Covert One 5 - The Lazarus Vendetta (47 page)

Lajes Field, Terceira Island, the Azores

Three people, two men and a woman, stood out among the small crowd of
passengers deplaning from Air Portugal's
Lisbon flight.
Unencumbered

by luggage, they moved swiftly through the slower
currents of locals and bargain-hunting tourists and made their way from the
tarmac into the airport terminal.

Once inside, Randi Russell stopped dead in her tracks. She stared up at a
large clock showing the local time as noon and then back to the board showing
flight arrivals and departures. “Damn!” she muttered in frustration.
“There's only one connecting flight to Santa Maria a day—and we've already missed
it.”

Walking on, Jon shook his head. “We're not taking a commercial
flight.” He led them toward the outer doors. A short line of taxis and
private cars stood at the curb, waiting to pick up arriving passengers.

She raised an eyebrow. “Santa
Maria must be close to two hundred miles away. You planning to swim?”

Smith grinned back over his shoulder. “Not unless Peter really fouls
up.”

Randi glanced at the pale-eyed Englishman walking beside her. “Do you
know what he's talking about?”

“Haven't a clue,” Peter told her breezily. “But I noticed our
friend there making a few sotto voce phone calls in Paris
while we were waiting for the Lisbon
flight. So I rather suspect he has something up his sleeve.”

Still smiling slightly, Smith pushed through the doors out into the open
air. He raised his hand, signaling a green, brown, and tan camouflaged Humvee
idling just down the road. It pulled forward to meet them.

“Colonel Smith and company?” the U.S. Air Force staff sergeant
behind the wheel asked.

'That's us," Smith said, already tugging open the rear doors and
motioning Randi and Peter inside. He hopped in after them.

The Humvee pulled away from the curb and drove on down the road. A quarter
mile farther on, it swung toward a gate in the perimeter fence. I here a pair
of stern-faced guards carrying loaded M16s checked their identity cards, carefully
comparing faces and pictures. Satisfied, the soldiers waved them through onto
the U.S. Air Force base at Lajes.

The vehicle turned left and raced down the flight line. Gray-camouflaged
C-17 transports and giant KC-10 tanker planes lined the long runway. On one
side of the tarmac, the ground fell away, eventually plunging almost straight
down toward the Atlantic. On the other, bright
green slopes rose high above the airfield, broken up into innumerable small
fields by low walls of dark volcanic rock. The sweet scents of wild-flowers and
the fresh salt smell of the ocean mixed oddly with the sharp, acrid tang of
half-burnt jet fuel.

“Your bird arrived from the States an hour ago,” the Air Force
sergeant told them. “It's being prepped now.”

Randi turned toward Smith. “Our bird?” she asked pointedly.

Jon shrugged. “A U.S. Army UH-60L Black Hawk helicopter,” he said.
“Dispatched here by C-17 about the same time we flew from Paris
to Lisbon. I
thought it might come in handy.”

“Good thinking,” Randi said with barely contained sarcasm.
“Let me get this straight: You just snapped your fingers and had the Army
and the Air Force ship you a multimillion-dollar helicopter for our personal
use? Is that about right, Jon?”

“Actually, I asked a couple of friends in the Pentagon to pull a string
or two,” Smith said modestly. “Everybody's so worried about this
nanophage threat that they were willing to bend some of the rules for us.”

Randi rounded on the leathery-faced Englishman. “And I suppose you
think you can fly a Black Hawk?”

“Well, if I can't, we'll soon find out the hard way,” Peter told
her cheerfully.

PharmaTech Airfield, Santa Maria Island

Hideo Nomura paced slowly along the edge of the long concrete runway. The
wind, blowing from the east, whispered through his short black hair. The light
breeze carried the rich, sun-warmed smell of tall grass growing on the plateau
beyond the fence. He looked up. The sun was still high overhead, just beginning
its long slide toward the western horizon. Far to the north, a few clouds
drifted slowly past, solitary puffs of white in a clear blue sky.

Nomura smiled. The weather was perfect in every respect. He turned, seeing
his father standing behind him between two of Terce's hard-faced guards. The older
man's hands were handcuffed behind his back.

He smiled at his father. “It's wonderfully ironic, isn't it?”

Jinjiro eyed him with a stony, cold reserve. “There are many ironies
here, Lazarus,” he said coldly, refusing even to call his treacherous son
by his own name. “To which do you refer?”

Ignoring the gibe, the younger man nodded toward the runway in

front of them. “This airfield,” he
explained. “The Americans built it in 1944, during their war against Germany and our
beloved homeland. Their bombers used this island as a refueling point during
their long transatlantic flights to England. But today, I will turn their own work against them. This airfield is about to
become the staging area for America's
annihilation!”

Jinjiro said nothing.

Hideo shrugged and turned away. It was clear now that he had kept his father
alive out of a misguided sense of filial piety. Once the first Thanatos drones
were airborne, there would be time to arrange a fitting end for the old fool.
Some of his scientists were already working on different variations of the
Stage IV nanophages. They might find it useful to test their new designs on a
live human subject.

He strode toward a small knot of flight engineers and ground controllers
waiting beside the runway. They wore headsets and short-range radios for
communications between the aircraft hangars and the tower. “Is everything
ready?” he asked sharply.

The senior ground controller nodded. “The main hangar crew reports they
are ready for rollout. All canisters are onboard.”

“Good.” Nomura looked at his ranking flight engineer. “And the three aircraft?”

“All of their systems are functioning within the expected norms,”
the man told him confidently. “Their solar power cells, fuel-cell
auxiliaries, flight controls, and attack programs have all been checked and
rechecked.”

“Excellent,” Nomura said. He glanced again at the ground
controller. “Are there any unidentified air contacts we need to worry
about?”

“Negative,” the controller said. “Radar reports nothing
airborne within one hundred kilometers. We're in the clear.”

Hideo took a deep breath. This was the moment he had spent years planning,
scheming, and killing to make a reality. This was why he had tricked, trapped,
and betrayed his own father—all for this single glorious instant of sure and
certain triumph. He breathed out slowly, savor-

ing the delightful sensation. Then he spoke.
“Commence Thanatos operations.”

The ground controller repeated his order over the radio.

“Open hangar doors.”

In response, at the southern end of the airfield huge metal doors on the
nearest hangar began groaning apart, revealing a vast interior crowded with men
and machines. Sunshine streamed inside through the rapidly expanding opening.
It fell on the solar cells of the first Thanatos flying wing. They gleamed
like golden fire.

“The first aircraft is taxiing,” the senior flight engineer
reported.

Slowly, the enormous drone, with a wingspan wider than that of a 747,
lumbered forward, clearing the doors with only feet to spare. Fourteen
twin-bladed propellers whirred silently, pulling it out onto the runway.
Clusters of thin-walled plastic cylinders were visible on each of the
aircraft's five underwing pods.

“Don masks and gloves,” Nomura ordered.
The controllers and engineers hurriedly obeyed, shrugging into the heavy gear
that would give them limited protection if anything went wrong during takeoff.

Terce moved to his side, offering him a gas mask, respirator, and thick
gloves. Hideo took them with a curt nod.

“And the prisoner?” the tall green-eyed man asked, in a voice
muffled by his respirator. “What about him?”

“My father?” Hideo glanced back at
Jinjiro, who was still standing bareheaded in the sun, rigid and unbending
between his two gas-masked guards. He smiled coldly and shook his head.
“No mask for him. Let the old man take his chances.”

“The second aircraft is taxiing,” the flight engineer reported,
speaking loudly enough to be heard through his mask and breathing apparatus.

Nomura looked back at the runway. The first Thanatos drone was
already two hundred meters away, slowly accelerating as it rolled north on its
takeoff run. The second flying wing was emerging from inside the mammoth
hangar—with a third just visible behind it. He pushed his fa-

ther's impending death to the back of his mind and
focused instead on watching his cruel dreams take flight.

Terce moved away, unslinging a German-made Heckler & Koch G36 assault
rifle from his shoulder as he went. His head swiveled from side to side,
checking the armed guards he had posted at intervals along the runway. All of
them appeared alert.

A slight frown crossed the big man's face. Counting the two men watching
Jinjiro, there were ten sentries stationed at the airfield. There should have
been twice as many—but the unexpectedly heavy losses he had sustained in New Mexico and then again in Virginia could not be made up in time. The
deaths of Nones and his Paris-based security detail only made the manpower
shortage worse.

Terce shrugged, looking westward out to sea. In the end, it would not
matter. Nomura was right. Stealth outweighed firepower. No matter how-many
soldiers, missiles, and bombs they possessed, the Americans could not attack a
target they could not find.

He froze. Something was moving out there above the Atlantic,
right near the edge of his vision. He stared harder. Whatever it was, the
object was drawing closer at high speed. But it was difficult to make out
through the thick, distorting lenses of his gas mask.

With a snarl, Terce tore off the mask and attached respirator and tossed
them aside. At least now he could see clearly! A small dark
green dot, racing low just above the ocean waves. It curved toward him,
tilting slightly—growing larger fast. Sunlight flashed off spinning rotor
blades.

■

Aboard the UH-60L Black Hawk, Smith leaned forward in the copilot's seat,
peering at the airfield ahead of them through a pair of high-powered
binoculars. “Okay,” he said loudly, shouting to be heard above the
howl of the troop carrier's two powerful engines and its large, clattering
rotors. "I count two An-124 Condor cargo planes near the north end

of the runway, parked next to a big hangar. Also
what looks like a much smaller executive jet, maybe a Gulfstream."

“What's that moving down near the south end of the runway?” Randi
yelled in his ear. She crouched behind the forward cabin's two seats, holding
on tight with whitened knuckles. The Black Hawk was shuddering and bouncing
wildly as Peter fought to hold the helicopter just fifty feet above the rolling
crests of the ocean waves—all the while flying at more than one hundred knots.
He had brought them in at very low altitude to avoid being picked up by the
airfield's radar.

Smith swung his binoculars to the right. For the first time, he saw the
three huge flying wings lined up one after another on the long concrete strip.
The lead aircraft was already moving faster and faster, rolling smoothly toward
takeoff. At first, his exhausted mind refused to accept that anything so big and,
at the same time, so fragile-looking could possibly be airworthy.

Then, in a flood of understanding, the facts and images fell into place,
pulled from memory. Several years ago he had read up on NASA's scientific
experiments with high-altitude solar-powered long-endurance robot planes.
Nomura must have stolen the same technology for his own vicious ends.
“Good lord!” he said, rocked by the sudden realization. “Those
are Nomura's attack aircraft!”

Quickly he briefed the others on what he remembered of their flight profile
and capabilities.

“Can't our fighter planes shoot them down?” Randi asked somberly.

“If they're flying at close to a hundred thousand
feet?” Smith shook his head. “That's beyond the maximum
ceiling for any fighter in our inventory. There's not an F-16 or F-l 5 or
anything else we own that can fly and fight that high up!”

“What about your Patriot missiles?” Peter suggested.

“One hundred thousand feet is above their effective ceiling, too,”
Smith replied grimly. "Plus, I'll bet those damned drones out there are

built to avoid most radar.“ He gritted his
teeth. ”If they're at high altitude, they'll be invulnerable and probably
undetectable. So once those planes are operational, Nomura will be able to hit
us at will —unleashing nanophage clouds over any city he chooses!"

Horrified by the danger he saw looming before the United States, Jon focused his
binoculars on a small group of men standing together just off the runway. He
drew in a short, sharp breath. They were wearing gas masks.

The world around him seemed to blur, slowing while his mind raced. Why were
they wearing masks? And then, suddenly, the answer—the only possible
answer—leaped out at him.

“Take us in, Peter!” Smith snapped. He jabbed a finger at the
airfield. “Straight in!”

The Englishman glanced at him in surprise. “This isn't an attack
mission, Jon. We're supposed to be scouting—not riding in with sabers drawn
like the bloody cavalry.”

“The mission just changed,” Smith told him tightly. “Those
planes are armed. That son of a bitch Nomura is launching his attack now!”