Medina had said the “Bulgarian” looked like a tough, smart customer. Chances were, he wasn’t Bulgarian at all; KGB, most likely, and he wouldn’t be alone. After the old switcheroo at Regocijo, taking Blue Sky Three from there to a rigged crash near Llano Mojado, did Medina really expect them just to assume he drowned? You’ll have to get cute; check the area for signs of ambush. We’ll have to talk it over, Speedy. With only a set of map coordinates for the Llano Mojado strip and no previous landings there, Medina would need eyes in the back of his head once he waded ashore.
But Corbett cursed, those plans forgotten instantly, after he soared past Regocijo and spotted the old deactivated spook airstrip. Its hangar had been a big structure of dry old wood, now only a smear of blackened debris collapsed in on the concrete floor. Corbett, his throat dry as toast, made three successively lower passes over it, the last into the wind at a trifling speed less than fifty feet above charred timbers, before he knew that someone had died in that ruin.
His passage might have been noiseless to a man, but not to the sharper senses of vultures, and to the gaunt coyote that burst out of the wreckage and skulked off at a lope. Corbett saw three buzzards hopping across smoke-blackened concrete like gargoyles in a frantic effort to take off with full bellies, and he got a glimpse of what had drawn their attention. Sickened, he climbed a hundred yards before using the IR scanner.
The burned-out hangar showed no trace of residual heat, not even as much as the coyote which had not skulked far off. Corbett’s eye traced the outlines of something that had once been a graceful craft of wood and plastic, now ash and glistening filament, partially covered by sections of burnt roof.
He wanted to land, because a careful foray into the debris might tell him more. But, Got a bad feeling about that, he thought. Uncle Sugar sure didn’t do this, and if the Sovs did, how do you know they haven’t booby-trapped the fucking place? There’s not a soul here and that in itself is suspiciousbut then, this is mańana land. Wonder whose remains those are next to the airplane. The old caretaker, probably. Shit! This means you have to ransom the hellbug itself if you want that money. And you haven’t got Medina now; nor those gas cartridges either.
With one final slow, skimming pass over the wreckage, he assured himself that the remains had been human. Whoever did this, they wouldn’t be Americans and they’ve killed somebody already. The odds are, those same people are waiting at Llano Mojado. In fact, maybe this was their way of saying, “We know about your clever switch, and this is what we think of it; we want Black Stealth One, or nothing.” Yeah, that figures.
He sent the hellbug climbing, fully aware that temporary safety lay within reach, near San Luis Potosi. The place had become his home and maybe he would simply have to trust someone to keep his secret there. And what a load of shit that is; if you believe that, you’d believe anything! Hiding near San Luis as a man with modest means and this mind-bending airplane simply isn’t an option, so put it out of your head. The question now, is whether you go on to Llano Mojado and try to flimflam the people who invented flimflam.
But by the time he reached cruise altitude he had cut through his rationalizations; knew that possession of only Black Stealth One, or only the money, would leave him forever embittered at his own failure, not the failure to win but the failure to try. The question of confronting that Sov paymaster was not, and never had been, a matter of “whether.” The only question was “how.”
FORTY-TWO
Jorge Ocampo, squinting against the afternoon sun, shoved his battered hat onto the back of his head and leaned his fishing rod against the shed wall. El lobo has spent much of this day sending us on childish errands. And some of them no longer make sense, he reflected when Vins had finished giving new orders. Aloud, Jorge asked, “Are we searching for a boat, or a man?”
“Either,” Vins assured him, “or both. Perhaps more than one man.”
Mateo Carranza, spooning beans directly from a can onto a tortilla, said, “We have searched for men already, Lobo. It sounds as if you know something you have not told us.”
My thought exactly, thought Jorge. This Russian is not the same man I knew, and perhaps the money has changed him. He gives us no credit for brains; leads us here and there like burros. If he has brought us here as sacrifices, I shall put a bullet in him.
Vins stood up, brushing crumbs from his thighs, and folded his arms as he let his gaze sweep the marshlands. “It is only a suspicion, a feeling I have. And I have learned to trust my suspicions. If this man Medina is cunning enough to put an airplane in our hands, he is not so stupid as to arrive without some kind of support. So,” he said, and waved both hands to indicate the countryside. “Where is that support?”
Jorge’s eyes followed the wave. “He must be so cunning that we will not see it until the man wishes us to,” he shrugged, and rolled himself a bean sandwich.
“I will not accept that,” Vins said. “We simply must be more cunning than he is.” He chose a key and unlocked the trunk of the blue Ford. “Something is out here. I know it. We have only to find it.”
Jorge chewed as he looked into that trunk, looking not at the submachine guns ranked inside, nor the direction-finder units with loop antennae for tracking money, but at the three net bags of paper money el lobo had let them count into almost equal piles, and then he swallowed, though he did not taste the frijoles. He was tasting the money.
Jorge accepted a stubby little Uzi from Vins without a word and watched Mateo take one as well. The short, wire-stocked Israeli weapon was heavier than an American M16 and had a shorter range, but three of them could be hidden in a single piece of luggage and the Uzi’s reliability was a legend. You keep the weapons inside a locked trunk in between patrols. Why, Lobo? I know why; and a man who no longer trusts his squad is a man I no longer trust. With all this money lying about, you have become more coyote than wolf.
Still, it was clear that Vins had lost none of his shrewdness. “Mateo, you will see the water’s edge with fresh eyes because you have not investigated it. Look carefully for signs of a boat, probably not within sight of the runway. We meet back here at dusk; sooner if the airplane arrives. Jorge, you and I will move out from a central point in the brush. He who finds a vehicle, shoot once to signal.”
Mateo: “And he who finds a man?”
Vins: “Shoot to kill. We do not want more than one man to chase, later.” He motioned for Jorge, who fell in step as they marched toward the scrub.
They had not walked thirty paces when Mateo called, “And what if the man is one of your own? You said it was possible.”
“I have only two men,” Vins called back. “If you shoot anyone else’s, it is their problem.”
Jorge did not often hear Karel Vins chuckle to himself as he did now, striding into the brush. You say you are a patriot, yet you would willingly shoot a man from your own country, a man like yourself, thought Jorge. Me, I think perhaps you do not like men like yourself. And then Jorge understood. “A dead GRU man would be one fewer to chase us. Correct?”
Vins did not reply, but his heavy-lidded glance endorsed the notion. Presently, Vins made a hand gesture as if patting an invisible dog, commanding silence as he turned away. Jorge watched him for a moment, in grudging admiration. Coyote or lobo, Vins knew how to move through brush with no sound that would carry more than a few yards, watching where he stepped, avoiding branches when he could, holding and releasing them with silent hands when avoidance was impossible. I would not want to be the man you hunt, Jorge thought as he began his own reconnaissance. And you turned your back on my Uzi, Lobo. Perhaps you can be trusted after all Jorge tried to think like a sniper, skirting every likely hummock and thicket, checking each one thoroughly and taking his time to do it right. Now and then he paused, as el lobo had taught him in earlier campaigns, squatting to listen. He did not want to hear a Ford Escort engine because that would mean Karel Vins had doubled back, after all his talk of patriotism, to take the money and leave alone. In fact, he did not want to think about it, and so he could not help thinking about it. Jorge did a lot of listening in the next hour or so.