clock was fast becoming his mortal enemy.
And when had any mission anywhere ever gone like clockwork?
He unsnapped his quick-release harness, hoisted himself up, and swung his legs out over the side of the cockpit. It was only a four-foot drop, but he sank up to his knees in soft snow. The cold took his breath away. So did the view from one notch below the top of the world; his eyes took in the vast sweep of valley far below, stretching away beneath a cobalt blue sky. He reached up to give Tex a hand, his eyes riveted on Widowmaker’s approach.
Ferguson was emulating Hawke’s successful glide path perfectly, but wisely kept his nose a bit higher and compensated for the last second windshear at the mouth of the crevasse. His landing was a thing of beauty; the second Black Widow got her skids down, rushed towards Hawke, twin white drogue chutes billowing out behind her, spraying snow to either side of her nose skid. She slewed to a stop two hundred feet shy of Hawkeye. Hawke gave Ferg and Quick a big thumbs up, then he and Patterson rapidly walked to the rear of the port fuselage and opened the cargo doors. Inside the twin holds on each Widow was everything one might need for an armed assault on an impregnable fortress.
“I don’t like the way Ron sounded up there,” Patterson said, hurriedly fastening a web belt around his waist. “Too giddy, you ask me.” From each man’s belt hung assorted frag and flash-bang grenades to both kill and disorient the enemy. Each two-man team would carry the same weapons. Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine guns, which could be fitted with grenade launchers, and on their hips, the new HK USP .45 pistol with sound suppressor.
“Sounded okay to me. I thought that was just Ron’s game voice,” Hawke said, wincing as the bitterly cold air seared his lungs. He’d removed the onboard oxygen mask and tossed it back into his seat. His assault and rescue team had spent the last thirty hours at a 12,000-foot base camp. Even though he was somewhat acclimated, it was painful to breathe at 18,000.
“No,” Tex said, “Definitely not Iceman’s game voice.” Gidwitz’s street nickname back home on the south side of Chicago was ‘Iceman.’
“Hypoxia?” Alex asked, concerned now. At 18,000 feet, oxygen deprivation could be a killer. You got euphoric, cocky, belligerent. A mean drunk. The high-altitude glider Black Widow had internal oxygen for just that reason. Phantom had reported a problem earlier, a warning light, then told Hawke to disregard the report. Hawke turned and took a long hard look at Phantom’s approach. She was definitely rocking and rolling but there was so much turbulence and shear out there, it was damn near impossible to spot trouble.
His overall pitch and glide level looked pretty good to Hawke’s eye. He said, “I don’t know, Tex. Anybody crazy enough to land an airplane up here is out of his mind to begin with. What would you look for?”
“Yeah, I reckon,” Tex said, eyeing Gidwitz’s approach, clearly not reassured. “Let’s move it.”
First things first. They grabbed two of the portable oxygen and communications units stowed inside the starboard side hold and strapped them on, fitting the face masks over mouth and nose and jamming the new cylinders onto their regulators. At this altitude, there was sufficient oxygen but insufficient pressure to force that oxygen into your bloodstream. Unless you were fully acclimated, a few minutes without oxygen up here, you started to think you could fly.
FlyBaby was next, and again, the landing was flawless. Mendoza popped his drogue chutes and slid up right behind Widowmaker. Three ducks in a nice neat row, and one more on the way. Phantom was a quarter of a mile out and looking reasonably good. Hawke zipped up his white-camo thermal outerwear and shouldered into the MP-5 submachine gun, the strap over his shoulder. The gun could be fitted with HK’s 40mm grenade launcher and had the pre-ban high-capacity fifteen-round magazines. Time to roll. He’d cleared the chamber of the HK and was checking the mag when he heard something he didn’t like at all. He looked up just in time to see Ron Gidwitz and Ian Wagstaff’s Phantom catch a wingtip on the rocky lip of the crevasse and veer violently out of control.
Ground loop. The two most dreaded words in a glider pilot’s vocabulary.
As he and Tex watched in horror, Phantom flipped over on her back and hit hard. She was throwing up a blinding avalanche of onrushing snow and skidding directly towards Widowmaker. Hawke saw both her wings sheared away, and then, to his utter amazement, he saw the slender egg-shaped cockpit, intact, emerge from the leading edge of the avalanche. The black egg flew directly toward him, traveling at a hundred miles an hour. He dove out of its path, rolled over and watched the disembodied cockpit pod fly over his head and disappear over the edge of an icy cliff.
Chapter Fifty
INSIDE THE CATACOMBS, YOU COULD SEE YOUR BREATH. YOU could feel the damp stone beneath your feet begin to climb your bones. She shivered, wrapping her fur-lined silks more tightly about her as she ran. She raced past dark tombs and rooms that could still knife cold fear into her heart. She’d been seven years old when she’d first set foot in this very passageway. She still awoke some nights in a terror of what she’d seen at the very end of it.
In the early seventies, her father, the Emir, commenced construction of a new mountain fortress atop the ruins of a fourteenth-century Moorish fortification. Workers had uncovered a vast network of tunnels and tombs and burial vaults deep inside the mountain. Yasmin had accompanied her father the first time he explored the honeycomb, a small girl following his flickering torch through the endless confusion of dripping and dank passageways.
They’d come at last upon a vast vault, the torchlight suddenly picking out an entire wall of the ancient dead, their eyeless sockets, lipless grins and twisted claws seeming to beckon her forward. Join us! She screamed and ran, finally rushing into the arms of her mother who, sensibly, was waiting at the entrance to the tombs. Father says it’s the Kingdom of Lost Souls, she’d cried to her mother. Long afterwards, her father would laugh at her childish fears, recounting the story with relish throughout her childhood. As if it was amusing to be afraid of death.
Many of the underground vaults she now hurried past made ideal hiding for the caches of gold and weapons the Emir and her husband were amassing for the coming wars with the infidels. Legions of political enemies were locked away in these catacombs. Many went insane under torture here, and many died or were simply forgotten.
Her father had made her a wedding gift of the present fortress. She’d named it the Blue Palace for the color of its stone. The young bride had immediately demanded the tombs be sealed, but her handsome young husband, Snay bin Wazir, had rescinded that decree. He would find many uses for the underground world, he had assured her. New horrors now occurred beneath her home. She looked but did not see.
Countless innocents had died where she now tred, Yasmin thought, as she hurried through the slimy passages, the grey stone glistening in the light of her torch. But no more. It was time for it all to stop. She herself would end it, or die trying. She’d had another dream the night before. A dream in which she herself wielded the sword of Fudo Myo-o, the god whom Ichi-san called King of Light; she had the power to stop this nightmare. Awaking, she knew she could not act alone. Some in the palace, given the opportunity, would rise up in her defense. But, there was one man whom she could trust completely. She knew where she would find him and she hurried there now.
An occasional oil lamp or guttering candle mounted on the jagged walls of the Kingdom lit the way. Passing guards dropped to the stone, prostrating themselves before her. Rats scurried before her and disappeared like the countless lost souls who had suffered and died in this dismal hell.
No more.
Word had just reached Yasmin that strange black aircraft had been spotted attempting to land atop the Blue Mountain. One plane had crashed, but there were thought to be survivors. It was, the captain of the house guards assured her, most probably a rescue party sent in search of the imprisoned American. It was insane, he laughed. But, nevertheless, quite interesting. In all these many years, no one had ever attempted anything quite so daring or quite so stupid.
Her husband, who had just returned from Suva Island, was also vastly amused by the news of the intrusion. He had just ordered a patrol outside the walls to find and capture the interlopers. Anyone foolish enough to try and
