But with perhaps two hours of sun left, Jorge had also covered a broad swath of the sparse sandy landscape, some two kilometers of it, dodging cactus as well as less hostile shrubbery. He was wondering whether Mateo had taken his work seriously, also wondering whether he had gone too far to hear a gunshot, when he saw a shadow cross a hummock ahead of him. The shadow was far too vast to portend any living thing. Jorge looked up and saw the monster bird instantly, no more than a hundred feet above him.
It was a creature so stunning, so terrifyingly enormous, that Jorge Ocampo simply stared with his jaw agape. But it produced a sound like a soft wind though its wings did not beat as it wheeled almost overhead, and when it came still lower something happened to its plumage. It was no longer plumage at all, but a dull gray with faint glitters of late sun from a million points on its hide, and now that he saw that the thing was an airplane, Jorge’s eyes picked out the faint outline of a cockpit bubble. I must have imagined that it wore a bird’s plumage; the error of a poor observer, and one not to be mentioned. Jorge began to run in a steady trot toward the landing strip long before he heard a single gunshot, multiplied by faint, flat echoes.
There had been a time when such a run would not have winded him, but Jorge arrived at the strip breathless. He had seen the airplane’s first slow, floating passage down the length of the landing strip, and its second pass somewhat higher as it crossed over the shed, continuing low over the scrub until it disappeared. El lobo was already standing on the strip’s grassy verge, peering at a gray, creased placard of some sort, and Mateo approached with his trousers wet to the thighs.
Jorge, with forced breathing to flood his oxygen-starved tissues, heard the rumble of Russian curses as he realized Karel Vins was reading from the inner face of a flimsy cardboard container. “I saw nothing on my patrol but that monster airplane,” Jorge reported. “Me, I think the man is truly alone.”
Vins glanced at Mateo, who only offered an elaborate shrug by way of a patrol report. “You may be right,” Vins muttered. “He must have seen me wave; he dropped this on his second pass. Certainly not the message of a man who came prepared.”
Jorge saw the scribbles penciled onto the gray cardboard. “What does it say?”
“It is in English,” Vins replied. “He demands that we place the money one hundred meters from the far end of the strip, and stand together at this end until he has landed to take the ransom. He must think we are fools.”
Mateo: “But if he is afoot, Lobo”
“That airplane, I am told, can rise like a helicopter gunship. He could fly off with the money before we could get within gunshot range. No, thank you.”
“Ahh,” Jorge said. El lobo had explained much in few words, for any airplane that could do such wondrous things might indeed be worth such a ransom. “So what do we do? Shoot him down?”
Vins held his silence for a long moment, sweeping the horizon with his gaze, before answering as if to himself. “We must take the aircraft intact. This man Medina is improvising now. I think, if he sees the money through those net sacks, his greed will make him landeven if I am standing next to the money. Yes, that is what we shall do. We can assume he is armed, and he must have seen my Uzi. I shall place it far out of reach on the dirt. You two, go to the other end of the strip and wait.”
Jorge: “You will face him unarmed?”
“I am never unarmed,” Vins said with his wolf’s grin. Jorge nodded. He had not seen el lobo’s sidearm during the entire mission, but of course the man would keep one. He watched Vins select a key, open the trunk of the blue Ford, and lift out the bags of cheap jute net full of Swiss banknotes.
Then Jorge walked toward the end of the dirt strip with the laconic Mateo Carranza.
Jorge saw the thing come out of the sun five minutes later, settling low over the water, awesome in its silence. El lobo stood waving. This time the vast wings seemed almost to flap as the aircraft banked away in a long, slow circle over the marsh, returning a minute later, passing almost over Karel Vins who seemed to be shading his eyes before he ran forward toward something that fluttered to the ground after the monster began to climb into the heavens.
It seemed to Jorge that this whole operation was turning to muck under his feet. He thought perhaps el lobo had begun to hold the same opinion when Vins, trudging back like a peon with the ransom of a king over one shoulder, whistled a familiar old call. He did not feel much like taking any more orders but, “A sus ordenes, Lobo,” he said as he and Mateo reached the shed.
Vins flashed another piece of torn cardboard, brightly colored on one side, gray on the other. On the gray side were four letters: a single word. “He wishes us to wait,” Vins grumbled in Spanish, dropping the money into the car’s trunk and slamming the lid.
Now Mateo spoke up. “He will return, then.”
The eyes of el lobo searched the sky. “I am certain he saw the money; who would not return for that? But he has turned very, very cautious for a man who has dared so much. He could force a change in our tactics. And our tactics may depend on just how long we have to wait.” Jorge studied the Russian’s face and saw no duplicity there, but simple frustration.
FORTY-THREE
Corbett’s face remained impassive until he had studied the terrain thoroughly from three thousand feet, but once he had made his choice, the corners of his mouth began to develop smile lines as he pursued his stratagem. Some of that grass in the salt marshes stood higher than a man could reach, thick as cattails and sharp-edged enough to slice a man’s skin unless he moved carefully. To go touring through that stuff, a man had to be highly motivated. The grass was capable of supporting a very light load if it were well distributedacross, say, sixty feet of ultralight wing. It would compress a bit. Well, so much the better, up to a point. He wafted Black Stealth One in its pixel mode over the protective sandbar, almost grazing the surface, keeping a dunelike rise of ground between himself and the distant landing strip. The hellbug nosed deep into dense marsh grass less than a hundred feet from shore, roughly a mile from that scabrous little landing strip.
He reasoned that the man his IR scanner had picked up out in the scrub would probably be the Russki’s ace in the hole, maybe a sniper. He’d been on the other side of the landing strip, though, on foot; certainly not in a position to see the hellbug slide into its grassy nest.
The Russians had two small cars in that shed. Corbett had seen two other cars within a few miles of this spot, one an abandoned hulk close by near the road, the other a windowless old VW a mile or so out in the scrub, perhaps dumped years before from the look of it. He had hoped for, but not really expected, one or two men; if more than three or four, the risk would have been unacceptable. So quit worrying about what you might’ve done; too many ifs and you might chicken out. This bunch puts your chances on the very margin of sweet reason. The access road stretched away to his left, and the vintage Chevy lay just beyond the road. From the distant shed, a man would not be able to see the old car unless he walked to a nearby rise of sandy turf. Without that obscuring rise, Corbett would have had only the dry brush for cover.