Juan nodded to Mark. Murph hauled back on the starboard door until it locked against its roller stops, and then he grabbed the loop of webbing around Cabrillo’s feet.
The Chairman let his upper body fall out of the helicopter, coming up short when he hit the end of his tether. The tremendous power of the wind nearly pushed him back inside, but he fought it with every muscle in his legs and back.
Because he was firing aft from the right-side door, he had to shoot offhand, his left gripping the trigger and his right clamped over his taped shirt. There was no help for the spent brass flying into the helo’s cabin.
His sudden appearance had startled the Argentine pilot, but he was moments late taking evasive action. Juan used those seconds and opened fire. The .30 cal bucked in his arms like a jackhammer, and heat began seeping through the gun’s barrel sleeve and the bundled shirt.
It was a miracle that the flapping ammo belt didn’t jam as the machine gun chewed up cartridges at four hundred rounds per minute and spat out a metallic plume of empty shells that pattered to the deck like shiny hail.
The clear Plexiglas windshield of the fast-approaching helicopter turned opaque as round after round punched into it, spiderwebbing the plastic until it was almost a solid sheet of white. The pilot veered sharply away, making the mistake of not passing behind the Corporation’s pilfered chopper and giving Juan more opportunities to fire. He had no idea if the follow-up barrage struck his target, but it certainly caused the other helicopter to fly a miles-long arc away.
“LZ coordinates coming up,” Mike said. If the prospect of landing the unfamiliar Eurocopter bothered him, it didn’t come through in his voice. “What the . . . ? I’ll be damned. Murph, how did you know?”
A quarter mile from waypoint Echo—the decaying wreckage of the blimp—was an area large enough to land the helicopter where the jungle vegetation was no more than a few feet high and composed mostly of immature shrubs and ground cover.
“When the Flying Dutchman crashed,” Mark shouted back, “its rubber gasbag would have landed nearby. As it lay across the jungle canopy, it would have shaded the plants under it until they died. Nothing would grow there until the envelope decomposed, forty or fifty years later. Voilà, instant landing zone.”
“Pretty slick,” the Chairman told Mark with more than a little pride. “Even for you.”
“Strap in,” Mike warned.
Hemmed in by thick jungle that rose a hundred or more feet into the air, the clearing was coming up fast. Trono slowed the Eurocopter on his final approach, skewing the aircraft to the left, then too far right, before centering over the nearly open area. He eased off the power, and the chopper slowly lowered itself earthward. When a sudden gust threatened to push the main rotor toward the wall of trees, he chopped the throttle a little too much, and the four-million-dollar aircraft hit with a bone-jarring impact. He immediately killed the engines. The turbines wound down, but the rotor continued to whip the grass into a frenzy and caused the trees to sway as if caught in a gale.
“Everybody out,” Juan commanded. “That other chopper will be back any second.”
Mike unbuckled his harness, and Murph went to work on Jerry’s.
“Forget it. I ain’t going anywhere,” the big Pole muttered. His chin was covered with blood. He held up an object for the others to see. Somehow, he had managed to pull a wad of Semtex plastique explosives and a pencil detonator from the thigh pocket of his combat fatigues. “Give me one last shot.”
“Ski?” Mike’s eyes were pleading.
“Not this time, bud. I don’t have it in me.”
“Damn it, Jerry,” Juan cursed. “I can carry you. The boat’s only a couple miles away.”
The sound of an approaching helicopter echoed across their little glen.
“I suck at good-byes,” Pulaski said. “Just go.”
“I’ll make sure your family’s taken care of.” Juan tried to look his friend in the eye but couldn’t. He shouldered his way into the seventy-pound harness for the power cell and jumped from the chopper. He took a moment to drag the unconscious pilot into the shrubs and found cover a short distance away, his machine pistol raised in the direction of the approaching Argentines.
“Give ’em hell, Jerr,” Mark said.
“You, too, kid.”
Tears welled unashamedly in Mike Trono’s eyes.
“Good-bye,” he said, and leapt from the Eurocopter.
Using Cabrillo’s GPS, the three men started off toward the RHIB. The plutonium was half the burden to Juan as the guilt he felt leaving Jerry behind. They had fought side by side for half a dozen years and had had drinks in every seedy harborside bar from Shanghai to Istanbul. Never could he have imagined abandoning Jerry Pulaski in a godforsaken jungle so he could blow himself up and give the rest of the team a chance of escape.
With every pace he had to fight the urge to turn back.
The canopy overhead muffled the sound of the Argentine helicopter but couldn’t dampen the staccato burst of machine-gun fire they heard ten minutes into their march. It seemed to go on forever as the Ninth Brigade soldiers vented their fury at the downed helo.
If Jerry hadn’t already succumbed to his wounds, the withering fusillade would almost certainly be fatal. Juan’s expression grew more grim, and he began to notice the weight of the padded nylon straps digging into his aching shoulders. The sling had been designed for Jerry’s broader back, so the power cell hung low and uncomfortable.
A silent five minutes passed as the men continued toward the river and their boat. The machine guns had silenced the jungle creatures, and the breeze didn’t reach into the gloom of the forest floor. It was eerie, still, oppressive.
The blast that rang out wasn’t the distant roll of thunder, but an immediate crash of noise that struck like a hammer. A moment later it was followed by a secondary explosion.
They knew what had happened. Jerry had held off until men were descending from the Argentine helicopter and then popped the C-4. The second blast was the detonation of what little fuel and vapors remained in their aircraft’s tanks. There would likely be survivors among the Argentine commandos, but there would be no pursuit.
EIGHT
THE RADIO LINK WENT DEAD. THAT WASN’T TRUE. THERE had been a concussive sound just before Lieutenant Jimenez stopped talking. Major Jorge Espinoza tried again, shouting out Jimenez’s call sign, Jaguar.
He had stayed behind at the logging camp because between the two officers, Espinoza had more cross training as a medic. And his skills were sorely needed. They had six men killed outright and another three who would probably never walk again. Two more were in rough shape with multiple lacerations and broken bones. Only Jimenez had walked away from the crash unscathed. Espinoza had used up all the field dressings the men carried in their personal kits, and had taken the emergency gear from the second chopper, before sending Jimenez and five men from the reserve force after the thieves.
He knew it was the Americans. Who else could have tracked the satellite and dispatched a search team so quickly? But knowing it and proving it were two entirely different things. With Argentina’s world standing so poor, accusing the Yanquis without evidence to back it up was simply a waste of breath.
He needed Jimenez to capture at least one of them. Preferably with the fragment of satellite.
Not for the first time, he wondered what was so important about the satellite that the U.S. felt the need to risk some of their Special Forces on a retrieval operation. According to his briefing, Espinoza was told that it was some science research mission, but their level of interest in it told him it was something else, something almost certainly military. If he had the fragment back, plus one of the soldiers, then the propaganda coup Raul had mentioned earlier wasn’t so far-fetched.
“Jaguar, come in, damn it.”
A burst of static squelched from his handheld radio and forced him to pull the device away sharply. Jimenez had reported that they had pumped a couple hundred rounds into
the downed chopper, waited for a few minutes to see if it was going to explode, and then sent three men down on fast-rappel ropes.
“Jimenez, is that you?”
“Jefe?”
“Jimenez, come in.”
“It’s me, sir. Not good.”
“What happened?”
“They booby-trapped the helicopter. It blew just as my men were about to set foot on the jungle floor. The blast wasn’t big, but it was enough to shove my chopper a hundred feet or so, and that saved my life because then the fuel tanks exploded. The fireball was enormous.”
“What of your men?”
“The three on the ropes are gone, sir. Blown to ribbons. But we see another man on the ground who survived the blast.”
Espinoza seized on this news and asked, “One of them?”
“No, sir. It’s the other pilot, Josep. He appears injured, but it looks like they patched him up before taking off.
Defeat left Espinoza’s mouth bitter. He thought for a moment. “You said you’re about five miles from the Rio Rojo, yes?”
“That is correct.”
“They have a boat,” Espinoza said. “They must have snuck through the border last night when those worthless frontier guards were either asleep or too busy scratching themselves to notice.”
“I don’t think we have the fuel to chase them,” Jimenez said. It was clear in his voice this was a disappointment. “And the pilot says the chopper might have been damaged by the first explosion.”
“No matter, mark Josep’s position on the GPS so we can send a team to get him, then head straight for the base. Radio ahead so our third EC-135 is ready to take off as soon as you land. They probably have a fast boat, but you should be able to catch them before they reach Paraguay. I’m also going to alert the border guards. They can send out some patrol boats and stop anyone who looks suspicious.”
“We’ll have them yet, Jefe.” Jimenez’s wolfish grin carried through the static-filled connection.
“We will,” Major Espinoza agreed, and, if anything, his smile was more dangerous.
JUAN AND THE TWO other survivors reached the RHIB a little over an hour later. It had remained undisturbed under its cover of foliage. Juan lashed the power cell to the deck while Murph and Trono stripped away the camouflage. The twin outboards came to life with a turn of the key. Juan knew their boat, with its performance-tweaked engines, could outrun anything on the river, but he had no illusions that a reception wasn’t already being planned for when they neared the Paraguayan border.
“Lines are clear,” Mark said, coiling the dark nylon rope around a cleat. When the Chairman didn’t react, he called out, “Juan?”
“Sorry. Thinking.”
Juan bumped the throttles, and the boat emerged from its hidden lair. The river was clear of traffic, so a few moments later he had them skimming across the surface at better than forty knots, slowing marginally in the blind corners, then giving the RHIB her head once again.
Going with the current, it took them less time to reach the main river than when they’d come upstream earlier in the day. The men were drained by the events of the past twenty-four hours, yet they remained vigilant as they started northward. Mike stood facing aft, his eyes scanning the sky for pursuit, while Juan and Mark studied the river and its banks for anything out of the ordinary.
They saw nothing for an hour, but then Mark Murphy tapped Juan on the shoulder, handed him a small pair of binoculars, and pointed a few points off their bow.
Juan needed only a second to recognize two Boston Whalers coming at them at full speed. He didn’t need to see details of the occupants to know they were armed to the teeth.
“Mike,” he yelled over his shoulder. “We’ve got company.”
“No kidding,” Trono called back. “There’s a chopper crawling up our six.”
Cabrillo didn’t bother looking back. The Whalers were coming too fast for him to worry about the helicopter. With a combined closing speed of nearly ninety knots, the pair of boats would pass the RHIB in seconds.
Juddering lights winked at them from both craft. The Argentines had opened fire well before they were in effective range. Tiny splashes sprinkled the river well away from the charging RHIB.
Juan waited until the two boats were less than fifty yards off, ignoring the lead that was filling the air. He could see three men on each; the driver, and two riflemen lying in the bow. With the Whalers skipping across the water, none of the shooters could aim accurately. The little boats were just too unsteady.
Of course, Mark couldn’t get off a meaningful shot with the RHIB bouncing along either.
“Hold on!” Juan shouted.
He cut both throttles and used his palm to crank the wheel over to its lock. Despite the deflated cells of the buoyancy ring, the assault boat did a perfect one-eighty, shouldering aside a wall of white water and coming to an almost complete stop.
Having practiced the maneuver countless times and knowing it was coming, Trono and Murph reacted instantly. Now that the RHIB was wallowing, they could anticipate her movements and compensate for them with their machine guns. They opened fire as the two Whalers flashed by less than a hundred feet away. The two drivers standing in the open cockpits took the worst of it. One was stitched from thigh to shoulder, the kinetic impact of the 9mm rounds hurling his body over the gunwale. The other took two to the head and slumped over the console.
With its engines still pouring out full power, the Whaler started to veer off course because of the weight of the dead driver on the wheel. The centripetal force pushed the body in the opposite direction, and he slipped from the cockpit, his hand still tangled in the wheel’s spokes. The Whaler turned sharply, caught part of the wave that had been generated by the RHIB, and flipped over. It augered into the water and vanished under the surface only to float up again, its keel pointing skyward.
The second Whaler continued racing down the river, no one sure if there was anyone aboard still alive.
Juan spun the RHIB around again and slammed the outboards to their stops. The bow rose up in an instant, the deep V hull coming onto plane faster than about any boat afloat.
RAUL JIMENEZ IGNORED the wind buffeting him as he stood in the helicopter’s open door, incredulous that the first Boston Whaler had barrel-rolled and then sunk. The second border-patrol boat continued downstream behind them. At first he thought the cowards were running away, but then the Whaler slammed straight into the riverbank. It folded like an aluminum can. Its outboards tore from the transom and vaulted into the underbrush while the three men were tossed like mannequins. Jimenez neither noted nor cared if any of them was alive. All his attention was focused on the fleeing boat below.
He recognized the black craft as an RHIB, the type favored by the United States Special Forces, though it was also available on the commercial market and could easily be operated by a group of mercenaries. He needed just one of them alive. He wanted the others alive, too, but when he was finished with them they would be in no condition to be paraded in front of television cameras.
This chopper wasn’t equipped with a door gun, but they had pulled the weapon from the one damaged in the explosion and concocted a makeshift mount using straps threaded through eyelets in the ceiling. Jimenez stood behind it now, watching the RHIB grow larger and clearer in his sights. Just a few seconds more and he’d tear away the back of the boat. While one of the thieves drove, the other watched the approaching helo with a machine pistol tucked up hard against his shoulder. The third man was flat on the deck, either dead or wounded. Either way, he didn’t appear to be moving.
Ever since his boyhood, Raul Jimenez had loved to hunt. He’d made his first slingshot out of tubing and a forked piece of wood, and killed birds by the hundreds around his family’s farm. With his first rifle, a gift on his tenth birthday, he went after larger and larger prey until taking a jaguar from a hunting blind with a nearly seven-hundred-yard shot his companions said couldn’t be made.
But on the day h
e killed his first man, a deserter who then-Captain Espinoza had told him to track, Jimenez knew he would never find satisfaction hunting mere animals again. He had stalked the deserter for five days through some of the toughest jungle Argentina has to offer. The deserter had been wily, and made the hunt the best of Jimenez’s life, but in the end nothing could keep him from his prey, and the man had died despite his cunning.
Jimenez felt that same sense of satisfaction as he lined up the sights on the black RHIB. Just as he squeezed the Browning’s trigger, the nimble boat cut sharply, and the heavy .30 caliber rounds peppered the water, turning it into a constellation of tiny white fountains.
He cursed, lined up, and fired again. It was as if the driver fifty feet below was reading his mind because the bullets arrowed into the river off the RHIB’s port flank. He was certain the boat would dodge left this time and let loose a hammering string of tracers. And like before, the driver outwitted him by veering farther right, going under the helicopter and emerging on its blind side.
“Spin around,” Jimenez shouted into his headset. “Give me an angle.”
The pilot pushed hard on the rudder, pivoting the Eurocopter on its axes as it continued to race up the river. It was flying almost sideways, crabbing across the sky, but more than able to keep up with the speeding RHIB.
In the three seconds Jimenez had lost sight of the boat, the man he thought was injured had gotten to one knee. Behind him was an open space in the deck that had been a covered storage locker. On the man’s shoulder sat an ominous dark tube pointed straight at the chopper. The range was less than two hundred feet.