Outside, the line waiting for entry through the magic portals of the club snaked halfway around the block. The black stretch limo sat in front of the door. Spears and Hedritch got in the backseat; the sweet smell of marijuana permeated the interior. General Hector Campon was leaning in the corner dressed in full military regalia, three rows of ribbons twinkling from the breast of the dark blue uniform, the joint glowing between his fingertips. His dark glasses swung slowly toward the two men.
‘Well?’ his Spanish-accented voice asked.
‘Bad news,’ said Hedritch. ‘The place is wall-to-wall crazies in costume. You can’t hear a word. The stage and dance floor are back-lit with strobes.’
‘A security nightmare,’ Spears added.
‘Ridiculous,’ Campon answered, sitting up, ‘you
Spears mimed the words to himself. He had heard the line often enough. Big balls was Campon’s answer to every crisis.
‘General,’ he said, ‘this is the worst yet. You go in there, we can’t guarantee anything.’
‘Your job is to protect me, not bore me with your problems,’ he snapped. ‘Driver! ‘The door.’
Six men had been guarding Campon since he escaped from Madalena three months earlier. Spears and Hedritch headed the third team that had worked the trick. Three weeks in Fort Lauderdale and Campon was bored. Two weeks in St Louis and he was bored. He had lasted a month and a half in Chicago, and now for two weeks he had been living in a houseboat on Lake Lanier, fifty miles north of Atlanta. Actually it was just as well; moving around like that made it harder to .get a fix on him. The security force of ten comprised Campon’s four bodyguards and the Americans. What was needed to guard a reckless bastard like General Campon was a small army.
‘Six men to cover the insanity inside,’ Spears mumbled as they followed Campon out of the car to where he stood like a ramrod, waiting for his entourage to get in position. He was over six feet tall, making him an easy target, and with the medals on his chest there was no way to miss him.
Campon was hotter than boiling water. The president was browbeating everyone in Congress to approve a $50 million appropriation to back Campon’s planned overthrow of the leftist government that had deposed him. Campon was biding his time, lobbying influential friends with phone calls by day, raising hell every night, while his army, or what was left of it, was cooling its heels across the border in a neighboring country. ‘To throw off his enemies, the Feds had leaked lies to the press: that the general was supposed to be in the Bahamas; that he had moved on to Canada; that he was hiding out n a ranch in the Far West.
At times Spears and Hedritch felt like Campon’s pimps, rounding up women, checking their backgrounds, paying for his sex and for secrecy. But this behavior, appearing in public this way, was a violation of all the rules.
So, what else was new? Hedritch ordered two of his men to go in ahead and work the stage at the back of the dance floor. The other two he sent to the balcony. Spears looked around the shopping center, checking the rooftops, while Hedritch checked out the line. Hell, thought Spears, if they want to get him, they’re going to get him. But they were sure they had not been followed, and that reduced the odds a little. They moved to the door.
‘Names?’ asked the king of the portals.
‘Campon,’ the general said.
The doorman’s finger ran down the list and stopped. ‘Yes, sir, General,’ he said, unsnapping the red cord.
Spears looked at Hedritch with panic as the entourage moved into the club.
‘Did he make a reservation?’ Hedritch asked incredulously.
‘Yes, sir, yesterday,’ the doorman answered.
‘Shit!’ he snapped as they rushed after the general. They caught up with him as Campon was about to enter the main room, a sprawling semicircle of tables crowding up to the dance floor.
‘General, at least go upstairs, please,’ pleaded Hedritch. ‘You can see better from up there and we can cruise the room a lot easier.’
‘The action’s down here,’ Campon answered curtly, following his four beefy men into the club. Spears and Hedritch trotted along behind hum, looking frantically, futilely, around the club as the deposed dictator walked to the edge of the dance floor where he stood watching the madness. He was a stationary target.
‘Shit city,’ Spears yelled in Hedritch’s ear, ‘keep your head on a swivel.’
The general’s gaze swept the dance floor, stopping once on a woman dressed like a giraffe with her bosom swelling over the top of her striped costume. Beyond her, on the far side of the floor, the yellow stork jerked weirdly through the crowd, blurred by the flashing lights. It raised its yellow-feathered wings and turned in a slow circle, bobbing to the beat of the music. Campon laughed and applauded the stork, although it was hard to see it because of the lights flashing in his face.
The stork’s alert eyes checked the general’s entourage, the two men in the balcony, the two men behind it on the stage, as it turned slowly, making a 360-degree survey of the club. The stork was so bizarre, so visible, the security men ignored it.
Campon clapped his hands again and chuckled gleefully at the spectacle. It was the last sound he ever uttered.
Well concealed amid the feathered wings attached to its arms, the stork held a silenced mini.-Uzi. Only a foot long and weighing six pounds, the submachine gun held a thirty-two-round clip and was equipped with a plastic cup to catch the casings. The stork was an expert. It squeezed off three three-round bursts, watching in the slow- motion flashes of the strobes as the rounds splattered into their target. Campon’s head jerked forward as the first three rounds exploded in his chest; his arms swung out in front of him and then he arched backward as two more rounds ripped into his head. The third struck a waiter behind him in the spine and took down two of the bodyguards.
Spears and Hedritch were caught totally by surprise as Campon seemed suddenly to have a seizure. The music continued to thunder. One of the bodyguards spun around and fell against Hedritch.
Oh my God, it’s happening! Hedritch thought.
