The Ransom of Black Stealth One

FORTY-TWO

Jorge Ocampo, squinting against the afternoon sun, shoved his battered hat onto the back of his head and leaned his fishing rod against the shed wall. El lobo has spent much of this day sending us on childish errands. And some of them no longer make sense, he reflected when Vins had finished giving new orders. Aloud, Jorge asked, “Are we searching for a boat, or a man?”

“Either,” Vins assured him, “or both. Perhaps more than one man.”

Mateo Carranza, spooning beans directly from a can onto a tortilla, said, “We have searched for men already, Lobo. It sounds as if you know something you have not told us.”

My thought exactly, thought Jorge. This Russian is not the same man I knew, and perhaps the money has changed him. He gives us no credit for brains; leads us here and there like burros. If he has brought us here as sacrifices, I shall put a bullet in him.

Vins stood up, brushing crumbs from his thighs, and folded his arms as he let his gaze sweep the marshlands. “It is only a suspicion, a feeling I have. And I have learned to trust my suspicions. If this man Medina is cunning enough to put an airplane in our hands, he is not so stupid as to arrive without some kind of support. So,” he said, and waved both hands to indicate the countryside. “Where is that support?”

Jorge’s eyes followed the wave. “He must be so cunning that we will not see it until the man wishes us to,” he shrugged, and rolled himself a bean sandwich.

“I will not accept that,” Vins said. “We simply must be more cunning than he is.” He chose a key and unlocked the trunk of the blue Ford. “Something is out here. I know it. We have only to find it.”

Jorge chewed as he looked into that trunk, looking not at the submachine guns ranked inside, nor the direction-finder units with loop antennae for tracking money, but at the three net bags of paper money el lobo had let them count into almost equal piles, and then he swallowed, though he did not taste the frijoles. He was tasting the money.

Jorge accepted a stubby little Uzi from Vins without a word and watched Mateo take one as well. The short, wire-stocked Israeli weapon was heavier than an American M16 and had a shorter range, but three of them could be hidden in a single piece of luggage and the Uzi’s reliability was a legend. You keep the weapons inside a locked trunk in between patrols. Why, Lobo? I know why; and a man who no longer trusts his squad is a man I no longer trust. With all this money lying about, you have become more coyote than wolf.

Still, it was clear that Vins had lost none of his shrewdness. “Mateo, you will see the water’s edge with fresh eyes because you have not investigated it. Look carefully for signs of a boat, probably not within sight of the runway. We meet back here at dusk; sooner if the airplane arrives. Jorge, you and I will move out from a central point in the brush. He who finds a vehicle, shoot once to signal.”

Mateo: “And he who finds a man?”

Vins: “Shoot to kill. We do not want more than one man to chase, later.” He motioned for Jorge, who fell in step as they marched toward the scrub.

They had not walked thirty paces when Mateo called, “And what if the man is one of your own? You said it was possible.”

“I have only two men,” Vins called back. “If you shoot anyone else’s, it is their problem.”

Jorge did not often hear Karel Vins chuckle to himself as he did now, striding into the brush. You say you are a patriot, yet you would willingly shoot a man from your own country, a man like yourself, thought Jorge. Me, I think perhaps you do not like men like yourself. And then Jorge understood. “A dead GRU man would be one fewer to chase us. Correct?”

Vins did not reply, but his heavy-lidded glance endorsed the notion. Presently, Vins made a hand gesture as if patting an invisible dog, commanding silence as he turned away. Jorge watched him for a moment, in grudging admiration. Coyote or lobo, Vins knew how to move through brush with no sound that would carry more than a few yards, watching where he stepped, avoiding branches when he could, holding and releasing them with silent hands when avoidance was impossible. I would not want to be the man you hunt, Jorge thought as he began his own reconnaissance. And you turned your back on my Uzi, Lobo. Perhaps you can be trusted after all Jorge tried to think like a sniper, skirting every likely hummock and thicket, checking each one thoroughly and taking his time to do it right. Now and then he paused, as el lobo had taught him in earlier campaigns, squatting to listen. He did not want to hear a Ford Escort engine because that would mean Karel Vins had doubled back, after all his talk of patriotism, to take the money and leave alone. In fact, he did not want to think about it, and so he could not help thinking about it. Jorge did a lot of listening in the next hour or so.

But with perhaps two hours of sun left, Jorge had also covered a broad swath of the sparse sandy landscape, some two kilometers of it, dodging cactus as well as less hostile shrubbery. He was wondering whether Mateo had taken his work seriously, also wondering whether he had gone too far to hear a gunshot, when he saw a shadow cross a hummock ahead of him. The shadow was far too vast to portend any living thing. Jorge looked up and saw the monster bird instantly, no more than a hundred feet above him.

It was a creature so stunning, so terrifyingly enormous, that Jorge Ocampo simply stared with his jaw agape. But it produced a sound like a soft wind though its wings did not beat as it wheeled almost overhead, and when it came still lower something happened to its plumage. It was no longer plumage at all, but a dull gray with faint glitters of late sun from a million points on its hide, and now that he saw that the thing was an airplane, Jorge’s eyes picked out the faint outline of a cockpit bubble. I must have imagined that it wore a bird’s plumage; the error of a poor observer, and one not to be mentioned. Jorge began to run in a steady trot toward the landing strip long before he heard a single gunshot, multiplied by faint, flat echoes.

There had been a time when such a run would not have winded him, but Jorge arrived at the strip breathless. He had seen the airplane’s first slow, floating passage down the length of the landing strip, and its second pass somewhat higher as it crossed over the shed, continuing low over the scrub until it disappeared. El lobo was already standing on the strip’s grassy verge, peering at a gray, creased placard of some sort, and Mateo approached with his trousers wet to the thighs.

Jorge, with forced breathing to flood his oxygen-starved tissues, heard the rumble of Russian curses as he realized Karel Vins was reading from the inner face of a flimsy cardboard container. “I saw nothing on my patrol but that monster airplane,” Jorge reported. “Me, I think the man is truly alone.”

Vins glanced at Mateo, who only offered an elaborate shrug by way of a patrol report. “You may be right,” Vins muttered. “He must have seen me wave; he dropped this on his second pass. Certainly not the message of a man who came prepared.”

Jorge saw the scribbles penciled onto the gray cardboard. “What does it say?”

“It is in English,” Vins replied. “He demands that we place the money one hundred meters from the far end of the strip, and stand together at this end until he has landed to take the ransom. He must think we are fools.”

Mateo: “But if he is afoot, Lobo—”

“That airplane, I am told, can rise like a helicopter gunship. He could fly off with the money before we could get within gunshot range. No, thank you.”

“Ahh,” Jorge said. El lobo had explained much in few words, for any airplane that could do such wondrous things might indeed be worth such a ransom. “So what do we do? Shoot him down?”

Vins held his silence for a long moment, sweeping the horizon with his gaze, before answering as if to himself. “We must take the aircraft intact. This man Medina is improvising now. I think, if he sees the money through those net sacks, his greed will make him land—even if I am standing next to the money. Yes, that is what we shall do. We can assume he is armed, and he must have seen my Uzi. I shall place it far out of reach on the dirt. You two, go to the other end of the strip and wait.”

Jorge: “You will face him unarmed?”

“I am never unarmed,” Vins said with his wolf’s grin. Jorge nodded. He had not seen el lobo’s sidearm during the entire mission, but of course the man would keep one. He watched Vins select a key, open the trunk of the blue Ford, and lift out the bags of cheap jute net full of Swiss banknotes.

Then Jorge walked toward the end of the dirt strip with the laconic Mateo Carranza.

Jorge saw the thing come out of the sun five minutes later, settling low over the water, awesome in its silence. El lobo stood waving. This time the vast wings seemed almost to flap as the aircraft banked away in a long, slow circle over the marsh, returning a minute later, passing almost over Karel Vins who seemed to be shading his eyes before he ran forward toward something that fluttered to the ground after the monster began to climb into the heavens.

It seemed to Jorge that this whole operation was turning to muck under his feet. He thought perhaps el lobo had begun to hold the same opinion when Vins, trudging back like a peon with the ransom of a king over one shoulder, whistled a familiar old call. He did not feel much like taking any more orders but, “A sus ordenes, Lobo,” he said as he and Mateo reached the shed.

Vins flashed another piece of torn cardboard, brightly colored on one side, gray on the other. On the gray side were four letters: a single word. “He wishes us to wait,” Vins grumbled in Spanish, dropping the money into the car’s trunk and slamming the lid.

Now Mateo spoke up. “He will return, then.”

The eyes of el lobo searched the sky. “I am certain he saw the money; who would not return for that? But he has turned very, very cautious for a man who has dared so much. He could force a change in our tactics. And our tactics may depend on just how long we have to wait.” Jorge studied the Russian’s face and saw no duplicity there, but simple frustration.