Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [37]
The Twin-Beech was parked in the general-aviation section of El Dorado International Airport. It didn't require too much in the way of intelligence to make an accurate assessment of what the aircraft were used for. There were too many expensive cars, and far too many expensive aircraft to be explained by the Colombian gentry. These were toys for the newly rich. Clark's eyes swept over them, his face showing neutral interest.
"Wages of sin ain't bad, are they?" Larson chuckled.
"What about the poor bastards who're paying the wages?"
"I know about that, too. I'm just saying that they're nice airplanes. Those Gulfstreams - I'm checked out on 'em - that's one sweet-handlin' bird."
"What do they cost?" Clark asked.
"A wise man once said, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."
"Yeah." Clark's mouth twisted into a smile. But some things carry a price that's not measured in dollars. He was already getting into the proper frame of mind for the mission.
Larson preflighted the Beech in about fifteen minutes. He'd just flown in ninety minutes earlier, and few private pilots would have bothered to run through the whole checklist, but Larson was a good pilot, which meant he was before all things a careful one. Clark took the right-side cockpit seat, strapping in as though he were a student pilot on his first hop. Commercial traffic was light at this hour, and it was easy to taxi into the takeoff pattern. About the only surprise was the long takeoff roll.
"It's the altitude," Larson explained over the intercom headset as he rotated off the runway. "It makes the controls a little mushy at low speed, too. No problem. Like driving in the snow - you just have to pay attention." He moved the lever to bring the gear up, leaving the aircraft at full power to claw up to altitude as quickly as possible. Clark scanned the instruments and saw nothing obviously awry, though it did seem odd to show nine thousand feet of altitude when you could still pick out individual people on the ground.
The aircraft banked to the left, taking a northwesterly heading. Larson backed off on the throttles, commenting that you also had to pay close attention to engine temperatures here, though the cooling systems on the twin Continental engines were beefed up to allow for it. They were heading toward the country's mountainous spine. The sky was clear and the sun was bright.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
"It is that," Clark agreed. The mountains were covered with emerald-green trees whose leaves shimmered with moisture from the night's rain. But Clark's trained eyes saw something else. Walking these hills would be a cast-iron bitch. About the only good thing to be said was that there was good cover under which people could conceal themselves. The combination of steep hills and thin air would make this place an arduous one. He hadn't been briefed on what exactly was going to happen, but he knew enough to be glad that the hard part of the job would not be his.
The mountain ranges in Colombia run on a southwest-to-northeast vector. Larson picked a convenient pass to fly over, but the winds off the nearby Pacific Ocean made the crossing bumpy.
"Get used to it. Winds are picking up today because of the weather front that's moving in. They really boil around these hills. You ought to see what real bad weather is like."
"Thanks, but no thanks! Not much in the way of places to land in case things -"
"Go bad?" Larson asked. "That's why I pay attention to the checklist. Besides, there are more little strips down there than you might imagine. Of course, you don't always get a welcome when you decide to use one. Don't sweat it. I just put new engines on this bird a month ago. Sold the old ones to one of my students for his old King Air. It belongs to the Bureau of Customs now," Larson explained.
"Did you have any part in that?"
"Negative! Look, they expect me to know why all these