Brown, Dale - Independent 04 (12 page)

 
          
“Get
a grip, Stork,” Cazaux ordered, pushing the Ethiopian’s hands away from the
control yoke. He quickly shut off the aircraft’s transponder, the radio device
that transmitted standard identification and tracking data to FAA air traffic
control—no use in trying to pretend they were a regular flight anymore. “We are
not going to surrender to the authorities.
Never!
I will not give them the satisfaction.” The cannon on the F-16 flashed again
near the right windscreen, and the searchlight pierced the darkness of the
L-600’s cockpit. Cazaux’s eyes had just gotten readjusted to the darkness, and
the hot white light was painful this time. “Attention on the L-600, this is
your last warning.”

 
          
“No!”
Cazaux shouted. “Fuck you, bitch!”

 
          
“Lower
your landing gear immediately!” the female voice shouted once again on the
GUARD radio channel. “This is your final warning!”

 
          
“Look
out!” Korhonen shouted. The glare of the F-16’s searchlight revealed how close
they were getting to the mountains ahead—they could see the tops of trees in
the glare of the fighter’s position and anticollision lights. They had been
forcing him lower and lower toward the rising terrain, he realized. He would be
forced to use more power, and more fuel, to climb over the terrain, or be
diverted left or right around it. Every minute he wasted on these unplanned
maneuvers was another minute farther from his objective.

 
          
“Bastards!”
Cazaux shouted. “You want me, you take me—but I will take you to hell with me!”
And at that, Cazaux threw the LET L-600 into a steep right turn into the F-16
fighter.

 
          
Not
surprisingly, the F-16 effortlessly dodged away—his maneuver was totally
expected. They were toying with him, Cazaux realized, a very real cat-and-mouse
game. That hard turn probably cost him his scheduled landing in
Mexico
. If Cazaux was correct about their
position, he knew that the terrain was rising much faster to the left, and a
turn in that direction might be fatal. He had no choice—he had to turn right
and climb.

 
          
“You
are not going to make it to your destination, mister!” the female Air Force
pilot radioed. “Federal agents are in helicopters all the way from here to the
Mexican border waiting to pick you up when you land, and there are more
fighters and radar planes on their way to track you, so flying low won’t help
you. Your best option is to follow me and surrender.”

           
Korhonen and Jones were staring at
Cazaux, worried. The powerful searchlight on the F-16 revealed every tension
line, every quivering muscle in the terrorist’s face. For the first time, they
saw real despair in that face, like a wild animal caught in a trap. “What you
gonna do, Captain?” Jones asked him.

 
          
“What
can I do? I need time to think!” Cazaux snapped. “I try to tell myself that
they will not open fire, that they will not shoot this plane down, but I am not
so sure now. It’d be too easy for them to make a convenient ‘mistake,’ and this
countryside is sparse enough that they wouldn’t endanger anyone if they send
this plane crashing into the ground. I need time to think.” He paused for a few
moments, his fingers nervously massaging the well-worn horns of the control
yoke; then he turned the LET L-600 farther right, pulled off a notch of power and,
to the Stork’s surprise, lowered the landing gear and turned on all the
exterior lights.

 
          
“What
are you doing, Captain?” the Stork shouted over the roar of the gear in the
slipstream.

 
          
“I
am buying time, Stork,” Cazaux said. “With the gear down, their fingers will
stay off the cannon trigger—I hope. Keep this plane headed toward
Sacramento
or
Stockton
— any population center you can see. The
longer we stay over populated areas, the less likely they will shoot.”

 
          
“Fly
a heading of three-zero-zero for Mather Jetport,” the female Air Force pilot
radioed. Mather Jetport was a former Air Force base that had been taken over by
the
county
of
Sacramento
and turned into a commercial cargo and
airliner maintenance facility. It had a long two-mile- long runway and was an
Air National Guard helicopter gunship base. They would have plenty of firepower
support to help capture Cazaux and secure the cargo plane. “You have two F-16
fighters on you now, both within one mile. Do not deviate from course unless
instructed. Do you understand? Over.”

 
          
Cazaux
keyed the microphone button:
“Mais oui,
mademoiselle
. I understand. I do not know why you are doing this. You
obviously have confused me with someone else. I have done nothing wrong. But I
will follow your instructions. Can you activate your position lights,
mademoiselle?
I cannot see you.”

 
          
“I
have visual contact on you just fine,” the Air Force pilot replied. “Stay off
this frequency unless instructed to reply.”

 
          
It
was the reply he was hoping for: “Mr. Krull, in the second pallet, gray metal
case, a pair of night-vision goggles. Get them quickly.” On the radio, Cazaux
continued: “Obviously you accuse me of doing something so wrong as to threaten
to shoot me down—I think a relatively minor crime such as talking too much
cannot be any worse,” Cazaux said, using his best, most urbane, most
lighthearted voice. “You sound like a very young and pretty woman,
mademoiselle.
Please tell me your name.
Over.” There was no response—Cazaux did not expect one. He pulled back another
notch of power and lowered five degrees of flaps— not enough to be noticed by
the fighter, but enough so he could safely slow down another ten to twenty
knots. As he fed in some elevator trim to maintain altitude at the slower
airspeed, he said cross-cockpit, “Let’s see how slow the F-16 fighter can fly,
shall we?”

 
          
“I
got ’em,” he heard Krull say behind him. The “goggles” were actually older
NVG-3 model monocular night- vision scopes, bulky and heavy, with a separate
battery pack and a head mounting harness kit.

 
          
“Plug
them in, search out the windows for the fighter on our right wing,” Cazaux
said. “Tell me the approximate angle of attack of the fighter.”

 
          
“The
what?”

 
          
“Tell
me how high the fighter’s nose is from the horizon, and whether she has deployed
flaps—the control surfaces on the front and back edges of the wings. Do it.”

 
          
It
took a long time for Krull to figure out how to use the night-vision goggles
and to study the F-16 fighter beside them. In that time, Cazaux had slowed the
LET down to below 160 knots and had fed in ten degrees of flaps. They were also
much closer to the central part of the
Sacramento
Valley
, with the city lights of central
California
’s megalopolis stretching from
Modesto
to the south all the way up to Marysville
to the north, and the bright glow of
San Francisco
to the west, visible to them. In a few
minutes they would be flying over the Route 99 corridor, a two-hundred-
mile-long string of cities and towns with over two million residents. Cazaux
felt safe from attack by the Air Force fighter now—they would probably kill
hundreds of persons on the ground if they were shot down.

 
          
“You
still have not told me your name,
mademoiselle,
”
Cazaux said on the radio. “You know we shall never meet, so indulge me
this simple pleasure.”

 
          
“Stay
off
the frequency,” the female Air
Force pilot replied angrily. The terrorist smiled—he could easily hear the
tension in the woman’s voice. At only one hundred and sixty knots, the F-16
must be getting extremely difficult to control.

 
          
“I
can’t tell shit, man,” Krull said as he came back into the cockpit and knelt
beside the pilots’ seats. “I can see the tail thingamabobs movin’ like crazy.”

 
          
“The
horizontal tail surfaces.”

 
          
“What-the-fuck-ever.
I think I see the front part of the wings curled downwards a bit. I can’t see
nothin’ else.” “What about the landing gear? Did you see the wheels down?”

 
          
“Oh,
yeah, man, I saw them. They was down.”

 
          
“Good.”
Cazaux didn’t know much about the F-16 Fighting Falcon, but he did know that
they must be close to its approach speed. At the very least, the F-16 pilots
would have their hands full trying to keep up with the slow-flying L-600—and if
he was lucky, they wouldn’t be able to keep up, and they’d be forced to break
off the intercept or turn it over to someone else. Either way might provide an
opportunity to escape.

 
          
“Lead,
go ahead and accelerate out,” Vincenti radioed to McKenzie on the command
channel. He was one thousand feet above the LET L-600 cargo plane, in a tight
orbit over Cazaux and McKenzie. Since he put his landing gear down, Cazaux’s
airspeed had bled off to the point where he could no longer safely shadow the
target, so he had to orbit. Soon, McKenzie would have no choice but to orbit as
well—the sooner she transitioned to an orbit, the better. “I’ve got a lock on
him. Transition to your racetrack.”

 
          
McKenzie
wasn’t listening.

 
          
With
her landing gear down, her leading-edge and trail- ing-edge flaps extended, and
the flight control system in takeoff/land, the angle-of-attack indexers were
beginning to hit the stops, and the low-speed warning tone would intermittently
sound, which meant she had to take her hand off the throttle to silence the
horn. Flying at such low airspeeds was common for landing, but she wasn’t
accustomed to doing it in level flight, at night, flying close to a strange
aircraft that had already tried to turn into her. But she didn’t want to break
off the intercept—Henri Cazaux wasn’t going to get the satisfaction of watching
her fly away.

 
          
“Lead,
you copy?” Vincenti radioed to her again. “Clean up and I’ll take over.
Transition to radar pursuit.”

 
          
“I
got it, Al,” she radioed back. But she didn’t have it, and couldn’t keep it,
and she knew it. When pursuing a slow-speed target like this, the normal
procedure was to begin a racetrack pattern around the target, keeping the speed
up in safe limits. A racetrack was dangerous at night, since radar contact
could not be maintained on the wingman while in the racetrack, and Vincenti had
no night-vision goggles.

 
          
But
she had no choice. The low-speed warning tone came on for the seventh time. The
target had slowed down below 150 knots, and there was no way McKenzie could
hold that speed in an F-16. “Correction. Lead’s entering the racetrack. Two,
you have the intercept. Break. SIERRA PETE, this is Foxtrot Romeo flight, the
target has decelerated—we are transitioning to radar pursuit.”

           
“Two’s in,” Vincenti replied.
McKenzie smoothly advanced the throttle to military power, raised the landing
gear before passing 80 percent power, and began a right turn away from the LET
L-600.

 
          
“The
fighter’s leavin’!” Jones crowed. “Landin’ gear’s up ... it’s turnin’ away!”

 
          
“They
won’t be leaving, only setting up an orbit over us so they can keep us in sight
and keep their airspeed up,” Cazaux said. “But they’ll give us some breathing
room now, and the lower airspeed gives us some more time.”

 
          
“To
do what, man?” Jones asked. “We still got two jets on our tail, and sure as
shit they’re callin’ their buddies to help out. With the gear hangin’, we’ll be
runnin’ on fumes in an hour.”

 
          
“I
know all that, Mr. Krull,” Cazaux said in exasperation. “Shut up and let me
think.”

 
          
He
didn’t have much time to think, because soon the line of lights along the Route
99 corridor reached its largest expanse at the capital city of
Sacramento
. There were four major airports around
Sacramento
, all surrounded by housing subdivisions,
offices, and light-industrial facilities; Mather Jetport was the largest
airport east of the city. Already the rotating beacon and runway lights were
visible— they were less than thirty miles out, about fifteen minutes from
touchdown. Their flight path was taking them north- westbound toward Highway
50, a busy freeway linking
Sacramento
with the
Sierra
Nevada
foothills;
once reaching that freeway, a turn to the west would put them on a five- mile
final approach to Mather Jetport. The lights of the sprawling city were
breathtaking, but Cazaux hardly noticed them—all he saw was his plane
surrounded by federal agents, a shootout, an explosion, a fireball...