Whirlwind (42 page)

“If you knew your ass from your elbow, you’d know the president inked an executive order even if the hijacked plane is Air Force One with him aboard, you and your kind get blown out of the sky. No more World Trade Centers, asshole!”

Charlie gave the copilot a questioning look. The major nodded. “Standing orders. Either you put this plane down now or someone is going to put it down in pieces.”

“San Luis, call off those interceptors. I can explain this.”

“Don’t waste your breath. You’re on your way to hell, and I’m one proud American to be sending you there.”

“How long?” Charlie asked the pilot.

“They’ll be wheels up in under five minutes. Even if they’re coming out of Camp Pendelton, it will only take ten or fifteen minutes to get in range. An AIM-120 clocks Mach four. A minute after the pilot fires, forty-five pounds of high explosive are going to detonate on this aircraft’s fuselage. Mister, you’ve got two choices. One is surrender. The other is die.”

There’s a third choice. There’s always an alternative. And, God help me, I know what it is. Faking it every step of the way, he forced himself to sound calm. “How much fuel does this plane burn in five minutes?”

The captain’s answer was more reflex than anything else. “At fifty-seven pounds a minute, two hundred and eighty-five pounds. Why?”

Charlie had been eyeing the controls, marking out buttons and levers and switches that looked… interesting. He bent forward, his index finger brushing a touch-screen panel. He cur sored down, then tapped Enter. Bitching Betty began squawking, “Fuel loss. Fuel loss.”

Of all the sins on my soul, dumping jet fuel over the Pacific Ocean may be the one I most regret.

Smiling, showing his teeth, he put his face close to the copilot’s. Very softly, very sincerely, he whispered, “When the gauge shows four hundred pounds, I’m unlocking your handcuffs and giving you control of this plane. You won’t have enough juice to get to an airport. You’ll barely have enough to land. By which time, by God, you had better have come up with a solution to my problem. Because if you don’t then you and I and all of us are going to die together.”

Utter disbelief: “You’re crazy!”

“In my profession we call this forcing a resolution. Major, either we are going to flame out at two hundred knots an hour, or you are going to figure out how to help me. There is no middle ground.” Bitching Betty bleated again, “Fuel loss! Fuel loss!” Charlie showed his teeth. “And how the hell do you turn off that damned annunciator. If it doesn’t shut up, I’m going to shoot it.”

“Sir, uneuff me now.”

The major’s face a little pale, a little sweaty told Charlie all he needed to know: he’d won. “Nope. We’ve still got twelve hundred pounds to go.”

“I’ll do what you say. Just… damnit, sir, you have my word.”

“I trust no one who has a choice.”

“The switch there, the yellow one, upper right. It’s marked EVS.”

“And what might that stand for?”

“Enhanced Vision System. Realtime infrared, I can see … we can see what’s down there.”

Well now, that calls for a stem rebuke. Charlie nudged him behind the ear with the pistol. “Sonny boy, you’ve been holding out on me. That makes me grumpy. Believe me, you don’t want me grumpy. So if you’ve got any other little secrets up your sleeve, now would be a real good time to speak up.”

“Fuel loss! Fuel loss!”

The copilot swallowed hard. “Tour son’s been drifting.”

Charlie didn’t like the sound of that. “Explicate.”

“Just take the cuffs off me. I’ll tell you everything.”

With throaty menace: “You’re going to tell me everything anyway, aren’t you?” Oh, yes, he thought, that was nicely done. It takes a lot to put one of these Air Force boys into a panic. This one’s getting close.

Scott hit the EVS switch. The plane’s Heads Up Display projected a quivering electronic horizon across the windshield, the empty Pacific seen or more likely inferred by infrared detectors. Charlie was taken aback; he’d expected the computer image to be pale green, a color too often seen through a night scope; instead it was red-orange, the hue of hot work, and he didn’t like the implication.

The copilot spoke rapidly. “I’ve been watching the Flight Management System display, sir. Your son… Scott’s a good enough pilot, but he’s flying this plane like it’s a single-engine prop job navigating off compass headings, not the FMS. We’ve got strong westerlies off the ocean enough to nudge us a little off course. Unless you understand the HUD readouts you don’t even notice.”

Scott had completed his turn inland. Charlie glanced up at the infrared display. Still a flatline horizon. No sign of the jagged coast. The Gulfstream’s technology was impressive, but it wasn’t magic; nothing could see through a fog as thick as this. “What’s our position? Our real position.”

“Twenty nautical miles off shore and zero-point-eight miles north of your target area. Sir, please quit dumping fuel.”

Tempting. At least it would shut up that blasted’ computer “Scott, you’re part of this.” Damnit all! “What do you think?”

“Keep dumping, dad. There must be a dozen ways the major can get the upper hand. He could put the plane into a spin or “

The copilot shouted, “A spin! A passenger jet! Holy Christ! Do you think I’m as crazy as you are?”

“Adjust your course, son. Aim her a little south, just like the man said. Major, you’re not taking the helm until the both of us have no alternatives left.”

Bitching Betty’s complaint had changed. Now the computer warned, “Low fuel. Danger. Low fuel.”

Wiggling backward, trading hand signals with Bushmaster and Krait, Schmidt tallied up all the facts he knew about Irina Kolodenkova, and all that he had deduced. On balance, he concluded, it was enough to tip the scales.

She’s too poised, too self-contained. I believe a little attitude adjustment is called for. “Irina, what did you think about that rodeo rider, Mitch Conroy?”

No static, no interference, the radios worked fine in the fog. “Why do you ask?”

Schmidt’s lightweight tropical slacks and shirt were soaked wet and cold colder still with a stiff breeze off the ocean. He pressed a numb finger down on his transmit button. “Because I killed him. With a knife. It was delightful.”

Her inflection was unchanged distant and polite. “Charlie will hurt you for that.”

Well, that didn’t work. “Charles is not going to be hurting anyone. I beat him until he looked like grape jelly.”

“That only would have made him angry.” Mockery in her words.

He was moving slowly low profile, silent, damp clothing turned grey, camouflage on the parking lot’s asphalt. She’d never see him. Nor would she see Bushmaster and Krait, both of whom were, like him, belly-crawling toward the marina fence. That was the safest place. With their backs to the water, they’d be able to cover the entire field of operations: Bushmaster to his right with a rifle pointing at two o’clock, Krait on the left aiming at ten o’ clock, and he himself in the center, high noon. “On the contrary. When I beat a man, I make sure he knows he’s beaten. The objective is not physical pain, it’s psychological pain. Humiliate your opponent, and you unman him.”

“Charlie is more of a man than you shall ever be.”

She was out there somewhere, somewhere in the fog, stealthily making her way toward him. Fine, let her be the hunter. The ignorant woman didn’t have enough sense to know that she was merely saving him the trouble of stalking her. Nonetheless, he gnawed his lip.

“That was a rather obvious ruse, young lady.” He knew himself to be a humorless man; still he tried to imitate an amused tone of voice. “The sort of offensive ploy Charles would assay a tiny prick from a small needle to goad your opponent. You’ve learned something from him, haven’t you?”

“Everything, Mr. Schmidt. I have learned everything from Charlie.”

Schmidt snorted derisively although, truth to tell, unnerving her was proving more difficult than he’d anticipated. She was, he supposed, a bit stronger than he had expected. “I’d like to ask you something about your ingenious lie. With your permission, of course.”

“What lie would that be?”

“That you laid a trail, that you lured me into coming to San Carlos. That is the lie to which I refer.”

“Are you so vain that you cannot admit that I as Charlie would say have outfoxed you?”

Another annoying gibe. He tightened his jaw. You’ll pay for that piece of arrogance. “Nonsense. You came here to steal a boat, a sailboat to be precise.”

Her laughter was cold, inhuman perhaps even frightening, he supposed. For a moment it actually discomfited him. But, of course, she was only acting.

“To steal a boat? What ever for, you foolish man?”

Nettled by this inexperienced neophyte with no field expertise whatsoever, a raw recruit wet behind the ears, this mere girl talking down at him, he shot back. “To escape, of course. To escape to Mexico. Then make your way home to Russia.”

She laughed again. “You are so silly. I do not wish to return to Russia. I wish only to kill you. Then I am done with killing. Forever.”

You do not laugh at me, girl. You do not call me silly. All you do is beg for mercy.

He was on a graveled path now, the fence a few yards in front of him. San Carlos was so law-abiding a village that the authorities did not bother to string razor wire along the fence’s top, nor even barbed wire. Pathetic, really, it was no deterrent at all.

“Well, that’s good. I mean it’s good that you have no plans for going home. If you try, they’ll turn you away. You see, they’ve stripped you of your citizenship.”

“This makes me happy. This lifts a burden from me.”

“The American government had words with Moscow words at the highest levels. You can’t go home because you don’t have a home. You are an exile, expelled in disgrace.”

“I thank you for informing me of this.”

Infuriating. Everything that should disconcert her has the opposite effect. Schmidt wiped fog dew from his glasses while he evaluated his options. What to say next? How to shake her too perfect equilibrium? He gave thought to the matter, a chess player considering both the move he must make next and the moves that would follow. Strike as hard as I can strike straight at this annoying young woman’s heart that’s the best strategy now.

“What about the disgrace, Irina? You’ve shamed your father’s good name. How will he take the news?”

“My father is a kibini-matt.”

Schmidt surprised himself by wincing at this, the most scathing of Russian obscenities.

The Kolodenkova girl continued: “I do not care what my father thinks. When we are little children, then we try to please our parents. Now I am a grown-up. In these past four days, Mr. Schmidt, I have become an adult. The only person whom I must please is myself.” Schmidt shook his head like an angry bull. Kolodenkova should have been furious rushing to silence him, and therefore rushing into his gun sights. Instead she was behaving like a professional, as much of a professional as me. All right, girl, let’s see the stuff you’re really made of.

“You came here for a boat. Don’t deny it. Your father never trusted you “

“Oh, Mr. Schmidt, you also are a kibini-matt.”

He’d kill her for that. Well, he’d kill her anyway. All that would be different would be the art of it.

A rattle of gunfire. Seven pop-pop-pops in a row. They came from the left, distant, the reports muffled beneath a blanket of fog. Krait glanced toward Schmidt, shaking his head. Bushmaster too signaled negative, no target in sight. What had she been shooting at? Certainly not Pit Viper; he’d not had time to run this far.

She used a rifle, small caliber, stolen from the late Python. There’s no doubt of that. And she emptied a full magazine. But she wasn’t firing at us. If she was, I would have heard the ricochet. What is her game?

He flipped to his side, peering at the tiny marina thirty boat slips, three rows often, each slip twelve feet wide and separated by a narrow boardwalk. Most of them were occupied by small sailboats, none larger than thirty feet. Their masts were a dead forest in the fog. Some of their cockpits were covered with blue tarpaulins. A few slips were occupied by rusty trawlers, commercial fishers bobbing on an incoming tide. The sea cat-lapped at the shore, soapsud waves on dirty sand. In the far distance a foghorn sounded, its light unseen in thick cloud billowing inland on a freezing wind. Did something move out there, out at the farthest, almost invisible end of the dock? Was that a man standing… Kolodenkoval

He threw his rifle to his shoulder, sighting through its Milspec scope. He’d already begun to caress the trigger when he recognized his target for what it was: no man, no woman, merely a gas pump located, as all marine gas pumps were, at the distant end of the upwind dock. The fog swirled; for a moment he saw it sharply before another eddy of dirty grey hid it from sight.

Something about that pump … Something wrong … Instinct again, not knowledge, and all the more unsettling for that.

Peering blindly through his scope, he thought of evil. There was malice in this fog, a hostility that transcended natural phenomenon. The weather had become his enemy. He hated it and wished to kill it.

Superstition. Old Kafir women telling ghost stories around an open fire, and jackals whining in the dark. Am I afraid? If so, it is only a tale I tell myself. My enemies are foul weather and a frail woman. Not even a child would be afraid of that!

As angry at his momentary weakness as he was at her, he taunted, “You missed, Irina. Do you wish to try again? If you do, you’re going to need to get closer.”

“I am closer than you think.”

Was that possible? Had the girl somehow managed to outflank them? Was she out in the marina, hidden on some pleasure craft, slowly making her way from boat to boat, creeping up on him from behind? Schmidt wiped a hand across his brow.

Sweat? Has this doomed child so frightened me that I am sweating?

The coast was a fractal orange outline on the Heads Up Display. An ambiguous geometry that might have been a parking lot, a baseball field, a cow pasture, lay directly behind shapes that were more regular, three long rectangles, each with rows of right-angled catwalks. It was the marina, and they were closing on it fast.