and hit the load-crew square in the face, temporarily blinding them.

  “Ten seconds, load crew—”

  “A helicopter, ” one of the crewmen yelled. “Off our right side, a chopper ...”

  The two pilots stared as the huge Black Hawk helicopter maneuvered even closer. Running and navigation lights popped on all over the chopper, revealing the words “U.S. CUSTOMS” painted in large black-and-gold letters. A large door was open on the left side of the Customs Service chopper, revealing two soldiers in life jackets and helmets, aiming M-16 rifles at the plane.

  “Customs! Where the hell did they come from?”

  “Never mind that. Drop,” the pilot ordered over the interphone. “Drop now. ”

  One load crewman hit the foot lever to eject the first canister, ignoring the blinding NightSun searchlight that seemed to illuminate every corner of the Cessna’s cargo hold. The first canister slid down the rails and disappeared, whipping the carefully coiled rope behind it. But just as the load crew was pulling the second canister up onto the rails, the soldiers in the Customs Service chopper opened fire, spraying the Cessna’s cargo hold with bullets. One crewman was hit in the right shoulder and shoved back to the other side of the plane; the other dodged the hail of bullets and jumped back away from the door.

  The second canister never made it out the cargo door. It hit the cargo deck sideways, skipped awkwardly over the sled’s rails and wedged itself between the sled and the bulkhead. The first canister hit the water, but the nylon rope did not break and the canister was dragged through the water. The sudden drag pulled the Cessna Caravan’s nose hard right and down, precariously close to the water.

  “Pull up, pull up,” the copilot shouted, but the pilot was already struggling with the controls. Just as he regained control of the plane, another volley of gunfire ripped across the right cockpit windows, shattering the glass and killing the copilot. The sudden attack diverted the pilot’s attention for a split-second, but it was enough when flying a fifteen-thousand-pound plane at slow speed only fifty feet above the sea—the Caravan nosed over, the nose lifted but the plane continued to lose altitude, crashing seconds later and flipping end- over-end for hundreds of feet across the warm Caribbean waters.

  Border Security Force Headquarters, Aladdin City, Florida “Lost contact with the target.”

  The right-side situation-monitor on the front wall of the Com- mand-Control-Communications-Intelligence Center at Border Security Force headquarters had zoomed in on the northeast sector of the Caribbean. Centered in the display was a single red box with a cross in the center—an unidentified radar target, designated by the controllers as an intercept target. Data readouts beside the box showed the target’s speed, approximate altitude, heading and velocity changes—now all suddenly read zero.

  Annette Fields was in the intelligence center of the Hammerheads C-3-1 complex, manning the data console along with another technician. With her was Brad Elliott. “ROTH has his airspeed at zero,” Fields said. “Altitude data is unreliable but that reads zero too.” “Message from Bat Seven,” the technician reported. “The Turks constables opened fire on the target.”

  “What?” from Elliott. “Get a report from them.”

  The technician listened intently, taking notes, then acknowledged. To Elliott, he said, “They hit the target with a searchlight and observed the target beginning a drop, sir. When the smugglers kicked out the first load, the Turks and Caicos constables opened fire. The crew lost control of the plane and it crashed.”

  “No one ordered them to open fire,” Fields said. “We should have gone a
fter them ourselves.”

  “The OPBAT team is better suited for this job than we are,” Elliott said. OPBAT stood for Operation Bahamas/Anguilla/Turks and Caicos, a U. S. Customs operations unit that transported foreign police and military units to the scene of drug-smuggling drops where the United States did not have jurisdiction. OPBAT teams regularly made drug arrests all across the Caribbean by carrying foreign constables aboard Customs Service, Coast Guard and U. S. Navy aircraft and surface vessels. It was one of the few drug-interdiction operations not turned over to the Hammerheads after the creation of the Border Security Force. This OPBAT operation used a Customs Service Black Hawk helicopter to carry constables from both the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas.

  “The Turks constables have every authority to do what they want—Customs is the taxi driver,” Elliott said. “The Turks and Caicos government have always had a straightforward attitude about drug trafficking—if they catch you, you’re dead. Get someone else to monitor the rescue. Let’s get the status of the other inbounds.” Fields had expanded the scale of the radar display on the monitor to include the northern half of the Bahamas, Florida and northern Cuba. She highlighted a red square with an “X” in the middle, a designated radar target moving east to west, roughly between Andros Island in the Bahamas and Key Largo, Florida. “The other target is another twenty minutes to the Cay Sal Bank,” Fields reported. “He’s still at ten thousand feet, should be descending soon.” Directly behind that target was another square, this one in blue—an AV-22 Sea Lion tilt-rotor plane, Lion Three-Three, which had picked up the target coming across Andros Island and was now following a few miles behind and a few thousand feet above, waiting for the opportunity to pounce.