Assassin

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Emirate

HAWKE LOOKED AT HIS WATCH, WILLING THE RED SWEEP second hand to slow down. Two days earlier, on a warm morning at No. 10 Downing Street, seventy-two hours had seemed reasonably sufficient. But now that he was down to five hours and counting, he wasn’t at all sure. In exactly three hundred and forty minutes, the big B-52s arriving upstairs would open their bomb bays. If that wasn’t exciting enough for you, you’d be seeing a goodly number of little blips on your radar screen. Incoming Tomahawk land attack missiles, fired from guided missile cruisers with the Nimitz Carrier Battle Group deployed in the Indian Ocean.

“We’re five miles out,” Hawke said into the lip-mike. “Squadron climb and maintain two-one-zero—over.”

He eased back on the stick and watched his altimeter needle spin. At twenty-one thousand feet, he leveled off. The twin peaks of the mountain were now a whole lot closer. The extensive high-resolution recon photos hadn’t lied. The mountain itself was a deep gentian blue against the pale sky. There, like a wound, was the designated LZ; a narrow strip of blinding white at the bottom of a ragged crevasse that cut between the mountain’s peaks.

“Squadron…turn right to a heading of one-four-niner,” Hawke said.

It was roughly one hundred feet across and a bit shy of two thousand feet long. Hawke lifted his visor and knuckled the stinging sweat out of his eyes. Christ. It was going to be a bit like setting down on Pimlico Road during a Saturday afternoon tornado without your wingtips clipping any double-decker buses.

He craned his head around and looked over his shoulder at Patterson. Tex was strapping a Velcro bandolier of four thirty-round mags over his white Kevlar vest. Checking all his gear. Hawke smiled. Tex would be carrying an HK MP-5 submachine gun as an added measure of security in addition to his trusty Colt .45 Peacemaker. The team had given a great deal of thought to weapons. Since they carried no personal effects and wore no insignia, no national or unit markings, it was decided it didn’t matter what kind of firepower they brought along. Hell, you could buy anything at all on the open market these days.

Each man on this mission had signed on as a NOC. Spook-speak for “Not On Consular.” It meant your name did not appear on any list, Consular or otherwise. If you got caught, you didn’t exist. Hardly mattered. You were soon dead anyway.

“I just thought of something, Tex,” Hawke said.

“I’m a little busy right now, Alex. What?”

“We’re five minutes out and we’re still alive.”

“Good point. I’ve just spotted three radar domes. No Sammies. I guess these new-fangled jammer things work okay. Shoot, Hawkeye, in the early days we used to lose about a Widow or two a month, or pretty near.”

“Most encouraging,” Hawke said. He craned his head around, looking aft, making sure all his little ducks were in a row.

“Squadron turn right to zero-six-zero,” Hawke said, “Form up. Stick to your predetermined order going in: Hawkeye, Widowmaker, FlyBaby, Phantom. Copy?”

“Dead last,” Phantom’s ex-Marine pilot Ron Gidwitz said, laughing.

“Bad choice of words, Ronnie,” Patterson said over the radio.

“Don’t worry, Phantom, you’re about to kick some serious ass! Semper Fi, man!” came the response from another aircraft.

Hawke recognized Tommy Quick’s adrenalin-pumped voice. He was riding along with Ferguson in Widowmaker’s aftermost seat. A last-minute member of the team, Hawke had insisted the Army’s former number-one sharpshooter would be a vital addition no matter how this all played out.

“Ron, you okay back there? Copy?” Patterson asked Phantom’s pilot, the concern in his voice obvious.

“Okay? I’m fuckin’ fantastic!” Gidwitz replied. Hawke smiled at the reply. Patterson’s Blue Mountain Boys did not need any more motivation. They were psyched. Gung ho.

“Cut the mike chat,” Hawke said. “Hawkeye is going in.” He flipped down his visor and focused every scintilla of his concentration on the narrow slash in the top of the mountain dead ahead.

Alex lined his nose up on the rocky leading edge of the crevasse. From here, the opening in the bloody thing looked to be about six inches wide and a foot long. To make it all the more interesting, the closer he flew to the sheer face of the mountain, the more unpredictable the winds got. The buffeting had increased dramatically in the last thirty seconds.

“Ride ’em, cowboy,” Hawke said dryly. They were porpoising severely. Just keeping his spindly wings level was a full-time job.

“Man-oh-man,” Patterson drawled, craning around Hawke’s helmet for a first-hand look at the snow-scoured jaws of the approach. He’d seen pictures of where they were headed but they didn’t do it justice. For one thing, it didn’t look anywhere near close to wide enough to accommodate their wingspan. “You honestly believe you can thread this needle, Hawkeye?”

“Tell you something I’ve always wondered, Tex,” Hawke said, struggling to control pitch, yaw, and roll, while maintaining his glide path. The delicate aircraft was being bounced all over the sky by strong crosswinds and hammered by wind shear.

“What’s that, son?”

“I wonder how the bloody hell it’s possible for a man to break a sweat when the temperature outside his window is–50 Fahrenheit.”

“You, too, huh?” Tex said. “You plan to hit the brakes anytime soon?”

“Right about…now!”

Hawke hauled back on the dive brake handle with his left hand. He’d waited until the very last possible moment, then got the brakes wide open. The glider would now descend at the steepest possible glide slope. He needed a steep angle because of the short two-thousand-foot rollout, and he was coming in very hot because of the extreme altitude. Thin air. Hawkeye was dropping at 400 feet per minute. He eased the brakes and shot a glance at his yaw string. The two-inch-long string of red yarn attached to the leading edge of the canopy was a fail-safe aeronautic instrument invented by Wilbur Wright himself. It was now absolutely straight. The only way to fly.

“Final leg,” Hawke announced matter of factly.

“Call the ball, son,” Tex said.

“I have the ball sir,” Alex replied.

A second later, “Shit. Full dive brakes.”

When Hawke realized he was too low instead of too high it was almost too late. The sudden downdraft had him going nose first into something big and hard that didn’t move. He had instinctively closed the dive brakes, flared out, prayed, and waited for the crunch of impact. Later, he estimated his skids had cleared the rocky serrated outcropping by less than a foot. It was enough. He popped his twin drogue chutes and his nose came up and he scraped in over the rocks hitting the snowfield dead center, neatly bisecting the hundred-foot-wide opening.

Once he was inside the shelter of the crevasse, the crosswind died abruptly and he got his tail-skid down first, then the nose, and he steered with his rudder. He kept his wings level, skidded and bounced straight up the snowfield as planned, giving the three aircraft coming in behind him some operating room. Using backward stick motion, he managed to keep his tail down. Finally, he lowered the Widow’s snow brakes and brought the plane to a stop.

Hawkeye was safely down. By a nose.

“That sure was exciting,” Tex said as Alex popped the canopy release. The frigid air, gleaming with ice particles, was startling. Alex cleared the ice from his oxygen mask and looked back at Patterson. Each mask contained a lipmike so communication would be uninterrupted while on the mountain.

“Pretty good landing, son, considering,” Tex added.

“Any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” Hawke replied, aware of the cliché, finding it unavoidable under the extreme circumstances. Up here, the hackneyed old World War II sentiment was definitely true. He saw the mission time remaining on the digital readout of his instrument panel. He had one plane on the ground and three in the air. Five hours left on the clock. Even if everything from now on went like clockwork, the clock was fast becoming his mortal enemy.

And when had any mission anywhere ever gone like clockwork?

He unsnapped his quick-release harness, hoisted himself up, and swung his legs out over the side of the cockpit. It was only a four-foot drop, but he sank up to his knees in soft snow. The cold took his breath away. So did the view from one notch below the top of the world; his eyes took in the vast sweep of valley far below, stretching away beneath a cobalt blue sky. He reached up to give Tex a hand, his eyes riveted on Widowmaker’s approach.

Ferguson was emulating Hawke’s successful glide path perfectly, but wisely kept his nose a bit higher and compensated for the last second windshear at the mouth of the crevasse. His landing was a thing of beauty; the second Black Widow got her skids down, rushed towards Hawke, twin white drogue chutes billowing out behind her, spraying snow to either side of her nose skid. She slewed to a stop two hundred feet shy of Hawkeye. Hawke gave Ferg and Quick a big thumbs up, then he and Patterson rapidly walked to the rear of the port fuselage and opened the cargo doors. Inside the twin holds on each Widow was everything one might need for an armed assault on an impregnable fortress.

“I don’t like the way Ron sounded up there,” Patterson said, hurriedly fastening a web belt around his waist. “Too giddy, you ask me.” From each man’s belt hung assorted frag and flash-bang grenades to both kill and disorient the enemy. Each two-man team would carry the same weapons. Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns, which could be fitted with grenade launchers, and on their hips, the new HK USP .45 pistol with sound suppressor.

“Sounded okay to me. I thought that was just Ron’s game voice,” Hawke said, wincing as the bitterly cold air seared his lungs. He’d removed the onboard oxygen mask and tossed it back into his seat. His assault and rescue team had spent the last thirty hours at a 12,000-foot base camp. Even though he was somewhat acclimated, it was painful to breathe at 18,000.

“No,” Tex said, “Definitely not Iceman’s game voice.” Gidwitz’s street nickname back home on the south side of Chicago was ‘Iceman.’

“Hypoxia?” Alex asked, concerned now. At 18,000 feet, oxygen deprivation could be a killer. You got euphoric, cocky, belligerent. A mean drunk. The high-altitude glider Black Widow had internal oxygen for just that reason. Phantom had reported a problem earlier, a warning light, then told Hawke to disregard the report. Hawke turned and took a long hard look at Phantom’s approach. She was definitely rocking and rolling but there was so much turbulence and shear out there, it was damn near impossible to spot trouble.

His overall pitch and glide level looked pretty good to Hawke’s eye. He said, “I don’t know, Tex. Anybody crazy enough to land an airplane up here is out of his mind to begin with. What would you look for?”

“Yeah, I reckon,” Tex said, eyeing Gidwitz’s approach, clearly not reassured. “Let’s move it.”

First things first. They grabbed two of the portable oxygen and communications units stowed inside the starboard side hold and strapped them on, fitting the face masks over mouth and nose and jamming the new cylinders onto their regulators. At this altitude, there was sufficient oxygen but insufficient pressure to force that oxygen into your bloodstream. Unless you were fully acclimated, a few minutes without oxygen up here, you started to think you could fly.

FlyBaby was next, and again, the landing was flawless. Mendoza popped his drogue chutes and slid up right behind Widowmaker. Three ducks in a nice neat row, and one more on the way. Phantom was a quarter of a mile out and looking reasonably good. Hawke zipped up his white-camo thermal outerwear and shouldered into the MP-5 submachine gun, the strap over his shoulder. The gun could be fitted with HK’s 40mm grenade launcher and had the pre-ban high-capacity fifteen-round magazines. Time to roll. He’d cleared the chamber of the HK and was checking the mag when he heard something he didn’t like at all. He looked up just in time to see Ron Gidwitz and Ian Wagstaff’s Phantom catch a wingtip on the rocky lip of the crevasse and veer violently out of control.

Ground loop. The two most dreaded words in a glider pilot’s vocabulary.

As he and Tex watched in horror, Phantom flipped over on her back and hit hard. She was throwing up a blinding avalanche of onrushing snow and skidding directly towards Widowmaker. Hawke saw both her wings sheared away, and then, to his utter amazement, he saw the slender egg-shaped cockpit, intact, emerge from the leading edge of the avalanche. The black egg flew directly toward him, traveling at a hundred miles an hour. He dove out of its path, rolled over and watched the disembodied cockpit pod fly over his head and disappear over the edge of an icy cliff.