Hamid volunteered to watch the back, while Crocker and Akil joined DZ, who had arrived in a Volkswagen Jetta that was now parked across the street and down the block from the front gate.
Once Hamid was in position, Akil walked to the blue gate and, standing in a pool of light from the lone streetlamp, rang the bell. A short stooped man with a short white beard and a long dark robe appeared looking like he’d just walked out of the Arabian desert. Akil addressed him in Farsi. The old man nodded, looked left and right along the street, then stepped aside and let him in.
Akil returned twenty minutes later to report that the guesthouse stood at the back left corner of the compound. He had walked by the one-story structure and seen through a window three men smoking cigarettes and drinking tea at a table.
“You recognize any of them?” Crocker asked.
“I only saw the sides of their heads.”
“What did you tell the old man at the gate?” Crocker asked.
“I told him I wanted to pray.”
As they sat in the car waiting for the men to leave or others to arrive, the conversation drifted to James Bond movies.
“Who’s your favorite Bond girl?” Akil asked.
“Ursula Andress in Dr. No,” Crocker said. “I was a kid when I first saw her coming out of the water wearing that white bikini. Suddenly a whole world of fantasies opened up to me.”
“I bet.”
“What about the orange bikini Halle Berry wore?” DZ asked.
“Outstanding as well.”
Crocker watched an old dog with sagging tits cross the street and disappear in the shadows next to the walled mosque. The rain had subsided to a gentle spray when he heard Hamid’s voice over the push-pull radio in DZ’s lap. He said, “Four men have just exited the back gate and are getting into a black Ford Ranger.”
Akil leaned over the back of the front seat and said, “That might be them.”
“What do you think?” Crocker asked Hamid over the radio.
“They have suitcases with them. Looks like they’re leaving.”
“Let’s follow,” Crocker said.
They did, in both vehicles-Hamid and Akil in the Explorer, DZ and Crocker in the Jetta-over the rusting iron International Friendship Bridge to the Brazilian border, where they were stopped by four Brazilian Federal Police officers wearing jeans and bulletproof vests who asked to examine their passports, then waved them in. DZ pointed out that they were in Foz do Iguaçu now, which seemed to be a slightly more upscale version of what they’d seen on the Paraguayan side.
They followed a hundred feet behind the Ford Ranger down a two-lane highway through a field of sugarcane. The half moon hung off kilter to their right, peeking through cumulus clouds.
The rain stopped and the wind picked up, whipping the high cane on both sides of the road. Crocker saw the brake lights on the Ranger light up, then the vehicle take a right past what looked like a little farmhouse.
“Where are they going?” he asked.
DZ shook his head. “I don’t know this area.”
The road narrowed and circled behind long, dilapidated, industrial-looking buildings to an unmanned gate. They lost the Ranger in a grove of mature avocado trees. Hamid’s voice over the radio barked, “Cut your lights!”
Crocker, in the passenger seat, spotted the Ranger two hundred feet ahead. “They’re turning left,” he said urgently.
DZ drove past the intersection, parked the Jetta off the road under a big tree, and got out.
“Why are we stopping here?” Crocker asked.
Hamid hurried over and spoke through the open driver’s window, the wind playing with his hair. “There’s an airstrip back there that’s used by Brazilian charters,” he said. “It’s not sufficiently lit, and closes after dark.”
Crocker said, “Let’s hide the vehicles and take a look.”
“Yes.”
They armed themselves with pistols, then Hamid led the way through a sea of high sawgrass. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped around them. Two hundred yards along, he raised his right hand, pushed the foliage in front of him aside, and pointed. “There they are, over there.”
Crocker saw a runway with portable klieg lights powered by a generator and an old aluminum 737 with “Aero Tetra” stenciled in black on its tail. Two large covered trucks were parked beside it. Men in short sleeves were tossing suitcase-sized bales of something wrapped in clear plastic from the back of the trucks into the jet’s forward and aft cargo doors. An empty jeep sat fifty feet behind the jet.
“Aero Tetra? Never heard of it,” Akil said.
“They couldn’t get away with calling it Aero Terror,” DZ commented.
“Who couldn’t get away with calling it that?” Akil asked.
“The Iranians, man, the Iranians.” There was no time to explain.
Crocker counted eight guards in shorts, armed with AK-47s, standing near the airplane and trucks.
“You think it’s cocaine?” DZ whispered to Crocker.
“If it is, they’re hauling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth.”
“Where do you think they’re planning to take it?” Akil asked.
“Europe, probably.”
Akiclass="underline" “What do we do now?”
“We stop it,” Crocker answered.
“The aircraft? How?”
An excellent question. Armed only with pistols, they were grossly outgunned and outnumbered, had no body armor or backup, and there was a strong probability that Brazilian authorities had been paid off.
Crocker stuck out his chin and looked to his right along the runway to the terminal, which was completely dark. Then he pushed a button that illuminated the dial on his watch. It read 2308 hours.
The men loading the plane were moving quickly. The cockpit lights were on, which meant that the pilot, copilot, and navigator were inside and probably doing a preflight instrument check before they started the engines. That gave Crocker and the three men with him ten to twenty minutes to stop the plane from taking off.
The time it would take to alert the CIA stations in Asunción, Brasília, or Buenos Aires didn’t seem worth it. Besides, all three cities were far away.
Turning to Akil, Crocker whispered, “Grab one of the radios and come with me. You guys wait here and stay alert,” he said to DZ and Hamid.
“What are you gonna do?” DZ asked.
“Don’t know yet, but I’ll keep you informed.”
He led the way through the sawgrass with his head tucked down and arms in front of him so the serrated blades wouldn’t cut his face to shreds. We’ve got to stop it. Somehow we’ve got to stop it, he repeated over and over in his head.
After two hundred feet the field opened onto a large cement parking lot. A one-story terminal topped with a seventy-foot-tall control tower stood to his left. No lights. No sign of people inside. Akil breathed heavily behind him.
“What do you see, boss?” Akil whispered, sweat running down his forehead.
“Nothing. Follow me.”
Crocker readied his 9mm Glock, dashed to the six-foot chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the runway, climbed it, and landed on the other side. He knelt on the concrete and scanned the area. On the tarmac on the runway side of the tower rested two trucks with “Petrobas” painted on them. One was a fuel truck; the other was a flatbed. Judging by the height of the tank above its suspension system, the fuel truck was empty.
“See if that one has keys inside,” Crocker whispered, pushing Akil to the flatbed.
Neither of them did.
Akil joined Crocker near the cab of the tanker. “Boss, what are you thinking?” he asked.
“I checked, and the tank is empty.”
“So?”
“I’m considering hot-wiring this baby and driving right at ’em. See how close we can get.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“If we drive at ’em, they’re going to shoot us to shreds,” Akil warned. “I counted eight armed guards, another half-dozen loaders. They could be armed, too.”