Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (49 page)

“We’re two minutes from the expected drop point.”

Slaton hesitated, then eased his trigger pressure. “If I take one down and the other guy comes back—he’s going to find a body and a nice neat hole in the windscreen. He might move to a place where I don’t have a shot.”

“He might also be in back with his hand on a release lever,” Bryan argued over the intercom.

There was no good answer. The entire plan rested on taking out
both
men. Only then could the autopilot transform the jet into a massive drone that would, with any luck, continue harmlessly into the southern ocean. Slaton tried to think of a way to make both men show themselves, and an idea came to mind. He turned and explained it to the loadmaster.

“You want me to
what
?” Willis responded.

“No time to explain—just do it!”

SEVENTY-FIVE

It was the oddest thing,
Tuncay thought as he stared out the front windscreen in wonder. Through his years in the sky he had seen a great many sights. Shooting stars, continuous displays of lightning, the Star Wars effect of traveling through snowflakes at 300 knots with landing lights ablaze. He had seen the aurora borealis and St. Elmo’s fire. Never had he seen anything like this.

“Walid!”

He heard banging from the aft cabin, but got no reply.

He shouted a second time, “Walid!”

“What? Is it time for the release?”

Tuncay turned around and saw his copilot holding a Styrofoam cup with steam rising from the top.

“The coffeemaker still works,” Walid said. “Do you want some?”

“No!” Tuncay barked. “Come here!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Look out the window and tell me what you see.”

Walid took a cursory look out front. “I see a dark desert. Is it the oil field?”

“No, higher, just ahead in the sky. I see a light.”

Walid leaned forward, put his head over the glare shield. “Yes … I do see something. Turn down the lights.”

Tuncay rotated a series of knobs and the lights on the instrument panel dimmed. He too leaned forward and saw it more clearly—flashing lights and movement, as if a tiny motion picture were floating in the sky. Then he registered something more ominous, a counterpoint to the tiny square of light. A massive shadow all around it.

Tuncay said, “It looks like another—”

The last word of the revelation never escaped his lips. Behind an explosion of glass and a rush of air, the Turk flopped back into his sheepskin-covered seat. Walid froze in place, stunned to see his partner splayed motionless, his head a bloody mess.

Walid’s lower jaw dropped down, as if to speak. No words came before the second bullet arrived.

*   *   *

“Two down,” Slaton said evenly into his microphone.

Through his scope he scanned the cockpit back and forth. The man in the left seat was clearly hit, slumped and motionless, but the second target was no longer in view. The damage to the windscreens was as he’d predicted, two cleanly riveted holes, spiderweb cracks around each for a six-inch radius. There had been no explosive decompression. This point had also been discussed during the course of their eastbound chase—due to the low cruise altitude, it could be assumed that the pressure differential inside the cabin would be minimal. Indeed, according to Bryan, the MD-10’s cabin had likely been depressurized in order to vent the drop tank. Apparently, a valid assumption.

Everything seemed to have gone as planned, yet Slaton, ever the perfectionist, wanted confirmation.
Had he struck the second target a lethal shot?

“Get me closer,” he said into the intercom, “I need to confirm the kill. Climb so I can see the cockpit floor.” The last thing Slaton wanted was a surprised but unharmed, or possibly wounded, copilot crawling to activate the drop release mechanism.

He heard the C-17’s engines again rise in pitch. The cockpit of the MD-10, backlit by its fight instruments in a jaundiced yellow hue, came gradually closer until the magnification of the scope was no longer necessary. Slaton gave a series of commands until Bryan had them flying no more than a hundred feet in front of the MD-10, perhaps fifty feet above. Finally, Slaton got his confirmation. He saw the second pilot sprawled motionless on the flight deck floor, his bloody face ghastly in the amber light.

“All right, two confirmed kills.” He was considering whether a follow-up was justified for either target when the MD-10 banked to its right. The geometry and closure suddenly changed, and the two jets began to merge.

“Climb!” Slaton shouted. “Climb now—their autopilot is maneuvering and we’re getting too close!”

Bryan reacted sharply on the controls, the frayed nerves of a pilot who was flying a heavy jet in formation with another he couldn’t see. The C-17’s engines whined to full power, and a surge of positive Gs pressed Slaton’s body to the deck as they bucked upward. He watched the MD-10 slide harmlessly underneath.

Bryan’s voice chimed over the intercom seconds later. “All right, gentlemen—job done. I’m relaying a report to headquarters. Now we sit back and watch—and hope to hell we’ve got this right.”

Behind Slaton, Sergeant Willis held up his iPad, which was still playing the animated Disney movie
Frozen
. “Can I turn this off now?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Willis did so, and said, “Man, I am
not
telling my daughter what I just did.”

SEVENTY-SIX

Christine couldn’t say why she woke—she only knew it was abrupt. The kind of tense, alert stir derived from an unaccustomed noise in the middle of the night.

By a mother’s instinct, she knew it wasn’t Davy. There had been no gathering cry, no coo, no sound of the crib mattress being used as a trampoline. She sat up in bed and saw the usual stray light at her open hallway door. The television downstairs had gone quiet, but wind still rattled the window. Had that been it? A stray gust?

She went to the hallway, but saw and heard nothing unusual.

“Yaniv?” she called out.

No answer. She crossed the hall to the nursery. Davy was not in his crib. The first stab of fear.

“Yaniv!”

A terrible silence. Nothing but the wind.

She went cautiously to the staircase and looked down. Nothing amiss. Then she heard a knock. No, an intermittent banging noise.
Clunk, clunk.
She descended into the living room. The TV was on a news channel, but muted. “Yaniv?” Her tone was less demanding. Hopeful. “Davy?”

No response.

Clunk, clunk
. The kitchen.

She edged that way, and before turning the corner Christine felt a cool gust. She found the back door swinging freely in the wind, battering against the house.
Clunk, clunk
. Davy was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Stein. Full-blown panic clutched her gut. She hurried to the door and looked outside, saw no one. In the old snow, however, were three sets of footprints. One coming toward the house, two going away—they ran up the driveway to the street, and then across on a diagonal.

“God, no!”

She ran for her phone but it wasn’t on the counter where she always left it. Through the window she saw that Annette’s place was dark—Tuesday night was chorus practice. She had to call for help. She went out the kitchen door and looked up and down the street, trying to calculate who might be home. That was when she noticed the garage door of Ed Moorehead’s house—it was raised, and inside was the silhouette of a car. Could that be where Davy was? Inside, about to be taken away?

She reversed back inside and ran upstairs. In the nursery she rushed to the closet and flung open Davy’s circus-theme toy chest. She tossed aside layers of Fisher-Price plastic and stuffed animals, and scooped out a layer of brightly colored wooden blocks. She tipped the heavy box on its side to reveal the false bottom. At the time she’d objected mightily, but of course David had been right.
It’s the last place in the world anyone will look
. She removed the trigger lock on a Beretta 9mm and slipped it into her back waistband.

She darted downstairs, and out to the driveway. The driver’s door was open on the car in Ed’s garage. Had it been earlier? She couldn’t remember. Christine went back to the kitchen and ripped a spare key from a hook by the door, then dashed to her own garage. A light flashed on, causing her to freeze like an escapee caught in a prison-yard spotlight. Then she remembered—Stein had rigged it that way. She entered her garage through the side door, disengaged the opener, and heaved the big door up. Christine tumbled into the Ford. The engine cranked hesitantly, laboring in the cold, but soon the car was running. She slammed it into gear and hit the gas hard. The Ford lurched outside in reverse, slid into the street. She spun the wheel hard, slammed the gearshift into drive, and the car bounded up airborne over the opposite curb. She took out Ed Moorehead’s mailbox, and closer to the house a snow-encrusted plant pot, but the car came to rest right where she wanted it—sideways in the driveway, blocking the garage entrance. Christine put the car in park. Removed the keys. Set the parking brake.
What else?
She pressed the keys into a gap in the backseat upholstery.

She studied Ed’s garage but still saw no one. The door that connected to the house—through a laundry room, she knew—was hanging ajar. She got out, and looked up and down the street, hoping her demolition-derby run had been loud. Hoping every neighbor within earshot would call 911. Not a single porch light flickered on, nor were any heads peering out windows. Her neighbors were mostly professionals, people who worked and dined late. People who kept their shutters closed when they were home at all.

She saw no sign of either Davy or Stein. The cold Beretta pressed hard in the small of her back.

Never had Christine felt so alone.

She moved cautiously toward the car. There was no one inside, front or back.
Where are you, Davy?
Just then, the garage door began to lower. Christine stood frozen, unsure what to do.
Make it stop!
She looked near the door to the house, and where the plastic button should have been was a wire hanging out of the wall. The big segmented door was halfway down. She ran and kicked the tiny black box at the foot of the roller track, the motion detector whose beam would break and cause the door to freeze in place. The box flew clear out into the driveway. The door kept moving and hit the floor with a thump of finality.

Suddenly in near darkness, she was seized by fear. The only light was a thin shaft of white that spilled from the open laundry room door. Christine edged toward it and found a wall switch. She snapped it on and an overhead fluorescent light staggered to life. She looked up, searching for the rope-and-handle arrangement that would disengage the garage door opener, a mechanism like the one she’d pulled minutes ago to free her own car. It wasn’t there. Not anymore.

The rope had been cut cleanly away.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

The cheer at Langley was short-lived. Slaton’s two bullets had given them what they wanted. Yet what they wanted was a pilotless wide-body aircraft hauling a deadly stockpile of radioactive cesium.

“That’s half a victory if I’ve ever seen one,” commented the army colonel on the line with CENTCOM.

“Are you sure this will work?” asked Director Coltrane, addressing Davis.

“Sure? Nothing is sure. But so far so good. There’s no evidence of a release yet, and the Raptors have seen the aircraft make deliberate, coordinated turns. If the autopilot wasn’t engaged that jet would be waffling around the sky like a drunken paper airplane. The heading would drift, and it wouldn’t hold a steady altitude. There’s no doubt in my mind—so far that jet is hooked up to its flight computers. The question is whether anything has been programmed after the end of the delivery track. If it makes an abrupt turn toward an airfield somewhere, then we’re out of options—we pick the least-risk terrain and shoot it down over Saudi airspace. On the other hand, if the last fix on their route is at the southern end of the Ghawar field … then she’ll just hold that heading until the fuel tanks run dry.”

“And you still think that’s the case?” Coltrane asked.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Davis reasoned, “that’s what I’d do. After the drop, I’d want to hightail it away and get on the ground. You can fly more aggressively by hand than on an autopilot.”

Everyone watched the central map as Davis’ theory kept holding. Aside from the course the aircraft would take, there was one other vital unknown. How much fuel was on board the big jet? Reach 41, critically low on fuel itself, had already broken from the formation and was headed for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Ruger 22 was still shadowing the MD-10 when they reached the southern end of the Ghawar field.

For a few tense minutes everyone waited, hoping the MD-10’s heading held steady. Twenty miles later the lead Raptor pilot, who would be the first to see anything amiss, confirmed the good news, her radio-filtered voice crackling over the speaker. “No turns, she’s holding steady south. We show a one-seven-two-degree course.”

A collective sigh of relief washed over the operations room.

Davis said, “We’re not out of the woods yet. It’s still a long way to the Indian Ocean.”

“What else can we do?” Sorensen asked.

“Did that chaplain ever get here?”

*   *   *

For as long as possible, the crew of Reach 41 followed the drama over Ghawar on the tactical frequency, but the reception was weak by the time they landed at Riyadh Air Base.

As soon as the C-17 was shut down, Slaton followed Lt. Colonel Bryan across the tarmac toward base operations. They had not yet reached the door when a two-stripe airman burst out of the building with a message, and soon Slaton was talking for a second time to the woman named Sorensen on a secure line. She explained that they had unearthed an eighth conspirator, one who’d recently entered the U.S. at Washington Dulles International Airport.

“Do you know who it is?” Slaton asked.

“Actually, we were hoping you could tell us. We have a passport photo and we’d like you to take a look.”