Chapter Two
Gregoire stood on the helipad and searched through the skies, wondering where Arris and the helicopter could possibly be. Arris and his team of agents should have been back hours ago, but nobody knew anything about why they had not yet returned. There was no way they were still out there flying: a UH-1 had about a two-hour flight time and no way of aerial refueling, and there were no plans for in-mission forward-deployed refueling points. Which meant Arris would have had to have already returned. And, yet, he hadn’t.
Gregoire pulled a cigar out of a box of Swisher Sweets in his cargo pants pocket lit it, puffing as he surveyed the base camp. The last of the surveillance boats was just returning and there was a buzz among the many operators as to what had gone on that day, and as the word spread that the helicopter had not returned, speculation spread as to what that could mean. Everyone knew that they were looking into an unusually militarized organization, given the kinds of boats in the operation, and there was plenty of analysis leading to some sort of foul play, although nobody knew what. It was all speculation.
He walked through the encampment and into the tactical operations center, which was abuzz with agents at laptops or on satellite phones. One agent gave Gregoire’s cigar a brief, dismissive glance, but Gregoire shrugged off the unspoken condemnation of his tobacco product.
“Well?” he asked, stopping by the folding table that served as the ops center’s clearinghouse.
The agent looked up at Gregoire and shrugged. “Nothing, yet.”
“Was there a distress call or anything?”
The agent shook his head. “No. Not that anyone’s reported.”
“And it didn’t land anywhere?”
“Not that we know of. Listen, Gregoire, we don’t know anything, and the air traffic control that covers the area he was flying in didn’t have any contact with him after he established initial contact after take off,” the agent said. “And, ATC said he never showed up on radar and he didn’t respond to follow-on radio requests to squawk a transponder code, so we don’t have any idea where he was after he left here.”
Gregoire thought about that for a second. It made no sense. Arris was an experienced pilot with two-thousand or so hours of helicopter time, most of it in the military, and he would not have ignored ATC or not set a squawk code before take-off. He took a puff on his cigar and thought about the options at hand. Already, outside, the Drug Enforcement Agency unit was tearing down the operations center while the other members of his unit, code named Opera, were already gone. Technically, he should’ve left with them, too, but he was breaking company protocol because … because Arris had not returned from the mission and he couldn’t trust the government agents to launch a search for an independent contractor. Not when it would be easier for them to write Arris off as a never-was.
“How many boats do we have?” Gregoire asked.
“Three, why?” the agent asked.
“Let’s crew them and search the area of his flight plan,” Gregoire said. “Maybe they had mechanical problems and had to ditch. They could be floating out there, somewhere.”
The agent looked up at Gregoire with the look of a bureaucrat asked to make a special exemption to the regulations dictating how policy was enacted. And, Gregoire’s team was considered expendable, blacker than black, no resources were to be allocated to it should anything go wrong. Arris, Gregoire, the other members of Opera didn’t exist. Gregoire tapped some ash from his cigar onto the ground and leaned close.
“Two of your guys were on that helicopter,” he said.
The agent nodded slightly, and softened. “We’ve only got until sundown, that’s only a few hours.”
“Well, you crew two boats with your guys and meet your deadline,” Gregoire said, “I’ll take out the third on my own, and if I don’t come back, you can write me off.”