"Quite sure."
The point he had indicated was no more than a kilometer from the entrance to the barranca where Rafael Madero's cabin was located. Roddy began to get some disturbing vibrations from the passenger sitting beside him. Who was Ivan Netto? Was he really an importer looking for silver someone had stolen from him, or was he something more insidious? Was he someone sent by Adam Stern to test the chopper pilot's knowledge and interest in the remote mountain cabin?
Roddy decided to play along and see what happened. If Netto was not involved in whatever activity the Foreign Affairs Roundtable had cooked up for that secluded canyon, they could do a quick fly-by and move on to a more likely area to seek the yellow truck. It had been about a week since his discovery of the cabin with Bryan Janney. And since Stern had long since returned to New York, probably nothing was going on there now anyway. Nevertheless, he approached the barranca warily, coming in from the west, away from the dirt road that led into the canyon.
The forest-covered folds of lava appeared as an undulating green carpet as the chopper cruised along a few hundred feet above the treetops. Roddy spotted the swift-moving stream that had carved out the barranca over countless millennia just before crossing over the precipitous canyon rim. At the most he expected to see a four-wheel drive vehicle or two, a few horses tied up behind the house, maybe some cowboys doing chores. But what caught his eye nearly stopped his heart. It was an almost instantaneous series of flashes. They appeared beside the stream at the other end of the gorge, beyond the cabin. Moments later, several small explosions erupted just below the chopper's flight path.
Startled, Roddy stared down at the smoke and dust and debris rising from the canyon floor, then back in the direction of the flashes.
"What the hell was that?" Netto yelled into the intercom.
His pulse racing, Roddy stared for what seemed an eternity, though it was actually only seconds, until the sight was indelibly etched into his brain. Men on the ground gesturing wildly at the chopper, pointing rifles toward it. He reacted instinctively, applying maximum power, racking the helicopter into a tight one-eighty. As the small Bell craft raced for the top of the canyon wall, a well-aimed bullet from a 7.62mm automatic rifle crashed through the deck, streaked just behind the seats and exited with explosive force through the door beside Netto.
"Shit!" Roddy blurted when he finally released the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "That was damned close."
Netto stared, ashen-faced, at the jagged hole beside him. "We could have been killed."
"Lucky we didn't catch the mortar fire."
"Mortar fire?"
"Yeah. It's something you don't forget. I damn near became a mortar target in Vietnam. Did you see where the fire came from?"
Netto nodded, the color just beginning to return to his cheeks. "The back of a truck—"
"A damned yellow dump truck!" Roddy's voice blasted through the earphones. "Who the hell are you and what's going on around here?"
He checked his instruments. Everything seemed to be running normally, no indication of damage to the engine or controls. He glanced at the compass and swung onto a direct heading for Miguel Hidalgo Airport. He didn't intend to tarry en route.
Roddy saw the man called Ivan Netto rub his forehead and close his eyes, obviously shaken by what had just happened.
"What do you know about Adam Stern?" Roddy demanded.
Netto gave him a puzzled look. "Who?"
"Adam Stern, with the Foreign Affairs Roundtable."
"I know no such person. The other name, Foreign Affairs something, has no meaning for me."
The man certainly sounded sincere, Roddy thought, but he had suddenly become much more critical in his assessments. It was too big a stretch of the imagination now to accept that story about the theft of silver objects. "Where the hell did that truck come from?"
As he considered where things stood, Yuri Shumakov realized he had just run out of options. Obviously his hopes of cornering Major Romashchuk had suffered a severe setback. All those people firing rifles at them. The KGB man was now surrounded by a veritable army. Reluctantly, he accepted that he could no longer count on carrying out his ambitious scheme alone. And what he had just witnessed convinced him that this whole business with the former state security apparatus was getting out of hand. He had an obligation to warn someone. But who? And how?
He looked at the pilot, the short brown hair, the open, sincere face. Though understandably infuriated now, he had earlier exhibited a relaxed, easy smile. Could he risk revealing the truth to this man? Rodman was a former American Air Force officer. He knew that was about as good a recommendation as he was likely to find.
Yuri had known from the start that it might come down to this. And he realized there were no guarantees. All he could do was go with his instincts, and his instincts told him that Roddy Rodman was a man he could trust.
40
His agonizing decision made, the Minsk chief investigator opened up like a penitent seeking absolution. "My real name is Yuri Shumakov," he said. "I come from Minsk, Belarus, not from Atlanta, Georgia."
Rodman nodded, his eyes shifting suspiciously. He kept the chopper climbing until they had an unrestricted view of both the Atemajac Valley and its surrounding airspace.
"The man who brought in the yellow truck is a Ukrainian," Yuri explained. "He was a major in the old KGB. I followed him to Guadalajara from Veracruz, where he took delivery of a large crate that arrived on a ship from Gdansk, Poland."
"Are you a cop?" Roddy asked.
Shumakov shook his head, the pain showing in his face. "I was an investigator for the Minsk prokuratura, the city prosecutor, until two weeks ago."
"What happened?"
"I was accused of a murder I did not commit."
As they flew toward Guadalajara, as fast as Rodman could push the bulbous chopper, Yuri related sketchily how his brother Anatoli had been killed and his recent pursuit of the facts behind the explosion. He decided, at least for the present, to skip the tie-in with General Borovsky's investigation and Chairman Latishev's fears that had brought it on. He was still no closer to an answer to that knotty puzzle. Anyway, it was apparent that Rodman would have enough difficulty coping with the account of the stolen weapons. There was no need to complicate things further.
"You're telling me this Major Romashchuk has some lethal chemical weapons down there?" Rodman asked.
"In mortar shells."
"Damn! I'm sure those weren't chemical rounds we saw. It must have been a dress rehearsal for the real thing. What the hell would he use them for?"
"I have no idea."
"With only a few rounds, you couldn't make a concerted attack on anything but a small installation," Rodman said. "I once hauled some counter-terrorist agents who knew all about such a setup. They mentioned an IRA attack against a police facility in Northern Ireland. Seems the IRA fired rounds from homemade mortar tubes mounted on a flatbed truck. It isn't the most accurate kind of artillery barrage, but, hell, with nerve gas, you'd only need to get close."
Rodman contacted the Miguel Hidalgo tower as they approached the airport and requested landing instructions. While he was making his letdown, Shumakov pulled a photograph out of his briefcase.
"This is Major Romashchuk," he said, holding out the photo.
Rodman glanced at the picture, did a double take, and almost lost control of the chopper. "I've seen that face. He was at a bar with Adam Stern last week."
When they reached the Aeronautica Jalisco ramp, he shut down the engine and stripped off his earphones. Circles of perspiration discolored his shirt beneath his armpits.