Code of Honor

45

Chavez watched John Clark’s plane take off an hour and five minutes before the F-15 Eagles were set to arrive. He was a big boy and had worked dozens of operations without Clark on scene. Maybe it was his massive headache from the repeated blows to his face. Maybe it was his chipped tooth. But for some reason, this time left him feeling like he was on the ropes. He had no idea what Clark was up to, but he could tell by the amused look on the man’s face that it would be dangerous.

Chavez and Adara took the Faraday bag containing Calliope inside the fixed-base operator, at the south/civil aviation portion of the airport. Jack Junior remained outside in one van while Midas and Caruso waited in the other, watching for threats. Chavez wasn’t worried about trackers. The Faraday bag would keep any signal from getting in or out of the drive or the plastic box it was stored in. But there was only one airport in Manado, and one FBO at that airport. It wasn’t a leap to think that Suparman might guess where they would go to get the tech out of the country. And if he figured it out, he’d come after it with a vengeance. The gaming magnate had already proven he would have no problem resorting to violence. In Chavez’s experience, people were seldom more ruthless than when they were trying to steal shit back that they had stolen from someone else.

On the other side of the door on the airport side of the building was the flight line, the secure area down the ramp from where the commercial airliners parked. The area around the airlines was brightly lit and a hive of activity. There were few lights immediately outside the FBO. The maintenance hangar was closed and dark, all the mechanics having gone home for the day. Several business jets and a couple of prop aircraft were parked in the darkness. Most sat locked and idle, but just beyond the Hendley G550, four men loaded bundles of what looked suspiciously like drugs into the back of a low-wing twin turbo-prop. Chavez recognized it as a Piper Cheyenne IIIA by the high T-tail and long nose. The DEA had a couple rigged out for surveillance. On the flip side, they were fast and fuel-efficient enough to make a pretty good drug-smuggling plane. The men did their loading in the dark, so Chavez felt confident that was what was going on here.

He would have been more than happy to blow their operation to hell, if he’d had the time. They’d eventually be caught — and probably executed. Drug smuggling was a stacked game in Indonesia. Even if you paid off the police, which you had to do, odds were you would eventually get caught. And they killed you for that over here. He’d give the Cheyenne a wide berth to avoid guilt by association.

If all went well, in a little over sixty minutes the F-15 pilots would come inside and take Calliope off their hands. He doubted if they’d even take the time to pee. The likelihood of a threat coming from that direction was low, but Chavez kept an eye peeled anyway.

Chavez had called Helen and Country, the Gulfstream pilots, to check on their status, but they were having issues with the rental car not starting and were at least another hour out. It figured. A beatdown, gun battle, and car trouble: The night could hardly get any better. It was a good thing Clark had flown commercial, even absent his desire to insulate the rest of the team from what he planned to do.

Everyone had brought all their gear with them, anticipating a quick egress from the country. There was no reason to return to the hotel. Nothing to do now but wait.

Chavez plopped himself in one of the faux-leather seats with a paper sack of popcorn. You got accustomed to waiting for agonizingly long spans of time in this business — waiting in the limo for your protectee to finish his or her meeting, waiting in the shadows for an asset to show up, or simply waiting at an airport for someone to pick you up. Smokin’ and jokin’, the Feds called it. Keeping your wits about you while you were exhausted, beaten down, and bored out of your skull was an art. Popcorn helped. A lot. Nearly every FBO he’d ever seen, anywhere in the world, seemed to have a machine. The smells of popcorn and jet fuel were so intertwined in his mind that if Patsy made Orville Redenbacher to munch while they watched something on Netflix, Chavez invariably had dreams about airplanes — usually jumping out of a perfectly good one.

With no metal detectors or X-rays inside the FBO, Ding and Adara had retained their handguns. Neither of them wanted to disarm until Calliope was on board one of the fighters and those fighters were back in the air, heading for a computer lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. And then there were the drug smugglers loading the Piper Cheyenne to consider. Yep. Much better to stay gunned up.

Chavez rubbed a fleck of blood he’d missed on the side of his hand. He’d used wet wipes and hand sanitizer to clean up as best he could, and then finished the job in the restroom. Like most men’s rooms overseas, there were no paper towels, making Chavez glad he’d taken up his father-in-law’s practice of carrying a handkerchief. Head wounds were terrible bleeders, though, and he had a couple that made him look like a zombie if he didn’t keep an eye on them. He felt like a zombie, that was for sure. The pain in his head grew with each minute that ticked by.

“ETA one hour on the nose,” Adara said, startling Chavez a little when she sat down next to him with her own bag of popcorn. “We can stand on our heads for this long.” She turned half in her seat, assessing his wounds — and he had many — then used the long white paper bag to gesture at his left eye. “You need a few stitches right below your orbital,” she said. “Can you see okay? A blow like that can rattle your vision.”

“I’m good,” Chavez lied.

He still hadn’t gotten used to seeing Adara with black hair. A perfectionist, she’d taken the time to dye her eyebrows, too. One bottle of Indonesian hair dye and she’d gone from looking like a badass Tinker Bell, to… well, still badass, but not quite right, like the evil doppelgänger of her actual self. It was more than a little unsettling. Chavez kept that to himself, though, particularly since he’d been the one to give her the dye.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said. “I’ll hit a clinic as soon as we get home.”

As a former Navy corpsman, Adara was often referred to by the team as “Doc.” She slipped into the role with ease.

“I have lidocaine on the G5,” she said. “I can stitch it up for you, as long as we don’t have too much turbulence. The sooner the better with facial wounds.” She grinned. “And my copay is cheaper than a doc in the box.”

Chavez gave a slow nod, thinking it over. She’d stitched everyone on the team at one time or another, even back when she’d been director of transportation, before Clark and Gerry had tapped her to be an operator.

“Okay,” he said. “It is a hell of a long fl—”

The radio bonked, coming in garbled as two people outside tried to speak at the same time.

Chavez and Adara sat up straighter in their seats.

Midas came over the radio next, sounding tense, like he was talking through clenched teeth.

“We have company!” he said. “Two Hilux pickups full of trouble. Estimate eight to ten men. All armed.”

Chavez turned toward the door in time to see the man behind the counter at the FBO come up with a pistol.

“Gun left,” he snapped, for Adara’s benefit. He gave the man behind the counter a quarter-second benefit of the doubt. There was a slim chance he was protecting himself from the newcomers outside.

Nope.

The night manager swung the gun in a wide arc, crossing Adara first. Both she and Chavez fired at the same time, both rounds catching him center-mass.

“One down inside,” Chavez said over the radio. “We’re still good, but the cops can’t be far away.”

“Bad news,” Jack said. “I’m thinking these are the cops.”

Adrenalized, Chavez forgot about his pounding headache. Unfortunately, it hadn’t forgotten about him, and he swayed on his feet as he moved toward the door that led to the ramp. “Do not let these guys ID you.”

“Copy,” Jack said. “We’re still sitting in the vans. So far they don’t even know we’re here.”

“They’re gearing up to come in,” Caruso added. “Jack can go; I’ll stay and help you out.”

“Negative,” Chavez snapped, regaining his balance by sheer force of will. “Adara and I will slip out the back door to the flight line before they come in. We’ll work our way around to the south if we can. Jack, you sit still. Midas, you guys wait until they are about to hit the door, and then haul ass. Peel out, make a lot of noise like you’re bolting. Hopefully they follow you. Jack, if you can, slip away after they leave. We’ll rendezvous at the alternate site in four hours.”

The alternate site was a church downtown that he’d designated when they first arrived in Manado. It was a long way from the airport — and the F-15s — but if Chavez sat still, Calliope would be long gone before they got here — and he and Adara would likely be dead.

Pistol in hand, Chavez grabbed the door and gave Adara a nod to let her know he was ready. He could barely see out of his left eye, his head was on fire, and he was sure he had at least two bruised ribs. Yeah, things were just peachy.

Adara grabbed her pack and threw her body across the counter, reaching for the button to buzz open the exit to the ramp. Chavez held the door until she got there. A quick peek outside said they were clear, and they ran into the sticky blackness.

The sound of squealing tires carried around the building. Chavez caught a glimpse of the Toyota’s taillights heading away from the FBO. He counted one, and then a second pickup truck sped past, giving chase.

Chavez and Adara stopped next to a parked fuel truck. The smell of the tarmac rose on the warm night air, reminding him of a racetrack. On any other evening, one where he wasn’t running for his life with some stolen computer tech in his pocket, he would have enjoyed the smell.

“Looks like they’re buying it,” Adara said, watching the taillights.

“Hope so,” Chavez said. “Now Midas and Dom just need to get away.”

Jack came across the net. “Heads up! They left three behind. One’s watching the parking lot; the other two are coming your way.”

“Stay where you are,” Chavez said, panting more than he should have been.

“You okay?” Adara asked.

“I’m good.” He was able to muster a grin. “Just a little smashed up from my beating.”

The men coming inside would be finding the dead FBO manager about now. They’d slow down to check the building if they had any sense, but there wasn’t much to check besides a back office and the restrooms. It was a matter of seconds, not minutes, before the men were right on top of them.

“Tell me you have a surprise Ding Chavez plan up your sleeve,” Adara hissed. Crouched in the shadows with her pistol at low ready, she looked formidable. Chavez had little doubt they’d be able to handle the two men, but he hoped to get out of Indonesia without engaging any police officers, even if they were on Suparman’s payroll. He thought about going to the Gulfstream for about half a second, but a thin-skinned aircraft was a terrible place to make a stand.

A Batik Air commercial airliner roared overhead, vibrating the ground as it took off to the south.

“Ryan’s penned down,” Adara said. “Short of hijacking an airplane, I’m not sure we have many options besides duking it out with those guys when they come out. I guess we could always give up.”

Chavez nodded, half standing. “That’s it.”

“Give up?” Adara scoffed, her face blue in the scant ambient light. “That was a joke. I don’t think these guys plan on taking us to jail.”

Chavez gestured toward the Piper Cheyenne with his pistol.

“I’m not talking about giving up.”