Charon's landing m-2

by Jack Du Brul

  The phone recessed into the armrest of his seat bleated like a lamb, a discreet chirp that he almost ignored in his agitation. On the fourth ring he finally picked it up.

  “What?”

  “Sir, it’s Tariq.” After Abu Alam, Tariq was Rufti’s most trusted lieutenant. An orphan from Lebanon’s brutal civil war, raised in the refugee camps on a diet of hatred and death, Tariq was fiercely loyal and utterly without morals. When it came to killing, Abu Alam did it with the burning need of an addict, but Tariq carried out his duties with the coldness of a professional. Rufti had sent him to the hospital as a backup to the idiot Kurdish national.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m on the motorway, headed toward Heathrow Airport following a blue Bentley.” His voice was distorted by the cellular phone connection. “Shortly after the Kurd went up to Khuddari’s room, two people left the hospital garage, two women, one western, one Arab. The Arab woman was dressed in a chador, her face veiled. I’d seen them enter the hospital garage earlier. It appeared that the vehicle belonged to the Arab woman, for she drove here, but when they left, it was the Western woman who was behind the wheel and she didn’t seem familiar with the car’s controls.”

  “Get to the point, Tariq,” Rufti snapped.

  “I believe that the robes are a disguise and that I’m following Khuddari as he attempts to flee the country.”

  “Are you certain?” The glimmer of hope Tariq offered reminded Rufti that he hadn’t eaten for nearly thirty minutes. As he continued the conversation, he rang for the steward. “Is it really Khuddari?”

  “My instincts tell me yes.”

  “How far are you from Heathrow?”

  “Only about ten minutes from the main gates. I suspect that they’re headed to the international terminal, Terminal 4.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, let me think.” There wasn’t time before Khuddari entered the secure perimeter of the airport to launch an attack. What Rufti needed now was a way to delay Khuddari in London for a few hours, enough time for him to get to the UAE and put into motion his side of the coup. “Do you have any explosives with you?”

  “I have just a couple of grenades,” Tariq admitted, his voice breaking up as the radio waves of his cell phone encountered the pulsing radar beams given off by Heathrow Airport.

  “Perfect,” Rufti glowed. The steward put an entire salmon before him, the flesh of the fish so pinkish and light that the slit along its flank resembled the intimate lips of a woman. “After I hang up, call that Kurdish fool and relay my orders. Now here’s what I want you to do…”

  While the Bentley had seen its finer days nearly a decade earlier, such a luxury vehicle still commanded respect as it hissed along the M-4, just east of Heathrow. Millicent was now familiar enough with the automobile to intimidate other drivers into giving her the slight advantage she needed to edge the old Bent forward another spot or two on the clogged expressway. A tandem trailer truck honked at her aggressive driving, which she riposted with an unladylike curse and the extension of her middle finger. She apologized to Khalid for the gesture but explained that no one ever complained when she drove her Rolls Silver Cloud so martially.

  Khalid had been silent for most of the drive, consciously fighting the pain that flashed like sheet lightning across his back and lower legs. One moment, he could keep it at bay, forcing it back with sheer will, and then suddenly it would peak. There was so much he was supposed to be thinking about, so many plans he had to make, but his mind was too addled to concentrate. He could feel Millicent Gray glance at him every once in a while, but he could not bring himself to turn and look back at her.

  They swerved through the sweeping curves of the access road, patches of lawn and shrubbery giving way to great expanses of asphalt and corrugated steel warehouses. Millicent followed the overhead signs toward International Departures, jinxing around the buses that dominated the narrow roads, their backsides belching clouds of smoke on their endless loops around Heathrow’s thousands of acres.

  “Which airline?” Millicent asked as they neared Terminal 4.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Khalid replied listlessly, slipping out of the chador. “Once inside, I can call a reservation number to get me the next flight to Abu Dhabi.”

  “Are you sure about this?” She eased the Bentley up to the curb before one of the numerous British Airways doors, tucking neatly behind a motor coach disgorging dozens of poorly dressed people finishing their whirlwind European package tour. “I can take you to a different hospital or maybe to the trauma station here at the airport. I’m sure they have a doctor on duty.”

  From his pants’ pocket he pulled a twist of tissue, which he opened to reveal a few capsules. “I’m sure,” he said, swallowing them in a quick movement. “I’ve been saving these, Percodans, I believe. They should see me through.”

  “Wait, shouldn’t there be some security people waiting for us here?” she asked.

  “That was a bluff on Trevor’s part to get you to cooperate. He wouldn’t have had the time to set up something like that. I have to go now.” Khalid opened the passenger door. “Thank you, Lady Gray. I think very soon you will see the results of your act this morning.”

  He stepped from the car, gingerly testing his strength before taking the first tentative steps to the terminal building, oblivious of the throngs jostling around him. Once within the building, he was swallowed by the crowds, invisible, just another face to the thousands of passengers and well-wishers milling and queuing up. His legs trembled and the clothing touching his back and shoulders scalded the multiple wounds even through their thick bandages. If the pills didn’t kick in soon, he would collapse.

  It took him a few minutes to secure a seat on the next flight to Abu Dhabi by way of a British Airways flight to Riyadh. He need only produce his passport at the VIP lounge to get his ticket. It was the first time he’d ever used such a diplomatic privilege, and he vowed that he wouldn’t ever make a habit of it — but it was reassuring to know he could.

  Trevor had thoughtfully placed a handful of twenty-pound notes in the pants pocket, one of which he used to buy a stout umbrella and a pair of sunglasses. He used the umbrella like a cane so he could keep his weight off the worse of his two legs. While the large glasses didn’t hide all the wounds on his face, they camouflaged a couple of them, and with his hair raked forward, he could almost pass as the victim of a recent auto collision.

  At the top of an escalator, just before the security X-ray machines, a young woman in a blue uniform approached him.

  “Minister Khuddari, my name is Vivica Smith.” The British Airways hostess smiled brightly. She was young, barely in her twenties, with bobbed blond hair and soft eyes. She checked his passport against the information given to her by the airline’s executive ticketing service. Seeing how he hobbled, Vivica Smith called over one of the airport’s electric carts to carry them to where a Boeing 767 was waiting for its final passenger.

  “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 chea
p.

  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.