Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (23 page)

Thirty percent chance of rain in the vicinity of Austin turned out to be one hundred percent heavy thunderstorm activity with horizontal wind shear down on the deck that threw the King Air around like a twig in a washing machine. Carlos and his flunkie had their faces buried in barf bags, which they gripped with white knuckles either side of their faces. I enjoyed watching them struggle so much I almost forgot my own fear of striking the ground in a burning fireball of aviation fuel and shredded aluminum airframe. Well, almost.

Somewhere down on the churning waters of Lake Travis, there was a boat awaiting delivery from the sky.

“We’ll have to make another run,” Daniela yelled into her mike as the King Air bucked and jinked in the turbulence barely fifty to one hundred feet above the white caps, depending on the aforementioned effects of wind shear. Given our altitude and the conditions, I was nervous about a sudden downdraft turning the King Air into a submarine, but then I watched Carlos push his face into the bag a little too hard, tearing it in half so that the contents slid onto his knees, and I completely forgot my anxiety. Laughter will do that.

I felt the plane go into a steep climbing turn, the turboprops screaming. Carlos and his pal were shitting themselves. That made three of us, but they had it worse than me.

“C’mon!” I called at Carlos to do like we planned. “The door! Get it open …”

Carlos sat buckled into his seat, his eyes wild, a beard of bile hanging off the hair on his chin and a slick of corn and beans sitting in his lap. He either didn’t hear me or he was too scared to move. Lightning struck the plane with a loud bang. The engines surged again. I hoped Lina and Daniela knew what they were doing. Honestly, my levels of faith in that department were stretched. Maybe I was doing them a disservice but how much flying can you honestly do jumping up and down on the sidelines for the Cowboys?

Speaking of the twins, Daniela shouted over her shoulder, “Hey, we’re coming around!”

I gave up on Carlos, unbuckled my restraint and somehow made it to the door. Once there, I struggled into a harness attached to a lifeline and checked that said lifeline was attached to a hard point.

“Slow us down!” I called forward.

I heard the pitch of the propellers change and sensed the nose of the aircraft come down, the flaps lowering.

“Okay, do it!” said one of the twins.

The aircraft wasn’t pressurized, which made possible what I was about to do. I pulled the emergency release and, using my shoulder, pushed the door out into the airflow. The door’s weight did the rest. It dropped down on its gas strut, the wind and rain howling through it at a little over one hundred miles per hour, shrieking as it whipped through the integrated handrails.

“On the count of ten,” one of the twins shouted.

I grabbed bags of cocaine off the pallet and pushed them toward the opening in the side of the aircraft, the rain outside lit up red by the port-side navigation light before flashing briefly silver when the strobe on the T-tail fired.

“Seven! Six! Five … !”

I started throwing the bags out into the airflow on “two”, and then dropped to my butt and started kicking them out the door to get it done faster. I saw the waiting boat flash by below. With Carlos and his pal glued to their seats, too scared to assist, it took another two frightening runs to get the cargo out the door.

“Clear!” I shouted over the screaming turbines when there were no more bundles to toss.

“Strap in!” Lina called back.

I buckled into a chair as, moments later, the King Air began to climb and roll on its side, the turboprops wailing. We kept rolling, the maneuver sickening, until the open doorway was facing the underbelly of the storm cells. Lightning forked, framed by the black rectangle open to the violent sky. Rainwater surged in, rivulets of it running from the doorway’s leading edges. And then suddenly the open panel in the side of the plane was open no more as the doorway swung upwards on its hinges and slammed into place, closing decisively. Comparative silence.

The King Air rolled back onto a more conventional attitude and climbed. Some big hills between us and Brownwood.

*

“Nice night for flyin’,” said the middle-aged balding guy from Texaco as he clipped the earth wire onto the King Air prior to fetching the hose from the truck. “But then I s’pose flyin’s a bit like sex and pizza. Even when it’s bad it’s good, am I right?” He laughed.

I joined in. “Yeah.”

He watched Lina walk around the aircraft, checking it over, and liked what he saw. He said as much with a conspiratorial look like I was one lucky bastard to be flying around with that. And I could guess at the look he’d give me if he saw Daniela, especially in a cheerleader’s outfit.

“So where are you folks headed?” he asked as he unscrewed the cap for the main wing tank and sank the nozzle into the filler hole.

Headlights appeared on the apron. A courier truck. “All-righty, here it is,” I said. “Right on time.”

“You expecting a delivery?”

“Parent company’s being audited by the IRS.” I gestured at the truck. “Those will be tax records. We’re delivering ’em to head office in Dallas, then flying on home to Houston.”

“What business you in?” he asked.

I nodded at his tank. “Oil, oil exploration, gas …”

“The IRS? It’s not right. Oil companies built this country,” he said, shaking his head. “I bet it’s them communists in DC. They don’t like oilmen. Tryin’ to take away our second amendment rights. Don’t know where it’s gonna end.”

“Yeah,” I said again, unsure about how he managed to find a link between a tax audit and the right to bear arms.

The truck pulled up beside the aircraft. Carlos and his little helper jumped out of the King Air and ran to the back of the vehicle. A moment later they reappeared, each carrying two filing storage boxes. They placed them in the King Air’s doorway, pushed them in and jogged back for another load.

I gave the refueler a shrug. “No one argues with the tax man.”

“I guess not,” he said as he stopped pumping the gas and checked the level in the tank with a pencil flashlight. Satisfied, he replaced the filler cap.

“The captain asked me to get both tanks filled,” I told him.

“No problem.” He motioned at Carlos carrying another load. “A lot of paperwork you got there.”

“Big company. And these days you gotta keep records for the air you breathe. Let me know when you’re done. You take cards?”

“No problem.”

“Might go lend the boys a hand.”

“Sure, don’t let me get in your way.” He jumped down, hoisted the nozzle and hose to the opposite wing and repeated his process. His inquisitiveness apparently sated, I left him to it, joined Carlos at the back of the truck, and picked up a couple of boxes and carried them across to the King Air. The load in my arms was unexpectedly heavy. I wondered how much money I was carrying. Fifty million was a lot of cash. Judging by the number of boxes, assuming the weight of each box was roughly equal, I guessed the total weight to be around a thousand pounds, well inside the King Air’s maximum load capacity.

Brownwood went off without a hitch. Half an hour later, we were on descent into Love Field. I went forward and crouched between Lina and Daniela, the lights of Dallas sliding under the nose.

“Love tower, this is November seven four Victor Romeo,” said Lina. “VFR, one five nautical out, level five thousand, heading one-niner-zero; looking for vectors to your active. Say local altimeter. Over.”

Daniela put her hand in front of the mike. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

I nodded. Yep, it looked pretty, but then so did Dar es Salaam at night from five thousand feet. “Who’s logging the flight plan?”

“Lina’s already called it in,” Daniela informed me.

“There’s no need to land,” Lina joined in. “The tanks are topped off, we’ve done what we came to do and you’ve proved your point. We’re gonna use Love Field as a way point and turn for home.”

“Being on the ground is a risk,” Daniela pointed out. “Fake registration, fifty million on board …”

They were right, of course. There was also the risk, though remote, that someone might recognize me as a cop killer from El Paso. “Okay,” I said, “Let’s go.”

“Do we need your permission?” Lina said as she banked to the west, answering her own question.

I went back to my seat, which faced aft, and gazed at the boxes of money. At least now I couldn’t see Carlos. I closed my eyes so that I couldn’t see anything and wondered if I’d be able to get to sleep.

Seconds later – but maybe it was longer – they snapped open. Something was seriously wrong. The side door was open, the airflow howling past it, and the naked sound of screaming turboprops filled the cabin space.

Movement behind me. I raised a hand to protect my face. A belt was thrown over my head and pulled back. My hand was inside the loop, jammed back against my windpipe. I shifted, tried to turn, change the angles, find a way out. Choking … Pressure against my neck … Then Carlos’ man was in front of me. He had a knife; heavy blade, curved. A bowie knife. I kicked out at him, which only dropped me lower in the seat. Carlos’ face was over mine, his teeth clenched, straining. I kicked up at him again. This time my toe caught him by surprise, slammed into his nose. I saw it collapse, felt it crunch, the cartilage and bone smashed. Blood exploded from it. He howled and let go of the belt. I went down, onto the thick beige carpet. Drops of blood there. I coughed; throat scorched, dry. Carlos’ pal was crouched, blade in hand, about to strike. I moved, grabbed a box, got my back up against the fuselage. The guy with the knife came at me, thrust the blade. I parried with the box. He thrust again. The blade buried itself in the box, struck something hard within – compressed money. He pulled the knife out, destroying the box. On the end of his blade, a wad of … newsprint?

I gave him a front kick. It caught him in the sternum and sent him flying backward into the curved fuselage opposite. But all I’d done was make him mad. And now Carlos had a gun.

“No guns!” Daniela screamed, coming back from the cockpit. She hit him in the side of the head with a flight manual and sent him sprawling.

The guy with the knife attacked from the side. I twisted, felt the blade slice the skin over my ribs. I twisted some more; the blade caught in my clothes and he had to let it go. I punched him, a left jab to the teeth – felt them rattle. A right cross found his chin and his head jerked back. Punch number three came from my left, collected his jaw on the right, snapping his head in a circular motion. One, two, three. I could see his brain spin in his skull, anchored by his spine and the optic nerves attached to the back of his eyeballs, pulling them left then right. Four: an uppercut, the bottom teeth smashing against his top teeth. He staggered to the left, the wrong way to stagger.

And suddenly he disappeared through the hole in the door. He was there, and then … gone.

Carlos charged. This time I was ready and, using his momentum, slammed him against the fuselage. The wind shot out of his mouth along with blood and spit and bits of nose bone. The bowie knife, no longer caught up in my clothing, dropped onto the carpet. I picked it up. The weight of the handle was comforting, the balance felt good. I owed this guy … So I spun around, generating extra force, extended my arm and swung the curved blade. I felt it jar against something hard. Carlos started screaming. I glanced over and saw why. The blade had skewered his hand, pinning it fast against the plane’s aluminum skin.

As I turned, there was time to see one of the twins and the butt of a raised pistol. Too late to –

*

I regained consciousness duct taped into a chair, jolted awake by the King Air’s landing gear striking the earth. My head hurt, a blinding pain somewhere behind my ear. There was a trickle of dried blood that ran down my neck and into my shirt. The props screamed in reverse pitch, the plane braking hard as I pieced together the events of the night. The delivery and pickup had been a success, except that there wasn’t any money in those boxes, which also told me there probably hadn’t been cocaine in the packages kicked out over Lake Travis either. I didn’t believe that Apostles would have sent the twins on a dry run into the United States. Why risk them when there was nothing to gain? That led me to Perez. Carlos was
his
man. I lifted my head. The exit door was closed. I glanced over at Carlos. He was unconscious, his body strapped to the fuselage and his arm outstretched like he was waving, except that the hand on the end of his arm, pinned to the fuselage and covered in clotted blood, wasn’t doing any waving. Maybe Perez really believed that I’d try to hijack the flight and take off with the drugs or the money, as he’d earlier suggested to Apostles. If so, Carlos and his pal were on hand to make sure I didn’t get away with it … No, that didn’t work. I was being a model of good behavior for once and had done nothing to warrant being attacked. Perez just didn’t want me to return – simple as that. Carlos and his buddy had come along to kill me. I had to believe, therefore, that there was a good chance Apostles didn’t know what Perez had had in store for me. And the same went for Lina and Daniela.

The King Air came to a jolting stop and the engines died. The propellers windmilled for a brief period and then came to rest altogether. I heard a thump against the fuselage and the door swung down as Blue Bra – Lina – cut me out of the duct tape with a pocket knife. “Sorry,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

Portable lights flooded the apron with hard white light. A couple of men came onto the plane, hauled me out and brought me in front of Apostles and Perez. Half a dozen other men, all in Desert Storm BDUs, accompanied them.

Apostles drew his pistol and pressed the muzzle into my cheek.

I tried to turn away but I was being held. “Hey! What –”

“No,” said Perez, placing his hand on the pistol’s barrel. “You promised me.”

Apostles thought about it, then raised the weapon and uncocked the trigger.

I had no idea what was going on, but I took a shot at it anyway. “Carlos and friend jumped me,” I explained.