his unease dampened his courage.
“Have a drink, y‘all,” said the man. “What are you havin’?”
Remembering his last experience with vodka, Babin ordered a beer.
“Messed up your leg, huh?” said the man’s friend. They were in their early twenties, relatively big.
Could they lift five hundred pounds between them?
Probably not. Babin had a ramp in the truck, though. They could angle it down into the back of their car and manhandle the crate inside.
The trick was to get them to want to do it.
“My back is the problem,” said Babin. “It’s a big problem. My partner and I were supposed to make a delivery to one of the construction sites up the road. A bathtub. Special order. But the trailer can’t make it past the mud and, with my back, I couldn’t help him unload it anyway.”
“Bummer,” said the man who owned the car.
“Maybe I could hire some help,” said Babin, taking the beer.
The man closest to him turned and winked at his friend. “Five hundred bucks cash, no questions asked,” he told Babin.
“Five hundred?”
The man leaned toward him. “What you’re delivering’s hot, right?”
“Hot?”
“You’re going to remember you need to deliver the whole load, right? Five hundred bucks. Each of us.”
“It’s just one.”
“Oh, OK,” said the man, smiling and returning to his beer.
The liquid stung Babin’s mouth. He took another sip, realizing this would be much easier than he thought.
“Careful, man, this car has to last me another year,” said the American as he and his friend began easing the crate into the back of the Subaru Forester.
Though they were using the ramp, the job was made more difficult by the fact that the car’s rear hatch opened upward. The front of the wooden crate cleared easily, but then it hung up about three-quarters of the way in. Tucume came and helped, pushing on the crate with one of the Americans while the other held up the hatch. Finally, the crate made it all the way in.
“Take the girl for something to eat,” Babin told Tucume. “Then come back for me.”
“She’s still sleeping.”
“There was a McDonald’s restaurant down the street. Have her wait for us there.”
Tucume nodded. Babin walked back to the two men, who were trying to close the rear door on the crate. It was about an inch too long.
“We’ll just get some rope and tie it down,” said one of the men.
Babin looked at it. Clearly, this would not do; he worried that there might be some highway regulation about driving with an open hatch and they would be stopped. The rear portion of the crate could be pried away. Then it might fit.
They’d have to get different license plates, preferably from out of state. From as far from Texas as they could find.
“So what’s really in there, dude? You moving dope?”
Babin swung around, filled with fear. He expected the man would be holding a gun in his hand, but he was not.
Too bad for him, for Babin had pulled the general’s .22 from his pocket.
Without answering the man’s question, Babin fired quickly. As the man crumbled, his friend began to run. He got only a few feet away before Babin put a slug in the back of his head.
Tucume dragged the second body to the Dumpster, holding his nose as he picked the dead man up and dropped him over the side. He felt like a grave robber.
“How low I have fallen,” he mumbled to himself, going back to the car.
Babin had pulled part of the crate off to get the weapon to fit inside.
“We’ll need to find a blanket to throw on top of the crate.” said the Russian. “But let’s get rid of the truck first.”
“Why not leave it here? The building’s old. It looks as if it’s abandoned.”
“It will blend in better in the salvage yard up by the highway,” said Babin. “No one will look for it.”
“It’s a mile away.”
“I’ll wait.”
“The girl.”
“We should leave her.”
“No.”
“Then hurry or she’ll run off on her own.”
Tucume gritted his teeth, then climbed into the cab.
115
The Mexican port of Manzanillo had admirably modem facilities — which made it easy for the Art Room to obtain information about the location of the container. According to the computer, it was still parked in Lot 5A — and in fact, Rubens and the rest of the people in the Art Room could see it on the infrared feed from a U-2S that had been specially detailed to the strike team.
“Lia and Tommy are landing now,” said Rockman. “The CIA team is moving in.”
Of course, thought Rubens. They want to get the credit.
Three large black SUVs appeared in the frame at the right. Rockman toggled the controls for the viewer, zeroing in on the target. A dozen men jumped from the SUVs and surrounded the container, their M4 carbines and grenade launchers clearly visible.
Then the image blurred. The screen dissolved in whiteness.
“Technical glitch,” said Rockman. “Something in the air force system. Theirs, not ours.”
Rubens stared at the screen, waiting for information. They were just a resource here — helpers, rather than the lead agents. He’d have much preferred it if his people were the ones going into the truck.
Desk Three wasn’t set up to conduct an operation on such a massive scale as the search for the weapon in Peru; even when it took the lead on a mission, it had to draw on many other agencies for support.
Its capabilities should be expanded and extended to include others. The CIA and the military special operations should have Desk Three’s capabilities as well — in fact, they should work together seamlessly, as the original plan had called for.
His original plan.
If he had taken the job as national security adviser, he would have made doing so a priority.
Telach cursed as the image came back on the screen.
“It’s the wrong container,” she said. “The boxes are too small. Listen.”
An audio report came over the speakers, an account from one of the CIA people back to Langley. The boxes he was describing were about three feet by two feet by two feet.
“The radioactive kernel could be inside one,” said Rockman. “The bomb pit itself weighs only a few pounds.”
Rubens watched the screen, trying to remain optimistic though he agreed with Telach. The image from the scene showed the team beginning to remove the contents. The chatter began taking on a pessimistic tone.
“Maybe it’s further back,” said Rockman.
“No, I believe we’ve missed something,” said Rubens. “They’ll be going to Plan B next.” He turned toward the back of the room, where Johnny Bib was waving his hands furiously behind a bench of analysts.
