Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [375]
"Want me to take it?" John asked.
"My job, man." Ding checked the capacitor charge again, then wiped his face. He clenched his fists to stop the slight trembling he noticed, both ashamed and relieved that he had it. The widely spaced landing lights told him that this was another target, and he was in the service of his country, as they were in the service of theirs, and that was that. But better to do it with a proper weapon, he thought. Perhaps, his mind wandered, the guys who preferred swords had thought the same thing when faced with the advent of muskets. Chavez shook his head one last time to clear it, and aimed his light through the open window, working his way back from the opening as he lined up on the approaching aircraft. There was a shroud on the front to prevent people outside the room from seeing the flash, but he didn't want to take any more chances than he had to…
…right about…
…now…
He punched the button again, and again the silvery aluminum skin around the aircraft's cockpit flared brightly, for just a second or so. Off to the left he could hear the warbling shriek of fire engines, doubtless heading to the site of the first crash. Not like the fire sirens at home, he thought irrelevantly. The E-767 didn't do anything at first, and he wondered for a second if he'd done it right. Then the angle of the nose light changed downward, but the airplane didn't turn at all. It just increased its rate of descent. Maybe it would hit them in the hotel room, Chavez, thought. It was too late to run away, and maybe God would punish him for killing fifty people. He shook his head and dismantled the light, waiting, finding comfort in concentrating on a mechanical task.
Clark saw it, too, and also knew that there was no purpose in darting from the room. The airplane should be flaring now…perhaps the pilot thought so, too. The nose came up, and the Boeing product roared perhaps thirty feet over the roof of the building. John moved to the side windows and saw the wingtip pass over, rotating as it did so. The aircraft started to climb, or attempt to, probably for a go-around, but without enough power, and it stalled halfway down the runway, perhaps five hundred feet in the air, falling off on the port wing and spiraling in for yet another fireball. Neither he nor Ding thanked God for a deliverance that they might not have deserved in any case.
"Pack the light and get your camera," Clark ordered.
"Why?"
"We're reporters, remember?" he said, this time in Russian.
Ding's hands were shaking enough that he had trouble disassembling the light, but John didn't move to help him. Everyone needed time to deal with feelings like this. They hadn't killed bad men deserving of death, after all. They had erased the lives of people not unlike themselves, doomed by their oaths of service to someone who didn't merit their loyalty. Chavez finally got a camera out, selected a hundred-millimeter lens for the Nikon F5 body, and followed his boss out the door. The hotel's small lobby was already filled with people, almost all of them Japanese. "Klerk" and "Chekov" walked right through them, running across the highway to the airport's perimeter fence, where the latter started taking pictures. Things were sufficiently confused that it was ten minutes before a policeman came over.
"What are you doing!" Not so much a question as an accusation.
"We are reporters," "Klerk" replied, handing over his credentials.
"Stop what you are doing!" the cop ordered next.
"Have we broken a law? We were in the hotel across the road when this happened." Ivan Sergeyevich turned, looking down at the policeman. Me paused. "Oh! Have the Americans attacked you? Do you want our film?"
"Yes!" the officer said with a sudden realization. He held out his hand, gratified at their instant cooperative response to his official authority.
"Yevgeniy, give the man your film