“Attention aircraft on runway one-three right, warning, shut down your engines immediately.”
The Stork yelled something and pointed to one of the instruments, but Cazaux shook his head. Krull saw several gauges with their needles in the red arcs, but Cazaux was ignoring them all. It seemed to take forever, but finally the power needle made it up past 90 percent, and Cazaux released the brakes. The Stork kept his hand on the throttles to make sure they were full forward, jabbering away unintelligibly about something. The engines still didn’t sound right, were obviously not putting out full power yet.
“Hey, Captain,” Krull said, “this looks bad.”
“Sixty knots… now!” Cazaux shouted. Krull hit the stopwatch. “Just be quiet and give me a countdown.”
“Five seconds!” Krull shouted. It looked as if the airspeed needle had barely moved. “Eight seconds…” The needle was just over ninety knots, bouncing back and forth wildly in its case. “Ready, ready… now! ”
Cazaux did nothing but continue to watch the instruments, both hands on the yoke, feet dancing on the rudder pedals, trying to keep the plane on the centerline.
“I said twelve seconds, Cazaux, twelve seconds! We’re only at one-ten. Aren’t you going to abort the takeoff?” “Not likely,” Cazaux said. He waited until the runway end-identifier lights had flashed under the nose, then hauled back on the control yoke with all his might. The nose of the LET L-600 hung in the air precariously. The Stork’s eyes were wide with fear as the white chevrons of the runway overrun area became visible — and then the cargo plane lifted off. But it was as if the Belgian mercenary wanted to commit suicide, because he immediately pushed the control yoke away from his body, forcing the nose of the LET DOWN.
“What the hell are you doin’?”
“Shut up, goddammit!” Cazaux shouted. “We lifted off the runway in ground effect — we aren’t at flying speed yet.” His eyes were glued to the airspeed and vertical-speed indicators. Airspeed was pegged at one-ten, still ten knots below flying speed. Krull could do nothing but watch the trees at the departure end of the runway get closer and closer by the second. A lighted windsock whizzed by, the orange, cone-shaped flag not far below eye level. They were still too low.
“Pull up!” Krull shouted. “We’re gonna hit!”
Cazaux watched, and in a few seconds the airspeed indicator crept up to one-twenty and the vertical speed indicator nudged upwards. As soon as it did, Cazaux raised the landing-gear handle. The cockpit occupants heard a loud swiissssh! outside the windows as the tops of a stand of trees were chewed apart by the propellers. Krull could see the lights of homes atop the nearby hills getting larger and larger by the second. But as soon as the red landing gear warning lights were out, Krull felt pressure on the bottom of his feet, the LET behaved more like an airplane and less like a ballistic sausage, and the homes disappeared safely under the nose — close enough to rattle the windows, but there was no impact.
“Jesus… man, I thought we were goners,” Krull exhaled. “You either crazy or you got big brass balls. What was all that bullshit about acceleration timing? I thought you said you were gonna abort the damn takeoff.”
“Mr. Krull, there is only one thing worse than dying in a massive fireball in Chico, California, and not making the delivery as promised,” Cazaux said as he slowly, incrementally raised the flaps, carefully watching the airspeed to make sure it didn’t decay, “and that is surrendering to the police or to the military. I will never surrender. They will have to take my bullet-riddled body away before I will give up, and I will take as many with me as possible before I go. If I’m awake I will try to escape, because capture is worse than death to me. I was in a prison once. It will never happen again.”
“Well, you crazy motherfucker, you did it,” Krull said with undisguised glee and relief. “Those pricks ain’t gonna catch us now.” The Stork looked at Krull with wide, white, disbelieving eyes, then began to laugh loud enough to be heard over the thunder of the LET’S turboprops. “What’s this brother laughin’ at?”
“He’s laughing because we’re not out of danger yet, Mr. Krull,” Cazaux said. “If the authorities want me as badly as I think they do, they have one more card they can play.”
Southwest Air Defense Sector Operations Command Center (SOCC)
March AFB, Riverside, California
The night crew had just finished a grueling three-hour-long exercise in which a flight of ten Sukhoi-25 attack bombers from Mexico had tried to penetrate the air defense screen around the United States and bomb the Coast Guard base at San Diego and the U.S. Customs base at March Air Force Base so all drug smugglers could enter the United States easier. They had gotten that idea from a series of actual attacks a group of Cuban terrorists had made a few years back, when sophisticated drug cartels used military weapons to protect their drug shipments from American interdiction forces. That was good for about a dozen different air defense scenarios built into the computer system at the Southwest Air Defense Sector.
Lieutenant Colonel John Berrell, the Senior Director on the floor that evening, made the last few remarks in his shift exercise critique sheet. Overall, it was a very good exercise. His shift was young and inexperienced, but they performed well. There were usually no instructors around at night, so every console operator had to be on his toes and be prepared to carry his or her load alone. A few coordination items had been missed by overzealous operators in one of the Weapons Control Teams who thought they knew their procedures down cold and didn’t use their checklists. The plastic-covered pages in the red folders before each operator had been built over decades of experience and covered every known contingency in the air defense game. It was almost guaranteed to keep the operators out of trouble when the fur started flying.
His crew had accomplished the most important aspect of the job: detect, track, and identify.
Berrell clicked on his master intercom button: “Ops to all stations, well done.” No use pointing out the ones that screwed up — they still had a long night ahead of them, and he wanted everyone’s mind clear and sharp. “Run your postexercise checklists and check your switches are back in real-world mode. Repeat, check switches back in real- world mode.” Several years ago in Europe, an American air defense unit had been running a computer simulation in which a large stream of Soviet bombers invaded West Germany. The exercise was a success and the computer-generated bad guys driven off — unfortunately, after the exercise, one operator forgot to turn off the simulation. An hour later, the “second wave” of Soviet bombers “appeared” on radar, and the panicked operator scrambled dozens of very real, very expensive American, West German, Belgian, Norwegian, and Danish fighters against the phantom bombers before someone realized it was not happening.
Those were the good of days, Berrell thought. Before the sweeping world political changes in 1991 and 1992, air defense units were the spearhead of national defense and deterrence. Radar constantly sweeping the horizon, young faces staring at green cathode ray tube radarscopes, picking out the enemy from within the friendly targets; determined, daring men sitting by their planes ready to launch at a moment’s notice to track down and destroy any intruder. Before 1992, before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the threat was deadly real. A Soviet Backfire bomber that appeared on radar five hundred miles off the coast was already in position to launch a large AS-12 nuclear cruise missile — one such missile could destroy Washington, D.C., or any major city on the eastern seaboard.