Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel

A brutal massacre. A terrifying madman.

OSI Special Agent Vin Cooper is brought to the scene of an airport massacre in El Paso, Texas, to investigate the death of a USAF airman, AWOL from a nearby Air Force base.

When a survivor of the chilling massacre crawls out of the desert, Cooper comes to the obvious conclusion – with major cartels just across the border in Juarez, this has to be about drugs.

As he begins to piece together the case, Cooper is drawn into a world of violence and treachery. Soon he finds himself on the run, framed for murders he didn’t commit. But being a fugitive just happens to be the perfect cover for his most dangerous mission yet – crossing the border and infiltrating the cartel.

Coming face-to-face with a terrifying madman, Cooper soon realizes that the airport massacre was just a dress rehearsal for something even worse …

For Sam, my biggest fan and greatest critic.

The glossy red Learjet was parked on the ramp beside a Winjeel, an old orange and white single-engine flight trainer with faded Royal Australian Air Force markings on the wings and fuselage. Bobbie Macey, the Lear’s pilot, patted the old timer’s dusty skin with the flat of her hand. “You’re a long way from home, babe.”

A cab pulled up. Macey’s co-pilot, Rick Gartner, got out and wandered over. “That ol’ girl’s had a hard life,” he said with way too much cheer for the hour. “Bit like you.”

“Watch it, sonny,” said Macey.

“Sleep okay?”

“Fine. You?”

Gartner slipped her a sly grin.

Macey sighed. “Local girl?”

“Not saying.”

“Struck out, huh?”

Gartner kept up the grin but the edge had come off it.

“Thought so,” said Macey.

The two pilots had an easy relationship, all business in the cockpit and all banter out of it – most of it good-natured. At forty-four, Macey was the captain and Gartner, in his early thirties, her co-pilot. Over the past few years they’d flown quite a few charters together and knew the routine like it was scripted. If there was occasional friction between them it stemmed from Gartner’s habit of chasing skirt even though he was married with a kid. A gigolo had written the guy’s moral code, Macey had decided, and it rubbed her the wrong way. But he was easy to get along with otherwise, once the ground rules had been set out during a two-day layover in Panama. That night, after putting away a skinful, he’d cupped her breast as she passed him on the way to the john. She’d stopped, looked down at his hand like it was a food stain on her shirt and said, “You want a bottle broken over your frikken’ head?” Later that night, she’d said, “Pull that shit again I’ll have you fired. I’m your boss, get it?” After that, no further trouble. Nevertheless, it still bugged Macey when Gartner left a bar with some floozy under his wing, and that happened often enough.

Macey ran her hand down the riveted skin of the old trainer’s flank. The aluminum was cooler to the touch than the ambient air temperature, which the local weather report on her cell phone told her was hovering just above seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Comfortable.

“Not much going on around here,” Gartner commented, hands on hips, surveying the surroundings. “Might go see if I can rustle up some coffee.”

“Not for me, thanks,” said Macey.

“Bladder can’t cope, eh?”

She grunted. “I’d like to see you pass a kid the size of a submarine.”

The younger man snorted as he walked off. “Too much information, boss.”

“Be back here in thirty,” Macey said to Gartner’s back, the co-pilot raising his hand above his shoulder in acknowledgment.

With Gartner gone, the pre-dawn quiet returned. Macey did a few stretches, using the Winjeel’s wing for support. A pickup pulled off the access road and motored slowly into the facility. Despite the early hour, there were still plenty of people moving about this small privately owned airport – early risers.

Here and there were single-engine aircraft: Cessnas, Beeches, a few twins and several gliders – this place was big on those. It was Macey’s first time at this facility. She’d run charters in and out of El Paso often enough in the past, operating from the international airport ten miles across town to the northwest. But Horizon Airport looked and felt home built. The single runway was narrow and lumpy like it had been rolled straight onto the desert floor, the sand and rock nibbling at the edges of the asphalt. And getting in and out of this place was different to what she was used to. After flying for United back in the day, and the Marines before that – KC-130s, tankers, airborne gas stations – you got used to a certain level of infrastructure. This place had almost none. No radar, no control tower. Around here it was all see-and-avoid, which wasn’t ideal when you were flying a jet with a stall speed equal to the cruise of the average single-engine plane frequenting this chunk of sky. What troubled Macey most about Horizon, though, now that she thought about it, was the almost complete lack of security. A little chain-link fencing enclosed the back of the facility and that was pretty much it. Anyone could just wander in and do whatever they liked. It was for this reason that she’d slept aboard the Lear. The passenger seats went back horizontal so it wasn’t so bad. Lord knows she’d slept on aircraft most of her adult life.

Macey took a stick of cinnamon gum from her pocket, called it breakfast and popped it in her mouth. She walked past the trainer toward the Lear. A 35 model. Compact, yet with ample room for eight passengers. Agile too, like a sports car, and cruised comfortably at a little over Mach 0.8 at forty thousand feet, performance roughly equal to that of a big commercial airliner. Worth a few mill. A nice prize if someone cared to steal it.

She walked around the aircraft, giving it a casual pre-flight, looking over the control surfaces and landing gear. Chocks up against the tires: check. Tags on the pitot tubes to keep out the sand and bugs: check. Covers on the engine intakes for same reason: check. Nothing amiss. Macey examined the front hatch: locked, just as she’d left it.

Today’s charter was to take a local well-to-do rancher, his wife and two young children, to Orlando, Florida. They were spending the day at Disneyland, a birthday present for one of the kids from what she’d been told. At 7 pm, they were to return the family to Horizon before heading back to the charter company’s HQ at LAX.

Macey’s watch read 5:09. The family wasn’t scheduled to turn up till 5:45. It would still be dark then, but they wanted to get an early start. So, in other words, Macey told herself, you got time to kill, babe. She gazed up. The stars directly overhead were dimmer than the points of light down on the horizon, the larger ones twinkling like the landing lights of faraway inbound aircraft. She dug her hands in her pockets and started walking along the short taxiway, toward the runway. Somewhere unseen within the facility, a single-engine aircraft fired up and then settled back into an easy idle. A Lycoming 320, her educated ear told her. A lizard, startled by her footsteps, skittered for cover into some low scrub. Macey walked into and out of a cool band of air. She enjoyed this time of the morning. It was peaceful, quiet.

*

Gartner strolled to the terminal building and tried the front door. Locked.

“Great,” he said. He put a hand against the glass and peered inside to make doubly sure that the place was empty. Dark, no movement. He went around the corner of the building and was startled by a large black man sitting on a side doorstep. The man stopped what he was doing, which was aimlessly lobbing pebbles collected in one hand into a tin.

“Hey,” he said looking up.

“Hi,” Gartner replied.

“You work here, man?”

“No, just having a look around.”

“Know if I can I get a plane outta here?”

“It’s not that kinda airport. A charter flight maybe. You might get lucky …”

The man grunted and turned away without further acknowledgment and went back to lobbing pebbles.

Gartner walked around him and meandered back behind the building toward a row of Quonset huts. Several had lights on. The sound of an angle grinder coming from one of them cut through the silence. A pickup motored slowly by, muffled country and western music on its sound system. Despite the early hour, people were already here earning a buck. An old Piper Cub was hangared in one of the Quonsets, a Cessna 172 in its neighbor and an auto body shop in the one after that. He stopped in front of the body shop. A shower of sparks from the angle grinder sprayed from the shadow behind a ’69 Mach I Mustang. The space around the old classic was filled with used auto parts: panels, axles, differentials and suspension components. A guy in dirty blue coveralls stood up behind the car, a cigarette attached somehow to his upper lip. His sudden appearance caught Gartner by surprise.

“Morning,” Gartner said, adding a wave.

The guy repositioned the protective glasses on top of his faded Las Vegas ball cap. “Mornin’.”

“Say, where can I get a coffee around here?”

The man walked to the front of the Quonset. He was in his mid-forties, of medium height with longish brown hair hanging down either side of the cap and a face streaked with black dust. He puffed on the cigarette before pulling the butt off his lip. He dropped it on the ground and stood on it. “Now? Not a chance.”

“The sleepy end of town, eh?” said Gartner more to himself, looking around. This adventure was a dead end. He told himself he should just go back to the Lear and fire up its cappuccino machine. And then he remembered Bobbie had the keys.

“Ah can fix ya some if yer desperate, long as ya don’t mind it black,” the man said helpfully. “Cain’t get m’ heart started ‘thout it.”

Gartner thought about saying no, but the minutes were dragging. A coffee and a word or two would pass the time. “Know what you mean. Black’s good, thanks.”

“Don’ got no sugar, neither.”

“That’s how I take it.”

“Shouldn’t be more’n a minute or two. Just had a coffee masef.” The man laid the angle grinder carefully on a mat protecting the car’s hood, went to a side bench cramped with a jumble of auto-electrical components and flicked a switch on a white plastic electric kettle smeared with greasy black fingerprints. “Ya’ll own that Lear up on the main ramp?”

“I wish.”

“But ya’ll’s the pilot, right?”

“One of ’em.”

“Needs two pilots, eh? Nice plane.”

“Nice car,” Gartner countered.

The man unscrewed the red lid from a jar of Folgers and shook some granulated coffee into a foam cup.

“Will be when ah’m finished. Juss ‘bout ready to take ‘er over t’ the paint shop. Not mine, though – a customer’s. She been givin’ me the hurry up for weeks.”

“She?” In Gartner’s world a Mach I Mustang was a man’s car, though probably Macey would have something to say about that, he thought.

“Yeah, she – Gail Sorwick. Anniversary present for her ol’ man.”

“Some present.” For some reason the name was familiar to Gartner but he couldn’t place it.

“Some lady – ya know what ah mean?” In case Gartner didn’t, the man made a gesture with his hand like his fingertips were burning and then shook them to put the flames out. “Drives a Porsche herself, a Cabrio’. Every time she come roun’ here the place kinda stops and a lotta male traffic starts walkin’ back an’ forth out front here tryin’ t’ look busy, borrowin’ shit. Funny as hell.”

“Hot women have that effect on the world. An immutable law of the universe.”

“Yep.”

The lid on the jug danced excitedly before the unit turned itself off with a loud click. The man poured boiling water into the foam cup and handed it to Gartner. “There ya go.”

“Thanks. This’ll help.”

Close by, a Lycoming roared into life and then settled back into an idle. Gartner glanced in the direction of the sound and saw the red beacon rotating on a Piper Warrior. “What’s down the far end of the road?” he asked.

“Not much. Trucks an’ trailers, mostly. Whole yard full of ’em out back. All the action’s right here.” He confirmed that with a yawn. “Don’ get many Learjets. Why ya’ here?”

“Got a charter. Off to Disneyland for the day.” Gartner sipped his coffee. “Happiest kingdom of them all.”

The man grunted. “So they say. Well, ya’ll have a nice day.”

“You too,” said Gartner. “And thanks for this.” He held up the foam cup and gave it a nod.

The man went back to the Mustang and his angle grinder and Gartner walked toward the Piper, thinking that the people round here were pretty friendly. The single-engine aircraft began to move, its landing lights chasing away the darkness in its path. Red light from its tail beacon swept the low buildings while its strobe light fired flashes of hard white light that hurt his eyes. A refueling truck drove a short distance and parked against an office. The lights went on in the building beside it and Gartner heard music or a television, he wasn’t sure which. The place was waking up. He glanced at his watch. Still had a good fifteen minutes. He gulped down a mouthful of the Folgers and followed the Piper. It turned and disappeared from view until Gartner walked further onto the ramp, opening out the angle. The lights outlining the runway came on. He concluded that the Piper’s pilot would’ve flicked the switch remotely with his radio to activate them.

*

Bright white lights suddenly came on, outlining the runway. Macey turned and watched the aircraft swing onto the taxiway. It motored slowly west, coming her way, heading for the beginning of Runway 08 and a take-off into the soon-to-rise sun.

She stepped off the asphalt and walked in the flinty dirt, giving the aircraft coming up behind her plenty of room. Something small and frightened jumped out of her path and dived for a burrow; some kind of gopher, she imagined.

The aircraft – it was a Piper Warrior, she now saw – turned off the taxiway and onto the runway. Half a dozen seconds later it ambled past her, strobe lights flashing and its beacon washing her in red light. The pilot raised a hand to Macey, giving her a departing wave. She returned the gesture and went back to keeping an eye out for gopher holes.

Up ahead, the Warrior stopped briefly. It then turned sharply through one-eighty degrees and faced back down the runway, its landing lights powerful and blinding. Macey put her head down and watched her feet kicking up the dust as she walked. The Warrior’s engine note climbed rapidly, its throttle open. She didn’t have to look up to know that the plane would be stationary, its handbrake on while the pilot performed final engine checks. Its racing Lycoming and prop noise died away for a few moments before it began all over again. But this time the plane began to move, handbrake off, the engine and propeller reaching a higher, louder, more serious note this time, throttle wide open.

It eventually howled past her – no wave from the pilot this time – and bounced down the asphalt, lined up perfectly between the two rows of lights. The small aircraft lifted off when it was roughly adjacent to the terminal building and climbed out at a shallow angle. Macey savored the smell of burned aviation fuel reaching her nostrils. The lights beside the runway turned off, leaving behind blue and orange floaters that swam in her eyes.