A few moments later, one of the beefy loaders came up to the entry hatch nearest Cazaux. “All cargo loaded aboard as ordered,” he reported.
Cazaux maneuvered his way aft to the third pallet and inspected the Stinger coffins. He had placed an almost invisible pencil line on each crate lid that would clearly not be aligned if the lids had been opened — none had been touched. Cazaux made a few tugs on the straps and several hard pushes on the stacks of crates and found them secure. He reached over to the second pallet and extracted three packets of cash. “Good job, gentlemen,” Cazaux said. “Your work here is finished. That buys your silence as well as rewards you for your labor. See to it that silence remains golden.”
The loader’s eyes flashed with delight when he saw the bundles, but they just as quickly blinked in surprise when a large switchblade stiletto suddenly appeared in Cazaux’s hand out of nowhere. Cazaux’s eyes registered the loader’s surprised expression, and his handsome face smiled, if only for a brief moment. Then he dropped the packets into the loader’s arms and drew the stiletto’s razor-sharp edge across one of the packets. The loader’s greedy hold on the money packets allowed waves of one-hundred-dollar bills to ooze out of the incision. “Count it,” Cazaux said casually as he folded the switchblade and instantly returned it to whatever secret place he had drawn it from.
“Not necessary, sir,” the loader said breathlessly, turning to leave. Cazaux looked a bit perturbed at first, then shrugged and nodded as if silently acknowledging the man’s offhanded compliment. “Call on us anytime, sir.”
“I could use some men like you in my operation,” Cazaux said to the back of the man’s head. “Join my team now, and you’ll make that much cash, and more, on every mission.”
The loaders stopped, looking at each other — obviously none of them wanted to accept, but they were afraid of the consequences of saying no to Henri Cazaux. But one black man turned toward Cazaux. “Yo, man, I’ll take it, right here.” The other loaders, all white, looked relieved that the lone black had left them.
The black guy was big, with beefy shoulders and arms and a broad, massive chest, but with a bit of a roll of fat around his middle and a spread in his ass, like a veteran truck driver, a played-out boxer, or an ex-artillery loader turned couch potato. His eyes were clear, with no hint of dullness from drugs or too much alcohol, although the flabby waist and chest said this guy downed at least a case of beer a week. “Do you have a passport?” Cazaux asked him.
“Uh-uh… Captain,” the loader said in a dark, cave-deep voice.
“It will cost you one thousand dollars, in advance,” Cazaux said. He extended his hands toward the bundles of cash held by the head loader, motioning for the man to toss him the money.
“That ain’t the deal,” the head loader said. “We split the money later.” But Cazaux hefted the AK-47—not aiming it at them, but the threat was clear — and the loader counted out a thousand dollars in one-hundred-American-dollar bills from the sliced-open packet and handed it to the black man.
“Work hard, and it will be returned to you with substantial interest,” Cazaux said, holding out his hand.
The black man scowled at Cazaux, clutching the cash in his big hands. “I ain’t paying you nuthin,’ man,” he said. “You got your own damned plane, man, you can get me in.”
“Just stick the nigger in with the rest of the baggage,” one of the other loaders suggested with a laugh.
A stern glare from the Belgian mercenary silenced the loader. “You will need a passport for some of our destinations,” Cazaux said, “and it costs a lot to get a good document.” He shrugged. “Part of the price of doing business.”
The anger rising in the black man’s chest was enough to raise the air temperature in the hangar several degrees.
“Trust me,” Cazaux said reassuringly.
The guy finally relented, handing Cazaux the money and hopping aboard the L-600. The others were hustling toward the side hangar door as fast as they could. They were sure the big black guy was going to turn up dead in a very short period of time, like as soon as he closed the hangar doors.
“You are the one they called Krull?” Cazaux asked the one remaining loader.
“Yeah,” the black man replied.
“Is that your real name?”
The man hesitated, but only for a second: “Hell no, Captain. And I’ll bet you ain’t no captain, either.”
Cazaux knew the man’s real name was Jefferson Jones, that he was just paroled from a Florida state penitentiary, serving three of seven years for armed robbery, and that he had a common-law wife and two kids. An arrest for dealing drugs, no conviction, and an arrest for selling guns, again no conviction. A small-time hood, dabbling in crime and so far not demonstrating any real aptitude for it. Cazaux’s sources described this one as a good worker, good with a gun, more intelligent than most foot soldiers, a quick temper when provoked but otherwise quiet. “Good answer, my friend,” Cazaux said. “I saw your dossier.”
“Say what?” Big eyes growing wide with surprise.
“Your records. I know you are telling the truth. Lying to me is fatal, I assure you.”
“You’re the boss,” Krull said. “I ain’t lying to you.”
“Very well.” Cazaux knew that Jones had used a variety of weapons in his years as an armed thug, and Cazaux had chosen him, whether Krull knew it or not, over all the other hirelings as a possible recruit. “You begin work immediately. Open those hangar doors, close them after we taxi clear, hop aboard, then close this door like so.” Cazaux showed him how to close and latch the large rear cargo door, and Krull left to see to the hangar door. He had no trouble opening the manually operated steel doors, and soon the warm California night air was seeping into the hangar. Time to get moving.
“Prepare to start engines,” Cazaux shouted forward to the Stork. “I want taxi clearance right now. Report our position on the field as the Avgroup cargo terminal, not this location. Let’s go.” He bent to make one last check of the cargo straps before heading up to the cockpit.
Aboard an Army UH-60 Assault Helicopter
That Same Time
The image on the nine-inch color monitor wavered as the helicopter passed by some electrical transmission lines, but the picture steadied as soon as they were clear. “I didn’t hear you that time, Marshal Lassen,” Federal District Court Judge Joseph Wyman, Eastern District of California, said. “Repeat what you just said.”
“Your Honor, I said that because Henri Cazaux is extremely dangerous, I must be granted extraordinary latitude for this capture,” Chief Deputy Marshal Timothy Lassen said into the videophone, a suitcase-sized unit strapped into the UH-60 Black Hawk’s helicopter seat across from Lassen. Lassen, age forty-eight, was the number-two man in charge of the Sacramento office of the U.S. Marshals Service, Eastern District of California. He was speaking on a secure voice/video/data microwave link to the federal courthouse in Sacramento while speeding southward only one thousand feet above ground toward Chico Municipal Airport. Lassen’s lean frame was now artificially beefed out with a thick Kevlar body armor vest over a loose-fitting black flight suit, recently purchased from a mail-order catalog for this particular mission; a black vest with the words U.S. MARSHAL in green covered the bulletproof vest. His boots were scuffed-out survivors of the Marshals Service Academy Training Course at Quantico, Virginia, and used since then only for duck hunting. He wore a plain black baseball cap backwards and a headset to speak on the videophone over the roar of the helicopter’s twin turboshaft engines.
Judge Wyman had been summoned to his desk at midnight to issue an arrest and search warrant for Lassen’s operation. Even distorted by the scrambled microwave linkup and the occasional interference, it was obvious that the judge was not happy. “ ‘Latitude’ is one thing, Deputy,” Wyman said irritably, “but your warrant justification reads like something out of the frontier West.”