Day Zero (13 page)

 

T
ang Dalu stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows inside security, eyes locked on the plane he and his team would soon blow apart somewhere over the desert of eastern California.

He could see Lin’s reflection in the glass. She leaned back in her chair, pallid face toward the ceiling, eyes closed as if she was asleep. Tang knew better. His wife rarely slept anymore. Many evenings he had returned home from his work as a Qingyang City policeman, to find her sitting in the same chair where he’d left her when he’d gone. The cup of tea he’d made her for breakfast, the cake, all untouched. At first he had pled with her, begged her to eat, to see a physician for something to help her sleep. Then, he’d screamed until frothy spittle had flown from his mouth. He’d even slapped her, knocking her from her chair, telling himself it was for her own good, to snap her out of her stupor. She’d merely knelt at his feet, soft hands clutching pitifully at the pistol on his belt, and begged him to put it to her head and end her misery. To his shame, he’d struck her again, harder this time—because he had not known what else to do.

He had locked his gun away in the box beneath their bed and gone to sleep, leaving her to climb back in her chair and stare at nothing.

Even when the man from Pakistan had come and given them purpose, that purpose had only given her blank eyes something on which to focus. It did not help her sleep.

Tang watched the last few passengers pull their roller bags off the plane, milling with the waiting crowd that would soon take their place. A man with a heavy suitcase stepped around him to take a seat by the window so he could get better phone reception. In his haste, the man kicked over the camera bag that sat at Tang’s feet. Even through his misery Tang felt it deliciously ironic that a rude man would shove his way past the very object that would soon bring about his death.

Tang drew the bag closer with the toe of his shoe, holding it safely between his feet. Across the aisle from Lin, Hu Qi clutched his bag to his chest. They had decided against assembling the bomb in one of the airport restroom stalls. There was too great a chance that the hawkish TSA guards milling around in the gate area would decide to flex their inviolable muscles one last time during the boarding process.

Hu and Ma stood together, just outside the gate. Gao had put his last dollar bill into one of the slot machines in the middle of the terminal and now sat quietly, stooped over, head resting in his hands. Any talk was pointless. There were no more dreams to discuss, no more women to conquer, no more riches to seek—no more tomorrow.

Each man had long ago made peace with his decision. They waited quietly and thought about the things men think about when they stand on the bittersweet edge of death for a greater cause.

The gate agent called for their row, causing Lin to open her eyes. She did not smile, but looked at Tang and nodded, as if let him know that everything would now be all right. Tang hung his head, mired in a mixture of religious fervor and regret. He had never really made his wife happy, and now the only way to ease her misery was to watch her die.

The cell phone in his pocket rang as he bent to pick up the camera bag. He jumped a little when he felt the unexpected sensation. Other than the members of his team, only one person had the number.

“Yes?” Tang said, turning to face the window again. For some reason, it helped calm him to look at the skin of the plane he was about to destroy.

“There has been a change of plans,” Qasim Ranjhani said, breathing deeply through his nose.

“We are boarding,” Tang whispered.

“Well, stop boarding,” Ranjhani said, calmly, not realizing that what he asked was akin to ordering a man not to kill himself once the blade was half into his belly.

“But, sir,” Tang gasped. “We have prepared. We cannot abandon—”

“There will be no abandoning of anything,” the Pakistani said, voice clicking away. “You will all accomplish the same mission, but it must be tomorrow—and with much greater effect.”

“As you say.” Tang felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. He glanced quickly at Ma Zhen, who was in the lead, just three away from the head of the line. Tang shook his head. He waved his hand, motioning for the young man to step aside. The others followed, heads bowed, eyes closed. Gao looked a little relieved, another problem Tang would have to deal with.

Ranjhani continued with his explanation. “The next flight to Alaska leaves in two hours. I have made arrangements for you and your people to be on it. I have booked you all on Global Airlines flight 105 from Anchorage to Vladivostok tomorrow morning. You will have to pass through Customs, but I have taken care of the necessary paperwork.”

“Of course,” Tang said.

“Believe me, my friend,” the Pakistani said. “Nothing has changed but for the time and place. You will all make a great difference.”

The others crowded around Tang by the time he ended the call. Lin slouched in a chair a few feet away. She had no stomach for petty details and wanted only for this to be over.

Tang explained their new orders.

“Tomorrow?” Gao said, his thick face twisting into a scowl. “I will need to borrow some money so I can eat.”

Gao was chosen to be their muscle. He was a depressed psychopath whose mother would be well taken care of after his death. It was only right that he keep his strength up. Tang dug a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and shoved it at the frowning man. It was all the money he had left, but that didn’t matter, he had no appetite.

He was a bullet in a gun, with no will of his own—and bullets did not get hungry.

 

Q
uinn had been so busy trying to connect with Ronnie and Jacques before he lost the cell tower that he hadn’t had time to notice how cramped the interior of the little Super Cub actually was until they were well away from Mountain Village.

Rain streaked the Plexiglas, buzzing with the growl of the 150-horse Lycoming engine as the plane wallowed its way through guncotton clouds. Hundreds of silver lakes ghosted in and out of the heavy mist, pocking the tundra just five hundred feet below.

Not one to balk at any sort of danger, Quinn had never really been comfortable in small airplanes. He’d jumped out of a few to get his wings as an Air Force Academy cadet, then later, during training as a combat rescue officer or CRO—the commissioned rank of the Air Force PJs. It was an odd reality that he felt more comfortable dangling under the canopy of his chute, held aloft by only a few dozen lengths of skinny cord, than he did cooped up in a tiny winged box over which he had no control. He supposed that was the problem. If he’d ever taken the time to learn to fly, he might have felt better about the whole notion. Placing his safety in the hands of another had never been easy—and now he’d turned his life over to a twentysomething girl who was addicted to punk-ash tobacco and appeared to be dancing to Queen behind the controls of the airplane.

Lovita’s small shoulders and peroxide-orange hair bounced in time to the music, just inches in front of him. Her green David Clark earphones had a large piece of sheepskin running along the top to cushion her smallish head, making her look like an elf wearing a ridiculous hat. Every so often, she gave in to the urge and belted out the notes with Freddie, causing her husky voice to buzz across the intercom into Quinn’s headset. She was amazingly good, though her voice was an octave lower than any member of the Queen ensemble.

Quinn shifted in his seat, trying to readjust in the cramped quarters. He tried to imagine someone as big as Jacques crammed into the tiny plane behind Lovita and realized such a thing would have been impossible. She was so close that it felt as though she was flying with her shoulders between his knees. She would have been wearing the big Cajun like a backpack.

The Piper was outfitted for search and rescue with thirty-gallon tanks in each wing and bubble windows that gave Quinn a better view than he really wanted out of each side of the airplane.

Saint Mary’s lay along the Yukon, nearly due east of Mountain Village, so Lovita took them north at first, avoiding the oncoming Cessna full of contract killers. Twenty miles up, she cut back to the east, crossing the squirming oxbows of the upper Andreafsky River. Low clouds pressed her down, just a few hundred feet off the deck. She had the heater cranked up to full, keeping the interior of the little plane relatively warm, but Quinn’s knees pressed against the outer walls, drawing in the moist chill through the thin skin of the airplane, and bringing back unpleasant memories of his recent swim in the Yukon.

His forehead against the bubble side window, Quinn was subjected to the dizzying view of thick willows and green swamps dotted with pairs of starkly white swans that had come north to breed. They were close enough he felt as if he could count their feathers. The plane passed over the occasional moose, lone bulls or cows with tawny twin calves. Traversing over the wider, meandering waters of the Chuilnak River, a monstrous brown bear that looked to be the size of a Volkswagen peered up from his fishing hole with a scolding, pig-eyed stare, reminding Quinn that he would not be at the top of the food chain should they have to set down out here.

Lovita’s voice crackled over Quinn’s headset, rough, like a mile of gravel road.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Quinn said, happy to take his mind off crashing in the wilderness.

“Are you some kind of secret government spy?”

Quinn chuckled, in spite of the situation. “No.”

“What’s it like?” Lovita asked.

“I said I wasn’t one.”

“Okay,” she said. “But that’s exactly what a spy would say.” Though a rich purr, her voice bordered on a monotone and with nothing to judge by but the back of her head, it was difficult to read her emotions. “You came to us looking like you’d been mauled by a brown bear. I know you were in the military. You look at things different from other people, and nobody else I know would have been able to fight their way through all those guys like you did.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Quinn said. “Spies are all about gathering information and reporting it back up the chain.”

“But you are something else.” Lovita banked the plane gently to the right, drifting between two low hills that rose up through the fog. “Some sort of secret government operative?”

“How do you know so much about government operatives?” Quinn mused, half to himself.

“I watch movies,” Lovita said. “I told you, we got the Internet out here, and satellite TV, and books, and the mail, and everything.”

Quinn didn’t answer.

“My uncle said you’re worried about guys like the ones that came to our village going after your daughter,” Lovita said. “I thought government operatives were all single with no family ties.”

“Some are,” Quinn sighed. “But there are more with wives, husbands, and even big families.”

“Looks like people with no ties would have less to worry about,” Lovita said. The back of her head bobbed in time with her words.

“Or fight for,” Quinn said, thinking of Mattie and Ronnie and Kim and his brother and parents and a dozen other people he held dear. “It’s pretty difficult to go through life with no ties.”

“Maybe,” Lovita said. “Maybe so.” She dropped another hundred feet, close enough that Quinn could see individual rivulets in the small streams and ponds that crossed and dotted the soggy tundra below. She checked the clear tubing that displayed the fuel level on each wall over her window. “We’re golden on gas all the way to Anchortown,” she said, using the slang for Alaska’s largest city. “As long as we don’t have to do too much pokin’ around in these clouds. ’Course, I gotta warn you. I got five-hour fuel tanks and a three-hour bladder so we’ll have to make a stop somewhere.”

 

 

Two hours into the flight it became impossible to see the ground and, more important, the terrain ahead of the airplane, forcing Lovita to drop even lower. Quinn couldn’t help but think they’d be driving across the tundra if she went much lower.

“I was trying for Ptarmigan Pass,” she said, “but the weather looks bum up that way. I’m gonna cut south and take Lake Clark through the mountains. Lotsa glaciers so it might be a little bumpy.” Lovita shimmied forward in her seat, her attention darting from the gray mass of nothingness in her windshield to the bracket-mounted GPS at the corner of her console. Quinn knew enough about the geography of western Alaska to know they were flying through the northern remnants of the Kilbuck Mountains. The terrain would flatten again somewhat after that, before the sharp, glacier-filled teeth of the Alaska Range rose up to block their way to Anchorage.

Quinn leaned forward, focused on the small blue triangle that signified their position on the GPS. “Everything okay?”

“For now,” Lovita said, rolling her shoulders in a movement that reminded Quinn of a boxer preparing to step into the ring. “Those other guys are around here close,” she said. “I can feel ’em. I’ve hid out below the clouds as long as I can, but we got some big hunks of rock coming up. I’m gonna have to punch through the tops to keep from drillin’ a hole in some mountain. GPS says this is a good place.”

She added throttle and pulled back on the stick, pitching the nose of the little plane upward so it began a gradual climb. The cockpit sounded like the inside of a tin barn during a hailstorm. The clouds darkened at first, and Quinn found himself calculating the odds of flying headlong into the other plane, or even a bird. He was so disoriented in the foggy gloom, he wouldn’t have known otherwise until they augered into the tundra. Lovita appeared to be an excellent instrument pilot, but the Super Cub had no radar. No matter how skilled a pilot she was, not hitting something other than the mountains shown on the GPS was one hundred percent luck.

Quinn watched the hands on the altimeter climb through eight and then nine thousand feet before the clouds began to thin. Patches of hazy blue made more frequent appearances. Turbulence tossed the plane like a toy as it skidded through the top layer of weather at ten thousand feet.

When they finally popped through the clouds Quinn felt like a diver coming up for air.

Lovita kept climbing for a long moment, before diving back down into level flight. “This day is Super-Cubable,” she said, the ear-to-ear grin audible in her voice.

A sea of clouds stretched for miles in all directions, silver white under a brilliant sun. Craggy black peaks rose like islands around them and made Quinn wonder how Lovita had managed to avoid smashing into one during their time down in the muck. Far to the east, the Alaska Range loomed in a hazy line. Below, hidden under a blanket of clouds, was a maze of passes and peaks that made up the Kilbuck Mountains—but above, the Cessna was nowhere in sight.

 

 

“Hear that?” Lovita said, an hour later. The GPS said they were flying over the foothills leading into the western entrance to Lake Clark Pass.

Quinn strained his ears. “Hear what?”

“There’s nothing like flying a little airplane over mountains or ocean to make you hear all sorts of rattles and clangs in the—”

Her voice cut out. Quinn, who’d been scanning behind them, turned to see a blue-and-white Cessna Caravan cross their path from north to south, five hundred feet above and maybe a mile away.

A much larger and faster airplane than the Super Cub, the Caravan cruised the skies like a hunting shark, just waiting for the little Piper to show itself. It banked toward them immediately.

Lovita shot a glance over her shoulder. “What do you wanta do?”

“Not sure,” Quinn said, watching the plane grow larger as it bore down on them. “Unless they’re outfitted with jump doors, a Caravan’s not set up to open up in flight and shoot at us.”

With the closing speed of the two airplanes reaching nearly three hundred knots, the Cessna shot past seconds later, fifty feet off the little Piper’s left wing. Quinn’s head whipped around, watching it for as long as he could. At least three faces pressed to the Caravan’s windows stared back at him.

Both Quinn and Lovita looked back and forth in an effort to see behind them. The Cessna made a tight banking turn, falling in easily on the Super Cub’s tail.

“He doesn’t have to shoot us down,” Quinn said.

“He’s got three times our range,” Lovita finished his thought. “He can stay behind and wait until we land and then shoot us on the ground. I saw the way those guys were back in the village. They treat Natives like scum.”

“They treat everybody like scum,” Quinn said, mind racing through his meager options. “But you’re right. They don’t have to do anything but follow us and wait for reinforcements.”

Lovita reached above her console and scrolled through several screens on the GPS, nodding to herself as she spoke. “It’s a dead zone out here. No cell towers and radio traffic is no-go unless it’s plane to plane. Satellites are so low on the horizon this far north a sat phone call is even iffy.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said, twisting around again to watch the plane behind them.

Lovita picked up her iPod and put on another Freddie Mercury song.

“Do you trust me, Jericho Quinn?” she said, shouting above a throbbing engine and the loud music that now streamed across the intercom.

Quinn turned from where he’d been watching the plane behind them to stare at the back of her head.

“Yes,” he said. “I trust you.”

“Good.” She pulled back the throttle, slowing the plane a hair and allowing the Caravan to close the distance behind them. Freddie Mercury still wailed over the headphones. “Because we need to get them really, really close for this to work.”

Lovita waited until the other plane was almost on top of them, and then dropped the Piper’s nose, plowing back into the weather.

The brilliant sun winked out as clouds enveloped them again. Quinn’s stomach rose into his chest. His back pressed against the seat. He didn’t know if he should worry more about the planeful of contract killers behind them, or the hungry black rocks that lurked in the fog below.