State of Siege - Tom Clancy [12]
The second load of bags went up. There was one more to go. Traffic had backed up nearly a quarter mile when people realized what was going on. There was no way to get through. The police would have to respond either with members of La Brigade tquestre or by air. The men continued to work quickly but efficiently. There was no sense of panic.
The third load went in. Suddenly, Sazanka raised his finger and moved it around in a quick circle. Then he pointed to the left. There was a police helicopter en route from the west. Georgiev lowered the platform again. As they'd planned, Barone climbed in, followed by Vandal. The Bulgarian didn't reel the net in. Instead, the men all removed their gas masks, hooked them to their equipment belts, and began climbing the line. When the men were respectively twenty and ten feet up, Downer hopped onto the platform. Now Georgiev began reeling it in. While it rose, Downer steadied himself by holding the net siding with one hand while with the other he pulled the grenade launcher from his shoulder. Then he pulled off his gas mask so he could see more clearly, lay on his side, removed a projectile from the grenade pouch on his belt, and loaded the weapon. Above him, Georgiev helped Barone and Vandal climb back into the helicopter. Sazanka climbed, quickly pushing the chopper to its maximum cruising speed of 160 mph. As he did, Downer made sure that both the barrel and the exhaust of the launcher were poking through the mesh siding. He didn't want to incinerate the net and fall to his death.
Georgiev secured the platform with cables run through two eye hooks on the front and back side nearest the helicopter, but he left it hanging three feet below the open door of the helicopter's aft compartment. From here, Downer could cover pursuit from any direction. Being close to the underbelly would also keep him from being knocked around by the winds and by the down-draft from the rotor. And it would be much more difficult for a sharpshooter on the ground or in the air to notice him in the shadow of the chopper.
While they waited for a possible pursuit, Sazanka held them to one thousand feet and took them northwest along the river. A small plane was waiting for them at a tiny airstrip outside of Saint-Germain. Once the men and money bags had been transferred from the chopper, they would fly south into Spain. There, the chaos of the simmering civil war would make it easy for them to buy their way in and then out of the country. "There it is!" Georgiev shouted down. The big man was pointing toward the southwest.
Downer didn't have to look up to see where the Bulgarian was pointing. He'd also just spotted the police helicopter. It was about two thousand feet up and a half mile away. As Vandal had expected, it was from the French Gendarmerie's Special Intervention Group.
The white and blue police chopper flew toward them in a sweeping, downward arc. The SIG team would follow their usual operating procedure. They'd attempt to raise the fleeing chopper by radio, which they were probably doing now. When the men didn't respond, the police chopper would stay in constant radio contact with ground forces. Even if they had medium-range weapons, the police wouldn't attempt to shoot the chopper down. Not as long as it was over a populated area and carrying a million dollars in currency. When the Hughes landed, both air and land units would close in on it.
Vandal knew that the Paris police department relied on radar from the two nearby airports to monitor the skies over the city. They used Charles de Gaulle to the northeast in Roissyen-France and Orly to the south. Vandal also knew that when an aircraft dropped under two hundred and fifty feet, radar was ineffective due to interference from surrounding buildings. He had Sazanka