Lee listened to the tower through his headset as he played around with a JT3D-7 turbofan in a comer of the hangar at the airfield. After two weeks of tinkering with the same engine, he felt he knew it better than anyone at Pratt & Whitney. The Gulfstream touched down and was due for a quick turnaround before heading to Vladivostok.
That made it even more suspicious, Lee thought, since the baked-goods distributor was thought to be tied to the Russian mafia.
Feeling a bit constricted in the bulletproof vest he wore under his white jumpsuit, Lee set down his wrench and walked to the phone on the hangar wall. He felt the lopsided weight of the holstered .38 Smith & Wesson press against his left shoulder as he punched Ken’s mobile number into the green phone.
“Ken,” he said, “the Gulfstream just landed and is pulling up to hangar two. Meet me there.”
Ken Sawara said, “Let me check it out.”
“No-”
“But your Japanese is terrible, Jet-
“Your Colombian is worse,” said Lee. “See you there. ”
It was well before sunrise, and though the airport was not as busy as the one in Honolulu had been over six hours before, at 2:35 P.m. local time, it was busy enough as air traffic converged from the west and the east. Lee knew that many mobsters, men like Aram Vonyev and Dmitri Shovich, liked having their planes land at big public airports rather than at the small strips that government agents found easier to watch. Those two criminals especially liked having their planes come and go during the day, out in the open, where law officers and rival gangsters didn’t expect to see them. In Honolulu, as in Mexico City and in Bogota, Colombia, before that, this plane had landed and taken off in bright daylight.
The Gulfstream taxied quickly to the Yaswee Oil truck waiting near the hangar nearest to the runway. Here, as at the other fields, the Gulfstream had its own fuel trucks waiting. Though mobsters had their own reasons for moving goods somewhat out in the open like this, none was so brazen that he wanted to stay on the ground any longer than absolutely necessary.
If the plane followed the pattern-and there was no reason it shouldn’t, Lee knew-then after less than fifty minutes on the ground in Tokyo it would be airborne again, its twin Rolls-Royce Spey Mk 511-8 turbofans carrying it to the northwest, into the dark, overcast skies. Soon it would be in Russia, just across the Sea of Japan.
Brushing his longish balck hair from his forehead, Lee pulled a purchase order from his pocket and pretended to read it. He whistled as he walked onto the dark tarmac. He saw the winking lights of the small jet as it rolled toward the hangar for refueling, its tanks nearly empty after the 4,500-mile journey. He watched as the ground crew rolled the hose from the tank, and Lee knew then that the plane was carrying contraband. The crew was working faster, with more serious efficiency than usual. They’d been paid off.
From the corner of his eye he saw car headlights. That would be Sawara. As planned, he’d pull off to the side and wait-just in case Lee needed backup. The FBI agent intended to walk up to the plane, tell the crew foreman he was told to check for a faulty fuel switch, and while they took up the issue with the pilot he’d swing inside and have a poke around the cargo.
The Toyota pulled up beside Lee, pacing him. Lee stopped, confused, as he looked down at the driver’s-side window. Then the window rolled down, showing Sawara’s expressionless face.
“Can I help you?” Lee said to Sawara in Japanese, though with his wide eyes and a severely pinched brow he was actually asking, What the hell are you doing?
In response, Sawara lifted the .38 Special Model 60 revolver from his lap and pointed it at Lee. With speed and instincts that were uncanny, the agent dropped flat to his back on the tarmac an instant before the gun flashed.
Yanking his own .38 from its holster, Lee swung it across his chest and shot out the passenger’s side front tire, then rolled to his right as Sawara tried to back away for another shot The bare rim sparked and screamed as he slammed the car into reverse, one hand on the steering wheel, the other still holding the gun out the window. His second shot caught Lee in the right thigh.
The turncoat bastard! Lee thought as he put three bullets through the car door. Each shell entered with a dull clung and Sawara’s third and fourth shots flew wild as Lee’s bullets struck him. With a moan, the Japanese soldier arched to the left, toward the window, then his forehead drooped against the steering wheel. The car sped up, turning at crazy angles, as the wounded man’s foot sat heavily on the pedal. At least it was moving away from him, and Lee watched as it collided with an empty luggage cart. The Toyota rode up on the side of the cart, crunching it down and going nowhere as the tires were lifted off the ground.
Lee’s wound felt like a hellish muscle cramp, sunburn-hot to the bone and brutally tight from his thigh to his knee. It was impossible to move his leg without sending a sheet of pain from his heel to his neck. Craning his head around, Lee looked at the plane some two hundred yards away. The underbelly of the fuselage was flashing white and dark from the lights and the ground crew continued their work, though now two men had appeared in the open doorway. Both were dressed in dungarees and sweatshirts and neither man carried a gun. Either they weren’t stupid, Lee thought … or they were.
The two men ducked back into the plane, shouting at one another.
Lee knew that they’d be returning soon, and mustering his will, he flopped onto his belly, got onto his left knee, and climbed to his feet. He winced with pain as he began hopping forward, unable to put weight on his right leg without causing a burst of white light to erupt behind his eyes. As Lee approached, he looked at the ground crew as they watched him. They were working quickly without wanting to appear as though they were hurrying, as if to say they’d taken the money and would do the job, but this wasn’t their fight.
It was Lee’s fight, however. One he’d been trained for, one from which he wouldn’t run. Not when he had his quarry pinned in a plane that was suckling on a fuel tank, unable to go anywhere.
When he was nearly at the nose of the plane, one of the two men reemerged in the cabin door. He was holding a German Walther MP-K submachine gun, and he wasted no time firing a burst at Lee. Having expected that, the FBI agent pushed off on his good leg and dove toward the opposite side of the plane, putting the nose of the aircraft between himself and the gunman. He wondered where airport security was: they had to have heard the gunfire, and he didn’t want to believe that they were all on the take like the ground crew and that son of a bitch Sawara.
The shells picked a jagged line in the tarmac to his right, but they were several feet away from where Lee hit the ground. Crawling forward on his elbow, he stretched his arm out to shoot at the nosewheel; that would keep the plane on the ground long enough for someone to look into what was going on. Unless everyone at the airfield, including the security forces, had been paid off.
An instant before Lee fired, a burst erupted from behind him, chewing into his armpit and shoulder.
He hadn’t expected that. His arm jerked up and he missed the tire, sending four shots into the wing and fuselage. Then another burst hit him in the right thigh.
He turned and saw the bloodied form of Ken Sawara standing above him.
“You couldn’t … just leave it,” Sawara gasped as he dropped to his knees. “You couldn’t let me go!”
Putting all his strength into his arm, Lee swung his .38 toward the soldier. “You want to go?” he said, sending a bullet into his forehead. “Go.”
As Sawara dropped to his side, Lee turned his face toward the plane. He was struggling for air as he watched the men continue fueling the aircraft. This couldn’t be it, he told himself The crimefighter is betrayed by his partner and dies on oil-slick tarmac? No one to see, no sirens in the distance, no one to book the criminals or tend him a hand … not even a consciencestricken worker?
Simon Lee died feeling like he’d failed, utterly.