Kirk Russell - Redback

‘What about now?’

Papers shuffled, Brian looking at his notes. ‘KZ has changed hands in the last few years and is owned by a larger corporation that I’m trying to learn something about. What I’ve learned so far is that they own eleven other orchards, six in California, two in Oregon, three in Washington. I’ve got a couple of pages on them. They bought all of them over the last five years. Each has an airstrip.’

‘This one has just been enlarged. If they had a plane like the Sherpa they could move shipments of drugs from one orchard operation to another, and then use delivery trucks to distribute.’ Marquez counted trucks. ‘I’m looking at nine trucks right now with KZ painted on the side.’

‘I’ve got more on the Sherpa too. That plane is a helluva workhorse. It can land in some tough places. I’ve never told you this, but in Vietnam I had the job of calling in air strikes. In the end there Charlie was all over us and I had to bring the bombs right up to our guys. I knew sometimes we were killing some of our own. You tell yourself you’re not because it’s the only way you can deal with it, but afterwards you can never really get away from it. I think that’s why I’m ready to rock and roll all the time with these cartel freaks.’ Hidalgo paused and abruptly switched subjects. ‘It’s getting weird around here. Holsten came through this morning looking for you. There’s some news out of Tijuana.’

That night Marquez slept in a Best Western motel and dreamed of a Mex Fed captain named Viguerra. Captain Vengeance they called him for the way he went after narco trafficantes. In his dream Viguerra was smaller, his black mustache neatly trimmed, his uniform crisp and neat in a way it never was in life. He stood near the wreck of a burning plane.

‘For every one I arrest, I kill two. I have chosen to fight them. A man can rule a certain amount of territory as a lion rules. As long as he is strong and shows no weakness he can dominate. For now, I am the lion. I have the helicopters and soldiers and the will to kill them, but this is a war with no ending. This is what the Americans don’t understand. In this war are beings among us who are not human. They have aspects of us, but they are not of us, and they bring cruelty that is inhuman. Even now, I can feel the presence of one. His men I can kill. Him, I don’t know. If you can find for me where he was born, I will give you all the wealth of Mexico. But you will never find that. There is no birthplace or childhood for any of them. They are not of God.’

‘Come on, a man is a man. He’s the same as any of us.’

‘No, my friend, he isn’t.’

But that was just a dream. He woke in the motel room and lay on his back thinking about the leak at DEA. He once had a mission and a purpose and a way of fighting the war on drugs without getting overwhelmed by the scale of it. But he was losing his hold on that. He closed his eyes, saw Captain Viguerra again and asked, ‘How do I find Stoval?’

Viguerra laughed.

‘You don’t have to worry about finding him. That is one thing you do not need to worry about. I promise, when he learns you are looking for him he will find you.’

At the Calexico International Airport the air controller was happy to talk shop about the Sherpa. He liked talking planes and was very familiar with the gray fifty-eight footer and its pilot. Calexico International had only one east/west runway. A fully loaded Sherpa needed up to five thousand feet of runway to land, but not if it was coming in empty from San Diego. The Calexico runway was four thousand six hundred and seventy feet, but that was okay, the controller explained. Weaver’s routine was to land with an empty plane that then got loaded.

‘He ferries cargo for a business in town that distributes products for a group of Mexican manufacturers. They’re losing traffic to these new big box stores, so I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last. Why are you asking?’

Marquez took a chance and handed him a card. The DEA insignia was on it and the controller’s reaction was a look of sad regret, though not of surprise. He studied the card as if wanting to collect his thoughts before speaking.

‘I know he learned to fly that plane in the Coast Guard and the one he owns he bought as a wreck at an auction. He spent way too much rebuilding it. He’ll have to fly cargo to the moon and back to pay it off, but I sure hope he’s not doing anything illegal. He’s too nice a guy.’

‘I don’t know that he is doing anything illegal.’

‘But you’re investigating him.’

‘I’m following up on a tip. It doesn’t mean anything yet so I’d appreciate you keeping it to yourself.’

‘No problem.’

Now Marquez waited for a DEA pilot to fly in. When he did, Marquez walked out to meet him. Then they waited together until the Sherpa landed and loaded. It all went down in under an hour. As the Sherpa lumbered into the air again, a gray beast with its trusslike build, they took off right behind it.

Marquez had counted three men, the pilot and two others who were much younger and more than likely there to handle cargo. They trailed the Sherpa northeast at eight thousand feet. Below the rugged country was colored with shades of brown, the sky ahead a dark blue. He listened as the DEA pilot went back and forth on the radio, and watched as he slid his headset off and turned.

‘Your friend here is gradually changing his heading. This isn’t the flight plan he filed, so he may know we’re here.’

‘Can he dump the load?’

‘Oh, yeah, that plane is built for it. I’ve never ridden one of those flying boxes, but they say you have to beat them out of the air. Those two guys with him can slide the cargo doors open and shove stuff out.’

The Sherpa pilot got cleared to land at Mammoth Lakes Airport on the eastern side of the Sierras. His bearing became northeast and at this speed he’d land in Mammoth in forty-five minutes. On this heading he’d cross over Death Valley.

And that’s what he did. He took it right up the spine of the Panamint Mountains. Above the deep canyons there the cargo doors slid open and Marquez and the DEA pilot watched slit bags tumble from the plane, spinning, trailing a thin plume of cocaine, some bursting open in a tiny cloud in the air, others lost in the dark jagged rocks below. Marquez videotaped but looking down at the unpaved roads that ran across the big wash and vanished early in the steep canyons, he knew they wouldn’t recover anything. Each bag probably held fifty kilos, and still the pilot had to circle the Panamints twice before they were done.

The Sherpa tracked alongside the bone dry land east of the White Mountains, came around Montgomery Peak and descended alongside Highway 395 to the airport at Mammoth Lakes. Two county cruisers were waiting. Drug-sniffing dogs were on the way from Reno. Weaver surrendered without incident and now was in a holding cell in Mammoth. The pair of San Diego gangbangers traveling with him were in separate cells. Marquez tried the gangbangers first. Despite clothes caked in cocaine dust, they gave him nothing but attitude. He called home to the Field Office and talked to Sheryl.

‘I need everything we can get on Weaver, the pilot.’

With Weaver they might get somewhere because Weaver looked like a broken man. He slumped in his cell. He wept as Marquez talked with Sheryl about recovering cocaine.

‘It’s in canyons and on ridges in the Panamint Mountains in Death Valley. It’s probably a hundred and ten degrees in those canyons this time of year. We might find a bag or two but then we’d have the problem of proving it was theirs, and even if we did, no DA is going to touch it. Our best chance is to get the pilot to talk.’