Lovita shot a glance over her shoulder. “What do you wanta do?”
“Not sure,” Quinn said, watching the plane grow larger as it bore down on them. “Unless they’re outfitted with jump doors, a Caravan’s not set up to open up in flight and shoot at us.”
With the closing speed of the two airplanes reaching nearly three hundred knots, the Cessna shot past seconds later, fifty feet off the little Piper’s left wing. Quinn’s head whipped around, watching it for as long as he could. At least three faces pressed to the Caravan’s windows stared back at him.
Both Quinn and Lovita looked back and forth in an effort to see behind them. The Cessna made a tight banking turn, falling in easily on the Super Cub’s tail.
“He doesn’t have to shoot us down,” Quinn said.
“He’s got three times our range,” Lovita finished his thought. “He can stay behind and wait until we land and then shoot us on the ground. I saw the way those guys were back in the village. They treat Natives like scum.”
“They treat everybody like scum,” Quinn said, mind racing through his meager options. “But you’re right. They don’t have to do anything but follow us and wait for reinforcements.”
Lovita reached above her console and scrolled through several screens on the GPS, nodding to herself as she spoke. “It’s a dead zone out here. No cell towers and radio traffic is no-go unless it’s plane to plane. Satellites are so low on the horizon this far north a sat phone call is even iffy.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said, twisting around again to watch the plane behind them.
Lovita picked up her iPod and put on another Freddie Mercury song.
“Do you trust me, Jericho Quinn?” she said, shouting above a throbbing engine and the loud music that now streamed across the intercom.
Quinn turned from where he’d been watching the plane behind them to stare at the back of her head.
“Yes,” he said. “I trust you.”
“Good.” She pulled back the throttle, slowing the plane a hair and allowing the Caravan to close the distance behind them. Freddie Mercury still wailed over the headphones. “Because we need to get them really, really close for this to work.”
Lovita waited until the other plane was almost on top of them, and then dropped the Piper’s nose, plowing back into the weather.
The brilliant sun winked out as clouds enveloped them again. Quinn’s stomach rose into his chest. His back pressed against the seat. He didn’t know if he should worry more about the planeful of contract killers behind them, or the hungry black rocks that lurked in the fog below.
Chapter 22
Tang boarded the underground train that would take them to the Alaska Airline gates on the other side of the airport. They had plenty of time, but he could not bear the thought of missing the flight and prolonging their agony even more than the Pakistani already had.
“Why would they do this?” Hu stood clutching a stainless-steel handrail as the train started to move. “At the last possible moment…” Oblivious to the other passengers now, he whispered what everyone else on the team was thinking.
Tang shook his head. He spoke in Mandarin, but kept his words broad. The number of Americans who spoke Chinese — or any other language — was small, but it was prudent to be careful. “I do not know,” he said. “But his reasons are surely important.”
Hu grabbed the rail with both hands and leaned a distraught face against his arms. His eyes glistened with tears. For a time, Tang thought the man might cry. He certainly deserved to.
Hu Qi had been a champion gymnast and still found time to study law at Zhejiang University. His coaches said he had a chance at the Olympics and his professors spoke often of his future in government. But those dreams were crushed when his father had been arrested for trafficking heroin. The man was a devout Muslim and never touched alcohol, let alone something as evil as heroin. The entire family knew the drugs belonged to Qi’s older brother, but the authorities had found them at his parents’ home. Any mitigating circumstances had been swept away when a routine blood test at the time of arrest revealed old man Hu had AB-negative blood, the same type as a deputy minister in need of a liver transplant. Both Qi and his elder brother had been tested as well. Qi was A-positive, but his brother, the real owner of the heroin, shared his father’s blood type. He was summarily arrested as an accessory.
A speedy trial found both men guilty of the capital offense of trafficking dangerous narcotics. In keeping with Yanda, China’s policy to strike hard against drug traffickers, both men were sentenced to death. With many such cases, the court might hand down a death sentence with a two-year probationary period — showing the seriousness of the crime, but demonstrating the mercy of the state if the condemned did not commit another crime during the two-year period. In the case of the Hus, all appeals were carried out with lightning speed, in order to ensure the deputy minister received his vital organ transplant before it was too late. Both men were executed four days after the original verdict was pronounced.
Hu Qi, little more than a boy, had waited in the shadows across from the prison and watched the nondescript white bus roll through the iron gates. This mobile execution van parked in front of the administration building, behind the prison walls, but in plain sight of the road. Qi was able to witness a chain gang of five men, including his father and brother, as they were ushered at gunpoint into the open back doors of this kill house to have their organs harvested for party officials and Chinese businessmen rich enough to afford them. A short time later, uniformed guards carried coolers of what were surely kidneys, hearts, and even eyes out the back, while the van exited the gate and turned up the quiet road toward the crematorium with what was left.
Hu Qi had withdrawn from the university at once to take care of his mother, getting a job digging graves at the cemetery where the ashes of his mutilated father and brother were buried. Somehow, the man from Pakistan had found him as well. He’d plucked the bitter young student from the life of misery with the promise of a chance to fire a killing shot at the regime that had destroyed his family.
Tang gathered his bag as the train came to a stop and the passengers poured out. The crowd clumped together as they waited for the escalator that would take them up to their gates. He turned to make sure Lin was still with him. She shuffled along behind, barely more than a shell anymore. She looked so much like their daughter, a fact that added even more anguish to Tang and surely pierced Lin’s heart each time she looked in the mirror.
Chapter 23
Quinn twisted in his seat, face pressed against the window, doing his best to keep an eye on the other plane. The Caravan drifted back and forth in the clouds behind them as if towed by an invisible rope. It was close enough he could almost see the sneer on the pilot’s face.
“Okay,” Lovita said. “This is where it’s gonna get a little hairy.”
Quinn looked forward to see nothing but gray fog. The instruments on her console said they were flying straight and level, but there was absolutely nothing to reference outside but mist and rain.
Lovita checked her GPS again and then reached down long enough to bring up another song on the iPhone connected to her headset. There was a flurry of drums and electric guitar as “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” started to play.
“Hang on to your lunch!” Lovita said as she added steady power. Hauling back on the stick, she began to sing along with Freddie.