As Luis hesitated, Sean moved. He eyed up the small collection of corpses in an attempt to ascertain who his patsy was going to be.
“Miguel was the most experienced soldier,” offered Luis as he walked past Sean towards the door.
Sean looked at Miguel. He certainly looked the hardest and most convincing shooter but he had been killed some time before the Colonel had been shot. Sean needed a few days not a few hours to sort things out. The chances of the patsy being accepted had to fit the timeline.
Sean picked the larger of the two bodyguards that had accompanied Luis to the house. He certainly looked the part and was shot after the Colonel, which made him a far better candidate than Miguel.
“Be quick, the timeline for this is tight!” reiterated Sean.
Luis nodded his head nervously. He jumped into his car and sped off.
With Luis having left, Katie and Sean were once again alone in the house. Katie left the safety of the living room and walked towards Sean as he struggled with the bodyguard’s lifeless corpse.
“So who are you?” she asked candidly.
“My name really is Sean Fox,” replied Sean, lifting the dead weight up and onto his shoulder.
Katie watched as he struggled towards the door. The life that had flooded back into her on seeing Sean again had drained completely away. The loss of her son compounding the second loss of her husband was obviously a weight she struggled to bear. Sean dumped the bodyguard’s body in the trunk of his rental and despite his lack of time, returned to the crestfallen Katie. Small and vulnerable he wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her and make everything right. Something he knew he would try and do but to have that chance he had to ensure Vincent’s team of assassins stayed as far away from Laredo and her Mexican twin as possible.
“We’ll figure this all out, I promise.” He stood arms length away and held her as you would a child, somebody it was your job to protect and look after. He was treating her as someone he cared for and would save from harm. He hardly knew her but the look in her eyes said much more. She knew him, she read him like nobody had ever read him. She smiled, weakly but it was there, she believed him, she believed in him.
“Thank you,” she replied. “Now go!”
Sean kissed her on the forehead and ran from the house. He needed to get in position and that was not going to be easy.
Chapter 34
“Mayday, Mayday, Laredo tower we have an electrical emergency and request immediate clearance to land.”
Adam spat the French fry from his mouth as the radio burst to life. The word Mayday was even more shocking to him than the scene that had just played out on the TV that was keeping him awake for the graveyard shift at Laredo International Airport.
He grabbed the microphone and hit the communicate button.
“This is Laredo Tower, you are cleared for immediate landing on runway one seven lima. I repeat one seven lima. Please identify yourself.”
“Thank you. This is Aeroflot 321 heavy, in bound towards LAX.”
The Russian designation surprised Adam as he would have sworn the captain’s accent was American.
Adam turned to his radar. There was no sign of the inbound aircraft on the screen; the only sign of a plane was one small unidentified blip with no data. Had it not been for the emergency, he would have written the small blip off as a flock of birds due to how small it registered on his screen.
“Aeroflot 321, did you say you were heavy?”
“Correct. We are an Ilyushin 96.”
Adam stared at his screen. He knew an Ilyushin 96 was pretty much the same size as a Jumbo Jet and there was no way on this earth it was anywhere near Laredo. Its blip would have been screaming at him, not blipping dully.
“On final approach!” announced the captain.
Adam couldn’t help himself. There was nothing on his screen “To Laredo International?”
He didn’t need an answer as the powerful landing lights lit up the sky and the massive Russian airliner screamed overhead and landed on the runway ahead of him.
Adam looked up from under the desk and watched as the colossal airliner, far larger than any normal plane at Laredo, taxied towards the terminal building. Adam looked around wildly for the procedure manual. He was on his own and a large international flight had just arrived, claiming to be suffering from a malfunction of some kind. On finding the manual, he quickly realized the incident wasn’t covered, certainly not when the airport was effectively closed in the middle of the night and one member of staff was on duty.
Adam donned a high-vis safety vest, grabbed a torch, his cell and headed down to the chaos he expected below.
As he walked, he called the airport’s operations chief, his boss. He quickly explained what had happened to the somewhat sleepy executive and was informed he would be arriving there within the half hour.
As he approached the aircraft, the four main doors opened and an internal stairway began to appear from the hold of the aircraft and within five minutes, Adam was surrounded by over 300 bewildered passengers. None of them spoke English and from what he could tell, they had as much difficulty understanding the Russian stewardesses.
A few minutes later, as the chaos was beginning to reach fever pitch, the captain appeared at the top of the stairs and announced everything was OK, they had identified the problem and were good to go.
“Err, sorry,” coughed Adam as it appeared the captain was simply going to reload his passengers and leave.
“It was just a faulty fuse, all fixed,” he explained as Adam rushed up the stairs to stop them.
“You can’t just take off. We need to file an incident report, contact the FAA…”
The captain gave Adam his best poster smile. “Son, I’m the Captain with a staff of fourteen and three hundred passengers keen to get to their destination. You’re one little guy, now get the fuck off my steps before I throw you off!”
Adam looked at the smile on the captain’s face and suddenly realized there was a complete lack of any warmth behind it. As good as it looked, it was only skin deep. The menace in his voice had Adam retracing his steps and praying his boss arrived before the plane had a chance to leave. It seemed unlikely. An order was barked at the passengers that were milling around the aircraft and almost as one, they disappeared back on board. The stairway began to retract back into the hold and as the final door closed, the plane began to taxi to the runway. Without so much as a request for clearance, the plane powered up its four massive engines and shot into the sky. The final act of the bizarre scene being its somewhat magical disappearance as the lights extinguished almost the second it left the ground.
Adam was left looking into the blackness of an empty sky and wondering if he had just dreamed the last twenty minutes when the screech of his boss’ tires brought him back to reality.
“Adam, what the hell are you doing down here?” asked his confused boss, pointing to the control tower. “Get up there and help the plane down.”
“They’ve been down,” he said meekly and then launched into what had happened, from the first mayday to the captain threatening to throw him off the plane.
Unfortunately for Adam, there would be no evidence of any plane having landed. While he was distracted by the multitude of passengers, two technicians had made their way to the tower and successfully doctored any record of their landing at Laredo. Every detail was wiped, even down to the customer service webcam that broadcast the exciting movements on Laredo’s runway. If anybody checked the flight number, they would find it had landed hours earlier at LAX, without incident and was in fact an Airbus A330. No Ilyushin had been used on the LA route for many years.
To add to Adam’s woes, a small stash of extremely potent Marijuana had been left near his workstation.
What Adam would never know was that the Ilyushin was no ordinary Ilyushin and was in fact one of a few experimental and highly secret ghost planes developed by the Russian military. Only flown at night, the plane had a
