not like scandal.
The more Schwanberg thought about it, the more he was convinced he was on the button. Fuck logic! It felt right. Which raised two questions: why had they not acted already? And who was going to do the hit?
The delay in making their move was easy to work out. They did not know what was going to go down at the meet and wanted all the firepower they could get. A reasonable decision, but a fatal one for them.
Fitzduane tensed for a preemptive move against Schwanberg – and then relaxed. His instincts screamed danger, but his head argued with cold logic that the scenario should be played out. The first priority was what was taking place down below.
Schwanberg would have to wait – and he was covered by an ace in the hole. A very experienced ace who knew exactly what he was doing.
An ace who was not as young as he had been, whose reflexes were perhaps a little slow?
Fitzduane suppressed his doubts. The situation was complex enough already without his taking any precipitative action.
He would wait. He glanced across at Schwanberg and Palmer again. Nothing untoward.
AS to who was going to make the hit, Schwanberg started to give some serious thought to Bergin. He had dismissed the threat from that source before, but now it looked as if he had been wrong. This was the kind of thing the Agency liked to handle internally. Allowing outsiders to liquidate your personnel was not a good precedent. So maybe someone here worked for the Agency or… maybe he was anticipating a threat from the wrong quarter.
Schwanberg took a fresh look at his surroundings. He had read a briefing document on the airship before deciding it was worth using, and now he tried to recall what he could from it. What he saw was now illuminated only by dim red light. They were on night-vision status. Shortly, the light would be extinguished altogether, as the focus of attention switched to the meeting below. If they were going to make a move, it would have to be very soon or they would not be able to see what they were doing.
The gondola was, in effect, a long thin room that was suspended under the main balloon. At the front end were the two pilots, separated from the main cabin by only a three-quarter-height partition. Strictly speaking, he recalled, the airship did not need two pilots, but there was some safety regulation which made belt and suspenders mandatory.
In the middle was the main cabin. In passenger mode, it could seat up to twenty-four, but now there was only a short double-row of seats down the middle. Fitzduane was speaking into a microphone, and sitting beside him was the Delta sniper, busy checking his weapon. Farther back on the left, the Japanese bitch stood half leaning against the rear bulkhead. She appeared to be dozing. At any rate, her eyes seemed closed. Most probably she was into some meditation shit.
Beyond the bulkhead, at the rear of the gondola, was a major thickness of soundproofing and the engines. Schwanberg again tried to recall the layout of the airship. Wait! He had forgotten the head on the left and a small galley space on the right.
He had used the head, so there was nothing untoward there. He looked toward the galley space and it was not there – there was just a door – and suddenly their who fucking game plan became clear.
'CHUCK!' he screamed, and drew his Browning and pumped seven rounds through the galley door.
The door crashed open and Bergin stumbled out, blood spewing from a wound in his neck.
There was a silenced automatic held high in his right hand, and Schwanberg watched as the barrel swung toward him and the black circle jumped twice, as two rounds were fired. They missed him, as he knew they would.
Schwanberg felt a rush. Once more he had beaten them to it. The VC could not get him, nor could anyone else. He was whip-smart and fucking well invulnerable.
He shot again three times and watched Bergin's skull come apart and his body slam back toward the galley door.
Chifune dropped to the ground just as Chuck Palmer fired his pistol, and the round smashed through the gondola wall just above her. She was now hidden behind the center row of seats, and Palmer fired a burst of shots trying to guess her position.
She had moved forward as he was shooting, and now raised herself on one knee and put two shots into Palmer's stomach.
He folded in two, and she shot him again in the crown of his head. The bullets exited at the back of his neck.
Schwanberg could not understand the terrible pain.
He knew he had not been shot, but his vision was dimming and there was not strength in his limbs.
He looked down, and the haft of a throwing knife was protruding from his chest.
He saw Fitzduane's face, and then the pain was overwhelming as the blade was removed from his torso and plunged in once again under his rib cage and up into his heart.
Fitzduane removed his knife from Schwanberg's body and saw with horror a double hole in the low screen immediately behind the pilot's chair.
He leaped forward and ripped the screen aside.
The copilot's face, frozen with shock and fear, looked up at him in desperation. The side of the screen in front of the pilot was black with blood.
The digital chronometer on the instrument panel read 01:47 A.M.
There were thirteen minutes to go before the meet.
Fitzduane looked down at the police copilot. 'We will proceed as planned, Inspector- san,' he said grimly.
He began to wipe the blood and brain matter from the windshield while the copilot went into a slow circuit around the Hodama residence far below.
The parameters of the residence were defined by infrared strobe lights that were invisible at ground level and even from the air, unless seen through the appropriate goggles.
The object was to keep the Hodama garden below at a constant diagonal from the airship. A predictable range made for more accurate shooting.
Behind Fitzduane in the main cabin, Lonsdale and Chifune clipped up observation windows and readied their weapons.
As he went through the necessary actions, every fiber of Fitzduane's being screamed in pain and sadness at his friend's death and then focused totally on what had to be done. Grieving would wait. Mike Bergin, if anyone could, would understand.
You shut out the sadness and you did what had to be done, and only afterwards did you weep. That was the way of it. There was no other.
The Spider waited in his command vehicle as the deadline approached, and although he had seen no official status, Yoshokawa waited with him.
The meeting at the Hodama residence was the focal point for a vast police operation involving concentric rings of the top-secret Airborne special antiterrorist unit and armed riot police. In all, over eleven hundred men and a host of specialized equipment were deployed, and the hardest part of planning the operation had been devising ways of concealing the buildup. Fumio Namaka and his terrorists and Katsuda and his yakuza must be allowed into the trap before it was sprung, or the whole exercise was pointless.
The downside of that vital qualification was that response time to Hodama's villa would not be as fast as the Spider would have preferred. However, he was reassured that whoever got into the residence would not get out, and he had the advantage of Fitzduane and his team visually monitoring the operation from on high.
