“Coming up?”
“Yeah. Let's take her down a little, ought to be colder.”
“Goddamned D.C. weather.”
Thirty minutes later, they circled over Camp David. Strobe lights told them where the landing pad was — you could see down better than in any other direction. The co-pilot looked aft to check the fairing over the landing gear. “We got a little ice now, Colonel. Let's get this beast down before something scary happens. Wind is thirty knots at three-zero-zero.”
“Starting to feel a touch heavy.” The VH-3 could pick up as much as four hundred pounds of ice per minute under the right — wrong — weather conditions. “Fuckin' weather weenies. Okay, I got the LZ in sight.”
“Two hundred feet, airspeed thirty,” the major read off the instruments. “ One fifty at twenty-five… one hundred at under twenty… looking good… fifty feet and zero ground-speed… ”
The pilot eased down on the collective. The snow on the ground started blowing up from the rotor-wash. It created a vile condition called a white-out. The visual references which had just reappeared — vanished instantly. The flight crew felt themselves to be inside a ping-pong ball. Then a gust of wind swung the helicopter around to the left, tilting it also. The pilot's eyes immediately flicked down to the artificial horizon. He saw it tilt, knowing that the danger that had appeared was as severe as it was unexpected. He moved the cyclic to level the aircraft, and dropped the collective to the floor. Better a hard landing than catching a rotor in the trees he couldn't see. The helicopter dropped like a stone — exactly three feet. Before people aboard realized that something was wrong, the helicopter was down and safe.
“And that's why they let you fly the Boss,” the major said over the intercom. “Nice one, Colonel.”
“I think I broke something.”
“I think you're right.”
The pilot keyed the intercom. “Sorry about that. We caught a gust over the pad. Everybody okay back there?”
The President was already up, leaning into the cockpit. “You were right, Colonel. We should have left sooner. My mistake,” Fowler said graciously. What the hell, he thought, he wanted this weekend.
The Camp David detachment opened the chopper's door. An enclosed HMMWV pulled up to it so that the President and his party didn't have to get too cold. The flight crew watched them pull away, then checked for damage.
“Thought so.”
“Metering pin?” The major bent down to look. “Sure enough.” The landing had just been hard enough to snap the pin that controlled the hydraulic shock-absorber on the right-side landing gear. It would have to be fixed.
“I'll go check to see if we have a spare,” the crew chief said. Ten minutes later, he was surprised to learn that they didn't. That was annoying. He placed a phone call to the helicopter base at the old Anacostia Naval Air Station to have a few driven up. Until it arrived, there was nothing that could be done. The aircraft could still be flown in an emergency, of course. A fire-team of Marine riflemen stood close guard on the helicopter, as always, while another squad walked perimeter guard in the woods around the landing pad area.
“What is it, Ben?”
“Does this place have a dorm?” Goodley asked.
Jack shook his head. “You can use the couch in Nancy's office if you want. How's your paper coming?”
“I'm going to be up all night anyway. I just thought of something.”
“What's that?”
“Going to sound a little crazy — nobody ever checked to make sure that our friend Kadishev actually met with Narmonov.”
“What do you mean?”
“Narmonov was out of town most of last week. If there was no meet, then the guy was lying to us, wasn't he?”
Jack closed his eyes and cocked his head to one side. “Not bad, Dr. Goodley, not bad.”
“We have Narmonov's itinerary. I have people checking on Kadishev's now. I'm going all the way back to last August. If we're going to do a check, it might as well be a comprehensive one. My position piece might be a little late, but this hit me last — this morning, actually. I've been chasing it down most of the day. It's harder than I thought.”
Jack motioned to the storm outside. “Looks like I'm going to be stuck here a while. Want some help?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Let's get some dinner first.”
Oleg Yurievich Lyalin boarded his flight to Moscow with mixed feelings. The summons was not all that irregular.
It was troublesome that it had come so soon after his meeting with the CIA Director, but that was probably happenstance. More likely, it had to do with the information he'd been delivering to Moscow about the Japanese Prime Minister's trip to America. One surprise he had not told CIA concerned Japanese overtures to the Soviet Union to trade high-technology for oil and lumber. That deal would have upset the Americans greatly only a few years earlier, and marked the culmination of a five-year project that Lyalin had worked on. He settled into his airline seat and allowed himself to relax. He had never betrayed his country, after all, had he?
The satellite up-link trucks were in two batches. There were eleven network vehicles, all parked just at the stadium wall. Two hundred meters away were thirty-one more, smaller Ku-band up-links for what looked like regional TV stations, as opposed to the bigger network vans. The first storm had passed, and what looked like a tank division's worth of heavy equipment was sweeping up the snow from the stadium's enormous parking lot.
There was the spot, Ghosn thought, right next to the ABC “A” unit. There was a good twenty meters of open space. The absence of security astounded him. He counted only three police cars, just enough to keep drunks away from men trying to get their work done. The Americans felt so secure. They'd tamed the Russians, crushed Iraq, intimidated Iran, pacified his own people, and now they were as totally relaxed as a people could be. They must love their comforts, Ibrahim told himself. Even their stadia had roofs and heat to keep the elements out.
“Gonna knock those things over like dominos,” Marvin observed from the driver's seat.
“Indeed we will,” Ghosn agreed.
“See what I told you about security?”
“I was wrong to doubt you, my friend.”
“Never hurts to be careful.” Russell started another drive around the perimeter. “We'll come in this gate right here, and just drive right up.” The headlights of the van illuminated the few flakes of this second storm. It was too cold to snow a lot, Russell had explained. This Canadian air mass was heading south. It would warm up as it hit Texas, dropping its moisture there instead of on Denver, which had half a meter, Ghosn estimated. The men who cleared the roads were quite efficient. As with everything else, the Americans liked their conveniences. Cold weather — build a stadium with a roof. Snow on the highways — get rid of it. Palestinians — buy them off. Though his face didn't show it, he had never hated America more than at this moment. Their power and their arrogance showed in everything they did. They protected themselves against everything, no matter how big or small, knew that they did, and proclaimed it to themselves and the whole world.
Oh, God, to bring them down!
The fire was agreeably warm. The President's cabin at Camp David was in the classic American pattern, heavy logs laid one atop the other, though on the inside they were reinforced with Kevlar fiber, and the windows were made of rugged polycarbonate to stop a bullet. The furniture was an even more curious mix of ultra-modern and old-comfortable. Before the couch he sat on were three printers for the major news services, because his predecessors liked to see the wire copy, and there were three full-sized televisions, one of which was usually tuned to CNN. But not tonight. Tonight it was on Cinemax. Half a mile away was a discreetly-sited antenna farm that tracked all of the commercial satellites, along with most of the military ones, a benefit of which was access to every commercial satellite channel — even the X-rated ones, which Fowler didn't bother with — creating the world's most expensive and exclusive cable system.