The Omega Command (4 page)

The galley door opened and Blaine backed the loader into position, then climbed on top of the bay next to the steel casing which held 150 microwave-warmed stuffed-chicken dinners. He pressed a button and the lift began to rise, stopping when it was even with the open galley door. He had started to wheel the cart inside when a hand grasped his hair and yanked him viciously backward. Blaine tumbled to the galley floor and found his eyes locked on the barrel of Bote’s machine gun. The terrorist’s wild hair and beard seemed all one piece. He was grinning malevolently.

Dinner is served, sir
, Blaine wanted to say but stopped himself because being too cute would get him thrown off the plane or shot, and either way his plan would be ruined. So he just gazed up, trying to look helpless.

“Ari, search this bastard!” Bote ordered.

A dark-skinned, black-haired boy little more than sixteen loomed overhead and shoved Blaine onto his stomach. Thin hands ruffled his person up and down, satisfied finally he wasn’t carrying a gun.

“He’s clean,” the boy named Ari said, and Bote grabbed Blaine by the collar and yanked him back to his feet.

“You a cop?” Bote asked.

“Yes,” McCracken answered, because that was the way something like this would be done.

“They send you to check us out?”

“No,” Blaine replied. “They’ve already got a hundred pictures of the plane’s inside. I’m here just to fill your request for the food.”

Bote seemed impressed with McCracken’s apparent honesty. “An unfortunate assignment all the same.”

“I volunteered.”

“You know I can’t let you leave the plane.”

Blaine nodded. “I figured as much, but it would be a good gesture on your part if you released a few passengers in my place.”

Bote raised his rifle as if to strike him, features flaring. “I am not interested in gestures. In forty minutes, when your people fail to give in to our demands, I will blow up this plane and everyone in it.” A pause. “That means you, too, now, asshole.”

Blaine stood his ground. “They plan to meet your demands,” he told Bote, again because that was what the man he was pretending to be would have said.

Bote snickered and slammed him against the galley wall, a hand full of sweater tight under his chin. The terrorist was bigger than McCracken had remembered. His body stank of perspiration and his breath reeked.

“You will pay for your lies,” Bote said softly. “You will all pay for your lies. But first you are going to distribute the dinners to our nervous passengers in need of reassurance. Ari will guide you the whole way, and if you make one move that doesn’t look right, he will kill you.” Bote nodded to the boy, who nodded back.

McCracken pulled the food cart inside the jet and then, obeying Bote’s orders, latched the heavy door behind him. He maneuvered the cart forward and swung it gingerly so it was facing the rows and rows of terrified passengers, many of them children. Blaine gazed out and seemed to meet all their stares at once. With Ari holding an Uzi a yard behind the cart, he started to pull it down the right-hand aisle.

Bote remained in the front of the cabin, poised before the movie screen, which was still in position.

Blaine knew that the third terrorist, a woman, was seated somewhere among the passengers, finger ready to press a button that would trigger the explosives. He could see the wires looped across the ceiling and peeking out from the overhead baggage compartments, where the plastique must be stored. The wires strung the explosives together, but the detonator would be transistor-powered; no wires to give the female terrorist’s position away. Determining her location was the centerpiece of McCracken’s plan, though. That a second terrorist would be so close when he acted was a godsend, but nothing mattered if he could not find the woman.

Blaine stopped the cart a bit down the aisle and continued distributing the chicken dinners that had been kept warm within the heated slots. Most of the passengers weren’t hungry but took a plate anyway just to have something to do. McCracken’s eyes strayed always a row or two ahead, seeking out the eyes of all women, in search of the pair belonging to the one holding the detonator. Most of the front rows were occupied by the children from New Jersey, which gave his eyes plenty of opportunity to roam, but the high seat backs blocked him from seeing too far ahead.

In the tenth row a woman smiled and accepted the dinner gratefully. Their eyes met and Blaine felt a gnawing in his stomach. There was something wrong about her. He broke the stare and handed a tray to the man seated next to her. The man’s eyes darted sideways toward the woman, a nervous signal—inadvertent perhaps but nonetheless confirming Blaine’s suspicions. This woman had to be the one he sought.

“Hurry up,” the boy terrorist urged, poking at the steel cart with his rifle. The boy never should have let McCracken position the cart between them, of course, but in this case fortune proved more useful than design.

Blaine reached inside the cart for another tray and let his hand wander deep into the back, where he had taped the Browning pistol. It came free easily and he moved it under a tray he was already maneuvering out with his left hand. The result was to make it appear as if he were holding the tray sandwichlike, with both hands. No reason for either of the terrorists to be suspicious.

He pulled the tray from the cart and started to lower it toward a man sitting two seats away from the female terrorist on the aisle.

As the man waved off the dinner, Blaine fired the Browning twice. The woman’s head snapped back, rupturing, and showered passengers with blood and brains.

A small black transmitter slipped from her lap onto the floor.

The boy terrorist let the shock consume him for just an instant, but an instant was all it took for McCracken to turn the gun on him, the tray that had been covering it flying to the side. He placed two bullets in the young chest before the boy could squeeze the trigger of his Uzi.

He grasped it as he fell and the bullets stitched a jagged design in the jet’s ceiling. Passengers screamed, jostled, collapsed against one another.

“Stay down!” Blaine screamed, but the last part of his warning was drowned out by Bote’s machine gun.

The bullets blasted into the food cart which had become his cover, and Blaine fired a volley back high. From this angle he didn’t want to risk hitting a passenger instead of Bote.

The terrorist was still firing in a wide arc, when McCracken rose and pumped off four rounds in his general direction, his bullets digging chasms into the thick aircraft walls. Bote kept firing the machine gun behind him as he disappeared around the corner.

Another detonator
, Blaine realized with a clap of fear in his stomach,
he’s going for another detonator
!

McCracken vaulted over the food tray and tucked into a roll to the chorus of people still screaming. He was back on his feet almost immediately, rushing down the aisle toward the galley where Bote had taken cover. A hail of machine-gun fire forced him into a dive as he neared it. The dive carried him to the front of the galley, where Bote was grasping for something in a black bag. His free hand came around with the machine gun.

Blaine fired first.

His initial shot tore into the terrorist’s chest, pitching him backward. The next two bored into his head, obliterating it in explosions of blood and bone. Bote slipped to the floor with the black detonator gripped in his hand.

Blaine was still lying prone on the floor amid the continued screams of the passengers, when a pair of the 767’s doors shattered outward and a troop of French security police tumbled in, nearly falling over themselves.

“Smoking or nonsmoking?” he asked them, rising carefully with arms in the air.

“You’re finished this time. You know that, McCracken?” Daniels shot out accusingly in the backseat of the Peugeot heading back to the American Embassy.

“No, Tommy my boy. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Daniels shook his head. “You’re a walking embarrassment, McCracken. I thought I’d heard it all with that Parliament Square incident five years ago, but today beats everything. Now you run a rogue operation on foreign soil. Do you have any idea what that means?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

Daniels’s driver made a hard right.

“Well, you just might lose the top of your head, McCracken. This is a diplomatic disaster. Washington will have to hold your head up on a stake just to get the French to talk civil to us again.” Daniels’s stare grew incredulous. “None of this really matters to you, does it?”

“What matters to me is that none of the passengers died.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is?”

Daniels’s emergency phone rang and he grabbed it from its rest on the back of the seat before him.

“Daniels.” A pause. His eyes found Blaine. “Yes, I’ve got him with me now … What? That wasn’t the original plan. I’m more than capable of—” Another pause. Daniels’s face reddened. His teeth ground together. “Yes, sir, I understand … Yes, sir, immediately.” He replaced the receiver and looked back at McCracken. “I’ve been ordered to send you back to Washington. Pronto. Looks like the President wants to fry your ass personally.”

“I’ll make sure he saves some grease for you, Tommy my boy. There’s plenty to go around.”

Chapter 3

FIRST THING TUESDAY
morning Sandy Lister walked down a third floor corridor in the network’s New York headquarters and popped her head into the fourth doorway down.

“You ready?” she asked her assistant.

T.J. Brown nodded nervously. “The research is all finished, if that’s what you mean. But am I ready for a meeting with Shay? No way, boss.”

“Good,” said Lister. “You’ll do just fine.”

And seconds later she was hustling T.J. toward the elevator that would take them up to the fifteenth floor and the office of Stephen Shay, executive producer of the newsmagazine
Overview
.

Sandy had been through scenes like the one coming dozens of times before, but this one had her more nervous than usual. It was a story she really wanted, one that hadn’t come through network channels and was arguably somewhat out of her league. The network had hired her away from her previous position as anchor of a rival’s morning news program to become one of five reporters on a new television magazine slotted to compete with the flagging
60 Minutes. Overview
would be more people-oriented and promised to deal with issues crucial to the American public as determined by up-to-the-minute polling. It would be fresher, more spontaneous than its counterparts. Or at least that was what the network had told Sandy and the public. Thus far four episodes had aired with another two in the can and the results had been something neither fresher nor more spontaneous than any other television newsmagazine.

The ratings, though, were at least as good as expected, especially during Sandy’s segments, mostly because the lighter, profile segments she hosted were more to the public’s liking than hard news. When you came right down to it, who wanted to hear about chemical waste anyway? Plenty of viewers had enough troubles paying the bills to make sure their toilets kept flushing, never mind worrying about someone else’s unsanitary landfill.

The fact that she wasn’t a hard journalist didn’t bother Sandy and probably never would. She took pride in her interviewing technique, glad not to be likened to the coarse, falsely intimate style of Barbara Walters or the puffy, prepackaged smiles of the
Entertainment Tonight
staff. On those occasions where research was required, she headed the process every step of the way, refusing to just step before the camera on call and read what someone else had written. Nor would she permit redubbing of her questions and shamelessly superficial reaction shots. The result was a far more spontaneous, unaltered interview and this as much as anything accounted for the fact that Sandy’s popularity rating was the highest of any woman in broadcasting.

Accordingly, Sandy felt a growing confidence in herself. She had no desire to expand her reach into hard journalism per se, but felt ready to take a more active role in story selection and follow-through.

Starting today.

Her contract in these areas was vague. Her meeting with Stephen Shay this morning would not be. She knew what she wanted and, more, how to present it in terms he would understand. She would ask for the one specific story she wanted most. From there everything would take care of itself.

She was aware of T.J. Brown hovering close behind her as they stepped into Shay’s private office together. Sandy nodded at the secretary, who smiled and picked up the phone immediately.

“Sandy’s here, Mr. Shay.” Then, looking at Sandy, “You can go right in.”

T.J. seemed frozen in his tracks.

“Piece of cake,” Sandy whispered. “Just picture him naked.”

“Huh?”

“I had a public speaking teacher once who said to avoid nervousness when giving an important speech, just picture your audience naked.”

That made T.J. smile as they moved toward the inner office door. “Shay naked? I’ll give it a try.”

T.J. had graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism three years before, fourth in his class and just as black as when he went in. Broadcast spots for minorities were still limited, so T.J. wallowed around for a while with newspapers and radio stations before applying for a research assistant’s position at the then infantile
Overview
. The five anchors had screened the over four hundred applicants personally and Sandy Lister had come away especially impressed with T.J. He was actually overqualified for the job, but nonetheless seemed eager to be considered. Hiring him became Sandy’s first completed business with her new network, a decision she had not regretted for one moment, even when T.J. urged her to go harder on her subjects and dangled plenty of research to help her do so.

She stepped into Stephen Shay’s spacious office as smoothly as she stepped into the living rooms of millions of Americans on Thursday nights.

Shay rose from behind his desk and moved away from it, grasping Sandy’s hands and kissing her lightly on the cheek.