Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  Lizzy did.

  Drake learned nothing new by watching it again.

  “Once more. Can you zoom in until all we see are the ailerons and elevator.”

  Lizzy did her one better and used all four screens at the end of the table.

  Upper right was the satellite overview of the plane.

  The mission clock was upper left.

  The tail section’s elevator, which, Drake had to remind himself, controlled the up-and-down pitch, was lower left and the wing’s ailerons for turning were on the lower right screen.

  The images were fuzzy and the angle sucked; due to the satellite descending again, he supposed.

  “The moment arm of force isn’t commensurate with air turbulence. That descent was pilot-initiated.” Miranda had tipped her head as she dispassionately narrated the image. “A small initial mistake. The control yoke was briefly pulled back and twisted to the left. It was rapidly recovered. Less than a second later, there was an extreme maneuver pitching the nose sharply down and right. A slight delay and then a more controlled recovery, though not as smooth as the first one. The continuing irregularities of motion are still being generated by the cockpit—as if the pilot was very distracted.”

  Drake didn’t need to see Mike’s face turn sheet white to know that they were having exactly the same thought.

  67

  “Shit!” Jon let go of the controls as his altimeter shattered.

  Only after he saw the hole in the center, and the sparks spitting at him, did he register the sharp crack of the gunshot.

  Gunshot.

  Aboard a plane.

  That was very, very, very bad.

  Another round dead-centered the autopilot, which was no great loss as he hadn’t yet had time to figure out how to use it.

  The Antonov wasn’t at all like the C-5M Super Galaxy he’d last flown. It wasn’t even like the C-5B Galaxy he’d first certified on. The Russian AN-124 made a fifty-year-old, first-generation C-5A look like rocket science.

  He got his hands back on the controls, then turned to see what was happening behind him.

  Twice a waving gun swept the empty void of its barrel across his face.

  He tried to flinch aside, but the seat harness kept him pinned in its sights.

  Then someone struck the wrist holding it and the weapon skittered along the floor.

  The first thing he did was check the windshield. No star cracks. No shattered glass.

  Okay.

  No autopilot.

  He couldn’t go and help in the fight even if he’d known how to engage the autopilot when it was intact. First he checked the duplicate altimeter in front of Holly’s copilot position. It was mounted to the right of her control yoke, so it was a pain to see, but he could make it out.

  He pulled on the oxygen mask as a precautionary gesture, just in case someone with a death wish shot out his windshield, then looked behind him again.

  There was blood.

  Lots of it.

  Not arterial, but a lot of it. It was smeared on the steel door, along the frame. A pool of it was being trampled into the carpet. But most of it was on the people, especially their hands.

  It wasn’t something he was used to seeing in flight. Even as a crash investigator, it was typically rust brown by the time he arrived on site. This was alarmingly bright and very red in the sun-filled cockpit.

  Tom, on the floor, took a brutal kick to the head and rolled backward out of sight.

  Tim had both of his arms wrapped around one of the attacker’s and had one of his legs hooked around one of…hers.

  In the center of the melee was a fierce blonde. It took him a moment to remember that Holly had died her hair black.

  That meant…

  Elayne?

  He’d overheard Holly briefing Tim and Tom about her on the flight to Samara, but he’d been too busy studying the flight manual to pay any real attention. Secret agent or something.

  The fight seemed interminable as each person struggled for any advantage.

  A knife appeared—was knocked aside.

  Punches blocked.

  Grunts when they connected brutally.

  Then a knee got through Elayne’s defenses.

  He’d heard that being kneed in the crotch was as painful for women as it was for men. Not that he’d ever believed it because—Damn.

  Until now.

  Holly’s knee lifted Elayne a foot in the air.

  Her scream sliced through the cockpit.

  Then Holly and Tim literally fell on her until she collapsed beneath their shared weight.

  He glanced forward and corrected back to level flight. A quick glance at altimeter and artificial horizon. Corrections confirmed out the windshield. Shit, he was flying like a first solo in a Cessna.

  This time when he turned, he saw a struggling Elayne clawing at Holly’s arm pressed across her throat.

  Even as he watched, her struggles faded.

  Holly’s face was bloody and he could see the claw marks on Holly’s cheek and arm.

  Tim had his own share of cuts and bruises, which included a bloody scalp wound.

  But Tim didn’t pay any attention to it.

  Even though Elayne had stopped moving, Holly didn’t ease up until Tim had layers of duct tape around Elayne’s ankles and knees.

  They hauled her limp body and dropped it into the assistant engineer’s chair, then (after the removal of another knife from her sleeve) they taped her to the chair.

  Holly picked up the gun, then moved to sit in the radio operator’s seat across the aisle yet up one row position.

  “Go check on Tom, then get some strapping. Salvage some seatbelts or something.”

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Tim growled, then spat blood out of his mouth onto Elayne’s pants. “But if she does, shoot the bitch.”

  “I promise.”

  The sudden silence in the cockpit was almost alarming.

  Jon looked forward and fixed a five-degree bank, checked his heading, then climbed back to his assigned flight level.

  “You okay, Holly?”

  “Think so. You?”

  “I got shot in the altimeter and autopilot, but otherwise I’m good.” Jon had flown through mortars and machine guns at Bagram. Small-arms fire and RPGs at Kandahar. And he’d never understood the dry humor of aftermath among warriors as well as he did at this moment. For this instant in time, it kept all the horror and fear at least one step removed so that everyone could keep functioning.

  When Holly didn’t respond, he twisted back to look at her. She was wiping at a bloody nose, not realizing that was probably the least of her injuries.

  “How did she even find us?”

  Holly offered him a bloody smile through cut lips. He’d seen entire bar brawls with fewer injuries. She’d taken a hit right in the mouth, but appeared to still have all her teeth.

  “I invited her to fly with us.”

  Jon watched for a moment to see if she was joking. When he decided that she wasn’t, he turned back to flying his plane.

  At least that he understood.

  68

  All secure. On plan.

  The flight had straightened out twenty minutes ago.

  “She wasn’t scheduled for a check in,” Lizzy was checking her log.

  Drake nodded to acknowledge what they all knew. Whatever had happened, it had taken twenty minutes for them to recover enough to send reassurance.

  Lizzy cleared the message.

  There was nothing else on-screen because of the recon satellites’ positioning. They weren’t heavily scheduled over central Russia, but Holly’s satellite phone had reached up to a secure, low-orbit comm bird, which had forwarded the message.

  Drake did his best to nod sagely.

  Mike still hadn’t moved from the edge of his chair.

  “It’s okay, Mike.”

  “Huh?” His eyes weren’t exactly focused.

  Drake wondered when the last time was he’d taken a breat
h.

  “Right. Oh right.” But Mike didn’t relax very far.

  Drake knew that Miranda didn’t actually miss much, no matter what Mike thought. But if she’d made any conclusions, she kept them to herself.

  69

  By the time Holly returned to the copilot’s seat, the fiery pain of the fight was burning through her system. As well as the fury. Tom was a mess. And Tim wasn’t exactly going to heal overnight either.

  “Sorry to leave you on your own for so long, Jon.” Even lowering herself carefully into the seat caused different body parts to clench or spasm. “It was a hell of a Barney.”

  “Barney?”

  “Brawl. Dust-up.”

  “Oh. You realize that you have more bandages than an entire Tour de France team after a high-speed crash.”

  “Feels worse than a slap with a wet fish, I can tell you that much.” She buckled her seatbelt carefully, hissing at the fingernail she’d torn bloody getting out of the chair, but hadn’t noticed during her cleanup.

  “The others?”

  “Elayne is still out. Thankfully, it’s a military flight, so the med kit has morphine. We dosed up Tom and belted him to a bunk. Couple of broken ribs, broken arm, and his nose is going to have a very distinctive angle for the rest of his life. Tim’s about in my condition, at least what he’ll admit to.”

  “That’s ’cause I’m made of hardier stuff that some Ozzie chick.”

  Holly turned in time to see just how gingerly he sat back in his own chair.

  “You done good, Tim.”

  “You too, Hol. Remind me to never piss you off.”

  “Deal. Same to you.” She hated that nickname, but was too sore and too grateful to Tim to complain.

  They traded nods and Tim began checking over both the navigation and engineering instruments—wincing each time he had to reach out to one.

  Jon didn’t say a word for the next couple hundred miles, but Holly could still hear his question: What was that about?

  “I invited Elayne Kasprak to join us for one reason. The instant I found out she was Zaslon—”

  Jon cut her off. “That’s when you started lying about what we found on the blown-up Condor.”

  “I only suspected at that point. But Miranda was seeing things that Elayne didn’t want seen.”

  “Like the explosives detonator.”

  “And the trigger I found,” Holly liked that Jon was sharp. “But it wasn’t enough. It’s very hard to make Miranda appear incompetent.”

  “But you did. At least enough to satisfy Elayne.”

  “Not enough.” Holly leaned back and closed her eyes, but there were no comfortable positions. “Elayne is smart. She’d figure it out eventually. She’d come after us. After Miranda. I doubt if Miranda has ever looked over her shoulder in apprehension. And I couldn’t risk looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, not even for her. I’ve already done that for too long.”

  “So you took out the threat. Why didn’t you just kill her?”

  “That was my first idea. Mike had a different one.”

  Besides, Mike was right. Miranda wouldn’t have liked that. Not at all. And Holly had been left with the decision of killing Elayne, as she should have, or of staying on Miranda’s team. It had been a close thing in Clarissa’s office, but Mike had won.

  70

  Jon let the solid drone of the engines wash more miles away.

  They’d been flying east, later into the day. By his best estimation, it was well past midnight for his Kentucky body time, two hours earlier for Holly. He’d been rousted after five hours sleep. According to Miranda, that was an hour more than they’d slept on the C-130 Hercules from her home to Kentucky.

  Here it was past late afternoon.

  The low March sun streamed in behind Holly and made her hard to see.

  She might have slept, but each time he thought she was out, she’d open one eye and scan about before closing it again. Her bad one wasn’t quite swollen shut, but she’d have a pretty good shiner.

  Tim’s low grunts each time he shuttled across the aisle between the engineering and radio/navigation stations said that despite his injuries, he was still doing two people’s jobs.

  Holly offered to help, but Tim declined. “Rather do something to keep moving. Otherwise I’d start thinking. Hate it when I do that kinda shit.”

  They’d shared a laugh, then both groaned at the pain that induced.

  “You just fly the plane if Jon has any problems.”

  That had bought Tim a laugh from Holly, but Jon wasn’t so happy about it. Tom had been his backup pilot. He supposed he was damned lucky that Elayne had only shot the autopilot and not the live one—or they’d be in a whole different world of hurt right now.

  For the moment, that wasn’t a problem.

  But they were fast approaching the changeover between planes and that was going to be a very different challenge. Things were going to get busy and he’d really planned on Tom’s help from the copilot’s seat.

  He needed a distraction. And he expected that not all of the pain on Holly’s face was from her injuries.

  But he didn’t dare come straight at it. Holly would just brush it off.

  “You really think Miranda doesn’t look over her shoulder?”

  Holly again proved she wasn’t sleeping when she one-eyed him carefully.

  “It’s not like I’m fishing for insider information on her.”

  “You so are.” At least she was speaking. Getting her started seemed to be half the battle.

  “Maybe a little, but that’s not my point. I wish she did a little less looking over her shoulder.”

  “Different meanings,” Holly twisted around to check on Tim and the tied-up Elayne.

  Jon looked as well.

  “Still out?”

  Tim stuck out a foot and tapped Elayne’s knee as if it might be toxic or electrically charged. “Still out. Does a damn good job of looking harmless, doesn’t she?”

  “So not,” Holly eased back around until she was facing out the windscreen again.

  Jon figured he’d lost the battle to get Holly talking. He was about to try engaging Tim when she finally spoke.

  “Miranda looks back at her past with loss and wonders how to move forward. I hate looking back because every time I do all I see is death. But I have to keep looking, because death hunts me. Sometimes in the form of pretty-bitch Zaslon operatives, sometimes the ghosts of my old team.”

  “Or of your brother?” Oo! Not smooth.

  71

  If Jon expected Holly to flinch, he’d be disappointed.

  She’d long since learned how to cover every time the past tried to drive a knife into her gut. It was easy; all she had to do was die a little more each time.

  “How?” How the hell had Jon known to ask that question?

  “Miranda.”

  “You shittin’ me, mate?” The chance of Miranda noticing someone else’s feelings were…apparently not as low as Holly thought.

  “She told me what she knew, which wasn’t much. Mostly she saw you change any time he or your family came up, but especially him.”

  Holly thumped her head back against the headrest. Her eye exploded with pain that yanked a gasp out of her. She needed to do it again—beat her head hard against something—but the pain was too much.

  She was lucky to still have an eye. Elayne had aimed a two-fingered gouge at her left eye and only missed because Holly had stumbled over Tom’s prostrate form. Instead she’d gouged a long cut on Holly’s cheek. The blackened right eye? She wasn’t sure when that had happened.

  “Such is life. That’s Ozzie for ‘The past sucks.’”

  “Thank God the past is in the past. Thought you were going to tell me something I didn’t know. Guess not.”

  Holly glanced over at him.

  Jon was smiling.

  Not sympathy she’d brush aside or a prod and a poke for more details.

  Instead he was telling her that the past wa
s just some…thing. Like hers and Miranda’s pasts actually didn’t matter.

  Hadn’t she told Jeremy the same thing during the A-10 Thunderbolt crisis?

  Hadn’t learned that lesson for herself, had she?

  She started smiling, which hurt her cut lips, but she didn’t care.

  It was too crazy. She was on a stolen plane in the middle of Russia and had just defeated a Zaslon operative.

  Their chances of survival still weren’t impressive.

  And she was worried about the past?

  Jon was right—totally trivial.

  It was the present that was going to kill them.

  Then she made the mistake of glancing at him at the same moment he looked over at her.

  They both started to laugh.

  “Oh God,” she gasped against the pain in her ribs.

  But it was a good laugh and she couldn’t stop it.

  72

  Elayne climbed back up along the sound of laughter in a whole world of hurt. Every single part of her body throbbed or ached.

  Elayne felt like she’d fucked an entire hockey team—only worse.

  Only one of her eyes would open and she didn’t like what she saw when it did.

  Her arms were duct taped and strapped to the chair arms. Her calves and knees were likewise bound together. When she tried to swing her legs forward, her right knee screamed with complaint.

  But her feet didn’t move.

  A little testing. Also bound to the chair.

  Straps across her chest and stomach were all that were keeping her upright.

  Loud.

  The sound was loud and humming.

  The Antonov AN-124. She was still aboard.

  “Hey, we’ve got some life here.” The flight engineer called out.

  He looked as battered as she felt.

  Good.

  Pilot and copilot, but the other man wasn’t here.

  “Where’s your buddy?” She croaked out.

  His scowl went dark.

  Even better.

  She thought she’d gotten one of them.