“Four hundred knots.”
“Okay, roger. Don’t get beyond five hundred knots, sir. We’re not trying to pick a fight here, sir. We, uh, we —we’re still setting up shop here.”
Hawke grinned. Not trying to pick a fight? Why the hell else would they be there? Hawke fired up his air-to-air radar and pinged the opposing fighter. As soon as the ping hit him, the Mirage went into violent defensive maneuvers and Hawke dove down after him. They were now both in a circling spin toward the ground. Each pilot was hoping to take advantage of a split-second mistake by the other guy. He was at twenty thousand feet and the whole of the Gulf of Oman lay below him. He caught his first glimpse of the Strait of Hormuz.
From this altitude, it wasn’t hard to grasp the strategic importance.
He had the bogey locked up, and a warning signal sounded in the cockpit as he armed his AMRAAM radar missiles. The new Aim-120s under his wings were the latest thing. Air-launched aerial intercept missiles employing active radar target tracking. They were capable of speeds of Mach 4 and provided capability against single and multiple targets in all environments. The bogey beneath him, now spinning earthward like a pinwheel, was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet.
“Johnnie Black, veer off! Veer off!” Archangel shouted in his phones.
“Repeat?” Hawke said, his voice incredulous, his right hand poised in midair. “I have this bogey locked up! You want me to disengage?”
“Affirmative, affirmative. Disengage! Do not shoot! Veer off now, sir.”
“What the bloody hell is going on? Somebody want to tell me?” he said, letting anger and frustration creep into his voice.
“This is not a shooting war, Johnnie Black.”
“It isn’t? Then there’s some serious lack of—what the hell kind of war are you boys fighting?”
“Right now it’s strictly a pushing and shoving war, sir.”
“Pushing and shoving.”
“That’s affirmative. Until further orders.”
“Roger, Archangel,” Hawke said, simultaneously calming himself down and peeling away. “Seems to have been a serious lack of communication somewhere along the line, Archangel.”
“Roger that, Johnnie Black. We apologize, sir. We, uh—were not informed you were coming. We, uh, oh shit!”
There was a muffled boom below and Hawke flipped his plane left and saw what had caused it. The French Mirage F1 jet had augured into the side of a mountain. Licks of orange fire and thick black smoke were curling up from the crash site. The pilot’s evasive maneuver was sound but he’d gone too deep. Or rather, Hawke thought, he’d been pushed and shoved too deep. Another pilot who’d run out of luck and experience at precisely the same moment.
“Looks like the other guy blinked,” Hawke said. “Too bad.”
“Roger that, Johnnie Black. You’ve certainly made our day a helluva lot more interesting. Sorry about the misunderstanding. We’ll definitely make the evening news tonight. Have a lovely day, sir.”
“Johnnie Black proceeding to Seeb International, Oman.”
Hawke rolled the jet right and came to a new heading. He could see the capital city of Muscat dead ahead. Jim Beam floated up on his left side. Hedges looked over at him, shaking his head. He was sure the American AWACS pilot thought he was crazy for going after the Mirage as aggressively as he had. But the French pilot was testing the waters. And Kelly had asked him to be as realistic as possible when he tested the waters himself. If Langley wanted a realistic assessment of Operation Deny Flight’s performance, then by God he was going to give them one.
The CIA wanted to find out exactly what the French pilots would do if challenged. Now they knew. Maybe this wasn’t a shooting war, not yet anyway. But all that might change radically and soon. A lot depended on what Johnnie Black found on the ground in Oman.
So far, if you didn’t count the little contretemps in Cannes a few weeks ago, not a single shot had been fired in this war. But each side had now lost one airplane. Only one side had lost a pilot.
So far.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Bad Reichenbach
STOKE HEARD THE PIANO TINKLING AS HE AND JET CLIMBED the slippery steps up from the cellar. Something deep and stirring in a minor key. Viktor was in great form, but it was four o’clock in the morning. What the hell was he doing awake? Jet said she had dumped enough of her potion into their teapots to put both him and Frau Irma out for a week.
“Is she in there, too?” Jet whispered. Viktor was banging out some heavy chords and Stoke didn’t think their whispers could be overheard. Jet was standing behind Stoke in the darkened kitchen doorway, both of them looking out into the living room. Flickering light and shadows were dancing on the ceiling and walls. Pairs of beady glass animal eyes were gleaming all around the room, staring down from the walls. Candles?
Yeah, Viktor had all the candles on the piano lit up for his moonlight sonata or whatever the hell he was playing now. Sure as hell wasn’t Ray Charles. Viktor’s setup looked like Liberace the way he had the heavy black lid of the piano propped up and the big silver candelabra lighting up the keyboard as he raised his hands up high before bringing them down on the ivories. Tinkle, tinkle, boom.
“Don’t see her. I think it’s just him,” Stoke said in her ear.
“Good. If we can slip past him and up the stairs to our rooms it would save us a lot of trouble. But you can’t make a sound. His sense of hearing is phenomenal.”
“Yeah? How come he plays such awful shit all the time?”
“Good question.”
“And, why the candles? He’s blind.”
“Smell,” Jet said. “He loves the smell.”
“Aromatherapy. It’s everywhere. Ready?”
Viktor was banging on the left side of the keyboard now, building up to his big climax. Jet squeezed his arm.
“Hurry. We must get to the stairs before this song ends. Go.”
They were halfway across the room when the music stopped, Viktor’s hands frozen in air above the keyboard. His head swiveled in Stoke’s direction.
“Guten Morgen, Herr Jones,” Viktor said after the last mournful note had faded away. “Wie gehts?”
“Pretty good, Viktor. How you doing, buddy?” Stoke said, wondering how on earth the man had heard him crossing the room in the middle of all that damn racket.
“Zo. You are a somnambulist, nicht wahr?”
“A what?”
“A sleepwalker.”
“Yeah, that’s right, Viktor. I’m seeing somebody about it but, man, nothing seems to work. It’s a problem. Listen, you don’t know any Ray Charles, do you?”
“Was?”
He stood there looking at the guy sitting at his piano. With the candlelight gleaming in the lenses of his dark glasses and his wild Einstein hairdo, Viktor looked like a demented eighty-year-old Bavarian rock star. Had he heard Jet, too? Maybe not. Girl moved like a tiger stalking something in the bush. She was frozen in place and watching Viktor like a cat. Stoke looked at her and put a finger to his lips. Then he motioned to her to continue padding over to the staircase while he engaged their host in conversation.
Stoke’s plan had been for the two of them to be packed up and out of here before Frau Irma and Viktor woke up in the morning. He’d leave a note and a lot of cash to cover their expenses. Down in the wine cellar, they’d carefully replaced the wine registry book and put the cellar table back just like they’d found it. He figured since the baron still had no idea where they were, no sense having Frau Irma calling him up and raising a lot of questions in
