“Hit the dome light,” he said when he was finished with the spit bath, then leaned back in his seat with his arms and hands open. “Any blood on me?”
Midas and Ryan both gave him a once-over, shaking their heads.
Ryan caught his eye, quizzing him without words.
“Better for you if I keep this close to the vest,” Clark said. “It’s a need-to-know thing…”
Ryan scoffed. “And I don’t need to know.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Clark said. “I’m just looking out for you.”
45
Chavez watched John Clark’s plane take off an hour and five minutes before the F-15 Eagles were set to arrive. He was a big boy and had worked dozens of operations without Clark on scene. Maybe it was his massive headache from the repeated blows to his face. Maybe it was his chipped tooth. But for some reason, this time left him feeling like he was on the ropes. He had no idea what Clark was up to, but he could tell by the amused look on the man’s face that it would be dangerous.
Chavez and Adara took the Faraday bag containing Calliope inside the fixed-base operator, at the south/civil aviation portion of the airport. Jack Junior remained outside in one van while Midas and Caruso waited in the other, watching for threats. Chavez wasn’t worried about trackers. The Faraday bag would keep any signal from getting in or out of the drive or the plastic box it was stored in. But there was only one airport in Manado, and one FBO at that airport. It wasn’t a leap to think that Suparman might guess where they would go to get the tech out of the country. And if he figured it out, he’d come after it with a vengeance. The gaming magnate had already proven he would have no problem resorting to violence. In Chavez’s experience, people were seldom more ruthless than when they were trying to steal shit back that they had stolen from someone else.
On the other side of the door on the airport side of the building was the flight line, the secure area down the ramp from where the commercial airliners parked. The area around the airlines was brightly lit and a hive of activity. There were few lights immediately outside the FBO. The maintenance hangar was closed and dark, all the mechanics having gone home for the day. Several business jets and a couple of prop aircraft were parked in the darkness. Most sat locked and idle, but just beyond the Hendley G550, four men loaded bundles of what looked suspiciously like drugs into the back of a low-wing twin turbo-prop. Chavez recognized it as a Piper Cheyenne IIIA by the high T-tail and long nose. The DEA had a couple rigged out for surveillance. On the flip side, they were fast and fuel-efficient enough to make a pretty good drug-smuggling plane. The men did their loading in the dark, so Chavez felt confident that was what was going on here.
He would have been more than happy to blow their operation to hell, if he’d had the time. They’d eventually be caught — and probably executed. Drug smuggling was a stacked game in Indonesia. Even if you paid off the police, which you had to do, odds were you would eventually get caught. And they killed you for that over here. He’d give the Cheyenne a wide berth to avoid guilt by association.
If all went well, in a little over sixty minutes the F-15 pilots would come inside and take Calliope off their hands. He doubted if they’d even take the time to pee. The likelihood of a threat coming from that direction was low, but Chavez kept an eye peeled anyway.
Chavez had called Helen and Country, the Gulfstream pilots, to check on their status, but they were having issues with the rental car not starting and were at least another hour out. It figured. A beatdown, gun battle, and car trouble: The night could hardly get any better. It was a good thing Clark had flown commercial, even absent his desire to insulate the rest of the team from what he planned to do.
Everyone had brought all their gear with them, anticipating a quick egress from the country. There was no reason to return to the hotel. Nothing to do now but wait.
Chavez plopped himself in one of the faux-leather seats with a paper sack of popcorn. You got accustomed to waiting for agonizingly long spans of time in this business — waiting in the limo for your protectee to finish his or her meeting, waiting in the shadows for an asset to show up, or simply waiting at an airport for someone to pick you up. Smokin’ and jokin’, the Feds called it. Keeping your wits about you while you were exhausted, beaten down, and bored out of your skull was an art. Popcorn helped. A lot. Nearly every FBO he’d ever seen, anywhere in the world, seemed to have a machine. The smells of popcorn and jet fuel were so intertwined in his mind that if Patsy made Orville Redenbacher to munch while they watched something on Netflix, Chavez invariably had dreams about airplanes — usually jumping out of a perfectly good one.
With no metal detectors or X-rays inside the FBO, Ding and Adara had retained their handguns. Neither of them wanted to disarm until Calliope was on board one of the fighters and those fighters were back in the air, heading for a computer lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. And then there were the drug smugglers loading the Piper Cheyenne to consider. Yep. Much better to stay gunned up.
Chavez rubbed a fleck of blood he’d missed on the side of his hand. He’d used wet wipes and hand sanitizer to clean up as best he could, and then finished the job in the restroom. Like most men’s rooms overseas, there were no paper towels, making Chavez glad he’d taken up his father-in-law’s practice of carrying a handkerchief. Head wounds were terrible bleeders, though, and he had a couple that made him look like a zombie if he didn’t keep an eye on them. He felt like a zombie, that was for sure. The pain in his head grew with each minute that ticked by.
“ETA one hour on the nose,” Adara said, startling Chavez a little when she sat down next to him with her own bag of popcorn. “We can stand on our heads for this long.” She turned half in her seat, assessing his wounds — and he had many — then used the long white paper bag to gesture at his left eye. “You need a few stitches right below your orbital,” she said. “Can you see okay? A blow like that can rattle your vision.”
“I’m good,” Chavez lied.
He still hadn’t gotten used to seeing Adara with black hair. A perfectionist, she’d taken the time to dye her eyebrows, too. One bottle of Indonesian hair dye and she’d gone from looking like a badass Tinker Bell, to… well, still badass, but not quite right, like the evil doppelgänger of her actual self. It was more than a little unsettling. Chavez kept that to himself, though, particularly since he’d been the one to give her the dye.
“Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I’ll hit a clinic as soon as we get home.”
As a former Navy corpsman, Adara was often referred to by the team as “Doc.” She slipped into the role with ease.
“I have lidocaine on the G5,” she said. “I can stitch it up for you, as long as we don’t have too much turbulence. The sooner the better with facial wounds.” She grinned. “And my copay is cheaper than a doc in the box.”
Chavez gave a slow nod, thinking it over. She’d stitched everyone on the team at one time or another, even back when she’d been director of transportation, before Clark and Gerry had tapped her to be an operator.
“Okay,” he said. “It is a hell of a long fl—”
The radio bonked, coming in garbled as two people outside tried to speak at the same time.
Chavez and Adara sat up straighter in their seats.
Midas came over the radio next, sounding tense, like he was talking through clenched teeth.
“We have company!” he said. “Two Hilux pickups full of trouble. Estimate eight to ten men. All armed.”
Chavez turned toward the door in time to see the man behind the counter at the FBO come up with a pistol.