Don Pendleton - Hostile Dawn

“Yes, by all means intercept him if you can,” Brognola said, reaching into his trench coat for a plastic-wrapped cigar. “With any luck, he’s still airborne.”

“He doesn’t have much of a jump on us,” Grimaldi replied. “Hell, we were already out on the runway waiting for him when we got the word.”

“Still, there’s a lot of airspace between Barstow and San Diego,” Brognola said. “I’ll get Camp Pendleton to send somebody up to help out.”

“Fine by me,” Grimaldi said. “But what if we get to him first?”

“We’d obviously like him alive for questioning, but do what you have to. We can’t let him get away.”

“Got it.”

When he heard Grimaldi click off, Brognola silenced his earbud transceiver and peeled the wrapper from the cigar. There’d been a time, years ago, when he smoked expensive, hand-rolled Havanas, but now cigars were nothing more to him than a prop, something to keep his hands busy at times, like this, when the going got tough and his nerves were rattled.

“Something went wrong with Ahmet’s transfer,” Price said. It was more a statement than a question. She’d already deduced what had happened from listening to Brognola’s side of the conversation.

“Afraid so,” the big Fed replied, rolling the cigar between his fingers. “Some college kids near San Diego just came across two bodies that dropped out of the sky at a park near there. One’s the pilot of the transfer plane and the other’s the federal Air Marshal who was guarding Ahmet. They’d both been shot with the marshal’s pistol. We have to assume Ahmet’s behind it, which means he’s on the loose in a Gulfstream 100.”

“It shouldn’t have happened.” Price parked the cart and both she and Brognola retraced their steps to the Computer Room. “You’d think they would have had the guy chained to his seat with more than one guard watching him.”

“You’d think so,” Brognola conceded. “But apparently the idea was to go easy on the restraints in hopes of buttering him up. Not a great idea in my book, and I’m sure somebody’s being called on the carpet about it as we speak.”

“As well they should,” Price said. “Now, instead of having Ahmet dropped in their lap, Able Team has to go out and find him.”

Airspace over San Bernardino and

Riverside counties, California

“This is more like it,” Jack Grimaldi said, speaking through his headset microphone with Able Team commander Carl Lyons, seated behind him in the gunner seat of the F-16 fighter jet.

“Yeah, I’ll take a weapons pylon over those damn recliner seats any day,” Lyons said, staring out the gunner window at the rugged desert terrain below. “Now let’s just hope we can track this scumbag down. The longer he stays off our radar, the better his chances of getting away.”

“Pedal’s to the metal,” Grimaldi said, opening the jet’s throttles. “If he’s still in the air when we spot him, he won’t be able to outrun us.”

“The Marines are closer,” Lyons said, “but at this point I don’t care who gets him, as long as he’s taken out of the mix. Finding the rock al Qaeda’s hiding under is hard enough without splitting our focus.”

Able Team’s search for the sleeper cell in Barstow had produced only limited results. They’d managed to secure an address linked to Army Gideon, the paramilitary group rumored to be offering explosives to the al Qaeda team, but when they’d raided the site, located a few miles to the south in Oro Grande, they’d found the place deserted. There’d been traces of gunpowder on the property, and a day-old newspaper had been found stashed in a trash barrel along with scraps of fast food that had yet to spoil, convincing Lyons and the others that the compound had been only recently evacuated.

A visit to the burger franchise matching the food wrappers had determined that the meals had been purchased by Gideon members rather than the al Qaeda team, but Able Team had chanced upon a lead soon after when they’d stopped for gas at the only service station in the area. They learned the cashier had sold a handful of maps to a man who roughly matched the description of Mousif Nouhra, the purported field leader for the al Qaeda team. The maps had been for the L.A. freeway system, lending credence to the theory that the terrorists were hoping to somehow cripple the city’s transportation network. Nouhra had also apparently asked for directions to southbound I-15, suggesting that the terrorists were headed back to Los Angeles.

Lyons’s colleagues, Rosario “Politician” Blancanales and Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz, had already headed back to L.A., armed with a description of Nouhra’s Dodge Caravan. After receiving word of Kouri Ahmet’s aerial escape, Lyons had called both men, advising them to switch gears and provide ground support in the search for the Lebanese fugitive. The plan now was for Blancanales and Schwarz to check out private airfields south of L.A. on the chance Ahmet would decide to quickly land the hijacked Gulfstream and seek out another avenue of escape.

As Grimaldi gunned the F-16 across the desert between Barstow and L.A., Lyons changed frequencies on his headset transceiver and touched base with Blancanales.

“What’s your position, Pol?”

“I’m on the 405, just passing through Westwood,” Blancanales reported. “Once I hit the ‘10’ split, I’m going to dog it east toward San Bernardino. Gadgets is a few miles ahead of me. He’ll keep heading south. We’ll update you once we reach the airfields.”

“Good enough,” Lyons responded. “If we spot our guy from up here, I’ll let you know so you can change course.”

“Got it.”

“But, if you happen to spot that Caravan out on the road, by all means forget about Ahmet and run an intercept.”

“Not gonna happen, but I’ll keep my eyes open,” Blancanales promised.

Lyons clicked off and passed along word to Grimaldi, then lapsed into silence.

We’ve got our hands full on this one, he mused darkly.

Grimaldi had powered the fighter jet over the freeway and toward a relatively uninhabited mountain region when a call came in from a MAG-39 pilot from Camp Pendleton who’d taken another F-16 to the sky in search of Kouri Ahmet.

“I have visual contact with the Gulfstream,” the Marine pilot reported. When he gave his position, Grimaldi was quick to respond.

“We’re in the neighborhood. Stay on him and wait for us to catch up.”

Grimaldi banked the fighter jet and veered eastward toward the wilderness stretching between Hemet and Palm Springs. A few minutes later, both the Marine jet and the hijacked Gulfstream appeared on the horizon.

“Looks like showtime,” Grimaldi told Lyons through his headset. He patched through to the other pilot and asked, “Any word from Ahmet?”

“Negative,” the pilot answered. “I’ve put through calls telling the guy to bring the plane down and surrender, but he’s incommunicado.”

“No surprise there.”

Grimaldi nosed the Fighting Falcon and dropped another thousand feet before leveling off on a course parallel to that of the Gulfstream. Behind him, at the gunner controls, Lyons lined up the other plane in his sights.

“Sucker’s got its fly open,” Grimaldi said.

Lyons looked and saw that the side door of the Gulfstream was ajar.

“He might’ve just left it open after tossing the bodies,” Lyons said.

“Try again,” Grimaldi said, inching still closer to the other craft. “There’s nobody in the cockpit. Bastard has the thing on autopilot!”

“He jumped?” Lyons said.

“That’s gotta be it,” Grimaldi replied. “And unlike the guys he tossed, I’m guessing he bailed with a parachute.”