Charon's Landing, page 37
“Thank you for your prompt attention, this is really quite welcome,” Khalid said. The painkillers were finally beginning to take effect, blunting the edges of his sharper wounds. While they trundled down the carpeted hallways, he borrowed Vivica’s cellular phone to call Colonel Wayne Bigelow in Abu Dhabi. The old desert rat wasn’t in his cluttered bachelor’s apartment, but Khalid left word on his answering machine that he would be arriving in a few hours, giving the particulars of the flight and asking Bigelow to pick him up at the airport.
Heavily burdened passengers parted before the cart as they glided past the duty-free shops, countless magazine stands, and elegant boutiques that were the pride of Terminal 4. It took just a few minutes for them to reach Khalid’s gate. Vivica Smith jumped from the cart and swung around a wheelchair that had been left by the gate’s entrance. With a minimum of fuss, he was wheeled to the aircraft and led to his first class seat. To get such a seat on this short notice and to have the plane delayed until he was aboard cost nearly ten times the regular ticket price. Privilege wasn’t cheap.
No longer able to remain awake, Khalid fell into the blissful sleep he’d been fighting as the big jet lumbered away from its hard stand.
THE delaying fuse of a Czech-manufactured RGD-5 grenade had been altered from its normal four seconds to a full sixty, making it an ingenious terror weapon for crowded areas where more sophisticated devices could be detected if left for too long. Waiting until the second hand of his watch made the final tick of their schedule, Tariq slurped down the remainder of a container of soft drink, pulled the grenade from his coat pocket, and dropped both items into the trash bin he’d been waiting near for fifteen minutes. Calmly, he meandered back out of the airport and headed toward his car stowed in short-term parking. Even if someone recognized him as the man who’d planted the device, this was his first action outside the Middle East and it was improbable his description would lead the authorities to him.
Fifty-nine-point-eight seconds after the grenade’s handle released, the 120 grams of TNT within its rounded body exploded, embedding the lid of the trash container in the terminal’s ceiling. The concussive force also blew outward, the weapon’s fragmentation liner dicing the weapon’s outer casing into hundreds of tiny shrapnel shards. A nineteen-year-old Norwegian au pair returning home caught the brunt of the blast, larger portions of her dismembered body landing yards from the explosion. Eight other people were wounded by the blast. One of them, a Nigerian priest, would later die in the airport’s medical facility.
Even before panic could ripple through the large building, the phone in the airport administrator’s office rang. Already in a foul mood because of the traffic reroutings caused by the El Al emergency landing at Gatwick, Geoff Wilberforce didn’t want to answer his extension.
“What?” he barked, expecting some spineless air traffic controller at Gatwick.
“At the precise moment your phone rang, an explosive was set off in Terminal Four’s main concourse. The blast was small in comparison to what we have planted throughout the airport, including several of the aircraft waiting clearance to take off.
“If any planes attempt to leave Heathrow after two minutes of the termination of this call, I will detonate the rest of the bombs. The blood of the innocents will be on your hands. I will allow aircraft to land for the next hour, but if any planes attempt to do so after that, I will detonate the remaining explosives. Heathrow Airport is shut down on order of Kurdistan United.”
The caller cut the connection, leaving Wilberforce listening to the steady drone of a dial tone, much like the flat-line sound on a heart monitor. He was just getting to his feet when his secretary burst into his office. She was near tears.
“Geoff, there’s been an explosion.”
THE big engines of the British Airways Boeing 767 were still idled to a low whine as the huge craft moved across the taxiways behind a New York-bound jumbo. They were fourth in line for takeoff when suddenly the engines were cut to dramatic silence. The cabin lights dimmed and the air-conditioning units switched to their much weaker internal power.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I’m afraid there is a mechanical problem here at Heathrow. The main radar unit just died and took the computers with it. We may be stuck here for a little while until they can sort everything out. On behalf of British Airways, I and the rest of the crew apologize for this slight delay, and I will certainly pass on any information as I receive it. In the meantime, I’ve authorized the flight attendants to start a complimentary beverage service. Thank you.”
Khalid Khuddari slept through the entire announcement.
Fifteen Miles South of Fairbanks, Alaska
At five thousand feet above the low bowl of ground on the banks of the Chena River that is Fairbanks, Alaska’s largest interior city, the swelling fires raging to the southwest of the urban center were easily discernible. They seethed and roiled upward and outward into the night, unaffected by the rain that fell in a wind-driven downpour. The fire was centered near the International Airport at Alyeska’s new equipment depot. Eddie, Mercer, and Mike Collins could see the frantic movement of men and equipment trying to battle the fierce blaze. Revolving lights atop the emergency vehicles winked furiously. From their high vantage, it appeared that the number of fire engines was woefully inadequate for the size of the conflagration. At least a couple of acres were obscured by undulating sheets of flame and black chemical smoke.
“Jesus Christ, what’s going on down there?” asked the fourth man in the helicopter, a young sergeant assigned by Colonel Knoff to handle communications between Eddie Rice and the two Huey gunships about half a mile in front of them.
“One hell of a diversion,” Mercer replied from his place in the back of the JetRanger. “Looks like we’re not going to get any ground support from Fort Wainwright.”
Before leaving Elmendorf, Colonel Knoff had suggested sending a convoy of Military Police from the Fort Wainwright Military Airfield in Fairbanks up the Dalton Highway toward Pump Stations 5 and 6. Mercer had agreed, knowing that the three choppers would reach the pump stations long before the MPs, but if Kerikov had already left, he would run right into the army vehicles.
An emergency as large as the fire burning below would surely take precedence over Mercer’s mission in the eyes of the local government. Any able-bodied soldier from Wainwright would certainly be assisting in crowd control, search and rescue, and medical treatment. The three helicopters thundering north were on their own.
Mike Collins sat next to Mercer and stared out the window, his face pressed tightly to the Plexiglas as he studied the devastation. His lips were compressed and bloodless and his hands flexed nervously in his lap. “Do those lunatics realize that there’re about a thousand tons of seismic charges and other explosives warehoused at that facility?”
“Probably,” Mercer observed mildly.
“This isn’t some joke.” Collins turned and glared at Mercer.
“Mike, I know it’s not, but I guarantee that this is just a sideshow; the main event is still to come. Kerikov knows there would be a response once we lost communications from the pump stations, and he’s trying to sidetrack us.”
“How do you know that? How do you know the fire isn’t what he wanted all along?”
“Because I know how the bastard thinks, and this just isn’t big enough for him.” Mercer was going to continue, but the sergeant interrupted. Colonel Knoff wanted to speak with him. Mercer put on his headset. “Yes, Colonel, what’s up?”
“I just got a priority message from Wainwright. They need our choppers for medical evacs to Anchorage. Facilities in Fairbanks are swamped; they need every available aircraft to get patients south and doctors and supplies north.”
“Negative, we go on.”
“You said yourself this might be a wild-goose chase, and there are people dying down there. They need us.”
“There wouldn’t be a fire down there if one of those pump stations hadn’t been attacked. It’s a distraction, Colonel, nothing more.”
“That distraction has already claimed twenty-three lives, Dr. Mercer,” Knoff said acidly.
“My mission takes precedence. I’m sorry. Mercer out.”
“You cold son of a bitch,” Mike Collins said, then turned back to the window as Fairbanks vanished behind the helicopter’s flat bottom.
Mercer sat quietly, arms folded across his chest, eyes flat and unpenetrable. Behind the facade, his mind was working furiously. Am I right? he asked himself. Or am I consigning innocent people to death by refusing them these helicopters?
“Mercer, call from Andy Lindstrom,” Eddie Rice said through the headset. “He says no answer from Pump Station 5, but 6 is on line, a skeleton crew standing by. He’s asking if he should send some men down to 5.”
“No! Under no circumstances are those men to leave Pump Station 6. They’d be cut to ribbons long before they reached the control building. Number 5 is under the control of terrorists. Sergeant, call Colonel Knoff. Tell him the target is Pump Station 5. Eddie, what’s our ETA?”
“At least another hour and twenty minutes. This weather is really killing us, and those Hueys are even slower than we are, especially fully loaded.”
“Shit! Pump Station 5 went off line hours ago. It’s possible Kerikov’s already gone.”
Time slowed. Whenever Mercer twisted his wrist to look at his watch, a shorter and shorter arc of the minute hand had swept by. The rhythmic throbbing of the rotor blades over his head had a lulling effect, sending him into a kind of daze, his mind emptied of everything, so he was just barely aware of the JetRanger’s turbine engine and the occasional mutterings between Eddie Rice and the pilots of the two Hueys. And then the thoughts came, fear and doubt the strongest, but also a deep exhaustion, a gritty feeling behind his eyes that made blinking painful. He had been awake for twenty-two hours. But that wasn’t what was really nagging him.
Suddenly the quest for the unknown, the search for knowledge that had dominated his life, that made him who he was, was no longer so important. He felt like telling Eddie to turn the chopper around and head back to Anchorage. This wasn’t his problem, it wasn’t their fight. He had done this too many times now, put his life on the line for an ideal, a belief that he couldn’t really define or name.
This was always the worst, the waiting. He’d been here before, with Eddie in fact, but with other men, too, hurtling into harm’s way, fear like a weight in his stomach, doubt like a nagging headache behind his temples. He’d long ago stopped wondering why he found himself constantly surrounded by danger, but he still questioned how much longer his strange obsession would allow him to live. How many more times could he descend into the earth in some mine shaft in need of immediate repairs? How many times could he climb aboard a helicopter to face someone like Ivan Kerikov and actually return? Pessimism burned hotly behind his ribs.
God, I’m tired.
“Ten minutes to the Pump Station,” Eddie called.
Mercer straightened up, noting the queer look Mike Collins shot him, as if Alyeska’s Chief of Security had been reading his mind. He ignored Collins, leaning forward to peer out the cockpit canopy. In the darkness, the running lights of the two Air Force Hueys looked like flashing jewels, a cold, comforting light signifying the presence of other humans amid the great expanse of forested nothingness below. Thousands of square miles of birch and white spruce separated the Alaskan Range mountains from the Brooks Range, whose foothills they were approaching. The area was crisscrossed by dozens of rivers, streams, and tiny lakes.
“Any traffic on the Dalton Highway?”
“I haven’t seen anything, and we’ve been over it for nearly half an hour. I didn’t even see any police cars where the Alyeska vans reportedly went off,” Eddie replied. “It’s like the road isn’t even there.”
“Call Knoff. Tell him we’re almost there.”
“Already done. His boys are chomping at the bit.”
“Good. I want you to hang back at least a mile until they’ve landed and Knoff gives us the all-clear sign. If Kerikov and his men are still here, Knoff’s troops should be able to handle them. He won’t be expecting this strong a reprisal because of his pyrotechnic display in Fairbanks.”
“Does this mean you’ve lost your death wish?” Eddie teased. “Last time we flew together you had me land at ground zero of a nuclear explosion with about two minutes to go.”
Mercer laughed. “Government cutbacks have slashed my danger pay to below minimum wage again. I only raid liquor cabinets unless given a direct presidential order. Which reminds me, I could really go for a . . . What the hell?”
A flash of light, like a laser beam, streaked up from the dark ground so quickly it appeared as a solid line rather than a moving object. It intercepted the lead Huey, the two coming together in a violent blast, the helicopter outlined briefly in the fire of its destruction. In an instant, the chopper was falling to the earth in a flaming ruin. The pilot of the second Huey had just started evasive action when a second SA-7 Grail missile rocketed skyward on a brilliant cone of expended solid fuel.
Known by NATO forces to be wholly inaccurate and under-armed with just six pounds of high explosive in its warhead, the Grail was still deadly against low-flying helicopters, especially those with exposed exhaust ports like the UH-1. The Grail fired at the Huey didn’t have the upgraded cryo-cooling unit to aid its infrared sensors at finding hot signatures, yet it still had no trouble locking onto its target against the cold background of the Alaskan night. The second Huey disintegrated.
Mercer was just recognizing the attack for what it was when Eddie Rice banked the JetRanger, applying max power to the turbines and the rotors, eking out every bit of speed as he tried to get them out of range of the shoulder-fired missiles. Debris from the first two choppers fell to the earth like meteor showers, the hulls hitting in explosive wrecks, fuel and metal and bits of their crews thrown up in fountains of flame and shrapnel. Patches of forest around the crash sites were ignited by the burning choppers, pine trees flaring like matchsticks. It would take hours for the rain to douse such a fuel-rich fire.
“Watch for those missiles!” Eddie shouted, jerking the controls first one way then the next in an attempt to foul the aim of the terrorists below them. The JetRanger, designed more for comfort than agility, groaned at Eddie’s flying, the bulkheads and structural members straining well beyond their design specifications.
“I’ve got a launch, starboard side,” Mercer called out, watching with morbid fascination as another missile lifted from the black forest.
“Got it.” Eddie hauled the JetRanger onto its side, tightening his turn so quickly that the helicopter lost nearly a thousand feet in just a few seconds.
The Grail passed behind them, its infrared sight unable to lock onto the exhaust ports of their chopper. Its rocket motor ran out of fuel and toppled the missile back to earth. During the violent maneuver, no one saw another Grail hurtle into the air.
It was almost directly ahead of them, its guidance system seeking them out with single-minded resolution. At last finding the heat signature it had been hunting for, the fifty-three-inch-long missile slightly altered its attack vector, shallowing its approach so as to come up under the Bell helicopter.
“Oh, God!” Mike Collins shouted, while the young soldier in the copilot’s seat screamed and screamed.
Mercer let himself go limp. The fear that had squeezed his chest when the first two helicopters were hit released him at this last moment so he could face his death calmly, watching it happen with almost clinical dispassion.
Of them all, only Eddie Rice hadn’t given up. The moment before the warhead struck the underside of the JetRanger, he again jerked the craft hard over, presenting the now tilted bottom of the chopper to the missile. It struck a glancing blow where the secondary rotor boom attached to the fuselage, and exploded.
Most of the blast was directed away from the helicopter because of Eddie’s quick thinking and exceptional reflexes, yet the JetRanger was mortally wounded. Smoke filled the cabin even as the chopper was thrown violently through the air, turned almost completely upside down by the explosion. The electrical system failed and a second later the turbine skipped, caught briefly, then began faltering as it starved for the fuel gushing from the severed lines. The raw stench of avgas gagged the four men as they struggled to regain proper seating in the bucking aircraft. Mercifully, it hadn’t ignited. Yet.
Relying on instinct alone, Eddie managed to get the JetRanger onto an even keel; the smoke was so thick that he couldn’t see the instrument panel only feet from him. They had started to auto rotate as they fell to the ground, the chopper spinning on its own axis in a tightening circle, pressing the men outward against the fuselage. Eddie used this to his advantage, slowing the descent by using what little lift remained in the still-spinning main rotor.
“I can’t see,” he shouted above the jarring noise of the fragmenting helicopter.
Mercer leaned forward, groping blindly through the smoke until his hands felt the cold metal of the Heckler and Koch MP- 5 submachine gun the sergeant had lost when the chopper was hit. Straightening, he cocked the weapon. “Cover your face!”
Aiming over Eddie’s shoulder, he loosed a hail of bullets against the windscreen.
The Plexiglas starred, then lost all integrity, flying into space in nearly one whole chunk. A few fragments whipped into the cockpit, one dagger-size shard burying itself in the shoulder of an unconscious Mike Collins. The swirling torrent of wind sucked the smoke out of the cabin, taking with it the paralyzing smell of avgas. Once again Eddie could see, his hands taking tighter control of the spiraling aircraft.
“We ain’t gonna make it,” Eddie yelled over the din.
A thousand feet below, the ground was a featureless, dark abyss, the starless night revealing nothing. They couldn’t tell if there were rocky mountains or a soft field or water below them. Eddie would have to try to make the landing blind, not even able to rely on the altimeter to get a fix on their position. It had frozen when they were hit.
