Trader of Secrets: A Paul Madriani Novel (44 page)

She got down flat on the ground. Herman got down next to her.

“You OK?”

She nodded. “I’m not leaving without him.”

“Worry about staying alive,” said Herman. He looked around, trying to figure out their next move.

“What do we do now?”

“Sit tight,” said Herman. “Stay here.”

“Where are you going?” Before she could turn to look, Herman was gone toward the tail of the plane. He hugged the side of the fuselage as he approached the spinning props. The wind nearly peeled him off the metal. One of the engines on this side was already smoking.

The incoming fire seemed to diminish. Now there were only occasional bursts and single shots that could barely be heard over the roaring engines. Herman wondered where Adin and the Jeep had gone.

He got down on his hands and knees and scurried with the pistol in hand toward the dead commando and the SAW machine gun. Under the belly of the plane Herman could see several men in uniforms with assault rifles moving on the other side coming toward them. Between the approaching hostiles and the plane was a chain-link fence with a gate. The three armed men were maybe seventy meters beyond the fence.

Just as Herman reached the automatic weapon, a hand grasped his shirt. He looked down. The commando wasn’t dead. Herman came face-to-face with his open eyes. The soldier gestured toward his legs. He was wounded in both thighs and couldn’t walk.

Herman nodded, handed the machine gun to him, and grabbed the web harness at the back of his neck. “Ready?”

The guy nodded.

Herman dragged him twenty feet behind the belly of the plane where Sarah lay prone on the concrete.

The wounded soldier rolled onto his back. “Where is the colonel?”

Herman had to read his lips over the massive noise from the engines. He shook his head. “Don’t know.” He hadn’t seen Ben Rabin or any of the other commandos since the Jeep took off. He assumed they were still inside the plane. Herman fished in the guy’s backpack. He got up close in his ear and asked him if he had a medical kit. Herman wanted to stanch the bleeding from the wounds in the man’s legs.

The smell of fuel was becoming pungent as it dripped from the belly of the plane and ran into the concrete swale underneath. Herman took one look at the overheating engines. The plane provided cover for the moment, but he knew they couldn’t stay there for long.

Chapter
Sixty

L
effort hugged the walls on the inside of the corridor as he listened to the massive gunfire outside. The place was a goddamn war zone. All he wanted now was to find a car and get as far away as he could.

The buzzer was still ringing in his ears, though someone had finally turned it off. The gunfire outside seemed to ebb.

With it Leffort began to move more quickly down the hallway. He crossed an intersecting corridor and saw an open doorway on the other side. There was a janitor’s large rolling trash bin in the hallway outside, one of those rectangular canvas trash bags on wheels. He moved cautiously. The last thing he needed was to run into one of the guards and find himself ushered to the underground bunker. They might as well put him against a wall and shoot him now.

Leffort peeked around the open doorway. Inside the room was a long high counter, an empty desk against one wall and an open safe against the other. He arched an eyebrow and glanced at the sign over the door. It was written in a language he didn’t understand, some kind of script that looked as if it was written upside down and backward.

The room appeared to be empty. “Hello!” He waited to see if a head might pop up from behind the counter. It didn’t. Leffort stepped inside. There was a closed gate in the middle of the counter. He walked toward it.

Leffort didn’t see the blood or the body sprawled on the floor on the other side until he was a few feet from the gate.

He stopped dead in his tracks and looked around. His gaze wandered back to the blood on the floor, then caught the windows on the far side of the room. Two of the narrow slits looking out over the runway had been shot out. The venetian blinds in front of them were ripped to pieces. Leffort’s wheels began to turn, dead man, stray bullets, open safe. The conclusion was pretty obvious. To Leffort it spelled opportunity.

He glanced over the edge of the gate and looked both ways. Except for the dead man, the room was empty. He reached over and felt for the latch. It had to be there somewhere. It was.

He opened the gate and walked quickly toward the safe. A smile spread across Leffort’s face as he approached the two open doors. The safe was filled with money. He glanced back over his shoulder one last time to make sure he was alone and that he wasn’t dreaming. There were no voices, no footsteps out in the hallway, only the occasional sound of sporadic gunfire outside, which for now buoyed his spirits. As long as they were busy out there, they wouldn’t be coming in here.

Leffort’s attention was so fixed on the cash in the safe that he nearly tripped over the six buff canvas bags on the floor in front of it. He looked at the dead man lying on the floor, then back to the bags. “If that isn’t poetic justice,” said Leffort. He didn’t have to guess what was in the cloth sacks. It was nice of the guy to bag it for him. The only question was how much.

He tried to untie at least one of the bags to find out. The double knot was too tight. Leffort knew there was no time to screw around. He looked at the stacks of bills in the safe, then went over quickly and examined them. It didn’t take him long to realize how the denominations were organized and to discover the sizable void in the hundreds on the bottom shelf. His admiration for the deceased was growing by the minute. Unlucky the man may have been. A fool he was not.

Leffort tried to lift the bags using the leather belt they were attached to. The load was heavy. He got it up on one shoulder, but by the time he got all six bags through the gate in the counter, he was struggling and having second thoughts. He dropped the load and started dragging the sacks on the floor behind him.

At the door he checked both ways and saw the cart. Leffort laughed and shook his head. The man had thought of everything—except a bulletproof vest.

He pulled the load out into the hallway, closed the heavy door behind him, and started lifting the bags into the rolling trash bin.

From the room across the hall, Liquida couldn’t thank him enough. Everything had been going swell until the bullets started flying. They punched holes in the cabinets under the counter and had Liquida crawling around on his hands and knees out the door. He had been forced to leave the money behind and was beginning to wonder if he would ever get back to it.

He watched as Leffort struggled with the bags. The man was a wimp, a certified candy ass. If Liquida had had more time, he would have strung the bastard up by his nipple rings and let him hang for a few days over hot coals. As it was, he was in a hurry.

The problem with the load was that it was all strapped together by the leather belt. Leffort couldn’t lift the whole thing high enough to get it all into the bin at one time. He leaned over and unbuckled the belt and started to slip it from the loops in the ties at the top of each bag.

He cleared one bag when his right hand suddenly went numb. Leffort looked at it, then tried to massage it with the other hand. There was a pain, a hitch somewhere high up in his back. He wanted to reach for it but his arms were dead, only a tingling from his shoulders to his hands. He tried to say something but he couldn’t. It was the strangest feeling. His mind seemed clouded. He looked down through a foggy gaze and realized he’d grown a third foot—his right, his left, and a middle one that wasn’t there a minute ago. He chuckled almost whimsically as blood ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped onto the floor.

He had no sense of anything below his neck. And yet he was standing there, supported by what he didn’t know because he couldn’t feel his legs. It was as if he was weightless, floating in space, when suddenly he tumbled upside down into the bin. He didn’t seem to mind. It was like the ultimate anesthetic. Someone had tickled the crazy bone in his brain. For Leffort this was something new and different, the ultimate out-of-body experience. He gazed up into Liquida’s eyes and suddenly realized that the feeling of warmth on his back was his own blood. Leffort smiled, and everything went dark.

“I hope it was good for you,” said Liquida. “Because I certainly enjoyed it. It could have lasted a little longer, I suppose . . .” He talked to himself as he wiped the stiletto on the canvas cloth along the side of the bin, then threaded the bag back onto the belt. Like Santa with his sack, he lifted the load of cash and headed for the door.

*  *  *

“Rebel Two, this is Rebel One, where are you?” Ben Rabin spoke into the small mic on the headset fastened to his combat helmet.

“Rebel One, I am in the defilade behind the brick building at the end of the runway.” Adin spoke to him from the shadows behind a small blockhouse just off the runway under the trees. The guards had fired at the speeding Jeep but missed. “They are moving on you, three of them that I can see,” said Adin.

“We got ’em,” said Uncle Ben. “One sniper up on the flight deck, the other at the top of the ramp.”

“Give me the word, I’ll take out the twenty millimeter,” said Adin.

“There are two of them,” said Ben Rabin.

“I know the other one is behind the plane. I don’t want to risk losing the artillery until we take out the dish,” said Adin.

“Roger. We go on the count of three?”

“Give me a few seconds.” Adin looked at his loader on the back of the Jeep.

The guy swung the tube of the recoilless rifle until it was perpendicular to the back of the vehicle.

“I’ll back up. Give you a window. Whatever you do, don’t miss,” said Adin.

“I won’t.”

“On your count,” Adin spoke into the mic again. He started the engine on the Jeep.

“One, two, three.” Before the last syllable cleared Uncle Ben’s lips, two sharp cracks echoed from the plane. Two of the standing bodies beyond the fence fell.

The Jeep skidded into reverse. It cleared the corner of the small brick building and stopped. A second later, fire erupted from the 105-millimeter barrel. As the round streaked across the runway, a third shot could be heard coming from the plane. The last guard approaching the C-130 fell as the explosive round struck the twenty-millimeter antiaircraft gun in front of the large building. It erupted in a ball of fire as bodies and shards of steel flew into the air. Secondary explosions of live ammunition filled the sky as the surviving guards scurried from the sandbagged emplacement.

Adin pulled the Jeep behind the buildings as the field came alive with the sounds of battle once more. Fire poured into the crippled Hercules again as the plane took the brunt of the reprisal. Adin waited only long enough for the loader to put another round into the recoilless rifle. “Hang on.”

He raced out from behind the brick building toward the crippled plane, gunning the Jeep with both hands on the wheel and his head down.

The movement drew small-arms fire as they sped across the field.

A few seconds later the trailer rolled down the ramp of the plane. It hit the twisted end of the ramp and turned over on its side directly under the huge tail of the plane. Ben Rabin’s men poured out of the belly of the plane like fleas, taking cover behind the trailer and opening up on the building with everything they had.

The Jeep cleared the front of the plane as Adin got a fix on the other twenty-millimeter gun. “Do you see it?”

“Got it,” said the loader. Just as he said the words, the spray of heavy tracers bent away from the plane toward the Jeep. The recoilless rifle belched fire as the recoilless round streaked on a flat trajectory across the distance. It hit the sandbags directly in front of the heavy gun and exploded, sending sand and bags into the air as shrapnel killed the gunner.

“Got him,” said the loader.

“No, you didn’t.” Adin could see the guards pulling the gunner from his seat. Another guard climbed up and got behind the gun. “Hit ’em again!” yelled Adin.

The loader raced to get another round into the rifle as tracers began to snap and streak over their heads. Adin sensed that they had but seconds before the Jeep would be nailed by the heavy twenty-millimeter rounds. He had to move or the Jeep and its vital recoilless rifle would be destroyed.

Adin punched the accelerator and took a sharp turn to the left. The loader hung on for his life as centrifugal force nearly flung him from the back of the vehicle.

They headed for cover behind the plane, hoping for another shot. Adin couldn’t risk losing the recoilless rifle until he used it to take out the two satellite dishes, his primary goal of the mission.

Heavy fire poured in on the C-130. With the Jeep gone as a target, the twenty-millimeter tracers zeroed in on the outboard starboard engine of the plane. The heavy rounds blew the spinning prop apart, sending the massive blades into the air. Seconds later the engine exploded. Fire erupted all along the wing as the inboard engine went up.

The heat of the explosions drove Herman and Sarah back away from the airplane. Herman dragged the wounded commando out onto the open tarmac away from the left wing and the violently gyrating propellers of the two remaining engines. It was only a question of time before the massive fuel tank inside the plane exploded. Herman tried as best he could to maintain cover as the dense black smoke of the burning plane began to billow over the field.