One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

“Ouais.”

  “I’d love to hear about that sometime.”

  David shuffled his feet. “Anytime.”

  “I better get set up.”

  Elyse set up her DSLR camera and tripod and then took out her phone as a backup. It was cold up on the roof, a breeze that wasn’t noticeable on the street blew across the rooftops. David brought her a blanket and a warm drink, which was instant coffee but much appreciated.

  She was looking through the DSLR when she saw the big black Suburban drive onto the tarmac and stop. The windows were tinted so she couldn’t see who was in the vehicle, but it sat there for a long time. She took still shots of the license plate, and then flicked the DSLR to video as a small airplane landed and the big vehicle moved toward it.

  Then Jean Loup got out of the vehicle. He looked tired, but it was late and the poor lighting on the runway did him no favors. She checked that her camera was taping, and then watched on the LCD screen as Loup walked across the tarmac to the plane. Then he stopped. A man loading the plane broke open a crate from his dolly, and Loup pulled out something from it. He held it up against the light-colored fuselage of the plane and she saw it. A bazooka. She recalled they were called RPGs now. She double checked that her video was running. Then she saw Loup turn and aim the RPG at the Suburban.

  The Suburban took off backwards, tires screeching. She looked back at Loup. It seemed that either the RPG was malfunctioning or he didn’t know how to operate it, because the man with the dolly appeared to be showing him how.

  Then Loup turned it again and aimed at the Suburban. This time the Suburban stopped, again in a cloud of smoking rubber.

  Flynn hit the brakes hard. He was driving backward via the rear view mirror and saw the headlights of the van pull across behind him. He skidded to a stop and looked out at Jean Loup, who had dropped the RPG from his shoulder. Then Flynn glanced back via the side mirror and saw the van fishtail around him and then turn back toward the hangar.

  The van skidded to a stop under the bright light coming from the hangar where the Dassault Falcon jet waited. Flynn realized what he was seeing. Either end of the tarmac, on a night that Jean Loup should have been far away in Paris. Two favors. For two deals. One a terrorist delight of arms and RPGs, and the other, a whole other kind of delight.

  Flynn hit the accelerator again, backward once more. The Suburban was made for backward driving. The rear window was massive and the rear bumper almighty. As he drove back Flynn saw the van doors open and the first girl was pulled out. Then one of the guards from the van started shooting.

  The Suburban was good for that, too. Flynn appeared to be driving an uparmored version, designed for heads of state. The bullets bounced off the rear window. Flynn got to the edge of the hangar and hit the brakes. He slipped out with his Beretta raised and popped off a couple of rounds aimed high. He didn’t want to shoot any of the women. He saw the last of the women being pushed up the stairs into the jet. Flynn aimed and fired. He winged the guy on the stairs, causing him to drop his weapon and fall down onto the concrete.

  Flynn ran. He pumped his arms hard and sprinted around the front of the van. The guy on the hangar floor was crawling toward his gun. Flynn didn’t retreat. He ran hard, his lungs bursting. The guy reached out for his gun.

  Flynn threw himself along the floor in a football tackle. He had lived a good chunk of his life in Brussels while his father served at NATO headquarters. He grew up watching American football on the Armed Forces Network, but playing what the rest of the world called football on the streets outside his house. He hadn’t forgotten. He slid the tackle perfectly, not cracking his hips on the concrete as he went down, and sliding feet first into the ball. Except the ball was a gun, and he kicked it away across the hangar floor, then as he was sliding he bounced up in one fluid motion and ran to the jet stairs.

  He dashed up into the cabin. It was plush. Polished wood and beige leather, the seats as wide as a car. Ten women were in the seats. For a moment, Flynn stopped again. He was fairly confident that he would never step onto an aircraft completely populated by such attractive women. Each and everyone given the poison chalice of beauty. Flynn saw Monsieur Betesh’s wife and sister. Again he was struck how stunning Betesh’s wife was. She was older than the others, but she must have married young. It happened that way, in many cultures. He smiled at her and she pushed her daughter back and stood between them.

  “La!” she yelled. No.

  “I am here to help,” Flynn said, but it didn’t. He realized he had a gun in his hand, so he stuffed it in his coat pocket and put his hands up.

  “Betesh, I will take you to Betesh,” he said. The woman yelled louder, spitting out Arabic so quickly that Flynn couldn’t keep up.

  “Damascus,” Flynn. “You are from Damascus. I have helped many others from Damascus.”

  The woman stopped yelling. She frowned. It was a stunning frown. Breathtaking.

  “’ana last min dimashq,” she said.

  Flynn stopped. Now it was his turn to frown.

  “You’re not from Damascus? Then where are you from?” he asked in Arabic.

  “Aleppo,” she said. All the other women on the aircraft nodded.

  Then Flynn heard the signature sound of pistol being cocked behind him.

  Don’t move.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Turn around.”

  “You said not to move.”

  “This is not the movies, mon ami. You get smart, you die.”

  Flynn already had his hands in the air so he slowly turned. A guy in a pilot’s uniform stood in the entrance to the cockpit, pointing a Glock at Flynn.

  “I’ll just be getting off, then,” said Flynn.

  “You move, I’ll shoot you.”

  “You don’t want to do that. From this range, a 9mm will probably go right through me and damage the fuselage. You won’t be able to take off.”

  “Don’t come closer.”

  Flynn got closer. The pilot stepped back into the cockpit. Flynn moved closer.

  Then he jumped out the door. He ran for the Suburban, and the pilot got two shots off that missed by meters, before he gave up. He slipped back inside and the jet engines began whining, and the sleek jet moved before the stairs were raised.

  Flynn watched as the jet headed out into the night with it’s door hanging open. Then he saw someone running for the aircraft like they were trying to hail a bus.

  It was Monsieur Betesh. He ran alongside the aircraft and jumped onto the bottom of the stairs, his feet dragging behind. Then he scrambled up onto the stairs and darted up into the moving aircraft.

  Flynn took off at a sprint. He had spent the previous night lying in wait in the forest behind the Loup estate, and then the entire day lying in wait in the loft of the stables. In between then and now he had fireman-carried a man, committed an international crime by waterboarding that man, and then sprinted a hundred meters as fast as he could. Now he was sprinting again. This time he wasn’t sure he’d cut it. The pilot was going at no great pace but it was still an Olympian effort sprint. Flynn drove his elbows down and his knees out and kept his stride as long and fluid as he could. His head started to bob and his strength ebbed and his pace dropped off, and he stopped, gasping for air as Loup had done earlier.

  He looked up and saw Betesh appear at the doorway of the taxiing aircraft. He had hold of a woman’s hair. The older of the two. The wife. So-called. He was dragging her out of a moving plane. She was screaming and he was yanking. He stepped down onto the stairs and she fell to the floor of the aircraft, and then he started pulling her out like a suitcase.

  The Flynn heard the shot. It hit Betesh in the shoulder spun him around, and he lost his balance and his grip, and he fell from the stairs and hit the tarmac. Flynn couldn’t see where the shot had come from. Gorski was invisible to the human eye at that range.

  Now all Flynn cared about was that jet. He ran back toward the Suburban. It was the closest thing to an armed tank that he could find.
He screeched out of the hanger and out onto the grass field. There was no point chasing the aircraft. Once behind it, when the pilot decided to take off, he was gone. Flynn needed to be in front, not behind.

  But someone was behind. Flynn saw the small car—was that Elyse’s rental?—and realized that Betesh had gotten up, grabbed the vehicle that he had used to drop off Elyse, and now he was back after the women. Why, Flynn didn’t know. But it was clear that neither of them were his wife or daughter. Flynn wondered if he were himself a smuggler. Which would make him a competitor to Jean Loup. Which made for strange bedfellows, because at that moment Betesh screeched to a stop on the tarmac right next to Jean Loup, and Loup got in his car.

  Betesh needed to be on that aircraft. He was shot, but he’d been shot before. He’d lived then and he’d live now, because he was a survivor. He had served in Bashar al-Assad’s military as he had served Bashar’s father before him. He didn’t care what al-Assad’s politics were. Half the time he didn’t even know if the man knew himself. He was an eye doctor, for goodness sakes, not a president. He only got the job because his brother had died in a car accident.

  But Betesh was a survivor. He had flourished in the military, earned respect and money and prestige. He had a nice house and a nice car, and his wife was happy, and that made his life easy. Until Aleppo. Why these terrorist had to start a civil war was beyond Betesh. Live and let live. He didn’t want to go to Aleppo, he didn’t want to bomb the place. It had seemed like a beautiful city, and such a waste. But rebellions had to be quashed. Countries didn’t function without unity.

  He didn’t know if the chemical weapons were necessary, but like the Americans in Hiroshima, they certainly sent a message. Don’t mess with us, was the message. He had gone in after, as he was ordered to do. Clean up. He found the people, the women, the children. Burned and scarred, disfigured and maimed. They were in misery. They had no real medicine and he could not provide any. What message would that have sent? And the social media and the news, they made up stories where there were none. So he had brought the people out into the alley and he shot them. All of them. He walked down the line with a machine gun and put them out of their torment.

  But someone saw. Someone who didn’t understand the consequences of talking. Two women. Attractive yes, but bad inside. They would flee their home to allow others to judge what he done for his country. To stand witness. But Betesh was connected. He found them. In Greece. In a refugee camp. So to Greece he went, to silence those who would stand false witness. And just as he tracked them down, in that UN halfway house, Jean Loup interfered. He swept the women up and moved them for processing for asylum in France. And Betesh had followed. And he almost had them. Twice.

  Betesh jumped on the brakes. On the tarmac beside the car stood the man himself, Jean Loup. He looked like he had seen death, and returned to tell the tale. Betesh leaned out the window.

  “I can help you.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Betesh. You need to get on that aircraft.”

  Loup looked at the jet out toward the end of the runway. The door was open and it was slowing down, but it was too far to run.

  “Get in, quickly,” said Betesh.

  Loup slipped into the car and Betesh sped after the jet.

  “I help you, you help me,” he said.

  “Help you with what?”

  “We get on the plane together. There are two women. They are mine. They belong to me.”

  “They belong to Prince al-Amdar,” said Loup.

  “If I get you on the plane. You will give them to me.”

  “Drive faster.”

  They sped across the tarmac toward the jet that had slowed to get around the other aircraft that was loading at the end of the runway. Then the stairs on the jet started lifting up, and they disappeared and the door closed. Then the aircraft turned right and aimed right down the runway.

  Betesh honked the horn and he accelerated. They saw the pilot glance out the window of the cockpit. Loup leaned out the window of the little car and waved furiously. The jet stopped. Betesh weaved around the Avro cargo aircraft and behind the jet, and then pulled up on the other side. The door dropped down and the stairs opened up.

  Betesh and Loup jumped out of the car and ran up the stairs. Betesh first. He saw the women. They had retreated to the rear of the craft but they saw him. He took the vacant seat at the front. There was no need to cause a scene now. They weren’t going anywhere. At least, not without him.

  Then Loup stumbled into the cabin. The pilot caught him.

  “Monsieur, are you quite all right?”

  “Let’s get out of here?”

  “Still to Riyadh?”

  Loup looked at the women. “Yes, Riyadh. The prince awaits his prizes.”

  The pilot jumped back into the cockpit and the door began closing. Loup moved through the cabin, not looking at the beautiful women he was taking to a new life in Saudi Arabia. What would be, would be. He stepped through into his private chamber at the rear of the cabin. His workstation, his bed, his shower. But before it all, one quick call. He hit a button on his desk phone, and the satellite network routed it to his estate house.

  “Thierry,” he answered.

  “Thierry, it’s me.”

  “Monsieur Loup? You’re okay? Where are you?”

  “I’m onboard the jet. We’re about to take off.”

  “What happened?”

  “Later. Right now, I’m on a damn jet full of Syrian refugees who are about to become hookers in Riyadh. I need to not be near this. I’m staying in my office onboard and getting back asap. If the Saudis ask where I am, I’m in Paris, or somewhere. Make up a story. Something with proof. It’s six and a half hours each way, call it fourteen with refueling. Most of it will be overnight.”

  “Got it? And the Avro?”

  “It’s here, about to leave for Angola. Listen, there’s a guy here. You need to get down here and fix him.”

  “Fix him?”

  Loup looked across his desk at the reflective glass. He looked terrible. Death warmed up. And now he had to explain everything. He really needed a new head of security.

  “Jesus, Thierry. Do you have a learning issue? Kill him. Find him and kill him. The bastard had me standing in the middle of the tarmac with an RPG, for crying—”

  Loup looked in the mirror again. What was that? He put his hand to the lapel of his coat. In the button hole, a hair clip. He pulled at it.

  “Monsieur? Monsieur Loup?” said Thierry.

  He pulled the clip out. It was attached to a wire. The wire went in through his coat and into . . . his inside breast pocket. And what was this?

  “Monsieur Loup?”

  He pulled the thing out. It looked like an old phone. No, older. Not even a phone. An iPod. And old music player. How the hell did that get in there?

  Loup fell back against his chair as the pilot hit the throttle and the jet accelerated down the runway.

  Chapter Forty

  The jet was a little heavier than expected, but the pilot did the quick calculations and came up with the right answers. He had launched this aircraft on the short runway at London City. This was a walk in the park. He pushed the throttle down and watched the aircraft eat up the tarmac in front of it, the dotted white lines becoming a blurred single line as he hit speed. He looked toward the end of the runway, checking his distance and speed. And then he saw the lights. Big, bright lights on the runway ahead. Coming straight at him like a freight train.

  Flynn bounced in his seat as he spun off the grass and onto the tarmac. The tires gripped and the big vehicle leaned over like it was considering a roll, and then it steadied and Flynn started to seriously reconsider what he was doing. Dead ahead was a fast moving aircraft. From front on it looked like a Concorde and moved like a bullet. The two vehicles closed the ground between them faster than Flynn could think. He couldn’t let the aircraft go. Those women, who had been through hell, who had fled their homes and all they knew, w
here about to be transported into a knew kind of hell. Slavery. Prostitution. Flynn really didn’t know what they would be forced to do, but it was the being forced that he couldn’t abide. The opportunity to serve in the army had been taken from him, and his life in the French Foreign Legion had been a proud one, simply because he knew that he wasn’t just serving a country, but an ideal. One that he believed in. One that his father had fought and died for.

  Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité.

  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

  Just because he wasn’t in the Legion anymore didn’t mean he didn’t believe these truths to be self evident. So he wasn’t going to let that aircraft fly.

  He wondered if the French pilot had ever heard of the American game of chicken.

  The pilot did the rapid calculation in his head. The aircraft’s acceleration and the vehicle’s acceleration and the distance between the two. He came up with a maybe. Maybe he could take off before he hit the oncoming car. Maybe. He pulled back on the yoke and waited for the nose to lift. And waited. And waited.

  Chicken.

  The pilot yanked back on the throttle and threw the thrust into reverse. Everyone in the cabin was thrown violent forward. But it wasn’t enough. The sleek aircraft slowed but still shot right at the vehicle ahead.

  Flynn could see the under belly of the jet. It wasn’t a large aircraft but it was a hell of a lot bigger than a Suburban. Flynn waited until the last moment. In Europe, the natural tendency in a vehicle was to pull to the right to escape trouble. Nobody pulled into oncoming traffic expecting anything other than disaster. The pilot must have felt the same way. The jet tugged to the right—Flynn’s left—just as Flynn pulled hard to his right.

  Flynn ducked as the wing tip clipped the side of the Suburban, spinning it around and around on the grass until it crashed into the wire fence that separated the airfield from the retail center next door. The aircraft’s left wing flew up with the collision and then thumped down, throwing the passengers around once more. The pilot fought the control, and the jet spun toward the middle of the field and hit the grass, where the nose wheel bit and the main wheels skidded, and the aircraft spun sideways to a stop.