“Can you take it for a minute?” Willis asked.
“Copilot’s airplane,” Johns acknowledged, taking the stick and easing the Sikorsky down another foot or so. “You don’t want to climb so much winching the guy in, not with possible SAMs out there.”
“At night you’d expect more guns than SAMs.” Willis was right, sort of. It was a hard call. And he knew the answer that would come.
“We’re protected against small-caliber guns. The big ones are as dangerous as SAMs. You keep it closer to the ground next time, Captain.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Other than that, not bad. Arm a little stiff?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It might be the gloves. Unless your fingers fit in just right, you end up gripping too hard, and that translates back into the wrist and upper arm after a while. You end up with a stiff arm, stiff movements on the stick, and sloppy handling. Get yourself a good set of gloves. My wife makes mine for me special. You might not always have a copilot to take the airplane, and this sort of thing is tough enough that you don’t want any more distractions than you gotta have.”
“Yes, sir.”
“By the way, you passed.”
It wouldn’t do to thank the colonel, Captain Willis knew. He did the next best thing after flexing his hand for a minute.
“I got the airplane.”
PJ took his hand off the stick. “Pilot’s airplane,” he acknowledged. “By the way ...
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ve got a special job coming up in a week or so. Interested?”
“Doing what?”
“You’re not supposed to ask that,” the colonel told him. “A little TDY. Not too far away. We’ll be flying this bird down. Call it Spec-Ops.”
“Okay,” Willis said. “Count me in. Who’s cleared to—”
“In simple terms, nobody is. We’re taking Zimmer, Childs, and Bean, and a support team. Far as everybody knows, we’re TDY for some practice missions out on the California coast. That’s all you need to know for now.”
Inside his helmet, Willis’s eyebrow went up. Zimmer had worked with PJ all the way back to Thailand and the Jolly Green days, one of the few enlisted men left with real combat experience. Sergeant Bean was the squadron’s best gunner. Childs was right behind him. Whatever this TDY—temporary detached duty—assignment was, it was for-real. It also meant that Willis would remain a copilot for a little while longer, but he didn’t mind. It was always a treat flying with the champion of Combat Search and Rescue. That was where the colonel got his call sign. C-SAR, in PJ’s lexicon, it came out “Caesar.”
Chavez traded a look with Julio Vega: Jesucristo!
“Any questions?” the briefer asked.
“Yes, sir,” a radio operator said. “What happens after we call it in?”
“The aircraft will be intercepted.”
“For-real, sir?”
“That’s up to the flight crew. If they don’t do what they’re told, they’re going swimming. That’s all I can say. Gentlemen, everything you’ve heard is Top Secret. Nobody—I mean nobody! —ever hears what I just said. If the wrong folks ever learn about this, people will get hurt. The objective of this mission is to put a crimp in the way people move drugs into the United States. It may get a little rough.”
“About fucking time,” a quiet voice observed.
“Okay, now you know. I repeat, gentlemen, this mission is going to be dangerous. We are going to give each of you some time to think about it. If you want out, we’ll understand. We’re dealing with some pretty bad folks. Of course”—the man smiled and went on after a moment—“we got some pretty bad people here, too.”
“Fuckin’ A!” another voice said.
“Anyway, you have the rest of the night to think this one over. We move out at eighteen-hundred hours tomorrow. There is no turning back at that point. Everybody understand? Good. That is all for now.”
“Ten-Hut!” Captain Ramirez snapped. Everyone in the room jumped to attention as the briefer left. Then it was the captain’s turn: “Okay, you heard the man. Give this one a real good think, people. I want you to come along on this one—hell, I need every one of you—but if you’re not comfortable with the idea, I don’t want you. You got any questions for me?” There weren’t. “Okay. Some of you know people who got fucked up because of drugs. Maybe friends, maybe family, I don’t know. What we have here is a chance to get even. Those bastards are fucking up our country, and it’s time we taught ’em a little lesson. Think it over. If anyone has any problems, let me know right away. If anybody wants out, that’s okay.” His face and tone said something else entirely. Anyone who opted out would be seen by his officer as something less than a man, and that would be doubly painful since Ramirez had led his men, shared every hardship, and sweated with them through every step of training. He turned and left.
“Damn,” Chavez observed finally. “I figured this was going to be a strange one, but ... damn.”
“I had a friend died of an OD,” Vega said. “He was just playing around, y‘know, not a regular user like, but I guess it was bad stuff. Scared the shit outa me. I never touched it again. I was pissed when that happened. Tomás was a friend, ’mano. The fucker sold him the shit, man, I wouldn’t mind introducin’ him to my SAW.”
Chavez nodded as thoughtfully as his age and education allowed. He remembered the gangs who had been vicious enough in his early childhood, but that activity seemed almost playful in retrospect. Now the turf fights were not the mere symbolism over who dwelt on what block. Now it was over marketing position. There was serious money involved, more than enough to kill for. That was what had transformed his old neighborhood from a zone of poverty to an area of open combat. Some people he knew were afraid to walk their own streets because of other people with drugs and guns. Wild rounds came through windows and killed people in front of televisions, and the cops were often afraid to visit the projects unless they came with the numbers and weapons of an invading army ... all because of drugs. And the people who caused it all were living high and safe, fifteen hundred miles away....
Chavez didn’t begin to grasp how skillfully he and his fellows—even Captain Ramirez—had been manipulated. They were all soldiers who trained constantly to protect their country against its enemies, products of a system that took their youth and enthusiasm and gave it direction; that rewarded hard work with achievement and pride; that most of all gave their boundless energy purpose; that asked only for allegiance in return. Since enlisted soldiers most often come from the poorer strata of society, they all had learned that minority status did not matter—the Army rewarded performance without consideration to one’s color or accent. All of these men were intimately aware of the social problems caused by drugs, and were part of a subculture in which drugs were not tolerated—the military’s effort to expunge its ranks of drug users had been painful, but it had succeeded. Those who stayed in were people for whom the use of drugs was beyond the pale. They were the achievers from their neighborhoods. They were the success stories. They were the adventurous, the brave, the disciplined graduates of the mean streets for whom obstacles were things to be overcome, and for whom every instinct was to help others to do the same.
And that was the mission they all contemplated. Here was a chance to protect not only their country, but also the barrios from which they had all escaped. Already marked as achievers within the ranks of the Army’s most demanding units, then given training to make them prouder still, they could no more decline participation in this mission than they could deny their manhood. There was not a man here who had not once in his life contemplated taking down a drug dealer. But the Army was letting them do something even better. Of course they’d do it.
“Blow the fuckers right out of the sky!” the squad’s radio operator said. “Put a Sidewinder missile right up his ass! You got the right to remain dead, sucker!”
“Yeah,” Vega agreed. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Hell, I wouldn’t mind it if
we got to go after the big shots where they fucking live! Think we could get them, Ding?”
Chavez grinned. “You shittin’ me, Julio? Who you suppose they got working for them, soldiers? Shit. Punks with machine guns, probably don’t even keep ’em clean. Against us? Shit. Maybe against what they got down there, maybe, but against us? No chance, man. I’m talking dead meat. I just get in close, pop the sentries nice an’ quiet with my H and K, an’ let you turkeys do the easy stuff.”
“More Ninja shit,” a rifleman said lightly.
Ding pulled one of his throwing stars from his shirt pocket and flicked it into the doorframe fifteen feet away.
“Smile when you say that, boy.” Chavez laughed.
“Hey, Ding, could you teach me to do that?” the rifleman asked. There was no further discussion of the mission’s dangers, only of its opportunities.
They called him Bronco. His real name was Jeff Winters, and he was a newly promoted captain in the United States Air Force, but because his job was flying fighter aircraft he had to have a special name, known as a call sign. His resulted from a nearly forgotten party in Colorado—he’d graduated from the United States Air Force Academy—at which he’d fallen from a horse so gentle that the animal had nearly died of fright. The six-pack of Coors had contributed to the fall, along with the laughter that followed from his amused classmates, and one of them—the asshole was flying trash-haulers now, Winters told himself with a tight smile—assigned him the name on the spot. The classmate knew how to ride horses, Bronco told the night, but he hadn’t made the grade to fly F-15-Charlies. The world wasn’t exactly overrun with justice, but there was some to be found.
Which was the whole purpose of his special mission.
Winters was a small man, and a young one. Twenty-seven, to be exact, he already had seven hundred hours in the McDonnell-Douglas fighter. As some men were born to play baseball, or to act, or to drive race cars, Bronco Winters had entered the world for the single purpose of flying fighter planes. He had the sort of eyesight to make an ophthalmologist despair, coordination that combined the best of a concert pianist and the man on the flying trapeze, and a much rarer quality known in his tight community as SA—situational awareness. Winters always knew what was happening around him. His airplane was as natural a part of the young man as the muscles in his arm. He transmitted his wishes to the airplane and the F-15C complied at once, precisely mimicking the mental image in the pilot’s mind. Where his mind went, the airplane followed.
At the moment he was orbiting two hundred miles off the Florida Gulf Coast. He’d taken off from Eglin Air Force Base forty minutes earlier, topped off his fuel from a KC-135 tanker, and now he had enough JP-5 aboard to fly for five hours if he took things easy, as he had every intention of doing. FAST-pack conformal fuel cells were attached along the sides of his aircraft. Ordinarily they were hung with missiles as well—the F-15 can carry as many as eight—but for this evening’s mission the only ordnance aboard were the rounds for his 20mm rotary cannon, and these were always kept aboard the aircraft because their weight was a convenience in maintaining the Eagle’s flying trim.
He flew in a racetrack pattern, his engines throttled down to loitering speed. Bronco’s dark, sharp eyes swept continuously left and right, searching for the running lights of other aircraft but finding none among the stars. He wasn’t the least bit bored. He was, rather, a man quietly delighted that the taxpayers of his country were actually foolish enough to give him over $30,000 per year to do something for which he would have been grateful to pay. Well, he told himself, I guess that’s what I’m doing tonight.
“Two-Six Alpha, this is Eight-Three Quebec, do you read, over?” his radio crackled. Bronco squeezed the trigger on his stick.
“Eight-Three Quebec, this is Two-Six Alpha. I read you five by five, over.” The radio channel was encrypted. Only the two aircraft were using the unique encoding algorithm for this evening; all that anyone trying to listen in would hear would be the warbling rasp of static.
“We have a target on profile, bearing one-nine-six, range two-one-zero your position. Angels two. Course zero-one-eight. Speed two-six-five. Over.” There was no command to accompany this information. Despite the secure radios, chatter was kept to a minimum.
“Roger, copy. Out.”
Captain Winters moved his stick left. The proper course and speed for his intercept sprang into his mind unbidden. The Eagle changed over to a southerly heading. Winters dropped the nose a touch as he brought the fighter to a course of one hundred eighty degrees and increased power a fraction to bring his speed up. It actually seemed that he was abusing the airplane to fly her this slow, but that was not actually the case.
It was a twin-engined Beech, Captain Winters saw, the most common aircraft used by the druggies. That meant cocaine rather than the bulkier marijuana, and that suited him, since it was probably a cokehead who’d mugged his mom. He pulled his F-15 level behind it, about half a mile back.
This was the eighth time he’d intercepted a drug runner, but it was the first time he’d be allowed to do something about it. On the previous occasions he’d not even been allowed to call the information in to the Customs boys. Bronco verified the course of the target—for fighter pilots anything other than a friendly was a target—and checked his systems. The directional radio transmitter hanging in the streamlined container under the fighter’s centerline slaved itself to the radar tracking Beech. He made his first radio call, and flipped on his landing lights, transfixing the small executive aircraft in the night. Immediately the Beech dived for the wave tops, and the Eagle followed it down. He called again, giving his order and getting no response. He moved the button on the top of his stick to the “guns” position. The next call was accompanied by a burst from his cannon. This started the Beech in a series of radical evasive turns. Winters decided that the target was not going to do what it was told.
Okay.
An ordinary pilot might have been startled by the lights and turned to evade a collision, but an ordinary pilot would not do what the druggies did. The Beech dived for the wave tops, reduced power, and popped his flaps, slowing the aircraft down to approach speed, which was far slower than the F-15 could do without stalling out. This maneuver often forced the DEA and Coast Guard planes to break contact. But Bronco’s job wasn’t to follow the guy in. As the Beech turned west to run for the Mexican coast, Captain Winters killed his lights, added power, and zoomed up to five thousand feet. There he executed a smart hammerhead turn and took a nose-down attitude, the Eagle’s radar sweeping the surface of the sea. There: heading due west, speed 85 knots, only a few feet over the water. A gutsy pilot, Bronco thought, holding that close to a stall and that low. Not that it mattered.
Winters extended his own speed brakes and flaps, taking the fighter down. He felt to make sure that the selector button was still in the “guns” position and watched the Head-Up Display, bringing the pipper right on the target and holding it there. It might have been harder if the Beech had kept speed up and tried to maneuver, but it wouldn’t really have mattered. Bronco was just too good, and in his Eagle, he was nearly invincible. When he got within four hundred yards, his finger depressed the button for a fraction of a second.
A line of green tracers lanced through the sky.
Several rounds appeared to miss the Beech ahead, but the rest hit right in the cockpit area. He heard no sound from the kill. There was only a brief flash of light, followed by a phosphorescent splash of white foam when the aircraft hit.
Winters reflected briefly that he had just killed one man, maybe two. That was all right. They wouldn’t be missed.
9.
Meeting
Engagement
“So?” ESCOBEDO EYED Larson as coldly as a biology professor might look at a caged white rat. He had no special reason to suspect Larson of anything, but he was angry, and Larson was the nearest target for that anger.
But Larson was used to that. “So I don’t know, jefe. Ernesto was a
good pilot, a good student. So was the other one, Cruz. The engines in the aircraft were practically new—two hundred hours on each. The airframe was six years old, but that’s nothing unusual; the aircraft was well maintained. Weather was okay all the way north, some scattered high clouds over the Yucatan Channel, nothing worse than that.” The pilot shrugged. “Aircraft disappear, jefe. One cannot always know why.”
“He is my cousin! What do I tell his mother?”
“Have you checked with any airfields in Mexico?”
“Yes! And Cuba, and Honduras, and Nicaragua!”
“No distress calls? No reports from ships or aircraft in the vicinity?”
“No, nothing.” Escobedo moderated somewhat as Larson went through the possibilities, professional as ever.
“If it was some sort of electrical failure, he might be down somewhere, but ... I would not be hopeful, jefe. If they had landed safely, they would have let us know by now. I am sorry, jefe. He is probably lost. It has happened before. It will happen again.”
One other possibility was that Ernesto and Cruz had made their own arrangements, had landed somewhere other than their intended destination, had sold their cargo of forty kilograms, and had decided to disappear, but that was not seriously considered. The question of drugs had not even been mentioned, because Larson was not really part of the operation, merely a technical consultant who had asked to be cut out of that aspect of the business. Escobedo trusted Larson to be honest and objective because he had always been so in the past, taking his money and doing his job well, and also because Larson was no fool—he knew the consequences of lying and double-dealing.
They were in Escobedo’s expensive condominium in Medellin. It occupied the entire top floor of the building. The floor immediately under this was occupied by Escobedo’s vassals and retainers. The elevator was controlled by people who knew who could pass and who could not. The street outside the building was watched. Larson reflected that at least he didn’t have to worry about somebody stealing the hubcaps off his car. He also wondered what the hell had happened to Ernesto. Was it simply an accident of some sort? Such things had happened often enough. One reason for his position as flying instructor was that past smuggling operations had lost quite a few airplanes, often through the most prosaic of causes. But Larson was not a fool. He was thinking about recent visitors and recent orders from Langley; training at The Farm didn’t encourage people to believe in coincidences. Some sort of op was about to run. Might this have been the opening move?