Countdown to Mecca

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  Cast of Characters

  Jack Hatfield: fearless San Francisco freelance journalist, defrocked former host of the cable TV program Truth Tellers

  Doc Matson: former soldier, current merc, trusted ally of Jack

  Dover Griffith: one-time Department of Naval Intelligence analyst, now FBI agent … and Jack’s lover

  Sammy Michaels: Jack’s younger half brother, former Marine, now a professional clown

  Sol Minsky: San Francisco–based gangster

  Boaz Simonson: Minsky’s IT wizard

  Ric: Minsky’s driver and bodyguard

  Carl Forsyth: FBI field director, San Francisco

  Pyotr Ansky/Peter Andrews: Russian national, assassin

  Thomas Brooks: Three-Star General, U.S. Strategic Command

  Montgomery Morton: One-Star General, U.S. Strategic Command

  Steven Reynolds: Captain, U.S. military

  Andrew Taylor: Colonel, U.S. military

  Anastasia Vincent: Russian-born escort

  Ritu: Indian-born escort

  Miwa: Japanese-born escort

  Daniel Jeffreys: Captain, San Francisco Police Department

  Helmut Schoenberg: CEO of German multinational company Der Warheit Unternehmen

  Bernie Peters: eccentric physicist based in San Francisco

  Prologue

  Saint Petersburg, Russia

  Aeroport Pulkovo

  Pyotr Ansky’s pale eyes were dead as he walked through Terminal Two toward his flight. He saw everyone without empathy or interest. It had been that way since his first assignment years before.

  Passing through the last of three security checkpoints, Ansky glanced uncaring at two middle-aged transportation officers, his face like that of any distracted, put-upon, thirty-something traveler. That was his disguise this day. Pulling on his shoes at the end of the security line, Pyotr imagined himself to be what his visa said he was: a computer contractor headed for a programming job in Jordan.

  Pyotr made his way through security without incident. Rossiya Airlines was justly proud of its Aviation Security Program, which found no weapons or contraband on him, or in his backpack, during his third and final search prior to boarding.

  He smiled as he found his seat at the rear of the cabin. Pyotr allowed himself a sliver of satisfaction as he appeared to stretch before sitting. He was not just an assassin. There were plenty of those on the international market. He was one of a unique breed: a professional chameleon doing a consummate infiltration.

  There was no time to savor his successful boarding. Pyotr went to the lavatory where he reviewed the next scene of operations. The 737-500 had a cruising speed, 850 kilometers an hour. Maximum flight altitude was 12,300 meters. Seating capacity was 117. He mentally reviewed the layout, the exits, the cockpit configuration.

  He emerged and looked around.

  The flight was not full but Pyotr noted every face onboard: intense young businessmen, older businessmen drunk from the airport bar, a family with an eight-year-old, women in burkas accompanied by their husbands or brothers.

  Pyotr did that for every single face of the ninety-four people onboard before deciding who the Russian security agent was. Pyotr had no doubt there would be a plainclothes undercover operative. This was, after all, a flight to Amman, Jordan. Islamic terrorism had long been considered a major threat to the security of Russia, both before and after the Soviet era.

  Four things would mark him. He would have a sport coat to cover his weapon. He would possess a penetrating stare as he analyzed passengers for potential threats. He’d be middle-aged, retired from the military, but with enough bulk to suggest he’d once been athletic. And he would be a man: there was only one woman in the force, and Pyotr already knew she was assigned to flights originating to Moscow and New York.

  Ahead, aisle seat. Row sixteen, aisle seat, economy class. Near the exit door. He saw the shadow of a shoulder holster as the agent leaned forward.

  The man sat alone. That would make things easier.

  Satisfied, Pyotr Ansky fell into his seat but did not relax after takeoff. As the aircraft started over the Black Sea one thousand miles from Pulkovo, the copilot emerged to use the bathroom. Pyotr knew that was coming: the man had used the lavatory when he boarded to put a full bottle of Putinka vodka in the trash. Many Russian pilots, also former military aviators, had a drinking problem. The agents who had taken this flight during the past fortnight reported where the copilot and first class flight attendant kept the key to get back in.

  As soon as the cockpit door opened, Pyotr rose and removed his wallet. He grabbed a blanket from the overhead bin, slung it over his shoulder, and slipped the Nalchik Bank ATM card from its pocket. He walked forward nonchalantly as if to be next in line for the lavatory. As he reached the aisle seat where the Russian security agent was sitting Pyotr appeared to stumble. He leaned on the back of the agent’s seat, extended his right arm, and sliced the sharpened edge of his credit card deep across the agent’s neck, from ear to ear. His body shielded the view of the young woman across the aisle. The wound gurgled as the man drew breath, the air rushing into the wound, not his mouth. Pyotr dropped the credit card and gripped the MP-443 Grach semiautomatic in the dying, gurgling man’s holster. Pyotr quickly spread the blanket across the doomed operative, who was busy drowning quietly in his own blood. He moved swiftly now toward the front of the plane.

  He held the agent’s sidearm low and in front of his leg. It was not so unobtrusive that it couldn’t be seen, but he passed smoothly and a gun was the last thing anyone expected to see—especially since Pyotr’s face displayed no sense of the power or arrogance that often comes with a gun.

  A male flight attendant finally took notice of Pyotr as he neared the cockpit door. The man seemed about to protest when the passenger failed to stop at the lavatory door. He never got the words out. Pyotr pressed the gun into his chest and pulled the trigger, angling down to keep the bullet inside the body. Decompression, now, would not be good for the mission. Pyotr took the key from a chain around the man’s neck.

  The rest happened quickly. Though muffled, the noise alerted about a dozen people in the front of the plane but it also froze them for the moment Pyotr needed. He unlocked the door, pushed into the cockpit, and locked the panel behind him.

  The pilot heard the commotion as the door opened and he began to turn. Pyotr pushed him down, pressed the gun barrel into the crown of his skull, then pulled the trigger. The 9mm bullet went through the man’s brain and most of his body before lodging in his coccyx.

  Not bothering to move the pilot, Pyotr slipped into the copilot’s vacant seat, buckled up, turned off the transponder that broadcast the plane’s identity and position, then shifted the course southeast. Someone, probably the copilot, shouted from behind the door, then began pounding. Pyotr ignored it. With the partition’s reinforced bolts, no one would be getting in.

&nb
sp; Pyotr also ignored the radio, whose questions were becoming more strident. Instead, he appreciated how smoothly he transitioned from flight simulator lessons to airline control. In reality, once he’d reprogrammed the course, the autopilot did ninety percent of the work. The only tricky part would be to get down.

  He began his descent into the sunset.

  The pounding got louder but Pyotr concentrated on the plane’s descent. By then, the airport was starting to announce that if he didn’t acknowledge at once the air force would shoot the 737 down.

  The threat was certainly real, but Pyotr knew the nearest Russian command was more than forty-five minutes away. Even if they had a plane in the air—they rarely did—his assignment would be completed before any could intercept him.

  Checking his position, he adjusted his course slightly so that he was over the center of the 143,000-square-mile sea—far enough from the shore and the oil platforms to avoid being seen. Finally parallel to the Azerbaijan coastline, he steepened his descent by two degrees, lining precisely into the glide slope he had memorized during flight training.

  There was a loud crash at the cockpit door. The passengers and crew had decided to use a service cart as a ramrod. A decade and a half before, that tactic had saved America’s Capitol Building, as a group of brave Americans stormed the cockpit of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania and managed to take the plane down.

  But that was before cockpit doors and bulkheads had been uniformly reinforced. A service cart would no longer cut it.

  Pyotr pressed the DITCH button that closed the outflow, extract, and flow control valves, as well as the air and avionics inlets. In theory, a water landing wasn’t much different from a runway landing. An American pilot had done it on a river in 2009; in June 2011 a South African aircraft belly-flopped in the Atlantic. In both cases, all aboard survived.

  With the exception of himself, Pyotr didn’t care who lived or died on this water landing. Like the people he’d seen in the airport, they were inconsequential. Nothing mattered except the mission.

  He steered the plane into the wind to slow it down, watching as his airspeed slipped toward one hundred knots. He needed to slow down, but not too slow. If the plane stalled it would nosedive into the water. If it went too fast it would literally shatter on impact.

  At fifty meters above the waves, the left wing jerked up suddenly from a rogue current of air spitting off the Caspian. Pyotr resisted the urge to overcorrect as he’d done in the simulator. Coolly, he got the wings parallel to the dark shadow of the water and kept the wings exactly parallel, nose up, tail drooping as if for a normal landing.

  There was a jolt followed by a loud, metallic clang as the rear of the plane struck the water. The plane jerked, shuddered, but it did not come apart. His hands remained firm. The plane coursed through the water like a bullet through gelatin, the cabin bucking, twisting, and screeching, but the old Russian bird held. The Caspian waves pounded against the fuselage. He heard the shrieks of passengers still in their seats, the cries of those who fell. They seemed to get louder as the engines shut down. Now, there were only the screams and the slosh of sea water.

  The engines fell off as they were designed to do on impact, disappearing into the depths so they wouldn’t drag the plane with them. The surface of the sea was just below the windows. Pyotr threw off his seat belt, pulled himself from the seat, unlocked the cockpit door, and emerged gun first. Lit by the emergency lighting system and the shadowy dusk penetrating the windows, the cabin was a disjointed collection of wailing passengers and fallen luggage.

  The copilot, who’d been standing when the plane hit the water, was curled on the floor near the first row in business class. Pyotr drove his left foot into the man’s side, more to get him out of the way than to guard against a threat. Then he cast an eye toward the back of the cabin, making sure no one was in a position to interfere.

  Certain that they were all too distracted to bother him, he stepped into the small crew area directly behind the cockpit. There was a tall cabinet here; he opened it, exposing a set of metal lockers used to transport high-value cargo.

  “Why?”

  The strident word cut into his mind like a laser. He snapped his head around to see, standing in the aisle, a mother and her baby. Pytor had noted the child in her mother’s arms when he first came aboard. There was blood and a deep crack in the infant’s thinly haired skull. The baby was limp. The mother was not enraged or vengeful. She just seemed confused, clearly in shock.

  Certain she was no threat to him, he just answered her honestly while reaching beneath his shirt for a plastic key that was taped there.

  “Because it’s easier this way.”

  He left it at that as he opened a locker and took out a small attaché case. His employers had originally wanted to smuggle this attaché case onto a military plane to avoid just this sort of collateral damage to innocent victims. But he couldn’t figure out how to get it there, and then retrieve it, without setting off alarms in every major military office in the world. He remembered the chain of events, the intense investigation, that a Chinese attack on an American military chopper in Afghanistan had wrought the year before. It was safer to attack civilian aircraft. Only the insurance companies cared until they wrote a check. Then this “act of terror” would be forgotten.

  He pushed past the woman and went back into the main cabin as passengers began to organize an egress. Flight attendants were trying to organize the removal of seats for flotation. The back of the plane had suffered extensive damage, but the middle and forward sections were entirely intact, and one of the men in the emergency exit rows began struggling with the door over the wing. Blue twilight flooded in as it opened. People in the seats nearby began to shout to others to come and escape.

  That was fine with Pyotr. Concerned with survival, they left him alone. He turned and went to the main door, pushing the handle without arming the slide. The door was heavy and difficult to open; he had to give his full attention to it. This left an opening for two passengers from the first class cabin who wanted to follow him out. As he pulled the door back, water flooded in.

  One first class passenger came up behind him, yelling, “Out! Go, go!”

  Pyotr shot him in the head, then looked outside as the other passengers fell back, blood-spattered and wailing. The relatively calm, black waters were bathed in yellow, gold, and orange, the sun slipping behind the low hills at the west. But Pyotr only had eyes for the rigid-hulled raft speeding toward him from the distant shadows.

  Everyone who wasn’t dead or unconscious were out of their seats now, struggling to escape the downed plane without getting near the gunman. The rigid-hulled raft pulled up next to him without incident. Pyotr swung the attaché case at the nearest man in a wet suit aboard the craft. That man stumbled with it and landed seat first in the bottom of the boat.

  “Careful!” Pytor shouted in Russian. “It’s worth your life. More than that.”

  “Sorry, sir,” huffed the man, trying to regain his balance.

  Pyotr had hopped into the raft. He cut the man some slack because it had been he, disguised as an airline galley supplier, who had gotten the case onboard. “Get us out of here.”

  “Yes, sir,” said another man at the engine.

  They backed from the plane, then turned. Someone yelled from the aircraft, pleading for help. Other voices joined the cry, like the Sirens of Greek mythology.

  “Stop,” Pyotr told the man at the engine.

  As the operator throttled back, Pyotr reached for the large, waterproof bag that sat between him and the man in the bow. He unzipped it, revealing the case of a Russian rocket-propelled grenade launcher. He removed the launcher and made it ready to fire.

  Russian rocket-propelled grenade launchers had become the de facto man-portable weapon among terrorists and guerillas everywhere; they were rugged and dependable. The most famous weapon, the RPG-9, dated from the early 1960s. It came in a number of different flavors, including a folding paratrooper model,
and had a range of explosive charges. The weapon in Pyotr Ansky’s hands packed even more destructive power, with greater range and accuracy.

  Known as the Kryuk, the RPG-30 had been designed to fire an armor-piercing, two-part projectile capable of penetrating a main battle tank. Such a shell would have probably flown entirely through the aircraft before exploding; that would not do. So instead, Pyotr was using a hand-built phosphorous explosive shell. The explosive had been developed in China and recently sold to Syria, which had also acquired a small amount of RPG-30s to fight against its rebels. Anyone examining the destruction would see the connection, and be misled.

  Pyotr looked through the night sight, setting the crosshairs on the wing root, aiming for the center fuel tank that sat between the wings under the passenger deck. He glanced over his shoulder, making sure he had a clear path behind him for the escaping gases, then pulled the trigger.

  The air itself seemed to sizzle. The explosion that followed was disappointingly quiet and small, more a flare than the spectacular cascade of red and white. But the secondary explosion, as the fuel tanks caught, was far more showy, with brilliant orange flames reaching to an impressive height.

  “Circle, to make sure there are no survivors,” Pyotr told the man at the controls. He threw the launcher over the side, putting the briefcase into the waterproof container. Then he took out his satellite phone. “Keep the engine noise down,” he said as he punched in the number. “I have to tell the general that his parcel has been procured.”

  “Colonel,” said the man who had fallen. “Is that wise?” His expression and the circling motion he made with his hand communicated the sentiment that ears were everywhere.

  “Do not worry,” he told his subordinate. “No one will think anything of a pleasure boat that happened to witness an explosion.”

  1

  San Francisco, California

  Samuel Michaels was dozing on his comfortable, threadbare sofa when he heard a key move in the door of his second floor Montgomery Street studio apartment. As his eyes opened so did the door. A blonde, barefoot, platinum-eyed vision in a low-cut, form-fitting black micro-mini-dress jumped in, panting. His neighbor Anastasia Vincent and his half brother Jack were the only ones who had a key—and this definitely wasn’t Jack Hatfield. Jack hadn’t been here in over a year, which was the last time they spoke. It was to thank him for a jazz CD Sammy had sent as a birthday present and peace offering.