The Raider slowed until it was just floating in midair over the landing pad, the engine vibrating but the helicopter motionless. Jessica reached up and pushed the red switch to activate stealth mode, scrambling communications with Tampa and, she hoped, vanishing from Cuban radar screens. The plan assumed that the Cuban military tracking incoming American flights would conclude that the helicopter had landed at the base. Nothing to see here.
Jessica followed the next step in the plan, turning the Raider to the south and accelerating forward at low altitude. Within seconds, she was over the fence line and in Cuban airspace. Jessica was flying straight for the drop point with Charlie Three, an isolated location nestled within the hills of Baconao Park adjacent to the naval base.
“ETA four minutes, Alpha Nine Nine,” said the voice in her headset.
“Roger that. Four minutes, Whiskey Base Seven.”
Unlike the bright lights of the naval base, the park was pitch-black. Jessica could barely see the ground with the naked eye, relying instead on the Raider’s night vision capabilities to fly low and fast.
After three and a half minutes, Jessica tapped her ear again. “Approaching Charlie Three.”
“Roger that, Alpha Nine Nine. We see you. We’re putting you back in a ten-foot hover.”
The target was blinking on her navigation screen and the helicopter slowed to a midair halt.
“Roger, Whiskey Base Seven,” she said. Jessica then reached up to the red stealth switch above her head and rubbed it between her fingers. She looked out the window into a total void of light. Jessica couldn’t see anything, but she knew Charlie was down there somewhere.
“I see movement on the ground. Whiskey Base Seven, can you confirm that’s Charlie Three?”
“Checking now, Alpha Nine Nine. Stand by.”
“Negative,” she said. “Whiskey, I’m going full black.”
“Negative, Alpha Nine Nine. Repeat, negative. We advise—”
Jessica clicked the switch down, cutting off her copilot in Tampa in midsentence. She then reached down underneath her seat, feeling for the box and the connecting wire. She gripped it tight.
“Good-bye, Whiskey,” she said, and released a guttural roar as she ripped the cable out of the floor. She examined the purple wire, limp in her hand, and then tossed it behind her, satisfied she now had full control of the Raider.
Jessica pushed back her sleeve to read the new coordinates written on her arm. She typed them into the navigation system and then spun the nose of the Raider to the east.
“Sorry, Charlie,” she said aloud as she pitched the helicopter forward and shot off.
74.
DOWNTOWN WASHINGTON, D.C.
FRIDAY, 11:42 P.M.
The Deputy Director flipped up the collars on his jacket and pulled the Nationals baseball cap lower on his head. It had been stupid to risk exposure at a high-profile hotel like the Willard InterContinental, just a stone’s throw from the White House. He cursed himself for his weakness. And at a time like this.
The lobby of the Willard was full of foreign agents and, boy, would they love to have spotted him here. How many times had his operatives found valuable information in the walls and wires of that very building. The same hotel where Abraham Lincoln had stayed, where Martin Luther King, Jr., had written his famous “I have a dream” speech, where countless business deals, foreign plots, even revolutions, had been hatched.
But he couldn’t allow his own activities at the Willard that evening to become part of history. The secret cables back to Moscow, Caracas, Beijing, London—they all had to be clean.
She had insisted on a suite at the Willard, one she promised had been arranged for inconspicuously. With a few basic precautions, no one would ever know. It was safer than risking a U.S. park policeman knocking on the fogged-up window of a Cadillac Escalade. So they had arrived separately, through different doors, and taken distinct paths to the suite. Now that it was time to leave, he had changed his clothes and departed first, taking the elevator down two floors, then a flight of the stairs, then crossed the hallway and took another elevator. Once on ground level, the doors opened with a cheery ding. He brushed his shoulders and double-checked his fly.
The Deputy Director walked briskly, making no eye contact with the clusters of businessmen, diplomats, and tourists milling around the lobby. He reached the main revolving door facing Pennsylvania Avenue, pushed hard, and, without slowing down, jumped into a taxi and sped off.
He knew that someone in that lobby would have killed to spy a juicy nugget like the Deputy Director of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency slinking out of a downtown hotel late on a Friday night. He would have to be more careful once he was CIA Director. And even more so if he became DNI. He was warming to that idea.
For now, the Deputy Director was just grateful that no one had recognized him in the lobby. And he hoped, in five minutes or so, that no one would recognize the nine-term congresswoman from Florida either.
75.
OFFSHORE EASTERN CUBA
FRIDAY, 11:44 P.M.