Brotherhood and Others (3 page)

He started to resign himself to his fate. But what fate was that? A Buenos Aires jail? He flashed again on that image of police officers leaving an unmarked car with shotguns. He saw himself running hard away from a movie theater and the bloody bodies of his mother and father sprawled on a cold sidewalk.

No, he could not go to jail. He couldn't chance an encounter with any police officer whatsoever, certainly not in this city, even now. They'd kill him if they caught him. No doubt.

“Well?” Claudio demanded.

Torn as he was, Robin realized that he only had one way to get where he really wanted to be—inside the Brotherhood with Claudio. Protected. Part of something bigger than himself.

“Okay,” Robin said at last. “I'm getting the bracelet and I'm getting the painting. I am not going to get caught. I'm going to steal them blind.”

Claudio grinned. “Just like any good little thief would.”

Diego Garcia

Central Indian Ocean

March 19, 2003

3:37
P.M
.

Beneath an open-air hangar that shielded him from the sun but did little to cut the brutal tropical heat, Monarch buttoned an oversize green military fatigue top, hiding a chest harness beneath that held two Heckler & Koch USP .45 caliber pistols and four loaded clips for each. There was also a small but powerful handheld satellite radio, two Mag lights, and a GPS tracking device that he had just turned on.

Monarch could smell the sea, but was barely aware of the beck and call of men working around him. Wiping at the sweat already beading on his forehead, he picked up the bib-style bottom of the squirrel suit and struggled into it.

Made of Kevlar and cable-reinforced parachute fabric, the squirrel suit was two-piece, jet black, and featured soft wings like a flying squirrel's that hung down from the arms to the waist and between the legs of the suit from the crotch to ankle. An integrated hood fit him like a glove. Extreme sports base jumpers had invented the suits to fly off cliffs, but over the years Monarch had found them perfect for high-altitude jumps, giving him the ability to soar in virtually any direction and at varying speeds, all while plummeting toward Earth.

He checked the altimeter on his right wrist and then a second GPS device on his left. Two feet above sea level. Thirty-three hundred and fifty-two miles to target. He put a headlamp on over the hood, and then swung his arms into the straps of a lightweight parachute pack that he'd use at ultralow altitude.

Sweltering now, Monarch nevertheless picked up a helmet and a set of clear goggles and turned toward General Barrens and Ellen Wolfe. The general wore short sleeves and aviator sunglasses. The CIA officer wore a khaki top and shorts and Ray-Ban sunglasses sat on top of her head. For the first time, she looked genuinely concerned about Monarch's safety.

He looked beyond Barrens and Wolfe at a black B-2 stealth bomber that was also inside the open-sided hangar. The stealth bomber featured special coatings that allowed it to slip past radar undetected and had a range of six thousand miles The pilot and navigator bombardier were making their final inspections. A team of U.S. Navy ordnance specialists were maneuvering the last of sixty-five five-hundred-pound Mark 82 bombs into the belly of the flying beast.

“You sure those are going to hold above me?” Monarch asked.

Barrens nodded. “There's a foolproof rack system up in there; you'll see it. The ride will be uncomfortable, but you'll have plenty of room. Test your radio and headset once you get yourself situated.”

Monarch nodded. “Oxygen? Water? Pressure?”

“Four tanks of O
2
,” Wolfe replied. “More than enough. And two gallons of water, two bags of jerky, dried fruit, nuts, and a bar of dark chocolate.”

“They've rigged the bay so it will have about the same pressure dogs get when in transport on commercial jets,” Barrens said.

“What more could a man want?” Monarch said, and moved past them toward the bomber, irritated by the ungodly heat.

“Robin?” the CIA officer called.

Monarch glanced back over his shoulder at her.

“Be safe,” Wolfe said.

He smiled and said, “You too, Ellen,” and kept going.

The bomb bay doors were open. Monarch flipped on the headlamp. Bombs filled much of the bay above him, stacked and positioned on hydraulic racks linked to a retractable pin system that the bombardier alone controlled. But between the underbelly of the bomber and the first actual bomb, there was a gap of five feet. Strapped to the empty racks below the bombs were the four oxygen canisters, water jugs, and a nylon sack, which he guessed held his food.

Monarch donned leather gloves and the helmet, then climbed up inside. He got to his feet, got a firm grip on the empty bomb racks before looking down at one of the ordnance specialists, a thickly set Hispanic whose name tag identified him as Corporal Escobar.

“Dude, you out of your frickin' skull, or what?” Escobar said.

“I've considered that more than a few times,” Monarch admitted, then gave the man a smile,\ and said into his mic, “Let's button her up.”

He held tight to the rack above him and lifted his feet. The bomb doors hissed and slid shut, leaving him in a steel sauna lit only by his headlamp. He grabbed one of the water jugs and drank as much as he could stomach, hearing the B-2's turbines start and gather power.

When the bomber began to move, Monarch removed the helmet. He took the mouthpiece and hose connected to the first oxygen tank and fit it over his nose and lips, then got the helmet back on.

Using the handle given to Monarch back in the Special Forces, the pilot, a Texan, drawled over the speaker in his helmet, “Rogue, you ready to get up close and personal with a little ‘Shock' and ‘Awe'?”

“Roger,” Monarch said, then sat on the bomb doors and braced himself, the heels of his boots pressed against two nubs of steel on the doors, his back against the rear wall of the bomb bay, holding tight to the empty racks again.

Given the sheer tonnage of the bombs above him, he was surprised at the power of the B-2's engines, which roared and hurled the stealth down the Navy airstrip toward the ocean. The force of the acceleration pinned him against the fuselage, and they climbed steeply.

Two minutes into the climb, Monarch became agitated. His muscles began to throb and his teeth began to ache.

“This is Rogue, are you pressurizing the bay?” he asked as the heat around Monarch became overwhelming, smothering, swiftly robbing him of consciousness.

“That's a negative,” came the Texan's response as Monarch plunged into darkness. “We are having problems with initiation. Rogue? Rogue, do you copy?”

*   *   *

His face blackened with dirt, Robin stood in the alley shadows beside the rear wall of the compound immediately north of the one where the party was taking place. Claudio had pointed out that several stout limbs from the ancient live oak tree in the darkened compound hung over into the shadows behind the revelers. The older boy had also pointed out that the alley wall of the dark compound doglegged slightly, a corner that could be climbed. That would be his route in. How he got out was his own problem.

Robin felt in his pants pocket for the pocketknife and the three thin picks Claudio had given him as his only tools. Satisfied, he bowed his head and pleaded with the spirit of his late father to watch over him. The teen remembered when he was much younger, perhaps six, and Billy was coaching him as he climbed through a jungle gym at a playground in Germany. His father showed Robin how he could hang from things as well as a monkey if he just allowed his fingers, arms, and shoulders to rotate effectively. With that in mind, Robin began to ascend the alley wall, his fingers and rubber-sole shoes finding niches in the brickwork and mortar that he clung to or pressured against to inch his way ever upward.

As Claudio had warned, there were glass shards embedded along the top of the wall, except in one small section, up at the top of the jog he now climbed. Claudio had been on the wall three nights before. He'd broken off the shards there and filed them down smooth.

Still, Robin had to kip his way up onto the ledge with care lest he slice his feet and hands. He perched up there for three short breaths and then somersaulted forward off the wall and into a splayed position. He landed with an
oomph
in a freshly tilled flowerbed, just as Claudio had said he would.

It took several seconds for Robin to catch his breath and another several to get to his feet, but then he was running across the interior of the darkened compound, praying that the older boy was right, that there were no dogs patrolling the yard.

He reached the base of the live oak without incident and saw to his surprise that a children's swing hung off one of the bigger limbs, one that could not be seen from that high spot in the flowering trees across the alley. Without hesitation, he grabbed the chains, twisted them together, and began to haul himself up into the tree hand over fist.

Soon he was twenty feet up in the tree. Foliage surrounded him, blocking anyone's ability to see him, certainly anyone attending the party, which was now less than one hundred and fifty feet over the wall and down from him.

Amid the music and the happy din echoing over to Robin, a man's deep, boastful voice boomed something about the wonders of the Perón family. Anger flooded through Robin with such hot intensity that he wanted to fling himself over the wall and find and attack the man. What did he know? How could he know?

Robin flashed on images of his parents leaving that movie theater and uniformed policemen exiting a dark unmarked sedan, seeing the entire scene as he had from far up the sidewalk. For a moment, there in the oak tree, he relived those terrible memories as if they were unfolding right in front of him. Echoes of shotgun blasts pounded inside his head.

*   *   *

“Rogue? Rogue,
do you
copy
?” came the pilot's Texas drawl.

Monarch roused in the bomb bay, gasping for air, aware that it was cold and that the terrible pressure and heat that had built inside his body was gone.

“Copy,” Monarch managed.

“Sorry 'bout that, partner,” the pilot said with a sigh. “Pressurizing system kind of locked up on us there for a minute. You feeling all right?”

It felt as if every muscle in his body had been worked hard, but nothing was broken. “Just tell me if that's going to happen again.”

“It won't,” the pilot promised. “We are at thirty-five thousand feet. ETA twenty hundred hours and fifteen.”

Monarch shook his head, coming more awake, feeling colder still. He got to wobbly feet, breathed the oxygen deeply, then eased over, hanging on to the rack until he got to the food sack. He sat with the food and water and forced himself to eat half of the ration they'd given him.

Two hours later his feet were turning numb and he was fighting chills. He ate the rest of his food and drank half a gallon of water. Ten minutes later, he strapped the smallest oxygen tank to his chest.

At twenty hundred hours and ten, the pilot said, “You ready, Rogue?”

“Affirmative,” Monarch replied, checking the oxygen mask once more. Trying to minimize the effect the squirrel suit's wings would have as he exited the bomb bay at better than four hundred miles an hour, he took a narrow stance, parallel to and above the seam of the doors, almost like a diver out on a high board.

“Once the doors open, you have ten seconds to be away,” the pilot said. “I've got targets that will be right out in front of you. Copy?”

“Understood,” Monarch said, and went down inside himself, breathing and pushing away all thoughts until there was only the seam of the bomb bay reflected in his mind.

*   *   *

Robin lay belly-down on the branch and grabbed leaves, his heart beating wildly at the memory of the shotgun blasts that killed his parents. Gasping for air, furious yet again, he noticed that the deep male voice that upset him so much had died back into the good-natured din of the party. In the next few moments, the anger in the teen chilled and iced until he believed he could hang from it, rely on it, use it to do whatever he wanted.

And in that process, in that icing, something transformative happened to Robin. All those things his mother and father had taught him, all those things Claudio had been teaching him, they all came together and gelled, and quite suddenly the idea of cat-burgling a multimillionaire's house during a party became the normal, the expected, the longed-for.

I am my father's son, I am my mother's son,
Robin thought fiercely.
I will be a member of the Brotherhood. I'm going to take these things right from under their noses.

He imagined that the bracelet and the painting belonged to the Perón supporter with the booming voice, and that set him in motion again, scrambling among, over, and along the branches of the live oak with the nimbleness and light touch of a monkey. He stopped, belly-down again on the largest of the upper limbs. About eight feet below him he could see the top of the wall.

Robin looked down into a narrow spot between the wall and the side of the mansion, which was covered in thick leafy vines. Waitresses in gray uniforms exited and entered through a door about forty feet to his left, carrying dishes that smelled indescribably delicious and made him realize he hadn't eaten at all since the morning.

The tree limb ahead twisted and stretched toward the mansion, coming closest to a small arched dormer up on the third floor. He judged the space that separated the tree from the roof of the dormer at four feet to the wall and about a six-foot drop. The shutters on the window had been thrown open and the sash lifted to catch the night air. Inside he spotted gray dresses hung in a row. A closet for the domestic help, Claudio had said

Robin studied the branch and the dormer for another minute until he saw how to cross that gap and snag the lip of the arch above the window. From there it was a cinch.