Fazoul wasn’t talking any more than Clyde was. But he had other things on his mind. “What is wrong with this picture, Khalid?” he said, pointing to the Antonov.
“I wouldn’t know,” Clyde said after examining it for a minute. “I don’t know much about planes.”
“But you do know that they need fuel.”
“Yeah.”
“And as Hennessey pointed out, fuel is critical to the Iraqis’ mission—if their mission is to get the toxin all the way to Baghdad.”
“Yeah.” Clyde finally figured it out. “But they aren’t refueling the Antonov.” He pondered it. “Maybe it’s because the airport is shut down for Christmas.”
“This operation must have been planned for months in advance,” Fazoul said. “They could not have been so stupid as to forget about getting the plane fueled.”
“So what do you think is going on?”
“I fear that the Iraqis intend to crash the plane into Chicago.”
They slogged on for another minute. Clyde tried to get his heartbeat under control.
“I don’t think so,” Clyde said. “First of all, if they wanted to nail Chicago, they would have just towed the container into the city, which takes all of an hour and a half, and blown it up.”
“True,” Fazoul said.
“Secondly, I know the crew of this plane, and they may not be what you call upstanding citizens, but they are not kamikazes for Saddam Hussein either.”
“Then explain to me the mystery,” Fazoul said. And he did sound genuinely mystified, which was something new. Clyde had got used to Fazoul knowing everything he didn’t.
“How do you know the crew?” Fazoul asked.
Clyde told him the story about how they had driven off the road in May. “So they owe me a favor,” he said in conclusion.
Fazoul shook his head and laughed.
They walked straight across the tarmac as if they belonged there. They walked past the red container, trying not to stare at it; but Clyde could see work had been done on it recently, the torch burning away its red paint to expose dull steel underneath, laying down new silver welds where rectangular containers about the size of cigar boxes had been attached to the outside of the tank. There were at least a dozen of these. They were wired together with armored cable of exactly the same type Clyde had seen Tab Templeton buying at Hardware Hank back in September. Clyde could not see inside these boxes, but he assumed they were packed with explosives.
It was incredible that the tank was just sitting there unguarded. But the Iraqis’ car was idling not far away. Clyde assumed that the defogger was running full blast, and that on the other side of the tinted windshield someone was watching him and Fazoul as they approached, and that this person was ready to detonate the explosives on the toxin container by remote control.
Fazoul was dragging the cigarettes. As they approached the Antonov, Clyde began waving his arms over his head and hollering, “Tovarisch! Tovarisch! Vitaly! Vitaly!”
One of the Russians came cautiously down the cargo ramp, wearing a fur hat that looked like a yearling bear cub curled up on his head. Clyde recognized him; it was the guy who had suffered a broken arm back in May, the beneficiary of the Big Boss’s inflatable splint. Clyde saw no Iraqis inside the Antonov, so he turned his back on the car, hooked a thumb under the bottom of his ski mask, and peeled it back to expose his face for a moment. Then he pulled it back down; but the Russian had recognized him and looked delighted. “Sheriff!” he said.
Clyde winced and glanced in the direction of the car. This could not have been very obvious to the Russian, given that Clyde was standing twenty feet away and wearing a ski mask; but something about growing up in a totalitarian state had made him exquisitely sensitive to this kind of body language. “Moi drug,” he corrected himself. He held up his formerly broken arm and slapped it heartily, demonstrating its soundness. Then he looked at Fazoul quizzically.
Fazoul stopped at the base of the ramp, unzipped the sleeping bag, hauled out one of the cases, and ripped the lid open to expose the familiar Marlboro logo—making sure that all of this was clearly visible to whatever Iraqis might be watching from the car.
“Oy,” said the Russian, and glanced nervously toward the terminal building. “In, in.” He beckoned them up the cargo ramp with movements of his big furry head.
The interior of the Antonov was like the vault of a cathedral. But most of it was full this time. It was stacked three high and five wide with shipping containers. Like the one resting out on the apron, they were tank containers for carrying bulk liquids. The resemblance ended there; these did not appear to be wired with gobs of plastic explosive, and Clyde did not imagine that they were full of biological-warfare agents. They were plumbed together with a jury-rigged network of wrist-thick hoses. The plane was redolent of kerosene.
“It is jet fuel,” Fazoul muttered, “the whole plane is full of jet fuel.”
Chapter Fifty-Three