The bullet entered her skull just above and to the left of the bridge of her nose, destroying her face and snapping her head back. She was dead before she crumpled to the deck.
McGarvey turned and sprinted back up to the flight deck, manhandling the pilot’s body out of its chair in time to hear someone on the radio.
“Fukai Semiconductor aircraft on an easterly heading north of the Hawaiian Islands, this is your last chance to respond before we fire.”
Chapter 79
“Brood House this is Red Dog One, negative response, advise,” Dimaggio radioed.
The jetliner was one mile ahead and five hundred feet below them. Dimaggio had illuminated it with his doppler radar and had a positive lock for the Sparrow.
“Red Dog One, you have permission to fire,” his confirmation < came. “Repeat, you have permission to fire.”
“Roger,” Dimaggio said, and he reached with his thumb for the air-to-air weapon-release button on his stick.
McGarvey scrambled into the pilot’s seat, snatched up the microphone and frantically searched for the proper transmit frequency selector. Outside, the afternoon was beautiful, with only a few low clouds beneath them, and the pale blue of the Pacific Ocean lost in the haze on the horizon. There were no signs of any warplanes, but McGarvey figured they would by now be above and behind, ready to shoot.
He pushed the microphone button. “U.S. warplanes about to shoot at the Fukai Semiconductor 747 aircraft, do you copy?”
The radio was silent. McGarvey leaned forward as he tried to get a look aft, but he still couldn’t see anything but blue sky. Of course the warplanes did not have to be within sight in order to attack. Some of their missiles were accurate forty nautical miles out.
“U.S. warplanes, this is the Fukai 747 north of the Hawaiian Islands, do you copy?”
“Roger, we copy. You are required to immediately break away from your present heading, do you understand? If so, acknowledge.”
“Negative,” McGarvey radioed. “You’re going to have to get confirmation of what I tell you, but we’ve got to get this aircraft on the ground and soon.”
“Repeat, you are required to immediately break away from your present heading. This is your last warning. If you do not comply immediately you will be shot out of the sky.”
“Listen to me. My name is Kirk McGarvey. I am an American intelligence officer, something you can verify by calling Washington. Everyone else aboard this airplane is dead, including the crew. We’re carrying a nuclear device that is probably set on some sort of timer. It’s hidden in a unit marked hydraulic distribution system-secondary.
Have you got that?”
There was no answer.
“Goddamnit, ace, I asked, did you get that?”
“Stand by.”
McGarvey sat back in the seat for a long moment, closing his eyes and trying to let his mind go blank. He wanted to crawl away and curl up in some dark corner somewhere, to lick his wounds-both mental and physical. But it was not possible now, nor had it ever really been possible ever since his parents had been killed in Kansas … a century ago? Ten lifetimes?
And, as before, the death and carnage that always seemed to surround him solved nothing, offered no satisfaction. Even the woman’s death, for what she had done to Elizabeth, had been empty. Liz’s life would not be changed for the better because of it. Nor would his. The deaths were nothing more than another chapter in his continuing nightmare.
Minutes later the F/A-18s showed up just off both sides of the 747.
“Mr. McGarvey, you still with us?” Dimaggio radioed. McGarvey could read the pilot’s name and rank stenciled on the Hornet’s fuselage beneath the canopy.
“That’s a famous name you got there, Dimaggio. Any relation?”
“I wish,” Dimaggio said. “You’re it aboard?”
McGarvey was looking directly at the young man. “Except two female flight attendents,”
he said. “That’s the good news. The bad is that the biggest plane I’ve ever flown was a V-tail Bonanza, and that was fifteen years ago. I never did get my license.”
“Did you land it?”
“Badly.”
“But you walked away from the landing,” Dimaggio said. “So things aren’t as bad as we thought they might be. Now listen up, Mr. M, this is what we’re trying to work out for you.”
Twenty-three U.S. Navy and Marine Sea Stallion helicopters out of Pearl and off the CVN Nimitz
showed up almost simultaneously along the west coast of Niihau, the most isolated island in the Hawaiian chain, and immediately began announcing the evacuation of all residents.
Eighteen miles long and five miles wide the island was home to less than two hundred people who spoke only Hawaiian, though they understood English, who did not use electricity, plumbing or telephones, and who got around by bicycles and horses.
During the Second World War an airstrip had been laid down on the island’s arid interior, and although it had been lengthened to take jets almost twenty years ago, it had never been used except in emergencies.
Even before the evacuation had begun, a C-130 Hercules was touching down on the strip with fire fighting and medical units out of Pearl, while another C-130 circled overhead, ready to lay down a thick blanket of foam along the entire runway and surrounding area the moment the supplies and personnel were secured and the first C-130 took off.
Also among the personnel were two Air Force nuclear weapons specialists on loan to the Navy at Pearl. Everything humanly possible to secure the bomb aboard the 747
when the jetliner landed was being done. McGarvey’s survival was secondary, even though it was up to him to bring the big jet in.
“Ten to one he doesn’t make it,” one of the technicians aboard the circling AWACS
commented. “But the device should survive a controlled crash landing with no real problem.”
The 747’s controls were surprisingly light, the jetliner even easier to fly, in some ways, than the small four-place Beech Bonanza.
Ted Kinstry, a veteran 747 pilot for United Airlines, had been brought out from Honolulu aboard the AWACS to talk McGarvey in, and although he figured the chances of pulling off a survivable crash landing were far less than ten to one, he instantly established a rapport with McGarvey and talked him through the motions, step by step.
“I have the island and the runway in sight now,” McGarvey radioed. On instructions he had dumped most of the 747’s fuel out over the ocean before changing course for the nearly five hundred mile straight-in approach.
While still well away from any land, Kinstry had McGarvey make two simulated landings, using an altitude of twenty thousand feet as the imaginary ground level. On the first landing, McGarvey managed to pull up and level off at eighteen thousand five hundred feet; the second time at nineteen thousand seven hundred.
“You crashed and burned both times,” Kinstry had told him. “But there was an improvement.”
“Let’s try it again,” McGarvey suggested.
“No time or fuel. Sorry, Mac, but the next time is the big one.”
Which was now.
“We’re going to start using flaps now,” Kinstry’s voice came into McGarvey’s headphones.
“Why so soon?” McGarvey asked.
“Because we need to slow you down sooner. This time we’re not using landing gear.
You’re going to belly her in. It’ll tear hell out of the aircraft, but the landing will be easier.”
“You’re the boss,” McGarvey said, trying to blink away the double vision that was coming in and out now, at times so badly he could barely read the instruments. He hadn’t told that to Kinstry. It wouldn’t have helped.
“You don’t have to reply from now on unless you have a question,” Kinstry said calmly.