In the Courts of the Sun (73 page)

We headed almost due east, down out of the high bluffs over the rapids, and then veered east by southeast as the Chisay bent into the Río Cahabón. A gray chalk cliff came up in front of us, and instead of hopping over it the pilot dug into a turn around it, staying low and over the center of the river, so that it felt more like we were snowboarding than flying. Foliage seemed to envelop us and then we were around it and into an expanding void.
A different voice came onto the main communications channel.
“Es este el vuelo 465-BA del Poptún?”
the voice asked. “You are 465-BA out of Poptún?” The ID readout said he was calling from Guzmán Base, the Guate City military airport.
“Correcto,”
the WSO said.
“¿Perdone la molestia, mas el OC dice qué pasa?”
“There’s some kind of a problem south of Chisec,” the WSO said in Spanish. “Corporal Olaquiaga at Poptún Base told us to respond.”
“Okay. You seem to be off schedule today, though.”
“No kidding, that’s why we’re going back.”
Uh-oh, I thought. He’s pretending we’re a Guatemalan air force plane. Trying to fool the air traffic controllers for as long as possible. Which means we don’t have support within the Guate military.
The Hippo climbed a thousand feet as we hopped over the source of the Oxec, between Cerro Tabol on the left and the west flank of the big Sierra de Santa Cruz on the right.
“—that ID by us again?” the Guate voice was saying.
“GAC 465 BA, 20380-821809-234874211,” the WSO said.
“We have to check that,” the voice said, “otherwise they’ll give you trouble at the border.”
“I’ll call them,” the WSO said.
“Why don’t you just hang out where you are for a second? Slow down.”
I flicked to Marena’s channel, channel 4, and beeped her. She flicked in. I told her the Guates sounded like they were getting antsy.
“It’s probably not a problem,” she said. “They’re looking for flights coming in, not going out.”
“—but why the heading?” another Guate voice was asking.
“There’s a chance some of the terrorists may have left by truck earlier this morning,” the WSO lied. “He wants us to see if we can spot them at the border.”
“Yeah, okay, but I have to account for all flights near the DMZ,” the controller said.
“You should call Olaquiaga,” the WSO said. He started giving a string of call numbers.
“He’s not at that base, you have to call the CO there.”
“Can you patch us in?” the WSO asked.
“You have to hail him with your own band.”
“I’ll do it,” the WSO said.
He cut the radio channel. The pilot—who I guess didn’t talk unless it was necessary—came on the ALL PAGE channel. That is, he was talking to us, not to anyone outside the Hippo. “Okay, be advised,” he said, “we are going to increase our airspeed.” Before he finished, my head stuck to the right wing of the seat and I could feel the loose skin of my cheeks creeping backward in the four or five extra Gs. He’d tucked in the rotors and fired the forward jets. Guess that blows our low profile, I thought.
“Just hang out for a second,” the Guate controller’s voice said.
Ana’s voice came onto the channel. “So what do you think?” she asked.
“They don’t know what they’re doing,” the pilot’s voice said. “Let’s just stay on at this speed.” His right hand hovered delicately around the cyclic stick cradled between his legs.
The Guates squawked in again.
“465 BA, this is Guzmán Base CG, what are you doing?”
We didn’t respond.
“You have to get a new order or reverse heading and land here,” the controller said. “Sorry.”
“No me quiebres el culo,”
the WSO said. “Don’t bust my ass. You’re
not
telling us to head back.”
“Sorry.”
“Olaquiaga se va a cagar,”
the WSO said. “Olaquiaga’s going to shit himself.”
“Yo no te puedo asegurar que llegues salvo,”
the voice said. “I can’t make it safe.”
“Te van a chingar por el culo. Agarra la onda.”
“They’ll fuck you up the ass over there. Come on, go with it.”
The WSO paused.
“Bueno, reconocido,
Guzmán.”
“Bueno,”
the voice said. It clicked off.
But we kept going. On my little map the flight plan had shifted. Now it went south down to the Lago de Izabal, and then out into the Mar de las Antillas, that is, the Caribbean Sea. I guessed the idea was to make them think we were heading back and then head out low over the water, where there wouldn’t be any large antiaircraft installations.
The Guate controller dude came back on the radio.
“465 Barcelona Antonio, aterrize en seco,”
he said.
“Somos responsables del seguridad del Corporal Olaquiaga,”
the WSO lied.
“No contestes. Pararse en seco desde ahora.”
The WSO clicked off. “Okay, they’re not buying it,” he said on the PAGE channel.
“465 BA, tomar tierra a Poptún,”
the Guate controller screeked.
“Esto es el último apelar.”
“No puedo,”
the WSO said. “Please call your commanding officer.” He clicked off and went back to PAGE. “Okay, that’s fucked,” he mumbled. “Let’s get a directive here.”
The pilot slowed, leveled us off, and swung the nose around like he was going to head back inland.
Marena’s voice came on. “What are you doing?”
“Uh, they’ve basically got us cut off,” the WSO said.
“We have to decide,” Ana said. “Either we let them land us or we go to Case B.”
“Okay,” Marena said.
“Okay what?” Ana’s voice asked. Pause. “It’s your call.” She spoke a little more clearly than usual, making sure the flight recorder got every word.
“Case B, evade and deliver,” Marena said.
“Understood,” Ana said. Another pause. “Okay, we’re going to take it on, right? Anybody object?”
This is getting way out of hand, I thought. Maybe I ought to object.
Nobody objected.
“Right, then, remember I’m the sole CO from here in,” Ana said. “Nobody takes order one from Marena or anyone else.”
“Hoo-hah,” the pilot’s voice said.
“Hwah,” the WSO said. What was that? I wondered. Oh. They were saying HUA, like heard, understood, and acknowledged.
“Okay, hang on,” the WSO said. He opened a different radio channel. “Zepp to NERV Base.”
“Hello, Zepp,” a white-sounding voice said. It was the head air traffic guy at the Stake. “This is NERV Base, go ahead.”
“We’re switching to Case B,” the pilot said. “We’re requesting MD4s.”
“Copy that, just a sec,” NERV said. “Looks like you’re in a bit o’ shit.”
“Fuckin’-A.”
Our speed dropped even more until we were practically hovering. I stared through the nose-cone camera at a square of burning forest. I typed “MD4?” into my high-chair-bar keyboard. A silhouette of a drone cruise missile came up. It was a slender thing, only six feet long, with long nose wings. It said it was fast, and that it was armed with an air-to-air warhead. Hell. Send in the drones, I thought. Hell. Hell. We’re fucked. We’re going to get shot down. Well, at least it probably won’t hurt—
“Okay, Zepp,” the NERV voice said. “We see your beacon and four MD4s are prepping for launch.”
“Thank you, NERV.”
“Tell them we’re landing,” Ana said.
“All right, Guzmán. We acknowledge and we’re going back to Puerto Barrios,” the WSO lied. My map spun around as we made a sharp about-face.
“No Puerto,”
the Guate voice said.
“Pop—”
Click.
“Okay, Zepp,” the NERV voice said, “the MD4s are up and headed your way.”
“Okay, thanks, NERV,” the WSO said, “do you have an ETA on those?”
“They will be alongside you in two minutes forty-five. You just bear south another twenty degrees and they won’t have to turn around.”
“HUA.”
“You guys take care, you hear?”
“Will do and thank you, NERV,” the WSO said.
“Forty degrees coming up,” the pilot said. He pitched left and pulled his left foot off the antitorque jet, banking us into a turn that seemed to screech in the air. We screamed south along a narrow watercourse between gorges and out over the Moxela River.
“There’s the intercept,” the WSO said.

[64]

I
looked around but couldn’t see any aircraft. I guessed she meant they were visible on the map. I clicked it up and enlarged. I was beginning to get the hang of the interface. Ahead of us the Belize border was dotted with active antiaircraft installations like a string of Christmas lights. Oh, there they are. A pair of red dots were drifting toward us at 310 degrees. I put my cursor on it and typed IFF, for “identification friend or foe.” A window came up and scrolled through the radar profiles of various aircraft until it found a match. 2 COMANCHE H-18 (?) AIRBORNE A+?, it said. I guess the A+? meant they looked armed, but it wasn’t sure with what yet. I found INTERCEPT PROBABILITY on the menu and it drew two range circles, a green one around us and a red one around them. They looked too close for total comfort.
“They don’t want to pop us,” the WSO said. “They want to get a Hippo. They’ll try to force us down up ahead.”
“Let’s not be too sure about that,” Ana’s voice said.
La gran puta.
How’d I get into this again? I wondered. An hour ago we were all nice and cozy up in the king’s niche, taking our time, and now we’re risking death from the Guate air force. Why didn’t Ana just let them arrest us? Warren would have bailed us out in a week. No. Two days. Our timetable can’t be that important. I mean, it is and everything, but still . . . fuck. It just hadn’t quite gotten through to me that these guys were ready to take it all to the next level. Damn. Idiot. You know, the fact is, Jeddo, you wanted to think you were just getting into bed with corporate thugs, but really, you were getting into bed with war thugs. And honestly speaking, you knew it all the time. So don’t—
We nosed up toward the center of the Sierra de Santa Cruz, climbing at two thousand feet per minute, and flashed past a green cliff with a narrow white chalk gorge. There’s a depression in the range that extends nearly due south, and we followed that at about 340 miles per hour, hugging the cliffs. On the map the two circles crept up on each other, about to connect.
Well, so much for the royal tombs, I thought. We wouldn’t be visiting Ix Ruinas again anytime soon. Or ever, probably. The only thing we could do now—if we even got back to the Stake, which was looking less and less definite—was look for the lodestone cross. That is—and I think I mentioned this—where Jed
₂
was supposed to have buried a crate with a second copy of all his notes on the Game. And now we also had to hope that it turned up far enough away from Ix that we could still sneak back in and dig it up without the Guates hassling us. That is, if Jed
₂
even got that far. How many ifs is that? I wondered. A lot—
A new cluster of blips entered the map from the north.
“Okay, that’s the MD4s,” the WSO said.
He slowed. The drone blips increased their speed and came in underneath us like pilot fish. I guess the idea was to keep them hidden in our radar profile.
“Okay, NERV, we’ve got ’em,” the WSO said.
“Uh, copy, Zepp, we’re releasing the wire. Take over.”
“Thanks,” the WSO said. “Got it. Listen, Keelorenz wants to make sure you’ve got the Ducks in a row.” He meant the pickup boats.
“The Ducks are fine.”
“Okay,” the WSO said.
I scrolled ahead along the flight plan until I could see the string of boats. We had our choice of four pickups, two in the Mar de las Antillas and two in the Gulf of Mexico. Were we going to have to bail out? I wondered. For some reason I shivered. No,
ni modos.
They’ll lower us down. And after that I suppose these two guys would land this Hippo thing in the Keys, answer a whole lot of questions, do some time, and get amply compensated.
“I see ’em, I see ’em,” the WSO said. I cursored over the two enemy dots. The IFF said (2) US-B/CAH#220? It meant they were two Guate Comanche helicopters. They had rockets.
“We should expect a launch,” the pilot said. He changed heading to forty degrees northwest, toward Punta de Manabique.
“Better give me the balls,” the WSO said. “Now. Seriously.” We passed through the opaque cloud-front, like we were wadded in cotton for a second, and then rose out of it into the blue.
“They’re hailing us,” the WSO said. He clicked the air-to-air common channel.
“
...
no me friegues,”
the Guate Comanche said. (“Don’t fuck around.”) “Land and surrender.”
“Diles que nos la mamen,”
Ana said. “Tell them to suck it.”
They can’t be going by the book here, I thought. Generally you weren’t supposed to chat with the other side. Maybe Executive Solutions had given up that rule since they’d gone private.
“Listen, Comanches, get out of the way,” the WSO said on the common channel.
“Pela las nalgas,”
one of the Guate helicopters said.
“No les hables,”
a Guate controller cut in. “Don’t talk to them.”
“Vete
,
”
the WSO said. “Back off. You’re way out of your league.”
“Mejor andate a la mierda! . . .”
“We’ve got some heavy shit,” the WSO said. “You’re going down.”
“Chíngate,”
the Guate pilot said. “Go fuck yourself.”
“I do not want to fuck you up,” the WSO said. “Beat it. Last chance.” He clicked off and came onto the PAGE ALL channel. “Okay, team, listen up,” he said. “Just in case w—”
A high-E tone, the targeting alarm.
Oh, fuck, I thought.
“Oh, fuck,” the pilot said.
“Ave María, LAUNCH!!!” the WSO said. “Shitfucker! Don’t worry this is pretty routine we’re designed for this—”
“Try fifty-five,” the NERV voice said. “Four at six point forty-two.”
A rose flash bounced through the cabin as the Guate targeting laser swept across us. I choked back a glob of vomit. We’re fucked, I mumbled inaudibly into my visor, I can’t believe I got talked into this, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. I pounded my thigh.
“Roger that,” the pilot said, “we’ll vector to ninety-five at the low end.”
“Low radius should be one eighty.”
“Make it one seventy.” A red danger dot appeared on my screen and then didn’t seem to move, the way things don’t when they’re coming at you.
“Mierdita!!!”
“Got it. Okay, counting from ten.”
“Okay, mark.” The pilot swiveled the nacelle positions and the tilt-rotor simultaneously, throwing the Hippo almost into reverse. My head felt like it was going to twist off my spinal cord. Suddenly our turbines reduced power and the rotor pitch changed again, practically stalling us in midair, and all at once the interior was weirdly silent. A gloop of that oh-shit-the-bottom’s-fallen-out feeling inflated and burst as we dropped. It’s okay, I yelled to myself, it’s cool, there’s still a whole hell of a lot of air around us and it’s holding us up pretty good. We were under the overcast again and you could just see the red beacon of the Punta de Amatique lighthouse one mile due east. We flew northeast over the bay.
“Okay, I have it still closing,” the WSO said. “Uh, ninety. Eighty-five.”
“Right, we’re doing a U49,” the pilot said. “Mark.”
Our engines slowed again and, to me, they almost seemed to stop.
On our port side one of the MD4s fired its engine, mimicking our heat signature. We fell. At about two thousand feet the pilot tilted the rotors back to where they started catching some air again, but he kept us almost-falling toward the foam at the tip of the peninsula, down into denser air that would lower the ATAs’ hit probabilities. It felt like we were burrowing into additive-free peanut butter. On my map view the missile looked like it was just hanging out next to our permanent spot in the middle of the screen, tiptoeing a bit closer every so often and then edging away. At less than twenty feet above water level the pilot pulled us up in a sickeningly smooth parabola. I felt my testicles rise up through my inguinal canal, through my digestive tract, and into my mouth, and swallowed them back down. I swear I could really feel both of them, the left one bigger than the right one, and I had to choke back each one separately. There was a
PFRROOOOSH
underneath us, like a safety valve popping on a giant cappuccino machine, as the red dot went past us, following the decoy, down toward the swamp. I didn’t see any impact, but the missile must have hit the point only about a hundred feet ahead of us, just a bit offshore of the lighthouse. There was a
BUMP
shockwave through the cabin and a POCKETA-POCKETA-POCKETA staccato from everywhere at once as the Hippo’s composite shell expanded in the heat. The chin-bubble window buckled inward from the pressure and popped back into shape all webbed with cracks. Pebbles clattered over our Kevlar-skinned undercarriage, there was a sickening uprise, and then it was already all back to normal. I switched to the tail camera. All I could see was scattering gulls and a blob of steam the size of a ten-story helping of instant mashed potatoes. For some reason I kept thinking about all the dead parrot fish. We leveled off again and headed straight on northwest, out into the Golfo de Honduras, rising again.
“Come on,” the WSO said, “they still have five dicks left. Let’s not fuck around.”
We rose into the clouds and up through them. This is such bullshit, I thought. If I’d wanted to play with GI Joe toys I would have intentionally fucked up my SAT scores, joined the marines, faked the physical, and gotten vaporized in Iraq. I called up com channel 4.
“Marena?” I asked. “Are you okay?” I couldn’t really see her with my helmet cam, or rather she was just another floating label.
“I’m fine,” her voice said after a few seconds. “I’ve got Max on the line, I’ll call you back.” Click.
I noticed a strong smell of vomit, with a top note of urine and maybe even some feces in there. Somebody’d gotten scared enough to let it all go. Probably Michael, I thought. What a wuss.
“Back off,” the WSO said over the radio. “I’m gonna fuck you up. I’m gonna fuck you up.”
“Muerancen huecos,”
the Guate pilot said. “Die, faggots.” Our targeting alarm beeped again. Shit. I got another surge of panic and snuggled myself into the entirely deceptive security of my ergo-foam seating equipment.
“Ana, give him the balls right fucking now,” the pilot said.
“Okay,” Ana said. “Fuck ’em. Target and engage.”
On my readout a discreet box came up that said the nearer Apache was a target for the number two MD4. Like it had said on their specs table, the MD4s were multiuse UAVs. They could divert rockets, like the last one had, but they could also act as missiles. They were slower than ATA rockets, like Sidewinders or whatever, but they could still come around behind an aircraft, creep up on it, and detonate. I watched the number two MD4 edge away from us and drift toward the Comanches.
“You’re dead, shitter,” the WSO said on the radio.
“Metetela, hueco,”
the Guate pilot answered.
Meanwhile, the second ATA was coming up on our rear end. “I’m going to drop foil on this one,” the WSO said on PAGE ALL. I enlarged our tail camera view. Strings of what seemed like thousands of sparkles bloomed behind us, like we were birthing a population of chrome jellyfish. Each sparkle was actually a small self-inflating Mylar balloon, trailing a long fringe of streamers and a single burning flare. On the radar layer of my map a big smear of interference appeared between us and the missile. On the infrared layer it looked more like a thousand points of heat. Either way, the thing’s primitive onboard brain found it confusing, and it drifted off course. At the same time the pilot banked us into an S-curve evasion move. There was a high rising and then descending whine as another rocket went under us. Somewhere it must have detonated, because we didn’t try to evade it again. Instead we leveled out and got on another steady northeast course. There was a pause, as though we weren’t fighting, just joyriding. On the map, though, the two Comanches were slowly getting ahead of us to the east, between us and the low sun. I guess the idea was that if they got much closer they’d launch two rockets at once, and there’d be no way we could deflect or evade both of them.
The lull in the action stretched out and out. “Mommy really, really loves you,” Marena said to Max. “You’re the best boy in the world.” I watched the two orange enemy dots closing in. I watched the readouts of water depths flow under us. I watched the green dot that represented our MD4 drift closer and closer to the nearer Comanche. On my nose cam window the cloud shelf below us was like a field of corrugated pack ice. A single huge clump of cumulus clouds reared above the plain far away to the east like Arabian Nights domes, marking the Cuba Reef underneath. I still couldn’t see any aircraft. Finally the dot that represented the nearer Comanche veered sharply to the southeast. He’d realized what was going on. The drone crept up behind him. He dove into a tight downward parabola, trying to reflect the heat from his jets off the water, but it was too late. On the video window you could just see a tiny yellow flash as the MD4 detonated, and then a tangerine streak of burning fuel that stretched out into a horizontal helix.
“Dio perro,”
the pilot said. “Incompetent fucks.”
“Hey, guess what happened in lacrosse,” Max said. Now we were close enough to see the helicopter skim slowly across the water in a ball of steam, spurting little glowing chunks. One of the ejector rigs materialized out of the smoke and steam like a stamen out of a lily blooming in ten-minutes-per-second time lapse video. It shot up pretty high but then the chute didn’t open all the way, and the Guate pilot’s body spiraled down like a warped shuttlecock, strapped to the big seat and trailing pink specks of flaming plastic.
“Dios mio,”
the WSO said. I could tell from his voice he was crossing himself.
“Did the other one eject at all?” Ana asked.
“I don’t think so. Those things are pure shit anyway,” the WSO said, “they never work.”
“Fuck. My responsibility,” she said.
We came up over the debris. The water was bubbling. Now you could see the second Comanche on video. I thought it was going to fire, but instead it seemed to be hanging back. Either he was scared now or his COs had told him not to engage.
We banked north again and headed out at twenty-five degrees into the Golfo de Honduras. We passed the closest point to the second Comanche. Nothing happened. We kept going.
En todos modos,
I thought. Maybe everything’s going to work out. No problem.
Nobody was saying anything on the main channel, so I hit MONITOR ALL. Nobody was talking there either. You’d think that everybody would be whooping and cheering and congratulating each other, but they just weren’t. I didn’t think it was because folks were disturbed about the casualties, though. It was more that this had suddenly gone from an international incident to a really serious international incident. Suddenly, we were all eligible for a whole lot of jail time. Not that anybody’d probably get their act together on that, but still. And we weren’t home yet either. I noticed our speed was back up to 600 kph. I tuned into the WSO’s helmet. He was sweeping the communications bands. There were dozens of outraged people squawking in Spanish and at least a few in English. I caught the phrase “Scramble all available,” which didn’t sound good.