The helicopter shifted and slid across the deck toward the railings.
“Here goes…” Roo grabbed the collective lever down by his thigh and pulled up. The electric engine surged and the helicopter rose off the deck.
Roo yanked it all the way up and tilted the helicopter forward, and then as they cleared the ship, he headed for the buildings of Aves. After a second of flight, he shoved down hard on the pedal with his ruined foot to turn them. He screamed as the helicopter’s back rotor kicked around, and they curved to aim out for the open ocean.
“Roo!”
“It’s okay,” he hissed. They were rising, a few pings from lucky gunfire hitting the fuselage, but moving rapidly across the harbor and out of reach.
Glass shattered. A close shot. Roo winced and kept his hand steadily shoving the cyclic stick between his knees forward.
He glanced at one of the cockpit displays that served as a rearview camera. In the water behind them the yacht rolled over on its side in the water. It looked less like a spaceship at anchor and more like a dead whale.
You’re welcome, Mr. Beauchamp, he thought, leaning back and closing his eyes.
“Roo!”
He opened his eyes. Kit stared at him, her eyes wide and worried. She held the cyclical stick with one hand and shook him with another. “What?”
“You passed out.”
Roo looked at the dark water suddenly just under the windshield. The helicopter blared an audible repeating altitude alert. They’d dropped down low enough to be skimming the ocean surface. A stray wave could kiss the skids, or worse, them.
He pulled them back up into the air. “How far out are we?”
“Just a few minutes. You stopped responding and the alarm went off.”
Blacking out should have scared him, but he didn’t have the energy for it. Blood dripped from his bandages onto the helicopter’s floor. He’d taken way too many painkillers.
“I flew out in a random direction,” Roo told her. “I need to turn us toward Dominica. I might scream again.”
He eyed the old analog compass. Dominica would be east-ish. Roo thought about it for a long, slow moment. Then he took a deep breath and pushed the pedal with his good foot, taking them in a long circle until they faced east.
“How you doing?” Kit asked.
Roo wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Look for a cloud in front of us,” he said. “I’m having trouble focusing.”
“A cloud?”
“I don’t know how to access the maps function on these screens,” he admitted.
“Shit.” Kit leaned forward and squinted for a long moment. “There is a cloud,” she said.
“Bearing?”
“Just a few points south of east.”
“A few?”
“I’ll call it out as we get further along,” she said. “What is it?”
“Dominica,” Roo said. “All the lights, reflecting off the bottom of any clouds passing overhead. Let’s you see it over the curve of the horizon.”
An old sailor’s trick.
“ROO!” Kit slapped him across the face.
He jerked up. His shirtsleeve was pulled up and she’d applied the last two stimulant patches on his left bicep. His mouth tasted like seaweed, but was so dry he could barely swallow. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m sorry. Just had to close my eyes for a second.”
“It’s getting worse,” Kit said. “That’s the fourth time.”
Four? He didn’t remember the second or the third.
Roo cleared his throat, but started coughing. He looked down at the blood on his hands from covering his mouth. “That’s not good.”
“I can get a signal on your phone, now,” Kit said slowly. “Who do I call?”
“Anyone who can help you,” he said. “DGSE.”
“Of course I’ll do that. But what about you. Who do I call at the CIG?”
Roo looked at her. “There’s no one left for me, Kit. No one will touch me after what I just did. Get the word out, I’ll get picked up by whoever. See if I can disappear, think about what to do next. You need to get the DGSE on Beauchamp.”
He closed his eyes. He opened them up again to find Kit screaming at him and holding onto the cyclical stick. The whole world was tilted wrong. Roo yanked them back to level with a gasp.
They were flying low, but Dominica would likely be scrambling small drones now that he was close enough to be tracked. He wondered if Beauchamp would be able to convince Dominican authorities to shoot them down. By flying off in the wrong direction they might have confused matters. By flying away, they wouldn’t have been a direct threat to Aves, which was why they hadn’t been shot down by drones on the way out. Approaching Dominica was a different story.
He checked the flight systems. Winced.
“Kit, there’s a life jacket under your chair,” Roo said, his voice slurring. “Put it on.”
“Roo…”
“You’re going to have to jump out. The helicopter isn’t going to make it. Something hit the battery. The charge isn’t there. Or maybe they didn’t recharge it in time before we stole it.” The batteries weren’t the only things fading, though. He was going to accidentally kill them both when he tried to land. And if they were attacked by drones he was useless right now.
Roo squinted. He could see the distant shapes of lights. Houses on hills. An island just on the horizon. He slowed the helicopter’s forward pitch, easing them toward a hover over the ocean. “Take the phone with you, put it in a plastic bag. Should be one in the duffel.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Ditch the copter and float. Tell them to fish me out,” he said.
“Roo, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
It was too late. Roo started dropping them down toward the water. The Caribbean Ocean glittered with smooth, large swells in the night air.
“Get the jacket on,” he said. “Come on. See the capsule with the antenna? That’s an emergency beacon. Trigger it by breaking the transparent seal, it’ll call out. But if you can, get your people. DGSE. It’ll be safer.”
She hurriedly put the phone in the baggie. Roo dipped them lower still as she pulled the life jacket on, watching the swells. Just a few minutes of alertness more, he told himself. And then he could relax.
“Open the door, stand on the skids,” he said to her. “And good luck.”
She looked back him, her hair flying around in the rotor wash, face full of concern. “Roo. What about you?”
He winked. “Buy me a drink when we meet up on the shore later. Now: jump!”
She disappeared. Roo saw the splash below them a second later. She floundered in the kicked-up water from the rotor wash, so he quickly pushed forward and moved away from her.
A hundred feet. A few hundred. Five … Roo blinked. The helicopter dipped lower, wavered, and the tip of a wave struck its underbelly. The whole helicopter shivered. Roo tried to lower it into the space between the swells.
It gyrated, wobbling from the wave strike. He wasn’t in control, every time he blinked the world shifted. Alarms bleated. Systems in the helicopter tried to take over and compensate for him, but he fought them. Down, down.
Roo was tossed as the entire world gonged, the rotors slapped water, and the dark ocean grabbed the helicopter and shoved its way through the windows to coldly embrace him.
He didn’t have time to try and get out. He sat there, relaxing, as they sank through the darkness together. The water, initially shockingly frigid, now felt warm and pleasant against his skin.
Bubbles glopped and boiled around him, tickling the hairs on Roo’s neck.
He was still buckled in, he realized.
20
Roo sat up on a comfortable bed surrounded by fluffy white pillows and under sheer cotton sheets. The breeze stirred gauzy curtains and Roo breathed in the smell of salt air, asphalt, and the distant smell of curry.
His stomach roiled.
A medical monitor by the bed dinged softly
. Roo twisted to eye it. The interface flipped through screens in standby mode as it sensed him watching, giving a series of summaries of his vitals.
Field-grade emergency surgeon’s equipment stood in a semicircle around his bed. Roo spotted the folded-up capsule shape of a robotic surgeon, its spiderlike cutting hands folded away under the transparent shell.
A transparent stainless-steel device, shaped like a mini whisky flask, had been taped to his right arm. An IV drip ran from it. Inside, Roo could see thumb-sized canisters of pressurized fluids. Blood, plasma, saline. A week’s worth of vital fluids for a soldier, crammed into a palm-sized device.
This was all Special Forces shit, Roo realized.
His shoulder had been cleaned, the bullet pulled. There was regenerative skin already puckering under the bandage, mostly healed up. His ankle had been sewn up and a simple air cast covered it.
Roo limped across the room to the window, leaning against the sill as his muscles protested the abuse of walking around. He watched traffic swirl around the street below for a long moment, then turned back around.
A serious young man in full combat body armor and a very large, businesslike machine gun stood at the edge of the room. The body armor and uniform underneath were Caribbean Special Forces. He must have been waiting around the corner of the arches at the far side of the room.
This was a presidential suite, Roo realized.
“You’re awake, sir. I’ll inform the commander and the doctor.”
“Wait.” Roo held up a hand. He swallowed hard. The words hurt. His throat burned. Something had been rammed down it. Intubation tube, maybe. “Where am I?” he croaked.
“Fort Young Hotel,” the soldier informed him. “You’ve been here for three days.”
He disappeared back into his niche, just out of sight, murmuring an update to some unseen handler.
Roo stood at the window as long as he could. He was in downtown Roseau, the capital of Dominica. They hadn’t taken him away from the island he’d crash landed just off of.
His legs started buckling. He moved back and sat on the edge of the bed, watching the door at the far end of the lavish suite.
It opened. A tall man in a white suit walked in.
“Jesus Christ.” Roo shook his head. “Aman fucking Constantine.”
Aman smiled, handed his coat to the soldier like he was a doorman, and walked in. “Don’t be so glad to see me, man. You should have kept sleeping in. Because now you up, the big boys is coming in to harass you.”
“How bad?” Roo asked.
“Bad enough we being recorded right now. In case I try to help you out.”
“Cold day in hell,” Roo muttered.
Aman shrugged. “See, I actually think you’re worth saving, Prudence. Because if anything you was saying before they shoved that tube down you throat to save you is true, then I vote we … fix you mess.”
“Pushing the hills patois, Aman?” He came from up in the mountains of Jamaica. Push Aman hard enough, piss him off, even Roo didn’t quite catch half the curses the man would sling at you.
“Want to make them big country boys listening in work for they bread,” Aman said with a wicked smile. “What go on with you, you sound all Yankee American?”
“Too much time away,” Roo said softly, and then changed the subject. “You have me hidden away. Not in a hospital.”
Aman nodded. “Yes. If half what you say is true, then we don’t want Beauchamp to know we have you. No hospitals, nothing. Just field medics and you bloody, drowned ass on the floor here. The best of the best of Special Forces medicine. And a beautiful hotel to recover in. Away from them prying eyes.”
“You know something rotten with Beauchamp,” Roo said.
“One big boy and one big girl coming in,” Aman said, sweeping his hand at the door. “Save you breath.”
Roo met his eyes. “Who?”
“One American, the other British. Draw a conclusion.”
The doors to the suite opened. Two upper-level management types in nearly identical black suits walked in. They were sweating heavily, faces beet-red, their temperate-weather-styled heavy jackets no doubt overheating them.
The four of them sat at a small breakfast table in the corner of the suite. The man in the black suit set a phone down in the center, as did the woman.
He had a strong British accent, and after tapping the phone said, “This is a preliminary interview of Mr. Prudence Jones in reference to the Aves Island incident. Attending are…” He looked up. “Shit, I’m used to doing the formal one. Other than Mr. Jones, we’re not really here, are we?”
Aman leaned over the table. “Roo, they just need the information confirmed so all of them can start digging. Understand? Nothing formal happening here.”
Roo looked at the phone. “Looks formal to me, Aman. Am I in trouble?”
Aman smiled. “More trouble than Beauchamp tried to give you?” He spread his arms.
Roo nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Here is everything I know right now.…”
* * *
When the door closed, Aman let out a deep breath. “And that is that, my friend. Beauchamp will be under a very large magnifying glass now. We know there are drums of something he moved out of his labs, we got the courts to let us get into Aves Island and review footage. We have people replacing the people running security now. Purging out the rot Beauchamp got in there.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“We waiting for him to turn up.”
Roo grimaced and looked at the door out of the suite. “What about the French?”
Aman looked blankly back at Roo. “What about the French?”
“No French agents are going to want to talk to me as well?” Roo was confused. They’d had an agent of their own caught up in all this. Why wouldn’t they press for someone on the scene? “The DGSE doesn’t want in on this, with their agent involved?”
“What agent?”
Roo swallowed. “Katrina Prideaux.”
Aman flipped through his phone. “Our man in Guadeloupe is…”
“Man?” Roo’s pulse jacked up. The monitor by the bed beeped a warning, and Aman glanced at it.
“There’s no Katrina Prideaux representing the DGSE,” he said slowly. “Not in the islands.”
Roo felt his stomach lurch. He grabbed the table with both hands. “Aman…”
“But someone rescued you, Roo. Wrapped you in a life jacket and called for help. Gone when we arrived. That your Katrina?”
Roo opened his mouth, a sudden douse of cold water swirling through the back of his mind. “I remember getting free of the helicopter,” he said. “Getting to the surface. I was angry.”
“Angry?”
“I want Beauchamp dead. He killed Delroy. I wanted to hunt him down and make him pay. So I refused to give up. I got to the surface, I remember that.”
He remembered moving up and down in the large swells, kicking off his shoes and jacket so that he could float in the water, his face turned up to the stars.
Just float.
“She gave me the jacket. Stayed with me,” Roo murmured.
“And slipped away at the docks when we came and took over,” Aman said. He held up his phone and turned the screen to Roo. “You said Katrina Prideaux?”
There she was. Younger, in a tailored dress that shimmered blue cut just above the knees. The diamond brooch on her collar looked fake, merely because the stones were too large.
“Who the fuck is she?” Roo asked.
“Katrina Prideaux,” Aman said. Roo relaxed slightly. “Originally … Beauchamp.”
“I don’t…” Roo looked out toward the window, not quite able to process that. Beauchamp?
“She’s his daughter,” Aman continued. “And a recent widow. She used to be DGSE. They haven’t been able to bring her in.”
That didn’t make any sense. Or had it? She had been using him to hunt something down. Hunt down Zee’s information. Shit, she still had the tree frog drive,
Roo realized, his hand automatically moving up to the empty space over his chest where the necklace had been.
Had she been trying to get at that for her dad?
No. Roo shook his head. She’d risked her life back on Aves. And in the storm. And while escaping her father’s neo-Nazi gunmen. There had to be something else going on. “Widow? She didn’t say anything about a husband.” But she’d acted so grieved back in St. Thomas. He’d marked it as good acting, as she pretended to be Zee’s sister. What if it had been something true?
“Two months ago, her husband, Hamid Prideaux, and his family went on a retreat in the French countryside. They all died of…”
She’d risked her life to get into the helicopter. She’d wanted to get word out. Wanted to stop her father. Roo looked at Aman as his words clicked into place for Roo. The French countryside. “Her husband died of hemorrhagic fever, didn’t he? The plague her father designed.”
She hadn’t gone up to the party with him because she hadn’t wanted to be spotted by her father. She’d chosen to wait in the shadows. To save him. Because she could have run with the drive if that’s all she wanted. Left him to die outside the lobby of Beauchamp Labs.
Aman sucked his teeth. “If that was your friend, then yes. Her father killed her husband and his whole family. Left them to bleed out the eyeballs. Some cold-ass shit, Roo.”
“Yeah. And she found out. You want Beauchamp, you go looking for Kit,” he said to Aman. “She wants his head. Give me CIG clearance, a few agents, and some server cycles, I’ll hunt Beauchamp down. They’re going to turn up in Guyana, Florida, or Barbados.”
“Why those three places?”
“We need to find out,” Roo said. “That’s where Zee was looking. Get agents out to those places, activate anything you can already out there. Get some computers searching through pictures tourists take, and get me in the game.…”
Aman was shaking his head. “You can’t leave.”
“What?”
“You’re one of our cards. We keeping you close. And away from all this. You too close and personal, Roo. He got Delroy killed trying to come at you. You went after him. Blew up his boat. But remember, Beauchamp is filthy with coin. And we don’t have anything for sure. So there are other men in suits, and politicians, pressing down hard on all of us.”
Hurricane Fever Page 15