Ballantine’s Sherpa.
Matt sprinted in the direction of the airplane, tripping and stumbling down the hill until he was standing knee-deep in a creek. To his rear, the creek opened to the lake. To his front it widened into the rocky shore, Ballantine’s landing strip. The crescent moon hung in the southern sky like a misplaced ornament above the opening in the tall fir trees.
The sound of the airplane grew in intensity. With his back to the lake, he saw the Sherpa bouncing along the small river rocks, lifting ever so slightly into the air, and then finally gaining altitude as it buzzed directly over his head.
Matt turned and watched the airplane fly across Lake Moncrief into the night. The airplane looked different, though. It seemed darker, and the wingspan looked like bat wings.
With a certainty he had not felt in a long time, he knew that his brother was on that airplane. With that knowledge, he cemented his conviction to find a way get him back.
Alive.
PART 3:
Blowback
CHAPTER 32
Frank Lantini was kicked back in an old metal chair that had two legs digging into the plywood floor and two legs angled up in the air. His AK-47 rested on his thighs. He sat in the corner of the cinderblock hut watching enemies of the United States plan and debate the next moves of what they were calling Phase Two.
He had grown a full beard that grayed toward the tips of the uneven strands of hair and stood in contrast to the dark brown hair on his head, now longer than when he had been CIA director last year. He wore old olive-colored pants, a black T-shirt, and a tan fishing vest in which he carried ammo. He passed as a simple, mute guard.
Lantini caught Tae il Sung’s eyes ogling his beautiful assistant, Sue Kim. Sung was the North Korean leader of the Central Committee and knew Lantini as “Ronnie Wood.” He had an understanding with Sung. He provided information and access where possible, which at times was substantial, in addition to strategic guidance.
As Lantini watched Sung stand to address the group that included representatives of Russia, Colombia, Serbia, Angola, Cuba, China, Iraq, and North Korea, he reflected on his path to this particular spot.
He recalled watching Matt Garrett lying in the snow with his team watching over a small village in Pakistan. Then Garrett linked them into his sniper scope via a USB-port uplink, and they were all staring down the length of the scope, looking through the interrupted cross hairs at al Qaeda senior leadership.
Lantini knew that his personal involvement in the Rolling Stones conspiracy last year was witting, yet forced. His guilt over guiding in the JDAM to Garrett’s position and denying the kill chain had racked him. Lantini viewed himself as a patriot, yet his career aspirations had left him no options, he believed.
So last year, his life in disarray, he had fled when he heard that Matt Garrett had returned alive from the Philippines. If anyone knew how to beat the system, it was the director of the CIA. He had the passports and credit cards and identity-altering materials in a go-bag. Last May as the Shimpu was diverted from Los Angeles harbor with its rogue nuclear weapon, he used that focus as a magician uses misdirection. Lantini secreted himself in his 40-foot Chris Craft Roamer and used the two 200-gallon fuel tanks and twin Volvo IPS 500 engines to power along the Intracoastal Waterway down the East Coast. From Florida, he popped into the Caribbean Sea, all the while changing his appearance.
And thinking.
Like Fox and Diamond had done to Stone, the real Ronnie Wood had done to him. Wood maintained an E*TRADE account in Lantini’s name with his social security number, and his home address that showed 10,000 shares of AIG short trades in the first week of September 2001. The trades were covered in January of 2002. He suspected that the money generated by the faux account had either been piped into the Philippine deal last year, or pocketed by the man who had held the weapon to his head as he called in the kill-chain denial to Garrett. After all, government employees, particularly military officers, didn’t make much in the way of salary, and the frame job would have been entirely believable, not to mention impossible for him to refute.
And then he was given three options: Accept the role as Ronnie Wood, endure the embarrassment and prison sentence from the short trades, or die. He chose the path of least resistance and had remained a skeptic through their deliberations. Did the other Rolling Stones know he was a coerced participant? He didn’t know. What he did know was that the real Ronnie Wood was a heartless megalomaniac.
But he could do something about it now. Last summer as he cruised south, he passed to the north of the main island of Puerto Rico, skirted the east side in the channel formed by the island of Culebra, and then cruised to the east of Vieques Island, which at one point had been a Navy bombing range.
And was sparsely inhabited.
He had circled the twenty-mile-long island once and then settled on anchoring in Sun Bay, just off shore from the coastal town of Esperanza. Vieques had been his target all along, it was just a matter of where he would anchor. The south side gave him a quick escape route into the open waters of the Caribbean, relative shelter from most hurricanes, and, most importantly, open portal access to the radar station managed by the Joint Interagency Task Force for Counter Drug Operations.
The satellite dishes on his boat weren’t simply piping in HBO and XM Radio; rather, he had taken the effort to have a private contractor for the CIA build a state-of-the-art communications suite into his bridge. From this platform, he had been able to conduct sufficient eavesdropping operations to piece together the communications traffic of the Central Committee, determine their plan, and infiltrate the dilapidated Fort Sherman prior to their arrival.
The pressures inside the beltway were enormous for those who cared about career advancement, legacy, and such. A Navy admiral, Lantini remembered, had shot himself when a reporter was about to break a story that he had worn a medal that he had allegedly not earned. Lantini knew he was not a saint, nor was he a martyr. He was a survivor, at all costs.
He had sold his soul to the man with the pistol to his head, and now he was hoping for a bit of redemption. Then he would disappear again, because the E*TRADE records were still out there, and too much conjecture had occurred regarding his role as Ronnie Wood.
And the last thing he wanted was Matt Garrett salivating at the mouth with an opportunity to slit his throat after what had happened to his brother.
He knew what Garrett was capable of doing.
No, he would get his revenge and then disappear. But first, once this meeting was concluded, he had some people he needed to talk to.
CHAPTER 33
And Lantini watched the plan develop.
As it was not lost on him, he was certain the irony was not lost on Tae Il Sung. They were sitting in a concrete-slab and cinderblock building with no air conditioning in the middle of Fort Sherman, a former military base in a country owned and operated by the United States for the better part of the last century.
Now North Korea’s greatest ally, the People’s Republic of China, had achieved near sole proprietorship. Once the United States had turned over the canal, China began snapping up land and facilities in Panama as if the country was holding a going-out-of-business sale.
Lantini watched Sung survey the assembled crowd.
Sung smiled inwardly at his own brilliance in being able to gather such a diverse group of statesmen and criminals. He had never found Saddam Hussein a likeable person, but the former Iraqi dictator had been Sung’s peer in the field of terror and Machiavellian statesmanship. And, Tae Il Sung did possess a certain affinity for Hussein’s former regime emissary, Hosni Aswan. How Aswan had avoided being included in the infamous deck of cards, he would never figure out. Perhaps it was the same way that Jacques Ballantine had avoided scrutiny. Regardless, Sung found Aswan to be direct and business-like. Sung preferred it that way. There were enough games to play just maintaining power within one’s own country, so it was nice to be able to relax among fellow members of oppressive regimes.