Sitting here with her team that was bigger than her former team, it was still as incomplete as Jeremy’s world map.
Unable to sit still, she rose to her feet to walk the length of the fuselage. Except to the rear were bunks, and she didn’t want to disturb Andi. Forward were piles of litters and body bags. She hadn’t even met the Navy pilots who’d taken over the flight in London.
The ping to fasten seatbelts was a relief. Now she had something to do.
She returned to her seat and buckled in.
Then she checked her watch. It was nowhere near time to land.
But—
The plane jounced.
She sighed. Midair turbulence.
Hours to go.
52
The Falcon 7X raced down the runway and twisted aloft.
And Holly could only glare at it in frustration.
If she had a rifle, maybe she could do something. The air marshal’s Glock didn’t stand a chance.
The goddamn Aussie pilots. What was it with guys and blondes? Elayne had clearly bamboozled them but good—at least enough to get on board. Were they still flying or—
Then the Falcon made a hard bank and a too-abrupt recovery. That too was bobbled before the plane stabilized, turned for the northeast toward India, and raced away. No Royal Australian Air Force pilot would make such a mistake. But a woman who knew how to fly but didn’t know the handling of that particular jet might.
Good bet there were two more bodies either on the tarmac or getting a funeral ride in the back of their own plane. Two Royal Australian Air Force pilots down.
“We need to chase that plane and shoot it down.”
“We don’t have any fighter jets here at the moment. There’s a big exercise going on with India off Kerala. That’s hours away.”
“You have a military airbase with no protection?”
He pointed toward an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.
Maybe half the speed of the Falcon, if she was willing to get on board—Mike and Jeremy hadn’t had much luck the last time they had.
She yanked out her phone and called Clarissa.
53
“Go west?” Elayne kept her voice calm and friendly. She sat in the pilot seat of the Falcon 7X. The other four had dealt with the pilots lounging in the back while she got the plane moving and in the air.
“Yes,” the heavy Chinese woman was apparently their mouthpiece. “In Africa, we can disappear.”
“I’m not going to Africa. I’m going to Syria. I will drop you at the Kuwait-Saudi Arabia border.”
“No. Khartoum, Sudan. We can get out from there. I have contacts.”
“And who is going to fly you if I say no?”
The woman pointed at her own chest.
Elayne glanced over her shoulder.
The Chinese woman stood close enough to hold on to Elayne’s seatback in a very proprietary way. The Latin Wonder, Mr. Eurotrash, and the quiet Indian woman crowded close enough to listen.
“Any of the rest of you pilots?”
All three shook their heads.
Elayne made a show of sighing.
“Africa? You’d get off there?”
The woman nodded.
“O-kay.” Elayne banked the plane to turn from her original northeasterly heading—to at least temporarily deceive anyone who gave immediate chase—toward the west. As she reached her desired northwest heading, she abruptly leveled the plane.
The woman spread her feet to brace and grabbed on to the copilot’s seat with her free hand to keep her balance—which occupied both her hands.
As she did, Elayne kept her left hand on the wheel. With her right, she slid her knife out of its thigh sheath and rammed it between the woman’s legs.
The woman shrieked in agony as Elayne drove the big blade upward. With a twist, she scraped the blade along the back of the abdominal cavity. The geyser of hot blood over her hand told her that she’d managed to cut both of the femoral arteries.
“So,” she looked up at the woman’s face, “are you getting off on this? Real good for one last time?”
Elayne twisted the blade to make her point, eliciting a fresh shriek of pain with each movement. Making her dance on knife point.
Then Elayne tipped the point, still buried inside, and probed for the spinal column. She found it—and gave a vicious sideways yank. When Elayne felt it sever, she jerked out her blood-drenched blade. Red ran down over her entire forearm and dripped from her elbow.
With her spine cut above the legs, the Chinese woman collapsed to the deck.
Elayne looked at the others, “Everyone else okay with the Kuwait border?”
The Indian woman nodded.
Mr. Eurotrash wasn’t visible, but she could hear someone puking—hard.
The Latin Wonder merely smiled. He placed a hand over his heart and mouthed, “Ah, Señora.”
Elayne wiped the blade on her pantleg and pushed it back into the sheath.
“Good. I’d appreciate it if you could get that out of my cockpit.”
At the rate the Chinese woman’s whimpers were fading, she’d bleed out before she reached the back of the cabin where the pilots were stacked.
Then she looked at her arm before calling out.
“Could someone bring me a wet towel?”
A warm wet towel was always nice after sex.
Even knife sex.
She doubted if the dead woman in the back would appreciate the joke.
She was still laughing herself when the Latin Wonder brought her the towel.
54
“Do you know what time it is? This had better be important, Harper.”
Clark grunted beside her. He was a ridiculously deep sleeper.
Clarissa slipped out into the hall and sat on the carpet of the staircase’s top step. The old Queen Anne Victorian of the Vice President’s home was dead silent. She couldn’t hear the Secret Service patrol that was bound to be outside, even at this hour.
“Elayne’s gone,” Holly told her.
“Who?” But she felt a chill and wished she’d grabbed a robe instead of just wearing her nightgown.
“Elayne Kasprak, your fucking Guest whatever-the-hell number it was. She’s gone. You’ve got at least four dead CIA guards. Another five US Air Force people aren’t going to be breathing again anytime soon, and I’d wager that you’ll have to explain two dead pilots to the Royal Australian Air Force.”
Clarissa hadn’t risen to being the CIA Director by being slow, but it was three thirty in the morning, and her brain simply couldn’t keep up with Holly’s single-breath list of disasters.
“Waiting here!” Holly sniped at her.
“Do you have her?”
“Two dead Aussie pilots, remember? Come on, Clarissa. Get it in gear. She just stole the Falcon 7X. Last seen headed north. You need to shoot that bitch down.”
“I’ll—” Do what?
“Wasting time here, Clarissa,” Holly rasped into her ear.
“Bitch!”
“Let’s worry about the bitch in the sky, okay? Get her ass down and into the ocean. Though I’d rather have her alive. I need to know what she’s got planned for Miranda.”
“What she what? Never mind. Hold please.” Clarissa muted the call and resisted the urge to throw the phone and Holly down the stairs to shatter on the marble of the entry hall.
Once she could trust her voice, she dialed the number for her head of station at Diego Garcia.
“I’m standing right next to him,” Holly shouted over Maxwell’s greeting.
Shit! She’d been hoping for a moment of sanity.
“Situation?”
He put his phone on speaker. “Other than what Ms. Harper said? We have an unknown number of guests—”
“Hyper-violent sociopaths!” Holly shouted over him. “You lock them in a box for not even Her Royal Highness the Queen knows how long, and you think they’re guests?”
“—unaccounted for,” Maxwell was always steady under fir
e. “Possibly as many as seven others—we have two bodies so far. The site is flooded. Now that Guest Seven is no longer posing a threat here on Diego Garcia, we can lift the lockdown. We should be able to dispatch a dive team to make a more accurate assessment within the hour. The Chinese hacker and the Arab bomber Najila Dawoud, Three and Nine respectively, are accounted for.”
“Get the divers moving in the next five minutes. I need to know which ones to put back on the Most Wanted list.”
There was a brief sound of scuffling, like someone grabbing the phone, though it remained on speaker.
“Clarissa! That’s goddamn ninetieth on the list. Start at the head of the track.”
“Holly, you don’t understand. These are the very worst. If these people get out—”
“Grab a clue off the apple tree, Clarissa. They’re out. And there’s not a plane here fast enough to catch them.”
“So tap the Air Force.” She knew the CIA kept very few assets on Diego Garcia other than the Black Site.
“No,” Ernie spoke up, “They don’t have one. The only jets on the ground right now are cargo and fuelers. Not even an aircraft carrier within a week of the lagoon. No fighter jets to borrow.”
“It’s a goddamn Air Force base with no fighter jets?” Clarissa slapped a hand over her mouth. Clark might be a deep sleeper, but shouting just outside the bedroom door wasn’t going to help.
She headed down the stairs.
“Not at the moment.”
“Hell of a stupid way to run an Air Force.” But Clarissa sure wouldn’t be calling the Chief of Staff of the Air Force to complain. He hated her guts almost as much as he hated the CIA. He was so old school that he believed that diplomacy or military action were the only two necessary tools to maintain world order. He wanted the third option of clandestine operation eradicated—as if every President all the way back to Eisenhower didn’t love having their own squad of assassins.
“What do you want me to do?” There was a reason she liked Ernie Maxwell. After they’d graduated from the Academy and entered the field together, he’d stayed out there. Assistant to the CIA Chief of Station in Moscow until his cover was blown, then reassigned to Tel Aviv followed by Riyadh. He’d recently crossed Gavin Chalmers on the Middle East desk and been sidelined to the Diego Garcia posting.
Maybe it was time to bring him to DC.
Actually, there were several reasons she liked Ernie Maxwell all of the way back to their last assignment in the field together, setting up one of the first Black Sites in Afghanistan.
“Get assets along the routes to the northeast on the lookout for the damned Falcon. And get Holly on the fastest plane you can find.” And out of Clarissa’s hair. “Anywhere she wants to go.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Yes. Get me that diver report. I want photographic proof of each one. Then you can flush the whole damn mess for all I care.”
“Done.” And Maxwell was gone.
Clarissa hadn’t quite meant it that way. Though she’d learned the hard way in Afghanistan that once a Black Site was exposed at all, it was best to shut it down, erase all the evidence, and set up somewhere else. There was a reason that the Diego Garcia site was all below ground. It had intentionally been placed so that they could turn off the pumps that kept it dry, and the sea would reclaim the site very quickly.
A simple set of explosives to collapse the upper stairwell, and all evidence would be gone. Flushed.
Well, if Ernie did that, she wouldn’t be shedding any tears over the inmates. Nor would anyone else in the world. She’d have to smooth it over a bit—two of the guests had been escorted in by the Brits’ E Squadron and one by the Israeli Kidon.
That’s when she noticed that Holly was still on the other line.
“What?”
There was a long pause before Holly whispered softly, then hung up.
She couldn’t have just said, “Thanks”…could she?
Clarissa stood in the middle of the foyer; her bare feel cold on the chill marble.
Seven guests—psychopaths—on the loose? Eight with Elayne. Eight of them unleashed, under her watch. It could be the worst bungle by the CIA since the mid-seventies.
That disaster had come about with the 1974 leak of the internal “Family Jewels” document, chronicling every illegal activity since the 1950s. The four failed assassination attempts against Castro, including the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco, right up to Watergate—all exposed on the front page of the New York Times. It had launched the crusade by the Pike and Church Congressional Committees. In the end, they’d stripped the entire action division from the CIA. It had taken decades and, ultimately, Osama bin Laden to rebuild it.
These eight could wreak havoc across international boundaries.
The blame for their release was going to follow right back along those illegal orders to the Special Operations Group. Even if that knowledge never reached past the Gang of Eight congressional leaders or the President, she’d be quietly dismissed—driven from the CIA and politics.
Years. Years of planning, intelligence gathering, political maneuvering, including her goddamn marriage to Clark and the manipulations to make him Vice President—for nothing?
She tried to dial the hacker twins.
Clarissa stopped with her finger hovering over her phone.
It was shaking.
Her hand never shook. Not when she’d put down her father like the rabid dog he was. Not when she’d negotiated the deal that had placed her in the director’s chair. Not even when Harper was finding some new way to crawl under her skin.
Focusing on it didn’t stop the motion.
The phone began to shake as well.
Then the light went away when the screen timed out.
Now she could acknowledge that it was just being woken in the middle of the night. Or low blood sugar.
Yes, she’d get something from the kitchen and be fine.
Yet her feet remained rooted to the cold marble floor.
55
His contact at the Diego Garcia Black Site was on the deceased list.
While disappointing, it wasn’t particularly relevant now that Guest Seven was on the loose.
Could he trust the woman to stay out of the way for long enough? He didn’t need complications…not that she had any idea who he was.
He looked at the report again.
Four CIA agents down, five Air Force people too, and an unconfirmed number of escapees.
But it didn’t conclusively tie back to where it was needed to. He needed one more piece to do that. One tiny link. Regrettably, the telephone that only connected to the Director/CIA was now under two stories of water on a remote island atoll.
Maybe if he came at this another way.
The Middle East was anything but peaceful.
Perhaps he should have crashed the Senators’ plane where Guest Seven had told him to. Get the Russians right in the Americans’ faces. Too late to change that.
But still…
Perhaps he could give the Syrian situation a nudge in precisely the wrong direction. A nudge that could only have originated from one person’s desk.
He headed into the office even though it was only five in the morning.
By noon, it would be done.
56
Elayne had taken careful note of what planes were visible at Diego Garcia. They hadn’t finished scouting the hangars when the Falcon 7X showed up.
When she’d seen Holly Harper climb down from the sweet jet, Elayne knew she had to take it. It was being offered to her and Holly would be shown up for a complete fool.
The others had said it was a reckless act in broad daylight.
Not reckless—calculated.
Calculated to cause Holly Harper the maximum amount of misery.
Like most Zaslon operators, Elayne had been trained in basic airplane and rotorcraft flight, precisely for situations like this one. But a twenty-four-meter-long trijet was a new experience. It would have been
nice to get the Aussies’ cooperation, but there would be no way to trust them. She’d put a round in each one’s face, then left it up to the others to make sure they were dead.
Of course, Holly Harper had been flown around the world in a luxury jet while she’d been rotting in prison. It was definitely not enough to just off Miranda Chase as she’d originally arranged. No, it had to be much worse—not all of the Siberian gulag labor camps were gone.
She liked that idea. Then Elayne could keep sending little pictures to Holly at random times of Miranda in the mines of some closed city. Perhaps as a test subject for one of the poison labs in the closed city of Shikhany-2 where Novichok was manufactured.
No, she had to be alive so that Holly would come looking for her.
But first, Elayne herself had to survive. When no fighter escort appeared off her wing in the first fifteen minutes, she took it as a good sign.
Staying extremely low, under any radar, she crossed the Arabian Sea. The tensions between Saudi Arabia and Egypt made the Red Sea on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula a no-go. Especially with Israel and their American radar systems sitting at the northern end.
Following the Iran-Iraq border north was a possibility. But last year’s accidental downing of an airliner by an overanxious Iranian missile officer said that might be too big a gamble.
In the end, she slalomed up the Persian Gulf, then slithered over the northern border into Saudi Arabia. Ten kilometers inland, she touched down in the desert. She braked hard enough to force everyone to stay in their seats.
As she jerked to a final halt, she spun out of her seat and pulled her sidearm.
She aimed it down the cabin.
The other three looked at her in some surprise.
“This is the middle of the desert,” Mr. Eurotrash whined.
She didn’t shoot him, because she didn’t want to risk damaging this plane before she was done with it.
“Not the middle. Wafrah, Kuwait, is ten kilometers due north. You even get to walk with the sun at your backs. A two-hour stroll, you’ll be there before dark. Now, leave your weapons on your seats and get off my plane.” She didn’t want anyone shooting up her plane.
Havoc: a political technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 7) Page 18
