The First Billion (45 page)

“And you’re willing to turn this over to the government?”

“I am.”

A palm muffled the mouthpiece and Cate could hear Dodson’s heated voice summoning someone named Roy. Waiting, she watched Jett climb into the Mig’s cockpit and Grushkin take his place next to him. Jett looked more comfortable now, and she found her own nerves settling too. Then she reminded herself that in a little while she would have to take Grushkin’s place, and her hard-won repose vanished. Suddenly, the Mig looked very big and very dangerous.

“Miss Magnus, you’ve piqued my interest,” she heard Dodson’s voice say. “What is it you want?”

“Just a little help getting home.”

“Oh?”

Cate outlined Jett’s plan for the next twenty-four hours and how the FBI could help.

“Anything else?” Dodson asked. “Dinner with the President? An audience with the Pope?”

“No, thank you,” Cate replied, all business. “That’s all.” Her sense of humor had deserted her sometime back, probably in a dusky pine clearing in the plains north of Moscow. “Is that a yes?”

It took Dodson a long time to answer.

She had one call yet to make. As usual, she’d saved the hardest for last. Half a dozen times already, she’d picked up the handset only to slam it right back down. Grushkin had brought her a flight suit and draped it over the door. A helmet with a dark sunshield sat on the desk in front of her, and she could see her reflection in it. She asked herself who she really was, Cate Magnus or Katya Kirov. And who, after all was said and done, she would choose to remain. The answers came more easily than she expected. As Jett said, there was only one direction: straight ahead.

Picking up the phone, she dialed the nine-digit number that she recognized as belonging to the north side of Moscow. It was a hard part of town, and the voice that answered the phone matched it perfectly.
“Da?”

Catherine Elizabeth Magnus did not hang up.

You ready?” Gavallan asked Cate.

“Yeah,” she said, then more certainly, “Yes, I’m ready. Jesus, Jett, what am I supposed to say—hee-hah, let’s git? I’m scared, that’s what I am. Are you?”

Glancing to his right, he caught sight of her beneath the Perspex bubble next to him. Wearing the oversized helmet, she looked thin and vulnerable. He could see that she was trying to smile and having a hard time of it. Shifting his eyes to the fore, he gazed down the slim strip of asphalt rolling to the horizon. He waited for his heart to beat faster, for the prickly fingers to scratch at the back of his neck, but his heart was calm, and so was his psyche. In the final analysis, he was just flying a plane. Besides, it wasn’t takeoffs that frightened him. It was what he’d find up there.

“Am I what?” he asked, a half second later.

“Are you ready?”

“Absolutely,” he said, fingering the throttle, inching it ever so slightly forward. Immediately, the engine roared. The aircraft begin to rumble. “Let’s go to Germany.”

Colonel Pyotr Grushkin watched his beloved Mig taxi to the end of the runway, turn slowly, then barrel down the asphalt and take off over the golden fields of wheat swaying in the warm evening breeze. Wings sweeping back toward the fuselage, the aircraft climbed higher and higher into the azure sky. The American rocked the fighter port and starboard, a gentleman’s good-bye, and Grushkin’s heart went with it.

When the Mig was barely a speck in the sky, he walked into his office and made a phone call.

“Jerzy, this is Pyotr. Listen, I have a student taking the jet out for a long run toward the border. Nothing to worry about—just a training exercise. But in case anything funny happens, maybe you could keep your eyes closed.”

“What do you mean, ‘keep my eyes closed’?” Jerzy asked.

“Take a short break. Forget you saw anything. If any tough guys ask, say everything’s quiet as the grave.”

“This is a serious matter you are talking about, Colonel. A question of the motherland’s security.”

“I think it is more a question of a thousand American dollars,
nyet
?” There was a pause, and Grushkin pictured his old crew chief seated at his obsolete radar array, a cigarette burning between his fingers, a tepid cup of coffee on his desk. “Please, Jerzy. A favor.”

“It is a very quiet evening. I would be surprised if anything of interest appeared on our screens. Good-bye, Pyotr.”

When Grushkin returned to the hangar, he was confronted by a pageant of disappointed faces. He stared back, then slowly allowed a broad, shit-eating grin to crack his stoic face.

“Hey, don’t look so glum, you dirty bastards,” he shouted. “Somebody break out the vodka! We’re fucking millionaires!”

62

The safe course was to keep the plane low, respect a two-hundred-foot ceiling, bleed the speed to five hundred miles per hour, well under supersonic, and take the Mig for a sunset cruise over the rooftops of Eastern Europe. A check of the instruments showed what Gavallan thought of the safe course. Speed: 650 knots. Altitude: 30,000 feet and climbing. Screw the safe course. It was long gone anyway. He’d thrown safety to the wind when he’d busted into Ray Luca’s home in Delray Beach Friday afternoon. No, he decided, he’d chucked it earlier than that. He even had the date: January 10, somewhere around three o’clock, when after a boozy lunch at Alfred’s in the financial district, he’d signed Konstantin Kirov as a client and pledged Black Jet Securities’ every effort to make the Mercury offering a grand slam.

Rolling his shoulders, Gavallan tried to get comfortable in the scooped-out seat. One hand fought the stick. He was holding it too rigidly, nudging the aircraft left every few seconds to compensate for a slight oversteer. The other hand rested on the throttle like a leaden weight, keeping his airspeed steady.

A click of his thumb activated the intercom. “How ya doin’?”

Cate sat beside him in her own self-enclosed turret, his airsick RIO, or radar intercept officer, in her sky blue flight suit and pearl white helmet. “Alive,” she whispered. “Just barely.”

“We’re about eleven hundred miles out,” he said. “Another two hours and we’ll be on friendly soil.”

“Just hurry, Jett.”

Cate had greeted the initial rush of speed with an exhilarated “Wow!” and then, a few seconds later, as they’d slowed dramatically, a less enthusiastic “Uh-oh.” She’d used two of Grushkin’s doggy bags, and Gavallan didn’t think there was anything left in her tummy for a third.

“I am,” he said. “You can count on it.”

Gavallan released his thumb and turned his eyes back to the bank of instruments. He’d expected it to be easier than this. He’d expected it all to come right back, as if sliding into the cockpit after an eleven-year break were the same thing as slipping on an old jacket and finding that it still fit. Instead, the seat felt tight on his bottom. The cockpit was much too small, the stick unresponsive. It wasn’t a question of whether he could still fly. He could. The Mig was not especially challenging in that regard. The cockpit configuration was similar to that of the A-10 he’d piloted prior to going into the Stealth program. Aircraft design dictated that form follow function and the throttle, stick, and navigation systems were all in similar places. The gauges and the heads-up display, or HUD, with their Cyrillic lettering might be difficult to read and the airspeed indicator was in kilometers, not knots per hour, but when it came down to it, the Mig was just another jet. All the same, he was flying poorly, stiffly, with no grace, no feel for the aircraft. Even the familiar tightness of the G suit around his thighs and across his stomach, the shoulder harness’s stiff bite, failed to comfort him.

Relax, he told himself. You were born to do this.
Born to fly.

The words set him on a slingshot journey back through time in which he reviewed his every accomplishment as a pilot. Baghdad. Tonopah. Colorado Springs. The images shot past his mind’s eye with increasing speed, faster and faster, one on top of the other, blurred, ill-focused, until just as quickly they froze and he saw himself at age fifteen, lying on the hood of his father’s Chevy on a hot summer night in Texas. The car was a hot rod, a fire engine red ‘68 Camaro with a 454 engine, twin chrome exhausts, and a white racing stripe painted down the hood. After spending all afternoon washing and waxing it, he’d driven twenty miles outside of town and parked in the middle of the open plain where alone in the gathering dusk, he could watch the jets from Beeville Air Station, fifty miles to the north, screech across the sky. He would lie there for an hour, looking up at their gleaming silver bodies, listening to their engines shake the very pillars of the sky, dreaming upon the white contrails they left behind. He was born to fly. It had come to him with a certainty that was raw and cold and frightening. Shivering in the ninety-nine-degree dusk, he’d known he belonged up there.

So, fly,
he told himself now.
Relax and fly, goddamn it.

He gazed at the countryside below. The sun had fallen below the horizon, and its waning rays burnt the Earth’s cusp a flaming ochre. The sky above was dark and supple and inviting.

Gavallan’s eyes fell to the radar array, a square black screen six inches by six inches located on the instrument console. The screen was dark except for his own orange blip and a flashing triangle that was a passenger jet ninety miles to the north. He’d been flying for an hour, and so far he had detected no sign of Russian air patrols. Either Grushkin was a man of his word or Russian air defenses were perilously lax.

Checking his coordinates on the heads-up satellite navigation system, he put the plane into a seventy-degree roll and brought his heading to west-southwest. Doing some quick math, he figured he’d put the bird down at Ramstein Air Force Base outside of Frankfurt at around 10 P.M. local time. From then on, they’d be living on the good graces of others.

Five minutes passed. Gavallan checked his coordinates against a map on his knee and decided he was somewhere just south of Kraców, Poland, safely out of Russian airspace. “We’re going to start looking mighty suspicious to our flyboys anytime now,” he said to Cate. “Time to call ahead and give the boys in blue our arrival time.” He checked his radio log and dialed in Ramstein Air Force Base, home to the 86
^th
Airlift Wing. As he keyed the mike a second time, a steady howl sounded outside his earphones. At the same time, a red square blinked on his console.
Fire.
Starboard engine. His eyes kicked right. The gauge showing the exhaust gas temperature was maxed out, full in the red. He pulled the handle to activate the fire extinguisher and cut fuel flow to the engine. At the same time, he cut back on the throttle, shut down the engine, and put the plane into a steep dive. A check over his shoulder revealed nothing. But the gauge didn’t lie.

The plane shuddered, as if hit from the side.

“Jett!”

“Hold on, sweetheart, just a little problem.”

“What is it?”

Gavallan’s heart was racing; a lump lodged high in his throat. The stick was bucking in his hand. He jerked it to the right, but there was no response. A high-pitched buzz saw whined in his earphones. He was losing control of the aircraft.

This isn’t my plane, he protested silently. I haven’t trained in a Mig. A second check over his shoulder showed flames licking the wing. Immediately he hit the auxiliary extinguisher, and a gust of white puffed from beneath the wing. The flames flickered, then disappeared.

And then the world turned upside down on him. The Mig rolled over and went nose down, spinning in a slow roll.

“Jett, help us. Stop this. Oh, God . . . no, no!”

Gavallan looked at Cate, her eyes wide with terror, her helmet pinned to the canopy.

A voice inside him whispered,
You were born to fly. So, relax and fly.

“Just a little glitch,” he said, in the voice Grafton Byrnes had taught him that hot and sunny day in Alamagordo. “Not to worry.”

Still inverted, he pulled back on the stick, depressed the ailerons to stop the spin, and pulled the nose through. Gently he goosed the port engine. The single turbine hummed confidently. It was working. The plane was responding to his touch. He was guiding the aircraft instead of allowing it to guide him. A well of confidence grew in his chest, warm and reassuring. It was the pilot’s bravado coming back. The certainty he could do anything, if by sheer force of will alone.

And there, as he plummeted toward the earth at four hundred miles an hour, a dam burst in his mind. A clarity of thought, of memory, of action, came to him that he had not possessed for years.

Priority One. Ring One.

The words struck him like a lightning bolt.

The attack on Abu Ghurayb. Saddam’s Presidential palace.

He saw himself in the cockpit of the F-117—
no, damn it, he is there . . .
the stick between his legs, the joystick to his left, the infrared display screens.
He is there.
Inside
Darling Lil,
ten thousand feet above the Iraqi desert.

He is at bombing altitude. A finger toggles a switch. Bomb armed. Eyes forward on the IR display. Target spotted. A stable of buildings silhouetted against the gray desert floor. His finger slews the crosshairs back and forth across the palace until he decides he has found the wing. Then, as if a mechanism itself, the thumb locks down. A yellow light flashes. Laser acquisition engaged. Red lights fire on the heads-up display. Target in range. Gavallan hits the pickle and the weapons bay door opens.
Darling Lil
shudders. He depresses the pickle again and the bomb falls from the aircraft. He feels the aircraft jerk upward, as if freed from its moorings.

As the bomb falls, his eyes lock onto the IR screen and the delicate crosshairs positioned over the east wing of the Presidential palace. All external stimuli disappear. He is in a tunnel. At the far end rests his target. Thumb locked. The crosshairs do not move.

“Thunder three-six. Red Leader One. Copy?”

The bomb appears on the screen. A lethal black dot skimming across the ground at an impossible speed. A red light blinks. A fuel warning. Tanks low. Gavallan pays it no mind. It will wait.

“Roger Red One. Come in.”

“Friendlies in the area. We have friendlies on-site. Abort run. I repeat: Abort run.”

At the sound of the word “friendlies,” Gavallan’s finger is already moving, skewing the crosshairs away from the palace, guiding the “smart bomb” away from the American troops.

On the console, a second light blinks—yellow, urgent. It is the Allied Forces Locator warning him he has engaged friendly forces.

“Abort run! Confirm, Thunder three-six!”

But the pilot’s instincts have beaten the verbal command by a second, maybe two. An eternity in the electronic world that can be translated into two hundred fifty feet of fall time.

Gavallan keeps his thumb pressed to the right, ordering the bomb to follow his instructions. But the bomb does not listen. She has been on her downward trajectory too long and it is as if she is too stubborn to alter her course.

The desert flower blossoms. The IR screen blanches. A blizzard of white noise. The palace reappears. The east wing is no more, a bonfire of angles fallen in on itself. The heat signatures have disappeared, too, replaced by the blotchy, pulsing quasars that indicate fire.

Inside the Mig, Gavallan lets the images fade away. He has seen enough. In an instant, the past has vanished. But it is a different past than the one he has known. A different reality than the one he has lived with these eleven years. No longer will he question his response, second-guess his reflexes. He knows now that he did everything he could, more even, to prevent the bomb from injuring American Marines. Governed by his instincts, he ordered the bomb off its course even before he himself had fully received the command. If his actions were not sufficient to save the lives of ten men, to prevent two others from being robbed of their ability to live full and decent lives, they were still all he could demand of himself. He was an accessory, yes, and for that he would always feel horror and revulsion. But he would no longer feel the guilt, the shame, the dishonor, no longer believe that it was his own poor reactions that had caused those tragic events.

He would never be free of that night, but he was no longer its prisoner.

Slowly, the nose righted itself and the wings found the horizon. The plane shuddered again and was still. They were gliding on a lake of ice.

“Just a little engine problem,” he said to Cate. “All taken care of. Sit tight. I’ll have us down in a jif.”

“Hurry, Jett . . . thank you . . . but hurry.”

“Roger that.”

Bringing the airspeed down to 250 miles an hour, Gavallan let go a long breath. The Mig flew straight on its course, a black eagle skipping across the European sky.

Ramstein Tower, this is United States Air Force Captain John Gavallan, retired. Serial number 276-99-7200. I’ve got a Russian Mig under my butt that I’d like to put down at your place. You should have word about our arrival. Copy?”

“Copy, Captain Gavallan. Sorry, but we have no word of your status. You are negative for a landing. Please exit secure airspace immediately.” There was a pause, and the communications link crackled with white noise. A new voice sounded in Gavallan’s earphones. “Captain Gavallan, this is Major Tompkins. You are roger for a landing. Please proceed to vector two seven four, descend to fifteen thousand feet. Welcome back to the Air Force.”

“Roger that,” said Gavallan. Same old. Same old.

At 10:07 local time, Gavallan brought the Mig to a perfect three-point touchdown on runway two-niner at Ramstein Air Force Base, thirty miles south of Frankfurt, Germany. A jeep waited at the end of the runway, blue siren flashing, to guide them to their parking spot. Gavallan followed at a distance, keeping his ground speed to a minimum. Finding his spot, he killed the engines. Airmen dashed beneath the Mig and threw blocks under his tires. Gavallan waited until they reappeared, flashing him the “thumbs-up,” before opening his canopy and unbuckling his seat harness.

The twin, rounded hooks of a flight ladder coupled onto the fuselage and, reluctantly, he climbed out of the cockpit. He stopped at the bottom rung, not wanting his foot to touch the ground. The crackle of avionics still echoed in his ear. The “by the seat of your pants” rush that came with flying a jet lingered inside him like a melancholy phantom. For a few seconds he listened to the cry of the turbine engines winding down and sniffed at the burnt rubber and let the wind brush his cheek. Technically, he owned the plane, but he had no plans to fly it again. Jets belonged to his past, and he knew well enough not to look back.