“Uh-huh.”
“Our altimeter. I know you know what that is. Should be a window across the top half with numbers. Can you read them?”
Charlie’s stomach settled, somewhat. Alice knew what she was doing; she wasn’t just trying to calm him down. “About fifty-two hundred feet.”
“Stable?”
“I think so.”
“Great. To the left is a speed indicator. Read it to me.”
“One-ninety.” According to the gauge, it was 190 KIAS. Knots? Knots Incorporating Air Speed? No time for Q amp; A.
“We have to find out how much flying time we have. On the wall to your left, there should be two gauges on a separate panel.”
“Okay.”
“Those are the fuel gauges.”
“There’s one-twenty-five on both gauges.” Not a bad total, he thought, if this was anything like a car.
Alice was silent.
A sticky foreboding spread over Charlie.
He glanced at Drummond. Still out.
Finally, Alice spoke. “What do you see outside?”
“Not much,” Charlie said. “Just tranquil Caribbean, a couple of clouds.”
“No land?”
“No.”
“I was hoping-sometimes there are islets there that don’t make the GPS maps.”
“We’ve run into a couple. Just not lately.”
“Listen, Charlie, I’m afraid there’s no way you’re going to make land.”
“Not with two hundred and fifty gallons of fuel?”
“That’s not gallons, that’s pounds. Two hundred fifty pounds of fuel is around thirty-five gallons. We’ll be stretching it to fly another fifteen minutes.”
Charlie turned to ice. “Don’t tell me we’re going to do a water landing?”
“Fine, I won’t tell you. But I’ll bet that, afterward, you’ll say it was no big deal.”
“A bet I’d be happy to lose.”
She laughed. Briefly. “Between the two yokes, lower down, you’ll see some levers. Grab the pair on the left, the biggest ones. They’re the throttles. Pull them back halfway.”
Easy enough, he thought. The throttles gave more than he expected, though. “Shit, the nose is dropping!”
“Hold it up.”
He pulled the yoke toward him, inducing a blast of g-forces strong enough, it felt, to push him through the floor. Finally the nose evened out.
He tried to keep his voice from shaking. “Piece of cake.”
Alice added a rapid series of instructions involving altitude adjustment and controls for the tail. He tried to follow, head still aching from hypoxia. Worse was the nagging certainty that he’d forgotten at least one crucial step. In spite of a few bumps, however, the plane began a smooth descent.
“Now, take the two levers for the props and push them all the way up,” she said.
Setting the phone on his lap, Charlie scrambled, groping for the levers. When was his damned adrenaline going to kick in?
He snatched up the phone. “Done,” he said. And hoped.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah, except my stomach is so knotted up, I’ll only be eating soup from now on.”
“I know a good New England clam chowder recipe.”
He forgot about his stomach. He wanted to say he loved her.
“Now, push the nose down, not a lot,” she said. “Remember our attitude indicator: Push it down just under the line.”
“Got it.”
“What’s the airspeed now?”
“One-eighty.”
“Dandy. Pull the throttles back another quarter. We want to be going slow close to the water.”
“Airspeed’s slowing.”
“Tell me when that needle gets into the white arc; should be around one-fifty. Also you need to head into the wind, which is coming from the east, according to my phone. So where’s the sun?”
“Behind us.”
“Perfect.”
“And speed’s now one-fifty.”
“Altitude?”
“Thirty-one hundred.”
She gave him instructions for the flaps and throttles.
Easy to follow, for a change. “Flaps, check. Throttles, check. Twenty-four hundred feet.”
“Good. Where’s your dad?”
“Copilot seat.”
“Belted in?”
“No.” Drummond’s safety belt had fallen by the wayside because of Charlie’s concern over how long a person was unconscious before it was considered something worse, like a coma.
“Do it up. Yourself too. When you hit the water, you’re probably going to get thrown around a bit.”
Reaching over and pulling the straps across Drummond, Charlie considered that a cage match with a professional wrestler equated to “thrown around a bit” by Alice’s standards.
Drummond didn’t stir, not even with the loud metallic pop of the seat-belt buckle.
Even Alice heard it. “Okay, Charlie, now bring the throttles back an inch or so and keep the plane coming down. Try and settle the speed at around a hundred, otherwise the airplane will stall. You know what happens then, right?”
“No. Do I want to?”
“Probably not. Just don’t go less than ninety knots or raise the nose higher than ten degrees. I’m telling you, that chowder will make this worthwhile.”
The plane continued to descend. Easy enough, though Charlie knew full well that actually setting the thing down would be the most difficult thing that he had ever done and ever would do. If a wingtip touched the water first, the plane could turn into a skipping stone. Set the plane down in proper sequence but at the wrong angle, and the impact forces would obliterate everything.
“Eight hundred feet now, speed one-ten,” he said.
“Bring the throttles back about an inch and keep coming down.”
“Speed’s around a hundred.”
“Keep the nose down. Altitude?”
“Three hundred.” Although the sea was a placid blue green, he had the sensation of entering a dark alley.
“When you hit, get out, as soon as you can. Among other things, the plane might flip, it might fill with water, or it might get too dark for you to see. So just go for the cabin door. There should be a life raft and vests there. Can you see the raft?”
There was an orange pile of rubber next to the door. “Needs to be inflated.”
“On the way out of the plane, put on the vests as soon as you can. Inflate the raft after you get out or you won’t get it out.”
“And then what?”
“Category of desirable problems.”
Charlie was sorry he’d asked. “At a hundred feet now,” he said. The looming sea made him feel minuscule.
Alice maintained her calm. “Pull the throttle back just a hair, then leave it alone.”
He set it, glad to have one less item to worry about. “Seventy feet.”
“Both hands on the yoke.”
The moment that he’d continued to hope would not come: It had come. “Forty feet.”
“Slowly now, pull the yoke back. Keep the wings in the center of the circle.”
He did. His stomach contracted to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. The water flew up at him. “Fuck. Twenty feet.”
“Bring the nose slowly up ’til you hit the water.”
The water was so close that Charlie could taste the salt. He fought an impulse to close his eyes.
A perfect shadow of the plane floated on the waves ahead, slowing, as if trying to meet him. The water was serene. He made out individual, sparkling droplets in a gauzy mist lofted by the waves, when-WHACK-the tail hit water, pulverizing his muscles, joints, and tendons. His face smashed into the yoke, forcing him to release his grip. With a whine, the left propeller dug into the water, throwing a mass of spray that battered the fuselage. The nose of the plane slammed down onto a swell, sending his body in different directions at once. Water rose over the front windows.
Finally, the plane settled afloat in
a gentle drift, but not for long. Seawater rushed into the cabin.
“We should get out, don’t you think?” said Drummond, unbuckling his safety belt. He appeared rested, and unperturbed by the events of the past few minutes.
Charlie popped free of his harness. “Sure, why not?”
Drummond led the way out of the cockpit, fighting the influx of water to reach the cabin door.
Tugging the life raft free of its Velcro mooring and grabbing the vests, Charlie said, “Now we just need to reach land, which was too far to fly to, using two rubber paddles.”
Drummond pointed outside at the svelte yacht heading their way. “Actually, I think that boat is going to rescue us.”
45
Stanley sat below deck of Corbitt’s USS Perk in a startlingly spacious living room with taxpayer-funded, rich mahogany paneling and a copper-plated bar containing a transatlantic crossing’s worth of single-malt whiskey. Every fixture or component involved either precious metal or crystal-even the Kleenex, dispensed from a crystal cube within silver latticework. There was a fireplace, too, with antique brass andirons piled with logs that required a third look before Stanley was sure they were fake. The only reminder that he was at sea rather than in an English gentlemen’s club was the set of pedestals, in place of legs, to fasten the seats to the floor-a floor swathed in antique Persian carpet.
The captives sat in a pair of red leather wing chairs. Wet and bedraggled, they seemed far less menacing this time around. Drummond was struggling to stay awake. Charlie was so frenetic in his narration of their adventure that he could barely stay seated. “Your capturing us is the best thing that possibly could have happened,” he was saying. “I know that sounds crazy now, but let me tell you what we’ve learned.”
“The best possible thing would have been if we’d gotten to you before you sold the bomb,” Stanley said.
“Who was the buyer?” asked Hadley. She sat to Stanley’s left on the camelback sofa, facing the fugitives-her thousand-euro heli-taxi ride from Martinique would probably be overlooked by headquarters in light of their having coralled the Clarks.
She aimed a Glock at them. After her experience with Bream, Eskridge had finally granted her permission to carry. The teakettle’s purple imprint was visible on her forehead. The gun was unnecessary, though. Shortly after Charlie’s Mayday calls had enabled Echelon to pinpoint his whereabouts, a second helicopter had landed on Corbitt’s yacht, depositing four marines with enough weaponry to stage a coup on some of the area islands. The yacht resounded now with the dull thuds of their combat boots. The opportunity to stay on deck and “command them”-Corbitt’s words-ended his protest over his exclusion from the debriefing.
“When we last saw the device, Bream’s men were loading the washer into a Zodiac,” Charlie said. “We have reason to believe they’re planning to ship the bomb to India. So you ought to have plenty of time to intercept them.”
Hadley looked to Stanley. “What do you think?”
“Nothing to lose by checking it out.”
She dropped the Glock into her shoulder bag and withdrew her new BlackBerry. She began tapping out a cable to Eskridge, at the same time saying to Charlie, “The thing that puzzles me now is how you could sell a weapon of mass destruction in the first place.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Stanley said. His concerns actually ran much deeper.
“It wasn’t a sale,” Charlie said. “It was ransom.”
He was polite, Stanley reflected, not petulant, or acting in any way that pointed to dissembling. “Why didn’t you go to the authorities?”
“The bad guys would have killed Alice. And the authorities would have tried to kill us. Like last night.” Charlie indicated Hadley with a tilt of his head. “But things are different now. Now we have proof of everything I told you. The Cavalry’s plot is all right there on the Web. A few minutes online and you’ll be able to see exactly how we were set up, plus how Bream was able to learn about the existence of the bomb.”
Her cable dispatched, Hadley placed the BlackBerry back into her shoulder bag. “This story sounds familiar,” she said to Charlie. “Don’t tell me: Bream revealed the whole plot to you as he was leaving you to die in a plummeting airplane instead of simply shooting you?”
“I wondered about that too,” Charlie said. “Whoever he really is, he’s got more than his share of ego. He was proud of his plan and wanted to brag about having outsmarted the best and the brightest. But he’s nobody’s fool. Maybe he wanted our deaths to look accidental. Why add the murder of a CIA Trailblazer to the list of reasons you have to hunt him? In any case, to verify my story, all you have to do is flip on the Internet, go to Korean Singles Online-dot-com, and throw some decryption software at Fielding’s hidden text. His mistake was not living long enough to delete it.”
“Well, I’d be shocked if Corbitt doesn’t have this brig equipped with high-speed satellite Internet access.” Hadley started to rise, presumably to go up on deck and ask the base chief.
“Hold on just a second,” said Stanley, turning to Charlie. “If what you’re saying is true, why wouldn’t Alice Rutherford or her NSA colleagues have taken action?”
“I was too busy landing the plane to mention Korean Singles Online-dot-com to her. And once we hit the water, I lost the phone-not that she’d have been able to stay on long. Odds are the same people who wanted us have sent a hit team after her too, right?”
“Probably so,” Stanley said. “We need to ensure that no one ever sees that Web content.”
“But it could exonerate these men, Bill.” Hadley searched his eyes for a clue to his thinking.
“It would be the death knell for the Cavalry.” Stanley lifted the Glock and its silencer from her shoulder bag.
Charlie froze. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”
Even Drummond sat up.
Hadley looked to Stanley, eyes wide.
“I’m sorry, Hilary.” Twisting on the silencer, he aimed the gun at her.
The other night in the Haut-de-Cagnes safe house, Ali Abdullah-aka Austin Bellinger-had tried to make the case that his Cavalry was made up of bright and gallant patriots who gave no thought to flaps and didn’t waste time on the chains of cables seeking permission for action. They just went ahead and acted. Their actions often brought them into legal gray areas. Sometimes they simply broke laws. But always for the greater good.
Stanley left the safe house convinced that the Cavalry was the clandestine service he had dreamed of joining as a young man. He believed that exposure of the unit’s efforts to stop the Clarks, particularly the truth about the unfortunate Hattemer episode, would force soft and cowardly bureaucrats like Eskridge to roll up the operation. Stanley wanted to help prevent that. So when he was assigned to the Clark case the next day by Eskridge-it turned out that Bellinger had planted the seed in the head of his onetime groomsman-Stanley felt that he had found his calling, at long last.
Now he found himself hesitant to extinguish the lives of Hadley and the Clarks.
Unfortunate but vital to national security, he concluded.
Frozen in astonishment on the sofa, Hadley was an easy target. With the space between her eyes centered in the Glock’s sight, Stanley pulled the trigger.
46
As Stanley pressed the trigger, there was a bright orange blur on the edge of Charlie’s peripheral vision.
Drummond’s Croc bounced off Stanley’s gun barrel.
The report was muted, probably sounding like an ordinary cough to someone on deck, assuming it was heard at all over the big yacht’s engines. Hadley’s head snapped sideways. A red circle appeared in her hair just above her right ear. She collapsed, falling to her left, with enough force that the massive camelback sofa toppled with her, the pedestal snapping free of its moorings. The sofa landed directly over her, shielding her from another round, or at least from Stanley’s sight.
Stanley knelt, shifting his gun to the armchair in which Drummond had been sitting. Drumm
ond was in midair now, diving headlong at Stanley.
With both hands around the handle of his gun, Stanley tracked his flight. With a click of the trigger and another muted blast, a bullet sliced a channel along the right side of Drummond’s collar, cleaving the air by Charlie’s left shoulder before particling a glass porthole.
Slamming into Stanley’s abdomen, Drummond tried to wrap his arms around the spook’s waist. Stanley twisted free, dropping his elbow onto the base of Drummond’s skull.
On his hands and knees, Drummond sought the cover of the copper-faced bar. As he pulled himself around the corner, Stanley fired. The bullet clanged into the copper plating as Drummond disappeared from sight, save one Croc.
Stanley fired instead at the face of the bar, repeatedly, the bullet holes tracing Drummond’s probable path behind it. Glass exploded and scotch jetted into the air, spraying Stanley and raining onto the fancy carpet.
Charlie noted that the pilot light in the fireplace was on. The handle to turn on the gas was open as well. So he flung himself at the button for the burner, pounding it as hard as he could. Gas hissed through the pipe and created an instant blaze. He redirected the pipe at the spilled liquor, which burst into flames that streamed along the carpet toward Stanley.
The spook sidestepped the fire. Still one of his pant cuffs ignited, and, in a blink, flames coated the liquor-soaked front of his khakis. In obvious pain, he tried to beat the fire out. He was nearly successful, when Drummond popped up from behind the bar and hurled a stout highball glass.
Stanley ducked and the glass disintegrated the crystal sconce on the far wall.
Drummond threw another, this time striking Stanley’s gun hand, forcing him to drop the Glock.
Charlie lunged for it. Stanley kicked at Charlie’s head. Charlie rolled, averting the spook’s toe, but the heel caught his ear-slashing it so sharply he was surprised it remained attached. Stanley wound back again, like a field goal kicker. Charlie sat up, getting a solid grip on the gun and leveling it at the spook, freezing him.
Suddenly the door to the cabin was smashed inward. A crowd of marines in gray-green body armor, guns drawn, filled the small aperture.
Twice a Spy dc-2 Page 19