“I’ll let you know when I reach my limit.”
Slowly, Laramie stood, lifted the bag she’d brought, and plopped it on the table.
“Here’s the intel on your target. The man I told you about will be in touch to handle your logistics, so be available through the number at your hotel. I’ll be in touch also, since, among other reasons, we’ll need to sort out the way we communicate during your trip.”
Cooper offered his commanding officer a salute from his seat at the table.
Laramie threw back her own unenthusiastic smile.
“Break a leg,” she said.
Then Laramie crossed the street to her car and started in on the drive back to the Flamingo Inn.
47
Despite its preponderance of crashes, the MU-2B turboprop cargo plane remained a favorite among drug runners, its high-capacity cargo bay and relatively fast and quiet engines still managing to do the trick for regional dope-transit duties nearly thirty years past its birth date. Plus, the plane also happened to be one of the primary aircraft used by FEMA, the Red Cross, and numerous other international aid organizations-meaning that if you chose your routes carefully, there was a pretty good chance an MU-2B full of cannabis would be ignored by the semiomnipresent U.S. Coast Guard AWACS and P-3 Orion airborne antidrug phalanx.
It also meant that on one particular, startlingly humid night in the moonless skies east of San Salvador, the unmarked, privately owned and cash-leased MU-2B droning by at twelve thousand feet would not have appeared as anything out of the ordinary-just another, technically illegal but government-ignored dope harvest making its way to an equally ignored processing plant along the country’s northern border.
Cooper separated from the MU-2B by way of the rear cargo door. Outfitted and equipped all but identically to the way he’d gone in the last time around, he reflected as the wind slammed him in the face that the only real difference between this dive and the last was that he was doing it solo-that and the fact that he’d aged a century in the nineteen years since that first airborne diplomatic overture to a Central American head of state.
Less than a minute later, he landed-brutally.
Coming into a stand of trees he hadn’t seen in the darkness-or maybe he hadn’t seen them because his eyesight just plain sucked, and any paratrooper worth his ass would have been capable of avoiding a crash landing with a simple glance downward-Cooper spotted the tall trees a second too late, and plowed right into them while still trying to maneuver away. This caused an instant of confusion-he hesitated in switching from steering to landing mode, and the hesitation resulted in a direct impact with the trunk of the first of the trees in the stand. He struck the tree square, a silent, invisible battering ram that pummeled him in one smack, his body absorbing the crushing blow more or less equally from head to toe. He felt more than heard a muted crunch, thinking it was somewhere near his pelvis, maybe a hip-but there wasn’t enough pain for the noise to be that of a broken bone.
Utterly out of air, he tried to grab hold of his straps, and managed to un-clip one of the parachute strings in the process. He dropped fifteen feet without any resistance and came to an instant midair halt. Finding, upon regaining his wind, that it seemed he was dangling sideways maybe twenty feet from the floor of the forest-held in place by a single string connecting him to the entangled parachute.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.
He considered with grave seriousness that if this was his opening act, then he probably ought to turn his gun on himself now-or maybe make a run for the nearest airport and stow his way into a luggage hold to get the hell out of here.
Once his eyes adjusted, he was able to see some of what the landing pad below had to offer. It didn’t look too painful-mostly low-lying bushes, maybe featuring thorns, maybe not, but certainly looking less deadly than a sidewalk or log. He swung for a minute on the string, orienting his body for a feet-first landing, then went for it, unlatching the clip. He hit the bushes hard but bounced in a kind of rolling corkscrew, the twigs, stickers, leaves and flowers bracing his fall in trampoline fashion as he found himself, when all was said and done, on his back, earthbound and unbroken.
If he’d landed near where he intended to, he knew he could find the road he was looking for about one mile to the west. On the satellite shots provided by Laramie’s guide, the road had appeared to be a logging trail-cleared sufficiently for trucks to travel back and forth through the woods with their lumber haul but no more developed than that.
Cooper reached into one of the zippered pouches of his jumpsuit. Laramie’s guide had provided him with a portable GPS device of the sort they’d used in Cuba, and he was keeping his satellite phone in the pouch too. Something poked through his skin as he felt around the pouch. He shone his Maglite inside it, only to discover the source of the crunching noise: his collision with the tree had shattered his GPS unit and sat phone.
“Nice work, there, hotshot,” he murmured.
He still had at his disposal a fancy-dancy, luminescent-dial wrist compass-also provided by Laramie’s guide-and found that on the other wrist, his plain old wristwatch seemed to remain in working order.
He used the compass to pick his direction and set out through the woods, encountering, twenty-six minutes later, twin tracks he figured for the logging road. He headed north, setting out at a jog in the relative blackness along the road. It was mostly downhill, which was good; the path was more overgrown than he’d expected, Cooper needing to high-step it most of the way despite the occasional bald-earth truck tracks underfoot. He timed himself based on a slightly slower pace than what he typically ran on the beach; he had only his watch by which to clock the run, but he’d run varying distances on enough different surfaces to know pretty much what his pace would be. He would run for an hour-five miles, if all went well.
At the end of his hour-long jog, he worked his way around for and found a suitable break in the trees and ducked back into the forest. Naples and Conch Bay beach runs notwithstanding, he found he was already winded, with somewhere near half the trek left.
Not good.
He knew from the satellite photographs he’d reviewed that he was four miles from his destination once he made the turn into the woods, but the last four miles would take him through treacherous terrain-thick jungle sloping up a steep mountain. That, he supposed, was the idea: the residence of President Raul Márquez included, along with various other accoutrements, a security perimeter made up of football field-size lawns surrounded by an eight-foot stone wall. The wall jutted up against the mountain range Cooper was about to climb over-a stretch of land impossible to traverse in any vehicle. You could do it on foot, but it wouldn’t be easy.
Something a beach bum should have given more consideration to.
A “source,” which Cooper assumed was dubious at best, had provided Márquez’s weekly schedule to Laramie’s guide. The schedule had apparently been circulated among the various wings of the Salvadoran government. President Márquez had supposedly hosted a Chilean diplomat for dinner at his home five hours ago; he was destined for a session of his cabinet tomorrow, with a press conference to follow, beginning at ten in the morning. The cabinet meeting and press conference were taking place forty-five miles from his residence. Meaning if Cooper was going to nab him under the cover of night, he had until dawn-otherwise he’d be camping in the jungle somewhere near the estate until Márquez returned from his cabinet business and whatever else was on the docket for the day.