Public Enemy

47

Despite its preponderance of crashes, the MU-2B turboprop cargo plane remained a favorite among drug runners, its high-capacity cargo bay and relatively fast and quiet engines still managing to do the trick for regional dope-transit duties nearly thirty years past its birth date. Plus, the plane also happened to be one of the primary aircraft used by FEMA, the Red Cross, and numerous other international aid organizations-meaning that if you chose your routes carefully, there was a pretty good chance an MU-2B full of cannabis would be ignored by the semiomnipresent U.S. Coast Guard AWACS and P-3 Orion airborne antidrug phalanx.

It also meant that on one particular, startlingly humid night in the moonless skies east of San Salvador, the unmarked, privately owned and cash-leased MU-2B droning by at twelve thousand feet would not have appeared as anything out of the ordinary-just another, technically illegal but government-ignored dope harvest making its way to an equally ignored processing plant along the country’s northern border.

Cooper separated from the MU-2B by way of the rear cargo door. Outfitted and equipped all but identically to the way he’d gone in the last time around, he reflected as the wind slammed him in the face that the only real difference between this dive and the last was that he was doing it solo-that and the fact that he’d aged a century in the nineteen years since that first airborne diplomatic overture to a Central American head of state.

Less than a minute later, he landed-brutally.

Coming into a stand of trees he hadn’t seen in the darkness-or maybe he hadn’t seen them because his eyesight just plain sucked, and any paratrooper worth his ass would have been capable of avoiding a crash landing with a simple glance downward-Cooper spotted the tall trees a second too late, and plowed right into them while still trying to maneuver away. This caused an instant of confusion-he hesitated in switching from steering to landing mode, and the hesitation resulted in a direct impact with the trunk of the first of the trees in the stand. He struck the tree square, a silent, invisible battering ram that pummeled him in one smack, his body absorbing the crushing blow more or less equally from head to toe. He felt more than heard a muted crunch, thinking it was somewhere near his pelvis, maybe a hip-but there wasn’t enough pain for the noise to be that of a broken bone.

Utterly out of air, he tried to grab hold of his straps, and managed to un-clip one of the parachute strings in the process. He dropped fifteen feet without any resistance and came to an instant midair halt. Finding, upon regaining his wind, that it seemed he was dangling sideways maybe twenty feet from the floor of the forest-held in place by a single string connecting him to the entangled parachute.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

He considered with grave seriousness that if this was his opening act, then he probably ought to turn his gun on himself now-or maybe make a run for the nearest airport and stow his way into a luggage hold to get the hell out of here.

Once his eyes adjusted, he was able to see some of what the landing pad below had to offer. It didn’t look too painful-mostly low-lying bushes, maybe featuring thorns, maybe not, but certainly looking less deadly than a sidewalk or log. He swung for a minute on the string, orienting his body for a feet-first landing, then went for it, unlatching the clip. He hit the bushes hard but bounced in a kind of rolling corkscrew, the twigs, stickers, leaves and flowers bracing his fall in trampoline fashion as he found himself, when all was said and done, on his back, earthbound and unbroken.

If he’d landed near where he intended to, he knew he could find the road he was looking for about one mile to the west. On the satellite shots provided by Laramie’s guide, the road had appeared to be a logging trail-cleared sufficiently for trucks to travel back and forth through the woods with their lumber haul but no more developed than that.

Cooper reached into one of the zippered pouches of his jumpsuit. Laramie’s guide had provided him with a portable GPS device of the sort they’d used in Cuba, and he was keeping his satellite phone in the pouch too. Something poked through his skin as he felt around the pouch. He shone his Maglite inside it, only to discover the source of the crunching noise: his collision with the tree had shattered his GPS unit and sat phone.

“Nice work, there, hotshot,” he murmured.

He still had at his disposal a fancy-dancy, luminescent-dial wrist compass-also provided by Laramie’s guide-and found that on the other wrist, his plain old wristwatch seemed to remain in working order.

He used the compass to pick his direction and set out through the woods, encountering, twenty-six minutes later, twin tracks he figured for the logging road. He headed north, setting out at a jog in the relative blackness along the road. It was mostly downhill, which was good; the path was more overgrown than he’d expected, Cooper needing to high-step it most of the way despite the occasional bald-earth truck tracks underfoot. He timed himself based on a slightly slower pace than what he typically ran on the beach; he had only his watch by which to clock the run, but he’d run varying distances on enough different surfaces to know pretty much what his pace would be. He would run for an hour-five miles, if all went well.

At the end of his hour-long jog, he worked his way around for and found a suitable break in the trees and ducked back into the forest. Naples and Conch Bay beach runs notwithstanding, he found he was already winded, with somewhere near half the trek left.

Not good.

He knew from the satellite photographs he’d reviewed that he was four miles from his destination once he made the turn into the woods, but the last four miles would take him through treacherous terrain-thick jungle sloping up a steep mountain. That, he supposed, was the idea: the residence of President Raul Márquez included, along with various other accoutrements, a security perimeter made up of football field-size lawns surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall. The wall jutted up against the mountain range Cooper was about to climb over-a stretch of land impossible to traverse in any vehicle. You could do it on foot, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Something a beach bum should have given more consideration to.

A “source,” which Cooper assumed was dubious at best, had provided Márquez’s weekly schedule to Laramie’s guide. The schedule had apparently been circulated among the various wings of the Salvadoran government. President Márquez had supposedly hosted a Chilean diplomat for dinner at his home five hours ago; he was destined for a session of his cabinet tomorrow, with a press conference to follow, beginning at ten in the morning. The cabinet meeting and press conference were taking place forty-five miles from his residence. Meaning if Cooper was going to nab him under the cover of night, he had until dawn-otherwise he’d be camping in the jungle somewhere near the estate until Márquez returned from his cabinet business and whatever else was on the docket for the day.

It took him three hours to make it over the mountain.

As expected, the perimeter wall was patrolled by an armed military detail. Similar in function and appearance to the exterior fence found at your average prison, the wall included endless coils of razor wire on its crest and a guard tower every two hundred yards or so. The towers were occupied by guards, one man per tower. The men wore brown-paper-bag fatigues and were armed with what looked to be AK-47s. All no surprise. Both the wall itself and the entire stretch of lawn behind it, he saw, were lit like a baseball stadium.

Coming down the last stretch of hill as quietly as he could, Cooper slipped on a mossy boulder and almost crashed headlong into an exterior guard post, which had not been lit on the side that faced the mountain. Even after he caught his balance, he almost walked directly past the open door of the building before realizing there was a light on within, and a pair of guards seated inside.

He peered in from a place a few yards into the trees and observed that the men were playing cards and sipping cups of what might have been coffee. Like the men occupying the towers, these two were armed with AK-47s, plus hip-bound pistols and chunky walkie-talkie units.

Cooper had devised a number of infiltration schemes based on what he’d learned about the facility and its security perimeter, but with these jokers playing cards and probably sipping on spiked coffee while they traded spare change, he thought his life might just get a little easier. He needed the boost, anyway-maybe it had been the ride in the plane, kicking things off with a little airsickness, but he was feeling as though somebody had altered the atmosphere on him and sucked half the available oxygen from the normal mix. He felt like passing out.

The key was to get over the wall. But not here-not where he’d do little but stroll out onto the fucking Best Buy soccer field for all to see. Halfway around the wall, closer to the front of the residence, he knew the sod-moat to be shorter, most notably beside the driveway for the six-car garage, where there was only a few yards of grass behind a series of landscaped foliage beds designed to show visiting dignitaries how immaculate was the home of President Raul Márquez.

The last visible guard tower to the east, he could see-the last one off to his right, where the perimeter wall stretched around the side of the main residence-was close enough to the landscaped driveway to suffice. If I can get up in that tower, he thought, the dash for the shrubs should be easy enough to make without being seen.

This sounded better to him than his original plan A, which involved pulling the shovel from his backpack and commencing to tunnel beneath the section of wall nearest the landscaped driveway. The tunneling strategy, he thought, being the safer of the two-but if I go that route I may die of oxygen debt before I get knee deep in the dirt.

Let’s go, big fella.

He triple-checked his MP5’s screw-on silencer and approached as close as the darkness outside the shack would allow-Cooper thinking maybe he ought to lean right into the doorway just to see whether these poker-playing idiots could spot him. Resisting the impulse, he clicked off two rounds with a one-second gap between shots. He came into the shack immediately, doing his best to catch the guards’ falling bodies before they, along with their chairs, weapons, radios, and thermos crashed to the floor in the wake of his sniper fire.

It occurred to him as he caught the second man’s toppling body that he’d just allowed himself to get caught up in things a bit too fervently. As he’d informed Laramie, he wouldn’t be icing President Márquez before determining whether Márquez was definitely the king of the sleepers-but apparently he was willing to take out random members of Márquez’s guard detail with reckless abandon.

Whatever, he told himself, attempting to buy into his own fairly unconvincing argument: they’re in the military. They get paid to defend their president. They failed.

Trying to avoid thoughts of the families these guys had just widowed, he propped one of the bodies in its seat, doing his best to shield the flow of blood from the hole in the man’s forehead from the view through the open door. He laid the second body on the floor. Then, sequentially dismantling his own array of strapped-on tools and gear, he stripped the guard of his Che Guevara fatigues and stepped into the outfit. He noticed that once he’d buttoned it around his own frame, the guard’s uniform stretched embarrassingly tight-undoubtedly due to the paratrooper suit I’m wearing underneath.

He took the man’s rifle, pistol, and walkie-talkie, reattached his own gear, and got immediately to light-footing his way through the jungle along the exterior of the wall. He managed to traverse the half-mile crescent to the last guard tower without smacking headlong into any other patrol buildings.

The next part, he knew, would get more complicated.

He camped out for a few minutes in the woods near the tower and assessed the feasibility of his scheme. The guard in the tower strolled slowly around his circular platform, eyes active but heavy in the lids. The wall immediately below the tower appeared easily scaled-the stones in the face of the wall were large and held together by mortar or some other substance, the mortared sections full of dugouts that offered plenty of hand-and footholds. Then there was the razor-wire gap: the architects of the perimeter security design hadn’t seen the need to stretch the razor wire across the towers themselves, only along the wall leading up to and away from the places where the towers had been built.

He took as much time as his schedule allowed, watching the routine as performed by the guards in all of the towers until he had the hang of things. There was an irregular but continuing cycle each guard followed: walk over to face the mansion, stare that way for a while, rotate to the other side of the tower, take a look out at the woods. Repeat.

He got his silenced assault rifle set, waited until the men in the two nearest towers reached appropriate and coinciding spots of their observation cycles, then aced the guard in the closest tower with a single, scope-aided shot. As he’d hoped, the guy toppled silently and uneventfully, any sound of his thumping fall, or crashing AK-47, obliterated entirely by the incessant chorus of crickets, frogs, and whatever other creatures were doing their singing from the jungle behind him.

Cooper made sure the guards in the other towers hadn’t come around on their loops. When he saw they hadn’t, he dashed down the hill from his hiding spot, climbed the wall aided by the momentum of his downhill sprint, and rolled himself over the rail and into the tower. He found that he’d lost the hat he’d taken from the shack-guard, so quickly snatched the cap from the tower guard’s body and put it on. He swung the shack-guard’s AK-47 strap into the appropriate place on his shoulder, stood, and started in on what he’d observed to be the guard’s walk-and-look observation routine.

Slouching as he did it to help hide his face, it occurred to him that this was an occasion on which his tan came in handy-In my brown-paper-bag fatigues and sun-dried skin, I look positively Salvadoran.

The guards in the other towers came about as their own routines progressed. He bit his cheek waiting for a problem to arise, but there came no wave, shrug, or other panic-instilling gesture from his newfound comrades.

He realized he’d need to stand the guard’s body against the railing and hope it would take a while before the others noticed he was dead in order for his harebrained scheme to work. Maybe I’m still the homicidal maniac who escaped torture by way of sheer murderous brutality-and chose this option solely because it would require me to kill the most guards possible.

He had to wait longer than he wanted before making his move, but approximately nine minutes in, the other guards synched up their cycles and appeared to all be looking out at the mountains at once. He got the body propped up, clambered down the tower’s interior ladder, and strode across the fifteen yards of grass with as calm a nonchalance as he could muster.

Then he rolled his way into the banana palm beds and crawled quickly away, out of the splash of the lights.

Still no screams, whistles, shots, or sirens.

Per his pre-mission conversations with Laramie and her guide, this was the moment when he was to report in by way of his sat phone. Made it inside the perimeter, he might have told Laramie. Taking a look at the type of video surveillance they’ve got on the exterior of the house but will need to get in ASAP. You won’t hear from me after I get inside.

Unfortunately, because of the plastic shards in the pouch that had once been his sat phone, there would be no such conversation. He assumed the GPS homing beacon that marked his position on their monitoring equipment would, without battery or logic board, also have failed to work the minute he’d plowed into the tree.

The radio he’d swiped from the shack-guard suddenly made a chuck-pfft sound that almost popped him out of his combat boots, but the noise wasn’t followed by any dialogue. He turned around and took in a view of the mansion that loomed above him, looking ominously like the Spanish fort it had once been.

Cooper didn’t like the look of the place.

He’d read that the fort had originally been built in the late-seventeenth century for the Spanish land baron overseeing the territory. Perhaps-but it looked, for Cooper’s tastes, too much like the same kind of seventeenth-century fort where those ruthless, mustached bastards had kept him locked in a subterranean cell almost twenty years ago now.

He knew this place too would contain its own underground labyrinth of dungeon cells and related facilities-after all, no self-respecting Spanish land baron, acting more or less as imperial governor, could manage the savages without his own private chamber of horrors in which to enforce his reign.

Cooper could practically feel the tunnels beneath his feet-the ghosts of those fucking Mayans, or whatever cousins of the golden princess statue had been tortured and killed beneath him, calling out from six feet under the endless emerald meadow. Oh, yeah, Cooper, those pals of the golden priestess screeching to him, welcome back, old friend. It’s been too long a time coming. But there’s no salvation waitin’ for you here-only pain. Pain and sufferin’ enough to last an eternity. Come share in our misery, you tired, drunken fool!

He shook off the ghost-talk thoughts and checked his watch. It was almost a quarter to five. At best-unless President Márquez was as lazy as he, and preferred to sleep in-he had an hour to get in while Márquez was still asleep, and the sun had yet to rise.

If not less.

“All right, Island Man,” he said in a croaking whisper. “Time for the hard part.”

His own voice sounded oddly unfamiliar to him.