49
Somewhere over the Atlantic, July 7
KURT AUSTIN AND JOE
ZAVALA found themselves in the noisy cockpit of a Russian-designed
IL-76 transport as it cruised at thirty-four thousand feet. They
sat in the jump seats, just behind the pilots. They wore headsets
and flight suits and stared through the windshield at a brilliant
sunset out over the Atlantic.
After leaving
Singapore, they’d spent several days rounding up the equipment Kurt
felt he needed to get aboard the Onyx.
The last piece of the puzzle had been a jet capable of a
transatlantic hop, piloted by a few people that would ask no
questions.
They’d chartered it
out of Tangiers, through a somewhat murky chain of brokers that
began with an Egyptian friend of Joe’s, who knew a man from Greece,
who had good contacts with a few people in Morocco.
While the chain of
command worried Kurt a bit, the aging craft they were flying in was
even more concerning. It shook and rattled and smelled as if it
were leaking jet fuel in half a dozen places. The pilots tapped
hard on the old analog-style gauges as if they weren’t working,
fiddled with a pair of fuses at one point, and chatted in English
with an Eastern European accent, making constant references to the
“worthless mechanics.”
So far, the wings
hadn’t fallen off. Kurt considered that a small
victory.
As he pondered
whether their luck would hold, the copilot turned to
him.
“Radio call for you,”
he said. “Switch to channel two on headset.”
Kurt looked over at
the toggle switch beside the headset jack. Cyrillic writing and the
numbers 1 and 2 presented themselves. He flipped the switch to
number 2.
“This is Kurt,” he
said.
“You’re a damn hard
person to find, Kurt.” It was the voice of Dirk Pitt. “If it wasn’t
for a rather large item on your NUMA credit line regarding an
aircraft charter, I wouldn’t have been able to track you
down.”
“Um, yeah,” Kurt
mumbled. “I can explain that.”
He tapped the copilot
on the shoulder.
“Is this line
secure?” Kurt asked.
The copilot nodded.
“It’s a proprietary channel. Scrambled until it reaches plane.” He
smiled, a large mustache turning up with the corners of his mouth.
“All part of our service to you.”
Kurt almost laughed.
Not exactly the cone of silence, he thought, but it would have to
do.
“I think we’re onto
something,” he said, wishing he had been able to have this
conversation after he’d confirmed the accuracy of that particular
thought. “I think we’ve found our man.”
“Where?” Dirk
asked.
“On a ship in the
middle of the Atlantic.”
“Then why are you
airborne?”
Kurt gazed out the
window. The sun was about to drop below the horizon ahead of them.
The moment of truth was still two hours away.
“It’s the only way to
get close enough,” he said. “The ship we think he’s on is sitting
in the middle of the Atlantic, making a few knots and pretty much
going nowhere. The problem is, it’s a hundred miles from the
nearest shipping lane in a barren spot in the middle of the ocean.
Approaching it on the water would be a dead giveaway—with emphasis
on the word dead. Our only hope is an
airdrop.”
Dirk went silent,
perhaps evaluating his employee for bravery or maybe a Section
Eight.
“I’m sure they have
radar,” Pitt said finally. “I take it you’re not going to fly
overhead and jump.”
“No, sir,” Kurt
said.
“Okay,” Dirk replied,
obviously aware of what Kurt was planning. “That explains the
second item on your account.”
“I made sure to get
receipts,” Kurt insisted, as if it mattered.
“We’ll talk about
that later,” Dirk said. “The thing is, I don’t believe you need to
make this jump.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say we’ve
confirmed our primary target as lying elsewhere,” Dirk said.
“Unfortunately, we’ve already sparred with them once today and we
lost that round. Brinks was right, your man is nothing more than a
hired hand. He delivered his hostages and took off. While there’s
some value in locating him, I wouldn’t risk your life over
it.”
Kurt considered what
Pitt was telling him. The brass all assumed Andras was a soldier of
fortune, and why not? That’s what he’d always been. It seemed they
thought his part in this was over and that he was on his way to a
vacation or another job.
Maybe they would pick
him up later, maybe they wouldn’t, but if Kurt understood what he
was being told, they’d confirmed Sierra Leone was the sponsor of
all this madness.
“Why don’t you just
sit this one out?” Dirk added.
“You know I would,”
Kurt said, “but something is still bothering me. Our target is not
acting like a mercenary. More like it’s his party. I’m not sure
what it all means, but I swear there’s more to this than we
know.”
He glanced over at
Joe. “On top of that, Mr. Zavala says there’s a lot about this
tanker that doesn’t add up. For one thing, she’s forty feet wider
than most tankers her length, which gives her a kind of stubby
appearance even though she’s twelve hundred feet long. She also has
odd bulges protruding near the bow underneath the forward anchors,
and a raised section amidships. We have no idea what any of it is
for, but neither one of us likes it. If it’s all the same with you,
I’d just as soon get a closer look at her.”
“You’ve earned the
right to make this call,” Pitt said. “Just be sure you’re making it
for the right reason.”
“I’m not trying to be
a hero,” Kurt said. “If there’s nothing interesting down there,
I’ll go over the side, pop the cork on my survival raft, and wait
for you to send a blonde, brunette, and a redhead to pick me up.
But on the odd chance Joe and I are right, better we find out now
rather than later.”
Pitt was quiet.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Don’t get yourself blown up before I can
yell at you for all these bills that are coming in.”
Kurt laughed. “I’ll
try not to.”
With that, Pitt
signed off. Kurt gazed ahead at the orange ball of the sun just
dipping below the horizon. The truth lay eight hundred miles ahead,
moving slowly through the dark of night.