“Look?” she snapped. “Look at what? I just ran a damned triathlon across Denver International Airport, I’m apparently a fugitive from justice, and I’ve got men chasing after me with guns, Gardner. I’ve treated more bullet wounds in the last two days than I’ll see in the rest of my career; it’s like a traveling emergency room with you people. I really don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, and I’d do anything for you, you know that. But this isn’t my fight.”
“That’s what I used to think, that it wasn’t my fight,” Noah said. “And if you want to know exactly how we all got to where we are today, that pretty much sums it up.”
With the air transit shutdown in full effect it took more than a few calls and a price that was several times the market value, but at last Ellen had managed to line up a pair of cars from a local service. Once that was done she’d apologized to Noah in her way, and of course he’d understood. Right and wrong aside, in matters of life and death we’d all at least prefer to make our own decisions.
Noah found a box of company sweatshirts and after the two of them had changed he took an extra and they headed back toward the front of the hangar to wait.
When they stopped at the plane they found Molly and her new friend sitting across from one another in the passenger cabin. McCord had wrapped her in a plush blanket and brought her a cup of hot coffee from the small galley near the back. The two were deep in a conversation about the Founders’ Keepers and the state of the world in general.
It turned out that their host was more than a little familiar with Molly’s group and their goals and had been so for many years. By his enthusiasm he seemed to be completely unfazed by the more recent smears against her character and reputation. As she spoke he was looking at Molly as though he were in the presence of a visiting dignitary.
The interior of the aircraft had been lovingly restored with all the style and luxury of a far more romantic era in civil aviation. Wood, fine leather and polished metals adorned every crafted surface where plastics and polyesters were the norm in the assembly-line products of today. Along with all the classy touches it had also been fully appointed with more modern features—including onboard medical equipment stored close at hand—to ensure the comfort and safety of the aging heroes who were to be ferried to Washington on the refurbished plane’s first flight of the present century.
Ellen took a seat as Noah walked up the inclined center aisle. From a spot near the cockpit he saw the first of the cars his friend had ordered. The long black sedan pulled up and then came to a stop outside.
“That was quick,” he said.
He picked up Molly’s duffel bag, told the others to relax where they were for the moment, and then exited the plane and began to walk toward the parked car to let the driver know they’d be along soon.
When he was halfway there a second car appeared, moving more slowly, and soon it made the turn onto the inbound straightaway.
The rear passenger door swung open on the unmarked vehicle parked in front of him, and Noah froze where he stood.
Everything looked right, but something was wrong.
After another moment he thumped his forehead as though he’d forgotten something, made a polite gesture toward the car that said wait just another minute, please, and then turned and walked back into the hangar. When he was nearly to the plane he stole a glance over his shoulder and saw the driver and another man standing by the side of their sedan; just standing there in the rain, watching. A third man had emerged from the other vehicle, which had by then pulled up to park near the first. That guy was also watching, and though it was hard to tell for sure at this distance, he appeared to be speaking into his lapel.
Noah stepped up into the cabin with the others. “We’ve got trouble,” he said.
He went up the aisle so he could get a hidden view out the windshield and Bill McCord followed him forward.
“Those guys in the cars, you think they’re the ones who’re after you?”
“Looks that way.” Noah could feel the seconds passing too quickly to stop and think. Other vehicles were arriving, headlights off, and were easing around either side of the hangar as if on their way to cover any exits to the rear.
The two men hurried back to the set of seats where Molly and Ellen were waiting and Noah told them what he’d seen.
“How can that be?” Ellen asked. “We used somebody else’s phone and I made the calls. They’re not even looking for me.”
“They’re looking for Molly,” Noah said, “and she knows me, and I know you. That’s all it takes; it’s not that hard to make the watch list anymore. They don’t need a warrant and it’s all done by machine. They can monitor every single call that’s made and listen for keywords, listen for voiceprints—I guess I just didn’t realize they’d reached the point where they could do it in real time.”
“So what now?” Ellen asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We’re not giving up,” Molly said. “We can’t.”
“Molly,” Noah said as he knelt down next to her, “we’re surrounded in here. If we don’t come out now they’re just going to come in after us. I don’t think we’ve got a choice.”
“And I don’t think they’re here to take us alive, Noah.”
They all let that prospect sink in as more precious seconds ticked by.
“Well, if they’re not going to let you walk out,” Bill McCord said, “what do you say we fly?”
Half a minute later the two women were securely buckled in and Noah was sitting in the right-hand seat up front.
He wasn’t to do anything he wasn’t told to do by the man in the captain’s chair, not that he would have known where to even begin. With the exception of the add-on GPS, what looked like a radar screen, and a small computer display, there was nothing remotely recognizable in the wall of dials, levers, and lights arrayed in front of him.
“If you’ve got any doubts, say so now,” McCord said.
“No doubts here,” Noah replied, though his heart felt like it was trying to pound its way out of his chest.
“Okay, then. Hang on to your hat.”
McCord put on his headset and motioned for Noah to do the same. Then he flipped a toggle and with a shrill mechanical groan the tri-blade propeller to the left began to turn over. Almost immediately a sharp thud put a hole through the Plexiglas windshield on the pilot’s side as the sound of a gunshot echoed through the hangar. McCord ducked and hit the switch labeled PRIME and then he cracked one of the throttles barely ahead. The left radial engine coughed and spewed a billowing cloud of dirty white smoke but after a few more pops and revolutions it thundered to life.
“Keep your heads down!” Noah yelled to the rear, and new shooting erupted from two positions up ahead.
Ladders and racks of tools clattered to the floor outside as the plane jerked forward and began to roll. The right-side engine was balking and McCord fought the rudder and the brakes to straighten out his taxi and compensate for the one-sided thrust. As the men out front were advancing and firing at will, another hail of gunfire broke out from behind. The plane shook and veered as the wing impacted and overturned a bank of work lights. Just then the other engine belched fire and started up with a roar.
Noah was shoved back into his seat as Bill McCord jammed the throttles forward and the plane surged ahead. The rear passenger door had still been hanging open but it slammed closed from the sudden forward momentum. Between where they were and freedom there were fifty cluttered yards inside the hangar, two men who were now retreating but still firing their automatic rifles, and an open gap between the tall outer doors that looked like it might almost, but not quite, be wide enough to clear.
“Those cars outside,” Noah shouted over the noise, “are the wings going to make it over those cars?”
“That’s among my concerns!” McCord shouted back.
As their forward speed reached the first milestone the tail lifted and the cabin leveled with the pilot working hard to hold hi
s straight line and thread the needle that was fast approaching. The gunmen dove aside and an instant later the view ahead and above opened up as they cleared the confines of the hangar without an inch to spare at the wingtips. Noah held his breath and braced himself as they rocketed through the parked cars with the wheels and the arcs of the spinning propellers passing just between them.
McCord wasn’t celebrating this astounding exit, and he wasn’t stopping, either. He didn’t call the tower for clearance and there wasn’t going to be any stately rollout toward a distant assigned runway. The plane tore through the long, deserted parking lot, picking up speed all the way, and when they’d bumped across the access road only flat grass and concrete lay before them.
As the pilot pulled back on the yoke the wings caught a gust and the ancient plane leaped into the air at a perilously steep angle. Their speed dropped off and for an endless moment it felt like the craft would give out and spin into the ground, but the wings somehow leveled and seized the lift again, and against all the laws of man and nature, it seemed, they were flying.
Chapter 56
Though the aircraft was shot full of holes and whistling like a sieve, no one inside had been struck by any of the bullets that had passed through the outer skin. And, as the Rocky Mountains were behind them and theirs was now the only plane aloft in the entirety of U.S. airspace, the odds of a midair collision seemed nil. These were the only two bits of reassuring news that Noah Gardner could come up with at the moment.
The instant they’d broken ground they’d been picked up on radar and the tower had ordered them to land immediately. Bill McCord was known to the controllers at Centennial and at first he’d responded with a vague tale of a medical emergency on board the plane. That dodge didn’t hold up for very long; the familiar, concerned voices in their headsets were soon replaced by others. As the climb-out continued toward cruising altitude the firm orders coming over the radio escalated rapidly to warnings, and then to threats. The commander at Buckley Air Force Base, having earlier brought his forces to their highest level of alert, was already in the process of sending up four fighters to intercept them, and if necessary, to bring them down.
“We’ve got three choices now,” McCord said, “and none of them are great.” He punched a button and the urgent chatter on the radio went quiet. “We can land now and get arrested, we can keep doing what we’re doing and get shot down, or we can try to evade the pursuit and run.”
“Run? How can we outrun an F-16?”
“We can’t, but we can go where they’d have a hell of a hard time trying to follow us.”
Noah looked his pilot over. The man was gray as a ghost and already breathing hard from even the initial ordeal he’d already been through; who could tell how he might fare against what could lay ahead?
“Are you all right, Bill?”
“I’ve been better. Now go and see what your friends want to do.”
“Okay. I’ll be right back.”
“And I’ll be right here.”
Before he even asked them he’d already known what Molly’s answer would be. She was bound for Pennsylvania, come what may. Ellen didn’t put up a fight; she seemed stoically resigned at this point to whatever gruesome death the fates might bring. But Noah also had another concern to share with her.
He bent to her ear and said, “Doctor, I think after this next part you need to come up and have a look at Mr. McCord.”
“Why not right now?”
“Because if we take his mind off his business right now we might not get to the next part at all.”
As Noah strapped himself into his seat again he told Bill McCord that they’d decided not to surrender, but to press on. The man nodded, and then he pointed out the altimeter on the control panel and carefully explained how to read it.
“We’re going down to the deck pretty soon and I’m going to have my hands full and my eyes straight ahead. When that needle starts to drop I want you to call out every thousand feet and then do the same in hundreds toward the end. Got it?”
“Got it. So we’re at almost ten thousand feet right now, and I’ll call out every thousand on the way down.”
“And then hundreds, below two thousand. That’s what I need.”
With that understood the pilot put the plane into a shallow bank to the right. When he leveled off again the compass read due east and there was a solid wall of churning black clouds dead ahead, a massive curtain drawn across the sky that towered from the surface up higher into the heavens than the eye could see.
“We’re not going that way,” Noah said.
“Pennsylvania’s that way.”
“We’re going into the storm?”
“That weather will blot us out on the radar, and if they actually follow us in, with any luck those jets’ll be looking for us up high while we’re running down low.”
“What do you mean, if they follow us?”
“You’ve gotta be real smart to be a fighter pilot”—McCord nodded ahead—“and a man would have to be dumb as a bag of hammers to fly into that.”
The plane shook violently as a pair of shock waves pounded against the outer hull. Two jets had come from behind and streaked past on either side, so fast that it looked like the old C-60 was standing still. Before they reached the approaching storm front the fighters peeled off in opposite directions, heading around in wide arcs that would ultimately bring them into position for another warning pass, or for an easy kill.
Bill McCord hit more switches. The navigation lights and strobes outside went dark, as did all interior lights except for the dim glow from the dials in the control panel.
“Cinch up your seat belts!” McCord shouted behind. “This is going to get pretty rough!”
Seconds later the windshield went completely gray as they breached the wall of the storm. The craft lurched suddenly upward; it felt like an elevator shooting to the top floor ten times too fast, only to be dropped again into a plummeting dive to a level far below where they’d started. Noah had his eyes glued to the altimeter and he watched as the needles fought to keep up with the rapid, random changes.
“Grab on to the yoke,” McCord said. There was a duplicate set of controls in front of the right-hand seat. “Don’t add or take away from what you feel me trying to do. I just want you to be ready to give me a little more strength if I need it.”
“Okay.” As he took his grip Noah could feel the violence of the weather tearing at the control surfaces outside, but also there, in answer, were the sure and steady responses from the man right beside him.
“Here we go,” McCord said.
The yoke pushed slightly forward. With no horizon or any other visual reference out the windows, there was only a gradually building press of acceleration and the counterclockwise wheeling of the altimeter to tell them they were now descending.
“Eight thousand feet,” Noah said.
The plane was buffeted by a rapid series of powerful forces, some rocking them to the side, others lifting, others punching down from above. Three of the bullet holes in the front windshield suddenly joined as a whitened crack snapped between them.
“Seven thousand,” Noah said, and only seconds later he had to call out again. “Six!”
He felt the forward pressure on the yoke begin to ease and then pull back. “Five thousand.” Their rate of descent was barely slowing at all.
“Give me a hand!” McCord shouted.
Together they pulled back as one, and Noah watched as the altimeter responded, but only sluggishly. A sudden burst of hailstones hit them all at once and then was gone.
“Four thousand feet.” A blinding flash of light illuminated the clouds outside as a crack of nearby thunder reverberated through the interior. The yoke was fighting them both and it seemed the storm was intent on pushing its foolish intruders all the way to the ground.
“Twenty-five hundred!” Noah shouted, having missed the previous mark by a second or two. “Two thousand!”
There was another
bright flash outside and for the first time since they’d taken off he could see the earth down below. He’d begun by then to call out the altitude in hundred-foot increments.
“Thirteen hundred. Twelve hundred. Eleven hundred . . . one thousand . . .” The descent was slowing at last, and Noah could feel the press of the Gs shifting as the plane finally passed through the bottom of a leveling curve. “Nine hundred,” he said, and after a few seconds more added, “and holding steady there.”
Chapter 57
The small radar screen in the front panel showed only a solid sea of pulsating multicolored blotches ahead and behind. Similar displays at ground stations or aboard any aircraft still in pursuit would show much the same. With no transponder, and hidden in the depths of all those angry clouds, their plane’s tiny signature would be all but invisible, just as their pilot had predicted.
When the radio was tuned to an automated weather station the report said there was an end-to-end string of severe thunderstorms forming up in a line across the region and far beyond, with worsening conditions likely to spawn the same kind of weather precisely along their route toward the East Coast. That meant this journey wouldn’t be getting any easier.
After a little over a hundred arduous, ground-hugging miles Bill McCord announced that he felt it was safe enough to ascend to an altitude where the turbulence might be less punishing. If they’d really slipped their pursuers then higher was better; it had been a brutal ride so far and more than once a sudden downdraft had nearly ended the trip.
They were tossed around repeatedly on their way back upstairs, and then without any warning the ride smoothed out and leveled off. There was a sort of kick and then a strong push from behind, and while watching his instruments the pilot explained that they must have happened onto an unusually low-traveling jet stream and were being temporarily borne along on the rapids of this powerful river of air.
For the first time there were a few moments to assess the situation and think.