Norrgard sneered at him. “I’ll remember you said that.” Even restrained, the man made it a meaningful threat.
Movement from inside the aircraft snapped Gibson to attention. He crouched beside the ramp and aimed into the darkness. Waited breathlessly. He heard movement before he saw it. His finger slipped off the trigger guard of its own volition.
“It’s me,” Jenn called loudly. “I’m coming out.”
She appeared at the top of the ramp. Her MP7 dangled loosely from its harness. Blood was splattered across her chest and dripped from her arms and from her hands. Gibson felt his heart climb his throat and try to punch its way out.
“It’s not mine,” Jenn said.
Gibson felt a wave of relief, but then he realized what that meant. He dropped his head and asked, “How many?”
“Two. Both of the pilots.”
The big Scandinavian roared and struggled against his restraints. He vowed revenge in the blunt poetry of soldiers. Called her all the words men saved for women that they hated. “How many is that now?” he demanded. “How many have you killed?”
Jenn came down the ramp and knelt beside him. Her hand wrapped around the grip of her MP7, and for a moment Gibson thought she meant to add the Scandinavian to her résumé. The Scandinavian must have believed it too, because his jaw snapped shut.
“You stop holding hostages, Norrgard, and I’ll stop filling body bags with your men. How’s that?” She snatched up the loadmaster’s clipboard and flipped through the cargo manifest. “George isn’t on board,” she said to Gibson.
“What?”
“He’s not on board,” she said again, the frustration ringing in her voice.
She held out the clipboard. Gibson took it and ran up the ramp into the plane. They didn’t have a lot of time.
The cargo bay of a C-130 was nine feet high, forty feet in length, and ten feet across at its widest point. Down the center of the hold sat pallets of equipment wrapped in plastic and tethered in place by thick straps. The pallets were shoulder height, and narrow pathways had been left on either side. Gibson worked quickly, scanning the cargo manifest and comparing it against the pallet tags.
“Replacement parts for vehicles.”
“Ammunition.”
“Medical supplies.”
“Computers.”
Customs had signed off on the manifest. Everything looked official. There was no sign of George.
At the bulkhead behind the last pallet, Gibson found where the two pilots had made their stand. They lay, one on top of the other, like two brothers wrestling on the living room floor. Brass casings lay all around in the grease and blood. One had died instantly, but the second had clung to life until he’d bled out. Gibson saw where Jenn had tried to administer first aid.
Gibson stepped over the bodies and went up the cockpit ladder with the absurd hope that George Abe would be there waiting to be discovered. Nothing. He went down the other side of the aircraft, praying for a miracle, but finished his lap around the hold without spotting anything that Jenn had missed. He hated to think that they’d done this for nothing. Killed two men. Jenn had kept it bottled up tight, but he knew her well enough to see that she’d gotten her hopes up. How would she respond if she’d missed again? And how had they? Had Calista been wrong or had Eskridge smelled a rat?
Was this a trap?
“Anything?” Jenn asked, looking up the ramp at him. She still knelt beside Norrgard. Her hand still rested on the pistol grip of the MP7.
“Nothing. What about him?” Gibson pointed to the big Scandinavian. “What does he have to say?”
“Says he doesn’t know.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I think I need to ask him another way.”
Gibson didn’t like the sound of that. Jenn had experience as an interrogator from her time in the CIA. At a time when the country’s definition of torture had been far more flexible than it was now. Given her state of mind, Norrgard would be lucky if it stopped at enhanced interrogation.
Gibson said, “We don’t have that kind of time.”
Jenn checked her watch and grimaced. “Maybe they’re bringing him in at the last minute?”
“And maybe the pilots called for reinforcements. Maybe this is a trap.”
“You don’t know that,” Jenn said.
“We don’t know anything. That’s my point. We’re into wishful-thinking territory here,” he said, even as he felt himself losing her attention. “Jenn. It’s time to leave. We have to stick to the plan.”
Jenn looked despairingly from the aircraft to the hangar doors and back. Her eyes settled on Norrgard.
“Where the fuck is he?”
“Where you’ll never find him. The colonel is on to you, bitch.”
“Bullshit,” Jenn said and pressed the muzzle of the MP7 to his head. She asked her question again. Over and over. With each repetition, a little more of the humanity drained out of her voice. Gibson recognized it—his father’s ghost’s voice in the days leading up to taking Damon Ogden.
Duke scoffed. “Don’t try and pin this on me.”
“I’m only going to ask you one more time,” Jenn said, her face an unreadable mask.
“Jenn!” Gibson said.
“What?” she screamed back.
“We have to go. Now.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. Jenn pulled away. She looked pale and shell-shocked. Staring at nothing. If hope was a cancer, as Dan Hendricks insisted, then Gibson thought Jenn might be a terminal case. He feared that she would curl up and surrender. He said her name again but got no response. It was like standing outside a dark house, ringing the bell, unsure if anyone was even home. He tried again, and this time he saw the lights flicker on in her eyes.
“Jenn?”
She drew a deep breath and finally met his eyes. “All right. We’ll go.”
The C-130 lumbered down the runway and rose reluctantly into the night sky. It should have been a great feeling. Against all odds, they’d come through an impossible gauntlet unscathed. They’d broken dozens of laws, killed two men, and pulled off an epic heist, stealing an airplane right off a runway at a Cat X airport. It was the stuff of legend.
Except it wasn’t. It had all been for nothing, and now Jenn had no choice but to flee the country. That had been the plan all along, but she was doing so without George. They’d failed, and as the ramifications of that failure sunk in, Jenn retreated further and further into a shell.
Gibson watched her carefully. Military C-130s flew with a flight crew of four. Cold Harbor had gotten by with three, combining the flight engineer and navigator into one position. It was definitely not an aircraft designed to be flown solo. It could be done, but a pilot would need to be focused. That was not how Gibson would describe Jenn at present.