58 Minutes (Basis for the Film Die Hard 2)

by Walter Wager

  It wasn't because he was her boss and one of Britain's top diplomats. Career considerations were not involved. This was something more elemental. Sir Brian Forsythe, admired at the Foreign Office for his sensitivity in negotiation and grasp of people, had no idea that the wide-eyed woman he worked with nearly every day was in love with him.

  She had been for almost two years. She hadn't admitted it to herself until his wife died nineteen months earlier, but, deep within her, she had known. She had hidden it from everyone. The Oxford-educated son of a baronet couldn't possibly care for a Welsh butcher's daughter who'd studied at an unimportant "red brick" university devoid of tradition or status.

  And there was another gap between them—eighteen years. People might smirk and jest about a "father fixation," and the fact that she looked even younger than her age would only emphasize the meaningless numerical difference. Class, education and age were not the only reasons that she concealed her feelings. She had her Welsh pride too.

  There was no way she could tell him.

  That was unthinkable.

  It was much safer and wiser simply to acknowledge his compliment about the speech.

  "That's very kind of you, Sir Brian," she said and immediately regretted her compulsive modesty.

  "I'll try to do your text justice," he promised and drained his champagne glass. "I'd like to go out on a high note."

  "Out?"

  "There isn't much time. I'll be sixty in June, and that's the retirement age."

  Six months. She had tried so hard not to think about it. When he retired, she'd probably never see him again.

  "Couldn't they make an exception for a valuable senior diplomat?" she asked in as calm a voice as she could muster.

  "I'm not sure that I'd want them to. Don't worry, Miss Jenkins. The chap who takes over may be much better."

  Unable to stop herself, she shook her head in disagreement.

  "Oh no, Sir Brian!"

  "I appreciate your loyalty, but no one's irreplaceable."

  She struggled for the courage to tell him.

  "In any case, HMG has rules," he continued as a blond stewardess approached with an opened bottle of champagne. "I've lived by those rules for over half my life."

  "May I, Sir Brian?" the smiling stewardess asked.

  He thanked her, and she began to refill his glass.

  "Now let's talk about something more interesting," he said. "Stewardess, please tell us about that old lady who attracted so many journalists at Heathrow. Her dreary clothes seemed Russian."

  "Bull's-eye, Sir Brian," the pretty flight attendant complimented. "She's seventy-six, I'm told, and she is Russian. Her name is Mrs. Olitski."

  "Sarah Olitski is a Jewish widow who has become a cause célèbre for several U.S. politicians and two New York City newspapers that detest each other," Ellen Jenkins said crisply. "They've all been trying to get her out to rejoin her only living relatives who are, I believe, residents of Brooklyn."

  "The Kiev Grandma!" Forsythe recalled. "It was on the BBC last night that she'd left Moscow. She must be delighted."

  "Not entirely," the flight attendant said as she filled Ellen Jenkins's glass with chilled Mumm's. "In point of fact, Mrs. Olitski is rather distressed about something, but we don't know what it is. She doesn't speak a word of English."

  Then she paused before she asked the question.

  "Do you happen to speak Russian, Sir Brian?"

  "Not as well as Miss Jenkins. She has a remarkable gift for languages. Is it five ... or six?"

  Embarrassed by his disclosure, Ellen Jenkins unbuckled her seat belt.

  "I'd be glad to help if I can," she said and rose to follow the stewardess.

  Sarah Olitski sat twenty-two rows back, wearing a tired woolen babushka over her hair and an expression of acute tension. When Ellen Jenkins asked in Russian how she was, a torrent of words poured out in urgent reply.

  "It's a human and not a political problem," the Welsh diplomat told the stewardess. "Mrs. Olitski needs to use the lavatory. I'll show her the way."

  When they returned to the gray-haired exile's seat a few minutes later, the older woman squeezed Ellen Jenkins's hand and spoke again.

  "Could you possibly get her a glass of tea? It's the Russian custom," the Welsh woman explained.

  The Kiev Grandma beamed and squeezed Ellen Jenkins's hand once more when the glass of tea arrived. Then the older woman thanked her, sipped the tea and closed her eyes in contentment. When she opened them, she uttered another burst of Russian and Ellen Jenkins replied softly.

  Then she started back with the flight attendant toward the First-Class compartment. As they reached it, Ellen Jenkins turned sideways to let a portly stockbroker pass. In doing so, she inadvertently brushed against a well-dressed young man in the aisle seat.

  "I'm terribly sorry," she said in reflex courtesy.

  He didn't answer. Clutching a black attaché case with both hands, he scowled at her in open hostility. Ellen Jenkins noticed something else in his eyes as well. It looked like fear.

  She apologized again, as she had been brought up to do, and continued toward the First-Class section with the stewardess.

  "Did you notice his leather case, Miss Jenkins?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "That's what he's so bloody nervous about. . . won't let go of it for a second. Even takes it to the loo with him," she confided with a wry giggle.

  For a few moments Ellen Jenkins wondered what might be in the attaché case. Then her mind turned, as it did so often, to Sir Brian Forsythe. She felt a sudden tightening in her throat, and it took a strong effort to speak when she sat down beside him twenty seconds later.

  5

  NOSE HIGH like some huge predatory bird, the swept-wing transport knifed through the sky like a supersonic dagger. Racing above the South Atlantic from Morocco, it was the fastest and most expensive passenger plane on the planet. The 747s and DC-10s, the L-101 is and Soviet Ilyushins were all bulky buses in comparison.

  1,350 miles an hour.

  Only the highest performance military aircraft could match it.

  There was no airline name or designer-crafted logo on the side of this exceptional machine. It did not belong to any of the globe-girdling air carriers or famous multinational corporations. This Concorde was the private property of one of the wealthiest men on earth.

  He was Prince Omar, eldest son of the king of Tarman. An insignificant land of semiliterate Bedouins, drifting dunes and sand fleas until forty years ago, Tarman was now one of the richest of the Arab oil states. With more than $6 billion a year in petroleum income, the royal family could afford almost anything. King Raschid, who traveled with a large retinue, had a 747 of his own as well as a fleet of smaller planes and helicopters.

  Prince Omar, heir to the throne and thoughtful foreign minister, preferred the smaller and much swifter Concorde. A sophisticated man with a degree in management and international trade from Stanford University in California, thirty-eight-year-old Omar had a shrewd sense of both politics and business. The Concorde screeching toward New York from Rabat, where the Tarmani crown prince had conferred with the Moroccan monarch, was both a jet-propelled pleasure dome and an airborne executive suite.

  This was no holiday or shopping trip. While the damask-and velvet-draped bedroom at the Concorde's rear housed two perfumed wives—one third the number that accompanied his father on journeys—Prince Omar was working right now in his ultramodern and handsomely furnished office.

  "As you instructed," he dictated to his male secretary, "I will make it absolutely clear to the American secretary of state that our position has the support of both our Moroccan and Saudi brethren."

  He stopped to phrase the final sentence carefully.

  "Following Allah's sacred precepts, I believe that we will be able to stop this bloodshed within two or three days. . . . Put that in my personal code and have it radioed to my father immediately."

  As the respectful secretary left, Omar pressed a b
utton on the elaborate control panel built into his elegant desk. The large computer screen five feet away instantly began to display a running report on the latest London market quotes on gold and oil. He touched another button and the current values of the world's major currencies stutter-stepped into sight.

  Omar studied them soberly and knowledgeably. He understood exactly how these numbers affected his family and his country. He knew almost as much about interest rates and wheat futures as he did about the Holy Koran. Neither libertine playboy nor fundamentalist fanatic, hawk-faced Omar of Tarman was a versatile contemporary executive—simultaneously prince and tycoon.

  While Omar swiftly analyzed the implications of the newest surge in the value of the dollar, his secretary was busy thirty feet away in the office suite's data center and communications room. More than $2.6 million had been spent on this high-tech facility, and it was all visible. There were two large computers; an Associated Press teleprinter for news; a pair of state-of-the-art word processors, one with Arabic typefaces and the other for Western tongues; an ultramodern and highly sophisticated coding machine and two powerful radio transmitters equipped with scramblers.

  This section of the Concorde was never left unguarded. Even when the plane was on the ground, two armed men were always on duty to prevent any tampering or bugging. Every week, the entire aircraft was "swept" by electronics experts for concealed eavesdropping devices. Right now, four members of the prince's own security team carrying West German MP-5 submachine guns were on duty.

  A pair of Tarmani Army sergeants were busy at the word processors, while a trio of lieutenants—all wearing automatic pistols—manned the radios and the cryptographic gear. Within half a minute after the prince's secretary handed over the message, the encoding began.

  A dozen yards away in his private office, the hawk-faced prince flicked on the speakerphone on his desk. With stock prices still parading across his computer screen, he tapped a button on the communications control panel to talk to the pilot in the cockpit.

  "When do we reach Kennedy, Captain?"

  "We should be landing in approximately forty-two minutes, Your Highness."

  Omar thanked him and turned off the speakerphone.

  He glanced at the massive gold Rolex on his right wrist before looking at the wall clocks showing the time in five key cities around the world.

  Forty-two minutes?

  That would be three minutes after eight in New York.

  6

  THEY would kill to stop her.

  She had known that long before she boarded Aerovias Flight 16.

  Lima . . . Quito . . . Bogota . . . Caracas . . . San Juan . . . and, in another forty minutes, New York.

  Clutching her rosary, the determined young woman in seat 37A stared out the window at the stars. She didn't see them—or anything else. She wasn't blind. She was looking inward, concentrating totally on her crucial mission.

  She had to complete it.

  This was a matter of principle.

  That was what gave her the strength to face the terrible danger. Her heart had been pounding wildly at the airport as she waited for Flight 16. Her mouth had been so dry that she could barely speak. If they had suspected what she'd concealed beneath the gray nun's habit, she'd be spread-eagled on one of their interrogation tables now.

  Naked . . . bloody . . . screaming as they hurt and defiled every part of her twenty-nine-year-old body.

  They did such things—routinely and expertly. Just thinking of it made her shudder, and she turned her head in unconscious reaction. When she squirmed in her seat, the pouch taped to her skin just beneath her breasts chafed her and she winced.

  Seeing her discomfort, the dapper steward hurried toward the pretty young nun. Product of a religious home, Enrique Arias was always respectful toward members of the Catholic clergy. The fact that she had the lovely face of a cherub helped accelerate the macho steward's stride.

  "Is there anything that I can do for you, Sister?" he asked solicitously.

  "I'm all right."

  "A pillow—that will help you," he said and reached up to provide one from the overhead bin. As he walked away, he found himself wondering why such an attractive female had chosen celibacy. After all, ordinary-looking women could do this noble work just as well.

  She closed her eyes, but opened them wide a dozen seconds later. She couldn't afford to relax. She was still in danger. There might be a plainclothes policeman on the plane, watching her. She would have to stay fully alert until the Aerovias 767 landed and she entered the terminal at Kennedy.

  Then she would complete her crucial mission.

  She would help strike an important blow against the oppressors—one that would be noticed around the world.

  Some 385 miles to the northwest, Paco Garcia was driving the blue Ford carefully down the New Jersey Turnpike. Visibility wasn't good in the falling snow, but he'd been here twice before in the rehearsals that Staub had ordered so he knew exactly where he was. Traffic in this storm was only half the normal flow, and that helped too.

  He saw the blinking lights and grinned.

  There was the target—sixty yards ahead.

  When he reached it, he pulled the Ford off onto the shoulder and turned off the engine. The target was a microwave relay tower capped by a round dish and adorned with lights so that pilots would see it. The roar of a big jet overhead confirmed what Paco Garcia had noticed on his first reconnaissance here. Newark Airport was only three miles away.

  Garcia took the heavy suitcase from the car, cursing its weight and the blowing snow as he trudged toward the tower. Shuddering in the cold wind, he swore at Staub for planning an attack for late December in the middle of a storm.

  What the hell was so special about this tower?

  Why did the assault have to be tonight?

  Completely obsessive about security, Staub hadn't explained the entire operation to the Garcia brothers. He'd told them about the money, their FALN comrades who would be liberated and the targets that Paco and Juan Garcia were to destroy—when he gave the order. That was another thing the one-eyed European was insistent about: absolute control.

  When Paco Garcia neared the base of the tower, he set down the suitcase and opened it. With blowing snow pelting his face, he took out the two explosive charges and their timers. Having scouted and studied the metal structure earlier, he knew precisely where to place the explosives. He was an expert with mines and explosives, having learned a great deal during three years as a combat engineer in the U.S. Army.

  He began to tape the first charge into place on one of the main metal supports. Concentrating on this and unable to hear much beside the storm, he didn't notice the car that pulled up behind his Ford. Like the microwave tower, it was crowned with a flashing light. It was a State Police cruiser.

  Spotting the sedan by the side of the highway, the two uniformed troopers had stopped to see whether he required help. Assisting motorists in distress, especially in temperatures well below freezing, was one of their responsibilities.

  When they found that the Ford was empty, they looked around and saw Garcia at the foot of the nearby tower. In the black winter night and swirling snow, it was difficult to make out what he was doing. It never occurred to them that he was an armed professional terrorist making war on the United States of America.

  "Hey, Mister! You okay?" one husky trooper shouted.

  "Need any help?" the other called out loudly.

  And they kept walking toward him.

  Paco Garcia turned and saw the two uniformed men.

  Talk or shoot? He had only seconds to decide.

  He reached down into the suitcase, grasped a silenced MAC 11 submachine gun and swung it swiftly. The policemen never even reached for their holstered pistols. Garcia fired in short accurate bursts, putting half a dozen heavy 9-millimeter slugs into each of them.

  They had no time, no chance. In five seconds they were corpses. Battered by the automatic weapon's terrible torrent of bulle
ts, they reeled and spun under the impact. They were dead before they hit the snow.

  Garcia looked at the ruined bodies for several seconds, decided not to take any chances and put another burst into each. Unlike Staub, he got no pleasure from killing. Sometimes the liberation of his native island required it, he reflected as he put down the submachine gun.

  Then he finished rigging the two charges and set their timers in accordance with Staub's order. His brother was doing the same thing at two other towers, and for all Paco Garcia knew, somebody else might be planting explosives at a fourth and fifth.

  He clapped his hands together a few times for warmth, picked up the suitcase and hurried back to his car. He didn't slow down when he passed the corpses, but he looked at them. The 9-millimeter slugs had torn big holes. The snow for a yard around the bodies was dark with blood.

  It was their own fault, Paco Garcia told himself. If they hadn't stopped to help him, it wouldn't have happened. He'd explain that to his brother when they met at the rendezvous. He didn't want Juan, who had such firm views on how "unnecessary bloodshed" would hurt the FALN's image, to be angry with him.

  He put the suitcase in the Ford. Then he realized that there was one more thing to be done. The flashing light on the police car might attract attention. The longer the bodies remained undiscovered the better it would be, so he had to turn that light off immediately. He did it with two bullets from the automatic pistol that he drew from a belly holster.

  He wiped the melted snow from his face when he entered the Ford. Warm air poured from the heater as soon as he turned on the motor, and he shivered. Well, he'd be away from this imperialist land and its awful weather in a few hours—with his brother, their freed comrades and the money. He and Juan would be heroes.

  There was no time to think about such things now. He had to meet Juan and transfer to the white van. As he drove onto the highway, he couldn't help wondering why they'd been ordered to paint the name of that hospital on the van. He'd find out when they met Staub.