Now that the nose of the plane was horizontal again, there was space up there for the passengers—padded seats in a partially noise-proofed compartment sandwiched between the cockpit and the cargo hold. Three of the Iraqis went there immediately. Al-Turki stayed behind for a minute, fiddling with some connections on the outside of the tank. Clyde and Fazoul clambered to a slightly different position so that they could see what he was doing. Al-Turki began to back away from the red tank, paying out wire from a reel, wrapping it around the occasional fixed object. He backed all the way into the passenger compartment and then shut the door.
Clyde looked questioningly at Fazoul, who shrugged. “Maybe they are afraid that if they continue to rely on the radio detonator, perhaps your clever electronic-warfare specialists will figure out how to trigger the bomb in midair by beaming a signal into the plane. This is what I would be afraid of. So they turn off the radio and hook up a hardwired detonator instead.”
Sheets of something cold and wind driven were flailing against the metal skin of the Antonov, sounding like wet concrete sprayed out of a pressure hose. The engines throttled up, but the plane didn’t move; the wheels were iced up. Up in the cockpit Vitaly began to alternate the thrusts on the engines violently. Finally the wheels cracked loose and the ship jerked forward. Tons of fuel sloshed back and forth in all of the tank containers, causing the whole jungle gym to strain against its moorings, and yanking the Antonov back and forth on its suspension in a slow oscillation that took a minute or two to die away. But the plane was moving—plowing and skidding to the southeastern extreme of the airport, where the twelve-thousand-foot runway began.
Vitaly turned the plane around very, very slowly, trying not to get that fuel sloshing. When he had it aimed in the right direction, he sat for a minute or two, perhaps running through a checklist, perhaps just screwing up his courage. Clyde hoped foolishly that they would call the whole thing off and that he would get to stay home today.
Then Vitaly released the brakes and racked the engines up as high as they would go. The combination of the engine noise, which must have been breaking windows in town, and the wind and ice and sleet sliding off the skin of the plane overwhelmed Clyde’s hearing and made it impossible to think.
The Antonov accelerated weakly but steadily, its tires pounding through snowdrifts. The takeoff run lasted forever; Clyde could not believe that they were still in the airport. The runway could not possibly be long enough for this. But then the noise of the tires diminished and went away entirely. The ride was still rough, but now it was the roughness of an airplane in turbulence, no longer that of a four-wheel-drive vehicle speeding across rough ground. Hydraulics whined and the doors over the landing gear slammed shut like the gates of hell. The Antonov hit an air pocket the size of a city block and seemed to lose about half its altitude; tremendous sloshing noises came from all the fuel tanks, and the whole jungle gym began to creak and pop and bend out of shape. Clyde could not see outside, but he knew the territory and calculated that they must be about to crash headlong into the bluffs of University Heights.
The right wing dipped as Vitaly banked the ship northward, which would be necessary to avoid the bluffs. Clyde counted to ten, then twenty, then a hundred. They didn’t hit anything. The ride got smoother. Clyde’s ears popped, then popped again.
They had cleared the twin cities.
Maggie wasn’t going to die today.
And Clyde was going far, far away from home.
Clyde checked his watch. It was just past one in the afternoon. “How far to Iceland?” he said to Fazoul.
Fazoul had wedged himself underneath one of the fuel tanks and was busy working on something. Clyde clambered down for a better look. “How far to Iceland? You have any idea?”
Fazoul rolled his eyes. “It is not a place frequently visited by Vakhan Turks.” He had taken some items from a belt pack that he had been wearing under his Twisters sweatshirt and was deeply involved in a project of some sort.
“Just off the top of my head,” Clyde said, “I figure that by the time we’ve gone a thousand miles, we’ve cleared most of the parts of Canada where people are living. Two thousand probably gets us way up into the Arctic. Three thousand, and we’re over the ocean. Four thousand is too late—getting close to Europe. Does that sound good to you?”
“Yes,” Fazoul said absently, snipping a couple of small wires.
“How fast you figure this crate flies? Five hundred?”
“Something like that.”
“So in six hours we jump the Iraqis, and if we screw it up, the only thing that dies is a lot of fish.”
“Fine,” Fazoul said. He began pushing buttons on a small electronic box he had just lashed to the fuel tank with some black electrician’s tape. “And in seven hours this brick of plastique explodes.” He pointed to a lump of translucent clay jammed between a fuel tank and a reinforcing gusset. “Unless one of us lives long enough to disconnect it.”
“And how is that done?”