Threat Level Black af-2 Page 13

  Howe reached over and grabbed for it; the man slapped his hand on Howe’s.

  “No,” said Howe, shaking his head. “I get it.”

  The Korean didn’t let go. Howe reached and took his own weapon; he thought of threatening the Korean but then thought of something better: He threw it down toward the ground.

  Finally the Korean let go of his hand. Howe tossed the weapon down.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, going forward and climbing in.

  Chapter 22

  Tyler saw the vehicle before anyone else did.

  “Take him,” he said over the discrete-burst short-range com system that connected him with the men guarding the approach.

  As he gave the order, the jet engines kicked up several notches on the field below, the plane roaring from the runway.

  Belatedly, Tyler realized he had made a mistake. The truck was too far away to see the plane.

  “Wait!” he yelled.

  But it was too late: A Russian-made RPG grenade fired by one of his men blew through the windshield of the truck and exploded. A second later the rest of the team peppered its occupants with fire from their AK-47s.

  “Shit,” said Tyler.

  “Major?” asked the warrant officer in charge of the team that had just destroyed the truck.

  “My fuckup,” said Tyler. “Make sure they’re dead, then let’s see what we can do about getting rid of the truck.”

  Chapter 23

  Like the Russian design it had been based on, the S-37/B had special rough-field grates that helped keep debris and other nasties from shredding the engines on takeoff. Something big cracked against one of them as the Berkut built speed; Howe felt the shock but pressed on, committed to taking off both by momentum and situation. He had his nose up but his wheels still on the ground: Air-speed wasn’t building quite as fast as he expected. Something rumbled to his right and he held on, more Newton ’s passenger than his own.

  The Berkut stuttered, then lifted freely.

  He cleaned his gear and felt another rumble.

  He was losing the right engine.

  Howe’s hands flew around the cockpit even as his mind sorted out the situation. Something had smacked against one of the louvers and sent bits of metal or debris into the right power plant. It couldn’t have been much — the engine still wanted to work — but he could see the oil pressure shooting toward red and the power plant’s output sliding.

  Like most jets, the Berkut had been designed to operate on one engine, and now that he was off the field with a relatively light load, he’d dodged the worst of the situation. Even so, flying with one engine meant changing his flight plan. The nap-of-the-earth route out required good reserve thrust; there were several points where he’d have to pull the nose up and make like a pole vaulter, squeaking over obstacles, just not doable on one engine.

  He could go directly south, but that path bordered on suicide. Better to take it higher and round off some of the edges. He had the Russian ID gear, darkness, and, if all else failed, the cannon.

  “Ivan to Sky,” he said over the satcom system connecting him to the mission coordinator in the RC-135 over the Sea of Japan. “I have a situation.”

  “Sky,” acknowledged the coordinator, asking Howe to detail his problem.

  “Down to one engine. Am proceeding.”

  “Copy that. You’re on one engine.”

  “I’ll run as close to the course as possible,” added Howe.

  The controller didn’t answer right away.

  “Sky?”

  “Roger, we copy. Godspeed.”

  Howe thought of his passenger in the backseat. He flipped the interphone circuit on.

  “We have a slight complication,” said Howe, pausing, as he worried that Dr. Park might not speak English well enough to understand what he said. “We’re down to one engine.”

  “I understand,” replied the Korean.

  His voice was so calm that Howe was sure the man didn’t know what he had said, but Howe let it go. He banked gently to the north, moving his stick gingerly as he came onto the course bearing. He did an instrument check, then broke out his paper maps and began working out his alterations to the course.

  Chapter 24

  One of Fisher’s ideas in raiding the Washington Heights apartment was that if it was connected to a terrorist operation, even tangentially, hitting it might shake up everyone else connected to it and get them to do something stupid. Given that they had a whole net of wiretaps working and another apartment under surveillance, the idea was not without merit. While Fisher was not by nature an optimist, he did hope that the suspect in the other apartment — home at the time — might lead them to something that would, if not blow open the case, at least crack it a bit.

  The problem with that theory, however, was that it required the team watching the apartment and the suspect not to lose track of the man. Which they promptly did within five minutes of his leaving the apartment an hour after the raid. He’d gone down to park near the Triborough Bridge, headed for the drug dealers who held market on the street nearby, then jumped into a small motorboat tied up on the rocks below. The boat had, of course, disappeared.

  “Shoulda shot him,” said Fisher when Macklin related the story. “Don’t you teach these guys anything?”

  They kept the surveillance teams on the apartment, waiting to see if their man, Faud Daraghmeh, returned. Fisher in the meantime sorted through various leads and made the rounds of the borough’s coffee shops. He did better with the latter than the former, finding a Greek place just a few blocks from the surveillance post that managed to impart a burned taste even to the first drop of liquid from the pot. As for Caliph’s Sons, the arrest of the men in the first apartment led to a variety of leads, none of which had panned out. Fisher wasn’t sure whether this was because the DIA had been charged with running them down, though he had his suspicions.

  The command post for the surveillance operation was a second-story office up the street from the apartment, located over a twenty-four-hour Laundromat. The machines rumbled constantly, and the place was so hot that one of the detectives assigned to the post theorized that the dryers were being vented through some hidden mechanism directly into the office.

  A bank of televisions fed by video cams showed every possible approach to the apartment; in addition, a small radar unit and two bugs gave the detectives and agents a full picture of what was happening inside.

  Which was nothing.

  Fisher surveyed the feeds for a few minutes, then picked up the latest intelligence summary on the case, which ran down intercepts the NSA had made with any possible connection. That, too, was a blank, with the only mention of a blackout coming in a conversation that clearly had to do with basketball coverage.

  “You missed the morning quarterback session,” said Macklin, showing up with a bag of doughnuts around eleven. “Hunter was asking for you.”

  “Use any four-letter words?”

  “Many.” Macklin ripped open his bag and spread it over the table at the center of the room. “I’m thinking of pulling the plug on the surveillance. I have warrants so we can go search the place. What do you think?”

  Fisher took two of the doughnuts from the table. “I think it’s time to find out how good a cup of coffee Mrs. DeGarmo makes.”

  “DeGarmo? The landlady?”

  “Yeah,” said Fisher. He checked his watch. “Maybe if we stay long enough, she’ll invite us for lunch. Plate of cold spaghetti would really hit the spot.”

  * * *

  “Who’s there?”

  “Andy Fisher.”

  “Who’s Andy Fisher?”

  “FBI.”

  “Who? The plumber?”

  “Yeah. You have a leaky faucet?”

  The doorknob turned and the heavy door creaked open. Fisher saw a pair of eyes peering at him about chest high.

  “You’re a plumber?” she asked.

  “FBI.” He showed her his Bureau “creds,
” a small laminated ID card.

  Mrs. DeGarmo squinted at it. In the right light, the picture looked a bit like that of a dead rat.

  In bad light, it was the spitting image of one.

  “Where’s your tools, if you’re a plumber?”

  “I have to look at the leak first,” said Fisher.

  “Okay,” said the woman, pulling the door open.

  Lillian DeGarmo was ninety if a day. Her biceps sagged beneath her print housedress and her upper body pitched toward the floor. She tottered slightly as she walked but soon reached the kitchen, which lay just beyond the long entry hall.

  “Sauce smells good,” said Fisher.

  “The faucet’s in the bathroom, around the corner,” said the old lady, pointing to the doorway at the other end of the small kitchen.

  “Actually, I’m here for something else,” said Fisher. “I’m an FBI agent. Say, is that coffee warm?”

  “You want coffee?”

  “Well, I have doughnuts,” said Fisher, pulling the doughnuts from his pocket.

  “Oh, I can’t,” said Mrs. DeGarmo. “The doctor said they’re bad for my diabetes.”

  “Doctors. Probably told you not to smoke, right?”

  She pursed her lips for a moment.

  “I hate doctors,” said Fisher, pulling out his cigarettes.

  “Me too,” said Mrs. DeGarmo, grabbing the pack.

  By the second cigarette Mrs. DeGarmo had told Fisher all she knew about her tenant. Faud Daraghmeh went to St. John’s University, where he was a prelaw student. He claimed to be Egyptian — he was actually from Yemen, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service — and greatly admired the United States. Until a few days ago he had kept a very strict schedule, always in by nine o’clock and always in bed before the eleven o’clock news, which Mrs. DeGarmo watched religiously. He got up within a few minutes of eight o’clock every morning — during the Today show — and left by noon, before the afternoon soaps (she called them her “stories”) came on.

  “You can hear him above the TV?” Fisher asked.

  “Big feet,” said the old lady, waving her hand. “More coffee?”

  “Sure,” said Fisher. “So a couple of days ago he just stopped coming home, huh?”

  “Sometimes he goes away, but usually he tells me when he’ll be back. ‘Mrs. D,’ he says, ‘I go to see friend in Florida.’ ”

  “ Florida?”

  “I think he said that.”

  “He said that this time?”

  “No. Other times. This time, eh… ragazzi.”

  Technically the word ragazzi meant “boys,” though coming from the old Italian lady the word implied much more.

  “He’s a nice boy,” added Mrs. DeGarmo quickly. “He’s not in trouble, I hope.”

  “Might be,” said Fisher.

  “He’s very nice. He helped me out.”

  “How?”

  “Little jobs. He could fix things. You want lunch? I have sauce on the stove: Have a little spaghetti.”

  “Spaghetti’s good,” said Fisher.

  Mrs. DeGarmo made her way to a pantry at the end of the hallway in the back where she kept extra groceries. The groceries were on a small bookcase in the hall; the pantry itself was occupied strictly by grocery bags. If there was ever a shortage, she could supply the city for months.

  “Look at that,” she said, pointing to the floor as she took the box of Ronzoni.

  “What?”

  “The rats are back,” she said.

  “Rats?” asked Fisher. “Rodent rats?”

  “They always come back. This time at least they stayed away for weeks.”

  “Good exterminator’s hard to find,” said Fisher, helping himself to another cup of coffee as they returned to the kitchen.

  “Faud knows how to chase them away,” said the landlady, checking on her large pot of water.

  “Really?” said Fisher.

  “Oh, yes. He was very good at that. He was a very good boy.”

  “He put out traps?”

  “No. Fumigate.”

  “Fumigate?”

  “Very stinky. We had to go outside the whole day. He sealed it off. Smelled like Clorox when he was done, but there were no rats.”

  “Sealed what off?”

  “Downstairs. Two times, he did it.”

  “Two times?”

  “He was a very good boy.”

  “Mind if take a look?” asked Fisher.

  “First you have something to eat. Then you fix the faucet,” said Mrs. DeGarmo. “Then you take a look.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” said Fisher, twirling his spaghetti.

  Chapter 25

  Howe was fifty miles from the coast when the radar warning receiver buzzed, picking up the two MiGs flying almost directly at him from the east at 25,000 feet. They were less than fifteen miles away, which would put them overhead in roughly sixty seconds. He pushed lower to the mountains, sliding down through 10,000 feet in hopes of avoiding their radar.

  He thought he’d slid by when the RWR came up again; he’d strayed close to a ground radar. Howe held to his course anyway. There was another radar to the north closer to the coast, and maneuvering away from one would expose him to the other. The MiGs or at least their radars had disappeared.

  Four minutes to the coast, then another five minutes before he’d be far enough away that nothing could stop him.

  A flight of F/A-22s would be on station by now, off the coast to the south. If they scrambled north, they’d meet him over the coast, or just off it.

  So, really, he only had to make it though four minutes. Two hundred and forty seconds.

  Long seconds.

  He got a blip: the MiGs.

  Howe glanced down at the map he’d unfolded across his lap and leg. He could cut farther north and hope to avoid the MiGs by legging into Russian territory, but that would take him farther from the F/A-22s presumably scrambling to his aid. It also would stretch his fuel further and leave him vulnerable to the Russians, who surely would be interested in a plane that looked like one of theirs.

  He looked up at the black night in front of his cockpit, calculating which way to push his luck. There was chatter on the frequencies used by the Korean air force.

  “Ivan, be advised a second flight of MiGs scrambling from Orang to check unknown contact in your vicinity,” warned the mission coordinator in Sky. “We’re tracking them now. They’re going to be in your face in zero-two minutes. SAMs are coming up.”

  “Ivan,” acknowledged Howe, his grip tightening on the sidestick.

  “Another flight: You’re being targeted!”

  The words were drowned out by the blare of the radar warning receiver, whose fervent bleat indicated that an air-to-air radar had just locked its grip on him.

  Chapter 26

  The first bulletin took Blitz by surprise. He was actually staring at a feed from a U-2 flying near the Korean DMZ, and as the screen changed he didn’t immediately understand what he was seeing.

  “They’re going to war!” exclaimed one of the officers standing nearby him in the situation room. “Oh, my God.”

  Everyone around them jumped to their feet. The screens flashed. People started to shout.

  Calmly, Blitz turned to his military aide. “Get the President on the line. Now.”

  Chapter 27

  In the end the best they could do was push the wrecked vehicle into a ravine about fifty feet below the road. They took the two men they’d killed and carried them with them for a few miles before burying them in the rocks at a pass in the hills.

  You screwed up, a voice told Tyler as he set out just ahead of the tailgunners. You gave the order too soon.

  The muscles in his chest tightened; they felt like bands of steel clamping him together, slightly swelled like ice cramping against the sides of a hose. He concentrated on his job, on his situation, on his men, but still the muscles in his chest failed to relax.

  They had to retrace part o
f their path, coming in on the route they had taken. Though risky by its nature — at least in theory someone who was trailing them would have the route covered — it had seemed the only way when they were laying out the plan back in D.C. Tyler had gone over it again before they kicked off; it was the only way to get across the mountains in that area while avoiding settlements and completely impassable terrain.

  He second-guessed himself now, arguing that he should go a different way. Sweat poured from his neck as he walked, and by the time he finally reached the turnoff to the path beyond the pass, Tyler felt a wave of relief.

  It was short-lived. They were just starting down the hill when the com system crackled with a warning: three vehicles approaching.

  Silently the soldiers moved off the road.

  “We can take them,” said Warrant Officer Chris Litchfield, who was fifty yards ahead on the other side of the road.

  “No,” said Tyler.

  Litchfield didn’t reply. The first of the trucks came into view. It was a large canvas-backed six-wheeler, probably older than its driver. The other two were close behind; none of the three trucks had their lights on.

  Tyler watched through his night optical device, or NOD, as the trucks stopped. Men began piling out of the backs of all three. They were chattering. A dozen or so went to the side of the road, climbed down a short way.

  It was a piss stop, nothing more. Just a stop so a few soldiers could relieve themselves midway through a long journey.

  Of all the luck.

  Tyler saw what would happen a few seconds before it did.

  “Get the lead truck,” he managed to say before the first Korean shouted that there was someone on the hill.

  Chapter 28

  The RWR screamed at Howe as he threw the Berkut into a hard turn, trying to beam the interceptor’s radar. It was too late; the Korean had launched a pair of radar-guided missiles at him.