Choke Point

by Jay MacLarty

  “Does it matter?” Chricher looked up from his calculations, his expression indifferent, no concern one way or the other. “Him being alone or not?”

  Mawl thought back to his last conversation with Trader. I don’t give a fuck who gets in the way. Just get it done! “Nope. Doesn’t matter at all.”

  Robbie Kelts, sitting in the front passenger seat, twisted around and gave the privacy glass a couple of sharp raps, the sound barely penetrating the thick Cyrolon-over-glass laminate.

  “Excuse me.” Kyra reached across Atherton, to the control panel on the door, and lowered the partition. “What is it, Robbie?”

  “Beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but I don’t think you should be goin’ anywhere before we’ve had a chance to make security arrangements at the other end.”

  Kyra smiled, her eyes glowing with a kind of big-sister affection. “You looking to take a trip, Robbie?”

  “No, ma’am, really, I don’t like to fly. I just don’t think you should be going anywhere before we’ve had a chance to set something up. Maybe you could catch another flight.” His gaze swept back and forth, from Atherton on her left, to Simon on her right. “Join these gentlemen later.”

  “I appreciate your concern, Robbie, but no one knows I’m leaving the province. You can’t get better security than that.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but—”

  “If you want to tag along, you’re welcome to join us.”

  The young man grimaced, obviously uncomfortable with the thought. “No, ma’am. Like I said, I—”

  “I understand,” Kyra interrupted, “you don’t like to fly. Don’t worry about it.” She reached out and simultaneously patted the two knees on each side of her own. “These gentlemen will take good care of me.”

  He opened his mouth, clearly intending to argue the point, then nodded reluctantly and turned back to the front. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Atherton raised the partition. “Presumptuous bastard.”

  She cut the man a hard look. “Robbie’s a good kid. He’s just doing his job.” She turned, as if expecting an attack from both flanks. “What about you, Leonidovich? You want to add your two cents?”

  “No, ma’am.” Though he knew it was coming, she was too quick, jabbing her elbow into his ribs. “Damn, Rynerson, those elbows are as sharp as your tongue.”

  “Remember that the next time you think about using that word.”

  Atherton leaned forward, his expression puzzled. “What word?”

  “Trust me,” Simon answered, trying to rub away the sting. “You don’t want to know.”

  Atherton hesitated, his eyes bouncing from Simon to Kyra, then back again. “I believe you.” He started to sit back, then noticed the titanium cable running from Simon’s left wrist to the black case at his feet. “That it?”

  “It is,” Simon answered, already knowing what the next question would be.

  “Can I see it?”

  “Sure.” Simon pulled the case between his legs, just enough to shield his hands, and quickly sequenced through the unlocking procedure: right latch toward the handle, foot-lock one-half turn clockwise, left latch outward. Reaching inside, he extracted the Frisbee-sized high-impact repository and unsnapped the latch, exposing the lower right section of the carving embedded within its molded impression.

  Atherton frowned, a slightly cheated look. “Looks just like that reproduction in the suite.”

  “Exactly,” Simon agreed. “The ones at the Pearl were cast from molds of the original three pieces.”

  “I expected more for some reason.”

  Exactly what Simon thought when he first saw it. “It’s the smallest section. The one in Taipei is considerably larger.” He closed the cover, slipped the container back into his security case, reactivated the alarm, then reached across Kyra and snap-locked the cuff around Atherton’s wrist before he realized what was happening. “You’re the man, Jim. Don’t lose it.”

  “Hey! What the…what’s the idea?”

  “You wanted to come.” Simon cracked a little smile—the one Lara called his snake charmer—letting the man know it was all in good fun. “You might as well make yourself useful.”

  “Well, yeah but—”

  “I’m the pilot. Need both hands.”

  Kyra gave Simon a conspiratorial nudge. “And I have to make sure he doesn’t fly us off into never-never land.”

  Atherton shrugged, his lips curling into a good-natured grin. “Do I get hazard pay?”

  “Only if I forget the combination,” Simon answered, “and we have to cut off your hand.”

  Atherton grimaced. “How’s your memory?”

  “Pretty good until that guy hit me in the head.”

  “Sorry I asked.”

  “Asked what?”

  Kyra snorted a laugh, and then they were all laughing together, like old school chums sharing an inside joke. Beyond the privacy glass, in the visor mirror above his head, the eyes of Robbie Kelts watched this lighthearted display of camaraderie with an odd expression of fatalistic regret.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Macau

  Tuesday, 10 July 08:59:05 GMT +0800

  Standing beneath the five-blade rotor, Mawl read the pulsating display on his cellular—Jocko—and knew it wouldn’t be good news. “Talk to me, kid.”

  “I’ve only got a second,” Robbie whispered. “I’m in the WC at the charter service.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “He’s not flying alone,” Robbie answered. “Ms. Rynerson and that Atherton bloke are going with him.”

  Mawl noticed “the Rynerson bird” had suddenly become “Ms. Rynerson,” and decided the kid was taking his bodyguard role a little too seriously. “That’s not a problem.” He glanced at the darkening cloud bank, afraid if they didn’t leave soon, they might cancel the flight. “Why haven’t they left? What’s the holdup?”

  “But I thought—”

  “Don’t,” Mawl interrupted, “that’s my job. I repeat, what’s the holdup?”

  “But what about Ms. Rynerson?” Robbie persisted. “She’s not the target.”

  Mawl forced himself to take a breath, to give the kid some slack. “Listen up, Jocko, you have to forget the bird. She’s CD.” It was the kid’s first big test, and to write off someone he knew as collateral damage—especially a woman, and someone he had been charged to protect—would stretch his concept of commando warrior. “It’s unfortunate. It’s not your fault. That’s just the way things worked out. Okay?”

  There was a long beat of silence, then a temperate, “Yessir, I understand.”

  Obviously not, Mawl thought, but he decided to let it go. The kid could bury his guilt in money once the job was over. “So what’s the holdup?” he repeated. “Why haven’t they left?”

  “They’re signin’ papers now,” Robbie whispered, his voice heavy with resignation. “Don’t think it’ll be much longer.”

  Mawl glanced again at the gray wall of clouds, which seemed stalled about fifty kilometers off the coast, and hoped the kid was right.

  Simon nudged the yoke forward, leveling off at 24,000 feet, the roar of the dual Pratt & Whitney engines dropping to a steady growl. “Handles real well.”

  Kyra nodded. “Want me to take over?”

  “Fifteen minutes in, and already you want to play Sky Queen?”

  “I’m bored.”

  “Well, you can forget it, Rynerson, I need the hours.” More than hours, he needed the distraction. Over the last couple of years, flying had become his favored escape, his best means of clearing away the cerebral roadblocks. He glanced toward the north: a sweeping panorama of the China coastline and the South China Sea, its dark-blue surface speckled with islands of green and brown. Leaning forward, he looked past Kyra to the huge bank of dark clouds off the right wingtip. “Just keep your eyes on the weather, okay?”

  “Whoop-de-do! If you had told me about this little excursion, I could have had them send the Gulf 5 up from Bangkok. We could have flow
n right over those babies.”

  “Yeah, and I could have called a press conference, too.”

  “Oh, right, clandestine mission.” She flashed one of her sassy smiles and du-dummed the theme music from Mission: Impossible. “I forgot.”

  “That’s right, Rynerson, it was supposed to be a…” He was about to say “secret,” but the word got hung up in his brain as a collection of random images and displaced bits of information came together in a disturbing collage.

  “Simon…?”

  “What’s the nearest airport?”

  Her expression mutated instantly from playful to stony serious, her right hand going for the portfolio of maps in the expansion pocket next to her seat. “Why?”

  “There may be a problem with the plane.”

  Her gaze swept the instrument panel. “Everything looks normal. What are you talking about?”

  He ignored the question and began banking the plane toward the coast. “Just find me a place to land.”

  Atherton, who was sitting in a rear-facing seat immediately behind the cockpit, poked his head through the open door. “What’s going on?”

  “Simon thinks we may have a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  Simon glanced at Kyra, who had the portfolio open and was looking for the right map. “Didn’t you think it was odd the way Robbie tried so hard to talk you out of going?”

  She pondered the question for no more than a second. “No. He wasn’t concerned about the flight. He wanted to make sure I had security when we landed.”

  “Yet he didn’t ask where you were going.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No.”

  She hesitated, thinking about it. “I don’t remember…but even so, he’s just a kid. Who knows what—”

  “A former member of the SAS.”

  “So?”

  “You ever hear of someone in the Special Air Service who didn’t like to fly?”

  She frowned in disbelief. “Oh, hell, Leonidovich, lots of people don’t like to fly.”

  Atherton glanced back and forth between them, his tan face suddenly ashen. “What are you saying? You think that security guy might have done something to the plane?”

  “No,” Simon answered, “I don’t see how that’s possible. He didn’t have an opportunity, but…” He hesitated, his mind still splicing the various bits of information into something that sounded reasonable.

  “But what?” Kyra demanded. “Just because he’s worried about me, doesn’t mean—”

  “It’s more than that,” Simon interrupted. “I always thought it was odd the way two members of your security detail disappeared on the same day. The only ones who spoke English.”

  She shook her head, as if trying to wave off her own doubts. “I think your imagination is working overtime.”

  “There’s something else. Something I saw at Madame Chiang’s. A note with a name and phone number. I knew I’d seen the name somewhere, but I didn’t put it together until now. The Kowloon Security Service. It was on Robbie’s profile sheet—the company he worked for in Hong Kong.”

  The last of the color drained from Atherton’s face. “Oh, Jesus.”

  It took Kyra another second to grasp the significance. “Holy shit! Now you remember! What the hell happened to that photographic memory of yours, Leonidovich?”

  Good question, though he felt certain it had something to do with a very large lump on the back of his head. “Momentarily out of film, I guess.”

  “Find us a place to land!” She slapped the map portfolio onto his lap. “I’m taking control.”

  “Took you long enough.”

  She grabbed the yoke on her side, pushing it forward in the same motion. “Hang on, I’m going to put this thing on the deck!”

  Simon glanced back, but Atherton had already withdrawn into his seat, only his right arm and the titanium cable attached to the security case still visible through the narrow opening.

  “What do you think?” Kyra asked, her voice rising as she increased power. “Should we call it in?”

  He knew what she was asking. Was he sure? Was he confident enough in his theory to declare an emergency before they really had one? Did he want to explain why, and risk sounding like an idiot? Even more important, did he want to try and explain to some low-level bureaucratic investigator why he was transporting a priceless Chinese artifact to Taiwan? “We’re not that far out of Hong Kong. Maybe we should wait.”

  “Okay by me. Check the map, see if there’s any place to put down between here and there. Maybe one of those islands has a strip.”

  It took him less than a minute to find the right map and determine that the only thing flat between them and Hong Kong International was a very deep ocean. “Nope. Kia Tak’s our best bet.”

  She nodded, an expression that could have taught stoniness to a mountain. “It’s probably nothing.” She sounded more hopeful than confident.

  “Right.” Never in his life had he wanted so much to be so wrong. He took a deep breath, trying to control the rising pace of his heart. “What’s your plan?”

  “I’ll level off at a thousand feet,” she answered. “If something happens, I should be able to control the glide from that altitude.”

  “Sounds good,” but they both knew if something happened to the flight controls, there would be no glide, and even from a thousand feet the water would be like cement. “Maybe we should island hop our way in…just in case.”

  She cut a glance back and forth across the seascape. “It would take longer.”

  “Not much, and if we go down, we might be close enough to something to get ashore.”

  They passed through 4,000 feet and she started to ease back on the yoke. “Okay. You pick the route, but keep us in as straight a line as possible.”

  He began to trace a route with his finger, a connect-the-dots island hop right into Hong Kong. “This shouldn’t add more than a couple minutes to our time.”

  She leveled off at a thousand feet, not more than thirty miles and ten minutes out of Kia Tak. “I need to call in.”

  He nodded, his heart rate beginning to settle. “I’ll do it.” He felt responsible. The plane, he suspected, would be okay, and all he had done was scare the bejesus out of everyone by twisting a bunch of innocent remarks into a conspiracy.

  She shook her head. “No, let me. I’ve got the seniority. I’ll just tell them we’re experiencing some sporadic instrumentation problems. That we want to get on the ground before—” Without so much as a sputter or cough, both engines shut down, every needle and light on the instrument panel going dead and dark. Her final words—“something happens”—loud and ominous in the eerie silence.

  Before her words faded, Simon had his fingers on the ignition switch. The faint click-click-click confirmed what already seemed obvious: complete electrical failure. “Dead.” Clever choice of words, Leonidovich.

  Behind them, Atherton groaned, the pitiful sound of a wounded animal caught in a trap.

  “Help me!” Kyra yelled, struggling to keep the nose up. “I can barely hold it.”

  “There!” Simon answered, pointing his chin toward an island less than a mile in the distance. “Two o’clock!”

  Working together they managed to ease the plane toward the slender mountain of vegetation, but it was hopeless, the dark-blue sea rising to meet them faster than they could close the distance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  South China Sea

  Tuesday, 10 July 09:32:18 GMT +0800

  From the moment they took off, Mawl had kept his attention glued to the tracking device attached to the instrument panel. At one hundred and thirty knots, a mere fifty feet above the water, just looking at the dark, undulating surface for more than a few seconds gave him a feeling of vertigo. Determined not to expose his weakness, he concentrated on the transponder’s small red dot and waited for it to disappear.

  For twenty minutes, the distance between the helicopter and the plane had co
ntinued to widen, then the Beech King took a sudden and unexpected turn toward the coast. Mawl pressed the COM button on his headphones. “What’s going on?”

  Chricher shook his head, not taking his eyes off the horizon.

  “Well, something’s not right. Maybe the acid only took out part of the circuitry.”

  Chricher shook his head again.

  “How do you know? They could be trying to make an emergency landing in Hong Kong.”

  Chricher reached up and tapped one of the bubble earphones that covered his ears. “There’s been no emergency call. I would have heard it.”

  “Their radio might be out.”

  “They haven’t changed altitude,” Chricher answered. He pointed to the altimeter reading on the transponder. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

  Mawl nodded and glanced at his watch. Twenty-one minutes. They would know soon enough.

  Two minutes later it happened; the altimeter reading on the transponder rolling downward like an out-of-control slot machine. “You were right,” Mawl shouted, barely able to contain his excitement. “They’re going down.”

  Chricher’s lips curled slightly, a look of vindication.

  “How long will it take us to get there?”

  Chricher glanced at the transponder, mentally calculating the distance against the speed of the helicopter. “Fifteen minutes.” He took one hand off the pitch lever and rolled it back and forth. “Give or take.”

  Mawl nodded, unable to take his eyes off the plunging numbers. It must be strange, he thought, to know the exact moment of death, to see it hurtling toward you, knowing you could do nothing to stop it. Not the way he wanted to go. Too much time. Too much thinking and waiting. He could visualize exactly what they were going through: the uncontrollable panic, the frantic effort to gain control, the erosion of hope, and finally…splish, splash, you is takin’ a bath. He smiled to himself; no playing hide-the-gun this time, Leonidovich. Then, as the numbers rolled past 4,000 feet, they began to slow dramatically, as if the plane had suddenly hit a layer of thick air. “What the…?”