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One of the remaining three men below produced a Kalashnikov AK-47, and the Little Bird pilot veered away. From his 100 feet up, he could see the black dots of the inflatables closing the gap, creating a closing speed of a hundred knots.
The undamaged go-fast saw them, too. The helmsman could no longer bother with the enigma of where they had come from. They were there, and he was trying to save his cargo and his freedom. He decided to streak right through them and use his superior speed to get away.
He nearly succeeded. The damaged go-fast closed down its other two engines and surrendered. The lead boat continued at sixty knots. The SEAL formation split and spread, swerved into shuddering turns and gave chase. Without the helicopter, the smuggler might have been able to race to freedom.
The Little Bird skimmed the flat sea ahead of the go-fast, turned at ninety degrees and spewed out a hundred yards of invisible blue nylon cord. A small cotton drogue at the end dragged the flex out into the air, and it fell to the ocean where it floated. The go-fast swerved and almost made it. The last twenty yards of the floating cord slid under the hull and wrapped itself around all four propellers. The four Yamahas coughed, choked and stopped.
After that, resistance was useless. Facing a firing squad of MP5 submachine guns, they allowed themselves to be transferred to the big RHIB, were shackled and hooded. That was the last daylight they saw until they stepped onto Eagle Island, Chagos Archipelago, as guests of Her Majesty.
An hour later, the Chesapeake was alongside. She took the seven prisoners. The brave dead man was given a blessing and a length of chain to help him sink. Also transferred were two tons of two-stroke fuel (which could be used), various weapons and cell phones (for analysis of previous calls made) and two tons of baled Colombian puro.
Then the two go-fasts were riddled with holes, and the heavy Yamahas took them down. It was a pity to lose six good and powerful engines, but the instructions of the Cobra, invisible and unknown to the SEALs, were precise: nothing traceable to be left. Only the men and the cocaine are to be taken, and then only for temporary storage. Everything else disappears forever.
The Little Bird settled on the forward hatch, closed down and was lowered into her out-of-sight home. The three inflatables went up, over the side and into their own hold to be washed down and serviced. The men went below to shower and change. The Chesapeake turned away. The sea was empty again.
Far ahead, the freight ship Stella Maris IV waited and waited. Finally, she had to resume her voyage to Euro port Rotterdam, but without any extra cargo. Her first officer could only send a bewildered text message to his “girlfriend” in Cartagena. Something about not being able to make their date because his automobile had not been delivered.
Even that was intercepted by the National Security Agency at their enormous Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland, where it was decrypted and passed to the Cobra. He gave a thin smile of gratitude. The message had betrayed the go-fasts’ destination, the Stella Maris IV. She was on the list. Next time.
IT WAS a week after the Cobra declared open season that Major Mendoza received his first call to fly. Global Hawk Sam spotted a small twin-engined transport lifting off from the Boa Vista Ranch, clearing the coast over Fortaleza and heading out across the wide Atlantic on a heading of 045° which would take her to any landfall between Liberia and the Gambia.
Computer imaging identified her as a Transall, a onetime Franco-German collaboration that had been bought by South Africa and, at the end of her active service as a military transport, sold secondhand to the civilian market in South America.
She was not large, but a reliable workhouse. She also had a range that would in no way take her across the Atlantic, even at the shortest point. So she had been “doctored” with extra internal fuel tanks. For three hours, she plodded northeast through the near darkness of a tropical night, flying at 8,000 feet above a flat plain of cloud.
Major Mendoza pointed the nose of the Buccaneer straight down the runway and completed final checks. In his ears he did not hear the control tower speaking in Portuguese, for it was long closed down. He heard the warm tones of an American woman. The two American communications personnel on Fogo with him had taken her message an hour earlier and alerted the Brazilian to get ready to fly. Now she was patched through to his earphones. He did not know she was a U.S. Air Force captain sitting behind a screen in Creech, Nevada. He did not know she was watching a blip that represented a Transall freighter, and that soon he, too, would be a blip on that screen, and that she would bring the two blips together.
He glanced out at the ground crew that stood in the darkness of the Fogo airfield and saw the “Go” signal flashed at him. This was his “control tower,” but it worked. He raised his right thumb in assent.
The two Speys increased their howl, and the Bucc shuddered against the brakes, wanting to be free. Mendoza flicked the RATO switch and freed the brakes. The Bucc flung herself forward, he emerged from the shadow of the volcanic mountain and saw the sea gleaming in the moonlight.
The rocket thrust took him in the small of the back. Speed shot up and through takeoff velocity, the wheel rumble ceased and she was up.
“Climb to fifteen thousand feet on heading one-nine-zero,” said the warm molasses voi
ce. He checked the compass, steadied the craft on 190° and climbed to height as instructed.
In an hour, he was three hundred miles south of the Cape Verdes, turning in a slow rate 1 circle, waiting. He saw the target at one o’clock low. Above the plateau of cloud, the gibbous moon had appeared and clothed the scene in a pale white light. Then he saw a flitting shadow below him and to his right. It was heading northeast; he was still halfway around a sweeping turn. He completed the turn and came up behind the prey.
“Your target is five miles ahead of you, six thousand feet below.”
“Roger, I have it,” he said. “Contact.”
“Contact acknowledged. Clear engage.”
He dropped until the outline of the Transall in the moonlight was quite clear. He had been given an album of likely planes used by cocaine fliers, and there was no doubt this was a Transall. There could simply be no innocent plane like that in the sky.
He flicked off the safety catch of his Aden cannon, placed his thumb over the Fire button and gazed ahead through the gunsight modified at Scampton. He knew his two gun packs were centered to concentrate their united firepower at four hundred meters.
For a moment, he hesitated. There were men in that machine. Then he thought of another man, a boy on a marble slab in the São Paolo mortuary. His kid brother. He fired.
There was a mixture of fragmentation, incendiary and tracer in his ammunition packs. The bright tracer would show him his line of fire. The other two would destroy what they hit.
He watched the two lines of red fire race away from him and unite at four hundred meters. Both impacted into the hull of the Transall just to the left of the rear loading doors. For half a second, the freighter seemed to shudder in midair. Then it imploded.
He did not even see it break up, disintegrate and fall. Its crew had evidently only just begun to draw on the inboard reserves, so those tanks inside the hull were brimful. They took the white-hot incendiary rounds, and the whole airplane turned molten. A shower of blazing fragments fell through the cloud layer beneath, and that was it. Gone. One plane, four men, two tons of cocaine.
Major Mendoza had never killed anyone before. He stared for several seconds at the hole in the sky where the Transall had been. He had wondered for days what he would feel. Now he knew. He just felt empty. Neither exultant nor remorseful. He had told himself many times; just think of Manolo on his marble slab, sixteen years old, never to have a life to lead. When he spoke, his voice was quite steady.
