by Dana Haynes
Ray peered out the rain-spattered window. “That’s . . . a runway? Jesus, that’s the highway!”
Isaiah said, “Six of one,” and hauled with all his strength, forcing the jet toward the six-lane ribbon of asphalt.
Conchata Menchu was singing along to the soundtrack of West Side Story, belting out the Sondheim lyrics at full volume. She couldn’t carry a tune worth a lick, but singing by yourself in the cab of a long-haul truck had its advantages.
Conchata was so caught up in the refrain from “I Feel Pretty” that it took her a moment to realize that the great gray blob in the air, dead ahead, wasn’t an extremely dense cloud formation. Conchata’s voice faded away, leaving Marni Nixon to handle the tune alone.
The gray blob grew larger, took on a shape. It was a plane. No, a jet plane. No, a really, really big jet plane.
And a really, really low one.
“Holy Mary,” Conchata whispered. She hit her powerful air horn, prayed the other drivers around her had seen what she had, and began yanking on the massive steering wheel with all her might.
Tommy and Kiki looked out through side-by-side windows in first class, then looked at each other, then out the windows again.
Tommy said, “Well, shit.”
“This is the oncoming lane!” Burke bleated from the copilot’s seat.
Ray rested a hand on his shoulder. “We don’t want to be sneaking up on those drivers. Better they should see us.”
The plane was still bucking badly and Ray braced himself against the copilot’s seat.
Isaiah shook his head. “Overpass.”
“Yeah.” Ray sighed. “I see the bitch.”
About two miles ahead, a rural road crossed over the highway, just barely visible in the gloom.
Burke said, “Our father, who art in heaven . . .”
Ray said, “That’s not funny.”
Isaiah said, “He’s not joking.”
Dennis Silverman switched lanes and his wheels spun without traction for a split second before catching. The Outback lurched forward.
Peering through the arc of the windshield wipers, he activated the Bluetooth hands-free controls on his steering wheel. He’d preprogrammed in the number.
“Scarlotti Aviation.”
“This is Dennis Silverman! I’m with Gamelan Industries! Our Gulf-stream Three is scheduled for a flight to California! Is it ready?”
“Sir, I gotta tell you, we’ve got a nasty storm front moving south. We’ve got considerable wind shear and lightning cells all over the place. They just shut down Portland International and McNary Field could be next. Are you sure y—”
“Yes!” Dennis bellowed, blinking as sweat dripped into his eyes. The Battlestar Galactica model dangling from his rearview mirror danced as he swerved around a sky-blue Caddy. “I have to fly out today! I’ll be at the airport in twenty minutes. Have the engines running. We’ll take off the second I’m on board!”
He disconnected. Around him, cars started honking. Fuck you all, he thought, speeding up.
The cars across the median from him, heading north, started honking, too.
The Vermeer 111 was hobbling along on two engines and the stall-warning stick shaker sounded yet again. Isaiah hauled back on the yoke, scrambling for every inch of elevation he could get. The rural road overpass slipped beneath them, clearing the belly by three feet.
“Landing gears down.”
“Please, God, oh please . . .” Burke chanted. He didn’t touch the landing-gear controls.
Isaiah casually stretched far to his right, hit the controls.
The great plane began dropping again. “Seat belts!” he shouted.
Ray folded down the extra seat behind the pilot’s and reached for the wall-mounted shoulder straps.
In first class, Tommy and Kiki scrambled for the nearest seats and strapped themselves in.
A long-haul rig zoomed down I-5, carrying three tiers of the new line of Lexus LS 460Ls, one atop the other on their tracks. The driver was searching through his books-on-tape collection. He glanced up as the Vermeer screamed over his cab.
The driver panicked. He wrenched the wheel as hard as he could to one side, even though the jetliner had already passed. The truck glided into a right angle relative to the trailer, blue smoke erupting from the wheels as momentum dragged it sideways down the highway. The trailer crabbed over onto its side, covering all three lanes, and the right-hand wheels left the ground. It teetered for a moment, then bucked over. The sedans were wrenched from their tie-downs, rolling over and over across the highway like monstrous dice. Three of them bounded through the air and barrel-rolled across the median, landing in the southbound lanes.
Oncoming northbound cars screeched and swerved to avoid them and hit one another instead. One minute they had been seven individual cars driving for seven individual destinations; the next they were a kinetic sculpture of rent bumpers, hoods accordioned in and steam hissing from engines.
In the southbound lane, a school bus carrying the girls’ basketball team from Sprague High School belched blue smoke from its tires as the driver stomped on the brake and brought the mammoth yellow vehicle to a full stop. Girls screamed. The nose of the bus barely kissed the chassis of an on-its-side Lexus, moving at less than a mile an hour, making the sedan rotate slowly on its doors like a clock hand.
A mile south of that accident, Dennis Silverman glanced over and realized that every single northbound car had pulled off the road, onto either the median or the shoulder. There must be one hell of a fender bender back there, he thought. Which was when he saw that some of the cars heading in his direction were veering to the shoulder of the road, too.
What could—
The gigantic wheels of the Vermeer touched the pavement almost exactly parallel to Dennis’s Outback, belching black smoke and leaving melted-rubber patches as it shrieked past him in the same direction, roaring south in the northbound lanes, the wing span so great that the starboard wing stretched across the median and hung over two of the southbound lanes.
Dennis screamed. The Outback swerved as if under its own power, shifted two lanes and back again, but not before it clipped the left-front quarter panel of a Civic, sending it into a spin. Dennis’s heart slammed in his chest. “Fuuuuuuuuuck!” he keened.
The Vermeer shot ahead of him, engine reversers howling like werewolves, its wake vortex made visible by a solid tube of swirling rainwater, twin, horizontal tornadoes stretching out behind it.
The plane disappeared into the thick rain ahead. Dennis regained control of his car, tears running down his face, and plunged after it, slamming his fist into the ceiling of the car, over his head, again and again. “Fucking . . . I killed you! Fuckers! Fuck! I . . . FUCK!”
The reversers screamed at Isaiah, straining to slough off the magnificent momentum that let a bucket of metal 230 feet long and 63 feet high defy gravity. At that speed, Isaiah’s vision was limited to ten seconds ahead of the nose cone. If another overpass was waiting for them, or if any of the drivers failed to get their cars off the road, he wouldn’t have time to swerve. But then, he didn’t have any space to swerve anyway.
How far to the next overpass? He’d driven the route out of Salem twice so far, but he couldn’t remember where the overpasses were.
He gauged the speed of the highway stripes. The reversers in the two functioning engines were doing their job. The Vermeer began to slow down.
Not only had every car abandoned the northbound lanes to avoid the Leviathan bearing down on them, but most of the cars in the southbound lane had either pulled off to the side, or had been hit by one of the flying Lexus sedans. The highway behind the Vermeer remained empty of all traffic.
. . .
As cars pulled off the road ahead of him, Dennis shot into the fast lane and stood on his accelerator. The Outback fishtailed, the tires caught, and he raced ahead.
It took him two minutes to catch up to the Vermeer and zoom past it, crossing under the starboard wing. By now, the
jetliner was crawling toward a complete stop.
He had thrown the greatest technological monkey wrench in history at the airliner. His Gamelan had fucked over one engine for sure and was prepared to fuck over the others, as need be.
There was no possible way to bring that jet down for a safe landing. It had been doomed.
Dennis continued to cry. “Dammit! Goddammit!” He pounded the steering wheel with his fist, tears streaming down his face.
The doomed craft was on the ground, not so doomed after all. And the fucking Go-Team had survived.
Tommy Tomzak forced himself to look out the window. The rain-slick highway wasn’t moving. He turned to Kiki. She was staring at him.
Ray Calabrese said, “Where the hell did you learn to fly like that?”
Isaiah pried his fists off the yoke. “I learned how to do that about thirty seconds ago.”
“Fucking Jedi.” Ray clapped him on the shoulder.
Ray stood up, his legs almost buckling under him. Burke sat, bent forward, lips moving in silent prayer.
“I thought that guy Kim was going to make the projector flicker? What the hell went wrong?”
“That wasn’t Peter’s doing. There’s no way.” Isaiah unbuckled his harness, pointed to the Gamelan monitor, now dead. “See this? This light blinked as we flew over Peter and Walter’s car. Less than half a second later, it blinked again. I didn’t think much about it at the time. On the second flyby, I was watching. It blinked twice again.”
“One blink, as it received Peter Kim’s signal,” Ray cut in. “One from someone else?”
Isaiah nodded. “What I’m thinking.”
“Okay. Then who?”
Isaiah shrugged.
“How well do you guys know that Silverman guy?”
“Dennis Silverman?” Isaiah shrugged. “We don’t. He’s our liaison with Gamelan. But, really? The nerdy guy? You like him for your mastermind?”
Ray thought about it for a minute. “Nah. Not really. But he is the expert with the Gamelan. He was at the airfield when someone called the Red Fist’s phone in Atlanta. . . .”
The thought of the out-of-shape geek with the bad glasses and goofy grin as the villain behind this plot seemed pretty unlikely. But Ray had to admit, there was a case to be made.
BOOK THREE
CRASH
47
REACHING MCNARY FIELD, IN Salem, Dennis Silverman scrambled from the Outback, carrying his overnight bag and his laptop with infrared transceiver. He scampered across the tarmac to the big, corporate Gulfstream III, running beneath its thirty-five-foot-long wing. The ladder/door was out, and a man in a captain’s peaked hat and a slicker was waiting for him.
“You just about didn’t make it,” the captain said. “Word is, they’re shutting down this airspace in twenty minutes.”
Dennis stood at the top of the stairs and peered owlishly through his rain-soaked glasses. “Can you get me to Southern California ahead of this storm?”
The pilot winked. “We got a couple of Rolls-Royce turbofans out there that can hit five hundred eighty miles an hour without breaking a sweat. We can get you there all right. Go get yourself buckled in, sir, and we’ll see what this bird can do.”
INTERSTATE 5
Ray moved back into first class to tell Tommy Tomzak about the new theory: that Dennis Silverman of Gamelan Industries was behind their near crash.
He found Kiki Duvall sitting on the arm of a seat, hands on her knees, watching as Tommy knelt, pushed John Roby’s head into a more dignified position, and closed John’s eyes. Kiki looked like she was close to passing out.
“Doc,” Ray started, then looked over Tommy’s shoulder. “Ah, man. I’m sorry.”
“Cervical,” Tommy said, not turning around. “Clean break. Immediate cessation of the central nervous system. He didn’t suffer.”
“Jesus.” Ray scanned his brain for something to say, came up with nothing new. “I’m sorry.”
Nobody spoke for a while.
On the flight deck, the copilot wordlessly unbuckled himself and shoved his way out. A second later, Tommy, Kiki, and Ray stepped in.
“Everyone okay?” Isaiah asked.
Tommy held a handkerchief to his bleeding forehead. “John died. We have abrasions, contusions, nothing serious. We—”
Isaiah almost fell back into his chair. “John? Ah . . . Jesus. John?”
“Yeah. I know.” Tommy wiped tears from his cheeks. Then he suddenly threw a bear hug around Isaiah. He pulled back, kissed the pilot on the forehead. “Seriously, that was one kick-ass piece of flying. We owe you our lives, man.”
“Yes.” Kiki kissed Isaiah on the cheek. “Thank you.”
He and Kiki left Ray and Tommy, who sank into the copilot’s chair. Ray leaned back, his head against the wall, eyes closed.
“The Englishman. You two were friends?”
Tommy nodded, wiped his cheeks again. “Worked together three times. He’s brilliant. Very funny.”
They waited, quietly. Tommy dabbed the still-bleeding wound on his forehead. He nodded at the avionics. “That was spooky.”
“No shit.” Ray opened his eyes blearily. Only then did he realize that Tommy was bleeding. Ray reached into his jacket pocket and produced a travel pack of Kleenex. He tossed it to Tommy.
“Thanks.”
Ray activated his cell phone. His hands were still shaking. Ray called Henry Deits in Los Angeles.
“Calabrese? I’m glad you called. What’s going on there?”
“Oh, not much,” Ray said, his voice almost cracking. “How about on your end?”
The assistant director told him about the Irish delegation en route to LAX. “They’ll be there in under four hours,” he said.
“I still like them as the target.”
Deits said, “I have my doubts. I don’t like coincidences any more than you do. But still. There are Sinn Fein members on board, true, but also Ulster Unionists. They’re not likely to sacrifice the same number of their friends, are they?”
“I don’t know,” Ray said honestly. “Everything we’ve seen points to them bringing down that Vermeer. Daria says they’re moving into position for another play. Look, there’s something else. Guy named Dennis Silverman.”
Ray walked Deits through it, including the emergency landing on the highway.
“Holy crap! You’re okay?”
“Yeah, but we heard Silverman was leaving town for a conference. If I’m remembering correctly, it’s in California. Have someone from the Portland field office check with Gamelan. Find out where he is. Also, look into this guy’s background. He sure doesn’t come across as a terrorist, but you never know.”
“Okay, we’re on it. Ray? Wow, I hope to hell you’re wrong.”
Ray nodded. “I know why. If I’m right, this schlub can drop airplanes out of the sky. At will.”
Across the cockpit, Tommy called Susan Tanaka at the Woodburn tower and told her about John Roby.
Susan allowed herself five seconds to mourn John, then filed it away for later. There would be plenty of tears. Now wasn’t the time.
“It was Dennis Silverman,” Susan said, even before Tommy broached the subject.
“Whoa!” Tommy reached out and backhanded Ray’s shoulder to get his attention. “Susan. She says it’s Dennis Silverman.”
Ray said, “Call you back?” and folded away his phone.
“Suze?”
“Walter heard a car near where they were parked. As it pulled away, he got a good look at the driver. Peter surmises that he sent a message to your Gamelan, screwing up your flight.”
“We figured the same thing,” he assured her. “Call the cops and—”
“We did. I, ah, may have used Agent Calabrese’s name a bit liberally to get the police to report back to me. They called about thirty seconds ago. There’s no sign of him at his office or his home. And a receptionist says he was scheduled to fly to California today.”
“He’s in California,” Tommy repeated
, watched Ray nod his understanding.
“Stick close to the swap-out,” Susan told him. “From all reports, you guys have clogged traffic in both directions. Walter is calling in the flatbeds that hauled Flight Eight One Eight here. We’ll get an ambulance for John. They’ll be there in about two hours to tow you guys off the highway.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Tommy? I am so sorry about John.”
“I know. Me, too.” He rang off, glanced at Ray. “California?”
BOCA SERPIENTE, CALIFORNIA
The three Irishmen and Daria sat in the stifling motel room, watching TV. The men had found the ESPN Soccer Channel and a football match. Manchester United versus Arsenal. None of them cheered or groaned, they all just watched stoically, waiting for something.
Everyone twitched when a knock sounded at the door. Donal O’Meara slipped his hand around his Colt Python and moved to the side of the door. “What is it?” he shouted without opening it.
“Are you Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“Got a phone call for you in the office.”
O’Meara slipped the gun’s safety back on, then tucked it into his belt, throwing on a work shirt to cover it. He unlocked the door and stepped out.
Contact. In the time Daria had been with the Irishmen, this was the first time O’Meara had received a direct, real-time contact with anyone. Always before, he’d left messages on answering machines. But a true, living human and a live telephone conversation meant that this was their final destination after all. Whatever was going to happen, this motel would be the staging point.
Which meant it was time to call in the marines.
A plan came to her fairly quickly. “Hope he remembers to get towels,” she said, eyes on the telecast.
Keith O’Shea said, “What?”
“Towels. We don’t have enough for everyone to shower, and I’m afraid in this heat, we’ll all want one.”
