Chavez didn’t like it. He wanted to be there for his friend. But he said, “Roger, John. The 550 will take you wherever you want to go.”
“You have a clean passport on board for me?”
Now Ding smiled. “I do. Multiples. But I have something else on board in case you need to make a serious covert penetration, to enter an area without leaving any paper trail whatsoever.”
Clark understood. “Does Captain Reid know about that?”
“She does, and she will comply. Miss Sherman will get you set up.”
“Guess I’d better get going, then.”
“Good luck, John. I don’t want you to forget. Anytime. Anyplace. You say the word and I appear on your shoulder. You got that?”
“I got it, and I appreciate it.” The men shook hands, and then they embraced. Seconds later, John Clark headed to the Gulfstream while Domingo Chavez watched him walk off in the rain.
The Hendley Associates Gulfstream flew to Bangor, Maine. This was not its final destination, but it served as a temporary staging area, a place to refuel and to wait until the next afternoon, when they would leave the country for Europe. John Clark did not leave the aircraft, though the crew did check into a local hotel to spend the balance of the evening and the next morning.
Their original flight plan showed them heading to Geneva, but they would amend that in flight. The departure customs check at Bangor was a breeze, even though Clark’s face had been on the news for the past twenty-four hours. His false mustache and toupee along with his thick-lens costume eyeglasses made him unrecognizable as the man on television.
At five p.m. on Wednesday, the G550 took off on runway 33, banked to the northeast, and began the long flight over the Atlantic.
Clark had spent the day researching his target on a laptop on board the plane. He checked maps, train timetables, weather, yellow pages, white pages, and a never-ending list of German federal, state, and municipal government employee databases. He was looking for a man, a man who might very well be dead, but a man who would be crucial in helping him uncover information about those targeting him.
The sixty-four-year-old former Navy SEAL slept a few hours while in flight, until his eyes opened to the sight of the short blond hair and gentle smile of Adara Sherman looking over him.
“Mr. Clark? It’s time, sir.”
He sat up and looked out the window, saw nothing but clouds below them and a moon above.
“What’s the weather like?”
“Cloud cover above eight thousand feet. Temperature in the thirties on the deck.”
Clark smiled. “Long underwear, then.”
Sherman smiled back. “Most definitely. Can I bring you a cup of coffee?”
“That would be great.”
She turned for the galley, and Clark recognized for the first time how worried she was about what they were about to do.
Fifteen minutes later, Captain Helen Reid came over the cabin intercom. “We are at nine thousand feet. Beginning depressurization now.”
Almost immediately Clark could feel pain in his ears and sinus cavity as the cabin depressurized. Clark had already dressed, but Adara Sherman put on her heavy double-breasted wool coat while sitting on the sofa next to him. She was careful to button all the buttons and to cinch the waist belt, and then secure it with a double knot. It was a fashionable coat by DKNY, but it looked a bit odd lashed down on her body like this.
While she slipped her hands into her gloves she asked, “How long since you’ve jumped out of a plane, Mr. Clark?”
“I’ve been jumping out of planes since before you were born.”
“How long have you been avoiding answering difficult questions?”
Clark laughed. “About as long as I’ve been jumping. I’ll admit it. I haven’t done this in some time. I suppose it’s like falling off a log.”
Worry lines rimmed Sherman’s eyes behind her glasses. “It’s like falling off a log that is traveling at one hundred twenty miles an hour, seven thousand feet above the ground.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Would you like to go over the procedure again?”
“No. I’ve got it. I appreciate your attention to detail.”
“How is the arm?”
“It’s not on my top-ten list of problems, so I guess it’s fine.”
“Good luck, sir. I speak for the crew when I say we hope you will call us anytime you need us.”
“Thank you, Miss Sherman, but I can’t expose anyone else to what I have to do. I hope to see you again when this is over, but I won’t be using the plane during my operation.”
“I understand.”
Captain Reid came over the PA. “Five minutes, Mr. Clark.”
John stood with difficulty. Strapped to his chest was a small canvas bag. It carried a wallet with cash, a money belt, two false sets of documents, a phone with a charger, a suppressed.45-caliber SIG pistol, four magazines of hollow-point ammunition, and a utility knife.
And strapped to his back was an MC-4 Ram Air parachute system.
First Officer Chester “Country” Hicks stepped out of the cockpit, shook John’s hand, and together Hicks, Clark, and Adara moved to the rear of the cabin. There, Sherman raised the small internal baggage door, creating cabin access to the baggage compartment. Sherman and Hicks buckled themselves into wide canvas straps attached to the cabin chairs and then they crawled, one at a time, into the tiny baggage hold. They had moved all the luggage into the cabin and lashed it to chairs earlier in the flight, so they had enough room to maneuroom to ver while on their knees.
Adara moved to the right side of the external baggage door, Hicks took the left side. Clark remained in the cabin of the aircraft, as the space was tight enough with two bodies in the cargo hold. He just dropped to his knees and waited.
A minute later, First Officer Hicks glanced at his watch. He nodded to Sherman, and then the two of them pulled on the external baggage door from the inside. The hatch itself was only thirty-six by thirty-eight inches, but it was very difficult to open. The external door was flush with the fuselage, just below the left engine, and the airflow over the skin of the aircraft created a vacuum suction that the two crew members in the cargo compartment had to defeat with brute force. Finally they got the door pulled in, a squeal as cold night wind rushed into the compartment. Once the door was inside, they slid it up like a tiny garage door, and this opened the thirty-six-by- thirty-eight-inch port to the outside.
The port-side jet engine was just feet away, and this created a raging noise that they had to scream over to be heard.
Captain Reid had dropped them below the cloud cover as they approached their destination airport, Tegel in Berlin. The earth below was black, with only a sprinkling of lights here and there. The hamlet of Kremmen, northwest of Berlin, would be the closest concentration of development, but Clark and Reid had chosen a drop zone west of there, because it contained a large number of flat open fields rimmed by a forest that would be virtually empty on an early Thursday morning.
Clark kept his eyes on Hicks in the luggage compartment in front of him. When the first officer looked up from his watch and pointed to Clark, John began counting backward from twenty. “Twenty, one thousand. Nineteen, one thousand. Eighteen, one thousand…”
He turned around, got on his hands and knees, and backed into the baggage hold. At “Ten, one thousand,” he could feel Adara and Chester’s hands holding the straps of his parachute rig, and he could tell the toes of his boots
