“She’s just a hair heavy. That’s good.” Vickers liked the blimp to take off heavy; fuel consumption would lighten it later.
“Where are the Cokes? Have we got the Cokes?” Simmons said. He thought they would be airborne for at least three hours, possibly longer. “Yeah, here they are.”
“Take it, Simmons,” Lander said.
“Okay.” Simmons slid into the single pilot’s seat on the left side of the gondola. He waved through the windshield. The crewmen at the mooring mast tripped the release, and eight men on the nose ropes pulled the blimp around. “Here we go.” Simmons rolled back the elevator wheel, pushed in the throttles, and the great airship rose at a steep angle.
Lander leaned back in the passenger seat beside the pilot. The flight to the stadium, with the tailwind, took nine and a half minutes. Lander figured that, wide open, it could be done in a shade over seven minutes, if the wind held.
Beneath them, a solid stream of traffic jammed the expressway near the Tulane exit.
“Some of those people are gonna miss the kickoff,” Simmons said.
“Yeah, I expect so,” Lander said. They would all miss half time, he thought. It was one ten p.m. He had almost an hour to wait.
Dahlia Iyad got out of the taxi near the Galvez Street wharf and walked quickly down the block toward the garage. The bomb was there, or it was not. The police were waiting or they were not. She had not noticed before how cracked and tilted the sidewalk was. She looked at the cracks as she walked along. A group of small children were playing stickball in the street. The batter, no more than three and a half feet tall, whistled at her as she went by.
A police car made the players scatter and passed Dahlia at fifteen miles an hour. She turned her face away from it as though she were looking for an address. The squad car turned at the next corner. She fished in her purse for the keys and walked up the alley to the garage. Here were the locks. She opened them and slipped inside, closing the door behind her. It was semidark in the garage. A few shafts of sunshine came in through nailholes in the walls. The truck appeared undisturbed.
She climbed into the back and switched on the dim light. There was a thin film of dust on the nacelle. It was all right. If the place were staked out, they would never have let her get to the bomb. She changed into a pair of coveralls marked with the initials of the television network and stripped the vinyl panels off the sides of the truck, revealing the network emblem in bright colors.
She found the checklist taped to the nacelle. She read it over quickly. First the detonators. She removed them from their packing and, reaching into the middle of the nacelle, she slid them into place, one in the exact center of each side of the charge. The wires from the detonators plugged into the wiring harness with its lead-in to the airship’s power supply. Now the fuse and its detonator were plugged into place.
She cut all the rope lashings except two. Check the bag for Lander. One .38 caliber revolver with silencer, one pair of cable cutters, both in a paper sack. Her Schmeisser machine pistol with six extra clips and an AK-47 automatic rifle with dips were in a duffle bag.
Getting out, she laid the Schmeisser on the floor of the truck cab and covered it with a blanket. There was dust on the truck seat. She took a handkerchief from her purse and wiped it carefully. She tucked her hair into a Big Apple cap.
One fifty. Time to go. She swung open the garage doors and drove outside, blinking in the sunshine, and left the truck idling as she closed the garage doors.
Driving toward the airport, she had an odd, happy feeling of falling, falling.
Kabakov watched from the command post at the stadium as the river of people poured in through the southeast gate. They were so well dressed and well fed, unaware of the trouble they were causing him.
There was some grumbling when lines formed at the metal detectors, and louder complaints when now and then a fan was asked to dump the contents of his pockets in a plastic dishpan. Standing with Kabakov were the members of the east side trouble squad, ten men in flak jackets, heavily armed. He walked outside, away from the crackle of radios, and watched the stadium fill up. Already the bands were thumping away, the music becoming less distorted as more and more bodies baffled the echoes off the stands. By one forty-five most of the spectators were in their seats. The roadblocks closed.
Eight hundred feet above the stadium, the TV crew in the blimp was conferring by radio with the director in the big television van parked behind the stands. The “NBS Sports Spectacular” was to open with a shot of the stadium from the blimp, with the network logo and the title superimposed on it. In the van, facing twelve television screens, the director was not satisfied.
“Hey, Simmons,” the cameraman said, “now he wants it from the other end, the north end with Tulane in the background, can you do that?”
“You bet.” The blimp wheeled majestically northward.
“Okay, that’s good, that’s good.” The cameraman had it nicely framed, the bright green field, solidly banked with eighty-four thousand people, the stadium wreathed with flags that snapped in the wind.
Lander could see the police helicopter darting like a drag onfly around the perimeter of the stadium.
“Tower to Nora One Zero.”
Simmons picked up the microphone. “Nora One Zero, go ahead.”
“Traffic in your area one mile northwest and approaching,” the air controller said. “Give him plenty of room.”
“Roger. I see him. Nora One Zero out.”
Simmons pointed and Lander saw a military helicopter approaching at six hundred feet. “It’s the prez. Take off your hat,” Simmons said. He wheeled the airship away from the north end of the stadium.
Lander watched as the landing marker was deployed on the track.
“They want a shot of the arrival,” the cameraman’s assistant said. “Can you get us broadside to him?”
“That’s fine,” the cameraman said. Through his long lens, eighty-six million people saw the president’s helicopter touch down. The president stepped out and walked quickly into the stadium and out of sight.
In the TV van, the director snapped, “Take two.” Across the country and around the world, the audience saw the president striding along the sideline to his box.
Looking down, Lander could see him again now, a husky blond figure in a knot of men, his arms raised to the crowd and the crowd rising to their feet in a wave as he passed.
Kabakov heard the roar that greeted the president. He had never seen the man, and he was curious. He restrained the impulse to go and look at him. His place was here, near the command post, where he would be instantly alerted to trouble.
“I’ll take it, Simmons. You watch the kickoff,” Lander said. They switched places. Lander was tired already, and the elevator wheel seemed heavy under his hand.
On the field, they were “reenacting the toss” for the benefit of the television audience. Now the teams were lined up for the kickoff.
Lander glanced at Simmons. His head was out the side window. Lander reached forward and pushed the fuel mixture lever for the port engine. He made the mixture just lean enough to make the engine overheat.
In minutes the temperature gauge was well into the red. Lander eased the fuel mixture back to normal. “Gentlemen, we’ve got a little problem.” Lander had Simmons’s instant attention. He tapped the temperature gauge.
“Now what the hell!” Simmons said. He climbed across the gondola and peered at the port engine over the shoulders of the TV crew. “She’s not streaming any oil.”
“What?” the cameraman said.
“Port engine’s hot. Let me get past you here.” He reached into the rear compartment and brought out a fire extinguisher.