The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

He looked around the control room and found a radar screen.

I wouldn’t want to make an instrument landing using that, but that’s not what it’s intended for. That’s just to let the authorities of Drug Cartel International know that an aircraft has entered their area.

There was a blip on the radar screen.

I wonder how far away that a

irplane is. How far and how high.

Monitor Fourteen showed a dot in the sky that quickly grew into an airplane.

Castillo looked at Tarasov to see if he had seen it. Tarasov nodded.

Castillo went back to the screen. The airplane had now grown an enormous vertical stabilizer and engines above the fuselage.

Castillo looked at Tarasov again.

Tarasov nodded and mouthed, “Tu-934A.”

That’s one weird-looking airplane. If I had ever seen one—even a picture of one—I would have remembered.

Monitor Fourteen showed the weird-looking airplane coming in low for a landing.

“I’d never seen an airplane like that before,” García-Romero said.

Well, the Russians certainly didn’t show it off at the Paris Air Show. That’s a Special Operations special.

That it exists can’t be kept a secret but the fewer people who know anything else about it, the better.

The landing roll looked normal, until all of a sudden it decelerated at an amazing rate until it was almost at a complete stop and then turned.

He must have spotted the cave.

Proof of that came when Monitor Fourteen showed the Tu-934A coming into the cave, and the camouflaged tarpaulin being lowered into place once the plane was inside.

The rear door of the Mercedes opened and a man in a business suit walked toward the Tu-934A.

The monitor pulled in on his face.

“Well, hello, Pavel,” Tom Barlow said.

“Who is he?” Castillo asked.

“Pavel Koslov,” Svetlana said. “The Mexico City rezident.”

“And that means this is important, and probably that there’s somebody notorious on the plane,” Barlow said.

Monitor Fourteen showed the ramp at the rear of the Tu-934A’s fuselage lowering. Before it quite touched the ground, two men in rather tight, hooded black coveralls, their faces masked, and carrying Kalashnikov rifles, trotted down it and looked the area over.

One of them made a come on gesture and two more similarly dressed and armed men came down the ramp.

“We call people who dress up like that ‘ninjas,’” Castillo said. “What do you call them, Sweaty?”

“Spetsnaz.”

Another man, in the black coveralls but not wearing a mask, came down the ramp. The camera moved in for a close-up.

“And a very good afternoon to you, General,” Barlow said. “I trust the general had a pleasant flight?”