“Randi!”
A sense of weightlessness came over her as she was dragged away from the house.
“Hold on, Randi!”
But she couldn’t. Not this time. She closed her eyes and the sense of weightlessness grew. They’d planned this so carefully. How the hell had she ended up being the one lying facedown in the snow?
Eric Ivers had Randi’s collar in one hand and his gun in the other, firing it in the general direction of the woods as the man he’d set up on the roof took much more careful shots.
“Almost there, Randi! Hold on!” he said, leaving a crimson trail as he dragged her behind her car. His partner sprinted across the street and disappeared into the woods as the voice of his sniper came over the radio. “I no longer have line of sight. The shooter is uninjured.”
Ivers swore under his breath as he eased Randi onto the driveway, unsure what else to do. He was a combat specialist, not a medic. In the end, he just rolled her onto her stomach so that if she vomited her passageway would remain clear, and then set off after his partner.
“Karen, do you have anything?” he said into his throat mike.
“Easy tracking because of the fresh snow. But I could use some backup.”
“On my way.”
Ivers entered the trees twenty-five yards south of where she had and ran hard, risking the use of open ground to make time.
He saw a muzzle flash ahead and adjusted his trajectory to take him into the darkness just behind it.
“I got him!” he heard Karen say over the radio. “The shooter is down. I repeat, the shooter is down.”
Ivers came in from the side, spotting her creeping toward a man lying across an icy log. He was on his back, struggling to sit up while she screamed at him to stay down.
The man released the rifle he no longer had the strength to wield and rolled far enough left that Karen wouldn’t be able to see his hands. From the opposite angle, though, Ivers saw him pull a metallic tube from the pocket of his camouflage parka.
“Bomb!” Ivers shouted. “Karen, get dow—”
He covered his eyes to protect them from the flash, dropping into the snow as a hot gale washed over him.
When he looked up, his partner was on the ground, clearly injured but not so badly that she couldn’t give him a shaky thumbs-up. Satisfied that she was all right, Ivers switched his radio to a separate encrypted channel.
“Mr. Klein. Are you there?”
“I’m here. Go ahead.”
“Randi’s down — she took a bullet dead between the shoulder blades. The shooter was booby-trapped and there’s not much left of him.”
“How did he get close enough to the cabin to take a shot?”
“I don’t know, sir. But I take full responsibility. The rest of the team was flawless.”
“This isn’t the time to start allocating blame, Eric. Is your situation stable?”
“We’ve got the start of a forest fire up here, Mr. Klein. I’m not sure the snow’s going to stop it.”
“Understood. An extraction helicopter is four minutes out. Burn the cabin and Randi’s car, then get out. The better we can obscure what happened there, the more time it buys us.”
60
The plane leveled out and the seat belt sign went off, prompting Jon Smith to slip from his seat and walk to the back of the first-class cabin. Dahab was easy to spot through a small gap in the curtain, his height and turban making him tower over the other passengers. He was in a window seat, looking around him with paranoid jerks of his head and dabbing at his face with a handkerchief.
Smith brought his eye closer to the gap, looking for blood on the white cloth. Nothing, thank God. There would be soon, though. Too soon.
“More champagne?”
Smith glanced back at the flight attendant putting a cup onto Howell’s tray.
“Looks like it’s almost empty,” the Brit said, tapping the bottle in her hand. “Perhaps you could just leave it?”
She cheerfully complied and then headed back to the galley for a fresh one. Howell brought it to his mouth and drained it under the disapproving stare of a woman who clearly wasn’t pleased to be stuck across the aisle from two men who smelled like sweaty camels.
As always, Howell was thinking ahead. The bottle would be a useful weapon — heavy enough to do serious damage to any skull it came into contact with, but blunt enough not to generate much blood.
The flight attendant reappeared, this time with a cheese tray, and headed straight for Smith. “Antsy already? We’ve barely been in the air fifteen minutes. Would some Brie help?”
“I don’t think so,” he said and then lowered his voice. “I’m Colonel Jon Smith with the U.S. Army. There’s a situation on the plane that I need to speak to the pilot about.”
“A situation? What kind of situation?”
“I’ve been tracking a terrorist for the past few weeks and I finally caught up with him at the Entebbe airport. But I wasn’t able to keep him from getting on the plane.”
Her eyes widened a bit, but she was clearly not convinced. “Do you have any identification?”
“Just a passport. For obvious reasons, I don’t have anything on me that could connect me to the U.S. government.”
She examined his face for a moment and, finding nothing to suggest that he was joking or a crazy, turned toward the cockpit. “I’ll speak to the pilot.”
When he looked through the curtain again, Dahab was in a heated exchange with the man sitting next to him. Smith tensed, preparing to signal Howell to move, but the Sudanese seemed to lose his train of thought and the argument was suddenly over.
“Sir?” the flight attendant said, reappearing behind him. “If you could follow me, please?”
She led him to the galley, where a short, fastidious-looking man in uniform was waiting.
“I’m Christof Maes, the captain of this flight,” he said, extending his hand hesitantly. “I’m told you believe we have a problem?”
“I’m afraid so, Captain. A Sudanese terrorist I’ve been tracking managed to get on board—”
“Is he armed? Did he get a weapon through security?”
“Not in the normal sense,” Smith said, deviating into the story he’d invented during takeoff. “What he does have, though, is an extremely serious form of drug-resistant tuberculosis. His plan is to get into Europe and spread it.”
“And it’s my understanding you have no identification or proof of this.”
“If you let me use your radio, I think I could get you confirmation.”
“Perhaps it would be better if I notify the authorities in Brussels myself. They can—”
“It may be too late for that, Captain. He’s also extremely violent and borderline psychotic. He knows that my partner and I are on board, and it’s likely that he isn’t going to go quietly. Also, there’s the matter of quarantining the passengers.”
“Quarantine? You think that will be necessary?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Now, if you could please let me use your radio to contact my people, they can get in touch with your government and we can try to deal with this thing as efficiently as possible.”
“I’m afraid it’s against regulations to allow you access to the cockpit,” he said, pulling a satellite phone from his pocket. “I can offer you this, though. In the meantime, I’ll notify ground control—”
“The phone will work just fine,” Smith said, having to supress the impulse to snatch it from the man’s hand. “But could you hold off contacting ground control? It might be more appropriate to let our respective governments handle that.”