Countdown to Mecca (2 page)

The engines fell off as they were designed to do on impact, disappearing into the depths so they wouldn't drag the plane with them. The surface of the sea was just below the windows. Pyotr threw off his seat belt, pulled himself from the seat, unlocked the cockpit door, and emerged gun first. Lit by the emergency lighting system and the shadowy dusk penetrating the windows, the cabin was a disjointed collection of wailing passengers and fallen luggage.

The copilot, who'd been standing when the plane hit the water, was curled on the floor near the first row in business class. Pyotr drove his left foot into the man's side, more to get him out of the way than to guard against a threat. Then he cast an eye toward the back of the cabin, making sure no one was in a position to interfere.

Certain that they were all too distracted to bother him, he stepped into the small crew area directly behind the cockpit. There was a tall cabinet here; he opened it, exposing a set of metal lockers used to transport high-value cargo.

“Why?”

The strident word cut into his mind like a laser. He snapped his head around to see, standing in the aisle, a mother and her baby. Pytor had noted the child in her mother's arms when he first came aboard. There was blood and a deep crack in the infant's thinly haired skull. The baby was limp. The mother was not enraged or vengeful. She just seemed confused, clearly in shock.

Certain she was no threat to him, he just answered her honestly while reaching beneath his shirt for a plastic key that was taped there.

“Because it's easier this way.”

He left it at that as he opened a locker and took out a small attach
é
case. His employers had originally wanted to smuggle this attach
é
case onto a military plane to avoid just this sort of collateral damage to innocent victims. But he couldn't figure out how to get it there, and then retrieve it, without setting off alarms in every major military office in the world. He remembered the chain of events, the intense investigation, that a Chinese attack on an American military chopper in Afghanistan had wrought the year before. It was safer to attack civilian aircraft. Only the insurance companies cared until they wrote a check. Then this “act of terror” would be forgotten.

He pushed past the woman and went back into the main cabin as passengers began to organize an egress. Flight attendants were trying to organize the removal of seats for flotation. The back of the plane had suffered extensive damage, but the middle and forward sections were entirely intact, and one of the men in the emergency exit rows began struggling with the door over the wing. Blue twilight flooded in as it opened. People in the seats nearby began to shout to others to come and escape.

That was fine with Pyotr. Concerned with survival, they left him alone. He turned and went to the main door, pushing the handle without arming the slide. The door was heavy and difficult to open; he had to give his full attention to it. This left an opening for two passengers from the first class cabin who wanted to follow him out. As he pulled the door back, water flooded in.

One first class passenger came up behind him, yelling, “Out! Go, go!”

Pyotr shot him in the head, then looked outside as the other passengers fell back, blood-spattered and wailing. The relatively calm, black waters were bathed in yellow, gold, and orange, the sun slipping behind the low hills at the west. But Pyotr only had eyes for the rigid-hulled raft speeding toward him from the distant shadows.

Everyone who wasn't dead or unconscious were out of their seats now, struggling to escape the downed plane without getting near the gunman. The rigid-hulled raft pulled up next to him without incident. Pyotr swung the attach
é
case at the nearest man in a wet suit aboard the craft. That man stumbled with it and landed seat first in the bottom of the boat.

“Careful!” Pytor shouted in Russian. “It's worth your life. More than that.”

“Sorry, sir,” huffed the man, trying to regain his balance.

Pyotr had hopped into the raft. He cut the man some slack because it had been he, disguised as an airline galley supplier, who had gotten the case onboard. “Get us out of here.”

“Yes, sir,” said another man at the engine.

They backed from the plane, then turned. Someone yelled from the aircraft, pleading for help. Other voices joined the cry, like the Sirens of Greek mythology.

“Stop,” Pyotr told the man at the engine.

As the operator throttled back, Pyotr reached for the large, waterproof bag that sat between him and the man in the bow. He unzipped it, revealing the case of a Russian rocket-propelled grenade launcher. He removed the launcher and made it ready to fire.

Russian rocket-propelled grenade launchers had become the de facto man-portable weapon among terrorists and guerillas everywhere; they were rugged and dependable. The most famous weapon, the RPG-9, dated from the early 1960s. It came in a number of different flavors, including a folding paratrooper model, and had a range of explosive charges. The weapon in Pyotr Ansky's hands packed even more destructive power, with greater range and accuracy.

Known as the Kryuk, the RPG-30 had been designed to fire an armor-piercing, two-part projectile capable of penetrating a main battle tank. Such a shell would have probably flown entirely through the aircraft before exploding; that would not do. So instead, Pyotr was using a hand-built phosphorous explosive shell. The explosive had been developed in China and recently sold to Syria, which had also acquired a small amount of RPG-30s to fight against its rebels. Anyone examining the destruction would see the connection, and be misled.

Pyotr looked through the night sight, setting the crosshairs on the wing root, aiming for the center fuel tank that sat between the wings under the passenger deck. He glanced over his shoulder, making sure he had a clear path behind him for the escaping gases, then pulled the trigger.

The air itself seemed to sizzle. The explosion that followed was disappointingly quiet and small, more a flare than the spectacular cascade of red and white. But the secondary explosion, as the fuel tanks caught, was far more showy, with brilliant orange flames reaching to an impressive height.

“Circle, to make sure there are no survivors,” Pyotr told the man at the controls. He threw the launcher over the side, putting the briefcase into the waterproof container. Then he took out his satellite phone. “Keep the engine noise down,” he said as he punched in the number. “I have to tell the general that his parcel has been procured.”

“Colonel,” said the man who had fallen. “Is that wise?” His expression and the circling motion he made with his hand communicated the sentiment that ears were everywhere.

“Do not worry,” he told his subordinate. “No one will think anything of a pleasure boat that happened to witness an explosion.”

 

1

San Francisco, California

Samuel Michaels was dozing on his comfortable, threadbare sofa when he heard a key move in the door of his second floor Montgomery Street studio apartment. As his eyes opened so did the door. A blonde, barefoot, platinum-eyed vision in a low-cut, form-fitting black micro-mini-dress jumped in, panting. His neighbor Anastasia Vincent and his half brother Jack were the only ones who had a key—and this
definitely
wasn't Jack Hatfield. Jack hadn't been here in over a year, which was the last time they spoke. It was to thank him for a jazz CD Sammy had sent as a birthday present and peace offering.

“Sam!” she gulped in her charming Russian accent. “They are after me!”

“Who is?” Sammy asked.

“Very bad men!” she said, shaking. Her eyes, normally alert as those as a Nordic wolf, seemed wary, frightened.

Sammy's Marine training was a little rusty. He hadn't worn a uniform for years, not since he was on one of his motorcycles when a teen driver had hit him, sending him into a year of physical therapy and paving the way for a handsome settlement with the insurance company. Still, as the saying goes, Once a Marine, Always a Marine. Sammy was up and moving past her in an instant. He slammed his apartment door shut behind her, rattling the painting he'd bought at a flea market showing a shipwreck in the Farallon Islands, out in the Bay. Then he locked and bolted the door and turned toward her.

“It's okay,” he said. “You're safe now.”

Her Arctic eyes locked on his. “Are you sure?”

He wasn't, but he said, “Absolutely. No one would ever expect to find a beautiful girl in my apartment.”

She smiled halfheartedly. “You are making a joke.”

“I wish. Now, relax and tell me what's going on,” Sammy coaxed.

She began to calm. He maneuvered her to the sofa and sat next to her, looking intently into her eyes. It was easy. They were the brightest, lightest blue he had ever seen. But he kept one ear trained on the door, on the steps outside. They were old wooden steps and they creaked. It would be difficult for anyone to sneak up on him.

Anastasia Vincent was a strong, very special girl. Within weeks of her moving here from Moscow he had learned she was a high-class call girl. That was probably how she got into this country, paying her way with favors, but that didn't matter. If there was one thing he'd learned in his thirty-seven years, people did what they had to do. Hell, he was a professional party clown. Not a party animal, but a bona fide clown: big red wig, big red nose, big red slippers, and lots of polka dots in between. Who was he to judge others? Ana had character, wisdom, and she had seen more in her twenty-seven years than most women see in a lifetime. He figured she was on the lam from an angry john, someone he could handle.

“You want a drink? Water? Something stronger?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Thank you, though.” Once Ana caught her breath it all came out in a rush. “I met a military officer six months ago at a party hosted by a wealthy armament manufacturer. He introduced himself as General Montgomery Morton. He seemed very taken by me.”

Sammy smiled. “That doesn't exactly put General Montgomery Morton in the genius class for pickers.”

“You are very sweet,” she replied graciously.

Ow
. Sammy was used to hearing
that
from women, which is why there weren't many of them trying to get in to see him. They wanted the younger, the studlier, the wealthier. Even in San Francisco, there were still enough straight guys like that to shrink the dating pool for guys like him to zero.

“So you met this general,” Sammy said.

“Yes. Soon he was calling me every week and paying very well,” she said. “We were always staying in the city's best hotels, ordering room service, expensive champagne.” She smiled wryly. “No gifts, though. Nothing that could be traced. But that was all right. His money was good. The last time we met he asked me to bring other women to party with his friends. That was today. He said it was a special occasion.”

“A birthday? A promotion? An appointment?”

“He did not tell me,” Ana said. “We met at a Tower Suite of the Fairmont Hotel.”

She was right about him spending lavishly: a suite like that, high on Nob Hill, cost more each night than he made in a couple of weeks.

Anastasia explained that she had brought along Ritu, a voluptuous girl from India, and Miwa, an ethereal Japanese girl. The oldest man, whom she mentally named “Pallor” for the whiteness of his skin, lit up at the sight of Miwa. The youngest man—whom Anastasia nicknamed “Kid”—immediately put his arm around Ritu's shoulder and drew her toward the bedroom.

“The general took me to the couch,” she said. “He seemed to be thinking about something far away. But I had gone there to do a job and—I did.”

She said that for the next hour the general was rougher than usual, though it was nothing she couldn't handle.

“Still, I was relieved when it was over,” she said. “The two other girls left but I stayed to get ready for my next engagement. I went to dress and fix my makeup in the bathroom and was about to step out when the general's smartphone rang. As he answered he jumped over and slammed the bathroom door but didn't realize there was a towel on the floor. The door did not shut all the way.”

Ana decided to wait until he was done. There was a short silence and then the general uttered a single word. “Good.” The next pause was longer, so long that she thought the call was over. But just as she placed her hand on the doorknob she heard him again.

“He said, ‘Firebird moves to stage two,'” Ana told Sammy. “It was spoken softly, almost like a prayer.”

“Military code?” Sammy wondered.

“That was what I thought,” Ana told him.

When the call was finished, she said she shook her hair, opened the door, and froze. The general's eyes were on the rumpled towel, on the open door. And then they were on her.

“His expression was dark and very, very angry,” Ana said. “He demanded to know what I had heard. I told him I hadn't heard anything. He just stared at me with those evil eyes. “‘
What did you hear?
' he shrieked, this time rising from the bed and coming toward me. I repeated that I had heard nothing, but he didn't believe me. He lunged for me, like he wanted to grab my hair, but I got around him because he was still tangled in a sheet. I ran toward the door.”

“Wow,” Sammy marveled. “That's quite an extreme reaction, especially for a high-ranking military officer.” He shook his head after considering the matter. “He must be under enormous pressure to go off like that.”

“No, he wasn't under pressure once we finished,” Ana said innocently.

Sammy stifled a grin; he knew she meant it as a professional observation.

There were tears in the girl's eyes as she recounted how he had shouted for the others to stop her. Pallor and the Kid tried to grab her, but Ana said that she had spent a lifetime escaping—from local bureaucrats who wanted favors when she was sixteen to border dogs when she was eighteen and left the country without permission. The next thing she knew she was out in the hall, running.