Suddenly Kincaid whispered, “What’s that?”
Janson heard it, too, from behind them, the rumble of heavy engines, approaching from the sea. He flipped up the panoramics. The control tower had grown visible in the predawn light.
“Turboprops.”
The aircraft engines rumbled overhead and faded toward the hills. Then they heard the plane turn around and the sound grew louder.
“Descending.”
The tower windows were dark, the field closed for the night. Whoever was approaching was coming in without air controller assistance. Janson and Kincaid picked up the pace so as not to be exposed in the landing lights. They followed the plane by its sound. Suddenly they saw its profile silhouetted against the graying sky, a high-wing, twin-engine transporter.
“Weird,” said Janson.
Kincaid agreed. It looked like a C-160 Transall, the twin-engine turboprop that they had seen flown by the Deuxième Régiment Étranger des Parachutistes rapid-intervention units exercising in Corisca. It came down fast and skillfully. Landing lights blazed on at the last second, revealing a camo-green fuselage. The massive tricycle landing gear absorbed the impact. Propellers reversed with a roar and the Transall slowed so quickly that it was able to turn around in less than a third of the runway. With another roar, it came straight at them, landing lights aglare.
“What?” yelled Iboga, blinking, struggling to shield his eyes with his trussed hands. Janson and Kincaid had already flipped down their night gear, which neutralized the glare.
When they saw the rear cargo door spilling paratroopers onto the tarmac, they had only seconds to escape. But that would mean abandoning their prisoner and drawing fire at Ed and Mike on the Embraer.
“It’s the goddamned French Foreign Legion.”
“This is Italy. They can’t come here.”
“Looks like no one told them.”
A stentorian voice amplified by a bullhorn bellowed French.
“He’s saying, ‘Hands in the air.’ ”
“I got that.” They raised their hands. “Now what’s he saying?”
“Uhhmm … ‘We arrest Iboga … taken illegally from France.’ ”
Two soldiers ran up, grabbed the dolly’s handgrips, and wheeled Iboga to the Transall.
“Here come the cops.”
An Italian police car squealed around the terminal, past the control tower, and raced onto the runway with flashing blue lights. Two Carabiniere officers jumped out, straightened their black tunics, and swaggered toward the Transall. A French paratrooper stepped forward and fired a long, loud burst with his assault rifle. Bullets whistled past the police and blew out all the windows in their patrol car.
Kincaid said, “Since when does the French Army issue AK-47s?”
A second burst over their heads sent the Italians running into the dark.
Janson counted paratroopers. “That Transall holds eighty. I see ten.”
“They’re not Legionnaires. They’re as phony as ours were. Jesus, who the hell are they?”
“Just hope they keep the act up and don’t strafe us. Those AKs aren’t phony.”
“And just let them take Iboga?”
“We’ll follow them,” said Janson, with little hope. “If they don’t shoot our tires out.”
The gunmen in paratroop gear unstrapped Iboga from the dolly and helped him up the Transall’s steps.
At the top, the wary-looking Iboga suddenly broke into a grin so broad that it showed his pointed teeth.
“What is going on?” said Kincaid. “He looks happy as hell.”
“Wait,” said Janson. “It’s going to get worse.”
One of the phony Legionnaires presented Iboga with a bright yellow scarf, his signature Arab kaffiyeh. Iboga gathered it around his enormous skull. For a long moment he stood proud as a king. Then he gestured imperiously for the trooper to shoot Janson and Kincaid, who were still holding their hands in the air.
The trooper did not pull the trigger but with help of the others urged Iboga into the transport. He argued and kept pointing at Janson and Kincaid. It took four strong men to shove Iboga in the door. To Janson’s surprise, the last man up the ramp did not strafe the Embraer’s landing gear with his assault rifle. Instead, he threw a mock salute as the airplane started rolling down the runway, and pulled the door shut.
Janson vaulted up the Embraer’s steps, with Kincaid right behind him.
“Fire ’em up, boys! Follow that plane —Oh, God!”
Ed’s and Mike’s seat belts held their bodies in the pilot and co-pilot chairs. Their throats had been cut and the cockpit stank of blood.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Vicious, senseless…” Kincaid’s voice was cracking, her mouth trembling. “Why didn’t they just kill us instead?”
“Ed and Mike were easier to kill.”
There were times, Janson thought, that he was ashamed to be a human being. These two men, these gentle men, so precise in their skills, so quietly proud of the partnership they forged daily with the elegantly engineered Embraer, so ready to whisk Janson anywhere in the world, to change course without hesitation, to be always loyally at his service, to risk their licenses to play fast and loose to serve him, did not deserve to be murdered.
“Senseless,” Kincaid repeated. “They’re just pilots. They’re not— Oh, God, they were always so nice to me.”
Not quite senseless, thought Janson. There was purpose behind the murders. The phony Legionnaires had left him and Kincaid holding the bag, stuck on the ground, on foreign soil, with two dead men to account for. They would be tied down for weeks explaining to the Italian authorities. Under Italian law they could be held without charges for two years.
He was heartsick. The inner circle of CatsPaw and Phoenix was small, very small. His family. Jesse, Quintisha, his pilots. He stared out the windshield. How many miles had Ed and Mike looked through it taking him places he had to go? The Embraer was pointed east down the runway. The sky was brightening over the sea. The Carabiniere would be radioing reinforcements.
“I’ll get towels and blankets,” he said. “We’ll lay them out aft.”
Kincaid followed him to the back of the plane, stumbling like a woman wrenched from sleep. They got blankets and towels from the linen locker and hurried forward, Janson moving with increasing urgency. He stopped to retract the stairs and lock the door. He found Jessica on her hands and knees in the cockpit, toweling blood off the deck. They wrapped Ed and Mike as best they could in the blankets, carried them aft, and strapped them into the fold-down bunks.
“Iboga looked surprised. He didn’t expect to be rescued.”
“Yeah, I saw that. Fucking SR.”
“These guys weren’t necessarily SR. SR would have shot everyone in sight. Cops, us.”
“They did Ed and Mike.”
“They did the bare minimum to leave you and me holding the bag so the Italians will hunt us instead of them. We can spend a year in Italy. Or we can try and get out of here so we can track down Iboga and his money.”
“And get who did this to Ed and Mike?”
“Have you been practicing takeoffs on the simulator?”
She tore her eyes from the shrouded bodies. “Yeah, Ed set it up. Mike sat in with me.”
“How’d you do?”
“Aced it. Second try.”
Janson said, “It’s been a while since I’ve flown and I expect you’re better at it than I am.”
“Not saying much.”
“I’ll lay smoke. You get us out of here.”
* * *
KINCAID WIPED MIKE’S blood off the left-hand chair, climbed in, and adjusted it forward so she could reach the rudder pedals. Ed had taped a card to the throttle on which he had written “V 1114” and “V R130.”
V 1was her all-important takeoff-decision speed, which Ed had based on the weight of the aircraft, the length of the runway, the temperature, and the speed of the wind. It told Kincaid that she had until the fifty-thousand-pound jet plane was hurtling at 114 knots—130 miles per hour—to decide notto take off. If she lost an engine slower than that she had to abort. Above 114 knots, she had to try to take off. She showed Janson the bud that Ed had set on the airspeed indicator at 114 knots. It would be Janson’s job, as the one not flying the ship, to call out, “V 1.” At V R, rotation speed—which Ed had written as “130 knots”—Janson would simply call out, “Rotate,” so Kincaid would know when to draw back on the control yoke to elevate the nosewheel off the runway.