by Mark Henwick
Victor lifted us out of the slipstream and poured on the gas. We angled away from the interstate, racing away into the unrelieved blackness of the prairie.
“Got them.” The gunner.
“This is Bravo. Eagle, you are cleared to engage.”
“What? No! Are you crazy?” the pilot yelled. “Negative, negative.”
The colonel’s eyes met mine in the weak glow from Victor’s instruments. I could see the same thoughts in his head as in mine. The last roll of the dice came down to the conscience of a couple of soldiers in the night sky over Colorado.
“Eagle, engage that helicopter. This is a matter of national emergency.”
“Bullshit, Bravo. We came here to spot for you. We’ve got him, and he isn’t getting away. He’s got to land sometime.” The pilot.
“There is no way we’re going to fire on an unarmed civilian aircraft without legal authority.” The gunner.
“Eagle, this is Bravo. We constitute that legal authority. This is a direct order. Fire on the target.”
“Is this some kind of crazy test?” The gunner couldn’t believe his orders, but how long would he hold off? As far as he knew, Petersen was legal authority.
The colonel’s hand played over the switches of his TacNet controller.
“All life is a test, son.”
My head snapped around. He’d patched himself into their comms system. He spoke with his eyes closed, and his face so sad, so tired.
“It’s a decision that comes down to you,” he said quietly, “to your honor and integrity. There are no other guides here. And no good outcome. Do your duty and God bless you.”
There was a second of silence. Bravo started to yell something, but the Apache gunner overrode it all.
“This is Eagle. Weapons locked down.”
He hadn’t said he wouldn’t track us, but it sure as hell beat being blown out the sky. There’d be something we could do to sneak us away on the ground. I wanted to punch the air and shout, but the colonel just dropped his head into his hands.
What the hell?
There was a double flash in the darkness behind us. Victor swore and hauled the Bell into a tight curve. At the far point of the swing, I looked back to the east and saw the remains of the Apache aflame. It seemed to fall so slowly; a huge, red flower floating gently down to the waiting blackness.
Chapter 30
THURSDAY
“Ingram, can you not bypass this DC bullshit?”
“Well, an’ I jus’ might, Ms. Farrell, but for what justifiable cause? Those army folks aren’t going anywhere. You can’t spirit a whole damn battalion from under my nose.” His voice was tinny coming from the speaker.
“They can. They have been, for a dozen years.”
The colonel and I were sitting in the study at Manassah, surrounded by the boards displaying my stalled investigation into the rogue. With Jen’s furniture in mind, we’d changed out of our blood-soaked clothes into the spare sweats we’d gotten from Haven. Both of us looked like extras from a horror movie, with Vera’s blood smudged over our hands and faces.
She was stable and unconscious, lying quietly in a guest bedroom. Bian was with her, waiting for more blood to be delivered from Haven’s emergency supplies. For all the power of Athanate healing, it couldn’t magic blood out of nothing, and Vera had lost a lot.
Jen and Pia were in the living room, getting the story from David. Julie was in the dining room, calling every number she could in Ops 4-10. And we were on the telephone to Ingram in Washington trying to whip him into a gallop without getting slowed down by detail. It wasn’t working.
“I can hear something’s riled you up good, Ms. Farrell, but I can’t—”
“They blew up an Apache Longbow last night.” The colonel had been silent until then.
“Jesus! And who might you be?”
“Colonel Laine. Former OC Ops 4-10 and the Ops 4 Observation Facility.”
“Umm. Well, good morning to you, sir. Now, when Ms. Farrell promised me a talk with you, I had envisaged us sitting down over a cup of coffee.” He sighed. “I guess that’ll have to wait on opportunity. So tell me your story.”
“I understand you’re aware of my situation, as far as it will have been described by Colonel Petersen to law enforcement?”
“I am.”
“Well, I’ll skip ahead.” The colonel ran a hand through his hair. He didn’t bother dismissing the charges that had been made against him, nor did he justify his decision to run and hide rather than surrender. “I knew I’d been seen when I crossed into Kansas. I had jinked around, kept off the interstates and major roads thinking they’d be stretched too thin to catch me, but either I was wrong or they got lucky. I’d brought an Ops 4 TacNet system with me, and I patched into their circuit so I knew approximately where they were and what they were doing. That got me a couple more hours driving, but I was still more than an hour short of Denver when they put enough resources in the area that I had to hide out in a barn. I was stuck. They had light aircraft overhead during the day and a helicopter at night. I called Sergeant Farrell.”
“If I can stop you there for a moment, Colonel. As you say, I do understand your situation and Apache helicopters are a big headline, but I’m puzzled. I can understand you not wanting to put yourself in the hands of local law enforcement officers, especially after what happened to the Ops 4-16 team that we had in custody, but what is it about Denver that makes you so sure it’s safer there? Ms. Farrell is admirable, but hardly sufficient against the forces you say are chasing you.”
A typical Ingram question. The colonel hoped that the Athanate, with all their centuries of living hidden, were capable of making him and Vera disappear for as long as it took. But we couldn’t talk to Ingram about that, and I really didn’t want to start lying.
“I’m going to have to leave those details out for the moment,” the colonel said. “They’re not mine to reveal.”
Great. Back in my court. I couldn’t blame him.
The speaker was silent for long seconds. I didn’t dare breathe.
“Very well. We must speak when we can, Ms. Farrell. And that ‘when’, it’s gonna have to be sooner. Proceed, Colonel.”
The colonel took him through a condensed version of the night’s events, ending with the explosion of the Apache.
There was another ominous silence from Ingram in Washington, then, “Help me out here. They have an Apache on your tail tracking you but refusing to fire, so they blow it up?”
“The important question in there, is why they placed a bomb in the Apache in the first place.” The colonel had just out-Ingramed Ingram.
“I hear they call it ‘tying up loose ends’ on bad TV,” Ingram said, after another pause. “They couldn’t chase your helicopter into Denver; too many witnesses, too likely to come across people who would ask what the hell they were doing. So the Apache crew became a liability. I have said to Ms. Farrell before, you guys play hardball.”
“Even against their own team, once you’d gotten them into custody,” the colonel said. “Let me guess, they originally asked for them to be handed over directly to Ops 4. You insisted on going through some official channel handover.”
“I did. I guess that was the point those boys got taken off the playlist.”
“I believe so. The next question is, if they’re willing to kill some of their own men and blow up helicopters, what’s their next move?”
“Suppose you lead me there, Colonel.”
“This is their endgame for their project with Ops 4-16. Whatever they planned is either in motion or is being abandoned. The FBI is on their case and they’re going to run. The bulk of them might already have run.”
“So, if they’re running, why stop to try and get you, or Ms. Farrell? Why kill their own team?”
“Because not everyone is running. They’re covering for someone,” The colonel said.
“But, if you’ll excuse me, Ms. Farrell don’t know sh—”
“She may not
know what she knows.”
“There, you’ve done lost me like a dog in the desert, colonel. All that stuff about not knowing what you don’t know is all over my head.”
I huffed. Agent Ingram’s mouth was just running on to give him time to get ahead of the conversation. But for me, I was truly that dog in the desert, as he put it. What the hell was Colonel Laine talking about?
The colonel stared at the phone. “I’ll explain that later. It’s not on the critical path.” He shifted forward in his seat. “The critical path is stopping any more loose ends from being cleaned up, and the danger of doing things by the book is that somewhere in the chain of command is the person or persons that Petersen is trying to cover for. They’ll delay things. It’ll risk bringing attention to themselves, but their hope will be to prevent any proof from being captured.”
“Someone in my meetings today might be working with Petersen?”
“More like Petersen is working for that person.”
“So you’re suggesting I just press the button on the operation down in Carolina and hope.”
“Speak to the most senior person in your chain of command that you can absolutely trust, if you have to,” the colonel said, “but every hour is critical now.”
The door opened and Julie came in, her face pale.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir. I have something.”
The colonel gestured to the phone and Julie nodded. This was for sharing. He waved her on and sat back.
“Sergeant Alverson here, Agent Ingram. I’ve been calling friends in Ops 4-10. You have no time. The base has gone to lockdown. All the Command, Admin and Medical blocks are closed. Most of Ops 4-16 have gone already. They’re trying to load 4-10 on some Hercules transports—”
“Ingram,” I interrupted Julie. The nightmare image of a huge red flower floating down in the night blotted everything else out of my mind. “Get on to air traffic. Ground everything out of the base. Every transporter off the ground means a hundred or more dead. And shut the power down to the whole complex. Every minute you leave power on means more records trashed.”
“Whoa, I can’t do that,” he complained. “You’re leaping to some huge conclusions there.”
“You have to go in now. If they’re willing to take out their own men with RPGs and blow up Apaches, they’re not going to hesitate over blowing a Hercules. And I’d lay my last dollar that there are 4-16 teams in those closed blocks, right now, destroying every record they can find.”
“That’s crazy,” Ingram said. “Everyone does off-site backup.”
“They know that as well, and they know where,” the colonel said. “You’ll have a few unexplained fires that happened last night. Agent Ingram, we’re wasting time.”
There was a long pause before he growled, “Damn. I’m on it.” The call cut off.
We looked at each other, stunned by the magnitude and swiftness of it all.
“Those Hercs—”
“I think I’ve persuaded enough people to delay that a few hours,” Julie said. “The whole operation was strange enough that people were already asking questions. I think it’d help if you called some people as well, sir.”
“I will,” Colonel Laine said, getting up. “Trouble is, this is a planned operation for Petersen and whoever’s backing him. The FBI, on the other hand, will be going in with no plan, no clear view of the scale or direction.” He shook his head and went to join her in the dining room where Matt’s untraceable telephone system was set up.
I checked on Vera. There was only so much Bian had been able to do for her, given the amount of blood she’d lost.
As Victor had brought the Bell over Denver, heading for the landing pad at Manassah, Bian had managed to get a cellphone call out to Paul and Mykayla at Haven. They’d arrived with an emergency transfusion kit a while after we’d landed, and between them they’d done everything they could for Vera.
Bian was satisfied, and said all Vera needed was rest. I’d have liked Alex’s medical opinion as well, but he hadn’t gotten back yet. He should have called. I put it out of my mind. He was with Ricky, and whoever took on the pair of them had better know what they were doing.
Vera was sleeping peacefully in one of the guest rooms. Paul was sprawled in a chair alongside her, half-dozing. He made it halfway to his feet before I pressed him back down and left them.
A glance in through the open door of the living room showed me Jen and Mykayla talking on the sofa. Bian sat in the window seat, totally absorbed in cleaning her katana with my gun oil.
I was too nervy to sit with them. Outside, Victor was shooting the breeze with some of the guards and I slipped out to join them. Dawn had started painting the eastern sky with moody pinks and I shivered at the chill in the air.
Faces turned to me—eyes a little wide, faces a little shocked. Victor must have been entertaining them with stories of the crazy bitch.
“You okay, big man?”
He grumbled. “Another liter of coffee with a bourbon chaser and I’ll be right,” he said. “You?”
“I’m good. That was some flying you did last night.”
He grunted. His eyes swiveled to the house and he frowned. His men picked up the tension and left us alone.
It wouldn’t be the first time Victor had flown with wounded people. It probably wasn’t the first time he’d brought in someone bleeding from a damaged artery. But it might very well have been the first time someone with that kind of injury had survived the flight.
We hadn’t called an ambulance. We’d spirited her away from the blood-splattered helicopter and Victor could see that everything had calmed down. He was professionally not curious about clients’ private business, but this had all gone way beyond the normal parameters.
“I owe you some kind of explanations,” I said.
My Athanate uncoiled. It’d been completely unconcerned with my talking about the Athanate to Jen, for instance, but this was different. Victor wasn’t House.
What if he was? Would he be an asset? My Athanate thought so.
I turned away in frustration, hugging myself against the cold. I couldn’t go around adopting everyone. I had enough problems as it was, without trying to find out how to run a large Athanate House.
Victor patted my shoulder clumsily. “Well, what you can, when you can, woman. Mainly. But what I need right now is enough to make sure my team are briefed on what they’re facin’.”
It was more than fair.
“Those guys last night were soldiers from another covert special ops battalion.” I frowned, thinking over the colonel’s comments to Ingram. “We call them Nagas and they’re not good guys. They’re well trained and well equipped. They’re after the colonel and me. Unfortunately, they’ll have enough info to know I’m likely to be found here. The colonel is going to disappear for a while, but I can’t. It’s going to come down to a race between the FBI closing them down and the Nagas finding me.”
“Can’t you get some FBI help here?”
I shrugged. “I doubt it. They’re stretched like everyone else. Their solution would be to put me in protective custody. No use for me, and anyway, that’d leave Jen out in the open.”
Victor’s eyes swept the front of the house, the drive, the gate, the guards. I could see him looking at the hundred ways the place could be attacked by people who were committed enough to try.
“Too many ways in. The gate’s good, but that house,” he waved to the adjoining building, then down to the boundary of Manassah, the larch and cypress adorned with tendrils of mist, “the gardens, the club grounds. It’s a mess. I need more people,” he said. “An’ that’s a problem. I’m using everyone on this one contract at the moment. Not good business.”
He frowned and stomped his feet in the cold. He’d moved Jen out once before on the basis that the house was too open, and she’d hated it. But if it was a choice of that or Victor pulling out of his security contract, Jen would have to take it.
“I’ll talk to Ms. Kingslund,” he sai
d finally, and moved off to get feedback from his team.
I retreated to the warm study and ignored the accusing stares of the blank project boards. It was quiet. I could faintly sense David and Pia. Jen was still in conversation in the living room; something Mykayla had to say was fascinating her.
Still nothing from Alex.
I knew what I needed to do to settle myself. Everyone has their post-mission ritual, even if some hid them in rowdy drinking or horseplay. Mine was silent and contemplative. I took an old piece of knotted string out of my desk drawer and sat on the floor, legs hitched up into a half lotus, and closed my eyes.
My fingers began to play the string. The knots weren’t any code or anything, just a tactile prompt for my ghosts.
Joe was first. Handsome Joe from Nevada with the pretty eyes and the quiet smile. My nineteenth birthday. Green. Sweating in the cold. Jungle all around us. He’d taken a bullet that had had my name all over it. I’d carried his body out.
On I went, fingers and thoughts threading their way through ten years of special ops. Not everyone who died, just the people who put themselves in the way for me. On, through the five dark ones. My team at Hacha del Diablo. On, to Larry. Reeking of cheap bourbon and leading Matlal’s elite hunters away from me in Cheesman Park.
To the end. My fingers twisted two knots close together. A huge, red flower in the dark. Pilot, Gunner, names presently unknown, crew of an Apache codenamed Eagle. Duty, honor and integrity.
“Roll call?” Julie’s voice was quiet, her hand on my shoulder gentle. She knew my ritual as I knew hers.
I nodded.
“We have to go,” she said.
Life went on. Jen needed to be at her office and I needed to track Alex down.
I stood. Jen was at the door watching.
Julie slipped out and Jen flowed into an embrace.
“However bad it gets, and it got real bad last night waiting here,” she whispered, “there’s not a thing I would change about you.”
She broke away, her hand trailing down my arm, to my hand, till her fingers played over the memory knots in my string. Calm, blue eyes held me. “I hope, one day, you’ll share all of this with me.”