The Valhalla Prophecy (38 page)

The first of the parked bombers swept past. He grinned and swung the gunsight around. The cannons followed his movement. “Did you just
cackle
?” Nina asked.

“Remembered my training,” he replied, lining up the sight and pushing the red button.

The guns blazed again, even the headphones doing little to muffle the din. But Eddie didn’t care, walking the line of fire along the rank of bombers. A stream of 23mm rounds blasted holes in the fuselages of the stationary Tu-95s, aluminum shreds scattering like confetti.

“Chase!” demanded Kagan. “What are you doing?”

“Keeping ’em busy!” he shouted back over the noise. “Don’t worry, a friend of mine once told me Russian planes are easy to fix.” The bulbous radar dome beneath the chin of one of the Bears disintegrated as he concentrated his fire upon it. “Bit of work with the tin snips and a hammer, that’ll knock right out.”

“Chase!”

“Just talk to your fucking bosses, all right?” He switched his aim to the Tu-95’s forward landing gear. The leg collapsed under the onslaught. The Bear’s front end dropped to the ground, the fuselage smashing flat like a dropped egg and breaking the aircraft’s back.

Most of the more distant pursuers abruptly slowed. The message had got through:
Back off or I take out your entire fleet
. The UAZs hounding the hijacked Tupolev came back into view, veering away. Eddie stopped firing. Turning the AM-23s on them would result in a massacre, and he had no enmity toward the base personnel.

More bombers rolled past, the old turboprop behemoths followed by newer and even larger swing-wing Tu-160 jets. Eddie was sorely tempted to put a few dozen explosive rounds into each to make life easier for NATO, but held his fire; even if they survived long enough for Kagan’s superiors to call off the hunt, they were already in enough trouble with the Russian government—and diplomatic immunity would only extend so far.

Eddie’s voice came through Nina’s headphones. “They’ve pulled back.”

“Good,” she replied, looking ahead. “We’re almost
out of road!” The end of the long concrete taxiway was now only a few hundred yards away. She gestured with the gun for the copilot to follow a connecting lane around to the main runway. The Tupolev swung onto its new course, the nosewheel tires squealing in protest at the fast turn.

Kagan spoke in urgent Russian, briefly holding a hand over his microphone to say to Nina, “I am through,” before continuing.

“Thank God,” she replied. “Eddie, Kagan’s gotten through to his bosses.”

“Great,” he said. “Let’s hope
they
don’t get put on hold when they try to call the base!”

The pilot gasped in pain. Nina saw blood spreading across his shirt. She searched for some way to help him. A white box marked with a red cross was attached to one of the sickly green-painted cabin walls. “Tova, do you know first aid?” The Swede nodded. “Grab that and see if you can help him. I’ll make sure nobody tries anything stupid.”

Tova collected the medical kit and came into the cockpit. The copilot appeared briefly confused that his hijackers were also willing to help his injured comrade, but turned his attention back to the view outside as the Bear approached the main runway. “Go onto it,” Nina told him, accompanying the command with a hand signal. He worked the controls to turn the bomber. “Kagan, what’s happening?”

“I have told them about Slavin,” he replied. “They are going to tell the base commander to cancel the shoot-on-sight order and hold everyone until the truth can be determined.”

“How long will that take?” The base’s main runway, almost two miles long, swung into sight ahead.

“Not long—Unit 201 has a high—”

The Bear shuddered as its flank was hammered by a series of explosive impacts.

Holes ripped open in the fuselage. The communications officer was practically cut in half by shrieking
metal, his blood splattering the back end of the cabin as shrapnel tore through him.

“Holy
shit
!” Nina yelled as she crouched. “What the hell was that?”

The copilot screamed into his headset. Nina didn’t need to understand his language to know that he was begging whoever was firing on the bomber to stop. It had no effect, another fusillade hitting the wing. Black smoke belched from the outermost engine nacelle.

Astern, Eddie swore as he shoved the gunsight as far over as it would go, but to no avail—the Tu-95’s turn had put their attacker out of sight. But he knew what it was—and
who
. “It’s Slavin!”

The Russian officer had commandeered a ZSU-23-4—a tank-like anti-aircraft system armed with four 23mm autocannons much like those the Englishman was controlling. In his desperation, he was willing to destroy the entire aircraft to silence anyone who could expose his treachery. The guns would cut the Bear to pieces—and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

Unless …

More pounding blows shook the bomber. Eddie twisted to look through a small side porthole, glimpsing the ZSU under the port wing. “Go! Full power, get us moving!” he shouted into his headset.

“We will never be able to take off!” Kagan protested.

“I don’t want to take off—I want to get past him so I can fucking
shoot back
!”

In the cockpit, the Russian urgently relayed the order to the copilot. The man hesitated, but more explosive rounds shredding the side of the fuselage immediately erased his doubts. He pushed all the throttles to maximum power.

The wounded Bear surged forward. The trail of smoke from the damaged engine was joined by flames—then an explosion ripped open the nacelle.

Nina risked raising her head and saw the squat ZSU carving toward the runway ahead of them. More fire flashed from its cannons, tracers streaking at her like meteors. She ducked again as the Tupolev took more hits, impacts tearing along the hull. Another set of warning lights flashed on the instrument panel. “Eddie! This thing’s going to rip us apart!”

“Just tell them to keep going—it only has light armor, so if I can hit it, it’s dead!”

“
If
you can hit it! And we’re a much bigger target!” She looked up again. The ZSU was about four hundred yards away, but rapidly growing as the bomber bore down upon it.

“Just tell me how far away it is—and where to aim!”

“It’s on the left, about—I dunno, a hundred feet from the runway and getting closer. We’re about three hundred yards away—
whoa!
” She dropped behind the pilot’s seat as cannon shells punctured the radome below the cockpit. A shrill wind blasted into the cabin.

The copilot shouted at her, but she waved for him to keep going. “Two hundred yards, we’re almost—”

The ZSU unleashed another ferocious burst of fire. An entire section of the Tupolev’s port wing blew apart as shells ripped through a fuel tank. A hot gale rushed in through the holes in the hull.

The Russian weapons officer opposite Kagan shouted in panic. Nina looked back to see red lights flashing urgently on his control panel. “The wing is on fire—and so are the missiles!” Kagan yelled.

“Then tell him to drop them!” She stumbled back down the gangway.

“It’s against protocol!”

“
Screw
protocol!” She reached the weapons station. The Cyrillic was impenetrable, but the symbol beside a rank of switches under the blinking lights was self-explanatory. A stylized missile with a downward-pointing arrow behind it, surrounded by an irregular multipointed star:
explosive release
.

She glanced forward, seeing the ZSU whip out of
sight as the Bear rushed past it. “Eddie, I’m sending you some bombs!”

Before the weapons officer could stop her, she stabbed at the switches.

A series of rapid cracks came from the burning wing pylon—then the three cruise missiles mounted upon it dropped away and tumbled along the runway like skittles.

Eddie’s view of the runway’s edge had been blotted out by a huge cloud of swirling black smoke. If he didn’t destroy the ZSU, it would tear the crippled Bear apart, but he couldn’t see his target—

Flashes of pale gray on the ground—and he realized he didn’t need to.

Each Kh-101 was fully laden with fuel and carried a warhead weighing a full metric ton. The 23mm rounds were more than enough to detonate them.

He fired—

The missiles exploded, their combined blast ripping a huge crater out of the runway. Eddie was thrown back in his seat as the detonation pummeled the Bear’s tail. But the bomber was already haring away from the explosion.

The ZSU was not.

Slavin was in the commander’s cupola, looking out from the top of the turret. His triumph at seeing the Tupolev’s wing erupt into flames changed to terror—then the shock wave pounded his head into a bloody pulp against the unyielding open hatch cover behind him. The ZSU was flipped end-over-end, the burning wreck slamming down on its back in the snow.

“I got him, I got him!” Eddie shouted into the headset. “Slow us down!”

Nina desperately searched for somewhere to secure herself. “We can’t!” she cried. The copilot had already yanked back the throttles and stamped on the pedal to apply the wheelbrakes, but with half a wing missing
the Bear was unbalanced and veering toward the side of the runway. One of the overstressed nosewheel tires exploded, the metal rim screeching along the concrete in a shower of sparks.
“Hang on!”