He looked up at the fireman and gestured invitingly at the seat across the aisle from the one Simmons was in. “
The man nodded. As he turned his back to him and went to sit down, Zahed raised his handgun and slammed it sideways against the man’s head, the hardened steel colliding against the man’s skull with a dull crack. The official crashed heavily into the chair, face first. Blood was seeping out onto the hair at the back of his head and oozing down onto the leather seat. He wasn’t moving.
“Aw, man,” Steyl grimaced, annoyed. “That’s gonna make a bitch of a mess.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Zahed told him calmly as he pulled the man off the chair and dumped him on the cabin floor. “Just get us out of here.”
“We can’t land there with him on board, you know that,” Steyl told Zahed.
The Iranian thought about it for no more than a second, then shrugged. “So we won’t.” He gave the pilot a pointed look.
Steyl nodded his understanding.
The pilot shut the cabin door, took his seat, and restarted the engines. He guided the plane off the runway, and within seconds, they were climbing into the cloudless sky. Zahed was seated facing backward, with Simmons across from him. He looked out his window and waited.
A few moments after takeoff, Steyl slid the right cup of the headset off his ear and leaned back into the cockpit’s opening. “We’ve been cleared to five thousand feet,” he informed Zahed.
The view was spectacular, all the more so as Steyl banked the plane in mid-climb. The high-country plains around L’Aquila quickly gave way to forest-cloaked mountains. The small aircraft soon crossed over the fortified hill town of Castel del Monte, and within minutes, they were skirting a bold line of jagged peaks, with the snowcapped tip of the Gran Sasso, the highest peak in Italy, to their left.
Steyl leaned back across. “Leveling off at five thousand feet,” he told Zahed. “We’ve got about a minute or so before I have to start climbing again.”
Zahed felt the aircraft slow down and knew Steyl was throttling back to an airspeed of a hundred knots. When he sensed they’d stabilized, Zahed pushed himself out of his seat. He took Simmons’s shades off, tucked them in his pocket, and gave him a quick check. Simmons was awake, but still heavily tranquilized, his dimmed eyes staring at Zahed from a vegetative face. Zahed tugged on the archaeologist’s seat belt to check that it was secure, gave Simmons a patronizing pat on the cheek, and crouched over to the cabin door.
The Conquest’s door consisted of two sections that opened like a clam—the upper panel, a third of the height of the opening, was hinged from the top and opened upward, the other, which also contained the stairs, opened downward. Zahed held the latch with both hands and twisted it slowly, then held his breath for a second and nudged the upper part of the door out about an inch. It instantly flung open, the edge of the panel catching the airflow that was rushing away from the fuselage. He released the handle of the bottom panel, and it too flew open.
A blast of cold air rushed in, filling the cabin with a deafening roar. Zahed steadied himself. He had to act fast. Air traffic control would already be giving Steyl the all-clear to ascend to his next flight level and would start questioning him if he didn’t resume his climb soon after. He stepped over to the fireman, leaned down, slid his hands under his armpits and yanked him up. He grunted under the man’s sheer weight and had started pulling him when he felt him stir. The man was groggy, but conscious. His arms flailed around a bit, weakly. Zahed moved with added urgency. He half-lifted, half-dragged the fireman the four feet to the cabin door, keeping to his side, alert for any sudden movement. None came. He got him to the doorway and set him down on the cabin floor, then moved to his feet and started pushing.
The fireman’s head went out first. It hit the fierce airflow and twisted sideways violently, wrenching him awake and causing his senses to fire back to life. It was something he would have probably preferred to avoid. His eyes snapped open, and after a brief moment of confusion, what was happening to him clearly hit home as he stared down the back of the aircraft, then strained against the wind and hauled his gaze into the plane, where Zahed had his arms locked around the fireman’s legs—and he was still pushing.
Their eyes met for a second, long enough for Zahed to see the absolute terror in the fireman’s expression— then he gave him a final shove. The fireman’s body tumbled out of the plane and instantly plummeted out of view, trailing the briefest, split-second scream. Zahed hung on as the aircraft’s nose pitched down violently, its center of gravity shifting forward the instant the fireman flew out, just as Steyl had told him it would. Steyl controlled it and steadied the plane. Zahed glanced toward the cockpit. Steyl glanced back. Zahed nodded. Steyl nodded back and turned to face forward.
Zahed felt the plane yaw slightly to the left, as if it were sitting on a turntable that someone turned counterclockwise. Steyl had the Conquest under crossed controls and was, as planned, forward-slipping the aircraft. It was now plowing ahead at a slight angle away from its fuselage’s main axis. The move redirected the airflow around it: It was now curling around the plane’s body from the windward side rather than from the front, and hitting the open door panels from behind. Zahed was ready. The wind blew the panels so they were now sticking out almost horizontally, within easy reach. Zahed reached out for the bigger of the two, the lower door, pulled it in, and secured it shut. He then grabbed the upper part of the door and locked it into place. The noise inside the plane went from hurricane roar to lawnmower buzz instantly. Zahed relaxed and inhaled deeply, then turned and saw Steyl’s face leaning across the cockpit opening. The pilot give him a thumbs-up. He returned it and took another deep breath.
He settled back in his seat as the small aircraft resumed its climb. He felt the pressurization start to kick in, shut his eyes, and leaned back against the lush headrest, punch-drunk from the wild sensation that was coursing through him. Mansoor Zahed had experienced things most men could never conceive of, but he’d never been through that before. It took a lot to get his pulse racing, and it sure as hell was racing now. He felt electric. He inhaled deeply and allowed the sensation to anchor itself into his memory more intensely. It pleased him no end to realize that, even for someone like him, there were still new experiences to be sought out in this lifetime.
He and Steyl had talked about this, a few years earlier, when the Iranian had first hired the South African for one of his covert jaunts. They’d discussed the possibility that something like this would happen one day. One night, over a few beers, Steyl had told Zahed about his days in the Angola bush wars, where he used to ferry UNITA rebels around in an old Cessna Caravan. He’d told the Iranian how one of the rebels’ favorite pastimes was taking a bunch of captured SWAPO men—the Soviet- and Cuban-backed government forces they were fighting—and chucking them out of his plane while whooping it up in drunken frenzies. Zahed had been deeply intrigued by Steyl’s story, but up until this moment, he hadn’t had a chance to experience it firsthand.
It had been worth the wait.
He opened his eyes slowly as he came out of his reverie, and his gaze found the man sitting facing him. Simmons was awake and conscious, but his eyes were straining wide. Judging by the horror radiating from them, Zahed knew that the archaeologist had witnessed what he had done.
Zahed gave him a thin, humorless smile.
Knowing that Simmons had been watching in a helpless daze made the event even more memorable.
Chapter 18
ISTANBUL,TURKEY
Reilly spotted Vedat Ertugrul just as the Alitalia Airbus’s cabin door swung open. The legal attache of the Bureau’s Istanbul suboffice, a paunchy American of Turkish descent with a trumpet player’s jowls and puffy crescents under his eyes, was waiting for them at the edge of the jetway. They’d met briefly three years earlier, in the southern coastal town of Antalya, when the legat had proven to be very efficient and easygoing. Reilly hoped that was still the case as he stepped out to meet him, with Tess close behind.
A couple of darker-skinned men were standing there alongside Ertugrul, one in a navy blue police officer’s uniform with a gold star on each shoulder, the other in a charcoal-colored suit over a white shirt. Both had humorless, dark brown eyes, buzz cuts, and severe mustaches accessorizing the stern expressions on their faces. After quick introductions all around, Ertugrul, the chief of police, and the spook led Reilly and Tess out of the air- conditioned jetway through a side door and down some stairs to the tarmac. Even though it was late in the
