by Jack Mars
He extended a hand to Luke.
What else was Luke going to do? He shook it.
“I am Captain Soares,” the man said in heavily accented English.
“I’m Agent Stone.”
“Well, Agent Stone, you are in violation of treaties accepted by the United Nations concerning Cuban airspace and territorial waters. As I understand, the United States is a member state of the United Nations, is it not? We are free to consider this an unprovoked act of war.”
Luke gestured at Omar. “This man is my prisoner. His name is Omar bin Khalid al Saud. He is wanted in the United States for suspicion of terrorism.”
The man’s eyes glinted. He almost smiled. “Suspicion?”
“Yes.”
Captain Soares shook his head. “There is no extradition treaty. Our government knows this man. He is a friend of the Cuban people. And we are concerned about the thousands of so-called suspects imprisoned in America without the due process of law.”
Luke nearly laughed. The Cubans were concerned about human rights? When did that happen, this morning? Luke had missed the news report about it.
“You may take your fallen comrade with you,” Soares said. “And we will escort your helicopter back to United States airspace. But you must disarm, and you must leave this man with me. Please understand that you are outgunned and surrounded.”
Luke stared at the Cuban commando. What he had just described was total surrender.
“I’ll give you three minutes to decide.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“He said death from the skies,” Luke said into the satellite phone. “He said a sick, twisted American would do it, someone who had gone insane.”
Trudy’s voice came back to him. “It’s not much to go on, Luke.”
“It’s a start, Trudy. If it’s true, it means they’re going to spray from the air, maybe a helicopter or a crop-dusting plane. We need to do a search for chopper and small plane pilots with a history of mental illness, maybe people who’ve been in psychiatric hospitals, or even just in jail. Maybe former military with posttraumatic stress disorder, or nursing some kind of grudge.”
“Luke, we’re almost out of time.”
“Trudy, what’s the matter with you? I’m your boss. Don’t argue with me. Just do what I say. Pull together twenty people and start searching databases. In the meantime, ground every pest control helicopter and crop duster in the country. Every single one.”
“Luke, we don’t have the authority to that. You’ve been relieved of your command.”
Luke stopped talking. He looked out the right side door of the Black Hawk. It was the door where Ed had stood with the machine gun earlier. Ed and one of the SEALs had broken the gun down and dropped it into the ocean. They had no choice. The Cubans had the drop on them.
In the sky outside the door was a dark blue Mi-24 helicopter gunship escorting the Black Hawk back to American airspace. Luke turned and looked out the left side door. Another Mi-24 moved abreast of the Black Hawk on that side. At least three more followed behind. No Cubans had been killed. That was the reason they weren’t all sitting in a Cuban jail right now, or at the bottom of the ocean.
Otherwise, the raid was a disaster.
On the floor of the transport hold, two SEALs were zipping Sommelier into a canvas body bag. The three remaining Rangers sat along the left side bench. Their body language was dejected, limp, drained—the exact opposite of how they had been before the mission started. One of them was crying. More than crying—he was weeping, tears rolling down his face, his shoulders jerking.
“You need to man up, son,” one of the SEALs with the body bag said. “You wanted to see war? Well, you’ve seen it. This is what it looks like. You don’t like the orders you got? You think your friend died in vain? Then now’s the time for you to embrace the suck.”
Trudy was still speaking into Luke’s ear.
“The Saudi ambassador has called a press conference for six p.m. He’s already made some remarks to the media, demanding to meet with the President. He’s called for you to be extradited to Saudi Arabia, to be put on trial for the murder of nine Saudi nationals, and assault with a deadly weapon against a member of the royal family. Can you imagine what will happen if you’re actually extradited? They’ll cut your head off.”
Luke almost smiled. If Charlie Something wasn’t dead on the floor, he would have.
“Thanks, Trudy. That makes me feel better.”
She went on. She sounded like a school teacher admonishing him. “The Saudi ambassador to the United Nations has filed a complaint to the Security Council. The Cuban ambassador has been recalled to Havana. This is an international incident, Luke. It turns out one of Omar’s companies is a major investor in oil exploration off of Cuba’s southern coast. You’ve way overstepped. You’re on the shit list, and I don’t mean that as a joke. I’m afraid you’re in real trouble this time.”
Luke sighed. “Can we take me out of this for a minute? It’s four thirty-five by my watch. As far as we know, we’ve got a terror attack scheduled for five thirty. A man with knowledge of the attack has suggested it will come from the sky, and that an American, possibly one with mental illness, will carry out the…”
“I can’t accept orders from you, Luke. I can’t do anything. No one will listen to me. We’re all on suspension until further notice.”
Outside, the Cuban helicopters suddenly stopped and hovered, dropping back from the Black Hawk. They had reached the edge of American airspace. As if to emphasize this fact, three F-18 fighter jets roared by overhead, the shriek of their engines splitting open the sky.
“We’re home,” the cigar-chomping SEAL said.
“Trudy, do one thing for me, if you can.”
“What is it?”
“We’ll be back at base in twenty minutes. Make a formal request. Beg. Grovel. Remind her that I saved her life, but whatever you do, get me a phone call with the President.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
5:11 p.m.
Charleston, South Carolina
A young man, well dressed in a blue button-down shirt and slacks, stood close to the helicopter. Too close, as far as James Walter Shouberty was concerned. The young man had brown skin, not James Shouberty’s favorite skin color.
The kid held a fat book in his hand, and he read out loud from it. He had little sections of it picked out with those tassels that Christian preachers often used. The Holy Quran, the kid called it. James shook his head, but listened anyway. The kid was giving him a blessing, after all.
“Listen not to the unbelievers, but strive against them with the utmost strenuousness,” the young man said. “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people.”
James stood about ten feet from the young man, his mind starting to drift. He was sixty-three years old, listening to a fool less than half his age read from a book the kid didn’t understand, and spout nonsense about things he couldn’t even begin to comprehend. James knew light years more than this kid.
They were in an open field, where James had landed the chopper he had spent the better part of the past twenty years flying. It was a Bell Jet Ranger 206, a peppy little twin-bladed utility chopper in use the world over. Police and fire departments flew it, TV news shows flew it, third-world militaries flew it, and even James Walter Shouberty flew it. The one he flew belonged to Charleston County.
On either side of the chopper, there was the county seal, along with the words Charleston County Mosquito Control.
The Muslim kid droned on.
“Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him we shall bestow a vast reward.”
He looked up from the book now and over at James. “May Allah accept the sacrifice of brother James as jihad, and open the gates of paradise to him this very day.”
B
ehind the kid was a white sixteen-foot aerial support trailer. Someone had left it here yesterday, with two full pallets of product inside. Normally, the product would be 220 gallons of larvicidal chemicals, which James would load into the twin broadcast sprayers mounted on either side of the chopper.
This time the product wasn’t for mosquito control, however. This time it was for people control. James had waited for this day a long, long time. God had brought him to this moment. Not Allah, but God, the one true God, the real God.
James was God’s avenging angel. James had known this for many years. Now God had brought James these Muslims… They were earnest, they were young, and they were clowns and buffoons. Their lives were meaningless. They were following an imaginary god, and they were trying to do something that made no sense. They wanted to rebuild a medieval kingdom? Good luck with that. The truth, God’s Pure Truth, was annihilation.
He looked at the kid.
“You done?”
The kid nodded. “Yes.”
James slid a hand into the pocket of his flight coveralls. He pulled out his gun, a tiny .25 caliber. They called it a pocket pistol, and that’s why he carried it in his pocket. It was for person protection. It wouldn’t stop a tank, it might not even take out a car windshield. But there was one thing it did very well.
Kill people.
James didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even think. He shot the kid four times. The shots rang out, loud, but not disturbingly so. If you were nearby, you might mistake them for firecrackers. Anyway, no one was round. They were just in a vast, empty field, surrounded by marshland, and all by themselves.
James walked over to the kid. The kid lay on the wet ground, gasping for air. The kid’s precious Holy Quran had fallen near his head. James kicked the book away across the dirt. The kid’s blue button-down was quickly changing color. Dark red circles had appeared and were expanding. As James watched, the circles reached for each other, flirted, kissed, and then became one. The shirt was soaked in blood.
James leaned over and looked into the kid’s face. The kid’s eyes were wide and afraid. Tears streamed down his cheeks and mingled into the dirt.
“Are you in pain?” James said.
The kid nodded crazily. He was like a toy bobble head doll.
“I want to tell you something,” James said. He smiled. He’d been thinking about this a lot, but he had no one to tell it to. James was a loner, and the people he worked with seemed to think he was strange. He spent a lot of time thinking, and a lot of those thoughts went nowhere. But not today.
“Please help me,” the kid said. His whole body trembled and shook. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Funny that the kid would ask James for help. Hadn’t James just shot him a moment ago?
“Imagine you’re trapped in an attic,” James said. “And there’s a lady in a wedding dress by the window. She’s looking away from you. You walk up to her, she turns around, and she’s a skeleton. You try to scream but you can’t. You know why? Because you’re a skeleton, too.”
“Please…” the kid said.
“You think you’re watching television,” James said. “But really, it’s watching you.”
The kid looked away and winced in pain. It wasn’t the response James was hoping for. He wasn’t quite sure what he was hoping for. He pointed the gun in the kid’s face and fired one last time. The shot echoed across the field.
“Unlocked doors are invitations,” he told the kid’s splintered and bloody skull. “And your door was wide open.”
James turned and walked toward the chopper. Moments later, the bird was gaining altitude. He rose above the treetops, then flew south and east, toward the beaches, the harbor, and downtown. God, he loved this bird. He loved being up in the air like this, soaring like an eagle. And he loved raining down the apocalypse, whether on parasites like mosquitoes, or on vermin like the human race.
*
“Your Mercedes wasn’t enough?” James Shouberty said.
The sun rode low to the west, and it was almost as if he were speaking to the big yellow orb. He sat inside the bubble of the chopper’s cockpit, the sky wide open all around him. He was alone up here. He could be talking to the sun. He could be talking to God.
He often talked like this when he was in the cockpit. He often talked like this in the car, and at home as well. When no one was around, which was most of the time, he often slipped into quiet, seething rants. He wasn’t even quite sure who he was talking to. The yuppies, he supposed. The yuppies, and their charmed lives.
“Your golden necklaces weren’t enough?” he asked them. “Your trust fund wasn’t enough? Your vodka and cognac weren’t enough? All of your debaucheries weren’t enough?”
He was about a thousand feet up, and he flew the chopper southwest along the beaches of Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island, places he had sprayed many times. He usually dropped to about a hundred feet above the tree line here, and bombed those thick marshes just behind the dunes. Mosquitoes loved to breed back there.
A few people were walking on the beach after work. Not enough, though. Not nearly enough people. The camel jockeys, the ones worshipping a false god, had told him to drop the product in a densely packed area. That was how it would do the most damage. That was how the effects would spread.
James was a fan of genocide, and he wrote an anonymous blog about it. His employers never found out about it. His family never found out—he didn’t talk to them, anyway. The police and FBI had never bothered him—heck, it was free speech to talk about mass murder and destruction. It was free speech to describe your fantasies of global destruction in detail for a few hundred people a month. And we had free speech in this country, didn’t we? You bet we did.
Few people ever contacted him about the blog. But the camel jocks did. They were curious about him. He was American, obviously, but where in America? What were these references he made to flying, and these references to raining death and to wiping out breeding populations from the sky?
Was he a real pilot?
Oh yes, he was as real as they come.
Did he really know how to rain death?
On mosquitoes, yes.
Was he as interested as he seemed in wiping out humans?
More than you could possibly know.
He had finally met with a camel jockey at a diner just two weeks ago. He’d been talking to them on the internet for the past five months. Even so, he took precautions. He sat in a booth and watched the guy for an hour. The guy didn’t speak to anyone. He didn’t look around. He didn’t whisper into a radio or make secret hand signals. Eventually, James felt fine about everything, walked over, and slid into the man’s booth. They talked for about twenty minutes, mostly working out details and logistics.
Finally, near the end, James asked the question that to him was most important.
“Could it kill everybody?”
The expression on the young man’s face didn’t change in the slightest. “Do you mean everybody on Earth?”
James nodded. “Yes.”
The man nodded. “It’s possible, if enough people were infected, that the virus could spread out of control. It’s a dangerous virus, very deadly, and very easy to catch. Once it gets loose, it will be hard to stop. But I think you would have to spray a lot of people for it to go around the world.”
“Well, I guess I’ll spray a lot of people then,” James said.
Now, below him, the low five-sided walls of Fort Sumter were just ahead, guarding the mouth of the harbor, just as it had done during the Civil War. He kept the fort on his left and peered down into the open area within the old stone walls. A handful of tourists milled around inside the fort like ants. A handful was not enough.
“They’re mocking you, Jimmy. They’re making fun of you because of how you look, and how weak you are. But that’s okay. Ultimate revenge coming, and right on time. You people could have shown me more respect, treated me better, asked for more guidance from me, and maybe this wouldn’t have happened
. All you rich snots who think you’re higher than me and everyone else with all your money, just because you were born with it?”
He moved up through the harbor, dropping altitude. The bottom of the peninsula was dead ahead—the Charleston Battery, with its twenty-million-dollar pre–Civil War waterfront mansions, and its throngs of afternoon walkers and joggers and bench sitters and various other lingering wastes of skin. He would hit there first, then move right up the line. He came in low, lower, dropping down to three hundred feet.
The Battery was straight ahead; it was early evening, and people were out. There must be a hundred people. He could see them straight ahead, practically close enough to touch. The line of mansions grew closer, the pastel-colored Rainbow Row of fancy houses clearly visible now. He was coming fast. He pulled up just a touch. Here came the waterfront walkway. People were looking his way. They could hear the chopper, closer than they expected.
He was over the water, a hundred yards out and closing fast.
“You didn’t see this coming, did you?”
He hit the sprayers. A dense cloud of purple-brown fog opened up on either side of him. He laid down a thick mist, banking left, and following the line of the Battery walkway, dropping product the entire time.
He rained death. People didn’t run. They didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know what was happening. Maybe it was Malathion? Maybe it was Pepsi-Cola? No, you dummies. It’s death. Death is on you. It’s all over you.
He closed the sprayers and checked his levels. He had two more drops’ worth, and that one was a direct hit. Good, very good.
“They never saw it coming,” he said. He shook his head for emphasis. “They never imagined what I would do. They were just dreaming along in dreamland. Wake up, dreamers! Welcome to nightmare land.”