Done with her raisins, Heidi began fooling with her necklace. The round medallion was actually three concentric rings and a tiny hourglass at the center. She gave it a flick and the inner rings spun in different directions.
“Poof, gone like it never existed. Kurt Grice also did not authorize the C-17’s crew to untie the six-man SOG team for the entire return flight. Bet they are some kinda pissed. They’ll be back at Travis Air Force Base in just a few minutes. Which provides our sole piece of actually possible coincidence. That is less than two minutes from when the second flight of the Coast Guard’s pair of C-130J Super Hercules out of Hawaii are expected back at Johnston Atoll to complete the evacuation of the dead and the cargo. Chase’s team have their own plane.”
“Busy day.”
“Hmmm,” Heidi agreed.
Clarissa managed to wait three heartbeats before she couldn’t stand it anymore. “And the order that I didn’t send?”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.”
“Hmmm,” this time Heidi’s noise was more thoughtful than agreeable.
“Heidi…” Clarissa fought to not grind her teeth.
“Well, it was definitely sent with your ID and authorization, but the IP address is a little squirrely. There’s a double-layer mask that—”
“There it is!” Harry shouted so loudly that Clarissa bit her own tongue instead of her pizza slice. “Man, that’s so weird.”
“So weird?”
“Your order—”
“It wasn’t my order!”
“Uh-huh,” Harry nodded, still distracted by his screen. “Your order—”
Clarissa sighed.
“—came through the Finnish back door.”
“From Russia?”
“Into Russia.”
“How did those goddamn bastards—”
“But,” Harry dropped back in his chair and picked up his own slice of pizza, “it’s ultimately all just a pass-through.”
“From where?” Maybe she’d threaten to cut off his pizza budget.
“Here.”
“What?”
“The signal didn’t hit any of our servers, or we’d have seen it. Instead, it picked up a low-security trunk line out in Bethesda. Masking itself as a signal originating here, it—”
“Harry, cut to the chase or I’m going to fucking ruin your life.”
“It originated in Bethesda…”
“That does it, I’m going to cut off your pizza allowance.”
Harry ignored her. “From there it traveled low security with a CIA IP signature. Bounced through a mash-up of old routing equipment Iceland-Finland-Russia. It reappeared at the Russian military airbase at Tiyas, Syria. The next hop should have been impossible, and I almost lost the back path there. It entered our system at our al-Tanf Garrison in southern Syria, definitely have to plug that hole; I sent their IT guy a note on which physical cable to yank—probably left over from when the Syrians occupied the base. After picking up the CIA secure link there, it shuffled down to Diego Garcia, then pounded back into our system as an order originating from you.”
“Diego Garcia?” Clarissa could barely manage a whisper.
“You know, that weird little island that the US and the UK grabbed to make a military service base out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. A totally bizarro choice for a server to bounce off. Like I said, weird.”
“Very strange, also,” Heidi offered in a sing-song voice like a fake Indian accent.
“Mm. Strange indeed,” Harry said back in the same fake voice like they were quoting movie lines at each other.
Normally that made her nuts, but at the moment she didn’t care.
Several of her picked-off-then-replaced pepperoni slices had dropped onto her new Yves Saint Laurent mulberry satin blouse. The stain was going to show forever. And she didn’t care about that either.
A false order.
Framing her.
That she cared about a great deal.
She could only think of one thing that connected her, the Russians, and Diego Garcia.
Weird? Strange?
No.
It was absolute worst-case scenario.
Somehow, Guest Seven had reached out from down inside her hole.
There was no way to predict where the next blow would be coming from.
25
He sat in the darkness of his parked car, listening to the soft fall of rain patter on his roof.
It was a pity about the SOG team failure, but the back door Guest Seven’s contact had prepared for him in advance had just paid its first dividends.
He hadn’t intended to use it until later in the operation, but a few more pointing fingers never hurt.
Wouldn’t hurt him, at least. They were going to be very painful to someone else though.
He sipped his coffee as he sat in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot at the northwest corner of Andrews Air Force Base.
Not the rich brew of Jerusalem or the sweet-and-cardamom of the Turks, but it was sufficient to the moment.
He’d—
There!
Taking off from Andrews. The US Air Force C-40B was headed aloft. He tracked the converted 737 up into the night sky.
There, it turned east and headed out over the Atlantic.
He resisted the urge to wave goodbye, just in case someone was watching him.
Except for a refueling stop, he would be the last person to see any of them alive.
26
It was four hours after “night” had fallen outside her cell.
Thankfully, they didn’t cut off the television feed. Instead, they fed her an unending supply of American prime time. Endlessly insipid shows and movies with an unseemly number of advertisements. Didn’t Americans have lives?
The only thing she could ever stand to watch was CNN. It was so skewed to American news and American points of view and American “ideals” that it was almost unwatchable. At least they didn’t do the BBC: Oh dear, we’re so very understated about everything distasteful. The Americans were at least blunt about their pitch.
But three a.m. offered few other options.
So it was CNN.
Presidential this. Congress that. Another murder in the streets. Even strolling through southwest Moscow’s Bitsevski Park during the Chessboard Killer’s years of rampage was less dangerous than the news made out every American city to be.
She’d actually hit the off button when a fading image caught her attention.
The five-second restart on the television felt like five years.
It was a crashed plane, spread across an island atoll runway.
We’re just now getting reports from a terrible airplane crash on Johnston Atoll in the South Pacific. It rises alone from the ocean depths a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii.
She bolted upright in bed.
Not lost in the middle of the Pacific.
No! No! No! This couldn’t be right.
As you can see, the damage was extreme.
Not enough! It wasn’t shattered across the runway in a hundred thousand tiny pieces. The fuselage had broken into four neat sections.
It lies only eight hundred miles from where Amelia Earhart’s plane was lost near Howland Island.
Like who gave a fuck. That was forever ago.
These images are from survivors’ cell phones, recently uploaded upon their safe return to Hawaii aboard US Coast Guard C-130J Hercules airplanes.
Survivors was wrong. It had to be wrong.
Fifty-three are reported dead, with a hundred and eighty-seven survivors including the entire flight crew.
Please let The Bitch be one of the fifty-three.
The cause remains unknown, however—
Even as she watched, there was a fresh clip of a woman wearing a vest with a bright yellow NTSB logo on the back.
—a crash investigator was on the flight and is already studying the wreckage.
And then the image zoomed in.
Tall, shapely,
gold-blonde hair just past her jawline—shorter than the last time she’d seen The Bitch—but no doubting who it was.
She heaved the remote control at the screen.
It just bounced harmlessly to the carpet.
Impossibly, Holly Harper was still alive.
She glared at the phone, but it didn’t ring. Her unknown contact had to know that Harper was still alive—and he wasn’t calling her!
If she ever caught up with the man, he was going on her goddamn personal kill list.
She’d offered to fuck him for his help in offing Holly.
For sixteen years, her father had taught her what it meant to serve Mother Russia.
For another eighteen she’d studied. Army, Spetsnaz Special Operations, and her last decade for the SVR foreign intelligence bureau’s lethal action arm—Zaslon. She’d been stuck in this cage for a year, waiting.
Well she was done with waiting.
She was thirty-four and one of most highly refined killing machines ever created. She was goddamn Elayne Kasprak!
Fuck the bastard on the phone?
She’d goddamn fuck him to death!
But. She. Was. Still. Stuck. In. This. Fucking. HOLE!
Elayne screamed her fury at the unyielding walls.
27
By the time the pair of US Coast Guard C-130J Super Hercules returned to Johnston Atoll, Holly felt as if she was going to shatter.
With no sleep on the plane, she was already thirty-six hours awake with no end in sight.
On one hand, Quint was being Aussie-subtle about his interest in her—about as obvious as a dingo-dog’s balls. It was…flattering, she supposed.
On the other hand, Mike was neither oblivious to Quint’s interest nor subtle in his own need for reassurance that…
Hell if she knew what.
That she was alive?
Couldn’t he just see that for himself and be satisfied?
She’d finally sent Taz to sit with Andi because who knew what the PTSD attack had done to her. Andi had refused to leave her vigil over the dead or give up the damned Deagle sidearm, which was almost as big as she was. If it looked right in Schwarzenegger’s hand, in Andi’s it looked like she was toting around a howitzer.
Miranda appeared to be fine, but Holly had stayed close just in case. If she never heard another scream like that one again, it would be a lifetime and a half too soon. The last time she’d heard one like it, she herself had been sixteen years old, clinging to the steel bridge deck on the Stuart Highway and watching her brother be sucked under for the last time.
The only one she wasn’t having to worry about was Jeremy—other than possible sunstroke as he had returned to the wreck again and again to verify what he’d found on the QAR.
The USCG planes landed, and for just a moment, it seemed like a bad replay of the SOG team’s arrival.
As the rear ramp of the first Hercules lowered, there was a thudding roar of machinery from deep inside the plane. No fireteams of guards came down the ramp. Instead, a midsize D4 bulldozer trundled out into the sunlight.
About two seconds before she pulled out the air marshal’s Glock and shot the dozer, the operator cycled it down to an idle.
He climbed off and strolled over to them. “I’ve been asked to clear the runway, ma’am. Anything you need preserved before I start?”
That was a welcome change. She took her hand off the Glock.
“The first ten feet of the left wing,” Miranda pointed. “The fat end, not the pointy one.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes, we’ve recorded everything else. If you could turn it over for inspection, that would be helpful.”
“We have instructions to get a move on. Bird sanctuary and all. Is it okay if I go ahead and just load it on the plane? They can always use the hoist to flip it in there. You’ll have a long flight back to check it out.”
“Yes, thank you.” Miranda sounded perfectly normal whenever she was talking about airplanes.
“I’m on it.” He spun up the machine and trundled it over to the tail section that had been mangled by the excavator. With an expert nudge, he began shoving it toward the side of the runway.
A small rotary-brush sweeper mounted on the front of a Bobcat came out the C-130J’s shadowed cargo bay and was soon sweeping bits and pieces ahead of it.
The second Coast Guard plane had landed near the temporary morgue. A team armed with litters began loading the bodies into bags and carting them aboard.
Taz and Andi remained at attention as an honor guard until the last of them were aboard.
The dozer operator broke off the last ten feet of the wing by the simple expedient of driving over it widthwise repeatedly in a steel-tracked, thirty-thousand-pound machine. After shoving the main section of the wing onto the sandy verge, he made quick work with a few chains to raise the remaining piece just a foot into the air.
Before he drove it onto the plane, Holly and Miranda lay on the ground a moment to look at the underside.
“Just like you said, Miranda. The skin held it together. I thought the spar and rib damage would be too great to survive the descent. Figured I’d bought it this time.”
“I was most careful in calculating the odds I told you earlier. It was my considered assessment that it would hold. You have to remember to think about the in-plane tensional strength of the wing skin material. It has poor shear strength and worse compression resistance, but it’s the old trick of you can’t tear a sheet of paper in two by pulling outward at either end.”
“That’s a metaphor, Miranda.” Holly couldn’t help smiling.
“No, it’s an quantifiable analogy.”
“Either way, I look forward to inspecting the bottom of this more closely.”
“The engine mount never should have failed like that. Something is wrong here.” Miranda practically crawled under the suspended wing section.
“Aside from the fact that it crashed?” Holly tugged her back out.
“Yes, aside from that. Note the frame member bending in the engine pylon? That’s most unusual.”
Holly stared at it more carefully—without crawling into harm’s way. The bend was unusual. As if it had been slammed by a huge lateral force that wasn’t explained by the angle the plane had hit the runway.
She did rap her knuckles on the wing’s aluminum skin. It ponged sharply. Nothing wrong with this side of it.
They stood and waved the dozer away. “My old job was always about leveraging the weakness, not analyzing the strength.”
Miranda nodded. “I know. Mindsets are like in-plane tensional strength, they are very hard to break. It’s like why I stayed with Jon; I couldn’t pull it apart until it completely sheared.”
“Now that is a metaphor.”
Miranda blinked in surprise, then smiled brightly. “I got one!”
They high-fived.
Then Holly turned and practically impaled herself on the nose of an airplane.
It must have landed and taxied while she and Miranda had been buffered by the steady roar of the bulldozer. She’d heard the whine of the turbojet engines, but hadn’t thought much of it. It had already been a day of too many sensations.
The high whine seemed to cut through the air louder than the dozer now banging its way up the C-130J’s cargo ramp with their chunk of wing. It actually felt as if the whine was the stripping of gears inside her own head.
Miranda, of course, had probably heard it when it was still twenty miles out and only thinking about landing. She certainly hadn’t flinched at finding it close behind them.
Holly stared at the nose of a sleek Gulfstream G650 painted in the same cheery colors as her own flight had been—before it crashed.
Turbine engines.
The twin Rolls-Royce engines slowly wound down and the whine began to fade.
Perfect—more people for her to keep alive on a desert island.
As a distraction, Holly tried to get the stress diagram to form in her thoughts; structura
l issues were her specialty after all. She felt drugged by the heat and people. The air was so thick she couldn’t breathe properly.
“Before it sheared…” she turned to Miranda. The morning seemed so long ago but there’d been something important. “Yes, there was a vibration. Hard enough in Seat 57A to be very annoying.”
“That wasn’t picked up by the QAR.” Jeremy pulled out his tablet. “Can you describe the exact sequence of events so that I can try to match them up? We should really have Mike here. After all, interviews are his thing.”
Before Holly could stop him, Jeremy yelled out for Mike. Quint, then Andi and Taz followed until they were all gathered around her as the Gulfstream finally finished winding down.
She didn’t need a goddamn flock of gawkers. She needed—
28
“Quint Dermott,” the airline’s president shook his hand the moment he stepped off his business jet and out into the sunshine. “Thank you for saving as many as you did.”
Quint had never even met Eli Jackson before, yet the president gripped his hand like they were old drinking buddies.
“Uh, did what I could, Mr. Jackson. But it was mostly Captain Dani Evers’ doing, sir. As I recall, I spent most of the time just trying not to piss myself.” He had to shout a bit as the dozer was now nudging the aft chunk of circular fuselage into a lazy banging roll across the runway.
Eli looked down at Quint’s pants, raised a questioning eyebrow, and offered a flash of his famous smile. He appeared in a lot of the airline’s ads as well as being the CEO. His two-day-old beard looked hip. When Quint had tried it, both Dani and Mum had voted him off the island.
“Dries up fast in the tropical heat,” Quint brushed at the front of his pants and explained with the straight tone of Aussie humor.
“Good man!” Eli pumped his hand one more time, then released his grip and thumped the side of a fist on Quint’s shoulder. “I reached Dani just as they were landing in Hawaii. She says you kept your head way better than she did.”
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