The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

Before the team leader had carefully climbed completely down the ladder, there was about thirty seconds of intense Uzi fire as the site was cleaned of the remaining three men and their women and children.

The firing made more noise than the team leader would have preferred, but the options would have been to either garrote the locals or cut their throats, and that was time-consuming, often a little more risky, and this way there was less chance of messy arterial blood to worry about.

As he watched one of his men carry a box of thermite grenades into the living quarters, the team leader heard a rushing noise, and a split second later, when he looked up, he could see two brilliant landing lights come on as the aircraft approached the field.

A moment later, he could see the aircraft itself.

It was an unusual-looking airplane, painted a nonreflective gray, ostensibly making it invisible to radar. That was a joke. As soon as they had turned on the radar just now, they had seen it twenty miles distant.

There were two jet engines mounted close together on top of the fuselage, where the wings joined the fuselage just behind and above the cockpit. This had made it necessary for the vertical fin and the horizontal stabilizers to be raised out of the way of the jet thrust. The tail of the aircraft was extraordinarily thin and tall, with the control surfaces mounted on the top.

The aircraft, a Tupolev Tu-934A, was not going to win any prizes for aesthetic beauty. But like the USAF A-10 Thunderbolt II—universally known as the Warthog—it did what it was designed to do and did so splendidly.

The Warthog’s heavy armament busted up tanks and provided other close ground support. The Tupolev Tu-934A was designed to fly great distances at near the speed of sound carrying just about anything that could be loaded inside its rather ugly fuselage, and land and take off in amazingly short distances on very rough airfields—or no airfields at all.

It was also an amazingly quiet aircraft. The first the team leader had heard its powerful engines was the moment before touchdown when the pilot activated the thrust reversal system.

And even that died quickly as the aircraft reached braking speed on the landing roll and then stopped and turned around on the runway.

Number three, now holding illuminated wands, directed it as it taxied up the runway, and then signaled for it to turn.

Before it had completed that maneuver, a ramp began to lower from the rear of the fuselage.

“Bring up number one truck,” the team leader ordered.

The Ford F-150 came across the tarmac and backed up to the opening ramp at the rear of the now-stopped aircraft.

A small, rubber-tracked front-loader rolled down the ramp. The driver and the four men riding on it were dressed in black coveralls.

The team leader saluted one of the newcomers, who returned it.

“Problems?” the operation commander asked in Russian.

“None so far, sir.”

“Cleanup?”

“Completed, sir.”

“Cargo inspected?”

“Yes, sir,” the team leader lied. He had forgotten that detail.

“Well, then, let’s get it aboard.”

“Yes,

sir.”

Instead of a bucket, the front-loader had modified pallet arms. To the bottom of each arm had been welded two steel loops. From each loop hung a length of sturdy nylon strapping.

The other two men who had ridden off the aircraft on the rubber-tracked vehicle climbed into the bed of the F-150, removed the tarpaulin which had concealed its contents—two barrel-like objects of heavy plastic, dark blue in color, and looking not unlike beer kegs. They then removed the chocks and strapping which had been holding the rearmost barrel in place.

That done, they carefully directed the pallet arms over the bed of the truck until they were in position for the nylon strapping to be passed under the barrel and the fastener at the free end to be inserted into the loop on the bottom of the arm.

The strapping had lever-activated devices to tighten the strapping—and thus the barrel—against the underside of the pallet arm.

“Tight!” one of the men called out in Russian when that had been accomplished.