She thrust the gun up against his temple. ‘Move,’ she hissed, ‘to the front of the plane.’
Shabanov was about to take a step forward when the lights in the roof went out. He knew what was happening. The next moment he was on the ground, his hands clamped over his ears, his eyes screwed shut. A split-second later the two doors over the wings, about four rows forward from him, blew into the airliner. Even though his eyes were shut, he saw the intensity of the flashes through his eyelids.
Shabanov looked up to see a figure clad in black, clutching a machine-gun/flashlight combination, his outline faintly illuminated by the sidelobes from the torch beam.
‘Everybody stay down, stay down,’ the figure shouted, voice muffled by the gas mask.
Layla was still standing in the aisle. Shabanov saw a look, like that of a frightened animal caught in a car’s headlights, etched on her face. The Heckler and Koch jumped twice in the hands of the assault commando and she fell to the ground, a deep red stain over her T-shirt.
Behind the lead commando, a second figure fired two shots into the prostrate body of Mahmoud, who had been knocked off his feet by one of the doors.
The first commando probed the smoke with the beam of his flashlight and fired twice again. That took care of the stick insect behind him.
There was another explosion at the front of the aircraft, the flash and blast catching Shabanov unawares. When his vision and hearing returned, the man with the grenade lay sprawled on the floor by the forward toilet. The commando who shot him kicked the grenade from his hand out into the dawn air through the still smoking doorway.
The man behind him tried to move. His wife began screaming.
‘Keep down,’ a remote voice shouted.
The black figures roamed up and down the aisle, the light from their torches stitching across the seats and the startled faces of the passengers.
‘Everybody make their way to the escape chutes,’ a muffled voice said. It was calm, but authoritative.
Shabanov got to his feet and helped the woman in the row behind to hers. He ushered her to the nearest exit, picked her up and threw her on to the chute, which had already been fully deployed from the fuselage to the ground. Then he jumped himself.
He ran across the tarmac to the minibus, which had not moved from its position at the outset of the incident, and rapped on the door. There was a brief pause, some muffled sounds from within, then it slid back on its rails.
Shabanov found himself staring into the face of a USAF officer.
‘How long?’ the Russian asked him.
Colonel Elliot Ulm, commander of the USAF’s 1725th Combat Control Detachment, better known as the Pathfinders, looked again at the stop-watch. ‘One minute thirty-five seconds from the moment the doors blew to your knock.’
‘Congratulations, Colonel,’ Shabanov said. ‘That’s quick.’
Ulm jumped down onto the tarmac. ‘Thanks.’
He looked over to the airliner, an old Boeing 727 the unit had managed to scrounge off one of the airlines for next to nothing. It was in the airlines’ interest for the Pathfinders to get it right. One day soon it would be for real. The Gulf War had shown what terrorism, or even the threat of it, could do to revenue.
The last of the eighty-two passengers was coming down the rear exit chute. This time, they had lost only one. Only wasn’t good enough. But it was doubtful if there was any way they could have avoided it. The officer from PsyOps had warned him of Mahmoud’s instability, but until they received political clearance, there was no way of going in. The go-ahead came, as was so often the case in real hijackings, only after the shooting had started.
Still, Ulm thought. They were getting better. Not as good as the Soviets in all-round terms, maybe, but they were improving.
Ulm turned to face Shabanov. ‘Did you survive your ordeal, Colonel?’
‘More than that, I enjoyed it,’ the Russian said.
‘Hardly a term I would have used.’
Ulm couldn’t make the guy out, even after several weeks of exchange visits between their two units. Shabanov was engaging, beguiling almost, but still one of the hardest bastards he had ever come across in almost twenty years of the SOF business. Maybe he’d get that officer from PsyOps to have a look inside the Russian’s head.
Ulm took the evening air deep into his lungs. A light wind had sprung up with the setting sun, scattering the tumbleweed across the New Mexico desert and over the crumbling concrete of the runway. The 727 was flanked a little way off by the disintegrating carcasses of combat aircraft. The sun found a single piece of shiny metal on an old F-106 and reflected it in Ulm’s face. The special forces colonel let the light dance in his eyes for a moment. The pinprick of warmth on his skin felt good, but it could not compensate for his malaise.
An old boneyard, a scrap metal dump — the epitome of his worth in the eyes of the Pentagon. The Red Rio Range, part of the White Sands reservation in New Mexico, was a weapons training area for A-10 ground-attack aircraft. The dilapidated combat aircraft on the disused runway gave them something to aim at. Ulm’s unit, based at nearby Kirtland Air Force Base, shared the Red Rio training ground with rusting relics of the Vietnam era.
He wondered if Shabanov had any idea to what extent the Romeo Protocol was a sham.
A black-suited figure loomed out of the gathering darkness. Master Sergeant Nolan Jones pulled the mask and Balaclava from his head. Jones was from the Everglades, scalp and gristle above the neck line, muscle from collar to feet.
‘All passengers present and accounted for, Colonel. Four terrorists dead. Aircraft safe from explosives.’ He smiled at his commander, exposing a row of chipped, stubby teeth. ‘We took the mother down, sir.’
Ulm congratulated him. ‘See you at the debrief in a half hour, Spades.’
Shabanov watched Jones amble back to the team’s minibus, which had drawn up under the wing of the 727. ‘Spades?’ he said.
Ulm had almost forgotten about his guest.
‘During his selection test, Jones listed axe-throwing as a special skill. They encourage individual talents in the special forces, so they put him to the test. During his trial they discovered he could slice a melon into halves with a trench spade at twenty yards. We look for people like that in the Pathfinders.’
‘I see,’ Shabanov said. ‘There is a master sergeant in my unit, Starshina Bitov, that I would like him to meet. They would be quite a team.’
Beyond Ulm’s shoulder, Layla appeared at the doorway of the aircraft. The wet stain on her T-shirt accentuated the shape of a perfect left breast.
Ulm caught the direction of Shabanov’s stare. ‘Normally we would put a couple of shots straight between the eyes,’ he said. ‘These training sessions are meant to sacrifice nothing for realism, only those dye-filled capsules we use can blind if they hit you in the eyes. So in training we go for the heart.’
Shabanov followed Layla’s progress across the weeds and the concrete. ‘And where do you find your terrorists?’
‘Layla’s an air force captain,’ Ulm said. ‘Second-generation American. Her grandparents were Lebanese. The others are all seconded from various branches of the armed forces. They’ll go back to their units tonight.’
As she strolled past, Layla gave Shabanov a smouldering look. Then she smiled warmly. He flexed his fingers behind his back and returned her grin. Another time, perhaps.
‘In the Soviet Union we have many ethnic minorities. I myself am descended from the tribesmen of Uzbekistan in Soviet Central Asia. With so many republics, it is hardly surprising that our recruit come from different cultures and backgrounds. But I had no idea the make-up of the American services was so… diverse.’