The Hunters Read online

  Yung was quickly informed that that in fact was a picture of Jean-Paul Lorimer.

  The thing to do with Lorimer, Castillo then had decided, was to repatriate the missing diplomat—by force, if necessary—and he set up an operation to do that. He had just identified himself to Lorimer in Lorimer’s office at the estancia when the barrel of a Madsen submachine gun smashed the office window and sprayed the room, killing Lorimer and wounding El Coronel Munz. They had been attacked by six men, who were all killed in the next few minutes. None of them carried identification of any kind.

  The third man in Jean-Paul Lorimer’s office was dressed—as Sergeant Kensington was—in the black coveralls and other accoutrements worn by Delta Force operators when engaged in clandestine and covert operations. He was cradling in his arms a black bolt-action 7.62×55 sniper’s rifle, modified from a Remington Model 700. Had he not pushed his balaclava mask off his face, Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, who was nineteen, would have looked far more like what comes to mind when the phrase Delta Force operator is heard.

  With the mask off, it had just occurred to the fourth man in the room, he looks like a kid who has borrowed his big brother’s uniform to wear to the high school Halloween party.

  He was immediately sorry for the thought.

  The little sonofabitch can really shoot, as he just proved by saving my life.

  The fourth man was Major (Promotable) Carlos G. Castillo, Special Forces, U.S. Army. He was thirty-six, a shade over six feet tall, and weighed one hundred ninety pounds. He had blue eyes and light brown hair. He was in a well-tailored dark blue suit.

  He turned to Munz, who was looking a little pale from his wound.

  “Your call, Alfredo,” Castillo said. “If Kensington says he can get the bullet out, he can. How are you going to explain the wound?”

  “No offense,” Munz replied, “but that looks to me like a job for a surgeon.”

  “Kensington has removed more bullets and other projectiles than most surgeons,” Castillo said. “Before he decided he’d rather shoot people than treat them for social disease, he was an A-Team medic. Which meant…what’s that line, Kensington?”

  “That I was ‘Qualified to perform any medical procedure other than opening the cranial cavity, ’” Kensington quoted. “I can numb that, give you a happy pill, clean it up, and get the bullet out. It would be better for you than waiting—the sooner you clean up a wound like that, the better—and that’d keep you from answering questions at a hospital. But what are you going to tell your wife?”

  “Lie, Alfredo,” Castillo said. “Tell her you were shot by a jealous husband.”

  “What she’s going to think is, I was cleaning my pistol and it went off, and I’m embarrassed,” Munz said. “But I’d rather deal with that than answer official questions. How long will I be out?”

  “You won’t be out long, but you’ll be in la-la land for a couple of hours.”

  Munz considered that for a moment, then said: “Okay, do it.”

  “Well, let’s get you to your feet and onto something flat where there’s some light,” Kensington said. He looked at Castillo and the two of them got Munz to his feet.

  “There’s a big table in the dining room that ought to work,” Kensington said. “It looks like everybody got here just in time for dinner. There’s a plate of good-looking roast beef on it. And a bottle of wine.”

  “Okay on the beef,” Castillo said. “Nix on the wine. We have to figure out what to do next and get out of here.”

  “Major, who the fuck are these bad guys?” Kensington asked.

  “I really don’t know. Yung is searching the bodies to see what he can find out. I don’t even know what happened.”

  “Well, they’re pros, whoever they are. Maybe Russians? Kranz was no amateur and they got him. With a fucking garrote. That means they had to (a) spot him and (b) sneak up on him. A lot of people have tried that on Seymour and never got away with it.”

  “Spetsnaz?” Castillo said. “If this was anywhere in Europe, I’d say maybe, even probably. But here? I just don’t know. We’ll take the garrote and whatever else Yung comes up with and see if we can learn something.”

  When they got to the dining room, Kensington held up Munz while Castillo moved to a sideboard the Chateaubriand, a sauce pitcher, a bread tray, and a bottle of Uruguayan Merlot. Then he sat him down on the table.

  “You going to need me—or Bradley—here?” Castillo asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Come on, Bradley. We’ll find something to wrap Sergeant Kranz in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sergeant First Class Seymour Kranz, a Delta Force communicator, who at five feet four and one hundred thirty pounds hadn’t been much over the height and weight minimums for the Army, was lying facedown where he had died.

  A light-skinned African American wearing black Delta Force coveralls sat beside him, holding a Car-4 version of the M-16 rifle between his knees. Despite the uniform, Jack Britton was not a soldier but a special agent of the United States Secret Service.

  “Anything, Jack?” Castillo asked.

  Britton shook his head.

  “It’s like a tomb out there,” he said. And then, “Is that what they call an unfortunate choice of words?”

  He scrambled to his feet.

  “Let’s get Seymour on the chopper,” Castillo said, as he squatted beside the corpse.

  The garrote which had taken Sergeant Kranz’s life was still around his neck. Castillo tried to loosen it. It took some effort, but finally he got it off and then examined it carefully.

  It was very much like the nylon, self-locking wire-and-cable binding devices enthusiastically adopted by the police as “plastic handcuffs.” But this device was blued stainless steel and it had handles. Once it was looped over a victim’s head and then tightened around the neck, there was no way the victim could get it off.

  Castillo put the garrote in his suit jacket pocket.

  “Okay, spread the sheets on the ground,” Castillo ordered. “You have the tape, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Corporal Bradley responded.

  He laid the sheets, stripped from Jean-Paul Lorimer’s bed, on the ground. Castillo and Britton rolled Sergeant Kranz onto them. One of his eyes was open. Castillo gently closed it.

  “Sorry, Seymour,” he said.

  They rolled Kranz in the sheets and then trussed the package with black duct tape.

  Then he squatted beside the body.

  “Help me get him on my shoulder,” Castillo ordered.

  “I’ll help you carry him,” Britton said.

  “You and Bradley get him on my shoulder,” Castillo repeated. “I’ll carry him. He was my friend.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Castillo grunted with the exertion of rising to his feet with Kranz on his shoulder, and, for a moment, he was afraid he was losing his balance and bitterly said, “Oh, shit!”

  Bradley put his hands on Castillo’s hips and steadied him.

  Castillo nodded his thanks and then started walking heavily toward where the helicopter was hidden, carrying the body of SFC Seymour Kranz over his shoulder.

  [THREE]

  Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Newbery

  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  2345 31 July 2005

  When the Bell Ranger helicopter called Jorge Newbery Ground Control, announced that he was at twenty-five hundred feet over the Unicenter Shopping Mall on the Route Panamericana on a VFR local flight from Pilar and wanted permission to land as near as possible to the JetAire hangar, Ground Control immediately cleared the pilot to make a direct approach.

  “You’re number one to land. There is no traffic in the area. Report when you are at five hundred feet over the threshold. Visibility unlimited. Winds are negligible.”

  There is not much commercial late-night activity at Jorge Newbery, which is commonly thought of as Buenos Aires’s downtown airport. The airport is separated by only a highway from the river Plate and is
no more than—traffic permitting—a ten-minute drive from downtown Buenos Aires. Very late at night, the tarmac in front of the terminal is crowded with the Boeing 737s of Aerolineas Argentina, Austral, Pluna, and the other airlines which will, starting very early in the morning, take off for cities in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

  The informality of the radio exchange between the Bell Ranger and Newbery Ground Control would have driven an American FAA examiner to distraction, but in practical terms there was nothing wrong with it.

  Ground Control had not bothered to identify the runway by number. There is only one, about seven thousand feet long. And since he had given the helicopter pilot permission to make a direct approach, and the winds were negligible, there wasn’t much chance the pilot would misunderstand where he was supposed to go.

  “Newbery, Ranger Zero-Seven at five hundred over the threshold.”

  “Zero-Seven, you are cleared to make a low-level transit of the field to the right, repeat right of the runway for landing at the JetAire hangar.”

  “Mucho gracias.”

  “Report when you land.”

  “Will do.”

  As the Bell Ranger came down the field, over the grass to the right of the runway, the doors of the JetAire hangar began to slide open.

  A sleek, small, glistening white jet airplane—a Bombardier/Learjet 45XR with American markings—sat, nose out, behind one of the doors. It was connected to ground power and there were lights visible in both the cockpit and cabin.

  Four men pushing a trundle bed, which would attach to the skids of the helicopter—the Ranger does not have wheels—and permit it to be rolled into the hangar, came out and waited for the helicopter to land.

  “Newbery, Ranger Zero-Seven on the ground. Mucho gracias.”

  “You’re welcome. Have a nice time.”

  “I’ll try.”

  The Ground Control operator had assumed—not without reason—that the Bell Ranger was owned by a wealthy estanciero who had flown into the city for a night on the town. That happened three or more times every night. Sometimes the tarmac in front of JetAire was as crowded with private airplanes and helicopters as the terminal tarmac was with airliners.

  As soon as the Ranger had been trundled into the hangar, the doors began to slide closed again.

  Three men came down the Lear’s stair door and approached the helicopter as the pilot pushed the cockpit door open.

  The larger of them was Fernando Lopez, Castillo’s cousin. He was a dark-skinned man in his midthirties, six feet two inches tall and weighing well over two hundred pounds.

  Lopez saw something he didn’t like on Castillo’s face. “You okay, Gringo?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “Solez?” Fernando Lopez asked.

  Ricardo Solez was a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration assigned to the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires. He had been drafted from the DEA by Castillo for the Estancia Shangri-La operation.

  “He’s driving the Yukon back here,” Castillo said. “He’s all right.”

  “I thought the kid was going to do that,” Lopez said.

  “Bradley’s in there,” Castillo said, indicating the helicopter.

  “How did it go, Charley?” Colonel Jacob Torine, USAF, a tall, slim redhead in a sports coat, asked.

  “Not well,” Castillo replied. “Lorimer is dead. And Kranz bought the farm.”

  “Oh, shit! What happened?”

  “And Munz took a hit,” Castillo went on. He looked at the third man, who was slim, in his early forties, with shortly cropped thinning hair and wearing a light brown single-breasted suit.

  “Well, hello, Howard,” he said, not kindly. “Your boss send you to see how badly I bent his chopper?”

  Howard Kennedy had spent most of his adult life as an FBI agent. Two years before, he had abruptly abandoned his prestigious duties in the FBI’s Ethical Standards—read Internal Affairs—Division to go to work for Aleksandr Pevsner, a Russian national, who, it was alleged in warrants issued for his arrest by nearly a dozen countries, had committed an array of crimes ranging from being an international dealer in arms and drugs all the way down to murder.

  “I came because he thought I might be useful,” Howard Kennedy said.

  “What happened, Charley?” Colonel Torine asked again.

  “There were some other people at the estancia. Six of them…”

  “Who?” Kennedy said.

  “…all dressed in black and armed with Madsens,” Castillo finished.

  “Who were they?” Kennedy pursued.

  “I wish to hell I knew,” Castillo said, and turned to Torine. “How soon can we go wheels-up?”

  “All I have to do is file the flight plan. It shouldn’t take long this time of night.”

  “Howard, can you take care of Colonel Munz?” Castillo asked.

  “Does he need a hospital?”

  “The bullet’s out, and he’s been given antibiotics. Unless he develops an infection, no.”

  “Who took the bullet out?” Kennedy asked.

  Castillo ignored the question.

  “Take him home, Howard. Right now, he’s still in la-la land, but that should wear off in no more than an hour. Then he’ll start to hurt.”

  “Can he walk?”

  Castillo nodded.

  “I don’t like this,” Kennedy said.

  “Howard, didn’t your mother ever tell you when you go somewhere uninvited, you’re likely to find something at the party you won’t like?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And if I wasn’t here, what would you have done with Munz?”

  “He gave me a number to call if something went wrong,” Castillo said. “I just want you to remember I didn’t have any idea you would be here.”

  “Okay. So what?”

  “Special Agent David W. Yung, Jr., of the FBI is in the chopper.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!”

  “I’m going to tell him that who was here when we got here is classified ‘Top Secret Presidential.’ I have no reason to believe that he will breach security regulations.”

  “Then you are naïve.”

  “Well, what do you want to do?” Castillo asked.

  Kennedy looked at him for a moment, then walked quickly to the fuselage door and opened it.

  “Well, how are you, David?” he said. “Long time no see.”

  He put out his hand.

  “I thought that was you, Howard,” Yung said.

  “Glad to see me?”

  “‘Surprised’ is the word that comes to mind.”

  “I’m on the pariah list, but I don’t have leprosy,” Kennedy said, nodding at his still-extended hand. “We go way back, David.”

  Yung looked at Kennedy’s extended hand.

  “Yeah, we do,” he said and took it. “And I just realized I’m glad to see you.”

  “That you saw him, Yung, is classified Top Secret Presidential,” Castillo said.

  “That’s good,” Yung said. “That saves me from having to decide what to do now that I have seen him.”

  “Do you mind if I interpret that to mean you wouldn’t have reported me even without Charley’s invoking the criminal code vis-à-vis unauthorized disclosure of classified information?”

  “To tell you the truth, Howard, I don’t know what I would have done,” Yung said.

  “Okay, Howard, get Colonel Munz out of here,” Castillo said.

  “He’s unconscious,” Yung said.

  “Probably asleep,” Castillo said. “Shake him and find out.”

  El Coronel Alfredo Munz woke instantly when Yung touched his shoulder.

  “Aha!” he said, cheerfully. “We have arrived. I must have dozed off.” He spotted Kennedy. “¡Hola, Howard!” he cried. “I didn’t know that you were going to be here.”

  “Alfredo, can you walk?” Castillo asked.

  “Certainly I can walk,” Munz said and tried to get out of his seat.

  “That’ll be easier if
you take the seat belt off,” Castillo said, then added: “Unfasten it for him, Yung.”

  Yung did so. Munz got out of his seat and went through the door. He started to walk across the hangar floor, then felt a little woozy and staggered. He put his good arm out like the wing of an airplane, cried, “Wheee,” and started trotting in curves around the hangar.

  Kennedy went quickly to him and steadied him.

  “What we are going to tell my wife is that I shot myself when I was cleaning my pistol,” Munz confided to Kennedy. “And you are my witness. My wife says you have an honest face.”

  Kennedy maneuvered Munz over to Castillo.

  “Howard’ll take care of you now, Alfredo,” Castillo said. “Thanks for everything.”

  “It was my great pleasure,” Munz said and bowed.

  “I suppose we’ll be in touch, won’t we, Charley?” Kennedy asked.

  Castillo nodded. “Tell your boss thanks, Howard.”

  “I’ll do that,” Kennedy said and then started guiding Munz toward the rear of the hangar.

  Castillo walked around the Ranger and opened the copilot’s door.

  “Bradley, load the stuff—everything in the chopper that belongs to us—into the Lear and make sure there’s a seat where we can put Sergeant Kranz.”

  “Yes, sir,” Corporal Lester Bradley said.

  “I’ll give you a hand with the body,” Yung said.

  “Just put him over my shoulder,” Castillo said. “I’ll carry him.”

  Five minutes later, Jorge Newbery Ground Control cleared Lear Five-Oh-Seven-Five to the threshold of runway thirty-one.

  [FOUR]

  Office of the Commander in Chief

  United States Central Command

  MacDill Air Force Base

  Tampa, Florida

  1235 1 August 2005

  There were several reasons that Command Sergeant Major Wesley Suggins was rarely in the commander in chief’s conference room when the twelve chairs around the long table were occupied by what he privately thought of as “the heavy brass.”