Page 58 of Air Force One
“Heard worse. Which airport?”
“Nalchik.”
Tad’s dark skin paled noticeably, even in the bar’s dim light. “Nalchik?” He aimed a finger at one of the walls. “Like the one in Russia?”
“Exactly like that one.”
“Well…shit, man.”
51
Max was shaking his head.
Holly shouldn’t have had the half beer. Or should have slept on the plane. Or followed that brief thought to go hide in her personal missile silo home back in Washington State.
“Max, it’s the best we’ve got.”
Andi’s concept, that she and Mike had spent most of last night honing, had been only moderately ludicrous, making it vastly superior to anything else they could come up with. Get Inessa out on some frozen river, doing some kind of fashion photo shoot. Crack the ice so she goes in. Be waiting for her to fall through. Then, using a couple of diving underwater scooters (they’d brought a couple), drag her up-current to a pre-scouted hidden escape hole. Everyone else would assume the body was washed downstream to never be found. Conveniently the Nalchik River flowed right through the heart of Nalchik, Russia.
“First, it’s January in Russia. The river is frozen.”
“That’s sort of the point, Max.”
“Reka Nalchik is shallow. In most places it will be frozen to the bottom.”
“Shit!”
“Second, they put in multiple cascades, what you call waterfalls, to stop it flooding the town in the summer. It chops the river into little sections.”
“Okay, okay. I get the idea. I need something. We have to be in place by tomorrow and there have to be witnesses.”
That shut the conversation down.
“Okay, let’s one-step this,” Tad was the first to break the long silence that threatened to crush her.
“Which means we ain’t got shit!” Holly pushed herself upright, or tried to, but the Vicodin she’d talked out of the Coast Guard medic had worn off. She knew there was more in her pack, somewhere, but that would take too much energy to find. “Sorry, I meant that nicer than I sounded. Go ahead; take it from the top.”
“If Pavle here can fake me some electronic Russian ID…”
Pavle raised his cup of coffee in a toast.
“Cool. Then I can get you in and out of the country. Georgia still flies a lot of the old Mil helos. I’ve got, uh, my boys, the, uh, Georgia Air Force have several Mil Mi-8 Hips and Mi-24 Hinds that would blend right in.”
“We aren’t invading Russia. I don’t need a freaking gunship.” Hinds were scary-as-shit gun birds. “And didn’t Hips go out of style in the last century or maybe the one before that?”
“They still fly just fine, and Russia uses a ton of them. I have two in camouflage paint, so it wouldn’t take much to add a Russian Air Force logo. Or would you rather I hop you into Russia on an American Bell Huey, Harper? I’ve got a double handful of those.”
She conceded her battle, crossed her arms on the bar, and put her head down on them. “Okay, fine. You dump us in or near Nalchik in a repainted Hip, which is probably twice my age.”
“They’ve only been making them for sixty years,” he teased her.
“Fine, three times my age.”
Only Mike laughed at her joke.
She managed to raise her head. “Then you fetch us once we have her, that gets us in and out. But what do we do between the time her jet lands at sunrise and takes off at sunset?”
“Did you say a jet?” Max was now leaning forward with both his hands braced on the bar. “How do you feel about snow?”
