Three paces took him to the lavatory door, and then he was gulping down oxygen from the mask dangling over the toilet bowl.
Carver handed the mask over to Alix, pausing for a second to make sure she could still hold it steady over her mouth and nose. Then he left the lavatory and stood by the bulkhead that divided the passenger compartment from the bomb bay, desperately turning the wheel that opened the hatch. There was an audible click as the lock disengaged and a moment of truth as the door was flung open and a blast of thin, freezing air roared into the cabin, instantly condensing all the moisture in the atmosphere and turning it into an impenetrable fog.
The aircraft’s dive became even deeper and the fuselage swayed one way and the other, like the weight at the end of a pendulum, as the pilots struggled to maintain control.
Carver reached out and grabbed Alix, dragging her after him as he squeezed through the cramped, steel-ringed hatch, both of them banging heads, shins, and elbows, almost forcing exclamations of pain and wasting precious oxygen. Agonizing seconds stretched by as the hatch was closed and locked again to slow down anyone else who realized that their only hope lay in the bomb bay.
Now Carver was kneeling, hands reaching out through the freezing, poisonous fog, fingers stretching, searching, because there had to be a way of opening the doors manually, a fail-safe in case the electrical control in the cockpit didn’t work. And there it was, a handle, on top of a metal rod, waiting to be pumped up and down. Desperately he set to work.
For a moment, the doors remained shut. Carver pumped the lever two or three more times steadily, then frantically again and again as he felt his lungs begin to burn, eyes flare and then water, his muscles giving way.
Then doors were opening, letting in a gale that drove the smog from the bomb bay; air that was bitterly cold, but rich and clean enough to breathe in desperate inhalations between hacking, retching coughs. But the pumping never stopped, up and down, pain shooting through arms, shoulders, and back with every motion of the handle, until the bay doors were wide open and the earth was dimly visible down below.
Above it sat the bomb, a drab brown case, crudely strapped to a parachute, cradled in its metal frame. A lever on the frame disengaged the bomb from the cradle-just as well that those blind, grasping hands had clutched the pump handle first.
Carver’s eyes darted around the bay, settling on bungee cords looped around hooks on the wall, there to secure the legitimate cargo that the engineers who adapted the aircraft naively assumed would be in the plane. He grabbed a cord and looped one end around one of the straps that linked the bomb and parachute, knotting it tight. Then he held Alix close to him, her arms wrapped around his waist. She gave him a little squeeze back as he passed the cord around them in a figure eight, before tying that off, too, forming an umbilical link with the bomb.
The whole aircraft was shaking more and more as it failed to respond to the crew’s commands. There couldn’t be long before they lost control completely and the descent turned into a freefall.
Suddenly there came a motion from the front end of the bay, the turning of the small metal wheel. Someone was there, on the other side of the bulkhead, trying to get into the bay, and the hatch was opening to reveal Vermulen. He must have recovered and grabbed the other bodyguard’s gun. Now he had it out and was firing, the barrel jerking randomly with every convulsion of the doomed plane, bullets ricocheting off the bomb cradle and the aircraft’s own metallic ribs.
There was one last, great spasm as the cables snapped. Carver heard Alix give a muffled cry of surprise and felt her body give a sudden jerk. The plane lurched into its death dive, Vermulen was flung back against the bulkhead, and now there was nothing to do but wrench the lever and then put his arms around her head to protect it as gravity took over and the bomb, the parachute, and the two entwined lovers were hurled out, crashing through the cradle into the yawning void, hurtling toward the ground at two hundred miles an hour.
The parachute was set to open at five thousand feet, slowing the descent of the bomb before its detonation over Jerusalem ’s Temple Mount. But the hills and mountains of northern Macedonia rise as high as fifty-five hundred feet. The earth was rushing ever closer and suddenly Carver heard himself shouting wordlessly in frustration and fear as he realized that nothing that had happened in the past few minutes had made any difference.
The hard, unyielding mountainside was just seconds away now. Carver held Alix’s body even closer to him, unable to see her eyes in the darkness. But as the final moment of impact drew near, and his mind refused to shut down, he screwed his own eyes tight shut, so that the explosive impact of the plane, maybe eight hundred feet away, was only heard, rather than seen.
Closer, closer still… And then there was a sudden jolt, enough almost to tear clinging arms from their shoulder sockets, as the parachute finally opened, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, barely enough to decelerate the bomb and the two people tied to it as they struck the ground and went tumbling over and over, striking rocks and plowing through undergrowth, down a narrow ravine until they finally came to a halt in the soft, damp earth beside a mountain stream.
Carver had suffered a hairline fracture in one ankle and badly sprained the other. The pain that stabbed through him with every breath told him that several of his ribs were cracked.
He reached over and untied the rope that connected them to the parachute harness and the bomb. As he loosened the loop around his waist, Alix rolled away from him. She came to a halt on the ground next to him, lying on her front, her head tilted away from him, motionless. He spoke her name, but there was no reply.
At first he assumed she’d been knocked cold by their fall down the hillside. And then he realized that his hands were covered with something wet and dark. For a second he thought it might be mud. He prayed it was mud. But then he realized that his chest was covered with it, too, and he knew that it must be blood.
“Oh, God, no…” he moaned, and he patted his hands over his body, desperately hoping that they might find the wound that had produced the bleeding. That could happen. You got cuts sometimes, deep ones, and just didn’t feel them.
But Carver had not been cut. He knew that.
So then he looked across at Alix and the moonlight cast a gray wash over the ragged, purple-black hole, high up by her shoulder blade, that could have been made only by Vermulen’s gun. Carver placed a finger to her throat, feeling for a pulse… and it was there, not a steady beat, but a delicate, barely perceptible flutter. He listened for the bubbling, sucking sound of a lung wound and heard nothing. That was some relief at least, but not much.
The entry wound was much bigger and messier than Carver would have expected, as if someone had punched a fist right into her. The bullet must have already been deformed by the time it hit her, maybe by a ricochet off a
