by Dean Ing
Mateo buttoned his fly, gazing past the low, stunted trees to landward and then scanning the scraps of cirrus that rode the stratosphere winds. It was not so much his question as his insolent air that set the vawlk's teeth on edge: "Well? What do we do, Lobo, when a carload of his friends arrive?"
You're scum, but you aren't stupid, Vins thought.
"We welcome them, offer them chocolate, and kill them. All but one—it does not matter which one," Vins said evenly, putting the paper down at last. "He will take the money, and we must catch him later. We could have several days to recover the money and become desaparecidos before a search is mounted for us."
But Mateo's mind ran in more direct channels. "It seems to me we could merely bury him immediately and then tell your superiors we are chasing him," he said, sliding down that corner post until his rump reached dirt.
"Mateo, it is impossible for us to know all the ways that my superiors might employ to check on our progress here," said Vins with a sigh. "They could have been watching you from orbit as you pissed into the sand. They may have another team well hidden, perhaps frogmen, checking the number of Medina's friends as they arrive. If such friends arrive. So, we must release one man with the money. He is our reason for disappearing."
"And then he escapes," Mateo said sullenly. "And we get to be poverty-stricken heroes."
"Not if we are on our toes," Vins replied. "I have means of signaling that we have succeeded in ransoming that airplane. The money itself is bugged, and we have direction-finders. You two will follow our quarry, but not too closely. The moment I am relieved here, I will set out after you in the other car. With our radios, and our training, we should have no difficulty."
"If he wants to buy one of the cars?"
"They are not for sale," Vins shrugged. "And if he leaves on foot, he can be followed on foot."
Lazily, almost dreamily, as if Mateo did not really care: "Then why did we rent two cars?"
"Collate, shut up," Vins spat, "enough of your cross-examination. If he has a vehicle nearby that we have not discovered, that question will answer itself, yes?"
"So much for our brotherhood of equals," Mateo said cynically, scratching his armpit.
We are still far from soviet man, the perfect, selfless product of world revolution, Vins told himself as he regained his poise. But at least I will satisfy my country before I satisfy myself. "My apologies, Mateo; my temper grows short as the time grows near. Do you have any further questions?" His tone conveyed, nonetheless, that he would tolerate very few more such questions.
Mateo Carranza grunted and waved a languid hand to acknowledge the apology. Then, "I know something of the way your GRU works, Lobo. And unlike that poor fool Jorge Ocampo, I have given this much thought. It seems to me they would not weep if they arrived here for the airplane and found the pilot dead. I should think they would insist on it. And then they would demand the money."
"And if that happens, we must give it to them," Vins said. "That could be a part of the plan they kept from me, and that is another reason why I will not take one step out of line until the airplane is secure in the proper hands. But I think it is not part of their plan, because it is the Soviet Navy, not the GRU, which will take that airplane from us. The GRU may have a man on that team, but most naval men are a different breed, Mateo; they are not trained for wet work like ours. It would not be good for their morale if they knew some of the things we must do."
"So," Mateo said, with a grunting that could have been laughter, "we must appear to deal fairly with a turncoat thief, because your sailors think of themselves as honorable men."
Now Vins stood up and stretched, scanning the edge of the marsh for Jorge Ocampo. "You may ask them if you like," he said with easy sarcasm.
"I would rather count the money again," said Mateo Carranza.
"You have counted it twice already," Vins said, and strode toward the marsh where Jorge was dutifully plying his cover with a fishing rod. He did not see Jorge for several minutes and, when he did, for an instant he did not recognize the swarthy little man with the battered hat and saltwater lures festooning it. It really might have been someone else, he admitted silently as his heart settled down to its usual steady rhythm.
It might have been Sretsvah, or some young captain I have not met, sent to keep tabs on me. There may be one hiding nearby, and it is barely possible that Maksimov sent him. But he would not show himself so openly. And if I found him, would I kill him? More to the point, would he beat me to it? A man does lose his muscle tone, given enough years. I will be well out of this business, and the sooner, the better. Right after we chase down our rabbit, and I kill my two hounds.
When Jorge Ocampo turned toward him, el lobo was doing deep knee bends.
FORTY-ONE
Ground-effect skimming would have been sheer suicide for a man in an ultralight aircraft crossing Mexico's jagged spine, the Sierra Madre Occidental Range, with its violent downdrafts and uncharted wilderness where, some said, men still fired weapons with crude black powder and raised pre-Columbian crops, and sacrificed to gods that Hernan Cortez only thought he had vanquished. Corbett fell back on his other tactic for fuel economy, far older than those gods, as old as the condor itself, searching out the updrafts that skirted the ten-thousand-foot peaks, gradually working his way south down the state of Durango. But a soaring sailplane moves at a stately pace, and Black Stealth One did not reach Regocijo until after noon, though its fuel bladder was still full. No hurry, he told himself, with a control movement that sent the hellbug wheeling in an upward spiral, buoyed by a thermal current. This is why you took the risks, beyond any notion of revenge. And if you can't come out of this mess with a king's ransom, you won't be able to afford the hangar and the maintenance the hellbug demands. So why not spend a day playing with your new toy? It might be the last day you'll ever see.
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 suspicious—but then, this is mañana 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 after-noon 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.
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 land—even 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 side-arm 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.
