Threat Level Black

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?”