by Bill DeSmedt
Compliance flicked his gaze over to where the flight attendant was still doing her Horatio-at-the-bridge thing. “C’mon, let’s get you out of here before the dam busts.”
The Compliance guy made something of a production of getting them off the plane—eyes darting side to side, hand poised inside his jacket pocket, looking every inch the armed-and-dangerous escort. Knox suspected it was all an act to get out of helping them lug their carry-ons.
Compliance led them out the emergency door at the elbow of the exit ramp, then down the stairs onto the tarmac. Fifty yards across the apron, gleaming in the last rays of the sun, a Learjet sat waiting.
Knox watched Marianna latch onto their pilot as the group walked toward the little twin-engine jet. What was she up to now?
“Oh, wow—one of the new 33 As?” she was saying.
“Yep, nothing but the best when you fly the secret skies.”
“Say, Matt,” she went on, “if you’re going to be all alone up in the cockpit, would you mind if I sat in? Just to observe.”
“Depends. Are you rated for jets?”
“I’m instrument-certified for twin-engine props. But I’d love to move up, if I could just find a way to put in the hours. Susan Alloway—you know her?—she’s let me second-chair a time or two.”
“Okay, provided you look but don’t touch.”
“Deal!” She paused at the foot of the Lear’s retractable stairs. “Coming, Jon?”
While Marianna was busily sweet-talking her way into a ride up front, Knox stopped to look back at the Airbus, now ringed round with catering trucks and luggage trailers. Fie stood watching the unloading operation with professional interest, having taken part in the postmortem for the botched automated baggage-handling system at Denver International a few years back. One area where humans still beat machines, hands down.
Not these humans, though. Knox winced as one of the jumpsuited baggage crew dropped yet another Samsonite suitcase. To a man, they seemed singularly inept. Maybe if they’d pay more attention to what they were doing, instead of looking around all the time, instead of looking over here, in his direction.
Suddenly Knox experienced that familiar shiver, that hair-standing-on-end feeling of imminent pattern apperception. Not knowing why, only knowing not to question the impulse, he reached out and grabbed Marianna, pushed her to the ground, threw himself down alongside her.
“Stay down!” he hollered in her ear, as the first bullets whistled over their heads and thudded into the bodies of their escorts.
“Oof! Jon? What the hell do you think you’re—” Marianna cut off in mid-protest as she heard the slugs whine and hit, watched Compliance topple over, his left eye a red ruin. Saw Matt falling from the boarding ramp to land in a crumpled heap.
Christ! They were under attack!
“Jon,” she whispered, “don’t move, okay? Not till I’ve got—Ungh!” She heaved with all her strength and managed to roll Compliance’s body over enough to pull his Glock-17 from its holster. She felt the bulge of a spare clip in his jacket pocket. She grabbed that too.
She did a low-crawl over to the stairs, then risked a look. Five men in gray jumpsuits were advancing cautiously toward the Learjet, the muzzles of their guns weaving back and forth like snake-heads.
“Listen up, Jon. In about ten seconds, those guys are going to start hitting the deck. When they do, you get your ass up the stairs and into the plane, okay?”
“Okay.” He sounded as scared as she felt.
“And, Jon?”
“Yeah?”
“Take care. I . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “Nothing. Just keep your head down.”
A thousand one, a thousand two . . . She braced her elbows and took aim at the guy out front. A thousand four, a thousand five . . . Funny, the fear she’d felt a moment ago was gone. Like it wasn’t her lying there, finger on the trigger. A thousand eight, a thousand nine . . . Like it was somebody else, somebody she didn’t even know.
A thousand ten!
She squeezed off a round. Felt the dock kick in her hands. Saw the hole in the line of attackers where her target had been. Aimed and fired again—damn! Only winged that one.
Then the remaining gray men were scattering for cover. She stood, taking what shelter she could behind the retractable stair, and began laying down a suppressing fire. Off in the distance she could hear sirens wailing. Up close and personal she could smell the sharp bite of cordite mingled with the sourness of her own adrenaline-doped sweat.
She looked over to see Jon still crouching beside the stairway. “Now, Jon! Go!”
That got him moving. He pounded up the no-skid treads and dived in the open hatch. She followed him, fully expecting to be hit. But their assailants were falling back in confusion. Maybe they hadn’t expected resistance. Or maybe they’d just gone after more firepower. She wasn’t waiting around to find out.
“Here, take this!” She shoved the pistol and spare magazine into Jon’s hands. “Anything shoots at you, you shoot back, okay?”
“Don’t I have to flip the safety off or something?”
“Not on a Clock. It’s got three safeties, but they all turn off automatically the instant you squeeze that trigger. Think you can hold the fort, tiger?”
“Uh-huh.” He looked pale and sweaty, but—hell, so did she. He was maintaining, that’s all that mattered.
“Where are you going?” he asked as she turned away.
“See if I can get us out of here.” She yanked open the cockpit door.
The flight deck layout looked pretty much like that of the prop-jobs she’d trained on. She sat down and belted in. Her mind raced as she studied the controls. Like she’d told poor Matt, she’d never actually flown a jet. But second-chairing with Susie Alloway had been the next best thing. Susie had been as good as any flight instructor Marianna’d ever had—patient, friendly, talking through all the moves before committing to them, and sometimes letting Marianna get the feel of the wheel when it was just the two of them aboard, and . . . what was she forgetting?
Oh, right, there was one extra step to the start sequence for a jet: you had to spin up the compressor first. She flipped what looked like the right switch and was relieved to hear the whine of the electric motor.
“Jon,” she shouted through the cockpit door, “what’s happening back there?”
“Quiet for the moment,” came the reply. “No, wait. A boom truck just pulled out on the field, off our port wing. Maybe the cavalry’s arrived.”
A momentary pause, just long enough for Marianna to begin to wonder why the airport SWAT team would show up in a boom truck. Then Jon was talking again: “Damn! It’s not the cavalry; it’s Apache reinforcements. That guy in the cherry-picker’s aiming something our way!”
Marianna leaned far enough forward to catch a glimpse of a jump-suited figure with a two-handled tube resting on his shoulder. Oh, shit! An RPG-7! A direct hit from that rocket-propelled grenade would peel this little jet like a grape!
Praying the compressor was nearly at operating revs, Marianna opened the fuel valve and lit the igniter. Under her coaxing, the jet whined and began to spin in a ninety degree arc. Give them as small a target as possible.
She could hear Jon firing out the door, hear him holler, “Marianna, this bastard’s going to—”
The rest of his words were drowned out in a whoosh and a deafening blast. A yellow-white fireball blossomed in the windshield. The yoke shook violently beneath her hands.
“Jesus Christ!” she could hear Jon shouting. But how could she hear anything at all, when she was dead?
“Jesus Christ,” he yelled again, “they bagged the Airbus!”
Missed us! It happened sometimes with RPGs. Easy enough to flinch at the last instant, even when there wasn’t somebody shooting at you. They’d missed and . . .
My God! The Airbus! Those poor people! Had they all gotten out in time?
No time, no time to think about that. The guy’d be reloading, de
termined not to screw up this time.
“Jon! Button us up—we’re punching out of here!”
Even as she heard him yell “Clear!” and felt the thunk of the door-lock mechanism sliding home, she was nosing the jet down the taxiway.
“Ground,” she said into her headset mike, “Lear 4325 alpha requesting permission to taxi.” Better late than never.
A momentary pause. “Roger, 25 alpha, taxi runway four left and hold short.”
Now what? It would take forever to taxi the Learjet all the way out to the runway, and all of thirty-five seconds for the opposition to lock and load a second RPG.
Well, she did have permission to taxi; might as well stretch a point. “Jon? Sit down and buckle in. Evasive maneuvers!”
She didn’t have clearance to take to the sky, but even on the ground the Lear was nearly as fast and maneuverable as a Formula One racer. She pushed the throttles forward and careened down the taxiway, sluing the jet from side to side, doing her level best to be an uncooperative target.
She glimpsed flashing lights off to her left. An emergency vehicle, by the look of it. Could be a friendly. Then again, it could be wheels for a more experienced RPG marksman. Having seen what the opposition had done to the horse they rode in on, she was in no mood to take chances. Not to mention the guy was coming in on a collision course!
Screw this! Some of these JFK taxiways were as long as regulation airstrips. She sure hoped this was one of them.
“Jon! Prepare for takeoff!” Marianna prayed this was going to work; no way she’d had time to complete the preflight. Shit! Just do it! She leaned into the throttles, shoving them forward all the way to the stops.
The Lear gave a shudder, then lifted just in time for the would-be interceptor to pass harmlessly beneath it.
“Ground?” she said into her headset mike, “got a situation here, under rocket attack—25 alpha taking off!”
“Jesus, 25 alpha! Was that a rocket hit AF on? We can see the flames from here.” A brief pause while Air Traffic Control recovered his composure, then: “Roger, Lear 4325 alpha cleared immediate takeoff runway—um, taxiway delta; right turn one eighty-five degrees at five hundred; climb and maintain forty-five hundred, barometer twenty-nine point ninety-four. All traffic be aware: emergency takeoff in progress taxiway delta.”
She heard the ATC guy catch his breath, swallow audibly. “Best move your tail, honey—uh, 25 alpha. Looks like they just fired a heat-seeker!”
28 | Flight Plans
MARIANNA STOOD THE little jet on its tail, clawing her way up into the darkening sky.
“Ground?” she gasped when she could breathe again. “That rocket still coming?”
“Right up your ass,” the voice said. “Sorry, 25 alpha, it’s gaining on you. Looks like you’ve got maybe thirty seconds till . . .” Air Traffic Control didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.
Marianna’s eyes darted frantically around the unfamiliar cockpit. CROM usually equipped its custom-order aircraft with—there, thank God!
“Releasing countermeasures,” she said, and hit the red button. Radar-blinding chaff sifted out from a compartment in the jet’s underbelly, followed by a “hotspot”—a thermite incendiary that would burn bright enough to divert a heat-seeker, keep it from following the Lear’s thousand-degree exhaust straight up a tailpipe. That was the theory anyway.
But she couldn’t see if it was working: the fuselage blocked her view of the rocket vectoring in directly behind them. “Ground?” she said, no longer even trying to keep her voice from shaking. “25 alpha here. Want to give me a heads-up?”
“Roger, 25 alpha, still got you on visual.” The whole tower must be watching this show, waiting to see the Lear smear out like a Roman candle against the evening sky. “Rocket’s still coming. I can see the exhaust plume. It’s closing, closing . . . almost on you . . . It’s—Ow!”
From the sheer volume of that howl in her headphones, Marianna guessed ATC must have been watching through high-powered binoculars when the jettisoned thermite ignited. “Holy shit! 25 alpha, what the hell did you do? It missed! The rocket missed! You, you’ve got a detonation, immediately to your rear!”
“Tell me about it, Ground!” Marianna fought the bucking control wheel as the concussion threatened to upend the little craft. Rode the Lear like a surfer on the crest of the Ninth Wave. Climb, climb!
Suddenly, as if someone had hit the off switch, they were out of the maelstrom, rising through quiet air.
“Nice flying, 25 alpha,” the voice of ATC crackled in her headphones. “Um, you could raise your landing gear anytime now.”
“Roger that, Ground,” she mumbled, embarrassed. She’d had a lot on her mind. Still did.
“25 alpha, you are instructed to land Westchester soonest. Stand by for routing.”
That was standard procedure in an incident like this: get the implicated aircraft back on the ground and start the FAA investigation. She had no time for this! Fortunately, she knew the magic words.
“Negative. Setting transponder to 7734.” She punched in the code. That got ATC’s attention. “Lear 4325 alpha confirm: 7734?”
“You heard right.” There were only a vanishingly few situations where a pilot could preempt ground control in assigning the last four digits of the transponder code. Preempt ground control, period. One was a hijacking in progress. This was another. 7734 was CROM’s FAA-authorized priority override. As such, it allowed her to commandeer the airspace between here and wherever she wanted to go. So, where did she want to go?
“25 alpha, provide routing please.”
“GPS direct DIA.” Might as well head toward Dulles, at least till she came up with a better idea.
Marianna switched on the PA and blew into the mike. “Captain has turned off the seat-belt sign. Jon, you want to come forward? We need to talk.”
Ship’s bells chimed half past midnight. Arkady Grishin sat in his headquarters suite watching the big-screen version of the JFK mopping-up operation now in progress. Millions spent on high-tech surveillance, even a tap into the spy-satellite network, and he had to tune into CNN to find out what was happening!
According to Wolf Blitzer, things weren’t going well for the Mafiya. That was acceptable; killed or captured, the mercenaries could betray nothing worth knowing, nothing that might tie the International Arrivals operation back to GEI. CROM would know, but then CROM already knew.
No, that was not the problem. The problem was what he was hearing in Merkulov’s droning color-commentary. He swiveled his chair just enough to fix the security chief with a glare. “So, Vadim Vasiliyevich, in non-technical language, you are saying you cannot confirm a kill.”
Merkulov seemed to shrink into his chair, as if he could will himself small and unobtrusive enough to escape the director’s notice—an effort doomed from the outset by his hundred-twenty-two-kilo bulk.
“Not at this time, Comrade Director. We have reports of a mid-air explosion, but we have also intercepted subsequent cockpit-to-tower communications indicative of survival.”
“You have, in other words, failed.”
That roused Merkulov from his slouch. “Comrade Director, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, this was from the outset an action with very little prospect of success. Four hours to plan, to secure the resources, to brief the team, move them into position. Four hours! An all but impossible task. Only the dedication of our security cadres brought us as near as we came to achieving our goal.”
His outburst over, Merkulov sat back, deflating slowly.
“It may well be as you have said, Vadim Vasiliyevich,” Grishin conceded. “In any case, it is of no matter now. Far more important is what we do next. We must assume the targets are still in the air, and heading for home. I trust our own forces are moving into place there?”
“Yes, Comrade Director,” Merkulov bobbed his head. “Fully half of them are already deployed just outside the Dulles perimeter, covering all approaches.”
“Good.” Gr
ishin smiled grimly. “Let us see if our friends can dodge a missile on landing as handily as they did on takeoff.”
“Rest assured, Arkady Grigoriyevich, they cannot. But . . .”
“But what?”
“It is our second contingent, Comrade Director—the ones staking out the CROM headquarters facility itself. They are reporting something strange.”
With the LearJet still climbing toward its thirty-thousand-foot cruising altitude, it was uphill all the way to the flight deck for Knox, on legs still shaking with reaction. Worth it to see her smile, though. For a while there, he’d thought he never would, ever again.
“Hi, Jon. Sit down and don’t touch anything unless I say so, okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
He’d barely belted into the copilot’s seat when an alarm went off.
“Christ! What now?”
“Cabin pressure,” she said, pulling out her oxygen mask from the compartment above her head and motioning him to do the same. “We didn’t get away as clean as I thought; the fuselage must’ve got holed in the firefight.”
She broke them out of the climb and leveled off at twenty thousand feet. Knox put on the copilot’s headset in time to hear: “Lear 4325 alpha, this is New York Center. Are you experiencing difficulties?”
Are we experiencing difficulties? Does a wild bear shit in the woods?
But Marianna was already responding in that laid-back, no-sweat voice they taught you the first week of flight school. “New York Center, 25 alpha here. Under control now. Request direct DIA, altitude twenty thousand.”
“25 alpha, confirm altitude twenty thousand feet.”
“Roger that, Center, we have a pressurization, uh, malfunction here.”
After a moment, the voice came back. “Roger, 25 alpha. Cleared present position direct DIA, maintain twenty thousand.”
She turned to Knox. In a voice muffled by the mask she explained, “Without cabin pressure this is as high as we go: the masks aren’t rated above twenty K-feet.”
