Crocker, in the passenger seat, spotted the Ranger two hundred feet ahead. “They’re turning left,” he said urgently.
DZ drove past the intersection, parked the Jetta off the road under a big tree, and got out.
“Why are we stopping here?” Crocker asked.
Hamid hurried over and spoke through the open driver’s window, the wind playing with his hair. “There’s an airstrip back there that’s used by Brazilian charters,” he said. “It’s not sufficiently lit, and closes after dark.”
Crocker said, “Let’s hide the vehicles and take a look.”
“Yes.”
They armed themselves with pistols, then Hamid led the way through a sea of high sawgrass. Frogs croaked and crickets chirped around them. Two hundred yards along, he raised his right hand, pushed the foliage in front of him aside, and pointed. “There they are, over there.”
Crocker saw a runway with portable klieg lights powered by a generator and an old aluminum 737 with “Aero Tetra” stenciled in black on its tail. Two large covered trucks were parked beside it. Men in short sleeves were tossing suitcase-sized bales of something wrapped in clear plastic from the back of the trucks into the jet’s forward and aft cargo doors. An empty jeep sat fifty feet behind the jet.
“Aero Tetra? Never heard of it,” Akil said.
“They couldn’t get away with calling it Aero Terror,” DZ commented.
“Who couldn’t get away with calling it that?” Akil asked.
“The Iranians, man, the Iranians.” There was no time to explain.
Crocker counted eight guards in shorts, armed with AK-47s, standing near the airplane and trucks.
“You think it’s cocaine?” DZ whispered to Crocker.
“If it is, they’re hauling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth.”
“Where do you think they’re planning to take it?” Akil asked.
“Europe, probably.”
Akil: “What do we do now?”
“We stop it,” Crocker answered.
“The aircraft? How?”
An excellent question. Armed only with pistols, they were grossly outgunned and outnumbered, had no body armor or backup, and there was a strong probability that Brazilian authorities had been paid off.
Crocker stuck out his chin and looked to his right along the runway to the terminal, which was completely dark. Then he pushed a button that illuminated the dial on his watch. It read 2308 hours.
The men loading the plane were moving quickly. The cockpit lights were on, which meant that the pilot, copilot, and navigator were inside and probably doing a preflight instrument check before they started the engines. That gave Crocker and the three men with him ten to twenty minutes to stop the plane from taking off.
The time it would take to alert the CIA stations in Asunción, Brasília, or Buenos Aires didn’t seem worth it. Besides, all three cities were far away.
Turning to Akil, Crocker whispered, “Grab one of the radios and come with me. You guys wait here and stay alert,” he said to DZ and Hamid.
“What are you gonna do?” DZ asked.
“Don’t know yet, but I’ll keep you informed.”
He led the way through the sawgrass with his head tucked down and arms in front of him so the serrated blades wouldn’t cut his face to shreds. We’ve got to stop it. Somehow we’ve got to stop it, he repeated over and over in his head.
After two hundred feet the field opened onto a large cement parking lot. A one-story terminal topped with a seventy-foot-tall control tower stood to his left. No lights. No sign of people inside. Akil breathed heavily behind him.
“What do you see, boss?” Akil whispered, sweat running down his forehead.
“Nothing. Follow me.”
Crocker readied his 9mm Glock, dashed to the six-foot chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the runway, climbed it, and landed on the other side. He knelt on the concrete and scanned the area. On the tarmac on the runway side of the tower rested two trucks with “Petrobas” painted on them. One was a fuel truck; the other was a flatbed. Judging by the height of the tank above its suspension system, the fuel truck was empty.
“See if that one has keys inside,” Crocker whispered, pushing Akil to the flatbed.
Neither of them did.
Akil joined Crocker near the cab of the tanker. “Boss, what are you thinking?” he asked.
“I checked, and the tank is empty.”
“So?”
“I’m considering hot-wiring this baby and driving right at ’em. See how close we can get.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“If we drive at ’em, they’re going to shoot us to shreds,” Akil warned. “I counted eight armed guards, another half-dozen loaders. They could be armed, too.”