"Maloney, Mack - Wingman 05 - The Twisted Cross UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maloney Mack)

"Any place special in Colombia?" he asked.

Now she eyed him suspiciously. "Are you a cop?" she asked.

"No," he said, deftly producing another bag of silver. "Are you?"

She shook her head and smiled. "Can I sit for a minute?" she asked.

He reached over and pulled out the small table's other chair. "Be my guest," he said.

A half hour later, Hunter was pushing a baggage cart down the pier where the luxury liner had docked.

He was dressed in a nondescript pair of denim coveralls and a woolen cap - both articles of clothing courtesy of the diner waitress. He took his place in amongst the small army of baggage handlers loitering around the ship's gangway and pretended to smoke a cigar. All the while he was taking in every detail possible about the Big Easy Princess.

This was no ordinary cruise liner. True, while its decks were lined with what looked to be fairly ordinary passengers and some soldiers, its fore and aft sections boasted at least a dozen gun mounts. Also its mast was bristling with a forest of sophisticated radar hardware and, easily spotted by his well-trained eye, a number of missile guidance and tracking systems. He even noted unmistakable scrape marks along the port side of the ship which indicated that small boat launches - probably attack craft - were lowered and raised regularly.

He was sure there could be much more evidence found inside the hull of the boat, but Hunter had no plans to steal aboard to find it. He didn't have to. He knew a drug-running ship when he saw one . . .

Drugs were a nasty fact of life in New Order America.

Just because the United American Army had defeated The Circle didn't mean that criminality had suddenly come to a screeching halt across the continent. The skies were just as dangerous to fly in and the roads just as treacherous to move on as before the final defeat of The Circle. And the fractured nation's seemingly endless cycle of drugs and money kept spinning along.

When Jones and the United Americans set up their Reconstruction Government in Washington following the war, not one of the top command men was laboring under any illusions. The continent was still a scattering of ever-changing independent countries, kingdoms, cantons, shires, free states and territories. All the new government in Washington could hope to do is solidify the continental defenses to keep out foreign interference and to restore some semblance of order to the larger cities east of the Mississippi. These two tasks alone were next to impossible. So the leaders in Washington knew that things like drug-running, gun-running, air piracy, slavery, forced prostitution and so on would stay on the national landscape for some time to come.

Hunter realized this too, and it was not so much that the ship before him was most likely loaded to the gills with drugs that had caused him to take to the disguise and get a closer look. No - it was the route the boat had taken to get those drugs that interested him.

The waitress had told him she'd met an unsavory character who had booked passage on the Big Easy Princess just a month before. The man had swaggered into the diner just after disembarking and bragged that he had enough cocaine to keep a small city high for a year. He claimed that he had scored the stuff in Colombia, specifically in the port of Buenaventura, which was close enough to Medellin, still the recognized coke capital of the world.

What had Hunter's brain buzzing in all this was the fact that the man hadn't bragged about picking up his illegal "Bogota-sugar" in the Colombian harbors of Cartagena, or Santa Maria, or Riohacha. These port cities were located on the Caribbean coast of the South American country.

Buenaventura, on the other hand, was located on the

Pacific side.

What Hunter wanted to know was, assuming Peg's somewhat fantastic tale of entrapment and horror on the Canal was true, how the hell was the coke boat able to make the passage through Panama without so much as a scratch?

Chapter 6

It was dark and drizzling by the time Hunter made it to the prearranged rendezvous spot.

He had postponed his plans to return to Washington. A quick radio call to Jones that morning had them in agreement that there was still some more information to be had in New Orleans. Now the sun had just set, and Hunter found himself shivering slightly, out on the isolated swampy bayou in the chilly mist. He faced the north and waited.

Ten minutes went by. Then he felt a familiar vibration start at the back of his neck and run down his spine. His brain got the message on the instantaneous ricochet.

Off in the distance. Getting closer. Two aircraft . . .

He had never been able to come up with a better item for this sensation other than simply calling it the feeling. It was many things and it was a solitary thing. It was ESP. It was deja vu. It was Synchronicity - that state of affairs described as "meaningful coincidences." He simply knew things that he had no logical reason for knowing. It was that feeling he got whenever he climbed into his airplane and not so much flew it as became a part of it. It was also the feeling he got when he knew that aircraft were approaching even before they showed up on any radar set. The feeling ... It had saved his life more times than he could count. No one else had it-just him. And not a day had gone by when he didn't wonder why.

Closer now. About two clicks away . . .