Authors: Alan Jacobson
78
V
ail licked her lips, blinked her eyes, and then pushed herself off DeSantos’s shoulder. He was still unconscious, so she shook him awake.
He took a deep breath, wiped away the saliva dripping down his chin, and stretched his arms above his head. “Guess we’re on our descent.”
“We’ve been on our descent since the moment we landed at Heathrow.”
“Jesus, Karen. Don’t be such a downer. We got Hussein Rudenko. We really haven’t had time to process that. He’s escaped law enforcement for decades. He’s, what, number nine on your FBI Most Wanted?”
“Number four,” she said as she unbuckled her restraint. “So what? You think we should pat ourselves on the back?”
“Don’t you?”
Vail went silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I guess so. If we hadn’t—If Walpole—”
“Look, once in a while you get an op that runs into some kind of FUBAR scenario. Walpole’s death definitely qualifies. But I’ve learned to take my wins where I get them. A guy like Rudenko, who traveled the world wreaking havoc, feeding the war machine in a dozen countries…I mean, eliminating him is a huge victory. To say nothing of preventing the ricin attack. How many lives did we save?”
Vail sat there a moment, lost in thought. Then she bolted upright, threw the blanket aside, and began pacing.
“Uh oh. I don’t like that look. What’s wrong? Something I said?”
“Yeah. Something you said.” She looked toward the cockpit. “Uzi, can you hear me?”
“I was just going to come wake you,” he said through her headset. “Welcome back to consciousness.” He twisted his body to face her. “Everything okay?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know. Hector and I were talking about things, and I may have—I’m not sure, I may’ve screwed up. Can you reach Clive Reid or Ethan Carter?”
“It’s, like, four in the morning.”
“Between getting warrants and rounding up junior ministers, they’ve been plenty busy. They’re not sleeping.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
DeSantos pushed himself up and then sat back down. “Between the blow to the head and that little hypoxic episode, I’m not quite ready to stand yet. What’s going on?”
Vail rubbed her temples, still pacing. After a minute, she said, “I hope I’m wrong. But something Idris Turner told me. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I just thought we were dealing with a terrorist bombing of an art gallery to destroy a rare manuscript.” She stopped and faced him. “You see? You should’ve told me everything from the start—”
“Karen. Get to the point.”
“He told me that—”
“Karen,” Uzi said, “Reid didn’t answer. But I’ve got Ethan Carter.”
Vail ran to the cockpit and took Uzi’s phone, slipped it under her right earpiece. “Carter, can you hear me?”
DeSantos grabbed onto an overhead pipe and pulled himself erect, slowly making his way toward Vail.
“Hear you?” Carter asked. “Barely. Where the hell are you?”
“Uzi,” Vail said, “can you put this call through so we can all listen in?”
He took a patch cord from the comms and plugged it into the earphone jack on his handset. “Go for it.”
“Carter,” Vail said. “Listen to me. I think I fucked up. Where’s Reid?”
“Arrested. Not looking too bloody good. Why?”
“We need to talk to Idris Turner. You know where he is?”
“We’re ready to release the gallery back to him, but he’s not answering his cell. The Met doesn’t want to just pull the constables and abandon the place because it can’t be adequately locked and there’s still a lot of valuable stuff there. How important is it that you talk to him?”
“Very. I need to know about the Turner Gallery, its history.”
DeSantos, who had made it to the cockpit, was holding onto Rodman’s seatback. He shared a concerned look with Uzi.
“I was briefed on it,” Carter said. “What’s the problem?”
“Just tell me what you know.”
Carter sighed. “When the director general was setting up the op, he gave us a backgrounder. The gallery’s been around about a hundred years. Been in the family, passed down over the generations. Started in Manchester. About twenty-five years ago, after the father died, Idris took it over and moved it down to London.”
“Was the elder Turner married?”
“Widowed, from what I recall,” Carter said.
“Children?”
“One son. Idris.”
“You’re sure Idris is the son?”
“I only know what I was told,” Carter said. “Why?”
Vail took a deep breath. “Because I think you’re gonna find that Idris Turner is not a descendant of the Turner family. I think you’re going to find that Idris Turner is an alias.”
“An alias? For who?”
Vail closed her eyes and cursed herself. “Hussein Rudenko.”
79
“W
hat?” DeSantos said.
“Reid told me you killed Rudenko,” Carter said.
Vail massaged the bridge of her nose. “We killed the man we
thought
was Rudenko: Gavin Paxton. But we got the wrong guy.”
“Are you sure?” DeSantos and Carter asked simultaneously.
“Get something from Turner’s house. Hair, saliva—whatever—and do a DNA profile. You’ll find a match for the Rudenko sibling’s exemplar that we’ve got on file.”
“We already got a match,” Carter said. “For Paxton.”
Vail shook her head. “We got a match against the exemplar, and the exemplar was his sibling. Paxton could’ve been another sibling.”
“Back up,” DeSantos said.
Vail thought a moment, reasoning it out. “Stay with me on this. Carter, you’re gonna find that the Idris we know and the one from Manchester are two different people. That’s why when ‘Idris’ took over the family business, he moved it to London. The local clientele in Manchester would know what the real Idris looked like, and they’d know an imposter right off. So Rudenko moved the well-known business to London and assumed Idris’s identity.”
“And what about the real Idris?” Carter asked.
DeSantos snorted. “Pretty obvious. Dead. Like his father. Rudenko needed a front for his business, a place where he could launder large sums of money. An art gallery, a rare manuscript broker, dealing in high-end merchandise, fit the bill.”
“Londoners wouldn’t know that Hussein Rudenko appropriated the identity of the real Idris,” Vail said. “Check around, find some family photos. You’ll see.”
“I’m on it,” Carter said.
“And you’ll also want to look into old man Turner’s death. You’ll find it was murder, made to look like natural causes. Heart attack or some kind of ‘unfortunate accident.’”
“Heart attack,” Carter said.
“If they’ve still got the tissues,” DeSantos said, “check them for high levels of insulin. There are other drugs, but that’s a good place to start.”
“Hang on,” Uzi said. “What makes you so sure Gavin Paxton wasn’t Rudenko?”
Vail let her head fall back against the bulkhead. “Turner told me, and I was too dense to see it. He said he travels the world collecting art and making buys. Paxton stays behind and manages the shop. Turner’s been making buys, all right—weapons.”
“Wait,” Uzi said, “I’m not following you.”
“A guy like Rudenko has to travel to do his illicit business,” DeSantos said with a slow nod. “And who was often out of town? Not Paxton, the guy we thought was Rudenko, but Idris Turner.”
Carter groaned, then said, “Fak me.”
Not exactly how I’d phrase it, but I agree.
“Get with Buck and lock down all air traffic, trains, boats—anything and everything out of England. Find him.”
Vail handed Uzi back his phone. They were silent a moment before Vail sank down to the cabin floor and cradled her head in cold, rough hands. “We had the bastard. I had coffee with him. He played us!” She kicked the bulkhead.
After thinking a moment, DeSantos said, “Paxton’s gotta be Rudenko’s brother. That would explain the DNA similarity. But he’s also a conspirator, Karen. And we got him.”
“Small consolation.”
Uzi swiveled in his seat. “That gallery—because of its history in Manchester—Rudenko gained instant credibility in the business community. In the art community. It’s an institution.” He shook his head. “It’s hard when criminals are smart.”
“I like to think we’re smarter than most of them,” Vail said.
“We are,” Uzi said. “But it’s also why a guy like Rudenko is unique, why he’s escaped law enforcement for so long.”
“Here we go,” Rodman said as he tuned up the USS
New York
’s navigation frequency, channel 78Y on the military’s Tactical Air Navigation system, or TACAN. “I’ve got a good lock on the ship. Three-one-zero at about thirty miles. Right where we want to be.”
Vail pulled herself up from the floor. “Sorry for letting you down. I totally missed it.”
“Missing Rudenko…it sucks,” Rodman said. “But shit happens. Can’t beat yourself up over it. On the other hand, I just realized I should’ve dialed in the TACAN when we were climbing to twenty thousand. If the
New York
wasn’t exactly where we expected her to be, I could’ve adjusted course. If they got delayed or weren’t in the right spot, we probably wouldn’t have had the fuel to change course. They’d have been fishing our bodies off the floor of the Atlantic.
That’s
a fatal error, Karen.”
“Exactly.” DeSantos steadied himself as Rodman reduced their speed. “Like I said, we take our wins where we can get ’em. We stopped the terror attacks. We eliminated several of Rudenko’s accomplices, secured the ricin, and closed down his base of operations. We did our best. We’re not perfect.
You’re
not perfect.”
“Okay, you two,” Uzi said as he squared himself in his chair and pressed a button on the panel. “This is gonna be a rough landing. Take your seats and belt yourselves in.”
“I thought Hot Rod could handle it,” DeSantos said.
Uzi glanced at Rodman, who busied himself with the controls. “Well, Hot Rod’s never actually flown an Osprey before. And since we’re almost out of fuel, we’re only gonna get one shot at this.”
Vail closed her eyes
. Terrific.
80
D
eSantos sat beside Vail in the cabin and fished around for his seat restraint. He clicked it home and then glanced at Vail. She looked like she wanted to rip her headset off and smash it against the bulkhead.
“Worried about the landing?”
“No. Yes. And I’m pissed at myself.”
“He can do this,” DeSantos said. “Hot Rod’s a good pilot.”
“You trying to convince me, or yourself?”
DeSantos knew that touching down on a ship required skill and practice. A pilot who was unfamiliar with shipboard landings could get disoriented very quickly and end up crashing into the water—or against the side of the ship.
While he didn’t doubt Rodman’s skill, DeSantos knew that even if he had done this before, it had been at least several years. And he had never done it in an Osprey.
“How’s your head?” she asked.
“Bleeding’s stopped. I’ll live.”
Vail snorted. “Assuming we don’t crash and burn.”
UZI TOLD RODMAN he was letting him take the plane in—a hollow gesture since Rodman was the only one who had any experience piloting an Osprey—even if it was in a simulator.
Judging by how tightly he was gripping the thrust control lever, there were other places Rodman would rather be right now.
They had “glided” in on low power, and when they reached five hundred feet, they increased engine thrust.
The flashing yellow fuel light turned red, and an adjacent warning light came on. Uzi ignored them; there was nothing he could do about it. They had done everything reasonable to conserve fuel, so now they could only hope there was enough in the tank to safely touch down on the flight deck.
Uzi consulted the TACAN, which showed that they were about twenty-five miles out. The plan was to come in astern at a slight angle, along the port side of the ship.
When Knox had set up the rendezvous point and provided them with the TACAN code, he instructed them to use the USS
New York
’s alias, “Liberty.” To maintain anonymity in open, international waters, ships preferred not to use their real names over the radio. Uzi depressed the communication switch on the stick.
“Liberty, this is Shadowrider, approaching in a CV-22 squawking 1200, on emergency fuel. We’ve got sweet lock, request permission to land on arrival. I say again, we are on emergency fuel.”
“Roger, Shadowrider, this is Liberty control. Liberty is setting emergency flight quarters now. Expect a BRC of 275.”
“BRC,” Uzi said to Rodman. “Rings a bell, but—”
“Base Recovery Course. It gives us the bearing that the ship’s traveling. The flight deck’s not a stationary landing field, so there’s no runway heading. The BRC points us toward the ship.”
“Emergency fuel acknowledged,” Liberty control said. “Please squawk 0421.”
“Copy that.” Uzi twisted the identification, friend or foe code into the Osprey’s transponder, allowing their aircraft to be identified on the controller’s radar scope and telling the
New York
that they were who they said they were. Otherwise, the ship would lock them up with its self-defense weapons and shoot them down as an unapproved, approaching plane.
“Liberty control has you sweet-sweet on the 060 radial at sixteen nautical miles. Continue your descent to cherubs five. Report a ‘see me.’”
Even at this distance, Uzi thought he could make out the flight deck lights. The sizable landing pad he had expected to see looked more like a postage stamp. “We really going to set down on that thing?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“See you at fifteen,” Uzi said into his mic, informing the
New York
that they had a visual on the ship and that they were fifteen miles out.
“Roger, Shadowrider,” the controller said. “Check in with the air boss on 231.5.”
Uzi dialed in the UHF transmitter to frequency 231.5 and keyed his radio. “Liberty Tower, this is Shadowrider checking in.”
“You are cleared to spot four. Relative winds are 003 at twenty knots.”
Uzi glanced at Rodman, who shrugged. He reached out and pressed the “radio call” button. “Uh, Liberty Tower, where exactly is spot four?”
“Are you not familiar with shipboard ops, son?”
“Well—” Uzi cleared his throat. “We’ve never done this before.”
“Say again? You’ve never done
what
? Landed an Osprey on a ship at night? Or landed an Osprey on a ship?”
“I guess we can start with we’ve never
flown
an Osprey before, and then the rest is kind of self-explanatory.”
“You gotta be shitting me.” The air boss was silent a long moment. Then: “Best you stay the hell away from my deck. Land that thing on a nice, long, Air Force runway—where you belong.”
Rodman’s face hardened. “Liberty Tower, we don’t have enough fuel to land anywhere but on your deck.”
“So either clear us to land,” Uzi said, “or you’d better launch the SAR helo to pick up the survivors from our crash off your port side. Assuming we survive.”
“Boss,” Rodman said, “bring your captain online. But make it fast, because we don’t have enough time or gas left to debate this. We’re on approach.”
A moment later, another voice: “Shadowrider, this is Captain John Dunbar.”
“Captain,” Uzi said, “I don’t understand the problem. You were expecting us.”
“I was ordered to divert to these coordinates to pick up a package. Nothing was said about some greenie trying to land a goddamn Osprey on my deck—at night.”
Rodman set his jaw. “Don’t take this the wrong way, sir, but we
are
coming in. If you deny us access, you’re going to have to explain our deaths to Secretary McNamara. Because that’s who I report to—directly.”
“Captain,” the air boss said, “I don’t care who he reports to. I can’t clear these guys to land. They’re not qualified.”
After a long pause, Dunbar said, “My ship, my decision. Get that Huey off the flight deck and into the hangar. And get the Cobra airborne. Everyone but the LSE off the flight deck when that Osprey comes in.”
The air boss started to object, but Dunbar cut him off. “Those are my orders. Have the Officer of the Deck set General Quarters.”
Uzi knew that Dunbar was maximizing readiness for the crash he was anticipating. Uzi did not appreciate the lack of confidence, but what he and Rodman were attempting carried low odds of success.
“Shadowrider,” Dunbar said, “I’m clearing as much real estate as I can, but we’re full up. We’re putting one in the air to give you spot four, port side, just aft of the hangar bay. Look for the yellow shirt waving his wands.”
“Can you turn up the lights,” Uzi said, “help us out a bit?”
“Copy that, but we’re set up on night vision. We’ll need time to change it out from NVG-compatible deck lighting.”
Uzi consulted his watch. “You’ve got five minutes. Sir.”
They heard the captain say something over the open channel. It was muffled but sounded like “All lights to full bright.” The mic cut out, then came back on. “—don’t care, you’ve got two minutes to make it fucking daylight out there!”
Rodman winked at Uzi, as if to say, “That’s more like it.”
Uzi figured they would be mobilizing a crash crew to be prepared to douse the deck with A-Triple F, a chemical that smothered fire. Unfortunately, Uzi was familiar with the stuff.
As the Osprey neared the
New York
, the dim postage stamp in the dark ocean lit up like Times Square, and the two squat masts and smooth, flat sides of the massive vessel came into full view.
Uzi had seen pictures of the ship
when it was commissioned; a big deal was made of the fact that its bow had been constructed of several tons of steel from the Twin Towers in the aftermath of 9/11. If there could be a fitting use of the ruins of a terror network’s destructive act, it was as part of a United States warship. In a sense, it was the military raising its middle finger to al-Qaeda and anyone else who would mount an attack on US soil.
Uzi felt a sense of pride as they approached the
New York
. He pushed it aside and concentrated, ready to lend a hand as the landing pad grew larger through the windshield.
“Holy shit,” Rodman said. “He wasn’t kidding about the deck being full.”
“You can do this.”
“Find out soon enough. I’m bringing us in closer than I should before switching over to a hover. Hover uses—”
“More fuel. I remember.”
Waiting till the last possible moment, Rodman cut back on the thrust and, using the thumbwheel, began transitioning the nacelles to a vertical orientation.
The pace of the blinking red fuel light immediately quickened. An alarm sounded. Moving to hover mode was like sucking the last drops of water from a cup with a straw.
“Call out airspeed and altitude,” Rodman said.
Uzi tore his eyes from the flight deck. “Twenty knots, 475 feet. Eight knots, 410. Bring us in lower—drop, drop, drop!”
Rodman corrected—and then overcompensated. They fell toward the water, like an elevator in free fall.
“Holy Christ, too low!”
The plane rose abruptly, like an amusement park ride, rocking side to side.
“Wave off,” the air boss yelled over the radio. “Wave off!”
“Negative,” Rodman said. “No gas.”
Rodman brought them along the port side, as if to parallel park. There were two slots open; spot four was exactly where Dunbar said it would be, on the edge, behind the hangar and in front of another chopper.
A sizable CH-53 Super Stallion helicopter sat to their right.
They were swaying wildly as Rodman attempted to line up the Osprey with the margin of the flight deck.
He was overcontrolling the aircraft. Uzi knew it, Rodman knew it—but this was where actual in-flight scenarios came into play. Simulators could only take you so far.
A crewman in a yellow jacket and helmet began moving his arms, using hand signals to guide them in.
Rodman inched over the port side and hovered there a long second, the wings continuing to rock from side to side, the rotors coming dangerously close to striking the helicopter on his right.
A moment later, he stabilized the plane and lowered it slowly—but unevenly. The crewman held his arms straight out at his sides, then dropped them rapidly to his hips, signaling Rodman to bring it home.
But at that instant, the fuel pressure indicator dropped to nearly zero.
Every buzzer sounded. Every light on the forward display lit up.
And the Osprey dropped like a rock toward the flight deck.