It was brutally turbulent, though, and the plane had sounded like it would come apart at any moment. But the escapees breathed a sigh of relief once they left Cuban airspace. It appeared their ruse had worked. They'd even relaxed a little, hoping to maybe see the dull lights of the Florida coastline through the storm. Up to that point, it had been so far, so good.
Then they found the bomb.
It had been taped to the roof of the tiny modular commode squeezed in behind the flight deck's engineering station. Placed there days before, no doubt, by a member of Iran's notorious secret police, it was discovered when Puglisi went into the Porta Potti to take a leak and smelled the distinctly sweet odor of plastique. He'd quickly informed the others, and it didn't take much brainpower to realize the Iranian mullahs had intended to blow up the transfer plane all along.
Luckily, Puglisi knew about bombs, including ones like this. Hooked to a primitive altimeter assembly, it had been set to go off once the plane reached 7,500 feet. That's why it had been wise, if not totally dumb luck, that Ryder and Gallant had leveled off at 7,200. They'd come within 300 feet of blowing themselves to Kingdom Come.
Disarming the bomb was another matter. It was very crude and unstable. The altimeter-trigger assembly was held together by nothing more than an elastic band. Rather than defusing it and taking the chance of something going wrong, Puglisi strongly suggested that they stay as low as possible and take care of the bomb once they were on the ground. Of course, flying low had been part of the plan all along. Ryder and Gallant had already been busting arm and ass just keeping the damn plane a few feet above the minitsunamis kicked up by the Atlantic gale. One wrong move and it would have been all over for them very, very quickly.
The anxiety of the bomb, the shitty overall condition of the airplane, the fact that despite all their deceptions, they still might be picked up on U.S. radar, and that would mean facing at least a couple all-weather-equipped F-15s or F-16s whose pilots would be working under the post-9/11 rules of shoot first and ask questions laterâall these things had made the dash up the stormy Atlantic seaboard a bit uncomfortable, to say the least.
“We might wind up in the drink yet,” Gallant had said more than once during the trip.
So it was almost a surprise when, 122 minutes later,
they'd found themselves approaching the tiny isthmus called Cape Lonely.
The storm had been almost as bad here as down at Gitmo, which was a good thing, because it had indeed helped mask their flight up. But at that point, they needed to get some air under them to rise above the cliff, turn around, and land. Though loath to go up even an inch, Ryder and Gallant had eased the balky craft to a hair-raising 3,000 feet. They didn't linger there for very long, though. Putting the plane into a wide bank, they lined the nose up with the northern end of the runway and started back down. They'd had no contact with anyone on the ground, of course. This was strictly a seat-of-the-pants landing. No lights. No wind direction. So it wasn't until the very last instant that they realized the airstrip was badly in need of a haircut. They came down in a small forest of ragweed and nettle, hitting hard and fast. Ryder and Gallant had to stand on the brakes with such force, three tires blew outâ
Pop! Pop! Pop!
âone right after another, each one sounding, yes, just like a small bomb going off.
They'd needed every inch of the overgrown runway to get the Persian beast to finally grind itself to a halt, accompanied by a cloud of sand and dust and muck and pieces of weeds being shredded up by the big, wet propellers. It seemed like the screeching would never stop, even when they nosed down into the ditch at the far end of the strip. The front wheel finally collapsed, thoughâand so did Ryder and Gallant, right over the controls, both exhausted. To their utter dismay, they'd discovered their fellow escapees had dozed during most of the trip. Only the less than gentle landing woke them up.
Recovering from their ordeal, both pilots had looked back at their groggy colleagues in the cargo compartment, yawning and stretching like they'd just got off the couch from a nap.
“They'll pay for this,” Gallant had grumbled.
All this happened a week ago, and this was Ryder's first look at the plane since. They'd headed north for D.C. not 30 minutes after landing. (That ironic trip was made mostly by
Greyhound bus, a nightmare of cramped conditions and broken air-conditioning that made them all yearn for the Transall.) He'd left something behind on the plane that night, though. He was here now to get it back.
He climbed inside the airplane; the cargo hold smelled of low tide and oil. The flight deck itself was as messy as Li's house. Finch and his cohorts had been up here trying to steer the beast while pulling it out of the ditch and into the hangar with their small fleet of jeeps and SUVsâall this after first disposing of the bomb. Ryder was glad he missed that little adventure.
He sat down at the controls and looked over the flight panel. He threw a few switches, but nothing would even turn on. He tried the engines, just for the hell of it, but there was little power left inside the plane. There was no way anything was going to start. The Transall appeared dead for good.
Enough of that. He reached up to the sun flap above the pilot's side window, and there it was: the photograph he'd hidden here. It showed a beautiful woman, in her garden, just turning to smile after being caught unawares by the camera.
It was his wife, Maureen.
The only true love of his life.
Gone now almost four years ⦠.
She'd been aboard Flight 175, the second plane to go into the World Trade Towers. Ryder had taken this picture a few months before that dark day and had carried it with him ever since. Yet he'd left it here, inside the Transall, after landing seven days ago. For some reason, he'd decided not to bring it up to D.C. with him. Perhaps he'd been afraid that if he got caught doing what he was doing they would take it away from him after he was arrested and he'd never see it again. Or maybe it had been something else.
But at last he had it back againâa great relief. He looked at it now, and as always, her eyes looked right back out at him. Blond. Sexy. Sweet. Deep blue beauty with a big smile.
Damn ⦠.
The flap where he'd stashed the picture fell back down
suddenly, startling him. Its hinge had been shaken loose in the landing just like everything else aboard the airplane. But there was a small mirror attached to it, and now Ryder was looking right into it. From forehead to chin he didn't recognize the person in the reflection. Skin burned and creased, hair not cut in months. Nose looking broken, though it wasn't. Lips cracked, beard erupting. Chin quivering. But it was his eyesâthey scared him the most. Red and watery, they looked absolutely insane.
He flipped the mirror back up in its place and pushed it in so it stayed there, cursing the cosmos for this unneeded piece of synchronicity. He already had enough reminders that he was spiraling downward. He didn't need any more.
He returned to Maureen's picture, gleaming in the flashlight. If he'd ever had any doubts about what he and the others were about to do, those misgivings were gone now. She'd been his life, and the mass murderers of Al Qaeda had killed herâand in doing so had killed him as well. He was not the same guy he was before her death. Back then, he was a highly paid test pilot for Boeing and the Air Force, this after many years of flying black ops. He was a normal person, or as normal as a test pilot could be. Then, in a blink, she was gone and he knew he would never be normal again. At the bottom of the blackest pit on the blackest days that followed, he'd never got through the last stage of grief: acceptance.
Just couldn't.
Instead, he'd jumped right over it to the next emotion: revenge. Get mad;
then
get even. That's what he was doing in the secret outfit.
That's what they were all doing here.
He put the picture in his pocket and wiped his crazy eyes. Someone was approaching.
It was Gallant. He stuck his head in the flight compartment, half a doughnut still hanging out of his mouth.
“You think flying this pig was a lot of fun?” he asked Ryder. “Wait 'til you see what we're riding in next ⦠.”
Â
The rest of the team were already standing at the entrance to the fourth hangar when Ryder and Gallant approached.
Refueled by the half-gallon of coffee they'd just split between them, the ghosts were jumpy now, anxious to get to the next step.
Master Chief Finch had prepared himself well for this moment. He had a regulation three-ring binder with him and was reading it by flashlight. He was calling out numbers, weights, speed, things like that. But as the two pilots drew near, Ryder heard Fox say to Finch, “You gotta convince these two guys first. They're the ones who'll have to fly this thing.” The other team members were staring into the air barn with shared looks of amusement and horror. This was not what any pilot wanted to hear or see.
Ryder and Gallant reached the door of the hangar and finally saw what the others were looking at.
It was a helicopter. A very
old
helicopter.
“What
the fuck
is that?” Ryder just moaned.
Finch went back to his three-ring binder again, returning to the first page.
“This is a Sikorsky Super S-58,” he announced. “They used to call it the âSky Horse.' Big engine. Lots of power. Lots of range. New tires. Ain't it a beauty?”
Well,
that
was in the eye of the beholder, Ryder thought. This thing looked like something from a bad fifties war movie. It was bigânearly 55 feet long. And bulkyâat least 15 feet off the ground, probably more. And Sky Horse? It looked more like a huge insect. The nose was bulbous and thick, the cockpit stuck on top of it almost as an afterthought. It had a gigantic four-bladed rotor, the tips of which drooped so much, they nearly touched the hangar floor. This made the thing look not only ancient but very sad as well. And it got worse. Most advanced choppers these days needed little or no tail rotor for stabilization. Microprocessors did much of the work. The tail rotor on this craft, however, was about the size of one of the propellers on the Transall-2. This meant the copter would be very hard to keep stabilized in the air, and that would make for very bumpy riding.
“We can't go in this thing,” Gallant said now; he was the
team's lead copter pilot, so he would know. “It's too big, too ugly. Too old.”
Finch just shrugged. “It's also all we got.”
Gallant went up and touched the helicopter on its nose, as if he had to convince himself that it was real. “But ⦠when was the last time its engines were even turned over?”
“Last night,” Finch told him simply. “Those old boys who shared their doughnuts with you? They put this thing together in six days. From scraps out back, and stuff they stole, and stuff they've had here in storage since I was a recruit, and, of course, stuff from Radio Shack.”
Everyone's jaw dropped.
“
Those
old guys built this for usâfrom
Radio Shack
parts?”
“Rebuilt it, yes,” Finch replied. “Mostly in the cockpit.”
Gallant was almost speechless. They all were.
“But have they
flown
it?” Gallant pressed him.
Finch just shook his head. “If they say it will fly ⦠then believe me, it will fly.”
Exasperation now filled the air. Gallant just looked at Fox and then walked away. On cue, the rest of the team members left, too. It would be up to the DSA officer to explain the situation to Finch.
“Look, Eddie,” Fox began. “We realize these are difficult times. And we're all taking a great amount of risk here, with what we are doing, especially you. But my friends and I have a long way to go, and a lot of things to do when we get there. We were expecting something a little more ⦠well,
up-to-date.”
Finch just shrugged again. “Besides finding you a place to land, âour mutual friend' also asked me to provide you with something to get you where you needed to go.” he said. “Something untraceable. Something with long range and power. And he gave me exactly two weeks to get it done.
This
is what I came up with.”
Fox shifted nervously. “Well, I appreciate that,” he began again, stumbling a bit. “But it's just that your friends look,
well,
very retired
, let's say. And my friends here are used to having real sharp tacks working on their things.”
Finch just looked back at himâand then laughed. He handed Fox the three-ring binder.
“Believe me, Major,” he said. “If those guys say it will fly, it
will
fly.”
With that, he walked away.
Â
The team reassembled and discussed the situation amid a storm of windblown cigarette smoke.
They were under the gun. They had to get moving. They had a timetable to meet, and if they were just a few minutes late, it might mean disaster. As unappealing as the Sky Horse seemed, it was obviously the only ride in town. Where they were going they couldn't walk. Or take a bus. Or Li's little Toyota. The S-58 would have to do.