Ortiez blushed at the praise de Santiago heaped on him. He was not accustomed to such compliments. He endured the insults hurled his way by the Russians and the Iraqis and the American, all in their odd, staccato tongues.
“You are too kind, El Jefe. I merely do my job. You order and I follow. All is ready as you directed.”
He led the way through the open door into the hut then down the hidden passage into the laboratory. De Santiago and Dura shivered from the blast of chilled air blowing up the stairs to greet them. It was a brisk and refreshing change from the cloying heat and humidity of the jungle.
The gleaming, clean facility was empty, save the three men coming down the staircase. De Santiago raised an eyebrow as he looked about for his expensive scientific talent. Ortiez rushed to explain.
“I sent them all to work in the library for a few hours. From the nature of your instructions, I assumed it would be better if they were not aware of your visit.”
De Santiago smiled and nodded.
“As usual, you are most discerning. It would be better if no one knew we had come here. That would only raise curiosity about the nature of our visit.”
Ortiez fidgeted, then seemed to summon the courage to spit out a question on which he had been chewing.
“I must admit, I am curious why you want to take all the additive. To have the secret recipe leave this place. It is safe here.”
“Of course it is! This place will never be discovered by the Americanos or Guitteriz’ bastard army.” De Santiago punched the man on his shoulder playfully. “We have a pressing need for the additive now. We are including it in a new batch from one of our most secret factories. We still can’t trust the foreigners. Who knows when they might get homesick for their godforsaken homelands and try to flee our little paradise? They would die swiftly, but we cannot afford to have the recipe die with them. No, Jorge. This place is secure.”
Ortiez seemed to accept his leader’s explanation. He turned quickly and reached into a locker under one of the lab benches, retrieving a backpack. He handed it over to de Santiago.
“Here is everything, El Jefe. I have included all the procedures, both in printed hard copy and on a computer disk, as you asked. There is also sufficient additive here to enrich several tons of cocaine. It is all of our production for the last month. We have none left.”
De Santiago took the offered backpack.
“But it is so light. It can’t weigh more than ten kilos. Are you sure this is everything?”
“El Jefe, most of the weight is the paper for the formula print-out. There are only four kilos of the additive. Remember, it is very concentrated.”
De Santiago laughed and threw the backpack across his broad shoulders.
“So little will cause so much worry for our enemies.” He jumped up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Come, Alvene! We have far to ride before the sun sets.”
Without a word, Dura chased after him.
Jorge Ortiez shivered slightly in the chill of the air conditioning.
The satellite continued to process images of the scene, recording one every hour. It had successfully downloaded the images of two men crossing the small jungle clearing. A lone man emerged from the open space. He was coming from a small structure of some kind. It had sent down an image of the scene after they had all disappeared. It was processing an image showing two men saddling their horses.
John Bethea waited as the last image was painted on his computer screen.
No doubt about it now. There was something of definite interest in that lonely, remote part of the Colombian jungle.
Sophisticated and all seeing as the satellite was, there was no way it could tell him what was going on there. There was only one way. The old-fashioned way.
He would have to wait for Bill Beaman to drop in there and find out.
28
Dennis Kuhn slipped out of the darkened stateroom on tiptoes. Steve Friedman and Stan Guhl waited for him in the narrow passageway. The dim red light illuminated the three as they huddled together, whispering conspiratorially.
“Get it done?” Friedman asked under his breath.
Guhl glanced over at him, an evil gleam shining in his eye, and nodded.
“Yeah, he’ll never know what hit him. You ready?”
“Ready. All I have to do is turn the tape on. I recorded this 1MC announcement while we were running the casualty drills last week.”
Joe Glass stepped into the passageway just then and spied the three submariners huddled together, murmuring to each other. He stepped up and grabbed Kuhn by the shoulder.
“All right, what mischief are you three derelicts up to? I’m not giving you enough work to keep you busy?”
Kuhn held his finger to his lips.
“Shhh! You’ll spoil it, XO. You remember how particular the Nav is about always having his poopie suit ready to go, always hung up neatly on that middle hanger? Well, we switched poopie suits. We hung up Chris’ suit on Beasley’s hanger. We even changed the collar devices and dolphins so he won’t notice anything. I figure the Nav is at least eight inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than Chris is.” Kuhn wore a wide grin. “The fun is just about to begin.”
Steve Friedman pulled out a small tape deck and held it just outside the door to Earl Beasley’s stateroom. Kuhn and Guhl stepped into the wardroom with the XO.
“Watch this,” Kuhn whispered as he signaled to Friedman, who hit the “Play” button on the recorder.
“Red sounding! Red Sounding! Navigator, lay to control!”
The tiny machine blasted at a volume extraordinary for its size.
They could hear Earl Beasley as he bolted up in his bunk and bounded out in a state of near panic. A “red sounding” meant Spadefish was in very real danger of running aground immediately and that she was far from where she was supposed to be. They needed to take immediate and drastic action and the sub’s navigator was the expert to tell them what to do.
Beasley grabbed the poopie suit from its customary center hook and stepped out into the passageway to pull it on. In one smooth move, he put one leg into the coveralls, then the other, and tried to pull them up and over his back. The suit wasn’t coming up far enough. In his half-awake state, Beasley jerked hard on the sleeves to try to get the outfit on and zipped. He grunted as the poopie suit rode up tightly in his crotch and pulled his shoulders backward.
He jerked at the recalcitrant suit again, even harder this time. And that only resulted in considerably more discomfort.
His sleep-shrouded mind slowly registered that there were three officers standing at the end of the short passageway, laughing at him and his efforts to get dressed. Just behind them, the XO stood, shaking his head.
Beasley dropped his grip on the much-too-small uniform. It fell to the deck as he shook his fist at Kuhn.
“Eng, you son of a bitch! I’ll get even with you for this! You scared me to death!” he yelped, but only half in anger.
Kuhn could barely speak, he was laughing so hard.
“Nav, that’s payback for the shoe polish trick. Way I have it figured, we’re about even now,” he was finally able to choke out.
Little Chris Durgan stepped into the passageway then.
“You children done playing now? I need my poopie suit back. I got work to do.”
His words sent the three men into another fit of wild laughter when they saw the shorter man in Beasley’s coveralls, the stride halfway to his knees, the legs puddled around his feet, and the sleeves long on his arms.
Even Joe Glass had to laugh.
Carlos Ramirez sat across the small wooden table from Jason Rashad, playing idly with a beer coaster. The bar was dark, almost empty. The cold Seattle drizzle had reduced the light weekday evening traffic in this suburban watering hole even more. A brass wall lamp barely illuminated the two as they sat hidden in the back corner of the bar. They were removed from the late-evening customers seated around the bar, discussing the stock market or the latest hot IP
O. The noise of the game show on the television set suspended over the far side of the bar masked the two men’s conversation.
They stopped talking when the bartender placed two glasses of dark beer and a basket of pretzels on the table. They remained silent until the man scurried back to his haven behind the granite-topped bar.
“I have heard from our friends down south,” Ramirez resumed quietly. “It’s time to put everything in motion. The first shipment arrives in five days. Are we ready?”
The black man smiled and fingered his nose ring.
“Ready as we’ll ever be. Our customers were balking at a fifty-percent-advance fee structure. I persuaded them of the advantages of the arrangement.” He took a long swallow from his beer and smacked his lips. “There was one small problem. I’m afraid we are short one middleman now. Seems our distributor for Detroit had an acute attack of lead poisoning during the negotiations. It was fatal. The others were very eager to cover his action, though.”
“Good, good,” Ramirez nodded, not concerned by the murder. He was confident the task had been necessary. Its execution accomplished properly.
“One thing, though,” Rashad said. “I thought we were going to take it slow, get the product out here, make sure the additive was doing what it was supposed to do. Why are we bringing in all the distributors so soon?”
“Don’t ask me. I just do what de Santiago tells me to do. If I didn’t know better, I’d say El Jefe needs some cash in a hurry. Maybe he needs some curtains for the hacienda.” Ramirez took his own swig of beer and chewed on a pretzel for a moment. “We make our dough quicker this way so who gives a shit? And we’ll be back in business in no time.” He winked and grinned at Rashad. Then he turned serious. “I know you had to rush up your plan. How’s it going with the receipt and delivery operation?”
Rashad drained the beer from his glass before answering, then licked the foam from the rim.
“Got a handle on it, boss. We’re gonna land everything down at that old Navy testing facility on Carr Inlet. It hasn’t been used for anything in years but a shithouse for the seagulls. Coupla big buildings there to hide the trucks in.”
Ramirez nodded and studied the condensation from his beer mug that had pooled up on the table.
“Sounds okay. But one thing still worries me. How are we going to get that many trucks in and out of there without anybody noticing anything?”
“Figured we do it right under their noses in broad daylight. Trucks're all painted like UPS delivery trucks. Baby-shit brown. Nobody’ll see one or two extra runnin’ around out there.”
Ramirez took a long pull on his beer.
“Start moving them in. Shipment arrives Monday. Make sure the security is very tight. I don’t want anything happening to this stuff. We’ve got too much invested in it. No slipups.”
He gave Rashad a long, meaningful glare. There was no mistaking the message he was trying to impart. The big black man nodded slightly and hoped he had made his boss as confident as he was that everything would go according to plan.
Ramirez rose, tossed a crisp, new hundred-dollar bill on the table, turned on a heel, and walked out of the bar.
Rashad shook his head ruefully, picked up the hundred and left a wrinkled ten and two ones. Some things the boss would never learn. A bartender would remember two guys, off in a corner by themselves, talking quietly, then leaving a ninety-dollar tip for a couple of brews.
And Jason Rashad, of all people, knew how dangerous it could be to be remembered.
Jim Priutt banked the P-3C hard left. The big four-engine airplane leveled out. He turned to Randy Dalton, his co-pilot.
“That damn Japanese sub has to be around here someplace. I feel like we’ve searched every square inch of water between SoCal and Hawaii. He has to be hiding in the noise of that freighter.” He pointed downward at a darker gray silhouette that was pitching and bucking on a gray, rolling sea, struggling to the northwest. “Let’s take a look. Sensors ready to drop another search pattern? We’ll drop ten thousand yards in front of it and let it steam through the pattern.”
Dalton looked over his shoulder, back down the passageway of the old plane. Jess Carmon gave him a thumbs-up.
“Yep, Skipper. Ready to drop in auto as soon as you arm the pickle. I’m sure glad we’re up here and not down there in that crap.”
Rain lashed across the windshield of the low flying aircraft. It bumped and yawed with the wind. It was far rougher down there on the ocean’s surface.
Pruitt lifted up the small red cover from over a switch on his right control handle then flipped it on.
“Pickle is hot. Steady course two-seven-five.”
Priutt heard Carmon’s voice coming crisply over the headset.
“Stand by for auto-pattern drop. Stand by. Commencing drop now.”
The P-3C flew on through the rain and clouds. Six sonobuoys were ejected from beneath the aircraft, one after another, in a computer-controlled sequence. The AN/SSQ-53 DIFAR sonobuoys parachuted to the water below then dropped a hydrophone on a long wire to listen deep under the storm-tossed Pacific. The main body of the buoy stayed on the surface, bobbing about in the churning seas. A thin wire antenna shot out of the top of each one.
Carmen spoke into his microphone.
“Skipper, I have six live buoys on the link, but I don’t know how long I can keep them in this sea state.”
“Just do the best you can, Jess. We’ll go back upstairs to do an ISAR search. Shep, keep your eyes peeled. If that Japanese is shallow, he may get sucked to the surface in this sea state. I’d like to catch him if he does.”
Pruitt pulled back on the control yoke. The big gray bird climbed slowly until the low cloud layer swallowed it up. The sea disappeared from view. There was a light gray wall outside, exactly the same color as the P-3C.
Kevin Sheppard looked up from his screen and nodded.
“I’m ready, Skipper. Taking the radar from ‘Standby’ to ‘ISAR search.’ Going to the two hundred-mile-range scale.” He flipped a couple of switches. The large CRT screen in front of him developed into a picture of the seas below. “Skipper, we’re radiating. Only return is that freighter and a lot of sea-return.”
“Okay, keep your eyes peeled.”
The crew sat back for the long wait. Hunting submarines was a game of strategy, guesswork, and waiting. Pruitt had once tried to explain the gratification of a successful sub hunt to his fighter-jock friends. He compared his game to one of chess, theirs to a kid’s video arcade game. He had given up when he realized the jet pilots lived in a split-second world of instant gratification while his was a slower paced one, a snail-paced competition. One where he could savor each gambit.
To each his own.
The airplane flew a large circle through an all gray world. Three engines turned to keep her aloft. The operators watched their equipment, electronically slicing through the gray to search the sea beneath it for its hidden secrets.
“Skipper, buoy three is hot!” Carmen yelled. “Positive contact. Bearing two-four-three.” He watched the information develop on his screen. “Hey, wait a minute! This ain’t that Japanese boat! These lines equate to a Sturgeon class. This has to be our old friends on Spadefish.”
“Are you sure?” Pruitt shot back. “Any chance the Japanese are spoofing us?”
Carmen did not hesitate in his answer.
“Skipper, ain’t no doubt. If you don’t believe me, come back here and look for yourself.”
Pruitt looked over at Dalton. He didn’t need to go back and look at the display. If Carmen said there was a Spanish galleon down there, it damn sure would be.
“What the hell? Spadefish isn’t playing in our little jamboree. What are they doing out here? Get on the horn and tell the TSC what we have. We’ll let them sort it out.”
The Tactical Support Center was located in a cinderblock building back on North Island. From there, the ASW Area Commander directed the airborne search for submarines, and that included Jim Pruitt
’s aircraft. From the relative comfort of a desk that didn’t move about with the pitching of the sea or the eddy of upper air currents, they could see the big picture. That picture didn’t include the broad red stripe through the area drawn for Spadefish’s safe transit. They couldn’t help the aircrew.
Dalton turned to Pruitt to report that fact.
“TSC doesn’t have any report of Spadefish being out here.”
“Then I guess we’re just gonna have to ask her what she’s doing ourselves. We don’t want her running up on that Japanese sub before we do!”
Ward held on tightly to the chrome rail around the periscope stand. The rocking and pitching of the sub at periscope depth was worse than it had been the last time they came up to look and talk. The storm was building. It made these trips up to near the surface uncomfortable.
“What do you have, Mr. Durgan?”
“Looks to be a sea state five, building to a six. I’m guessing these waves are twenty to thirty feet tall. I can’t see the Helena K at all anymore. Visibility down to maybe four thousand yards in this rain.”
Ray Mendoza spoke over the 21MC.
“Conn, Sonar. We’re losing signal in this sea state. I’m tracking now in manual, buzzing bearings. Not enough signal for ATF. Skipper, we’ll never be able to keep it all sorted out when we get closer to where the fleets are playing.”
Ward grabbed the swinging microphone. The nose of the sub pitched downward in a roller, slamming him hard into the sonar repeater. He managed to keep his feet.
“Do the best you can, Master Chief. We’ll try to stay close.”
Spadefish rolled sharply to starboard. A loud crash of broken pottery followed by a yelp and a string of curses from Cookie Dotson came from the galley, down in middle level. That foretold a disaster for lunch.
Dan Larson reported through the open microphone.
“Conn, ESM. I’m picking up an ISAR radar. Signal strength five. I’m guessing we have a P3 pretty close.”
Final Bearing Page 35
