"To what?" Scott asked. "Sir, it isn't like you to be evasive." Prost sat upright. "Would you consider parachuting onto the Chen Ziyang at night and documenting what's on board?" Scott and Jackie were astonished.
Hartwell turned to Jackie. "We want your help too."
Dalton at first stifled a laugh but allowed a small grin to spread across his lips. "You're kidding… of course," he said, and locked Prost in his gaze. "Aren't you?"
"No, I'm not kidding," he said with a straight face. "As you know, all of your records since the military — along with Jackie's records — have been completely sanitized."
Scott glanced at Jackie and saw the concern in her eyes.
"We can't have any fingerprints leading to anyone in the administration, or pointing to any agency in the government. Scott, this is exactly the kind of operation we had in mind when we asked you to leave the Agency. This has to be a stealth operation, clean and neat with no congressional questions until after the president confronts Liu Fan-ding in front of the world."
Taken aback, Scott was calculating the odds of a successful jump and a safe means of escaping.
"You can write your own ticket, buy a new jet, whatever you want," Hartwell said, and looked at Sullivan. "The same for you, Jackie. Just let me know what equipment you'll need."
"Mr. Prost, would you mind if I discuss this with Jackie before we give you an answer?"
"I insist that you do." Hartwell rose from his chair. "However, I'll need an answer bright and early in the morning, before I fly back to Washington."
"Yes, sir."
Hartwell donned his cap and adjusted it. "How about breakfast at the club, say seven sharp."
"That'd be great," Jackie said.
After Hartwell left the office, Jackie and Scott stared at each other for a long moment and then laughed at the same time. "We can move up from a Bonanza to a jet," Scott said with the parachute jump still playing on his mind. "What do you think?"
"We?"
"As in the two of us — you and me."
"How about taking me to dinner?"
"Let's go," Scott said with a grin.
"I think I need a Manhattan."
"You got it," he said with excitement in his voice. "We have a tough decision to make."
Jackie rose from her chair and pulled Scott to his feet. " You have a tough decision, my friend. I'm not the one who has to parachute onto a Chinese ship in the middle of the night."
After the strategic waterway was returned to Panamanian control at noon on December 31, 1999, another December day that will live in infamy, the Red Chinese military became the de facto gatekeepers of the ports at the Atlantic and Pacific ends of the big ditch.
Hutchison Whampoa Limited, of Hong Kong, a powerful conglomerate with strong ties to the Chinese government and the People's Liberation Army, won underhanded contracts to operate the critical ports of Cristobal and Balboa. The deceitful and lucrative twenty-five-year lease, along with the optional twenty-five-year extension, were a cause of great concern in many circles, including the Pentagon.
The unorthodox bidding, along with shiploads of money from China to Panamanian government officials, provided a means for the Red Chinese to delay or stop expedited treatment normally reserved for U.S. warships.
One of the most strategic choke points on the globe was transferred from the most powerful nation on earth to a small Third World country with a population of 2.8 million people. This major international asset was now controlled by a corrupt communist power.
Because Panama no longer had a military, Beijing quietly began moving thousands of Chinese soldiers into the Panama Canal Zone. They did this on the pretext of protecting Hutchison Whampoa civilian employees from roving bands of Colombian insurgents, drug traffickers, and the guerrillas of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
With more than 83,00 °Chinese nationals and 12,80 °Chinese troops dispersed in the ten-mile-wide swath across the Isthmus of Panama, Beijing was using the former Howard Air Force Base and the Rodman Naval Station to base warplanes, missiles, bombs, submarines, and warships only nine hundred miles from U.S. soil.
Under the vacuous and controversial Panama Canal Neutrality, Treaty signed in 1977, the United States reserved the right to intervene militarily if the canal was threatened or invaded. President Macklin, Hartwell Prost, the secretary of defense, and the joint chiefs were secretly making contingency plans to deal with the growing Chinese military force in Panama.
Based at Biggs Army Airfield, Fort Bliss, Texas, the de Havilland RC-7 reconnaissance plane was approaching Panama City three hours before dawn. Though ostensibly it was a U.S. counternarcotics aircraft, a National Defense Authorization Act had expanded the charter of Joint Task Force Six to conduct counterinsurgency missions and to keep a watchful eye on Colombian guerrillas and the Red Chinese in the area of the canal.
Packed with sophisticated intelligence equipment for the interception of radio and mobile phone communications, the four-engine turboprop RC-7 could gather burst communications, the latest digital voice encryptions, or low-probability-of-intercept signals and transmit them to the National Security Agency for analysis.
The flight crew also shared information with more than three hundred covert operatives from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the CIA. The mission was the Pentagon's biggest covert operation in Latin America.
Eight miles from Balboa, at an altitude of seven thousand feet, the reconnaissance aircraft made a slight course correction to follow the Panama Canal from Bahia de Panama to Bahia Limon at the entrance to the Caribbean Sea. The winding, slate-black fifty-one-mile lake-and-lock waterway was easy to see in the ivory-and gold moonlight.
The pilot in command, army captain Barbara Yankovitz, studied the former Howard Air Force Base and turned to her copilot. "Since we pulled out of Panama, the druggies have had a field day."
Captain Ronald Jansen gazed at the sprinkling of lights on the ground. "Yeah, giving up the canal was a gigantic blunder. It left a huge hole in our drug-fighting efforts."
"And it's getting worse."
Jansen looked at the strobe lights of another plane in the distance. "I'm just surprised that the Chinese aren't doing something about it."
"Well," Yankovitz said as she made a minor course correction, "they sure haven't been timid about fortifying their defenses near the ditch."
"Not exactly subtle." Jansen reached for his coffee cup. "I heard that we have a battle group in the Colombian Basin."
"That's what I hear." Yankovitz studied the lights on the ground as they passed over the coastline north of Balboa. "A friend of mine, a pilot stationed at Hurlburt Field, told me the Special Operations Wing has two AC-130 Spectre gunships on standby around the clock."
"I have a feeling something is about to happen, especially with a carrier battle group just off the coast."
Yankovitz chuckled. "And it isn't going to be good."
"Not with the Chinese at our back door."
In the cramped fuselage of the aircraft, three army reconnaissance specialists and two Colombian antidrug officers were gathering a variety of covert information about the Chinese, the Colombian guerrillas, and the bands of Colombian drug traffickers.
The de Havilland flew directly down the center of the canal. Nearing the canal lock east of Gatun Lake, Yankovitz complied with a request from one of her aerial surveillance experts. The pilot flew the plane in a wide 360-degree circle to the right and rolled out over the canal.
Suddenly, as the crew reacted in shocked silence, a man-portable surface-to-air missile slammed into the right inboard turboprop and exploded in a blinding fireball.