Talia, still trapped in her pressure cage, stood on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder at the screen. “What’s the bad news?”
He glanced back at her, expression grave. “We’re comin’ doon way too fast.”
Chapter
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six
ABANDONED SOVIET BONEYARD
BLACK SEA COAST, UKRAINE
EDDIE WATCHED THE STORM over the Black Sea grow into a churning gray mass, filling the windscreen of the van. His shackles were gone. Darcy had removed them the moment Ivanov had shown his true colors.
The two had heard every word spoken on Gryphon through the comms. Now the airship was falling out of the sky, straight into the storm, with Eddie’s best friend trapped on board in a pressure-sealed polycarbonate booth. To keep her company in this dire hour, she had the assassin who had murdered her father, the new world record holder for high-altitude jumps, and a marginally loyal Scotsman. Life had become far more surreal than Eddie had ever imagined, and that was saying a lot for a kid that grew up in Bombay, New Jersey.
“Mac is pushing her close to shore with the RCS,” Tyler said through the comms. “He’s aiming for your position. But the hydrogen is gone. Our fall is accelerating. How bad will it get?”
“Stand by.” Eddie switched off the microphone and looked up at Darcy, whose fingers rapidly worked the screen of a tablet. “Anything?”
“Hold on. These equations are not so simple, yes?” She stopped tapping, shook her head, and swiped something away as if crumpling a sheet of paper. “We must be precise. Call up Gryphon’s aerodynamic data.”
Eddie dug the numbers out of the files they had stolen from Avantec and put them up on the screen.
Darcy set to work on the tablet again, then pushed out her bottom lip. “So . . . the news is not fantastic. They will decelerate in the lower atmosphere, but not enough. They will hit the water at thirty-five meters per second, give or take.”
“That’s almost eighty miles per hour.”
She shrugged. “I said it was not fantastic, no?”
Eddie switched on the microphone. “Um . . . Yeah . . . Mr. Tyler, by our calculations you might hit the water a little fast.”
“How fast?”
Eddie gave Darcy his Should I tell him? shrug, and she answered with a Not on your life shake of her head. He winced. “Uh . . . you know . . . pretty fast. But we’re developing a solution.”
“That’s good to hear. Get back to us soon.”
Darcy reached over him and switched off the mic, scrunching up her nose. “What solution? You did not tell me you had a solution.”
“I don’t.”
Their assets were not promising. Eddie removed his glasses and rubbed his temples. “With the computing power on this vehicle, I can retask satellites, divert airliners, or launch rescue missions from a dozen nations. But I can’t stop Gryphon from crashing into the sea.” He swiveled his chair toward the open panel door, putting his glasses back on, and Darcy’s duffel bags came into focus. “Um . . . Exactly how much explosive did you bring?”
“Hard to say. A little of this, a little of that.” Darcy made her pbbt sound. “One must come prepared for anything, yes?”
“Yes.” Eddie glanced from the bags to a line of derelict boats lying upside down on the tarmac outside. “Anything.”
ACCORDING TO MAC, the airship’s free fall had topped out at over two hundred miles per hour. That’s when Talia’s feet had left the deck, and she had hung there for the last several minutes, hovering in her booth. “It’s like zero gravity,” she said, watching Finn zoom across the cabin.
“On the contrary.” Tyler held on to a server rack, keeping himself firmly planted on the rubber floor. “Too much gravity is our biggest problem.”
Finn slowly tumbled back and forth. Mac’s feet rose behind him while he worked the RCS to drive them closer to Eddie and Darcy. The rush of air was like white noise from a sleep app. It felt strange. Peaceful.
Tyler closed his eyes and Talia could see he was praying. A big part of her wanted to pray with him, but how could she kneel beside a man she hated and pray to a God she had despised for most of her life? The words appeared in her mind, just the same. Dear God, don’t let Ivanov hurt all those people. Please protect Jenni and the rest of those families who took me in.
Her families. Talia had not thought of any of her foster parents in that way for years.
Peace and prayer did not last long enough. Once the airship fell into the storm clouds, mayhem took over.
Dense air and updrafts slowed the ship’s fall, dropping them all to the deck. Gryphon rocked and pitched like a raft in a typhoon. The smooth rush of wind became a terrifying racket as hail pelted the cabin. A chunk flew up through the hole in the floor and ricocheted off the ceiling. Finn shielded his face to fend it off, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Gryphon’s special hull will protect us from the lightning, right?”
“It should!” Tyler knelt beside Talia’s door, using the butt of his machine gun to chip away the ice that had formed along the seal. “Too bad it won’t protect us from the crash waiting at the—”
Tyler stopped working and furrowed his brow, as if listening to the comms through his earpiece. A moment later, he glanced at Finn, who was shaking his head.
“What is it?” Talia shouted.
“That was Eddie!” Tyler started chipping the ice again. “He and Darcy are going to blow up a boat!”
“Wait! I’ve heard this one!” Using the bulkhead and server stacks for balance, Finn crossed the deck so they could hear him better. “It’s like that guy who fell out of a B-17 in World War II! The blast of his own bombs cushioned his fall!”
The turbulence worsened as they fell, but the racket of the hail stopped. Talia wedged her hands into the corners of her booth to keep from getting tossed around. “That’s just a myth.”
“For a human, yes,” Tyler said, “but this airship is wider than a football stadium and made of ultralight materials. Darcy’s blast will catch it like an airbag.”
“That’s fifteen thousand.” Mac was still furiously working the joystick. “The air is breathable.”
Talia jammed a shoulder against her door, cracking through the remainder of the ice. With help from Tyler, she stepped out onto the deck. She was free, for all the good it did her.
“Ninety seconds!” Mac called. “Brace yerselves!”
Finn laid his body flat on the deck. When Talia and Tyler gave him incredulous looks, he motioned for them to do the same. “Trust me!”
What did they have to lose? Talia lay down.
Tyler lay down beside her. “I’m sorry.”
She met his eyes for a long time, feeling the rumble of the ship beneath them. “I know.”
EDDIE MOTORED a sputtering old Russian gunboat back toward the boneyard. By Gryphon’s GPS signal, the airship would soon be coming down right on top of them. He and Darcy needed to get out of the way.
Rain pattered down from the dying storm. The waves brimmed at the rails of a leaky skiff they had loaded up with Darcy’s explosives and anchored offshore.
“She’s sinking.” Eddie coasted the gunboat in beside the abandoned helipad. “Will the C4 work wet?”
“Oh yes. Not a problem.” Darcy helped him up onto the platform and pointed at the sky. “There they are!”
A massive black form broke through the hanging mists of a dissolving rain cloud, catching a fresh ray of sunlight. Eddie knew Gryphon’s dimensions by heart, but he was not prepared for the sight. It looked like the Death Star falling into the sea. “Now?”
“Not yet. We must be exact!” Darcy held her tablet, tracking the airship’s fall with its camera and reading real-time data from the screen. “Too early and they will have time to speed up again. Too late and they will not slow down enough.”
The heart of Gryphon’s shadow engulfed the sinking skiff so Eddie could no longer see it. The sheer size of the airship made it seem closer to the water than it was. He coul
dn’t bear it. “Now?”
“Not yet.”
“Darcy, they’re going to hit!”
“A little more . . .”
“Darcy!”
“Now!” She mashed down on a remote trigger, and both ducked at the sight of the explosion. The boom and the blast wave passed over them first, followed by a drenching shower.
Eddie wiped his eyes and blinked to find the Black Sea had reached up like a giant hand to catch their friends. Gryphon splashed down, banged up and broken by the storm and the explosion. “Come on, Talia.” Eddie watched the surrounding waves. He felt a hand in his and glanced down.
Darcy squeezed his fingers and repeated the plea. “Come on. All of you.”
A hand appeared above the froth, holding a helmet high. Then a head appeared, and another. Finn and Mac bobbed side by side as the thief helped the wounded pilot swim.
But Tyler and Talia were not with them.
“Please, Talia. Where are you?” Eddie heard a shout—maybe. His ears were still ringing from the blast. He shielded his eyes and looked farther north. At first he thought they might be a mirage, a trick of the sunlight reflected on the water. But then Talia and Tyler both waved. He waved back, jumping up and down. “We did it!”
Darcy jumped beside him, still holding his hand. When the two of them stopped, they stared into each other’s widened eyes, and then crashed together in a passionate kiss.
OUT IN THE WATER, with Gryphon sinking behind him, Finn watched the pair embrace. “The geek and the psychopath. That’s not gonna end well.”
“Yeah.” Mac held on to Finn’s shoulder and kicked with his one good leg to keep his head above the waves. “That’s quite a kiss, though. Ya think they’ll simmer down long enough ta get in that boat o’ theirs and come get us?”
Chapter
sixty-
seven
ABANDONED SOVIET BONEYARD
BLACK SEA COAST, UKRAINE
“TELL ME YOU GOT A LOCATION on that missile.” Tyler stood bare-chested, partially hidden by GROND’s driver-side door, changing out of his pressure suit. “If I know Ivanov, he went straight for it.”
Eddie brought up a map on his main screen. “I tracked him with the beacon you left on the Mark Seven. He flew to an island in the Black Sea, forty-eight miles away.”
“You left a tracker on the Mark Seven?” Talia asked, watching the map zoom in on the island.
“Contingencies.” Tyler emerged from behind the door wearing cargo pants and a tactical vest. “Like I told you before.”
She nodded, then shifted her gaze to Finn and Mac. The Scotsman sat on the back of the box truck while Finn tended his leg wound. Each had also exchanged his pressure suit for tactical gear. “You thought of all these potentialities.” Talia returned her gaze to Tyler. “And yet you still failed to bring me a change of clothes. I look like a half-drowned comic book hero.”
He shrugged, offering a half smile. “I’ll take note of that for next time.”
Mac hobbled over to the van, aided by Finn. “I heard Wee Man sayin’ he found the Mark Seven.” He squinted at Eddie’s screen as he approached, frowning. “I don’t see it.”
“This is old imagery,” Eddie said, with a hint of you’re a brainless Neanderthal in his tone. “Although . . .” He created a green box around the island, a hunk of brown rock half the size of the airfield where they were parked. “We might be able to get a real-time look.”
Darcy laid a hand on his shoulder. “You told me before that you could retask satellites, no?”
“Yes.”
“And was that true, or were you trying to impress me?”
“Both.” Eddie got to work, and soon the telemetry data for a reconnaissance satellite appeared on his secondary monitor.
Darcy leaned down, putting her cheek next to his. “You are a genius.”
“No,” he countered, giving her a peck on the cheek without breaking the pace of his typing. “You are a genius.”
“Yeah . . .” Finn closed his eyes and shook his head. “This will get old fast.”
Talia didn’t care about Eddie’s budding romance. She was worried about the ramifications of hacking a satellite. “I don’t think the Agency wants us tapping into the US reconnaissance constellation. This could bring a lot of heat down on Brennan.”
“It’s not a problem.” Eddie waved off her concerns with the flick of his hand. “I didn’t hack a US satellite. I hacked a Russian one.”
In short order, he had live video of the same brown rock up on the main screen. Eddie pointed at some shading on the eastern side. “That shadow is too uniform to be natural.” He pressed his nose closer to the image and then let out a laugh and tapped the keys. “Oh, I see you now. You can’t hide from me.”
That section of the island grew bigger and the clarity resolved. Talia could make out a man-made structure—brown-painted concrete merging with the surrounding rocks. A rectangular section near the center was angled upward at twenty degrees. “There it is,” she said, “our launch facility.”
“And the Mark Seven.” Eddie lifted his hands from the keys in triumph. He circled a finger over a large object on the north end of the picture, covered with camouflage netting, and looked up at Talia. “We’ve got him.”
“We haven’t got a thing. Ivanov can launch at any time.”
“Actually, he’s on a schedule,” Tyler said. “His promised demonstration is still more than two hours away. And he’s in no hurry. He thinks we’re all dead.” He crouched down beside Eddie. “You can hack a satellite. Can you hack the island?”
“Already working on it. I’m targeting the facility’s network using our satellite’s UHF transmitters. And . . . I’m in.” A schematic of the island popped up on the screen. Eddie zoomed in and the view shifted to a large, angled hangar next to a stacked control room.
Talia knelt down at his other shoulder. “And the missile?”
“I can see the hangar. But I’ve got no access to the hardware. Ivanov is smart. The island’s key systems—locks, security, the missile systems—they are all isolated in closed loops. Without hooking in a wireless receiver, I can’t touch them. Not yet, anyway.”
While Eddie kept trying, the rest of the crew stepped out onto the tarmac to survey their options. Tyler nudged Darcy and thrust his chin at the gunboat she and Eddie had used to tow their explosives into position. “What about your boat? How fast will it go?”
“Ten knots. Assuming she can sustain it. You heard her engine, no? We barely got her back to shore after picking you up.”
Finn turned to Talia. “You’re an American operative. Call in reinforcements?”
“Already have,” Eddie said from the van. “When Ivanov escaped, I alerted an Agency asset embedded with a Special Tactics Team at Incirlik. They’ll be wheels up in thirty, plus three hours’ flight time.”
“More than an hour too long,” Tyler said. “And we can’t ask the Russians for help. They’ll haggle for some kind of recompense like Abu Dhabi carpet dealers. There’s no time for that kind of negotiation.”
Darcy made her pbbt sound. “Then it seems we need a better boat, no?”
“No. Not a boat, per se.” Talia’s eyes had settled on a bunker at the end of a man-made inlet. “We need that.”
The nose of a Soviet beast of legend was poking out of the bunker, a monster long at rest. She could just see its eight jet engines placed like gills on the forward canards. Tubes for anti-ship missiles rose from its back like the spines of a sea dragon. The Soviets had called it an ekranoplan—a half ship, half aircraft designed to fly mere feet above the waves at over three hundred knots. She nodded in the beast’s direction. “All we have to do is get it started, and that thing will get us to the island with time to spare.”
Chapter
sixty-
eight
ABANDONED SOVIET BONEYARD
BLACK SEA COAST, UKRAINE
“WE’LL NEVER GET THIS THING STARTED,” Finn said. The team had driven
both vehicles to the corner of the marine hangar. The Soviet sea monster’s armored hull rested in a floodable track with a foot of stinking, bloodred canal water pooled at the bottom. “For all we know, she’s rusted in place.”
Mac pushed himself down out of the box truck. “I don’ think so. If she’s Russian, then her hull is titanium—rust resistant. And look.” He pointed to cracked vinyl slips protecting each engine. “The engines’re covered, and there’re no oil stains beneath. They’ve been properly drained. This great beastie was once some Soviet crew chief’s wee babe. He took great care when he put her to bed for the last time.”
“Then maybe we can wake her up.” Tyler clapped his hands at his crew. “Get to work. We need her running in an hour.”
While Finn and Tyler scavenged fuel and oil from the graveyard derelicts, Darcy and Eddie jury-rigged the truck battery into the electrical system. That left the avionics to Mac and Talia.
“She’s not really that old.” Talia rubbed away the dust with a rag from GROND’s toolkit. “At least, she’s not as old as the other relics in this boneyard. The big ekranoplans were the final extravagance of the Soviet war machine. This one was probably brand new when the wall came down.”
Mac caressed the controls. “Oh, she’ll fly. Won’t you, beastie?”
In answer, the lights in the dash came on. Eddie shouted at them from below. “Battery’s in!”
It took all hands to filter the muck from the gas and oil. Talia imagined the loving crew chief who had cared so much for the monster would have a shoe-throwing hissy fit worthy of Khrushchev if he saw the foul-smelling sludge they were feeding her. But the ekranoplan had to run for only twenty minutes. To boost the monster’s chances, they added fresh diesel from the spare barrels in the box truck, which Tyler had been saving for a drive out of there. Mac said it was as good as any military jet fuel.
Far too many minutes later, Tyler secured the fuel panel door atop the right wing and kicked the last barrel over the side. “We have to go! Ivanov will launch in approximately fifty minutes. What’s left?”
The Gryphon Heist Page 29
