Alpha Kat

by William H. Lovejoy

“Much farther than that,” Wilcox said.

  “Then we probably don’t want to stop him, White House approval or not. He’s expendable.”

  “He’s got thirty damned good people with him, Ted.”

  “Thirty people versus eighty million? Thirty people versus what Lon Pot’s operation is doing to America? Do you know how far his tentacles reach, Ben?”

  “We think he owns a shopping center in Atlanta. There’s probably others. He’s got that twenty billion doubling every three or four years.”

  “Kimball’s expendable,” Simonson repeated.

  Wilcox had known that from the beginning. It was part of the profession. Sometimes, though, it was difficult to admit it to himself.

  *

  Dao Van Luong had once told Lon Pot that his father was Vietnamese and that his mother had been Laotian. He had only known them for fourteen years, the age at which he had been conscripted into the North Vietnamese Army, (NVA). They had been killed in one of the American B-52 raids of the Linebacker operation.

  It was not out of compassion for the fate of his parents that Dao had received an education. Rather, some officer had noted his penchant for arithmetic and made him a clerk in an NVA accounting office. He had moved successively to battalion, then regimental levels. After the war had been won, he had been encouraged to pursue an accounting degree while working for the national bank.

  And several years after obtaining his degree, he had created some phantom accounts, transferred a large amount of the government’s dong to Shanghai, then converted it to American dollars and shipped it to New Delhi where he met up with it.

  Vietnam was still trying to get it back, or to extract its equivalent in blood, and twice in earlier years had almost managed to do so. After the second attempt on his life, Dao had arranged a meeting with Lon Pot and offered his creative financial services in exchange for protection.

  The arrangement had been beneficial for both of them, Lon Pot thought. The man had orchestrated the investment of Pot’s excess cash, which was considerable, and much of it was now considered legitimate by any government’s definition. The rate of return was immense, considering that little or no taxes were ever paid on the income.

  He was certain that the small, dark-haired man sitting opposite him on the couch had made parallel investments of his own and had also benefited. He was also certain that Dao had never mismanaged one baht of Lon Pot’s money. Dao had already learned of the ferocious revenge sought by the Vietnamese government, and he knew that Lon Pot’s vengeance, unlike a mere government’s, could not be blocked.

  They understood each other.

  Dao had spent an hour reporting, as he did each month, on the current state of Lon Pot’s financial affairs. Lon Pot found the reports boring in the extreme, but he always listened in rapt attention and asked what he thought were pertinent questions. He did not understand much of what went on: shell companies, foreign exchange rates, blind corporations. But, he thought it important that he display some degree of knowledge.

  “And the Pegasus Fund?” he asked.

  Dao searched the papers littering his lap, found one, and said, “Twenty-two million dollars.”

  “It is all in dollars?”

  “Yes. The recipients prefer dollars.”

  The fund was tapped for bribes and for greasing the wheels of various bureaucracies. Lon Pot thought he would eliminate a lot of bureaucratic functions in the future. If they could be bribed by him, they could be bribed by anyone.

  “And the change?”

  “It is down almost three million from last month,” Dao Van Luong said. “We have paid out much in the last week.”

  And well worth the price, Pot thought. Most of the northern coastal villages had quietly reported their change in allegiance. Within a week, he told himself, the Rangoon government was going to wake up and have no government to manage.

  “And speaking of the Pegasus Fund, Henry Loh wants me to give him a million dollars in cash tomorrow,” Dao said.

  “Let him have it, then. He is going to the capital to meet with old friends. It will be used to our advantage, I am certain.”

  “Of course, Prince.”

  Lon Pot liked the sound of that. When he had passed out the “Chief” titles to his key advisors, he had told them that, from now on, he would assume his rightful position as a prince of the realm. The only prince of the realm.

  He had liked it in Machiavelli, and he liked it in himself. There was a pure sense of tradition and custom and power in the title, unlike that of president or chancellor or prime minister, any of which could be transitory and fleeting.

  “Henry Loh also wants to buy four more airplanes. Attack aircraft from the French.”

  Pot pondered the request. In a week, Loh would have the entire Burmese air force at his disposal.

  If the air force did not put up a strong resistance. Was Loh concerned about that?

  “He had a rationale?” Pot asked.

  Dao smiled his little grim smile. “It is to be a reserve unit for your personal air guard, or so I was told.”

  “Nothing beyond that?”

  “There may be a squadron or two of the national air force that might not capitulate readily. That is my own interpretation of possibilities, Prince.”

  “We should have prepared long before this.”

  “Perhaps the information was not known to Loh until recently?”

  Lon Pot pursed his lips. “Perhaps. Very well, let him obtain bids from his sources, then we will discuss it.”

  Dao Van Luong nodded.

  He waited.

  Dao waited also.

  “Is there anything more?” Pot asked.

  “There is your wife.”

  Lon Pot had many wives, some as transitory as the titles of leaders, but this one was legal.

  “She has a complaint?”

  “She would like to have larger living quarters. And she insists upon an increase in her allowance.”

  He could tell that Dao did not relish bringing up these matters any more than Lon Pot relished hashing over her insistent and unreasonable demands. In the infrequent times when he met with her, she was as complaisant as ever. When she found pen and paper, she created elaborate and expensive plans for herself. She felt as if she must present to the world the facade of a queen, simply because Lon Pot had some resources.

  “No to both demands,” he said.

  Dao Van Luong nodded.

  *

  Derek Crider drove the rented Renault. It was fifteen years old, and the wind whistled past holes rusted through the floorboard.

  He bitched at the inane traffic from time to time, but they had left the hotel early enough to find their spot. The sun would not go down for another hour. They passed one policeman on their way to the airport.

  “No security to speak of,” Alan Adage said.

  “I didn’t think there would be. Kimball’s not a visiting dignitary.”

  He glanced over at Adage, who opened the attaché case. Nestled in foam was a broken down Husqvarna Monte Carlo de Luxe. There was a Weaver scope, a hand-machined silencer, and five hand-loaded 7.62 millimeter rounds in the case also. There had been eight cartridges, but Adage had used three to fire in the weapon earlier, out in the desert.

  The attaché case had been waiting for them when they arrived at the hotel. All it had cost Crider was a phone call from the Azores and five thousand American dollars. He had lots of friends and acquaintances, and friends of friends, all over the world who liked money.

  Adage lifted the receiver from the case and began fitting the stock. His fingers moved over the blued metal surfaces with a loving touch. Adage’s old man had taught him the finer points of hunting in the Kentucky hills, and the Marine Corps had refined his trade for him. The man loved a well-designed weapon more than he would any woman.

  He had a blue stocking cap pulled down over his telltale bushy red hair, but not much was going to disguise his flaming red beard. They both wore dark blue windbrea
kers and black denim jeans.

  Crider bypassed the entrance to the passenger terminal, jamming the gear shift into third, and lurching onto a service road headed north. The transmission required jamming, and the clutch was on the ragged end of its useful life.

  The engine screamed through a ventilated muffler until he could get enough speed to shift to fourth.

  “Didn’t have a better car, did they?” Adage asked.

  “Nothing that didn’t stand out like a sore thumb.”

  Crider had scouted the area earlier. He passed several freight and industrial transfer companies housed in small buildings. They were already darkened, their inhabitants gone for the day.

  Adage screwed the silencer into place.

  Crider turned into a small gravelled lot, keeping an eye on the rearview mirror. There was no traffic behind him.

  He downshifted twice, bouncing through the lot.

  Adage fitted the Weaver scope to its mountings and tightened the thumb screws.

  At the edge of the lot, Crider whipped a hard left, slammed on the brakes, and ground the gearshift into reverse. He backed over a set of dried-mud ruts and into the narrow space between two buildings. They were both constructed of corrugated steel that shimmered with rust.

  With his arm over the back of the seat, peering through the dirty rear window into the shadowed alley, he gripped the wheel with his left hand and raced in reverse toward the chainlink fence that guarded the airport proper.

  Easing on the brakes, he slid to a stop a few feet before hitting the fence. He left the engine idling and they both got out.

  Adage glanced up to check his sunlight, then looked across the runways to where Kimball’s aircraft were parked.

  “That’s them?” Adage asked.

  “That’s them.”

  “No sweat. About six hundred yards. Where do you want it?”

  Crider squinted to clarify his image of the six Alpha Kats lined up with their noses toward the runway. Behind them were the two giant transports and the Kappa Kat.

  He had been thinking about it.

  “They’re due to take off just before dusk. Before that, the ground crews have got to pull off the protective covers on the intakes. As soon as they do, you put a slug right up the intake.”

  “Why wait for the covers? We do it now, and take off.”

  Crider tried to be patient. “Because a bullet hole in an intake cover gives us away. We want it to look like engine failure.”

  “They’re center-line mounted, Crider? The engines?”

  “Right.”

  Adage moved toward the building on the right, got right next to it, back by the fence, and squatted down.

  “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “I might just have enough angle, if I put the round to the right side of the left intake. Can’t guarantee much, though, since I don’t know what kind of interior curve the intake has.”

  “Do what you can, Adage.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  The sniper stood up and went back to the car to get his rifle.

  Crider turned the engine off, crossing his fingers in the hope that it would start again.

  The shadows were long, and between the buildings, they were in semidarkness.

  Adage went back to the fence and stretched out on the ground, lifted the Husqvarna to his shoulder, and peered through the scope. He wet his finger with his tongue and tested the wind. There was none that Crider could feel.

  Adage adjusted his windage and elevation knobs and then lowered the rifle gently to the ground.

  Crider sat down on the driver’s seat with the door open, his feet planted in the dusty earth.

  They waited.

  The shadows got longer. The sky dimmed toward gray. It did not get cooler. The sweat beads formed on his forehead and slithered down his cheeks.

  Adage retrieved an already sodden handkerchief and used it frequently.

  Twenty minutes went by before Crider saw mechanics begin to move around the airplanes with some purpose.

  “I could take out five of them,” Adage said.

  “Just one. We don’t want questions about unexplained coincidences.”

  The intake covers started coming off.

  “Any one in particular you’d like?” Adage asked.

  “Take the fourth in line.”

  “Good. The angle should be right.”

  The ex-Marine pulled the Monte Carlo sporting rifle tight against his shoulder, aimed more quickly than Crider expected, and squeezed the trigger.

  Phut!

  Adage stood up, already disassembling the weapon.

  “You got it?”

  “Of course. Let’s go get something to eat.”

  *

  The Aerospatiale Super Frelon, capable of handling thirty combat-loaded troops, but equipped as a military VIP transport, lifted off shortly after dark. Its massive rotors kicked up a dust storm that should have obliterated N’Djamena.

  Kimball sat in one of the over-cushioned flight seats next to Sam Eddy. Soames had gone back to manage the flight operations, and Kimball felt like he was sidelined. He should be flying, or at least directing the mission, but here he was playing salesman.

  One look at McEntire in the dim reddish cabin lighting told him that Sam Eddy had the same thing on his mind.

  The Chad air force and defense ministry people were in good humor after a heavy dinner that Kimball had picked his way through. They lounged in their seats and tried to chat above the roar of the engines. It was a lark for them, and Kimball couldn’t help thinking about the lack of thought that had gone into putting all of the heavy brass and high defense people into the same vulnerable transport helicopter.

  One missile.

  Exit the command structure.

  No problem at all for the Alpha Kat.

  He flipped open his notepad and looked at the roster he had set up for the demonstration:

  BENGAL ONE: Mel Vrdlicka

  BENGAL TWO: Alex Hamilton

  BENGAL THREE: Jay Halek

  BENGAL FOUR: Howard Cadwell

  BENGAL FIVE: Warren Mabry

  BENGAL SIX: Tom Keeper

  HAWKEYE ONE: Sam Miller

  HAWKEYE TWO: Fred Nackerman

  HAWKEYE THREE: Conrad Billingsly

  HAWKEYE FOUR: Phillipe Contrarez

  ZOOKEEPER: A.J. Soames

  He studied the list, fingering the walkie-talkie resting in his lap. His codename was Lion, but he would only be able to talk to Soames since the portable radio couldn’t manage the scrambled channels. If something drastic …

  McEntire slapped him on the shoulder and leaned over to practically shout in his ear, “Quit fretting about it, Kim. The right decisions have already been made.”

  He shook his head, unable to stop worrying.

  There was a lot riding on this program.

  McEntire grinned at him. “Dumb shit. If I’d known you were going to turn all sour on me, I’d never have married you.”

  Sixty miles later, according to the map they had been given, the helicopter set down, deplaned its passengers, then raced away into the night.

  Despite a couple of generators chugging away to provide electricity and a couple of trucks that were idling a hundred yards to the east, it seemed magnificently quiet in the middle of the desert.

  The night would have been utterly black but for the thousands of stars that ranged over and around them like a bowl. They stretched from one horizon to the other. The whisper of a mild wind touched his cheeks, cooling them. What he could see of the landscape was rugged and barren. There wasn’t all that much sand, and the ground was hard, cracked and creviced from intense heat.

  Two large canopies had been erected, lit on the inside with red bulbs, and straight-backed chairs were arranged in rows facing north. Several folding tables had been set up, and radios rested on them. The radio operators spoke in clipped, guttural Arabic and passed hand-written messages to several junior officers.

  General Haraz, the air force chief of s
taff, waved toward several chairs, and Kimball and McEntire sat down with him near one of his radios.

  Kimball raised his portable unit to check the operation. “Zookeeper, Lion.”

  “Five by five, Lion,” Soames came back.

  “Status?”

  “Ah … we’re ready to pounce.”

  Kimball looked to the general, and he nodded.

  “Launch them, Zookeeper. Let me know if you have a problem.”

  “Roger that, Lion. Launching in ten.”

  Haraz spoke quickly to a colonel in Arabic, who passed the word to his radio operator. Kimball figured that the ten Mirage defenders had been ordered into the air.

  In his cultured and stiff English, the general said, “Let me orient you, Mr. Kimball and Mr. McEntire. The map is never quite the same as the reality, is it? Out there,” he pointed with a stiff right forefinger, “directly ahead of us by two thousand meters is the target, the old truck. It is radiating a signal on UHF radio.”

  The finger moved in a large circle. “We have emplaced four mobile surface-to-air missile units around the target. Their crews are very reliable.”

  “I’m sure they are, General. As are your pilots, but I’m afraid they won’t see anything to shoot at.”

  The general smiled. “We shall see.”

  Sam Eddy got up and went to look at a repeater monitor that was relaying the radar picture from one of the SAM sites. When he came back he said, “The Bengals are moving north at about Mach One, Kim. Give ’em another five minutes.”

  He went back to the radar screen.

  Kimball checked his watch, and when the time elapsed, called Soames on the portable.

  “Zookeeper, kill the IFF.”

  Twenty seconds later, from next to the radar repeater, McEntire said, “We just went incognito.”

  A large group of field grade officers had begun to gather around the radar screen. Kimball couldn’t interpret the rapid chatter, but the various tones ranged from skeptical to incredulous.

  The colonel supervising the radio operators reported to General Haraz, again in Arabic.

  “Our fighters are closing in,” he said to Kimball. “They have targeted your command plane.”

  Kimball heard the moan of one flight of Mirages passing high overhead.

  The dialogue on the radios started to get excited. Messages flew back and forth.