by Ted Bell
A very small number of those watching the White House monitors knew the fate of their country was very likely riding with the men inside those four Black Widows.
The silence in the Oval Office was broken when the quietly excited voice of one of the four pilots crackled over a set of speakers. “This is your captain speaking,” the small group heard the pilot say, “Kindly put your seatbacks and tray tables in an upright position.”
“Copy that, Skipper,” came the laconic reply. “And in the unlikely event of a water landing, I reckon the cheeks of my ass will act as a flotation device?”
“Roger that,” the pilot laughed.
“That would be Alex Hawke and Tex Patterson aboard Hawkeye, the lead plane,” the president said, smiling grimly at the small gathering of people watching with him in the Oval Office. “Hawkeye will be first in.”
Jack McAtee’s eyes were glued to the screen. The tension in the room was more than palpable, it was excruciating.
“This is it, boys,” the grim president told the vice president and his chief of staff. “This is the whole damn shooting match, right here.”
So far, so good, Hawke thought, easing his stick forward an inch and getting his nose back below the horizon where it belonged. Of course, the method of getting out of a high-mountain hot zone would not be nearly so straightforward as getting in—but Hawke had enough on his mind at the moment to stuff those kinds of thoughts back into the semidistant recesses of his brain. He concentrated instead on the good news; uneven, mountainous terrain might shield their approach from visual and electronic monitoring.
“FlyBaby…Widowmaker…Phantom,” Hawke said. “This is Hawkeye, copy?”
“Roger, Hawkeye, FlyBaby’s right behind you, high, wide, and handsome,” her skipper, a tough south Florida kid named Mario Mendoza, said. “Can’t shake me with all those circus acrobatics.”
“Copy that, Hawkeye, Widowmaker at your five.” Jim Ferguson, Ferg, was a good old boy from West Texas, former crop duster and current knucklebuster. Tom Quick, the only non-DSS agent besides Hawke, was two seats behind him.
“That leaves you, Phantom,” Hawke said. “Copy.”
“Uh, roger, Hawkeye, Phantom copies,” Ron Gidwitz, the skinny kid from the south side of Chicago who was flying Phantom said. “We got, uh, got us a minor problem here, sir. Got a warning light lit up and…we, uh—”
“Talk to me, Phantom,” Hawke said. A minute stretched out.
“Disregard, Hawkeye,” Gidwitz finally said, “Warning light just went out. Some kind of electrical glitch. Over.”
“Roger that, Phantom. Hawkeye over.”
The flock of blackbirds flew onward, etching themselves against the bowl of the sky.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Flight 77
CHERRY LANSING COULD TELL THAT THE EXTREME HOTTIE seated next to her in the window seat was never in this lifetime going to talk to her. Like, she straight up knew it. He had to be like one of the few remotely hot species she’d seen on this entire vacation. Oh, well. How cool could he be? He was reading the Bible, some foreign bible anyway. He did have an MP3 player, which was a good sign. But he’d tuned out, stuck his headphones on right after takeoff—which was, in her experience with boys, a bad sign. A-hole.
She squished the disgusting ham sandwich into a little ball, put it back in its nice little silver, as if, Styrofoam dish and stuffed it in the seatback in front of her, wondering what her parents were having for lunch up in first class. No wonder she was buggin’. It was so undemocratic, sticking her back here in the ghetto.
Then, when she dared, how dare you, to complain to her mother about how unfair it was, her mother goes getting all up in her business about how spoiled she was—like that was remotely true—so she’d gone into the ladies right next to the gate and fired up some chronic she’d bought off this cute street boy back in Sing-Song or Hong Kong, whatever. Really good leaf. She’d gotten baked.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hello,” he said back. Hello? Is that what he said? Hello? Not, yo, whasup? Like any normal person?
“Like my necklace? Bangin’ rocks, huh? My name in lights. Got it in Singapore.”
“What?”
Maybe he didn’t speak good English. He looked like Middle Eastern or Asian or one of those. Short, dark, and handsome. Cherry flashed her namesake necklace at him again. She was totally iced out for this trip home. Asian bling from Sing-Sing. Couldn’t wait to show the new crown jewels to all her hootchie friends back in Darien. Them and her baby daddy who she’d missed so much. Oh, well. It was only twelve hours to L.A. and then another five to New York and then an hour or so up the Merritt by limo to Darien—she pulled the airport book her mother’d bought her out of her bag and opened it. It was named after that famous artist Da Vinci but her mother told her it was about secret codes or something.
“You are interested in numerology?” the boy said, pulling his headphones off and looking at the book. College. Definitely college.
“What?” she said. Like she was annoyed at having her reading interrupted. Like she read books. As if.
“Numbers. Their hidden meanings.”
“Oh. Yeah. Fascinating.”
“Me, as well.” He smiled. Nice grill. Straight and pearly. Big brown eyes. Long, long lashes.
“That’s what this is about? Numbers? Jesus Christ. This is a math book?”
“It’s what everything is about. Flight 77. You see? A mystical number. Powerful. Or, this row number we are this moment sitting in. It’s 76. A very important number for you Americans, is it not?”
“76? You mean, like, the gas station? Or, what?”
He just looked at her and then went back to what her dad called the thousand-yard stare.
“My boyfriend gave me this book,” she said quickly. “You should see him. What a babe. He looks exactly just like JFK. Identical.”
“Which one?”
“Which one?”
“Yes. The president? Or, the airport?”
“What?”
The seat belt sign pinged off and the bitchy British Airways stewardess said in her bitchy British accent that they could get up if they wanted to but stay out of the aisle so they could get their crappy carts up and down and keep the belt fastened loosely when they were in their seats because there was some storm or other down in South China.
Get up but stay out of the aisles? Unfasten your seat belt but keep it fastened? Hello? Is this woman two toys short of a Happy Meal, or what?
“Excuse me, please,” the hottie-tottie brown-eyed boy said, taking his cheesy plastic shaving kit out of his made-in-Taiwan special backpack. He turned his back and unzipped it like he didn’t want her peeking and put his MP3 player inside it. As if she cared about what was in his stupid shaving kit. “I must use the restroom, please. Urgent.”
Oh. Like she cared. He was going to shave? Brush his teeth? It was way more information than she needed. Why didn’t he just say he was getting up? She’d use the restroom herself and fire up some more leaf but you couldn’t even smoke weed in there anymore. She knew, believe me. She’d tried.
Urgent? What could be urgent? Yuk.
Flight 00
THE MINUTE JOHNNY ADARE STEPPED OUT OF THE COCKPIT and into the upper galley with the little doctor in tow, everybody started calming down. It was the uniform, he guessed, and the famous Adare smile he’d inherited from his dad. He’d gotten laid with both so many times he couldn’t remember. It had taken every ounce of self-control he had to stay away from the Bambah for the last three days. He’d watched the lassies land, climb on the buses, and head for the hotel. Not one of them much over twenty-five, none of them exactly drop-dead gorgeous, but what the hell. At any rate, they had not been chosen for their looks.
“Don’t even think about it,” Khalid had told him, the two of them standing by the hangar watching the stream of young women climb up the steps of the buses to the hotel. Yeah, yeah. So, he hadn’t ever gone over to the hotel but that
didn’t mean he ever stopped thinking about it. Ever.
“Sorry, ’bout the bumpy ride, ladies,” Johnny said on the intercom phone in his pilot voice. One of the prerequisites for the Pasha’s death squads was that they all had to speak perfect English, so that made it easier. He had a vague idea of what this was all about but he’d learned long ago that it was a lot easier not to ask a lot of questions. Just shut up and fly the bus, Johnny. He’d learned that lesson long ago from Khalid.
“Just a few potholes in the sky,” he continued. “That’s all. We’ll be flying a little lower than usual for a while, until we get through this stuff, but it shouldn’t be much longer. Then, we’ll climb to our normal altitude. We’re expecting a smooth ride to L.A. today. Everybody sit back and relax. As soon as we can, we’ll be serving you a light breakfast. Thanks.”
He sounded funny, he thought, hanging up. Ten years with the Pasha. Christ, he’d almost forgotten what a real airplane pilot sounded like.
He nodded thanks to the cabin crew, the Pasha’s three beautiful private hostesses seated on fold-downs in the upper galley, two of whom he knew very well. He smiled at them, hung up the phone, and motioned Soong to follow him down the spiral stair. The abbreviated main cabin, six seats abreast, was full of some very nervous female passengers. But, just as it had topside, his appearance on the main deck had a calming effect. That, plus the fact that Khalid had disobeyed orders and turned all the interior lights on and climbed high enough so that the wave tops were no longer threatening to reach up and pull them from the sky.
He flashed his smile, pausing here and there with a brief word of reassurance. He and the doctor were headed all the way aft to what little of the Pasha’s private quarters hadn’t been turned into auxiliary fuel tanks. About halfway back, he noticed an overhead panel hanging down. The engineer who, at the last minute, had replaced all the oxygen canisters with the ones Soong had brought aboard in his black suitcase, had neglected to fasten it properly. Johnny smiled at the three women as he reached over them to snap the panel back into place. They all smiled back. Hell, they were all smiling now.
He started aft. Where was that little bugger?
“Heads up! Doc! I thought you said it was important,” he called to him. The guy was still leaning over to talk to one of the travel agents in a tight white Gap T-shirt. She did have a pair that would pop the pennies off a dead Irishman’s eyelids, he’d noticed. The doc was practically drooling on her. Scratch the practically.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, and came toddling after Johnny, holding onto seat backs as if he really wanted to keep from falling into somebody’s lap.
Adare closed the beautifully carved door behind them, leaned his back against it and shook out a cigarette. He snicked a match with his thumbnail and, for once, it worked. The warmly lit cabin was certainly stunning, but familiar. He’d spent a lot of time back here entertaining the hostesses when the boss wasn’t aboard. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. His last official voyage. One for the road.
“So?” he said, rolling the delicious whiskey around in his mouth before swallowing. “What’s up, Doc?”
The doctor was lighting up, too. He’d taken one of the Pasha’s Baghdaddies from the inlaid box next to the leather sofa. His hand was shaking so badly he could barely hold the match.
“We must do an in-flight test,” Doctor Soong puffed nervously. “Very important. Sooner the better.”
“In-flight test?” Adare said. That didn’t sound good. “You’ve got to be joking, man. A test of what?”
“No-no,” Soong said, putting a bony little hand on his arm to reassure him. “Not to worry. Only the emergency oxygen system, Johnny.”
Johnny?
Adare’s right arm shot out and he slammed the man up against the bulkhead. His ribs felt like chickenbones. And Johnny felt like snapping them. This little shit had definitely gotten Johnny’s Irish up.
“I want somebody to call me Johnny, I let them know. And you, you miserable little bugger, are at the very back of a very long fuckin’ queue. You better tell me what the bloody hell you’ve done. Last-minute changes to my airplane, Doc, I don’t like ’em.”
“Please! The cockpit has its own oxygen supply, no?”
“What of it?”
“And, the cockpit itself has an airtight seal?”
“Jesus Christ, man! Are ye flat crazy? What have ye done to us?”
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Emirate
HAWKE LOOKED AT HIS WATCH, WILLING THE RED SWEEP second hand to slow down. Two days earlier, on a warm morning at No. 10 Downing Street, seventy-two hours had seemed reasonably sufficient. But now that he was down to five hours and counting, he wasn’t at all sure. In exactly three hundred and forty minutes, the big B-52s arriving upstairs would open their bomb bays. If that wasn’t exciting enough for you, you’d be seeing a goodly number of little blips on your radar screen. Incoming Tomahawk land attack missiles, fired from guided missile cruisers with the Nimitz Carrier Battle Group deployed in the Indian Ocean.
“We’re five miles out,” Hawke said into the lip-mike. “Squadron climb and maintain two-one-zero—over.”
He eased back on the stick and watched his altimeter needle spin. At twenty-one thousand feet, he leveled off. The twin peaks of the mountain were now a whole lot closer. The extensive high-resolution recon photos hadn’t lied. The mountain itself was a deep gentian blue against the pale sky. There, like a wound, was the designated LZ; a narrow strip of blinding white at the bottom of a ragged crevasse that cut between the mountain’s peaks.
“Squadron…turn right to a heading of one-four-niner,” Hawke said.
It was roughly one hundred feet across and a bit shy of two thousand feet long. Hawke lifted his visor and knuckled the stinging sweat out of his eyes. Christ. It was going to be a bit like setting down on Pimlico Road during a Saturday afternoon tornado without your wingtips clipping any double-decker buses.
He craned his head around and looked over his shoulder at Patterson. Tex was strapping a Velcro bandolier of four thirty-round mags over his white Kevlar vest. Checking all his gear. Hawke smiled. Tex would be carrying an HK MP-5 submachine gun as an added measure of security in addition to his trusty Colt .45 Peacemaker. The team had given a great deal of thought to weapons. Since they carried no personal effects and wore no insignia, no national or unit markings, it was decided it didn’t matter what kind of firepower they brought along. Hell, you could buy anything at all on the open market these days.
Each man on this mission had signed on as a NOC. Spook-speak for “Not On Consular.” It meant your name did not appear on any list, Consular or otherwise. If you got caught, you didn’t exist. Hardly mattered. You were soon dead anyway.
“I just thought of something, Tex,” Hawke said.
“I’m a little busy right now, Alex. What?”
“We’re five minutes out and we’re still alive.”
“Good point. I’ve just spotted three radar domes. No Sammies. I guess these new-fangled jammer things work okay. Shoot, Hawkeye, in the early days we used to lose about a Widow or two a month, or pretty near.”
“Most encouraging,” Hawke said. He craned his head around, looking aft, making sure all his little ducks were in a row.
“Squadron turn right to zero-six-zero,” Hawke said, “Form up. Stick to your predetermined order going in: Hawkeye, Widowmaker, FlyBaby, Phantom. Copy?”
“Dead last,” Phantom’s ex-Marine pilot Ron Gidwitz said, laughing.
“Bad choice of words, Ronnie,” Patterson said over the radio.
“Don’t worry, Phantom, you’re about to kick some serious ass! Semper Fi, man!” came the response from another aircraft.
Hawke recognized Tommy Quick’s adrenalin-pumped voice. He was riding along with Ferguson in Widowmaker’s aftermost seat. A last-minute member of the team, Hawke had insisted the Army’s former number-one sharpshooter would be a vital addition no ma
tter how this all played out.
“Ron, you okay back there? Copy?” Patterson asked Phantom’s pilot, the concern in his voice obvious.
“Okay? I’m fuckin’ fantastic!” Gidwitz replied. Hawke smiled at the reply. Patterson’s Blue Mountain Boys did not need any more motivation. They were psyched. Gung ho.
“Cut the mike chat,” Hawke said. “Hawkeye is going in.” He flipped down his visor and focused every scintilla of his concentration on the narrow slash in the top of the mountain dead ahead.
Alex lined his nose up on the rocky leading edge of the crevasse. From here, the opening in the bloody thing looked to be about six inches wide and a foot long. To make it all the more interesting, the closer he flew to the sheer face of the mountain, the more unpredictable the winds got. The buffeting had increased dramatically in the last thirty seconds.
“Ride ’em, cowboy,” Hawke said dryly. They were porpoising severely. Just keeping his spindly wings level was a full-time job.
“Man-oh-man,” Patterson drawled, craning around Hawke’s helmet for a first-hand look at the snow-scoured jaws of the approach. He’d seen pictures of where they were headed but they didn’t do it justice. For one thing, it didn’t look anywhere near close to wide enough to accommodate their wingspan. “You honestly believe you can thread this needle, Hawkeye?”
“Tell you something I’ve always wondered, Tex,” Hawke said, struggling to control pitch, yaw, and roll, while maintaining his glide path. The delicate aircraft was being bounced all over the sky by strong crosswinds and hammered by wind shear.
“What’s that, son?”
“I wonder how the bloody hell it’s possible for a man to break a sweat when the temperature outside his window is–50 Fahrenheit.”
“You, too, huh?” Tex said. “You plan to hit the brakes anytime soon?”
