The Shooters

by W. E. B Griffin

  Duffy gave him a dirty look but didn’t respond directly.

  “How would you deal with the problems you see?” he asked Lorimer. “Starting with locating precisely where Timmons and my men are, presuming they’re together?”

  Castillo answered for him: “We’re working on that as we speak.”

  “I’ll let that pass for the moment,” Duffy said to Castillo, then turned back to Lorimer. “How would you go about rescuing Timmons and my men?”

  Lorimer looked to Castillo again for permission. Castillo nodded, and Lorimer replied, “A simple helicopter assault operation.”

  “Like the one staged at Estancia Shangri-La?” Duffy said, more than a little sarcastically.

  “Not quite,” Castillo said. “Shangri-La was supposed to be a passenger pickup, not an assault. We were really surprised when those people shot at us. We’ll go into this one expecting resistance. And act accordingly.”

  “How many helicopters do you think you can borrow from Pevsner, Colonel? How many does he have? Enough for even a ‘simple helicopter assault operation’?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Isn’t that why you’re going to Bariloche?” Duffy asked, almost triumphantly. “To borrow a helicopter again from that Russian criminal Aleksandr Pevsner?”

  “No, that’s not why I’m going to Bariloche, not that that is any of your business. The helicopters involved in this operation will begin to arrive somewhere around midnight on the eighteenth of September. In one week, plus one day, plus however many hours between now and midnight. This is tentative; I haven’t had much time to plan. And, frankly, I need your help with the planning.”

  Castillo noticed that that got Duffy’s attention.

  “Between now and then—this is where you come in, Comandante—we are going to have to set up refueling stations for the helos, a landing field between where I plan to initially land the aircraft—which is on the playing fields of the Polo Association in Pilar—and then somewhere near Asunción. The landing field will need to be big enough for a JP-4 fuel cache for each helo every three hundred kilometers. And be an isolated field, of course. And we need a base of operations in Argentina, also isolated, where we can conceal the helicopters from anyone flying over, and from which we can operate into Paraguay.”

  Duffy considered all of this a moment.

  “How many helicopters will you have?”

  “Four, at least.”

  “And you think you’ll be able to fly four U.S. Army helicopters across a thousand—fifteen hundred—kilometers of Argentina and get away with it? Undetected?”

  “U.S. Army helicopters? No. But I don’t think one or two Argentine Army helicopters flying anywhere—across the pampas or up the Río de la Plata or the Río Paraguay—are going to attract attention from anybody.”

  “Your helicopters will be painted like ours,” Duffy replied, “is that what you’re saying?”

  Castillo nodded, and thought, Now I really have his attention.

  I just have to sink the hook.

  “Except maybe other Argentine Army helicopters?” Duffy pursued. “Their pilots might say, ‘I wonder who that is?’”

  “Mine will be flying nap of the earth, very low—”

  “I know what nap of the earth means,” Duffy protested.

  “—and will have radar on board, which will permit my pilots to take evasive action should they detect any other aircraft in the vicinity.”

  “Like a sudden turn of course which will take them right over an airfield, or a city?”

  “They’re equipped with satellite navigation systems to keep that from happening,” Castillo said. “And the pilots do this sort of thing for a living.”

  “You seem very sure of yourself, Colonel.”

  “This is what I do for a living, Comandante,” Castillo said evenly. “Now, would you like to hear our very preliminary plans for the actual assault? I really need your input on this.”

  Duffy nodded without hesitation.

  Got him!

  Castillo glanced at Munz, who nodded just perceptibly. Castillo then motioned at D’Elia.

  “This is Captain D’Elia, Comandante,” Castillo said. “He will be in charge of the actual assault.”

  Duffy offered his hand.

  “Mucho gusto, mi comandante,” D’Elia said, then glanced at Castillo. “With your permission, mi coronel?”

  “Go ahead,” Castillo said.

  “Generally speaking,” D’Elia began, “as I understand we not only intend to rescue our men but plan to take prisoners—and if we determine our people are being held at a refinery, or transfer point, to either seize or destroy both the drugs and the plant itself—”

  “You are an Argentine, Capitán?” Duffy interrupted.

  “No. But thank you, mi comandante, for your error. I have worked hard on the Porteño accent.”

  “Well, you could have fooled me,” Duffy said.

  We all fooled you, Duffy, Castillo thought.

  And thank God for that!

  I don’t know what the hell I would have done if you had stormed out of here in a rage right after you came in.

  “If I may continue?” D’Elia asked politely, then went on: “If we are to take prisoners and seize drugs, etcetera, the fact that Lieutenant Lorimer has told us these places are accessible only by one road works in our favor.”

  Duffy’s face was expressionless.

  “If there’s only one way in,” D’Elia explained, “there’s only one way out.”

  Duffy nodded knowingly.

  “That’s where your men will come in, Comandante,” D’Elia continued. “At the moment the assault begins—we call that ‘boots on the ground’—the road will have to be cut. Not a moment before, which would alert them, nor a moment after, as it has been my experience that an amazing number of rats can get through even a very small hole in a very short period of time when they are frightened. And we intend to do our very best to badly frighten them.”

  Duffy again nodded his understanding.

  Castillo looked at Munz, who very discreetly gave him a thumbs-up signal.

  Castillo smiled at him, but thought, Why am I waiting for the other shoe to drop?

  [TWO]

  Above San Carlos de Bariloche

  Río Negro Province, Argentina

  1755 10 September 2005

  “There it is,” Alfredo Munz said, pointing.

  Castillo, in the pilot seat of the Aero Commander 680, looked where Munz was pointing out the copilot side window, then banked the high-winged airplane to the right so that he could get a better view below.

  Darkness was rising, but there was still enough light to see a red-tile-roofed collection of buildings—the Llao Llao Resort Hotel—sitting on a mountainside sticking into and several hundred feet above the startling blue waters of a lake.

  Lakes, Castillo corrected himself. Lake Moreno and Lake Nahuel Huapi.

  Well, it looks like we cheated death again. The airport is only twenty-six clicks from here.

  And I’m only half kidding.

  He straightened the wings, then put his hand, palm upward, over his shoulder.

  “Let me have the magic black box, navigator,” he said.

  Corporal Lester Bradley very carefully laid a small laptop computer in his hand, and Castillo very carefully lowered it into his lap.

  He was navigating using a prototype AFC Global Positioning System device connected to the laptop. Aloysius Francis Casey himself had warned him that it was a prototype, its database incomplete, and he really shouldn’t rely on it.

  “It’ll take me three, four days to come up with a good data chip for Argentina and that part of the world, Charley,” Casey had told him in Las Vegas. “You got somebody down there I can FedEx it to?”

  Since Aloysius Francis Casey was a man of his word, presumably the data chip was on its way—or shortly would be—to Mr. Anthony Santini, Assistant Legal Attaché, Embassy of the United States of America, Colombia 4300, Buenos A
ires, Argentina.

  But the bottom line was that it hadn’t arrived.

  Still, what Castillo had—the prototype—looked a helluva lot better to him than the navigation system he’d found in the cockpit of the Aero Commander when they’d gone to Jorge Newbery.

  There had been a bigger problem than aged avionics when they first went to get the airplane at Jorge Newbery. The Commander’s owner had presumed that when Munz had told him he needed to borrow the aircraft, Munz had meant using the owner’s pilot, and he had shown up with his pilot in tow.

  Ordinarily, Castillo was a devout believer in the aviator’s adage “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are very few old, bold pilots.” And, accordingly, he really would have preferred a pilot experienced in (a) flying “his” own Aero Commander and (b) flying it around Argentina. Particularly since Castillo himself had not flown an Aero Commander for a long time.

  But the unspoken problem was that after Bariloche, Castillo planned on going on to Asunción…and intended en route to take the opportunity to make what the U.S. Army called a low-level visual reconnaissance of the area.

  For some wild reason, Castillo believed that (a) the owner would not be too fond of such an activity and (b) even if the owner gave his blessing, the pilot would not be experienced in such low-level visual reconnaissance techniques.

  After considerable discussion, the Aero Commander’s owner had apparently decided that the “several large favors” he owed to el Coronel Munz outweighed his enormous reluctance to turn over his airplane to some gringo friend of Munz, even if that gringo sounded almost like a Porteño.

  The owner’s agreement had come with a caveat: that the owner’s pilot take the gringo friend for “a couple of touch-and-goes,” what was tactfully explained as being helpful “to familiarize one with the aircraft.”

  And what that familiarization flight had done was convince Castillo that while the airplane was obviously scrupulously maintained, most of its navigation equipment had been in its control panel when the aircraft was first delivered—some forty-odd years earlier. Clearly, none of it was going to be as reliable as what Aloysius Francis Casey had given Castillo in the form of a prototype laptop computer and was worried about his using.

  All of this had taken time, of course, and it was quarter to one before Castillo finally managed to get Colonel Munz, Lieutenant Lorimer, Sergeant Mullroney, Corporal Bradley, and Max aboard and could take off on what he announced to the Jorge Newbery tower as “a local area flight, visual flight rules, destination private field near Pilar.”

  As Castillo retracted the landing gear, he suddenly remembered that another U.S. Army lieutenant colonel—the most decorated soldier of World War II, Audie Murphy, who later became a movie star—had been flying in an identical Aero Commander in 1971 when its wing came off in a thunderstorm over Roanoke, Virginia. Murphy, also a skilled aviator, crashed to his death.

  “Right on the money, Alfredo,” Castillo said, pointing to the GPS satellite map on the laptop screen. “The airport’s twenty-odd clicks thataway.”

  “Pevsner’s place is on the other side of the lake—Moreno,” Munz replied, and pointed again. “I don’t see how we can get over there tonight. It’ll be dark by the time we get to the hotel.”

  “You’ll think of something, Alfredo. You always do.”

  Then he reached for the radio microphone to call the Bariloche tower.

  [THREE]

  The Llao Llao Resort Hotel

  San Carlos de Bariloche

  Río Negro Province, Argentina

  1955 10 September 2005

  The general manager of the Llao Llao was about as unenthusiastic with the notion of providing accommodations to Max as the owner of the Aero Commander had been about turning his airplane over to a rich gringo. But as Castillo, holding Max’s leash in one hand and his briefcase in his other, watched Munz discussing this with him, he knew that Munz was going to prevail.

  And at the precise moment Castillo reached this conclusion, the problem of how to meet Aleksandr Pevsner at his home across the lake now that it was dark—really dark; there was no moon—solved itself.

  “Mama!” a young female voice said enthusiastically in Russian. “Look at that dog!”

  “Stay away from him!” a mother’s voice warned.

  Castillo turned.

  Twenty or thirty feet down the wide, high-ceilinged, thickly carpeted lobby, there stood a tall, dark-haired, well-dressed man in his late thirties. With him was a striking blond woman—“Mama”—and a girl of thirteen or fourteen whose own blond hair hung down her back nearly to her waist—My God, Elena’s about as old as Randy!—and two boys, one about age six, and the other maybe ten.

  Behind them stood two burly men. One of them Castillo knew, but only by his first name, János. He was Pevsner’s primary bodyguard. And János knew him, even if there was no sign of recognition on his face. Proof of that came when the other burly man put his hand under his suit jacket—and got a sharp elbow in the abdomen followed by the slashing motion of János’s hand.

  “It’s all right, Anna,” Castillo said to the mother in Russian. “Max only eats the fathers of pretty girls named Elena.”

  Simultaneously, János and Aleksandr Pevsner said, “It’s all right.”

  Pevsner looked at Castillo and added: “I thought I saw you—I even asked János—but we decided, ‘No. What would my friends Charley and Alfredo be doing in Patagonia with a dog the size of a horse?’”

  “Can I pet him?” Elena asked. “Does he speak Russian?”

  “He speaks dog, Elena,” Castillo said, “but he understands Russian.”

  She giggled and went to Max, who sat down and offered his paw. She scratched his ears, and when he licked her face, she put her arms around his neck.

  “So what are my friends Charley and Alfredo doing in Patagonia with a dog the size of a horse?” Pevsner asked.

  “Would you believe we came to see the fossilized dinosaur bones?” Castillo said.

  “Knowing that you never lie to me, I would have to.”

  “How about we heard you would be here and decided to buy you dinner?”

  “It would be a strain, but I would have to believe that, too.”

  “We need to talk, Alek,” Castillo said.

  “That I believe. That’s what I was afraid of,” Pevsner said. “All right, tomorrow morning. I’ll send the boat for you at, say, half past nine?”

  “How about tonight?” Castillo said. “I’m really pressed for time.”

  Pevsner obviously didn’t like that, but after a moment, he said, “We came for dinner. We could talk about what you want to talk about after dinner, if you like.”

  “That would be fine,” Castillo said. “Thank you. And you’ll be my guests at dinner, of course.”

  “That’s not what I meant, as I suspect you know full well, friend Charley. But faced with the choice between the long face of Elena over dinner—having been separated from her newfound friend—or breaking bread with you, I opt for the less painful of the two.”

  “Alek!” his wife protested.

  “It’s all right, Anna,” Castillo said. “What are friends for if not to insult?”

  “I’m afraid that after dinner I will learn what you really think friends are for,” Pevsner said. “Shall we go in?” He gestured toward the dining room. “Elena, the dog goes with the understanding he does not get fed from the table, understood?”

  “Yes, Poppa.”

  “I don’t think they’ll let him in there, Alek,” Castillo said. “This isn’t Budapest.”

  “Yes, I know,” Pevsner said. “In Patagonia, you have to have a substantial financial interest in the hotel if you want to bring a dog into the dining room.”

  Castillo smiled and shook his head.

  The maître d’hôtel appeared, clutching menus to his chest.

  “These gentlemen,” Pevsner ordered, indicating Castillo and Munz, “will be dining with us. Their friends”—h
e pointed to Lorimer, Mullroney, and Bradley—“will dine with mine.”

  His Spanish was good, even fluent, but heavily Russian-accented.

  “Bradley,” Castillo ordered, “go to your room and see if I have any telephone calls. If it’s important, tell me. Otherwise, just come down here and have your dinner.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Bradley said.

  A waiter arrived with a tray of champagne glasses almost as soon as the headwaiter had laid their menus before them. Two of the glasses held a bubbling brown liquid that Castillo decided was Coca-Cola for Sergei and Aleksandr. He was surprised when Elena was offered and accepted one of the champagne stems.

  I don’t need champagne if I’m going to be flying. I’ll just take a sip when we get to the inevitable toast.

  That came almost immediately.

  Pevsner got half out of his chair, picked up his glass, and reached out with it to touch Castillo’s.

  “To dear and trusted friends,” Pevsner said, and then moved his glass to tap the rims of the others, including his daughter’s.

  When that was over, Pevsner just about emptied his glass. Elena didn’t do that, but she took a healthy ladylike sip.

  They let her drink? Maybe she is older than Randy.

  “When were you born, honey?” Castillo asked her.

  “Sixteen November 1992, by the Western calendar,” Elena said.

  Jesus Christ! She is almost exactly as old as Randy. Thirteen.

  “And her drinking champagne shocks you?” Pevsner said.

  “Do you always think the worst of people, Alek?” Castillo asked, and then he turned to Elena and his mouth went onto autopilot: “What I was thinking, honey, is that you’re just about the same age as my son.”

  Jesus Christ!

  I just said “my son” out loud for the first time.

  “I didn’t know you had a family, Charley,” Anna said. “You never said anything.”

  Castillo was aware of Munz’s eyes on him.

  “I have a grandmother, a cousin who is more of a brother, and his family. And a son—Randy—who was also born in November of 1992. He lives with his mother and her husband.”