Spy (9 page)

T
hey pulled up as near the entrance as they could. There were a large number of motorcycles parked in under the concrete overhang, maybe thirty or forty of them, all painted in bright metallic colors. What they had in common was a large white death’s head painted on the fuel tanks. Below the skull, the symbol PS 13 was painted.
Para Salvados.
PS 13 rode well. They were expensive bikes, Franklin saw, Harleys and Ducatis and big Indians.

They stuck the Mossburg under the seat. Tejada had said no guns, but Franklin wasn’t walking in there completely unarmed. Homer had a gun. Franklin told Homer to take his hand off his hip as they walked toward the darkened archway, marking the entrance to the crumbling building. He didn’t want them getting shot by some trigger-happy crackhead on the way inside. The old building had a damp smell of rotting concrete and urine and time passing by.

They walked out into the center of the ring.

They were standing back-to-back in the middle of a circle of hard-packed sand about fifty-five yards across. All around them the concrete seats rose up into the darkness under the overhanging rooftop. The bad smell was even stronger out here, different. Franklin wondered if it might be a couple of centuries of blood soaked into the sand beneath his boots. Probably a sprinkling of matador blood mixed in with all the bull blood. Bull blood and bullshit, he amended his thought.

The noble
corrida.
He’d gone as a little kid down to Mexico City. There was a festival of some kind and they went to the Plaza del Toros Monumental. That was the biggest ring in the world at that time. His daddy had wanted him to see El Cordobés and the great Mexican matador, Carlos Arruza.

He’d seen them.

The bulls never had a chance, he thought then and now, gazing up at shadowy figures with guns moving around up on the top rows. Lots of them up there, maybe fifty or so. You had to assume they all had automatic weapons. He felt Homer’s trembling when they brushed up against each other. Just take it easy, he told him. We’re just here to talk to the man. That’s all. We’ll talk to him. Then we’ll go home. Steady.

“Welcome to the
corrida, Señores,
” a voice said from a tinny loudspeaker mounted high above the ring. It was Tiger. Franklin had heard his voice talking on a tape once at Laredo PD. The Feds had a tap on his home wire at that time and they’d had his cell for a while. He’d stopped using it now that he’d become rich and famous and could afford a sat phone.

“Howdy,” Franklin said, not bothering to raise his voice. They could all hear him just fine. A minute later, Tiger had some of his guys file inside the ring and fan out in a circle, maybe thirty of them, all standing behind the wooden barrera not twenty yards away. The barrera was a five-foot fence all around the ring to keep the bulls from goring the spectators. The sweet stench of marijuana wafted up from behind the thing. Some small talk and laughing. Friday night gangbangers having a good old time.

“You didn’t get my message about the guns?” the amplified voice said.

“I’m not having a conversation with a loudspeaker. You come on down here and talk man to man. We’ll put the guns down.”

There was a silence while Tiger thought that one over and discussed it with his compadres in the broadcast booth up at the top of the stadium. A blue-white spotlight suddenly came on, shining right down in their eyes. It was blinding and he hadn’t counted on that.

There was a loud bark and then the sputtering staccato sound of one of the big choppers outside exploding into life. This was followed shortly by the fairly awesome sound of about thirty more bikes being cranked and revved under the concrete overhang of the stadium.

“They leaving?” Homer asked.

“I don’t think so. I think they’re coming in.”

The wavering beam of a bike headlamp was visible in the tunnel leading to the ring. The first motorcycle to enter the ring came in slowly and took a left just inside the barrera. The rider made a slow circuit of the ring. The next rider took a right, the next a left and so on, left then right, until there were thirty or more inside, executing a slow parade at the perimeter of the ring.

Behind him, Homer said, just loud enough to be heard over the deep rumble of the bikes, “Looks like Hell’s Angels wannabes to me.”

Franklin spoke to Homer in a low voice over his shoulder. “Listen. Take your weapon out of your holster real slow and lay it on the ground.”

“You sure about this, Sheriff?”

“Yeah. Do it now.”

Homer did it but he plainly wasn’t happy about it. Franklin kicked the gun away with his boot tip.

“You coming down?” Franklin asked, squinting in the bright lights above. “Turn those dang things off if you want to talk to me.”

A few seconds later the lights went out, snapping and popping.

Tiger Tejada came out from behind the barrera and started walking. He waited for a break between bikes, then strode across the ring toward them with a whole lot of attitude. Heck, he was just a kid. Franklin was startled to see he was wearing a shiny jacket that seemed to be made out of blue sequins. His long black hair was pulled back from his face and tied into a ponytail. His narrow face was set in a frown, his eyes black under a high forehead with the entwined letters PS tattooed there. He was wearing black jeans and shiny snakeskin kicks on his feet, looked like some kind of gangbanger rockstar.

Tiger was a high-ranking Mexican warlord in a gang known as the
Para Salvados,
or PS. The gang originally formed during the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s, a war that killed a hundred thousand and left millions impoverished and homeless. Many thousands made their way to the United States and settled in Hispanic neighborhoods in cities like Los Angeles. Victimized by black gangs like the Crips or the Bloods, they soon formed their own self-protective society.

Over time, the PS, with a history of violence and business savvy, had grown to be one of the world’s preeminent importers of illicit drugs and weapons. By 2005, they had expanded far beyond the California borders. Huge cells of the gang existed from New York to Florida, and throughout the Midwest states of Illinois, Michigan, and into Texas and even Alaska.

“Ola, Tres Ojos,”
Franklin said to Tiger, using the street moniker he’d picked up on the FBI taps. Franklin saw a sudden flash of strong white teeth. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as everybody thought. He clearly enjoyed the gringo sheriff knowing his secret handle.

“Ola, Señor,”
he said with a smile of exaggerated politeness. “Thank you for coming down to visit.”

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Franklin said. “Tell me something, how’d you come by that name?”

The smile became a smirk. “
Tres Ojos.
Three eyes. My third eye is my pecker. Always on the lookout for pussy.”

Franklin forced a smile. “Yeah.”

“It’s good we have this little chance to talk, señor. Tell me. What was it you wanted to discuss? You here to arrest me?”

“I’m here to offer you a way out of this.”

“You’re offering
me
a way out, señor?”

“Correct.”

Tiger turned and looked back at his boys lingering behind the barrera. They all had their gun barrels resting on the top of the fence now, pointed toward the center of the bullring. A couple of them racked the slides on their weapons.

Tiger signaled the motorcycles to stop. When they had done so, he spread his arms in a wide arc and pivoted on his bootheels.

“
Muchachos!
The man says he’s willing to offer us a way out of here!”

After the irony of that had a chance to jell there was a chorus of raucous laughter. Somebody behind the barrera fired his 9mm automatic into the air and that really brought the house down. Tejada turned back to Franklin with a glittery mescal look in his eyes.

“Apparently, they do not accept your offer, Sheriff.”

“Listen. You want to be a grown-up and have a serious talk, tell me now. If not, my deputy and I will leave. Your call, son.”

“I admit to curiosity. What is it you could possibly want from me?”

“I want what I can get.”

“What you can get.”

“Yes. I can’t get the boys back, so I’ll take the girls.”

“
Las putas?
What’s the difference? Really. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You wasting my time.”

“Tiger, listen to me. You see that big black thing up there, looks like the sky? It ain’t. It’s a big Yankee hammer about to come down on your head. I’m offering you a chance to get out from under it.”

“What is this fucking hammer?”

“Swift justice. It’s coming your way shortly.”

“You threatening me?”

“Yes.”

“What is it you want? Spit it out. I have other appointments.”

“I want you to work for me.”

“You are truly crazy, you know that, man?”

“Maybe I am.”

“Tell me. What you want, man?”

“Let’s take a walk.”

“
Si.
Whatever.”

“It’s called flipping,” Dixon said when they were out of earshot. “We start at the bottom which is you. We flip folks in your organization, find out who the guy above them is and go after him. We keep flipping until we reach the top of Para Salvados. The head honcho who’s getting you into so much trouble.”

“You lost me way back with flipping, man.”

“Whoever it is. At the top. We take him out. And you take early retirement where nobody can touch you. Guaranteed. You understand?”

“I understand. You think I’m crazy as you.”

“I did. I don’t anymore. I think you’re smart enough to follow your survival instincts.”

“Yeah?

“Tiger. You’re in over your head and you know it. Take my offer.”

“And if I don’t? If I just add your Yanqui blood to this sacred ground of el toro?”

“You do that and men far less polite will come down here in sufficient numbers and with sufficient firepower to put you and everybody in this town underground. I promise you that will happen.”

“You serious, man?”

“Right now, I’m the only thing stopping it.”

The kid looked away and Franklin could see him coming to a decision. “It wasn’t me. That unfortunate thing with your posse. I heard about that, but it wasn’t me.”

“We’ll see, I guess.”

“I need to think about this.”

“Think fast. As a show of good faith, I want you to release the five women that were stolen from my town over the last six months. Today is Saturday. I’m giving you forty-eight hours.”

“You are crazy, man, fucking loco gonzo. What makes you think I have them?”

“If you don’t, you know how to find them. If all five are not back with their families by sundown Monday, I’ll take that as a decision on your part and act accordingly.”

“Shit. I don’t know, man.”

“Look at me, Tiger. See who I truly am.”

“I see pretty good who you are.”

“You’ve got until sundown Monday.”

“I make no promises.”

“Pleasure doing business with you, son,” Dixon said, walking away from the Mexican. “All right, Homer, get your gun. Time to saddle up.”

“Adios, Tres Ojos,”
Homer said, smiling at the narco.

“You know, perhaps some day me and my compadres will return the visit? How about that? We come see you sometime? You would like that?”

Homer and Dixon kept walking.

As they were climbing in the pickup, Homer said, “Were you kidding about all that ‘hammer of justice’ stuff?”

“Maybe.”

“America ain’t got a spare hammer right now, Sheriff, that’s the whole damn problem.”

“I know. I made it up when we were walking out there.”

T
he hungry mako was still in the picture. Loitering in the foreground, swimming lazy loops about twenty feet above the fuselage. Acting like he didn’t give a good goddamn, but Stoke would swear the fish kept checking him out, fish with that snaggle-toothed grin of his.

Stoke, back in his Navy SEAL days in the Keys, had always thought this particular make and model of shark was the meanest looking animal on earth. Fish had a very expensive set of curved knives set into his jaw. His pointy snout and dark eyes gave him a look of intense brainpower, even though he was just a damn eating machine. Definitely came with an aggressive attitude; his eyes looking into the back of your eyes, saying, “Hey! I’m the kind of fish who will personally bite your ass in half.”

Mako was a fast fish, too. Any Keys fisherman will tell you a mako can reach speeds of almost twenty-five miles an hour and can jump about twenty feet in the air. They’ve been known to attack small fishing boats, leaping up suddenly and landing on the deck, biting everything in sight. Like a collision at sea, a thing like that can ruin your day.

Stoke kept one eye on the mako, especially because he was pretty busy trying to stop his arm from bleeding. He’d ripped it on the jagged edge of some protruding cockpit glass. Reaching inside again, trying once more to move the dead pilot around, he’d been forced to pull his hand out in a hurry. What happened was, a big ass barracuda swam right up inside the cockpit, knocked the pilot’s head to one side and gave Stoke the evil eye.

Shit! Tore his damn wet suit, yanking his arm out and slicing his forearm deep and now his cut up hand was bleeding pretty good, too. Nothing like getting a good blood flow going around man-eating sharks to add a sense of heightened drama to any situation.

One swift scissors kick got him to the entrance to the plane. He poked his head inside. Visibility was way down inside the submerged airplane, but he could clearly see his man Luis poking around in the plane to his left. Sharkey saw Stoke and motioned him forward, pointing down at something below his fins. Stoke checked his right flank first, see if there were any more jaws-of-death types lurking around in the rear of the fuselage.

It was clear so he swam right through and hung a left toward the cockpit.

Sharkey immediately saw all the blood trailing from Stoke’s hand and started shaking his head, pointing upward, meaning he thought the wound was bad enough they should surface and get it taken care of. Stoke shook his head “no” and turned on his Beacon halogen dive light to see what all the excitement was about.

Sharkey had already ripped up a small section of the plane’s aluminum flooring. Something was down there and Stoke had the feeling it wasn’t any damn cocaine. He swam right down to the small opening and peered through it. Too dark to see anything much but they were definitely carrying cargo down there. He poked his hand down there and felt around. A flat surface under some kind of rough covering.

He stuck his light through the hole and directed the bright white beam fore and aft. There was way too much silt and blood in suspension to see anything much and he had to wait a bit for it to settle.

He looked at Sharkey, mouthing the words “good job.” Luis nodded his head, but grabbed him by the elbow and pointed up at the surface again.

Stoke held up two bloody fingers. “Two minutes.”

He pulled out the dive knife strapped to his thigh and used it to lever up a larger section of flooring. Now he could maybe get his light down inside there and see what the hell he had here. A foot below the floor frame, what looked like two large rectangular containers were lying side-by-side and covered with heavy burlap.

Stoke felt his heart pump.

Sharkey helped him get the rest of the floor section up. It took about five minutes. Stoke was starting to feel the loss of blood, but this was damn well worth a little dizziness. There were two long cases, each about six feet across and about twenty feet in length. He tried, but he couldn’t see how far they stretched back under the remaining floor.

He sliced open the burlap, making a slit about four feet long and then just ripping the material away.

Inside was a large metal container. There was stenciled information on top, printed in red. The writing was Russian, not one of his languages. Still, a word popped out at him and sent a new sensation flooding through his body, a mixture of fear and satisfaction. He’d seen this word buried in the thick briefing documents Harry Brock had given him to study when they’d met for his initial briefing in Washington.

On the Jet Blue back home, he’d opened the brief book and dug in. Read a lot of governmental boilerplate about what he could and could not do as an independent contractor. Perused a CIA overview of all of Latin American countries. And, finally, a long list of all the bad shit he should be on the lookout for when he got to the Caribbean. One whole section had been about black market foreign cruise missiles. Brock had told him to read that section very carefully. He didn’t need to tell Stoke why. It was one of the things the U.S. was most concerned about in the region.

Hell, you had half the nation’s strategic oil supply going up the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. Somebody, Fidel or Hugo, say, started taking out tankers or offshore rigs, you were looking at war on your back porch.

The Russian word he had recognized was
Yakhont.
Stoke sucked a lot of oxygen down and held it there, trying to calm himself down.

Yakhont had a familiar ring to it.

Sharkey and his old man had stumbled on the jackpot.

Yakhont, called
Firefox
by U.S. military, was the new Russian anti-ship missile. It scared the hell out of everybody in Washington. Death with wings. Unstoppable ship-killer. And, precisely what the U.S. government did not want was for even one of these damn things to find its way into the hands of somebody who didn’t have America’s best interests at heart. That’s why it was at the top of the list Brock had given him.

Firefox
combined all the qualities of future anti-ship missiles. It was designed to fly at supersonic speeds, be invisible to radar, deaf to jamming, and was guided autonomously on a “shot-forgot” principle. Fire a
Firefox
and
fugheddaboudit,
game over. It had a range of up to 300 km at an altitude of about 15 meters. The missile would drop down to about fifteen feet seconds before it hit you.

Flying at roughly 750 meters a second, and performing complex tactical maneuvering during flight, the
Firefox
would reach its target no matter what. Just one of these damn things could sink a supertanker or an aircraft carrier. And, no navy in the world had an effective means of defending against the Russkis’ new missile. Not one.

The missile was designed to be carried by Russian Su-27 and Su-35 fighter aircraft. This was the new Sukhoi Flanker, a front-line fighter that was one of the mainstays of Russian airpower. Sophisticated and extremely expensive. Now, who the hell had planes like that down here in the tropics? Castro certainly couldn’t afford any damn Su-27s. Cubans could barely afford breakfast in that island utopia.

But his bosom buddy, Latin America’s new Daddy Warbucks, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, sure could.

Two minutes had been used up. Stoke swam up to Sharkey who was tapping on his watch and staring at Stoke like he was crazy which was no newsflash. Stoke knew he’d lost a hell of a lot of blood but he wanted to get this done in one dive and get on the horn to Washington as quickly as possible.

Stoke opened his dive bag and pulled out a small digital camera designed to work underwater. He gave it to Luis and then pointed at the two cruise missiles. Sharkey understood and swam down to photograph the things.

The big barracuda, thank you very much, had left the premises when Stoke got up to the cockpit. He’d chewed up
el Capitán
a little more but Stoke wasn’t interested in the man anymore, only his uniform.

It was light blue. Military, but if Stoke expected to find insignia identifying the pilot’s outfit, he was mistaken. Anything that could have identified rank or national origin had been removed from the corpse’s uniform. And it wasn’t fishies who’d done it. Someone had used a knife to cut the patches away. Stoke knew that because he saw the knife still lying in the pilot’s lap.

Very interesting. The deceased had been stripped of ID. Somebody had survived the crash. Yeah. Somebody who’d kept his wits about him before he disembarked.

Stoke checked his remaining air. Time to go. He looked at the pilot one last time before he swam out of the cockpit.

Hasta luego, amigo,
he said silently.

Fly below the radar.

Die below the radar.