At the Calexico International Airport the air controller was happy to talk shop about the Sherpa. He liked talking planes and was very familiar with the gray fifty-eight footer and its pilot. Calexico International had only one east/west runway. A fully loaded Sherpa needed up to five thousand feet of runway to land, but not if it was coming in empty from San Diego. The Calexico runway was four thousand six hundred and seventy feet, but that was okay, the controller explained. Weaver’s routine was to land with an empty plane that then got loaded.
‘He ferries cargo for a business in town that distributes products for a group of Mexican manufacturers. They’re losing traffic to these new big box stores, so I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last. Why are you asking?’
Marquez took a chance and handed him a card. The DEA insignia was on it and the controller’s reaction was a look of sad regret, though not of surprise. He studied the card as if wanting to collect his thoughts before speaking.
‘I know he learned to fly that plane in the Coast Guard and the one he owns he bought as a wreck at an auction. He spent way too much rebuilding it. He’ll have to fly cargo to the moon and back to pay it off, but I sure hope he’s not doing anything illegal. He’s too nice a guy.’
‘I don’t know that he is doing anything illegal.’
‘But you’re investigating him.’
‘I’m following up on a tip. It doesn’t mean anything yet so I’d appreciate you keeping it to yourself.’
‘No problem.’
Now Marquez waited for a DEA pilot to fly in. When he did, Marquez walked out to meet him. Then they waited together until the Sherpa landed and loaded. It all went down in under an hour. As the Sherpa lumbered into the air again, a gray beast with its trusslike build, they took off right behind it.
Marquez had counted three men, the pilot and two others who were much younger and more than likely there to handle cargo. They trailed the Sherpa northeast at eight thousand feet. Below the rugged country was colored with shades of brown, the sky ahead a dark blue. He listened as the DEA pilot went back and forth on the radio, and watched as he slid his headset off and turned.
‘Your friend here is gradually changing his heading. This isn’t the flight plan he filed, so he may know we’re here.’
‘Can he dump the load?’
‘Oh, yeah, that plane is built for it. I’ve never ridden one of those flying boxes, but they say you have to beat them out of the air. Those two guys with him can slide the cargo doors open and shove stuff out.’
The Sherpa pilot got cleared to land at Mammoth Lakes Airport on the eastern side of the Sierras. His bearing became northeast and at this speed he’d land in Mammoth in forty-five minutes. On this heading he’d cross over Death Valley.
And that’s what he did. He took it right up the spine of the Panamint Mountains. Above the deep canyons there the cargo doors slid open and Marquez and the DEA pilot watched slit bags tumble from the plane, spinning, trailing a thin plume of cocaine, some bursting open in a tiny cloud in the air, others lost in the dark jagged rocks below. Marquez videotaped but looking down at the unpaved roads that ran across the big wash and vanished early in the steep canyons, he knew they wouldn’t recover anything. Each bag probably held fifty kilos, and still the pilot had to circle the Panamints twice before they were done.
The Sherpa tracked alongside the bone dry land east of the White Mountains, came around Montgomery Peak and descended alongside Highway 395 to the airport at Mammoth Lakes. Two county cruisers were waiting. Drug-sniffing dogs were on the way from Reno. Weaver surrendered without incident and now was in a holding cell in Mammoth. The pair of San Diego gangbangers traveling with him were in separate cells. Marquez tried the gangbangers first. Despite clothes caked in cocaine dust, they gave him nothing but attitude. He called home to the Field Office and talked to Sheryl.
‘I need everything we can get on Weaver, the pilot.’
With Weaver they might get somewhere because Weaver looked like a broken man. He slumped in his cell. He wept as Marquez talked with Sheryl about recovering cocaine.
‘It’s in canyons and on ridges in the Panamint Mountains in Death Valley. It’s probably a hundred and ten degrees in those canyons this time of year. We might find a bag or two but then we’d have the problem of proving it was theirs, and even if we did, no DA is going to touch it. Our best chance is to get the pilot to talk.’
He drove three miles back to 395 and then south to the metal buildings and the runway alongside the highway where the dull gray Sherpa sat. The dogs had arrived from Reno and the handler was waiting. The dogs picked up on cocaine as soon as they got in the cargo bay and Marquez wiped his hand across the cargo floor and came up with white powder. He looked at flattened KZ Nut cardboard boxes from the warehouse in Calexico and figured they shipped the cocaine double-bagged and in KZ boxes. He counted boxes as he talked to the dog handler, and then thanked her for coming down and walked back through the afternoon wind to his car.
To the west the high rock on the peaks was white in the sun and he was looking at country he hadn’t seen in years. He felt a wistful familiarity and love of the high clean granite that somehow he’d lost touch with. When he got back into Mammoth he washed the coke off his hands and sat down in a holding cell with the pilot, Del Weaver.
He waited for Weaver to look at him and then asked, ‘Do you want to talk and see what we can work out?’
Turned out it was debt, an overdue balloon payment on the plane, insurance, operating costs that he hadn’t anticipated, and alimony payments to a schizophrenic wife who would never work again. He put his living expenses on credit cards as he staved off his creditors. The Salazars paid cash and he was only going to do it until his debts were paid off.
Marquez took him through the drill, cited a couple of recent prison sentences of two guys who didn’t cooperate, and Weaver rolled over so fast Marquez had trouble keeping up.
‘I was supposed to take the load to an almond ranch in the valley, KZ Nuts. I haven’t told them I dumped it yet.’
‘But they know something has happened. You’re way overdue, so what are they thinking right this second?’
‘Those guys, they’ll think I stole the load.’
‘Who’s in charge? Give me a name.’
‘Mendoza. Raymond Mendoza, but he goes by Rayman.’
‘This Rayman works for the Salazars?’
‘He’s their main guy in California and he’s really only a kid.’ Weaver shook his head and then put a hand to his forehead, covered his eyes and spoke to the table. ‘I can’t go to prison. Everything will fall apart.’ He looked at Marquez. ‘I’ve got my mother in a nursing home. I’m paying them month to month.’
‘That’s going to be beyond me, Del. I can write it down and testify to what happened, to how you cooperated after we arrested you, but the decisions you’re talking about aren’t the ones I get to make. What if you called Rayman now and told him you had to land at Mammoth with mechanical problems but you’re almost back in the air? Then I fly with you to the almond farm.’
As he said this, he knew what a leap it was going to be to sell the idea in LA. He could see Holsten frowning, his expression saying, what are you doing in my office asking something so stupid?
‘What kind of deal would I get?’ Weaver asked.
‘That would be up to the US Attorney. But this could go a long way toward helping you.’
‘What happens after we land?’
‘You taxi away from them and I’ll have a lot of backup there. SWAT teams.’
In a perfect world they’d land somewhere first and pick up the SWAT team, come in like a Trojan horse. But there was zero chance of that getting approved. Marquez waited, knowing Weaver was scared and that he couldn’t coerce Weaver into doing this, and that it wasn’t likely to get far as an idea anyway. He gave Weaver another minute and then pushed his chair back and stood.
‘I’ve got to make a call.’
He called Sheryl and ran it by her with the idea she try to talk Holsten into it. ‘It’s his bold idea,’ Marquez said. ‘He keeps talking about us making a bold stroke. Talk up what the press will do with it.’ She laughed. ‘No, I’m serious, Holsten will hear that.’
Twenty minutes later she called back.
‘We’re on,’ she said. ‘Holsten is game.’
‘OK, I’ve got to talk to Weaver again.’
‘Talk him into it fast, and then call me before Holsten changes his mind.’