“Unknown persons shooting from the Aldrich blimp, the radio said. ”Two officers down. Ground crew advises a device is attached to the aircraft.”
“They got the blimp!” Corley said, pounding the seat beside him. “That’s your other pilot.” They could see the airship over the skyline now, growing larger by the second. Corley was on the radio to the stadium. “Get the president out!” he was yelling.
Kabakov fought the rage and frustration, the shock, the impossibility of it. He was caught, helpless, on the expressway between the stadium and the airport. He must think, must think, must think. They were passing the Superdome now. Then he was shaking Corley’s shoulder. “Jackson,” Kabakov said. “Lamar Jackson. The chopper. Drive this son of a bitch.”
They were past the exit ramp, and Corley turned across three lanes of traffic, tires smoking, and shot the wrong way down the entrance ramp, a car was coming, big in their faces, swerving over, a rocking sideswipe and they were down into Howard Avenue beside the Superdome. A screaming turn around the huge building and they slammed to a stop. Kabakov ran to the pad, startling the stakeout team still on duty.
Jackson was descending from the roof to pick up a bundle of conduit. Kabakov ran to the loadmaster, a man he did not know.
“Get him down. Get him down.”
The blimp was almost even with the Superdome now, moving fast just out of range. It was two miles from the packed stadium.
Corley came from the car. He had left the trunk open. He was carrying an M-16 automatic rifle.
The chopper settled down, Kabakov ducking as he ran in under the rotor. He scrambled up to the cockpit window. Jackson put his hand behind his ear.
“They got the Aldrich blimp,” Kabakov was pointing upward. “We’ve got to go up. We’ve got to go up.”
Jackson looked up at the blimp. He swallowed. There was a strange, set expression in his face. “Are you hijacking me?”
“I’m asking you. Please.”
Jackson dosed his eyes for a second. “Get in. Get the belly man out. I won’t be responsible for him.”
Kabakov and Corley pulled out the startled belly man and climbed inside the cargo bay. The helicopter leaped into the air with a great blatting of its blades. Kabakov went forward and pushed up the empty copilot’s seat.
“We can—”
“Listen,” Jackson said. “Are you gonna bust ‘em or talk to them.”
“Bust ‘em.”
“All right. If we can catch them, I’ll come in above them. They can’t see above them in that thing. You gonna shoot the gas bag? No time for it to leak much.”
Kabakov shook his head. “They might set it off on the way down. We’ll try to knock out the gondola.”
Jackson nodded. “I’ll come in above them. When you’re ready, I’ll drop down beside them. This thing won’t take a lot of hits and fly. You be ready. Talk to me on the headset.”
The helicopter was doing 110 knots, gaining fast, but the blimp had a big lead. It would be very close.
“If we knock out the pilot, the wind will still carry it over the stadium,” Jackson said.
“What about the hook? Could we hold him with the hook, pull him somewhere?”
“How could we hook on? The damn thing is slick. We can try if there’s time—hey, there go the cops.”
Ahead of them they could see the police helicopter rising to meet the blimp.
“Not from below,” Jackson was yelling. “Don’t get close—” Even as he spoke the little police helicopter staggered under a blast of gunfire and fell off to the side, its rotor flailing wildly, and plunged downward.
Jackson could see the movements of the airship’s rudder as the great fin passed under him. He was over the blimp and the stadium was sliding beneath them. Time for one pass. Kabakov and Corley braced themselves in the fuselage door.
Lander felt the rotor blast on the blimp’s skin, heard the helicopter engine. He touched Dahlia and jerked his thumb upward. “Get me ten more seconds,” he said.
She put a fresh clip in the Schmeisser.
Jackson’s voice in Kabakov’s earphones: “Hang on.”
The helicopter dropped in a stomach-lifting swoop down the blimp’s right side. Kabakov heard the first bullets hit the belly of the helicopter and then he and Corley were firing, hot shell casings spattering from the automatic weapons, glass flying from the gondola. Metal was ringing all around Kabakov. The helicopter lurched and rose. Corley was hit, blood spreading on his trousers at the thigh.
Jackson, his forehead slashed by the glass in his riddled cockpit, mopped away the blood that had poured into his eyes.
All the windows were out of the gondola and the instrument panel was shattered, sparks flying. Dahlia lay on the floor; she did not move.
Lander, hit in the shoulder and the leg, saw the blimp losing altitude. The airship was sinking, but they could still clear the stadium wall. It was coming, it was under him, and a floor of faces was looking up. He had his hand on the firing switch. Now. He flipped the switch. Nothing. The backup switch. Nothing. The circuits were blasted away. The fuse. He dragged himself out of the pilot’s seat, his lighter in his hand, and used his good arm and leg to crawl toward the fuse at the rear of the gondola, as the blimp drifted between the solid banks of people.
The hook trailed beneath the helicopter on a thirty-foot cable. Jackson dropped until the hook slipped over the blimp’s slick skin. The only opening was the space between the rudder and the fin beneath the rudder hinge. Kabakov was coaching Jackson, and they got it close, dose, but the hook was too thick.
They were stampeding in the stadium. Kabakov looked around him desperately and he saw, coiled in a clip on the wall, a length of three-quarter-inch nylon rope with a snap shackle in each end. In the half second he stared at it, he knew with an awful certainty what he had to do.
From the ground, Moshevsky watched, his eyes bulging, fists clenched as the figure appeared, sliding spiderlike down the cable beneath the helicopter. He snatched the field glasses from an agent beside him, but he knew before he looked. It was Kabakov. He could see the rotor blast tearing at Kabakov as he slid down the greasy cable. A rope was tied around his waist. They were over Moshevsky now. Straining back to see, Moshevsky fell on his rear and never stopped watching.
Kabakov had his foot in the hook. Corley’s face was visible in the opening in the belly of the chopper. He was talking in the headset. The hook slid down, Kabakov was beside the fin, no! The fin was rising, swinging. It hit Kabakov and knocked him away, he was swinging back, passing the length of rope between the rudder and the fin, beneath the top rudder hinge, snapping it in a loop through the hook, one arm waving, and the helicopter strained upward, the cable hardening along Kabakov’s body like a steel bar.
Lander, crawling along the blood-slick floor of the gondola toward the fuse, felt the floor tilt sharply. He was sliding and scrabbled for a handhold on the floor.
The helicopter clawed the air. The tail of the blimp was up at fifty degrees now, the nose bumping against the football field. The spectators screaming, running, the exits jammed as they fought to get out. Lander could hear their cries all around him. He strained toward the fuse, lighter in hand.
The nose of the blimp dragged up the stands, the crowd scattering before it. It caught on the flagpoles at the top of the stadium, and lurched over, clear and moving over the houses toward the river, the helicopter’s engine screaming. Corley, looking down, could see Kabakov standing on the fin, holding on to the cable.
“We’ll make the river, we’ll make the river,” Jackson said over and over, as the temperature gauge climbed into the red. His thumb was poised over the red drop button.
Lander heaved himself the final foot up the slanting floor and thumbed his lighter.