State of Emergency

DETONATION

A zest for living must include a willingness to die.



—ROBERT A. HEINLEIN





CHAPTER 65


January 11

0625 Hours





Quinn lay flat on his belly in the shadowy haze of a jungle morning. He ignored a beetle half the size of his hand that scuttled through the dead leaves in front of him. They’d risen well before dawn, braving possible booby traps and venomous creatures, knowing Borregos would want a pickup as close to daybreak as possible. Clouds of steamy fog hung here and there among the various layers of canopy. Two troops of monkeys, apparently angry at the intruding airplane, screamed from opposite ends of a grass runway. Night birds gave their last few shrieks before sunup. Egrets and other early birds squawked and flitted in the branches.

Aleksandra lay beside him, green eyes burning a hole in the foliage. Dense cover had allowed them to get within a few meters of a wooden supply shack off the side of the dirt runway hacked out of the jungle.

His initial assessment of eight men looked correct. Borregos stood at the aft of a Cessna Caravan supervising two younger men as they struggled to get a long green footlocker into the swinging cargo door. An older man, bald and much thinner than the drug lord, stood at the tail of the plane.

“The Bone Mother,” Aleksandra whispered. “We cannot let them leave.”

“I don’t intend to,” Quinn said, eyes darting around the narrow clearing.

The professor’s face was visible leaning against a forward window in the aircraft. Apart from the four at the aircraft, four more of Borregos’s men stood guard, each taking a corner and facing outbound into the jungle. The one nearest Quinn was less than thirty meters away, to his right. A Kalashnikov clutched in his hand, he looked capable enough, peering into the wall of foliage in front of him. He wore sunglasses, so it was difficult to see which way he was looking. On his belt was a Glock pistol with a set of extra magazines, much like a police officer would wear on duty. A rectangular pouch on his left hip, opposite his pistol, held extra magazines for the rifle. The long sleeves of his camouflage uniform blouse were rolled neatly over muscled forearms.

Quinn took a quick moment to study the other three. All were similarly armed; two looked much younger and one had a full beard with black hair that stuck out from under a green Castro-style cap. None were as squared-away as the professional soldier to Quinn’s right. This one was the type to clean his weapon every night and practice weekly because he enjoyed the smell of gunfire.

Quinn didn’t want a man like this shooting at him while he worked and the only way to see that didn’t happen was to take him out at the beginning.

He cocked his head toward Aleksandra, keeping his eye on the soldier. “Five rounds against a squad of eight well-armed men,” he said. “I’ll need two for what I have in mind. You take the other three along with this.” He gingerly slid the grenade from the booby trap out of the length of bamboo, keeping his hand around the compressed spoon. “We need to get this under the plane. I’ll get into place and cover you. You count to sixty and start shoot—”

The Caravan’s single Pratt & Whitney engine began to whine to life, the prop slowly catching up to the spinning turbine until whirred contentedly.

“Better make that twenty,” Quinn said, already scuttling backwards.

Her mouth hung open. “You only have two bullets.”

“And I hope that’s one more than I need.”





Quinn moved quickly through the brush, thankful now for the rising whine of the aircraft engine. The three other guards looked back and forth at each other in the orange light, eager to give up their posts and make a run for the plane. But the professional soldier stood fast, manning his station until properly relieved.

In order for this to work Quinn needed the soldier DRT—dead right there. He’d seen too many fighters on both sides of a battle absorb a great deal of lead only to keep fighting long past the time they should go down. He needed a target that would ensure that didn’t happen.

The moment Aleksandra fired her first shot Quinn rose up from the vines and bushes, approaching from the side, moving obliquely. The soldier spun toward the racket, bringing his rifle to bear and firing as Quinn moved up behind him less than five yards away.

Intent on firing his weapon at the threat to the aircraft, the soldier never heard the real danger padding up behind him. Ten feet out, Quinn let the front sight of his pistol float over a spot at the base of the man’s skull. He squeezed the trigger twice, using both rounds.

Borregos’s soldier fell in the peculiar corkscrew motion of someone shot in the brainstem, one leg folding before the other did. Quinn dropped the empty 1911 and was on him before he hit the ground. He scooped up the rifle and let the soldier fall away, leaving himself clear to engage the other guards. He was relieved to see one of Aleksandra’s shots drop the guard with the beard and Fidel Castro hat.

A man on the plane leaned out to pull up the boarding door. Quinn sent him tumbling onto the ground with two quick rounds to the chest. Incoming fire from one of the other sentries sent Quinn diving for cover as the pilot spun the Caravan and threw on the power, causing it to gain speed quickly since it was five people lighter than expected.

Quinn returned fire carefully, counting his shots and expecting the weapon to run dry at any moment. For all his professional demeanor, the dead soldier had used up much of his magazine in the first full-auto burst to protect the Caravan.

Scanning over the top of the rifle sights, Quinn tried to figure out what Aleksandra was doing with the grenade. A booming concussion answered his question. Shrapnel screamed through the air, rattling through the jungle leaves. For a split second a blossom of black smoke and falling debris obscured the Caravan’s tail.

To Quinn’s horror the plane kept rolling unaffected by the blast or the rounds. Aleksandra continued to engage the two surviving sentries while Quinn focused on the rapidly departing Caravan. With the engine pointed away he aimed for the thin walls of the fuselage, hoping to throw enough rounds into the avionics to stop them. If he was lucky he’d hit the pilot. Two rounds later, he was empty.

The plane continued to roll, picking up speed with every yard down the grass strip. It was airborne in a matter of moments, banking hard right to get beyond the trees. Quinn ran for the downed soldier, ignoring the bullets that thwacked the dirt at his feet as he grabbed for a fresh magazine on the dead man’s belt.

Aleksandra silenced the last sentry with a commandeered rifle at the same moment the Caravan disappeared over the treetops.

Quinn stood in the middle of the clearing wrapped in stunned silence. He held the freshly loaded Kalashnikov to his shoulder, though there was nothing to shoot at but air. By degree, the shrieks and chatter of the jungle crept back to normal as if the gunfight had never happened and Borregos’s plane had not just flown away carrying a five-kiloton atomic bomb.