He took one last glance at the truck when it was his turn to mount the stairs to the aircraft’s cabin. He had no idea what awaited him and the others at the end of the flight, but he saw fear in the eyes of those he passed on his way to an empty seat. They were also realizing they’d gotten more than they bargained for.
Fifteen minutes later, the Ilyushin was towed out of the hangar, and after another delay its engines fired and it began to taxi. Judging by the size of the airport complex and the time they’d driven, Eddie guessed they were near Shanghai. His theory was confirmed after the plane took off and arrowed over the city before turning northward.
“How long do you think it will take to reach America?” his seatmate whispered. He was a big farm boy who had no idea what he’d gotten himself into.
The boy still thought they were going to the United States, a land of prosperity and opportunity called Gold Mountain. Eddie didn’t know where they were headed, but he knew it wasn’t the States. The Ilyushin didn’t have anywhere near the range. He also had a sinking feeling that before long he’d come to believe the illegals they’d found drowned in the Sea of Japan were the lucky ones.
“You’ll know it when we get there, friend,” Eddie said as he closed his eyes to the inevitable. “You’ll know it when we get there.”
Cabrillo and his team spent the weekend setting up for the snatch. They worked at the construction site under the cover of darkness. Moving the tons of cement was backbreaking labor that took all of Friday night and part of Saturday evening. The risk of their activities being detected by a foreman checking the site over the weekend was negligible, since the sacks of portland were common at the work zone. They left the placement and wiring of the explosives for Sunday night. Because of their demolition expertise, this went quickly, and by midnight they were ready to return to the warehouse Cabrillo had rented in a town about twenty miles north of Zurich.
Juan sent the others ahead in the cars they’d use during the operation while he and Linc remained behind with the tractor trailer for one final test. At this late hour there weren’t any pedestrians on the street to question why the truck’s driver locked his partner in the back of the box trailer. Once Linc closed the doors, Juan wedged himself into a corner of the modified trailer to keep from being tossed around. He was exhausted, and his joints creaked as he eased himself to the floor. A moment later he heard the big MAN diesel grumble, and the truck started to move. He carried a flashlight, but the echoing metal container remained mildly claustrophobic. The motor and pulley system attached to the roof looked perfect, a simple design that Linc could operate from the cab.
Juan turned on a portable radio but couldn’t get a station on any frequency, and when he powered up his cell phone it couldn’t acquire a signal. “Can’t hear me now,” he said into the mute device. “Good.”
They’d installed baffles and jammers inside the trailer to isolate it from electronic signals. Linc and Hali Kasim had tested the equipment at the warehouse, but Juan wanted to make sure the system worked inside the city limits where cell coverage would be more complete. It was one more detail that he wouldn’t leave to the vagaries of Murphy’s Law.
Every five minutes during the thirty-minute ride he checked to make sure the phone remained useless. Linc let him out after Hali closed the warehouse doors behind the ten-wheeled truck.
“Anything?” the big man asked.
“Nada,” Juan answered, noting that once he was outside the truck his phone could connect to the nearest cell tower. “We’re good to go. We’ll grab a couple hours of sleep. The van carrying Rudolph Isphording should be in position no later than eight fifteen. I want us ready by seven thirty. Has Julia checked in?”
Hali nodded. “She called me when you were in the truck. Isphording’s wife is out cold, and she’s on her way back to her hotel. She’ll be waiting at the prison at seven and will report in as soon as the van leaves the gates.”
“Okay, good. She’ll shadow them into the city. Linc, you’ll wait with the truck behind the construction site. The crash car’s in position?”
“Parked it myself,” Kasim said. “And I triple-checked the cables are in the back.”
Juan nodded. He’d expected no less. “Now, up until tonight the only thing illegal we’ve done is impersonate a lawyer’s wife, and even that probably isn’t against the law. Come tomorrow morning, however, we’re going to break about every law written into the Swiss penal code. If this operation goes south, anyone who gets nabbed is looking at a few decades in Regensdorf prison.”
His people understood the danger. It was what they were paid for, but Juan always reiterated the risks before they went into action. Hali, Linc, and the other Corporate mercenary, an ex-pararescue jumper named Michael Trono, looked primed.
The following morning broke gray and cold. A light drizzle had begun to fall by the time the team reached their prearranged staging posts. The few people out on the streets were huddled in trench coats or under umbrellas. Rather than a problem, the foul weather was a blessing because it seemed to have delayed the morning traffic.
Juan had little trouble breaking into the construction site. After all, it was his third incursion, and hot-wiring the big engine that powered the crane was a snap. The climb up the tower left him wet and shivering but, fortunately, the crane’s cab had a heater. He fired it up and drank coffee from a thermos as he waited. Around his neck dangled infrared goggles.
Julia checked in again, informing the team that the armored van bearing Rudy Isphording into the city would be there in another ten minutes. From his vantage high above the streets, Juan would be able to see them five blocks before they reached the construction site. Linc had parked the tractor trailer behind the muddy area. Juan could see smoke pumping from its stack as Linc waited with the engine idling. Hali and the others were in the crash car, a small van they’d bought secondhand from a moving company in Lucerne. Juan couldn’t see them but knew they also had infrared goggles as well as gas masks.
The chairman scanned the work zone once more. Piles of building materials littered the site alongside overflowing trash containers the size of trucks. Excavators and bulldozers remained silent. There was no activity around the construction trailer because no one had yet shown up for their shift. If they held to the schedule the Corporation team had observed the past week, the first worker wouldn’t arrive until a half hour after the snatch had gone down. The seven-story building was dark in the murky storm, a skeleton of steel and concrete. From the high vantage he couldn’t see where he and his people had wired it to blow.
His cell rang. “Juan, it’s me.” Julia Huxley. “Isphording’s van just stopped. One of the cops in the lead car got out to confer with its driver. Hold on. I think it’s okay. The cop’s getting back into his car. All right, they’re on the move again. You should see them in a second.”
Far down the street a police car came into view followed by the armored van and a second cruiser. They didn’t have their bubble lights or sirens on and crawled along with the regular traffic.
“Okay people, it’s almost showtime,” Juan said over his encrypted phone’s walkie-talkie mode.
He wiped the sweat from his hands and let them rest lightly on the crane’s joystick controls. Although he’d never operated a tower crane, and the height made depth perception a bit tricky, he’d run more than his share of derricks and cranes over his years at sea to feel confident he could manage the behemoth. He’d already swung the hundred-foot horizontal boom over the street, and the trolley where the cable descended was positioned directly above the roadway. The heavy steel hook was lowered to within fifty feet of the cobbled street.
“I got ’em in my mirror,” Hali announced from the crash car.
“Goggles on, everyone.” Though distorted, Juan could make out details well enough, most notably the infrared strobe lamp they’d mounted on the crane’s hook. Invisible without the goggles, the IR lamp glowed like a flare through the sophisticated optics. This was similar
to the technology that allowed stealth fighters to drop bombs with pinpoint accuracy in any weather.
A flash of movement caught Juan’s attention. He looked up the street as a Ferrari rounded a corner and shot up the road. It had to have been doing eighty miles per hour as it rocketed down the wrong lane of the two-way street. The sound of its throaty exhaust echoed up the canyon of Baroque buildings and reached Juan’s perch a hundred feet up in the control cab. He calculated speed and distance and realized that the low-slung sports car would be abreast of the lead police cruiser at the critical moment. If Hali pulled out in front of it, the kinetic energy of the impact would not only destroy the Italian-built car and kill its driver, it would also push the van carrying Isphording out of the path of the police car, allowing the convoy to pass through their carefully laid ambush.
“Juan?” Hali called anxiously.
“I’m on it.”
As much as he hated to move the crane from its carefully calculated position, he had to act. He flexed a joystick and the long boom arm began to swing across the horizon. He thumbed off a safety cover from a toggle, and as the boom reached what he thought was the right position, he hit the switch. The three-thousand-pound hook assembly plummeted from the sky.
The Ferrari’s driver never saw the weight falling from above, so he only had seconds to react as the mass of steel smashed into the street, gouging a two-foot crater less than two car lengths in front the wedge nose of his F-40. He stood on the brakes and twitched the wheel to the right, sideswiping the trailing police cruiser. Juan activated another switch, and the hook tore free from the street, pulling up clots of dirt. The hook smashed through the million-dollar car’s windshield and peeled off its roof like a sardine can as it passed below. The Ferrari’s rear wheel fell into the hole, and the supercar pitched sideways, slamming into the cruiser again so both vehicles shuddered to a sudden stop.
Hali Kasim might have seen the whole thing unfold behind him in his rearview mirror, but it didn’t distract him from his job. As the first cruiser passed the van, he accelerated out of his spot, barely clipping the Swiss police car’s rear bumper. It was enough of a nudge to spin the vehicle so it completely blocked the narrow street.
The armored car carrying Rudolph Isphording braked hard and barely avoided hitting the cruiser. Julia Huxley, trailing the convoy, spun her car to block the van from reversing out of the trap.
Juan triggered the homemade explosives they’d laid inside the unfinished building.
The shaped charges had been carefully positioned for the maximum effect. As each went off, its force was funneled into sandbaglike redoubts of cement powder the men had stacked on every floor. From the ground level up, each sequential explosion sent a blooming gray cloud of dust blasting from the building in a scene reminiscent of the Twin Towers collapse. In seconds the fine powder had formed an impenetrable curtain of dust that lofted from street level to nearly two hundred feet and covered a two-block radius. It would take at least ten minutes for the light breeze to clear the dense fog from the area. Until then, no one would be able to see anything happening on the streets around the construction site.
Hali Kasim ignored the screaming pedestrians as he and his men dashed from the van, each carrying lengths of braided cable. The gas masks filtered out the worst of the cement dust, but he could still taste it with each breath. As for the IR masks, they allowed him to see the descending hook and the infrared lamps wired to the cable in his hand, but for the rest, it was like running through a forest fire.
The driver of the armored van would be trained to ram his way out of the accident and was probably in the process of doing so when Cabrillo kicked off the explosives. Now, like everyone else on the street, the driver and his men sat paralyzed by the enormity of the explosions that appeared to have leveled the adjacent building.
Hali fumbled to the front of the truck and looped the wire around the axle. He used a parked car to leap onto the roof with the two loose ends. Looking up, he saw the IR lamp on the hook gliding through the gray clouds like a tiny star amid the darkness of night. Kasim’s men had passed their cables around both rear axles and handed the ends up to Hali. Their job done, each stripped off their gear and vanished into the panicked crowd. The fleeing pedestrians were coated with cement dust and resembled ghosts stalking a foggy moor.
Up in the tower Juan maneuvered the hook so it was directly above the multiple bundle of IR lights atop the armored van. He could see them move a bit as Hali steadied himself on the vehicle’s roof.
“Okay, that’s got it.” Hali’s voice was muffled by his gas mask. “You’re right above me. Lower the hook about ten feet.”
“Lower ten, roger.” Juan paid out more cable, watching closely as the two points of infrared light merged. Without the lamps, finding the truck in the turbid swirl of dust would have been impossible.
“Hold there.” Hali fed the eyeholes at the ends of each cable through the heavy snap hook so that all six were secured. “Okay, Chairman, she’s all yours. Give me a second to get clear, and haul away.”
The Lebanese-American jumped to the ground and was about to let the current of running people carry him away when a cop from the lead cruiser suddenly reared out of the dust cloud. For what seemed like forever the two regarded each other. The officer’s eyes widened in his dust-streaked face as he finally recognized the object in Hali’s hand was a gas mask. That was as much a reaction as Kasim would allow him. Because he lacked Eddie Seng’s martial arts training, Hali had to settle for a swift kick to the cop’s groin before he took off running.
He managed just a few yards when he spotted another officer getting out of the rear-guard cruiser’s passenger side. The man was dazed by the car crash and explosion but had the presence to carry his big flashlight and a blocky automatic pistol. He was halfway out of the car when he saw Hali running through the storm of cement power. He recognized Hali’s Arab features despite the dust and made a snap assumption. He tried to raise his weapon above the doorframe, even though the angle for a shot was all wrong. Hali threw himself bodily against the cruiser’s door, breaking one of the cop’s ankles and pinning him momentarily. Hali reached for the gun, realized the cop had an iron grip on the SIG Sauer, and rammed his elbow into the cop’s face until his fingers went slack. Kasim wrenched the weapon away and took off again, leaving the unconscious officer in a heap on the pavement.
High above the fight, Juan Cabrillo put pressure on a joystick to raise the hook, tensioning the cables for a moment before lifting the seven-ton armored truck from the ground. Once he’d hauled it thirty feet off the street, he flicked the joystick to rotate the tower crane counterclockwise. He watched as the bright flare of IR light turned through the roiling dust. He slowed the rotation as the truck swung over the street where Franklin Lincoln waited with the semi.
As part of their preparations back in the warehouse, Linc and Hali had cut off the top of the trailer, split it lengthwise with cutting torches, and then remounted the two pieces on long hinges so the entire box could be opened to the sky. An IR light had been mounted on each corner of the trailer. While the dust had begun to settle at his elevation and his view out the cab windows was clearing, down at the truck the cement dust still billowed. Yet Juan could clearly see the rectangular pattern of lights with his goggles, and he gently lowered the armored van once it was positioned within the grid.
Linc had been waiting atop the tractor cab, and as soon as the van’s tires flattened slightly under the vehicle’s weight, he scrambled to release the hook. As soon as it was free, he radioed Juan to clear out, then returned to the cab. He put the transmission into first gear and hit the remote device to seal the trailer roof.
The guards were now isolated, and even if they’d called for help during the grab, they hadn’t seen anything in the dust storm, and the local police would be busy for several hours as they pieced together that this hadn’t been a terrorist attack.
Juan checked his watch just before descending the long ladd
er that ran down the tower crane’s single support column. From explosion to securing the armored van had taken one minute, forty-seven seconds. Thirteen less than he’d expected, but then he was working with the best. He could barely see to grope his way across the construction site, moving like a blind man through the dust storm. Grit filled his eyes and choked his lungs. It took five long minutes to find the gate. He climbed the chain-link fence and lowered himself to the sidewalk.
The street was at a standstill, and the curbs were empty of people. A fine, pale powder covered everything, like ash from a volcano. He had to brush his hand against the cars parked along the street to guide himself out of the worst of the swirling storm, and it wasn’t until he was two blocks from the ambush site that he could finally see enough to pick up his pace. Police cars were fast approaching, their lights slashing through the clouds like lighthouse beacons.
“What happened?” asked an Englishman standing outside a café. His clothes were clean as opposed to Juan’s dust-covered work clothes.
“I think some sort of construction accident,” Cabrillo lied, coughing.
“Dear God. Do you think anybody was hurt?”
Juan looked back at the settling cloud. “Not a soul,” he said, knowing this time he was telling the truth.
Rudolph Isphording knew a little about how the Russians were going to pull off his rescue, so he wasn’t as stunned as the guard in the back of the van with him when they heard the screech of brakes and the crash of metal from a traffic accident. The big truck came to a sudden stop. But when an instant later the building next to the courthouse seemed to collapse, Isphording’s fear was genuine.
Neither he nor the corrections officer could see anything out the small view ports that had been installed into the side of the vehicle, nor could they comprehend what was happening when the truck suddenly began to sway. They could both feel the slight centrifugal force, as if they were going around a gentle curve. Then the motion stopped, the truck pendulumed for a moment, and there was a slight bump followed by a low-pitched mechanical whine and a loud crash over their heads.