He mentally shrugged. He had hit harder. Once, during a monsoon, the JAL flight he was on had landed in Tokyo hard enough to collapse the nose gear, sending a shower of sparks past the passengers' windows despite the wet pavement. Once, on a flight to Moscow, the vintage turboprop Russian plane upon which he had been traveling had landed safely but hit a refueling truck as it taxied to the gate, killing the driver and throwing to the floor half a dozen passengers in too much of a hurry who had unbuckled and left their seats. Bones had been broken on that one. And once, after he had alighted from a small Cessna at a remote field in Chetsnya, the little craft had taxied away toward the runway to depart, rolled over a land mine sixty meters away, and had been blown to pieces.
He had ceased to worry about such things long ago. If your number was up, then it was up. Until then, the old saw was true: Any landing you could walk away from was a good landing.
A little pub in the terminal had Rueben sandwiches on the menu, and he ordered one and a beer. The television set was on, a sports channel. Hideously ugly women, puffed up like human toads and stained dark brown, paraded back and forth on a stage, flexing their muscles. They looked like men in bikinis. Backstage, one of the women was interviewed, and when she spoke, her voice was deeper than an operatic bass singer's.
Amazing what people would do to themselves. Ruzhyo had once trained briefly with Russian Olympic track athletes, and he knew something of the chemicals they used to enhance their performances. The male steroids these women bodybuilders took left them with permanent changes in their bodies: deep voices, acne, hairy faces and bodies, and enlarged sexual organs. It was fine to pump up when one was twenty-five to stand on a stage, but what would these poor women look like at fifty or sixty? He shook his head. No eye for the future.
"Jesus, would you turn that shit off?" one of the other bar patrons said to the man behind the counter. Several of the other men raised their glasses in support. The counterman shrugged and changed the channel.
Ruzhyo ate his sandwich and drank his beer.
MI-6 had given Alex and Toni a fair-sized office with full access to their computer systems. Well, at least insofar as this particular problem went. Toni had come across plenty of off-limits files.
Alex was down the hall, conferring with Hamilton. Toni was alone in the office, cross-referencing airline computer data, when Angela Cooper tapped at the open door.
"Come in," Toni said.
"Sorry to bother you, Ms. Fiorella, but Alex wonders if you might join him and the director-general for a word?"
Alex? She was calling him Alex?
"Sure," Toni said. She logged out of the workstation. Cooper stood there waiting, smiling, but looking somehow impatient.
"This way, please."
Toni felt short and dumpy next to the blonde, who wore a dark green suit with the skirt hemmed a couple of inches too high above her knees, and sensible pumps with two-inch heels. She had good legs though, and maybe if Toni were tall and leggy, she'd showcase them, too, instead of wearing a plain blue silk blouse, jeans, and walking shoes. Well, she hadn't packed for work, had she? After the conference, at which she'd worn both suits she'd brought and then sent them to the cleaners, pretty much all she had in the way of clothes were casual things. It was supposed to be a vacation, wasn't it? But she'd call the cleaners and get her work clothes back. She wasn't going to let Ms. Cooper here make her look any worse than she had to look.
"Sorry about interrupting your vacation this way."
Toni pulled her thoughts away from clothes and back to the moment. "What? Oh, well, it's not your fault. We got to see a little of your country anyhow."
"Different than the States, isn't it?"
"You've been to the U.S.?"
"Oh, yes, of course. A few work trips. And I spent a summer at UCLA back when I was a student. Lovely climate, I got my first real tan there."
I bet you did. Toni imagined Cooper in a bikini. She would be striking. The line of men hitting on her would form quickly in the SoCal sunshine. She'd have to carry a stick to keep them off — unless she wanted the attention, and probably she did. She was the type.
"Alex says you are from the Bronx?"
Oh, did he? What was Alex doing telling her that? "Yes. I'm afraid New York isn't anything like California."
"I spent a week in Manhattan once, late in August. The heat and humidity were fairly awful."
"It's worse in July."
Ten paces went by without any more conversation. The silence was just getting awkward when Cooper said, "I understand that Alex is divorced and has a daughter. Have you met her — the daughter?"
Jesus, what was Alex doing, telling her stuff like this? And when had he had a chance to tell it? Next thing you knew, he'd be giving this woman pictures of him and Toni in bed together! She said, "No, I haven't met her. Talked to her on the com a few times. Seen pictures of her. She lives with her mother in Idaho."
"That's out West, isn't it?"
"Yes. Out West."
"Ah, well, here we are, then." She indicated the door with one hand.
"You aren't coming in?"
"Afraid not, other duties. I'll see you later."
Cooper turned and left, a hint of a sway in her hips as she walked.
The bitch.
Inside, Alex stood next to a table with Hamilton, both of them examining hardcopy photographs under a bright light. Alex looked up at her. He didn't smile. "Toni. Come check this out."
She moved to stand next to him. The pictures were spysat overflies of some kind of military installation, computer-augmented for color and dimension. There was what appeared to be a pair of ICBMs on railcar launchers at one end of the complex. "What am I looking at?"
Hamilton said, "This is the experimental rocket station in Xinghua, near the coast of the East China Sea. The Chinese have been developing a new long-range nuclear missile here." He tapped the ICBM in the photograph. "Last evening, a computer put two of the working prototypes on alert and began a ninety-minute countdown to launch. The missiles were aimed at Tokyo."
"Lord!" Toni said.
"Precisely. The computer was locked out, they were unable to shut it down. Fortunately, both warheads were dummies, and also fortunately, technicians were able to abort the launches manually. The Chinese, while not normally forthcoming about such things, are terrified. Someone bypassed their computer safeguards and codes and lit the fuses from outside. U.S. spysats that keep the station under observation saw the prelaunch movements, and the U.S. military scrambled stealth fighter-bombers from their base on the South Korean island of Cheju-do. If the Chinese missiles had lifted, the stealth jets would have tried to shoot them down, and they would very likely have bombed the station to prevent any further launches."
Toni stared at Alex. He looked grim.
"Even without the nuclear payload, a pair of rocks that big dropping into the middle of downtown Tokyo would have caused considerable damage," Alex said.
"And it's our airline hacker?" Toni said.
"Or somebody just like him. I can't believe there are two of them."
Toni shook her head.
"We've got to run this guy down, fast. And our best tracker, Jay, is out of commission."
"Never rains but it pours, eh?" Hamilton said.
Toni looked at the man, then back at Alex. Bad, this was definitely bad.
Tyrone had figured out that if he got to the soccer field immediately after his school shift ended, the field would be empty for forty minutes before the next shift arrived. Forty minutes was plenty of time to get ten or fifteen good throws in.