Brown, Dale - Independent 02 (61 page)

 
          
Hammerhead One Air Staging Platform

 
          
McLanahan
was in his high-backed seat beside the drone control center when Hardcastle
came over to him. McLanahan was intently peering at an old Air Force E-6B
flight computer, the old aluminum “whiz wheel” circular slide rule used for
making mathematical and navigational calculations. After making a few notes and
spinning another calculation, he stared at the monitor showing the image of the
Piper Cheyenne carrying the smugglers, apparently back to safety.

 
          
“Drone
status, Patrick?”

 
          
“In
the green. Looks like he’s about twenty minutes from Cuban airspace. We can
send the drone around
Cuba
as planned and pick him up on the other
side.”

 
          
“Okay.
I’ve already notified Elliott about the overflight. He’ll contact the State
Department and have them issue an official protest to the Cuban government for
allowing an overflight by a known drug smuggler. They let a drug smuggler
overfly but won’t clear our drone or Sea Lions through. So much for their
so-called cooperation.

 
          
McLanahan
nodded, obviously preoccupied. “Something wrong? What are you working on?”

 
          
“Just
running a bunch of range calculations on that
Cheyenne
,” McLanahan told him, and punched up the
computer’s track of the aircraft, which included the plane’s previous sorties
into American airspace as well as a prediction of where the plane might likely
go next. Most of the lines indicated that the plane would land in one of
several Cuban airbases on its northern coast. A few other predictions, not very
heavily weighed, had the plane crash landing off
Haiti
or ditching in the shallow waters near Cay
Sal Bank. “You figure the Cubans will let that plane land in
Cuba
?” McLanahan asked.

 
          
“Who
knows? The Cubans, talking the good-neighbor line lately, haven’t said a word
today except about overflight restrictions. My guess is they’ll let this guy
overfly, and they may let him land if he declares an emergency. We have the hot
line working to
Havana
. If we notify the Cubans far enough in advance and feed them some of
our radar data on this guy, we
might
be able to convince them at least to allow extradition if he’s captured.
They’re feeling pretty isolated these days.”

 
          
“Well,
I expect he’ll be declaring an emergency any second, then,” McLanahan said.
“Look here, the computer predicts the flight path and arrival point of an
aircraft based on unloaded weight plus thirty percent over authorized added
internal ferry fuel. This guy dropped fifteen one-hundred-kilo cases of
cocaine—that’s well over three thousand pounds of cargo. Add twelve hundred
pounds of extra fuel in internal bladders, plus the weight of the five kids we
counted on board that plane—this guy was at
least
a thousand pounds overweight just before he made those drops. He’s gotta be
running on fumes.”

 
          
“That
could be why he’s stayed at fourteen thousand feet all this time instead of
heading for twenty-five thousand,” Hardcastle said. “Maybe he can’t climb any
higher.”

 
          
“More
accurately, the trade-off would be unacceptable,” McLanahan told him. “He would
burn more gas climbing to a best-range altitude than he would save at the
higher altitude.”

 
          
“So
. . . maybe there’s a real
downside
to using kids on smuggling runs,” Hardcastle said. “Every kid they put on board
is that much less product they can haul into the country. Plus the added weight
is a drag on fuel.”

 
          
“Plus
the kids are a liability throughout the flight. The drugs are dumped
overboard—the kids stay. They’re a range and weight liability from start to
finish.” McLanahan scowled at his computer, then tossed it on the table. “I’d
say get an SES or Coast Guard vessel out to that vicinity and get under that
Cheyenne
, because he’s coming down any—”

 
          
“We
got something going down on target one,” the senior controller reported.
Hardcastle and McLanahan glanced up at the image of the
Cheyenne
on the TV monitor. “He’s slowed way down,
under one-fifty. Thought I saw a hatch open . . . there it goes ...”

 
          
The
short airstair hatch and curved upper hatch on the plane had popped open. Both
door sections vibrated violently in the plane’s slipstream, threatening to
break off the fuselage at any moment.

 
          
“They’re
still at fourteen thousand feet? That’s strange. Are they making a drop?”
Hardcastle was saying. “Are there any boats in the . . .
Holy Mother of God
...”

 
          
Hardcastle
and McLanahan were on their feet, jaws gone slack as they watched without
believing what they were seeing . . . One of the children had just been thrown
from the open hatch of the
Cheyenne
.

 
          
It
got worse. One of the girls, her long hair pulled straight back in the
slipstream, was clutching frantically at the cable that held the bottom half of
the airstair. Her fight only lasted a few moments, and suddenly she was gone.

 
          
“Mark and record position, mark and record
... oh God, cut off broadcast to shore!” Hardcastle knew that sometimes it was
possible for people with satellite dishes to intercept their v ideo signals
from the platform, and it was very possible that politicians or other visitors
at the
Alladin
City
base might be watching the Seagull drone’s
transmissions. “Get all available Sea Lion units airborne immediately, I want—”
His last order was cut off in a near-shout as another youngster went plummeting
to his death, thrust out the open hatch of the plane like the fiberglass cases of
drugs that had already been tossed out. The last child, older and bigger than
the others—was the one in the cockpit, the one they first saw with the
Seagull’s camera—was not thrown far enough away from the plane and hit the
fuselage and horizontal stabilizer—each sickening impact clearly seen by those
in the command center. The
Cheyenne
swung hard left after the last impact on the left stabilizer, and the
Seagull initiated an automatic breakaway and veered hard left away from the
Cheyenne
. The video picture was, thankfully, lost
from view.

 
          
Hardcastle
barely made it back to the commander’s console and quickly sat down, feeling
strength wash out of him. He had to take a deep breath to force his words out:
“Instruct the Seagull drone to begin an orbit over that position,” he said in a
shaky voice. “Infrared scan at five hundred feet. Get every available Coast
Guard unit out to that area immediately. Get . . . get ...” His words faded
like an old phonograph winding down, and he could do nothing else but stare in
utter disbelief at the computer monitor before him.

           
The Swamps South of Dulac,
Terrebonne County
,
Louisiana

 
          
One Week Later

 
          
Scattered
through the swamps and bayous between the small town of
Dulac
and the northern part of
Lake Boudreaux
,
Louisiana
, a hundred armed men, most with shotguns and hunting rifles, sat
motionless in flat-bottomed bass boats. They seemed rather tolerant of the
heavy downpour they were experiencing, a thunderstorm with the biggest, fattest
raindrops anyone had ever seen. The thunderstorm seemed to provide them some
sense of relief, as if believing that only they would ever be out on a night
like this, that only
they
could take
the worst Mother Nature could dish out. These men of Dulac and this backwoods
area of
Terrebonne
County
used the bad weather, and their knowledge
of the southern
Louisiana
swamps, to protect themselves from those who would take advantage of
them as well as those who would dare to come to the swamps and try to arrest
them.

 
          
The
local’s small bass boats surrounded a large, fast airboat—a flat-bottomed craft
propelled with a large aircraftlike propeller and steered with aircraftlike
control surfaces—which served as the command vessel for this operation. The
leader of the group, a smuggler named Girelli, flicked his cigarette at a dark,
slithery shape gliding across the murky water. “Jesus,” he murmured, his
Staten Island
accent as strange to the locals as a
Martian’s. “This place gives me the creeps.”
 
         
Girelli
turned to a man beside him who had a radio headset pressed to one ear. The
radio itself, big as an ice chest, was in a waterproof canvas bag in the middle
of the airboat, with a rigid rubber antenna extending far above the airboat’s
fan; it had a navigational beacon in it as well as a powerful descrambling
radio receiver. “What’s the story, Mario?”

 
          
“I
can’t hear anythin’,” the guy said. “I ain’t heard anythin’ for hours.” The
radio was a tactical backpack radio transmitter used in
Vietnam
by Air Force and Army combat air
controllers who parachuted behind enemy lines on WET SNOW missions and set up
the beacon at presurveyed points. Air Force and Navy bombers would use the
beacon signals as navigational and bombing checkpoints and offset aimpoints to
strike their targets—the beacon would appear as thick and thin lines now on a
radar scope, corresponding to the agreed-on code used for each mission . .. now
the radio could be had at almost any surplus store for practically nothing.
Mario was selected for this smuggling run because of his familiarity with the
beacon system as a combat air controller in
Vietnam
. But instead of directing air raids along
the Ho Chi Minh Trail, they were going to use the war surplus beacon system to
precision-drop Colombian cocaine to waiting smugglers . . .

 
          
“How
do we know these guys took us to the right place, eh?” Girelli asked. One of
“these guys,” a man named George Debeaucha- let, assigned as the smuggler’s
escort, ignored the two outsiders’ remarks. “We could be miles from the drop
point.”

 
          
“These
guys ain’t dumb, Tony,” Mario said. “They’re getting paid good money to
cooperate. We don’t show with this stuff, these guys are gator food.”

 
          
Girelli
looked uneasily around him, trying not to look as apprehensive as he felt. The
locals, mostly Cajun-speaking, burly fishermen and trappers, came out of
nowhere when Debeauchalet took the two smugglers alone to this section of the
Lake
Boudreaux
swamps of south
Louisiana
. How these guys could navigate through the
endless swamps, islands, overhanging mangroves and unmarked mud trails Girelli
could never figure out. But they had met precisely on time, two or three men
per boat, without either Mario and Girelli knowing they were nearby.
Fortunately the Yankee smugglers were assured that the cops, local FBI or local
DEA boys didn’t possess the same skill.

 
          
Each
boat had one of Girelli’s heavily armed men on board, both to ensure the
local’s cooperation and to add to the considerable firepower as well as to help
disperse the shipment as fast as possible after the drop. Each man carried
either an AR-15 rifle modified for fully automatic fire or a Uzi or some other
small automatic weapon. It would be much tougher to catch twenty escaping
smugglers than one or two. But the presence of Girelli’s soldiers alongside the
scruffy locals didn’t help ease his apprehension. “These guys could probably
toss us over the side, take the stuff and disappear.”

 
          
“Hey.
They know the score,” Mario said. “The cartels and the Cuchillos own these
guys. And their families, too. They do their thing, they get paid big bucks. We
don’t show, all these bozos swallow swamp scum. Now shut up. I’m trying to
listen.”

 
          
The
group fell silent. After a few moments Mario removed the headphones and looped
them over his neck. “Nothin’ yet. It’s still early. A few more minutes, we
should hear.” He switched a level on the radio to VOX and picked up a
microphone: “
Duncan
, this is Mario. Radio check.”

 
          
“Yo
mama,” came the reply. Mario laughed and set the microphone back on its clip.
Duncan
was another member of the smuggling gang
stationed fifteen miles south of the drop zone, along the path of the inbound
plane. He would watch and listen for any signs of pursuit as the drop went
down, and warn the drop-zone crew.

 
          
“Pretty
good thinking, the cartel movin’ the drop site over to
Louisiana
,” Girelli said. “Just think: three million
dollars’ worth of blow. Three
million.
And we make three hundred grand for a couple days’ work.”

 
          
“A
hundred of which we fork over to these good ol’ boys, remember.”

 
          
Girelli
spat overboard. “These inbreeds do the job, they can have the dough. It’s their
own fault they bring half the county—we only asked for twenty guys.”

 
          
“I
just wonder how those flyboys—what do they call ’em, the Blades or
something?—how will they get past the Hammerheads?” Mario said. “The Heads got
this whole area closed off, don’t they?” “You butthole,” Girelli said. “What do
you think we’re sitting in this swamp for? The Heads don't have the whole Gulf
closed off. They just do
Florida
and the
Caribbean
and over that way. They don’t have none of
them oil platforms out this way. The nearest place they got to land is seventy
miles away.”

 
          
“I
know
that, dickbrain”—he didn’t know
any of that but he didn’t want to admit it—“I mean, they got those radar planes
too. you know, the prop-jobs with the radar flyin’ saucers on them. They can
see planes cornin’ for a hundred miles. I heard it on TV.”

 
          
“That’s
why we’re sittin’ here in a
damned thunderstorm, Mario,” Girelli said. “Those radars can’t see through
thunderstorms.” “They can’t? How do you know that?”

 
          
“Radar
can’t see through water. Didn’t you pay no attention in school? All’s a radar
sees in a thunderstorm is a big white cloud. And the planes stay away from
thunderstorms, too. Too much bouncin’ around in a thunderstorm.”

 
          
“So
how are the Blades gonna make a drop in this shit then?”

 
          
“How
is, the Blades got brass balls. Also, they know the Heads can’t fly in this
stuff, so that’s when they come. These Cuchillos, they ain’t afraid of nothin’.
Besides, the Heads don’t come out here. Most of the dope goes through
Florida
, so that’s where the Hammerheads operate.”
He had to laugh. “Them Heads are good against spicks and wetbacks but they
don’t wanna take on good
oX American
runners.”

 
          
Girelli
nudged Mario. “You know what else I heard? In case the Blades do get caught,
you know what they’ve done to keep from gettin’ shot down? Carry
kids
on their planes. You believe that?”
If Girelli could have seen Mario’s face, he would have seen that his partner
didn’t think too much of that. “And that ain’t the half of it. In case they run
low on fuel and don’t think they can make it back, you know what they do?”

 
          
“You
. . . you’re not—?”

 
          
“They
toss the little ones right outta the plane.” Girelli made a whistling sound, stomped
a foot in the water pooling up in the bottom of the airboat. “You believe
that?”

 
          
“That
ain’t funny,” Mario said. “I got kids. Anybody that uses kids like—”

 
          
“Business,
pal. It’s business.”

 
          
“I
guess that’s how the Blades fly in shitty weather like this—they got no sense
except gettin’ the job done,” Mario said, changing the subject.

 
          
“You
think about makin’ the big score, you can do anything.”

 
          
The
two became silent again, then Mario put the headphones back on, listening
intently. He turned to Girelli. “I think I hear somethin’.” He reached for the
top flap on the transmitter case.

 
          
“Wait,”
Girelli reminded him. “Get a definite code first.”

 
          
“I
know, I know, let me listen."

 
          
The
signal seemed to fade out, then disappear. Mario was only slightly worried—he
was told the loss of signal was part of the search routine as the incoming
plane lined up on the right course. A few moments later the signal returned,
this time stronger. Mario counted the clear, sharp pulses he heard. “I got it.
It’s the right code.” He lifted the top flap of the radio and pressed a
rubber-covered button. This time when the signal returned it illuminated a
yellow light on top of the transmitter. He turned a key on the radio that
locked the navigational beacon in the ON position. The yellow light came on
once more, then was out.

 
          
“They’re
comin’,” he announced. “First contact is about fifty miles out, they said in
the briefing. That means a rendezvous in about ten minutes.”

 
          
“And
that radio does it all? We don’t need to set up flares for a drop zone or
nothin’?”

 
          
“This
baby does everything,” Mario replied, recovering the transmitter with its
protective canvas top. “These Cuchillos will drop the stuff right in our laps.
I watched these guys work on another drop— these guys are good. They go balls
to the wall and they can still drop a dime from a hundred feet in the air. They
use the beacon as an offset aimpoint—”