Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

“Charlie!”

No response.

“Charlie! What’s the word?”

“We’re ready to go!” a voice yelled back.

Hudson heard the last of the engines winding up. He grabbed Tarasov and rolled him over. The man’s body was limp like a rag doll’s. The final shot had gone through his neck. His eyes stared lifelessly up and back.

“Damn,” Hudson said.

Half the mission was blown, but they still had the steel trunks and whatever was in them. Even though the CIA was a secret organization, they had offices and an address. If he had to, Hudson would go find them and bang on the front door until someone took him in and paid him.

He turned and fired toward the terminal again. And in that moment he noticed the lights from a pair of cars racing toward him from the far end of the ramp. He didn’t figure they were cavalry.

He dashed up the stairs and dove through the door as a bullet ricocheted off the Connie’s smooth skin.

“Go!” he shouted.

“What about our passenger?”

“Too late for him.”

As the copilot shoved the throttles forward Hudson slammed the door shut, wrenching the handle down just as the plane began to move. Over the droning sound of the engines he heard the crackle of glass breaking.

He turned to see Charlie Simpkins slumped over toward the center console, his seat belt holding him up.

“Charlie?”

The plane was on the move as Hudson ran forward. He dove into the cockpit as another shot hit and then another.

Staying on the floor, he reached up and slammed the throttles forward. As the engines roared he scrambled under the pilot’s seat and pushed hard on the right rudder. The big plane began to pick up momentum, moving ponderously but gathering speed and turning.

Another rifle shot hit the sheet metal behind him and then two more. Hudson guessed he had turned far enough that the aircraft was pointing away from the terminal now. He climbed up into his seat and turned the plane out onto the runway.

At this point he had to go. There was nowhere safe back on that ramp. The plane was pointed in the right direction, and Hudson wasn’t waiting for any clearance. He pushed the throttles to the firewall, and the big plane began to accelerate.

For a second or two he heard bullets punching holes in the aircraft’s skin, but he soon was out of range, roaring down the runway and closing in on rotational velocity.

With the visibility as bad as it was and the shattered window on the left side, Hudson strained to see the red lights at the far end of the runway. They were coming up fast.

He popped the flaps down five degrees and waited until he was a hundred yards from the end of the asphalt before pulling back on the yoke. The Connie tilted its nose up, hesitated for a long, sickening second, and then leapt off the end of the runway, wheels whipping through the tall grass beyond the tarmac.

Climbing and turning to a westbound heading, Hudson raised the landing gear and then reached over to his copilot.

“Charlie?” he said, shaking him. “Charlie!”

Simpkins gave no reaction. Hudson checked for a pulse but didn’t find one.

“Damn it,” Hudson said to himself.

Another casualty. During the war a half a decade back, Hudson had lost too many friends to count, but there was always a reason for it. Here, he wasn’t sure. Whatever was in those cases had better be worth the lives of two men.

He pushed Simpkins back up into his seat and concentrated on flying. The crosswind was bad, the turbulence worse, and gazing into a wall of dark gray mist as he climbed through the clouds was disorienting and dangerous.

With no horizon or anything thing else to judge the plane’s orientation visually, the body’s sensations could not be trusted. Many a pilot had flown his plane right into the ground in conditions like these. All the while thinking he was flying straight and level.

Many more had taken perfectly level planes and stalled and spun them because their bodies told them they were turning and falling. It was like being drunk and feeling the bed spin; you knew it wasn’t happening, but you couldn’t stop the sensation.