by Jack Mars
“I’ll need men and equipment,” Max said. “I’ll need an airport without much scrutiny, preferably one not that far from here. And I’ll need a detention facility.”
The man with the DWI shirt looked at him earnestly, eagerly. “This is Dark Waters,” he said with pride. “I can get you all that stuff. We have all the men you need, highly trained combat vets, no nonsense, at a moment’s notice. We have our own airport. We have armored vehicles, including a prisoner transport vehicle. We have a detention facility in Dania, unmarked, very secure, state of the art.”
The man was making a sales pitch, as if any of that was necessary.
Max nodded. He had long ago given up wondering why private companies had all these things. The world had changed, and was continuing to do so. You could either change with it, or let it run you over.
But the man wasn’t done with his pitch. “We already have existing blanket non-disclosure agreements with agencies represented in this room. We are, quite literally, the most capable and the most discreet security organization in South Florida, and we are available.”
“Good,” Max said. “You’re hired. Just make sure everybody does what I tell them.” He looked at the retired general. In the past few minutes, it had become clear that the general was the one in charge here. That hadn’t been clear before, at least not to Max.
“What if they fight?”
The general shook his head. “Bring overwhelming force. They won’t fight.”
“What if they do?”
The general waved his hand, as if dismissing the entire idea.
“Just get rid of them.”
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
4:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
Big Cypress International Airport (Abandoned)
Florida Everglades
“Should be just a few minutes now,” the driver said.
Max took a drag on his cigar and nodded. The smoke wafted slowly into the air. He was tired. Four cups of coffee hadn’t really put a dent in it. In the old days, he would have taken something a little stronger.
“Good,” he said.
He gazed out at the darkness of the steamy deep Southern night. It must be close to a hundred percent humidity. This was not a quiet spot, not by a long shot. Somewhere nearby, there must be about a billion tiny frogs, peeping and cheeping.
An entire motorcade was parked here, in a line. There were fifteen vehicles, mostly armored SUVs, but also a couple of Jeeps, and one armored truck. All were black, with no markings of any kind. The guy from Dark Waters had put this all together very quickly, as if he’d had the whole thing on standby. Then he handed the team over to Max, no questions asked.
The guy was hungry. Max liked that.
The armored truck was a sort of paddy wagon, once used by the U.S. Marshals Service to transport prisoners. Apparently, it had been purchased by Dark Waters at auction, re-armored and retrofitted with the latest radar, GPS, and cloaking technology. It was still used to hold prisoners, but not your typical bank robbers or other felons.
The vehicles sat in the weeds along the edge of a gigantic, pitted and broken concrete runway at an old airport deep in the heart of the Everglades. The runway was two miles long. The entire airport was this runway and an empty control tower that squatted in the darkness about half a mile away. The runway and control tower were all that had ever existed.
They were going to have the old supersonic Concorde SST fly in here once upon a time. The plane was too loud to fly in and out of Miami, with the sonic boom from breaking the sound barrier, so they built this place out here in the swamp. Then the Concorde had a couple of high-profile disasters, and they decided to scrap the whole thing. So now this place just sat here. And Dark Waters had bought it, too.
Dark Waters International owned an airport.
It was a perfect place for an interdiction. It was a perfect place to take personnel into custody. It was a perfect place for a disappearance. If it came to that, it wasn’t even a bad place for a shootout. The company owned hundreds of acres around here, and it was all closed to outsiders.
Max smiled.
If the police came here from Miami, or anywhere to the east, they’d have to find someone to remove the concrete barriers on the roadway and open the gate for them. This time of night? Good luck.
It was very unlikely the cops knew about the back entrance, across gravel roads, coming from the west. And it was very unlikely they’d come from that direction. Not much but vast wetlands, alligators, and Burmese pythons out that way.
Max sat up front in the shotgun seat of the lead vehicle, a Jeep. The driver was a crew-cut, stone-faced storm trooper type. Max liked no-nonsense types like this. The guy was certainly ex-military. He had probably seen combat. If Dark Waters had hired him, he’d probably been up to his neck in it at one time or another. Whatever happened out here, he probably wouldn’t lose much sleep over it.
The driver had a laptop wedged between him and the steering wheel. The laptop itself was steel-plated, armored, and sealed inside of hard, pressurized, watertight plastic. You could drop that laptop to the bottom of a swimming pool. You could run it over with your car. You could throw it against a wall.
Max approved of the laptop. He liked things that were hard to break.
In the glow of the computer, the driver was watching a blinking light against a dark background. The blinking light had just moved inside a concentric circle at the center of the screen.
“It’s coming in,” he said.
“We sure that’s the one?”
The driver nodded. “Its identifier is Apex Digital Management. That’s it. That’s our target.”
Max picked up the communications radio handset from the dashboard and depressed the TALK button. The vehicles were on their own, closed and encrypted network channel. The radio would talk to every man on this mission, coming straight out of the stereo speakers.
“Listen up,” he said. “This is Max. As you know, I am your commanding officer tonight. The plane is coming. Mission is green light. Here’s your refresher course for slow learners. As soon as the plane is down and stopped, B team takes up positions blocking its further forward movement, with all guns trained on the cockpit. C team takes up positions blocking rearward movement, guns trained on tires, wings, and rear of the fuselage. Wait for my signal, and listen carefully. We are trying to avoid a bloodbath. A bloodbath is bad optics. We are also trying to avoid a circular firing squad. Remember that. The most likely order you will receive is to take out the tires.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“A team, you’re with me. We go in the door to the passenger compartment. Follow my lead. Bloodbath directive still applies, especially because I’m going to be standing in front of you. But also because we want the girl intact, if at all possible. We take her first, remove her to Car Number Four, rear seat, two men with her at all times. All other prisoners are cuffed, bagged, and removed to the wagon, but only after the girl is secure.”
He took his finger off the TALK button.
“That seem clear?” he said to the driver.
The guy shrugged. “It’s clear enough to me.”
Max depressed the button again.
“We don’t want a fight,” he said. “But if they want one, we give it to them. First priority is the girl. Everything else is secondary. We’ve got about thirty guys out here tonight. As far as we know, they’ve got two men plus the pilots. Okay? It’s a mismatch. So we go fast, hard, professional. We’re going to close them out early. We won’t give them an inch of wiggle room.”
He put the radio back on the dash. Now, he could hear the engine of a jet plane approaching. In another moment, he saw the lights of the plane descending out of the sky. It came down, moving along the massive runway.
“Roll it,” Max said, and the driver put the Jeep in gear. Now they were racing across the cracked concrete, a long line of vehicles, all of them moving fast.
The plane was just ahead, parked, waiting, i
ts lights blinking in the deep darkness. It was sleek, a dark color, blue or black, with no obvious markings. The pilots had stopped it after taxiing a short distance. They had probably noticed that the runway was akin to the surface of the moon.
The Jeep pulled up about thirty yards from the passenger door. Max jumped onto the tarmac, pulling the pistol from his belt holster. To his left, black SUVs circled in front of the plane, facing it, taking a three-car wedge formation, blocking it from the front. Doors opened, and gunmen took positions behind them. To his right, more SUVs and another Jeep did the same. The paddy wagon was here in his group.
Men in black, helmeted, visors down, weapons out, ran to the passenger door. If a fight was coming, it was coming right now.
Max walked to the plane. He took his time. The men boarded the plane in seconds. The door was already open and the passenger stairs were down. Max jogged up the steps, ready for anything. He ducked through the low doorway.
The interior of the plane was set up like a living room, with plush leather chairs, something similar to a sofa, and a low coffee table mounted to the floor. A large, broad-shouldered black man sat on the sofa with a print copy of The Wall Street Journal. The pages were all over the place.
The man was as big as Max, or even bigger. He had a closely cropped beard. He wore a plain black, long-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and a black baseball hat with SRT in white letters on it. Despite his sheer size, he didn’t seem to have an ounce of fat on his body. He seemed relaxed, as if he’d had a pleasant flight.
He looked at Max. “Hi. Can I help you?”
“Who are you?” Max said.
The man shrugged. There were four Dark Waters troopers on here now, all with guns trained on him. It didn’t seem to bother him at all.
“I’m Luther Sykes,” he said. “Apex Digital Management. This is my plane. I think a better question would be, who are you?”
“Is anyone else here?” Max said.
“Just me and the pilot,” the man said.
Max’s back was to the door of the cockpit. There was another door behind the black man. Max gestured at it with his gun. “What’s that door?”
The man shook his head and raised his eyebrows. “That? That’s the bathroom. Uh, I left kind of a big one in there earlier. The water pressure on these planes leaves something to be desired, if you know what I mean. And I had a big salad for dinner. I don’t think I’d go in there if I were you.”
One of the men went over and kicked the door in. He looked back at Max.
“Nothing.”
The door to the cockpit opened. A woman came out. She had flaming red hair.
“This plane is government property,” the woman said. “It’s owned and operated by the FBI Special Response Team.”
Max gestured at the black man with his head. “He said he owns it.”
“I told you who we are,” the woman said. “And you are?” Her eyes were intense, angry.
“Never mind who we are.”
“I want you to know something,” she said. “It’s an act of sedition for private entities to interfere with United States government business. I’d to see some identification.”
Max shook his head. He would have smiled, but things were too serious for that. The girl didn’t seem to be here. There was no fight, but there was also no girl. How could that be? They were going to have to take this plane apart, from top to bottom. They were going to have to take these two in and make them talk.
And that raised issues, a lot of issues.
“Lady…” Max began.
“We’ve radioed Washington, DC, as well as the Miami FBI field office,” the black man said. He said it mildly and matter-of-factly, as if he didn’t care one way or the other. He was just sharing information.
“We’re expecting backup units to arrive any minute.”
How? That was the question Max wanted to ask. There was no way in here. If the backup units were coming from the Miami office, they had a long drive ahead of them.
Just then, the plane itself started to shake. From outside came the heavy WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP of helicopter rotors.
“Oh,” the woman said. She smiled. “That must be them now.”
She went to the doorway and looked out. “Huh. Imagine that. They sent AH-64 Apache gunships. I forgot to mention we also have friends at Joint Special Operations Command.”
She looked at Max. Max didn’t like the confidence in her eyes.
“I think I’d have your guys drop their weapons, if I were you. Have you ever seen what one of those things can do to people on the ground? It isn’t pretty.”
Now her smile was ear to ear. “And there are three of them up there.”
CHAPTER FORTY THREE
6:25 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
A Safe House
Annieville, South Carolina
“Are those really alligators?” the girl named Charlotte said.
Luke smiled, thinking of the time when Ed Newsam had said the same thing… when? Monday night. It was now Thursday morning. Monday could have been a month ago. Luke had been through the wringer since then. He was tired.
He glanced out the window. In the first weak light of day, a bunch of the gators were nestled in the mud on the far bank of the creek. If you didn’t know any better, you might mistake them for logs that had washed up.
He nodded. “Yeah. They really are.”
“Scary,” Charlotte said.
Luke shook his head. The kid had been abducted and taken prisoner. She had been flown to another country. There were people out there who would kill her to protect the man who had done it. They had shot down an airplane and tried to murder her in the jungle. Yet alligators were the scary ones.
He had brought her here because it was all he could think of. He was out of gas. His shoulder was in serious pain, and although Ed had cleaned it out and bandaged it at the airbase in Honduras, it seemed like it might be infected. He was running a fever. And at this point, he could barely put any weight on his ankle at all.
Maybe he should have brought the girl to Washington. He didn’t know. He didn’t know who to trust at this point. Clearly, the SRT had been infiltrated by someone. Either a mole was working inside the organization, or the headquarters was infected with listening devices. Bowles was regular FBI, and had been sent to destroy the mission. He had nearly succeeded.
But he didn’t, and they had gotten the girl out after all.
Jacob had flown them in the junker plane. He and Charlotte had simply stayed on the plane when they switched in Jamaica. Ed and Rachel had made a big show of moving gear from one plane to the other, a lot of activity, in case anyone was watching. Jacob had hugged the ocean the entire way here to avoid radar. Luke hadn’t told Jacob anything about where he was going or what his intentions were.
He just said, “Tell them where you dropped me off.”
Now they were here. Luke looked at the girl. She was sitting on the same chair Louis Clare had once sat upon. She was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt a female National Guardsman had given her in Honduras. She was still wearing Elaine’s green sneakers. The sneakers were utterly mud caked, and were now mostly brown and black, with a little bit of green showing underneath. The girl didn’t seem to notice.
The barren kitchen surrounded her. There was nothing to eat. There was terrible stale coffee, and that was it.
Charlotte had slept on the plane, but she still looked exhausted. She seemed like she could barely keep her eyes open. She was a pretty girl, and smart. A survivor, maybe. She had survived this long.
Luke wanted to do the right thing for her, but he didn’t know what that was.
At this moment, the right thing seemed to be waiting here to see who showed up. If they wanted to kill her, Luke would kill them first. If they wanted to help her, Luke would hand her over to them.
She was watching him, more than he was watching her. He was watching the windows and the doors, but he sensed her eyes on him.
“Thank you,”
she said quietly.
He glanced at her. She was staring at him.
“For saving me.”
He shrugged. “It was my pleasure.”
“Was it? Was it really a pleasure?”
“I don’t know what it was, to be honest. I guess a lot of people died.”
It was true. Luke hadn’t tried to keep count, but there was a pile of corpses. Luke had killed a bunch of them on the island. Then there were the dogs, the pilot, Elaine, Buzz Mac. There was no telling how many men were killed in the jungle fight.
Now the girl began to cry. It wasn’t much. Just a few tears running down her cheeks. “All because I went to a party.”
Luke shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that, but that’s not why it happened. It happened because some people are bad. That’s not your fault.”
She started to cry even harder. She put her face in her hands. Her body began to tremble.
He couldn’t comfort her. He had no idea what kind of help this kid was going to need, but he wasn’t it, not right now. He was spent. He didn’t even know how much longer he was going to be able to stay awake. He almost couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore.
He looked at the instant coffee packets again. He grunted. They were going to have to do. Brutal, stale, supermarket brand instant coffee. He practically needed to inject it straight into his veins.
Oh boy.
It occurred to him that Trudy had never gotten him the Dexedrine he asked for.
* * *
The man went by the name El Tigre.
It was a good name for a man like him. In the wild, the tiger was a professional killer. He hunted alone, at twilight, when the shadows made it hard to see. He moved under cover, camouflaged until it was too late for the other animals to save themselves.
El Tigre liked these associations.
