Carver could still make the run, though. There was time, just, to reach Alix before the plane doors closed behind her. It tore him up to see her face contorted with pain, the guard leering at her, enjoying the thrill of domination over a beautiful, helpless woman. Screw the odds, screw the bomb, screw everything: Carver wanted to go over and beat the crap out of the ape. He wanted his girl back. He longed for the feel and scent of her body in his arms, her hair slipping between his fingers, her wonderful eyes looking into his, the kiss of her lips. He needed to tell her how much he loved her, how deeply he appreciated the months she’d spent by his bedside, how bad he felt about all the things she’d been through on his account.
He wanted to say how sorry he was that he was killing her.
She was walking up into the plane now. He was staring at her, his eyes boring into her back. She must have felt it because she turned her head and looked in his direction. Just for a second their eyes met. He saw the look of amazement on her face, and then something deeper, a yearning desperation that cut straight to his heart as she cried out, “Carver!”
His reaction was unthinking. He couldn’t help it—he took a step toward her and gave himself away.
It was a pathetic, amateur move. But Carver’s incompetence saved him. He hadn’t even bothered to reach for his gun. So neither McCabe’s bodyguards, nor Darko’s fighters, milling around behind him, started firing. Not that it would make much difference in the long run, the amount of weaponry now pointing in his direction.
Darko nodded at one of his men, who came up to Carver and patted him down. He found the Beretta, removed it, and threw it clattering onto the floor of the hangar.
McCabe had stopped on the aircraft steps. He looked at Carver.
“Bring him here,” he barked, stepping back down to the ground.
Darko snapped out a series of instructions. Carver’s arms were grabbed, a man on either side, and he was hauled across the open space toward the aircraft. Darko was strolling alongside, cradling a gun. His face bore an expression of amusement, rather than hostility, as if he were motivated as much by curiosity as by needing to secure his captive.
McCabe glanced at Alix as the four men got closer.
“So you know this man?”
She said nothing. McCabe grunted dismissively then turned his attention back to Carver, peering at him as he came closer. The look became a stare, then the death’s head face creased into a savage grin.
“Forget it . . . I know you, don’t I, boy? You’re the reason I’m here.”
Carver stared back at him impassively.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re Lundin . . . the mechanic.”
“You heard the woman. She called me Carver.”
McCabe coughed violently, then spat a stream of bloodstained phlegm onto the ground between them.
“You fixed this plane, too, boy?” he rasped.
“Like I said, you’ve lost me.”
McCabe ignored Carver’s words. He took another shuffling step, leaning forward so that his face was right up by Carver’s, as close as a lover, whispering in his ear.
“You care to show me what you done?”
“I haven’t done anything,” said Carver.
There was only one way now to save Alix, and he went for it.
“If you don’t believe me, put me on the aircraft.”
Before McCabe could reply there was a shout from the hangar entrance and the guard from the main gate ran in, yelling in Serbian, a desperate edge to his voice.
Darko listened to the frantic jumble of words, then spoke to McCabe.
“He says helicopters are coming, just a few kilometers away. They will be here in two minutes, maybe less.”
McCabe considered this new information. He switched his attention back to Carver.
“We don’t have time to debate this. Guess you’d better just step onboard.”
“No problem,” Carver said.
Then he led the way up the steps, into the booby-trapped plane.
98
T
he Black Hawks came in from the northeast, through a gap in the hills, reaching the airport at the terminal end, a mile and a half from the hangar. McCabe’s plane was already on the runway, moving toward them, picking up speed for takeoff.
Major Dave Gretsch ordered the pilots to form up in line abreast, just over the runway, blocking the plane’s way. But the jet kept coming.
One of the choppers was a Direct Action Penetrator model, armed with a Gatling gun. Gretsch ordered it to fire a warning burst over the plane. It had no effect. Now the gap between the plane and the choppers was closing at over two hundred feet per second.
“Shoot to kill!” Gretsch commanded.
The Gatling’s rotating barrels spewed an unrelenting hail of bullets at the onrushing machine, but it hurtled onward, taking on the helicopters in an airborne game of chicken as its nose lifted up off the ground and arrowed toward the night sky.
“Break! Break!” screamed the pilot in the command helicopter, and the three choppers threw themselves sideways, scattering before the roaring plane, not like predatory black hawks, but panic-stricken, fat gray pigeons, their rotors clawing for purchase in air torn asunder by the jet engines’ wake.
The bomb-disposal team was hurled from side to side and buffeted up and down before the pilot was able to regain control.
One of the men shouted, “What the hell was that?”
Kady Jones was still trying to stop her stomach from turning cartwheels.
“I guess that was our bomb,” she gasped. “And I think it was saying good-bye.”
99
C
arver waited until the engines had been turned off, and there was nothing to hear but the rushing of the air outside and the passengers screaming in fear or calling out to their God. The plane was descending fast and it was going to keep going down until it hit the rocky, mountainous earth of northeastern Macedonia. There would be no airstrip to welcome them, no miracle landing. They all knew that. And yet the people around him still strapped themselves into their seats as the pilot instructed, and when the first soft tendrils of smoke wormed their way into the compartment, they reached for the oxygen masks.
As if any of that would make the slightest difference in the end.
Carver had been placed on one end of a three-seat divan that ran along the wall, toward the rear of the cabin. Alix was next to him, Vermulen at the far end. Two of McCabe’s men sat opposite them. The third was guarding his boss and keeping an eye on Francesco Riva. They were up front, in club seats the size of armchairs.
For the first few minutes of the flight, the goons in suits had sat there, pointing their guns at the trio on the divan, scowls on their faces, trying to look mean and intimidating. But any threat they posed had evaporated the moment the pilot announced that they had a problem. Then they just became two terrified passengers in a metal tube dropping out of the sky, each of them thinking about nothing but himself.
It was Carver’s hand that Alix reached for.
“Don’t worry,” he said, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “This isn’t over.”
He helped put her mask on.
“Deep breaths,” he told her. “Get plenty of oxygen into your blood.”
Carver could see Vermulen, looking past Alix at him.
“Who are you?” the general asked, shaking his head in bemusement, as if he were trying to work out how his judgment of people could have gone so wrong. He reached out to Alix, got no response, and sank back into his seat, lost in his own disillusionment.
Carver had no interest in Vermulen’s problems. He was more interested in McCabe, who was staring at a control unit in his hand. Carver saw a grin flicker over the old man’s face as he pressed the switch. Had he just armed the bomb in one last shot at Armageddon? Carver held a mask to his face, his breathing strong and steady, as he now looked across the cabin, through the steadily thickening smoke, toward the two men on the far side. One of them was having problems with his oxygen supply, yanking on his mask, trying to get his partner’s attention. But the other guy was having none of it. He was keeping all his fresh air for himself, one hand on his mask, the other—holding his gun—hanging loosely beside him.
The men were lost in their own dying world. They didn’t even notice Carver as he rose from his seat, crossed the aisle with a single stride, wrenched the gun from the limp, dangling hand, and smashed it twice—backhand, forehand—against the pair of naked pink scalps. One of the two slumped forward, unconscious. The other groaned and turned unfocused eyes in Carver’s direction. Carver hit him again, knocking him cold.
He turned back to the divan, now barely visible, even a couple of feet away, reached for his mask, grabbed Alix’s hand, and gave it a sharp tug. She got the message, unclipped her belt, and got to her feet. Carver could see a dark shadow that must be Vermulen looming beyond her. He lashed out with the handle of the gun, felt it hit something, he wasn’t sure what, and the shadow collapsed back toward the chair. Carver gave another pull on Alix’s hand, leading her back to the very rear of the cabin.
As they staggered through the acrid fumes, Carver felt the tremors running through Alix’s body, She was beginning to choke. He was coughing, too, his eyes watering, his nose and throat burning.
Three paces took him to the lavatory door, and then he was gulping down oxygen from the mask dangling over the toilet bowl.
Carver handed the mask over to Alix, pausing for a second to make sure she could still hold it steady over her mouth and nose. Then he left the lavatory and stood by the bulkhead that divided the passenger compartment from the bomb bay, desperately turning the wheel that opened the hatch. There was an audible click as the lock disengaged and a moment of truth as the door was flung open and a blast of thin, freezing air roared into the cabin, instantly condensing all the moisture in the atmosphere and turning it into an impenetrable fog.
The aircraft’s dive became even deeper and the fuselage swayed one way and the other, like the weight at the end of a pendulum, as the pilots struggled to maintain control.
Carver reached out and grabbed Alix, dragging her after him as he squeezed through the cramped, steel-ringed hatch, both of them banging heads, shins, and elbows, almost forcing exclamations of pain and wasting precious oxygen. Agonizing seconds stretched by as the hatch was closed and locked again to slow down anyone else who realized that their only hope lay in the bomb bay.
Now Carver was kneeling, hands reaching out through the freezing, poisonous fog, fingers stretching, searching, because there had to be a way of opening the doors manually, a fail-safe in case the electrical control in the cockpit didn’t work. And there it was, a handle, on top of a metal rod, waiting to be pumped up and down. Desperately he set to work.
For a moment, the doors remained shut. Carver pumped the lever two or three more times steadily, then frantically again and again as he felt his lungs begin to burn, eyes flare and then water, his muscles giving way.
Then doors were opening, letting in a gale that drove the smog from the bomb bay; air that was bitterly cold, but rich and clean enough to breathe in desperate inhalations between hacking, retching coughs. But the pumping never stopped, up and down, pain shooting through arms, shoulders, and back with every motion of the handle, until the bay doors were wide open and the earth was dimly visible down below.
Above it sat the bomb, a drab brown case, crudely strapped to a parachute, cradled in its metal frame. A lever on the frame disengaged the bomb from the cradle—just as well that those blind, grasping hands had clutched the pump handle first.
Carver’s eyes darted around the bay, settling on bungee cords looped around hooks on the wall, there to secure the legitimate cargo that the engineers who adapted the aircraft naïvely assumed would be in the plane. He grabbed a cord and looped one end around one of the straps that linked the bomb and parachute, knotting it tight. Then he held Alix close to him, her arms wrapped around his waist. She gave him a little squeeze back as he passed the cord around them in a figure eight, before tying that off, too, forming an umbilical link with the bomb.
The whole aircraft was shaking more and more as it failed to respond to the crew’s commands. There couldn’t be long before they lost control completely and the descent turned into a freefall.
Suddenly there came a motion from the front end of the bay, the turning of the small metal wheel. Someone was there, on the other side of the bulkhead, trying to get into the bay, and the hatch was opening to reveal Vermulen. He must have recovered and grabbed the other bodyguard’s gun. Now he had it out and was firing, the barrel jerking randomly with every convulsion of the doomed plane, bullets ricocheting off the bomb cradle and the aircraft’s own metallic ribs.
There was one last, great spasm as the cables snapped. Carver heard Alix give a muffled cry of surprise and felt her body give a sudden jerk. The plane lurched into its death dive, Vermulen was flung back against the bulkhead, and now there was nothing to do but wrench the lever and then put his arms around her head to protect it as gravity took over and the bomb, the parachute, and the two entwined lovers were hurled out, crashing through the cradle into the yawning void, hurtling toward the ground at two hundred miles an hour.
The parachute was set to open at five thousand feet, slowing the descent of the bomb before its detonation over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. But the hills and mountains of northern Macedonia rise as high as fifty-five hundred feet. The earth was rushing ever closer and suddenly Carver heard himself shouting wordlessly in frustration and fear as he realized that nothing that had happened in the past few minutes had made any difference.
The hard, unyielding mountainside was just seconds away now. Carver held Alix’s body even closer to him, unable to see her eyes in the darkness. But as the final moment of impact drew near, and his mind refused to shut down, he screwed his own eyes tight shut, so that the explosive impact of the plane, maybe eight hundred feet away, was only heard, rather than seen.