ironically held the keys to the fate of both those nations.
Kersik stood and thought and looked out across the ocean swells.. and after a while became dimly aware of a scurrying in the mangrove thicket behind him.
He turned, snapping on his flashlight, his right hand falling to the holstered Makarov at his waist. The sound had not really alarmed him; the only men on the island were the Thai's seawolves and his own commando units, and both groups had lookouts posted along the shore. Still, he was beyond all else a soldier… and good soldiers had cautious habits.
He trained the beam of his flash at eye level, saw nothing but smooth, gangling mangrove trunks and prop roots, and lifted it higher. Just below the leaf cover, a flying lemur clung to the bark and watched him with huge orblike eyes.
For a moment Kersik experienced a queer, almost dizzying transference, imagining how he might appear to the strange little creature — clumsily threatening, out of place, himself the real alien. He withdrew his hand from his pistol grip as if it were red-hot, feeling an intense and incomprehensible guilt.
The creature studied him for another second or two with its perfectly round eyes, and then spread its flight membranes and kited off into the forest blackness.
Shaken and hardly knowing why, Kersik stepped into the brush and walked back toward camp.
As one of the test pilots of the original Learjet had told Gordian about its maiden run, the flight had gone better than expected and he'd expected it to go well.
That about said it for the trip to Washington.
Now, approaching Dulles International Airport at 8,500 feet and 350 knots downwind, autopilot off, the night sky clear and moonlit, Gordian cross-checked the Global Positioning System and VOR windows on his horizontal- situation indicator for a course fix, then radioed ahead to request airspace clearance.
'Washington, Learjet Two Zero Nine Tango Charlie, over Alexandria VOR at eight thousand, landing Dulles. Squawking one two zero zero,' he said, finishing his initial communique with the standard numeric identification code for civilian aircraft.
A moment later the traffic controller responded, providing the computer code by which his radar-beacon system would differentiate Gordian's plane from other aircraft in the vicinity as it was guided down.
'Good evening Nine Tango, Washington Approach. Squawk five zero eight one and ident. Radar contact established, cleared into Washington Class B airspace. Descend and maintain four thousand.'
'Roger. Learjet Nine Tango, squawking five zero eight one. Understand cleared into the TCA. Out of eight for four.'
The buildings and illuminated landing strips of Dulles in sight below, Gordian trimmed power and entered a steady sink, carefully monitoring the instrument panel, making small heading corrections as he descended. Less than ten minutes later he again contacted the man on the ground floor.
'Approach, Leaijet Nine Tango, level at four.'
'Learjet Nine Tango, roger. Am familiar and would like Runway One Four Left.'
'Cleared for approach One Four Left,' the Approach controller began after a brief pause, then vectored and sequenced him into the lineup of arriving aircraft.
Not at all to Gordian's surprise, Approach concluded the transmission by informing him he would have to hold and circle at four thousand feet. In D. C. and other major cities, the terminal environment was often stacked with inbound traffic, in which instances one could look forward to a tedious wait.
He re-engaged the auto and informed his passengers they would have time for at least a couple of Scull's equally tedious jokes.
It was twenty-five minutes before the controller assigned a further descent altitude and then handed Gordian over to the tower — not as long as it might have taken, although he was still glad to be out of the pattern. The repetitive banking maneuver had been tiresome, and gobbled up more fuel than he would have preferred.
He switched to the tower frequency and identified himself.
'Leaijet Two Zero Nine Tango Charlie cleared to land Runway One Four Left,' the ATC acknowledged.
Gordian took the wind headings from him, rogered, and then read down the items on his computerized final checklist, mentally ticking them off to the line above Gear and Flaps. Although it sometimes seemed he had memorized the various checklist tasks when he was still in diapers, Gordian conscientiously ran through it before, during, and immediately after each flight. To do otherwise would be to deny his own fallibility, and that was not a mistake he ever intended to make — most especially not at the risk of people's lives.
Gordian returned his attention to the HSI, saw that he was coming in range of his final landing fix, and prepared to resume his checklist procedures. At just below six hundred feet and about a mile west of the runway, he was set to enter the base leg, and could see the brightly lit sprawl of the airfield in easy detail.
He pulled down the lever to deploy his wheels, expecting to feel the mild thump of the gear mechanisms lowering through the doors.
Instead the red master warning light suddenly illuminated.
The landing gear alerts on his EICAS began to flash.
An electronic alarm tone sounded from an overhead speaker.
Gordian's eyes widened. The breath catching in his throat, he pulled the landing gear handle up, then down again.
The red lights kept blinking.
The horn kept blatting into the silence of the cockpit with deadly insistence.
Gordian felt his heart clench as the ground rushed closer and closer up on him, the runway spooling toward his windshield.
The wheels, he thought.
With less than two minutes to go until he hit the ground, the landing gear hadn't lowered.
Chapter Twenty
Whether jammed tightly into the coach section of some ready-for-the-scrapyard commercial jetliner, or, as was presently the case, hugged gently by a leather club seat in Gordian's state-of-the-art executive Learjet, Vince Scull was a white-knuckle flier all the way, no matter that he had logged hundreds of hours in the air fulfilling his professional responsibilities at UpLink.
A lot of risk-assessment people, especially those whose job it was to research international markets, relied on second-or third-hand source material — news reports, sociological studies, statistical reviews, and so on. Scull, however, thought that was for slackers who might as well have spent their time picking their underwear out of their cracks as writing up analyses. Iri his opinion, if you wanted to learn about a place, you went there, breathed the air, ate the food, and if you were lucky, kissed a few of the local frauleins or signoras. And, unfortunately, if you wanted to get to the foreign country you wanted to learn about, you had to fly.
So he flew. Which didn't mean he had to like it, or pretend to anyone else that zipping around the world the way he did merited flight wings, unless maybe they were the ones that belonged to that Greek kid Zorro or Aesop or whoever it was that went too close to the sun and got his tail feathers fried.
It was during the takeoffs and landings that Scull always had his worst anxiety attacks, mainly because somebody had once told him they were the times at which the airfoils were under the most stress from physical forces… not that he knew shit about physics or flying, except that it seemed there were more accidents at those critical stages than when the planes were under way, so maybe there was something to what he'd heard.
Be that as it may, the reason Scull was now gripping the armrest of his seat like a convict in the electric chair waiting for somebody to turn on the juice was that Gordian was making his final approach into Washington, one of those very stages of air travel that scared the living crap out of him, never mind the boss was an Air Force-certified Flying Ace. It was also why he was crooning a jumbled medley of Sinatra hits under his breath — the summer wind came blowin in across New York, New York, ring-a-ding and doobie-doo — serenading himself with old standards being another tried-and-true Scullian method of coping with tension and blocking the unwanted from his mind.
