Condor Read online

  1 hour ago

  (11 p.m. Central Standard Time)

  Dmitri Voskov lined up with the approach vector into Fort Campbell and daydreamed of what wonders awaited him in Kentucky.

  The load of Russian helicopters would go to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. SOAR was the US Army’s secret helicopter regiment and no concern of his.

  Kentucky though…

  It wasn’t the land of petite Scandinavian white-blondes, but he’d been in the American South enough to appreciate the seriously built gold-blondes as well—even when it was dyed.

  No one would match the Helsinki Airport security officer who wore nothing under her uniform. That would be asking too much. But she’d left him with plenty to dream about. She’d also left him a phone number and first name—Valery. Valery, a female name in the West and a male name in Russia; it fit her strength well. She had the finest body he’d been invited to plunder since a fiery Irish redhead on a layover in Shannon, Ireland, three years before.

  While finishing the tie-downs and double checks, Portnov had lowered the cockpit stairway and Dmitri had given Valery a tour upstairs.

  Bunks near the back of the compartment—just ahead of the wings. Enough for the two loadmasters and the four-man flight crew to live in comfortably. The Antonov was their home most days of the year. A small lounge, bathroom, and a decent kitchen.

  They’d tiptoed through as the rest of his flight crew were snoring away in their bunks. Normally, he’d be ticked that they’d been so comfortable while he’d been trapped outside, but he had just spent a very, very friendly hour steaming up a car’s windows with an exceptionally flexible officer.

  In the cockpit, he gave her the full tour and grabbed a couple of nice feels. He’d spent most of the evening wishing Portnov would hurry up. Standing in the cockpit with Valery, he wished the man would screw up and ground them here for a week.

  “May I use bathing room?”

  “You know the way. Don’t worry about waking the other guys; you could drop a nuclear bomb and they would sleep through it.”

  On her return, Valery had asked in that charming mangled-English of hers as she closed the cockpit door, “Does these doors lock?”

  He’d reached across her, latched it, and tried to take her right up against the surface.

  Instead, she’d guided him to the pilot’s chair. Sliding it to the back of the stops, there was just room for her to straddle him once she stripped.

  Over Valery’s bare shoulder and out the windshield, he’d caught Portnov looking up in surprise from the ground four stories below, then grinning.

  Plenty to grin about here.

  The only thing more amazing than her hair, face, and breasts had been what she could do with her hips.

  She would start a motion somewhere deep inside that built in a slow gyration to—

  The radio hauled him back to the present. “Antonov, this is Campbell Army Airfield. You’re cleared to land Runway 23. Winds light and variable. Barometer two-niner-niner-five.”

  “Roger, Tower. I have the ILS.” Everything looked good.

  Everything.

  Including the updated schedule from the home office that said they’d be back in Helsinki in just three weeks. The first moment he was on the ground, he’d text Valery with the good news.

  He rode the big plane down the glide slope into the darkness. They’d flown west all night—a rough ride north of the Azores, but nothing unusual. Here in Kentucky, it was still before sunrise under crystal clear skies.

  Dmitri barely needed the Instrument Landing System; the runway was properly lit and clear despite the busy American Army base wrapped around it.

  Fort Campbell had plenty of runway, but he still placed the main gear on the pavement in the first five hundred feet. Nose gear down at a thousand.

  It would be good to get out of the cockpit and stretch. He might not even go barhopping. Maybe he’d just hit his bunk, think about Valery, and count the days until they were back in Finland.

  When Captain Dmitri Voskov pulled back to engage the thrust reversers on the four brand-new GE CF-6 engines, a hidden microswitch was engaged.

  It had been placed by SVR Zaslon Major Elayne Kasprak as Dmitri had buried his face in her breasts—so skilled with his tongue that she’d almost missed the proper placement.

  But the switch was in the correct location and was now pressed by the control lever.

  The switch turned on a tiny transmitter that sent a signal to a receiver she’d placed fifty feet behind the cockpit. Elayne Kasprak had hidden it beneath the rearmost bunk while ducking out of the cockpit to supposedly use the bathroom.

  The receiver was attached to a detonator.

  The detonator had been rammed into the heart of a shaped charge of C-4 explosive. The device—called a Krakatoa and originally designed for the British SAS, which she’d picked up from a UK munitions plant to avoid it being traced back to her—was no bigger than a fat beer can. That had made it easy to hide in her security officer’s parka coat.

  The two kilos of C-4 plastique exploded.

  The copper bullet formed by the device could punch a double-fist-sized hole through a warship’s armor plate at twenty-five meters.

  At two meters, it punched a half-meter-wide hole through the crew cabin’s thin rear pressure wall and the central wing fuel tank close behind it.

  As a by-blow, it also turned the bottom of Loadmaster Portnov’s bunk into a thousand pieces of shrapnel. His body was shredded—along with the Playboy Polska magazine he’d picked up in Warsaw last week, and had been using as a visual aid while he imagined Dmitri’s blonde going down on him.

  The sound had been muffled by the sleeping room door—now blown off its hinges—and the closed cockpit security door. In the cockpit, twenty meters forward, it was no louder than a blown tire on the main gear.

  “Shit!” Dmitri checked the indicators, but no red warning lights. Hopefully not a brake fire or a broken wheel axle. Please let it just be the rubber. An Antonov was a rare enough bird that they carried their own spares, but they couldn’t carry everything. With twenty main gear tires and four nose gear ones, and two stashed in the hold, he could lose one with few worries.

  The central wing tank had been run mostly dry during flight. Now it was filled with a shallow pool of Jet A fuel and nitrogen that had been pumped in as the tank emptied to decrease the chance of fire.

  The blast of the Krakatoa not only heated the remaining fuel above the ignition point, but the hole it created allowed oxygen to rush into the breached tank. A small windstorm sucked various detritus into the breached tank.

  Four seconds after the initial detonation, their speed was down to a hundred knots. The massive plane wasn’t pulling to either side, so Dmitri decided the problem might not be too terrible; probably just a flat tire rather than a frozen axle.

  Two thousand feet of runway gone, eight thousand still clear ahead. Under normal operations, the Antonov would need only a thousand more feet before turning off onto a taxiway—for all their size, helicopters didn’t weigh much, less than a third of the Condor’s load capability though they had filled every square meter of deck space.

  At five seconds, a fireball followed the stream of oxygen and flashed back through the original penetration in the tank and the cabin’s rear bulkhead. Portnov’s bunk had collapsed to partially block the hole. The blockage only lasted a few hundredths of a second against the monstrous pressure wave.

  It ignited the entire crew cabin and killed the other loadmaster, filling his lungs with fire when he breathed in to scream.

  Other than a sudden inward bulging of the closed cockpit door, the active flight crew, including Captain Dmitri Voskov, remained unaware of what was happening behind them. The copilot had opened his small side window to smell the fresh Kentucky air—splendidly warm and lush in the mid-March night—so their ears didn’t even pop at the sudden overpressure.

  Seven seconds after the initial blast, the mounting e
xplosion’s pressure wave inside the fuel tank exceeded critical rupture.

  Both of the central tanks’ side seams failed at a hundred and thirty-seven percent of design maximum.

  Steel shrapnel from the shredded central tank blew through the wing tanks to either side, spilling the three thousand remaining gallons of reserve Jet A fuel into the wing structure. From there, it cascaded down onto the runway through mechanical openings for flaps and landing gear.

  At nine seconds past ignition of the Krakatoa, both wings exploded internally. Bits of fuel tank and wing covering were blown so high that the last of them didn’t return to the ground until well after the rest of the plane was destroyed.

  The flash lit the darkness. The emergency response teams, woken by the blast, were on the move before the control tower could even sound the alarm.

  If the wings had broken free, the fuselage might have survived.

  Still marginally attached, they kept spilling fuel and feeding the fire along either side of the plane, turning the fuselage into a furnace that was still being cooked from the inside by the burning of the fuel dumped from the central tank over the helicopters in the cargo bay.

  Captain Dmitri Voskov’s final act fully damned the aircraft.

  He stood hard on the brakes for an emergency stop.

  They worked. All twenty-four wheels locked hard, leaving ten-meter stripes of black rubber on the runway that would be visible for years.

  The Antonov AN-124-200 Condor squatted in the middle of its own inferno and burned.

  Directly below the cockpit and crew area, the armament on the Mil Mi-28NM Havoc helicopter heated past critical.

  An Ataka-V anti-tank missile was the first to go. The blast ignited the three other missiles in the rack as well as the five smaller weapons in the S-13 rocket pod. These in turn triggered the Product 305 air-to-air missile that the West was very eager to inspect for the first time.

  The navigator and flight engineer died instantly from the impact of the multi-headed explosion against the bottom of the crew section. No one heard the copilot’s scream. Instinct had him reaching for escape through his small side window when the force of the explosion severed his arm against the sill.

  The combined blast was sufficient to separate the already weakened connection between the crew section and the wing assemblies. As the sides of the hull blew outward, the cockpit and living quarters were blown upward as a unit.

  Because its attachment at the nose held longer than at the wing, the rear end of the twenty-meter-long assembly arced skyward, trying to fly one last time before breaking free and landing on its back ahead of the fire.

  The inverted cockpit assembly now lay on Runway 23 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, clear of the shattered fuselage and its raging heat.

  Its escape from the fire didn’t matter.

  The final slam of the cockpit section onto the runway had killed the last survivor.

  It snapped pilot Dmitri Voskov’s neck as neatly as if Major Elayne Kasprak had done it herself.

  She always got her man.

  1

  Spieden Island, Washington

  10 p.m. Pacific Standard Time

  Now

  * * *

  Miranda’s phone interrupted her attempt to make the others say, “Ewan McGregor.”

  It was Charades, but she didn’t know who Ewan McGregor was.

  When she’d asked Holly for help—it was guys versus girls—she’d whispered “Star Wars” as if that explained anything.

  “Timer’s still running,” Mike called out as she stopped to answer the call.

  Good. Maybe it would run out before she was done with the call. No, Mike was tipping the tiny hourglass onto its side to stop the running sand. It was only fair.

  “Hello?”

  “Where’s your team?”

  Miranda had always appreciated that General Drake Nason didn’t waste his time on unnecessary niceties.

  “Holly’s on the couch, Mike is in my mother’s armchair,”—Mike looked down at his seat as if that was somehow shocking—“and Jeremy’s sitting on the floor by the coffee table.”

  Drake’s soft laugh made no sense. “Okay. Where are all of you?”

  “At my house.”

  “Where is that, Miranda?”

  Oh. “I live on Spieden Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, United Sta—”

  “Yes, I know that Washington State is in the US.”

  “—States. Okay, well that’s where we are.”

  “How fast can you get to Kentucky?”

  She didn’t need to ask why. There was a major military airplane crash or he wouldn’t have called.

  In fact, though they’d met many times, it was only the second time that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had called her. The first, the CIA had been using a SWAT team to try and capture her during a crash investigation. She hoped that it would be less traumatic this time.

  “We’ve had wine. Except for Holly, who’s had beer. But she’s not a pilot anyway, so I suppose that isn’t of direct consequence. Neither Mike nor I can legally fly for another eight hours. So, we can be aloft at six a.m. My Sabrejet can make the crossing in three hours and the Mooney in twice that.”

  “I assume there’s a runway on your island. I’ll get a C-21 headed in your direction.”

  “It could land, but it couldn’t take off again. My runway is eleven hundred feet too short for a Learjet’s minimum takeoff roll.” Its required forty-seven hundred feet was almost half the length of her entire island from rocky cliff to rocky cliff.

  There was a long pause before he came back. “What’s the side-to-side clearance?”

  “Two hundred feet.”

  “Good.” Another, briefer pause. “I’ll have a Hercules C-130 out of Joint Base Lewis McChord there in twenty minutes.”

  “I wouldn’t advise tha—”

  “Just get ready.” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff knew that Miranda hated unfinished sentences.

  “I wouldn’t advise that. No sane pilot would land a C-130 in the dark at a grass strip airport with only thirty-five feet of clearance off either wing.”

  “We have the best combat pilots in the world, Miranda. Be ready.”

  And he was gone.

  “They’re going to send a C-130 Hercules to land on Spieden Island?” Mike was frowning. As the team’s other pilot, he would understand the implications.

  “That’s so cool!” Jeremy sprang to his feet and rushed off to gather his gear.

  Only as they were driving the golf cart through the chill drizzle from the house to the hangar did Miranda remember the problem.

  “The deer!” The sharp pine smell of the Douglas fir trees made her think of them curled up cozily in the field grass, already growing lush despite the cold spring.

  “The deer?”

  “The island has a herd of deer. They’ve been sleeping on the northwest end of the runway lately.”

  “No worries.” Holly dropped the three of them at the hangar to gather the rest of the gear. She always drove when they were together—which seemed to irritate Mike Munroe every time.

  Perhaps that was why she insisted?

  Miranda was never very sure on what made people do things.

  Then Holly raced off into the night beeping the cart’s little horn as she went.

  Good thinking.

  Only as Holly was returning from the far end and the sound of four Allison T56 turboprop engines roared by close overhead did Miranda remember to turn on the runway lights.

  Not quite such good thinking.

  2

  “I swear to God, I thought they were messin’ with me, ma’am, when you turned on those lights. Telling me to land here? Look at me, I’m still shaking.” The pilot said as they ascended the plane’s rear cargo ramp.

  He held out his left hand with the fingers spread wide and shook it like a leaf.

  Then he raised a rock-steady right hand, “Thank God this is my flying hand.�
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  “I thought it took two hands to fly a C-130?”

  “I’m so good I only need one.” He winked at her for some unfathomable reason.

  Miranda tried to understand how someone could control both the wheel and the throttles simultaneously with only one hand.

  Before she could ask, Holly had tugged her away from the pilot and led her up the ramp.

  “What’s with the yellow hats, you all on the same team?” he called out after them.

  “Yes,” Holly called back over her shoulder.

  “No,” Miranda stopped. “Well, we are, but the hats aren’t relevant to that. The Matildas are the Australian women’s national soccer team and—”

  Holly towed her out of earshot as the pilot turned to Mike and repeated his line about how he’d made the landing one-handed.

  If he was untrustworthy in his speech, was he also untrustworthy as a pilot?

  Miranda considered the landing to have been good work, but turning around a plane with a hundred and thirty-two-foot wingspan between massive Douglas firs only two-hundred feet apart had been even more impressive to watch. The C-130 did have a published turning ability within a hundred and eighty feet; she’d just never seen it demonstrated before.

  Her own jet had a wingspan of a mere thirty-seven feet and still it felt cramped to make a full turn. The Hercules transport was by far the largest plane to ever land on Spieden Island. It was a pity that it was so dark, it would have been nice to have a picture of that.

  For now, she would trust the pilot of the Hercules, if not the man who was the pilot.

  She sighed.

  That particular incongruity was going to bother her for a long while.

  Inside, the Hercules transport’s cargo bay was nine feet high, ten wide, and long enough to carry three Humvees. The four of them and their packs took up very little of the space.

  As soon as they were aloft, Holly scrounged up some blankets and ear plugs from the loadmasters. “Get shut-eye while you can.”

  It was good advice. Miranda had stayed up far past her bedtime to play a game she didn’t understand.