They finished, and Brodie returned to the cabin and stowed the tube under the seat. “That felt good.” He asked her, “You want something to drink?”
“OJ. Thanks.”
Brodie stood and reached behind the bench seat and opened the cooler. “You didn’t put your pee tube in here, did you?”
“You want the small bottle with the label.”
“Right.” He retrieved two bottles of orange juice.
They sat side by side, sipping their juice. The refuel guy was at the right wing now, topping off the tank. Brodie pulled Taylor’s map out of the overnight bag and studied it. The Colombian border was about four hundred miles west of Kavak. Maybe beyond the range of the Cessna, which would be burning fuel just to get to Kavak, then more fuel for their recon. He’d have to speak to Collins about that, after Collins agreed to the change of plans.
Taylor asked, “What are you looking at?”
“Distances.”
She glanced at the map. “If we can’t make it to Colombia, we can easily make it to Brazil or Guyana.”
“Right. But we have military and Intel assets in Colombia, and we’re supposed to get debriefed at our embassy in Bogotá.”
“We won’t have Mercer onboard, so it doesn’t matter where we fly to first, as long as we’re out of Venezuela.”
Brodie did not reply.
She said, “We are about to fly into what could be hostile territory.”
“We’ve been in hostile territory since we landed in Caracas.”
She continued, “So I just want to be clear about the mission before we get there.”
“Right. Well, this is a recon mission. Intel gathering.”
“All right. So if we do take that boat trip up the river, there will come a point when we hit the one-hour mark, and I know you’ll want to go just a little farther—”
“We stop when we see the first shrunken head.” He assured her, “We will go to the edge of danger, but no further.”
“You know as well as I do that you don’t know where that edge is until you’re over it.”
Brodie finished his OJ and held up the bottle. “Is this bottle half-full, or half-empty?”
“It’s completely empty, like your brain.”
“Right. Can you get me another?”
“Another brain?”
“Juice, please.”
She stood, reached behind the bench seat, got another OJ from the cooler, and handed it to him.
They sat in silence for a minute; then Brodie said, “We told Dombroski we were going to get a fix on Mercer’s camp. And that’s what we’re going to do. And you suggested having a Delta team go in to take Mercer out. And Dombroski liked that idea. But without actionable intelligence for such an operation, we may as well have gone to Aruba.”
Taylor didn’t reply for a moment, then said, “In Afghanistan, I wasn’t afraid to die. I just didn’t want to die for a stupid reason.”
“In war, that’s not usually your choice.”
“True. But now it is.”
“Right. We’ll play it by ear.”
