Black operator complete.., p.34
Black Operator--Complete Box Set (Books 1-6), page 34
* * *
Vladimir Ushakov stayed calm as the pilot fought the controls and screamed in terror. They avoided a collision with the outgoing aircraft by mere inches. It was sheer luck, or some amazing meteorological or aeronautical fluke that made them avoid crashing into the Rapide. It happened on the final part of their descent, meters off the runway, with insufficient power to abort the landing and go around again. Amazingly, the aircraft touched down safely. The crew opened the door even before it had come to a stop, and he climbed out onto the snow. With an effort, he kept his face in a frozen grimace, refusing to show fear. He refused to show any emotion about what he knew must have happened.
That old biplane, there’s no question who was inside it. My birds have flown.
Captain Karpov raced up to him, and despite the bitter cold, she was perspiring. Either with the effort of trying to stop the fugitives, or with fear for her future; a future that lay in his hands.
"Sir, welcome to Siberia. I didn’t know you were coming.”
He eyed her coldly. “They were in that aircraft?”
“Yessir.”
"You failed."
"Sir, I…"
He put up a hand to stop the torrent of excuses. “Alert the Air Force, the Air Defense radar stations, and get fighters in the air. Find them! Shoot them down! The woman in that plane is the most dangerous person in Russia. If she escapes, I suggest you take out your pistol and blow your brains out. Clear?"
She'd gone even whiter than usual. "Yes, Sir."
* * *
“He’s alive.”
He was still recovering from the shock of the brush with death. First the camp guards doing their best to kill them, and then the incoming aircraft they’d almost collided with.
Maria slid into the co-pilot’s seat. “Peter Schiller. He’s alive.”
He flew on, unable to comprehend what she meant. Still feeling the effects of the gunshot wound to the head, he concentrated on fighting to keep the ancient aircraft in the air. His strength was almost gone, and he was losing the fight.
"Maria, put your hands on the control column in front of you and help me. This thing flies like a cow."
He felt the pressure ease as she put her weight into controlling the ungainly aircraft. Then he worked out what she’d said.
"You said he's alive. I saw them hit him with a machine gun burst, enough to kill an elephant."
“It wasn’t what it seemed. By some miracle, the bullets just winged him. All but two, which went all the way through his body, but they missed the vital organs. He's already recovered consciousness, and I think he's going to be okay."
"Who's fixing him up?"
"They all are, Mikhail, Nikolai, and Yuri. Nikolai is still in a lot of pain, but he served part of his military career as a medic, and he’s doing his best to patch him up."
He was scanning the instrument panel, and he frowned. "That’s great news, but I may as well tell you we have a huge number of problems to resolve before we get to safety."
"Problems like what?"
“Number one is fuel. I've been looking at the instruments, and the tanks are half full, enough for two hundred, two hundred and fifty miles at best. We must find somewhere to refuel. Maybe some isolated airstrip that will sell us some gas."
She frowned. "What else?
"You want a list? First, and last, the Russian air defense system. You can see we’re flying very low to stay off their radar. But it's not foolproof. They'll have fighter aircraft up and reconnaissance planes. Look-down/shoot-down radar will pick us up when we’re crossing open ground, and as much as I'd like to hug the mountains and valleys, it won't be possible. Sooner or later, we’ll have to fly across wide-open spaces, and the reconnaissance aircraft will pick us up immediately. They’ll vector in fighters, and the first we’ll know is when we see a missile streaking toward us. Or maybe a long burst of cannon fire that rips through the cabin."
She didn't seem fazed. "Anything else?"
"You want more bad news? We need somewhere to land if we ever manage to cross the Urals. We could make a run for the border, assuming we find enough gas, but the border is the most heavily defended part of the country."
"I don't want to go to the border. I want to go to Moscow."
"Moscow?” He couldn’t contain his look of astonishment, “Why there?"
"Because the most powerful weapon I have in my armory is in Moscow."
She explained about the documents she’d gathered detailing the corrupt deals and offshore bank accounts of the Kremlin hierarchy. How she'd spoofed them into thinking she was handing them over when she'd tried to save his life. And the political leaflets they’d have found when they went into the storage unit.
"I scanned all the documents and put them on a single high capacity USB stick. The stick is hidden in an Orthodox church close to the center of Moscow." She smiled, "In fact, I'd say it’s less than a kilometer from the Kremlin. I need to retrieve that stick and get the information transferred to the Internet. That way, I can threaten to make it public at the push of a keystroke if they continue with their attacks. I can't think of any other way to stop them."
"This was your plan when you first decided to come back?"
"It was always going to be my backup plan. The problem was they ambushed us before we even arrived in Russia, and I didn't have a chance to put it into practice. We must retrieve that USB stick and upload the documents so they can't stop publication. We have to try for Moscow."
He thought about what she’d said. They had a long way to go before they arrived in Moscow, and a lot of hostile aircraft between them and the capital.
"There may be a way to solve the fuel problem. An old aircraft like this won’t need high-octane aviation fuel. If we could land close to a gas station, we could fill up the tanks. If we find a small town, we can fly in and out without people even knowing we’ve been there."
She looked out the window and frowned. “A small town may not be so easy to find. Not in this wilderness.”
Below them lay a vast expanse, thousands of square miles, with no sign of human habitation. No towns, no anything. He flew on, keeping one eye on the needle of the gauge, estimating how much longer they could stay in the air. It wasn't long.
And then Maria exclaimed, "Look! Over there, I see a small town. No, it's little more than a village, but they're sure to have a gas pump."
She was pointing to a cluster of around forty houses, and he flew even lower. Skimming the ground at little more than twenty feet, and ahead of them, a large wooden sign came into sight, a gas station. He lowered the speed and dropped low for a landing. The Rapide flew three feet over a low wall and gently flared to land on a rough track that led straight to the gas station. The wheels bumped onto the ground, he slowed the engine to idle, and taxied toward the pump.
A man who looked more than a hundred-years-old stepped out of a stone cottage next to the pump. He gazed at the aircraft, and if he was surprised to see it rolling toward his premises, he didn't show it. He puffed at the cigarette between his lips, watching the Rapide roll to a stop thirty feet from the pump.
Mikhail exited the aircraft first. He ran to the man and spoke to him in rapid Russian. He didn't reply, just looked at him, and puffed on his cigarette. He regarded the aircraft and looked back at Mikhail; still no response until Peter stumbled through the cabin door and limped toward him. Cris was astonished the pilot could even walk. Even after being hit with five bullets, he remained on his feet. The guy was one tough hombre. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a bundle of notes, and gave them to the old man, who gave a slight nod. It was like he was used to filling fuel tanks of aircraft that dropped in from the skies, although his business would have been more likely agricultural machinery. Huge combines and the massive tractors the Russians used to tame their Arctic wildernesses. Still puffing on the cigarette, he coupled up the pipe and dragged it over to the Rapide.
The process was agonizingly slow. The pump was manual, and he cranked the fuel by hand, a long wooden lever that he pushed from side to side. Each stroke spat a spurt of fuel into the empty tanks. The whole time he kept puffing at the cigarette. He tossed it away when it burned down to a stub and lit another. Somehow, they knew he wouldn’t take kindly to a request to desist. By a miracle, the sparks from the crude, Russian tobacco didn’t ignite the fuel and turn the Rapide into a blazing pyre.
Rhodes watched the needle as it climbed higher, and after a half-hour, the tanks were full, enough for another five hundred miles. He shouted to Mikhail and Peter, who waved an acknowledgement. They spoke to the gas station owner. He disconnected the pipe, lit up yet another cigarette, and Cris started engines.
As they scrambled into the cabin, he pushed the throttles forward and taxied along the track, bumping and lurching on the rough surface. He picked up speed until at last they were back in the air. The long, slow flight continued hugging the ground, and never taking his eyes off the gauge to assess how quickly the fuel was being consumed. Schiller came forward and nodded to Maria. She climbed out of the seat and perched on the engineer’s jump seat. Schiller sat down, and Cris glanced across at him.
"It's good to see you’re still alive. I haven’t thanked you yet for coming to get us out of there."
His expression was grim. “It was an expensive trip, and it cost my friend Manfred Neumann his life. It nearly cost me mine.”
“I’m sorry about Neumann.”
“Yeah, me, too. I’ll send his share of the fee to his family.”
“Fee?”
He looked at Maria. “They said you were wealthy, that you’d pay a great deal for us to fly to Siberia and free you from the gulag. We didn’t do this out of some misplaced altruism.”
She gave him a curt nod. “You’ll get your money, don’t worry.”
“That’s good.” A pause, and he relaxed and grinned, “But even without it, I’d have come for you. Not that I normally do this for nothing, only if it’s for a good cause, and I’ve always been an admirer of yours, Miss Tereshkova. I just hope you don’t disappoint me. In fact, I hope you don’t disappoint the rest of the Russian people.”
Her expression warmed a fraction. “I’ll do my best.”
They flew on, and Schiller gave him the navigational coordinates for the next fueling stop.
"We gave the guy in charge a fat bribe on the way in, and he owes us a tank of gas on the way back.”
They landed at what had once been an emergency strip for air defense fighters at the height of the Cold War. Now, it was solely the preserve of agricultural aircraft, crop sprayers mainly, and a half-dozen Antonov An-2 biplanes lying around the airfield in varying stages of dilapidation. Cris taxied up to the aviation fuel depot, and a man in threadbare uniform was waiting to fill the tanks. Another fifteen minutes, and they were back in the air, continuing their flight west.
He continually scanned sky, and his unease grew with every mile they flew nearer to Moscow. He could sense the hunters prowling around them. Higher in the sky, he saw the telltale contrails of fighter interceptors, searching for them with their look-down/ shoot-down radars probing the ground below. So far, they’d flown almost the entire journey across rugged terrain. Thick, tall forests, low hills, and deep valleys, perfect to keep them clear of the electronic probes. Their luck ran out when they still had a thousand miles to run. A wide stretch of open steppe, and they were east of the Urals. Without warning, a lean, mean Sukhoi fighter jet flashed past the nose, and the old Dragon Rapide rocked in the turbulence. He glanced at Peter.
"They’ve found us. I guess that's it."
He snorted. "The hell it is. This is my aircraft, and no trigger-happy fighter jock is going to shoot it down. Not without a fight."
"You can’t be serious, Peter. He'll be armed with cannons and air-to-air missiles. What do we have to fight back with, a few AK-47s?"
"We fight back with the tools we have, skill and experience. The kid flying that plane will be as cocky as hell, already working out how he’s going to tell his pals in the mess how he chalked up a kill. He’d better think again. We're not quite the sitting duck he thinks we are. Let me have the controls."
He took a firm grip on the control column and continued straight and level, glancing around continually, looking for the Sukhoi to come in on its first attack run. They had no warning of the missile until Cris saw the contrail heading toward them, and he shouted a warning.
Schiller pulled the throttles back and dropped the flaps. The aircraft slowed almost as if it had hit a wall, and two seconds later, the missile went past them. It slammed into the ground, exploding in a welter of smoke and flame.
Schiller chuckled. "That's one missile gone. I heard they carry eight of those things, so we have seven more to go."
"And the cannon," he reminded him.
"The cannon, yes. Let's show this little bastard a thing or two."
The fighter flashed in, and this time, he wasn't taking any chances. He was flying astern of them, so if they tried to slow the airspeed, it would make no difference. The heavy caliber rounds would slam into the fuselage and blast the Rapide from the sky. The thumping noise of the 30-caliber gun was loud, and the shells punched through the air. But where the Rapide should have been, there was just empty space. They were flying over a dense pine forest. Schiller had discovered a wide firebreak between the trees. He dropped into the narrow gap, flying so low the wheels occasionally touched the ground, and for a few vital seconds, they were out of sight of the Sukhoi.
Peter grinned. "I'll bet he's getting angry. Time to clip his wings, I think."
Cris shook his head in admiration. "That was impressive. I guess you have something in mind for your next move."
"Damn right I have."
He pulled back the stick and soared up into the sky. When the pilot glimpsed the Dragon, he snapped off another burst of shells. At the last second, Peter banked the plane over hard, as if they'd been hit. He pressed a button on the instrument panel, and behind them, a long trail of smoke spewed out from beneath the fuselage.
"It's an old trick I learned from the guy who sold us the plane. It's a tank for carrying pesticide when they used the Rapide to spray crops. I keep the tank part filled with engine oil, and the outlet has been rerouted to spray onto the exhaust manifold. The oil hits the hot metal, and we trail smoke from the back, like we’ve been hit. The aircraft looks like it's mortally wounded and about to crash. Our friend out there won't be able to resist coming in again to gloat over his kill."
He rocked the control column side to side, and the aircraft did indeed stagger in the air. A moment later, the Sukhoi was coming up behind them, gloating.
"Slump down, as if you were hit," he said urgently, "Maria, get out of sight."
An onlooker would have to be blind not to believe the Dragon was mortally stricken, the crew dead or dying, and about to crash. From the corner of his eye, Cris saw the fighter struggling to maintain stability at such slow speed as it came alongside them. One hundred meters away, and it came closer. Fifty meters, forty, thirty, it was flying alongside them, wing tip to wing tip with scarcely three meters keeping them apart.
"About now. Hold onto something," Schiller shouted above the noise of the two aircraft.
They flew on for a few seconds more, and he gave the control column a light touch. The Dragon lurched toward the Sukhoi, and at the same time rose up in the air, as if about to crash down onto the starboard wing. The fighter pilot twitched the joystick to keep his expensive and sophisticated jet away from the lumbering old museum relic, forgetting the Rapide was in its element; a slow-moving biplane, flying close to the ground, and with the extreme lift given by the two sets of wings. Not so the Sukhoi, and even the tiny twitch was one twitch too many. His starboard wing dropped low and clipped a tall pine tree. The Sukhoi flipped over and tore into the pine forest. A massive explosion sent a plume of smoke up into the sky, marking the grave of the supersonic predator. They flew on.
The sky was empty, and Schiller looked at Cris. "We should be safe for now, as long as they don’t know they’ve lost their aircraft. I doubt they'll send anything else after us until they discover the loss. Our next fueling stop comes up in eighty miles, and we’ll be a long way away by then. Two more stops, and then we’re on the last leg of the journey."
"To Moscow."
He nodded. "That's what the lady wants. Moscow.”
"You can't just touch down at Sheremetyevo, Schiller."
He roared with laughter. "No, something tells me we could have a problem. But there are plenty of alternatives, and it’ll be nightfall by the time we arrive.”
“They’ll find us again, you know that.”
He nodded and smiled. “I still have a trick or two to play.”
They landed a half-hour later to refuel. With less than one thousand miles to go, Cris took control to take the Rapide off the ground, while Schiller watched. Making sure he didn't damage his valued aircraft.
"A few hours and it’ll be dark. We're going to make it, Rhodes."
Before he could reply, the radio crackled into life, and Schiller was wrong. They weren’t going to make it.
"This is Urals Air Defense Control calling unidentified biplane. You are ordered to land immediately. We have missiles locked onto your aircraft and fighter interceptors in the air. You cannot escape. Land now, or we will swat your aircraft from the sky.”
Maria had been aft in the cabin, but she rushed into the cockpit when she heard the radio. "What does it mean?"
Cris looked back at her. "What it means is we're fucked."
Chapter Five
They disembarked the Moscow train at Yaroslavsky Station. The Rapide was almost one thousand miles back, the wreckage scattered in a forest clearing. Before the crash, Peter Schiller had listened to the warning from Urals Air Defense with a tight smile.
"I think they’re serious, and they mean business. These people are beginning to annoy me."
