Hostile Fire (30 page)

“That’s the first thing they’ll ask. Our flight and our location.”

“Just ask about weather, stupid. Do it now.”

The pilot had just keyed the radio and sent out a mayday call when the third bolt of lightning hit the plane. The whole tail section exploded. The second engine flamed out. The T-tail rudder broke off, and the resulting strain on the heavy engines cracked them loose and the whole tail assembly fell entirely off the plane.

The craft went into a steep dive. The pilot fought the controls, but he had only the flaps and the ailerons to control it and they weren’t enough. The big transport spiraled down then flattened out. The three men in the cockpit were screaming at each other. Fouad didn’t know what had happened and tried to shoot the pilot. His round missed, and then in a violent spin he lost control of the pistol and it fell to the floor.

From fifteen thousand feet it took only what Fouad thought were seconds for the craft to plunge to the ground. He felt the first ripping and tearing as the cockpit hit first. Huge trees and limbs smashed into the plane; the cockpit’s heavy Plexiglas windscreen disintegrated, and chunks of it slashed into the cabin like shrapnel. Before he could even cry out at the pain, Fouad’s whole world turned black. The cockpit smashed into the ground at over three hundred miles an hour and crumpled. The wings sheared off; the fuel in the tanks exploded into a huge fireball that engulfed the wings and front of the plane and caught some of the towering trees and brush on fire. The wings and their fuel tanks careened fifty yards forward through the jungle growth, spewing flaming aviation fuel in their wake. The fire burned furiously for twenty minutes. Then when all the fuel was burned up or evaporated, the rain and the eternal dampness of the jungle squelched the blazes into smoking islands, which were soon put out entirely by the heavy downpour. Only a twenty-foot section of the body of the craft remained intact. It had been behind the wings and missed the gush of burning fuel. It lay half-hidden by the large trees and heavy rain forest growth on the slope of a mountain more then eight thousand feet high.

After an hour the rain stopped and the clouds blew away. Soon the birds began to sing again; the animals, frightened by the roaring, burning wreckage that had smashed into their habitat, came out of hiding and went about their daily work of survival.

There was no movement in the smashed and burned cockpit of the BAC One-Eleven that had buried itself ten feet into a small stream that ran down the mountain. All was quiet inside the cabin, deadly quiet.

Mexico City Airport

Murdock, Ching, and Rafii ate at a Chinese specialty cafe in the food mall and had no trouble paying for their meal with U.S. dollars. Murdock figured the dollar was worth about ten pesos. Then they met Antonio at the appointed spot near the tower.

“The time is eleven-fifty-five,” Antonio said. “If they got through the storms, they should be landing in either Tijuana or Mexicali in five minutes. I’ll call both places to check.”

“If they land, your people know what to do?” Murdock asked.

“Oh, yes. If that plane sets down at either spot, there will be a dozen police and agents swarming all over it. They won’t have a chance to get away.”

“Let’s hope,” Murdock said. “Then this chase will be over.”

Ching shook his head. “They never got through the storm. I’ve been watching the TV news. Worst storm in two years. Blanketed central and northern Mexico with rain, hail, and lightning, high straight-line winds up to eighty miles an hour. You know what that would do to a mid-range airliner like the BAC One-Eleven?”

“Snap it in half like a balsa wood glider under my foot,” Antonio said. “Yes, the weather has been horrendous, and if they flew toward León they were right in the middle of it. When does the rest of your platoon get in?”

“About an hour and a half. Do we have a HQ anywhere around here for the choppers to land?”

“Remember those old hangars we looked at? I rented the one where the BAC had been. The choppers will go there. I
told the tower to order the American Gulfstream to taxi over there as well. Let’s go to those phones over there. I’m calling Tijuana.”

Five minutes later, Antonio shook his head. “Neither airport reported that a BAC has landed, and they have no flight plans for one to come that direction. I called the choppers. They’ll be at our hangar in fifteen minutes.”

“Let’s go meet them,” Murdock said.

They paged Don Stroh and he met them at the north entrance. They took a taxi to the north side of the airport. The driver was angry the trip was so short, so Murdock gave him a ten-dollar tip and he was all smiles.

The hangar was about as they had seen it that morning. The two maintenance men were there, glad for the new renters. A catering truck arrived just after Murdock and the others and they stocked up on food.

“Your platoon ate on board the Gulfstream, but it won’t hurt to have some extra staples around,” Don Stroh said. He unwrapped a sandwich. “Yeah, tuna fish. Can’t beat a good tuna fish sandwich.”

When the choppers arrived, Murdock, Stroh, and Antonio had worked out a heading from the airport to León.

“If that last fifteen minutes are right on their flight, the plane could have gone down somewhere this side of León,” Antonio said. “Only it won’t be a straight line from here. The tower said they went out twenty miles north before they headed northwest. Let’s recalibrate our heading.”

The two helicopters arrived ten minutes late. Murdock checked his watch. It was twelve-hundred-twenty. The two craft were Bell 206 JetRangers. Two pilots and three passengers. They were veterans of the civilian chopper trade and reliable, but not capable of any heavy lifting. They talked to the two pilots. Both spoke only Spanish. Antonio told them what they wanted and what route they wanted to fly. He emphasized that this was a search mission and they needed to be as close to the ground as was safe.

Murdock put Antonio, one of his CIA men, and Ching in one bird. He, Stroh, and the other Spanish-speaking CIA man, who said his name was Hernando, went in the other one. Murdock told Rafii he’d done enough on this mission.

“Take a nap, have a Coke and another sandwich, and meet the rest of the platoon when the guys come. Tell them what we’re doing and the odds. If we find anything, we should be back shortly. Depending how far we have to go. At any rate we have to be back before dark.”

Murdock stepped into the Bell JetRanger. “
Vamonos
,” he called, and the pilot cranked up the rotor and they took off, heading north for twenty miles, then on a northwest track for León.

“What if we don’t find it?” Stroh asked.

“If we don’t find it, we’re in one hell of a lot of trouble. I have no idea where else it could be. Unless they really did disable their transponder and fly somewhere else, like to Houston.”

“If they did, we
are
in a lot of trouble,” Murdock said. “But Houston is in one hell of a lot
more
trouble. Nuclear bomb vaporization trouble.”

Guanajuato State
Central Mexico

The Bell JetRanger hit a few pockets of unsettled air that followed the main storm that had passed through central Mexico and was now heading for the Gulf Coast. The pilots had dropped down to a hundred feet over the lush growth of the rain forest below. The two birds flew fifty yards apart on the same course to double the chance of finding the crash site, if there was one. Murdock believed they would find the crash.

“It’s got to be here somewhere,” he said. “That BAC didn’t fly on to Houston. Fouad’s best chance was Tijuana. From there he could cross the border in a specially rigged truck, moving across at the busiest time. He could also have bribed three or four border crossing inspectors and paved the way. Once in the U.S. he was home free and could pick San Diego, Los Angeles, or San Francisco as the target. All he had to do was drive into the heart of any city, set a timer on the bomb, jump in a trailing car, and drive fifty miles outside the target zone.”

The pilot bellowed something and everyone looked out the windows. The sun broke through scattered clouds as the front moved quickly to the east. Below they could see a scorched spot of the forest. Both choppers circled the area.

Murdock shook his head. “Looks like a small forest fire that somebody put out. Not more than an acre or two. Must be hard for a fire to keep burning down there.”

The pilots swung back on their heading for León and dropped lower. They came to a series of hills that pushed them higher and higher, but they kept their distance above the forest at fifty to a hundred feet.

The sun broke out of the last cloud that scudded quickly to the east.

“How far to León?” Murdock asked Hernando, the Mexican CIA man. He relayed the question to the pilot. The answer came back.

“We’re about fifty miles to the town,” Hernando said. “Looks like they really got a lot of rain through here. Look at the water gushing down these hills.”

Below, a torrent of water rushed down a gully, turning it into a river twenty feet wide. It was water that had been dumped onto the foothills above and was just now coming down the slope.

They powered over the hills and up a long valley, but found nothing that looked like a crash.

“Most likely there would be a fire if the plane went down,” Murdock said. “It had just taken on a full load of fuel to fly the sixteen or seventeen hundred miles to Tijuana. That much fuel will make a furious fire.”

The two pilots saw it about the same time. “Trails of smoke ahead,” the pilot told Hernando, who told Murdock. He and Stroh stared out the windows on both sides and tried to see ahead. Hernando went to the front of the little craft and looked out the windscreen.

“Yes,” he shouted over the sound of the chopper. “Yes, a gash in the forest. Must be a quarter of a mile long. It’s coming up fast, it’ll be on the left side.”

Murdock and Stroh looked out the left-side windows. It came up quickly; then the pilot slowed the craft and hovered over the middle of the slash through the trees with a large burned area in the center. They could see the middle section of a jet airliner half-buried in the trees and brush.

“No tail,” Murdock shouted. “Where’s the tail and the DAF logo?” Murdock touched Hernando’s shoulder. “Tell the pilot to follow the fire trail. The wings have to be here somewhere.”

“They moved slowly above the burned path in the heavy foliage. A line of trees had been chopped down as if with a giant machete. The forest was scorched right down to the ground in two trails. Then they saw what was left of the smoking sections of the two wings.

“Had to have happened today, with that smoke,” Stroh said. “How close can we land?”

Murdock asked Hernando. He asked the pilot. Hernando came back shaking his head. “The pilot says he can’t see any place clear enough to land on for at least a mile. We wouldn’t have a chance to cut our way through that jungle and get to the plane and then back to the chopper before dark. A mile down there is like twenty on a good paved road.”

“Have him make another pass and hover over the middle section. Wish I’d thought to bring along some rappel equipment. I could have gone down there.”

The bird turned, flew back to the middle of the burned slash, and hovered. Murdock and Stroh stared out the open door at the wreckage.

“Any survivors?” Stroh asked.

“Don’t see any. If they could move, they would have got in the open by now. I’d guess all KIA.”

“Can you see any kind of a crate that could hold the bomb?” Stroh asked.

“Could be inside that section, or it could have torn lose on impact and rammed forward into the jungle.”

Murdock studied the scene for another two minutes. “Okay,” he told Hernando. “Let’s get out of here and back to the airport. We’ve got to rent a bird big enough to have a winch on it so I can go down and make certain that the bomb is on that plane. Then all we have to do is find another chopper big enough to lift the crate out of there. It must weigh at least two tons.”

Hernando told the pilot. He radioed the other pilot and they turned back toward Mexico City.

“Be sure the pilots don’t radio anyone that we found this plane,” Murdock said. “We don’t need any competition trying to get the bomb out of there.” Hernando went forward and came back with a frown.

“Afraid I was too late. Our pilot had radioed the tower at Benito Juárez Airport that we were hunting a downed jetliner. He didn’t say exactly that we had found it, but the authorities will be asking us questions.”

“Not if they can’t find us,” Murdock said. “Have the pilots fly us back to their home field. They aren’t at Benito, right?”

Hernando nodded. “Yes, that should work. This outfit, Helicopters Mexico, has some big birds there. With any luck we can get a chopper today to fly out with a winch to let you down and bring you back up. That way we’ll know for sure it’s the BAC and the bomb is on board.”

“Tell the other pilot where we’re heading,” Murdock told Hernando. “Be sure he understands that he makes no transmissions to the tower at Benito.”

The flight back to Mexico City was quick. But by the time they landed at a small airport just north of the city, and talked to the owners about a larger craft, it was too late to make a safe flight back to the crash site.

Murdock inspected the suggested chopper. It had no winch and was far too small to lift out even a ton. Hernando and Antonio talked with the owners, who shook their heads.

“They say they don’t think we’ll find any helicopters in the whole area with a winch and that could lift out two tons. Just not much work for them.”

Stroh waved him off. “Let’s get back to the embassy. He took out a cell phone, called them, and told them to send a car to the small airport to pick them up.

“Let me get to my SATCOM,” Stroh said. “We thought there might be some problems down here so we sent a pair of destroyers and a cruiser on an exercise into the Gulf of Mexico. We might have some assets that we can use.”

A half hour later at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Stroh used up the airwaves to call his headquarters in Langley, then the chief of naval operations. It took ten minutes and Murdock listened. When the last transmission was done, Stroh grinned.