jobs.”
“I’ll get back to it, then.”
The Russian disconnected the call, then headed to the street to wave down a cab. “Suka.” Bitch, she said under her breath.
SIX
PRESENT DAY
The tiny 1981 Cessna 206 Amphibian flew low and lights out over the moonlit ocean, buffeted by rough air. It banked hard to starboard, nearly standing on its wing as it turned south in the darkness.
Just sixty feet above the water, the pilot leveled his wings again as he put the nose on 120 degrees, then pushed the throttle forward and descended even more.
Fifty feet. Forty. Thirty-five.
Court Gentry was the lone passenger on board and he sat in the copilot’s seat, staring out into the darkness. He and the pilot were shoulder to shoulder, but they had barely spoken a word during the two-hour flight, and neither of them said a word as they approached the Venezuelan coast, just a couple of miles ahead.
Court could just make out a thin stretch of lighter gray in the black distance. It grew and grew, and then moments later they went “feet dry,” racing over a beach at thirty feet, the single-engine aircraft churning the warm salty air at full throttle.
The strip of stark-white sand was the only landform Court had been able to make out in the darkness, but within moments the pilot began banking again, left and right, and he alternately climbed and dove while doing so.
Court turned to look at the pilot and was comforted by the shape of the ATN PS15 dual-tube night vision goggles attached to a mount on a headband and positioned just in front of the man’s eyes.
The passenger was happy he couldn’t see a thing out of the windscreen in the cloudy evening now, but he was damn glad the pilot could. He knew they were winding through a forested mountain range, and they were likely a lot closer to impacting with terrain than he’d ever want to know.
He and the pilot had only met a few hours earlier at Oranjestad airport in Aruba, but the man and his aircraft had come well vetted and highly recommended.
Other than some surveillance gear, weapons, and other small items, Court wasn’t using any CIA assets on this operation. He had his own contacts and his own methods of support while operating in the field, including a clearinghouse on the dark web known to only a select few, where men and women could procure a specific category of goods and services, almost any good or service one could imagine.
Court used it from time to time when he had a special need. The laundry list of skills on offer was impressive. Undersea transfer of goods from Colombia, paramilitary fighters for hire in Myanmar, political assassination in Japan. And Court had been pleased to see earlier in the day that airborne insertion of personnel into Venezuela was listed—even if it came at a high price.
Those few hundred on Earth who knew of and used the clearinghouse also knew that all the buyers and sellers were carefully assessed and rated on their abilities by other buyers and sellers. Court could read reviews of providers, though no names were anywhere to be found in the data, and this gave him some peace of mind when he contacted the pilot earlier in the day and arranged for the late-night air transport of one man into the Caracas area, and then ground transport to a location to the south of the city.
No, Court didn’t know this son of a bitch next to him—Court’s internal defense mechanism meant the man was a son of a bitch until proven otherwise—but he had no doubts that the pilot was incredibly skilled. Court imagined that this man and this plane had made many incursions into Venezuela over the past several years, sneaking in intelligence officers, sneaking out drugs or other contraband to sell on the black market, or even helping Venezuelan citizens escape the misery of the economic and political stranglehold on their nation.
The Cessna weaved through the mountains for more than a half hour, Court’s stomach contents fighting to stay down all the while. And still there was no conversation between him and the pilot. Once or twice the clouds above cleared enough for starlight to filter in, and Court could briefly make out terrain. Thick woods of pine whipped by outside his starboard-side window, seemingly one hundred feet or less from ripping off the wing and turning the tiny seaplane into a rolling ball of fire and twisted metal across