State of Emergency

CHAPTER 66


Movement along the edge of the grass strip caught Quinn’s eye. When he went to investigate, he found the man who’d fallen out of the plane was still alive.

Quinn’s first round had hit him in the chest, but the second had gone low, entering the back of the knee as he tumbled down the boarding stairs. He lay in the grass with his leg turned unnaturally underneath his body. Dark eyes had sunken into deep sockets as if the life was seeping out from behind them. His chest heaved in ragged breaths.

He didn’t have long.

Quinn turned to Aleksandra. “Ask where they’re taking the bomb.”

She did, prodding his wounded leg with her toe to get his attention.

“Laa! Laa!” he cried. No, no.

Quinn looked down, shocked. He was speaking Arabic.

“Who are you?” he asked in Arabic.

The wounded man looked up, blinking his sunken eyes.

“Allahu Akbar,” he sighed with his last breath, the sound of air seeping out of flattening tire. God is great.

“Damn you stupidly shit!” Aleksandra attempted to curse in English, kicking the man again in frustration.

Quinn touched her arm.

“Let’s think,” he said. “This guy is an Arab and there were Yemeni AQAP reps at the party where you and I met. Borregos was there as well, but I’m betting this guy’s people picked the target. Borregos is a narcotics smuggler . . . probably moving the bomb for a share in the profits.”

Quinn stooped to search the dead Arab’s pockets and found a satellite phone. He pressed the power switch and held his breath as it cycled. As he suspected, they’d been in the jungle long enough the battery was completely spent.

“Dead,” he said, holding up the phone so Aleksandra could see it.

“There is a small generator beside that building,” she said.

None of the other guards had a satellite phone or a charging cord, but there were a handful of tools and a few spare aircraft parts in the shed. It took over four hours of scrounging wire and other materials to jury-rig a charging cord that would attach to the satellite phone’s battery—and another two to get the generator chugging long enough to give the phone enough juice to make a call.

It was nearly noon by the time Quinn was finally able to connect with Win Palmer. He had no idea how long the battery would last and uncharacteristically told the boss to shut up and listen as soon as he answered. He gave Palmer a CliffsNotes version of the past few hours’ events.

“I’ll take some photos of these guys with my phone and text them to you as soon as we get a signal,” Quinn said. “We could use an extraction for two ASAP. In the meantime, I suggest you get Diego Borregos’s photo out to every law enforcement agency within two hundred miles of the border.”

“I’ll get someone to you right away,” Palmer said, pausing. The sound of clicking computer keys dominated the line. “Bo is stable, by the way,” he said while he typed. “And Thibodaux is too damned stubborn to take it easy until we know for sure about his eye.”

“Thanks for the update,” Quinn said, relieved. “I wonder—”

“How long is the strip there?” Palmer spoke before Quinn could ask any more about Bo.

Quinn looked from one end of the grass field to the other. “Maybe twenty-five hundred feet,” he said. “But I got forty feet of jungle canopy rising up right off both ends of the runway.”

“Twenty-five,” Palmer inhaled sharply. “That’s awfully tight for anything fast enough to get to you anytime soon and big enough to carry you both. . . .” His voice trailed off giving way to more clicks of the keyboard. “Okay, I think I have something,” he said at length. There was a long silence, followed by a resigned sigh. “Hope you don’t get airsick.”