He is less happy with the arrangements here, which were made rather hastily. The problem is, as usual, the unpredictable Y.T. He was not expecting her to jump out of a moving helicopter and get free from L. Bob Rife. He was, in other words, expecting a hostage negotiation somewhat later on, after Rife had flown Y.T. back to his headquarters in Houston.
But the hostage situation no longer obtains, and so Uncle Enzo feels it is important to stop Rife now, before he gets back to his home turf in Houston. He has called for a major realignment of Mafia forces, and right now, dozens of helicopters and tactical units are hastily replotting their courses and trying to converge on LAX as quickly as they can. But in the meantime, Enzo is here with a small number of his own personal bodyguards, and this technical surveillance man from Ng's organization.
They have shut down the airport. This was easy to do: they just pulled Lincoln Town Cars onto all the runways, for starters, and then went into the control tower and announced that in a few minutes they would be going to war. Now, LAX is probably quieter than it has been at any point since it was built. Uncle Enzo can actually hear the faint crashing of surf on the beach, half a mile away. It is almost pleasant here. Weenie-roasting weather.
Uncle Enzo is cooperating with Mr. Lee, which means working with Ng, and Ng, while highly competent, has a technological bias that Uncle Enzo distrusts. He would prefer a single good soldier in polished shoes, armed with a nine, to a hundred of Ng's gizmos and portable radar units.
When they came out here, he was expecting a broad open space in which to confront Rife. Instead, the environment is cluttered. Several dozen corporate jets and helicopters are parked on the apron. Nearby is an assortment of private hangars, each with its own fenced-in parking area containing a number of cars and utility vehicles. And they are rather close to the tank farm where the airport's supply of jet fuel is stored. That means lots of pipes and pumping stations and hydraulic folderol sprouting out of the ground. Tactically, the area has more in common with a jungle than with a desert. The apron and runway themselves are, of course, more desertlike, although they have drainage ditches where any number of men could be concealed. So a better analogy would be beach warfare in Vietnam: a broad open area that abruptly turns into jungle. Not Uncle Enzo's favorite place.
"The chopper is approaching the perimeter of the airport," Ky says.
Uncle Enzo turns to his lieutenant. "Everyone in place?"
"Yes, sir."
"How do you know that?"
"They all checked in a few minutes ago."
"That means absolutely nothing. And how about the pizza car?"
"Well, I thought I would do that later, sir - "
"You need to be capable of doing more than one thing at a time."
The lieutenant turns away, shamed and awed. "Ky," Uncle Enzo says, "anything interesting happening on our perimeter?"
"Nothing at all," Ng says.
"Anything uninteresting?"
"A few maintenance workers, as normal."
"How do you know they are maintenance workers and not Rife soldiers in costume? Did you check their IDs?"
"Soldiers carry guns. Or at least knives. Radar shows that these men do not. Q.E.D."
"Still trying to get all our men to check in," the lieutenant says. "Having a little radio trouble, I guess."
Uncle Enzo puts one arm around the lieutenant's shoulders. "Let me tell you a story, son. From the first moment I saw you, I thought you seemed familiar. Finally I realized that you remind me of someone I used to know: a lieutenant who was my commanding officer, for a while, in Vietnam."
The lieutenant is thrilled. "Really?"
"Yes. He was young, bright, ambitious, well educated. And well meaning. But he had certain deficiencies. He had a stubborn inability to grasp the fundamentals of our situation over there. A sort of mental block, if you will, that caused those of us who were serving under him to experience the most intense kind of frustration. It was touch and go for a while, son, I don't mind telling you that."
"How did it work out, Uncle Enzo?"
"It worked out fine. You see, one day, I took it upon myself to shoot him in the back of the head."
The lieutenant's eyes get very big, and his face seems paralyzed. Uncle Enzo has no sympathy for him at alclass="underline" if he screws this up, people could die.
Some new piece of radio babble comes in over the lieutenant's headset. "Oh, Uncle Enzo?" he says, very quietly and reluctantly.
"Yes?''
"You were asking about that pizza car?"
"Yes?"
"It's not there."
"Not there?"
"Apparently, when they set down to pick up Rife, a man got out of the chopper and climbed into the pizza car and drove it away."
"Where did he drive it to?"
"We don't know, sir, we only had one spotter in the area, and he was tracking Rife."
"Take off your headset," Uncle Enzo says. "And turn off that walkie-talkie. You need your ears."
"My ears?"
Uncle Enzo drops into a crouch and walks briskly across the pavement until he is between a couple of small jets. He sets the skateboard down quietly. Then he unties his shoelaces and pulls his shoes off. He takes his socks off, too, and stuffs them into the shoes. He takes the straight razor out of his pocket, flips it open, and slits both of his trouser legs from the hem up to his groin, then bunches the material up and cuts it off. Otherwise the fabric will slide over his hairy legs when he walks and make noise.
"My God!" the lieutenant says, a couple of planes over. "Al is down! My God, he's dead!"
70
Uncle Enzo leaves his jacket on, for now, because it's dark, and because it's lined with satin so that it is relatively quiet. Then he climbs up onto the wing of one of the planes so that his legs cannot be seen by someone crouching on the ground. He hunkers down on the end of the wing, opens his mouth so that he can hear better, and listens.
The only thing he can hear at first is an uneven spattering noise that wasn't there before, like water falling out of a half-open faucet onto bare pavement. The sound seems to be coming from a nearby airplane. Uncle Enzo is afraid that it may be jet fuel leaking onto the ground, as part of a scheme to blow up this whole section of the airport and take out all opposition at a stroke. He drops silently to the ground, makes his way carefully around a couple of adjacent planes, stopping every few feet to listen, and finally sees it: one of his soldiers has been pinned to the aluminum fuselage of a Learjet by means of a long wooden pole. Blood runs out of the wound, down his pant legs, drips from his shoes, and spatters onto the tarmac.
From behind him, Uncle Enzo hears a brief scream that suddenly turns into a sharp gaseous exhalation. He has heard it before. It is a man having a sharp knife drawn across his throat. It is undoubtedly the lieutenant.
He has a few seconds to move freely now. He doesn't even know what he's up against, and he needs to know that. So he runs in the direction the scream came from, moving quickly from cover of one jet to the next, staying down in a crouch.
He sees a pair of legs moving on the opposite side of a jet's fuselage. Uncle Enzo is near the tip of the jet's wing. He puts both hands on it, shoves down with all his weight, and then lets it go.