Against All Enemies (17 page)

“Execution,” Ian said.

A smile confirmed his guess as accurate. “Shall we get started, then?”

Chapter Twelve

W
hen flying below two hundred feet at three hundred fifty miles an hour in blacked-out conditions, Jonathan preferred blindness to the enhanced imagery of NVGs—night vision goggles. At that altitude, every ground condition affected the performance of the Learjet, and Boxers was having the time of his life. They’d been doing it for the last two hundred miles to stay under the coastal radar as they raced toward a jungle airstrip that was really just a set of coordinates as far as Jonathan was concerned.

“Haven’t had this much fun in years, Boss,” Boxers said through a smile. The aircraft took a big bounce, and he blasted a boisterous laugh. “This was a great idea. All we need are incoming tracers, and it would feel like the old days.”

Boxers was the best pilot Jonathan had ever flown with, outside of the wizards of the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment. If it had wings or rotors, Big Guy could get it airborne when others couldn’t, and land it where it wasn’t designed to go. Sometimes the landing left a divot, and sometimes it didn’t. Jonathan vastly preferred the non-divot landings.

“How far out are we?” Jonathan asked. Among what he considered to be his greatest weaknesses was his penchant for air sickness. Right now, he was willing his dinner to stay put, but the dinner was fighting back.

“We’ve been feet dry for ten minutes,” Big Guy said. “That’s why it’s so bumpy. We’ve passed Ancón, but we buzzed it low enough that I fear we might have alerted the authorities.”

Jonathan chuckled. “That means we might trigger the Panamanian Air Defense Force?”

Boxers returned the laugh. “I’m thinking barrage kites and severe bad wishes.” Like much of Central and South America, Panama loved to beat the drum of sovereignty, but without an adequate defense to repel invaders, the word was more a debating point than a threat. Translation: no one was going to shoot them down.

But that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be arrested when they touched down. “How far are we from the field?”

“I figure two, maybe three minutes.”

“We’re landing in a goddamn jungle,” Jonathan said, “based on a series of numbers that someone said pointed to a particular spot on terra firma. The correct answer is something like two minutes and thirty-seven seconds.”

“Okay,” Boxers said. “Two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Feel better now?”

“Have I mentioned that I hate you?”

“Just don’t puke on the inside of the airplane. We don’t have time to clean it up, and it stinks like shit after it’s baked in the sun for a day.”

Look up Brian Van de Muelebroecke in the dictionary. You’ll see Boxers’ picture there as the definition of compassion.

“Seriously,” Big Guy said, “If you don’t mind putting on your big-boy underpants for a minute, I really could use a second set of eyes. We are in fact very close to the field.”

Jonathan didn’t bother to respond as he lifted his NVGs off of the top of the control panel and slipped the band over his head. He flipped the switch, and instantly, the absolute blackness became a tableau of finely detailed green landscape. Boxers had pulled back on the throttles, but the ground speed seemed ridiculously fast.

“You don’t like giving me time,” Jonathan said, “so how about you give me distance. How far are we?” He feigned annoyance in part to regain the upper hand in the dick-knocking.

“About five miles, give or take,” Big Guy said. “I’m too busy flying to watch the GPS. You can do that, though.”

Jonathan lifted the GPS finder from its position forward of the throttles and looked at it. The ridiculously expensive computer collected positioning data and combined it with speed and altitude to deliver a real-time image on a virtual map to tell them where they needed to be. “This shows two miles,” Jonathan said, “and three degrees off the right-hand side.”

The plane banked ever so slightly to the right.

Their contact on the ground was supposed to place an infrared strobe on both ends of the runway to establish the straight line that would define the landing strip. This was madness. Every now and then, Jonathan wondered if it was time to take down his shingle and stop doing this craziness that he called a job.

Below, the lights of Panama City had disappeared, resolving to an unbroken tableau of very dark jungle. All the better to spot a flashing strobe. This trust thing was among the most difficult elements of his job. Because of the tight time frame, Jonathan had had to work through proxies for this op—friends of associates—and that didn’t allow for the kind of vetting that typically was his preference. He’d been burned on such things in the past, but it didn’t happen very often. The last time involved an arms supplier he’d dealt with for years in this part of the world who’d betrayed him in favor of a better offer from a man who frightened him more. That had proven fatal to everyone on the wrong side of the deal.

“This jungle’s damned thick,” Jonathan said. “Unless the runway is wider than I’m expecting, it’s going to be a real trick seeing the strobe through the undergrowth.”

“Have a little faith, Boss. Have I ever hurt you before?”

Jonathan didn’t honor the question with an answer. The reality was so far into the yes column that he knew the question to be a joke. The good news was that the number of times Boxers had saved Jonathan’s ass far outstripped the occasions when he’d bruised him.

Big Guy leaned forward in his seat and reached for the control panel, where he spun one of the radio receivers to a new frequency. “The strobe has a homing signal, too, though we don’t often use it.”

“Because everyone else can hear it, too?”

“Exactly. But you never know. What’s the GPS telling you now?”

“One point one miles.”

Boxers pulled back on the throttles and dropped the flaps to slow them down, then executed a wide turn to the right. “Keep an eye out to the starboard side, Dig. I don’t have a lot of margin for error here. At this altitude, I can fly in the night or I can scan in the night. I can’t do both.”

Jonathan shifted his whole body in his seat and settled his NVGs more securely on his head. They’d been using the new four-tube arrays for a while now, but he still marveled at the panoramic view they provided, much more detailed and natural than the two-tube arrays that had been his mainstay for so many years.

The jungle was unrelenting, an unbroken sea of treetops that undulated in what appeared from here to be a soft breeze. Jonathan kept his gaze at a spot that was equidistant between the side of the aircraft and the horizon. If he looked straight down, he’d lose too much detail in the speeding scenery, and he’d become airsick. Boxers understood this, and if he’d chosen the correct path, and if the GPS was correct, and nothing went wrong, Jonathan would be able to pick up the flash, either by looking straight at it, or—

His peripheral vision in his right eye caught the flash. There was nothing subtle about it. The white-green strobe blinked frenetically, probably ten or twelve cycles per second. There was no mistaking it for any kind of natural occurrence.

He pointed. “There it is. Call it two o’clock, about midway to the horizon.”

“Got it,” Boxers said. He increased the bank of the aircraft and pulled a tighter turn. “Good eyes, Boss.”

Once you knew it was there, you had to wonder how anyone could miss it. As Big Guy buzzed the airfield to survey it before landing, Jonathan reeled at the size of the slash through the underbrush. It was certainly wide enough—thirty or forty yards, to Jonathan’s eye—and it appeared from a couple hundred feet to be fully paved.

“You think it’s long enough to land?” Jonathan asked.

“Landings are easy,” Big Guy said. Jonathan could hear the smile in his voice. “It’s the takeoff that needs the room. I guess we’ll find out the answers to both.”

Sometimes, a simple yes was too big a challenge for Boxers.

Three minutes later, they’d circled the field, and Boxers lined up for his approach. The fuselage rumbled as the landing gear deployed, and the plane slowed noticeably.

“Have you got enough airspeed to stay in the air?” Jonathan wondered aloud.

“You said you wanted to land.” Boxers laughed. Next to blowing stuff up, making Jonathan squirm was Big Guy’s favorite thing. “The runway is adequate, but I don’t want to push it. I’m gonna land just above stall speed.”

“And to think that airline pilots get to use runway lights,” Jonathan said.

“Airline pilots are pussies.”

Jonathan fought the urge to remove his NVGs again to deny the reality of the lumbering approach, but at this stage, the landing needed to be a team effort, one flying, the other scanning. As they descended to treetop level, the nearest strobe dropped out of view, obscured by the tree line, and then the wheels found pavement. The Lear hit with barely a bump, and it felt to Jonathan that Big Guy hit the reversers even before the nose wheel was on the ground. The deceleration pressed him against his seat restraints and caused his NVGs to shift on his head. He touched them with his forefinger and thumb to keep them from flying off entirely.

Then they were stopped.

“Pretty damn good if you ask me,” Big Guy said. He pointed out the windscreen. “And look how much runway I have left.”

Jonathan had been too busy keeping himself tethered to his seat to notice that half the runway stretched out in front of them. “What the hell was that about?”

Boxers just rumbled out a laugh.

Their ground asset—he had no name as far as Jonathan knew, and in fact had no face and he could have been a she—had come through perfectly. After the Learjet was secured in the leafy bunker that was designed for exactly that purpose, he and Boxers hiked with full rucks for a little over a mile to find the rattletrap Jeep Cherokee that had been stashed for them off the side of a little-used road. Dressed all in black, with balaclavas covering their faces, they were invisible in the night.

They pitched tents and camped army-style till morning. When dawn arrived, they plowed through an MRE breakfast and set out on their day.

“It’s been a couple of years since I ate this shit,” Boxers said.

Jonathan didn’t reply. He actually sort of liked the MREs. Some were better than others, but although he lacked the specific frame of reference, he didn’t think that any of them tasted like shit.

When the meals were finished and hygiene issues taken care of, they cleaned up any sign of their presence, and killed the remaining couple of hours before heading out reviewing and re-reviewing their plan. Then it was time to go.

The keys to the Cherokee were stashed right where they were supposed to be, behind the spare tire that uglied up the tailgate. They drove it into Panama City, through the Ritzy part of the city—if any part of the city actually qualified for such a lofty description—into El Chorrillo, a slum that made South Central Los Angeles look like Hyde Park. Back in 1989, this neighborhood had been Ground Zero for the invasion of Panama, code named Operation Just Cause. The main targets of thousands of round of expended ammunition were gone now—Manuel Antonio Noriega’s Comandancia (command post) and the shithole prison known as Carcel Modelo—replaced with shitty abodes that were only slightly more hospitable than São Paulo’s tarpaper favelas. Jonathan had spent more time in Central America than he cared to think about—and he and Boxers were therefore as fluent in Spanish as any native. He wished he could take all of it back. Every nation and every culture had its good guys and its bad guys, but here in Panama, the default mind-set was to rip off the unsuspecting. Perhaps that was a natural offshoot of three hundred years of perpetual invasion.

They parked the Jeep at Calle 23 Oeste—West 23rd Street—and Calle B—B Street—in front of a bar that was still churning at 11:30.

“This is a lot of people, Boss,” Boxers said.

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Jonathan replied. “You stay put. I’ll buy us some security.”

Without waiting for a response, Jonathan opened his door and stepped out into the thick, fetid air. Sometimes he wondered why the work he did was always and forever rooted in stinking hot environments. Sure, the Middle East provided that “dry heat” that desert dwellers loved to brag about, but a hundred degrees Fahrenheit was a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and that was, by any reasonable standard, really freaking hot. The only difference was soaked clothing versus dry clothing and crusty sinuses. At the end of the day, the difference didn’t matter.

Four dark-skinned men in their twenties took immediate notice as Jonathan stepped out of the Jeep. It was an expensive car for this neighborhood, and he was five shades lighter than the dominant skin color. Unlike Los Estados Unidos, where such aberrations were deliberately ignored in deference to political correctness, here in Panama, differences were recognized as the warning signs they were. Jonathan understood the men’s concern every bit as much as he understood the danger he faced as he approached them.

“Good morning,” he said in Spanish. They would recognize his dialect as more Colombian than Panamanian, but there was no downside in that. He still wore all black, but he’d shed the face covering and donned a New York Yankees baseball cap. The Yankees were America’s team, even in Central America. His shirt covered the Colt 1911 .45 that was nestled cocked and locked in a holster inside the waistband of his trousers.

“Hello,” one of them said. The speaker was tall for a Panamanian, and his skin shimmered with sweat. He wore a threadbare once-white guayabera and khaki pants. “I don’t know you.”

“Should I expect any trouble from you?” Jonathan asked. In this part of the world, a direct question was a statement of strength.

“Why would we give you any trouble?” the young guy asked.

“My name is Richard,” Jonathan said, extending his hand.

The other guy looked at his hand for a solid ten seconds, but never returned the gesture. “My pleasure,” he said.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Jonathan said.

“I didn’t give it to you.”