Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

They’d chartered it out of Tangiers, through a somewhat murky chain of brokers that began with an Egyptian friend of Joe’s, who knew a man from Greece, who had good contacts with a few people in Morocco.

While the chain of command worried Kurt a bit, the aging craft they were flying in was even more concerning. It shook and rattled and smelled as if it were leaking jet fuel in half a dozen places. The pilots tapped hard on the old analog-style gauges as if they weren’t working, fiddled with a pair of fuses at one point, and chatted in English with an Eastern European accent, making constant references to the “worthless mechanics.”

So far, the wings hadn’t fallen off. Kurt considered that a small victory.

As he pondered whether their luck would hold, the copilot turned to him.

“Radio call for you,” he said. “Switch to channel two on headset.”

Kurt looked over at the toggle switch beside the headset jack. Cyrillic writing and the numbers 1 and 2 presented themselves. He flipped the switch to number 2.

“This is Kurt,” he said.

“You’re a damn hard person to find, Kurt.” It was the voice of Dirk Pitt. “If it wasn’t for a rather large item on your NUMA credit line regarding an aircraft charter, I wouldn’t have been able to track you down.”

“Um, yeah,” Kurt mumbled. “I can explain that.”

He tapped the copilot on the shoulder.

“Is this line secure?” Kurt asked.

The copilot nodded. “It’s a proprietary channel. Scrambled until it reaches plane.” He smiled, a large mustache turning up with the corners of his mouth. “All part of our service to you.”

Kurt almost laughed. Not exactly the cone of silence, he thought, but it would have to do.

“I think we’re onto something,” he said, wishing he had been able to have this conversation after he’d confirmed the accuracy of that particular thought. “I think we’ve found our man.”

“Where?” Dirk asked.

“On a ship in the middle of the Atlantic.”

“Then why are you airborne?”

Kurt gazed out the window. The sun was about to drop below the horizon ahead of them. The moment of truth was still two hours away.

“It’s the only way to get close enough,” he said. “The ship we think he’s on is sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, making a few knots and pretty much going nowhere. The problem is, it’s a hundred miles from the nearest shipping lane in a barren spot in the middle of the ocean. Approaching it on the water would be a dead giveaway — with emphasis on the word dead. Our only hope is an airdrop.”

Dirk went silent, perhaps evaluating his employee for bravery or maybe a Section Eight.

“I’m sure they have radar,” Pitt said finally. “I take it you’re not going to fly overhead and jump.”

“No, sir,” Kurt said.

“Okay,” Dirk replied, obviously aware of what Kurt was planning. “That explains the second item on your account.”

“I made sure to get receipts,” Kurt insisted, as if it mattered.

“We’ll talk about that later,” Dirk said. “The thing is, I don’t believe you need to make this jump.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say we’ve confirmed our primary target as lying elsewhere,” Dirk said. “Unfortunately, we’ve already sparred with them once today and we lost that round. Brinks was right, your man is nothing more than a hired hand. He delivered his hostages and took off. While there’s some value in locating him, I wouldn’t risk your life over it.”

Kurt considered what Pitt was telling him. The brass all assumed Andras was a soldier of fortune, and why not? That’s what he’d always been. It seemed they thought his part in this was over and that he was on his way to a vacation or another job.

Maybe they would pick him up later, maybe they wouldn’t, but if Kurt understood what he wa

s being told, they’d confirmed Sierra Leone was the sponsor of all this madness.