With his surprise gone, this would have to be a scramble kill, and Kyle launched an unrelenting attack with deadly purpose. The body of his first victim was still against him, so Swanson kicked and threw it directly into the startled second soldier. He followed in immediately and hard, taking the man to the ground while stabbing wildly around the body between them, slashing the stomach and legs of the man on the bottom. Swanson violently pushed aside the first victim and mauled the second, who was already in shock and great pain, with his upper body now exposed to the assault. Swanson clamped his left hand over the man’s mouth and pushed the point of the knife deep into the stomach, up behind the ribs and into the heart area, then twisted hard and sawed and cut and watched impassively as life left the man’s eyes and the bowels and bladder let go. Kyle pulled the blade free, wiped it, and rolled the corpses into the ditch. They would be discovered easily, but that was unimportant.
By Kyle’s count, that airplane had been the eleventh big transport to land, and he had no way of knowing if it was the last or if more were coming. He could still see distant lights in the sky, though, and since Omar had confirmed the airport was closed to civilian traffic, it was logical that at least a couple more Iranian aircraft were on the way in the initial lift of troops. They had been arriving at the rate of one transport every fifteen minutes. He would proceed on that assumption and try to slow things down and let the Iranians know everybody was not playing by their rules.
Swanson understood that he was acting without orders, going on instincts that had been honed in battles of years past. One of his personal mottos was that it was sometimes better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission, and he was doing what he thought was in the best interests of his country. It was not the first time that he had run an unauthorized mission. Covert missions were run all over the world, all the time, and this one just happened to fall into his lap. The paperwork would just have to catch up. Official condemnations might erupt later, but any negative fallout would go elsewhere, while Kyle shuffled out the back door as an unseen force.
Meanwhile, he was right here, right now, with a window of opportunity, a bag full of explosives, and nobody asking questions.
17
Swanson sprinted across the runway, shifting his gaze from the landing lights of the approaching plane to the faraway terminal that was crowded with assembled troops. He did not really have a plan other than wreak some havoc, and the easiest way to do that was to blow some shit up — set the decrepit fuel tank truck afire, crater the runway, or even attack the tower. The most bang for his buck would come from the fuel truck, for it did not matter whether or not it was full of aviation gasoline. The trapped vapors from the last load would be more than enough to amplify the explosion, which would distract the attention of the pilot, and after that, who knew?
The U.S. armed forces had learned a lot about improvised explosive devices, the lash-up planted charges that the bad guys had popularized to face the mechanized American military during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not that hard to make, an IED could pop a Humvee apart like a firecracker under a turtle. He ran to the truck with a brick of C-4 plastic explosive already in his hand. A sharp knock on the round fuel tank resounded with a dull thud, indicating that it still contained a good amount of fuel, which made him smile.
He crawled beneath the truck and secured the C-4 directly below the tank so the explosion would point upward, like an erupting volcano. The ignition sequence would come from a blasting cap triggered by a cheap cell phone, all of which had been part of the Lizard’s kit of supplies. With that done, he punched nine digits of the ten-digit telephone number into his satellite phone, then crawled back from beneath the filthy belly of the truck, glancing over his right shoulder. Another cargo plane coming down fast, with its landing gear already extended and the engines growing to a howl that made his insides shudder. Swanson did not look at his watch as he ran, for the exact time was unimportant. Either he made it back to the ditch in the next few seconds, or he would be cooked alive by his own inferno. The hard concrete of the runway gave way beneath his pounding boots to softer dirt as the noise of the approaching plane screamed even louder.
Five more steps at a dead run and he hurled himself forward and rolled into the depression. The plane engines were close and deafening as the big bird rode toward touchdown. He planted his face in the dirt, held the sat phone up high, and pressed the final digit of the cell phone number that would trigger the booby trap beneath the truck. In the millisecond prior to the connection, he hoped that Sir Isaac Newton was right with his First Law of Motion: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. That meant that the heavy airplane going better than a hundred miles per hour and pointing away from him would normally maintain that momentum and direction until the brakes were applied and the thrusters reversed. Another external force was going to change that orderly line of movement, and Kyle’s bomb sparked just as the aircraft was almost directly beside the tanker truck.
The sudden explosion sheared off part of the left wing, tore away an engine, bounced the plane straight up off the runway again, and started it into an out-of-control forward cartwheel while still moving at about a hundred miles per hour. It slid and skipped in a typhoon of golden sparks and lateral trails of flame; then the entire tail section snapped away under the structural stress. The wreckage finally came to a slow, agonizing stop about halfway down the runway, with the front half plowing into the open field beside the concrete strip. There, it settled for a heartbeat before it went up in a whoosh of flames.
Huddled in the ditch, Swanson had opened his mouth and put his hands over his ears as the concussive wave of the blast shook him, then curled into a protective ball while debris from the dying plane splattered the runway like deadly rain. When things quieted, he looked up and saw the aircraft carcass burning hot. He climbed to his feet and hurried to the patrol car, turned on the engine, and drove away with no lights. Although he heard distant screams, no thought was given to how many people he had just killed. That was the job. Just a little shock and awe to start the day, fellas. Welcome to Egypt.
The safe house was a furnished apartment on an upper floor of a high-rise building about two miles from the west gate of the airport. A cluster of similar office and apartment buildings had grown up in the space as Sharm el-Sheikh had flourished on the tip of the Egyptian peninsula, drawing in tourists, businesses, and new residents who smelled money. Parked cars and small trucks lined the curbs, and Swanson dumped the stolen auto among a clutch of older vehicles parked in a line in a small lot of sand and downtrodden weeds. Numbers had been scrawled on some windshields with whitewash; it was a used car lot just like those that can be found anywhere in the world. Leaving the keys in the ignition, he was confident that it would soon be stolen.
A siren was wailing urgently at the airport as he shouldered his bag and, sticking to the walls and shadows, walked to the rear of the high-rise and took the service elevator up to the twelfth floor.