So Qank said: “The man in Room 6 has come up with a rather creative solution as to what to do with these helicopter people. I can tell you his idea now, sir, or wait until it has been completed.”
“I’ll wait,” Zim replied. “It will make more pleasurable listening that way.”
Now came several long minutes of complete silence. All Qank could hear was Zim’s labored breathing.
Finally the big man came back to life.
“All right, accept the offer,” he declared. “I will miss my lovely gunship. But it has made us substantial sums in the past two years, and has served us well. Now, even in getting rid of it, it is giving us a big return. I think it’s a good deal.”
“I agree, sir,” Qank toadied. “Shall I let the man in Room 6 go ahead with the final arrangements then?”
Zim simply nodded. “Yes, and be sure to thank him profusely for me. Send some nonalcoholic champagne to his room. I know he just loves that stuff.”
Qank did a deep bow. Time to get out.
“As you wish, sir,” he said, backing up.
He was almost out the door when Zim cleared his throat—a signal that Qank should freeze.
“One last thing,” Zim said. “How is that cash payment going to be made?”
Qank began sifting madly through the handwritten notes. He just hoped he could find the answer before Zim lost his notoriously short temper.
He finally found the right page; it was covered with scribbling, obscene doodles, and many, many numbers. But at the bottom was the information Zim wanted to know.
“The payment will be secured through a series of wire transactions,” he began reading. “Through the usual avenues in the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, and finally on to Zurich.”
To Qank’s amazement, Zim actually laughed. A full, burst-out guffaw from the huge man was rather frightening.
“Do you realize how I was paid the first time by these people who are now buying the gunship?” he asked Qank.
The intel man numbly shook his head. Was Zim actually going to reminisce with him?
“No, sir,” Qank whispered.
“It was back in the late seventies,” Zim began, looking at the ceiling. “A minor transaction. An exchange of a SCUD missile for F-14 parts, coincidentally enough, with some money on the side. And those fools actually sent me a check! And a birthday cake! Can you believe it?”
Qank started laughing now for real—not so much that some government would make payment to Zim for a back-alley arms deal by check, but that they would send him a birthday cake along with it.
“I’m sure that won’t happen this time,” Qank told him. “After all, they are just buying back what was once theirs in the first place. I have to believe they will want to cover their tracks better than that.”
Zim laughed again.
“Never underestimate the U.S. Government, Major,” he said. “You never know what they’ll do next.”
Chapter 26
Over central Iraq
Considering what it had been through, Truck One was flying just fine.
The troop-carrying Halo stank of aviation fuel—the entire unit had smelled of gas since the mad rush to refuel the four choppers on the cliff. But the chopper was cruising along without a hint of trouble now, and for that Gene Smitz was grateful.
He was shoehorned into a seat at the back of the chopper jammed up with half of the Team 66 Marines, most of the air techs, and two of the SEAL doctors. Most of his fellow passengers were asleep; the others were crowded around the chopper’s windows, looking out for any trouble that might be following them.
Meanwhile, Smitz was trying like crazy to get his NoteBook to work.
They’d been airborne for about a half hour now, and it had been aces since their daring escape from the mountain. No one was following them. They’d received no SAM warnings or any warnings of hostile intent from the ground or the air.
But Smitz knew this was definitely a temporary situation. Thus the wrestling match with his laptop.
Since the mission began, he’d been receiving his orders directly from his office via the NoteBook. That was one of the beauties of the highly advanced machine. It had a remote modem and could connect him with his office no matter where he was in the world.
Of course, he didn’t know who was on the other end of the pipeline. He never received any direct replies to his situation reports—and that was slightly troubling. But his missives were always followed by more orders. That was why Smitz was so anxious to get through to his office now. He had to apprise them of the new situation, and ask for immediate orders in extracting the unit—something he just didn’t have the authorization to do himself. He’d been waiting for a small green light to start blinking in the upper left-hand corner of his screen, telling him a line to Langley was secure and clear. Yet in nearly thirty minutes of trying, that little light was still solid red.
He was distracted for a moment when he looked out the window to see Norton’s Hind pull up in a protective position next to the Halo. Though they’d only been in-country two days, Smitz thought the Hind looked somewhat battered, used, as if it too was getting tired of this game. He also knew that its guns were nearly empty of ammo—the same with Delaney’s machine. What’s more, both Hinds were running on only half fuel. The rushed refueling job back on the mountain had given each of the four remaining choppers barely enough gas to get airborne and out of the immediate area, but not much more. Certainly not enough to reach friendly environs.
That was another reason why Smitz had to get new orders very quickly. There would be no more fuel to be had for them—not with the Hook gone. And they couldn’t just fly around Iraq forever. They needed an extraction plan now.
So Smitz closed his eyes and for the first time in years, actually whispered a small prayer.
And when he looked down at his laptop screen again, the little green light was blinking.
He began typing madly, nearly forgetting to hit the scramble-mode button first. He quickly gave the unit’s present position, then briefly reviewed what had happened. The raid on the Ranch, the empty prison, the dead Americans. He covered the details of their escape from the mountain in a few succinct words, and made no mention of his suspicions that the entire operation had been compromised. He concluded by asking for further instructions as soon as possible.
Then he hit the Send button.
Then he sat back to wait.
Smitz’s message beamed up directly from his modem to a top-secret military satellite called the Red Door 3, some five hundred miles above the Earth. It was then bounced off no less than four other communications satellites, before being sent down to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
No human ever responded to Smitz’s message, though. A computer had been awaiting a transmission—any transmission—from the unit, and now that it had arrived, the computer was sending back a response that had been entered into its hard drive several hours before.
The message told the unit to proceed to a point on the map known as El-Saad Men. This was an abandoned Iraqi Air Force base located in what was possibly the most barren part of the very barren central Iraqi desert.
Once there, the unit was to hide the choppers inside the most intact hangar on-site, and remain inside themselves until egress transportation arrived. The designated hangar would be easy to spot, as a large arrow was said to be painted on its roof.
This message made the return route up from Langley, to the four military bounce satellites, over to Red Door 3, and down to Smitz’s NoteBook in less than one minute.
The CIA man was stunned when he looked down sixty seconds later and saw his green light was blinking again. Nothing ever happened that fast. But when he read the message, he felt his heart lighten by a couple hundred pounds.