Quinn returned fire carefully, counting his shots and expecting the weapon to run dry at any moment. For all his professional demeanor, the dead soldier had used up much of his magazine in the first full-auto burst to protect the Caravan.
Scanning over the top of the rifle sights, Quinn tried to figure out what Aleksandra was doing with the grenade. A booming concussion answered his question. Shrapnel screamed through the air, rattling through the jungle leaves. For a split second a blossom of black smoke and falling debris obscured the Caravan’s tail.
To Quinn’s horror the plane kept rolling unaffected by the blast or the rounds. Aleksandra continued to engage the two surviving sentries while Quinn focused on the rapidly departing Caravan. With the engine pointed away he aimed for the thin walls of the fuselage, hoping to throw enough rounds into the avionics to stop them. If he was lucky he’d hit the pilot. Two rounds later, he was empty.
The plane continued to roll, picking up speed with every yard down the grass strip. It was airborne in a matter of moments, banking hard right to get beyond the trees. Quinn ran for the downed soldier, ignoring the bullets that thwacked the dirt at his feet as he grabbed for a fresh magazine on the dead man’s belt.
Aleksandra silenced the last sentry with a commandeered rifle at the same moment the Caravan disappeared over the treetops.
Quinn stood in the middle of the clearing wrapped in stunned silence. He held the freshly loaded Kalashnikov to his shoulder, though there was nothing to shoot at but air. By degree, the shrieks and chatter of the jungle crept back to normal as if the gunfight had never happened and Borregos’s plane had not just flown away carrying a five-kiloton atomic bomb.
CHAPTER 66
Movement along the edge of the grass strip caught Quinn’s eye. When he went to investigate, he found the man who’d fallen out of the plane was still alive.
Quinn’s first round had hit him in the chest, but the second had gone low, entering the back of the knee as he tumbled down the boarding stairs. He lay in the grass with his leg turned unnaturally underneath his body. Dark eyes had sunken into deep sockets as if the life was seeping out from behind them. His chest heaved in ragged breaths.
He didn’t have long.
Quinn turned to Aleksandra. “Ask where they’re taking the bomb.”
She did, prodding his wounded leg with her toe to get his attention.
“Laa! Laa!” he cried. No, no.
Quinn looked down, shocked. He was speaking Arabic.
“Who are you?” he asked in Arabic.
The wounded man looked up, blinking his sunken eyes.
“Allahu Akbar,” he sighed with his last breath, the sound of air seeping out of flattening tire. God is great.
“Damn you stupidly shit!” Aleksandra attempted to curse in English, kicking the man again in frustration.
Quinn touched her arm.
“Let’s think,” he said. “This guy is an Arab and there were Yemeni AQAP reps at the party where you and I met. Borregos was there as well, but I’m betting this guy’s people picked the target. Borregos is a narcotics smuggler… probably moving the bomb for a share in the profits.”
Quinn stooped to search the dead Arab’s pockets and found a satellite phone. He pressed the power switch and held his breath as it cycled. As he suspected, they’d been in the jungle long enough the battery was completely spent.
“Dead,” he said, holding up the phone so Aleksandra could see it.
“There is a small generator beside that building,” she said.
None of the other guards had a satellite phone or a charging cord, but there were a handful of tools and a few spare aircraft parts in the shed. It took over four hours of scrounging wire and other materials to jury-rig a charging cord that would attach to the satellite phone’s battery — and another two to get the generator chugging long enough to give the phone enough juice to make a call.
It was nearly noon by the time Quinn was finally able to connect with Win Palmer. He had no idea how long the battery would last and uncharacteristically told the boss to shut up and listen as soon as he answered. He gave Palmer a CliffsNotes version of the past few hours’ events.
“I’ll take some photos of these guys with my phone and text them to you as soon as we get a signal,” Quinn said. “We could use an extraction for two ASAP. In the meantime, I suggest you get Diego Borregos’s photo out to every law enforcement agency within two hundred miles of the border.”
“I’ll get someone to you right away,” Palmer said, pausing. The sound of clicking computer keys dominated the line. “Bo is stable, by the way,” he said while he typed. “And Thibodaux is too damned stubborn to take it easy until we know for sure about his eye.”
“Thanks for the update,” Quinn said, relieved. “I wonder—”
“How long is the strip there?” Palmer spoke before Quinn could ask any more about Bo.
Quinn looked from one end of the grass field to the other. “Maybe twenty-five hundred feet,” he said. “But I got forty feet of jungle canopy rising up right off both ends of the runway.”
“Twenty-five,” Palmer inhaled sharply. “That’s awfully tight for anything fast enough to get to you anytime soon and big enough to carry you both… ” His voice trailed off giving way to more clicks of the keyboard. “Okay, I think I have something,” he said at length. There was a long silence, followed by a resigned sigh. “Hope you don’t get airsick.”
CHAPTER 67
Quinn recognized the high-pitched whine of the Cessna A-37B before it screamed over the treetops, rolling slightly so the pilot could get a better look at the cramped jungle runway. The twin GE turbofan engines gave rise to the aircraft’s nickname of the Tweety Bird or Super Tweet — but Quinn had always agreed with those who called it a six-thousand-pound dog whistle. All but mandatory in just about every South American coup since the 1970s, the A37 had a slender tail and broad, tandem cockpit that gave it a toady look. Bulbous tip-tanks hung at the end of each Hershey Bar wing. A seven-round rocket pod was attached to the pylons on either side, midway between a second set of fuel tanks and the fuselage. This one was painted olive and brown and bore the red and white flag of the Peruvian Air Force.
“We are supposed to leave on this flying tadpole?” Kanatova scoffed as the little jet made another low-altitude pass. It skimmed the trees, low enough Quinn could clearly make out the pilot as he turned his head back and forth, planning his landing — and his eventual takeoff — in such cramped quarters.
Two minutes later saw the squat aircraft banking over the treetops, minus the external fuel tanks that had been under each wing. Engine whining, airbrake deployed, it settled in over the grassy strip and rolled to a stop with a nearly two hundred feet to spare. Both Quinn and Kanatova plugged their ears as the twin turbofans — little more than kerosene-burning sirens — pushed the little jet to the end of the field and finally spooled down.
A short, bantam rooster of a man with broad shoulders and stubby legs to match his airplane flipped up the bubble cockpit cover and climbed out. He wore a green Nomex flight suit and a flight helmet with a dark face-shield.
He peeled off a Nomex glove and extended his hand.
“J. C. Fuentes,” he said with only the slightest of Latin accents. Black hair hung across his forehead in a Superman curl. “Fighter Squadron 711 of the Peruvian Air Force. Are you Señor Jericho Quinn?”