The Hunt

42

‘Eight minutes,’ someone said.

Silence; all eyes scanning the darkened heavens.

Jaeger shook his head darkly. ‘They’re not coming.’

‘Shut up.’ It was Colonel Evandro. It was unlike him to be so brusque. ‘I hear something.’

Jaeger strained his ears. Sure enough, a faint, barely audible rumble reverberated over the treetops. An aircraft was coming in low and unseen from the west, the noise masked by the dense vegetation.

Moments later, the eerie form of the AN-12 lumbered out of the blackness, flying at a little above its 70-knot stall speed. It was showing no lights across its 125-foot wingspan, so it appeared like some kind of giant ghost plane. It did one pass low over the airbase before executing a smart turn and touching down smoothly on the dirt strip.

Unbelievable, Jaeger told himself, his adrenalin pumping. This guy sure knows how to fly.

For several seconds the 100-foot-long aircraft slowed on the runway, as if coming to a standstill. Yet when it was maybe a third of the way in, its four Ivchenko turboprop engines began to pour thick black smoke as they went to maximum power. The Antonov gained speed rapidly, and in a thunderous roar it clawed its way back into the darkness.

Jaeger sprinted for the radio room. The pilot must have noticed something was amiss. But what? What had they overlooked when preparing the airstrip for the sting? He burst inside to find Colonel Evandro’s radio operator firmly on the case.

‘Bear 12, you’ve aborted the landing. Why the abort?’

Silence. A long beat of echoing static in which the Antonov’s pilot didn’t respond. Jaeger feared they’d spooked him. Or maybe Los Niños’s radio operator had managed to make contact, alerting him to what was going on.

‘Bear 12, Bear 12, why the abort?’ the radio operator repeated.

A moment of silence, followed by a throaty chuckle. ‘No abort. Old Soviet trick. Testing if your strip is good. I touch wheels, see if strip holds up. Don’t worry. Is good. Bear 12 now making final approach.’

By the time Jaeger had got his pulse back to something like normal, the AN-12 had touched down and was coming to a halt on the dirt runway.

All eyes switched to Captain Ernesto Gonzales’s point of view now, as it was transmitted to a laptop set on the desk before them. Jaeger felt his heart race as he eyed the screen. It had made sense to rig the BSOB captain with a tiny surveillance device so they could monitor the sting as it went down.

A figure stepped into view dressed in grubby overalls. Using two fluorescent panels, he guided the aircraft towards the target hangar; the hangar that concealed the decoy cargo.

The AN-12 taxied to a standstill. Captain Gonzales strolled over, using one hand to anchor his Stetson against the aircraft’s powerful backwash.

The pilot powered down his engines. Once the deafening racket had died away, he slid open the cockpit’s side window. His face appeared: mid fifties, jowly; former Soviet military if the greying crew cut was anything to go by.

‘You’re late,’ Gonzales shouted up at him.

The pilot peered down. ‘You change frequency. Why the change?’

Gonzales’s face remained impassive. ‘You never heard of electrical storms? We get a lot of ’em around here.’

‘Thunderstorm not affect VHF.’

‘Well something did.’ A beat of silence. ‘You wanna bitch about it, or you wanna unload?’

The Russian shrugged. ‘We are here. We get unloading, comrade.’

‘You are. Let’s get started.’

There was an audible clunk from somewhere, and the AN-12’s rear ramp whined down. Captain Gonzales yelled out some orders and a bunch of narco lookalikes roared over in a pickup truck fitted with a hydraulic tailgate.

Moments later it had backed up to the AN-12’s ramp and disappeared inside. A minute ticked by. Gonzales wandered around to the AN-12’s rear and started yelling orders, gesticulating wildly, just to lend an added sense of chaos to the scene. The colonel had made the perfect choice – Gonzales was a natural.

The pickup drove down the ramp with a wooden crate the size of a small fridge-freezer strapped to its rear. As it headed across to the nearby hangar, Captain Gonzales moved back to the cockpit.

‘You wait there while we inspect the cargo,’ he told the pilot.

The pilot shrugged. ‘Cargo is good. No need to inspect.’

Gonzales moved his hand more firmly onto the AK-47 slung across his shoulder. ‘You wait while we check. Comrade.’

The pilot didn’t respond. He clearly wasn’t going anywhere until this narco gunman was satisfied.

There was a yell from the direction of the hangar. In Portuguese. ‘El Commandante! You need to see this!’

Gonzales eyed the pilot. ‘Something I need to check. You wait here.’ He strolled across to the hangar.

‘It’s a heap of bloody metal in a crate,’ one of his men complained, gesturing at the cargo. ‘What do we want with a heap of useless freakin’ metal? Take a look for yourself,’ he announced, feigning anger.

Gonzales and his men were keeping it one hundred per cent real, just in case any of the Russian crew spoke Portuguese and overheard. Gonzales made a show of peering into the crate. He frowned. ‘What the fuck? What is this shit?’

He turned around and strode back to the aircraft. There was a certain menace to his step now.

He eyed the pilot. ‘You just delivered a crateload of metal. This is not what was agreed. Where’s the coca paste, comrade?’

The pilot did a double take. ‘What?’

‘Coca. Paste. From Ecuador. Like last time.’ Gonzales’s tone was level and calm, with just the right hint of menace. ‘Plus we got the refined product to onload. Just like always.’

The pilot’s face darkened. ‘What is this bullshit?’

Gonzales placed his hand on his weapon. ‘We do this a hundred times, comrade, no problem. A hundred times. Then tonight we get a crateload of useless fucking scrap. No bullshit, comrade; you got some explaining to do.’

For a moment Jaeger wondered if Gonzales was laying it on a little too thick. This was the moment when the bad guys had to fall hook, line and sinker for the ruse.

The pilot glanced around, the spotlights blinding him. His gaze came to rest on Gonzalez again. ‘Look, brother, I load up at Moldova. I bring cargo here as instructed. I land.’ The pilot paused. ‘So, like I say: what bullshit is this?’

Gonzales unslung his weapon. ‘Mister, right now it’s me asking the questions and you giving the answers.’

The pilot was a tough old bird, but Gonzales’s act was getting to him. ‘Look, I have never been to this Ecuador. I have never fly the drugs. I fly the weapons. And tonight, I follow instructions to letter.’

Gonzales fixed him with a look. ‘Comrade, who exactly is your patron? Who is your customer for this pile of useless scrap?’

The pilot stiffened. He clearly wasn’t inclined to answer.

Gonzales ratcheted a round into the breech of his AK-47. ‘Mister, let me make this easy on you: you start talking and you start making some motherfucking sense, or things are gonna turn very ugly very fast.’

The pilot blanched. ‘El Padre,’ he growled. ‘Los Niños. I fly in here for El Padre.’

Gonzales scratched his head, his features displaying a certain incredulity. Then he let out a short bark of a laugh before glancing at the pilot again.

‘You’re on the wrong strip, comrade. I’m expecting a shipment of coca paste from Ecuador. End of.’

The pilot’s mouth hung open. Speechless.

Gonzalez shrugged. ‘Listen, we don’t mess with El Padre. No one does. Not if they want to live. So best you turn this crate around and get airborne again. Pronto.’

The pilot seemed frozen, his face drained of all colour.

‘Comrade, you’re free to go. But I gotta tell you something. You’re not just at the wrong strip; you’re in the wrong goddam country. This is Brazil. You want the other side of the border. Colombia.’

‘So who are…’ the pilot stuttered. ‘Who are you guys?’

Gonzalez shook his head. ‘Not your need-to-know.’ There was a steeliness to his gaze now. ‘Like I said, we’re done. Adios. You need to spin this crate around and get airborne.’

The pilot turned and barked a few orders in Russian at his co-pilot and navigator, then reached for his instrument panel. The colour was starting to return to his features. Maybe he was going to get away with this. Maybe he wasn’t about to die.

Gonzales yelled for his boys to load up the cargo once more. In the hangar, the dummy shipment was manhandled into the pickup, driven up the ramp of the AN-12 and deposited in the aircraft’s hold. With barely a second glance, the loadmaster got it strapped down and headed for the cockpit.

Gonzales’s men exited the aircraft, switch done.

‘Word of advice, Igor,’ Gonzales volunteered to the pilot. ‘You get to El Padre’s place, you may want to keep quiet about your little fuck-up. He doesn’t take kindly to… fuck-ups.’ A beat. ‘Good luck, comrade. Safe flying to wherever it is you’re headed. This side of the border, we’re the only guys in town.’

The pilot cracked a smile. He reached behind him and pulled out a bottle. ‘You like vodka? Khortytsa vodka. The best. All the way from Ukraine.’

Captain Gonzales shook his head. ‘I’m a tequila kind of guy. Maybe you’ll need that where you’re heading. If El Padre finds out what really happened here tonight…’ He let the words tail off menacingly. ‘Adios, comrade, and say hello to Moldova for me, or wherever the hell it is you come from.’

The pilot punched a button and there was the distinctive whine of the starter motors firing up the first of the aircraft’s engines. ‘Ukraine. I come from Ukraine. Oleksandr Savchenko, Ukraine’s finest pilot. But right now, we have cargo to deliver all the way to fucking China. If you ever come to Ukraine, please, you…’ The last of his words were drowned out by the howling of the engines.

‘Sure, I’ll look you up.’ Gonzales slapped the fuselage theatrically. ‘Safe trip! And next time, get a better navigator, Comrade Savchenko!’

He stepped away from the aircraft, his part of the mission complete: so far, so good.