This chopper wasn't equipped with a door gun, but they had pulled the weapon from the one damaged in the explosion and concocted a makeshift mount using straps threaded through eyelets in the ceiling. Jimenez stood behind it now, watching the RHIB grow larger and clearer in his sights. Just a few seconds more and he'd tear away the back of the boat. While one of the thieves drove, the other watched the approaching helo with a machine pistol tucked up hard against his shoulder. The third man was flat on the deck, either dead or wounded. Either way, he didn't appear to be moving.
Ever since his boyhood, Raul Jimenez had loved to hunt. He'd made his first slingshot out of tubing and a forked piece of wood, and killed birds by the hundreds around his family's farm. With his first rifle, a gift on his tenth birthday, he went after larger and larger prey until taking a jaguar from a hunting blind with a nearly seven-hundred-yard shot his companions said couldn't be made.
But on the day he killed his first man, a deserter who then-Captain Espinoza had told him to track, Jimenez knew he would never find satisfaction hunting mere animals again. He had stalked the deserter for five days through some of the toughest jungle Argentina has to offer. The deserter had been wily, and made the hunt the best of Jimenez's life, but in the end nothing could keep him from his prey, and the man had died despite his cunning.
Jimenez felt that same sense of satisfaction as he lined up the sights on the black RHIB. Just as he squeezed the Browning's trigger, the nimble boat cut sharply, and the heavy .30 caliber rounds peppered the water, turning it into a constellation of tiny white fountains.
He cursed, lined up, and fired again. It was as if the driver fifty feet below was reading his mind because the bullets arrowed into the river off the RHIB's port flank. He was certain the boat would dodge left this time and let loose a hammering string of tracers. And like before, the driver outwitted him by veering farther right, going under the helicopter and emerging on its blind side.
Spin around, Jimenez shouted into his headset. Give me an angle.
The pilot pushed hard on the rudder, pivoting the Eurocopter on its axes as it continued to race up the river. It was flying almost sideways, crabbing across the sky, but more than able to keep up with the speeding RHIB.
In the three seconds Jimenez had lost sight of the boat, the man he thought was injured had gotten to one knee. Behind him was an open space in the deck that had been a covered storage locker. On the man's shoulder sat an ominous dark tube pointed straight at the chopper. The range was less than two hundred feet.
Jimenez and the man holding the rocket moved at the same time. Mike Trono lit off the Stinger missile the same instant the Argentine soldier unclipped his safety harness. The rocket's infrared system only had a fraction of a second to come to life, find the heat plume billowing from the helicopter's exhaust, and make a minute adjustment. Jimenez leapt from the chopper just before the missile slammed into the turbine housing directly below the spinning rotor. The six-pound warhead detonated. The bulk of the engine saved Jimenez's life, but he was still caught in a flaming overpressure wave that ignited his clothing and slammed him into the water as if he'd jumped from twice the height. Had he not landed feetfirst in the roiling waves churned up by the RHIB's outboards, the impact would have been no different than landing on cement. The water extinguished his burning uniform and prevented the burns on his face and hands from going past second-degree. He came thrusting back to the surface, coughing up a lungful of river, his skin feeling like it had been dipped in acid.
Fifty feet ahead of him, the Eurocopter crashed into the river, smoke pouring out the doors and blown-apart windshield. Jimenez didn't have time to fill his lungs, as the craft tipped and the rotors hit the water. They came apart like shattering glass, shards of composite material filling the air. Several skimmed across the river surface inches above Jimenez's head and would have decapitated him had he not ducked under the waves.
Through the water he could see flames licking at the chopper's shattered carcass, a wavy, ethereal light that silhouetted the pilot still strapped in his seat. The dead man's arms swayed in the current like tendrils of kelp.
He struggled to the surface once again, the roar of fire filling his ears. Of the RHIB, there was no sign, and with the chopper down and the border patrol's two Whalers destroyed the thieves had a straight run to Paraguay. As he started the painful swim to shore, his burned hands screaming with every stroke, Lieutenant Jimenez could only hope they would be stopped before they could sneak across.
NICE SHOT, JUAN SHOUTED as the Argentine helicopter fell from the sky in their wake.
That was for Jerry, Trono said, laying the Stinger on the deck to reload it with the second missile stored in one of boat's several secret weapons caches. Mark Murphy was at the bows, watching for anyone else coming at them. He asked, Are we still going to stick to the original plan?
Cabrillo thought about it for a moment. Yeah, he replied. Better safe than sorry. The cost of the RHIB will just become one more line item in the CIA's black budget.
While Juan continued to drive, and Mark acted as lookout, Mike prepared for the final part of the operation, so when they finally cut the engines five miles from the border with Paraguay all their equipment was ready. The men slipped into their wet suits again and strapped the bulky Draeger sets to their backs. Juan overfilled his buoyancy compensators because he would be carrying the power cell.
After slicing open the remaining air bladders ringing the boat, they opened the sea cocks. The RHIB began sinking by the stern, dragged under by her heavy engines. They waited aboard her even after she slipped under the surface, making sure she settled on the bottom. The current had pushed them south another quarter mile, but they needed to ensure the boat stayed under. The bottom of the river this close to the bank was a jumbled snarl of rotting trees. They tied off the bow painter line to one of the more sturdy limbs and then started northward, propelled through the water by near-silent dive scooters.
Fighting the current, it took them the better part of two hours to reach the border, and another two until they judged it safe to surface. The scooters' batteries were on their last bit of power and the rebreathers nearly depleted. But they'd made it.
The men took a break before starting out on the six-hour slog back to the elevated hut they had slept in thirty-six hours ago. There they had stashed a small aluminum boat with a motor that they had towed into place with the RHIB.
When they reached base, Mike set himself against a tree and promptly nodded off. Juan envied him. Though Trono had been closer to Jerry than Cabrillo, Mike wasn't shouldering any guilt for his death. Just sorrow. Mark Murphy, with his love of all things technical, studied the power cell.
Juan moved a little ways off and pulled a satellite phone from a waterproof pouch. It was time to check in.
Juan, is that you? Max Hanley asked after the first ring. He could picture Max sitting in the Oregon's op center since the mission began, downing cup after cup of coffee and chewing on the stem of his pipe until it was nothing but a gnarled nub.
The phones were so heavily encrypted that there was no chance of them ever being listened in on, so there was no need for code phrases or aliases.
We got it, he replied with such weariness it sounded as though he would never recover. We're six hours out from waypoint Alpha.
I'll call Lang right away, Hanley said. He's been bugging me every twenty minutes since you started off.
There's one more thing. Cabrillo's tone was like ice over the airwaves. Jerry paid the butcher's bill on this one.
There was almost thirty full seconds of silence before Max finally said, Oh, Jesus. No. How?
Does it really matter? Juan asked back.
No, I guess it doesn't, Max said.
Juan blew a loud breath. I tell you, buddy, I'm having a real hard time getting my mind around this.
Why don't you and I take off for a few days when you get back? We'll fly down to Rio, plant our butts on the beach, and ogle a bunch of hard bodies in string bikinis.
Time off sounded good, though Cabrillo didn't particularly relish the idea of leering at women half his age. And he knew that after three failed marriages, Max wasn't really on the prowl either. Then Juan remembered the crashed blimp and Mark's suggestion to give closure to the families of men who'd perished on her. That was what his soul needed. Not staring at pretty girls but offering a bunch of strangers a little peace of mind after fifty years of wondering.
I like the concept, Juan said, but we need to work on the execution. We'll talk about arrangements when we get back to the ship. Also, you might as well go into my office. In the file cabinet should be Jerry's last will. Let's get that ball rolling right away. He didn't have too much love for his ex-wife, but he did have a child.
A daughter, Max replied. I helped him set up a trust for her, and he made me the trustee.
Thanks. I owe you. We should be home by dawn tomorrow.
I'll have the coffee waiting.
Juan replaced the phone into its pouch and sat back against the tree, feeling like he was feeding every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius.
Hey, Chairman, Mark called a few minutes later. Check this out.
What have you got, Juan crawled over to where Mark sat with his legs bent like pretzels.
You see this here and here? He pointed to two tiny indentations on the glossy metal surface.
Yeah.
These correspond with two matching holes in the nylon carrying harness. They're bullet strikes fired up at us from when we took off in the chopper.
Those were nine-millimeter from point-blank range, Juan said. Barely made a mark. That thing is as tough as NASA boasted.
Okay, but look at this. Mark struggled to turn the seventy-pound cell over so the top was facing up and then pointed at an even deeper pit gouged into the satellite fragment.
Juan gave his weapons expert a questioning look.
Nothing matches it on the harness. That was put there before we got our hands on it.
Something the Argentines did to it?
Mark shook his head. We watched them dig it up, and it was out of our sight for only a few minutes before they loaded it into the pickup. I don't recall hearing a shot. You?
No. Could it have happened when the logs slammed into the truck?
I don't think so. I have to do some calculations to be sure, but I don't think there was enough energy in the collision to cause something like this. And remember, the truck flipped into muddy ground. There wasn't anything hard enough and small enough to cause such a smooth divot.
A flash of understanding struck Cabrillo. It happened when the rocket blew. More than enough energy there, right?
That's the answer, Mark replied as if he'd known that all along, but there was little triumph in his voice. The problem is this is the top of the power cell. It would have been protected from the explosion by both the rocket's vertical speed and the bulk of the cell itself.
What are you saying?
I'm not sure. I'd love to do some tests on this back aboard the Oregon, but we're turning it over to some CIA flack in Asunci+|n. We'll never get answers.
What's your gut telling you?
The satellite was intentionally shot down by a weapon that only two countries in the world possess. Us
And China, Juan finished.
The Silent Sea
Chapter NINE
HOUSTON, TEXAS
TOM PARKER NEVER KNEW WHAT HE WAS GETTING himself into when he joined NASA. In his defense, he'd grown up in rural Vermont, and his parents never had a television because the reception on the side of the mountain where they raised dairy cows was terrible.
He knew something was up on his first day at the Johnson Space Center when his secretary placed a beautiful blown-glass bottle on the credenza behind his desk and said it was for Jeannie. He'd asked her to explain, and when she realized he had no clue as to Jeannie's identity she'd chuckled and said cryptically that he'd soon find out.
Next came a pair of hand-painted bellows delivered anonymously to his office. Again, Parker didn't know what this meant and asked for an explanation. By now, several other women in the secretarial pool knew of his ignorance, as did his supervisor, an Air Force Colonel who was a deputy director in the astronaut-training program.
The last piece of the puzzle was an autographed picture of a man in his mid- to late fifties, with receding red hair and bright blue eyes. It took Parker a while to figure out that the signature was that of Hayden Rorke. Internet research was at its infancy then, so he had to rely on a local library. This lead him to eventually discover that Rorke was an actor who played a NASA psychiatrist named Alfred Bellows who was continually vexed by astronaut Anthony Nelson and the genie he'd found on a beach.
Dr. Tom Parker was a NASA psychiatrist, and the I Dream of Jeannie jokes never stopped. After almost ten years with the program, Parker had dozens of glass bottles similar to the one Jeannie called home, as well as autographed pictures of most of the cast and several of Sidney Sheldon's scripts.
He adjusted the webcam on top of his laptop to accommodate the request of Bill Harris, his current patient.
That's better, Harris said from Wilson/George. I was seeing a picture of Larry Hagman but hearing your voice.
He's better looking at least, Parker quipped.
Leave the camera on Barbara Eden and you'll make my day.
So we were talking about the other members of your team. You leave Antarctica in a couple of days. What's their mood?
Disappointed, actually, the astronaut said. A front's closed in on us. The weather boys at McMurdo say it's only going to last a few days, but we've all seen the data. The storm's covering damned-near all of Antarctica. We're socked in for a week or more, and then it'll take a few more days to clear their runway and ours.
How do you feel about it? Parker asked. He and the former test pilot had spoken enough over the past months to have an honest dialogue. He knew Harris wouldn't sugarcoat his answer.
Same as everyone else, Bill said. It's tough when a goal gets pushed back on you, but this is what we're here for, right?
Exactly. I especially want to know how this has affected Andy Gangle.
Since he can't wander outside anymore, he's pretty much stayed in his room. To be honest, I haven't seen him in twelve or more hours. The last time was in the rec room. He was just passing through. I asked him how he was, he muttered 'yFine' and kept on going.
Would you say his antisocial behavior has gotten worse?
No, Bill said. It's about the same. He was antisocial when he got here and he's antisocial now.
I know you've mentioned you've tried to engage him over the last few months. Has anyone else?
If someone has, they've been shot down. I said before, I think the screeners who allowed him to winter down here made a mistake. He's not cut out for this kind of isolation, at least not as a functioning part of a team.
But, Bill, Parker said, leaning closer to his laptop camera for emphasis, what happens if you're on the space station or halfway to the moon when you realize that the doctors who screened your crewmates made a similar mistake?
Are you saying you're going to screw up? Harris asked with a chuckle.