Whirlwind (43 page)

Charlie would see what was going on at ground level, although what he’d see would be encrypted abstraction, the Gulfstream’s infrared vision system detecting what the human eye could not.

“Can’t you get lower?” he growled.

The copilot, now flying the Gulfstream, replied tightly, “The technical term for lower is ‘under water.”“

The major had a sense of humor. Charlie found that encouraging.

“Dad, I think those are cars.” Scott was still in the pilot’s seat, still resting his hands on the yoke. He could seize control of the plane in a second.

Yeah, he thought, cars. How many? Seven. Are any of them Toyota Camrys? Who the hell can tell?

“I’m going to bank now. I don’t want to come in over the marina. I could clip a mast, and the engine blowback might “

“Screw the boats!” I need the best view I can get. This is my only shot.

“Trust me, sir. You don’t want me sucking a mainsail off one of those sloops.”

Charlie gave it a moment’s thought. “Okay, Major. We’ll do it your way. You know the consequences if it doesn’t work.”

The copilot nodded.

The contours of two dozen boats sharpened, leaf-shaped hulls glowing orange, masts that wavered not of their own accord, but electrically as infrared detectors strained to pick out their silhouettes through blinding fog.

“Can you turn up that infrared so that it will detect body heat?”

“We’ve got first-generation EVS on this craft. It’s cranked as high as it will go.”

A seemingly infinite parallelogram disappeared to the east. That would be Main Street The town’s on either side of it Cubes and polygons, flickering pyramids on their tops, houses and roofs seen by pure energy, were interpolated by a computer that Charlie wished was much more powerful than it seemed to be.

The plane could not be more than four hundred feet above ground. Yet nothing, not a goddamned thing, could be seen by the human eye. Only the technology saw, and it did not see with sufficient clarity to pinpoint a lone woman in danger of her life.

Charlie was not certain whether he should pray or curse.

I’m powerless. Neither deed nor word will have the least influence. I’m impotent, and for the second damned time in my entire life there’s not a thing I can do.

“Look sharp, sir, we’re coming in.”

A. thunder where silence should have been, an elephant trumpeting in the mist, Johan Schmidt flinched at the unexpected howl of hot metal hurling through the mist.

A jet. Insanely low. We must be near an airbase. No one but a military pilot would dare fly in this weather.

“Charlie is here, Mr. Schmidt. He is coming for you.” Her voice was girlish, high-pitched and mocking one more debit on a ledger that must be cleared.

“Drivel.” He shook his frigid fingers, rubbed his hands together, rolled his muscles to stretch out the stiffness. The Alaska current ran just offshore; fog had lowered the temperature to fifty degrees; the wind-chill factor brought it lower than that. And he, in summer poplin, felt his teeth chatter at the cold.

“What will Charlie do when he finds you? Nothing nice, I think.” Spiteful irony in facetious tones that had become quite unbearable.

She’s feinting, a fencer’s gambit to trick me into lowering my defenses. Me? Are you so full of yourself as to try to trick me? Enough games, girl, I have had enough! Johan Schmidt launched his attack. “Tell me more about your father, Irina.”

Her accent became flat and guarded. “He is unworthy of discussion.” No spite in your voice now, is there, girly?

“Ah, but he is. He’s why you’re here.”

“I am here to kill you.”

Keep it up, just keep it up. All you do is make it worse for yourself. “I mean ‘here’ in the broader sense of the word. I mean he is why you joined the FSB.”

“I am not so infantile.”

You’re trying to hide from the issue. I intend to rub your face in it. “Your father encouraged you.”

“I believe I know what you will say next, Mr. Schmidt.”

Oh no you don’t. “And what would that be?”

“That my father expected me to become a swallow, a spy who uses sex to steal secrets. Am I correct, Mr. Schmidt? This is where you hoped to lead this conversation?”

God damn this woman!

“You will further say that he wrote a letter to my commander endorsing such an assignment. Perhaps you have access to intelligence sources. Perhaps you have read this letter. Perhaps you believe that a father who proposes prostitution for his daughter’s career scars her for life. Perhaps you even believe that reminding me of my humiliation will cause me to break down in tears like a helpless child. If such is your expectation, you will be disappointed. I am neither a child, nor am I helpless. Do you understand why that is so? If you were half the man Charlie is, you would.”

Schmidt roared, “I’m twice the man he is!”

“You said I shall disgrace my father, Mr. Schmidt. Think of that. Think, and then ask yourself if this is not the justice that is owed him.”

“Sir?” A harsh whisper, Krait off to his right. Why wasn’t the soldier using hand signals? Schmidt put a finger to his lips. Krait shook his head. Leaving his station, he slithered toward Schmidt. “Sir, do you smell something?”

Schmidt felt like slapping him. Kolodenkova could be outflanking them through the sector that Krait was assigned to guard. “Get back on your post, soldier!”

“It’s gasoline, sir. I smell gasoline.”

Well of course he smelled gasoline. Every boat in this marina carried an engine of some sort or another. Fuel spills were common. After all, you couldn’t put a sailboat in the water without a motor, usually one from Atomic Engines Inc. if memory served, because…

The gasoline pump. The one at the end of the upwind dock… “If you were as wise as Charlie, you would know that any woman having been shamed in such a manner can never be shamed again. Do you know how strong my father’s betrayal made me, Mr. Schmidt? Charlie does. You shall learn. Quite soon, I think.”

He was searching through the rifle sight, trying to find a gas pump lost in rolling fog, and, yes, he could smell the fumes, and yes the stench was stronger than it should be. the upwind dock. Strong gusts blowing inland. A rising tide.

“Mr. Schmidt, it shall be the last lesson you learn.”

Could she have done it? Had McKenzie put his own iron into her heart?

“Sir! Look!”

Fireworks, a rocket in a silver arc, white actinic fire in high parabola, its origin somewhere to the left, its terminus twenty yards behind Johan Schmidt.

Twenty yards into the marina, twenty yards over the water.

Hissing high above him, bright as a strobe but un flickering it trailed shining smoke behind.

“Flare gun! What’s she trying to do, signal that airplane that just flew over?”

Without warning, the wind stiffened, swirling the fog aside. Through his scope, Schmidt saw seven bullet holes in the gas pump’s base, seven urine-colored streams of fuel spitting down into the sea. Those shots, those shots minutes earlier she hadn’t been shooting at him. She hadn’t been shooting at any of them. The pump was her target. Out of sight, invisible in impenetrable fog, she’d brazenly walked to the edge of the fence line, calmly stood waiting for a few seconds of clear seeing, and coolly emptied Python’s rifle into a bright red Texaco pump, not missing a single shot.

The wind, the tide, were washing fuel in. Had washed it in. Small waves were spilling it on the sand. The entire marina was awash with it, every boat hull and every piling each soaked with creosote, a torch in its own right-coated with gasoline.

The conflagration would be beyond comprehension.

Who would have thought she had it in her?

So fearless, she had crept to another place of concealment, waiting to taste the scent of hell upon an evening breeze waiting with a flare gun stolen from the guard kiosk. A serpent of patience, she radioed Schmidt, distracting him while his back was ten paces from a bomb primed for detonation.

Ice water in her veins. I would never have believed it.

Then, careful in plan and conscientious in execution, she had aimed her flare out over the harbor, stroking a trigger, and Schmidt had not sensed the least change in her serene and self-possessed tone of voice.

A woman one might almost admire.

Goddess of death, she waited tranquilly for flaming magnesium to caress the sea and for the eruption of an inferno that would burn Schmidt off the face of this world and into another.

“Run!” He shouted to Bushmaster and Krait, “Run, you fools!”

He himself made it ten yards before he heard the first shot. The bullet sent Krait rolling in puddles, his blood spraying as he tumbled. He flapped his arms like a wounded seagull, but made no sound, said no word.

Bushmaster was noisier. He died, as such men do, not whispering needed prayers, but screaming the conventional obscenities. Fuck, motherfuck, cunt, cocksucker… all of that. Schmidt was used to it, had seen and heard it many times, and hoped that when the time came he had sufficient self-discipline to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

He was more than thirty yards from the fence when the blast came, and with it an unimaginable tempest of fire and flame and the roaring of demons boiling up from hell.

A hot typhoon threw him off balance, whirling him like a drunken dervish as two bullets cut the air on either side, and his feet slipped out from under him as a third bullet per cussed toward where his chest should be.

Then he saw her.

She was fumbling in her pockets for ammunition, an empty Tokarev in her hand.

Vulnerable at last.

The major was going to make a second pass over the marina, and that was that, and if Irina was down below she’d understand, get in her car and drive straight out of town, and straight into Charlie’s waiting arms.

He’d be waiting for her because the jet jockey was as crazy as he was. Crazier maybe. He was going to put the plane down on San Carlos’s preposterously narrow access road.

He said he could do it. The moment they’d broken out of the fog bank, soaring over open farmlands, he’d said the road was wide enough. Maybe. There wouldn’t be any traffic. Maybe. And besides, landing a Gulfstream only took about three thousand feet of runway, roadway, black asphalt, call it what you will.

Maybe.

Risky? Yeah. So what? The only thing that mattered was going in so low that Irina knew no one in the world could be in that plane except Charles McKenzie, Esquire. Who the hell else did you expect to be blind-as-a-bat barnstorming in a hijacked jet?

She’d know it was him. She was too damned smart not to.

Charlie stared out the cockpit window. The setting sun painted the sky with light from angels’ eyes. And beneath it… oh, hell… the fog bank. Only cloud, it looked like a granite mountain, ground level to twenty-five hundred feet. It was hard, damned hard, to keep control of your guts while you were flying straight at it, a hundred and twenty knots an hour, trying to convince yourself that it was only mist, not the solid rock it looked to be.

And Charlie flying blind was once again in its nowhere heart.

Pale light, dusk light, grey emptiness beyond time and space. There was only a hint as to where the setting sun was, dawn in Japan, nightfall in California, just a milky glow that flickered like

“Sonofabitch!” Charlie shouted, “that’s not the sun! It’s a beacon! Irina has lit a fire beacon!”

The copilot leaned forward. “Impossible. You couldn’t see a bonfire through this soup. At sunset the light does strange …” then very softly,”… oh, God.”

“What?” Charlie asked urgently. He bent over the man’s shoulder. Blinding pain exploded in his battered ribs, his vision blanked, and for a moment he found himself less breathing than gasping. He shook his head clear, straining to get a closer look at what he knew, no doubt in his mind, was Irina’s signal.

“Jesus wept! That’s no signal. It’s… it’s an inferno … it must be burning five stories high!”

Fear pierced him with such shocking swiftness that he might scream. “The town? Is the town on fire?”

“No. We’re almost over the town. Christ, it’s the marina! Look at the EVS! The whole thing’s blazing!”

No time for thinking, no time to puzzle out what was happening, Charlie had no time left at all. “Land this thing.”

“What!?”

Pistol against the major’s neck, he didn’t want to do it this way, but if he had to, he would, “I. Said. Land. The. Fucking. Plane.” No way!

“Scott, take control.”

The major jerked. “No! Jesus! Your son can’t handle this, it’s way beyond-“

Very calmly, very softly: “Then you do it.”

The answer: whispered capitulation. “Shit.”

Two hundred feet above ground level, Charlie stared at the infrared EVS display. San Carlos was a chunky grid, the main street arrow-straight through its center, and dead on toward the marina. How far was it from the last building in town to the marina turnoff? Well now, I’d say that might be a half mile. Sure as hell isn’t three thousand feet.

Landing gear lowered. Flaps full up. The throttle feathered back. The copilot held the yoke with white knuckles, a death grip if Charlie had ever seen one. “This is hairy. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Instruments only. Zero/zero. Residential area, civilian road. Wet civilian road. Smart pilots do not do this sort of thing. Son of a bitch, that’s a car! Jesus God, oh, Jesus God! Are we still alive? Okay, this is it. I’m doing this. I can do this. Brace yourself. We may go in the drink. Christ, they’ll promote me if I pull this off. I love you, mom. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

Charlie felt the road before he saw it. Wheels hissed, water streaming beneath tires. The plane was on the ground, rolling fast, but by God, it was down safe, and that was half the battle.

Twenty-five tons of aerodynamic iron rocketed down a country lane. Charlie watched the flickering passing of fence posts, grassy bunkers, drainage ditches choked with pussy willows, century-old eucalyptus tall and gnarled and dripping moisture, and the Gulfstream’s wingtips whisked against their leaves. A car, headlights on high beam, braked hard in a driveway, and he caught a glimpse of shock and almighty disbelief.