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Lowe took a full thirty seconds to consider his response.
“There’s a maybe ten-minute period, during which we will be recovering the UH-60s, that worries me. We’ll be headed, slowly, into the wind. If Venezuelan Air Force or Navy aircraft find us with our hand still in the cookie jar, so to speak . . . But there’s nothing we can do about that. And insofar as being attacked after we recover the choppers, that would be an unprovoked attack on a U.S. Navy vessel in international waters, which is an act of war. I don’t think they would do that. And of course we’re able to defend ourselves pretty well.”
“Thank you, sir. Colonel Kingsolving?”
“Charley, the only question in my mind concerns the UH-60 you stole from the Mexican cops. What are you going to do about that? Torch it?”
“Well, sir, first, I didn’t steal it. I bought it.”
“You bought it? You going to tell me about that?”
Castillo told him.
“Unbelievable!” Kingsolving said. “But back to my question: What are you going to do with it, torch it?”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do with it,” Castillo said. “I’d like to fly it back out to the Bataan. And then the first time the Bataan goes to its homeport . . . Where is that, Captain Lowe?”
“Norfolk. And as soon as we finish this operation—this is day fifty-six of a sixty-day deployment—we’ll be headed there ‘at fastest speed consistent with available fuel.’”
“Then the first thing Captain Lowe does when he docks the Bataan at Norfolk will be to lower the Mexican UH-60 onto the wharf while the Mexican ambassador and the State Department idiots who sold it for a tenth of its value to the Mexicans watch. They then—did I mention that our own Roscoe J. Danton will be there, as will the ever-vigilant cameras of Wolf News?—they will attempt to explain how that particular UH-60, after having died a hero’s death in Mexico’s unrelenting war against the drug cartels, was resurrected.”
“That’d work, Charley,” Danton said. “And I’m so personally pissed as a taxpayer about that bullshit that I will even arrange for C. Harry Whelan, that sonofabitch, to be there with me.”
“Then why not do it?” Kingsolving asked.
“One small problem, sir. Who would fly it out to the Bataan? Jake and I’ll be flying the Tu-934A back to the land of the free and home of the brave with only a fuel stop at Drug Cartel International.”
“I’ll fly it,” Kingsolving said.
“Sir, I have painful memories of standing tall before you while you lectured at length on the inadvisability of flying UH-60 aircraft without a co-pilot. I seem to remember you telling me with some emphasis that anyone who did so was an idiot.”
“Charley, if I went in with you on the Mexican UH-60, and then flew it back out here, that means we would have to land only one of the 160th choppers in there to take your Spetsnaz back to the Bataan. That would reduce the danger that one of my guys would dump one of ours at La Orchila, causing God only knows what consequential collateral political damage.”
“You don’t see any risk like when your guys take out the commo building?”
“As I understand your plan, Colonel, the idea is for my guys to hit the commo building in the dark, so they will never learn what happened to them, or who did it.”
Castillo was silent for a moment.
Next came dissension in the ranks of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment pilots.
Four of the Night Stalkers, just about simultaneously, spoke without permission. They all said about the same thing: “Colonel, let me fly that fucking Mexican chopper.”
To which Colonel Kingsolving replied, “Zip your lips, or nobody gets to go.”
There was another period of silence.
“Vis-à-vis my counseling you on the inadvisability of flying UH-60 aircraft without a co-pilot, Colonel,” Kingsolving said, “I meant every word of it. But there is an old military axiom that I’m really surprised you did not learn at our beloved alma mater. To wit: When you are the senior officer, you are, in certain circumstances, permitted to say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’
“I’m going to fly that Mexican UH-60 back and forth to the island of La Orchila, Charley. Period.”
“There goes your star, you realize.”
“That thought did run through my mind, frankly. But what the hell. If they made me a general, they’d say I was too valuable to fly myself anywhere, with or without a co-pilot. And I don’t want to fly a desk in the Pentagon.”
Then he looked at Captain Lowe.
“I think we’re through here, Captain. Is the Navy planning on feeding us lunch?”
