Major Dave Gretsch ordered the pilots to form up in line abreast, just over the runway, blocking the plane’s way. But the jet kept coming.
One of the choppers was a Direct Action Penetrator model, armed with a Gatling gun. Gretsch ordered it to fire a warning burst over the plane. It had no effect. Now the gap between the plane and the choppers was closing at over two hundred feet per second.
“Shoot to kill!” Gretsch commanded.
The Gatling’s rotating barrels spewed an unrelenting hail of bullets at the onrushing machine, but it hurtled onward, taking on the helicopters in an airborne game of chicken as its nose lifted up off the ground and arrowed toward the night sky.
“Break! Break!” screamed the pilot in the command helicopter, and the three choppers threw themselves sideways, scattering before the roaring plane, not like predatory black hawks, but panic-stricken, fat gray pigeons, their rotors clawing for purchase in air torn asunder by the jet engines’ wake.
The bomb-disposal team was hurled from side to side and buffeted up and down before the pilot was able to regain control.
One of the men shouted, “What the hell was that?”
Kady Jones was still trying to stop her stomach from turning cartwheels.
“I guess that was our bomb,” she gasped. “And I think it was saying good-bye.”
99
Carver waited until the engines had been turned off, and there was nothing to hear but the rushing of the air outside and the passengers screaming in fear or calling out to their God. The plane was descending fast and it was going to keep going down until it hit the rocky, mountainous earth of northeastern Macedonia. There would be no airstrip to welcome them, no miracle landing. They all knew that. And yet the people around him still strapped themselves into their seats as the pilot instructed, and when the first soft tendrils of smoke wormed their way into the compartment, they reached for the oxygen masks.
As if any of that would make the slightest difference in the end.
Carver had been placed on one end of a three-seat divan that ran along the wall, toward the rear of the cabin. Alix was next to him, Vermulen at the far end. Two of McCabe’s men sat opposite them. The third was guarding his boss and keeping an eye on Francesco Riva. They were up front, in club seats the size of armchairs.
For the first few minutes of the flight, the goons in suits had sat there, pointing their guns at the trio on the divan, scowls on their faces, trying to look mean and intimidating. But any threat they posed had evaporated the moment the pilot announced that they had a problem. Then they just became two terrified passengers in a metal tube dropping out of the sky, each of them thinking about nothing but himself.
It was Carver’s hand that Alix reached for.
“Don’t worry,” he said, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “This isn’t over.”
He helped put her mask on.
“Deep breaths,” he told her. “Get plenty of oxygen into your blood.”
Carver could see Vermulen, looking past Alix at him.
“Who are you?” the general asked, shaking his head in bemusement, as if he were trying to work out how his judgment of people could have gone so wrong. He reached out to Alix, got no response, and sank back into his seat, lost in his own disillusionment.
Carver had no interest in Vermulen’s problems. He was more interested in McCabe, who was staring at a control unit in his hand. Carver saw a grin flicker over the old man’s face as he pressed the switch. Had he just armed the bomb in one last shot at Armageddon? Carver held a mask to his face, his breathing strong and steady, as he now looked across the cabin, through the steadily thickening smoke, toward the two men on the far side. One of them was having problems with his oxygen supply, yanking on his mask, trying to get his partner’s attention. But the other guy was having none of it. He was keeping all his fresh air for himself, one hand on his mask, the other-holding his gun-hanging loosely beside him.
The men were lost in their own dying world. They didn’t even notice Carver as he rose from his seat, crossed the aisle with a single stride, wrenched the gun from the limp, dangling hand, and smashed it twice-backhand, forehand-against the pair of naked pink scalps. One of the two slumped forward, unconscious. The other groaned and turned unfocused eyes in Carver’s direction. Carver hit him again, knocking him cold.
He turned back to the divan, now barely visible, even a couple of feet away, reached for his mask, grabbed Alix’s hand, and gave it a sharp tug. She got the message, unclipped her belt, and got to her feet. Carver could see a dark shadow that must be Vermulen looming beyond her. He lashed out with the handle of the gun, felt it hit something, he wasn’t sure what, and the shadow collapsed back toward the chair. Carver gave another pull on Alix’s hand, leading her back to the very rear of the cabin.
As they staggered through the acrid fumes, Carver felt the tremors running through Alix’s body, She was beginning to choke. He was coughing, too, his eyes watering, his nose and throat burning.
Three paces took him to the lavatory door, and then he was gulping down oxygen from the mask dangling over the toilet bowl.
Carver handed the mask over to Alix, pausing for a second to make sure she could still hold it steady over her mouth and nose. Then he left the lavatory and stood by the bulkhead that divided the passenger compartment from the bomb bay, desperately turning the wheel that opened the hatch. There was an audible click as the lock disengaged and a moment of truth as the door was flung open and a blast of thin, freezing air roared into the cabin, instantly condensing all the moisture in the atmosphere and turning it into an impenetrable fog.
The aircraft’s dive became even deeper and the fuselage swayed one way and the other, like the weight at the end of a pendulum, as the pilots struggled to maintain control.
Carver reached out and grabbed Alix, dragging her after him as he squeezed through the cramped, steel-ringed hatch, both of them banging heads, shins, and elbows, almost forcing exclamations of pain and wasting precious oxygen. Agonizing seconds stretched by as the hatch was closed and locked again to slow down anyone else who realized that their only hope lay in the bomb bay.
Now Carver was kneeling, hands reaching out through the freezing, poisonous fog, fingers stretching, searching, because there had to be a way of opening the doors manually, a fail-safe in case the electrical control in the cockpit didn’t work. And there it was, a handle, on top of a metal rod, waiting to be pumped up and down. Desperately he set to work.
For a moment, the doors remained shut. Carver pumped the lever two or three more times steadily, then frantically again and again as he felt his lungs begin to burn, eyes flare and then water, his muscles giving way.
Then doors were opening, letting in a gale that drove the smog from the bomb bay; air that was bitterly cold, but rich and clean enough to breathe in desperate inhalations between hacking, retching coughs. But the pumping never stopped, up and down, pain shooting through arms, shoulders, and back with every motion of the handle, until the bay doors were wide open and the earth was dimly visible down below.
Above it sat the bomb, a drab brown case, crudely strapped to a parachute, cradled in its metal frame. A lever on the frame disengaged the bomb from the cradle-just as well that those blind, grasping hands had clutched the pump handle first.
Carver’s eyes darted around the bay, settling on bungee cords looped around hooks on the wall, there to secure the legitimate cargo that the engineers who adapted the aircraft naïvely assumed would be in the plane. He grabbed a cord and looped one end around one of the straps that linked the bomb and parachute, knotting it tight. Then he held Alix close to him, her arms wrapped around his waist. She gave him a little squeeze back as he passed the cord around them in a figure eight, before tying that off, too, forming an umbilical link with the bomb.