Silent Running
Brognola was hustled in, uncuffed and shoved into an empty cell. Being in jail in Cancun wasn’t like being locked up in the Mexican border towns traditionally seen in many movies. The resort town’s facility had been built to house inebriated young American tourists and was more of a cheap but clean motel than a jail. Since the resort was one of the Caribbean’s prime college break hangouts, they were aware that they had to treat their customers with kid gloves. If the cops traumatized a drunken frat boy, he and his brothers might not come back for spring break next year. So, for a jail, the accommodations in Cancun were first-class.
That was the good news.
The other side of that coin was that the jail had been built to modern security specifications. There would be no digging the flaking mortar from around a rusted iron bar and escaping from this place. The windows looked to be Lexan, the bars were stainless steel, the electronic lock on the door had been made in Dallas and the video camera watching him had originated in Pasadena.
At least, though, he had a comfortable place to lie down. That he was being housed alone in a four-man cell wasn’t a good sign, but he had to play it as it lay. The best thing a man in his position could do was to eat and sleep every chance he could get because he didn’t know when he’d get a chance to do either one again.
Brognola took off his coat, automatically checked his empty pocket one last time, placed it on one of the bunks, shook his thin blanket and stretched out for a nap.
He was asleep in minutes.
BROGNOLA WAS NOT surprised to be awakened only a few hours later. He hadn’t been deceived by the shortness of his initial interview with Diego Garcia. The classic “false hope” gambit only worked with morons and drunks, and he was neither.
A short ride back to the Hotel Maya confirmed his suspicion that he was on for another round with the “Boss.” The man was playing his hand by the book, chapter and verse. But since the big Fed had read the same book, he’d see if he couldn’t stall the process. He was in no bloody great hurry, as McCarter would say, to get his ass stomped into the ground. In fact, to make this come out right, he needed to delay that part of the program for as long as he possibly could.
It was apparent that he’d been included in the bag, because Garcia thought that he was “friends” with the President. On paper he was listed as a Special Justice Department Adviser to the President, but that was just a long-standing cover for what he actually did. And it was imperative that he keep his real job from Garcia for as long as he could. As far as the man’s thinking that he was one of the President’s personal friends, he had no idea where that had come from. But since it was on the table, he’d use it to buy himself as much time as he could.
This time, Brognola was escorted into what looked in happier times to have been the hotel management’s office suite. He was being taken to what looked to be the main office when the door opened and two goons walked out with Hector de Lorenzo between them. The Mexican’s face was bloodied, but he only gave Brognola a quick glance. Hector was playing the game, but with Garcia’s apparent intelligence sources, Brognola was certain that the bastard already knew of their long-standing friendship.
The office was large and tastefully decorated. A chunk of ancient Mayan carved stone was mounted on one wall, a minor Riviera painting on the other. Garcia was seated behind a huge, ornately carved, dark mahogany desk littered with enough electronic gear to run a fair-size war. Still working with an information deficit, Brognola knew whatever this operation was, it was no nickel-and-dime, hostage-taking incident.
“Mr. Brognola.” Garcia greeted him and pointed to a chair. “Please have a seat. It is time that I let you know why you are here.”
Brognola sat.
“Since it’s been almost twenty-four hours since you were last in communication with your government, I thought I’d fill you in on what has recently happened in Mexico and, of course, your own country.”
Brognola was interested but remained silent.
“You see,” Garcia continued, “since you went down to dinner last night with the lovely Miss Martinez, the Western Hemisphere has changed for the better. The government of Mexico is now in the hands of its rightful owners—the people. As, by the way, are the nations of Panama, Guatemala and Ecuador. As a result of this, your nation will no longer be able to manipulate the destinies of those who live in what you North Americans like to refer to as Latin America. The Yankee hegemony has ended for all time.”
“And how was this great feat accomplished?” Brognola asked.
“The will of the people is being brought to bear—and very successfully this time.”
“Under the leadership of what Communist party this time?” Brognola made a guess. “China’s?”
“Oh, no,” Garcia quickly replied. “This is completely our own affair. Our socialist brothers in China have assisted us in several ways, true, but this is a spontaneous true expression of the people themselves.”
“When pigs fly!” Brognola laughed. “Man, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that crap about ‘the will of the people.’ All you Communists are the same, but it’s never worked and it never will. The only thing that’s going to happen to the people is that they’re really going to get royally screwed now.”
Garcia didn’t rise to the bait. “Let me show you why it’s going to work this time. As I said, this revolution has come directly from the people themselves, and it’s long overdue. They have been repressed long enough and now they’re finally taking back what’s rightfully theirs.”
He picked up a TV remote from the desk, clicked it and the set mounted on the wall flashed to a San Diego channel. A helicopter-mounted camera was showing a scene of some kind of massive riot with tens of thousands of people involved. It was so large that it filled the entire field of vision of the camera. It took several moments before Brognola recognized that he was looking at what had been the U.S.-Mexican border crossing point at Tijuana.
The barriers that had controlled the endless streams of traffic coming and going were gone. The buildings that housed the Immigration and Customs offices were being literally torn down by bare hands. The vehicles waiting in line to cross the border when the onslaught struck were being looted or overturned and set on fire.
A clearly panicked young TV reporter sounded near tears as he did the voice-over. “We have just gotten word that the governor has called up the National Guard, but local authorities say that—” The transmission abruptly ended.
“Jesus!” Brognola said softly.
Garcia smiled. “Most of your country was stolen from my people and, as you can plainly see, we are taking it back now.”
“We have an army, you know,” Brognola said, “and we won’t let something like this happen without responding.”
“Most of your regular army is overseas fighting the so-called ‘terrorists,’” Garcia stated accurately, “leaving your reserves and National Guards at home to protect you. And, do you really think that those soft, part-time, citizen soldiers are going to fire on unarmed women, old men and children and kill them? You Americans are cruel, but even I don’t think they will do that.”
Brognola was stunned. The United States military could bring almost unimaginable force to bear on any armed enemy. The stronger the enemy, the greater the force. But firing on unarmed civilians, particularly women and children, went against everything America stood for. America extended a helping hand to such people, not a bayonet.
Garcia leaned forward, his eyes glittering. “Take a good look, Brognola. You’re watching the fall of the most corrupt government in human history, and it can’t come a minute too soon for me.”
The Cuban blinked and his hand flew to the side of his head. For a brief moment his eyes went unfocused, but it passed.
“And,” he continued, “California isn’t the only place where America is feeling the righteous rage of the people.”
He clicked the remote again and a scene from what had to be the beachfront of a city in Florida appeared. A flotilla of boats, both large and small, were drawn up close to the shore and their decks were filled to overflowing. The smaller boats were heading in through the surf to beach themselves while people jumped from the larger ones to swim ashore.
A huge crowd had gathered along the beach and were successfully holding the police at bay to allow the boat people to reach land. Tear gas canisters were flying and the riot squads were out in force, but they were too few and were being pushed back. Every time one of the boats ran itself up onto the beach, hundreds more jumped down to join the crowds fighting the police.
As Brognola watched, one flank of the police line broke and the crowd surged forward. When one of the cops slipped and fell, he was trampled into the concrete. As soon as the mob reached the shops flanking the street, they started looting. As the camera panned, he saw smoke rising over a mall as another crowd blocked the fire trucks.
“That is right outside Miami Beach, Florida,” Garcia said. “The boats are full of people from all over the Caribbean who have decided to immigrate to America so they can share the fruits of their ancestor’s slave labor. The world is coming to America to take what is theirs.”
“You’re one sick bastard,” Brognola stated.
The rifle butt to the back of his head sent him reeling into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER FOUR
SS Carib Princess
The requisitioned storeroom behind the cruise ship’s French café had served well as an impromptu playroom, and Richard Spellman and Mary Hamilton didn’t drift off to sleep until the early morning. Part of their sleeplessness, though, resulted from the occasional muffled gunshot heard in the night.
When sunlight streamed through the porthole on the two voluntary stowaways and woke Spellman, he glanced at his watch and saw that it was a little after nine. Getting up carefully so as not to wake Mary, he went to the porthole, but only saw open sea. Obviously the ship had passed through the canal into the Caribbean while they’d been in their self-imposed, but-not-completely-unwelcome exile.
“Richard?” Hamilton said.
“Right here.” He turned back. “We’re at sea, and my guess from the sun angle is that we’re heading south. At least we won’t starve, though. Hiding in a restaurant storeroom is definitely the way to stow away.”
“How’re we going to know when we’re safe?” Hamilton asked.
“Damned if I know,” Spellman admitted. “This sounded like a great idea last night and I’m convinced those were shots we heard, so I think we made the right move. The problem is that locked away like this, we don’t have any idea what’s going on out there. I’ve got a feeling, though, that I’m not going to be presenting my paper today.”
The gunfire in the night had scared Hamilton as nothing else had ever done, but Richard’d had a calming effect on her and it was still working.
She smiled slyly. “I guess we’ll just have to find something to keep ourselves occupied then.”
RICHARD SPELLMAN was no sailor, but later that afternoon he recognized that the ship had reduced her speed and he chanced a peek around the edge of the porthole.
“Where do you think we are?” Hamilton asked.
“It looks like we’re coming up to some resort mooring for cruise ships,” he replied. “If I had to guess, I’d say that we’re somewhere in Mexico. Maybe the Yucatán.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” the woman asked before she could stop herself. She hated playing the helpless woman with him, but she admitted to herself that she was scared. So far, Richard had been very calm, considering the circumstances, and in comforting her, had calmed her fears. Now that they had arrived at some kind of destination, though, the fear came flooding back.
“I don’t have much experience at this kind of thing,” he admitted, “but my guess is that we passengers have been taken hostage. For what, I have no idea. I don’t know anything about Mexican politics.
“But—” he snuck another peek “—like it or not, I think that we’re about to go to school for a cram course.”
She shook her head. “How can you be so damned calm about this? I mean, I don’t mind, but aren’t you scared half to death? I know I am.”
He turned back. “Sure I’m scared,” he said. “Any rational human in this situation would be. But I’m saving it up for the right time to freak out. You know, a time and place where it might be useful.”
She smiled in spite of herself and felt her fear ebb again. If she was going to die on this trip, at least she’d found someone she wouldn’t mind dying with.
“You’re a very funny man,” she said. “And if we can get out of this mess, I think I’m going to want to see more of you. A lot more.”
“That’s a date.” He grinned. “But first we have to figure out what in the hell we should be doing next. What do you think about trying to sneak off this damned thing as soon as it docks?”
She glanced around the storeroom. “There’s got to be more room to run out there than there is in here.”
“Good girl.”
THE CRUISE SHIP was met at the Cancun moorage by Diego Garcia, a small fleet of buses and a couple dozen of his Matador gunmen. Nguyen Cao Nguyen, the first man down the gangplank, was met on the dock by the Cuban.
“Here they are, Comrade,” the Vietnamese said, “packaged and delivered as you requested. Almost seven hundred and fifty of the international community’s top medical men, their women and their children. And, as we expected, most of them are Yankees.”
“Any casualties?” Garcia asked.
“None.” Nguyen shook his head, referring to his own Matador team. The deaths among the ship’s crew simply didn’t count, and the passengers who had tried to resist were too few to mention, either. Since the bodies had been dumped over the side, he hadn’t been able to reconcile the passenger manifest with the head count, though. But again, a few hostages more or less wouldn’t really matter.
“Do you have the people I asked for selected?”
Nguyen nodded. “Of course, Comrade,” he replied. A last-minute change to the master plan was to mix the political and medical hostages. He didn’t understand the reasoning behind the decision, but it didn’t really matter.
“Very good,” Garcia said. “Bring them out now and tell your people to keep the ship ready to sail on a moment’s notice.”
This was another change to the carefully formulated plan he had helped put together, but again he had to go along with it. “Where?”
“Anywhere we might have to go,” the Cuban said. “So have the fuel bunkers topped off immediately.”
Nguyen took out a portable radio and spoke into it. “They’re coming up on deck.”
“As soon as they’re transferred to the hotel,” Garcia said, “I’ll send some of the government hostages over to you. They’ll be easier to guard here.”
“I’m ready for them, Comrade.”
Under the guns of the Matador guards, the selected passengers started to file down the gangplank and onto the waiting buses. The men were grim-faced, the women visibly frightened. These weren’t people who were experienced with anything like this and their imaginations were obviously running away with them. There weren’t that many children, but they had picked up on their parents’ concern and looked dazed.
Garcia secretly smiled as the passengers were led away. Even though these doctors were educated, privileged men and women, like the rest of the Yankees, they were soft and would be no problem for him to hold captive for as long as he wanted.
THE TWO-SEAT, sea-gray camouflaged, Marine TAV-8B Harrier jet sat alone in a remote hangar at the U.S. Navy airbase at Corpus Christi, Texas. A squad of armed Marines secured the hangar from unauthorized visitors while the Navy ground crew gave the jump jet a final check-over. A figure in a flight suit broke away from the plane and walked to the locker room at the end of the hangar.
Marine Captain Fred “Mojo” Jenkins was the poster-perfect picture of a hot-rock Marine attack squadron aviator. Of medium height and in his early thirties, with a cocky, nonchalant bearing, he sported the typical buzz cut. He wore a half smile and looked at the world through steely eyes. His flight suit was covered with Tiger patches. Even so, he wasn’t quite sure what to expect from his passenger on this classified flight. He’d never been involved with moving spooks before and had no idea what he’d gotten himself into. He’d made sure, though, to have his crew chief put an ample supply of burp kits in the rear cockpit.
There was no doubt in his military mind, though, that he had to handle this guy, whoever he was, with kid gloves. The Commandant of the Corps himself had told him in no uncertain terms that the orders regarding this man had come down from the very top. That thought was foremost on his mind as he walked up to the man who, wearing an unmarked flight suit, was sitting alone in the locker room.
“I’m Captain Fred Jenkins, Sir.” The pilot extended his hand. “Call sign Mojo.”
“Glad to meet you, Captain.” Mack Bolan stood and shook hands. “I’m Jeff Cooper.”
Jenkins had seen enough spy thrillers to know there was no chance that was the man’s real name. But this guy looked as though he could call himself the king of Egypt if he wanted and make it work for him. He was a big man, but not overpowering about it the way a SEAL or Recon Marine would have been. He wore his size well and projected a sense of total competence. There was nothing overtly threatening about him, but his blue eyes told you not to even think about fucking with him. All told, he looked as if he was the right guy to have at your side in a bar fight.
The pilot turned to the gunnery sergeant who’d overseen his passenger’s suiting up. “Is Mr. Cooper briefed and ready to fly, Gunny?”
“Yes, Sir,” the sergeant replied. “And I think he’s done this once or twice before.”
“Very good.” Jenkins was curious, but knew better than to even think about asking questions. “If you’re ready, Sir, we should launch. It’ll be dark by the time we’re over the target.”
Bolan hoisted his black bag. “I need this stowed in your cargo pod.”
“My crew chief can do that for you.”
“Let’s go.”
JENKINS’S PASSENGER didn’t display any of the telltale signs of being a Cherry flyer and there was no doubt that he’d flown in military jets before. When the F-14s of the CAP that had been ordered to cover his flight in showed up six feet off the Harrier’s wingtips, Cooper hadn’t even flinched. Even the link-up with the tanker for a quick, couple hundred gallon fill-up hadn’t bothered him, and that was more than the pilot could say.
After the JP-4 top-off, Jenkins dropped down to wave-top level for the high-speed sprint to the coastline of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Harrier jump jet wasn’t supersonic, but it didn’t matter at that altitude. Once he crossed over the beach, the pilot flashed his “feet dry” code to the E-2C Hawkeye AWACS monitoring his mission and went on the terrain-following radar to continue keeping it low but out of the trees and native architecture. With his GPS nav system locked onto the LZ, he had no trouble locating the small clearing in the jungle a few minutes later.
Even so, rather than take a satellite photo’s word on its suitability for a vertical landing, Jenkins clicked in the intercom to his back-seat passenger. “I’ve got the LZ in sight, Sir, but I’d like to make a flyover to check it out before I put us down.”
“No problem.”
When the pilot spotted no obstacles to landing, he cranked the Harrier around, viffed his nozzles down, went into a hover and sat his plane in the clearing.
“Thanks for the ride,” Bolan said over the intercom as he unbuckled his seat harness and raised the canopy.
“Good luck, Sir.”
Leaving his flight helmet and aviator survival vest behind, Bolan climbed down and shot Jenkins a thumbs-up. As per his preflight briefing, the pilot triggered the release to the cargo pod shackled under his right wing. Bolan’s black bag fell to the ground and he quickly rolled it out of the way before shooting the pilot a second thumbs-up.
After answering with a crisp salute, Jenkins throttled up, hit his viffer control and the Harrier rose into the air. Balancing his lift, he fed in a little thrust and started forward. As soon as his air speed built to the point where the wings were generating enough aerodynamic lift to fly, he swiveled his nozzles all the way back and left town at top speed. Fortunately he didn’t have far to go to reach international waters again and the protection of the F-14 CAP over the Western Caribbean.
He had no idea where his passenger was heading, but he wished him the best of luck.
BOLAN WAITED UNTIL THE SOUND of the Harrier echoed away in the surrounding jungle before breaking out his gear. Along with his usual personal weapons and equipment, he was packing heavily this time. With this being an open-ended mission, he had rations for three days, a pair of two-quart canteens, a larger than usual med kit, satcom radio gear and extra ammunition. He quickly got into his gear and loaded his weapons.
The pod had been sanitized of all U.S. military markings and could be safely left behind along with the equally sterile flight suit. By the time anyone found them, he’d have Hal Brognola back and they’d be long gone. At least, that was the mission profile, and until he knew something different, that’s what he was going with.
He and Brognola had a history together that spanned almost his entire career, so when the President asked him via Barbara Price to try to extricate the big Fed from whatever was going on in Cancun, he hadn’t hesitated.
Beyond their long friendship, Brognola was the leader of the nation’s most secretive, clandestine operations organization known as the Sensitive Operations Group. When the nation needed a completely off-the-screen response to a threat or simply wanted to get some payback against evil-doers, Brognola’s action teams were the President’s first choice to take care of it.
Because of that, Brognola rarely traveled outside of the United States. And, on the rare times that he did, he was usually accorded Stony Man Farm black-suit protection. This time, though, he’d figured that since he’d be in the company of the top cops from the entire hemisphere, personal bodyguards wouldn’t be necessary.
That the President needed to get Brognola back as soon as possible went without saying. The information he carried in his head went beyond merely being damaging to national security. If the details of SOG were found out, it would be months, if not years, before the damage could be repaired. Bolan knew that Brognola was tough, but the risks of interrogation could never be underestimated, and it all hinged on him being able to stick to his established cover job. If Hal could force his kidnappers away from concentrating on breaking into that, Bolan should have enough time to get him out before it was discovered who he really was.
What should have been a simple hostage rescue operation was being complicated by a severe lack of intelligence. All communications with the region, even cell-phone traffic, had been cut and no one had any idea what was going on in the resort town. But if it had anything to do with what was happening in almost all of the rest of Mexico and the border states, the worst was feared.
The little information that had made it out of Mexico via satellite phones and TV hookups indicated that the nation was caught up in a bizarre revolution. The presidential palace in Mexico City had been taken over, along with most of the state governments. The armed forces were apparently also in the hands of the revolutionaries, as well as most of the major industries and services. That this was more than a traditional Mexican change in government “Pancho Villa style” could be seen in the reports of American business facilities being stormed and destroyed. Other foreign interests were being taken over, as well, but the main concentration seemed to be against U.S. property.