Assassin (47 page)

A
DARE WATCHED IN STUNNED DISBELIEF AS FOUR
A
MERICAN
Navy F/A-18E Super Hornets positioned themselves directly fore and aft of his airplane. And, there were two more right on his bloody wingtips, maybe a foot of separation to port and starboard. He could fucking well read the serial numbers on the bright yellow-tipped air-to-air missiles tucked up under their wings.

Five hundred feet above him was another squadron of fighters, Hornets from down at Miramar. His repeated calls to the tower in the last three or four minutes had gone unanswered. How the living hell, he wondered then, did he get himself into this bloody mess? Oh, yeah. The doctor and his money. Soong was begging him to just put the plane down. The Navy fighters scared the bejesus out of the little guy. Not Johnny Adare, however. He still felt safe.

“You think I’m putting this thing down at an Air Force base? That’s suicide! We’re out of here. No bloody way in hell they will shoot down an unarmed civilian carrier! We’ll go to Mexico, I don’t know, Alaska—”

“Johnny, calm down. Not to worry, okay? I can talk us out of this. It’s the only way out, now. Give me the radio.”

“Talk us out of it? You are wholly insane, man. I thought this whole thing was going to be a walk in the park! We land, let all the zombies disembark. They go blow up a few nuclear reactors or what have you while we walk away rich. Now—”

“Listen. They will shoot, Johnny. That 9/11 plane that went down in Pennsylvania? If it had not crashed, the president had ordered them to shoot it down before it took out the White House. I know this.”

“Jesus Christ,” Adare said, and then he heard a squawk in his headphones.

“Speedbird, I am the Navy F-18 Hornet riding on your starboard wingtip. Captain Wiley Reynolds, Top Hat Squadron leader, U.S. Navy. I say again, you are ordered to initate descent and land your aircraft immediately at Edwards Air Force Base. If you maintain current altitude and continue to disregard this order, I am authorized to take offensive measures against you. I repeat, descend and land your aircraft on Edwards runway two-niner at once. Over.”

“He means it!” Soong shouted. “He’ll shoot! Oh, my God!” Khalid was shouting at him too, pounding on the cockpit door again. Johnny couldn’t hear what he was saying out there, but he had a pretty good idea.

“Fuck you, Navy,” Johnny Adare said.

“Hey,
Gunfighter,
am I hearing things?” another Top Hat pilot said. “I think the man just said something impolite. Over.”

“British Airways, I say again, this is the U.S. Navy Super Hornet on your starboard wing. I am rapidly running out of patience with you. You familiar with the AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles you see under my wings, sir? If you do not want to see one or two headed up your tailpipe, I strongly advise you to begin your descent immediately. Follow us down.”

Johnny looked again at his fuel indicators and felt his whole life running out of gas. There was no way he’d make it even to Mexico, much less that old WWII airstrip up in the Aleutians he’d been thinking about. Christ. Only half an hour ago, he’d been dreaming about that first dry martini tonight in the Polo Lounge. Fuck.

He now had the hollow feeling of someone whose worst nightmare had come true. All of his plans and dreams of the future, his role as the dashing pilot who retired to his little pub in his little corner of Ireland—it was rumored about town that he was very rich—all of this was finished. His future now was, what, years of imprisonment? Maybe even execution. Yeah, they shot guys for this shit now. His daughter, Caitlin, had MS. He’d never see her again.

“We’ll follow them down,” Johnny told Soong finally. “But I don’t want to hear another fucking word out of you, understand?”

“Johnny—”

“And don’t call me Johnny!”

There was a beeping noise as he reached over and disengaged the autopilot. Then he raised the speed brake and eased the controls forward to initiate his descent. A fiery orange haze hung over the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Madre mountain range beyond. Like flying into Hell, he thought, but maybe he could still find a way out. Put down on one of those desert highways or even—

“Speedbird 77 heavy, L.A. Approach, contact arrivals one-three-three point eight. You are cleared to land on runway two-five left, over.”

“British 77 heavy, yeah, thanks L.A. I don’t think we’ll be needing that runway after all. Seems we’ve been diverted to Edwards Air Force Base.”

“Uh, roger, 77, this is L.A. Approach. Have a good afternoon, sir.”

“You bet, L.A. Good day.”

“Good job, Speedbird, this is
Gunfighter.
About time you came to your senses. We’ll peel off and give you a little flying room, sir.”

The Navy jets did just that. About thirty fucking feet of flying room on all four sides. And more bleeding squadrons upstairs. The Yanks were acting like he was trying to blow up their whole bloody country. But then, maybe he was. He didn’t really know everything Poison Ivy and the Pasha had planned really, now did he?

Johnny called the hostesses and got Fiona on the intercom. She was slightly hysterical, more than slightly, but he didn’t really have the time to calm her down. He told her to get everybody strapped in, they’d be landing somewhere in a few minutes. He didn’t tell her he didn’t have a clue exactly what was waiting for them down there.

Four Super Hornets rode the big airplane all the way down. The Top Hat squadron pilots, who’d heard the entire radio exchange, all had fairly itchy trigger fingers. Whoever this bastard was, he’d blown a civilian airliner out of the sky to get here. The big plane and its many escorts came in out of the west, down over the blue Pacific idly lapping at the California beaches, through the orange haze that blanketed the city of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. They flew on, out over the Mojave Desert, some ninety miles north of the city. Johnny Adare got his gear down when they told him to. Five minutes later, he was looking at the sprawl that was Edwards Air Force Base. With a whole lot of interested parties looking on, Flight 00 from Suva Island finally touched down on runway two-niner.

Flashing blue and red lights lined both sides of the runway. A squadron of recently scrambled Edwards AFB F-117A Stealth fighters roared overhead in the opposite direction, looking like a flock of evil black wizards. Emergency fire equipment, HAZMAT, and military vehicles raced across the field. Then, maybe a third of the way down the runway, Adare saw an Abrams M1A2 main battle tank squadron, flanked in a V-formation, throwing up a huge cloud of dust as they rumbled straight towards his plane.

“Tanks! Good Christ!” Adare shouted, “They’ve got the whole fucking army waiting down here! You still think you can talk you’re way out of this?”

“Yes,” Soong said quietly. He held up something that looked like a shiny football and smiled. Johnny didn’t have time for his or anybody else’s bullshit anymore.

He shoved his throttles right to the firewall and the big jet roared forward down the runway toward the oncoming tank squadron. He rotated, and his gear cleared the turrets of the lead tanks by maybe ten feet.

“I don’t know about you, but this ain’t my idea of retirement, Doc. Fuck it.”

Fifteen minutes later, while Johnny Adare was circling low over downtown Los Angeles at about two thousand feet, Hawke and the president, half a world apart, were engaged in a very urgent and private conversation.

“We’re about a New York minute from Armageddon, here, Alex. He now claims he’s got a nuclear device aboard that plane.”

“You want my advice, Mr. President?”

“Yes, Alex, by God, I certainly do.”

Every minute or so his loop meant Adare was flying directly into the setting sun and it was killing his eyes. He was bloody well exhausted now. He just wanted to go to sleep. Doctor Soong had ceased his wailing and was balled up into the fetal position in the left-hand seat, cradling the small football-shaped nuclear device in his hands, his finger curled around the ignition switch.

“They won’t do it, Johnny. I’m telling you. They won’t shoot. They just won’t risk a catastrophic radioactive explosion over this city. We’ll think of something. Yes, yes, a little time to think is all we need.”

“You lied to me, you little bastard. You told me you didn’t load any fooking nukes aboard. Too unstable, you said. Christ.”

“I am a congenital liar. It is something I cannot help.”

“Jesus. I don’t—we can’t keep this bluff up. We’re just about running out of fuel here. I’ll have to ditch the goddamn thing pretty soon.”

“It’s not a bluff!” Soong said, his black eyes gleaming. “Never a bluff, Johnny, when you hold precisely the cards you say you hold. Look! You see that tall group of buildings? Near the golf course? It’s called Century City. Take us down there. Excellent. High-target opportunity.”

“What the fuck,” Adare said wearily.

Johnny descended to a slow elliptical pattern about a thousand feet above the gleaming complex of office towers. He could see traffic backed up at the stoplights along two major intersecting boulevards. Rush hour. The light was pretty now. Kind of a rosy gold. There was a lush green golf course just beyond a thick hedge along one of the boulevards. Another world, fifty yards away from all the cars. People just going about their lives. Playing golf on one side of the hedge. Headed home on the other. Going to the cinema. Having a pint at the local pub. Kissing a pretty girl in a dark corner.

He heard a noise in his headphones.

“How long you want to play this game, Speedbird?” the Navy Super Hornet pilot now said. At first, when he’d bolted on the runway, the guy he called Navy had been extremely pissed. That’s when Soong got on the radio. And, now that they all knew about Soong’s Pigskin, and all the other suitcase nukes they were apparently carrying in the belly of the plane, Navy and everybody else had calmed way down. Or, at least Navy had lowered the decibel level over the radio.

Nice guy, Navy, Johnny thought. Name was Reynolds. Sounded like a guy you wouldn’t mind having a few pops with. Adare banked the big plane and descended five hundred feet. The shouting and screaming in the back of the bus had died down. Probably praying back there, Johnny imagined.

“How much longer you plan to dick around up here, Cap?” Navy said.

“How long you got, Navy?” Johnny asked him.

“Oh, we never close.”

“Well, I guess we just—hey! What are you doing with that thing? I don’t—don’t want to—don’t—”

“You’re breaking up, Cap. What did you—”

Muffled sounds and a high-pitched noise were coming from the cockpit. What they heard was the sound of Adare seizing the crazed doctor by the scruff of his scrawny neck. Soong had pushed a series of buttons on the device and it was now emitting a high keening sound. He slammed the Indian’s head repeatedly against the windscreen, not stopping until the glass was smeared with bright red blood. Poison Ivy was screaming now, begging Johnny to stop.

Finally, knowing he was fast losing consciousness, Soong attempted to detonate the nuclear device. But, in order to do so, he slightly shifted his death grip on the trigger mechanism. In that infinite fraction of a second, Johnny Adare seized the device and snatched it from Soong’s grasp, breaking the man’s wrist in the doing. Soong howled in fresh pain and lunged for his creation, but Adare sent him flying back into the pilot’s seat with the back of his left hand.

Captain Wiley Reynolds, like everyone else overhearing the life or death drama in the 747 cockpit, held his breath for what seemed an eternity.

“Is the president still on the line?” they finally heard a voice say. It was the pilot, Adare.

“I am,” Jack McAtee said.

“I, uh, I don’t want to do this—shut the fuck up! I’m talking to the president—I don’t want to do this, sir. Kill all those innocent people down there.”

“No, you definitely do not want to do that.”

“Is there some, uh, arrangement we could make?”

“You mean, some kind of immunity?”

“That’s correct.”

“We could talk about that. I would need your absolute assurance that the man in your cockpit has disarmed his device.”

“He doesn’t have it anymore. I took it away from him. I made him disarm…I don’t think it’s armed any longer.”

There was a pause as everyone drew a collective breath. Finally, the president spoke.

“I won’t negotiate with terrorists, son. As long as you are in my country’s sovereign airspace, you are a terrorist. Get twelve miles out over the Pacific, we can have a little talk.”

“Yeah. Okay. Listen, thanks a lot, sir.”

“You are doing the right thing. That’s all I can say.”

“Hey, Navy?” Adare said, after a moment.

“Yeah, Cap.”

“Can you guys give me a little breathing room here?”

“Yeah, will do. You’ll want to climb now to five thousand and go to heading two-seven-zero, Cap. I say again, climb and maintain five thousand, heading two-seven-zero. Over.”

The squadron of Super Hornets closest to the big airliner gave the target a thousand more yards fore and aft. Reynolds and his wingman over on the 747’s port side peeled away, decelerated, and tucked in behind flight 77.