Assassin (40 page)

F
OUR SKELETAL BLACK BIRDS SOARED HIGH ABOVE THE WHITE
floor of the valley. Jagged snow-blown mountains marched shoulder-to-shoulder up both sides of the wide basin, craggy promontories that scraped the crystalline blue skies. Three of the four gaunt black birds flew up this valley in a fair semblance of formation.

The fourth, mission code
Hawkeye,
putative leader of the flight, did not. This mischievous bird would lag behind the flock; first scribing tight corkscrew arcs downward, she would then ride a rising column of warm air, only to nose over the top and dive once more, the earth rushing crazily up, the airspeed indicator redlined. At the last possible moment, the wayward blackbird would level its wings and climb out, soaring once more on the warm thermals and rejoining the flight.

The pilot of this fourth bird, grinning with exhilaration, heard a squawk in his headphones.

“Hey. Offer you a deal, Hawkeye,” Patterson drawled on the intercom. “Limited time only.”

“Shoot, Tex.”

“You keep this bird on an even keel till we reach the LZ, set us down gently in one unbusted piece of high-tech plastic, you get use of this aircraft right here for one entire month of playtime.”

“You’re not serious?”

“I reckon I am.”

“Deal,” Hawke said, thrilled. With a wingspan of sixty feet,
Hawkeye
was in every sense the world’s most sophisticated high-altitude stealth glider. He’d never flown anything remotely like her. Few had.

The lanky Texan, seated two seats aft of the Englishman in the cockpit, heard the huge smile Hawke had put behind that word,
Deal.
Never in his life had he known a boy who just loved flying airplanes so much. And, never once, at least not since this whole nightmare had begun in Venice and on the steps of a little church in England, had he heard Alex Hawke sound so happy.

“Would you like to drive, Tex?”

“Naw, son, you doin’ jes fine now.”

“I aim to please.”

“G’night,” the big man said, flipping down the most darkly tinted of the three visors attached to his helmet. Tex stuck a fresh mint toothpick in his teeth, leaned his head back against his headrest and closed his eyes; trying to relax a little in the short time remaining before all hell broke loose.

For some time,
Hawkeye
soared gracefully up valley, riding the thermals, flock in tow, and nothing and no one disturbed the blissful silence of the air.

Now, the ice-encrusted twin peaks of the Blue Mountain loomed ahead. It was monstrous. A dark blue-tinged mass of sharp granite angles, frozen snow and blue-black ice, the rocky pinnacle rose through the few stringy cloud layers to scrape the sky at 18,000 feet. The tallest of the two peaks was just 9,000 feet shy of Everest, the other peak a thousand feet lower.

The narrow snow-filled crevasse that split that pinnacle was the little flock’s destination.

“Hey, Tex. You awake?”

“Am now.”

“I’ve got the LZ in sight. I still feel guilty. Flying your plane—these are your men, Tex. Your planes. Your men.”

“We been through all this, ain’t we? Law of the plains. Injuns got you surrounded, the best shot gets the long rifle. That’d be you, Hawkeye.”

“I suppose—”

“Hawke, listen. It ain’t like you’re hurtin’ my feelings. The president gave you this assignment, remember. Not DSS, and not me. Me and the boys will gladly knock down anybody gets within spittin’ distance of you. But you got the ball, son.”

“I have the ball, sir.” Alex said, laughing. It was the expression fighter jocks used in carrier landings to tell Flight Ops they were properly lined up on final approach.

“I got your joke, son. Mixing up metaphors, do it all the time, my wife says. Football and flying.”

“Right.”

“Glad we got that all straightened out,” Tex said, leaning back and closing his eyes. He had that rare ability, when all about him were losing their heads, to nap. Alex Hawke used the flying time remaining trying to envision what kinds of hazards he might soon encounter trying to land four Black Widows on a mountaintop at 18,000 feet. He stopped counting at three.

The DSS pilots had nicknamed the new glider design Black Widow in memory of the legendary P-61. The reedlike glider’s twin-barreled fuselage certainly recalled the World War II nightfighter, the P-61 Black Widow. The new high-altitude aircraft even had the red hourglass shape, identifying nature’s deadliest spider, painted on its matte black belly. But, while vintage Black Widows were powerful, bulbous, muscular warplanes, bristling with weaponry,
Hawkeye
and her like had no weapons. No engines. Built of carbon fiber composite and thin everywhere the P-61 had been thick, she looked, Patterson said, “Like a flying box built out of toothpicks.”

Hawke’s headphones crackled again.

“
Hawkeye, Hawkeye,
you got
Gabriel
upstairs,” a voice said. “I have your LZ in visual contact. You’re getting close. Glad as hell it’s you landing that thing up there, not me. Over.”

“Roger that,
Gabriel.
Appreciate your support as always,” Hawke replied.

The ungainly E2-C Navy surveillance plane, mission code
Gabriel,
was monitoring the entire mission and sending a real-time video feed direct to Washington. Earlier, a small group gathered around a monitor at the White House had cheered when the four glider pilots had pulled their release knobs, cast off the towlines from the Navy STOLs and soared away over the range of misty blue mountains. Then they’d lapsed into subdued silence.

A very small number of those watching the White House monitors knew the fate of their country was very likely riding with the men inside those four Black Widows.

The silence in the Oval Office was broken when the quietly excited voice of one of the four pilots crackled over a set of speakers. “This is your captain speaking,” the small group heard the pilot say, “Kindly put your seatbacks and tray tables in an upright position.”

“Copy that, Skipper,” came the laconic reply. “And in the unlikely event of a water landing, I reckon the cheeks of my ass will act as a flotation device?”

“Roger that,” the pilot laughed.

“That would be Alex Hawke and Tex Patterson aboard
Hawkeye,
the lead plane,” the president said, smiling grimly at the small gathering of people watching with him in the Oval Office. “
Hawkeye
will be first in.”

Jack McAtee’s eyes were glued to the screen. The tension in the room was more than palpable, it was excruciating.

“This is it, boys,” the grim president told the vice president and his chief of staff. “This is the whole damn shooting match, right here.”

So far, so good, Hawke thought, easing his stick forward an inch and getting his nose back below the horizon where it belonged. Of course, the method of getting
out
of a high-mountain hot zone would not be nearly so straightforward as getting in—but Hawke had enough on his mind at the moment to stuff those kinds of thoughts back into the semidistant recesses of his brain. He concentrated instead on the good news; uneven, mountainous terrain might shield their approach from visual and electronic monitoring.

“FlyBaby…Widowmaker…Phantom,”
Hawke said. “This is
Hawkeye,
copy?”

“Roger,
Hawkeye, FlyBaby
’s right behind you, high, wide, and handsome,” her skipper, a tough south Florida kid named Mario Mendoza, said. “Can’t shake me with all those circus acrobatics.”

“Copy that,
Hawkeye, Widowmaker
at your five.” Jim Ferguson, Ferg, was a good old boy from West Texas, former crop duster and current knucklebuster. Tom Quick, the only non-DSS agent besides Hawke, was two seats behind him.

“That leaves you,
Phantom,
” Hawke said. “Copy.”

“Uh, roger,
Hawkeye, Phantom
copies,” Ron Gidwitz, the skinny kid from the south side of Chicago who was flying
Phantom
said. “We got, uh, got us a minor problem here, sir. Got a warning light lit up and…we, uh—”

“Talk to me,
Phantom,
” Hawke said. A minute stretched out.

“Disregard,
Hawkeye,
” Gidwitz finally said, “Warning light just went out. Some kind of electrical glitch. Over.”

“Roger that,
Phantom. Hawkeye
over.”

The flock of blackbirds flew onward, etching themselves against the bowl of the sky.

C
HERRY
L
ANSING COULD TELL THAT THE EXTREME HOTTIE
seated next to her in the window seat was never in this lifetime going to talk to her. Like, she straight up knew it. He had to be like one of the few remotely hot species she’d seen on this entire vacation. Oh, well. How cool could he be? He was reading the Bible, some foreign bible anyway. He did have an MP3 player, which was a good sign. But he’d tuned out, stuck his headphones on right after takeoff—which was, in her experience with boys, a bad sign. A-hole.

She squished the disgusting ham sandwich into a little ball, put it back in its nice little silver, as if, Styrofoam dish and stuffed it in the seatback in front of her, wondering what her parents were having for lunch up in first class. No wonder she was buggin’. It was so undemocratic, sticking her back here in the ghetto.

Then, when she dared, how dare you, to complain to her mother about how unfair it was, her mother goes getting all up in her business about how spoiled she was—like that was remotely true—so she’d gone into the ladies right next to the gate and fired up some chronic she’d bought off this cute street boy back in Sing-Song or Hong Kong, whatever. Really good leaf. She’d gotten baked.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hello,” he said back. Hello? Is that what he said? Hello? Not, yo, whasup? Like any normal person?

“Like my necklace? Bangin’ rocks, huh? My name in lights. Got it in Singapore.”

“What?”

Maybe he didn’t speak good English. He looked like Middle Eastern or Asian or one of those. Short, dark, and handsome. Cherry flashed her namesake necklace at him again. She was totally iced out for this trip home. Asian bling from Sing-Sing. Couldn’t wait to show the new crown jewels to all her hootchie friends back in Darien. Them and her baby daddy who she’d missed so much. Oh, well. It was only twelve hours to L.A. and then another five to New York and then an hour or so up the Merritt by limo to Darien—she pulled the airport book her mother’d bought her out of her bag and opened it. It was named after that famous artist Da Vinci but her mother told her it was about secret codes or something.

“You are interested in numerology?” the boy said, pulling his headphones off and looking at the book. College. Definitely college.

“What?” she said. Like she was annoyed at having her reading interrupted. Like she read books. As if.

“Numbers. Their hidden meanings.”

“Oh. Yeah. Fascinating.”

“Me, as well.” He smiled. Nice grill. Straight and pearly. Big brown eyes. Long, long lashes.

“That’s what this is about? Numbers? Jesus Christ. This is a
math
book?”

“It’s what everything is about. Flight 77. You see? A mystical number. Powerful. Or, this row number we are this moment sitting in. It’s 76. A very important number for you Americans, is it not?”

“76? You mean, like, the gas station? Or, what?”

He just looked at her and then went back to what her dad called the thousand-yard stare.

“My boyfriend gave me this book,” she said quickly. “You should see him. What a babe. He looks exactly just like JFK. Identical.”

“Which one?”

“Which one?”

“Yes. The president? Or, the airport?”

“
What
?”

The seat belt sign pinged off and the bitchy British Airways stewardess said in her bitchy British accent that they could get up if they wanted to but stay out of the aisle so they could get their crappy carts up and down and keep the belt fastened loosely when they were in their seats because there was some storm or other down in South China.

Get up but stay out of the aisles? Unfasten your seat belt but keep it fastened? Hello? Is this woman two toys short of a Happy Meal, or what?

“Excuse me, please,” the hottie-tottie brown-eyed boy said, taking his cheesy plastic shaving kit out of his made-in-Taiwan special backpack. He turned his back and unzipped it like he didn’t want her peeking and put his MP3 player inside it. As if she cared about what was in his stupid shaving kit. “I must use the restroom, please. Urgent.”

Oh. Like she cared. He was going to shave? Brush his teeth? It was way more information than she needed. Why didn’t he just say he was getting up? She’d use the restroom herself and fire up some more leaf but you couldn’t even smoke weed in there anymore. She knew, believe me. She’d tried.

Urgent? What could be urgent? Yuk.

T
HE MINUTE
J
OHNNY
A
DARE STEPPED OUT OF THE COCKPIT
and into the upper galley with the little doctor in tow, everybody started calming down. It was the uniform, he guessed, and the famous Adare smile he’d inherited from his dad. He’d gotten laid with both so many times he couldn’t remember. It had taken every ounce of self-control he had to stay away from the Bambah for the last three days. He’d watched the lassies land, climb on the buses, and head for the hotel. Not one of them much over twenty-five, none of them exactly drop-dead gorgeous, but what the hell. At any rate, they had
not
been chosen for their looks.

“Don’t even think about it,” Khalid had told him, the two of them standing by the hangar watching the stream of young women climb up the steps of the buses to the hotel. Yeah, yeah. So, he hadn’t ever gone over to the hotel but that didn’t mean he ever stopped thinking about it. Ever.

“Sorry, ’bout the bumpy ride, ladies,” Johnny said on the intercom phone in his pilot voice. One of the prerequisites for the Pasha’s death squads was that they all had to speak perfect English, so that made it easier. He had a vague idea of what this was all about but he’d learned long ago that it was a lot easier not to ask a lot of questions. Just shut up and fly the bus, Johnny. He’d learned that lesson long ago from Khalid.

“Just a few potholes in the sky,” he continued. “That’s all. We’ll be flying a little lower than usual for a while, until we get through this stuff, but it shouldn’t be much longer. Then, we’ll climb to our normal altitude. We’re expecting a smooth ride to L.A. today. Everybody sit back and relax. As soon as we can, we’ll be serving you a light breakfast. Thanks.”

He sounded funny, he thought, hanging up. Ten years with the Pasha. Christ, he’d almost forgotten what a real airplane pilot sounded like.

He nodded thanks to the cabin crew, the Pasha’s three beautiful private hostesses seated on fold-downs in the upper galley, two of whom he knew very well. He smiled at them, hung up the phone, and motioned Soong to follow him down the spiral stair. The abbreviated main cabin, six seats abreast, was full of some very nervous female passengers. But, just as it had topside, his appearance on the main deck had a calming effect. That, plus the fact that Khalid had disobeyed orders and turned all the interior lights on and climbed high enough so that the wave tops were no longer threatening to reach up and pull them from the sky.

He flashed his smile, pausing here and there with a brief word of reassurance. He and the doctor were headed all the way aft to what little of the Pasha’s private quarters hadn’t been turned into auxiliary fuel tanks. About halfway back, he noticed an overhead panel hanging down. The engineer who, at the last minute, had replaced all the oxygen canisters with the ones Soong had brought aboard in his black suitcase, had neglected to fasten it properly. Johnny smiled at the three women as he reached over them to snap the panel back into place. They all smiled back. Hell, they were all smiling now.

He started aft. Where was that little bugger?

“Heads up! Doc! I thought you said it was important,” he called to him. The guy was still leaning over to talk to one of the travel agents in a tight white Gap T-shirt. She did have a pair that would pop the pennies off a dead Irishman’s eyelids, he’d noticed. The doc was practically drooling on her. Scratch the practically.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, and came toddling after Johnny, holding onto seat backs as if he really wanted to keep from falling into somebody’s lap.

Adare closed the beautifully carved door behind them, leaned his back against it and shook out a cigarette. He snicked a match with his thumbnail and, for once, it worked. The warmly lit cabin was certainly stunning, but familiar. He’d spent a lot of time back here entertaining the hostesses when the boss wasn’t aboard. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s Irish whiskey. His last official voyage. One for the road.

“So?” he said, rolling the delicious whiskey around in his mouth before swallowing. “What’s up, Doc?”

The doctor was lighting up, too. He’d taken one of the Pasha’s Baghdaddies from the inlaid box next to the leather sofa. His hand was shaking so badly he could barely hold the match.

“We must do an in-flight test,” Doctor Soong puffed nervously. “Very important. Sooner the better.”

“In-flight test?” Adare said. That didn’t sound good. “You’ve got to be joking, man. A test of what?”

“No-no,” Soong said, putting a bony little hand on his arm to reassure him. “Not to worry. Only the emergency oxygen system, Johnny.”

Johnny?

Adare’s right arm shot out and he slammed the man up against the bulkhead. His ribs felt like chickenbones. And Johnny felt like snapping them. This little shit had definitely gotten Johnny’s Irish up.

“I want somebody to call me Johnny, I let them know. And you, you miserable little bugger, are at the very back of a very long fuckin’ queue. You better tell me what the bloody hell you’ve done. Last-minute changes to my airplane, Doc, I don’t like ’em.”

“Please! The cockpit has its own oxygen supply, no?”

“What of it?”

“And, the cockpit itself has an airtight seal?”

“Jesus Christ, man! Are ye flat crazy? What have ye done to us?”