“Exactly where?”
“Howard, sir.”
“Very well. How can I get in touch with them?”
“Sir, they’re out of the net. I do not have that information. They can contact us but we can’t contact them.”
“That’s crazy,” Cutter objected.
“Not so, Admiral. We do that sort of thing all the time. With the MC-130 along, they’re a self-contained unit. The Herky-bird takes maintenance and support personnel to sustain the operation, and unless they call us for something, they’re completely independent of this base. In the event of a family emergency or something like that, we can try to contact them through Howard’s base ops office, but we haven’t had to do so in this case. I can try to open that channel now for you, if you wish, sir, but it might take a few hours.”
“Thanks, but I can be there in a few hours.”
“Weather’s breaking down around that area, sir,” the major warned him.
“That’s okay.” Cutter left the room and walked back to his car. His plane had already been refueled, and ten minutes later it was lifting off for Panama.
Johns was on an easier flight profile now, heading northeast down the great Andean valley that forms the spine of Colombia.
The flight was smooth, but he had three concerns. First, he didn’t have the necessary power to climb over the mountains to his west at his present aircraft weight. Second, he’d have to refuel in less than an hour. Third, the weather ahead was getting worse by the minute.
“CAESAR, this is CLAW, over.”
“Roger, CLAW.”
“When are we going to tank, sir?” Captain Montaigne asked.
“I want to get closer to the coast first, and maybe if we burn some more off I can head west some more to do it.”
“Roger, but be advised that we’re starting to get radar emissions, and somebody might just detect us. They’re air-traffic radars, but this Herky-bird is big enough to give one a skin-paint, sir.”
Damn! Somehow Johns had allowed himself to forget that.
“We got a problem here,” PJ told Willis.
“Yeah. There’s a pass about twenty minutes ahead that we might be able to climb over.”
“How much?”
“Says eighty-one hundred on the charts. Drops down a lot lower farther up, but with the detection problem… and the weather. I don’t know, Colonel.”
“Let’s find out how high we can take her,” Johns said. He’d tried to go easy on the engines for the last half hour. Not now. He had to find out what he could do. PJ twisted the throttle control on the collective arm to full power, watching the gauge for Number Two as he did so. The needle didn’t even reach 70 percent this time.
“The P3 leak is getting worse, boss,” Willis told him.
“I see it.” They worked to get maximum lift off the rotor, but though they didn’t know it, that, too, had taken damage and was not delivering as much lift as it was supposed to. The Pave Low labored upward, reaching seventy-seven hundred feet, but that was where it stopped, and then it started descending, fighting every foot but gradually losing altitude.
“As we burn off more gas…” Willis said hopefully.
“Don’t bet on it.” PJ keyed his radio. “CLAW, CAESAR, we can’t make it over the hills.”
“Then we’ll come to you.”
“Negative, too soon. We have to tank closer to the coast.”
“CAESAR, this is LITTLE EYES. I copy your problem. What sort of fuel you need for that monster?” Larson asked. He’d been pacing the helicopter since the pickup, in accordance with the plan.
“Son, right now I’d burn piss if I had enough.”
“Can you make the coast?”
“That’s affirmative. Close, but we ought to be able to make it.”
“I can pick you an airfield one-zero-zero miles short of the coast that has all the avgas you need. I am also carrying a casualty who’s bleeding and needs some medical help.”
Johns and Willis looked at each other. “Where is it?”
“At current speed, about forty minutes. El Pindo. It’s a little place for private birds. Ought to be deserted this time of night. They have ten-kay gallons of underground storage. It’s a Shell concession and I’ve been in and out of there a bunch of times.”
“Altitude?”
“Under five hundred. Nice, thick air for that rotor, Colonel.”
“Let’s do it,” Willis said.
“CLAW, did you copy that?” Johns asked.
“That’s affirm.”
“That’s what we’re going to try. Break west. Stay close enough to maintain radio contact, but you are free to evade radar coverage.”
“Roger, heading west,” Montaigne replied.
In back, Ryan was sitting by his gun. There were eight wounded men in the helicopter, but two medics were working on them and Ryan was unable to offer any help better than that. Clark rejoined him.
“Okay, what are we going to do with Cortez and Escobedo?”
“Cortez we want, the other one, hell, I don’t know. How do we explain kidnapping him?”
“What do you think we’re going to do, put him on trial?” Clark asked over the din of the engines and the wind.
“Anything else is cold-blooded murder. He’s a prisoner now, and killing prisoners is murder, remember?”
You’re getting legal on me, Clark thought, but he knew that Ryan was right. Killing prisoners was contrary to the code.
“So we take him back?”
“That blows the operation,” Ryan said. He knew he was talking too loudly for the subject. He was supposed to be quiet and thoughtful now, but the environment and the events of the evening defeated that. “Christ, I don’t know what to do.”
“Where are we going – I mean, where’s this chopper going?”
“I don’t know.” Ryan keyed his intercom to ask. He was surprised by the answer and communicated it to Clark.
“Look, let me handle it. I got an idea. I’ll take him out of here when we land. Larson and I will tidy that part of it up. I think I know what’ll work.”
“But -”
“You don’t really want to know, do you?”
“You can’t murder him!” Jack insisted.
“I won’t,” Clark said. Ryan didn’t know how to read that answer. But it did offer a way out, and he took it.
Larson got there first. The airfield was poorly lit, only a few glow lights showing under the low ceiling, but he managed to get his aircraft down, and with his anticollision lights blinking, he guided the way to the fuel-service area. He’d barely stopped when the helicopter landed fifty yards away.
Larson was amazed. In the dim blue lights he could see numerous holes in the aircraft. A man in a flight suit ran out toward him. Larson met him and led him to the fuel hose. It was a long one, about an inch in diameter, used to fuel private aircraft. The power to the pumps was off, but Larson knew where the switch was, and he shot the door lock. He’d never done that before, but just like in the movies, five rounds removed the brass mechanism from the wooden frame of the door. A minute later, Sergeant Bean had the nozzle into one of the outrigger tanks. That was when Clark and Escobedo appeared. A soldier held a rifle to the latter’s head while the CIA officers conferred.
“We’re going back,” Clark told the pilot.
“What?” Larson turned to see two soldiers taking Juardo out of the Beech and toward the helicopter.
“We’re taking our friend here back home to Medellín. Couple of things we have to do first, though…”
“Oh, great.” Larson walked back to his aircraft and climbed up on the wing to open his fuel caps. He had to wait fifteen minutes. The helicopter usually drank fuel through a far larger hose. When the crewman took the hose back, the chopper’s rotor started turning again. Soon after that, it lifted off into the night. There was lightning ahead to the north, and Larson was just as happy that he wasn’t flying there. He let Clark handle the fueling while he went inside to make a telephone call. The funny part was that he’d even make money off the deal. Except that there was nothing funny about anything that had happened during the preceding month.
“Okay,” PJ said into the intercom. “That’s the last pit stop, and we’re heading for home.”
“Engine temps aren’t all that great,” Willis said. The T-64-GE-7 engines were designed to burn aviation kerosene, not the more volatile and dangerous high-octane gas used by private planes. The manufacturer’s warranty said that you could use that fuel for thirty hours before the burner cans were crisped down to ashes, but the warranty didn’t say anything about bad valve springs and P3 loss.
“Looks like we’re going to cool ’em down just fine,” the colonel said, nodding at the weather ahead.
“Thinking positive again, are we, Colonel?” Willis said as coolly as he could manage. It wasn’t just a thunderstorm there, it was a hurricane that stood between them and Panama. On the whole, it was something scarier than being shot at. You couldn’t shoot back at a storm.