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“He’s trying to see if Langley has anything on this beach. He said I should tell you I have everything he knows, and he thought his time would be better spent seeing what else he could come up with.”
“The admiral called the DIA and they had nothing on suitable landing areas in Costa Rica,” Naylor said.
“Do we tell McNab or not?”
Naylor put his hands together so quickly that there was a loud pop.
“General McNab is not at the moment one of my favorite people,” Naylor said. “And when I say, ‘Yeah, we have to tell him,’ I have that in mind. The decision to use, or not use, this beach has to be his. If it won’t take the C-17, there will be a lot of dead people, and the 727 doesn’t get neutralized.”
Naylor stood up and walked across his office toward the Phone Booth.
[EIGHT]
Tomas Guardia International Airport Liberia, Costa Rica 1310 10 June 2005
“I’ll be a sonofabitch, there it is!” Castillo said as the Learjet taxied down a taxiway at another small but grandly named airfield.
There was a Boeing 727 aircraft, connected to both a tug and a generator, sitting on the tarmac in front of a concrete-block building with a sign on it reading, in Spanish: CENTRAL AMERICAN AERIAL FREIGHT FORWARDING.
There were red, white, and blue stripes on the vertical stabilizer and along the fuselage that looked to be freshly painted.
“There is a 727 with the right paint scheme and registration numbers. We won’t know if it’s ours until we have a look inside,” Colonel Torine said.
“You’re right,” Castillo agreed. “But I think we should tell MacDill this one’s here.”
“You’re calling the shots,” Colonel Torine said.
“Tell the tower you want to box the compass, Fernando,” Castillo ordered.
“I’d rather stay.”
“We’ve been all over that,” Castillo said.
There had been no in-flight advisories on their way from Cozumel to Juan Santamaria International Airport in San José advising them where the 727 could be found in Costa Rica, and when Castillo had called the two numbers Pevsner had given him both of the people answering said that he must have the wrong number, they knew of no Karl Gossinger.
“What are you going to do, Charley?” Colonel Torine had asked.
“If it’s not here, it has to be at the other airport, Tomas Guardia.”
“Or it’s not here at all. You’re still betting on Pevsner? He obviously doesn’t know where it is or we’d have gotten the in-flight advisory or one of those numbers you called would have paid off.”
“Or something happened. Maybe his people here couldn’t find it here and he couldn’t get anybody to the other airport to see if it was there. Or he did and there’s a communications problem. But he was pretty sure the 727 is in Costa Rica and I think we have to go on that. And if it’s not here, then it has to be at Tomas Guardia.”
“How are you going to handle it?” Colonel Torine asked.
“We go to Tomas Guardia. Fernando gets permission to box his compass, we go to the threshold of a runway, and Sherman and I get out with the radio, go hide in the grass, and hope nobody sees us. You take the Lear to the nearest airport in Nicaragua, where you can call MacDill and tell them where we are in case Sherman can’t get the
radio up. And then we see what happens. We may get lucky—and, God knows, I’m not counting on that—and actually find the sonofabitch. If it’s there and it looks as if it’s going to take off, Sherman and I can probably disable it.”
“Why don’t we just park the Lear and all of us get out?” Fernando said. “That would give us four people on the ground.”
“Because somehow we have to get word to MacDill, and the only way to do that—we can’t count on Sherman’s radio —is for you to go to Nicaragua.”
“Now that they’re this close, they probably have some pretty good perimeter defense around the airplane,” Fernando argued. “And Special Forces hotshots or not, you and Sherman adds up to two people.”
“What I think we should do is split the difference,” Colonel Torine said. “I get out of the airplane with you.” He looked at Fernando and smiled. “That would make it two Green Beanie hotshots and one Air Commando hotshot. The bad guys won’t have a chance.”
“I don’t like this, Gringo.”
