Page 98 of Clive Cussler's Quantum Tempest
Narcisco flashed a golden grin as he pulled out his big Desert Eagle pistol. “Let’s go hunting!”
Fierro saw the jagged orange lightning of a machine gun firing into the air, and heard helicopter blades faintly thrumming in the distance.
“Forget it. Come with me!” Fierro grabbed Narcisco by the shoulder holster and dragged him toward a secret door.
“Where to?”
“To live—and fight another day!”
54
TheOregon’s tilt-rotor approached Fierro’s mountain estate with Gomez on the stick and Cabrillo in the copilot’s seat. Both men wore white phosphor goggles to eliminate visible light in the cockpit and avoid being seen from the ground or in the air, no matter how marginal the possibility.
Murphy and Stone wore the same, sitting at their respective stations behind the cockpit and eager to begin their phase of the operation.
Eddie Seng, MacD, and Linda Ross were farther back, each kitted out for the ground mission. Ross wasn’t an official Gundog, but she was a trusted backup when the team needed an extra pair of boots on the ground.
“Thirty seconds,” Juan whispered in the onboard comms.
TheOregonhad raced to the west coast of Panama to get as near to Colombia as they could. Passing through the Panama Canal to get close to Fierro’s place was out of the question. Under the best of circumstances it would have taken at least eight hours to traverse the canal in one direction and only if they had made prior arrangements.
Stone had made quick work figuring out where Fierro was based. He accessed old DEA files on Fierro’s father, Colombian property records, purchase orders, and even delivery schedules from high-end gourmet food and beverage vendors. They all pointed to Amador Fierro’s current location. Further scouring local open-source intelligence confirmed the head of La Liga was ensconced on the compound at thisvery moment, but there was no telling how long he would stay on the property. They needed to get there, fast.
The AW tilt-rotor had a thousand-mile range with external fuel tanks. That was the calculated distance for the round trip from theOregon’s deck to Fierro’s villa in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Cabrillo checked the fuel gauges. They’d be touching back down on theOregon’s decks on fumes instead of fuel, but that would be Gomez’s problem, not his.
Assuming they all survived this half of the mission.
Juan and his team put together an assault plan based on Fierro’s location. The lightly guarded, remote mountain estate was set in the middle of a working coffee plantation. That meant in addition to the armed guards there were also innocent civilian farmers in the area who didn’t deserve to get caught in the cross fire. If their mission went as planned, there shouldn’t be any civilian casualties. But what mission ever went according to plan?
Fierro’s defenses were light because his place was surrounded by a deep moat of abject fear and high walls of bribe money. Local police, national army units, and even the Colombian government itself would provide sufficient defense should either of those fail. So far, they had proven to be enough.
Tonight’s objective was the big man himself. Cabrillo didn’t believe in the ladder of escalation or tit-for-tat exchanges. Juan’s formula for tactical victory was simple: surprise, speed, and violence of action. And the best way to win a war was to cut off the head of the snake—and in this case, drag it back to theOregon.Tonight’s mission was designed with both in mind. Whatever happened to Fierro after tonight was still up in the air, but no matter the outcome, La Liga would get the message: nobody in their organization was safe from capture.
Cabrillo admitted to his team he was coloring way outside the lines. But since no government would or could deal with La Liga, it was up to theOregonto do something about it. Otherwise, Olmedo’s ticket would eventually get punched. Cabrillo didn’t bother asking for permission from Overholt. If the old man told him he couldn’t do it,he’d do it anyway. And if the old man approved the mission and it failed, Overholt would get the blame for it and no doubt be punished for Cabrillo’s mistakes.
“We’re in position,” Gomez said.
The tilt-rotor hovered in high-altitude darkness a mile from the target like a predatory night bird, its noise-reducing rotors thrumming the air. Downrange, Fierro’s sprawling compound was bathed in the faint glow of security floodlights.
“Stand by,” Gomez said over the intercom.
He engaged the AW’s advanced sensor suite and began sweeping the compound with a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera, synthetic aperture radar, and low-light optics. The resulting images flashed on the cockpit’s panoramic heads-up display, the station monitors, and the wristband displays each of the operators carried. The team saw the scattered heat signatures of human bodies, the bright white-phosphor outlines of the main house, outbuildings, parked vehicles, and even the bright flare of lit cigarettes.
“I count two tangos north of the main house, four in the tree line to the east, three outside the guard shack, and four inside,” Gomez said.
“They’ve got beaucoup security cameras, which means motion sensors, too,” Murphy added.
“So we confirm nine tangos in the open, four inside the shack. That it?” Cabrillo asked.
“Confirmed,” Eddie said.
“Those security cameras and motion detectors won’t do us any favors. Nuke ’em.”
“On it,” Eric said as his fingers touched the EMP cannon controls. A moment later, a silent river of electromagnetic waves washed over the area. In an instant, the compound was thrown into utter darkness as floodlights snapped off, and every other light-emitting diode, LED and incandescent bulb was snuffed out of existence.
For just a second, Fierro’s emergency backup diesel generator roared to life, but just as quickly died when hit by a surging wave pulse. Stone swept the compound with electromagnetic pulse radiationfor another thirty seconds. Anything not wrapped in a Faraday cage or otherwise hard-shielded was dead.
The outside guards bolted from their positions as they snatched up dead radios, phones, and flashlights, trying to figure out what was going on. Unless they were complete idiots, it wouldn’t take them long to determine what had just happened. TheOregonteam needed to move fast.
