“How’s Alisio paying for it?”
“Like we suspected, it’s a combination of bullion, diamonds, and cash. Two million in Philharmonics, two million in round brilliants, and two million in US cash. A DPRK gemologist is going to examine the coins and diamonds for authenticity. It’s gonna take several hours because there’s four hundred diamonds to check and fifteen hundred gold coins.”
“Does Mason know everything you just told me?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s the exchange taking place?”
“Everyone’s tight-lipped, but my friend told me something about an abandoned borrow pit just north of Yuma. Everyone’s buzzing about it because Mr. A’s gonna be there.”
“In person? Are you sure?”
“That’s the scuttlebutt. He left yesterday; that’s why I’m able to call you like this. The exchange is going down right after sunset tonight. That’s all I could get without raising suspicion. I’m pretty sure I heard the word ‘reservoir’ a few times. Do you want me to press?”
“No, don’t risk it. I’ll follow up from here. Are you sure you’re not compromised? No one’s following you or acting strangely?”
“No. Everything’s normal.”
“I think Mason’s planning to ambush the exchange.”
“That’s crazy. Mr. A took a small army with him.”
“How many, best guess?”
“At least ten. His first and second LTs are with him.”
“Well, Mason’s on his own now. I’ve cut him off.”
“Will he blow my cover?”
Beaumont hesitated. “I don’t think he would normally. He respects you a lot. He told me you were his favorite graduate. Having said that, there’s still no telling what he’ll do. Especially if things go badly at the exchange. I’d feel better if you staged somewhere.”
“I can’t. I’m in charge until Mr. A gets back.”
“He may not be coming back.”
“Does that mean what I think it means?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You’re two hours ahead of Pacific time. Tonight at seven, Mexico City time, I want you to make some kind of excuse and get the hell out of there.”
“Forever?”
“I don’t know yet. It may not be safe at Alisio’s compound tonight. The place could be swarming with PFM agents. It’s better if you’re not there. Do you need anything, any arrangements?”
“No, I’m all set. I’ve been ready for this for months.”
“You’ve done a terrific job. I’m going to make sure you receive a healthy bonus. I’m giving you the money Mason, Hahn, and Lyons would’ve gotten this year. It’s the least I can do, given what you’ve risked.”
“Thank you, George. I appreciate it. I really miss my mom and dad. I haven’t seen them in two years.”
“Soon enough.”
“Man, I never saw this coming.”
“That makes both of us.”
“Is there anything I can do to help you between now and tonight?”
“Since Mason already knows about the real delivery, there’s nothing you can do. I’ll make this brief, but here’s what’s going to happen.” Ramiro didn’t interrupt while Beaumont laid out his plan.
“Who are these guys?” Ramiro asked.
“Retired Recons.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Two? You’re kidding.”
“They’ll have an FBI agent with them.”
“A SWAT guy?”
“Not exactly.”
Ramiro didn’t say anything, but Beaumont knew what his man was thinking—it’s a suicide mission.
“These guys aren’t your typical retired grunts.”
“For their sakes, let’s hope not. I don’t need to tell you what Mr. A will do to them if he takes them alive. I’m assuming they know about me?”
“Yes.” Beaumont knew Ramiro was worried about being given up under torture. “You’ve done great work down there. You’ve saved countless lives on both sides of the border.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Stay sharp. Assume nothing. I want you out of there if anyone even looks at you funny.”
“No problem. I’m ready.”
“I’ll see you stateside in a few days. Make contact after you cross the border.”
George Beaumont hung up and looked at the passenger sitting across the aisle.
Neither of them spoke. It wasn’t needed.
They were both thinking the same thing.
CHAPTER 33
Nathan lifted off from Montgomery Field with Harv and Grangeland twenty minutes after receiving Lansing’s call. He’d half expected Beaumont or his father to participate on the call, but Lansing said he’d attempted to reach them and gotten thrown into voice mail.
Lansing had given them GPS coordinates, describing their destination as an abandoned rock quarry, or borrow pit as they were sometimes called. The quarry sat approximately fifteen miles north of Yuma, Arizona. Lansing had thoroughly checked the satellite photos, and only one location fit Ramiro’s description.
Harv’s preliminary flight planning indicated it was approximately 150 miles to their destination. If they pushed the Bell 407’s engine a little, they could make it in seventy-five minutes, plus or minus. Given the timing of Ramiro’s earlier conversation with Mason, Nathan believed they’d arrive at least an hour before Mason, Hahn, and Lyons could possibly get there.
Having a helicopter and the ability to pilot it was a huge speed advantage, but Nathan knew it still didn’t offer much of a margin. They had to land at a safe distance, conceal the ship, hump over to the pit on foot, and then find tactical locations to set up their shooting positions.
The weather remained a positive aspect. Conditions were perfect. The previous night’s rain had cleared the air, and bright sunshine dominated the entire southwest quadrant of the country. Nathan hadn’t flown in several weeks, and lifting off reminded him how much he enjoyed flying and the feeling of freedom it offered.
Though Harv had only been licensed for a few years, he’d become a skilled pilot. In some ways, he was better than Nathan. Harv had an instinctive feel for performing autorotations, a crucial procedure pilots had to master in the event of an engine failure or other mechanical problems. Fortunately, it rarely happened, but Nathan supposed all pilots, both fixed wing and rotary wing, felt the same underlying fear. Flying wasn’t like driving; you couldn’t just pull over to the curb when the engine stopped.
Despite her hesitation to travel in helicopters, Grangeland was a good passenger. If she felt any unease, she hid it well, and after an uneventful flight following the I-8 corridor, they reached an expanse of sand dunes on the outskirts of Yuma. Harv told Nathan to fly a course of zero-five-nine.
Harv studied the chart for a few seconds, then pointed. “Head for the second line of peaks. The borrow pit should be just north of them.”
Fifteen minutes later, Harv gave a course correction to the east.
Nathan slowed to fifty knots as he approached their target area. “I see the quarry. Eleven o’clock at two miles.”
“Got it,” Harv said. “We’ll need to turn south before we reach the river to avoid entering Yuma Proving Ground’s airspace. After you make the turn, stay west of the river. We’ll maintain that heading for a minute or two before turning around and retracing our path. I don’t think we should risk orbiting the area. Someone could be down there.”
Nathan flew directly over the center of the quarry.
“I’m getting some good video footage. We’ll take a look after we land.”
A few miles southeast of the quarry, Harv told him to turn around and head back. Nathan executed a steep 180-degree turn, increasing the g-force.
Grangel
and groaned, but she didn’t sound as bad as the first time they’d flown together.
“You okay back there?” Nathan asked.
“Yeah, I think so. Can you keep the maneuvering to a minimum?”
“Sorry. No more steep turns, I promise.”
“Thanks. I didn’t take any Dramamine. It makes me a little drowsy, and I want to be fully alert.”
“Here we go, Nate. Twenty seconds to the turn . . . ”
“I’m on it.”
“Right about . . . here.”
Nathan gently pushed the cyclic to the left, added some left pedal, and watched the compass spin.
Sitting on Nathan’s left, Harv filmed the quarry’s southern hemisphere as they overflew it in the opposite direction.
Nathan burned the landscape into his head, making mental notes of the prominent geographical features. Accessed by a dirt road that wound its way up a canyon, there was no mistaking the borrow pit’s distinctive form—a giant, craterlike wound on the south side of a mountain. A lake, about the size of a soccer field, dominated the center of the pit.
The pit had roughly the same size and shape as a football stadium. At the open end of its south hemisphere—where the water nearly flowed out—several small buildings stood in various stages of decay. A rusty conveyor for moving and piling excavated earth had collapsed. Some wrecked hulks of cars dotted the area. The pit’s access road terminated at a large expanse of level ground where the buildings, the cars, and the collapsed conveyor sat.
It was hard to judge, but Nathan believed the overall depth of the quarry was somewhere around 150 feet measured from the highest point on its north rim. Thirty-foot-high terraces ringed the pit, each terrace measuring some thirty to forty feet wide. A fall from one of those ledges would break bones and likely be fatal. The man-made cliffs were nearly vertical.
Nathan saw a separate road following the rim of the quarry, but it didn’t connect to the tiers below. About a quarter mile west of the pit, they overflew another road running north and south, but it didn’t appear to be associated with the quarry.
The more Nathan thought about it, the more this place made sense. It was an ideal location to conduct business away from prying eyes, but only if sentries were posted along the rim. Otherwise, it could become a shooting gallery. It was defensible and isolated. Conversely, there was only one way in, or out, of the place.
“What do you guys think?” Nathan asked.
“It looks like a prime spot,” Harv offered, voicing his exact thoughts on the high sniping positions.
“Grangeland?”
“I agree with Harvey. I’d definitely want shooters overlooking the pit. From the west rim, they’d have a clear line of sight along the access road all the way to the Colorado River.”
“Harv, how far’s the river?”
“I’d say . . . two miles.”
“Did anyone see any vehicles in the immediate area surrounding the quarry?”
“Besides the junked cars . . . no,” said Grangeland. “But I saw a few cars and RVs parked at the river. It looked like a campground. There were some tents. I’m pretty sure I saw boat ramps at both of the lakes.”
“Those would be Squaw Lake and Senator Wash Reservoir,” Harv said. “I’ve camped here before, a long time ago. Squaw is the smaller lake below the dam.”
“Did you film those?” Nathan asked Harv.
“Yeah, I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“We’ll land a mile west of the quarry, take a look at your footage, and hump in from there.”
“Let’s hope your ballistic vests are . . . improved models,” Grangeland said.
“Indeed they are,” Harv said. “We upgraded them right after your incident.”
“Great timing,” she said dryly.
Nathan didn’t have the heart to tell Grangeland that Mason and crew were probably using armor-piercing rounds; she didn’t need the added distraction.
“Start descending,” Harv said. “I spotted a good place to land on our first pass.”
“Power lines?” Nathan asked.
“Negative, no poles or transmission towers are present. Turn to two-three-zero, keep descending.”
Nathan slowed and bled off more altitude. “I see it—that dry wash?”
“Yep.”
“Looks good. We’re going to kick up a sizable dust cloud. Grangeland, do you see any cars or people?”
Her voice sounded tight. “No.”
Nathan slowed and continued to descend. The spot they wanted sat in the middle of a sandy wash shielded by sloping twenty-foot-high banks on either side. The borrow pit sat about a mile to the east across a relatively flat expanse of desert. The wash flowed north to south, so Nathan pivoted the Bell, allowing it to touch down with the front of the skids first. He estimated he had thirty feet of clearance on either side of the main rotor.
No one traversing the road they’d overflown would be able to see the helicopter. It could be seen from the air, but night was coming soon. Still, to be safe, Nathan intended to cover its fuselage with desert camouflage netting.
Dust and loose weeds flew in every direction as Nathan brought the two-and-a-half-ton machine into a hover. Grangeland’s description of a giant leaf blower seemed accurate.
“Looking good,” Harv said. “We’re clear on the left.”
The helicopter jolted slightly as its left skid landed on a small rock and slid off.
“Talk about a pucker factor,” Grangeland said. “Is landing this thing as difficult as it looks?”
“Not really,” Nathan answered. “You try not to think about it. You do it by feel, using a visual reference to the ground. I focus on a spot about fifty to sixty feet away and then slowly lower the collective until the ship can’t fly anymore. I know that sounds overly simple, but the weight of the ship just settles to the ground.”
“If you say so.”
“If Holly had been here, she could’ve made this landing.”
“Holly knows how to fly this thing?”
“Yep, I’ve been teaching her. She doesn’t have a license yet, but she can fly it. Tell you what, on the way back I’ll give you some time on the controls . . . ” He grinned. “If you think you can handle it.”
“We’ll see.”
Nathan started the shutdown procedure. After the main rotor stopped, they climbed out into an arid landscape. Nathan glanced at his watch: 1602. Sunset was around seventy-five minutes away.
All three of them were dressed in desert MARPAT. Grangeland’s combat uniform fit her well because she was roughly the same size and build as Holly. Several years ago, Nathan had bought Holly two sets of both woodland and desert MARPATs as Christmas presents. Holly had been thrilled and immediately put them on—with nothing underneath. He smiled at the memory, but it vanished. Whatever the outcome between them, he just wanted her to be happy.
Not now, he told himself. He needed to remain focused on the task at hand: taking out the trash.
“Let’s get the ship covered,” Nathan said. He opened the luggage compartment and froze. A chill raked his skin. “Helicopter!”
“Shit!” Harv said.
Nathan yanked a camo-netting bag from the compartment. “Harv, get the other.”
“What can I do to help?” Grangeland asked.
“Get on the other side. I’m going to toss the net. We don’t have time to cover the main rotor.” Nathan threw the camo netting as if casting it from a fishing boat.
Coming from the east, the helicopter’s whooping grew in volume.
Harv tossed his netting over the rear of the ship. It draped the tail rotor and vertical stabilizer perfectly.
“Good toss,” Nathan said. “Mine’s caught on the cable cutter.”
Harv raced to the opposite side and opened the door. He lifted the net as best he could, but it kept ge
tting caught on the fin-shaped device.
“Good enough. Everybody under the net!”
They huddled under the belly of the ship. “It’s going to pass north of us,” Harv said. “It’s deep, sounds like a big one.”
“Could be a Navy or Marine Super Stallion from Yuma MCAS.”
“Did we fly through their airspace?” Grangeland asked.
“No. The air station is well south of here and Yuma Proving Ground is east of us. They saw us on radar, but pilots fly these corridors all the time to stay out of military airspace.”
The thumping grew louder, then reached a peak. “Harv, can you see it?”
“It’s a Stallion, but it’s half a mile away and not changing course. Might be heading out to El Centro or Miramar. No way to know.”
The whooping of its big main rotor faded, and silence fell across the desert once more.
“You feelin’ it, Grangeland?” Nathan asked with a smile.
“If you’re talking about this tingling all over my body, yes.”
He offered her a high five. She grinned and smacked his hand.
“Let’s get these nets squared away.”
They used large rocks to secure the corners. When they were finished, the netting resembled a sheer tent over the aircraft.
“That looks amazing,” Grangeland said. “No way anyone’ll see it from the air.”
Nathan took a moment to gauge the temperature and wind. Around seventy degrees and ten miles an hour out of the northeast, respectively.
“Let’s get underneath for a minute.”
They ducked under the mesh and formed a huddle next to the ship.
“Here’s the video I shot.” Harv wirelessly linked his video recorder to his laptop, opened the Bell’s door, and placed the computer on the rear seat. “We can slow it down, freeze the stream, and take screenshots.”
Nathan leaned in for a better look. “I have a pretty good idea where to position everyone, but we should scout the area before we make the final decision. Ramiro told Beaumont the exchange is going down about an hour after sunset, so we’ll need to choose locations near large rocks or boulders. That way, if Mason or Alisio’s men have thermal imagers, the rocks will help mask our signatures.”
Contract to Kill Page 26
