As the wings reached an altitude of less than fifteen feet, the ground effect began aiding him in his task; the dropping plane started to fly, and Court pulled the yoke back, tensing his body for impact but praying he could keep the plane in the air.
They leveled off when the wheels were less than three feet from the ground. The propeller kicked fresh snowfall around the Cherokee in a violent swirl; Court struggled to see and to keep his wings level while another nine-millimeter round popped the fuselage behind Gentry and more rounds streaked by the windscreen.
But they were flying now, they hadn’t slammed into the terrain, and now Court knew he just had to get the fuck out of the kill zone as fast as possible.
The little plane shot over the gravel road at a height of ten feet; Court banked to the west and climbed, flying at one hundred knots now and accelerating. He pulled a sweat-covered hand off the yoke and flipped on all the cabin lights, scanning the instruments to check for any obvious damage from the gunfire.
While doing this he said, “Are you hit?”
Ruth replied slowly, “I don’t think so. No.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said in a laugh as relief washed over her. She looked around her; out the broken window to her right the Baltic Sea was a vast blackness with only a few pinpricks of light. Ships in the distance.
They banked to port as they climbed, and as they did this Court finished his scan of all the dials in the cockpit, finding no evidence that the little plane had taken hits to its fuel lines or other critical points.
“Are we okay?” she asked him.
“Seem to be.”
“Where are we going, exactly?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted as they climbed and banked. “Let me think a minute.”
John Beaumont spit in the snow in front of him. He’d emptied his Uzi at the departing aircraft, but the little nine-millimeter submachine gun was hardly a suitable surface-to-air weapon.
His men converged on him quickly in the parking lot, and the vans raced forward from the runway to pick the men up.
“Where do you think he’s heading?” It was Jumper Five asking.
“Haven’t you read that motherfucker’s file? Look at a map. He’s going to Hamburg. We need ourselves a helo.”
“Why is he going to Hamburg?”
“It’s close and it’s congested and he can hop a train or a bus there. He can’t fly all the way to Brussels. He’s going to have to land it within a half hour or he’ll have the entire Luftwaffe tailing him.”
Beaumont nodded to himself. “We’ll kill his ass in Hamburg.”
FORTY-NINE
Court and Ruth flew south over the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, keeping their altitude below one thousand feet and ignoring the radio, but eyeing the sky in front of them, nervously scanning for any aircraft in their way.
Ruth had taped over the bullet holes in the window with a roll of duct tape she found in the cabin, but she had not spoken since shortly after takeoff. The terror of the last few minutes had taken a toll. In all her ops in the Mossad Collections Department she’d never herself been this close to danger, from both the armed men on her tail and the unconventional aviation tactics of her pilot.
The events also caused her to second-guess her decision to push forward and hunt Whitlock without backing from Tel Aviv. Lashing her wagon to a wanted man like Gentry and pursuing a dangerous individual like Whitlock, all without support from the Mossad, had been an impulsive decision, perhaps brought on by her need to rectify a situation that seemed to be spiraling out of control as long as she was playing by the rules.
She shook herself back into the here and now and steeled herself to see this through. She was convinced the prime minister would not survive if she stayed within the lines drawn by her organization.
“Have you figured out where we are going?” As she asked the question she realized how helpless she was in this situation. As a predator, she was in her element, but as prey, she was leaving everything up to Gentry, the expert.
“Hamburg,” he said confidently, “or at least most of the way there.”
“Why?”
“Right now I’m only certain of one thing. I’m going to need a gun in Brussels.”
“And you can get one in Hamburg?”
“Used to be able to. Hope I still can.”
“How soon till they come after us?”
“Townsend? Shit, they’ll probably beat us there. Nothing we can do about it. They can get a helo and fly right into the city. We’ll have to take a less efficient approach.”
Court added, “But Townsend isn’t our problem right now. It’s the Germans. They will get air after us quickly, probably police choppers, which we can outrun, but the German Luftwaffe will scramble something before long. I want us to be on the ground long before there is a major response.”
“‘On the ground’ sounds a little vague.”
“We’re going to have to land on a stretch of road or a field somewhere. It would be nice to find something with lights. This part of Germany is flat, so we don’t have to worry about the terrain too much, as long as I can see it.”
“Please stop making it so obvious you are an inexperienced pilot.”
Court laughed at that but then quickly refocused. He said, “We’ll split up in Hamburg. You’ll go directly to Brussels. I’ll acquire a weapon and meet you there by morning. When I get there I’ll contact Dead Eye and see if I can pinpoint his location.”
“Dead Eye?”
“Yeah. That’s Whitlock’s agency code name.”
“Will you really come to Brussels?”
He nodded. “I’ll come.”
Ruth stared at him, his impassive face glowing red from the cabin lights. She asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Have you forgotten? You said you would frame me if I didn’t.”
She shook her head. “I know I threatened to sic Metsada on you, but I don’t believe that is the only reason. You could run from this and disappear. Like you always do.”
Court hesitated, glanced at her. She was surprised to see a sudden vulnerability in his regular stoic expression. “Yesterday Dead Eye said some things. Things about where he and I came from. Things I hope aren’t true, but things, I suspect, are true.”
“What things?”
The drone of the Cherokee’s engine filled the cabin with a low persistent hum.
“I guess in the back of my mind I always knew I was damaged goods.”
“What does that mean?”
“Never mind. I need to see this thing with Whitlock and Kalb all the way to the end to prove to myself he was wrong about me. There’s right and there’s wrong. Sometimes I teeter on the edge, like I could fall off in either direction. So I fight it. I fight against falling off on the wrong side, by doing right whenever I can. It doesn’t make me pure. It just… it’s just better than the alternative.”
Ruth said, “What you do. What they made you. This does not have to be what you are.”
Court smiled a little. “That sounds all well and good, but the truth is, you don’t want me to stop. You want me to go after Russ Whitlock, and you want me to kill him.”
She sighed wearily. “I do. I am using you just like they used you.” She looked out the window. “I guess I’m no better.”
Court said, “Why don’t we worry about the next twenty-four hours for now, and then deal with whatever comes after, after?”
“Deal.”
They landed fifteen minutes later on a road in the middle of a lighted golf course near the village of Jersbek. Court and Ruth pushed the airplane off the road and down into a gully and began walking through the little town. By ten P.M. they were on a bus that would take them into the huge metropolis of Hamburg.