Assassin

Chapter Forty-Seven

The Emirate

FOUR SKELETAL BLACK BIRDS SOARED HIGH ABOVE THE WHITE floor of the valley. Jagged snow-blown mountains marched shoulder-to-shoulder up both sides of the wide basin, craggy promontories that scraped the crystalline blue skies. Three of the four gaunt black birds flew up this valley in a fair semblance of formation.

The fourth, mission code Hawkeye, putative leader of the flight, did not. This mischievous bird would lag behind the flock; first scribing tight corkscrew arcs downward, she would then ride a rising column of warm air, only to nose over the top and dive once more, the earth rushing crazily up, the airspeed indicator redlined. At the last possible moment, the wayward blackbird would level its wings and climb out, soaring once more on the warm thermals and rejoining the flight.

The pilot of this fourth bird, grinning with exhilaration, heard a squawk in his headphones.

“Hey. Offer you a deal, Hawkeye,” Patterson drawled on the intercom. “Limited time only.”

“Shoot, Tex.”

“You keep this bird on an even keel till we reach the LZ, set us down gently in one unbusted piece of high-tech plastic, you get use of this aircraft right here for one entire month of playtime.”

“You’re not serious?”

“I reckon I am.”

“Deal,” Hawke said, thrilled. With a wingspan of sixty feet, Hawkeye was in every sense the world’s most sophisticated high-altitude stealth glider. He’d never flown anything remotely like her. Few had.

The lanky Texan, seated two seats aft of the Englishman in the cockpit, heard the huge smile Hawke had put behind that word, Deal. Never in his life had he known a boy who just loved flying airplanes so much. And, never once, at least not since this whole nightmare had begun in Venice and on the steps of a little church in England, had he heard Alex Hawke sound so happy.

“Would you like to drive, Tex?”

“Naw, son, you doin’ jes fine now.”

“I aim to please.”

“G’night,” the big man said, flipping down the most darkly tinted of the three visors attached to his helmet. Tex stuck a fresh mint toothpick in his teeth, leaned his head back against his headrest and closed his eyes; trying to relax a little in the short time remaining before all hell broke loose.

For some time, Hawkeye soared gracefully up valley, riding the thermals, flock in tow, and nothing and no one disturbed the blissful silence of the air.

Now, the ice-encrusted twin peaks of the Blue Mountain loomed ahead. It was monstrous. A dark blue-tinged mass of sharp granite angles, frozen snow and blue-black ice, the rocky pinnacle rose through the few stringy cloud layers to scrape the sky at 18,000 feet. The tallest of the two peaks was just 9,000 feet shy of Everest, the other peak a thousand feet lower.

The narrow snow-filled crevasse that split that pinnacle was the little flock’s destination.

“Hey, Tex. You awake?”

“Am now.”

“I’ve got the LZ in sight. I still feel guilty. Flying your plane—these are your men, Tex. Your planes. Your men.”

“We been through all this, ain’t we? Law of the plains. Injuns got you surrounded, the best shot gets the long rifle. That’d be you, Hawkeye.”

“I suppose—”

“Hawke, listen. It ain’t like you’re hurtin’ my feelings. The president gave you this assignment, remember. Not DSS, and not me. Me and the boys will gladly knock down anybody gets within spittin’ distance of you. But you got the ball, son.”

“I have the ball, sir.” Alex said, laughing. It was the expression fighter jocks used in carrier landings to tell Flight Ops they were properly lined up on final approach.

“I got your joke, son. Mixing up metaphors, do it all the time, my wife says. Football and flying.”

“Right.”

“Glad we got that all straightened out,” Tex said, leaning back and closing his eyes. He had that rare ability, when all about him were losing their heads, to nap. Alex Hawke used the flying time remaining trying to envision what kinds of hazards he might soon encounter trying to land four Black Widows on a mountaintop at 18,000 feet. He stopped counting at three.

The DSS pilots had nicknamed the new glider design Black Widow in memory of the legendary P-61. The reedlike glider’s twin-barreled fuselage certainly recalled the World War II nightfighter, the P-61 Black Widow. The new high-altitude aircraft even had the red hourglass shape, identifying nature’s deadliest spider, painted on its matte black belly. But, while vintage Black Widows were powerful, bulbous, muscular warplanes, bristling with weaponry, Hawkeye and her like had no weapons. No engines. Built of carbon fiber composite and thin everywhere the P-61 had been thick, she looked, Patterson said, “Like a flying box built out of toothpicks.”

Hawke’s headphones crackled again.

“Hawkeye, Hawkeye, you got Gabriel upstairs,” a voice said. “I have your LZ in visual contact. You’re getting close. Glad as hell it’s you landing that thing up there, not me. Over.”

“Roger that, Gabriel. Appreciate your support as always,” Hawke replied.

The ungainly E2-C Navy surveillance plane, mission code Gabriel, was monitoring the entire mission and sending a real-time video feed direct to Washington. Earlier, a small group gathered around a monitor at the White House had cheered when the four glider pilots had pulled their release knobs, cast off the towlines from the Navy STOLs and soared away over the range of misty blue mountains. Then they’d lapsed into subdued silence.

A very small number of those watching the White House monitors knew the fate of their country was very likely riding with the men inside those four Black Widows.

The silence in the Oval Office was broken when the quietly excited voice of one of the four pilots crackled over a set of speakers. “This is your captain speaking,” the small group heard the pilot say, “Kindly put your seatbacks and tray tables in an upright position.”

“Copy that, Skipper,” came the laconic reply. “And in the unlikely event of a water landing, I reckon the cheeks of my ass will act as a flotation device?”

“Roger that,” the pilot laughed.

“That would be Alex Hawke and Tex Patterson aboard Hawkeye, the lead plane,” the president said, smiling grimly at the small gathering of people watching with him in the Oval Office. “Hawkeye will be first in.”

Jack McAtee’s eyes were glued to the screen. The tension in the room was more than palpable, it was excruciating.

“This is it, boys,” the grim president told the vice president and his chief of staff. “This is the whole damn shooting match, right here.”

So far, so good, Hawke thought, easing his stick forward an inch and getting his nose back below the horizon where it belonged. Of course, the method of getting out of a high-mountain hot zone would not be nearly so straightforward as getting in—but Hawke had enough on his mind at the moment to stuff those kinds of thoughts back into the semidistant recesses of his brain. He concentrated instead on the good news; uneven, mountainous terrain might shield their approach from visual and electronic monitoring.

“FlyBaby…Widowmaker…Phantom,” Hawke said. “This is Hawkeye, copy?”

“Roger, Hawkeye, FlyBaby’s right behind you, high, wide, and handsome,” her skipper, a tough south Florida kid named Mario Mendoza, said. “Can’t shake me with all those circus acrobatics.”

“Copy that, Hawkeye, Widowmaker at your five.” Jim Ferguson, Ferg, was a good old boy from West Texas, former crop duster and current knucklebuster. Tom Quick, the only non-DSS agent besides Hawke, was two seats behind him.

“That leaves you, Phantom,” Hawke said. “Copy.”

“Uh, roger, Hawkeye, Phantom copies,” Ron Gidwitz, the skinny kid from the south side of Chicago who was flying Phantom said. “We got, uh, got us a minor problem here, sir. Got a warning light lit up and…we, uh—”

“Talk to me, Phantom,” Hawke said. A minute stretched out.

“Disregard, Hawkeye,” Gidwitz finally said, “Warning light just went out. Some kind of electrical glitch. Over.”

“Roger that, Phantom. Hawkeye over.”

The flock of blackbirds flew onward, etching themselves against the bowl of the sky.