Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (71 page)

***

His temporary lead bodyguard
jogged up and insisted, “Mr. President,

we need to move out right now, sir!”

“What’s the problem?” drawled Dave Whitman.

“We’re not certain.  An aircraft, a drone—something’s up there.” The bodyguard pointed skyward.

Whitman shielded his eyes with his hand, and looked up as well. “Well I don’t see anything.  Are you sure?”

“They fly too high; you won’t see it.”

“Are you sure it’s not one of ours? I mean, who’d be spying on me?” The former President smiled, and said, “Oh, I’ll bet it’s only the Secret Service.  It just burns those boys up when I ditch ‘em like I did today.”

“Maybe we should just go, Mr. President,” said Peter Kosimos.  He pulled on his electric wheelchair’s toggle control and it began to roll backward toward the service road.  His white van was already driving toward them.

At that moment, they both saw and heard a tiny buzzing black dot in the distance across the lake.  Before the thought could fully register, the dot grew in size until they could just make out wings on either side of it.

For long seconds they simply stared in fascination, unable to avert their gaze. At first, it seemed totally unconnected to them, an accident, or just a coincidence.  It seemed so ridiculous, perhaps someone was playing a practical joke, preparing to fly over them and give them a fright. The plane’s distance was hard to estimate, it seemed so tiny, and therefore, still quite far away.  Only gradually did its actual diminutive size become evident.

Whitman’s uncertainty about the plane’s size compounded his confusion over its distance, and its inbound speed. Was it a real airplane still some distance away, or just a model? Before he could decide whether to fall to the ground or run away, the plane had grown to a formidable size, and seemed to increase its speed exponentially as it closed the distance.

For another few moments, the former President considered running to the Suburban that had picked him up at the jet.  Or maybe the big SUV would drive into the path of the little plane, blocking it?  That, or the plane was only a toy, and it was going to fly harmlessly over him.

These ideas simultaneously jammed his mind, and he froze in place. The little plane swiftly grew to an enormous size, racing directly at him, until there was no time left.  Now there was barely enough time to duck behind the only substantial protective cover available to him.

***

On Logan’s laptop, the lake’s shoreline
abruptly expanded to fill most of the screen’s video display.  Fir trees upslope behind the two men enlarged and appeared to spread apart.  Logan could see a pair of men still huddled by the stone bench, motionless.  Dave Whitman was crouched directly behind Peter Kosimos, who was in his motorized wheelchair.  Both men’s eyes were wide, their mouths hanging open, staring directly into the Pelican’s unblinking camera lens.  Their well-known faces grew huge, filling the entire screen, and then disappeared.  The video image flashed and went white for an instant, and then turned solid blue. 

***

Until the discovery of the drone,
Comandante Ramos had frankly been more concerned with the appearance of his men, than with the remote possibility that they would be required to engage in combat today.  They had been wearing their brown berets instead of Kevlar helmets, with their camouflage uniforms starched and pressed.  Their black paratrooper boots and their silver falcon insignias had gleamed in the sun. He had positioned them near the airport road running past the hangars, so that all of the arriving VIPs would get a good look at his elite Falcons, as they were driven from the runway to the Parker mansion.  

The “fashion show” was over, Ramos grimly noted.  The Falcons of Beta and Gamma platoons were divided into four squads of ten men each. Now each man was sitting on one of the metal pipe-frame seats in one of the four Blackhawks.  Their turbine engines spooled up and their four blades began to turn until they were invisible rushing halos, shaking the helicopters like enormous washing machines.  Their helmets were all securely chin-strapped; their M-16 rifles were pointed downward at the decks between their feet.  Ramos was handed an extra flight crew aviation helmet to put on, connected by a wire to the aircraft’s radios and intercom. He slid the clear plastic face shield up out of the way, put on the helmet, and adjusted the chin microphone.  He was crouched between the crew chief and the gunner, behind the pilots aboard Puma 1, when the message came from Lieutenant Almeria.  His communications officer was calling on the state guard’s encrypted radio channel.

“Falcon Leader, do you hear me, over?”

“Yes, loud and clear.”

“The drone is hostile, repeat hostile, and it has crashed, repeat, crashed, over.”

“Crashed? What does that mean? Over.”

“It’s down, I don’t know the reason. I did isolate its control channel before it went down.  It was directed by a ground radio, not by satellite.  It was using data compression and frequency hopping, but I found it, over.”

“Were you able to fix a location for the ground radio? Where are they?”

“I don’t have a precise location.  It was line-of-site from the drone to its ground control, and there are mountains in between.  I estimate fifteen to twenty kilometers southwest, over.”

“That’s the best you can do for a location, over?”

“Sí, Comandante.  The drone’s radio is no longer transmitting, but it was sending from the azimuth 220 degrees from here, over.”

Ramos redirected his words via intercom to the pilot in front of him. “Puma 1, did you copy that location?”

“Yes sir,” responded the helicopter pilot, nodding his helmeted head a yard in front of the Comandante.  “Range is fifteen to twenty kilometers, along the bearing two-two-zero degrees.”

“That’s right, now let’s go!  Puma 1 and 2, we will begin to search for the transmitter.  Puma 3 and 4, you will orbit above the ranch center, above the meeting places.  But be alert: this drone might have been a diversion, to pull us away.”

The two Blackhawks on the right side of the apron pulled pitch on their already spinning rotors, their tails rose, they began to roll forward and in moments, they were lifting skyward and banking to the Southwest. Ahead of them, mountain ridges rose thousands of feet above their ground level, to a maximum height of over eleven thousand feet.  Their quarry was only a matter of minutes away, if they could locate them in the search area Teniente Almeria had provided, before they escaped.

The helicopters passed in front of Wayne Parker’s stone mansion at an altitude of four hundred feet above ground level.  Ramos briefly observed the Very Important Persons, gathered on the wide reception gallery overlooking the pastoral valley and its alpine lake.  On the radio, he heard (in English) that the drone had crashed, “resulting in one fatality.” Although the Falcons were serving as the Quick Reaction Force, the actual security around the VIPs was being provided by gringos, private “contractors” paid by Wayne Parker. How the crash of an unmanned drone could result in a fatality was a complete mystery to the Comandante.  A long line of SUVs and vans were pulling into the driveway in front of the mansion, while men in dark suits and a few women in shimmering dresses scurried for vehicles, crouching among their bodyguards.  Whatever had happened with the drone had evidently been enough to spoil the party.  

The pair of Blackhawks continued to climb for altitude, and in a few minutes they crested a treeless ridgeline, and dipped into the first of a series of valleys.  The two helicopters flew abreast, spread apart by one kilometer, to be able to search a wider corridor on their first pass.  It would be a miracle if they could find the transmitter team in this rugged terrain, now that their radio had gone silent.  As long as they flew along the bearing of 220 degrees, they might find something, perhaps a vehicle, or a squad of men hiking out.  Of course, if their adversaries committed an error and made another radio transmission, they would be located almost instantly. This was Comandante Ramos’s greatest hope.  

Behind him, the ten Falcons from Beta Platoon’s 1
^st
Squad sat strapped to the aluminum and canvas seats, armed and eager for action, the troop doors all the way back to permit a rapid egress upon landing.  Puma 1’s crew chief and gunner sat on each side of the Comandante facing outboard, wearing green aviation helmets with their visors down, and also connected on the intercom.  Their gloved hands clutched the twin vertical
grips of their external pintle-mounted M-60D machine guns, as they leaned out through their square gunners’ ports, searching for targets.  A green steel box full of linked ammunition was racked up on the mount beside each machine gun, ready to fire.

***

Aboard the Cessna Centurion,
the encrypted radio transmissions between the Falcon officers and the Blackhawk pilots had been heard as squeals and static.  Logan attempted to decrypt the noise into intelligible speech, but he was unsuccessful.  The frequency being used and the length of the comms told them that the state guard Blackhawks were on the alert, and might even now be on the hunt—for them.  The Pelican’s laptops and radio were hurriedly disconnected, and the men slid them into soft cases, and passed them over to the rear of the aircraft.  

While the UAV had been aloft, they had seen the Blackhawks parked in a line outside of the main jet hangar, and had seen the troops waiting around them.  If the helicopters were now searching from the air, their pilots would not know precisely what they were looking for, but a white airplane parked on a straight road would certainly draw their interest.

With recovering the destroyed Pelican UAV no longer a concern, the men rushed to reinstall the right side door while Ranya stood guard, with the Dragunov across her chest at port arms.  Just before they could all climb back into the Cessna, they heard the distant rumble of rotors beating the air, and the whine of turbines.  The Blackhawks!  The three conspirators froze in place by the plane, as the sound of the helicopters grew louder and closer, and then actually passed over them, crossing their hidden road at an angle, one on each side of them.  Parked beneath the thick cover of the concealing spruce and maples, they never saw the helicopters in that narrow slice of blue sky between the pine branches directly above them, but there was no mistaking their hostile intent.

***

“Falcon Leader, this is Puma 2. 
We’re at twenty kilometers from base now. What are your instructions, over?”

Ramos considered his next move.  He had great faith in Lieutenant Almeria’s expertise at radio direction finding.  Someone had been transmitting from this area.  Perhaps because of the intervening mountains, Almeria was slightly off in either his range or bearing, or both.  “Puma 1 and 2, return along the same azimuth, but let’s open our separation distance to two kilometers, over.”

“Roger, Falcon leader.”

Both helicopters banked and circled outward, until they were again running on parallel tracks, but now back toward Wayne Parker’s runway and hangars.

***

They waited for the sound
of the helicopters to fade.  They were unsure if they should prepare to take off in the plane, or get ready to run into the forest, to try to escape and evade on foot.  The men were climbing into the airplane when the whining turbines and thumping rotor noises once again began to build.  Even through the trees, the sound of the Doppler shift of the Blackhawk engines made it clear that the helicopters were coming back for another pass.  

None of them spoke or moved.  They were three rabbits cowering under the shadows of eagles, in mortal fear of being seen or heard.  Once again, the rumble of the rotors and the scream of the turbines passed down either side of them.  Once again, by pure good fortune, they were spared the straight-down view that would have immediately betrayed the gleaming white wings and fuselage of the Cessna.  Once again they waited, almost afraid to breathe, as the helicopters passed them by and continued toward the north.

***

“Puma 1, this is Puma 2.
  What’s that between us, over?”

The pilot of Ramos’s helicopter replied, “Puma 2, that’s an old copper mine.  Do you see something there?”  He had a folded air map in a clear plastic envelope, Velcroed to his thigh.

“Uh, negative 1, but there are some buildings and sheds down below. They could be hiding our targets.  Falcon Leader, request permission to land and search them, over.”

Ramos squeezed the intercom switch on his wire lead, and replied, “Roger Puma 2, go ahead if you have enough space to land.  Don’t take any chances if it looks too tight.  I see some poles and wires, use caution. We’ll orbit in case you flush anyone into the open, over.”

Puma 2 hovered above the rutted dirt and weed-filled clearing between corrugated metal sheds and abandoned machinery.  Rusty cranes, derricks, pipes, pumps and gantries cluttered the level area along the flank of the mountainside.  An old asphalt road curved downward from the edge of the mountain past the abandoned mine pits, then ran straight for a few hundred meters, and disappeared into the thick pine forest that covered most of the mountain.  At an altitude of 100 meters above the ground, the pilot rotated his craft through 360 degrees above the clearing.  The pilots and the crew were scanning for obstacles that might impede the landing. When they were satisfied with the landing zone, the pilot began to settle the bird down.  Meanwhile Puma 1 circled overhead in a tight racetrack, banking tightly over their comrades with a clatter of rotor noise.

***

“Oh shit, they’re back! Now we’re screwed!”
  Logan stood by the open left-side door of the Cessna, gasping.  “They can’t miss us now—they must know we’re here, they must have seen us!”

Their airplane was concealed in a leafy tunnel, facing back out the way they had taxied in, a hundred yards from the edge of the woods.  The sound and vibration of nearby helicopter blades instilled terror into them.