Hard Fall Part 33

The first thing he saw, as the orbs of blue light settled from his vision, was Daggett, in a similarly dazed condition, staring back at him from the rear seat. He reached for his holstered weapon, inside the coveralls, but it wasn't there. He spotted it then, where it had been thrown, on the floor of the pa.s.senger seat, and stretched to retrieve it, prevented by his seat belt. Clumsily, he freed himself, took hold of the gun, sat up quickly and aimed.

The second thing he saw, a vision delayed by his murky left eye, was the huge front wheels of a jet as they swerved away from Daggett's car and connected fully with the back fender of his, spinning him around furiously, a full hundred and eighty degrees. His shot rang out vaguely in the direction of the terminal, as the gun once again flew out of his possession and out of sight. The ma.s.sive underbelly of the jet streamed overhead, his car pa.s.sing between the twin set of mids.h.i.+ps landing gear, and miraculously avoiding further contact.

He scrambled out of the car, rolled onto the tarmac as he collapsed from weakened knees, and came to his feet as he saw Daggett crawl over the front seat and slip behind the wheel, and the car begin to roll. At first, it failed to register that a car so badly damaged could possibly run, but run it did. It ran away from him. And he ran after it.

He reached for the back strut of the missing rear window just as the engine caught and the car leapt ahead. His fingers firmly fastened, the acceleration threw him up onto the trunk of the car. He pulled himself up to and through the s.p.a.ce of the missing window and tumbled into the backseat. Briefly, he caught the fearful whites of Daggett's eyes as the driver saw he had company. In one swift movement, Kort sat up and locked his right arm around Daggett's throat and drew his arm tightly into a choke hold. Only seconds now, and it would all be over.

FORTY-EIGHT.

DAGGETT FELT THE arm clamp around his Adam's apple like a vise, and the voice of some nameless instructor from a dozen years earlier spoke as clearly to him as if he were sitting in the seat next to him. Within five to seven seconds, the victim loses consciousness. He slammed on the brakes. The grip continued. He felt the energy drain from him as his brain was denied blood. Darkness loomed at the edges of his vision, a tunnel narrowing, and the entire tarmac, with its endless lines of planes and glowing jet engines, with its puffs of smoke as tires bit the asphalt, and sirens crying like frightened gulls, seemed suddenly caught in a lovely rosy twilight.

His fingers groped for the release lever that controlled the front seat. He knew it was there, just out of reach perhaps, but definitely there. They brushed it once, but did not light. The vise tightened its grip. He leaned forward for the lever, and as he did, increased the pressure on his neck. Unconsciousness beckoned. He touched the lever. As his foot squeezed down on the accelerator, lurching the car forward, he jerked the lever, released the seat, and shoved it back as quickly and as far as it would travel. He heard the man scream as his feet caught beneath the seat, and felt the arm's strength briefly weaken. He reached up, took hold of the man's hand and pulled hard, diminis.h.i.+ng the pressure, gasping for air as he tugged once more and spun to break the hold.

Kort released him completely then, as the car drifted out of control, driverless, slowing and wandering out into a lane of incoming aircraft. Daggett made no rational decision; logic or training played no part in his actions. He dove over the seat at the man and went after him like a wild animal. In the limited s.p.a.ce of the car, the ability to fight effectively was reduced to a few painless blows, at which point each man responded by going for the other's neck. Daggett was at a complete disadvantage here, his throat already weakened considerably by Kort's choke hold. And it was only as he realized that Kort was strangling him with one hand, while he choked him with two, that an array of tools wrenches and screwdrivers was strewn about the floor of the backseat, and that Kort had taken a screwdriver in hand.

He realized this fully as Kort stabbed him between the ribs.

He knocked the man's hand from the tool, leaving it stuck in him, the pain momentarily blocked by some survival switch thrown inside the brain, pinned the man's arm beneath his knee, and found a wrench in his hand. Where that wrench had come from was anybody's guess. It was as if G.o.d Himself had handed it to him. As he raised his arm high to deliver the blow of a lifetime or a death time he was hoping the intensity of the pain from his wound then found him, both electrifying and numbing. Rather than coming down strongly, as he had intended, the wrench was delivered effectively but not fatally to the front of Anthony Kort's skull.

Breathless, bleeding, and stark raving mad, Daggett looked up to see the 959 at the end of the runway just releasing its brakes for takeoff.

FORTY-NINE.

DAGGETT REACHED BACK, located the source of his pain, and removed the screwdriver with a single agonizing pull. A scream, born as much of rage as of pain, resounded out ,across the open expanse of tarmac and, despite the roar of a dozen jets, was heard by two baggage handlers traveling on a TUG outside Terminal A. With the screwdriver removed, the wound bled badly. He started to crawl back over the car seat before realizing the limitation of movement imposed by his injury, and ended up sliding, face first, down into the seat that itself was broken, stuck in its track, nearly in the backseat. A huge jet pa.s.sed directly over him in a deafening roar as it landed. He glanced to his right in time to see the tires of the 959 begin to roll, confirming his greatest fear: He wasn't going to stop it from taking off.

His reaction was immediate. Sitting forward on the edge of the broken seat, the radiator now steaming, he nursed the car up to its maximum speed, abandoning any pretext for safety, cutting a straight line toward the control tower. He drove directly beneath the planes where necessary, cut others off in their paths, and narrowly missed a direct collision with a single-engine Cessna he hadn't seen until it lifted off the runway, one tire actually bouncing off his roof. As he traveled at over sixty miles an hour toward the tower, the 959 traveled faster toward its takeoff. Again he found himself haunted with the memory of the dry, professional voices as the two pilots negotiated a hundred tons of airplane down a runway and into the skies. Most critical of all was that he note the exact moment the plane's wheels left the tarmac. He racked the rearview mirror (the only surviving piece of gla.s.s in the car) to afford him a view of the plane, his s.h.i.+rt sleeve tugged back, the seconds counting off.

With Daggett still thirty yards away from the tower, the plane took off.

He had his driver's door open before he applied the brake. It was only now, as he skidded to a noisy stop by the base door to the tower, that he realized the sirens and the activity he had believed directed at himself were in fact cl.u.s.tered around one of the distant gate entrances to the field. Then, as if to prove him wrong, he heard another siren and saw two flas.h.i.+ng lights approaching him at high speed.

He checked his watch: ten seconds gone; thirty-seven remained. He could picture Chaz Meecham's description of the detonator. With the cabin pressure in effect, and the nose pointed up, the timer had begun to count down the flight's final seconds.

The guard, at the bottom of the tower, his weapon drawn, stepped in front of the only door blocking it. "Hold it right there, buddy. Hands out where I can see 'em."

"FBI!" Daggett called out, still limping at a painful run toward the man. Not slowing. His hand fished for his ID and he realized it wasn't where it belonged. Somewhere in the backseat of the car perhaps; misplaced but not lost. The authority in his voice caused the guard a moment's hesitation, allowing Daggett to come another two steps closer. He had no time to debate that authority, or to rummage the car in search of a plastic laminated piece of paper with a color photograph. He was FBI. That was all that mattered. He had something less than thirty-seven seconds and only a vague idea of how he might yet prevail.

He pulled up just short of the man and kicked him in the groin with his full momentum behind the blow, simultaneously ducking and blocking the weapon out of harm's way. He pushed the guard aside, jerked the door open, and started climbing stairs. Each time he lifted his left leg, the hole in his ribs felt exactly like Kort had stabbed him there again. He hobbled up the stairs at an amazing pace, hollering out in agony with every other step. As he reached the first landing, his watch telling him twenty-seven seconds, shots rang out from behind him. Whoever had been driving that patrol car was now pursuing him.

One of the bullets. .h.i.t him.

There was no explaining it. Instead of concentrating on what now seemed like endless steps ascending to the tower, instead of seeing his life pa.s.s before his eyes, or hearing his mother's voice, or seeing a vast white room where ghostly white figures welcomed him, he charged up the stairs.

The bullet hadn't slowed him at all. It pa.s.sed through the flesh of his arm, just below his left armpit. Seventeen seconds. One last flight of stairs. Footsteps nearly on top of him now. They're going to shoot me dead, he was thinking. I've come all this way to be shot dead by my own kind.

And there was Hairless Agent Henderson the stump of a gumshoe who had been part of the Bernard arrest signaling for the two guards behind Daggett to hold off their fire. "What the f.u.c.k?" he shouted at Daggett, his eyes on the two b.l.o.o.d.y wounds on his left side.

But Daggett blew past him shouting, "The Quik-Link 959, the Quik-Link 959, who's got it?"

Twelve seconds, his watch pleaded.

"Flight control's got that one ..." a woman shouted out.

"There's a bomb on board! Patch through to them!" Daggett yelled at the top of his lungs, thinking in terms of police radios, sprinting toward her. He hadn't known exactly what he would do once he reached here, but at the time it had seemed his only chance of getting through to them, the only possibility of communicating, was from this tower. What had Meecham said? A three-way switch, each phase of which had to be working in order for the detonator to blow. Daggett could stop the timer only by closing one of the earlier gates. Think! Think! Not enough time for the plane to level out. "Tell them to decompress the cabin! Decompress the cabin, right now!"

Seven seconds.

How could they remain so calm, these people? In a voice that might have been mistaken for a priest's, the young woman called out in a southern drawl, "Mayday, Alpha-one-five-niner, this is National ground control on an emergency intercept. Explosives on board. Please decompress aircraft immediately. Repeat, blow air packs immediately. Mayday. Mayday."

"Five seconds!" Daggett screamed.

The room had gone as silent as a library, Daggett's breathing and the hum of electronic gear and cooling fans the only sounds. The woman said calmly into her headset microphone, "Emergency intercept, Alpha-one-five-niner . confirm loss of cabin pressure. Confirm loss of cabin pressure .. ." She placed a hand firmly to her ear set "Alpha-one-five-niner .. ."

Daggett, watching the seconds expire on his watch said, "Now!" his eyes then straining out the window to see an aircraft that was too far away to be seen.

"Confirm please, Alpha-one-five-niner. Confirm please .. ." Her hand still on the earphone. Every head in the room was turned. It seemed every breath was held. She looked to Daggett and nodded without a hint of expression. "That's affirmative," she said to him. "We've got callback."

It was as if he were a beach ball that had been overfilled with air to the point of bursting. His tremendous sigh of relief washed away the anxiety with a huge expulsion of air that was soon echoed by everyone in the seats around him. "Tell them to level out they've got to get out of the climb and get them back here as fast as possible."

She went about the communication in that same flat-toned, monosyllabic southern drawl. Daggett turned around. Henderson's face had gone ash white.

"We found the other detonator," Daggett said.

Henderson nodded. "I kinda guessed that."

FIFTY.

THEY MET ON that same beach on the Maryland sh.o.r.e where he had first spoken to her. It was early October, and the autumn winds had whipped the green sea into white-caps, winds that warned of a storm from the south, and caused Lynn Greene to raise her collar in defense. She was scheduled to leave the following day, returning to Los Angeles, and this had seemed an appropriate place to both of them.

As they walked, arm in arm, working the very edge of the water, their shoe prints were occasionally swallowed and erased from the sand. Sandpipers, like the Secret Service, hurried ahead of them, staying just beyond reach. There was some freighter traffic in the big s.h.i.+pping lanes far out to sea, and Daggett couldn't help but wonder where each s.h.i.+p was headed and what adventures lay in store. There had been a time in his life when he had wanted to be a sea captain. There had been times in his life when he had wanted to be many different things, but he was what he was; and this was what he had come to tell her.

"Is it okay to say that I don't like it, but I understand?" she asked him.

"It ain't over till it's over," he said.

"Then this will never be over," she replied. "Will it?"

"No, I don't think so."

"We should have made love that night. I've been kicking myself over that."

"I think we did. I've never loved you as much. I know that. We gained new ground that night. You listened. It's a marvelous gift to be able to listen. Something I'm working on."

"I do love you, you know."

"Yes, I think I do know."

She broke loose from him and chased the birds, and when she returned to stuff her arm into his, she had gla.s.sy eyes, and he wondered if it was the wind. "It gets so d.a.m.ned complicated."

"It does."

"But it seems so simple."

"It is: I have to see this through to the end. It may come tomorrow, it may come in a year's time. It may be that she and I find a way through together, and I owe that to her to try. If it was you .. ."

"I know. I would want the same thing. You're right. I know you're right, but it hurts."

"Yes, it does."

She stopped him. There they were, standing in the exact spot he had been standing when she had so boldly challenged him to come inside.

She withdrew her hand from the pocket of her coat slowly, cautiously, until she had his attention. She spun her hand over, opened up her fingers, and there lay a key. "Just once," she said, looking over at the cabin.

They made a mound of warmth on the bed out of all the blankets, their coats, and two large bath towels she found in the closet. They ended up tangled in the darkness of that coc.o.o.n, magically entwined in a perfume of their excitement, hearts pounding through their skin, fingers clenched into a single fist. The explosion of their contained love, was, as Daggett put it, "Something only an explosives expert could understand." But she encouraged further investigation on his part, and so, in the language of their professions, they teased each other until her suggestion of "only once" was long past, and the orange autumnal sun lit the sky a shocking pink.

They were silent on their walk back to the car, al though she giggled several times and followed this by squeezing his arm tightly. She finally said, "I suppose that may have to hold us a lifetime."

"It had better," he answered her. "I'm not sure I could live through that again."

FIFTY-ONE.

SIX WEEKS LATER, Anthony Kort sat waiting in a chair at Dulles International Airport. Across from him sat Monique Cheysson. His hands, like hers, were handcuffed; a chain linked his wrists to his shackled ankles. It was first time he had seen her since that day at the airport. She looked worse for wear. They had had separate hearings. He had been told by a guard that she had been caught several days after the bombing, while trying to board a train bound for New York. He had no way of knowing if this was accurate.

His attorney had won him the right to wear civilian clothes instead of the humiliating orange jumpsuit that the federal prosecutor had requested. Monique was dressed in a blue denim dress. He'd seen enough of orange jumpsuits for a long, long time.

The extradition was to Germany, where he was to stand trial for the downing of 1023. His attorney believed that this had come about from a failure by the prosecutor to build a "winnable" case that might get Kort the death penalty. The Feds very badly wanted the death penalty. Now their hopes hung on Germany.

He was surrounded by FBI protection. He recognized one of them, a guy named Levin, who had acted as an a.s.sistant to Daggett through many of the interrogations. Today, Levin seemed to be running the show without Daggett. He appreciated the irony of FBI protection.

The reason for all the concern was that Michael Sharpe had escaped prison. A total of four members of Der Grund had been freed in a daring helicopter raid on a prison, leaving the European press to speculate that Sharpe and his organization were exceptionally well funded and well connected. There were rumors of a secret "Green Fund" operating out of the Swiss banks, and a cartel of former industrialists who had "gone green." Only two weeks before the break, 60 Minutes had run a segment on Sharpe's recruiting of criminals and his "crusade of terror." Now his well-organized escape led the press to speculate that Sharpe knew the ident.i.ty of some or all of the industrialists funding the organization and its operations, and that it had been these people who had freed him.

Recent headlines had focused on Kort, and hopes had been raised that his trial in Germany might bring out some of the missing facts, might widen the already growing international investigation. America loved a good headline.

This was why he wasn't surprised when, looking out at ! the plane being readied, he recognized the face of one of the food service personnel. His whole body twitched when he saw that face it was one of Michael's henchmen. Michael had no intention of Kort telling them anything, that much was obvious. He looked over at Monique and he smiled thinly. She stared back at him without expression. He hoped they would sit them next to each other on the flight. He wanted to die alongside of her. With all he had been through, nothing should have surprised him. And yet sight of this man did.

"You all right?" one of his guards asked him.

Kort smiled widely. It had been months since he had felt such a thrill. "Couldn't be better," he said.

FIFTY-TWO.

DAGGETT SAT NERVOUSLY in the hospital waiting room.

Right about now, Kort's plane would be taking off.

He had his priorities set. He had told Pullman a flat no. Levin was handling this for him.

Just beyond a series of sealed doors, doctors were conducting the first exploratory surgery since Duncan had felt warmth in both his feet only ten days before. X rays confirmed that something perhaps the fall from the bookshelf, two months earlier had radically moved his third vertebra, and though the resulting progress could not be medically explained, there was a desire on the part of specialists to wire that vertebra in place before it slipped back again. If things looked okay in there, they would be doing that just about now.

She came down the hall toward him, and he stood to greet her. First they kissed, and then they hugged tightly. She had brought them Chinese takeout and she claimed she had not rigged the cookies, although he recognized the print of her typewriter and he doubted there ever had been a fortune that read Your son will play baseball with you within the year. It brought tears to his eyes and caused him to spill his coffee, which brought a moment of panic, but both were quickly mopped up.

His pager sounded at his belt. Daggett reached for it. But then he caught himself. Rather than read it, he switched it off and ignored it. Today was not a day for pagers, he reminded himself. That had been the whole point of telling Pullman no. He had not known such happiness in ages. He looked back upon the past few months, the past few years, and thought: I wouldn't do it any other way, even if given the chance. Where previously he had lived under the cloud of despair, now he felt the warm rays of hope. All was not perfect it was not a perfect world but given time .. .

GLOSSARY.

ATM Automatic Teller Machine, banking.

CAM c.o.c.kpit Area Microphone.

CNN Cable News Network.

CVR c.o.c.kpit Voice Recorder.

DFDR Digital Flight Data Recorder.

DOJ Department Of Justice, Sacramento California.

FAA Federal Aviation Administration.