Soul of the Assassin (52 page)

As far as Rankin could tell, George Burns had only one thing in common with his namesake—he liked to smoke big, thick cigars. And he liked to smoke them in his plane, which stank up the entire aircraft.

Which was saying something, because the airplane was comparatively large-—a 1960s-vintage two-engine Hawker Siddely 748 that in its prime regularly carried forty-eight passengers. The plane had seen use as both a passenger and a cargo aircraft, ferrying people first around India and then around Africa. George Burns had bought it from a somewhat shady government official in Senegal, overhauled the engines, replaced the avionics, and given it a fresh coat of paint.

Rankin sat in the copilot’s seat. Guns made do with a jump seat immediately behind the pilot.

“Not much of a view,” said Rankin as they flew over the desert.

George Burns didn’t answer. He occasionally reached for the throttle lever between the seats, and every so often would glance at his global positioning map. But otherwise he stared straight ahead at the mountains that marked the edge of the desert.

“You don’t really know where it is, do you?” asked Rankin. “You just have a general idea.”

George Burns took his cigar out of his mouth, examined the ash—two inches long—then put it back.

Rankin saw a shadow on the desert floor to the west. It was from an airplane, and for a moment he thought it was their shadow, cast in an odd direction. Then he realized that it was too small, and shaped wrong. He spotted the plane a few feet above the shadow, moving across the earth as if it were part of a toy display

“Hey, another airplane,” he said, pointing.

George Burns turned and looked, staring as the aircraft moved past. It was no more than a mile and a half away.

“We’re getting closer,” he said, and then he didn’t say anything else.

~ * ~

13

KALAMATA, GREECE

Col. Charles Van Buren jogged up the ladder into the command center of the 777th’s MC.-17, a Globemaster III combat cargo aircraft specially equipped to support the Special Forces Group. Van Buren and his men had just arrived from Aviano, Italy, relocating here so they could strike into Africa if needed. Additional support units, including tankers, C-130s, and Osprey aircraft, were being scrambled to assist.

“Mr. Ferguson for you, sir,” said the communications specialist, holding up the phone.

Van Buren took the phone and sat down at the console. “Ferg, what’s going?”

“Hey, Van. Corrigan give you the background yet?”

“We’re looking for an Iranian with Russian biological warfare material. Maybe he’s in Libya, maybe the Sudan. They’re looking. That’s what I know.”

“Rankin and Guns have a lead on a possible camp. They hired a pilot to take them out there. He’s real paranoid, so he may be right. If they find something, I say you hit it. But if Atha were smart, he’d be already back in Iran.”

“Are you going to follow him?”

“Actually, I’m trying to get him to come to me,” Ferguson said. He explained that he had convinced the Russian scientist to set a trap in Tripoli. “I could use some muscle there, three or four guys who can blend in.”

They worked out the details.

“You doing all right, Ferg? You sound a little tired,” said Van Buren when they were done.

“Yeah, I’m cool. Listen, be ready for anything on this. The professor says this stuff will tear your insides out and make you happy to die. You guys go in, you wear space suits, all right? MOPP NBCs, no fooling around.”

“My guys are checking them out right now, Ferg. Talk to you later.”

~ * ~

14

NORTHEASTERN SUDAN

When Dr. Hamid first heard the airplane in the distance, he thought Atha had turned back for some reason. But after listening for a few more moments, Hamid realized the drone was of something larger. His first thought was that it was a relief plane, though they rarely passed this way. Then he thought it might be a flight from Chad, which had propeller-driven SF 260 trainers converted to attack craft, which its air force used against “insurgents”—which in actual practice meant defenseless civilians in camps like theirs.

“Be ready with the missiles,” he told the Palestinian. Then Hamid went and put the bacteria into a safe where it would survive a bombing attack.

The Palestinian had already assembled his missile teams by the time the aircraft appeared. It was a two-engine plane that he did not recognize—not a fighter, he thought, but not a relief craft, either. It flew at about a thousand feet over the jagged ridge to the west; in his experience, no plane would fly that low unless it meant to land or strafe.

“Observe,” he told the men over the radio. There were two teams, each with an American-made Stinger heat-seeking missile. Shoulder-launched, the weapons had been given nearly two decades before to freedom fighters in Afghanistan, then sold after the war on the black market. Though old, they were nonetheless potent; a low-flying, slow plane like this was an easy target.

The airplane passed overhead without turning to land. Just as the Palestinian was going to order the group on the east to fire, it turned back.

“Observe,” he told his men again. “Be ready.”

~ * ~

15

OVER NORTHEASTERN SUDAN

Rankin used binoculars to get a look at the camp. There was a landing strip, but no plane. The puzzling thing was the buses—it looked as if it were a school parking lot.

“Looks more like a camping ground than a refugee camp,” said Rankin as George Burns circled back. “You sure that’s it?”

George Burns didn’t say anything. His cigar had burned down to a nub, the ash nearly at his lips, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

Guns leaned close to the window over Rankin’s shoulder, taking pictures with his small digital camera.

“What’s with the buses?” Guns asked George Burns.

“Don’t know.” The pilot spoke in short bursts, keeping the cigar riveted to his lips. “Never saw them before. Only been over twice.”

Burns pulled back on the wheel. He’d come down low so they could take pictures, but now he wasn’t feeling too good about it. Even for fifty thousand dollars, there was only so much risk he was willing to take.

“There’s no lab or anything down there,” said Rankin. “If the Iranian came here, he didn’t stay. Where can you go from here?”

“Shit!” yelled George Burns, spitting the cigar from his mouth.

Rankin thought he’d burned himself, then saw there was a red light flashing at the left side of the pilot’s panel. He heard something like a waterfall behind him.

Protective flares. Someone had fired a missile.

“Fuck,” said George Burns again, and a sharp shudder gripped the plane.

The missile hit the right engine, blowing it apart and starting a fire in the wing. If it weren’t for the fire, George Burns would have been able to save the plane; the Siddely was a durable aircraft, and he’d flown it on one engine more than a half-dozen times. But the fire spread through the wing, and within seconds he began losing control.

“Buckle yourselves in,” he said, searching for someplace to land. The camp was located on the far side of a narrow range of low mountains; beyond them to the northeast was open desert. George Burns held the plane up as long as he could, trying to get past the ridge to a point where he could glide into the sand.

His right wing began tipping upward; he struggled to hold it, then felt the controls start to give way—the lines that worked the controls had broken and he was losing the hydraulic fluid. Cursing, he jabbed at the pedals and tried pulling back on the control column, desperately trying to position the body of the plane to take most of the shock when it hit the ground. They were low—two hundred feet—but going too fast to land comfortably, even if they’d had a strip beneath them. He struggled to stay airborne as long as possible, let more speed bleed off, get his wings back level—he needed them level so they wouldn’t tip, would just slide in, skim across the desert as he’d done twice before; third time was the charm, they said. . . .

The tip of the left wing hit the ground, jerking the right side of the plane forward as the belly slammed into the sand. The plane skidded sideways, sliding down a rough hill and then tobogganing up and across into a flatter plain of sand. Dirt and smoke flew everywhere; parts of the plane fell off and others disintegrated; the spine of the aircraft snapped in two.

But as crash landings went, it wasn’t that bad. The plane remained relatively intact, and most of the heavy impact—and damage—was behind the flight deck. All things considered, George Burns had done an admirable job landing.

Unfortunately, Burns was not in a position to appreciate it. Thrown forward, his head had hit the dash; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage before Rankin and Guns managed to undo their seat belts.

“You all right?” Guns asked.

“I think I busted my arm.”

Rankin blinked his eyes. He saw two of everything in front of him.

“I think we’re on fire,” said Guns. He stood, unsteadily, and turned to go out the door immediately behind the flight deck. But there was black smoke everywhere.

“This way,” said Rankin, crawling through the windshield, which had blown out during the landing. Guns, coughing, stopped to unhook George Burns, then pulled him out behind him.

Rankin groaned as he fell onto the dirt. He was still seeing double. Stunned, he tried to pull his sat phone out of his pocket to tell the Cube where they were, but his arm wouldn’t move. He stood up, dazed, blinking his eyes to get his vision back to normal.

Pushed out by Guns, George Burns rolled onto the dirt near him. Rankin could tell by the way he landed that George Burns was dead. He got to his feet as Guns jumped down.

“You all right?” Rankin asked.

“More or less. How’s your arm?”

“Hurts.” Rankin’s eyes focused as he looked at his forearm. It was black and slightly swollen. He’d broken bones before and this had that kind of feel, though a little more intense. Inside, the bone had been displaced slightly—not enough for a compound fracture that would pierce the skin, but more than enough to cause a great deal of pain.

“Whoever shot at us will probably come looking for us,” said Guns.

“Yeah. Pull the phone out of my pocket. Tell Corrigan we’re OK. He probably started having a cow as soon as the GPS locator stopped moving,” said Rankin, looking around to see if there was any cover.

~ * ~

16

CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

Thomas Parnelles looked at the blinking red light on his phone console, hesitating before picking it up.

“Parnelles,” he said, pushing down the button.

“MI6 is going ballistic,” Slott said, without any other introduction or greeting. “Everyone but the janitor has called me. Their field guy is raising a major stink.”

“That’s not surprising.”

“I need their help in Indonesia. I can’t afford to just blow them off.”

“Give them the usual company line,” said Parnelles.

“That’s not working. I need to throw them a bone.”

“What bone do we have?”

“Bring them in on the operation. It was theirs to begin with. We should have cooperated with them from the start. Anyone other than Ferg would have done so as a matter of course.”

Parnelles leaned back in his seat, gazing at one of the photographs on the wall, which showed him and Ferguson’s father in their salad days. Slott was probably right when he said that anyone else would have opted to work with the MI6 agent, regardless of personal differences, but on the other hand, second-guessing the judgment of the man on the scene was not good policy. Especially when it was someone like Ferguson.