If no one spotted him running across the hangar with a gun in his hand…
If none of the three armed guards were alert enough to react to his attack…
If McCabe didn’t make it onto the plane and simply fly away alone…
If Darko didn’t object to him blowing away a valued client… And if Darko didn’t take this as the ideal opportunity to take McCabe’s money and his bomb…
Well, then, his plan might just work.
But if any of those possibilities occurred, then he would certainly die, Alix would probably die alongside him, and, far more important than that, the bomb would still be loose in the world.
The American, Jaworski, had told him what was at stake. McCabe was planning to start a war that would lead to Armageddon. Carver did not believe, for a fraction of a second, that the heavens were going to open and Christ would descend to earth just because a religious maniac like Waylon McCabe asked Him to. But he was absolutely certain that thousands, maybe millions of people might die in the chaos McCabe could cause.
Without making any conscious choice, he found himself getting out of the truck, walking around it to where there was a clear line of sight between him and the group following McCabe. They had almost reached the steps to the aircraft. For a second, Carver thought he might have a clear shot as McCabe walked up them. But then one of the air crew emerged from the door of the plane and came down to meet McCabe, taking him by the arm, blocking the line of fire.
Carver could still make the run, though. There was time, just, to reach Alix before the plane doors closed behind her. It tore him up to see her face contorted with pain, the guard leering at her, enjoying the thrill of domination over a beautiful, helpless woman. Screw the odds, screw the bomb, screw everything: Carver wanted to go over and beat the crap out of the ape. He wanted his girl back. He longed for the feel and scent of her body in his arms, her hair slipping between his fingers, her wonderful eyes looking into his, the kiss of her lips. He needed to tell her how much he loved her, how deeply he appreciated the months she’d spent by his bedside, how bad he felt about all the things she’d been through on his account.
He wanted to say how sorry he was that he was killing her.
She was walking up into the plane now. He was staring at her, his eyes boring into her back. She must have felt it because she turned her head and looked in his direction. Just for a second their eyes met. He saw the look of amazement on her face, and then something deeper, a yearning desperation that cut straight to his heart as she cried out, “Carver!”
His reaction was unthinking. He couldn’t help it-he took a step toward her and gave himself away.
It was a pathetic, amateur move. But Carver’s incompetence saved him. He hadn’t even bothered to reach for his gun. So neither McCabe’s bodyguards, nor Darko’s fighters, milling around behind him, started firing. Not that it would make much difference in the long run, the amount of weaponry now pointing in his direction.
Darko nodded at one of his men, who came up to Carver and patted him down. He found the Beretta, removed it, and threw it clattering onto the floor of the hangar.
McCabe had stopped on the aircraft steps. He looked at Carver.
“Bring him here,” he barked, stepping back down to the ground.
Darko snapped out a series of instructions. Carver’s arms were grabbed, a man on either side, and he was hauled across the open space toward the aircraft. Darko was strolling alongside, cradling a gun. His face bore an expression of amusement, rather than hostility, as if he were motivated as much by curiosity as by needing to secure his captive.
McCabe glanced at Alix as the four men got closer.
“So you know this man?”
She said nothing. McCabe grunted dismissively then turned his attention back to Carver, peering at him as he came closer. The look became a stare, then the death’s head face creased into a savage grin.
“Forget it… I know you, don’t I, boy? You’re the reason I’m here.”
Carver stared back at him impassively.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re Lundin… the mechanic.”
“You heard the woman. She called me Carver.”
McCabe coughed violently, then spat a stream of bloodstained phlegm onto the ground between them.
“You fixed this plane, too, boy?” he rasped.
“Like I said, you’ve lost me.”
McCabe ignored Carver’s words. He took another shuffling step, leaning forward so that his face was right up by Carver’s, as close as a lover, whispering in his ear.
“You care to show me what you done?”
“I haven’t done anything,” said Carver.
There was only one way now to save Alix, and he went for it.
“If you don’t believe me, put me on the aircraft.”
Before McCabe could reply there was a shout from the hangar entrance and the guard from the main gate ran in, yelling in Serbian, a desperate edge to his voice.
Darko listened to the frantic jumble of words, then spoke to McCabe.
“He says helicopters are coming, just a few kilometers away. They will be here in two minutes, maybe less.”
McCabe considered this new information. He switched his attention back to Carver.
“We don’t have time to debate this. Guess you’d better just step onboard.”
“No problem,” Carver said.
Then he led the way up the steps, into the booby-trapped plane.
98
The Black Hawks came in from the northeast, through a gap in the hills, reaching the airport at the terminal end, a mile and a half from the hangar. McCabe’s plane was already on the runway, moving toward them, picking up speed for takeoff.
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.