get your hands dirty?” He craned his neck to keep the transport in sight. It turned the opposite way and dove, trying to flee, a fatal mistake. Jake relaxed his turn and reset the armament switches. “No smirches on your lily-white soul. What do you think Farrell was fighting for?”
The Cub was in the forward quadrant now, several miles ahead as Jake completed the 270-degree turn. The tailgunner was blazing away but the shells were falling short. Jake put the pipper in the heads-up display on the plane, and got a rattling tone in his ears, the locked-on signal from the heat-seeking Sidewinder that had given the missile its name. He squeezed the red trigger on the stick pistol grip. A missile leaped off the rail in a blaze of fire. It tracked. Jake got another tone and squeezed the trigger again. The second missile shot after the first.
The gunner shot at the missiles. It was futile. They slammed into the engines of the Cub at two and a half times the speed of sound. Their 25-pound warheads flashed. The Cub rolled onto its right wing and began a spiral. The nose fell steeply.
Jake dipped a wing and watched the transport going down. It was going too fast. A piece of wing came off and the plane began to roll about its longitudinal axis, out of control, going down, down, down. Jake added power and eased the Tomcat into a climbing turn toward the north, still watching the falling plane far below. Then it exploded.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Toad said.
Jake took off his oxygen mask and wiped his face. He felt like he was going to be sick. “I’m sorry, too,” he muttered to the Gods, who were the only ones who could hear.
“Do you think they had the bombs?” Toad asked.
When Jake had his mask back on and adjusted, he said, “I doubt it.” Qazi didn’t seem the type to let himself be waylaid quite so easily. “Get on the radio. Find out where that frigate thinks that Red Cross plane is and ask the tanker to fly straight east at top speed. We’ll rendezvous with him and get some more gas, then try to catch the east-bound jet.”
“You don’t think it’s a Red Cross plane?”
“That has the earmarks of our colonel friend. An airline flies certain known routes every day, so you can’t just pretend you are an airliner without confusing the controllers. He needed a one-time flight plan.” Toad did as requested.
Or, Jake thought, Qazi could do what Jake was doing right now, which was fly around illegally without a flight plan and hope the controllers had their radars tuned to just receive transponder codes, not skin paints. But Qazi didn’t run risks like that. Oh, no. He would be covered, with a perfectly legal international flight plan filed days in advance. For a one-time trip.
The II-76 with Qazi, El Hakim, and the weapons aboard was circling, waiting. The fighters were late, Qazi heard one of the crewmen say. They had been circling for ten minutes. Out his defective window he could see only the blue of the ocean and the changing shadow of the wing as the transport flew a lazy circle.
El Hakim had never understood the importance of timing in clandestine operations, Qazi reflected. This ocean was an American lake, with missile-carrying surface combatants sprinkled at random. There was a carrier battle group off Cyprus. When the Americans sorted out the mess aboard
Noora and Jarvis were in the last row of seats in the module, their heads only occasionally visible. The guard with the Uzi had looked that way four or five times and was showing an increasing interest in their activities. That Noora, she could be relied upon to put her pleasure first. Qazi permitted himself a hint of a smile. He had not considered the possibility that she would be attracted to Jarvis. I am getting too old, he thought ruefully.
He sighed and watched the guard crane his neck, trying to see. The sexual curiosity of the Arab male could also be relied upon. He folded his hands across his lap and closed his eyes and tried to relax. The plane continued to circle.
The guard stood. It was too noisy to hear him, but Qazi sensed it. He opened his eyes to slits. The man was at the end of the aisle, looking aft. Then he passed behind the row of seats Qazi was in. Qazi lifted his right leg and drew the Walther PPK from his ankle holster. He thumbed the safety off. He laid it on his lap and covered it with his left hand.
Jake approached the tanker from the stern. The refueling drogue was extended. He flipped the refueling switch, and his refueling probe came out of the right side of the fuselage just under and forward of his cockpit. He added power and began closing on the tanker.
The drogue on the end of the fifty-foot hose hung down and behind the tail of the Intruder. Looking exactly like a large badminton birdie, the drogue oscillated gently in the lower edge of the tanker’s slipstream. The air displaced by the nose of the Tomcat would push the drogue away if Jake closed too slowly, so he used the throttles to make his closure brisk and sure. But at this altitude, at this low indicated airspeed, only 210 knots due to the tanker’s capabilities, the Tomcat was sluggish, responding sloppily to the controls. There, he snagged it. He pushed the drogue toward the tanker until the lights above the hose exit in the tanker’s belly turned from amber to green. He was getting fuel.
“How much do you want, CAG?” the tanker pilot asked.
“All you can give me and still make it to Sigonella.” They were flying east at 40,000 feet. The island of Sicily lay over a hundred miles behind them.
Toad was talking to the frigate on the other radio, as he had been for five minutes. Apparently he was conversing with one of the enlisted men in the watch section of the frigate’s CIC, all very low-key, though with the scramblers engaged. Toad handled it well, seeking aid on an “oh, by the way” basis, a few traffic advisories for a Tomcat crew out for a spin and some practice intercepts this fine Sunday morning.
“Here’s something interesting, Red Ace,” the sailor on the frigate said. “The spooks say we have some MiGs airborne north of Benghazi. We picked up the radar emissions and some radio traffic.” The transmission broke, then resumed, “And this is funny. There’s an airplane circling about a hundred ten miles or so north of Benghazi.”
“Ask him if he can pick up a squawk,” Jake said to Toad, who made the transmission. He checked the fuel readout. Twelve thousand pounds aboard. The tanker’s light was still green.
“Uh, it’s that Red Cross flight. Pretty weird, huh? You guys may want to return to Sicily or turn northbound to avoid the MiGs, over.”
“Yeah,” Toad said. “Thanks a lot, Buckshot.”
“That’s it, CAG,” the tanker crew said as the light over the hose hole turned red: 13,200 pounds of fuel. That would have to do.
“Thanks guys.” Jake backed away from the drogue and watched his probe retract. He eased up onto the tanker’s right side and gave the pilot a thumbs-up when the drogue was completely stowed. Then he pushed the throttles forward to the stops and flapped his hand good-bye. The tanker’s right wing came up and the plane turned away to the left as it fell behind the accelerating fighter.
Jake reset the radio switches so he could transmit on the second radio. “Buckshot, Red Ace. Get your watch officer and put him on the horn.”
The Tomcat was in burner, accelerating through Mach 1.4 when the watch officer came on the radio.
“Buckshot, this is Captain Jake Grafton. Please notify Sixth Fleet ASAP that Colonel Qazi and the weapons are probably in the Red Cross flight your controller has tracked. We are on course to intercept now. Got it?”
“Yessir. But what—”
“Just send the message. Red Ace out.”
Someone was there. Qazi opened his eyes. It was El Hakim, livid, trembling with fury. “679 93 62. That is the telephone number of the Israeli embassy in Rome. Tripoli confirms it. That was the number! How did you know it?”
“I called it.”
“Traitor!” The dictator’s lips drew back in a sneer and he threw back his head, his favorite gesture. “You are
