The Shadows of Power

by James W. Huston

  As he approached midpoint, where the large white semi tractor-trailer was parked, he passed through two hundred knots and continued to accelerate. The runway at Le Bourget was long—by the time he reached the end he was at four hundred knots.

  Stovic lowered the nose of the Hornet just slightly, then jerked viciously back on the stick. The Hornet pivoted around its center point and the roaring tailpipes rotated downward, sending afterburner exhaust onto the runway, then the dirt at the end of the runway just inches over the threshold lights, with such violence that the crowd gasped, thinking the back of his airplane had hit the ground. As the crowd looked on in horror, Stovic rocketed out of the dust cloud up into the sky in a demonstration of raw power and acceleration. He unloaded the Gs on the airplane and climbed up at a forty-five–degree angle. The airplane held four hundred fifty knots as he pulled away from the ground without losing any airspeed, defying gravity as long as he chose to.

  * * *

  Ismael felt for the button on the outside of his digital watch. Although the sound of the Hornets going into afterburner was slightly delayed in getting to him because of the distance, he knew it was close enough to start his stopwatch. He knew the show so well he could point to where Stovic was going to be at any moment. He didn’t have to look. He had been dropped off in a dumpster, a big blue one with French writing that prohibited its use by anyone except Le Corporation Aeronautique de Lyon, which, conveniently, did not exist. It had been placed at the end of a line of booths that extended all the way past the end of the runway, parallel to it. He had been driven through the security line as if it weren’t even there. Salam himself hadn’t actually driven through, of course, but rather one of the many people Salam was using, without names or explanations.

  When he had first seen Salam, Ismael had immediately known it had been inevitable. When he learned of the existence of an entire alternative plan, organization, and weapons, of which he had been completely unaware, his beliefs had been confirmed. Salam had been completely right about Madani. Eager but untested. Likely to make a critical or fatal mistake. Now it was different altogether.

  Ismael’s small protective steel cave had grown hot and stuffy. He was running out of oxygen. He illuminated his watch. He removed the flashlight from his pocket and checked the Stinger. He flipped the switch to turn on the electronics and run a self-contained electronic test, a BIT test, as the Americans called it—Built-In Test—required every time the missile was powered up. He began to breathe harder as the moment approached. He grimaced as the missile went through its checks, slower than he had ever remembered them going before, taking at least ten times longer than usual. But everything was checking out beautifully as the blue and gold jets screamed overhead, vibrating his dumpster with their thunderous presence.

  * * *

  Rat listened on the radio to every syllable of the Blue Angels’ flight. He knew he might be the only one able to warn them if he saw a missile fired from behind them. In his other ear was the radio for the Police Nationale, the gendarmes, the GIGN, and the GIPN. Some units had been given their own discrete frequency, but everyone was to monitor the general frequency as well. Rat understood the French and could tell that although the general sense of completion was dominating their work, they were still going through the motions.

  “Check the truck parked behind a building in a parking lot. It is idle, but there are people inside, or at least one person. Request assistance. One kilometer due west of the end of the runway. By the tire store.”

  Rat moved, aimed his rifle slightly south, and focused on the truck a thousand yards away from his position. He had seen the truck before. It was a good shooting position. Even with hundreds of gendarmes, Police Nationale, and FBI now swarming all over the area, it was too large an area to cover all possible shooting positions with any effectiveness. He focused on the truck and could detect movement in the driver’s seat.

  * * *

  The operations center had become nearly silent. Quiet confidence and self-congratulation had replaced panic and disappointment.

  That changed quickly. Elizabeth and Lew had finally reached a place where they could transmit. They shouted the news on different frequencies to different people. Everyone participating in security heard about it at the same time. The dead man wasn’t Ismael. Lew was sure.

  The security forces all around the airport suddenly knew they’d been had. They tried to avoid panic as they went to maximum alert and protection. They ran toward anything suspicious. Police cars flew around the perimeter. Gendarmes were stopping everyone with anything that could contain a missile. Le Bourget had become an intense, frenzied place filled with radio communication and last-minute attempts to avoid a disaster that they didn’t understand.

  One group of Police Nationale men raced toward a van off the airport, while another group suddenly began transmitting on the radio from the southwest section of the grid. Their position was marked on the large computer screen in the front of the operations room. “Suspected launch tube projecting out of a bush. We are closing in.”

  “Need assistance?”

  “Negative,” they replied in French.

  The FBI agents were on a separate radio frequency. Lew had a horrible feeling that no matter what they did, they would never anticipate what was about to happen. They had been outmaneuvered, but he couldn’t imagine who was behind it. They had gotten all the Algerians. So was Ismael operating by himself? Could be, but Lew doubted it. And if not, who was helping him?

  Lew looked up as the radio speaker in the front of the room broadcast the voice of a French officer followed by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. Lew leaned toward the interpreter, who looked grave. “They were approaching a construction site. They saw a man dragging a body away from a portable toilet. Inside the toilet was a missile launcher. They closed and”—he waited for more information—“he fired on them. They fired and he is down. The top of the toilet is hinged—he was going to stand on the seat and fire from inside the toilet. Quite clever, but he will not be shooting anyone. There must be others. Everyone is looking. . . .”

  Lew nodded, still listening to the FBI channel. They had no idea of the scope of the threat, the origin of the threat, or its composition. They had nothing. He turned to Patricia. “Why the hell don’t they just declare victory and land their damn planes?”

  “Because no one has told them about these sightings! They don’t even know this is happening. Last thing they heard the French had gotten Ismael. They have no idea!”

  Lew ran to the front of the room. “Where’s a radio I can use to talk to the Blue Angels?”

  A small thin man looked at him and replied in good English, “We are forbidden to be on that frequency.”

  “I didn’t ask you for your stupid opinion! Where is a radio I can use to talk to them?”

  François saw the commotion. “What is the matter?”

  “We need to warn the Blue Angels.”

  François glanced at the wall clock. “They will be done soon!”

  “Bullshit!” Lew yelled. “Where’s the radio?”

  “Right there,” Francois pointed.

  Lew grabbed the handset and listened. The frequency was quiet. “Boss, this is Special Agent Lew Savage. They didn’t get Ismael. Do you read me?”

  “Affirmative,” the Boss replied.

  “We’ve seen a couple of shooters. There may be more. Suggest you call it a day and land immediately.”

  “Thanks for the info. Coming around for the line abreast loop.”

  “Hoop. Link. Beeeeaaaner!”

  “Up . . . we . . . go . . . a . . . lit-tle . . . more . . . power . . .”

  Lew slammed the radio handset back into its cradle and ran back to Patricia. “Let’s get outside. We’re not doing much good here.”

  * * *

  Rat clenched his jaw. What a group grope this had turned into. Not only had they not gotten their target, they had believed they had until their noses were rubbed in it. Rat had to admit
that Lew was the kind of person that could rub people the wrong way, but he’d been right this time. Now they were fighting an enemy they didn’t know, with weapons they couldn’t identify, and a setup and network they knew nothing about. They were going to have very few chances to stop this. And it might all come down to him. He had given the French his location. They had reluctantly allowed him to stay there, to participate, but only with the understanding that he wouldn’t shoot anyone without their specific direction. He had immediately agreed to that condition since he had no intention of following it. No sense in arguing about it since it was beyond consideration. He’d take the chance of being wrong. If he shot someone who didn’t deserve to be shot, then they could talk to him.

  * * *

  Stovic pulled the nose of his plane through the horizon and relaxed the G as he leveled out at two hundred feet above the ground. He had heard the exchange between Lew and the Boss. As he feared. The threat was still there, maybe even worse than it had been.

  But the Boss hadn’t called anything off. They were going to finish the show. He lined up for the knife-edge pass opposite Oden. They were to do it at two hundred feet so others could see it. He hoped Oden took it down much lower. The lower they went now, the safer from being seen by someone with a missile standing on the ground, their view of the runway mostly blocked by hangars and static display aircraft.

  He leveled his wings and pointed directly at Oden. He smiled. Oden was at fifty feet, or even lower. He had heard the Boss. Stovic stole a quick look at the trailer at center point. He tried to see whether there was anything else out of order in his quick scan of the horizon and the ground, but saw nothing.

  “Hit it!”

  They rolled into their knife-edge pass and shot past each other thirty feet apart. Stovic leveled his wings, pulled into a hard left turn behind the crowd, and streaked out to the east of Le Bourget. He held his throttles to the stops and glanced around again for signs of missiles or trouble. Rat had promised not to say a word on the frequency during the air show unless there was a missile in the air. That assumed Rat was in place to see it. Now the FBI had jumped onto their frequency and thrown a cold glass of water into their faces. Stovic glanced around and moved his finger to the button on the stick that would release his flares. One touch, and flares would be released in a timed program.

  Stovic pulled around to the northeast of the airfield, continued to accelerate, and steadied at fifty feet off the ground, below the level of most of the hangars, which hid his presence from the crowd. Low, fast, and unexpected. It didn’t really matter who they were or what their flying experience was, “the sneak,” as his next maneuver was called, gave the crowd the unexpected sensation of having jet noise rammed down their senses. It never failed to evoke ducking by the crowd, cries of shock and concern, then exclamations of joy. He pulled around and pointed his Hornet at the crowd.

  * * *

  Inside the operations center, the noise of the single Hornet racing directly overhead was equally unexpected. The gendarmes and GIGN commandos buckled their knees and leaned over to avoid the sudden scream of the plane. They strained over the noise of Stovic’s jet to hear the radio reports from the gendarmes in the northern sector, who transmitted in a burst of energy, “We have what appears to be a launching tube sticking out of a bush in the back of a house. We are investigating.”

  “Say your coordinates! Do you require backup?”

  “Negative,” they replied.

  The police proceeded cautiously toward the wall. The top of the tube was barely noticeable above the wall, projecting out of the bush only an inch or two at the most. There was no movement at all.

  They could hear the Blue Angels thundering over the crowd behind them. There was a gate into the patio. The lead policeman tried the handle. It was unlocked. He glanced at his partner, who nodded. He pulled gently on the gate door until it began to squeak. They both jumped back and placed their backs against the wall, waiting. One indicated he was going to call for backup, surround the house, and come in from the front. His partner nodded. Suddenly the air broke as gunfire erupted from behind the wall in the patio next to the one they were investigating. Both were shot before they even knew what was happening. The sound of the assault rifle was drowned in the noise of the Blue Angel diamond passing overhead for its next maneuver. A man jumped down from his platform, out of the gate next door, and pulled the two dead policeman through the squeaky gate into the area where the fake missile launcher had been placed in the hope of luring police. The man returned to his platform behind the wall and activated his Russian missile.

  The radio calls to the dead gendarmes went into their radios, into their earpieces, and pleaded for them to check in, but there was no response.

  * * *

  Stovic looked up and spotted Oden dirtying up his airplane so they could do their next maneuver, the clean and dirty loop; Oden would begin his loop with his landing gear, flaps, and tailhook down, while Stovic came in below him, flew directly underneath him, and performed a clean loop at much higher speed and higher altitude, returning back to the same spot at the same time as Oden, after which they flew off together.

  Stovic watched Oden ahead of him, two hundred knots slower. He was flying a flawless routine, as were the other Blue Angels. He wondered whether the threat of death from a source other than your own mistake focused your mind even better on the task at hand.

  Stovic bunted the nose of his Hornet down just slightly to pass under Oden’s dirty Hornet. He flew sharply underneath Oden.

  “Hit it.”

  They pulled the noses of their airplanes up. They began loops, Oden a slow dangerous loop with his landing gear down, Stovic a fast sleek loop in a circle outside Oden.

  * * *

  Rat watched through his rifle scope as the gendarmes silently surrounded the van in the parking lot. They came around a wall and pulled open the side door. They screamed at the single occupant to raise his arms and lie down on the floor. He was completely stunned by their intrusion and reached for something. One of the French soldiers struck him in the side of the face with the butt of his machine pistol. The three men went into the van and looked around. It was full of electronics gear and screens. They headed it toward a command center. “We have found a radio van,” a proud gendarme said.

  “Anyone there other than the one man?”

  The head of the French detail looked at the man really for the first time. He was surprised to see a young man in his thirties, clearly French. “No.”

  “Who is he?”

  The gendarme took his wallet. “He is French,” he transmitted.

  “What is he doing there?”

  “He has a private investigator’s license.” The gendarme threw the wallet back on the man’s bleeding face and gave a jerk of his head to the other two. They dashed out into the sunlight and back around the wall.

  Stovic and Oden rendezvoused three miles west of the airfield. They were to fly directly at the crowd, roll two hundred seventy degrees, and pull in opposite directions. It was a visually complex and stunning maneuver, always one of the crowd favorites. It looked to the crowd as if they were pulling into each other and were sure to collide. But what the crowd couldn’t see was that although they were in formation, one of the Hornets was two airplane-lengths behind the other.

  Stovic’s right hand began sweating on the stick as they approached the portion of the air show that Rat had warned him about. The 9-millimeter Glock was heavy against his chest in the pocket of his flight suit. The G forces built as they came around. The Gs were comforting, representing acceleration and movement. The more G forces he was pulling, the more he was moving, turning in the sky, the harder he would be to hit.

  Stovic was in front. He lowered the nose of his F/A-18 and leveled out toward the center point, pointed directly down the runway.

  * * *

  Rat sat with his eye hard against the scope, waiting to see if the work van a thousand meters away would throw its doors open. There w
as no movement. The single man he had seen hadn’t emerged from the van for several minutes. It was the position of the van that made Rat concentrate on it. It was strategically positioned. As soon as the back doors opened, the man would have a perfect shot at the tailpipes of the F/A-18 solos as they screamed back toward the stands, toward the spectators.

  Rat heard them first, then glanced up and saw them coming toward him, heading for the center point of the air show at five hundred knots. This was it. He could hear the frantic efforts of the French and the FBI trying at the very last minute to find the shooters, looking everywhere.

  Rat put the microphone for the UHF radio near his mouth, the one he could use to talk to Stovic, who was above him.

  * * *

  Just behind the Admirals, Lew and Patricia looked around frantically for anything out of the ordinary. Patricia saw him first. Out of the corner of her eye she noticed movement on the roof of the operations building. She immediately assumed it was another security officer, since it was the roof of the building from which the entire security operation was being run.

  She screamed, “Lew!”

  He turned and saw the head of the man immediately. “What the hell?” he asked. He was about to reach for his radio when they saw the man stand and lift a long shoulder-tube launcher onto his shoulder.

  “He’s got a missile!”

  Lew and Patricia reached for the guns on their hips as the man they were watching casually looked through the site and lowered the missile tube to the level of Oden and Stovic racing directly toward him.

  “No!” Lew screamed.

  Several spectators saw them pull out their sidearms and began screaming. The panic quickly spread through the crowd, which began to realize they were at the center of an unfolding catastrophe.