Helius Legacy Page 5

  Paquin left Boutreau at the airport and took a cab to a private airfield outside the city, where a private jet was waiting to take him back to Austin. The drive through the dark and dusty streets of Douala brought back old memories. Africa had been his first overseas assignment as a STASI officer twenty years earlier. He’d been assigned to work with a KGB unit in Ethiopia, after the Soviet Union had persuaded Fidel Castro to dispatch fifteen thousand Cuban troops to assist the Ethiopians with their little war against neighboring Somalia.

  After the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, he’d left the doomed STASI and moved into corporate security work. The rules of the new game were somewhat different, but he’d adapted. Problems had to be solved, and he knew how to do it. People were willing to pay for that skill. Sometimes threats or bribes were sufficient. Other times, more drastic measures were required.

  Douala Airport, Cameroon

  December 4, 1999 / 10:20 p.m.

  The small African man sitting in the back of the airport waited until the two white men had left before walking to a nearby pay phone. A man with a deep baritone answered on the first ring.

  “Onwuallu.”

  “The priest got on the plane.”

  “That’s too bad. Well, we must be patient. Destroying Mr. Paquin is a prize worth the waiting for. Thank you, Mr. Porter.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  San Bernardino County, California

  December 4, 1999 / Saturday / 11:30 p.m.

  As the Learjet began its final approach, Severino looked out the window at the lights below. He tried to ignore his tension headache and the uneasy feeling in his stomach, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen until the target was put down. Severino didn’t have a problem with Mason’s kill order. He just didn’t like planning the operation and making it happen in one day when the target was on the top of a mountain over a thousand miles away. That kind of logistical nightmare was out of his league. He could also do without Mason’s “there’s no room for error” bullshit.

  Paquin planned the difficult ops, and on a high priority deal like this he would typically run the execution from start to finish. Severino’s job was to follow orders, and he was comfortable in that role. That wasn’t going to happen on this one. Paquin’s jet was still on the way back from Africa. Worse, they couldn’t reach him by phone because of a storm over the Gulf. Whether Severino liked it or not, this op was his baby from start to finish.

  The good news was the hit should be a piece of cake. The target was a nobody, and he didn’t know they were coming after him. With the muscle and firepower that I’m bringing to this party, it should be a real easy job, unless … unless someone on the team does something stupid.

  Severino glanced over at the two lean, hard-looking Latino men sitting across the aisle from him. He only knew them as Juan and Miguel. The two men usually worked with Simon Vargas on jobs in South and Central America. They just happened to be in town for a meeting with Vargas when Mason ordered the hit. After listening to Mason’s threats, Severino had pulled them into the operation. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  The two men had been part of a paramilitary unit in Nicaragua, before they moved on to private security work. Vargas said they knew their business and followed orders, which was good enough for Severino. He would have felt better if Vargas was a part of the team, but that was against protocol. When Paquin was out of town, one of them had to be on call back at the command center in Austin.

  It was the third member of the team, Julian Anders, who spooked Severino. Severino had considered leaving him off the team, but had reconsidered the decision at the last minute. Anders knew how to use a gun, and he had no problem with killing. Anders’s problem was that he didn’t follow orders. Two months earlier, Severino had sent Anders and two local thugs to persuade a labor organizer in Caracas, Venezuela, that Helius crews were off limits. Severino’s orders had been clear. The beating was intended to be a message, no more. It was not to be fatal.

  Anders had put his own spin on the order. He’d beaten the head organizer half to death and then stamped on the man’s spine after he was out cold, paralyzing him for life. Even the local thugs working the job with Anders had been taken aback by his brutality. The incident had blown over without trouble, but Severino knew they’d been lucky. If the foreign press had gotten wind of Anders’s rampage and traced it back to Helius, it could have been a disaster for the company. Severino intended to keep Anders on a short leash this time.

  The Learjet landed at what formerly had been Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino County, California. In 1995, the Pentagon had closed the sprawling facility and turned over control to the county. A part of the facility was being leased by the county to a private aviation firm, while the state and local officials argued about an overall reuse plan. The base was located at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains, where the target’s cabin was located, making it an ideal staging area for the op.

  Severino smiled wryly to himself as he mentally walked through the plan again. After five years of working with Paquin, the military jargon that Paquin used as a matter of course had now become a fixture in his own descriptions. Unlike a lot of the people who worked for Paquin, Severino wasn’t ex-military. He’d worked as an enforcer for the Garellis, one of the second-tier crime families in New York, for ten years. In 1995, that life had come to an end, when a rival family had won a turf war. As a part of the settlement with the rival family, the Garellis had offered up Severino, who’d killed a number of the other family’s top people. Severino had gotten wind of the deal and staged his own death in order to get out from under the sanction. His “accidental death” was caused by a meth lab explosion. The police found an unidentifiable body in an abandoned warehouse along with Anthony Severino’s burned wallet and a half-melted class ring. In the overworked world of NYPD Homicide, the evidence was sufficient for the positive identification of one dead mobster. No one missed the intoxicated homeless man that Severino drafted to serve as the corpse.

  After quietly leaving New York, Severino had drifted from job to job in the South, making enough to survive, but no more. He’d ended up working as a short-haul trucker for a subsidiary of Helius in Morgan City, Louisiana. Somehow, Paquin had learned about his background. When Paquin sat down at his table in the local bar, without an invitation, Severino was convinced he’d been sent from New York to punch his ticket. Paquin had allayed his concerns, explaining that he was in the business of solving problems for their mutual employer. He told Severino that he knew about his New York background, but it wasn’t a problem.

  Paquin had told him that he might be able to use Severino’s help on special jobs that paid well, but declined to provide any specifics. A week later, Paquin asked him to transport several boxes from an older part of the port area to a private airport outside of town. Severino had shown up on time, completed the job, and picked up five hundred bucks for a night’s work. Over the next three years, the jobs had gotten bigger, along with the money. Eventually, Severino had become one of Paquin’s trusted lieutenants, performing “services” throughout the world for his consulting firm. All of the work, directly or indirectly, involved Helius, and most of the work wasn’t all that different from what he used to do for the Garellis.

  The pilot of the Learjet, Ed Wilson, taxied the jet up to the ancient hangar at the far end of the airfield, and the sliding steel doors slowly opened. A middle-aged man with gray hair tied back in a ponytail drove out of the hangar in a squat vehicle, hooked up a cable to the front of the jet, and towed it into the hangar. Good. Cochrane’s here.

  When Severino climbed out of the jet, followed by the rest of the team, Cochrane was waiting at the foot of the stairs. Severino was surprised by the size of the old building. Cochrane noticed the look on his face.

  “Big, isn’t she? This monster was built for B-52s. Those old birds were big bastards. Yessiree.”

  Cochrane’s Alabama dra
wl grated on Severino. When Ed Wilson walked down the stairs of the jet, Cochrane walked past Severino and gave Wilson a friendly slap on the shoulder.

  “You looked a little shaky on your approach, old man. I just might have to give you a few pointers. Can’t have you bumpin’ into my chopper.”

  “Piss off, hillbilly,” Wilson responded with a smile.

  Both men were in their late fifties and had served a tour in Vietnam during the last years of the war. Wilson had flown a series of fixed-wing aircraft in South Vietnam and Laos, as a pilot with Air America, an airline formed and run by the CIA. Cochrane had served in the United States Army as a warrant officer in the First Air Cavalry Division. Although both men were good pilots, their “cowboy” attitudes hadn’t played well in the buttoned-down civilian air transport industry. After the war, they’d moved from job to job, inevitably becoming less and less employable. By the time Paquin hired them, the two men were hauling freight for small-time smugglers.

  Severino looked skeptically across the hangar at the ugly gray-brown Vietnam-era “Huey” (UH-1) parked next to the Lear. As far as Severino was concerned, it looked liked a big piece of shit, and that scared the hell out of him. The chopper was their transport up the mountain.

  “How’s the chopper?”

  “Don’t you worry about that old girl, chief. She may look a bit worn, but she’s almost new where it counts. Oh yeah, and since you told me this was such a big deal op, I brought a little something special along just in case us peaceful folks were to find ourselves in need.”

  Cochrane had a big smile on his jowly face as he walked over to the chopper’s big sliding door and pulled it open. Severino stared at the ugly black machine gun lying on a tarp, just inside the side door of the chopper.

  “What’s this shit?”

  Cochrane smiled, missing the anger in Severino’s incredulous voice.

  “What we have here is an M60D machine gun. I only got a hundred rounds, but—”

  Severino cut him off. “We don’t need it, Cochrane. This is going to be a nice quiet operation.”

  “Fine with me, boss, but you can never tell. Sheeit, I dropped enough of those Rangers and Greenie Beanies into what was supposed to be some real quiet LZs, but the hell if we didn’t take some heavy goddamned fire comin’ and goin’. Guess those VCs didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be there,” Cochrane said, patting the M60 affectionately.

  Wilson, who’d walked over to admire the big M60, smiled at Cochrane’s comment, and joined the conversation.

  “Roger that. Y’all never know when you’re gonna find yourself knee-deep in shit.”

  The aging chopper, the big gun, and the talk of a possible firefight struck a nerve in Severino. He’d killed a number of people as an enforcer for the Garellis, but he’d only been in one situation that could be called a gun battle. A pimp who’d refused to pay protection had opened up on Severino with a .44 Magnum just as he was getting out of his car with two muscle heads. The incoming rounds blew the Lincoln’s front windshield all over Queens Boulevard. Severino remembered lying by the curb struggling to get his Beretta out, as round after round ripped into the car above him. The three of them had managed to put down the pimp and get away from the scene, but he’d been scared shitless during the entire fight.

  Cochrane’s talk of a possible firefight brought the memory streaming back, and with it, the fear. The feeling enraged Severino and exacerbated the pain pounding in his temples.

  “Let’s get this straight, Cochrane. This is a quiet in-and-out deal against a soft target. The schmuck will probably be asleep when we show up. So forget about your LZs, VCs, or any other kind of Vietnam bullshit. We get in and out, real quiet. Are we totally fucking clear on that?”

  Cochrane and Wilson looked over at him with surprise.

  “Yeah, no problem, boss, in and out real quiet,” Cochrane repeated with a tight smile.

  As Severino walked around the other side of the chopper toward the office, Anders glanced up from the M16 that he was checking over. Severino could see the grin on his face out of the corner of his eye. Screw you.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  San Bernardino County, California,

  December 5, 1999 / Sunday / 2:30 a.m.

  Caine had been asleep for about an hour when he heard the sound of the low-flying chopper. A surge of adrenaline raced through him, and he sat up in the bed. For a moment, he struggled to identify his surroundings, and then he remembered. Sam was growling quietly, more in reaction to Caine’s tension than to the noise from the chopper. Caine reached over and stroked the dog’s head.

  Caine tried to get back to sleep, but gave up the effort twenty minutes later. He pulled on his jeans and shirt and walked into the dark kitchen. Sam followed him. He stopped in the middle of the room and looked out the window. The night sky was cloudy, but there was enough of a moon for him to see the snow-covered driveway and the dark tree line beyond. He reached for the light switch on the wall to his left, but stopped before he touched it. There was movement in the trees.

  Although the kitchen was dark, Caine instinctively stepped out of the limited ambient light coming in the window, to the darkest part of the room. He stared intently at the stand of trees just beyond the Jeep. It took Caine a moment to pick up the movement again and to identify what he was looking at. Four figures were just inside the tree line. As he watched, they stopped and separated into two groups. Two of them started around the house to the right. The other two began to circle to the left, toward the rear of the house.

  The dog standing beside him emitted a low growl.

  “Shhh, buddy. Let’s see what we have here,” Caine whispered reassuringly and opened the utility drawer on his left. He pulled out a small pair of binoculars and focused on the two figures moving toward the rear of the house. Both men were armed. From the outline of the weapons, he guessed they were carrying mini Uzis or Skorpion submachine guns. The guns had elongated barrels—suppressors.

  Caine turned his attention to the two men who were circling around to the right of the cabin. They were carrying similar weapons, but the larger of the two men had a gun sticking out of his backpack. It looked like a shotgun.

  Caine lowered the binoculars, questions screaming through his mind. Who the hell are these guys, and why am I suddenly a target after all these years? Caine decided to leave the questions for another time and focus on staying alive. He had to get out of the cabin before the assault began. Caine dropped into a crouch and walked over to the coat closet in the hall. He pulled a sweater over his head and grabbed a dark blue ski-jacket. Then he dropped to one knee and pulled out the black backpack resting against the rear wall of the closet.

  The retriever, sensing his intent to leave, put one of his front paws on Caine’s knee. Caine scratched the dog around the collar area. For a moment he considered staying with the dog and making a fight of it in the cabin, but then rejected the thought. The cabin was a trap. Staying put would just get them both killed. His best course was to get out fast and leave Sam behind. The opposition would be forced to follow him, leaving the dog safe in the house. He’d have his neighbor down the road pick up Sam up later.

  Caine spoke to the dog quietly.

  “Sam, you have to stay here. Once I go, they’ll have no reason to come in.”

  Caine grabbed the backpack and crawled rapidly toward the cellar stairway. He eased down the stairs silently, with the dog following in his wake. There was a storage room in the rear of the basement where Caine kept supplies and the dog’s food. The room had no exterior windows. He turned on the overhead light, drew a bucket of water from the sink for the dog to drink and ripped open a bag of dog food. To distract the dog, Caine placed one of the large rawhide bones that he kept on the shelf beside the bowl of water. Sam lay down and started in on the bone. Caine reluctantly closed the door behind him, praying that Sam would keep quiet and be safe.

  The black Arctic Cat was parked in front of the door that led to the backya
rd. Caine checked the gas gauge. It was about three-quarters full. That should be enough fuel to get him to the town. He opened the backpack and pulled out a Sig Sauer P226 pistol, three magazines, and a black nylon shoulder holster. He slid one of the magazines into the Sig and chambered the first round. Then he put the gun back in the shoulder holster and pulled it on. He put the other two magazines in his front pocket.

  Caine knew that he would be most vulnerable in the ten to fifteen seconds that it would take to cross the thirty yards of open space before the tree line. Unless he could create some kind of diversion, it could be a very short ride. Caine opened one of the pockets on the inside of the backpack and pulled out a flare pistol, along with three long cartridges. He selected the bright orange cartridge from among the three and loaded it into the pistol. He put the other two cartridges away and closed the pack.

  Caine glanced at his watch as he pulled on his hiking boots. It was 2:58 a.m. No more than eight minutes had passed since he’d spotted the men in the forest. He considered going back upstairs and trying to pin down their position before he made his run, but decided against it. He had to rely upon speed and surprise to get him out of a kill zone. The Cat would give him the speed, and if the flare performed its magic, he should have all the surprise he needed.

  Caine pressed the button that activated the door to the yard. When the door was three feet off the ground, he rolled into the open space, closed his eyes, and fired the flare into the night sky. Then he rolled back into the basement and climbed on the Arctic Cat, counting to himself. When he reached the count of five, he closed his eyes tightly and turned his face away from the now open door.

  The flare exploded in a single stunning flash of white on the count of seven. Two seconds later, the flare went dark, and Caine roared down the ramp into the snow-covered yard. The flare was a specialty load. It was designed to draw the attention of the enemy in a night fight and then explode with a blast of intense white light. Anyone looking at the flare when it exploded would be blinded for thirty seconds and suffer impaired vision for several minutes.