Last Plane to Heaven Read Free Page A

don’t kill ’em. Scare the hell out of whoever this is. And…” I glanced at Beier, who appeared to be snoring. “… they keep all their bits and pieces attached and intact.”
    I figured the marching orders would change between now and then, several times most likely, but I also figured the bits and pieces part would still apply.
    â€œWhat happens at the end?”
    â€œAn extraction.”
    They all got real quiet.
    â€œStaged, boys. And we’ll know they’re coming.”
    â€œI fire no blanks,” said one of the Belgians. Everybody laughed except me.
    â€œThink about it. Unless you can grow a truck under you or sprout wings and fly, we’re pretty much stuck.”
    â€œKnock over the Antonov right now,” said Nichols. “And split.”
    â€œNope.” I pointed the knife at him. “First off, a couple of stray rounds and that plane’s toast. You know what a piece of shit it is. Second off, they don’t keep no fucking maps on that thing. Three or four of us know enough to get it flying. None of us know the terrain. Something happens to the pilot, you want to navigate the Gobi from the air by eyeball and dead reckoning? Third, I’d bet money Hannaday’s got surprises inside that plane right now, just in case any one of us is a smartass.”
    â€œHannaday?” Nichols didn’t miss much, and he’d heard a lot of my stories.
    â€œYep. Mr. Congeniality himself.”
    â€œAnd you’re going for this?”
    Hell no, I wanted to say. What I did say was, “You got a better idea?”
    No one had an answer for that question. After a full minute of silence, I put my knife away.
    *   *   *
    An hour later Hannaday had me and Nichols on the plane trolling for new fish from five hundred feet.
    Antonov 17’s a funny bird. Looks almost like a kid’s drawing of an aircraft, twin props, high wing. Not that big, and a slow fucker to boot, but they really did keep flying forever. The seats had been designed for Chinese grandmothers, not American mercs with incipient butt spread. Tiny aluminum rails with webbing between, idiot cousin to the common lawn chair. Air Munchkin. How the hell a Sov platoon in full kit ever fit inside these cans I couldn’t imagine.
    I didn’t bother with the seat belt.
    Hannaday hadn’t relieved me of my Smitty, though the Stinger rack was back at camp. Nichols was sucking down another of those Paki horse turds as he fondled the barrel of his Mossberg jungle gun—a 40mm automatic shotgun that should have had Hannaday sweating.
    The Gobi lumbered along outside the oval windows, low and slow. The pilot was looking for something.
    Someone.
    Curiosity finally got the better of my common sense. “We’re doing a pickup out here ?”
    â€œSpecial delivery,” said Hannaday, surprising me. He wasn’t much given to sharing information.
    â€œWe’re a thousand klicks from anything .”
    â€œAnd that, my gimpy friend, is precisely why we’re here.” His eyes narrowed to steel-gray slits. There was another reason he was here, as opposed to somewhere else. Hannaday thought he could run me. He’d done it before.
    He was doing it now.
    Fuck him. I didn’t want to die of old age walking out of the south Gobi, but fuck him.
    Then the intercom crackled to life. The pilot said something fast and tonal—Cantonese, I thought, not that I could follow it. The Antonov banked hard and picked up speed as the engines coughed a bloom of black smoke.
    Whatever it was we were looking for, we’d found it.
    Hannaday just smiled. “Ready for some ladder work?”
    Ladder work? Out here?
    *   *   *
    And damn me if we didn’t bounce to a landing somewhere not much different from anywhere else. There were cloud shadows on the ground, and a small herd of yaks in the distance. That meant Mongolians somewhere—their