‘A taxi driver?’
‘Probably. They did pretty well to get someone on board the Galapagos, but getting an asset into a place like Puerto Quetzal at short notice wouldn’t be easy. This guy’s a rank amateur, but I don’t want to start a shoot-out at the O. K. Corral. He’ll have already reported that we haven’t disembarked, which will have them in a quandary. They’ll be wondering if we’re still on board or if their man was successful but somehow came to grief in the process. For the moment they’ll be confused, and it’s a waiting game.’
‘A chicken bus leaves about 5 a.m. from Puerta de Hierro, about half a mile east of here.’
O’Connor raised an eyebrow.
‘Trust me; I’ve been here before, or at least not far from here, on a dig.’
‘Excellent. We’ll sneak off early tomorrow morning, and with a bit of luck, James Bond up there will be fast asleep in his cab.’
O’Connor scanned the taxi cab with his night-vision sight and grinned. ‘I can almost hear him snoring. Time to go.’
He followed Aleta down the gangplank and together they crossed the dimly lit concrete dock to the safety of the closest warehouse. O’Connor checked the taxi again and then led the way between two warehouse buildings, and on past some oil storage-tanks. Even at four in the morning, the road tankers were lined up to refuel, so O’Connor and Aleta kept to the shadows, making their way along the dirt easement beside the oil pipes. Ten minutes later, they reached a back-road entrance and walked for another kilometre on a dirt road that ran past a housing estate.
‘Seems like quite a wealthy area,’ O’Connor observed, with a nod of his head towards the houses with pools, which had been built on the series of canals, most with their own jetty.
‘Puerta de Hierro’s eclectic and deceptive,’ Aleta replied, pulling the wheel of her bag out of a pothole in the dirt road. ‘Houses are a lot cheaper in Guatemala, and the big shipping companies subsidise their employees. This is all part of the Maria Linda River, and a little further down the coast is Iztapa, which means ‘river of salt’; there are lots of saltpans. But many of the Guatemalans on the other side of Highway 9 are dirt poor,’ she said, nodding towards the main road. To the east the sky was just beginning to lighten behind the jungle-clad mountains of the highlands.
The bus terminal was small by Guatemalan standards, and just four vehicles were loading – old retired US school buses reincarnated as part of the Guatemalan transport system.
O’Connor scanned the bus terminal while Aleta approached the ayudante, the ‘driver’s helper’ on the nearest bus. ‘Escuintla?’ Aleta asked, looking for the bus that would take them to the next big town.
‘No. That one over there,’ the ayudante said with a big smile, pointing to a brightly coloured bus with ‘Linda’ painted in vivid turquoise on the top of the windscreen, and on the back and sides. The rest of the bus was painted in bright reds and yellows, and the chrome on the old International reflected the lights of the bus terminal. Painted yellow flames issued from the below the big square hood.
The next ayudante offered to put their bags on the roof of the bus with the rest of the menagerie: baskets, tyres, chairs, tables, brightly coloured canvas bags, empty paint cans and assorted parcels of varying sizes wrapped in bright-blue plastic.
Aleta shook her head and slipped him a five-quetzale note, the equivalent of about sixty cents. The ayudante smiled and helped Aleta onto the bus with her bag. Not that she needed to have tipped him to ensure they could take their bags on. She had to ease her way down the aisle of the already crowded bus past two pigs, a large sack of carrots, three sacks of potatoes and a caged rooster. O’Connor stacked the backpacks containing the precious figurines in the luggage rack above them, and they took an empty bench seat in front of a woman in traje, the traditional dress of her village: a colourful handwoven huipil blouse, and the long corte skirt secured with a woven belt – the whole a kaleidoscope of tangerines, purples, aquamarines, scarlets and mustard yellows.
Twenty minutes later, the chicken bus pulled out of Puerta de Hierro, leaving a cloud of black smoke in its wake.
49
A gentle swell broke over a darkened Point Sal on the Californian coast, to the north of Santa Barbara. Two hours behind Guatemala City, the Point Sal beach was deserted. The security guards had cleared and secured the area just before dusk. Further south, a huge eighteen-metre-high LGM-30 Minuteman nuclear missile stood ready in test-launch silo Lima Foxtrot-26 at the northern end of Vandenberg Air Force Base. The heavy concrete slab on top of the silo was still closed; the gleaming missile beneath it weighing thirty tonnes. The missile’s range of 13 000 kilometres was more than enough to hit any target in Russia, China, Korea or the Middle East; and on the few occasions that a target might be out of reach, the US Navy’s Ohio-class nuclear-powered submarines were on continuous deployment, equipped with Trident nuclear missiles, which could be launched from beneath the surface of the ocean. America had the world well covered, and although this morning’s launch would not include a nuclear warhead, the experiment being directed out of Gakona would serve to boost America’s position as the dominant world power. A short distance away, in a heavily guarded hangar, technicians were already working on another Minuteman missile, the casing of which would act as a lens to deflect the high-powered ELF beam into Iran.
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dan Williams checked the digital clock in the control centre. He knew this was no normal test, and the tall lanky commander of the 576th Flight Test Squadron could feel the tension in the room. The 5.15 a.m. test flight was shrouded in secrecy, not least because the missile track would take it over populated areas of the United States and Canada, across Alaska and out to the north of Siberia. Williams glanced at the tracking screen above the array of consoles and computer screens that monitored every aspect of the launch. All going well, a powerful burst of electromagnetic radiation from the base in Gakona would deflect the missile back into the Arctic Ocean, to the north of the Beaufort Sea. Williams turned to Captain Chavez, the young electronics whiz who’d been assigned as the missile-test launch director.
‘Pass to Gakona: ready for launch.’
Chavez acknowledged the command and Williams reached for the secure handset that would connect him to Looking Glass, the modified 707 Boeing E6-Mercury command and control aircraft cruising at 29 000 feet above the launch silo. Tonight, in addition to its crew of twenty-two, Looking Glass was carrying a two-star admiral as the Airborne Emergency Action Officer, or AEAO. Should an attack on the United States knock out nuclear ground-control stations in the Pentagon, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and Site ‘R’ on Raven Rock Mountain in Pennsylvania, the AEAO on the ‘doomsday plane’ would be in position to assume the role of mission control.
‘ Looking Glass, this is launch director, over.’
‘Launch director, this is Looking Glass; loud and clear, over.’ The airborne launch colonel and captain were strapped into their seats at the command console, a suite of computer screens and control dials located behind the cockpit. It was just one of the many consoles in an E6-B cabin jammed with avionics that enabled the aircraft crew to monitor communications from super-high frequencies down to the very low frequencies critical for maintaining contact with nuclear-armed submarines. Each officer was entrusted with a separate key, both of which were required to execute a nuclear strike.
‘ Looking Glass, activate launch command on my mark: five, four, three two, one, mark.’ The launch colonel and captain nodded to one another and turned their keys. A high-speed burst transmission activated the control computers on the ground.