“Get up,” Hudson shouted, trying to haul him up.
“I… can’t,” Tarasov said.
“I’ll help you,” he said, lifting. “You just have to—”
As he pulled Tarasov to his feet another shot cracked, and the man sprawled to the ground face-first.
Hudson ducked behind the stairs and shouted toward the aircraft’s open doors.
“Charlie!”
No response.
“Charlie! What’s the word?”
“We’re ready to go!” a voice yelled back.
Hudson heard the last of the engines winding up. He grabbed Tarasov and rolled him over. The man’s body was limp like a rag doll’s. The final shot had gone through his neck. His eyes stared lifelessly up and back.
“Damn,” Hudson said.
Half the mission was blown, but they still had the steel trunks and whatever was in them. Even though the CIA was a secret organization, they had offices and an address. If he had to, Hudson would go find them and bang on the front door until someone took him in and paid him.
He turned and fired toward the terminal again. And in that moment he noticed the lights from a pair of cars racing toward him from the far end of the ramp. He didn’t figure they were cavalry.
He dashed up the stairs and dove through the door as a bullet ricocheted off the Connie’s smooth skin.
“Go!” he shouted.
“What about our passenger?”
“Too late for him.”
As the copilot shoved the throttles forward Hudson slammed the door shut, wrenching the handle down just as the plane began to move. Over the droning sound of the engines he heard the crackle of glass breaking.
He turned to see Charlie Simpkins slumped over toward the center console, his seat belt holding him up.
“Charlie?”
The plane was on the move as Hudson ran forward. He dove into the cockpit as another shot hit and then another.
Staying on the floor, he reached up and slammed the throttles forward. As the engines roared he scrambled under the pilot’s seat and pushed hard on the right rudder. The big plane began to pick up momentum, moving ponderously but gathering speed and turning.
Another rifle shot hit the sheet metal behind him and then two more. Hudson guessed he had turned far enough that the aircraft was pointing away from the terminal now. He climbed up into his seat and turned the plane out onto the runway.
At this point he had to go. There was nowhere safe back on that ramp. The plane was pointed in the right direction, and Hudson wasn’t waiting for any clearance. He pushed the throttles to the firewall, and the big plane began to accelerate.
For a second or two he heard bullets punching holes in the aircraft’s skin, but he soon was out of range, roaring down the runway and closing in on rotational velocity.
With the visibility as bad as it was and the shattered window on the left side, Hudson strained to see the red lights at the far end of the runway. They were coming up fast.
He popped the flaps down five degrees and waited until he was a hundred yards from the end of the asphalt before pulling back on the yoke. The Connie tilted its nose up, hesitated for a long, sickening second, and then leapt off the end of the runway, wheels whipping through the tall grass beyond the tarmac.
Climbing and turning to a westbound heading, Hudson raised the landing gear and then reached over to his copilot.
“Charlie?” he said, shaking him. “Charlie!”
Simpkins gave no reaction. Hudson checked for a pulse but didn’t find one.
“Damn it,” Hudson said to himself.
Another casualty. During the war a half a decade back, Hudson had lost too many friends to count, but there was always a reason for it. Here, he wasn’t sure. Whatever was in those cases had better be worth the lives of two men.
He pushed Simpkins back up into his seat and concentrated on flying. The crosswind was bad, the turbulence worse, and gazing into a wall of dark gray mist as he climbed through the clouds was disorienting and dangerous.
With no horizon or anything thing else to judge the plane’s orientation visually, the body’s sensations could not be trusted. Many a pilot had flown his plane right into the ground in conditions like these. All the while thinking he was flying straight and level.
Many more had taken perfectly level planes and stalled and spun them because their bodies told them they were turning and falling. It was like being drunk and feeling the bed spin; you knew it wasn’t happening, but you couldn’t stop the sensation.
To avoid it, Hudson kept his eyes down, scanning the instruments and making sure the plane’s wings stayed level. He kept the climb to a safe five-degree angle.
At two thousand feet and three miles out, the weather got worse. Turbulence shook the plane, violent up-and downdrafts threatening to rip it apart. Rain lashed the windshield and metal around him. The hundred-fifty-mile-an-hour slipstream kept most of it from pouring in through the shattered corner window, but some of the moisture sprayed around the cockpit, and the constant noise was like a freight train passing at full speed.
With the bullet holes and the broken window, Hudson couldn’t pressurize the plane, but he could still climb to fourteen thousand feet or more without it becoming too cold to function. He reached behind his seat and touched a green bottle filled with pure oxygen; he would need that up higher.
Another wave of turbulence rocked the plane, but with the gear up and all four engines going Hudson figured he could power through the storm and out the other side.
The Constellation was one of the most advanced aircraft of the day. Designed by Lockheed with help from world-famous aviator Howard Hughes, it could cruise at 350 knots and travel three thousand miles without refueling. Had they picked Tarasov up a little farther west, Hudson would have gone for Newfoundland or Boston without stopping.
He turned to check his heading. He was crabbing to the north more than he intended. He went to correct the turn and felt a spell of dizziness. He leveled off, just as a warning light came on.
The generator in the number 1 engine was going, and the engine was running extremely rough. A moment later the number 2 engine began to cut out, and the main electrical warning light came on.
Hudson tried to concentrate. He felt light-headed and groggy as if he’d been drugged. He grabbed his shoulder where the bullet had hit him. The wound was painful, but he couldn’t tell how much blood he was losing.
On the instrument panel in front of him, the artificial horizon — an instrument pilots use to keep wings level when they can’t see outside — was tumbling. Beside it the directional gyro was tumbling.
Somehow the aircraft was failing simultaneously with Hudson’s own body.
Hudson looked up at the old compass, the ancient instrument that was the pilot’s last resort should everything mechanical go wrong. It showed him in a hard left turn. He tried to level off, but he banked too far in the other direction. The stall horn sounded because his airspeed had dropped, and an instant later the warning lights lit up all over his instrument panel. Just about everything that could flash was flashing. The stall horn blared in his ear. The gear warning sounded.
Lightning flared close enough to blind him, and he wondered if it had hit the plane.
He grabbed the radio, switched to a shortwave band the CIA had given him, and began to broadcast.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” he said. “This is—”
The plane jerked to the right and then the left. The lightning snapped again, a million-volt spark going off right in front of his eyes. He felt a shock through the radio and dropped the microphone like a hot potato. It swung beneath the panel on its cord.
Hudson reached for the microphone. He missed. He leaned farther forward and tried again, stretching, and then grasping it with his fingertips. He pulled it back ready to broadcast again.