‘Definitely,’ Garcia said. ‘Here’s the thing, though. They won’t catch up to us until we’re near the border. They might not fire on us that close to a sovereign nation. That is, if they’re even coming after us. For all we know, they might be air support for the troops on the ground.’
‘Give me some odds,’ Cobb demanded.
‘Fifty-fifty,’ Garcia guessed.
Papineau pulled out his cell phone and made a frantic call, but the others couldn’t hear what he was saying. Maggie was holding the armrests of her chair, her face drained of color. Garcia was tapping at the keys of his laptop and mumbling to himself. McNutt rested in his chair with his eyes closed. If he was worried, he didn’t show it.
Their plane continued to gain speed.
Cobb glanced at Sarah, and she looked back at him. Their eyes locked for a few seconds, but there was nothing that needed to be said. The look alone expressed a range of emotions involving friendship, loyalty, concern, and lost possibilities.
Suddenly, a loud beeping noise emanated from Garcia’s laptop like an alarm.
‘What is it?’ Cobb asked.
‘The jets have altered course to chase us down. Two minutes out.’
From this point on, it was a race to the border.
Cobb felt each beat of his heart in his throat as the seconds ticked by slowly and painfully. When he closed his eyes he felt Sarah’s hand slip into his, and he squeezed it tight.
Forty seconds later, Garcia spoke again. ‘They’ve hit top speed.’
The Gulfstream’s engines were already whining so loudly that Cobb didn’t need to ask whether they had hit their maximum velocity. He knew the answer.
Almost a minute to go.
Cobb opened his eyes to look at Sarah, but she was in a trance of her own, her eyes closed in silent prayer. Papineau was off his phone, his eyes likewise shut.
‘Thirty seconds,’ Garcia called out.
Cobb closed his eyes again and started counting down.
At ten seconds, Garcia mumbled to himself. ‘I think we’re gonna make it.’
A moment later, another alarm shrieked — this time from the cockpit.
It was high-pitched and constant.
Cobb and McNutt knew the sound well.
One of the Chinese jets had missile lock.
‘Shit!’ Garcia shouted. ‘They fired!’
55
The next few seconds in the Gulfstream were completely silent.
The pilot shut off the missile alarm, and team members each retreated into their own morbid thoughts as they waited to explode in a ball of fire. A split-second over the border, something whizzed past them on the left, fast enough to rock the plane. It was followed immediately by an explosion that lurched the Gulfstream forward.
Inexplicably, a third jet passed directly overhead, aiming back toward the Chinese border. Its wash forced them to dip suddenly, but then the Gulfstream corrected its course and continued deeper into Bhutan airspace unharmed.
‘What was that?’ Cobb shouted.
‘Holy shit!’ Garcia blurted as he stared at his screen. ‘There’s another jet up here. It took out the missiles with countermeasures. I don’t know where it came from, but it certainly did the trick. The Chinese jets just turned back for home.’
The team let out a collective cheer, shocked by their good fortune.
‘Where the hell did the reinforcements come from?’ McNutt asked.
Papineau smiled. ‘Some friends of mine from l’Armée de l’Air. They were in Sikkim on joint task-force training exercises with the Indian Air Force. I gave them a call.’
McNutt stared, open-mouthed.
‘I wasn’t always a businessman,’ Papineau said.
Cobb realized he was talking about French mandatory military conscription, which would still have been in place when Papineau was graduating from high school. He probably would have served in North Africa or Lebanon. It wasn’t something Cobb had ever thought to investigate, despite having Garcia look into Papineau’s business dealings over the last decade.
The plane banked in an easy turn to the right, and Cobb could see the white Himalayas below the dipped wing through the small Plexiglas window. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Somewhere we can all decompress,’ Papineau said as he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘Then we need to examine what the monk gave to you.’
The Hyatt Regency in Katmandu, Nepal, was a luxury hotel that catered to the business set. With excellent restaurants, expensive decor, expansive meeting rooms, and a well-trained staff eager to please, it was a great place for the team to catch their second wind.
They had retired to their respective suites to rest for a few hours before regrouping and discussing their next move. Cobb had tried to sleep but failed miserably. He was too wound up. He knew Garcia would be, too, and that he would already be trying to decipher the contents of the USB drive the old monk had slipped to Cobb in the Potala.
Concerned for the monk and his brethren, Cobb had accessed the hotel’s Wi-Fi to check the news about the palace, but the media hadn’t gotten wind of the turmoil.
Or more likely, the Chinese had clamped down on all news coming out of Tibet.
Fed up with waiting, Cobb left his suite and headed down the hallway for Garcia’s room. Just before he got to the door, he heard someone approaching from behind.
‘Couldn’t sleep?’ McNutt called out to him.
Cobb shook his head. ‘I thought I’d see if Hector is restless too.’
Cobb and McNutt knocked on the door in unison. Sarah opened it a moment later. She had changed her clothes, but she looked as tired as Cobb felt.
‘Sorry, wrong room,’ Cobb said. ‘We were looking for—’
Sarah opened the door wide, and they could see Garcia at his desk, pounding away on his keyboard. Maggie was seated on the cream-colored sofa, looking at a tablet and swiping rapidly through images that Garcia streamed to her.
‘Welcome to the party,’ Sarah said, ushering them into the room.
Cobb and McNutt stepped inside and crossed the dark wooden floors. Exhausted from the day’s events but too tired to sleep, they quickly grabbed chairs in the sitting area.
‘No one else could sleep, either,’ Garcia said, not looking up from his laptop. He had changed into cargo shorts and a T-shirt that read: I’M NOT ANTI-SOCIAL; I’M JUST NOT USER-FRIENDLY.
Cobb looked around the room. ‘Papi must have been able to get some sleep, at least.’
‘Actually,’ Sarah said, ‘he just went to get ice. He’ll be right back.’
‘How is it going with the USB?’ Cobb asked.
Garcia kept typing. ‘It wasn’t encrypted. We’re going through it now with the translation software. Maggie has a lot of stuff already.’
Maggie looked up from her tablet. ‘Shall we wait for Jean-Marc?’
Just then they heard a knock at the door.
This time, Sarah made no move to get up. Instead, McNutt stood and quickly paced down the hallway to the door. Cobb noticed he did not look through the peephole in the thick wood, but rather stopped at the doorway to the bathroom and edged into it before calling out, ‘Who’s there?’
‘It is I,’ Papineau said.
As McNutt moved to open the door, Cobb was once again impressed with the sniper’s ingrained security-consciousness. He would never use a peephole, alerting anyone on the other side of the door to his location via the shadow cast through to the front of the glass, and he knew well enough to stand aside from the door should shooters be waiting on the opposite side.
Papineau entered the suite carrying a silver tray with several cups of steaming coffee. ‘I was going to have a Scotch,’ he admitted sheepishly, ‘but I thought perhaps coffee would be better for all concerned.’