Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (22 page)

The MH-53J left Eglin Air Force Base at about the same time, all of its fuel tanks topped off after engine warm-up.  Colonel Johns took it to one thousand feet and a course of two-one-five for the Yucatan Channel.  Three hours out, an MC-130E Combat Talon tanker/support aircraft caught up with the Pave Low, and Johns decided to let the captain handle the midair refueling.  They'd have to tank thrice more, and the tanker would accompany them all the way down, bringing a maintenance and support crew and spare parts.

“Ready to plug,” PJ told the tanker commander.

“Roger,” answered Captain Montaigne in the MC-130E, holding the aircraft straight and level.

Johns watched Willis ease the nose probe into the drogue. “Okay, we got plug.”

In the cockpit of the -130E, Captain Montaigne took note of the indicator light and keyed the microphone. “Ohhh!” she said in her huskiest voice. “Nobody does it like you, Colonel!”

Johns laughed out loud and keyed his switch twice, generating a click-click signal, which meant Affirmative.  He switched to intercom. “Why spoil it for her?” he asked Willis, who was regrettably straitlaced.  The fuel transfer took six minutes.

“How long do you think we'll be down there?” Captain Willis wondered after it was done.

“They didn't tell me that, but if it goes too long, they say we'll get relief.”

“That's nice,” the captain observed.  His eyes shifted back and forth from his flight instruments to the world outside the armored cockpit.  The aircraft had more than its full load of combat gear aboard—Johns was a firm believer in firepower—and the electronic countermeasures racks were gone.  Whatever they'd be doing, they wouldn't have to worry about unfriendly radar coverage, and that meant that the job, whatever it was, didn't involve
Nicaragua
or
Cuba
.  It also made for more passenger room in the aircraft and deleted the second flight engineer from the crew. “You were right about the gloves.  My wife made up a set and it does make a difference.”

“Some guys just fly without 'em, but I don't like to have sweaty hands on the stick.”

“Is it going to be that warm?”

“There's warm, and there's warm,” Johns pointed out. “You don't get sweaty hands just from the outside temperature.”

“Oh.  Yes, sir.” Gee, he gets scared, too—just like the rest of us?

“Like I keep telling people, the more thinking you do before things get exciting, the less exciting things will be.  And they get plenty exciting enough.”

Another voice came onto the intercom circuit: “You keep talking like that, sir, and we might get a little scared.”

“Sergeant Zimmer, how are things in the back?” Johns asked.  Zimmer's regular spot was just aft of the two pilots, hovering over an impressive array of instruments.

“Coffee, tea, or milk, sir?  The meals for this flight are Chicken Kiev with rice, Roast Beef au Jus with baked potato, and for the weight-watchers among us, Orange Ruffy and stir-fried veggies—and if you believe that, sir, you've been staring at the instrument panel too long.  Why the hell don't we have a stewardess along with us?”

“ 'Cause you and I are both too old for that shit, Zimmer!” PJ laughed.

“It ain't bad in a chopper, sir.  What with all the vibration and all . . .”

“I've been trying to reform him since Korat,” Johns explained to Captain Willis. “How old are the kids now, Buck?”

“Seventeen, fifteen, twelve, nine, six, five, and three, sir.”

“Christ,” Willis noted. “Your wife must be some gal, Sarge.”

“She's afraid I'll run around, so she robs me of my energy,” Zimmer explained. “I fly to get away from her.  It's the only thing that keeps me alive.”

“Her cooking must be all right, judging by your uniform.”

“Is the colonel picking on his sergeant again?” Zimmer asked.

“Not exactly.  I just want you to look as good as Carol does.”

“No chance, sir.”

“Roger that.  Some coffee would be nice.”

“On the way, Colonel, sir.” Zimmer was on the flight deck in less than a minute.  The instrument console for the Pave Low helicopter was large and complex, but Zimmer had long since installed gimbaled cup holders suitable for the spillproof cups that Colonel Johns liked.  PJ took a quick sip.

“She makes good coffee, too, Buck.”

“Funny how things work out, isn't it?” Carol Zimmer knew that her husband would share it with his colonel.  Carol wasn't her original given name.  Born in
Laos
thirty-six years earlier, she was the daughter of a Hmong warlord who'd fought long and hard for a country that was no longer his.  She was the only survivor of a family of ten.  PJ and Buck had lifted her and a handful of others off a hilltop at the final stages of a North Vietnamese assault in 1972. 
America
had failed that man's family, but at least it hadn't failed his daughter.  Zimmer had fallen in love with her from the first moment, and it was generally agreed that they had the seven cutest kids in
Florida
.

“Yep.”

It was late in
Mobile
, somewhere between the two southbound aircraft, and jails—especially Southern jails—are places where the rules are strictly applied.  For lawyers, however, the rules are often rather lenient, and paradoxically they were very lenient indeed in the case of these two.  These two had an as—yet—undetermined date with “Old Sparky,” the electric chair at Admore Prison.  The jailors at
Mobile
therefore didn't want to do anything to interfere with the prisoners' constitutional rights, access to counsel, or general comfort.  The attorney, whose name was Edward Stuart, had been fully briefed going in, and was fully fluent in Spanish.

“How did they do it?”

“I don't know.”

“You screamed and kicked, Ramón,” Jesús said.

“I know.  And you sang like a canary.”

“It doesn't matter,” the attorney told them. “They're not charging you with anything but drug-related murder and piracy.  The information Jesús gave them is not being used at all in this case.”

“So do your lawyer shit and get us off!”

The look on Stuart's face was all the response either man needed.

“You tell our friends that if we don't get off on this one, we start talking.”

The jail guards had already told both men in loving detail what fate had in store for them.  One had even shown Ramón a poster of the chair itself with the caption
REGULAR OR EXTRA CRISPY
.  Though a hard man and a brutal one, the idea of being strapped into a hard-backed wooden chair, then having a copper band affixed to his left leg, and a small metal cap set on a bald spot that the prison barber would shave on his head the day before, and the small sponge soaked in a saline solution to facilitate electrical conductivity, the leather mask to keep his eyes from flying out of his head . . . Ramón was a brave man when he had the upper hand, and that hand held a gun or a knife directed at an unarmed or bound person.  Then he was quite brave.  It had never occurred to him that one day he might be the helpless one.  Ramón had lost five pounds in the preceding week.  His appetite was virtually nil and he took an inordinate interest in light bulbs and wall sockets.  He was afraid, but more than that he was angry, at himself for his fear, at the guards and police for giving him that fear, and at his former associates for not getting him free of this mess.

“I know many things, many useful things.”

“It does not matter.  I have spoken with the federales, and they do not care what you know.  The U.S. Attorney claims to have no interest in what you might tell him.”

“That is ridiculous.  They always trade for information, they always—”

“Not here.  The rules have changed.”

“What do you tell us?”

“I will do my best for you.” I'm supposed to tell you to die like men, Stuart could not say. “There are many things that can happen in the next few weeks.”

The attorney was rewarded with skeptical expressions not entirely devoid of hope.  He himself had no hope at all.  The U.S. Attorney was going to handle this one himself, the better to get his face on the
5:30
and
11:00
Eyewitness News broadcasts.  This would be a very speedy trial, and a U.S. Senate seat would be available in just over two years.  So much the better that the prosecutor could point to his law-and-order record.  Frying some druggie-pirate-rapist-murderers would surely appeal to the citizens of the sovereign state of
Alabama
, Stuart knew.  The defense attorney objected to capital punishment on principle, and had spent much of his time and money working against it.  He'd successfully taken one case to the Supreme Court and on a five-to-four decision managed to get his client a new trial, where the death sentence had been bargained down to life plus ninety-nine years.  Stuart regarded that as a victory even though his client had survived precisely four months in the prison's general population until someone who disliked child-murderers had put a shank into his lumbar spine.  He didn't have to like his clients—and most often he didn't.  He was occasionally afraid of them, especially the drug runners.  They quite simply expected that in return for however much cash—it was generally cash—they paid for his services they would get their freedom in return.  They did not understand that in law there are no guarantees, especially for the guilty.  And these two were guilty as hell.  But they did not deserve death.  Stuart was convinced that society could not afford to debase itself to the level of . . . his clients.  It was not a popular opinion in the South, but Stuart had no ambition to run for public office.

In any case, he was their lawyer, and his job was to provide them with the best possible defense.  He'd already explored the chances of a plea-bargain; life imprisonment in exchange for information.  He'd already examined the government's case.  It was all circumstantial—there were no witnesses except his own clients, of course—but the physical evidence was formidable, and that Coast Guard crew had scrupulously left the crime scene intact except for removing some evidence, all of which had been carefully locked up for a proper chain-of-evidence.  Whoever had briefed and trained those people had done it right.  Not much hope there.  His only real hope, therefore, was to impeach their credibility.  It was a slim hope, but it was the best he had.

Supervisory Special Agent Mark Bright was also working late.  The crew had been busy.  For starters there had been an office and a home to search, a lengthy procedure that was just the opening move in a process to last months, probably, since all the documents found, all the phone numbers scribbled in any of eleven places, all the photographs on desks and walls, and everything else found would have to be investigated.  Every business acquaintance of the deceased would be interviewed, along with neighbors, people whose offices adjoined his, members of his country club, and even parishioners at his church.  For all that, the major break in the case had come in the second hour of the fourth home search, fully a month after the case had begun.  Something had told them all that there had to be something else.  In his den, the deceased had a floor safe—with no record of its purchase or installation—neatly hidden by an untacked segment of the wall-to-wall carpeting.  Discovering it had required thirty-two days.  Tickling it open took nearly ninety minutes, but an experienced agent had done it by first experimenting with the birthdays of the deceased's whole family, then playing variations on the theme.  It turned out that the three-element combination came from taking the month of the man's birth and adding one, taking the day of his birth and adding two, then taking the year of his birth and adding three.  The door of the expensive Mosler came open with a whisper as it rubbed against the rug flap.

No money, no jewels, no letter to his attorney.  Inside the safe had been five computer disks of a type compatible with the businessman's IBM personal computer.  That told the agents all they wanted.  Bright had at once taken the disks and the deceased's computer to his office, which was also equipped with IBM-compatible machines.  Mark Bright was a good investigator, which meant that he was a patient one.  His first move had been to call a local computer expert who assisted the FBI from time to time.  A freelance software consultant, he'd first protested that he was busy, but he'd only needed to hear that there was a major criminal investigation underway to settle that.  Like many such people who informally assist the FBI, he found police work most exciting, though not quite exciting enough to take a full-time job for the FBI Laboratory.  Government service didn't come close to paying what he earned on the outside.  Bright had anticipated his first instruction: bring in the man's own computer and hard-disk.

After first making exact copies of the five disks using a program called C
HASTITY
B
ELT
, he had Bright store the originals while he went to work on the copies.  The disks were encrypted, of course.  There were many ways of accomplishing that, and the consultant knew them all.  As he and Bright had anticipated, the encrypting algorithm was permanently stored on the deceased's hard disk.  From that point it was merely a question of what option and what personal encrypting key had been used to secure the data on the disks.  That took nine nonstop hours, with Bright feeding coffee and sandwiches to his friend and wondering why he did it all for free.

“Gotcha!” A scruffy hand punched the
PRINT
command, and the office laser printer started humming and disgorging papers.  All five disks were packed with data, totaling over seven hundred single-spaced pages of text.  By the time the third one was printed, the consultant had left.  Bright read it all, over a period of three days.  Then he made six Xerox copies for the other senior agents in the case.  They were now flipping through the pages around the conference table.

“Christ, Mark, this stuff is fantastic!”

“That's what I said.”

“Three hundred million dollars!” another exclaimed. “Christ, I shop there myself . . .”

“What's the total involved?” a third asked more soberly.

“I just skimmed through this stuff,” Bright answered, “but I got close to seven hundred million.  Eight shopping malls spread from
Fort Worth
to
Atlanta
.  The investments go through eleven different corporations, twenty-three banks, and—”