So they watched as the guard slung the Uzi over his shoulder by its strap, came into the hangar, and cut off the runway lights. Then he went back outside, grabbed the feet of the client, and dragged him out of the light and around the corner of the hangar. After a while he returned and grabbed the feet of the van driver and dragged him away also. When he returned, he stepped to the side of the hangar doors, picked up a garden hose that was coiled there, turned on the hydrant to which the hose was attached, and started washing away the considerable amount of blood from in front of the doorway and into the darkness.
Chapter 78
The sixty-five-foot Sphinx rocked gently in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. The pontoon plane had gone, and Kalatis and Jael sat on the deck with binoculars, their feet on the railing gazing at a specific coordinate to the northwest. The area they were watching was fifteen miles off the coast and might as well have been fifteen hundred miles off the coast It was the middle of nowhere and didn’t exist at all until someone drew the navigational coordinates on a map to define it. For three hundred and sixty degrees there was nothing but emptiness and darkness and one direction could have been any direction; it was all empty, without boundary or meaning or relationship.
Kalatis checked his watch and then looked again in that one single direction that the navigational maps had told him was the right direction. He lifted his binoculars. The space around them was silent except for the whispered swash of the Gulf Stream nibbling at the hull of the Sphinx.
Suddenly there was a bright flash directly in line with Kalatis’s gaze.
“Christ!” he said. “There it is. Close. Shit, closer than I was expecting. I didn’t even hear the plane.”
He took down his binoculars and watched the fireball the size of an orange against the star-speckled darkness.
“How much far away is that?” Jael asked, lifting her binoculars to see it more clearly.
“I don’t know,” Kalatis said, raising his binoculars again. “A mile. Maybe a mile.”
The fireball died out quickly, leaving its afterimage in the stars.
“That’s Pace,” Kalatis said. “The first thirteen million is in the van.”
Chapter 79
The guard came back into the hangar and stood at the rear of the van. He was out of Graver’s line of sight for a few moments, but whatever he was doing didn’t last long, and he soon closed both doors and slammed down the latch. But he did not close the hangar doors. Rather, he stood outside the opening, just about where he had shot the two men a few moments earlier, and worked with his Uzi. It sounded like he was fieldstripping the gun, a fact which gave Graver pause. As soon as the next plane landed Graver would be confronted with two armed men. Now was the perfect moment to cut that risk in half. But if he did, there would be no way of knowing whether or not this man had a role-a signal, some kind of all-clear communication-to play in the landing of the next shipment And Graver wanted that next shipment right there in the van in front of him, just like the first one. So he waited.
The heat inside the back room of the hangar was exacerbated by the dead weight of the motionless air. There was no circulation, and everything Graver touched stuck to him. Like Remberto, he had shed his coat and rolled his sleeves to his elbows, and every time he put his arm down on the edge of the barrel or on a box or a board, a layer of dust stuck to the sweat on his forearm. Perspiration rolled down his ribs, staining his shirt in long, dark smears. In the faint light he looked at Murray who had pulled off his white T-shirt because of its visibility. His thick chest and arms made him look like a gladiator as he held his reliable old. 45 in his right hand, his arms slightly out from his sides.
Graver then looked at Last who wiped his forehead on the arm of his expensive linen jacket and rolled his eyes. Last had done well. Graver had had secret reservations about giving him a gun and a role of responsibility, but by doing so without expressing doubts to Murray and Remberto, he was tacitly vouching for his trustworthiness in a squeeze. He had no idea, of course, if Last was indeed trustworthy in a squeeze, but Graver already had his neck out as far as it would go, and he needed another body-and another gun-on his side of this equation.
The guard reassembled his Uzi and then lit a cigarette which he left dangling in his lips while he stepped over to the side of the hangar, unzipped his pants, and urinated into the dried grass at the edge of the tarmac.
Just as Graver was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong, the drone of Maricio Landrone’s Mooney became audible in the distance. Hearing it, the guard finished his business, zipped his trousers and walked farther out onto the tarmac and looked up at the sky. As Pace had done, Landrone buzzed the hangar and headed out into the Gulf. The guard quick-walked back into the hangar, went to the electrical box inside the door, flipped on the runway lights, and then returned to the skirt of the tarmac to watch the landing.
While the guard was concentrating on the sight and increasing sound of the incoming aircraft, Graver nodded at Murray who slipped out of the door of the back room and signaled to Remberto. The two men went to opposite sides of the hangar, Remberto on the left side of the van as viewed from the office and Murray on the right Each hid behind a piece of equipment that they already had picked out and which would provide only momentary cover, Remberto behind a four-cylinder caddy for an acetylene welding rig, and Murray behind a generator for an arc welder. If anyone decided to take a look around, even a cursory one, everything would happen fast. If all went as planned, it would anyway.
Graver’s eyes were straining to see in the dull light of the hangar. From the moment Murray stepped out of the office door everything was out of Graver’s hands. Arnette’s men were perfectly willing to be led by Graver as to operational strategy, but when it came to tactical decisions they were on their own. They had had a long talk and an agreement about that. Graver was responsible for the decisions that set everything into motion, but the action itself was a second-by-second unfolding over which he had no control.
Landrone taxied his Mooney up to the door of the hangar as Pace had done his Malibu and the guard stood just inside the hangar, ten feet from the prop. Again the pilot cut the engine. The Mooney was a smaller aircraft than the Malibu, and the doors swung open from either side of the cockpit. Landrone and his copilot were the first out.
“Has Pace come in already?” Landrone asked, walking toward the guard, removing his baseball cap by its bill and wiping his forehead in the crook of his arm.
“Come and gone,” the pilot said, turning to the van, unlatching the doors, and flinging them back. “Eight boxes.”
“Okay. We’ve got eight too.”
The other guard and client were climbing out of the plane now, both stooping to come under the wings of the plane and into the light.
“Everything’s set,” the first guard said.
The second one nodded. “Okay, let’s unload this shit then.”
At that point both guards had their backs turned to Remberto and Murray, one on each side of the plane, both just inside the hangar and dimly illuminated by the light coming out of the back of the van. Pace’s guard was on Remberto’s side, Landrone’s guard was on Murray’s.
What happened next had been discussed in advance, the probabilities analyzed, the practical matters posited and agreed to.
“Police-freeze!” Remberto and Murray yelled simultaneously, charging out from behind their concealments straight at their respective guards with their firearms extended. Graver and Last also burst out of the office yelling, “Police! Police!” to make the place sound like it was filled with law enforcement officers.
But the guards did not freeze.
As naturally as their hearts beat, their hands clapped onto their Uzi’s which hung across their shoulders on straps, and they began spinning and dropping to a crouch. Neither Remberto nor Murray waited for them to get more than halfway around before they fired three times each as fast as they could from a distance of little more than twenty feet, their volleys knocking both guards off their feet and killing them instantly. Only Murray’s guard
