Hostile Dawn

“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.”

CHAPTER FOUR

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.”

San Jacinto Wilderness Preserve,

Riverside County, California

K OURI A HMET HAD JUST FINISHED stuffing his wadded parachute into a narrow crevasse deep in the heart of the San Jacinto Wilderness Preserve when he’d spotted the first of his aerial pursuers. He’d crawled beneath a jutting outcrop as one of the fighter jets had passed overhead and now, moments later, he heard a distant explosion in the air. His feet still tethered close together by ankle cuffs, Ahmet shuffled from cover and stared over the treetops, just in time to catch a glimpse of the disintegrated remains of the Gulfstream he’d hijacked earlier. The shards were raining from the sky, leaving behind a dark cloud of smoke. There was a second fighter jet in the sky, headed south, away from the falling debris.

Ahmet cursed. He’d figured the Gulfstream would wind up being shot down, but he’d hoped it would have taken longer for the enemy to realize he’d abandoned the aircraft. Any moment now, he knew both jets would likely double back, on the lookout for him. The jets’ surveillance capacities would be hindered by their speed and the need to fly at a high altitude, but it would be only a matter of time before helicopters were called in to assist in the search. Ahmet knew he would have to act fast to avoid being captured.

As he’d parachuted to the ground, the fugitive had spotted a campground to the north, and it was in that direction that he now headed, taking a circuitous route dictated by the rambling oak trees he took cover beneath, hoping their thick canopy would conceal him from view by those looking down from overhead. He was still wearing his prison-orange jumpsuit, and his hands, like his ankles, were still bound by cuffs. It would be impossible for anyone to see him and not realize he was an escaped prisoner.

Armed with the two Colt pistols he’d taken from the men he’d killed when taking over the Gulfstream, Ahmet made his way cautiously across the unruly terrain, stopping briefly when he heard the two jets pass by in quick succession. Once the drone of their turbos faded, he broke from cover and continued toward the campground. As with his escape, he had no set plan. All he knew was that he needed to gain access to some kind of vehicle. If he could get behind the wheel and out on an open road, it would then be only a matter of making his way to a main thoroughfare. There he could get lost in traffic and buy the time he needed to contact the allies he knew were hiding out only a short drive from where he’d chosen to bail from the jet.

The opportunity Ahmet had been seeking presented itself a few minutes later. Following the treeline, the fugitive had straggled up a slight incline overlooking a narrow, well-trodden path. When he heard the steady pounding of a hammer, Ahmet dropped to his knees and inched toward the edge of the incline. Downhill, thirty yards to his right, a park ranger was using a sledgehammer to drive fence posts into holes he’d augered in the hard-packed soil. A roll of wire fencing lay on the ground next to him. From the looks of it, the ranger was preparing to close off a section of the trail. He was working alone, his back turned to Ahmet, wearing a noise-reduction headset to mute the sound of his pounding. As if that weren’t enough reason to rally the renegade’s spirits, a set of bolt cutters lay atop the fence roll and, another ten yards away, a Ford F-150 pickup bearing the stenciled logo of the State Forestry Service was parked under the shade of a eucalyptus tree.

Perfect.

Ahmet rose to a crouch and, still hindered by his ankle restraints, awkwardly advanced along the incline. Once he was standing directly above the ranger, he coiled his legs, waiting for the right moment to strike. As the ranger began to bring the sledge bearing down on the post, Ahmet made his move. He leaped forward, arms outstretched, one knee extended in front of the other.

The ranger had just struck the post when Ahmet collided with him, driving his knee into the other man’s spine. He brought his hands down hard, making sure that the exposed butt of each handgun avoided the man’s headset and connected squarely with his skull. The sledgehammer fell from the ranger’s grasp as he collapsed under Ahmet’s weight. The two men tumbled to the ground, and only one of them got back up.