by Tom Cain
The bomb-disposal team was hurled from side to side and buffeted up and down before the pilot was able to regain control.
One of the men shouted, “What the hell was that?”
Kady Jones was still trying to stop her stomach from turning cartwheels.
“I guess that was our bomb,” she gasped. “And I think it was saying good-bye.”
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Carver waited until the engines had been turned off, and there was nothing to hear but the rushing of the air outside and the passengers screaming in fear or calling out to their God. The plane was descending fast and it was going to keep going down until it hit the rocky, mountainous earth of northeastern Macedonia. There would be no airstrip to welcome them, no miracle landing. They all knew that. And yet the people around him still strapped themselves into their seats as the pilot instructed, and when the first soft tendrils of smoke wormed their way into the compartment, they reached for the oxygen masks.
As if any of that would make the slightest difference in the end.
Carver had been placed on one end of a three-seat divan that ran along the wall, toward the rear of the cabin. Alix was next to him, Vermulen at the far end. Two of McCabe’s men sat opposite them. The third was guarding his boss and keeping an eye on Francesco Riva. They were up front, in club seats the size of armchairs.
For the first few minutes of the flight, the goons in suits had sat there, pointing their guns at the trio on the divan, scowls on their faces, trying to look mean and intimidating. But any threat they posed had evaporated the moment the pilot announced that they had a problem. Then they just became two terrified passengers in a metal tube dropping out of the sky, each of them thinking about nothing but himself.
It was Carver’s hand that Alix reached for.
“Don’t worry,” he said, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “This isn’t over.”
He helped put her mask on.
“Deep breaths,” he told her. “Get plenty of oxygen into your blood.”
Carver could see Vermulen, looking past Alix at him.
“Who are you?” the general asked, shaking his head in bemusement, as if he were trying to work out how his judgment of people could have gone so wrong. He reached out to Alix, got no response, and sank back into his seat, lost in his own disillusionment.
Carver had no interest in Vermulen’s problems. He was more interested in McCabe, who was staring at a control unit in his hand. Carver saw a grin flicker over the old man’s face as he pressed the switch. Had he just armed the bomb in one last shot at Armageddon? Carver held a mask to his face, his breathing strong and steady, as he now looked across the cabin, through the steadily thickening smoke, toward the two men on the far side. One of them was having problems with his oxygen supply, yanking on his mask, trying to get his partner’s attention. But the other guy was having none of it. He was keeping all his fresh air for himself, one hand on his mask, the other-holding his gun-hanging loosely beside him.
The men were lost in their own dying world. They didn’t even notice Carver as he rose from his seat, crossed the aisle with a single stride, wrenched the gun from the limp, dangling hand, and smashed it twice-backhand, forehand-against the pair of naked pink scalps. One of the two slumped forward, unconscious. The other groaned and turned unfocused eyes in Carver’s direction. Carver hit him again, knocking him cold.
He turned back to the divan, now barely visible, even a couple of feet away, reached for his mask, grabbed Alix’s hand, and gave it a sharp tug. She got the message, unclipped her belt, and got to her feet. Carver could see a dark shadow that must be Vermulen looming beyond her. He lashed out with the handle of the gun, felt it hit something, he wasn’t sure what, and the shadow collapsed back toward the chair. Carver gave another pull on Alix’s hand, leading her back to the very rear of the cabin.
As they staggered through the acrid fumes, Carver felt the tremors running through Alix’s body, She was beginning to choke. He was coughing, too, his eyes watering, his nose and throat burning.
Three paces took him to the lavatory door, and then he was gulping down oxygen from the mask dangling over the toilet bowl.
Carver handed the mask over to Alix, pausing for a second to make sure she could still hold it steady over her mouth and nose. Then he left the lavatory and stood by the bulkhead that divided the passenger compartment from the bomb bay, desperately turning the wheel that opened the hatch. There was an audible click as the lock disengaged and a moment of truth as the door was flung open and a blast of thin, freezing air roared into the cabin, instantly condensing all the moisture in the atmosphere and turning it into an impenetrable fog.
The aircraft’s dive became even deeper and the fuselage swayed one way and the other, like the weight at the end of a pendulum, as the pilots struggled to maintain control.
Carver reached out and grabbed Alix, dragging her after him as he squeezed through the cramped, steel-ringed hatch, both of them banging heads, shins, and elbows, almost forcing exclamations of pain and wasting precious oxygen. Agonizing seconds stretched by as the hatch was closed and locked again to slow down anyone else who realized that their only hope lay in the bomb bay.
Now Carver was kneeling, hands reaching out through the freezing, poisonous fog, fingers stretching, searching, because there had to be a way of opening the doors manually, a fail-safe in case the electrical control in the cockpit didn’t work. And there it was, a handle, on top of a metal rod, waiting to be pumped up and down. Desperately he set to work.
For a moment, the doors remained shut. Carver pumped the lever two or three more times steadily, then frantically again and again as he felt his lungs begin to burn, eyes flare and then water, his muscles giving way.
Then doors were opening, letting in a gale that drove the smog from the bomb bay; air that was bitterly cold, but rich and clean enough to breathe in desperate inhalations between hacking, retching coughs. But the pumping never stopped, up and down, pain shooting through arms, shoulders, and back with every motion of the handle, until the bay doors were wide open and the earth was dimly visible down below.
Above it sat the bomb, a drab brown case, crudely strapped to a parachute, cradled in its metal frame. A lever on the frame disengaged the bomb from the cradle-just as well that those blind, grasping hands had clutched the pump handle first.
Carver’s eyes darted around the bay, settling on bungee cords looped around hooks on the wall, there to secure the legitimate cargo that the engineers who adapted the aircraft naïvely assumed would be in the plane. He grabbed a cord and looped one end around one of the straps that linked the bomb and parachute, knotting it tight. Then he held Alix close to him, her arms wrapped around his waist. She gave him a little squeeze back as he passed the cord around them in a figure eight, before tying that off, too, forming an umbilical link with the bomb.
The whole aircraft was shaking more and more as it failed to respond to the crew’s commands. There couldn’t be long before they lost control completely and the descent turned into a freefall.
Suddenly there came a motion from the front end of the bay, the turning of the small metal wheel. Someone was there, on the other side of the bulkhead, trying to get into the bay, and the hatch was opening to reveal Vermulen. He must have recovered and grabbed the other bodyguard’s gun. Now he had it out and was firing, the barrel jerking randomly with every convulsion of the doomed plane, bullets ricocheting off the bomb cradle and the aircraft’s own metallic ribs.
There was one last, great spasm as the cables snapped. Carver heard Alix give a muffled cry of surprise and felt her body give a sudden jerk. The plane lurched into its death dive, Vermulen was flung back against the bulkhead, and now there was nothing to do but wrench the lever and then put his arms around her head to protect it as gravity took over and the bomb, the parachute, and the two entwined lovers were hurled out, crashing through the cradle into the yawning void, hurtling toward the ground at two hundred miles an hour.
The parachu
te was set to open at five thousand feet, slowing the descent of the bomb before its detonation over Jerusalem ’s Temple Mount. But the hills and mountains of northern Macedonia rise as high as fifty-five hundred feet. The earth was rushing ever closer and suddenly Carver heard himself shouting wordlessly in frustration and fear as he realized that nothing that had happened in the past few minutes had made any difference.
The hard, unyielding mountainside was just seconds away now. Carver held Alix’s body even closer to him, unable to see her eyes in the darkness. But as the final moment of impact drew near, and his mind refused to shut down, he screwed his own eyes tight shut, so that the explosive impact of the plane, maybe eight hundred feet away, was only heard, rather than seen.
Closer, closer still… And then there was a sudden jolt, enough almost to tear clinging arms from their shoulder sockets, as the parachute finally opened, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, barely enough to decelerate the bomb and the two people tied to it as they struck the ground and went tumbling over and over, striking rocks and plowing through undergrowth, down a narrow ravine until they finally came to a halt in the soft, damp earth beside a mountain stream.
Carver had suffered a hairline fracture in one ankle and badly sprained the other. The pain that stabbed through him with every breath told him that several of his ribs were cracked.
He reached over and untied the rope that connected them to the parachute harness and the bomb. As he loosened the loop around his waist, Alix rolled away from him. She came to a halt on the ground next to him, lying on her front, her head tilted away from him, motionless. He spoke her name, but there was no reply.
At first he assumed she’d been knocked cold by their fall down the hillside. And then he realized that his hands were covered with something wet and dark. For a second he thought it might be mud. He prayed it was mud. But then he realized that his chest was covered with it, too, and he knew that it must be blood.
“Oh, God, no…” he moaned, and he patted his hands over his body, desperately hoping that they might find the wound that had produced the bleeding. That could happen. You got cuts sometimes, deep ones, and just didn’t feel them.
But Carver had not been cut. He knew that.
So then he looked across at Alix and the moonlight cast a gray wash over the ragged, purple-black hole, high up by her shoulder blade, that could have been made only by Vermulen’s gun. Carver placed a finger to her throat, feeling for a pulse… and it was there, not a steady beat, but a delicate, barely perceptible flutter. He listened for the bubbling, sucking sound of a lung wound and heard nothing. That was some relief at least, but not much.
The entry wound was much bigger and messier than Carver would have expected, as if someone had punched a fist right into her. The bullet must have already been deformed by the time it hit her, maybe by a ricochet off a metal surface. That would explain why it had lodged inside her, instead of going straight through and hitting Carver as well. He tried not to think about the internal havoc the misshapen slug had caused. Even if it hadn’t hit any vital organs, she’d lost a lot of blood and more was still pouring from her.
Carver pulled off his shirt, ignoring the stabs of pain from his battered rib cage, and ripped it into strips. Then he gently lifted Alix into a sitting position, wincing as she gave a soft, semiconscious moan, and took off her shirt, exposing the shredded skin, splintered bone, and gaping flesh torn from her back. He crumpled one of the fabric strips into a wad and pressed it against the wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood. He used the other strips to improvise a bandage around her shoulder to hold the wad in place.
It was, at best, a temporary measure. If Alix did not receive proper medical attention soon, she would die. All he could do now was take her body in his arms and hold her. He spoke to her quietly, telling her all the things that had gone unsaid for so many months. There were occasional moments when he thought she might have heard some of what he said, as she blinked or twitched her lips, but that wasn’t the point of his words.
He was still sitting there when the Black Hawk found him. It landed on a patch of flat ground not far away, and he saw the beams from the flashlights slicing through the darkness as the people walked toward him. Then there was a figure standing in front of him and a hand on his shoulder.
“You okay?”
It was a woman’s voice. He glanced up and saw a slim, petite civilian, looking ill at ease in army combats.
“Yeah,” said Samuel Carver, though the word was sighed as much as spoken. “We’re just fine.”
Then he rose to his feet, with Alix still cradled in his arms, and started limping down the ravine toward the waiting helicopter.
POSTSCRIPT:
This Much Is Also True
The U.S. government was shown advance tapes of General Alexander Lebed’s claims that Russia had lost one hundred suitcase nukes and had a response prepared before the interview aired on 60 Minutes. State Department spokesman James Foley stated, “The government of Russia has assured us that it retains adequate command and control of its nuclear arsenal… appropriate physical security arrangements exist for these weapons and facilities… there is no cause for concern.”
Lebed, however, repeated his claims at a hearing of the Congressional Military Research and Development Subcommittee on October 1, 1997. The following day, he was backed by a senior Russian scientist, environmentalist, and member of the Russian National Security Council, Alexei Yablokov, who testified to the committee that he was “absolutely sure” that the KGB had produced miniature bombs, intended as terrorist weapons, in the 1970s.
The subject was debated in Congress in the autumn of 1999, when Republican congressman Kurt Weldon, a specialist in Russian affairs, stated that 132 suitcase nukes had been manufactured by the Russians. Weldon also claimed to have had a conversation with then FBI Director Louis Freeh in which Freeh “acknowledged the possibility that hidden weapons caches exist in the United States.” Weldon maintained, “There is no doubt that the Soviets stored material in this country. The question is what and where.”
There have been no public reports of any of the missing bombs being found anywhere in the world. The FBI, however, is believed to have searched an area near Brainerd, Minnesota, looking for possible weapons. Brainerd is close to Gull Lake.
Alexander Lebed died on April 28, 2002, in a helicopter crash in Russia ’s Sayan Mountains. The official cause of the accident was given as a collision with power cables in foggy weather.
On October 20, 1999, the FBI published its Project Megiddo report. Numerous extremist Christian groups and ideologies were examined, but the report concluded that while the Project Megiddo intelligence initiative “has revealed indicators of potential violent activity on the part of extremists in this country,” there were “very few indications of specific threats to domestic security.”
Subsequent events have shown this assessment to be well founded. There have been no real-life Waylon McCabes.
In June, July, and August 1998, CIA agents in Tiranë, the capital of Albania, carried out the forcible captures and extraditions of five senior members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an organization with extremely close, long-standing ties to al-Qaeda. The men were flown to Egypt, where they were tortured, tried, and found guilty of terrorist offenses. Two were executed, one sentenced to life imprisonment, and the others given lengthy jail terms.
Despite the presence of these known terrorists in Albania, ethnic homeland of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and despite the certain presence of jihadist fighters in Bosnia, U.S. and U.K. policy remained-and still remains-predicated on the conviction that there were, and are, no links between the Kosovo Albanians and Islamic terrorism. This view is hotly disputed by the Serbs and their traditional allies in Russia and Bulgaria. There is, however, considerable evidence that the KLA received both weapons and training from U.S. sources-civilian, corporate, and official-and had similar links to the German BND intelligence service. It would be embarrassing, t
o say the least, if Western governments had, yet again, been assisting the very forces that were most bent on their destruction.
But what of the terrorist threat, so feared by Kurt Vermulen?
In July 1998, the U.S. Commission on National Security issued the first of three wide-ranging reports analyzing expected global developments up to 2025, the threats they posed to U.S. national security, and the measures that should be taken to make the United States and its allies better able to deal with the threats facing it. None of these reports, whose later editions appeared in 1999 and 2001, included any specific suggestion that Islamic terrorism might be a danger to the United States or its allies, let alone strike directly at their territories and citizens.
On August 7, 1998, terrorists acting on behalf of the World Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders-a coalition of groups spearheaded by al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden-drove trucks laden with explosives into the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. More than two hundred people were killed and over four thousand wounded, the vast majority of them local civilians.
On October 12, 2000, during the last months of the Clinton administration, the U.S.S. Cole guided-missile destroyer was attacked by a boat manned by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, during a goodwill visit to Yemen. Seventeen U.S. Navy personnel were killed, along with the two bombers, Ibrahim al-Thawr and Abdullah al-Misawa. The Cole’s sailors were prevented from firing on their attackers by their rules of engagement, which only allowed them to shoot if shot at first. There was no defensive perimeter around the boat because government policy demanded “a small footprint” so as not to antagonize Arab opinion. The navy’s own investigation concluded, “The commanding officer of Cole did not have the specific intelligence, focused training, appropriate equipment or on-scene security support to effectively prevent or deter such a determined, preplanned assault on his ship.”