Flight 741

by Don Pendleton

  Annotation

  Flight 741.

  Departs Munich for New York. It will never arrive.

  Beneath the scorching Mideast sun, a nightmare begins to come true as Flight 741 sits like a silver coffin at Beirut International Airport.

  U.S. foreign policy is on the line, and in the balance are the lives of more than four hundred passengers. One of them is special, very special...

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  * * *

  Don Pendleton's

  Mack Bolan

  Flight 741

  Terrorists are the shock troops in a war to the death against the values and institutions of a society and of the people who embody it.

  Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former U.S. representative to the United Nations

  I see terrorists for what they really are, cold-blooded killers and thugs, and as such no different from the Mafia. Therefore my duty is to escalate, expand my war.

  Mack Bolan

  To the victims of terrorism everywhere.

  Special thanks and acknowledgment to Mike Newton for his contributions to this work.

  Prologue

  The great bird sat and baked beneath a broiling desert sun. Her silver wings appeared to droop, signaling defeat. The sightless cockpit-eyes stared vacantly across a vast expanse of sand. Once proud, she seemed to crouch, humiliated in the heat, waiting for the end.

  Her living cargo had departed hours earlier, the transit buses rattling on their way to Tripoli. There, negotiations would drag on for weeks or months, depending on the stamina of all concerned. But it would matter little to the silver bird. Whatever happened at the conference tables, she was all alone with her despoilers now. And she was doomed.

  The demolition team was disembarking, piling gear and rolls of wire into the jeeps provided by Khaddafi, putting ground between themselves and the disabled carcass of the bird. The dark man watched as they drew nearer, trailing plumes of dust, but now his mind was racing on beyond the patch of desert that had been his home for eighteen endless days.

  The dark man had a war to fight, and he was being wasted here.

  The demolition crew were scrambling from their dusty jeeps, all smiles and wringing handshakes now, producing clouds of dust from filthy tunics as they slapped each other on the back. Their mood of jubilation did not touch the dark man, and his eyes were fixed on something far away, invisible to those around him.

  At Amal's approach, he broke the spell and turned to face the leader of his mop-up crew.

  "Ready?"

  Amal was beaming at him as he nodded, passing on the radio-remote control. The dark man looked at the little detonating device. It was the best available, but then again, Khaddafi could afford the best.

  "A triumph," said Amal.

  "A start."

  He fingered the remote control, his gaze riveted upon the steaming carcass of the silver bird. She was a marvel of technology, a wonder to behold — and for the price of one such aircraft, he could feed the people of his village for a hundred years.

  An ancient anger stirred inside him, the pulse inside his temples taking on an independent life. The silver bird, this 747, was a symbol of the life that he and all his people were eternally denied. The decadence of Western culture sat before him, sleek and fat, its mere existence mocking his despair.

  Enough!

  Morality and all the rest of it belonged to others, the negotiators, waiting on the sidelines of his war. He was a soldier, first and last, his essence pledged to the eradication of his enemies.

  He had accomplished much in very little time... but there was so much still to do.

  Beginning now.

  "A start," he said again to no one in particular, and keyed the small device. A silent signal flashed downrange, and triggered a spark inside the belly of the bird.

  An oily ball of flame erupted from amidships, shattering the fuselage and shearing off one wing. The forward section of the aircraft shuddered, fell away, at once consumed by greedy flames. A string of secondary blasts blossomed as the fuel tanks blew, and now the tail was totally involved, its silver siding peeling back and melting into nothingness, the blazing skeleton revealed.

  He would remain until the 747 was reduced to ashes. He would remain and watch the flames, hoping to find an answer there. Today, the past three weeks, had been a start, but nothing more. His war had just begun.

  The worst — and best — of it were yet to come.

  But he could wait until the silver bird consigned itself to desert sand. There would be others waiting for him on the Continent. Increased security would not dissuade him from his mission now. The scent of victory was in his nostrils; there was no turning back. If he should fall, there were others like him to continue in his place.

  The man's black eyes reflected tiny, twin flickers of the conflagration in the distance, which provided a febrile intensity and gave the swarthy face a devilish appearance.

  He continued to stare at the burning plane and the heat seemed to reach out and touch him, warming him inside and lighting hungry sparks behind his eyes. It was a start, and he could afford to wait, to watch and plan.

  And that was good enough for now.

  Tomorrow was tomorrow, and he would be ready for another chance to strike against his enemies. To teach them fear.

  It was a lesson that the dark man had been well equipped to share.

  Chapter One

  The weapons came aboard in Munich with the cleanup crew. Although security precautions in the terminal were stiff, no one detected their presence before they reached the plane. And for the personnel involved with terminal security, the members of the cleanup crew did not exist.

  The scrubbers went about their jobs unnoticed, unsupervised. Their uniforms and id cards rendered them invisible, except in an emergency. If some unfortunate lost his breakfast on the concourse, or if the toilets overflowed, an urgent summons brought the men and women up "from maintenance," a kind of limbo somewhere out of sight and out of mind. But in the absence of a crisis, they were faceless and forgotten, worker ants who scoured the terminal and picked the grounded aircraft clean. If these cleaners had private lives and secret dreams, nobody paused to give the matter any thought.

  Karl Geiger was a man of private dreams and secret visions. In recent years his dreams had crystallized around the Baader-Meinhof Gang's Red Army Faction, and he pledged himself to serve the cause in any manner possible, no matter what the risk. He was prepared to die, if necessary, and so achieve the glory that had managed to elude him all his lif
e.

  This day his task involved sequestering a cache of weapons in the cabin of a 747 bound for Frankfurt and beyond, for the United States. He understood it was a contract mission, undertaken by the Baader-Meinhofs on behalf of other parties, but it was all the same. If the Baader-Meinhofs thought the matter was significant, Karl Geiger thought so, too, and he would do his best to carry out his mission.

  Still it might be too much for a single man, and Geiger's fellow reds had made arrangements for a backup. One of his associates, a regular in maintenance, had suffered an untimely accident the night before, and his emergency replacement was a veteran shooter for the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The union had been pacified with cash, conditioned by a history of dealings with the underworld and petty revolutionaries. If it occurred to Karl that his backup was in fact his supervisor, he did not allow the thought to prey on his mind.

  Karl Geiger didn't have to ask himself what kind of show the "other parties" had in mind. A blind man could have seen it coming, and the airport janitor was far from blind. He read the news, was conscious of the sudden rise in airline hijack incidents over the past few months. The last one, outside of Tripoli, in Libya, had been a beauty, with the destruction of a 747 on its desert runway once the passengers were bused away. Negotiations for their mass release had been completed less than two weeks earlier, with the Israelis backing down again, their jails disgorging yet another troop of fedayeen.

  The revolutionaries liked this airline. Karl knew that much, and he recognized the reasoning behind their preference. The airline was America incarnate, symbol of the jet-set running dogs who held the masses down. It represented money, world exposure, a direct connection to the mighty American media. The airline's jumbo jets were easy marks in every airport on the Continent, indeed, in North Africa and the Middle East.

  Karl loved to argue revolution, but plotting strategy produced a throbbing pain behind his eyes. He felt it coming now, and made his mind a blank until he felt the pulsing ache recede. He had a job to do, and if the Baader-Meinhof Gang had wanted policy decisions, well, they would surely have called on someone else.

  The container drum of Geiger's vacuum cleaner held four Ingram MAC-10 submachine guns, plus extra magazines. The canvas bag he wore across one shoulder held six RGD-5 antipersonnel grenades. The eggshaped Russian hand grenades possessed an average killing radius of twenty yards, and they would wreak a bloody havoc in the confines of a 747's cabin.

  If it came down to that, Karl thought.

  Concealing weapons on the plane had never been a problem. It was in the terminal, where passengers and baggage were subject to demeaning searches, that the problems could arise. Enlistment of the cleanup crew had virtually eliminated first-phase risks. The danger came in flight, when the shooters retrieved the weapons and ordered the aircraft to its new, unscheduled destination. Then, there were many risks, but none of them would prey on Geiger now.

  The antipersonnel grenades were stowed in a compartment just above the starboard emergency exit, overlooking the wing. Originally used to store the aircraft's life rafts, the compartment was ignored now that new rafts were installed inside the exit doors themselves. Karl knew from long experience that no one checked the holding bins before the aircraft taxied off.

  He stashed the lethal Ingrams and their extra magazines inside a crawl space set above the lavatories, in the rear. It was another wasted space, Karl thought, but he knew the submachine guns and their ammunition would be safe up there. The average airline passenger would be too busy thinking of his forthcoming vacation or business trip to even contemplate rummaging to find secret compartments. In any case Karl pushed the thought away, determined that his fledgling mission should succeed.

  It was two long years since Karl Geiger had joined the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and in that time, his service had been limited to passing on bits of information to others like himself. If Air Force One was scheduled for a touchdown, if there was a fluctuation in security around the terminal, if someone in the union raised the specter of a strike, he passed the word along. He had begun to think it was his lot in life to carry bits and pieces of the revolution, but now he had been chosen for a greater task. He had been called to serve.

  While Geiger worked, his backup was secreting other weapons on the plane: three Makarov 9 mm pistols, with their surplus magazines, above the port-side exit hatch; a folding-stock Kalashnikov inside the closet normally reserved for duty-free items purchased in flight.

  His task completed, Karl grudgingly began to clean the deck. In seven years of servicing the jumbo jets, it was the first time he could remember not cursing all the fates for placing him in such a menial position. Karl had always known that he would never be a wealthy man — such honors were reserved for bigger, "better" men than he — but he would make his mark this day, albeit hidden by a cloak of anonymity. Today, the cleanup man had made it possible for bolder men to clean up part of what was wrong with modern-day society. Instead of passing on an idle bit of gossip from the crew, he passed along the tools of revolution into other, willing hands.

  As Geiger pushed his vacuum sweeper down the 747's aisle, he was consumed with pride at having carved himself a place in history.

  * * *

  Steve Korning never paid attention to the cleanup crew. As flight attendant on a 747, working international, he had sufficient problems of his own without borrowing more from the maintenance team. Flight crew and passengers would be boarding soon, and in the interim, he spent a moment gazing through a rainstreaked window at the Frankfurt terminal.

  Security was tight all over Europe now, but he had never seen the lid come down as tightly as it had in Frankfurt. Men in uniform, with submachine guns slung across their shoulders, stalked the tarmac, heedless of the rain. There would be others like them in the terminal itself, prepared to move on signal if the need arose. And tucked away behind a hangar, almost out of sight, an armored tank stood ready to defend the terminal or block the runway as the circumstances might demand.

  The flight attendant shook his head, unable to suppress a smile. The Germans took their business seriously, and there was nothing quite like overkill to make a point. If any terrorists had thoughts of bringing down a plane at Frankfurt, they would only have to glance around the field before they changed their minds.

  Steve Korning didn't like the state-of-siege mentality inspired by recent skyjacks on the Continent. He knew the risks as well as anyone, had listened to the briefings that explained why psycho gunmen chose his airline over all the others, three to one. Sometimes he felt as if he was sitting on a powder keg... but still, there had to be some kind of happy medium.

  He thought about the incident two weeks before, when he had tried to bag an empty jump seat on a Frankfurt outbound 727. He was out of uniform, but pinned to his lapel was the standard-issue id badge of an employee. Even so, he found himself spread-eagled on the asphalt with the muzzle of a submachine gun pressed between his shoulder blades, while snarling soldiers shook him down and rifled through the contents of his bag. They held him long enough to make him miss his flight, and then released him, minus any hint of an apology, still watching him as he scooped up his toiletries and jockey shorts from the sodden runway.

  The need for strict security had never escaped Korning, but there was something in the German attitude that seemed to relish giving orders, taking liberties, demeaning others in the name of law and order.

  Now, as he moved away from the window, he vowed to seek a transfer back to the domestic schedule. No point in putting off the move this time. He would begin the paperwork the moment they touched down at Kennedy.

  But first he had a job to do, and passengers were boarding. Still forty minutes left to flight time, but it took that long to settle in the mothers with infants in their arms, the children traveling alone, the seniors with their walkers, wheelchairs or what-have-you. All of them were allowed on first, before the regulars began to embark by rows, and part of Korning's job — together with the other nine attend
ants on the flight — would be to get them settled before the crush began in earnest.

  Boarding was a hectic time. Everybody milled about in the aisles, obstructing traffic while they stowed their coats or bags in overhead compartments, wrestling with seat belts that had slithered down between the cushions of their seats. This one required a blanket and a pillow, that one couldn't see the movie screen, the next one had requested smoking and expected satisfaction before the plane took off. Predictably, a handful homed directly on the rest rooms, cheated of their dignity by shaky bowels and bladders. Others checked the pocket of the seat in front, relaxing only when they spied the airsick bag there.

  You didn't have a lot of time to scope on passengers, but Korning spotted several interesting faces, filing them away for future reference. There was the prisoner, for instance, denim-clad and wearing chains that jangled when he walked. He was American, and Korning vaguely recognized the face from television news reports. Some kind of payroll robbery, he thought, with several people killed and other gunmen still at large. The name would come in time.

  And there were others. Near the galley modules, a vivacious blonde, whose sweater hugged her like a second skin. He would have marked her as a first-class ride, and thanked his lucky stars that she had gone for coach instead. A tall man sat midway back along the aisle; he was athletic, muscular, with blue-steel eyes that didn't fit his dark complexion. There was a clutch of somber Arab types, four scrawny men in all, who made a beeline for the last row, huddled up against the lavatories in the rear.

  So many faces, Korning thought, and he could never hope to mark them all. Perhaps 350 riding coach, another 66 up front, divided by a curtain into first class and ambassador. With crew, they numbered some 430 souls, and Korning never ceased to wonder at the marvel that would keep them airborne, hurtling through clouds above the Atlantic, toward their destination in the States.