Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  Stalking a former SASR was such an adrenaline high that she could taste the bitter-metal of it at the back of her throat as she moved silently on her toes.

  This was the most likely hiding spot, the vast passenger seating area.

  But no Holly.

  No one at all.

  Which meant there was only one place left if she was aboard. Please let her be aboard.

  Elayne slipped through the small tunnel between the rear passenger cabin and the front crew cabin. The sign on the door said that the passage through the wings’ structural area was unpressurized in flight, so she was careful about sealing the doors behind her.

  Entering the forward cabin from the stern passage rather than the stairs placed her in the sleeping area.

  She glanced down and to the left.

  Right…there! There was where she’d placed the Krakatoa charge that had shattered the Antonov plane that had stolen Russia’s helicopters.

  Now the Ukrainians had one less Condor plane. When Ukraine had split from Russia in 1991, the Antonov factory and most of their incredibly useful aircraft had gone to the West.

  When the Russian Federation had taken back Crimea in 2014, it was still a long way from Kiev where the Antonov factory lay.

  What the troops should have done was drive straight through after they’d taken Donetsk and the Crimea. She’d helped instigate pro-Russian riots all the way to Odessa. If they’d taken it while they could, the rest of Ukraine would have become landlocked from the Black Sea and been forced to return to the fold.

  But that limp-dick Putin had no follow-through. He was all flash for the people and his fat-cat friends. All cautious about upsetting the West just so much and no more.

  Mother Russia could have—should have—owned the whole of Ukraine in 2014!

  Well, if blowing up one of their Antonovs brought the reunification of the great Russian Empire even one day closer, that was worth the price.

  The jet turned, paused, and then all of the engines awoke with a roar.

  The crew was behaving normally, all up front behind the cockpit’s closed door. Perhaps she’d have to just wait for Holly to emerge and show herself.

  After checking that there was no Krakatoa charge slipped under it, she sat on the last bunk.

  Leaning against the rear bulkhead, she waited as the lumbering jet gathered speed and began jouncing down the rugged runway. It was amazing that the satellite could survive the punishment. Though, she supposed, the ride to orbit atop a mighty Soyuz-2 rocket was probably far worse.

  Elayne found a girlie magazine tucked in beside the mattress and flipped through it while she waited for the climb to altitude. Russian porn was as lame as Western porn—the West too demure and the Russian too slutty. The Scandinavians had the best magazines. Just that thoughtful balance between fun and raunch.

  When the flight leveled out, she tossed the magazine aside and continued her search.

  Holly had to be aboard already and she was sick of waiting.

  Unless she wasn’t here at all, in which case Elayne was in for a tedious flight.

  If that was the case, she’d have to hunt them down herself, starting with that lame Miranda and saving Holly as the prize for the end.

  It would be a long flight to Vostochny for nothing if Holly wasn’t aboard. Maybe that flight engineer would be worth passing the time with. Or maybe she’d just go back to the porn—she’d never liked beards.

  62

  “Is that scrag here or not?” Holly couldn’t keep her nerves at bay.

  “She’s here.” Tom had reported that Major Elayne Kasprak was aboard when he’d closed the door. He’d been out there purposely waiting for her.

  But now they’d climbed all the way to cruising altitude without a peep. What devilry was the woman up to?

  Tim had taken the navigator’s seat and was handling Russian air traffic control like an old hand.

  She sat copilot to Jon’s right, so her back was to the cockpit’s door.

  Jon talked her through the few things that he needed her to reach, and somehow they’d gotten aloft.

  They still had to cross the entire width of Russia, pretend to crash, and sneak out of Russian airspace without anyone noticing.

  And they still had to deal with Elayne.

  Holly didn’t dare to go hunting a Zaslon agent, but maybe she’d have to anyway. She really should have thought this through more carefully.

  63

  Elayne worked her way forward.

  Nobody in the small lounge area. A few books. A gaming system and an impressive DVD collection. Only about thirty percent porn.

  She kicked through the small personal luggage closet, but no Holly.

  Where the hell was that bitch hiding?

  There was nowhere else for her to be hiding. The only people aboard were she and the crew.

  Shit! It was a dry hole.

  Once she’d tracked down and exterminated Holly’s whole team right in front of the chicken-coward bitch, she was going to rip the boobs off that goddamn Vesna whose phone call had sent her on this wild goose chase to begin with.

  She glared about the tiny kitchen, so desperate for a target that her hands were shaking.

  Except her hands never shook.

  Blood sugar. Had to be.

  Due to a tight connection, and all of the brainless-tourist delays at customs in London, the last time she’d eaten had been over the Atlantic.

  She craved the bag of cucumber-dill Lays potato chips, but knew she needed energy for her system. A honey-sunflower seed kozinaki bar fit the bill.

  She tucked her pistol in the back of her new jeans. Thankfully Bosco at Sheremetyevo had some lovely Etro jeans with a dark-grey paisley at the hips over black denim pants. The cropped top and the bell legs made it both sexy and allowed her to move easily. Thirty thousand rubles was still under five hundred dollars—she’d charged it to her Zaslon account. After today, they’d give her unlimited credit.

  Except that Holly had chickened out.

  Instead, Elayne had called up an emergency military flight from Moscow to Samara and flown to Vostochny. Command was going to be so livid they’d probably leave her there to rot for a while.

  She peeled the plastic off the bar, and continued headed for the cockpit as she ate.

  At the air-tight hatch to the ladder down into the cargo bay, she glanced through the small round window. A few work lights below, nothing moving. If Holly was down there, she’d be knocked out by now unless she had an oxygen kit. The Antonov flew with the hold at outside atmospheric pressure.

  Please let her be trapped down there. With the pressure at thousands of meters higher than Everest, her brain cells would be dying by the truckload. Even a brain-dead Holly would be better to show Command than nothing at all.

  The cockpit door swung open as she neared it.

  Tomas looked at her in surprise, then offered that lazy smile of his.

  “Was wondering where you got to, Sunshine.” No mistaking his pleasure.

  She glanced into the cockpit. There were four seats facing two-and-two to either side, only one was occupied. The pilot and copilot were facing forward. A man and a woman with neatly trimmed black hair.

  Where the fuck was Holly?

  If she wasn’t onboard…

  But Holly had wanted, had arranged for Elayne to be onboard…

  That meant they were planning to shoot down the plane.

  “You must land this plane immediately.”

  Tomas just blinked at her like some stupid horse.

  “We’re in grave danger. We must land now. No, wait.” Then she remembered her own booby trap on the Ukrainian Condor. It had been set to destroy the plane upon landing.

  Had Holly done the same?

  Were they safe until they tried to land?

  How to know?

  “I must speak with the pilot.”

  Tomas shook his head. “Sorry. Not possible at the moment.”

  To emphasize his point, he
stepped toward her and pulled the door shut behind him.

  She could hear the security lock click into place.

  That left three crew in the cockpit and one facing her.

  One final memory came to her as she stood there with her mouth half full of the taste of honey and sunflower seeds. Elayne recalled lying through her teeth when she’d claimed she knew that “We, Antonov Cargo, fly with flight crew of four and two of loadmasters.”

  Two loadmasters.

  She didn’t know if the number was right, but she knew that no military cargo plane would ever fly without any loadmasters at all.

  64

  “So, there’s nothing we can do from the ground to help them?” Drake already knew the answer, but had to ask it anyway.

  Mike shook his head. “That’s why I’ve been keeping my mouth shut. I can’t beat someone up like Holly, or shoot them like you probably can. So basically I’m screwed. All that talking about it would do right now is freak out Miranda. Until this thing is done, I want her functioning at a hundred percent. It’s the best way I know how to help Holly.”

  Drake nodded. So did he. He didn’t know how Miranda did what she did, but this was one of those times when having her close by felt like a good thing. He’d long since learned to trust his gut on that.

  “Okay. Thanks, Mike. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “Worrying myself sick? Not a problem; I’ve got that one down.”

  They shared a laugh, though not a happy one, and returned to the main conference room.

  Lizzy started speaking the moment they walked in.

  “On the next satellite pass, I was able to just get a peek under the clouds. And their parking space was empty.”

  “They’re underway.”

  Lizzy changed the view.

  A large white plane with a blue side-stripe and red flag on the tail floated above the clouds.

  “Thank ya, Jesus!” Mike raised his hand and Drake slapped it a high five.

  “I like the sound of this,” President Roy Cole and VP Clark Winston came back into the room.

  “They’re aloft,” Lizzy announced.

  A message pinged up in the corner of her screen.

  Aloft.

  “That’s from Holly’s satellite phone direct to my system at the NRO.”

  “Goddamn, that’s amazing, Drake. Well done.” Roy came over and shook his hand.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Miranda looked up at the screen for a moment, then turned back to her own with no obvious reaction.

  Drake could barely hear her comment to Jeremy over the others’ good cheer.

  “They still have six hours to Vostochny and have to fool the entire Russian military.”

  Over her shoulder, he could see Jeremy’s nod in a small chat window. He appeared to be in a small conference room with a Boeing logo behind him. Then they both went back to work on their reports.

  Drake glanced across the table at Mike.

  He hadn’t heard.

  Instead, he was back to staring at the clock displayed beside the plane.

  65

  Holly heard the click of the cockpit door latch just as she tucked her satellite phone in the cupholder beside the copilot’s seat.

  She knew she shouldn’t look—the risk of revealing her face to Elayne too soon could be disastrous.

  Unable to resist, she swung her hair forward and turned just enough to see through it—black hair was much harder to see through than blonde.

  The door was closed.

  Jon sat in the left-hand captain’s seat.

  Behind, only Tim sat at the technical consoles. Tom was nowhere to be seen.

  “Shit!” She tore a nail bloody as she scrabbled at the unfamiliar harness release trapping her in the seat.

  Even as she did so, there was a hard thump against the door.

  Hopefully that wasn’t Tom’s dead body.

  Tim launched out of his seat faster than she could.

  “No!”

  But he’d yanked the door open even as she screamed her warning.

  Only luck saved him having his windpipe crushed.

  While crawling out of the copilot’s seat, Holly snagged her foot on the control yoke because she’d forgotten to slide the seat back first.

  Jon cursed as the plane gave a twist to the side and up.

  Instead of Tim’s throat, Elayne’s strike slammed into his shoulder hard enough to slam him aside. He grunted at the force of the blow.

  Tom lay at Elayne’s feet, groaning.

  Free of the harness and seat, Holly grabbed onto the back of the seats and kicked her control yoke—hard.

  Jon had remarked about how impressively easy the Condor was to fly and how light it was on the controls.

  Her kick against the copilot’s yoke was hard enough to jerk the linked control wheel right out of Jon’s hands. The yoke slammed full forward and caused the massive plane to nose-down sharply.

  Elayne and Tim were thrown to the ceiling. Not hard, but enough to take their feet out from under them.

  Holly’s grip on the seats kept her in place.

  Tom, bleeding profusely from the nose and mouth, managed to wrap an arm around Elayne’s legs.

  Too bad. It stabilized Elayne just enough to land a blow to Tim’s sternum.

  He wheezed, but didn’t drop to the deck. Instead, like the trained fighter he was, he managing to grab one of Elayne’s arms in both of his and pin it.

  Holly used the plane’s momentum from Jon’s recovery from the dive to plant her feet firmly and lunge toward the rear of the cockpit. For this brief moment, she was sprinting downhill.

  And she needed every bit of speed she could get.

  Elayne, at the far end of the cockpit, was at least twenty feet away.

  Already her arm was in motion to draw a weapon.

  Twenty feet.

  Tueller’s Law.

  Twenty-one feet was the outer limit of his testing.

  Under twenty-one feet, a charging assailant could outrace their target’s time to draw, aim, and fire accurately enough to hit the primary body mass.

  Over twenty-one feet, the charging assailant might reach their target, but they’d probably do it with a bullet through their chest.

  In SASR they’d practiced techniques to shave tenths, even hundredths of a second off the time to draw, aim, and fire.

  Elayne would have done the same.

  Plus or minus three feet could make all the difference in the world.

  The full charge of adrenaline slowed down Holly’s perception of time.

  The increasing pressure on the bottoms of her feet as Jon continued pulling the nose up to recover from the unexpected dive gave her extra traction.

  Tim and Tom must be unaware that their hard clenches on Elayne’s arm and legs were serving to stabilize her.

  The arc of Elayne’s arm indicated that her primary weapon was in the waistband at the small of her back.

  Holly shifted her planned trajectory to the right.

  The narrow cockpit aisle didn’t allow much flexibility, but every additional millimeter that Elayne had to bring her weapon around for a cross-body shot bought Holly another little slice of time.

  Past the senior engineer and radio operator chairs.

  Elayne’s hand disappeared out of sight behind her.

  Now Holly was even with the empty and little-used assistant engineer and navigator stations halfway between the pilots’ seats and the cockpit door. Antonov AN-124s, like most Soviet-era aircraft, was a brute force solution—more bodies, less technology. It made for a painfully long cockpit.

  The direction of Elayne’s motion was shifting.

  She had the weapon.

  Holly wouldn’t be too late this time. Not. This. Time.

  Elayne would not take down this team.

  Never again would Holly be one step short.

  So few, grasping, desperate inches from saving her brother.

  As the pistol—a Grach MP-443�
��came into view alongside Elayne’s hip, Holly launched.

  She didn’t try to catch the gun arm—always a difficult target.

  Nor did she go for the obvious pain points of sternum or eyes.

  All she could see was Elayne beating Miranda.

  Killing Mike.

  No.

  Against all of her training, Holly’s outstretched hands were aimed to grab Elayne Kasprak by the throat.

  66

  Drake was considering going home for a couple hours’ sleep.

  Last night, he’d foolishly checked his phone at midnight and seen the message about the Condor exploding on the Fort Campbell runway. Now it was eleven at night, twenty-three sleepless hours later. The next expected event was the plane switch planned for three a.m.

  But he didn’t want to be the only one to leave. He expected that removing Mike would take some serious explosives, and Miranda never appeared to sleep.

  The President and VP had left, but they didn’t really count.

  “Hey Lizzy,” he fought off a yawn. “What do you think about—”

  “What was that?” Mike jerked upright in his chair.

  “What was what?” Drake hadn’t noticed anything.

  “Wind it back.” Mike was up on the edge of his seat, practically shouting at Lizzy.

  The Situation Room was dead silent as Lizzy backed up the satellite image and restarted it.

  Their stolen plane was in straight-and-level flight. It was, he checked the screen clock, nine a.m. local time for the airplane. The sun shone brightly off the white paint. They were clear of the storm’s edge that had obscured their Samara departure and the plane was now etched against the rugged green of the Ural Mountains.

  He was just about to ask again when it happened.

  The plane pitched up and left for a moment.

  As it was recovering, it twisted hard right and down. The change was awfully abrupt for such a big plane.

  Then it recovered and restabilized…mostly.

  It continued to wander along its track as if the pilot wasn’t paying attention.

  “Run it again,” Miranda’s voice cut through the silence.