The sultan gave her a tired but nonetheless enthusiastic smile as she headed for her plane. “I owe you a great deal, Miss McKenna.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“She’s a rough one, but a tough one,” the sultan commented in Malaysian to one of his aides, apparently forgetting she spoke it. “We need more of that.”
McKenna snorted to herself, then went to her aircraft at the end of the runway. Just as important as the fuel, Prince bin Awg had managed to find two mechanics to tend to the aircraft; they brought enough tools and parts with them that McKenna thought they could build one of the Dragonflies from scratch.
One thing about operating on a shoestring out of a jungle camp — there wasn’t a lot of hassle with the control tower. McKenna started her engines, checked her thrust, made sure the control surfaces moved in the right directions, and let it rip. The plane bucked as the wheels hit one of the mud holes — unavoidable because of the narrow path — but picked her nose up without a problem well before the trees.
McKenna tucked her wing toward the Belait River, which ran a crazy pattern up the southern Brunei countryside from the South China Sea. Both the river and the nearby roads, what little she could see of them, were deserted.
“Good to go:’ she told the helicopter pilot. “Let’s do it quick.”
“Brunei One,” acknowledged a familiar voice. The sultan, an experienced pilot, had taken the controls himself.
Chapter 52
Mack felt the cold hand grab his throat. He jerked nearly straight up and practically fell off the cot.
“I apologize if I startled you,” said the man who had interrogated him last night, Commander Sahurah Niu. “I trust you have rested.”
“Oh, yeah. Hell of a sleep. Thanks for the cot.”
“Put on your shoes and come with me,” said Sahurah.
“Come where?”
“I wish you to show me the aircraft.”
Mack frowned as if he were reluctant to do so, hesitating just long enough for Sahurah to tell him that, while prisoners had to be treated with respect, that commandment applied only to those who were obedient.
“All right,” said Mack, pulling his shoes on. He ran his hand over his jaw, scratching the nearly two-days-worth of growth there. “Can I get some coffee at least?”
Sahurah said something to one of the men at the door.
“The coffee will be brought to the plane. I wish to complete my tour before dawn.”
“I’ll take you wherever you want,” said Mack, hopeful now that he’d be free inside a few hours.
Chapter 53
Dog kept his eyes on the image displayed by the Flighthawk as he flew the Megafortress in a double-eight pattern about ten miles from the runway. He could see the Megafortress sitting in front of the hangar as he rode the Flighthawk in toward the large hangar in the military half of the complex. He couldn’t help but think about his daughter Breanna. A few days earlier and she would have been captured along with Mack.
Assuming he’d been captured. No one had heard from him, and it was possible that, like Deci Gordon, he had managed to escape and was simply hiding out.
Though that didn’t quite seem like Mack’s style.
“Any radars?” Dog asked his copilot, Kevin McNamara. “Negative”
“Hawkins, how are the radar sweeps looking?”
“Clean,” replied Lieutenant Jesse Hawkins, one of the two radar operators who had stations just behind him on the extended flight deck. “Quick Bird helicopters are approaching the platform. They’re running slightly ahead of schedule.”
“Good.”
“They have two guards on the road, no one close to the aircraft,” Zen told Dog. He nudged the Flighthawk down through four thousand feet, taking a slow turn above the hangar and parking area. Several Dragonflies were lined up near the hangar; Zen had been told during his visit that all of the aircraft were inoperable because of serious maintenance issues. Another Dragonfly sat wrecked near the end of the runway. The two helicopters used by the air force were missing, as were the three other operational Dragonflies; they knew from earlier reports that at least one of them had crashed after being hit by small arms fire yesterday.
Over on the civilian side of the vast complex, a 757 sat next to the terminal building and another aircraft sat alone at the far end of the parking area. That airplane looked like a 707; its nose slumped downward and Zen guessed that its front gear had been disabled.
Two Hawk anti-aircraft batteries guarded the airport, along with four Panhard M3 VDA anti-aircraft weapons. The American-made surface-to-air Hawk missiles were old models, though still deemed reliable by the Pentagon briefers. While they were potent weapons, they required a highly trained crew; Zen could tell from his radar warning receiver that their associated radars had not been activated. The Panhards were armored cars with a pair of twenty-millimeter cannons mounted on top; these could be fired by radar or manually sighted and as a practical matter were likely to be more of a hazard. But they, too, seemed silent.
“Have some activity near the terminal area,” said Zen, spotting it as he came back around. “Looks like there’s a gun emplacement on the road in, machine guns I think. That wasn’t there when I was here. I’m going to take a pass at rooftop level. Hold on — looks like somebody’s heading toward the Mega-fortress”
“Target the Megafortress,” Dog told his copilot. “Get ready to take it out.”
Mack recognized the low hush of the Flighthawk engine as it approached from the north.
Zen and his stinky, lousy timing, he thought to himself. He froze on. the tarmac.
“What?” demanded Sahurah.
“Down,” hissed Mack as the Flighthawk buzzed down less than a dozen yards away.
Dog swung the Megafortress out of its orbit, lining her up for a direct shot at the airport.
“I have the Megafortress,” said McNamara. “It’s far enough from the civilian side of the airport that we shouldn’t cause any collateral damage there, but the hangar in front of it will be wiped out, along with most of the apron. If it’s fueled, it’ll be a hell of a fire.”
“Understood,” said Dog.
“Range is ten miles,” said the copilot.
“Bay,” Dog told him, giving the order to open the bomb-bay door. A GPS-guided smart bomb rotated to the bottom of the launcher, ready to fire.
“I could be mistaken,” Zen said over the interphone. “But I think that’s Mack near the plane. I’ll go back through the video freeze-frame images in a second. That might even have been Deci with him, wearing a flak jacket.”
Dog immediately started to level the plane, breaking off his attack.
“Colonel?” asked McNamara.
“Let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on down there,” Dog told him. “I’d prefer not to have to kill our people.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was his walk that had given him away — Zen would recognize that strut anywhere. And sure enough, the enlarged image in the screen had the familiar buzz cut and crooked smile that said Mack Smith had an ego so large most days he didn’t need an airplane to get off the ground.
“You sure it’s Mack?” asked Dog.
“Looks like him. The flight suit looks like his, and there aren’t too many six-foot Anglos around here. His cowboy boots, I think.”