Hostile Fire (28 page)

Washington, D.C.

Murdock, Ching, and Rafii arrived in Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport at 0115. Murdock phoned Stroh at his office. A man answered and said Mr. Stroh was in conference.

“Good. Tell him Murdock and team have arrived at National. We’ll check into a local motel and wait for his instructions in the morning. I’ll call him with our hotel number when we have one.”

“I’ll tell him that. No, no, wait a minute, the meeting just broke up and Mr. Stroh is coming back in. Hold a moment.”

“Murdock?”

“The same. At National, where do you want us?”

“Stay there. I’ll send a car for you. We’ve had a report of a BAC One-Eleven that dropped off radar when it was on a flight plan to return to the Azores. Our team doesn’t think it crashed. They could have turned off the transponder, which makes it tougher for the sixty-mile radar to find them. Then they could have turned south. Not that many BAC planes flying in and out of Halifax.”

“So, Mexico City?”

“Looks that way. They could be almost there by now. At five hundred miles an hour you eat up the distance. We’ll get you into our place, get you new clothes a little less ethnic, and ship you out to Mexico City on a Gulfstream. You’ll get into Mexico City fast. Hope you slept on the plane. Yes, we can get you clothes in the middle of the night. This is the Company. Also get you some weapons. The car should be
there in about twenty minutes. Meet the driver at the central taxi stand.”

“A black Lincoln?”

“The same. Oh, the rest of the platoon left Germany about noon yesterday. Be in here sometime today at Langley.”

“Good. See you soon.”

An hour later, the three SEALs were checking out their new clothes. They fit. Sport clothes with a change in a modest roll-along suitcase. Each man had a 9mm automatic in his waistband and an Ingram in the suitcase with plenty of filled magazines.

Stroh looked them over.

“Not my idea of the perfect American tourist, but you’ll have to do. We’ve been bombarding Mexico City’s airport but can’t get much cooperation. They say a BAC One-Eleven has landed without a flight plan, but the crew claimed radio and computer problems on board. They released it and it’s somewhere on the big airport, but they had no reason to watch where it parked. Somewhere in the transit or freight sections, they figured.”

“I’ve been at that airport,” Murdock said. “There are all sorts of private hangars big enough to hold that plane. We’ll have to find it before it takes off again.”

Stroh’s cell phone rang. He answered it and nodded. “Fifteen minutes. Right. We’ll be there.”

“A chopper is standing by to get us back to National, where the Gulfstream is waiting. We’ll be in Mexico City early this morning. I’m going with you. We have to find that damn plane. It must have the fourth nuke on board.”

“We’ll give it a try,” Murdock said.

Thirty minutes later, the SEALs and Stroh boarded the sleek business jet used mostly to fly VIP visitors around. They had used the plane before. They leaned back the first-class-type seats and relaxed. They knew they would get little sleep once they hit Mexico City.

The pilot told them his flight plan was to Corpus Christi, Texas, then almost due south to Mexico City. The whole run
was about twenty-one hundred miles, and they could do that without stopping for fuel.

“Flight time a little under four hours, depending on the winds up there. We’ll be at forty-one to forty-three thousand feet, depending on the wind. It’s now three-oh-five
A.M
. Which puts us in the hot tamale town about seven
A.M
. Snacks in the galley and lots of pillows and blankets. Check in later.”

The speaker snapped off and the sleek jet raced down the runway and took off. Each man had twenty thousand U.S. dollars in a money belt around his waist. They were ready to do business in Mexico, where
cohecho
, or bribery, was the way business transactions were done. Murdock had three hundred in ten-dollar greenbacks in his pocket.

“Let’s get some sleep,” he said. He was sure before their work was done in Mexico they would need it.

Mexico City, Mexico
Benito Juarez Airport

Three Mexican CIA agents waited for them at the taxi stand when they walked out of the terminal. Murdock could tell that they were Company men. They didn’t wear suits or hats, but each had on a sports coat and a white shirt and tie.

“Mr. Stroh and Murdock?” one of the men asked as they walked up.

“Right, I’m Murdock,” he said holding out his hand. The other man shook it.

“I’m Antonio Gutierrez, head of station.” He turned to Stroh. “You must be Don Stroh. I’ve talked with you before but never met you.” They shook hands. “There are some messages for you at the embassy. The second car will take you there. They said you should go there first, and then catch up with us.”

“Thanks, Antonio. I’ll go see what they want, then come back here to the airport.” He waved and walked to the second black Buick at the side of the street and stepped inside.

“What do you know about that BAC One-Eleven that landed here sometime last night or early this morning?” Murdock asked.

“Not much. The Company is not exactly on good terms with the powers that be here, and the airport manager bucked us up to the Mexican City Chief of Police, who said he couldn’t help us.”

“So, where do we start?”

“We have a contact in one of the air-freight companies,” Antonio said. “He’s going to meet us as soon as I call him.”

“Go,” Murdock said.

Antonio took out a cell phone and hit the numbers and
chattered in Spanish for a moment. He looked up and waved at a black Buick that pulled up beside them. “That was my contact, Felipe. He said if it’s a rogue aircraft, there are more than a dozen old buildings on the north side of the airport where it might be hidden and worked on or just kept out of sight. We’ll split up and three of us will work from each end of the old buildings. They were supposed to be torn down, but things move slowly sometimes around here. You and I and one of your men will go one way, my two men and one of yours will be the other team.”

They all squeezed into the Buick and drove around the parking lot, through a gate marked,
FOR OFFICIAL VEHICLES ONLY
, and around a road that hugged the airport’s outside fence. Murdock saw the buildings well before they got there. All were old, most unpainted, one had half the roof fallen in. The car stopped at the first one and two of the Mexican CIA men got out. Murdock pointed to Ching, who joined them.

The Buick moved along the access road to the far end of the quarter-mile-long row of old hangars.

“Do these buildings still have electricity?” Murdock asked.

“Some do and some don’t. It depends on who the owner knows, and how much he pays to keep the juice on.”

They came to the last building, which looked better than the rest. “We might get lucky on our first try,” Murdock said. Then he saw a sign with lettering and pictures of three fish.

“This one I know,” Antonio said. “A big shipper of fish to outlaying areas in medium-sized transports. We’ll go in and look around anyway.”

On the south side of the airport, Asrar Fouad stared at his cell phone and swore in three languages. “What’s the matter with these people?” he asked the two men who stood near him in a clean, well-lighted hangar that had the large front doors closed. “I asked them for clearance to fly to Monterrey, and they told me I would have to wait for the weather to clear. Weather, where? There’s not a cloud in the sky here. Who knows what the weather will be like by the time we fly up there? These people are idiots.”

The two Mexican men grinned, understanding little of what he said, which had come out in rapid-fire Arabic. They knew he was angry. So far they had helped him get the plane fueled and even some food restocked in the galley. They had been ready when he landed and routed him to this hangar for transient aircraft. He knew a little Spanish, enough to make them understand what he needed. The strange behavior of the tower made him angry, and he slipped into Arabic out of necessity. He knew no swear words in Spanish.

Now he tried to relax and struggled to find the right word in Spanish. “The weather,” he said in Arabic. Then he tried his Spanish. “
Boletin meteorological muy malo
,” he said.

The two men looked up at the ceiling. “
Aqui?
” one asked.

Fouad shook his head. “
En Monterrey.
” The two Mexicans nodded and looked around. There was nothing else for them to do. Fouad seethed. He was ready. He had phoned Tijuana, and it took him an hour to get through. Mexico must have the worst telephone system in the world. He made arrangements on the other end and then filed his flight plan thirty minutes before he asked for take off. That’s when they started talking about the bad weather. Nothing he could say in his limited Spanish helped. He would have to wait. He told them he would be at 42,000 feet, but they weren’t swayed.

He was in a hurry but did not feel rushed. With any luck the air traffic people would figure his BAC went down in the Atlantic on the way to the Azores. He wondered if they would put out a search party looking for debris. Probably not. He went to the small door in the huge one and looked out. He didn’t expect to see a hoard of police cars, wailing sirens, and red lights angling for this hangar to take him into custody. But he checked anyway. He had violated no Mexican laws. Bent a few but hadn’t broken any. He knew that the CIA and Interpol had files on him, but first they would have to try to tie him into the cargo he carried, and then get him involved with the BAC. Slim to none, he figured. He had filed his flight plan to end at Monterrey, a big town four hundred miles due north. He groaned. So that was the holdup. Monterrey must be socked in with fog and he wouldn’t be able to land there. Shit! A town he wasn’t going to go to
was holding up his takeoff. He used his phone again and called the tower to find out about the weather for his flight.

The man on the phone this time said it was starting to clear. The way it looked now, he could take off in another thirty minutes.

“Yes, gracias.” Fouad said and hung up. He yelled at his two helpers and had one hook up the tractor to the front wheel and turn the plane around so he could tow it out of the hangar and the pilot could get the engines warmed up and ready for taxiing to the right runway. He hurried inside the plane and told the pilot the good news.

“Great, we’ll do our pre-flight check and keep in contact with the tower,” the pilot said. He knew enough Spanish to get by with the tower. “Thirty minutes, you said.”

“Right, and we head north for fifty miles, and then get on our course directly for Tijuana.” He looked at the flight engineer. “You have our course all plotted?”

“Right, fifty north, then northwest to Tijuana. Do we turn off the transponder?”

“Oh, yes,” Fouad said.

The flight engineer looked at him with a frown. Fouad wasn’t sure he had convinced the man. He’d have to check to be sure that the engineer did turn off the transponder. “We can claim an emergency on the radio and that our transponder is down. They’ll have to let us land. Then once there I have thirty men who will swarm the area and get us to a neutral spot where we can transfer the cargo to a specially made truck.”