Brown, Dale - Independent 04 Read online

  PART 1

  Chico Municipal Airport, California 2108 hours, PT, August 1995

  “Get your butts in gear,” Henri Cazaux ordered, swinging the AK-47 assault rifle on its sling from behind his back, holding it high so everyone in the hangar could clearly see it. He noisily jacked the cocking lever back, allowing a cartridge to spin through the air. The spinning brass glinting against the overhead lights made heads jerk all around the hangar. The sound of the cartridge hitting the polished concrete floor seemed as loud as if he had pulled the trigger. “Move, or I’ll end your miserable lives right now. ”

  Cazaux was perfectly capable of threatening any one of the burly workers before him even without the antiquated Soviet-made assault rifle. Born in the Netherlands of French and English parents who were residing in Belgium, Cazaux was a former commando in the elite First Para, the “Red Berets,” of the Belgian Army. During his youth he was in and out of trouble. At age fifteen he was caught smuggling drugs into the U.S. Army barracks near Antwerp, Belgium; he was incarcerated and abused by U.S. Army soldiers for two days before his identity was established and he was turned over to Belgian authorities. At that time he was offered a choice between a sentence of ten years in the Belgian Army or ten years in prison. He enlisted. He had some expeditionary assignments in Africa and Asia, but got in trouble with the authorities, again, and spent two years in a Belgian stockade until he was given a dishonorable discharge in 1987. He entered the drug trade in Germany, graduating to black market weapon sales, mercenary activities, and terrorism.

  His shaved head, tanned to a deep leathery brown by years in innumerable jungles, desert training camps, and killing grounds, revealed scores of scratches, dents, and blemishes that he hadn’t obviously been bom with. The face was ruggedly handsome, with bright, quick green eyes, a masculine, oft-broken nose, prominent cheekbones, and a thin mouth that clamped down hard on the stub of a cheroot. His baggy flight suit could not hide a well-muscled body. Thick forearms and deeply callused hands gripped the AK-47 as if it weighed only a few ounces. He could have been a model for a cologne or cigarette ad, except for the scars and punctures, most never properly sutured or dressed, that spoiled an otherwise photo-perfect physique. The ex-Belgian Special Forces warrior kept his body tense and his eyes darting to any face that might dare to turn on him, but inwardly Cazaux relaxed.

  Cazaux had been an infantry soldier for almost all of his adult life. That was his profession, but his first love was flying. Basic fixed- and rotary-wing pilot training was standard for most Belgian Special Forces cadre, and Cazaux found he had a real aptitude for it. Once out of the Special Forces and into the dark world of the professional soldier, le mercenaire, he became a pilot who could handle a gun and who knew explosives, assault tactics, and the other arcane arts of killing—a very valuable commodity. Cazaux held an American Federal Aviation Administration commercial pilot’s license, kept current as part of his “above-ground” life, but he had thousands of hours in hundreds of different aircraft, with landings all over the world that would never see the inside of any pilot’s logbook or FA A computer database.

  The plane was almost loaded; they would be airborne in less than a half-hour. The workers were just about finished loading three narrow wooden pallets aboard the rear cargo ramp of a Czechoslovakian-made LET L-600 twin-turboprop transport. The L-600 was one of the thousands of old aircraft bought on the open market after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when anyone could get an old Soviet military transport, spare engines and parts, and even experienced pilots for a song. This thirty-year-old bird had been purchased from a Greek broker for only five hundred thousand dollars, including a spare Motorlet engine, some other miscellaneous spare parts, and even a ferry pilot. The LET was in good condition—unlike the ferry pilot, who was an old alcoholic ex-Romanian Air Force colonel who flew this beast from Prague to the United States. The Romanian was overheard discussing his boss, Cazaux, with some bar bimbo one night—a fatal error in judgment. Henri Cazaux used the old fart and his new American girlfriend as a moving target when he was zeroing in a new sniper rifle several weeks ago, then buried them both under five thousand tons of gravel at a quarry near Oakland. Cazaux was in the weapons business, and the first standing order for all of his employees was strict secrecy.

  Henri Cazaux was the LET L-600’s one and only pilot, as well as its loadmaster, engineer, crew chief, and security officer. Cazaux entrusted the duties of copilot to a young Cuban-trained Ethiopian pilot named Taddele Korhonen, whom Cazaux called “the Stork,” because of his very tall, thin body and his ability to sit still for an incredible length of time. Cazaux had even seen Korhonen standing on one leg once, like some large dark swamp bird.

  Satisfied that the six loaders were sufficiently cowed and working as hard as they could, Cazaux stepped through the L-600’s forward port doorway into the cargo bay to inspect the goods. He had just a few inches to squeeze through between the fuselage and the three cargo pallets that occupied the bay—no fat boys on this crew—and Cazaux had to be careful to step over the thick canvas anchor straps securing each pallet to the deck.

  The cargo hold smelled like gun oil and machined metal, like sulfur and gunpowder, like terror and death—and money, of course. Lots of money.

  The first pallet was just forward of the cargo ramp, and it held the big prize, a cargo worth more than the aircraft that carried them and probably all the humans nearby—three “coffins” of Stinger shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiair missiles stacked aboard, with nine cases to go. Nine coffinshaped cases each held two Stinger missiles, preloaded into disposable fiberglass launch tubes, and four cylindrical “bean can” battery units. The other three cases held two launcher grip/sight assemblies and four battery units. The missiles had been stolen from a National Guard unit in Tennessee shortly after the unit returned from Desert Storm, and scattered in various hiding places across the country while the sales deals were cut. Cazaux had managed to stay well ahead of the authorities as long as the missiles were hidden and off the market. But as soon as the missiles came out of hiding—which meant hiring loaders, truckers, middlemen, guards, and bankers—the U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency, the Army Special Investigations Unit, and the FBI were howling at his heels. Cazaux was certain there was an informant in his operation, and he would ferret him or her out soon. Killing the informant would be his pleasure.

  The next forward wooden pallet contained shipment crates of various military field items, ranging from fatigues and boots to U.S. Army MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat, or more popularly known as Meals Rejected by Everyone), from medical supplies to tents, from power generators to five-pound bundles of cash worth at least two thousand dollars a bundle. When it came time to bribe a customs official in Mexico, the Bahamas, Bermuda, or at the cargo’s destination in Haiti, just one discreet toss, and the plane, five pounds lighter, would be on its way within moments. Each bundle of cash was worth about ten times what a Haitian Customs officer legitimately earned in a year, and Cazaux rarely encountered anyone who would turn down a bribe.

  The third pallet, secured closest to the front of the cargo bay, held the really nasty stuff—almost five thousand pounds of ammunition, high explosives, detonators, claymore mines, demolition gear, and primacord. Most of the stuff was stable and fairly safe to ship, except for the stuff in the center of the pallet, surrounded by Styrofoam shock absorbers—five hundred pounds of pentaerythritol tetrani- trate, or PETN, the primary component of detonating cord and used as a booster in large demolition charges. For the flight, the crystalline PETN was mixed with water to form a gray sludge, then packed in cases surrounded by wet sponges to keep it cool and protect it from shock—it had a detonation temperature of only 350 degrees Fahrenheit. PETN was the most sensitive of the primary military explosives, almost as bad as nitroglycerin—the friction of two crystals rubbing against each other could be enough to set it off.

  The explosives-laden pallet was placed toward the front of the plane to keep it closer t
o the L-600’s center of pressure, where aerodynamic forces were more balanced—no use whipping the pallet around unnecessarily. Cazaux was not the best pilot in the world, but he had not lost a shipment of weapons yet in over ten years. Although his copilot, the Stork, always checked the security of each holddown strap in his cargo bay several times before and during each flight, Cazaux himself triple-checked the security of all the straps on the third pallet, then double-checked the security of the middle pallet.

  A few moments later, one of the beefy loaders came up to the entry hatch nearest Cazaux. “All cargo loaded aboard as ordered,” he reported.

  Cazaux maneuvered his way aft to the third pallet and inspected the Stinger coffins. He had placed an almost invisible pencil line on each crate lid that would clearly not be aligned if the lids had been opened—none had been touched. Cazaux made a few tugs on the straps and several hard pushes on the stacks of crates and found them secure. He reached over to the second pallet and extracted three packets of cash. “Good job, gentlemen,” Cazaux said. “Your work here is finished. That buys your silence as well as rewards you for your labor. See to it that silence remains golden.”

  The loader’s eyes flashed with delight when he saw the bundles, but they just as quickly blinked in surprise when a large switchblade stiletto suddenly appeared in Cazaux’s hand out of nowhere. Cazaux’s eyes registered the loader’s surprised expression, and his handsome face smiled, if only for a brief moment. Then he dropped the packets into the loader’s arms and drew the stiletto’s razor-sharp edge across one of the packets. The loader’s greedy hold on the money packets allowed waves of one-hundred-dollar bills to ooze out of the incision. “Count it,” Cazaux said casually as he folded the switchblade and instantly returned it to whatever secret place he had drawn it from.

  “Not necessary, sir,” the loader said breathlessly, turning to leave. Cazaux looked a bit perturbed at first, then shrugged and nodded as if silently acknowledging the man’s offhanded compliment. “Call on us anytime, sir.”

  “I could use some men like you in my operation,” Cazaux said to the back of the man’s head. “Join my team now, and you’ll make that much cash, and more, on every mission.”

  The loaders stopped, looking at each other—obviously none of them wanted to accept, but they were afraid of the consequences of saying no to Henri Cazaux. But one black man turned toward Cazaux. “Yo, man, I’ll take it, right here.” The other loaders, all white, looked relieved that the lone black had left them.

  The black guy was big, with beefy shoulders and arms and a broad, massive chest, but with a bit of a roll of fat around his middle and a spread in his ass, like a veteran truck driver, a played-out boxer, or an ex-artillery loader turned couch potato. His eyes were clear, with no hint of dullness from drugs or too much alcohol, although the flabby waist and chest said this guy downed at least a case of beer a week. “Do you have a passport?” Cazaux asked him.

  “Uh-uh ... Captain,” the loader said in a dark, cave-deep voice.

  “It will cost you one thousand dollars, in advance,” Cazaux said. He extended his hands toward the bundles of cash held by the head loader, motioning for the man to toss him the money.

  “That ain’t the deal,” the head loader said. “We split the money later.” But Cazaux hefted the AK-47—not aiming it at them, but the threat was clear—and the loader counted out a thousand dollars in one-hundred-American-dollar bills from the sliced-open packet and handed it to the black man.

  “Work hard, and it will be returned to you with substantial interest,” Cazaux said, holding out his hand.

  The black man scowled at Cazaux, clutching the cash in his big hands. “I ain’t paying you nuthin,’ man,” he said. “You got your own damned plane, man, you can get me in.”

  “Just stick the nigger in with the rest of the baggage,” one of the other loaders suggested with a laugh.

  A stern glare from the Belgian mercenary silenced the loader. “You will need a passport for some of our destinations,” Cazaux said, “and it costs a lot to get a good document.” He shrugged. “Part of the price of doing business.”

  The anger rising in the black man’s chest was enough to raise the air temperature in the hangar several degrees.

  “Trust me,” Cazaux said reassuringly.

  The guy finally relented, handing Cazaux the money and hopping aboard the L-600. The others were hustling toward the side hangar door as fast as they could. They were sure the big black guy was going to turn up dead in a very short period of time, like as soon as he closed the hangar doors.

  “You are the one they called Krull?” Cazaux asked the one remaining loader.

  “Yeah,” the black man replied.

  “Is that your real name?”

  The man hesitated, but only for a second: “Hell no, Captain. And I’ll bet you ain’t no captain, either.”

  Cazaux knew the man’s real name was Jefferson Jones, that he was just paroled from a Florida state penitentiary, serving three of seven years for armed robbery, and that he had a common-law wife and two kids. An arrest for dealing drugs, no conviction, and an arrest for selling guns, again no conviction. A small-time hood, dabbling in crime and so far not demonstrating any real aptitude for it. Cazaux’s sources described this one as a good worker, good with a gun, more intelligent than most foot soldiers, a quick temper when provoked but otherwise quiet. “Good answer, my friend,” Cazaux said. “I saw your dossier.”

  “Say what?” Big eyes growing wide with surprise.

  “Your records. I know you are telling the truth. Lying to me is fatal, I assure you.”

  “You’re the boss,” Krull said. “I ain’t lying to you.”

  “Very well.” Cazaux knew that Jones had used a variety of weapons in his years as an armed thug, and Cazaux had chosen him, whether Krull knew it or not, over all the other hirelings as a possible recruit. “You begin work immediately. Open those hangar doors, close them after we taxi clear, hop aboard, then close this door like so.” Cazaux showed him how to close and latch the large rear cargo door, and Krull left to see to the hangar door. He had no trouble opening the manually operated steel doors, and soon the warm California night air was seeping into the hangar. Time to get moving.

  “Prepare to start engines,” Cazaux shouted forward to the Stork. “I want taxi clearance right now. Report our position on the field as the Avgroup cargo terminal, not this location. Let’s go.” He bent to make one last check of the cargo straps before heading up to the cockpit.

  Aboard an Army UH-60 Assault Helicopter That Same Time

  The image on the nine-inch color monitor wavered as the helicopter passed by some electrical transmission lines, but the picture steadied as soon as they were clear. “I didn’t hear you that time, Marshal Lassen,” Federal District Court Judge Joseph Wyman, Eastern District of California, said. “Repeat what you just said.”

  “Your Honor, I said that because Henri Cazaux is extremely dangerous, I must be granted extraordinary latitude for this capture,” Chief Deputy Marshal Timothy Lassen said into the videophone, a suitcase-sized unit strapped into the UH-60 Black Hawk’s helicopter seat across from Lassen. Lassen, age forty-eight, was the number-two man in charge of the Sacramento office of the U.S. Marshals Service, Eastern District of California. He was speaking on a secure voice/video/data microwave link to the federal courthouse in Sacramento while speeding southward only one thousand feet above ground toward Chico Municipal Airport. Lassen’s lean frame was now artificially beefed out with a thick Kevlar body armor vest over a loose-fitting black flight suit, recently purchased from a mail-order catalog for this particular mission; a black vest with the words u.s. marshal in green covered the bulletproof vest. His boots were scuffed-out survivors of the Marshals Service Academy Training Course at Quantico, Virginia, and used since then only for duck hunting. He wore a plain black baseball cap backwards and a headset to speak on the videophone over the roar of the helicopter’s twin turboshaft engines.

&n
bsp; Judge Wyman had been summoned to his desk at midnight to issue an arrest and search warrant for Lassen’s operation. Even distorted by the scrambled microwave linkup and the occasional interference, it was obvious that the judge was not happy. “ ‘Latitude’ is one thing, Deputy,” Wyman said irritably, “but your warrant justification reads like something out of the frontier West.”

  “I think that’s a slight exaggeration, Your Honor.”

  The videophone system was full duplex, like a regular telephone, but it would not easily tolerate interruptions— Lassen’s interjection went unheard: “I’ll buy a no-knock and use of military transport aircraft for the raid, Deputy, but the gunship is out.”

  “Your Honor... Your Honor, excuse me,” Lassen said, repeating himself to successfully interrupt the judge, “Henri Cazaux is the number-one fugitive on our most-wanted list, with fifty-seven federal warrants issued for him to date. He is an internationally known terrorist and arms dealer. He’s the biggest gunrunner in southwestern Europe, his efficiency and ruthlessness is putting the Italian Mafia to shame in southern Europe, and now he’s in the United States, where he’s been connected to several attacks against military arsenals. He has stolen everything from Band-Aids to glide bombs, and he knows how to use them all—he’s ex-Belgian Special Forces and an accomplished pilot. He has the Marshals, the FBI, ATF, and the state police outgunned in every category. We have to use military air just to even the odds.”

  Judge Wyman shook his head at the videophone unit’s camera lens on his desk and continued: “Use of deadly force? Use of military aircraft and weapons? Dead or alive? What is this, a vendetta? I will not sign a ‘dead or alive’ warrant, Deputy.”

  “Your Honor, Cazaux is known to have killed four federal officers this year,” Lassen said. “He hasn’t used anything smaller than an M-16 or AK-47 infantry rifle on any of his victims, and one marshal was believed to be killed by a direct hit by a forty-millimeter grenade, a weapon used for punching holes in walls and bunkers. We identified the dead agent by recovering one of his fingers that had been blown nearly a hundred yards away.”