Clear and Present Danger

  “Panache, this is CAESAR, where the hell are you?”

  “Lights on, everything, now!” Wegener shouted when he heard the call. In a moment Panache was lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Goddamn if you don’t look pretty down there!” the voice said a few seconds later.

  Adele was a small, weak, disorganized hurricane, now turning back into a tropical storm due to confused local weather conditions. That made her winds weaker than everyone had feared, but the eye was also small and disorganized, and the eye was what they needed now.

  It is a common misconception that the eye of a hurricane is calm. It is not, though after experiencing the powerful winds in the innermost wall of clouds, the fifteen knots of breeze there seem like less than nothing to an observer. But the wind is unsteady and shifting, and the seas in the eye, though not as tall as those in the storm proper, are confused. Wegener had stationed his ship within a mile of the northwest edge of the eye, which was barely four miles across. The storm was moving at about fifteen knots. They had fifteen minutes to recover the helicopter. About the only good news was that the air was clear. No rain was falling, and the crew in the pilothouse could see the waves and allow for them.

  Aft at flight control, the executive officer donned his headset and started talking.

  “CAESAR, this is Panache. I am the flight-operations officer, and I will guide your approach. We have fifteen knots of wind, and the direction is variable. The ship is pitching and rolling in what looks like about fifteen-foot seas. We have about ten or fifteen minutes to do this, so there’s not that much of a rush.” That last sentence was merely aimed at making the helicopter’s crew feel better. He wondered if anyone could bring this off.

  “Skipper, a few more knots and I can hold her a little steadier,” Portagee reported at the wheel.

  “We can’t run out of the eye.”

  “I know that, sir, but I need a little more way on.”

  Wegener went outside to look. The helicopter was visible now, its strobes blinking in the darkness as it circled the ship to allow the pilot to size things up. If anything screws this up, it’s going to be the roll, Wegener realized. Portagee was right about the speed. “Two-thirds,” he called back inside.

  “Christ, that’s a little boat,” Johns heard Willis breathe.

  “Just so the oars ain’t in the way.” PJ took the helicopter down, circling one last time and coming to a straight course dead aft of the cutter. He leveled out at one hundred feet and found that he couldn’t hover very well. He lacked the power, and the aircraft wavered left and right when he tried.

  “Hold that damned boat steady!” he said over the radio circuit.

  “We are trying, sir,” the XO replied. “We have the wind off the port bow at the moment. I recommend you come in from the portside and stay at an angle to the deck all the way in.”

  “Roger, I can see why.” Johns adjusted power one more time and moved in.

  “Okay, let’s move!” Riley told his men. They divided into three teams, one for each of the helicopter’s wheel assemblies.

  The deck, Johns saw, was not quite large enough for a fore-and-aft landing, but by angling his approach he could plant all six wheels on the black surface. He came in slowly, fifteen knots faster than the ship to start, and sloughing that off as he closed, but the wind shifted and turned the helicopter. Johns swore and turned fully away to try again.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I have some power problems here.”

  “Roger, take your time, sir,” the XO replied.

  PJ started again, a thousand yards out. The approach this time went well. He flared the aircraft a hundred yards aft to drop off excess speed, then flattened out and eased forward. His main gear touched just where he wanted, but the ship rolled hard and threw the aircraft to starboard. Instinctively PJ hit power and collective to lift free of the deck. He shouldn’t have, and knew it even as he did so.

  “This is hard,” he said over the radio, managing not to curse as he brought the chopper back around.

  “Shame we don’t have more time to practice,” the Coast Guard officer agreed. “That was a good, smooth approach. The ship just took a bad roll on us. Do that one more time, you’ll be just fine.”

  “Okay, one more time.” PJ came in again.

  The ship was rolling twenty degrees left and right despite her stabilizers and bilge keels, but Johns fixed his eyes on the center of the target area, which wasn’t rolling at all, just a fixed point in space. That had to be the trick, he told himself, pick the spot that isn’t moving. Again he flared out to kill off speed and inched forward. Just as he approached the deck, his eyes shifted to where the nosewheels had to hit, and slammed the collective down. It felt almost as bad as a crash, but the collective held the chopper in place.

  Riley was first up and rolled under the aircraft at the nosewheels. Another boatswain’s mate followed with the tie-down chains. The master chief found a likely spot and hooked them in place, then shot his arm out and made a fist. Two men on the other end of the chains pulled them taut, and the chief rolled free and went down the portside to get to work on the main gear. It took several minutes. The Pave Low shifted twice before they had it secured, but soon they had two-inch line to back up the chains. By the time Riley was finished, it would have taken explosives to lift it from the deck. The deck crew entered the helicopter at the stern ramp and guided the passengers out. Riley counted fifteen people. He’d been told to expect more than that. Then he saw the bodies, and the men who were struggling with them.

  Forward, Johns and Willis shut down their engines.

  “CLAW, CAESAR is down. Return to base.” Johns took off his helmet too soon to catch the reply, though Willis caught it.

  “Roger. Out.”

  Johns looked around. He didn’t feel like a pilot now. His aircraft was down. He was safe. It was time to get out and do something else. He couldn’t get out his door without risking a fall overboard and ... he’d allowed himself to forget Buck Zimmer. That door in his mind opened itself now. Well, he told himself, Buck would understand. The colonel stepped over the flight-engineer console. Ryan was still there, his flight suit speckled from his nausea. Johns knelt by the side of his sergeant. They’d served together on and off for over twenty years.

  “He told me he has seven kids,” Ryan said.

  Johns’ voice was too tired for any overt emotions. He spoke like a man a thousand years old, tired of life, tired of flying, tired of everything. “Yeah, cute ones. His wife is from Laos. Carol, her name is. Oh, God, Buck—why now?”

  “Let me help,” Jack said. Johns took the arms. Ryan got the legs. They had to wait in line. There were other bodies to be carried out, some dead, some only wounded, and they got the understandable priority. The soldiers, Jack saw, carried their own, helped by Sergeant Bean. The Coasties offered help, but it was declined—not unkindly, and the sailors understood the reason. Ryan and Johns also declined the assistance, the colonel because of the years with his friend, and the CIA officer because of a duty self-imposed. Riley and his men stayed behind briefly to collect packs and weapons. Then they, too, went below.

  The bodies were set in a passageway for the time being. The wounded went to the crew’s mess. Ryan and the Air Force officers were guided to the wardroom. There they found the man who’d started it all, months before, though none of them would ever understand how it had all happened. There was one more face, one which Jack recognized.

  “Hi, Dan.”

  “Bad?” the FBI agent asked.

  Jack didn’t respond to that. “We got Cortez. I think he was wounded. He’s probably in sick bay with a couple of soldiers keeping an eye on him.”

  “What got you?” Murray asked. He pointed to Jack’s helmet.

  Ryan took it off and saw a gouge where a 7.62 bullet had scraped away a quarter inch or so of fiberglass. Jack knew that he should have reacted to it, but that part of his life was four hundred miles behind him. Instead he sat down and stared
at the deck and didn’t say anything for a while. Two minutes later, Murray moved him onto a cot and covered him with a blanket.

  Captain Montaigne had to fight the last two miles through high winds, but she was a particularly fine pilot and the Lockheed Hercules was a particularly fine aircraft. She touched down a little hard, but not too badly, and followed the guide jeep to her hangar. A man in civilian clothes was waiting there, along with some officers. As soon as she’d shut down, she walked out to meet them. She made them wait while she headed for the rest room, smiling through her fatigue that there was not a man in America who’d deny a lady a trip to the john. Her flight suit smelled horrible and her hair was a wreck, she saw in the mirror before she returned. They were waiting for her right outside the door.

  “Captain, I want to know what you did tonight,” the civilian asked—but he wasn’t a civilian, she realized after a moment, though the prick certainly didn’t deserve to be anything else. Montaigne didn’t know everything that was behind all this, but she did know that much.

  “I just flew a very long mission, sir. My crew and I are beat to hell.”

  “I want to talk to all of you about what you did.”

  “Sir, that is my crew. If there’s any talking to be done, you’ll talk to me!” she snapped back.

  “What did you do?” Cutter demanded. He tried pretending it wasn’t a girl. He didn’t know that she was not pretending that he wasn’t a man.

  “Colonel Johns went in to rescue some special-ops troopers.” She rubbed both hands across the back of her neck. “We got ‘em—he got ’em, most of ’em, I suppose.”

  “Then where is he?”

  Montaigne looked him right in the eye. “Sir, he had engine trouble. He couldn’t climb out to us—couldn’t get over the mountains. He flew right into the storm. He didn’t fly out of it, sir. Anything else you want to know? I want to get showered, get some coffee down, and start thinking about search and rescue.”

  “The field’s closed,” the base commander said. “Nobody gets out for another ten hours. I think you need some rest, Captain.”

  “I think you’re right, sir. Excuse me, I have to see to my crew. I’ll have you the SAR coordinates in a few minutes. Somebody’s gotta try,” she added.

  “Look, General, I want—” Cutter started to say.

  “Mister, you leave that crew alone,” said an Air Force one-star who was retiring soon anyway.

  Larson landed at Medellin’s city airport about the same time the MC-130 approached Panama. It had been a profane flight, Clark in the back with Escobedo, the latter’s hands tied behind his back and a gun in his ribs. There had been many promises of death in the flight. Death to Clark, death to Larson and his girlfriend who worked for Avianca, death to many people. Clark just smiled through it all.

  “So what do you do with me, eh? You kill me now?” he asked as the wheels locked in the down position. Finally, Clark responded.

  “I suggested that we could give you a flying lesson out the back of the helicopter, but they wouldn’t let me. So looks like we’re going to have to let you go.”

  Escobedo didn’t know how to answer. His bluster wasn’t able to cope with the fact that they might not want to kill him. They just didn’t have the courage to, Clark decided.

  “I had Larson call ahead,” he said.

  “Larson, you motherless traitor, you think you will survive?”

  Clark dug the pistol in Escobedo’s ribs. “You don’t bother the guy who’s flying the goddamned airplane. If I were you, señor, I’d be very pleased to be coming home. We’re even having you met at the airport.”

  “Met by whom?”

  “By some of your friends,” Clark said as the wheel squeaked down on the tarmac. Larson reversed his props to brake the aircraft. “Some of your fellow board members.”

  That’s when he saw the real danger coming. “What did you tell them?”

  “The truth,” Larson answered. “That you were taking a flight out of the country under very strange circumstances, what with the storm and all. And, gee, what with all the odd happenings of the past few weeks, I thought that it was kind of a coincidence ...”

  “But I will tell them—”

  “What?” Clark asked. “That we put our own lives at risk by delivering you back home? That it’s all a trick? Sure, you tell them that.”

  The aircraft stopped but the engines didn’t. Clark gagged the chieftain. Then he unbuckled Escobedo’s seat belt and pulled him toward the door. A car was already there. Clark stepped down, his silenced automatic in Escobedo’s back.

  “You are not Larson,” the man with the submachine gun said.

  “I am his friend. He is flying. Here is your man. You should have something for us.”

  “You do not need to leave,” said the man with the briefcase.

  “This one has too many friends. It is best, I think, that we should leave.”

  “As you wish,” the second one said. “But you have nothing to fear from us.” He handed over the briefcase.

  “Gracias, jefe, ” Clark said. They loved to be called that. He pushed Escobedo toward them.

  “You should know better than to betray your friends,” said the second one as Clark reentered the aircraft. The comment was aimed at the bound and gagged chieftain, whose eyes were very, very wide, staring back at Clark as he closed the door.

  “Get us the hell out of here.”

  “Next stop, Venezuela,” Larson said as he goosed the throttles.

  “Then Gitmo. Think you can hack it?”

  “I’ll need some coffee, but they make it good down here.” The aircraft lifted off and Larson thought, Jesus, it’s good to have this one behind us. That was true for him, but not for everyone.

  30.

  The Good

  of the Service

  BY THE TIME Ryan awoke on his cot in the wardroom, they were out of the worst of it. The cutter managed to make a steady ten knots east, and with the storm heading northwest at fifteen, they were in moderate seas in six hours. Course was made northeast, and Panache increased to her best continuous speed of about twenty knots.

  The soldiers were quartered with the cutter’s enlisted crew, who treated them like visiting kings. By some miracle some liquor bottles were discovered—probably from the chiefs’ quarters, but no one hazarded to ask—and swiftly emptied. Their uniforms were discarded and new clothing issued from ship’s stores. The dead were placed in cold storage, which everyone understood was the only possible thing. There were five of them; two of them, including Zimmer, had died during the rescue. Eight men were wounded, one of them seriously, but the two Army medics, plus the cutter’s independent-duty corpsman, were able to stabilize him. Mainly the soldiers slept and ate and slept some more during their brief cruise.

  Cortez, who’d been wounded in the arm, was in the brig. Murray looked after him. After Ryan awoke, both men went below with a TV camera which was set up on a tripod, and the senior FBI executive started to ask some questions. It was soon apparent that Cortez had had nothing to do with the murder of Emil Jacobs, which was as surprising to Murray as it was reasonable on examination of the information. It was a complication that neither man had actually expected, but one that might work in their favor, Ryan thought. He was the one who started asking the questions about Cortez’s experience with the DGI. Cortez was wholly cooperative throughout. He’d betrayed one allegiance, and doing so to another came easily, especially with Jack’s promise that he wouldn’t be prosecuted if he cooperated. It was a promise that would be kept to the letter.

  Cutter remained in Panama for another day. The search-and-rescue operation aimed at locating the downed helicopter was delayed by weather, and it was hardly surprising to him that nothing was found. The storm kept heading northwest and blew itself out on the Yucatan Peninsula, ending as a series of line squalls that caused half a dozen tornados in Texas several days later. Cutter didn’t stay long enough for that. As soon as the weather permitted, he flew straight back t
o D.C. just hours after Captain Montaigne returned to Eglin Air Force Base, her crew sworn to secrecy that their commander had every reason to enforce.

  Panache arrived at Guantánamo Naval Base thirty-six hours after taking the helicopter aboard. Captain Wegener had radioed for permission, claiming a machinery problem and wanting to get out of Hurricane Adele’s path. Several miles off, Colonel Johns started up their helicopter and flew it onto the base, where it was immediately rolled into a hangar. The cutter came alongside an hour later, showing moderate storm damage, some of which was quite real.

  Clark and Larson met the ship at the dock. Their aircraft was also hidden away. Ryan and Murray joined them, and a squad of Marines went aboard the cutter to retrieve Félix Cortez. Some telephone calls were placed, and then it was time to decide what had to be done. There were no easy solutions, nothing that would be entirely legal. The soldiers were treated at the base hospital and flown the next day to Fort MacDill in Florida. The same day, Clark and Larson returned the aircraft to Washington, having stopped to refuel in the Bahamas. In Washington it was turned over to a small corporation that belongs to CIA. Larson went on leave, wondering if he should really marry the girl and raise a family. Of one thing he was certain: he would leave the Agency.

  Predictably, one of the things that happened was quite unexpected, and would forever be a mystery to all but one.

  Admiral Cutter had returned two days earlier, and was back in his regular routine. The President was off on a political trip, trying to reestablish himself in the polls before the convention started two weeks hence. That made easier what had been a very hectic few weeks for his National Security Adviser. One way or another, he decided, he’d had enough of this. He’d served this President well, done things that needed to be done, and was entitled to a reward. He thought a fleet command would be appropriate, preferably Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet. Vice Admiral Painter, the current Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (Air Warfare), had been told to expect it, but it was the President’s call to make, after all, and Cutter figured that he could have just about anything he wanted. After that, if the President was re-elected, maybe Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.... It was something to think about over breakfast, which was at a civilized hour for a change. He’d even have time for a jog after his morning briefing from CIA. The doorbell rang at 7:15. Cutter answered it himself.