October's Ghost (40 page)

Avaro allowed a very infrequent laugh. “Yes, he does, Father.”

Alvarez switched off the phone and folded it shut. “That damned interpreter!”

Parra took the cell phone from his leader and laid it on the table. “Your words to Avaro were true. It is too late for anything to stop us.”

“He is my son, Gonzalo. I must ease his fears. But to have the Americans looking...”

“As you said, they will not find it. When the country is ours, they cannot just snoop around without our permission. Of course they will want to, but want and will are two very different things.” Parra knew his words were having the desired effect. Even men of power needed reassurance in times of great events. “We will have a country. We will have the weapon with which to guarantee our sovereignty. We will have the director right where we want him. And from all those things we will amass great wealth.”

Alvarez hoped it would be so. Hoped it would be as they planned. “Soothe me, Gonzalo.”

Parra smiled with just his eyes. “In six months we will have the economy of our country moving in the right direction. In twelve months enough commerce will have returned that the moneys flowing in and out of our banks will be sufficient that the tracing of funds will be impossible...without the government’s assistance, of course.”

“You will make a fine minister of finance, Gonzalo.”

“Si, Mr. President. And I will see to our laundry business as if it were my child.” It was, actually. Parra had first suggested the lucrative use of the island’s financial institutions. There would be plenty of customers on the international market. Dirty money was a commodity of almost limitless supply among the world’s less savory power players. Someone had to “clean” it, and that someone was rightly due a very large commission for services rendered. “In eighteen months we will be generating more than one hundred million dollars a month. In three years that will more than triple. In five years...”

“Your words are like the touch of a fine, fine masseuse, Gonzalo.”

Parra nodded. His session was not finished. “By then we will no longer need the services of our friend in there. The money generated by our ‘sales’ division will be meaningless by then, and so will his protection. That we will be able to purchase. No one, I guarantee you, no one, will be able to refuse the sums we can offer. What we want will be ours.”

“He doesn’t even know he is working for us yet, and already we have signed his pink slip,” Alvarez joked. He thought of the amount earned from the director’s busy pen. It was peanuts compared to what lay ahead. Peanuts. “I love money, Gonzalo. I truly do.”

“Money is power, Mr. President.”

Alvarez nodded. There was much power to be had. In many forms.

*  *  *

“Bob, you know it’s good,” Chick Hill said as his editor ran through the story a second time.

“Good, sure, but is it true?”

“Old Limp Dick does not call the White House for nothing,” Hill reminded his boss. “Party line or not, they don’t like him, and he don’t like them.”

Bob Christopher, national editor for the
Post
, had no argument with that. Congressman Richard Vorhees had surprised many by not always falling in line with the President and his secretary of defense. Some said he was promoting his own agenda. The ones who didn’t say it simply agreed with those who did. “All right, morning edition.”

“Morning!” Chick’s hands went to his hips in a futile display of disagreement. Christopher’s look told him that. “All right.”

“Get it to copyediting.”

Hill took the hard copy and walked it down one floor to the copyeditor for the national pages. “Morning edition.”

The middle-aged man looked up. “Why didn’t you just transfer it?” All the
Post’s
computers were networked. It was standard to “send” a story to copyediting by pressing a button, not by hand delivery.

“ ‘Cause I needed the walk,” Chick answered sarcastically, reaching for his cigarettes as he walked away.

“Asshole,” the copyeditor said openly. Dealing with these prima donna “journalists” was his least favorite part of his job. At one time he had gotten some satisfaction in using them and the information they dug up to increase his net worth, but that part of his “night job” had slacked off in the recent past. His employers no longer craved the written word as they once had as if it were gold. Now he was much more often used simply as a message boy, the link somewhere in the middle of a chain whose other end he knew nothing about. And he’d continued to be blissfully ignorant as long as the end he did know of continued to pay him handsomely.

Back to the day job. Reading and rewriting, fixing the mistakes that these “highly educated journalists” made with comical regularity. Chimps at the National Zoo could do better.

Hold on
. He read over the first part of the story again. Then the rest. “Well, isn’t this interesting.” He knew from experience that he would not be the only person to see it as such.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number from memory that he had so many times before. Doing so was not even that unusual. Part of his job included checking facts, and one of the stories in his basket was about the new economic-treaty provisions that the republics of the former Soviet Union had just agreed to. Where else would he get the confirmations he needed?

The call was answered at 1125 Sixteenth Street NW and forwarded to the third secretary for consular affairs. Five minutes later, after a trip to the photocopy machine, the copyeditor left on his regular lunch break. A car departed the Russian embassy at the same time.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DESIGN AND CIRCUMSTANCE

The Pave Hawk appeared from behind the unmaintained gantry at Launch Complex 12 and raced across the green earth of the Cape at fifty knots toward the target. From a mile away, visible clearly in the unfamiliar daylight, the helicopter appeared to be skimming the ground, its altitude governed by the two groups of dark forms hanging below the fuselage, one higher than the other. As it drew closer to the target—an abandoned range-safety bunker that had once been a haven for crash crews during launches—the dark objects became distinguishable as men. Actually they were much more.

Twelve hundred feet from the bunker, the Pave Hawk slowed, its nose flaring slightly as it dropped twenty feet toward the ground. Four Delta troopers, suspended on SPIE (Special Patrol Insertion/Extraction) rigs below and behind their five comrades, hit the ground running, their weapons in hand. A single pull on their release handles freed them from the fixed shoulder harnesses. They began moving quickly to their right toward a group of drums arrayed in a large circle.

Lieutenant Duc, after depositing his first package right on the money, released the aft SPIE rigging and nosed down toward the primary target a quarter-mile dead ahead. He dropped twenty feet more in altitude, leaving a clearance of just that same distance between the boots of the troopers hanging from the forward rig and the ground. Crossing Central Control Road, he accelerated to sixty knots, pushing the dangling troopers toward the rear in a steady sway. The five men remained facing forward, a product of the SPIE rig’s designed stability, their stubby MP5SD4 submachine guns trained on the low gray structure that was coming at them fast. Very fast.

“On target,” Duc said, alerting the men twenty feet below to prepare for landing.

Major Sean Graber heard the warning in his earpiece, but there was no need to key the mic on his right chest and respond. He, like the four others arrayed to his sides on the rig, bent his knees slightly and kept his legs close together without letting them touch. Their boots caught the ground as Duc flared the Pave Hawk, the bunker practically in their face. They all released and went for the two entrances, one each on the north and south sides. Sean, Lewis, and Goldfarb took the south; Antonelli and Quimpo the north.

Graber heard the SPIE rig hit the ground a few yards away as the Pave Hawk cleared to the south, away from where the power masts and the lines strung between them would be. His moves, like all the troopers’, were quick and crisp. They went to each side of the door in crouches. One trooper reached for the top of the hinge side and stuck one end of a gray strip there. The other end hung straight down against the door as a plumb line would, a small wire trailing to the hand of the trooper who had placed it there.

Step one, Insertion, had just been completed.

“Go!” Sean said into the mic.

The triangular shaped det cord exploded as the troopers closed their eyes to avoid the bright flash, though that was more a concern in darkness. A hollow core of aluminum inside the explosive strip, shaped like a V pointing toward the door, focused the force of the blast against the old steel door. It ruptured along a straight line running from top to bottom and tilted inward, swinging toward the latch side, before falling to the concrete floor with a
clang
. On the north side, the same process was repeated within a second of that on the south.

Step two, Entry, was done.

The proper entry of a room or building where hostiles might be is choreographed long before any attempt is ever considered. When done simultaneously from several points—the preferred method in order that those being assaulted should be surprised from multiple directions—the planning takes on an even higher importance. Shooting a friendly is a distinct possibility in these situations, and this is why each trooper is given an area of responsibility to watch. His slice of the pie. His own personal killing zone.

Lewis was first through the south door, Graber behind him and Goldfarb bringing up the rear. The trio turned to their left, covering the west end of the open, single-room bunker. Lewis claimed the southwest corner and everything between it and him as his. Goldfarb did the same for the northwest corner. Sean took the middle and was the de facto backup should any surprises present themselves. To his back Antonelli and Quimpo had divided the east side of the room into just two sections.

Step three, Assault, was finished.

“All right, outside,” Sean ordered. The run-through, their second, had gone better, and faster, than the first. There would only be time for one more. The biggest hindrance was that the practice runs had all been “dry”— no firing. The makeshift facilities at the Cape were just unsuitable for that. Too much of a chance for ricochet existed, and any chance of that right now was unacceptable. The only other negative was the light conditions. Daylight practice, when the real thing would be going down at night, did not translate fully into complete situational awareness. They were unable to use the NVGs— attached uselessly to their titanium helmets so as to give the “feel” of the real thing—or the LAMs attached beneath the suppressors on the business end of their MP5SD4s.

Ideal, it wasn’t, Major Sean Graber knew, but then he and his men weren’t paid to work under the best conditions—they earned their money by making any situation the most favorable for them and the converse for any bad guys. That, he was confident they could do.

Sean waited for Buxton to trot over from the “cooling tower” with his team. “How’s your timing, Bux?”

“Fifty seconds from touchdown,” the captain reported.

“Good.” Sean checked the timer on his watch. “We were in and done in twenty seconds from touchdown. That means under two minutes for the show.” The “show” was the most interesting part of any mission, namely the time when getting killed went from possibility to probability. “I want to shave five more seconds off our transition on the last run-through.”

“Cho flew that one perfectly,” Antonelli commented as the Pave Hawk circled in and landed a hundred feet away. From its cabin Joe Anderson climbed out and approached while the crewmen retrieved the jettisoned SPIE rigs for the final practice.

“Fifteen minutes, troops,” Sean said, giving his men a short break before they again took to the sky. “Bux, you’re with me.”

Graber and Buxton walked to meet Joe halfway to the helicopter. “Nice ride, Mr. Anderson?”

“Your flyboy should be running the rides at Disney World, Major,” Joe observed. He didn’t know that would be taken as a compliment. “And that is where you want me because it’s
safer
?”

“You got it,” Sean affirmed. “I don’t want you on the ground until we have the area secured.”

“Yeah, the nine of you, your whirlybird, and that fire-breathing Herky bird.” Joe’s eyes rolled. “Good luck.”

Buxton looked to his commander. “He may have a point, Maj. Once we take out who we have to take out, things could still get interesting. There were a lot of troops in the area according to that last bunch of overheads we saw.”

“Yeah.” Sean’s mouth contorted in reluctant agreement. No matter how fast Delta was, there was liable to be a large, unfriendly force nearby, if not on top of them. The Israelis had to deal with the same problem at Entebbe, with Ugandan soldiers running around in the dark. They had done the smart thing and eliminated the bulk of them before they had a chance to officially become “the enemy.” Sean and his men would have no such firepower behind them. The AC-130 Spectre gunship, a modified C-130 with 25 and 40mm cannons, a 105mm howitzer, and the advanced targeting systems to accurately fire them at night and in bad weather, was worth a lot of men on the ground, but there was no substitute for those, Sean knew, despite all the ballyhoo about the supremacy of airpower. Delta would need some help, but from where?

“Why don’t you just rustle up some airborne guys to come in after you?” Joe asked.

“Because doing that makes it all the more likely that Fidel will know something is up before we get a chance to do our job,” Buxton explained. “Moving anything bigger than what we’re already moving could blow the whole operation.”

Joe looked at the distance from the Pave Hawk to the circle of drums that represented where
his
target would be. “I’m gonna have to go across four hundred yards of open ground to do
my
job, and all there’d have to be is one lucky Cuban out there to take me out? To take any of you out?”