Caruso noted the envious look from the men, who obviously wished they could simply climb aboard a private jet and leave the country.
Once the two Americans stepped back outside for the walk from the terminal building to the Gulfstream parked on the tarmac two hundred yards away, however, the Campus operators were surprised by the sudden wail of an alarm. At first Caruso thought they’d gone out the wrong door and triggered it themselves, but after a few moments a voice came over the loudspeaker in Lithuanian. Neither man understood what was being said, but whatever the announcer was saying, he sounded a hell of a lot more agitated than he would if he was just letting everyone know a couple idiots had passed through the wrong door at a sleepy airport.
Dom and Ding picked up the pace for the Gulfstream, which was bathed under lights in the distance in front of the fixed-base operator.
They were still one hundred yards away when the men heard a single snap from a rifle, far to the south, beyond the end of the runway. Both men looked out past the lights of the tarmac and saw several more flashes of light and then, an instant later, the sound of gunfire made its way to them.
“What the hell?” Dom said. “That can’t be the Russians here already.”
“Who says it can’t?” Ding replied, and he broke into a run for the plane.
An explosion back at the terminal sounded to both men like the detonation of a forty-millimeter high-explosive grenade, and it was answered by staccato bursts and single snaps from automatic and semiautomatic weapons.
By the time the men were within fifty yards of their destination, they heard sustained gunfire from the northern end of the airfield as well.
Caruso said, “They’ve got the runway surrounded! Whichever way we taxi, we’re going to be taking fire!”
Ding looked through the cockpit window and saw Campus pilot Helen Reid at the controls, and as he ran around the front of the plane he saw copilot Chester “Country” Hicks standing at the doorway with an HK UMP submachine gun down by his leg. He was looking to the south, the location of the nearest gunfire.
Even though Country wasn’t trained in the security of the aircraft like the usual flight security officer for The Campus, Adara Sherman, he had been a Marine aviator, and he knew how to skillfully operate a number of different weapons.
The two Campus men raced up the stairs and past Country, who immediately began to close the hatch. Chavez ducked his head into the little cockpit of the Gulfstream luxury jet. “There is shooting at the terminal, and at both ends of the runway. What are you going to do?”
“Do they have SAMs?” Captain Reid asked.
“No idea.”
“RPGs?”
“Unknown. I just heard automatic small arms and forty-millimeter grenades.”
Chavez had to back out of the cockpit so Country could climb into the right seat, then he leaned back in. Reid was already applying power to the port engine to turn the aircraft to starboard. To her right, Country was belting in and scanning out all the windows, trying to decide on the best direction to go.
He said, “Most of the shooting is to the south right now. Looks like the Fourth of July over there. Once they get through the terminal, though, the middle of the runway will be under direct fire.”
Helen Reid said, “Then let’s not hang around. I’ll take the high-speed taxiway to the middle of the runway, stop, hit full power while on the brake. I’ll try a short takeoff to the north.”
Chavez said, “Will that get you high enough to avoid the shooting at the north end of the runway?”
She was already taxiing at a speed that forced Ding to hold on with both hands.
Captain Reid answered, “No. We won’t have any altitude by the time we hit the end of the runway.”
Country said, “We can go hard right.”
She nodded. “Hard right. As soon as the wheels leave the runway, we’re going to climb to the east.” She glanced at Chavez. “You and Dom better strap yourselves in.”
Chavez rushed back into the cabin and sat in the captain’s chair next to Caruso. Caruso was looking out the portal next to him. “What did they say?”
“They said the in-flight meal is going to be delayed.”
Dom laughed despite the tension. “No problem. I have a feeling I’m about to lose my appetite.”
The Gulfstream did not ask for takeoff clearance from Vilnius Tower, because Reid could plainly see the flashes of light from gunfire through the tower glass. There was a gunfight going on in there, and she’d never heard of well-armed air traffic controllers, so she assumed the tower would be in the hands of the Russians in mere moments. Instead, she applied the brake, pushed both engines up to full throttle, and waited for them to spool up to a scream.
She released the brakes, the sleek white aircraft lurched forward, and she drove it down the middle of the runway with her foot pedals. Chester “Country” Hicks read off her speed as she kept her eyes flitting between the centerline for reference and the flashes of light out of the dark at the end of the runway. The gunfire seemed to rush closer to her with each second as her aircraft raced toward a battle it could not avoid.
Reid normally kept a “sterile” cockpit on takeoff: no conversation, no talking at all other than what was necessary for the operation of the aircraft. But this was no ordinary takeoff. She said, “If we get hit, we need to know where we are going to put down to the south.”
Country said, “Ninety knots… ugh, if it’s bad enough we’ll just have to find a highway. If we can limp over to Poland, let’s do that. One hundred knots.”
Reid needed 120 knots to rotate, but in front of her a shower of sparks began to explode across the runway. “They’re shooting at us.” She pushed down on her right pedal, taking her off the center line but racing her toward the right edge of the runway as the plane shot forward.
“One ten,” Country said, and then he added, “You’re running out of real estate.”
The sparks picked up all around. Reid had no idea why the Russian Army was shooting at her, but she assumed the assaulters had been ordered to prevent all aircraft from leaving the country.
When she could no longer see any of the right edge of the runway in front of the nose of her aircraft, she waited an instant more, then began to put back pressure on her yoke.
On her right, Country said his next sentence as if it were just one word: “onetwentyrotate.”
Reid pulled back harder, lifted the nose off the runway just feet before it rolled off the right edge and into the grass. The back tires left the hard surface even closer to the grass, but the plane was airborne now, just three hundred yards from the northern end of the runway.
As soon as they had any altitude at all, certainly they were no more than forty feet off the ground, Reid put her Gulfstream into a twenty-degree bank to the right.
Country said, “Gear up,” and he retracted the landing gear himself.
The twenty-degree turn became thirty, the thirty turned to forty, and soon they were heading off to the southeast.
Lines of glowing tracers raced by Reid’s left window.
One minute later Dom Caruso appeared between the two pilots. “I’m going to buy you both a beer, but not till we get where we’re going.”
Hicks just laughed, doing his best to play cool. Helen Reid, on the other hand, was not cursed with the same sense of bravado as the former Marine and the intelligence operator. She said, “Gentlemen, how about we stow the macho swagger until we get out of Lithuanian airspace? For all we know, a couple of MiGs are hunting us down as we speak.”
Caruso said, “You’re right, but we’ll be in Poland airspace in a couple of minutes.”