As it came in for a landing at the pad down by Launch Control, Vance checked it over. It was a Sikorsky S-61R, military, with a main rotor almost sixty feet across, a retractable tricycle landing gear, and a rear cargo ramp. It went back to the sixties—the U.S. had used them to lift astronauts from the sea—but it was a warhorse and reliable as hell. It had an amphibious hull, twin General Electric turboshaft engines located up close to the drive gearbox, and an advanced flight-control system. Whether or not this one had the latest bells and whistles, he did know its speed was over a hundred and sixty miles per hour and its range was over six hundred miles.
What's that all about? he wondered. Is this the getaway car?
Whatever it was, they were not landing on the regular pad; they were putting her down as close as they could to the vehicles.
No, he decided, what they're doing is setting up something, getting ready for the big show.
He already had a feeling he knew what it was going to be. The modus was standard operating procedure. But this was going to be a waiting game, at least for a while, and he thought about trying to catch a couple of winks. There was nothing to be done now. He'd have to wait till dark.
To pass the time, he clicked on the radio again, to see if they were using walkie-talkies. After scanning the civilian channels he finally got a burst of traffic. They were chatting, all right—a lot of coded talk in a mixture of German, English, and French.
He paused a minute, even picked up the mike, attached by a coiled black cord to the radio, and pushed the red button. But then he thought better of it and clicked it off. The time would come soon enough to get in on the fun, but not yet.
9:32 a.m.
Jamal Khan, the younger brother of Salim, watched as the Sikorsky set down, then pushed the starter button on the white electric cart, urging it to life. This was the moment he had been waiting for. Nothing he had ever done in years past matched up to this, not even the airline hijackings. The only drawback was his comrades. Like, for example, this wise-ass Israeli, Peretz.