Assassin (41 page)

H
AWKE LOOKED AT HIS WATCH, WILLING THE RED SWEEP
second hand to slow down. Two days earlier, on a warm morning at No. 10 Downing Street, seventy-two hours had seemed reasonably sufficient. But now that he was down to five hours and counting, he wasn’t at all sure. In exactly three hundred and forty minutes, the big B-52s arriving upstairs would open their bomb bays. If that wasn’t exciting enough for you, you’d be seeing a goodly number of little blips on your radar screen. Incoming Tomahawk land attack missiles, fired from guided missile cruisers with the Nimitz Carrier Battle Group deployed in the Indian Ocean.

“We’re five miles out,” Hawke said into the lip-mike. “Squadron climb and maintain two-one-zero—over.”

He eased back on the stick and watched his altimeter needle spin. At twenty-one thousand feet, he leveled off. The twin peaks of the mountain were now a whole lot closer. The extensive high-resolution recon photos hadn’t lied. The mountain itself was a deep gentian blue against the pale sky. There, like a wound, was the designated LZ; a narrow strip of blinding white at the bottom of a ragged crevasse that cut between the mountain’s peaks.

“Squadron…turn right to a heading of one-four-niner,” Hawke said.

It was roughly one hundred feet across and a bit shy of two thousand feet long. Hawke lifted his visor and knuckled the stinging sweat out of his eyes. Christ. It was going to be a bit like setting down on Pimlico Road during a Saturday afternoon tornado without your wingtips clipping any double-decker buses.

He craned his head around and looked over his shoulder at Patterson. Tex was strapping a Velcro bandolier of four thirty-round mags over his white Kevlar vest. Checking all his gear. Hawke smiled. Tex would be carrying an HK MP-5 submachine gun as an added measure of security in addition to his trusty Colt .45 Peacemaker. The team had given a great deal of thought to weapons. Since they carried no personal effects and wore no insignia, no national or unit markings, it was decided it didn’t matter what kind of firepower they brought along. Hell, you could buy anything at all on the open market these days.

Each man on this mission had signed on as a NOC. Spook-speak for “Not On Consular.” It meant your name did not appear on any list, Consular or otherwise. If you got caught, you didn’t exist. Hardly mattered. You were soon dead anyway.

“I just thought of something, Tex,” Hawke said.

“I’m a little busy right now, Alex. What?”

“We’re five minutes out and we’re still alive.”

“Good point. I’ve just spotted three radar domes. No Sammies. I guess these new-fangled jammer things work okay. Shoot, Hawkeye, in the early days we used to lose about a Widow or two a month, or pretty near.”

“Most encouraging,” Hawke said. He craned his head around, looking aft, making sure all his little ducks were in a row.

“Squadron turn right to zero-six-zero,” Hawke said, “Form up. Stick to your predetermined order going in:
Hawkeye, Widowmaker, FlyBaby, Phantom.
Copy?”

“Dead last,”
Phantom
’s ex-Marine pilot Ron Gidwitz said, laughing.

“Bad choice of words, Ronnie,” Patterson said over the radio.

“Don’t worry,
Phantom,
you’re about to kick some serious ass! Semper Fi, man!” came the response from another aircraft.

Hawke recognized Tommy Quick’s adrenalin-pumped voice. He was riding along with Ferguson in
Widowmaker
’s aftermost seat. A last-minute member of the team, Hawke had insisted the Army’s former number-one sharpshooter would be a vital addition no matter how this all played out.

“Ron, you okay back there? Copy?” Patterson asked
Phantom
’s pilot, the concern in his voice obvious.

“Okay? I’m fuckin’ fantastic!” Gidwitz replied. Hawke smiled at the reply. Patterson’s Blue Mountain Boys did not need any more motivation. They were psyched. Gung ho.

“Cut the mike chat,” Hawke said. “
Hawkeye
is going in.” He flipped down his visor and focused every scintilla of his concentration on the narrow slash in the top of the mountain dead ahead.

Alex lined his nose up on the rocky leading edge of the crevasse. From here, the opening in the bloody thing looked to be about six inches wide and a foot long. To make it all the more interesting, the closer he flew to the sheer face of the mountain, the more unpredictable the winds got. The buffeting had increased dramatically in the last thirty seconds.

“Ride ’em, cowboy,” Hawke said dryly. They were porpoising severely. Just keeping his spindly wings level was a full-time job.

“Man-oh-man,” Patterson drawled, craning around Hawke’s helmet for a first-hand look at the snow-scoured jaws of the approach. He’d seen pictures of where they were headed but they didn’t do it justice. For one thing, it didn’t look anywhere near close to wide enough to accommodate their wingspan. “You honestly believe you can thread this needle, Hawkeye?”

“Tell you something I’ve always wondered, Tex,” Hawke said, struggling to control pitch, yaw, and roll, while maintaining his glide path. The delicate aircraft was being bounced all over the sky by strong crosswinds and hammered by wind shear.

“What’s that, son?”

“I wonder how the bloody hell it’s possible for a man to break a sweat when the temperature outside his window is–50 Fahrenheit.”

“You, too, huh?” Tex said. “You plan to hit the brakes anytime soon?”

“Right about…now!”

Hawke hauled back on the dive brake handle with his left hand. He’d waited until the very last possible moment, then got the brakes wide open. The glider would now descend at the steepest possible glide slope. He needed a steep angle because of the short two-thousand-foot rollout, and he was coming in very hot because of the extreme altitude. Thin air.
Hawkeye
was dropping at 400 feet per minute. He eased the brakes and shot a glance at his yaw string. The two-inch-long string of red yarn attached to the leading edge of the canopy was a fail-safe aeronautic instrument invented by Wilbur Wright himself. It was now absolutely straight. The only way to fly.

“Final leg,” Hawke announced matter of factly.

“Call the ball, son,” Tex said.

“I have the ball sir,” Alex replied.

A second later, “Shit. Full dive brakes.”

When Hawke realized he was too low instead of too high it was almost too late. The sudden downdraft had him going nose first into something big and hard that didn’t move. He had instinctively closed the dive brakes, flared out, prayed, and waited for the crunch of impact. Later, he estimated his skids had cleared the rocky serrated outcropping by less than a foot. It was enough. He popped his twin drogue chutes and his nose came up and he scraped in over the rocks hitting the snowfield dead center, neatly bisecting the hundred-foot-wide opening.

Once he was inside the shelter of the crevasse, the crosswind died abruptly and he got his tail-skid down first, then the nose, and he steered with his rudder. He kept his wings level, skidded and bounced straight up the snowfield as planned, giving the three aircraft coming in behind him some operating room. Using backward stick motion, he managed to keep his tail down. Finally, he lowered the Widow’s snow brakes and brought the plane to a stop.

Hawkeye
was safely down. By a nose.

“That sure was exciting,” Tex said as Alex popped the canopy release. The frigid air, gleaming with ice particles, was startling. Alex cleared the ice from his oxygen mask and looked back at Patterson. Each mask contained a lipmike so communication would be uninterrupted while on the mountain.

“Pretty good landing, son, considering,” Tex added.

“Any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” Hawke replied, aware of the cliché, finding it unavoidable under the extreme circumstances. Up here, the hackneyed old World War II sentiment was definitely true. He saw the mission time remaining on the digital readout of his instrument panel. He had one plane on the ground and three in the air. Five hours left on the clock. Even if everything from now on went like clockwork, the clock was fast becoming his mortal enemy.

And when had any mission anywhere ever gone like clockwork?

He unsnapped his quick-release harness, hoisted himself up, and swung his legs out over the side of the cockpit. It was only a four-foot drop, but he sank up to his knees in soft snow. The cold took his breath away. So did the view from one notch below the top of the world; his eyes took in the vast sweep of valley far below, stretching away beneath a cobalt blue sky. He reached up to give Tex a hand, his eyes riveted on
Widowmaker
’s approach.

Ferguson was emulating Hawke’s successful glide path perfectly, but wisely kept his nose a bit higher and compensated for the last second windshear at the mouth of the crevasse. His landing was a thing of beauty; the second Black Widow got her skids down, rushed towards Hawke, twin white drogue chutes billowing out behind her, spraying snow to either side of her nose skid. She slewed to a stop two hundred feet shy of
Hawkeye.
Hawke gave Ferg and Quick a big thumbs up, then he and Patterson rapidly walked to the rear of the port fuselage and opened the cargo doors. Inside the twin holds on each Widow was everything one might need for an armed assault on an impregnable fortress.

“I don’t like the way Ron sounded up there,” Patterson said, hurriedly fastening a web belt around his waist. “Too giddy, you ask me.” From each man’s belt hung assorted frag and flash-bang grenades to both kill and disorient the enemy. Each two-man team would carry the same weapons. Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns, which could be fitted with grenade launchers, and on their hips, the new HK USP .45 pistol with sound suppressor.

“Sounded okay to me. I thought that was just Ron’s game voice,” Hawke said, wincing as the bitterly cold air seared his lungs. He’d removed the onboard oxygen mask and tossed it back into his seat. His assault and rescue team had spent the last thirty hours at a 12,000-foot base camp. Even though he was somewhat acclimated, it was painful to breathe at 18,000.

“No,” Tex said, “Definitely not Iceman’s game voice.” Gidwitz’s street nickname back home on the south side of Chicago was ‘Iceman.’

“Hypoxia?” Alex asked, concerned now. At 18,000 feet, oxygen deprivation could be a killer. You got euphoric, cocky, belligerent. A mean drunk. The high-altitude glider Black Widow had internal oxygen for just that reason.
Phantom
had reported a problem earlier, a warning light, then told Hawke to disregard the report. Hawke turned and took a long hard look at
Phantom
’s approach. She was definitely rocking and rolling but there was so much turbulence and shear out there, it was damn near impossible to spot trouble.

His overall pitch and glide level looked pretty good to Hawke’s eye. He said, “I don’t know, Tex. Anybody crazy enough to land an airplane up here is out of his mind to begin with. What would you look for?”

“Yeah, I reckon,” Tex said, eyeing Gidwitz’s approach, clearly not reassured. “Let’s move it.”

First things first. They grabbed two of the portable oxygen and communications units stowed inside the starboard side hold and strapped them on, fitting the face masks over mouth and nose and jamming the new cylinders onto their regulators. At this altitude, there was sufficient oxygen but insufficient pressure to force that oxygen into your bloodstream. Unless you were fully acclimated, a few minutes without oxygen up here, you started to think you could fly.

FlyBaby
was next, and again, the landing was flawless. Mendoza popped his drogue chutes and slid up right behind
Widowmaker.
Three ducks in a nice neat row, and one more on the way.
Phantom
was a quarter of a mile out and looking reasonably good. Hawke zipped up his white-camo thermal outerwear and shouldered into the MP-5 submachine gun, the strap over his shoulder. The gun could be fitted with HK’s 40mm grenade launcher and had the pre-ban high-capacity fifteen-round magazines. Time to roll. He’d cleared the chamber of the HK and was checking the mag when he heard something he didn’t like at all. He looked up just in time to see Ron Gidwitz and Ian Wagstaff’s
Phantom
catch a wingtip on the rocky lip of the crevasse and veer violently out of control.

Ground loop. The two most dreaded words in a glider pilot’s vocabulary.

As he and Tex watched in horror,
Phantom
flipped over on her back and hit hard. She was throwing up a blinding avalanche of onrushing snow and skidding directly towards
Widowmaker.
Hawke saw both her wings sheared away, and then, to his utter amazement, he saw the slender egg-shaped cockpit, intact, emerge from the leading edge of the avalanche. The black egg flew directly toward him, traveling at a hundred miles an hour. He dove out of its path, rolled over and watched the disembodied cockpit pod fly over his head and disappear over the edge of an icy cliff.

I
NSIDE THE CATACOMBS, YOU COULD SEE YOUR BREATH.
Y
OU
could feel the damp stone beneath your feet begin to climb your bones. She shivered, wrapping her fur-lined silks more tightly about her as she ran. She raced past dark tombs and rooms that could still knife cold fear into her heart. She’d been seven years old when she’d first set foot in this very passageway. She still awoke some nights in a terror of what she’d seen at the very end of it.

In the early seventies, her father, the Emir, commenced construction of a new mountain fortress atop the ruins of a fourteenth-century Moorish fortification. Workers had uncovered a vast network of tunnels and tombs and burial vaults deep inside the mountain. Yasmin had accompanied her father the first time he explored the honeycomb, a small girl following his flickering torch through the endless confusion of dripping and dank passageways.

They’d come at last upon a vast vault, the torchlight suddenly picking out an entire wall of the ancient dead, their eyeless sockets, lipless grins and twisted claws seeming to beckon her forward.
Join us!
She screamed and ran, finally rushing into the arms of her mother who, sensibly, was waiting at the entrance to the tombs. Father says it’s the Kingdom of Lost Souls, she’d cried to her mother. Long afterwards, her father would laugh at her childish fears, recounting the story with relish throughout her childhood. As if it was amusing to be afraid of death.

Many of the underground vaults she now hurried past made ideal hiding for the caches of gold and weapons the Emir and her husband were amassing for the coming wars with the infidels. Legions of political enemies were locked away in these catacombs. Many went insane under torture here, and many died or were simply forgotten.

Her father had made her a wedding gift of the present fortress. She’d named it the Blue Palace for the color of its stone. The young bride had immediately demanded the tombs be sealed, but her handsome young husband, Snay bin Wazir, had rescinded that decree. He would find many uses for the underground world, he had assured her. New horrors now occurred beneath her home. She looked but did not see.

Countless innocents had died where she now tred, Yasmin thought, as she hurried through the slimy passages, the grey stone glistening in the light of her torch. But no more. It was time for it all to stop. She herself would end it, or die trying. She’d had another dream the night before. A dream in which she herself wielded the sword of Fudo Myo-o, the god whom Ichi-san called King of Light; she had the power to stop this nightmare. Awaking, she knew she could not act alone. Some in the palace, given the opportunity, would rise up in her defense. But, there was one man whom she could trust completely. She knew where she would find him and she hurried there now.

An occasional oil lamp or guttering candle mounted on the jagged walls of the Kingdom lit the way. Passing guards dropped to the stone, prostrating themselves before her. Rats scurried before her and disappeared like the countless lost souls who had suffered and died in this dismal hell.

No more.

Word had just reached Yasmin that strange black aircraft had been spotted attempting to land atop the Blue Mountain. One plane had crashed, but there were thought to be survivors. It was, the captain of the house guards assured her, most probably a rescue party sent in search of the imprisoned American. It was insane, he laughed. But, nevertheless, quite interesting. In all these many years, no one had ever attempted anything quite so daring or quite so stupid.

Her husband, who had just returned from Suva Island, was also vastly amused by the news of the intrusion. He had just ordered a patrol outside the walls to find and capture the interlopers. Anyone foolish enough to try and land an airplane atop the Blue Mountain was sure to provide him a delightful afternoon’s entertainment.

He was ignoring her, busily making his plans for the day’s sumo celebration when his wife slipped away.

She arrived at the isolated cellblock vault where the American had been held since his abduction ten days earlier. The duty guard, who had passed food to the American for her and smuggled out his letter, hit the switch that opened the electric security door. Inside one of the dim cells, she could hear Ichi-san speaking softly to the American. Entering the cell, a silent scream caught in her throat.

“The honor in death—the death of honored ancestors—the true and solitary path of all warriors—” Ichi-san was whispering to the pale American kneeling before him on the stone floor. He was gently stroking the man’s head, offering him encouragement. The man’s frail body wore the scars of recent beatings. His head was bowed and he held the hilt of Ichi-san’s Samurai sword with both hands, the trembling tip of the blade already piercing the skin of his emaciated belly. She knew what this was called. In his desperation, Ichi-san had spoken its name often enough.

Hara-kiri.

“Stop!” Yasmin cried. “You cannot do this!”

The American slowly raised his head and looked up at her. His eyes looked like holes in a mask.

“Why?” he croaked, his parched lips barely moving. His hollow eyes were shining with tears. No food, no water, no sleep. He was broken, but he had not given up whatever it was they’d wanted. Had he, he’d be dead.

“Yes,” the sumo agreed softly. “Why? Bin Wazir’s method will be far less merciful than the blade of the Samurai.”

“If you do this now, others will die in vain.”

“Yasmin,” Ichi-san said. “I do not understand.”

“Someone has dared to come here to save him,” she said. “Unlike all the others who have died here—this man has not been forgotten.”

She fell to her knees beside the shaking prisoner and spoke, the words tumbling out in a rush. “Strange black aircraft have landed atop the mountain. It is believed that men have come for you. Put their lives at risk for your sake. My husband knows. He will surely find them and put them to death. He already intends to make sport of it. In the
dohyo
of the sumos.”

“You risk your life coming here,” Ichi-san said to her.

“I’ve had enough of this.”

“What can we do, Yasmin?” the sumo asked.

“Can he walk?” she asked. “His feet look—”

“Yes,” Ichi-san replied. “Barely.”

She pulled the black pajamas of a houseboy from the folds of her silks.

“Here. Dress him in this. And wrap his head in this. And bring that sword. If we are lucky, we will all live long enough to put it to good use.”

The sumo looked at Yasmin and smiled. He reached out his hand and stroked her cheek, flushed pink with the running and the damp cold here inside the mountain.

“No doubt. No confusion. No fear,” he said to her, his eyes alight for the first time since she’d met him. “We are ready now.”

“Yes, Ichi-san, I believe we are.”

“We must not be seen together. He is at the
doyho,
preparing for the ceremony. I must go there now.”

Yasmin caught his hand at her cheek and squeezed it.

“The harmonization of human beings,” Ichi-san said, smiling at her, “And, the timing of heaven.”