by Patrick Lee
Rachel called out Dryden’s name, groping around in the darkness, disoriented. Keeping the SIG and most of his attention on the fallen man outside, Dryden found Rachel’s flailing hand and held it.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m right here.”
He could hear her hyperventilating, trying to get control of herself. Waking up to gunshots was a hell of an alarm clock for anyone; he couldn’t imagine how it felt to a kid.
In his peripheral vision he saw Rachel sit up and look out through the doorway. The man was just visible outside. Dryden gave her hand a squeeze and then let go. He moved toward the dying man, ready to put another few shots into him at the first sign of movement. When he reached the door and got a full view past the lip of the rough platform, the SIG immediately felt heavier in his grip.
The man on the ground was a uniformed cop.
* * *
Implications flared in Dryden’s mind like muzzle flashes. Dots and connections, stitching together in rapid fire. He heard Rachel take a sharp breath in the dark behind him, picking up on what he’d seen.
He crossed the porch, stepped to the ground, and knelt over the officer. The man was still breathing, but Dryden could tell from the sound that his lungs were shredded. They were filling with blood. The guy had a minute at most.
There was a 9 mm on the cop’s hip. Dryden popped the holster strap, pulled the gun out, and slid it far from the man’s reach. As he did, he saw the guy’s head move. Dryden met his eyes just as they opened and fixed on him.
He thought to ask the man if he was alone, then decided it was a waste of fading seconds; if there was another cop within a hundred yards, there’d be bullets coming out of the woods already.
The officer struggled to take a breath. When he let it out, his body was racked with a violent coughing fit. Blood came out of his mouth; it looked black in the moonlight.
“How did you find us?” Dryden asked.
“Hiker saw your car … trailhead. You stupid fuck.”
“How would a hiker know to look for it?”
The cop’s voice grew fainter on each word. “Whole world’s looking for it. You were on TV all day.”
Dryden sat back on his knees, as if pushed by the force of the strange information.
“On TV for what?”
“You know for what,” the cop said. Another coughing fit seized him, worse than the first. When it ended, his breathing went fast and shallow. Then it stopped. The man convulsed once and went still. Gone.
Dryden stood and turned toward the cabin. Rachel was standing in the doorway, shaking; she couldn’t take her eyes off the body.
“Rachel—”
Dryden stopped himself.
He turned and listened.
The sound was right at the edge of his hearing. Rising and falling against the night wind. Then it solidified, and there was no doubting it.
Rotors. Far away but coming in. The drumming reverberated off the mountains on both sides of the valley, masking its direction and even its distance. It didn’t matter. It was already too close. Dryden went to Rachel and turned her face away from the dead man. He spoke softly but urgently.
“They’re coming,” he said. “We need to go.”
She nodded, still looking dazed. Dryden stepped past her into the cabin, put the SIG in its holster, and clipped it around his waist. Then he picked up the duffel bag containing the two emergency items from Visalia. The last thing he took was the audio recorder; he put it in his front pocket and left the sleeping bags and other gear behind.
Rachel, already following his lead and putting on her shoes, indicated the duffel bag in his hand. “Shouldn’t we get those out now?”
“Not yet,” Dryden said. He went to the doorway and listened to the drumbeat of the incoming chopper, so much louder already. “Not just yet.”
Rachel finished tying her shoes, and they left the cabin at a run.
* * *
Gaul was ready to put a chair through a window. He went so far as to pick one up, then slammed it back down, his hands gripping the armrests hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
He was in the computer lab again. The window, spared for the moment, looked out on the same L.A. nightscape as his private balcony upstairs.
Lowry and the others were at their stations. They sat transfixed by what the Mirandas were showing from four separate angles. Dryden and the girl were sprinting through trackless backcountry in Sequoia National Park while the body of the officer cooled in the dirt far behind them.
Gaul’s people had been explicit in their instructions to local authorities, from the moment the hiker’s tip had come in: They were not to interfere. Apparently this one hadn’t been able to resist getting his name on Fox News. Well, mission accomplished.
The element of surprise was gone. Granted, it wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway; Dryden still would have heard the chopper coming. But he wouldn’t have known it was hostile and would have lost precious minutes weighing the choice of whether to run for it. In truth, though, none of that mattered. There was no possible exit for Dryden and the girl this time.
There were only seven roads within a twenty-mile radius of the cabin they’d been holed up in. All of those roads were now blocked by local and federal authorities whom Gaul had control of, in a roundabout way, but those personnel were a redundancy; Dryden had no chance of reaching even the nearest road. The helicopter, a Black Hawk, carried ten specialists who answered directly to Gaul. They were his new sword point, promoted to fill the vacuum left by Curren’s group. The Black Hawk’s pilot had been instructed not to risk getting close to Dryden; there was no telling what sort of weaponry he was packing right now, having been free and unaccounted for all day. Instead, the pilot would circle Dryden and the girl at a distance of half a mile, guided by the techs watching the Miranda feeds, and deploy the ten-man specialist team into the forest at different points along the circle. They would form a mile-wide ring around the prey. Then it was just a matter of tightening in on them.
* * *
The helicopter was close now—closer than either of the ridges from which its echoes rebounded, to the east and west. Because of that, Dryden could finally determine the chopper’s location by sound, even though its lights were predictably blacked out. The aircraft was less than a mile to the south, and in the last minute it had halted its advance to take up a stationary hover.
That, too, was predictable.
There was a big difference between this conflict and those of the previous night: Dryden had had all day to contemplate this one. From the moment he’d settled on the cabin as a destination, he’d been aware that its primary asset was also its greatest vulnerability. The secluded forest made a perfect hideout, but failing in that function, it made a terrible place from which to flee. In a game of cat-and-mouse against satellites, desolation was a fatal disadvantage.
Usually.
That had to be what Gaul was thinking now, in any case. He would also be thinking of Dryden’s background and skill set; he would’ve taken both into account in planning this assault.
It was no surprise, then, that the chopper had gone stationary at a distance, rather than coming in for a sniper kill. Gaul would have to play it safe and assume Dryden had the means to take down any chopper close enough for that; a good .50 caliber with a nightscope would have done the trick, if aimed well enough. Dryden had in fact considered getting one. He’d decided against it on practical grounds: Taking down the helicopter in this scenario would not be a winning play.
As he and Rachel ran, he heard the chopper begin to move again, having hovered in place for maybe twenty seconds. Its new course was neither toward them nor away; it seemed to orbit their position counterclockwise, maintaining its safe distance, and after traveling a few hundred yards it halted again. Obviously men were fast-roping down out of it, probably one to three of them each time it stopped to hover. It would either deposit them in a straight-line pattern, in which they would comb across the wilderness like
hunters driving game, or it would off-load them in a giant, constricting circle.
Either way, the fast-roping was also something Dryden had expected. He was counting on it, in fact, though the plan would be far from risk-free. As the chopper resumed movement after its second stop, Dryden considered the fact that there were now at least two soldiers on the ground within half a mile, running straight toward them with satellite techs speaking through their headsets.
Catching his thought, Rachel said, “I think it’s time to open the duffel bag.”
“I think you’re right.”
* * *
On-screen, the third specialist was roping down into the forest. Gaul watched. It was hard to make out the details, looking at the scene from such a high angle, with a heat source as bright as a chopper right above the action—
“What the fuck?” Lowry said.
Gaul turned toward Lowry’s workstation. Lowry was tapping the monitor as if it were glitching.
“What?” Gaul asked.
“Dryden and the girl,” Lowry said. “They just disappeared right in front of me.” He keyed the handset through which he communicated with the soldiers on the ground. “Continue on vector, but be advised we’ve temporarily lost the targets.”
“Bullshit,” Gaul said. “There’s gotta be a tree in the way. They’re fucking redwoods.”
“We had four birds on them,” Lowry said. “They can’t all be blocked. Not for this long.”
On the monitor displaying the widest frame, the Black Hawk was moving again, arcing toward its fourth drop point. The three men on the ground continued their sprints inward toward an objective that appeared to have vanished. Gaul’s sense of calm had vanished with it.
* * *
The specialty shop in Visalia sold gear for firefighters, including the two remarkable items Dryden had purchased, one large and one small—the smallest in stock, anyway. They were called proximity suits, or more commonly kiln suits. Surprisingly lightweight, at least considering their capability, they were made of several insulating layers, with an outer skin of aluminized fabric to reflect radiant heat. This kind of suit was standard issue for fire crews aboard aircraft carriers or at oil refineries, people whose jobs might at times require them to actually walk into the flames. The material was that good at blocking heat.
The suits Dryden and Rachel had just donned were rated to keep out temperatures up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. With any luck they’d keep 98.6 degrees in—at least for a while.
They were wearing the suits inside-out, for whatever good it might do. Even the hoods—made of the same fabric as the body, and sporting a flexible plastic face screen—could be reversed. Dryden supposed the suits might’ve hidden them whichever way they’d worn them, but there was a good reason to have flipped them, regardless: Full-body reflective clothing was bad camouflage on a moonlit night. Reversed, the suits were simple black fabric on the outside.
They were also damned uncomfortable to run in. The moment he and Rachel had put them on, they’d turned and sprinted into the trees on a course perpendicular to the one they’d been on. Anyone watching on satellites, no longer able to see them, might assume they were still moving forward on their original path or had doubled back. Any other direction would be a guess.
As it happened, they were running almost straight north, toward a terrain feature Dryden had chosen earlier using a detailed map. The only way out, even if it was a long shot.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Gaul sat slumped in the chair he’d nearly thrown through the window. The full team was on the ground now. They’d converged on the spot where Dryden and the girl had vanished, and where Gaul had been certain they would find a mine shaft or natural tunnel of some kind; no other explanation made sense. Yet they had turned up nothing except the same hard ground—too rocky to hold a footprint—that covered the valley for miles in all directions.
“So, okay, let’s work through it,” Lowry said. “They fool the satellites, however the hell that’s possible, and they run. They disappeared twelve minutes ago, figure ten minutes to cover a mile—”
“Figure seven,” Gaul said. “They’re motivated.”
“That puts them almost two miles from where the team is, in which direction, we don’t know. We have a round search area growing in diameter by one mile every three or four minutes—”
Gaul stood, crossed to Lowry’s workstation, grabbed the communicator, and keyed it.
“Put the chopper on the deck,” he said. “Right now. Pick up the team and get airborne. Stow the fucking thermal vision; if the satellites can’t see them, neither will you. I want every man aboard wearing a standard amplified night-vision headset—there’s plenty of moonlight for that. I want all eyes scouring the woods from five hundred feet up.”
He set the communicator down and paced away. When he turned back, he found Lowry staring at him like an idiot.
“I don’t know where the chopper should start its search, sir,” Lowry said. “Which direction to send it.”
“Figure it out!” Gaul said. “People used to do that, before they had computers.”
Lowry knew better than to reply to that. He looked at his feet until Gaul turned away, then faced his monitor and brought up the widest Miranda image of the forest. He broadened it further still, to a width of five miles, and added a topographic map overlay.
“Let’s assume a man like Sam Dryden knows the terrain,” Lowry said.
“Let’s,” Gaul said.
“He’s also going to know we have the local roads blocked. But here’s Highway 198, about thirty miles away. He could figure we’re not expecting him to get that far, so maybe we’re not blocking it. Plus it’s busy; better chance to stop a vehicle and commandeer it.”
Lowry highlighted the path of a narrow waterway on the map.
“This stream bed transits the valley right down to the highway,” he said. “Straight shot, the whole thirty miles downhill. Dryden and the girl could probably make double time if they followed that. To reach the stream, their shortest path would be straight north from where we lost them. They wouldn’t have reached it yet, and right now they’d be right about…” He did the math in his head, then tapped the screen with his finger. “Here.”
He picked up the communicator and relayed the instructions to the Black Hawk’s pilot.
“Copy that,” the pilot said. “I’m setting her down now. There’s a clearing half a klick north of the team’s position, the only one big enough to land in. All boots rendezvous there.”
* * *
Captain Walt Larsen took the Black Hawk down into the clearing carefully; descending among sequoias was a first for him. They were about three times the height of any wilderness cover he’d ever landed in.
At twenty feet from the deck he saw that the clearing floor was a mess of ferns and scrub, two or three feet deep everywhere. Probably no risk of snagging a wheel, but he’d be careful on takeoff all the same. The Black Hawk set down as firmly as she would have on a tarmac.
“If you gotta step out for a piss, you got time,” Larsen said to his copilot, Bowles. “Team’s one to two minutes out.”
He’d no sooner said it than he heard one of the soldiers clamber into the troop compartment behind them. He turned.
It wasn’t one of the soldiers.
* * *
Dryden and Rachel had been sitting concealed among the brush from the moment they’d reached the clearing, ten minutes earlier. Waiting for the chopper had been the hardest part. Though Dryden had been confident it would land here, there was always the chance things could go wrong.
Then it had thundered in above them, silhouetted like a giant insect against the near-black sky, and set down only a few yards away. Dryden had been up and running before it had even settled on its wheel shocks.
Now he vaulted into the bay, tearing off the hood of his proximity suit with one hand, leveling the SIG at the flight deck with the other. The pilot turned to him with what started as a casual expression,
and then paled.
“Sidearms on the console, right now,” Dryden said. “I’d rather not kill you.”
Both pilots were now staring at him, too surprised to comply. Dryden stepped forward and smashed the barrel of the SIG against the copilot’s nose. Blood burst from it in a gush.
“I shoot on three,” Dryden said. “One, two—”
He didn’t get any further. Both pilots carefully withdrew their .45 sidearms and placed them on a flat portion of the console.
Behind Dryden, Rachel climbed into the troop bay.
“Both of you, out,” Dryden said to the pilots.
That surprised them, but they didn’t argue. They opened their doors, dropped to the undergrowth, and ran.
Dryden climbed forward into the pilot’s seat, and Rachel followed, discarding her own hood as she squeezed past him into the copilot’s chair. By habit he grabbed the pilot’s headset and put it on, even as he sat; the heavy ear protectors cut out most of the chopper’s noise. Rachel donned her own pair. Dryden reached to the comm selector switch near the headset jacks and set it to cockpit only—the chopper would no longer transmit audio from the headsets to any outside listener.
“You really would have shot them on three,” Rachel said, not asking, knowing. “That wasn’t a bluff.”
“That’s why it worked,” Dryden said.
His eyes roamed the instrument panel. He’d trained in a standard UH-60 Black Hawk; this was the MH-60K special ops variant, but the panel was nearly identical. It had a few extra bells and whistles, notably an all-purpose display that was currently showing what looked like a satellite feed of the forest—a pretty damn impressive satellite feed compared to the ones Dryden had seen in his day. In the image, the chopper was centered and two bluish white spots of light—the pilot and copilot—were visible at the edges of the clearing, where they’d retreated to. A few hundred yards to the south, the gathered team could be seen, coming north toward the Black Hawk. Fast. Without a doubt, they’d been told what was happening.