by Ted Bell
Chapter Forty-Six
Suva Island
THE BIG DAIMLER ROLLED UP JUST OUTSIDE THE MASSIVE corrugated hangar and hissed to a creaky stop. The sleek little Gulf-stream jet that would very shortly whisk bin Wazir home to the Blue Mountains was parked just outside on the tarmac, engines warming.
As Tippu hauled his ancient Vuitton steamer trunk up the steps of the G-3, Snay and the doctor stood for a moment outside the cavernous hangar filled with blazing arc lights. Snay bin Wazir’s heart was beating wildly. He knew what to expect inside, and still he was ill-prepared for the sight of the freshly painted behemoth standing in the glare of endless banks of lights.
It was beyond perfection. An exact copy. Down to the last nut and bolt.
His chief pilot, Khalid, strode forward out of the mass of technicians huddled under the nose of Snay’s now-unrecognizable 747-400. Thick cables, connected to two ancient Cray supercomputers on rolling platforms, snaked out of the nose wheel bay. Snay, grinning like a ten-year-old, opened his arms and embraced Khalid, clapping him on the back.
“It’s magnificent! Absolutely flawless!”
“Thank you, indeed, sir,” Khalid said, in his crisp English accent. He took a step back. “It does rather look like the real thing, doesn’t it?” The handsome, middle-aged pilot, whom, along with his copilot, bin Wazir had lured away from British Airways years earlier by doubling their salaries, was dressed in a perfectly pressed black pilot’s uniform, another exact copy of the original, right down to the last gold button. The pilot removed his cap and saluted. At that moment, his first officer, Johnny Adare, approached and snapped to attention. Like his senior officer, he was wearing a crisp black uniform.
“Sir!” Adare said smartly to bin Wazir. “The aircraft is nearly fueled. We have almost completed the downloading of the pirated transponder codes and GPS coordinates. My lads on the ground at Singapore Changi International Airport were able to ‘borrow’ the original flight plan for an hour and replace it onboard the BA plane without notice. As you assured us, security at the hangar there was conveniently absent. All we will need now is our friend’s squawk number, which we can easily obtain from the radio. As soon as we have finished downloading and fueling, we can begin boarding. Sir.”
“How long?” bin Wazir asked Adare, looking at his watch. The incident at the dragon cage had cost him nearly an hour. In order to avoid any high-altitude surveillance cameras, and make its rendezvous over the Pacific, his plane had to be airborne an hour before dawn.
“Two hours, sir.”
“Make it one.”
“Done,” Adare said. “I’ll whip these wog bastards a little harder.” Bin Wazir smiled. Adare still had a bit of the rowdy IRA kneecapper about him. Adare paused. “One thing, sir, a bit curious to me if you don’t mind. Passengers are due to start loading in half an hour. We have not yet received the…cargo.”
“Last-minute change of plans,” bin Wazir said. “The good doctor here will explain it in some detail. A colleague of mine. His name is Dr. I.V. Soong. He’ll be joining you in the cockpit. Stick him in the jumpseat.”
“Very good, sir,” Khalid said, looking closely first at Soong and then at his employer. “No changes to the flight plan? The destination is unchanged?”
“Nothing to be concerned about, Khalid. The blessings of Allah be upon your epic journey. I wish you a good flight.”
“Very good, sir. We’ll get moving, then. Doctor Soong? If you’ll follow us?” The pilot and second officer turned on their heels and headed for the rolling stairway leading up to the opened cabin door just aft of nose. Adare looked back over his shoulder at this strange little figure struggling with the two big black Halliburton cases. He was making a series of unintelligible noises.
“Is there something else?” Adare asked the man.
“Yes,” Dr. Soong said. “There is. You must get someone to help me, please. A mechanic. I need to make some last-minute changes in the aircraft’s emergency oxygen system. Minor alterations. Good, good! Let’s go!”
The man lugging the big black suitcases followed the two pilots up the steps to the open door of the gleaming, freshly painted Boeing 747.
“I don’t like it,” Adare whispered to Khalid, stepping inside the plane. “Not a bit of it. No payload. Now, this little bleeder wants to screw around with our air. If that’s not Poison Ivy himself, I’m Lady Margaret Thatcher.”
“I don’t much like it either,” Khalid replied. “But it’s payday, isn’t it, Johnny boy? We just drive the bus. So who the bloody hell cares.”
When this was over, Khalid was going to use his million dollars to buy that little semidetached cottage in Burton-on-Water. Send his kids to a good public school, give his wife some pretty dresses and a little garden, finally read all of T. E. Lawrence, starting with Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Johnny was going to buy that corner pub in his old Belfast neighborhood, the one he’d had his eye on for so long. He already had the clever name. The Quilted Camel.
With 63,000 pounds of thrust per engine, the roaring jumbo jet sent volleys of thunder through the dark jungle, scattering such wildlife as perched, scurried, or slithered there, the deep rumble rolling right up the western slope of the smoldering volcano, waking up every bone-weary farmer’s wife an hour early.
Carrying vast quantities of extra fuel in her wings and tail section, and with four hundred passengers aboard, the heavily over-loaded airplane still managed to reach her takeoff speed of 180 miles per hour before she ran out of runway. She rotated, and lifted off into the predawn sky. The few early risers, farmers who stood beside their oxen at the edges of their fields to watch, shuddered at the sight. They could not have said why, but there is something unnatural and malevolent about a large airplane flying into a dark sky with no lights illuminated.
Something secret and threatening.
Lumbering down the runway in the pale light of the dying moon, a long row of darkened windows glinting from her fuselage, she looked like a ghost plane. No red flashes at the wingtips, not a single light from within, not a bulb, interior or exterior, was lit. Now, airborne, the stark black flying machine was a moving silhouette against the stars. Accelerating low out over the rooftops of the old Bambah Hotel, the pilot could now see what all the fuss was about on his radar screen. A rapidly approaching black wall; a storm front moving in from the South China Sea.
Normally, the pilot would just vector around it, or climb quickly above it. Not today. Not now. He was staying right here, right down on the deck.
Crests of the wind-whipped waves below, some as high as a three-story building, lapped at the airplane’s broad belly and spattered the undersides of her fuel-laden wings. A typhoon had been building in the South China Sea and this was the leading edge. The four Pratt & Whitney engines howled ahead into the teeth of the headwind.
“Pull up! Pull up!” Dr. Soong said, after a long minute in which the aircraft did not appear to him to be climbing. “What is the matter? Are we going down?”
There was a faint reddish glow inside the cockpit, coming from the instrument panels, and the copilot, Adare, could see the terrified expression on the man’s face. The doctor wore thick black glasses, and the greasy lenses seemed to be made of waxed paper, but Johnny Adare could still see that this was not a happy flyer.
Adare, amused, looked at this little man seated in the jumpseat just aft of the captain and gave him an ironic and assuring thumbs-up. It was a gesture the doctor found most unconvincing. Something was very wrong. Look! They were about to fly though a big wave! He covered his eyes with both hands and waited for the impact.
The 747 was carefully following a well-thought-out flight plan. Unfiled with any aviation authority, but still, her flight plan. She would fly north-northwest for one hundred miles at an altitude of fifty feet above sea level. It was dangerous and made more so by the storm, but it was necessary. For now. A hundred miles out over the Pacific, safely out of Indonesian airspace, and any radar anywhere, she would begin an ascent to an altitude above n
ormal commercial operating routes. 45,000 feet was the plan. Barring any unforeseen difficulties, the 747 would be touching down at LAX International Airport in Los Angeles, California, in just less than twelve hours.
Two minutes after takeoff, Doctor I.V. Soong, still very agitated, said from the jumpseat, “I am wondering, Captain, how long we must stay so low to the sea? Dangerous. Very dangerous. Ground effect, you know.”
The captain turned in his seat and glared. The prospect of this hyperactive little gnome sitting behind him for twelve long hours was not appealing. He now understood why the Suva technicians referred to him as Poison Ivy. The man was indeed poisonous. It seeped from his pores. Even his breath was tainted and foul. He silently cursed bin Wazir for saddling him with this toxic little toad.
Ten long minutes into the flight they were still skimming the wave tops of the South China Sea. It was a bumpy ride, flashes of lightning lit up the cockpit, and they could hear the shouts of the passengers through the locked cockpit door. Khalid could only imagine what it must be like back there, flying through this mess in pitch-black darkness. When he’d agreed to the Pasha’s instructions, he hadn’t known about the storm.
“Cabin and cockpit lights,” he said to the copilot, and Adare flipped the two switches that turned them both on.
“Cabin and cockpit on,” Johnny said, as the cockpit was fully illuminated. “Nav lights? Wings? Beacon and strobe?”
Khalid looked at his watch. If bin Wazir ever found out about any of this, he’d most certainly be dead. He’d certainly been fired for less. Many times. But by the time bin Wazir did find out, he’d be long gone. The reins had begun to chafe long ago. In twelve short hours, he’d be out of harness forever.
“Light her up,” Khalid finally said, easing back on the wheel. He’d turn all the goddamn lights on and take the airplane up to five hundred feet. Flying this low to the water in these conditions was suicidal.
“Oh!” Soong cried. “Oh, my God!”
It was even rougher at five hundred feet. Khalid’s metal flight binder went flying across the cockpit. Soong knew they might have to fly lower than normal to avoid radar, but he’d had no idea they’d be flying at this altitude through a typhoon. He slipped out of his shoulder straps and staggered to his feet. He grabbed the back of the copilot’s seat and held on. He couldn’t stand it any longer.
“May I be having a small word with you?” Soong said, leaning over the co-pilot’s shoulder and speaking into his ear.
“What?” Adare said, lifting his headphones. He, too, was annoyed and shared Khalid’s distaste for the last-minute passenger in the cockpit.
“A word, if you please. Important. We could go down to bin Wazir’s kitchen,” Soong said, his smile no more than a minute crack, “Have a cup of tea. A spot of whiskey.”
“Took the bloody galley out,” Adare said, speaking above the engines and the storm. “Even the two bedrooms. Everything that used to be back there on the lower deck is now a fuel tank.”
“His sitting room, then?”
“Jesus. What is your bloody problem?”
“The Pasha told you. In the hangar. Last-minute change of plans. I need to explain. What needs to be done. We must speak.” The captain craned his head around and stared at Soong.
Khalid said, “If you and the Pasha cooked up some plan to do something with my airplane other than fly it across the Pacific, you’d best spit it out. Now.”
“My plans will in no way affect you nor your airplane, Captain,” Soong said. “In any way. You have my most sincere assurances.”
The captain returned his gaze to the black and rain-splashed windshield. This flight, his last official mission, was not getting off to a good start.
“Do it, Johnny,” Khalid finally said without looking back at either of them. “Find out what the little bugger’s up to. As long as you’re back there, you might as well do what you can to calm the ladies down.”
“Aye, Skipper, will do,” Johnny Adare said, playfully punching Khalid’s shoulder. “Ladies aren’t happy, nobody’s happy.” He laughed silently at the thought. Four hundred suicide killers back there, handpicked from the most brutal terrorist training camps on the planet. Wasn’t much left that could scare them, he didn’t imagine. He unbuckled his shoulder straps and eased out of the right-hand seat. “Come along, Doc, let’s see what kind of trouble we can get our ruddy selves into back there.”
“Johnny?” Khalid said to his copilot, grabbing his arm.
“Aye?”
“You hear any squawking out of this little bird that sounds even remotely sketchy, you get back up here and tell me all about it.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
The Emirate
FOUR SKELETAL BLACK BIRDS SOARED HIGH ABOVE THE WHITE floor of the valley. Jagged snow-blown mountains marched shoulder-to-shoulder up both sides of the wide basin, craggy promontories that scraped the crystalline blue skies. Three of the four gaunt black birds flew up this valley in a fair semblance of formation.
The fourth, mission code Hawkeye, putative leader of the flight, did not. This mischievous bird would lag behind the flock; first scribing tight corkscrew arcs downward, she would then ride a rising column of warm air, only to nose over the top and dive once more, the earth rushing crazily up, the airspeed indicator redlined. At the last possible moment, the wayward blackbird would level its wings and climb out, soaring once more on the warm thermals and rejoining the flight.
The pilot of this fourth bird, grinning with exhilaration, heard a squawk in his headphones.
“Hey. Offer you a deal, Hawkeye,” Patterson drawled on the intercom. “Limited time only.”
“Shoot, Tex.”
“You keep this bird on an even keel till we reach the LZ, set us down gently in one unbusted piece of high-tech plastic, you get use of this aircraft right here for one entire month of playtime.”
“You’re not serious?”
“I reckon I am.”
“Deal,” Hawke said, thrilled. With a wingspan of sixty feet, Hawkeye was in every sense the world’s most sophisticated high-altitude stealth glider. He’d never flown anything remotely like her. Few had.
The lanky Texan, seated two seats aft of the Englishman in the cockpit, heard the huge smile Hawke had put behind that word, Deal. Never in his life had he known a boy who just loved flying airplanes so much. And, never once, at least not since this whole nightmare had begun in Venice and on the steps of a little church in England, had he heard Alex Hawke sound so happy.
“Would you like to drive, Tex?”
“Naw, son, you doin’ jes fine now.”
“I aim to please.”
“G’night,” the big man said, flipping down the most darkly tinted of the three visors attached to his helmet. Tex stuck a fresh mint toothpick in his teeth, leaned his head back against his headrest and closed his eyes; trying to relax a little in the short time remaining before all hell broke loose.
For some time, Hawkeye soared gracefully up valley, riding the thermals, flock in tow, and nothing and no one disturbed the blissful silence of the air.
Now, the ice-encrusted twin peaks of the Blue Mountain loomed ahead. It was monstrous. A dark blue-tinged mass of sharp granite angles, frozen snow and blue-black ice, the rocky pinnacle rose through the few stringy cloud layers to scrape the sky at 18,000 feet. The tallest of the two peaks was just 9,000 feet shy of Everest, the other peak a thousand feet lower.
The narrow snow-filled crevasse that split that pinnacle was the little flock’s destination.
“Hey, Tex. You awake?”
“Am now.”
“I’ve got the LZ in sight. I still feel guilty. Flying your plane—these are your men, Tex. Your planes. Your men.”
“We been through all this, ain’t we? Law of the plains. Injuns got you surrounded, the best shot gets the long rifle. That’d be you, Hawkeye.”
“I suppose—”
“Hawke, listen. It ain’t like you’re hurtin’ my feelings. The presi
dent gave you this assignment, remember. Not DSS, and not me. Me and the boys will gladly knock down anybody gets within spittin’ distance of you. But you got the ball, son.”
“I have the ball, sir.” Alex said, laughing. It was the expression fighter jocks used in carrier landings to tell Flight Ops they were properly lined up on final approach.
“I got your joke, son. Mixing up metaphors, do it all the time, my wife says. Football and flying.”
“Right.”
“Glad we got that all straightened out,” Tex said, leaning back and closing his eyes. He had that rare ability, when all about him were losing their heads, to nap. Alex Hawke used the flying time remaining trying to envision what kinds of hazards he might soon encounter trying to land four Black Widows on a mountaintop at 18,000 feet. He stopped counting at three.
The DSS pilots had nicknamed the new glider design Black Widow in memory of the legendary P-61. The reedlike glider’s twin-barreled fuselage certainly recalled the World War II nightfighter, the P-61 Black Widow. The new high-altitude aircraft even had the red hourglass shape, identifying nature’s deadliest spider, painted on its matte black belly. But, while vintage Black Widows were powerful, bulbous, muscular warplanes, bristling with weaponry, Hawkeye and her like had no weapons. No engines. Built of carbon fiber composite and thin everywhere the P-61 had been thick, she looked, Patterson said, “Like a flying box built out of toothpicks.”
Hawke’s headphones crackled again.
“Hawkeye, Hawkeye, you got Gabriel upstairs,” a voice said. “I have your LZ in visual contact. You’re getting close. Glad as hell it’s you landing that thing up there, not me. Over.”
“Roger that, Gabriel. Appreciate your support as always,” Hawke replied.
The ungainly E2-C Navy surveillance plane, mission code Gabriel, was monitoring the entire mission and sending a real-time video feed direct to Washington. Earlier, a small group gathered around a monitor at the White House had cheered when the four glider pilots had pulled their release knobs, cast off the towlines from the Navy STOLs and soared away over the range of misty blue mountains. Then they’d lapsed into subdued silence.
