Assassin (43 page)

I
T WAS CRAMPED UP FRONT.
T
HE TERRIFIED KID
R
ASHID
driving, Hawke in the middle, Patterson on the door. Both men were wearing Type 3 Kevlar body armor, but Alex was strongly considering removing his because of the painful injuries to his ribs. The entire team wore the same armor, plus white balaclavas to protect their heads. Hawke had the muzzle of his USP .45 pistol wedged between two of the driver’s ribs. They’d gotten the Hagglund ATV turned around and were retracing its fresh tracks in the snow along the shoulder of a ridge, assuming they would lead them back to the mountain fortress built into the south side of the lower peak.

The .50-cal mounted above him on the roof started chattering before Hawke could see what Quick was shooting at. They came over a rise and he saw the target just below. A tracked Soviet Spetsnaz-style BTR-60 armored personnel carrier and twenty mountain troops all clad in white. The armored vehicle had just finished clanking across a small arched steel bridge which spanned a crevasse maybe sixty feet across. Beyond the bridge, their destination. A whirling red light marked the opening of a tunnel leading inside the mountain. Somebody inside that mountain had heard the shooting and sent this second war party out to see what was going on.

Quick’s .50 rattled again, expended brass cartridge cases pinging off the roof. Now this mountain division knew they had unwelcome guests.

“Don’t stop!” Hawke yelled at Rashid. “No matter what! Do, and you’re dead.”

Quick’s fire was rapid and lethal. The troops, or what was left of them, had been caught completely unaware. They scattered, diving behind snow banks or the rocks on either side of the steel bridge. The return fire was sporadic and for the most part inaccurate, but a few rounds were surely sizzling around Quick, who was exposed up on the roof. And it was only a matter of seconds before that armored carrier opened up on them. Luckily, Patterson had fitted the .40mm grenade launcher to the muzzle of his HK machine gun. The rooftop .50 was useless against the heavily clad Russian-made vehicle.

Without saying a word, Tex opened his door, swung it outward, and climbed out onto the step-up bar mounted beneath the doorsill. He hung on to the windscreen with one hand and tried to get a bead on the carrier through the open window.

“You got this bastard?” Hawke yelled at him. The troop carrier was getting dangerously close.

“Yeah, Pards, I got this sumbitch!”

Tex fired. There was a whoosh and a white vapor trail and suddenly the carrier’s ugly snout exploded and was engulfed in flames. It veered left and stopped, clearing the way to the snow-covered bridge. Then the carrier’s gas tank went up with a roar, putting a fiery end to everybody inside. There wasn’t much time for a victory celebration.

The Hagglund’s windscreen suddenly exploded into a thousand pieces. They were taking heavy fire from the left.

“Go! Go!” Hawke screamed at Rashid. He was leaning across the boy, firing his .45 pistol out the driver’s window. He saw two drop and kept firing. Maybe not hitting many hostiles, but keeping up appearances. Unlike their dead comrades on the ground behind him, Hawke thought, these troops meant business. The palace guards, no doubt. Fiercely loyal, fight-to-the-death types. The only way to do this was just blow right by any resistance and get inside that tunnel. Thank God he had Quick on the rooftop fifty and Tex riding shotgun.

Seconds before they reached the bridge, Rashid screamed something in Arabic and yanked the wheel hard right, locking it. Hawke thought he’d taken a bullet but, no, the kid was just trying to kill them all. The ATV veered sharply right of the bridge and plowed through a snowbank, accelerating toward the yawning black emptiness of the bottomless crevasse. They were going over an edge where the black ice of the mountain plateau disappeared into nothingness.

“Jump! Now!” Hawke screamed at Patterson, who was still hanging out the open door. “You, too, Tommy!” It was their only chance. He himself was locked in a desperate struggle with the boy for control of the wheel. He smashed his pistol against Rashid’s hand on the wheel, but the kid would not let go. Hawke was desperately stabbing at the brake pedal with his left foot. The Hagglund fishtailed, slowing, for he’d finally found the brakes, but it was still headed, skidding wildly now, out of control, straight for the precipice. The vehicle’s tracks finally stopped, but not the forward momentum.

It was too late.

The bottom fell out of Alex’s stomach as the cab lurched over the edge and dropped into space. Hawke and the boy were thrown forward against the empty windscreen frame. The crazily spinning view below was sickening. A ten-thousand foot drop into nowhere. There was a screeching metal sound and the cab bounced against the face of the crevasse and jerked to a stop, suspended in nothingness. Hawke remained completely still, his heart pounding, and did nothing for a second, willing himself not to breathe or move a muscle.

He felt the vehicle’s weight shift. Tom Quick was somehow still on the roof, most likely clinging to the base of the .50-caliber machine gun though he couldn’t see him. Where the hell was Patterson? Had he jumped in time? The door was still attached, at least the small part of it he could see, but it was hanging down at a weird angle.

He knew instinctively what had happened. They were hanging by a thread. The cab itself had gone over the edge but not the troop carrier they were towing. The brakes had slowed them just enough to prevent the entire rig from going over the side. Only the weight of the carrier up on the ledge, and the men inside it, stood between him and the abyss. Without even breathing, he craned his head around and looked up through the cab’s rear window. The carrier was up there, all right, tracks perched out over the lip of icy rock. He could hear no automatic fire. It was dead still except for the wind whistling through the cab.

That’s when he saw Patterson’s bloody hand appear. He hadn’t jumped, he was still clinging to the dangling doorframe. Somehow, Tex had reached up and grabbed a visible section of the door. The fingers were clawing at the metal, the joints showing white with strain.

“Hey, Pards,” he heard the cracked voice below say, “Gimme a hand, here, willya?”

“Hold on!” Hawke shouted. Hawke knew he had only one chance and he had to take it now. He hooked his left foot up under the dashboard and dove for the hand. The cab lurched sickeningly over to the right with his weight shift, the metal door Tex hung from banging against the rock face. Christ. He had one shot here. Hawke shot his right arm out and lunged for Texas Patterson’s hand. A fraction of a second more and he might have grabbed it. He watched in horror as five bloody fingers peeled away from the frame one at a time and disappeared before he could reach them.

Tex didn’t scream going down.

“Jesus Christ,” Hawke whispered, his breath ragged. He used his foot to haul himself back to the center of the seat and the cab swung back, grinding against the ice. Hawke slowly craned his head around and stared at the ashen-faced Rashid. “You bloody bastard,” he said to the kid. “Goddamn you to hell for what you did.”

Rashid had lost it. He was wide-eyed, staring down through the windscreen at the bottomless gorge below, taking rapid, shallow breaths. Watching Tex plunge ten thousand feet had taken a good deal of the religious fervor out of the holy warrior. Hawke briefly considered two options and opted for his second idea.

“Get out,” he said.

The kid stared at him, his eyes unseeing, too scared to understand what Hawke had said, perhaps. Vocal chords paralyzed with fear.

Hawke, barely keeping his emotions under control now, spoke.

“You wanted to go to Paradise? You’re looking at it.”

“Please—”

“Now! Get the hell out.”

Without waiting for a reply, Hawke reached gingerly across Rashid’s chest and unlatched the driver’s door. The cab had ended up tilted just enough to the driver’s side that gravity did the job for him. Rashid screamed and reached out for something, anything to hold on to, but all he got was a fistful of air. He slid straight out and down into oblivion. He fell so far, Hawke lost sight of him. He took a deep breath, said a silent farewell prayer for Tex, and weighed his options.

He noticed the cab had shifted slightly back toward an even keel with the sudden loss of weight on the driver’s side. Good. But now he could see one of Quick’s bloody boots dangling below the windscreen. Bad.

“Tommy?” Hawke said into his mike, praying they could still communicate.

“Jesus Christ,” Quick said, his voice quaking.

“Yeah. I know. Just hold on.”

“Oh, God, Skipper. I—I think my hand is broke. I’m having a hard time holding—”

“Just don’t move, Tommy. You just hang on, I’m going to get us out of this.
Widowmaker? FlyBaby?
Copy?”

“Copy,” was the terse, one-word reply from one of his guys still inside the troop carrier precariously balanced up on the ledge.

“Everybody all right up there?” Hawke asked.

“We’re all afraid to move, sir,” Gidwitz said. “Weight shift.”

“Yeah. Probably wise. This situation is a bit iffy. Can you see anything up there?”

“We’ve got the rear doors cracked. Tangos are approaching. Cautious, but here they come.”

“Listen carefully,” Hawke said. “You’ve got mountaineering equipment in that thing, I saw it. Nylon lines, grapnels, carabineers. Secure one end of a line somewhere solid inside. Anything seriously bolted down. Do it now. Then, two guys go out the door, one high, one low. Start shooting as you go out. No full auto. Three-round bursts and make them count, save your mags. Everybody still in the truck covers the third guy who goes out two seconds later with the bitter end of the line, heads straight for the steel bridge and takes two wraps around the rail. Got that?”

Hawke heard a sharp grinding, screeching sound above him. The cab dropped, a stomach-turning foot or so, maybe more, and jerked to a stop. A hard rain of rock and ice from above clattered on the body of the cab. Then it stopped. Nobody said anything.

“Uh, roger that last, Skipper,” Gidwitz said, finally breaking the tense silence. “Line is already secure here inside the carrier. Ring bolt in the floor. Taking it out myself. What about the loss of ballast weight when we bolt out of—”

“I can’t blame you if I’m dead, now, can I? It’s all we’ve got, Ronnie. Ready?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Gidwitz said.

“Go.”

It was probably not much longer than two minutes, but in the swaying frozen cab it felt more like two hours before the distinctive tune of automatic-weapons fire ceased and he heard Gidwitz’s voice through his headphones again. “Double lines rigged to the bridge here, Skipper. Solid. We got six tangos down, nobody else moving up here. We’ve secured the area.”

“Good. Get a slip-harness down here to Sergeant Quick. Now. He’s still out on the roof, holding on to the .50 with a broken hand. So make it extremely quick.”

“We’re on it. Rigging a second one for you, Skipper. Uh, and Chief Patterson’s status? We heard—”

“Yeah. You heard. Two rigs will do it. He, uh—”

“For God and country, sir,” Gidwitz said, his voice choked with emotion.

K
HALID SLIPPED OFF HIS HEADPHONES, RAISED HIS ARMS
over his head and stretched, yawning deeply. He looked across at Johnny Adare in the first officer’s seat and smiled. They were flying at high altitude, maxed out at the 747’s limit, 45,000 feet, on a north-westerly heading, a thick band of clouds beneath them. He was flying at Mach .84, normal cruising speed, 567 miles per hour, helped by a slight tailwind. They were due to descend though the cloud layer to their rendezvous at 0900 hours, local time. Half an hour. Good time to take a leak, grab a cup of coffee and stretch his legs.

He reached down into his black leather flight case and pulled out the red-and-white-striped envelope the boss had given to him back at the hangar. Instructions. Bin Wazir had told him not to open it until 0830 hours, just prior to the time when he was due to initiate his descent to 35,000. At that altitude, he would look for his target. He had a good ten minutes to take a break before initiating his descent for the rendezvous.

“She’s all yours,” Khalid said, sitting back and relinquishing control of the aircraft to Johnny. “You want any coffee?” He didn’t ask the doctor. The man had been sound asleep in the jumpseat for the last two hours and Khalid had learned long ago what they say about sleeping dogs, especially a mangy little cur like this one.

“Sure, Cap’n,” Johnny said with his usual cocky grin. “Long as you’re up.”

Khalid handed him the envelope. “We’re supposed to open this just before we begin our descent to 35,000. Try not to open it till I get back.”

“Is this a test?”

“Actually, it is.”

“One day, maybe you’ll trust me.”

“Yeah. One day. Ditch the autopilot and keep an eye on this,” he said, tapping the dial of a newly installed instrument. It was military, called a TAR, Target Acquisition Radar. As Khalid had told bin Wazir, finding another airplane out here in the middle of the Pacific would be next to impossible without it. The antiquated 747’s forward-looking radar was good for only one thing, weather. Locating another airplane in the vastness of open sky and sea that was the North Pacific was going to be difficult, under the best of circumstances. Even if you possessed the plotted waypoints from the target’s own main GPS nav systems, which he did. They’d been downloaded in Singapore along with his transponder code.

“His waypoint intercept’s not coming up for another twenty-five minutes,” Adare pointed out. He had the chart on his knee, with the target’s waypoints carefully penned in red ink.

“Yeah, well. Keep an eye on it anyway. This is an uncertain world we live in.”

Khalid squeezed past Soong in the jumpseat and opened the cockpit door. He took one last look at his copilot, smiled and left the cabin, pulling the door shut behind him.

Soong’s eyes popped open.

“Yes-s!” he said, pumping his fist like some ridiculous American football hero on television.

Johnny looked over at his new business partner. Couple of million quid, what the hell. He said, “Lock that door, Dr. Soong. It is now officially time to rock and roll.”

Soong leapt up and fumbled for the bolt that would secure the cockpit. For a scientist, his knowledge of basic aircraft design was pathetic.

“The red handle,” Adare said. “Shove it left until you hear it lock into place. Jesus.”

Satisfied the cockpit door was locked, Adare now gave Khalid a few minutes. He knew his routine. He’d stroll aft, go back in the upper cabin galley to chat up the girls for a couple of minutes while he sipped his coffee, then make his way to the head on the lower deck. Satisfied this was now done, Adare reached over and twisted the dial that opened the outflow valves, dumping the cabin pressure. The effect on the passengers in the main cabin would be sudden and unpleasant. Dizziness, lightheadedness. He could already hear them complaining out there. It would only be momentary, however.

“Climb up here where I can keep an eye on you,” he said to Soong, indicating the now-vacant pilot’s seat. The doctor did as he was told, grinning like a giddy twelve-year-old. If he’d had a little pair of plastic wings, he couldn’t have been happier. “Good,” Johnny said. “I’m going to seal the cockpit and turn on the emergency oxygen up here. Reach over your left shoulder. Pilot’s emergency oxygen mask is located just there.” The cockpit had its own system, completely separate from the rest of the aircraft. Drug-free zone, Johnny thought, smiling.

He and Soong both fitted the masks over their faces. Then Johnny thumbed the switch that would cause the masks to drop from the passenger cabin overheads and start the flow of oxygen from the doctor’s newly installed canisters. Next, he switched on the intercom and spoke in his most reassuring pilot voice.

“Well, we’ve just had a loss of cabin pressure as I’m sure you’ve all noticed. Nothing serious. Some kind of temporary malfunction. Just place the emergency oxygen masks over your faces and breathe normally. I’ll begin a descent to a lower altitude. Just relax, ladies, it’s all under control.”

Only then did First Officer Adare kick off the autopilot and take full command of the 747.

It took Khalid all of ten seconds to appear outside the cockpit and start trying to beat the door down. His muffled screams could be heard clearly but Johnny decided to ignore them. He’d get tired of it after awhile, realizing there was absolutely nothing he could do at this point. The new Kevlar door was reinforced. At any rate, pretty soon Dr. Soong’s drugs would kick in, and Khalid would be a walking zombie just like the rest of them back there.

Whatever concoction Soong had added to the oxygen flowing throughout the airplane, it was now dispersed. Adare’s experience taught him that everyone was mildly panic-stricken when the masks dropped in front of their faces. They tended to gulp the oxygen and suck it deep.

0900. Johnny Adare ripped open the Pasha’s envelope and handed it to Soong. “Read it,” he said, easing the wheel forward. Time to take her down below the cloud layer and have a look around. They’d stayed at 45,000 to avoid being spotted and for better fuel efficiency in the thinner air. The only thing he was now actually concerned about was fuel consumption. The plane normally carried 64,000 U.S. gallons. Reconfigured, the plane he was flying had an additional 6,000 gallons. His calculations had them getting to LAX, no problem, but how much could he afford to burn down at low levels looking around for the target? It was a question he would have liked to put to Khalid, but Khalid was no longer a factor in his life.

“What’s it say?” he asked Soong who was scanning the contents. Soong knew everything that was contained in the document. He’d written it. But there was no need to give Johnny more information than he required. Both Adare and Khalid had been informed that they were to intercept a British passenger plane en route from Singapore to Los Angeles. Precisely what would happen to that airplane, the two pilots had been informed at Suva Island, was contained in the sealed document. They’d both been promised a huge amount of money not to ask any questions.

“It is complete information on the rendezvous target. British Airways flight from Singapore. Flight #77. Waypoint intercepts marked on the charts. Biographical information on the pilot and copilot that we will need if we are challenged. Good stuff! Very thorough!”

Challenged? What the hell did that mean, Adare wondered but knew enough not to ask. Adare descended through the broken cloud layer and leveled off at the target’s designated altitude, 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. Empty sky, empty sea. He was now five minutes from the target’s next known waypoint. He should acquire the target on his radar screen any minute. He studied the TAR, looking for a tiny blip. Nothing.

He reduced his airspeed and flew on, imagining everything that could have possibly gone wrong. The list was disturbingly long. Ten minutes later, he was starting to sweat. Twenty minutes later, at 0930 hours, he was beginning to think something was seriously wrong. He flew what hurricane hunters called an Alpha pattern, a flight path that looks like a giant X when drawn on a chart. The fact that he was possibly late and not early began to creep into his mind. Then, the TAR began to beep.

“Well, hello there!” Johnny said, easing his throttle back to fifty percent and descending a thousand feet to make room for the new arrival fast approaching from the rear.

“Yes!” Soong echoed, pointing to the glowing blip on the screen, “Our twin brother! Identical twin! Good, good!”

The doctor had removed a small digital video camera from his case. It was wired to a bizarre contraption with a small dish antenna. He now put the camera viewfinder to his eye and began filming the empty sky outside the cockpit window.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Adare asked him.

“Bin Wazir likes to watch,” Soong said.

Was there no bleeding end to this little sod’s madness?

Captain Simon Breckenridge, a ruddy-faced man with thirty years experience, stared out his cockpit window in utter amazement. He was sitting in the left-hand pilot’s seat of British Airways Flight 77 heavy, en route to Los Angeles from Singapore. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Another company plane? Flying his precise course heading and altitude? What the bloody hell was going on here?

He looked at his copilot, John Swann, and both of them shook their heads. Mystified. This surrealist apparition did not make the least bit of sense to either man.

“Dee-dee-
dee
-dee…dee-dee-
dee
-dee…” Swann said, mimicking the old
Twilight Zone
theme.

“Company plane?” Breckenridge barked into his radio transmitter. “Identify yourself, over.”

No response.

“Speedbird on track Delta crossing one-four-zero degrees west longitude, say your call sign.”

Nothing.

“What the hell is this, Swannie?” Breckenridge eased his throttles forward. The big plane lumbered ahead, gaining on the other company plane now reducing speed and descending. When he was directly aft of the bizarrely positioned aircraft, he thumbed his mike.

“Company plane, this is British Speedbird 77 heavy, Whiskey Zulu Bravo Echo…identify yourself immediately.”

“Christ, Simon, I cannot believe what I’m seeing here,” Swann said. He was leaning forward, peering out his windscreen at the mysterious BA airplane. “He’s got—holy Jesus—he’s got our bloody tail number!” Tail numbers were deliberately small on commercial craft, to make life tougher on terrorists. But Swann was close enough now to read it.

The two giant aircraft were now flying parallel at roughly the same airspeeds. Breckenridge and Swann watched in amazement as a plane absolutely identical to their own in even the smallest detail now climbed a thousand feet and matched his altitude. The two planes were flying wing-to-wing about a thousand yards apart.

“You lost out here, Captain?” Breckenridge said into his mike and waited for a reply.

“Come back?” he finally said, when none was forthcoming.

“What the hell is that?” Adare asked the doctor. Soong had now pulled another small electronic device, brick-shaped with a flexible antenna, from inside his jacket and was punching in a sequence of numbers on a keypad.

“Radio transmitter,” the doctor said, his eyes alight. “In case our young friend over there loses his nerve.”

“Young friend?”

“Hmm. Yes. Seat 76-F.”

Soong was scanning the long row of windows on the British plane’s flank, wondering just which one the good-looking youth was sitting beside. Months earlier, he’d met the boy in a Damascus safe house and spent a week teaching him how to combine two apparently innocent and inert liquids into a powerful explosive apparatus, one triggered by a cheap, simple musical recording device called an MP3 player. If he failed to trigger it himself, Soong would use his radio transmitter and do it for him.

“Nerve? What are you talking about?”

“His name is Rafi,” Soong said, putting the camera to his eye once more and filming the British jetliner. “He is the young nephew of our beloved bin Wazir. Incredibly rich, handsome. Girls, girls, girls! Yet, he wishes to martyr himself and—Look! You are getting too close, Johnny! Get away, get away! Now, I tell you!”

Adare banked the plane sharply and rolled away. Oblivious to the cries and shouts of the four-hundred-some-odd terrified souls in his care, he climbed three thousand feet in a matter of seconds. It was barely enough to avoid the jagged chunks of metal flying in all directions.

The sudden and unspeakably violent explosion in row 76 on the starboard side of BA 77 broke the back of the airplane. People seated very close to the blast simply came apart, shards of the bomb and nearby objects fragmenting them. A fire raced through the airplane in the few seconds before it began to break up. The four Pratt & Whitney engines were still providing thrust, but the aircraft was no longer stable. It was experiencing horrific gyrations. Within five or six more seconds, the plane was in chunks. Seatbacks were collapsing and severely traumatized human beings were slipping out of their seat belts, thrown into the sky from what little remained of Flight 77.

Their fall from the sky lasted four minutes.

The passengers, and a few of them were still technically alive, fell seven miles, having attained the terminal velocity of any falling body, 120 miles per hour, during the first five hundred feet. Brutal impact against the ocean’s surface is what killed anyone aboard Flight 77 who had miraculously survived the explosion, the frigid air, and the horrific velocity. On impact with the water, the ribs break and become sharp jagged knives, eviscerating the heart, lungs, and aorta. The aorta also ruptures because part of it is fixed to the body cavity, and the internal organs keep moving for a fraction of a second even though the body that contains them has stopped dead.