The man who had been covering Cervante raised his rifle and started toward the jeepney. The first man grinned and called through the rain.
“I am sorry to disappoint you, Cervante, but we have changed our minds! You see, now that we have the store, Adleman is even more valuable to us!” He nodded to the man with the rifle. “Kill Cervante.” He turned to the sari-sari store.…
Suddenly, from inside the house, a volley of shots rang out, muffled in the downpour of water. The black marketers jerked in spasmodic actions, falling at crazy angles to the ground. Cervante heard the sound of bullets shattering bone.
Barguyo stepped from inside the house, holding an M-16. Cervante merely nodded at the boy as he picked up the briefcase. Pompano would be left with the dead bodies, but he would never talk, especially with Yolanda held hostage.
As Cervante drove off, Barguyo and the two Huks with him dragged the bloody bodies into the house, shut the door, and walked through the summer rain to their truck.
Major Kathy Yulok couldn’t see her target, but the sensors on the instrument panel glowed a bright green. Below her, cloud cover stretched as far as she could see. From this attitude, the horizon seemed to be just over the SR-73’s nose. They were flying relatively low this sortie, but it was the highest pass she was going to make.
It was really a job for the SR-73’s high-flying cousin, the TR-1, but the closest plane would have taken over five hours to get to Clark.
Yulok toggled her mike and spoke directly with Thirteenth Air Force Headquarters. “Blackcave, Shakedown One. Cameras are rolling.”
“Rog, Shakedown. Waiting your pictures.”
The cameras on the SR-73 were a far cry from the original chemical film that the old SR-71 Habu used to carry, thirty years ago when the aircraft was first commissioned. Now, ultrasensitive charged-coupled diodes, integrated with adaptive optics, fed their digitized pictures directly to a satellite link located in the SR-73’s long, flared nose. The digitized images were bounced from satellite to satellite until they were was finally downlinked to an Air Force ground station — a fifty-foot satellite dish located at a classified operating location known only as Tango Whiskey Three.
A high-performance parallel supercomputer at NSA unscrambled the coded imagery and integrated the pictures with sophisticated three-dimensional algorithms, false colors, and blink technology to produce ultra-clear pictures. The resulting pictures were scrambled again and faxed to Clark.
Thirty seconds after Major Yulok had announced that cameras were rolling, Major General Simone looked over the shoulder of an intelligence officer as the young captain poured over the high-resolution photograph.
“Bingo.” She drew a circle around what appeared to be a long gash in a jungle of trees. “This has got to be it. If Shakedown can get a closer picture, we can confirm it.”
Simone straightened. “Get a chopper out there.”
“Shakedown One can get us a close-up in five minutes, General.”
“And if that’s Air Force Two, we’ll get there five minutes faster. Move it.”
He didn’t have to repeat himself.
“Bring it in, bring it in! Hold it steady now!” Staff Sergeant Zazbrewski stood halfway out of the MH-60 helicopter hatch, leaning over the side, a hand on the crane. The line played out nearly a hundred and fifty feet before it hit the ground.
Zazbrewski saw the para-rescue specialists — PJs, in the jargon of the rescue folk — leave the harness and fan out to investigate the crash site.
“Hurry up, dammit!” Captain Richard Head turned his head and motioned impatiently for Zazbrewski to give them the sign to pull up. Holding any helicopter motionless was a herculean feat.
Zaz waved an arm at the helicopter pilot. “They’re off.”
“Thank goodness.” Captain Head pulled the MH-60 Black Hawk up as Zazbrewski reeled in the line. They would circle the crash site until the PJs radioed for them to drop a stretcher. If one was needed.
Head surveyed the debacle as he brought the helicopter up another hundred feet, keeping a good fifty feet or so below the cloud cover. Head hated flying in this weather — he had a fear that something would suddenly swoop out of the heavy clouds and hit his helicopter.
A gash ran through the forest. The jungle hadn’t burned, since rain had soaked the trees and underlying foliage, but he saw some singeing alongside the craft’s silver body. The wings had torn off a good half-mile away, and the fuselage looked intact. It was a wonder the thing wasn’t in a million pieces.
Clark Command Post came over the radio: “Fox One, Blackcave. Have you located any survivors?”
Head keyed his mike. “Blackcave, Fox One. That’s a negatory. We’ll keep you posted.”
The 747’s fuselage was nestled down in the gash, virtually invisible unless one had watched the plane go down.
Within minutes HH-3s and CH-53s from Subic had joined Head, Gould, and Zazbrewski. After dropping their teams of Navy SEALs, the other helicopters flew in a coordinated circle, waiting for word from the rescue teams below. Head kept his Black Hawk moving in a continuous bank.
Head’s radio cackled. “Fox One, PJ. We’ve got no survivors here.”
Head wet his lips. “PJ, Fox One. Come again?”
“You heard it, Fox.” The PJ’s voice sounded bitter over the radio. “No survivors. Nada. Inform Blackcave they’d better get some OSI out here, ASAP.”
The Air Force Office of Special Investigation? As soon as possible? Head keyed the mike. “Say again, PJ.”
“You bastards listening up there? It ain’t pretty down here. This is something the OSI needs to jump on, pronto.”
“How’s that?”
There was a long pause. “Everyone’s dead — no survivors. Whoever didn’t die in the crash has been killed — throats slit, bullets through the head. The only person we couldn’t find is the vice president. Comprehend? Lonestar is not here.”
Chapter 19
They had left the rice paddies far behind and were on the final leg to the plantation. The road was crowned in glorious green, and everywhere Cervante looked it seemed like he was being applauded for the ultimate coup. The rain — on the road, falling in the jungle, splashing up onto the side of the jeepney — all seemed to symbolize a washing away of the old, something never to be seen again. It was glorious. Cervante saw it as a validation of the very things he had so dearly believed in and fought for.
Every so often he had to sneak a look to the back, to see if the figure of Robert E. Adleman, vice president of the United States of America, was still there, still moaning and quivering, still waiting to be used to free the Filipinos.
And from the most powerful nation on earth!
A half a mile behind, the truck trailed Cervante, bringing the high-power microwave weapon and the girl.
At this point, Cervante couldn’t have cared less about either of them. Only about Adleman. And what the vice president could do for Cervante, dead or alive.
Bruce rapped on the door. He couldn’t understand why no one was home on the day Pompano and Yolanda were to sell the store.
“Yolanda?” Bruce walked around back, trying to peek into the tiny windows set high off the ground. Broken glass, cemented into the window sill, lined the windows.
Bruce looked around the back and moved to the back door, trying to remain under the overhang. He pounded on the door before noticing a brownish-red splotch. He knelt and ran a finger across it. Bruce’s heart began to palpitate.