The Twisted Cross (5 page)

The old sea captain was barely conscious when Hunter returned.

He bent over the old man, making him as comfortable as possible. Off in the distance lie heard the wail of a siren approaching. He was sure it was the New Orleans military police. They would be able to get Pegg to the hospital.

"Who were they?" Hunter asked the old man, somewhat stemming the flow of blood from his jaw with his jacket. "Who knew you were here besides Jones?"

Pegg opened his eyes slightly. The gleam was still there. "They knew!" he growled. "They . . . they must have tracked me down . . . The bastards wouldn't even let me finish my story ... I never . . . even got to ... the best part . . ."

"Who were they, damnit?" Hunter said with exasperation. It seemed like Pegg was more upset over having not finished his yarn than by being shot in the jaw.

"The first cousins . . ." Pegg managed to say, before he slipped into unconsciousness. "The bastards that are running the Canal ..."

Hunter rode in the back of the police van as it whisked Pegg off to the hospital.

The old man was slipping in and out of consciousness, but Hunter knew it was best that he didn't press him for details of the would-be assassins. The fact that both men had chosen suicide over capture was chilling enough.

Four hours later, Pegg was patched up-his fractured jaw was wired and he was stitched from his ear to his chin. The military doctors assured Hunter that the old buck would probably make it, though the recovery process would be a lengthy one, due to Peg's age. Hunter told the medics to spare no expense in treating Pegg, then the pilot visited the man's room.

Pegg couldn't speak, but he weakly gave Hunter a thumb's up sign.

Leaning over the man's bed, Hunter told him: "We'll get the people responsible for this . . ."

Peg's eyes started to water as he clasped Hunter in a handshake. Just then, a gorgeous middle-aged nurse walked in and announced that it was time for Pegg to get some rest. Pegg took one look at the nurse, then managed a slight smile through the tangle of wires around his mouth.

Hunter gave him a wink and whispered to him in a mock scolding voice: "Behave yourself . . ."

The sun was just starting to come up when Hunter left the hospital.

It had been dark and somewhat confusing when he rode into the place hours before in the back of the police van, so the pilot was somewhat surprised to find the hospital was so close to the city's docks. Now, as he walked out near the Toulouse Street Wharf, he could smell the tantalizing aroma of New Orleans waking up. There was no shortage of eateries in the area, and the air was a mixture of flapjacks, eggs on a grill, coffee and biscuits.

He knew he had to report to Jones as quickly as possible. But, judging by the hectic night he'd just put in, he decided to allow himself some chow before heading back to the New Orleans airport to retrieve his F-16.

But as with so many of the things in his life, it was if he was guided by some invisible hand to the cafe he chose to breakfast in. It was a small joint that hung out over the water, attached to the edge of an active pier. Inside there were only a half dozen window-side tables and a counter with ten or so stools.

Hunter walked in and took a small window table within leaping distance of the door, hanging up his hat and M-16 in the process.

A pretty black waitress appeared, took his order for coffee and a plate of flapjacks and home fries, then disappeared

back into the small kitchen. Hunter quickly surveyed the other clientele - two hookers drinking tea at the far end of the counter, three sailors sobering up at the far table, plus a couple of militiamen nearby -and decided everyone was generally harmless.

His meal arrived quickly and he immediately dug in. But three mouthfuls later, he found his attention drawn away from the stack of jacks and glued onto a large ship that was just entering the harbor.

"What the hell is this?" he thought to himself through a gulp of coffee.

It was a luxury liner. Big, sleek and all white, it appeared to be flying a hundred different flags. For the next ten minutes he watched in suspicious fascination as the ship was nudged into a nearby pier by a squad of tugboats.

Once it was close enough, he noted the ship's decks were lined with a couple hundred passengers. They all seemed animated enough, as if they had actually just returned from a pleasure cruise. He wouldn't have been surprised if he'd seen them all start throwing confetti and streamers.

His waitress returned to fill his coffee cup and he took the opportunity to point out the newly-arrived ship.

"What's with 'The Love Boat?'" he asked her.

She took a quick look at the white ship, now almost completely settled into a berth close by and laughed.

"Why that's the Big Easy Princess" she said, matter-of-factly. "Coming back from another 'Cruise to Nowhere,' I suspect."

"It docks here regularly?" Hunter asked.

"Sure does," she said. "Been doing so for about the past six months. It goes out for about two weeks at a time. Comes in, stays a few days, then heads back out again."

Hunter reached inside his shirt and came up with two bags of real silver.

"Where's it go?" he asked her, pressing the money into her hand. The savvy waitress immediately knew that he had just paid about ten times too much for the meal.

"From what I hear, it travels all over," she said, still clutching the bags of silver. "Sometimes Barbados, or Saint

Thomas or Saint Croix. Sometimes all the way down to Colombia."

A bell went off in Hunter's head.

"Any place special in Colombia?" he asked.

Now she eyed him suspiciously. "Are you a cop?" she asked.

"No," he said, deftly producing another bag of silver. "Are you?"

She shook her head and smiled. "Can I sit for a minute?" she asked.

He reached over and pulled out the small table's other chair. "Be my guest,"

he said.

A half hour later, Hunter was pushing a baggage cart down the pier where the luxury liner had docked.

He was dressed in a nondescript pair of denim coveralls and a woolen cap -

both articles of clothing courtesy of the diner waitress. He took his place in amongst the small army of baggage handlers loitering around the ship's gangway and pretended to smoke a cigar. All the while he was taking in every detail possible about the Big Easy Princess.

This was no ordinary cruise liner. True, while its decks were lined with what looked to be fairly ordinary passengers and some soldiers, its fore and aft sections boasted at least a dozen gun mounts. Also its mast was bristling with a forest of sophisticated radar hardware and, easily spotted by his well-trained eye, a number of missile guidance and tracking systems. He even noted unmistakable scrape marks along the port side of the ship which indicated that small boat launches - probably attack craft - were lowered and raised regularly.

He was sure there could be much more evidence found inside the hull of the boat, but Hunter had no plans to steal aboard to find it. He didn't have to.

He knew a drug-running ship when he saw one . . .

Drugs were a nasty fact of life in New Order America.

Just because the United American Army had defeated The Circle didn't mean that criminality had suddenly come to a screeching halt across the continent. The skies were just as dangerous to fly in and the roads just as treacherous to move on as before the final defeat of The Circle. And the fractured nation's seemingly endless cycle of drugs and money kept spinning along.

When Jones and the United Americans set up their Reconstruction Government in Washington following the war, not one of the top command men was laboring under any illusions. The continent was still a scattering of ever-changing independent countries, kingdoms, cantons, shires, free states and territories.

All the new government in Washington could hope to do is solidify the continental defenses to keep out foreign interference and to restore some semblance of order to the larger cities east of the Mississippi. These two tasks alone were next to impossible. So the leaders in Washington knew that things like drug-running, gun-running, air piracy, slavery, forced prostitution and so on would stay on the national landscape for some time to come.

Hunter realized this too, and it was not so much that the ship before him was most likely loaded to the gills with drugs that had caused him to take to the disguise and get a closer look. No - it was the route the boat had taken to get those drugs that interested him.

The waitress had told him she'd met an unsavory character who had booked passage on the Big Easy Princess just a month before. The man had swaggered into the diner just after disembarking and bragged that he had enough cocaine to keep a small city high for a year. He claimed that he had scored the stuff in Colombia, specifically in the port of Buenaventura, which was close enough to Medellin, still the recognized coke capital of the world.

What had Hunter's brain buzzing in all this was the fact that the man hadn't bragged about picking up his illegal "Bogota-sugar" in the Colombian harbors of Cartagena, or Santa Maria, or Riohacha. These port cities were located on the Caribbean coast of the South American country.

Buenaventura, on the other hand, was located on the Pacific side.

What Hunter wanted to know was, assuming Peg's somewhat fantastic tale of entrapment and horror on the Canal was true, how the hell was the coke boat able to make the passage through Panama without so much as a scratch?

It was dark and drizzling by the time Hunter made it to the prearranged rendezvous spot.

He had postponed his plans to return to Washington. A quick radio call to Jones that morning had them in agreement that there was still some more information to be had in New Orleans. Now the sun had just set, and Hunter found himself shivering slightly, out on the isolated swampy bayou in the chilly mist. He faced the north and waited.

Ten minutes went by. Then he felt a familiar vibration start at the back of his neck and run down his spine. His brain got the message on the instantaneous ricochet.

Off in the distance. Getting closer. Two aircraft . . .

He had never been able to come up with a better item for this sensation other than simply calling it the feeling. It was many things and it was a solitary thing. It was ESP. It was deja vu. It was Synchronicity - that state of affairs described as "meaningful coincidences." He simply knew things that he had no logical reason for knowing. It was that feeling he got whenever he climbed into his airplane and not so much flew it as became a part of it. It was also the feeling he got when he knew that aircraft were approaching even before they showed up on any radar set. The feeling ... It had saved his life more times than he could count. No one else had it-just him. And not a day had gone by when he didn't wonder why.

Closer now. About two clicks away . . .

He pushed up his coat collar again, and tried to wipe the dampness from the bill of his baseball cap. He was glad he had taken the precaution of wrapping the M-16 in plastic before setting out for this place.

The moisture would have done a job on his tracer ammunition.

They're here . . .

He strained both his eyes and ears and concentrated on the darkened skies to the north. He heard them before he saw them. The unmistakable whirring sound of a chopper engine; the clean powerful whistling sound made only by the Cobra

. . .

The Cobra attack helicopter was a frightening piece of machinery.

Forty-eight feet long, fourteen feet high, the insect-like chopper could haul ass at 175 mph. It carried a three-barreled 20-mm M197 cannon in its nose turret, and a variety of gun pods, rocket pods, missile launchers and even flame-throwing equipment on its two side pylons. Yet even with all this firepower, the Cobra could maneuver like a hummingbird. Up, down, sideways, backwards. All very quickly, and, fairly quietly.

Its very name did it justice: long and thin with a lethal snout. From Viet Nam to World War III to the post-war American battles, the Cobra had served well.

Just thinking about the chopper and what destruction it was capable of delivering-against ground troops, tanks, gun emplacements, ships -caused many an enemy of America fits, if not nightmares.

And no one flew Cobras with more skill and daring than the famous Cobra Brothers ...

A few seconds later he saw them.

Still two blinking red lights way off in the distance, but undoubtedly the people he'd been waiting for. He hunched up his coat again and retrieved a small flare from one of its many pockets. A quick strike on the fuse and the flare came alive with a brilliant red glow.

Two minutes later, the pair of two-seat helicopter gunships came in for a perfect landing on the soft, marshy field. Another two minutes went by until both chopper rotors wound down. Then three men - a pair from Cobra Two and a single from Cobra One - emerged from their cockpits and walked over to Hunter, who was waiting at the edge of the clearing.

"Hey Hawk, Baxter's all upset that he couldn't come along." The man doing the talking was Captain Jesse Tyler, the commanding officer of the four-man non-related Cobra Brothers. His partner, the pilot of Cobra Two, was Captain /

Bobby Crockett. He and Tyler had been friends and allies of Hunter ever since before the first Battle of Football City. Both Texans, when Hunter first met the Cobras, they had been supporting themselves as freelance gunship jockeys.

But since those first continental battles, the Cobras had been in the employ of the democratic forces exclusively. Tyler and Crockett were joined on this trip by Crockett's gunner, Lieutenant John "John-Boy" Hobbs.

"How was it that Bax stayed behind?" Hunter asked as he shook hands with all three men. "

"He pulled the low card," Crockett said. "Says you owe him a bottle of good stuff when you get back . . ."

Hunter laughed and said: "If we do the trick down here, and find out what we need to know, I'll gladly give him a Jug-"

Hobbs produced a thermos and soon all four of them were drinking thick black coffee.