“Can I cook or what?” Melissa grinned at him.
“Hot shit, lady!”
“Lab in”—she glanced down at her watch—“another twenty seconds.”
He checked his own. “Tin Goose in one minute-twenty. We need our weapons.”
“Not the Goose!”
“File a complaint with the British government.” He pointed a finger at Dayana. “She slid a charge into the fuel tank. Can’t get it back.”
Melissa grimaced at her. “Well, now you make perfect sense. Should have seen it, but you’re very good.”
Richie glanced between them as like acknowledged like. He still didn’t see it at all, but if Melissa did, then it must be true.
Carla had already unlocked the rear baggage compartment.
They’d come to the jungle airstrip heavy…and been adding to their armament with each trip. Kyle raced to the small shed where they’d stored the plane’s spare parts and placed a large ammunition cache. He came back out with two heavy bags, passing them off to Duane and Chad, before coming back with two more.
Richie looked down the row toward the BAe 146. Whoever was piloting rode the controls forward hard. The engines awoke with a deep-throated roar that drowned out all other sounds.
It also sent a blast of intense heat straight back into the trees. They must have expected to tow the jet out onto the field before starting the engines, and certainly before hitting full throttle.
The jungle burst into a towering wall of flame.
A figure came stumbling out of the jungle, his body burning brightly, his mouth open in a scream though there was no way to hear it over the jet engines’ roar.
One of the guards, still carrying his rifle. They had all been racing through the jungle to find the fictitious shooter. Richie didn’t have time for sympathy. And even if he had, the guards’ main job was to make sure that that workers didn’t run away into the jungle. His sympathy level was set very low for them anyway.
* * *
The lab went up in a bright bloom—an inferno that shot up fifty feet into the air. Melissa could barely hear the explosion, adding only a basso roll to the much closer BAe 146’s roaring engines. The size of the charge had looked plenty big over Duane’s shoulder.
A whole section of the fuselage, perhaps ten feet square, shot a dozen feet into the air. A blinding wave of light shot to either side. Then one of the chemicals inside the lab must have breached its container.
The entire top half of the fuselage lifted as a single piece ten stories into the jungle before shattering and cascading back into the pillar of fire that erupted into the jungle’s high canopy.
Analie Sala’s jet began rolling down the runway.
Melissa shouldered a rifle—an M-16 she’d grabbed out of the baggage compartment—aimed at the pilot’s window on the BAe 146, and spotted a dim figure inside leaning forward to see the exploding lab.
Melissa fired.
And the round bounced off the glass. Armored glass.
A dark, narrow face twisted to look out at her. Analie Sala. She’d expected Pederson.
“C’mon, bitch!”
She fired three more shots around the window, hoping that Sala hadn’t armored the whole cockpit, but the jet kept accelerating. More shots at the wing tanks, but by now the angle was bad and the distance long.
Then Sala was aloft and flying out the hole in the canopy.
Over the jet’s fading thunder, she heard a lot of shouts.
The civilians’ panic as they raced away from the series of explosions.
The guards as they stumbled out of the fire on this side of the field lit by Sala’s departing jet.
Then Pederson came running across the compound. He wore underwear and one shoe.
“Analie!” he shouted up at the departing plane. “Analie!”
Kyle raced over and grabbed him just as Richie grabbed Melissa’s arm.
“Got a plane to catch, Ilsa.” Richie grinned at her as they raced away from the ticking Tin Goose.
“We do?” Melissa was feeling a little dense and a lot charmed. Racing with her lover hand in hand through the heart of a battlefield was impossibly crazy for a girl with a frozen heart to imagine. So her heart must not be frozen at all.
They dodged around the little Cessna; it wasn’t big enough to carry their whole crew, even without Dayana or Pederson.
Behind them, the farthest plane in the line exploded in a ball of fire, which then set off a large secondary explosion as the fuel tanks were breached.
“Dayana only left two planes untouched.”
Melissa stumbled to a halt as the second plane they’d left behind them blew up.
The Gulfstream G250 was sixty-plus feet of sleek twinjet. It looked fast sitting on the ground.
“Who’s flying it?”
She didn’t like the way Richie was grinning at her.
* * *
The team set up a secure perimeter as Melissa raced along close behind him and shouted out the checklist.
Richie did his best to figure out what each instruction meant. He’d never flown a jet, but how different could it really be?
Not very. Because if it was very, then they were dead and that just wasn’t an option.
The timer on his watch beeped.
He spun around, tackled Melissa, and pinned her to the ground with his body over hers.
“What the—” was all she managed before the Tin Goose blew up like a Roman candle. The fuel tanks deep in the hull breached separately in a cascading set of explosions that shredded the Twin Otter. Shrapnel whistled by over their heads, some of it pinging off the Gulfstream’s hull, but the Cessna between them took most of the abuse.
“Let’s hope nothing critical was hit here,” he whispered to Melissa, not letting her up yet.
“Just my pride.”
“I’m sorry,” he tried to apologize. “I know I shouldn’t have. But I needed you to react and—”
“Richie!” Melissa cut him off.
“Yes?”
“Get off me, save our lives, and we’re square. Okay?”
“You’re the best woman ever!”
“Thanks. Get off me!”
“Oh, right. Sorry.” He levered himself up. “What’s next on the list?”
She grabbed his shirt collar and pulled him in, spending a precious second on a kiss.
“That’s one,” she said, ending the kiss as fast as it began. “Two. Remove wheel chocks.”
He dove and rolled under the low plane to pull them from the farside wheel as she pulled the nearer ones.
There was sporadic gunfire.
He couldn’t waste time looking up to see what the targets might be. It wasn’t until they were in the cockpit and going through the cold-start checklists that he managed a peek. People were storming toward them to board the plane. The Gulfstream could carry a dozen safely. There were six Delta, Dayana, and Pederson. Each of the Delta had at least eighty pounds of weapons and ammo. And he had no time to check what was in the cargo hold. It was official; they were full.
The team laid down warning shots to brush the crowds back, and it was working for the moment.
There was another booming explosion, muffled by the Gulfstream’s hull, and a blast momentarily blinded him through the windshield.
“I spotted a large propane tank behind the chow tent. That must be it,” Melissa informed him between APU start and temperature range targets, which he managed to find despite the bright dots and blotches swimming across his vision.
He flipped open the small pilot window when he had the engines up to temperature.
“Now! Now! Now!” Richie shouted it as loud as he could.
The team tumbled toward the plane. He could feel it shift on its shock absorbers as each person dove aboard.
“G
o! Go! Go!” Kyle shouted from the back.
There were red lights, green lights, and a half a hundred switches that Richie didn’t recognize. It didn’t just have a yoke like a steering wheel. There was also a control beside him that looked like a helicopter’s cyclic, a joystick with a bulbous head covered in switches. For all he knew, it was a Star Trek auto-destruct switch, so he didn’t touch it and prayed that he wouldn’t need to.
But he knew what throttles looked like and he rammed the two large silver levers in the center of the console forward as fast as he dared.
In moments they were rolling and people who had run out onto the runway were diving aside to get out of his way.
To the left were the ongoing explosions of the drug lab and chow tent. A fire had formed and was sweeping toward the tents and wrecked planes of the living quarters.
“The DC-3?” Richie was very fond of that plane.
“Sorry,” Melissa replied, “I had Duane blow it up.”
“Oh.” He didn’t know quite how he felt about that. There were memories there that…
“Don’t worry, Richie. We’ll make some new memories in the future. That’s a promise.”
He wanted to look over at her, acknowledge it somehow, but there wasn’t time. And there was a tightness in his throat that he couldn’t speak past.
To their right was a line of burning planes blown up by Dayana, the British NCA operative, and a wall of the jungle alight in two places directly behind where the BAe 146 and the Gulfstream each had been parked.
Melissa was the sort of woman that a man made promises to.
And that was an awfully big thought for an awfully small moment because straight ahead was a wall of tree trunks a hundred feet high and a dozen feet across.
Above them was a wall of massive trunks and tangled branches. Above that was a hole that looked far too small to slip this huge plane through.
As he raced past the Tin Goose, he sent a thank-you its way and was glad that he didn’t have time to look over at its shredded remains. He also wished that’s what he was flying. Wished it was just he and his Ilsa, off seeking adventure.
Melissa was reading aloud take-off speeds and rates of climb. He managed to locate his speed in the bewildering array of instruments spread across the dash.
It was a glass cockpit, with way too many display screens and each mode buttons all around them. Hardly a single decent, familiar, round-dial readout anywhere.
So he watched the number that he understood, ignored everything else, pulled back on the yoke when he dared, and climbed for a hole that his radar—at least that’s what he guessed it was—was telling him, “No way!” in loud alert tones and red flashing proximity alarms.
“Gear up,” Melissa called as she toggled the switch. He felt the hum and thunk through the fuselage as the wheels retracted. That would improve his speed and control.
Leaving the wheels down wouldn’t have helped anything anyway; they were far past landing again if he didn’t make it.
The jet kept accelerating. They were already faster than the top speed of the Tin Goose and he didn’t dare trying to slow down to give himself more time to maneuver. He always flew the Twin Otter through the entry of the jungle airstrip as slowly as he dared. He was going three times faster than that already.
The hole was coming at them so fast.
Tops of trees so close below.
Canopy close above.
Jungle ahead.
“Climb. Climb! Climb!” The last was a shout begging the plane to lift for him.
They raced toward the narrow opening at over two hundred miles an hour and accelerating.
* * *
The Gulfstream burst out into the midday sunlight.
Melissa felt as if she’d been reborn.
She could practically feel the shards of her past self falling away, tumbling slowly down toward the jungle.
And she looked over at Richie, he was side-lit by the sun streaming into the cockpit.
He looked…magnificent. Nerd, genius, warrior, and jet pilot. No one else could have jumped from a sixty-year-old turboprop to a ten-year-old jet and gotten them out alive.
Richie had just saved her life. And the lives of the whole team. He was right; it was a matter of give-and-take and it felt amazing.
He was circling over the hole in the jungle. The fire had climbed up and burned away the canopy from both sides. The whole airfield was exposed to the sky.
She figured out the radio and called Agent Fred Smith.
“Do you still have that 747 around?”
“Sure, it’s parked at…well, I can’t tell you that, but it’s not far away. What do you—”
She cut him off. “Load it with water. There’s a fire at the location we gave you. It wants putting out.”
“You burned it? That’s great. Why would I want to stop it?”
“Because you want an intel team on the ground there. There are also pilots with plenty of delivery information, a communications bunker, and a load of civilians still on the ground and none of them are going anywhere.”
“Okay, I’ve got the 747 on the move. I’ll get a ground team in right behind it. Did you take down the whole operation?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she looked at Richie.
He shook his head without speaking.
Analie Sala had gotten away.
“Pederson would know where she’s going, wouldn’t he?” Richie asked her.
Melissa considered going back into the cabin and beating Analie’s destination out of Pederson. But she wasn’t so sure.
Melissa thought about it and became even less sure. “Remember the interview aboard the BAe 146? She was the one sleeping in the cabin at the rear of the plane when we raided it. She was the first one to lean forward to shake hands on the deal even before Pederson did.”
“Huh!” Richie agreed. “That means she left Pederson to run around camp in his underwear because he’d been in someone else’s bed rather than hers, as we always assumed.”
“He was the front, but she was the brains. That’s why she flew that stupid swordfish job with us; she didn’t trust anyone else’s judgment. I’d wager that she didn’t trust Pederson with her next hidey-hole.”
Richie was nodding in agreement. “So how do we find her?”
“You want me to do the thinking for both of us?”
“That’s my Ilsa. You do the thinking, and I’ll do my best not to crash this jet in the meantime.”
Analie Sala had played her cards so close that it was hard to imagine what she was thinking. Her jet was capable of reaching North or South America, but not Africa. But maybe, just maybe…
“Head north.”
Richie didn’t ask why. He simply trusted her and turned the jet.
Then Melissa started studying the console in front of her.
Chapter 21
Richie did his best to fly by the seat of his pants, because Melissa was doing something that kept scrambling the screens in front of him. Every time he thought he had figured out something, there would be a blink and the information was gone. She was using that joystick control which must be the display commander. Hopefully it didn’t also have a James Bond ejection seat switch or he was in trouble.
Airspeed here—then over there. Engine temperature—not quite redline but gone before he could see if it was stable or getting worse.
He took to watching out the window.
They were already over the mountains of the Venezuelan coast. This bird was fast. Minutes later they flew over Maracaibo and then were out over the Caribbean. Still no midsized jet out ahead of them. No air traffic at all except for one of the rare commercial jets climbing out of Maracaibo airport.
He’d been staring out at the water for a while when the console finally stopped changing and Melissa spoke very proudly o
ver the intercom.
“There’s the bitch, Richie. Go get her.”
He had to blink at the screen several times before it made sense. It was a radar sweep. And ahead of them, way ahead of them, there was a little blip. He looked out the front windshield. Still nothing but water.
“How can you be sure?”
“Straight line flight from her hole in the jungle to Honduras. She needs to refinance and she has a billion dollars of cocaine in her hold. She’s headed to the drug capital of Central America, Honduras, in a straight line. She’ll offload there and then rebuild her operation somewhere that we’ll never find. You’ve got to stop her.”
“Any brilliant suggestions? We’re moving at Mach 0.85, which is almost six hundred miles an hour. We can’t exactly open the door and shoot her down.” Over the mountains, the land turned semiarid, and then in a flash they were over the intense blue of the deep ocean. “How about calling Fred?”
“I did that.”
“I didn’t hear you do it.”
“I switched you out of the circuit. I figured you were a little busy flying. Didn’t want to distract you from keeping us alive.”
“Oh.” Richie tried to think of something more intelligent to say, but repeating, “Oh,” was all he managed. “What did Fred have to say?”
“No assets that can get here in time. Panama we have a lot of assets, but none that can beat her now; it took me too long to find her. In Honduras we only have a small helicopter group. There’s a British frigate now turning for Honduras, but they’re half a day out; closest U.S. Coast Guard vessel is a couple hours behind it. We’re the only asset that can get to her before she lands. I don’t want her to land; she’s far too slippery.”
He was already moving at very close to the Never Exceed speed, which was a little faster than Analie’s plane could do. He corrected his course and kept crawling up to her, closer and closer.
Richie looked over his other shoulder and saw the rest of the team sprawled out in the cabin. Carla came forward when she saw him looking back.
“What’s the plan?”
Richie pulled back the ear of his headset so that he could hear her.
“Ilsa The Cat here wants me to take on Analie, jet to jet.”
Heart Strike Page 29