Standoff

Twenty-two

I spent an hour and a half in a hot airless room, a couple of armed guards on the door, with the maps, a ruler, and a pen and paper, plotting waypoints, noting elevations, towers and other features along the route. The only significant military airspace worth noting was around Del Rio where Laughlin AFB was situated. There was no real skill required in doing what I had planned, just balls. I had no doubt that every other day organized crime did a version of what I planned to do.

Transponder on standby, we’d take off after sunset, fly nap of the earth southeast, tracking the US — Mexico border, crossing it with a turn to the north at Heath Canyon and continuing more or less north as we climbed to fourteen hundred feet to be five hundred feet above ground level over Fort Stockton. We’d hook a right-hand turn there, skirt around that military airspace centered on Laughlin AFB, maintaining five hundred feet over the Ozona gasworks, and make a beeline via Mason for Lake Travis west of Austin. From there, it would be a northwesterly heading, avoiding Waco, to Brownwood Airport, a mostly general aviation facility, for refueling. That was where, if convenient, I intended to pick up Apostles’ chump change. Taking off from Brownwood with the transponder switched on, we’d fly to Dallas Love Field, another general aviation airport, in the heart of Dallas. At Love Field I intended to lodge a night VFR flight plan noting our destination as Houston, which we’d then completely ignore once in the air and beyond the airport tower’s visual range. The flight south would be less circuitous. We’d look like we were heading for El Paso before turning off the transponder, dropping down to five hundred feet and hooking a left turn for a run to Mexico airspace, again crossing over in the vicinity of Heath Canyon. The distance flown would be around 1780 standard miles and, allowing for a combined thirty-minute stop in Brownwood Airport and Love Field, total time for the round trip would be about six and a half hours.

There would be a gibbous moon and zero cloud for much of the route, though there was a thirty percent chance of a thunderstorm in the Austin area. Winds weren’t going to be a factor. A walk in the park.

Accompanied by the guards, I went outside for some air. The camp was around three miles from the base of a spur of mountains, rising gray and black a thousand feet high or more from the cookie-colored desert. They shimmered in the afternoon heat beneath a blue sky. There were no clouds or birds in it. Out to the west, the rising tan dust of the inbound storm that never seemed to arrive still hung on the horizon. The camp was quiet. As they say — too quiet. What the hell was this place all about?

I decided to take a tour of the various buildings, but was prevented from doing so by the guards who wanted me back into the office. I was considering whether to take the rifles out of their hands and introduce one of the stocks to their teeth when four men in BDUs, helmets and goggles on dirt bikes interrupted this thought, riding around the side of one of the hangars and disappearing inside the main door, swallowed by the dark shadow within.

Dirt bikes. Apostles was big on them for some reason. There was the escort that accompanied our arrival. And dirt bikes were a big feature of the other camp down in the Darién Gap, Colombia.

The four men who’d just ridden inside strolled out of the hangar and into the sun, coming toward me.

Agitated, one of the guards said, “Ven conmigo.” And then, when I didn’t move, repeated more assertively, “Ven conmigo! Ahorita!” Come with me! Now!

The riders kept walking toward me. Three were short and Mexican. One was much taller than the others, and of a completely different build. He was Caucasian. They strolled right past me, doused in sweat and water, joking among one another. The taller, rangy white guy looked at me. There was a momentary assessment, a what’s-your-business-here look, but no recollection or familiarity. But while he didn’t recognize me, I knew plenty about him. The last time I’d seen this guy, he was sitting on a motorcycle gesturing fuck you with his middle finger extended. Senior Airman Angus Whelt, alias the Doctor, AWOL from Lackland AFB, wanted for questioning in relation to the supply and distribution of narcotics. What the hell was he doing here? Had there been some prior connection between him and El Santo’s operation? Did he know what had happened to his pal at Horizon Airport?

I’d seen Whelt’s service record with a mug shot included, but there’d been no reason or opportunity for him to have seen mine. And we’d never actually met. At our last meeting, I was just an unfriendly silhouette behind the wheel of a Jeep Patriot leaking oil from a smashed sump, chasing him across the dry desert as his rear knobby tire threw rocks at Gomez and me. He’d won the chase and sometime later jumped the barrier fence, Steve McQueen-style. Now he was here in El Santo’s camp on a dirt bike, doing what? I wondered.

One of the guards nudged me in the back with his AK and motioned in the direction of the hangar. I had a few things to think about and didn’t have to be basting under the desert sun to do it, so I walked. A quick scan of the horizon told me that the sandstorm was definitely getting closer though the windsock still said it should be moving in the opposite direction. Strange, to say the least. A few things weren’t adding up, but I was getting some more figures to play with.

Arriving at the hangar, the familiar sound of approaching turboprops made me stop and turn. An anonymous cream-colored King Air arrived from out of the desert, flying low and fast. It rocketed over the strip and dipped a wing that almost skimmed the ground as it turned hard and climbed. One of the guards opened the building’s door and pushed me inside. The bricks of cocaine had been taken out of the black King Air and restacked on the pallet and the aircraft itself had been moved down the far end of the hangar. Carlos was nowhere around. A couple of men materialized and manually opened the hangar door, sliding one half back and then doing likewise to the other half while the cream King Air flew down its glide path on final approach, its propellers snarling and slicing the air on full fine pitch. I saw its tires kick up balls of dust on the dirt strip as it touched down adjacent to the hangar’s open doors, but in an instant it was gone from my view hidden by the rest of the hangar. I heard the engine note become more aggressive as the propeller pitch reversed and full power was applied to slow the machine.

Half a minute later, the aircraft arrived at the open hangar doors and the pilot killed the turboprops. The men who had opened the doors ran to the plane with a tow bar. They fitted it to the front wheel and dragged the King Air inside, bringing it alongside the cocaine on the pallet. The fuselage door opened, a ladder came down and out stepped Daniela and Lina, dressed in Desert Storm BDUs showing plenty of cleavage and with pistols in drop leg holsters worn low on their right thighs. Both saw me and ignored me as they strode to the hangar doors, which were being closed, and slipped out through the narrowing gap.

I went over to the plane as a number of mechanics went to work on it, pulling off engine cowls and so forth. The door in the fuselage was open so I climbed inside. It was a corporate aircraft with the center seats and some of the paneling over the fuselage removed. Also, there was no pilot or co-pilot, which led me to conclude that, given I hadn’t seen anyone else leave the plane, Daniela and Lina must have been at the controls. While I pondered that, I checked the navigation set-up — military specification GPS and radar altimeter, both with redundant systems. I had to hand it to Apostles, he knew how to do it right.

The sudden overwhelming roar of four-stroke single-cylinder engines filled the hangar and made it tremble as countless numbers of dirt bikes roared by the narrow gap left in the hangar door. This was interesting — I made a move toward the opening to get a better look, but those two guards materialized and barred the way.

“So now you have your aircraft,” said Apostles behind me, having entered by another door. I turned and saw that the twins were accompanying him, looking like a couple of pinups from Girls & Guns.

“What’s with all the dirt bikes?” I asked.

“Ask me tomorrow after your flight,” he said, smiling, putting his arm around my shoulders and steering me back toward the plane.

“As you requested, we’re going to paint her up in the corporate colors of the Hunt Oil Company, which has its headquarters in Dallas,” said … don’t ask me which twin. The only difference between them that I could see was that one had a pink push-up bra framing her cleavage, while the other twin wore blue. Okay, so I’ll go with that — Pink Bra was doing the talking. “That’s a couple of dark-blue stripes on the vertical stabilizer,” she continued, looking at a printout in her hand. “Registration number November seven four Victor Romeo.” Pink Bra handed the printout to one of the men who raced off with it while some of his flunkies wheeled a cherry picker up to the aircraft’s tail assembly, getting ready to mask off those stripes, I guessed.

“It shouldn’t take them more than an hour to get the job done,” said Blue. “In the meantime,” she looked at me, “why don’t you brief us?”

Apostles answered the obvious question. “The twins, they will be your flight crew tonight.”

“We know the territory,” said Blue.

“Dallas was our hometown,” Pink added. “We were Cowboys Cheerleaders.”

Apostles wore the hint of smirk, his arm around Pink and his hand on the ass of Blue. “Spiderman still joining us?” I asked to take my mind off a pang of jealousy.

The twins glanced at each other.

“Carlos,” I translated.

Pink smiled.

“Carlos and one other. Security,” said Blue, who by now I pegged as Lina by her no-nonsense demeanor.

“You expecting trouble?”

Lina shrugged. “You tell me.”

“Hey,” I reassured everyone, “I got a lot of money riding on this.”

“You’ve got more than money riding on this, Mr Cooper,” said Apostles.

“Okay, well then you might think about wearing more conventional pilot’s uniforms,” I replied, motioning to the twins. “While personally I think what you’ve got on is, well, pretty great, you’re supposed to be working for a god-fearing Texan oil company, not doubling for Lara Croft.”

The briefing took less than half an hour to conclude.

“We could have done this.” Lina observed when I was done.

“Then why haven’t you?” Neither twin had an answer for that.