Twelve minutes on the clock. The dead radioman, Ian Wagstaff, sealed inside one of the gold survival bags, had been carefully placed inside the troop carrier. The now delirious ambassador lay upon a makeshift bed between the two facing benches, breathing emergency oxygen. Gidwitz gave him first aid as Hawke raced the vehicle over the bridge at full throttle, out along the narrow shoulder of the mountain and through a narrow gorge. Finally he was heading up a steep icy incline he knew would lead to the crevasse and the long snowfield where they’d left the Black Widows.
Ichi, who sat up front in the cab, was looking at Hawke closely. “The palace is to be destroyed?” he asked.
“Yes. I hope Yasmin and the rikishi are taking shelter somewhere inside the mountain.”
“There are many bombs buried within that mountain, Hawkeye-san.”
“Bombs?” Hawke looked at him, changing down to a lower gear to make the grade.
“Bin Wazir is a death merchant. The mountain is one of his primary factories.”
“The British plane that exploded. And the new one to take its place. You know about these?” Ichi nodded, yes.
“Yasmin knows everything. She tells me everything. The new plane is disguised to look like the real one that was destroyed. The passengers aboard the new one are all from terrorist camps.”
“Is the new plane carrying bombs? How many?”
Hawke’s hands were relaxed upon the wheel, his eyes were calm and focused. But his heart was thudding in his chest.
“Some of the bombs in the mountain were going to America. But, now—”
“What, Ichi-san? You must tell me. There’s no time! Millions will die.”
“There was a problem with the fissile material. An accident. Many technicians died. Dr. Soong, who made the bombs, is aboard the plane for America now. He has infected those aboard with—”
“The bombs, Ichi, does he have bombs on the plane?”
“I believe that he does. But he is taking no chances now. Because of the problem, he has also infected everyone aboard with a virus. Something he created. Like God.”
“How many on the plane? Innocent people? What virus?”
“Four hundred trained terrorists, I think. No innocents. Smallpox.”
“Jesus, that’s the scourge,” Hawke said, pushing the accelerator to the floorboard. The Hagglund crested the top of the incline. To Hawke’s enormous relief, the three Black Widows were waiting just as he’d left them.
“I was worried they might have destroyed our planes,” he said to Ichi as he raced across the snow towards them. The sumo looked at him and smiled.
“You are not supposed to be alive.”
“I suppose not,” Hawke said, braking the ATV to a stop. He wished Ichi good luck and leapt out, running for his glider, organizing their escape as he ran. It had taken four minutes to reach the snowfield. Quick leapt off the roof of the cab and landed in the soft snow.
“Tommy, let’s roll. We’ve got less than eight minutes till bombs away. You guys know the drill. Mario and Ferg rig the poles for the snatch. You and Gidwitz keep the ambassador as comfortable as you can until we’re ready to get him into my plane. Gidwitz goes with you. My new friend Ichi-san will ride in Widowmaker. You guys’ll have to remove the middle seat to make room. Ditto my plane for Kelly. Move it!”
Hawke slid the canopy back and climbed into his pilot’s seat. There was a thin coating of frost on his instrument panel. He was thankful no snowfall had accumulated on his long slender wings. He lit up Hawkeye’s radio and thumbed the mike. His first order of business was getting his men the hell off this mountain. Behind him, the middle seat was being removed. The mission read-out on the panel ticked down to four minutes.
“Gabriel, Gabriel, this is Hawkeye,” he radioed the surveillance plane circling above him. “Come back.”
“Roger, Hawkeye, this is Gabriel. Shaving it a little close today, aren’t you, Captain?”
“We have the hostage, Gabriel. Alive, barely. Have emergency medical and trauma standing by to receive us. I am rigging the snatch poles for our extraction now,” Hawke said, “Poles and snatch wires will be up in under two minutes, so I want three Navy STOLs lined up with their hooks down and ready to grab us, over.”
“Uh, roger that, Hawkeye, if you look to your right, you’ll see them coming up the valley now.” Three of the four prop-driven planes that had delivered the gliders would now retrieve the survivors. A tailhook on each Navy STOL would snag a wire strung between two telescoping fiberglass poles mounted in the snow ahead of each plane. That wire was connected to an eyebolt at the nose of each glider. This glider snatch had been perfected by Navy pilots in the Pacific in 1944. It usually worked.
The last set of poles went up and he saw Ferg race for his plane.
Two minutes. Quick raced by, giving him a thumbs-up. The poles were all rigged and the crews were loading up. The Blue Mountain Boys were almost ready for extraction.
“Appreciate that, Gabriel, I need an immediate scrambled patch to the White House now. I repeat, this is Code Red FLASH-traffic emergency, over.”
“Uh, roger, we’ll put you through, Hawkeye,” the E2-C pilot said, all the banter gone now. “Stand by, over.”
Fifteen seconds later, after Brick Kelly had been carefully lowered and strapped on his back inside the newly created cockpit space, Hawke was talking to the president of the United States. He thumbed a switch to the right of his altimeter and the canopy cover closed silently over his head. Another toggle switch turned on the heat.
“Good work, Hawkeye,” Jack McAtee said, “I’m monitoring your traffic with the boys upstairs. You need to get those damn planes out of there now.”
“Working on it, Mr. President. We got Brick. I also have vital information—”
“You got to bin Wazir?” Hawke could hear the desperate edge of hope in the president’s voice. “What did you get?”
“Sir, bin Wazir blew a British Airways 747 out of the sky about twenty minutes ago. I saw it happen. Don’t know point of origin, but she was out over the Pacific, inbound to Los Angeles—”
The president cut him off, and Hawke could hear him barking orders to his staff. One minute. Christ!
The first Navy STOL roared ten feet over his head, snagged his wire, and the Black Widow glider lifted off, accelerating from zero to one hundred and twenty miles an hour in one second. Hawkeye and her tug flew straight up the crevasse and out into clear air. He looked back and down. FlyBaby and Widowmaker were airborne too, their tow planes climbing out fast.
Seconds later, his glider was rocked by the shock waves of massive explosions below. The B-52s, mere glints of silver above, had opened their bomb bays. American Tomahawk missiles, having flown all the way from the Nimitz Battle Group, were slamming into the mountain fortress, pulverizing it. The mountain peaks, where he’d been moments earlier, now disappeared in a massive cloud of ice, rock and debris climbing into the sky. It looked like a volcano blowing its top. But his little flock, now down to three, had made it out just in time.
“Go ahead, Hawkeye,” the president said. “I’ve got you on speaker. We’re all here in the Situation Room. What we know is, there was an explosion aboard a British Air carrier, but the plane is still apparently inbound.”
“Yes, sir, there may be another inbound aircraft carrying four hundred tangos infected with—”
“Another plane?”
“Affirmative, sir. You have an airplane inbound to Los Angeles that is not what it appears to be.”
“What about the goddamn Pigskins, Alex? Where are they?”
“I asked bin Wazir if the bombs were already inside the U.S. His reply, holy warriors now carry death to America. A scourge far more lethal than the atom. Quote, ‘Ten million Americans will die today—an angel of death will descend.’ ”
“Carrying how, Alex? How the hell were the warriors carrying the cargo? Angel of death? What in God’s name—”
“I know this sounds crazy, sir, but I saw it. When the British flight blew—”
“You saw the British plane go down?”
“Affirmative. Live feed on a monitor.”
“You assume it was a live feed.”
