Only explanation he could think of: If the machine created its own gravity field, then the normal rules of gravity didn’t apply. Whoa.
Goddamn Germans were onto something here, he thought, gliding on air, leaving all the howling hounds and shell-shocked storm troopers in his dust. Swoosh. Man who had the brains and the money to put these things under New York City could be looking at some seriously positive cash flow.
He proceeded out in a great gentle loop, a white blur of station platforms to his right every few seconds, until he felt the tunnel begin to bend toward the left. Calculating speed and distance, and what he recalled of the above-ground geography, he figured he was getting to the far end of the field. That hangar where they’d stowed the helo had to be coming up. He slowed the train by backing down the lever a few notches. It instantly reached a speed where he could read the platform signs flashing by. Udet, Voss, Richtofen…Lowenhardt…and, here it comes…Steinhoffer. Oh, yeah. He slowed to a crawl and stopped.
Home again, home again.
The platforms out here were much smaller. Maybe ten feet long, max. Only one car could access the platform at a time. But well-lit, and the white tile was brand-new. No escalator, just a simple iron stairway leading up to a closed door. Stoke took his bulging satchel and stepped off. He’d felt something familiar on his cheek, up his nose. A stale wind. Sweeping up from the dark tunnel ahead. Definitely funky. The kind of air forced ahead of a moving train.
He took one last look at his ride, the air-cushioned electra-glide Buck Rogers Special. Some damn train all right. Man. He took the stairs going up three at a time. A trainload of VDI troopers was on its way.
“What up, Arnold?” he asked the duct-taped prisoner inside Steinhoffer’s tool room. He located a small saw blade and went to work on Arnold’s feet first.
“Mmmpf.”
“Yeah, well, it took a little longer than I thought it would. Had us a big ass-kicking conference down in the Underworld subway station. I won, you’ll be glad to know. How much fuel left in the helo?”
“Mmmpf!”
“That much, huh? Is that enough to get to Zurich, you think? Or not?”
“Mmmpf-mmmpf!”
“Chill your ass out, Arnold, be cool. What’s your problem? You got control issues? I’m dancing as fast as I can here. Damn, you neo-Nazis are some seriously bossy individuals.”
Chapter Forty-eight
Gulf of Oman
AN HOUR BEFORE DAYBREAK, TWO DAYS AFTER HAWKE AND Brock had gone for their swim. The decks were varnished with rain. There were patches of fog appearing and disappearing on the gently rolling surface of the pearl-grey sea. The old supply vessel, Obaidallah, was anchored in fifty feet of water just off a small village on the coast of Oman. To the northwest lay the old port city of Ghalat. To the east, slouching like a slumbering cat on the horizon, lay Masara Island. The good ship Obaidallah, loaded to the gunwales for this run, would make her weekly supply trip to Masara tonight.
Stoke had arrived from Berlin two days earlier. He’d met up with Fitz McCoy and Charlie Rainwater at Muscat airport, along with their team of mercenaries just flown in from Martinique. The supplies that had been loaded for this particular run were all of the non-potable, nonedible variety. The stores now stacked in the hold were the exploding kind: satchel charges, limpet mines, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and nine-millimeter ammunition. The transfer of supplies from one boat to another was taking place in the dark and in secret.
At midnight, the trawler Cacique slipped up along Obaidallah’s port side and offloaded the weapons, ammunition, and other sundry equipment Brock and Ahmed had been accumulating in Muscat during the past week. The most prized item: Bruce, a minisubmarine developed by the U.S. Navy for the SEALs.
It resembled nothing so much as a huge squared-off torpedo with a wide shark’s smile painted on its nose. Now, the thirty-foot-long vessel remained on deck, covered with a heavy canvas tarp and lashed to the stern. This latest battery-powered vehicle was equipped with propulsion, navigation, communication, and auxiliary life support systems.
It was capable of delivering a squad of fully equipped combat swimmers and their cargo in fully flooded compartments to a mission site, loitering, and then retiring from the area while remaining completely submerged.
The Obaidallah, their new home at sea, had a brand-new captain and crew. The old team had been paid a month’s wages and sent home grinning like cats to their families. Ali al-Houri, captain of Cacique, had temporarily relieved the Obaidallah’s regular captain, a darkly handsome young man named Abu. He had agreed to stay on. He would serve as first mate for this run since he was well known to the French out on the island.
Ali was down in the engine room with his first mate working on the diesel now. There’d been some problem with the fuel pumps. Ali and Abu told Fitz they were pretty sure they could fix it. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. They had to go, and go tonight, one way or another.
Now, the sun was coming. And with it, the heat of day. Beneath the rolling purple ceiling of a low-hanging cloud bank, yellow light was leaking over the rim of the world. Hawke watched dawn’s arrival through the open porthole, blinking back tears of fatigue. Ah yes, Hawke said to himself. Here it comes. It’s morning again in Oman. Another crappy day just this side of paradise.
Hawke knew something his team did not.
Langley personnel on the ground in China had intercepted a red cell transmission out of Hong Kong. A communiqué from General Moon. The gist of it was, Kelly told Hawke, that the sultan was a dead man. If not already deceased, then soon. A courier had been dispatched from Hong Kong twelve hours ago with secret orders to murder Sultan Aji Abbas and his family.
Some bright boy in Beijing PRC headquarters had finally figured out that the sultan’s services were no longer required. It was the thing Hawke and Kelly had most feared during the run-up to this operation. Now it was happening.
Now that Sultan Abbas had publicly invited French troops into Oman, his continued existence was pointless. Even, as the Chinese had now figured out, dangerous. China had to assume the United States was looking for the sultan. If the United States succeeded and could actually locate him, the jig was up. The Americans would put him in front of a camera. He would proceed to denounce the French invasion and expose China’s role in the operation. The ensuing flap would demolish any chance of covert success.
As if the mission Hawke and his men faced wasn’t fraught with enough danger, the clock was now ticking. It was absolutely essential that they got to the sultan before the Chinese assassins did.
Below deck, five bearded and haggard men were seated around a battered wooden table in the dark, cramped space that passed for the main saloon. Even at this hour, with an ancient electric fan whirring away from its perch on a shelf, it was stifling below. Sweat stinks. So do Gauloise cigarettes. Two of the men were smoking heavily, all were drinking cold coffee out of tin cups, trying to stay awake. Maps, charts, diagrams, sat recon photos, and ashtrays littered the table.
All five were staring through bleary eyes at a crude handmade diagram Harry Brock had drawn of the underwater entrance and tunnels leading off from the powder magazine inside Fort Mahoud.
They’d been hard at it, formulating and rejecting and reformulating strategies, for a day and a half. A cherished hour here and there for sleep. It had been forty-eight very long hours since Hawke and Brock returned from the successful reconnaissance mission inside the fort. In that brief span of time, the world had changed.
The French navy was on the move. The Charles de Gaulle and Foch carrier battle groups had been repositioned to the Arabian Sea. Troopships were also en route, believed to be carrying an amphibious landing force of some forty thousand French infantry. It was rumored that, before the impending invasion of Oman, France’s much-vaunted Mirage and Dassault Rafale fighters would once more challenge the Anglo-American no-fly zone currently being enforced in the northern skies over the Strait of Hormuz.