Stanley peered through binoculars. Even before he could see the cigarette boat’s javelin-like bow, he recognized the craft’s characteristic contrail wake.
“It’s them,” he said, passing the binoculars to Corbitt, who was stretched out on a lounge chair on the second highest of three decks of what was listed in the House Intelligence budget as an Escape and Evasion Craft. In fact it was a svelte, seventy-foot-long pleasure yacht, or, as Corbitt put it, “a perk.”
Setting down his scotch, Corbitt pointed the twin lenses at the tall building on the little detention island.
“Three o’clock,” Stanley said.
Corbitt panned. “The cigarette boat?”
“Aye.” There were no other boats in view for miles. There was nothing but water. “We need to get on commo and send a flash to headquarters.”
“A flash cable? What for?”
“An eye in the sky.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Cigarette boats can go ninety miles an hour, and even faster if the folks on board don’t mind burning out the engines. The DEA in Miami finds ‘cigarette butts’ all the time.”
“But a satellite? What’s wrong with radar?”
“Practically useless against craft that fast.”
“Okay, high-speed helicopters?”
“They’re fine, but to chase anyone, they’d have to get out here, by which time …”
Corbitt sat up, still looking through the binoculars. “I can’t make out anyone on the boat,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure there is someone, but-”
Frustration cooked Stanley. “It’s. Them.”
“A gut thing, eh?” Corbitt said, no doubt itching to recite the line emblazoned on posters in Langley’s corridors since the sixties: The Agency has hundreds of brilliant analysts so that operators won’t have to rely on hunches.
“This isn’t some kind of sixth sense,” Stanley said. “Just two hours ago, after learning that the targets were at Detention Three, Carthage KO’d one of our officers and gave her backup team the slip. In any case, why would a cigarette boat be at a detention facility?”
Corbitt hoisted himself from the chaise and walked aft, struggling to maintain his balance, a landlubber if there ever was one. “Javier,” he called up to the bridge. “Radio Detention Three and see if anyone’s escaped or anything like that.”
He returned to his chair and his drink while the man at the helm punched a number into the radio set.
Stanley stared down at his own ordinary cell phone, a temporary replacement for the satphone that Drummond Clark had thrown into the Baie de Fort-de-France last night. Nothing close to a signal now, damnably.
Corbitt patted him on the shoulder. “You know the playbook, bud,” the base chief said. “I need confirmation. If it just turns out to be a drug dealer visiting an inmate, my division chief would come down on my ass like you wouldn’t believe.”
“If it is the men we’re after, and you lose them, what will your division chief do?”
“It certainly wouldn’t be my fault for going by the book. Do you have any idea what it costs to redirect a satellite? More per hour than flying a 747.”
This was why Stanley admired the Cavalry. Their operations incurred collateral damage-put bluntly, innocents fell victim to cross fire-but at least there was action.
“Nobody’s answering,” Javier called down from the bridge, mystified.
Corbitt relented, cabling the chief of the Latin America division, who flashed the satellite request to headquarters.
Twenty-one minutes later, headquarters approved a redirect. Thirty-four minutes after that, the Latin America desk had a picture. Given the analysts’ subsequent assessment that the cigarette boat had landed at one of fourteen small islands within a fifty-eight-minute radius of the detention center, that imagery came approximately three minutes too late.