Dead or Alive (3 page)

“No. Why bother?” the pilot decided. If he did this right, they wouldn’t notice a thing until the acceleration for the next takeoff. Having earned his spurs and twenty thousand hours with Swissair, he’d retired and bought his own used Dassault Falcon to charter millionaires and billionaires across Europe and around the globe. Half the people who could afford his services ended up going to the same places—Monaco, Harbor Island in the Bahamas, Saint-Tropez, Aspen. The fact that his current passenger was going none of those places was a curiosity, but as long as he paid, the destination was none of his business.

They passed downward through ten thousand feet. The runway lights were easy to see, a straight lane in the darkness that had once accommodated a wing of United States Air Force F-84 interceptors.

Five thousand feet and descending. “Flaps to twenty.”

“Roger flaps twenty,” the pilot acknowledged.

“Gear,” he commanded next, and the copilot reached for the levers. The sound of rushing air entered the cabin as the landing-gear doors opened and the struts came down. Three hundred feet.

“Down and locked,” the copilot replied.

“One hundred feet,” the computer voice said.

The pilot tensed his arms, then relaxed them, easing the aircraft down, gently, gently, picking the proper spot to touch down. Only his skilled senses could tell when the Falcon touched down on the ten-meter concrete squares. He activated the thrustreversers, and the Dassault slowed. A truck with blinking lights showed him where to go and whom to follow as he headed off to where the fuel truck would be waiting.

They were on the ground for a total of twenty minutes. An immigration officer queried them over the radio and determined that there were no changes from the CANPASS data. Outside, the fuel truck’s driver disconnected his hose and secured the fuel valve.

Okay. That’s done,
the pilot thought. Now for the second segment of the three-part flight.

The Falcon taxied back out to the north end of the runway, going through the pre-liftoff checklist, as he always did, after waiting at the end of the runway. The acceleration went smoothly; then the wheels came up, then the flaps, followed by the climb-out. Ten more minutes and they were at thirty-seven thousand, their initial assigned altitude from Toronto Center.

 

 

 

They cruised west at Mach 0.81—about 520 knots, or 600 miles per hour true air speed—with their passengers asleep aft while the engines gobbled fuel at a fixed rate of 3,400 pounds per hour. The aircraft transponder broadcast their speed and altitude to the air-traffic-control radars, and aside from that there was no need for radio traffic of any sort. In rough weather they might have requested a different, probably higher, altitude for more comfortable cruising, but Gander tower had been correct. Having passed through the cold front that had opposed their flight into Newfoundland, they might not have been moving at all, except for the muted roar of the jet engines hanging on the tail. Pilot and copilot didn’t even speak very much. They’d flown together enough that they knew all the same jokes, and on such an uneventful flight there was no need to swap information. Everything had been planned, down to the proverbial gnat’s ass. Both wondered what Hawaii might be like. They could look forward to a pair of suites at the Royal Hawaiian, and a long sleep to ward off the inevitable jet lag, sure to accompany the ten hours of additional day they were going to experience. Well, both liked a nap on a sunny beach, and the weather in Hawaii was forecast to be as monotonously perfect as it usually was. They planned a two-day layover before proceeding back east to their home field outside of Geneva, with no scheduled passengers on that leg.

“Moose Jaw in forty minutes,” the copilot observed.

“Time to get back to work, I guess.”

The plan was simple. The pilot got on the HF radio—a hold-over from World War Two—and called Moose Jaw, announcing his approach and his early descent, plus estimated time of arrival. Moose Jaw’s approach control took the information from the area control systems and spotted the transponder alphanumerics on its scopes.

The Dassault began bleeding altitude on a completely normal approach, which was duly noted by Toronto Center. The local time was 0304, or Zulu -4:00, keeping homage to Greenwich Mean/Universal time, four hours to the east.

“There it is,” the copilot announced. The approach lights for Moose Jaw showed up on the black countryside. “Altitude twelve thousand, descending one thousand per minute.”

“Stand by the transponder,” the pilot ordered.

“Roger,” the copilot replied. The transponder was a custom installation, done by the flight crew themselves.

“Six thousand feet. Flaps?”

“Leave ’em,” the pilot commanded.

“Roger. Runway in view.” The sky was clear, and the Moose Jaw approach lights strobed in the cloudless air.

“Moose Jaw, this is Mike Foxtrot, over.”

“Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw, over.”

“Moose Jaw, our gear doesn’t want to come down. Please stand by. Over.” That notification woke people up.

“Roger. Are you declaring an emergency, over?” the approach radio inquired at once.

“Negative, Moose Jaw. We’re checking the electrics. Stand by.”

“Roger, standing by.” Just a hint of concern in the voice.

“Okay,” the pilot said to his copilot, “we’ll drop off their scope at one thousand feet.” They’d been through all this, of course. “Altitude three thousand and descending.”

The pilot eased right. This was to show a course change on the Moose Jaw approach radar, nothing serious but a change nonetheless. With altitude dropping it might look interesting on the radar tapes if anyone cared to look, which was doubtful. Another blip lost in the airspace.

 

 

 

T
wo thousand,” the copilot said. The air was a little bumpier at the lower altitude but not as bumpy as it was going to get. “Fifteen hundred. Might want to adjust the descent rate.”

“Fair enough.” The pilot inched back on the yoke to flatten out the down-angle so that he could level out at nine hundred feet AGL. That was low enough to enter Moose Jaw’s ground clutter. Though the Dassault was anything but stealthy, most civilian traffic-control radars primarily saw transponder signals, not “skin-paints.” In commercial aviation, a plane on radar was nothing more than a notional signal in the sky.

“Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw, say altitude, over.”

They’d be doing this for a while. The local tower team was unusually awake. Maybe they’d flown into a training exercise, the pilot thought. Too bad, but not a major problem.

“Autopilot off. Hand-flying the airplane.”

“Pilot’s airplane,” the copilot replied.

“Okay, looping right. Transponder off,” the pilot commanded.

The copilot killed power to transponder one. “Powered off. We’re invisible.” That got Moose Jaw’s attention.

“Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw. Say altitude, over,” the voice commanded more crisply. Then a second call.

The Falcon completed its northern loop and settled down on a course of two-two-five. The ground below was flat, and the pilot was tempted to reduce altitude to five hundred feet but decided against it. No need. As planned, the aircraft had just evaporated off the Moose Jaw radar.

“Mike Foxtrot, Moose Jaw. Say altitude, over!”

“Sounds excited,” the copilot observed.

“I don’t blame him.”

The transponder they’d just shut down was for another plane entirely, probably parked in its hangar outside Söderhamn, Sweden. This flight was costing their charter party seventy thousand extra euros, but the Swiss flight crew understood about making money, and they weren’t flying drugs or anything like that. Money or not, that sort of cargo was not worth the trouble.

Moose Jaw was forty miles behind them now, and dwindling at seven miles per minute, according to the plane’s Doppler radar. The pilot adjusted his yoke to compensate for the cross-wind. The computer by his right knee would compute for drift, and the computer knew exactly where they were going.

Part of the way, anyway.

I
T LOOKED DIFFERENT than it had in the imagery—they always did—but they were in the right place, that was for sure. He felt his exhaustion drain away, replaced by focused anticipation.

Ten weeks earlier a CIA satellite had tapped into a radio transmission here, and another had taken a photo, which Driscoll now had in his pocket. This was it, no question. A triangular formation of rocks over the top identified the spot. It wasn’t decoration, despite its man-made appearance, but rather something left behind by the last set of glaciers that had ground their way through this valley God knew how many thousands of years ago. Probably the same meltwater that had carved the triangle had helped bore out the cave. Or however caves were formed. Driscoll didn’t know, and didn’t especially care. Some of them were pretty deep, some hundreds of meters deep, perfect safe holes to hide in. But this one had originated a radio signal. And that made it special. Special as hell. It had taken Washington and Langley more than a week to localize this place, but they’d been oh-so-careful following it up. Almost nobody knew about this mission. Fewer than thirty people in total, and most of those were at Fort Benning. Where the NCO club was. Where he and his team would return in less than forty-eight hours. God willing—
inshallah,
as they said locally. Not his religion, but the sentiment made sense. Driscoll was a Methodist, though that didn’t keep him from having the occasional beer. Mostly he was a soldier.

Okay, how do we do this?
he asked himself. Hard and fast, of course, but how to do it hard and fast? He was carrying half a dozen grenades. Three real ones and three M84 flashbangs. The latter were sheathed in plastic instead of steel, heavy on noise-making explosives, made from some kind of mix of magnesium and ammonium to make it seem as though the surface of the sun had paid an unexpected visit, to dazzle and blind anyone nearby. Again, the chemistry and physics of the things didn’t really concern him. They worked damned well, and that was what counted.

The Rangers were not in the business of fair fights. This was combat operations, not the Olympic Games. They might apply first aid to whatever bad guys survived, but that was as far as it went, and only then because survivors tended to be somewhat more talkative than the dead. Driscoll peered again at the cave’s entrance. Somebody had stood right in that spot to make his satellite phone call, and a RHYTHM e-lint satellite had copied it, and a KEYHOLE satellite had marked the location, and their mission had been authorized by SOCOM himself. He stood still, next to a large rock, close enough that his silhouette would blend with it. No evident movement inside. He wasn’t surprised. Even terrorists had to sleep. And that worked for him. Just fine, in fact. Ten meters. He approached with movements that would have appeared comical to the uninitiated, exaggerated straight-up-and-down movements of his feet and lower legs, carefully avoiding loose stones. Then he got there. Dropped to one knee and looked inside. He glanced over his shoulder to ensure that the rest of the team wasn’t bunching up. No worries there. Still, Driscoll felt the flutter of apprehension in his belly. Or was it fear? Fear of screwing the pooch, fear of repeating history. Fear of getting men killed.

A year earlier in Iraq, Captain Wilson’s predecessor, a green second lieutenant, had planned a mission—a straightforward insurgent hunt along the southern shores of Buhayrat (Lake) Saddam, north of Mosel—and Driscoll had concurred. Problem was, the young lieutenant was more interested in filing a glowing report than he was in the safety of his Rangers. Against Driscoll’s advice and with night falling, he’d split the team to flank a bunker complex, but as was their tendency, the hastily redrawn plan didn’t survive its first contact with the enemy—in this case, a company-sized gathering of Saddam ex-army loyalists who encircled and butchered the young lieutenant’s fire team before turning their attention on Driscoll and his men. The fighting withdrawal had taken most of the night, until finally Driscoll and three others made their way back across the Tigris and within range of a firebase.