Blood of the Assassin (Assassin Series 5) (33 page)

By his estimate he had thirty minutes before the guard would make it back, at the worst – more like forty-five, but he didn’t feel like cutting it too close. He hurriedly unpacked his items from the car and carried them to the plane, and then retrieved a toolkit he had bought that afternoon and set about his final preparatory task – removing one of the plane’s doors. He had the hinges unbolted in ten minutes, and once the door was stowed in the hangar’s depths, he had nothing left to do but start the engine, warm it up, and take off.

The noise of the motor revving sounded like a hurricane in his ears, the roar amplified by the hangar and the lack of the door. He eyed the gauges, confirming that he had sufficient fuel for what he intended, and then he inched the plane forward, increasing the RPMs as he pulled out onto the runway and strapped himself in.

It was a perfect night – not too cold, partially cloudy, perhaps a fifteen-knot wind from the west. He increased the revs and the little plane began a lazy roll forward. Then he pushed the throttle to the firewall, adjusted the flaps, and soon he was climbing into the night sky at a rate of roughly six hundred feet per minute.

The engine settled into a comfortable drone as he ascended through the eight-thousand and then the ten-thousand-foot level, and he hoped his luck would hold and he could get the plane to its maximum operating ceiling of fourteen thousand feet. The wind from the door opening buffeted him and tore at his heavy jacket with the violence of a hurricane, and as the temperature dropped he was glad he’d had the foresight to wear gloves.

The radio crackled as he scanned the frequencies, and then he picked up the expected warnings directed at him as he approached Mexico City. He would be well clear of the commercial airlines on approach or takeoff on the course he had plotted, which was essential to his plan – it wouldn’t do to be clipped by a 737 as he edged past the perimeter of the city.

The plane would be reported as stolen almost immediately by Cuernavaca ground security, and the assumption would be that it was a drug smuggler trying to secure transportation for a small shipment at no cost. By the time anyone had figured out that there might be another explanation, it would all be over but the shouting, and he would be long gone. He eyed the altimeter and made a few adjustments – the plane was straining at a little over thirteen thousand feet, and didn’t seem like it wanted to go much higher. When he hit thirteen thousand three hundred, he engaged the Stec 50 autopilot with altitude hold and slowed the speed to seventy miles per hour – twenty or so above the plane’s stall speed, and well short of its cruise speed.

After another few minutes, the lights of the international airport were plainly visible off to the left, and he made his final preparations. He entered a course on the autopilot that would take it on a northeasterly direction, and then estimated the fuel – an eighth of a tank, so it would probably run out over the mountains northeast of Pachuca and crash somewhere in that uninhabited area.

He reached beside him and hoisted the parachute he had gotten from the Los Zetas contact – a medium-performance Ram-air parachute that would slow his drop to just over twenty feet per second and had good glide characteristics. He donned the seven-point strap harness, cinching it to ensure it was secure, and then strapped the rifle across his chest with a nylon quick release clip he’d created specifically for it. He’d wrapped the weapon in neoprene so it wouldn’t be picked up on the tower radar, which he knew would be adjusted to tune out smaller objects like birds – and a bird was what he would look like to the radar as he dropped from the plane.

When he could see the airport a few miles to the southwest, he lowered himself onto the wheel strut, the wind tearing at him with incredible force, and then hurled himself into space, releasing the chute only four seconds after beginning his drop so as to have maximum maneuverability room.

The parachute slammed the harness into his torso as it deployed, and then he was in control, directing his glide to put him north of the airport and well out of the path of its traffic, which was a hazard at any time of night or day.

Ten minutes later he was on the roof of Terminal One, which as expected was empty at that late hour. There would undoubtedly be snipers moving into position in the early morning, but by then he would be hidden, in position inside one of the ventilation ducts he could just make out in the dark. He had dropped north of the airport, gliding in from over the city, so the likelihood of being detected was minimal at three a.m. – nobody would be watching for a nocturnal parachute ingression.

Rauschenbach quickly rolled the chute up, stuffed it back into the pack, and toted it to the duct. He extracted a small portable toolkit and set about removing the outer grid. Six minutes later he was done, and he moved to the next duct and removed those bolts as well, and then the next three in the line. His chore completed, he dropped the pack into the shaft and then eased himself in, and soon was lying face down on the cold steel surface. He pulled the grid closed so that if there was a cursory inspection, the missing bolts would appear to be the result of typically shoddy maintenance, same as the rest of the shafts in the area.

He fished a small camping headlamp from his shirt pocket, pulled it onto his head, and flicked it on. The pitch black shaft, approximately five feet wide by four high, brightened. He carefully set the rifle down, the camera tripod next to it, and maneuvered so that he was facing away from the opening. Rauschenbach knew from studying the blueprint he’d found online where the shaft ultimately led, but he wanted to prepare for a quick exit after the assassination – now a little under six hours away.

Forty-five minutes later he was back. He first retrieved the parachute and pushed it down the chute, and then returned for the rifle. If anyone bothered opening the grid in the morning they would see an air duct; and even if they bothered with an exploration, they wouldn’t be coming as far as he would be lying in wait, biding his time. The only wrinkle would be if they stationed a sniper right by his position, but that was luck of the draw. If they did, he would deal with it once it was light out. Now that he was in position, he had options, and could shoot from any number of locations.

The hard part was over. He turned off the lamp and returned it to the breast pocket of his dark blue shirt, and then slipped the baseball cap he’d pilfered over his head and settled in for the long wait till dawn.

Cruz had agreed to meet
El Rey
and Briones early at the Congress building to go over last-minute checks and to see whether there was anything that caught the assassin’s expert eye as being a hole in the security. At seven, all three were standing in front of the huge edifice, soldiers and
Federales
everywhere, the air overhead shredded by the blades of helicopters holding snipers, their rifles stabilized with gyro-harnesses. A kind of controlled pandemonium reigned: army vehicles formed a crude gray perimeter, wooden roadblocks painted bright yellow lay ready to be set in place, and hundreds of armed police marched from their deployment location to the surrounding neighborhoods, supported by a contingent of menacing-looking marines with black knit balaclavas pulled over their faces.

Briones and Cruz were both in uniform, and
El Rey
had a
Federales
badge and credentials on a lanyard around his neck. His eyes were in constant motion, roving over the building silhouettes, his operational instinct clamoring a warning – the German was here, in the city somewhere, and he would make an attempt on the Chinese leader’s life this morning. He was as sure of it as an arthritic grandmother knew when rain was coming, and the certitude had him restless, nerves close to the surface and hyper-aware.

The anxiety was contagious, and soon both Cruz and Briones were also unsettled as they moved from position to position, checking with the security teams, their Chinese counterparts already in place, having flown in on an earlier jet dedicated to their transport, their glacial eyes sharing the roaming vigilance of their Mexican colleagues.

After spending an hour reviewing the precautions, they decided to move to the airport to check on things there – it would take a half an hour in rush hour to make it using surface streets, so they would have thirty minutes to nose around and see if they could detect anything amiss. Cruz bought a couple of newspapers for them at a café and two coffees for himself and Briones, while the lieutenant went to fetch the cruiser from the nearby lot, the assassin having declined anything, as was his custom.

When Briones pulled to the curb, emergency lights flashing, Cruz climbed into the front seat and
El Rey
took the back. A traffic cop waved them through the already congested intersection, rubberneckers everywhere wondering at the awe-inspiring display of firepower in the nation’s capital. Cruz handed one of the papers to
El Rey
and then took an appreciative sip of his steaming beverage as he studied the front page.

“Huh. Can’t recall ever seeing that before,” Briones commented, catching the headline out of the corner of his eye.

“What’s that?” Cruz asked.

“Someone stealing a plane and then crashing it. Weird.”

“The ink must still be wet. Says it only happened a few hours ago,” Cruz commented. “Computers have enabled the papers to change the cover story right up till the first run comes off the presses. Brave new world.”

El Rey
read the short article, obviously written in haste, and then flipped the page, where a celebrity TV show host was gushing about her new baby and the tribulations of living with her multi-millionaire soccer player husband. A group of protesters had already gathered across the street from the Congress, and placards announced a host of uncoordinated complaints, railing against everything from the new accord the Chinese leader would be signing to steadily rising gas prices to the loss of Mexican jobs. The chanting hadn’t started yet, the protest leaders enjoying their coffee like everyone else before the cameras started whirring, and Cruz was struck by the pre-determined formality of the scene – protestors protesting, police officers policing, killers angling for a shot, politicians grandstanding through it all.

By the time they reached the airport, the perimeter road had been closed off, and Briones was able to park right in front of the terminal, his glower daring the local police at the curb to say anything about it. The officers on duty looked away – they had no dog in that fight.

The three entered the huge hall and moved to the security checkpoint, their progress tracked by dozens of armed federal police carrying assault rifles. Cruz made a cell call to advise the ranking
Federales
officer that his party was coming through and request that he meet them at the scanners to facilitate their passage. The officer was there in a few minutes, and they repeated their walkthrough, studying the runways where military vehicles and federal police assault vans were now parked in strategic locations, in anticipation of the Chinese plane’s arrival.

“Quite a show, eh?” Cruz said to nobody in particular, taking in the hundred or so armed men in clusters down on the tarmac, heavy fifty-caliber machine guns on the vehicle turrets manned by attentive soldiers, every one a combat veteran from the cartel wars that had been raging out of control for a dozen years. These were seasoned combatants used to taking fire and returning it, and Cruz found their presence reassuring, even if part of him knew that their presence was mostly for effect.

Their host, Captain Gabriel Guzman, looked equally fit to his retinue, and was only a few years younger than Cruz. He walked them through the steps he’d taken, politely answering their questions between fielding near-constant inquiries over his crackling radio. Cruz and Briones listened attentively, but the assassin seemed distant, lost in his thoughts as he searched in vain for a clue as to how the German intended to pull it off.

Forty minutes later, a charge of electrifying energy ran through the men as a Boeing 747 with the People’s Republic of China emblem on the tail dropped out of the sky and set down with the unlikely grace of an obese swan, its bloated torso defying physics with its ungainly flight. All eyes tracked it as it slowed at the far end of the runway, barely visible through the shimmer of polluted air, and then turned its bulbous nose slowly in their direction and taxied back towards them.

“Does anyone have binoculars?”
El Rey
asked, and Captain Guzman muttered into his radio. A few moments later a younger
Federal
came jogging up with a pair of spyglasses and looked quizzically at the group. The assassin motioned for him to hand them over, and then, without comment, he began studying everything within sight, taking his time, pausing now and again at a vehicle or structure. He could make out three snipers on the hangar roofs across the VIP area – one at each corner, facing the spot where the plane would come to rest, and one in the center.

He turned to Cruz. “I want to get up on the roof. How many shooters do you have up there?” he asked, shifting his focus to Guzman.

“Five at this terminal. Two more facing the staging area, and three facing the frontage road.”

“Let’s get up there,” Cruz said, and the four men made for the elevator to the upper level, where a guarded stairwell led to the roof.

“How’s it been going?” Briones asked, making small talk as they moved across the floor.

“Hectic, as you can see. They can’t just close down the terminal, so with the passenger traffic it’s been juggling a lot of balls. And the plane scare last night didn’t help.”

“Why did that affect you?”

“It flew by us, just a few miles east, so I got woken up in the dead of night. My fault for telling my subordinate to call me if anything unusual happened. Stupid bastard wound up crashing up by Pachuca. Got what he deserved.”

El Rey
followed the conversation without comment, and then stopped, just for a brief second, something nagging at his awareness. Then it flitted away, a ghost dancing at the periphery of his consciousness, too insubstantial to solidify.