Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (8 page)

 
          
“Just
fly,” Hardcastle shouted.

 
          
“Two
miles, altitude three hundred feet, groundspeed one-forty.” “McAlister, take us
down to three hundred feet,” Hardcastle said over interphone. “Put the Shorts
on my side of the cabin.” And to the rescue specialist: “Take a position at the
door, strap yourself in and fire on anything that moves down there.”

 
          
“You
mean shoot at the plane?” the very young dropmaster asked. Hardcastle tried to
keep his temper in check. “Yes,
shoot
the goddamn plane. Those people are murderers. Keep your eyes open and don’t
cross-fire with me.”

 
          
“One
point five miles—”

 
          
“I
got him,” McAlister shouted. “Eleven o’clock. He’s hauling ass.” The Shorts was
close enough to be a dark shape just above the trees. Suddenly the cargo plane
heeled left, trying to angle away from the Dolphin.

 
          
“Cut
him off,” Hardcastle ordered. McAlister threw the Dolphin into a hard left
bank, turned inside the Shorts and aimed for a spot ahead of its flight path.
The Shorts’ turn had cut its speed, and the more agile Dolphin helicopter could
move closer to its target.

 
          
Now
the Shorts was off to the Dolphin’s right, and Hardcastle was about to switch
over to the right side of the chopper when McAlister’s copilot yelled, “look
out!” and McAlister yanked back on the collective just as a flash of light
erupted from the Shorts’ left side.

 
          
“Put
him on the left,” Hardcastle ordered. McAlister banked hard right, looped over
the Shorts transport and zoomed back down, using his airspeed to close the
short distance between them. Hardcastle leaned out the door, and fighting the
wind blast, took aim on the transport and fired.

 
          
He
had to remind himself to let up on the trigger after a few seconds of automatic
fire. The sound of the rotors beating overhead, the ear-shattering noise of the
M-16, the target-fixation, the motion of the chopper, the force of the
slipstream slapping the rifle muzzle, the excitement, the fear, the
anticipation—it was all like a drug, he thought ironically.

 
          
McAlister
was shouting. “Cease fire, cease fire!”

 
          
Hardcastle
ignored him.

 
          
Telltale
sparks had jumped off the transport’s wings as Hardcastle began another volley.
He only stopped as the transport moved farther back out of his field of fire
and waited for
Roosevelt
to start shooting.

 
          
Roosevelt
had looked startled when the admiral had opened fire, but at a dark glance from
the admiral he began spraying bullets right and left over the sky. He’d had his
finger on the trigger for eight full seconds before Hardcastle stopped him. “Seaman,
watch what the hell you’re doing.”

 
          
“Sorry,
sir,” Roosevelt shouted over the wind blast, not realizing he was screaming
into the interphone, “but I haven’t shot an M-16 in almost a year.”

 
          
Hardcastle
looked at the young man, shook his head. The Shorts transport was in a steep
right turn, passing underneath the Dolphin. “Right turn and come around on him
again,” Hardcastle called to McAlister. “Don’t let him get on your right ...”

 
          
McAlister
hesitated, and that momentary pause was enough for the Shorts to get around to
the right, and for its machine gun to explode into action once again. Heavy
pings echoed off the Dolphin’s thin aluminum frame before McAlister could dodge
away.

 
          
“Move
away, put him in my door,” Hardcastle shouted. This time McAlister complied,
without hesitation or questioning. This time Roosevelt was ready too. As soon
as the Shorts popped into view, now less than two hundred yards away, he opened
fire directly on the cockpit.

 
          
As
he did a flash of yellow erupted from the Shorts’ right engine, and the
transport started a lazy left turn, skimming the treetops. Roosevelt ejected
his spent clip and fumbled for another, but Hardcastle waved a hand in his
face. “Hold your fire, you won’t need it.” A moment later the Shorts, still in
its left turn, lazily flipped over on its left wing and crashed into the thick
trees and murky swamps below. A few muffled explosions, a hint of fire—then
only the incessant beating of the Dolphin’s rotors overhead.

 
          
Hardcastle
loaded a fresh clip into his rifle. “Nice shooting, Roosevelt,” he said. The
young seaman looked frozen in place, the smoking rifle in his lap, watching the
spot where the transport had gone down. On the tactical channel Hardcastle
said, “SLINGSHOT, that Shorts is down near our present location. Mark and
record for a search team, then give us a vector back to that drop zone. We’ll—”

 
          
“Admiral,
this is McAlister. We’re getting a fluctuating oil-pressure, we may have taken
some of that fire from the Shorts. I’m heading toward Homestead to check it
out.”

 
          
Hardcastle
yanked the clip out of his rifle with a frustrated snap. But even as he and
Roosevelt safed their weapons he realized they were very, very lucky that they
were alive. One look in the young man’s eyes and Hardcastle realized that
Roosevelt was thinking the same thing.

           
“What was that gun they had on
board, Admiral?” Roosevelt asked. “I could hear it clear up here.”

 
          
“I
don’t know,” Hardcastle told him, wiping cold sweat from his face. In spite of
the wind still coursing through the cabin, he was burning up—the natural
amphetamine, his adrenaline, wearing off. He closed the sliding cargo door and
locked it. “Large caliber, maybe a twelve millimeter or even a fifty cal. We’ll
find out when we get an investigation team in there.”

 
          
“A
fifty caliber? On a dope smuggler’s plane? I thought the smugglers saved every
ounce of weight and room on a plane for product. These guys wasted about a
hundred pounds on a huge machine gun—I’m no math genius but I figure that’s
about fifty thousand dollars’ worth of uncut cocaine, or damn near a quarter
million dollars of street shit.”

 
          
Hardcastle
stared out the window. “Heavy weapons—something big enough to take out the
Black Hawk. Something very bad’s going down . . .”

 
          
“A
drug war? I mean, not just the usual inflow—a real drug war, sir?”

 
          
Hardcastle
was suddenly aware of the M-16 in his hands, felt the heat of the barrel, the
cold metal of the clip. He had carried an M-16 for years through the jungles of
Nam, yet the weapon still was as foreign to him as it was to Roosevelt.

 
          
More
Coast Guard and Customs agents were going to die.
Roosevelt
was right—drug smuggling was changing, and
the men at the front of the escalating war—the Customs Service and the Coast
Guard—were going to get killed unless something drastic was done.

 
          
On a Yacht off the Coast of
Curacao
,
Netherlands
Antilles

 
          
The
yacht was a floating palace—and fortress. Armed guards with pistols hidden in
beach towels or under waiter’s jackets strolled each of the massive craft’s
four decks. Two huge radomes on the upper deck contained satellite transceivers
that allowed the ship’s master to communicate world-wide—be it a bank in
Switzerland or the Cayman Islands or assassins in Washington or Paris—as well
as radars that could scan some fifteen miles in all directions for signs of
pursuit. Jet propulsion could carry the one-hundred-foot-long yacht at forty
miles an hour, faster than most naval vessels and patrol ships.

 
          
Above
the main salon and behind the master’s berth was an office that looked like
something in a luxury penthouse suite or Fortune 500 office, complete with
mahogany conference table, computer monitors, oak bookcases, liquid-crystal
displays of satellite news and video services, paneled walls and crystal
service sets. The entire room was secured by sophisticated electronic
scramblers as well as round-the-clock guards posted at the salon’s two
entrances.

 
          
It
was here that three of the world’s most powerful drug smugglers were meeting to
divide up the United States of America.

 
          
Gonzales
Rodriguez Gachez was the oldest of the three at age forty-one. Short, wiry with
a thin mustache over thin lips, he seemed never to blink—seemed to stare with
the unnerving eyes of a reptile. Pablo Escalante, age thirty-eight, had
movie-star perfect white teeth, a tall muscular body, black hair and trim
features. Jorge Luiz Pena, the third member of the group, looked thirty years
older than his thirty-five years, with a bulging abdomen, a smoker’s cough,
thin graying hair and the bulbous red nose of a hard drinker.

 
          
The
three sat now in a circle in the lounge area of the salon, watching each other
silently as waiters offered drinks—they had ignored, or chosen to ignore, the
sight of bodyguards tasting the drinks. Pena knocked his down as soon as his
chubby fingers surrounded the glass, ignoring Escalante’s upraised glass.
Escalante smiled wearily as Pena’s glass was refilled, worried that the little
bastard would ignore his host completely.

 
          
Escalante
turned to Gachez with his glass raised high: “To our gracious host, may you
always sail in calm seas and under bright skies.” Pena mumbled a “salut” before
finishing his second glass of cognac.

 
          
“I
thank you, Pablo,” Gachez said, sipping his cognac. “I am pleased you have
decided to be with me on this cruise. You are both my dear friends.” Escalante
nodded his thanks; Pena said nothing as he watched more of the amber liquid
being poured into his glass. “Jorge, how is Medellin these days?” Gachez asked
the short weasely man, watching as he downed another glass. “I have been away
too long.”

 
          
“The
same,” Pena told him. “Hot and boring. The only good thing about it is that my
wife is in Rio de Janeiro.”

 
          
There
was an uncomfortable pause as Pena went back to his glass— his appetite for
liquor matched only by his hunger for women. That he found enough to satisfy
him was a testimonial to the power of
ilaho
and money. “And how is business?” Pena asked Gachez. “You’ve been gone a long
time.”

 
          
“I
would say it goes very well,” Gachez told him. “At least I am satisfied.” He
paused, looking at his two guests with his maddening smile. “Ah, I see. So that
is what this meeting is about? My two close friends from the foothills are not
here on a friendly visit? A message from the cartel, perhaps?”

 
          
“The
other families are well pleased with you, Gonzales, well pleased,” Escalante
said quickly. “We have all been feeling the pressure on us by the Americans and
even the leftists in our own government. We have all been forced to cut down
shipments and therefore production. But you . . . you do not. You have managed
to maintain your production levels far above ours. How do you do this?”

 
          
Gachez’s
smile stayed fixed, but inside he was seething. These are the real cowards, he
thought. He said, “Nonsense, Pablo, I have done nothing special . .

 
          
“You’ve
shipped six thousand kilos into south Florida in just the past month,” Pena
said, with none of the fancy verbiage of Escalante. He took another gulp of
cognac. “At a time when the cartel had thought that south Florida was closed to
us you’ve breached it again. We’re sending token shipments in containers and
overland by trucks through Mexico while you’re sending over a thousand kilos a
week right in the American’s faces. Senor Escalante here prefers his flowery
prose and Hollywood smile to charm the info out of you, Gonzales,” Pena bulled
on. “I don’t need that. We pay a tribute to the cartel same as you, but you
vacation all winter on this floating Taj Mahal while we sweat in the jungles
bringing product to port. We have all shared the wealth—now, you must share
your knowledge. How are you shipping your product into the heart of the
American defenses?”