He knew it was the Americans. Who else could have tracked the satellite and dispatched a search team so quickly? But knowing it and proving it were two entirely different things. With Argentina's world standing so poor, accusing the Yanquis without evidence to back it up was simply a waste of breath.
He needed Jimenez to capture at least one of them. Preferably with the fragment of satellite.
Not for the first time, he wondered what was so important about the satellite that the U.S. felt the need to risk some of their Special Forces on a retrieval operation. According to his briefing, Espinoza was told that it was some science research mission, but their level of interest in it told him it was something else, something almost certainly military. If he had the fragment back, plus one of the soldiers, then the propaganda coup Raul had mentioned earlier wasn't so far-fetched.
Jaguar, come in, damn it.
A burst of static squelched from his handheld radio and forced him to pull the device away sharply. Jimenez had reported that they had pumped a couple hundred rounds into the downed chopper, waited for a few minutes to see if it was going to explode, and then sent three men down on fast-rappel ropes.
Jimenez, is that you?
Jefe?
Jimenez, come in.
It's me, sir. Not good.
What happened?
They booby-trapped the helicopter. It blew just as my men were about to set foot on the jungle floor. The blast wasn't big, but it was enough to shove my chopper a hundred feet or so, and that saved my life because then the fuel tanks exploded. The fireball was enormous.
What of your men?
The three on the ropes are gone, sir. Blown to ribbons. But we see another man on the ground who survived the blast.
Espinoza seized on this news and asked, One of them?
No, sir. It's the other pilot, Josep. He appears injured, but it looks like they patched him up before taking off.
Defeat left Espinoza's mouth bitter. He thought for a moment. You said you're about five miles from the Rio Rojo, yes?
That is correct.
They have a boat, Espinoza said. They must have snuck through the border last night when those worthless frontier guards were either asleep or too busy scratching themselves to notice.
I don't think we have the fuel to chase them, Jimenez said. It was clear in his voice this was a disappointment. And the pilot says the chopper might have been damaged by the first explosion.
No matter, mark Josep's position on the GPS so we can send a team to get him, then head straight for the base. Radio ahead so our third EC-135 is ready to take off as soon as you land. They probably have a fast boat, but you should be able to catch them before they reach Paraguay. I'm also going to alert the border guards. They can send out some patrol boats and stop anyone who looks suspicious.
We'll have them yet, Jefe. Jimenez's wolfish grin carried through the static-filled connection.
We will, Major Espinoza agreed, and, if anything, his smile was more dangerous.
JUAN AND THE TWO other survivors reached the RHIB a little over an hour later. It had remained undisturbed under its cover of foliage. Juan lashed the power cell to the deck while Murph and Trono stripped away the camouflage. The twin outboards came to life with a turn of the key. Juan knew their boat, with its performance-tweaked engines, could outrun anything on the river, but he had no illusions that a reception wasn't already being planned for when they neared the Paraguayan border.
Lines are clear, Mark said, coiling the dark nylon rope around a cleat. When the Chairman didn't react, he called out, Juan?
Sorry. Thinking.
Juan bumped the throttles, and the boat emerged from its hidden lair. The river was clear of traffic, so a few moments later he had them skimming across the surface at better than forty knots, slowing marginally in the blind corners, then giving the RHIB her head once again.
Going with the current, it took them less time to reach the main river than when they'd come upstream earlier in the day. The men were drained by the events of the past twenty-four hours, yet they remained vigilant as they started northward. Mike stood facing aft, his eyes scanning the sky for pursuit, while Juan and Mark studied the river and its banks for anything out of the ordinary.
They saw nothing for an hour, but then Mark Murphy tapped Juan on the shoulder, handed him a small pair of binoculars, and pointed a few points off their bow.
Juan needed only a second to recognize two Boston Whalers coming at them at full speed. He didn't need to see details of the occupants to know they were armed to the teeth.
Mike, he yelled over his shoulder. We've got company.
No kidding, Trono called back. There's a chopper crawling up our six.
Cabrillo didn't bother looking back. The Whalers were coming too fast for him to worry about the helicopter. With a combined closing speed of nearly ninety knots, the pair of boats would pass the RHIB in seconds.
Juddering lights winked at them from both craft. The Argentines had opened fire well before they were in effective range. Tiny splashes sprinkled the river well away from the charging RHIB.
Juan waited until the two boats were less than fifty yards off, ignoring the lead that was filling the air. He could see three men on each; the driver, and two riflemen lying in the bow. With the Whalers skipping across the water, none of the shooters could aim accurately. The little boats were just too unsteady.
Of course, Mark couldn't get off a meaningful shot with the RHIB bouncing along either.
Hold on! Juan shouted.
He cut both throttles and used his palm to crank the wheel over to its lock. Despite the deflated cells of the buoyancy ring, the assault boat did a perfect one-eighty, shouldering aside a wall of white water and coming to an almost complete stop.
Having practiced the maneuver countless times and knowing it was coming, Trono and Murph reacted instantly. Now that the RHIB was wallowing, they could anticipate her movements and compensate for them with their machine guns. They opened fire as the two Whalers flashed by less than a hundred feet away. The two drivers standing in the open cockpits took the worst of it. One was stitched from thigh to shoulder, the kinetic impact of the 9mm rounds hurling his body over the gunwale. The other took two to the head and slumped over the console.
With its engines still pouring out full power, the Whaler started to veer off course because of the weight of the dead driver on the wheel. The centripetal force pushed the body in the opposite direction, and he slipped from the cockpit, his hand still tangled in the wheel's spokes. The Whaler turned sharply, caught part of the wave that had been generated by the RHIB, and flipped over. It augered into the water and vanished under the surface only to float up again, its keel pointing skyward.
The second Whaler continued racing down the river, no one sure if there was anyone aboard still alive.
Juan spun the RHIB around again and slammed the outboards to their stops. The bow rose up in an instant, the deep V hull coming onto plane faster than about any boat afloat.
RAUL JIMENEZ IGNORED the wind buffeting him as he stood in the helicopter's open door, incredulous that the first Boston Whaler had barrel-rolled and then sunk. The second border-patrol boat continued downstream behind them. At first he thought the cowards were running away, but then the Whaler slammed straight into the riverbank. It folded like an aluminum can. Its outboards tore from the transom and vaulted into the underbrush while the three men were tossed like mannequins. Jimenez neither noted nor cared if any of them was alive. All his attention was focused on the fleeing boat below.
He recognized the black craft as an RHIB, the type favored by the United States Special Forces, though it was also available on the commercial market and could easily be operated by a group of mercenaries. He needed just one of them alive. He wanted the others alive, too, but when he was finished with them they would be in no condition to be paraded in front of television cameras.
This chopper wasn't equipped with a door gun, but they had pulled
the weapon from the one damaged in the explosion and concocted a makeshift mount using straps threaded through eyelets in the ceiling. Jimenez stood behind it now, watching the RHIB grow larger and clearer in his sights. Just a few seconds more and he'd tear away the back of the boat. While one of the thieves drove, the other watched the approaching helo with a machine pistol tucked up hard against his shoulder. The third man was flat on the deck, either dead or wounded. Either way, he didn't appear to be moving.
Ever since his boyhood, Raul Jimenez had loved to hunt. He'd made his first slingshot out of tubing and a forked piece of wood, and killed birds by the hundreds around his family's farm. With his first rifle, a gift on his tenth birthday, he went after larger and larger prey until taking a jaguar from a hunting blind with a nearly seven-hundred-yard shot his companions said couldn't be made.
But on the day he killed his first man, a deserter who then-Captain Espinoza had told him to track, Jimenez knew he would never find satisfaction hunting mere animals again. He had stalked the deserter for five days through some of the toughest jungle Argentina has to offer. The deserter had been wily, and made the hunt the best of Jimenez's life, but in the end nothing could keep him from his prey, and the man had died despite his cunning.
Jimenez felt that same sense of satisfaction as he lined up the sights on the black RHIB. Just as he squeezed the Browning's trigger, the nimble boat cut sharply, and the heavy .30 caliber rounds peppered the water, turning it into a constellation of tiny white fountains.
He cursed, lined up, and fired again. It was as if the driver fifty feet below was reading his mind because the bullets arrowed into the river off the RHIB's port flank. He was certain the boat would dodge left this time and let loose a hammering string of tracers. And like before, the driver outwitted him by veering farther right, going under the helicopter and emerging on its blind side.
Spin around, Jimenez shouted into his headset. Give me an angle.
The pilot pushed hard on the rudder, pivoting the Eurocopter on its axes as it continued to race up the river. It was flying almost sideways, crabbing across the sky, but more than able to keep up with the speeding RHIB.
In the three seconds Jimenez had lost sight of the boat, the man he thought was injured had gotten to one knee. Behind him was an open space in the deck that had been a covered storage locker. On the man's shoulder sat an ominous dark tube pointed straight at the chopper. The range was less than two hundred feet.
Jimenez and the man holding the rocket moved at the same time. Mike Trono lit off the Stinger missile the same instant the Argentine soldier unclipped his safety harness. The rocket's infrared system only had a fraction of a second to come to life, find the heat plume billowing from the helicopter's exhaust, and make a minute adjustment. Jimenez leapt from the chopper just before the missile slammed into the turbine housing directly below the spinning rotor. The six-pound warhead detonated. The bulk of the engine saved Jimenez's life, but he was still caught in a flaming overpressure wave that ignited his clothing and slammed him into the water as if he'd jumped from twice the height. Had he not landed feetfirst in the roiling waves churned up by the RHIB's outboards, the impact would have been no different than landing on cement. The water extinguished his burning uniform and prevented the burns on his face and hands from going past second-degree. He came thrusting back to the surface, coughing up a lungful of river, his skin feeling like it had been dipped in acid.
Fifty feet ahead of him, the Eurocopter crashed into the river, smoke pouring out the doors and blown-apart windshield. Jimenez didn't have time to fill his lungs, as the craft tipped and the rotors hit the water. They came apart like shattering glass, shards of composite material filling the air. Several skimmed across the river surface inches above Jimenez's head and would have decapitated him had he not ducked under the waves.
Through the water he could see flames licking at the chopper's shattered carcass, a wavy, ethereal light that silhouetted the pilot still strapped in his seat. The dead man's arms swayed in the current like tendrils of kelp.
He struggled to the surface once again, the roar of fire filling his ears. Of the RHIB, there was no sign, and with the chopper down and the border patrol's two Whalers destroyed the thieves had a straight run to Paraguay. As he started the painful swim to shore, his burned hands screaming with every stroke, Lieutenant Jimenez could only hope they would be stopped before they could sneak across.
NICE SHOT, JUAN SHOUTED as the Argentine helicopter fell from the sky in their wake.
That was for Jerry, Trono said, laying the Stinger on the deck to reload it with the second missile stored in one of boat's several secret weapons caches. Mark Murphy was at the bows, watching for anyone else coming at them. He asked, Are we still going to stick to the original plan?
Cabrillo thought about it for a moment. Yeah, he replied. Better safe than sorry. The cost of the RHIB will just become one more line item in the CIA's black budget.
While Juan continued to drive, and Mark acted as lookout, Mike prepared for the final part of the operation, so when they finally cut the engines five miles from the border with Paraguay all their equipment was ready. The men slipped into their wet suits again and strapped the bulky Draeger sets to their backs. Juan overfilled his buoyancy compensators because he would be carrying the power cell.
After slicing open the remaining air bladders ringing the boat, they opened the sea cocks. The RHIB began sinking by the stern, dragged under by her heavy engines. They waited aboard her even after she slipped under the surface, making sure she settled on the bottom. The current had pushed them south another quarter mile, but they needed to ensure the boat stayed under. The bottom of the river this close to the bank was a jumbled snarl of rotting trees. They tied off the bow painter line to one of the more sturdy limbs and then started northward, propelled through the water by near-silent dive scooters.
Fighting the current, it took them the better part of two hours to reach the border, and another two until they judged it safe to surface. The scooters' batteries were on their last bit of power and the rebreathers nearly depleted. But they'd made it.
The men took a break before starting out on the six-hour slog back to the elevated hut they had slept in thirty-six hours ago. There they had stashed a small aluminum boat with a motor that they had towed into place with the RHIB.
When they reached base, Mike set himself against a tree and promptly nodded off. Juan envied him. Though Trono had been closer to Jerry than Cabrillo, Mike wasn't shouldering any guilt for his death. Just sorrow. Mark Murphy, with his love of all things technical, studied the power cell.
Juan moved a little ways off and pulled a satellite phone from a waterproof pouch. It was time to check in.
Juan, is that you? Max Hanley asked after the first ring. He could picture Max sitting in the Oregon's op center since the mission began, downing cup after cup of coffee and chewing on the stem of his pipe until it was nothing but a gnarled nub.
The phones were so heavily encrypted that there was no chance of them ever being listened in on, so there was no need for code phrases or aliases.
We got it, he replied with such weariness it sounded as though he would never recover. We're six hours out from waypoint Alpha.
I'll call Lang right away, Hanley said. He's been bugging me every twenty minutes since you started off.
There's one more thing. Cabrillo's tone was like ice over the airwaves. Jerry paid the butcher's bill on this one.
There was almost thirty full seconds of silence before Max finally said, Oh, Jesus. No. How?
Does it really matter? Juan asked back.
No, I guess it doesn't, Max said.
Juan blew a loud breath. I tell you, buddy, I'm having a real hard time getting my mind around this.
Why don't you and I take off for a few days when you get back? We'll fly down to Rio, plant our butts on the beach, and ogle a bunch of hard bodies in string bikinis.
Time off sounded good, though Cabrillo d
idn't particularly relish the idea of leering at women half his age. And he knew that after three failed marriages, Max wasn't really on the prowl either. Then Juan remembered the crashed blimp and Mark's suggestion to give closure to the families of men who'd perished on her. That was what his soul needed. Not staring at pretty girls but offering a bunch of strangers a little peace of mind after fifty years of wondering.
I like the concept, Juan said, but we need to work on the execution. We'll talk about arrangements when we get back to the ship. Also, you might as well go into my office. In the file cabinet should be Jerry's last will. Let's get that ball rolling right away. He didn't have too much love for his ex-wife, but he did have a child.
A daughter, Max replied. I helped him set up a trust for her, and he made me the trustee.
Thanks. I owe you. We should be home by dawn tomorrow.
I'll have the coffee waiting.
Juan replaced the phone into its pouch and sat back against the tree, feeling like he was feeding every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius.
Hey, Chairman, Mark called a few minutes later. Check this out.
What have you got, Juan crawled over to where Mark sat with his legs bent like pretzels.
You see this here and here? He pointed to two tiny indentations on the glossy metal surface.
Yeah.
These correspond with two matching holes in the nylon carrying harness. They're bullet strikes fired up at us from when we took off in the chopper.
Those were nine-millimeter from point-blank range, Juan said. Barely made a mark. That thing is as tough as NASA boasted.
Okay, but look at this. Mark struggled to turn the seventy-pound cell over so the top was facing up and then pointed at an even deeper pit gouged into the satellite fragment.
Juan gave his weapons expert a questioning look.
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