“If you fire that gun in here, Marshal Jones, you will blow us all to hell.”
“It would be worth it to watch you die, Cazaux,” Jones said. “Step away from there, across the plane, facing the wall. Move.” As Cazaux moved slowly in front of the third pallet toward the left side of the cargo bay, Jones reached the intercom paneclass="underline" “Stork, this is Jones. Don’t turn back towards San Francisco. Fly north down the middle of the bay. I’m a federal marshal, and you’re under arrest. If you turn towards land, I’ll—”
Suddenly the LET L-600 seemed as if it flipped completely upside down. Korhonen had thrown the plane into a steep left bank, causing Jones to lose his balance for just a few seconds — but that was more than enough time for Cazaux. With incredible speed, Cazaux knelt under Jones’s first bullet, withdrew a Walther PPK automatic pistol from his right boot, dodged a second shot fired at him by throwing himself aft toward the open cargo ramp, then opened fire on Jones. He missed his intended target — Jones’s heart — but he managed several shots into the big man’s chest and one in the head. The undercover U.S. marshal fired several more shots at Cazaux before he dropped, still fighting even as he was dying.
“I have got to get out of this damned business. The authorities are practically in bed with me.” Cazaux tried to clear his head and get to his feet. One bullet had hit him in the left leg, creasing across his calf and ankle. Walking on it was difficult, but he ignored the burning pain, made his way forward and said to Korhonen, “Good job, Stork. I knew I could depend on you. You’re one of the few in my organization I can trust.”
“Thank you, sir,” the Stork said, showing two grimy rows of teeth. “I am getting a fluctuating oil pressure on the number two engine, sir. I think one of your shots hit the right engine. We have perhaps ten minutes’ time before I have to shut down. What are your orders?”
“One last act of revenge, and we will get out of this place, take the money, and go into hiding in Mexico,” Cazaux said. He pointed at San Francisco International and said, “Fly right over the main terminal building, Stork. Dive right for it, then pitch up at the last moment. I will get the pallet ready to drop. After that, fly her south along the coast at medium altitude, set the autopilot, and we’ll bail out together. We will make our way to the central valley and make contact with our Mexican agents. Thank you again, old friend.” He clasped Korhonen on the shoulder once again, then returned to the cargo bay.
But it wasn’t going to happen, Cazaux realized. Jones’s body was lying across the rear deck, directly in the path of the one remaining pallet, blocking the cargo ramp opening, and as hard as he tried, he couldn’t move the three- hundred-plus-pound corpse. The explosives weren’t going anywhere.
He shrugged, checked that his PPK was secure in its boot holster, stuffed a few bundles of cash into his fatigue shirt, tightened up his parachute straps, and hefted two of the remaining hand grenades. “Thanks again, Stork,” he said to no one. “You were a good pilot.” He then popped the safety pins off the grenades, tossed them atop the last pallet filled with explosives, and ran out the open cargo ramp, pulling his parachute D-ring as he cleared the ramp.
Taddele Korhonen was well above redline on both engines and at the plane’s structural redline as he careened through three hundred feet, aiming right for the main commercial terminal at San Francisco International — what was the worry about overstressing the plane, he reasoned, when they were apparently going to ditch it? Coming in from the northeast, he was lined up with runways 19L and 19R and offset a bit to the north. The taxiways on the X-shaped airport were dotted with airliners waiting to depart, and the entire circular main terminal building was choked with airliners and service trucks. As the center of the largest part of the main terminal building almost touched the cargo plane’s nose, the Stork clicked twice on the intercom to let his master know they had arrived, then began to pull up into a steep climb…
The first explosion did not seem too loud, and since Korhonen was concentrating on the pullout, he ignored it.
Then his ears registered a second loud bang! and then another explosion a hundred times louder and more powerful.
He had a brief sensation of intense heat on the back of his head before his body, and the rest of the LET L-600 cargo plane, was blasted apart by the sheer force of over two tons of high-explosives detonating at once.
Damn it, Vincenti cursed, he knew Cazaux was going to pull something like this. Shit! It was the same act he pulled with McKenzie: beg for surrender, then turn, attack, and run. Well, he wasn’t going to get away with it. He was determined to kill Henri Cazaux. Vincenti had bluffed a bit about how far away he was and about carrying missiles, but he wasn’t bluffing about wanting to see Cazaux dead. That was real.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the best position to attack.
When Cazaux turned away from San Francisco International, Vincenti found himself relaxing, momentarily confident that he’d won — and then he found himself high and fast, unable to stay with Cazaux’s slow-flying cargo plane without burying the nose and risking a crash into San Francisco Bay. He had no choice but to pull the throttle to idle, pop speedbrakes, and widen his turn beyond radar lock-on. Cazaux had turned his lights on when he dumped the cargo overboard — Vincenti did not believe for a moment that Cazaux had willingly dumped all his deadly cargo — so it was easy to keep him in sight as he closed in on him. But when Cazaux tightened his turn, shut off his lights, and headed back for San Francisco International again, Vincenti found himself ten seconds out of position and without a solid contact. He reacquired Cazaux’s plane a few seconds later, but by then Cazaux was over the airport at high speed. Just as Vincenti put his gun pipper on the radar return and got an IN RANGE readout on his heads-up display, the cargo plane’s nose began to pitch up, and…
And then the LET L-600 disappeared in an immense blinding ball of fire. Vincenti had a brief glimpse of a small flash of light inside the cargo bay, like a flashbulb or the muzzle blast of a rifle, followed immediately by a huge explosion that completely obscured the main airport terminal and effectively blinded the veteran fighter pilot. Vincenti shoved in full military power, retracted speedbrakes, pulled the nose of his F-16 ADF up, fed in afterburner power, and climbed away from the fireball. He had no way of knowing in what direction he was headed or what his airspeed was, but altitude was life right now.
When Vincenti’s vision cleared a few moments later, he leveled off and set up an orbit over San Francisco International. He couldn’t believe the carnage. The flaming wreckage of the L-600 had hit the central terminal, showering the control tower and the entire western half of the terminal with fire and debris. The entire multistory central terminal looked as if it was on fire, just seconds after the impact. The wreckage had spread across the center of the circular terminal, engulfing hundreds of cars and buses in the inner departure and arrival area. The impact pattern formed a gigantic fiery teardrop covering several hundred feet, all the way across the inner-terminal circle to the south terminal. Burning aircraft at the gates were setting other nearby planes on fire with incredible speed, like a candle flame being passed from person to person by touching wicks. Soon Vincenti could count about a dozen planes on fire near the impact point. Several explosions could be seen through the dense jet-fuel smoke, with great mushrooms of fire billowing into the sky very close to Vincenti’s altitude over the airport…
And then he saw it, plainly illuminated by the intense fire below — a parachute, less than half a mile away and no more than a few hundred feet below his altitude.