Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (67 page)

           
“No! Launch the attack immediately!”
he shouted. “Do it. Let Queen Salaam be the ruler of the largest graveyard in
Africa
.”

 
         
Jadallah
Zuwayy stomped off to his private residence, kicking furniture and individuals
out of his way with equal fury. “How
dare
she?” he shouted as he slammed the door to his apartment closed. “How dare that
bitch spit in my face like that? Who does she think she is?”

 
          
“Who,
my lord?” a woman’s thickly accented voice asked behind him.

 
          
“An
Egyptian whore that has the unmitigated
balls
to tell me what to do!”

 
          
The
woman approached him, naked, holding a crystal glass of thick, potent
arkasus
, or licorice brandy, in one
hand, and a silver tray with a linen napkin covering it. He tossed down the
brandy in one gulp. She set the tray down on a nightstand beside a lounge sofa,
then kissed the back of his neck and started to massage his shoulders. “Why
don’t you just eliminate this Egyptian whore, my lord?” the woman asked.

 
          
“Because
she was just elected president of the Muslim Brotherhood, and she is a guest in
my country,” Zuwayy said. “Do you know nothing of Arab culture, Russian?”

           
Ivana Vasilyeva felt for the knot
of bone at the base of Zuwayy’s long, scrawny neck, then counted the right
number of vertebrae up—right
there.
Snap that bone and Zuwayy would become a helpless lump of flesh on the floor,
unable to do anything—except feel pain. But she simply continued her massage.
“Forgive me, my lord,” Vasilyeva said. “You must instruct me about your country
and all its customs.”

           
Zuwayy turned, ran a hand roughly
over a nipple, then pinched it, hard. Vasilyeva opened her mouth in a half-yelp
of pain and half-moan of pleasure. “The first lesson is: Women must learn to be
subservient,” Zuwayy said. “You are nothing but bleeding, whining creatures who
respond better to the lash than to reason or reality. The quicker you
understand this, the happier your life will be.”

           
“Yes, master,” Vasilyeva said.

 
          
Zuwayy
kissed her lips roughly, released her nipple, then lay down on the lounger. He
rolled up the sleeve of his right arm. “You were recommended to me because you
had a unique talent. Show me. And if you disappoint me, you shall pay dearly
for it.”

 
          
“I
understand, master.” Vasilyeva removed the linen napkin from the tray,
revealing a hypodermic syringe and a rubber hose. She wrapped the hose around
Zuwayy’s biceps, kissed his right hand, then curled his fingers for him, silently
telling him to make a fist. Zuwayy never felt the needle slip into his vein;
never felt a thing as Vasilyeva injected the drug.

 
          
What
an idiot, Vasilyeva thought. She had bribed a
Tripoli
drug pusher to spread her name around as a
trained nurse and anesthesiologist; she had been admitted to the residence
almost immediately. Zuwayy liked whores and he liked heroin—he was a slave to
both. But apparently he disliked having his nurses and his whores around for
too long, so he usually had them killed after about a week in the residence.

 
          
That
was not going to happen to Vasilyeva.

 
          
The
drug she had administered was not heroin but thiopental sodium, an
ultra-fast-acting, short-duration sedative. Zuwayy was not unconscious, just
very relaxed. Vasilyeva removed the rubber tube from his arm and swabbed the
injection site. “Do you feel all right, Highness?”

 
          
“You
can leave me now.”

 
          
“Not
quite yet, Highness. Where is the female American prisoner, the one called
McLanahan, and the other American prisoners?”

 
          
“The
American spies? In my interrogation facility.”

 
          
“Which
ones? Where?”

 
          
“Who
are you, woman? Why do you care about the Americans?”

 
          
“I’m
here to take care of your problem with the Americans, if you just tell me where
they are.”

 
          
“I
don’t care to tell you.”

           
Vasilyeva had to remember to be
patient. Thiopental sodium, also known by its brand name Sodium Pentothal, was
just a mild sedative, not the much-vaunted “truth serum” fiction writers made
it out to be. If the subject didn’t want to talk, thiopental sodium couldn’t
make them do it. Eventually, however, she could get the information from him.
She needed to learn a little more about his peccadilloes, fantasies, fears, and
weaknesses. One or two more days and she would have him eating out of her hand.

 
          
She
prepared a small dose of heroin and, as expertly as the first time, injected it
into a vein, “jacking it off’ by drawing blood into the syringe in and out
several times before injecting it all into his arm.

 
          
He
looked at Vasilyeva with half-closed, dreamy eyes. “Are you going to kill me
now?” he asked.

 
          
“I
have no such orders, unless you resisted,” she said.

 
          
“Good.
I was hoping to get rid of those damned Americans anyway—I should’ve shipped
them off to Mersa Matruh and had them zapped with the neutron bombs along with
the others.”

 
          
“How
very interesting. So you deliberately killed those prisoners at Mersa Matruh
with a neutron weapon? It wasn’t an Egyptian insurgency group or Hamas or
Hizb’allah or any of the other right-wing Islamic terrorist groups? It was
you?”

 
          
“Sure.
I wasn’t going to let the Egyptians get the glory for saving them. I wish I did
the Americans too.”

 
          
“Of
course. So, is it true that you are not really a Libyan king, but just an
ordinary army soldier who is pretending to be a king?”

 
          
“Pretty
good scam, wasn’t it? I’ve got half the world believing I’m a fucking god. It’s
priceless. Some fools will believe anything you tell them as long as they think
they’ll get something good out of it.”

 
          
“How
clever of you. What will you do now, Highness?”

 
          
“Attack
Egypt
, again,” Zuwayy said. “That bitch Salaam
won’t back me with the oil cartel, so I’m going to have to destroy Salimah.
Actually, not destroy it—just the workers. I’ll keep the oil fields for myself.
I’ve got enough troops to take the whole southern part of
Egypt
.”

 
          
“Did
you already give the order to attack?”

 
          
“Yes.
And that cowardly bastard Fazani better follow my orders too.”

 
          
She
picked up the phone beside the lounger. “Call off the attack, Zuwayy. Killing
all those workers won’t get you any closer to the oil.” But he had already
drifted off into his drug-induced world, oblivious to the real one.

 
          
SURT
AIR BASE,
NORTHERN LIBYA
 
THE NEXT EVENING

 
          
As
soon as the three fighters fit their afterburners, the copilot started counting:
“
Talaeta
,
itnen, waehid
...
daeyikh!”
The
pilot released brakes and slowly moved the throttles up to full military power,
let them stabilize a few seconds, then pushed the throttles into afterburner
zone. He waited for the inevitable
kohha
—the
“cough”—as the old fuel valves struggled to keep raw fuel flowing into the
afterburner cans. Half the time, especially if the pilot advanced the throttles
too fast, a valve stuck or failed and the afterburner would blow out
completely. But it didn’t happen this time—the nozzles opened, the fuel-flow
needles jumped, and the Libyan Tupolev-22 bomber leapt down the runway. Six
seconds behind him, the second Tu-22 bomber began its takeoff roll.

 
          
A
third bomber wasn’t so lucky—both of its
Dobrynin RD
-7M-2 turbojet engines’ afterburners blew
out seconds after engagement. The pilot quickly yanked the throttles back to
military power and tried once more to light the afterburners, inching the
throttles up over the detent in slow, careful increments. But it was no use, and
the third Tu-22 bomber aborted the takeoff, its screeching, smoking brakes
barely managing to stop the two-hundred-thousand-pound bomber before it rolled
off the end of the runway.

 
          
Libyan
air force major Jama Talhi, the pilot and flight leader, said a silent prayer
as he retracted the landing gear and flaps, watching the hydraulic needles
jumping wildly in their cases. Hydraulic fluid was even more expensive than
fuel or weapons, and because it was not changed as often as it should be,
contamination was a problem. Amazingly, everything was working. Talhi, a
ten-year veteran of the A1 Quwwat al Jawwiya al Jamahiriyah al Arabiya al
Libya, was the Libyan air force’s most experienced Tu-22 bomber pilot, with a
grand total of just over three hundred hours in this ex-Soviet medium
supersonic bomber. In any other air force, three hundred hours would mean you
were hardly out of flight school—in
Libya
, surviving that many hours usually meant a
promotion. Tupolev-22 bombers were notorious maintenance hogs—they routinely
cannibalized as many as ten planes to keep three in the air. This time, even
that ratio wasn’t enough. Talhi had experienced every possible malfunction and
inflight emergency in a Tu- 22, but had never crashed one. That made him top
dog in the Libyan air force.

 
          
“Sahra
flight, check.”

 
          
“Two,”
his wingman replied. The third plane had already reported aborting its takeoff,
and the timing on this mission was so critical that they could not wait for
him. They would have to do the mission with one-third less firepower.

 
          
“Dufda
flight, Sahra flight checking in.”

 
          
“Sahra
flight, acknowledged,” the leader of the flight of three Libyan Mikoyan-23
fighters replied. They had launched from Suit Air Base in northern
Libya
just ahead of the bombers and were already
at patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet. It took just a few minutes for the
two formations to join up, and they proceeded east, flying in loose formation
as the crews completed checklists and got ready for the attack. “No contact
yet, but we expect company any minute.”

 
          
Just
ten minutes later, Major Talhi began a slow descent, keeping cruise power in
all the way down until his airspeed approached six hundred knots. They received
a few bleeps of their Sirena radar-warning receiver from the Egyptian air
defense base at Siwah, but they were below radar coverage in moments, cruising
at nearly the speed of sound across the northern
Libyan Desert
.

           
But they were not low enough for
Egypt’s main air defense system—a former American Navy E-2C Hawkeye radar plane,
orbiting over the desert just north of Al-Jilf Air Base in southwest Egypt. The
powerful AN/APS-145 radar of the E-2 Hawkeye spotted the Libyan planes two
hundred miles away, and the radar controllers immediately vectored in Egyptian
alert fighters—a mixture of former Chinese, French, and even Russian jets from
three different bases in central and southern Egypt.

 
          
“Sahra,
Sahra, be advised, Egyptian fighters inbound, range fifty miles and closing,”
the lead pilot of the MiG-23 fighter escorts reported.

 
          
“Sahra
flight copies,” Talhi responded. “Sahra flight, go to point nine.” The pilot
pushed his throttles until the airspeed indicator hit six hundred and sixty
knots—eleven miles a minute, or nine-tenths the speed of sound.