As one of the helicopters took off, its rotor wash stirred the fine desert sand into a maelstrom. Blinded, the pilot lost his bearings and flew into Austen’s C-130, parked fifty meters away. The chopper’s rotor blades sliced through the Hercules main stabilizer. Unbalanced, the helicopter toppled over the aircraft, gushing fuel and engulfing the plane beneath it in a fierce inferno.
Austen remembered the unexpected jolt to his plane, the burst of anger and confusion-What the hell’s the problem now? he’d wondered-the thoughts seared by a blinding flash and cauterized by a wave of intense heat that in the blink of an eye had swallowed him entirely. Strapped into his seat, the flames licking at his flesh, he repeated the words, “I’m dead, I’m dead.”
But he wasn’t dead. Unstrapping himself from his seat, he clawed his way out of the inferno. He walked out of the wreckage, his flight suit, his hair, his entire being engulfed in flame. An apparition from hell.
Several troopers knocked him to the ground and rolled him in the hard desert sand, extinguishing the fire.
He woke up inside a helicopter taking him to the USS Enterprise. A navy corpsman was hunched over him. Austen reached up and grasped the cross dangling from the corpsman’s neck. A jolt of salvation ran from his hand up his arm and through his body. Light surrounded him. Not flame, this time, but a healing light. In that moment, Austen saw Him. He saw the Lord, his Savior. He listened to His words and he promised to obey them. He knew that he would live. He had been given a mission to fulfill.
He, John Austen, who had not set foot inside a church since his confirmation at the age of thirteen, a user of alcohol, a womanizer who trampled on the sacred vows of marriage, a gambler who took the Lord’s name in vain, a heathen in all senses of the word, had been chosen to usher in the Second Coming of his almighty Lord, Jesus Christ.
That was twenty-eight years ago.
Austen ran through his preflight check. Ailerons. Flaps. Oil. Antifreeze. The nose camera came to life. He was presented with a view of the street outside his home. A series of lights had been set down on either side of the runway to act as boundary markers.
He pressed the throttle and the drone edged forward.
The Mahdi I was ready to fly.
82
Inside the command center, von Daniken put the binoculars to his eyes and studied the residence from behind the protection of lace curtains. The home purchased by the Excelsior Trust was located at Holzwegstrasse 33. It was a sturdy two-story residence designed without the least imagination. An ivory stucco box with a gray slate roof. A garden surrounded the property. A balcony extended from one of the bedrooms on the second floor. But what interested von Daniken most was the road passing in front of it. Cleared of snow, it ran straight and level for five hundred meters. To his eye, it made the perfect runway.
He moved his binoculars to the left. A stand-alone shed occupied a corner of the property. It didn’t appear large enough to house the drone, but then again, Brigadier General Chabert had told them that the drone could be assembled quickly. Otherwise, the house appeared quiet, giving no clue to any activity within.
The airport security fence began hardly ten meters away. In one direction, it climbed a mild rise then turned north and ran in a straight line for three kilometers bordering a lush evergreen forest. In the other direction, it cut through a broad meadow buried in snow. Farther on, the meadow yielded to a vast apron of concrete lit by tall, blinding lights. The southernmost edge of Zurich Airport.
Somewhere a plane was taking off. The noise grew in volume as the aircraft approached. Within seconds, the roar of the engines had drowned out every other sound.
He lowered the binoculars and returned to the dining room. “They chose well. No neighbors. A good view of the airport. Unobstructed line of sight.”
“And not just of the airport,” added a short, stocky man with curly black hair and a gambler’s pencil-thin mustache. His name was Michael Berger. He was captain of the Zurich police department’s special assault team. It would be Berger who would be first in the door to storm the house. “Whoever’s inside will be able to see us coming for one hundred meters. How many do you reckon there are?”
“We don’t know for certain, but we’re estimating that there are at least five. There may be more.”
“Armed?”
“Count on it. They’re professionals. They took possession of twenty kilos of Semtex-H plastic explosives a few weeks ago that’re almost certainly in the drone.”
Berger nodded grimly, his eyes calculating his odds of success and survival. “We’ll go in from the air. Two choppers. Rope down our team. We’ll time it to coincide with the takeoff of a passenger jet. The helicopters are equipped with engine baffles that permit them to fly in near total silence. We’ll send a second team up the main road and hit the house from the front. Your friends won’t hear a peep until we break down the doors. The entire operation should take less than sixty seconds.”
Von Daniken made a show of studying the drawings. “How many times have you done this?”
Berger squinted his eyes. “Never. But we do a very good job in practice.”
Von Daniken could only nod.
“We’ll be ready in forty minutes,” said Berger. “Let’s say seven-twenty.”
The men synchronized their watches.
Von Daniken strode to the front window where Myer had taken up position with the binoculars. “Has anyone in the neighborhood seen or heard anything?”
“Apparently, there’s been a lot of activity in the place the last few days. Men coming and going. Cars zooming up and down the street, parking in front of the house.”
“Any sign of the van?”
“Everything except the van.”
Captain Berger signaled from the back door that it was time to move out. Von Daniken joined him and they jogged to a waiting van and pulled the door closed behind them.
It was a two-minute drive to the local firehouse where Berger’s men were staging. Two Aérospatiale Écureuil helicopters sat on a soccer field adjoining it, their rotors turning slowly.
Inside the firehouse, the tension was palpable as the policemen pulled on midnight blue jumpsuits and Kevlar body armor, followed by nylon harnesses to hold their equipment: radio, grenades, ammunition. This was not practice.
There were twenty-five assault troops in all. It was not as young a group as von Daniken might have hoped for, and he observed more than one officer struggling to secure his vest over a sizable paunch. The standard armament was a compact submachine gun, the Heckler & Koch MP-5. Two men hefted large, ungainly rifles called Wingmasters, used to blow doors off their hinges.
Von Daniken’s two-way radio crackled. It was Myer. “Lights just went on inside the house.”
“Lights on in the house,” boomed Berger to his team.
The room reeked of sweat and anxiety.
“Any conversation?” asked von Daniken.
One of the tech teams had trained a laser microphone at the target’s windows. The device was able to read vibrations in the glass caused by persons speaking inside the home and translate them back into something approximating the original sound.
“Television’s on,” responded Myer. “Let’s hope they keep the volume nice and loud.”
Berger divided his men into two squads, eight men each, with eight in reserve. “I need an official green light.”