“He told me he has seven kids,” Ryan said.
Johns’ voice was too tired for any overt emotions. He spoke like a man a thousand years old, tired of life, tired of flying, tired of everything. “Yeah, cute ones. His wife is from Laos. Carol, her name is. Oh, God, Buck – why now?”
“Let me help,” Jack said. Johns took the arms. Ryan got the legs. They had to wait in line. There were other bodies to be carried out, some dead, some only wounded, and they got the understandable priority. The soldiers, Jack saw, carried their own, helped by Sergeant Bean. The Coasties offered help, but it was declined – not unkindly, and the sailors understood the reason. Ryan and Johns also declined the assistance, the colonel because of the years with his friend, and the CIA officer because of a duty self-imposed. Riley and his men stayed behind briefly to collect packs and weapons. Then they, too, went below.
The bodies were set in a passageway for the time being. The wounded went to the crew’s mess. Ryan and the Air Force officers were guided to the wardroom. There they found the man who’d started it all, months before, though none of them would ever understand how it had all happened. There was one more face, one which Jack recognized.
“Hi, Dan.”
“Bad?” the FBI agent asked.
Jack didn’t respond to that. “We got Cortez. I think he was wounded. He’s probably in sick bay with a couple of soldiers keeping an eye on him.”
“What got you?” Murray asked. He pointed to Jack’s helmet.
Ryan took it off and saw a gouge where a 7.62 bullet had scraped away a quarter inch or so of fiberglass. Jack knew that he should have reacted to it, but that part of his life was four hundred miles behind him. Instead he sat down and stared at the deck and didn’t say anything for a while. Two minutes later, Murray moved him onto a cot and covered him with a blanket.
Captain Montaigne had to fight the last two miles through high winds, but she was a particularly fine pilot and the Lockheed Hercules was a particularly fine aircraft. She touched down a little hard, but not too badly, and followed the guide jeep to her hangar. A man in civilian clothes was waiting there, along with some officers. As soon as she’d shut down, she walked out to meet them. She made them wait while she headed for the rest room, smiling through her fatigue that there was not a man in America who’d deny a lady a trip to the john. Her flight suit smelled horrible and her hair was a wreck, she saw in the mirror before she returned. They were waiting for her right outside the door.
“Captain, I want to know what you did tonight,” the civilian asked – but he wasn’t a civilian, she realized after a moment, though the prick certainly didn’t deserve to be anything else. Montaigne didn’t know everything that was behind all this, but she did know that much.
“I just flew a very long mission, sir. My crew and I are beat to hell.”
“I want to talk to all of you about what you did.”
“Sir, that is my crew. If there’s any talking to be done, you’ll talk to me!” she snapped back.
“What did you do?” Cutter demanded. He tried pretending it wasn’t a girl. He didn’t know that she was not pretending that he wasn’t a man.
“Colonel Johns went in to rescue some special-ops troopers.” She rubbed both hands across the back of her neck. “We got ’em – he got ’em, most of ’em, I suppose.”
“Then where is he?”
Montaigne looked him right in the eye. “Sir, he had engine trouble. He couldn’t climb out to us – couldn’t get over the mountains. He flew right into the storm. He didn’t fly out of it, sir. Anything else you want to know? I want to get showered, get some coffee down, and start thinking about search and rescue.”
“The field’s closed,” the base commander said. “Nobody gets out for another ten hours. I think you need some rest, Captain.”
“I think you’re right, sir. Excuse me, I have to see to my crew. I’ll have you the SAR coordinates in a few minutes. Somebody’s gotta try,” she added.
“Look, General, I want -” Cutter started to say.
“Mister, you leave that crew alone,” said an Air Force one-star who was retiring soon anyway.
Larson landed at Medellín’s city airport about the same time the MC-130 approached Panama. It had been a profane flight, Clark in the back with Escobedo, the latter’s hands tied behind his back and a gun in his ribs. There had been many promises of death in the flight. Death to Clark, death to Larson and his girlfriend who worked for Avianca, death to many people. Clark just smiled through it all.
“So what do you do with me, eh? You kill me now?” he asked as the wheels locked in the down position. Finally, Clark responded.
“I suggested that we could give you a flying lesson out the back of the helicopter, but they wouldn’t let me. So looks like we’re going to have to let you go.”
Escobedo didn’t know how to answer. His bluster wasn’t able to cope with the fact that they might not want to kill him. They just didn’t have the courage to, Clark decided.
“I had Larson call ahead,” he said.
“Larson, you motherless traitor, you think you will survive?”
Clark dug the pistol in Escobedo’s ribs. “You don’t bother the guy who’s flying the goddamned airplane. If I were you, señor, I’d be very pleased to be coming home. We’re even having you met at the airport.”
“Met by whom?”
“By some of your friends,” Clark said as the wheel squeaked down on the tarmac. Larson reversed his props to brake the aircraft. “Some of your fellow board members.”
That’s when he saw the real danger coming. “What did you tell them?”
“The truth,” Larson answered. “That you were taking a flight out of the country under very strange circumstances, what with the storm and all. And, gee, what with all the odd happenings of the past few weeks, I thought that it was kind of a coincidence…”
“But I will tell them -”
“What?” Clark asked. “That we put our own lives at risk by delivering you back home? That it’s all a trick? Sure, you tell them that.”
The aircraft stopped but the engines didn’t. Clark gagged the chieftain. Then he unbuckled Escobedo’s seat belt and pulled him toward the door. A car was already there. Clark stepped down, his silenced automatic in Escobedo’s back.
“You are not Larson,” the man with the submachine gun said.
“I am his friend. He is flying. Here is your man. You should have something for us.”
“You do not need to leave,” said the man with the briefcase.
“This one has too many friends. It is best, I think, that we should leave.”
“As you wish,” the second one said. “But you have nothing to fear from us.” He handed over the briefcase.
“Gracias, jefe,” Clark said. They loved to be called that. He pushed Escobedo toward them.
“You should know better than to betray your friends,” said the second one as Clark reentered the aircraft. The comment was aimed at the bound and gagged chieftain, whose eyes were very, very wide, staring back at Clark as he closed the door.
“Get us the hell out of here.”
“Next stop, Venezuela,” Larson said as he goosed the throttles.
“Then Gitmo. Think you can hack it?”
“I’ll need some coffee, but they make it good down here.” The aircraft lifted off and Larson thought, Jesus, it’s good to have this one behind us. That was true for him, but not for everyone.
30. The Good of the Service
BY THE TIME Ryan awoke on his cot in the wardroom, they were out of the worst of it. The cutter managed to make a steady ten knots east, and with the storm heading northwest at fifteen, they were in moderate seas in six hours. Course was made northeast, and Panache increased to her best continuous speed of about twenty knots.
The soldiers were quartered with the cutter’s enlisted crew, who treated them like visiting kings. By some miracle some liquor bottles were discovered – probably from the chiefs’ quarters, but no one hazarded to ask – and swiftly emptied. Their uniforms were discarded and new clothing issued from ship’s stores. The dead were placed in cold storage, which everyone understood was the only possible thing. There were five of them; two of them, including Zimmer, had died during the rescue. Eight men were wounded, one of them seriously, but the two Army medics, plus the cutter’s independent-duty corpsman, were able to stabilize him. Mainly the soldiers slept and ate and slept some more during their brief cruise.