Assassin (39 page)

The guy started screaming, flopping around. Digging his own grave, which would save Stoke a lot of trouble.

“ ’Bout damn time,” Stoke said to Ross.

“Sorry. Just woke up,” Ross said. He picked up the Cypress branch and it was just long enough.

“You just about burned beyond recognition.”

“I got blown up.”

“Looks like it.”

“
Señor,
I beg you!” Scissor screamed. He was up to his waist already. “Save me—”

“Save you?” Stoke said, whipping around furiously and looking at him dead in the eyes, one last time. “
Save
you?”

“Please!”

“Ain’t nobody can save you, Rodrigo. Take a good look at yourself. You going straight to Hell. And you halfway there already.”

It took the man with no eyes a long time to die. He flapped his arms back and forth, making snow angels in the muck, but it didn’t help much. He was going down all right, just as Stoke had told Ross he would, back at Vizcaya. Stokely and Ross sat on the clump of dry grass and watched. He pleaded and begged for a while. In the end, all that was still showing was the tip of his nose, just like in that movie about Africa that Stoke saw when he was a little kid.

He was there, and then a half-second later he wasn’t. Right after that, the exact same two little bubbles from the jungle movie.

Pop. Pop.

“You hurt?” Stoke finally asked Ross.

“A little. Heard him coming. Slipped over the side. Tried your reed-breathing technique. It worked okay until the ammo went up and blew me out of the water. You?”

“Couple of boo-boos, that’s all.”

“I don’t think you need your cummerbund anymore. You could tie that around your leg.”

“Good idea. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“You know what I like about this, Ross?”

“Can’t imagine.”

“At the end, I mean the very end, I do believe Rodrigo truly knew which direction he was headed in.”

“Yeah.”

“You see that, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Vicky, she was standing on the church steps. The girl was already halfway to heaven when she died.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. I guess that’s all you can ask for.”

Stoke got up and stuck his hand out to help Ross get back on his feet.

“I guess it is,” Ross said.

T
HE BIG
D
AIMLER ROLLED UP JUST OUTSIDE THE MASSIVE
corrugated hangar and hissed to a creaky stop. The sleek little Gulf-stream jet that would very shortly whisk bin Wazir home to the Blue Mountains was parked just outside on the tarmac, engines warming.

As Tippu hauled his ancient Vuitton steamer trunk up the steps of the G-3, Snay and the doctor stood for a moment outside the cavernous hangar filled with blazing arc lights. Snay bin Wazir’s heart was beating wildly. He knew what to expect inside, and still he was ill-prepared for the sight of the freshly painted behemoth standing in the glare of endless banks of lights.

It was beyond perfection. An exact copy. Down to the last nut and bolt.

His chief pilot, Khalid, strode forward out of the mass of technicians huddled under the nose of Snay’s now-unrecognizable 747-400. Thick cables, connected to two ancient Cray supercomputers on rolling platforms, snaked out of the nose wheel bay. Snay, grinning like a ten-year-old, opened his arms and embraced Khalid, clapping him on the back.

“It’s magnificent! Absolutely flawless!”

“Thank you, indeed, sir,” Khalid said, in his crisp English accent. He took a step back. “It does rather look like the real thing, doesn’t it?” The handsome, middle-aged pilot, whom, along with his copilot, bin Wazir had lured away from British Airways years earlier by doubling their salaries, was dressed in a perfectly pressed black pilot’s uniform, another exact copy of the original, right down to the last gold button. The pilot removed his cap and saluted. At that moment, his first officer, Johnny Adare, approached and snapped to attention. Like his senior officer, he was wearing a crisp black uniform.

“Sir!” Adare said smartly to bin Wazir. “The aircraft is nearly fueled. We have almost completed the downloading of the pirated transponder codes and GPS coordinates. My lads on the ground at Singapore Changi International Airport were able to ‘borrow’ the original flight plan for an hour and replace it onboard the BA plane without notice. As you assured us, security at the hangar there was conveniently absent. All we will need now is our friend’s squawk number, which we can easily obtain from the radio. As soon as we have finished downloading and fueling, we can begin boarding. Sir.”

“How long?” bin Wazir asked Adare, looking at his watch. The incident at the dragon cage had cost him nearly an hour. In order to avoid any high-altitude surveillance cameras, and make its rendezvous over the Pacific, his plane had to be airborne an hour before dawn.

“Two hours, sir.”

“Make it one.”

“Done,” Adare said. “I’ll whip these wog bastards a little harder.” Bin Wazir smiled. Adare still had a bit of the rowdy IRA kneecapper about him. Adare paused. “One thing, sir, a bit curious to me if you don’t mind. Passengers are due to start loading in half an hour. We have not yet received the…cargo.”

“Last-minute change of plans,” bin Wazir said. “The good doctor here will explain it in some detail. A colleague of mine. His name is Dr. I.V. Soong. He’ll be joining you in the cockpit. Stick him in the jumpseat.”

“Very good, sir,” Khalid said, looking closely first at Soong and then at his employer. “No changes to the flight plan? The destination is unchanged?”

“Nothing to be concerned about, Khalid. The blessings of Allah be upon your epic journey. I wish you a good flight.”

“Very good, sir. We’ll get moving, then. Doctor Soong? If you’ll follow us?” The pilot and second officer turned on their heels and headed for the rolling stairway leading up to the opened cabin door just aft of nose. Adare looked back over his shoulder at this strange little figure struggling with the two big black Halliburton cases. He was making a series of unintelligible noises.

“Is there something else?” Adare asked the man.

“Yes,” Dr. Soong said. “There is. You must get someone to help me, please. A mechanic. I need to make some last-minute changes in the aircraft’s emergency oxygen system. Minor alterations. Good, good! Let’s go!”

The man lugging the big black suitcases followed the two pilots up the steps to the open door of the gleaming, freshly painted Boeing 747.

“I don’t like it,” Adare whispered to Khalid, stepping inside the plane. “Not a bit of it. No payload. Now, this little bleeder wants to screw around with our air. If that’s not Poison Ivy himself, I’m Lady Margaret Thatcher.”

“I don’t much like it either,” Khalid replied. “But it’s payday, isn’t it, Johnny boy? We just drive the bus. So who the bloody hell cares.”

When this was over, Khalid was going to use his million dollars to buy that little semidetached cottage in Burton-on-Water. Send his kids to a good public school, give his wife some pretty dresses and a little garden, finally read all of T. E. Lawrence, starting with
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Johnny was going to buy that corner pub in his old Belfast neighborhood, the one he’d had his eye on for so long. He already had the clever name.
The Quilted Camel.

With 63,000 pounds of thrust per engine, the roaring jumbo jet sent volleys of thunder through the dark jungle, scattering such wildlife as perched, scurried, or slithered there, the deep rumble rolling right up the western slope of the smoldering volcano, waking up every bone-weary farmer’s wife an hour early.

Carrying vast quantities of extra fuel in her wings and tail section, and with four hundred passengers aboard, the heavily over-loaded airplane still managed to reach her takeoff speed of 180 miles per hour before she ran out of runway. She rotated, and lifted off into the predawn sky. The few early risers, farmers who stood beside their oxen at the edges of their fields to watch, shuddered at the sight. They could not have said why, but there is something unnatural and malevolent about a large airplane flying into a dark sky with no lights illuminated.

Something secret and threatening.

Lumbering down the runway in the pale light of the dying moon, a long row of darkened windows glinting from her fuselage, she looked like a ghost plane. No red flashes at the wingtips, not a single light from within, not a bulb, interior or exterior, was lit. Now, airborne, the stark black flying machine was a moving silhouette against the stars. Accelerating low out over the rooftops of the old Bambah Hotel, the pilot could now see what all the fuss was about on his radar screen. A rapidly approaching black wall; a storm front moving in from the South China Sea.

Normally, the pilot would just vector around it, or climb quickly above it. Not today. Not now. He was staying right here, right down on the deck.

Crests of the wind-whipped waves below, some as high as a three-story building, lapped at the airplane’s broad belly and spattered the undersides of her fuel-laden wings. A typhoon had been building in the South China Sea and this was the leading edge. The four Pratt & Whitney engines howled ahead into the teeth of the headwind.

“Pull up! Pull up!” Dr. Soong said, after a long minute in which the aircraft did not appear to him to be climbing. “What is the matter? Are we going down?”

There was a faint reddish glow inside the cockpit, coming from the instrument panels, and the copilot, Adare, could see the terrified expression on the man’s face. The doctor wore thick black glasses, and the greasy lenses seemed to be made of waxed paper, but Johnny Adare could still see that this was not a happy flyer.

Adare, amused, looked at this little man seated in the jumpseat just aft of the captain and gave him an ironic and assuring thumbs-up. It was a gesture the doctor found most unconvincing. Something was very wrong. Look! They were about to fly though a big wave! He covered his eyes with both hands and waited for the impact.

The 747 was carefully following a well-thought-out flight plan. Unfiled with any aviation authority, but still, her flight plan. She would fly north-northwest for one hundred miles at an altitude of fifty feet above sea level. It was dangerous and made more so by the storm, but it was necessary. For now. A hundred miles out over the Pacific, safely out of Indonesian airspace, and any radar anywhere, she would begin an ascent to an altitude above normal commercial operating routes. 45,000 feet was the plan. Barring any unforeseen difficulties, the 747 would be touching down at LAX International Airport in Los Angeles, California, in just less than twelve hours.

Two minutes after takeoff, Doctor I.V. Soong, still very agitated, said from the jumpseat, “I am wondering, Captain, how long we must stay so low to the sea? Dangerous. Very dangerous. Ground effect, you know.”

The captain turned in his seat and glared. The prospect of this hyperactive little gnome sitting behind him for twelve long hours was not appealing. He now understood why the Suva technicians referred to him as Poison Ivy. The man was indeed poisonous. It seeped from his pores. Even his breath was tainted and foul. He silently cursed bin Wazir for saddling him with this toxic little toad.

Ten long minutes into the flight they were still skimming the wave tops of the South China Sea. It was a bumpy ride, flashes of lightning lit up the cockpit, and they could hear the shouts of the passengers through the locked cockpit door. Khalid could only imagine what it must be like back there, flying through this mess in pitch-black darkness. When he’d agreed to the Pasha’s instructions, he hadn’t known about the storm.

“Cabin and cockpit lights,” he said to the copilot, and Adare flipped the two switches that turned them both on.

“Cabin and cockpit on,” Johnny said, as the cockpit was fully illuminated. “Nav lights? Wings? Beacon and strobe?”

Khalid looked at his watch. If bin Wazir ever found out about any of this, he’d most certainly be dead. He’d certainly been fired for less. Many times. But by the time bin Wazir did find out, he’d be long gone. The reins had begun to chafe long ago. In twelve short hours, he’d be out of harness forever.

“Light her up,” Khalid finally said, easing back on the wheel. He’d turn all the goddamn lights on and take the airplane up to five hundred feet. Flying this low to the water in these conditions was suicidal.

“Oh!” Soong cried. “Oh, my God!”

It was even rougher at five hundred feet. Khalid’s metal flight binder went flying across the cockpit. Soong knew they might have to fly lower than normal to avoid radar, but he’d had no idea they’d be flying at this altitude through a typhoon. He slipped out of his shoulder straps and staggered to his feet. He grabbed the back of the copilot’s seat and held on. He couldn’t stand it any longer.

“May I be having a small word with you?” Soong said, leaning over the co-pilot’s shoulder and speaking into his ear.

“What?” Adare said, lifting his headphones. He, too, was annoyed and shared Khalid’s distaste for the last-minute passenger in the cockpit.

“A word, if you please. Important. We could go down to bin Wazir’s kitchen,” Soong said, his smile no more than a minute crack, “Have a cup of tea. A spot of whiskey.”

“Took the bloody galley out,” Adare said, speaking above the engines and the storm. “Even the two bedrooms. Everything that used to be back there on the lower deck is now a fuel tank.”

“His sitting room, then?”

“Jesus. What is your bloody problem?”

“The Pasha told you. In the hangar. Last-minute change of plans. I need to explain. What needs to be done. We must speak.” The captain craned his head around and stared at Soong.

Khalid said, “If you and the Pasha cooked up some plan to do something with my airplane other than fly it across the Pacific, you’d best spit it out. Now.”

“My plans will in no way affect you nor your airplane, Captain,” Soong said. “In any way. You have my most sincere assurances.”

The captain returned his gaze to the black and rain-splashed windshield. This flight, his last official mission, was not getting off to a good start.

“Do it, Johnny,” Khalid finally said without looking back at either of them. “Find out what the little bugger’s up to. As long as you’re back there, you might as well do what you can to calm the ladies down.”

“Aye, Skipper, will do,” Johnny Adare said, playfully punching Khalid’s shoulder. “Ladies aren’t happy, nobody’s happy.” He laughed silently at the thought. Four hundred suicide killers back there, handpicked from the most brutal terrorist training camps on the planet. Wasn’t much left that could scare them, he didn’t imagine. He unbuckled his shoulder straps and eased out of the right-hand seat. “Come along, Doc, let’s see what kind of trouble we can get our ruddy selves into back there.”

“Johnny?” Khalid said to his copilot, grabbing his arm.

“Aye?”

“You hear any squawking out of this little bird that sounds even remotely sketchy, you get back up here and tell me all about it.”