by Patrick Lee
The man thanked him again and hung up.
Fuck.
It was all Karl could do to keep the curse to himself. The easy version of the plan had nearly worked.
From the open door of the fourth room off the hall, ten feet from where the hiker had stood with the satellite phone, Karl had watched the conversation.
He’d been in this room since just before the helicopter’s demise, after using the sound of its rotors to mask his return down the creaking hallway. The room had proven a fine place from which to listen to the hiker’s phone call, though Karl had been prepared to follow him elsewhere if necessary.
It really should have worked.
With the chopper down in flames, and the fighter pilot’s word that the valley was clear of hostiles, Karl had been certain Tangent would ask the hiker where the damn thing was hidden. He’d even started to tell them, before they’d stopped him.
That knowledge would have ended the game. Karl would have easily taken the key back from the hiker—probably by way of a silent kill in the hallway while the doctors were preoccupied—and left the building. He’d stowed his own satellite phone in the drain trench beside the highway, three hundred yards south. A quick jog, and he could have sent his superiors the location of the hidden Whisper more than an hour ahead of Tangent’s arrival at the site.
It would have been more than enough time. His people had already dispatched another chopper from their own staging point; it was screaming along the Brooks Range at this moment, below radar, toward the valley where the 747 lay in ruins and the Whisper lay hidden. The F–15 had long since turned for home, having spent its fuel inefficiently in the mad scream to reach Coldfoot.
One spoken sentence, and every tumbler would have clicked into place.
Fuck.
Karl waited for the hiker to wander back to the open doorway of the makeshift emergency room. The noise from equipment and voices inside provided ample sound cover. Karl moved past the man, down the hall and out the front door.
By the time he reached his phone, the lodge and the soldiers around it were distant specks, inaudible over the wind. He dialed and waited.
“Tell the chopper to land five miles west of the site and wait there,” he said when it was answered. “It’s going to be complicated.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
By the time the Black Hawks arrived, the wind out of the north had hardened. Travis put his back to it and watched them come in, their shadows rippling over the landscape far behind them. They were still a mile out when Dr. Carro came to the door of the lodge and waved him back inside.
“She’s asking for you,” Carro said.
He followed Carro back to the room and found Paige with her eyes open, though unable to focus. He took her hand, and she dragged her gaze to meet his, like a child pulling a heavy weight. He wondered if this was all she wanted: just to see a face she knew, if only barely. Then she spoke, her voice so weak Travis had to lean close.
“If you have to wake it up,” she said, “then do it. It’s worth it, if there’s no other choice. But let go of it as fast as you can.”
The doctors traded looks, and Carro said, “Confusion is normal for someone under this much sedation. She’ll be fine after—”
“I know I’m on ten milligrams per minute of propofol,” Paige whispered. “Please shut up and let me speak.”
Carro shut up.
Paige fixed her eyes more firmly on Travis and said, “I know Tangent is coming. I know everything seems safe. But we never assume. We can’t afford to. If things go bad . . . if you have to use the Whisper . . . press the key against it to wake it up.”
She faded for a few seconds, then drew a deep breath and said, “Just let go of it as soon as you can. If you wait too long, it won’t let you.”
Then her eyes closed, and her breathing stabilized.
Outside, the Black Hawks came in low over the building. Travis heard pebbles from the gravel parking lot scatter against the front of the restaurant. Then, through the window on the north wall, he saw both aircraft set down on the grass expanse outside. He held Paige’s hand a few seconds longer, then left the room.
By the time he reached the front of the lodge, a man had disembarked from the nearer chopper. One of the soldiers on guard cocked an ear at something the man shouted, then pointed at Travis as he stepped from the building.
Travis had expected the Tangent operatives to ask exactly one question, and otherwise not speak to him. Instead, the man shook his hand, identified himself as Shaw, and thanked him with the same gravity as the man on the phone.
Shaw was outfitted the way Travis imagined Navy SEALs would be. His rifle, modified to the nines, drew looks from the nearest soldiers.
“We’re ready right now, sir,” Shaw said, indicating the open door to the Black Hawk’s troop bay.
Travis followed him to it. It crossed his mind that, even a few days earlier, climbing into a military chopper full of commandos would’ve qualified as a strange thing. He pulled himself in and took a seat on a padded bench at the rear wall. Shaw climbed in beside him. In addition to the pilots, there were six men in the Black Hawk, all equipped for the end of the world. The turbines revved, and a moment later the chopper was high above the lodge and turning west, tinted shafts of sunlight swinging through the interior like spotlight beams. Travis looked over his shoulder through one of the small windows, and saw the surgeons bringing Paige out on a stretcher. He kept his eyes on her until the first ridgeline swept below the aircraft, blocking his view.
Facing forward again, he saw a squat metal shape in the center of the floor: a cobbled-together and much smaller version of the steel box that had contained the Whisper aboard the 747.
Outside, ridges and valleys that had taken hours to cross on foot slipped by like sections of sidewalk.
The encampment had seen heavy traffic since Travis had left it. Staring down from the circling Black Hawk, its starboard door now wide open as the men scrutinized the valley for movement, he saw a broad patch of disturbed ground that had served as the hostiles’ landing pad. Skids had dented the surface in all directions, and the comings and goings of the hostiles had turned the grass there to bare earth.
Satisfied that the valley was clean, the pilot set down on the torn earth, the clearest place in sight. As soon as the wheels touched, the men exited from both sides of the chopper. Travis was the last one out, glancing forward along the fuselage as he stepped from the door.
Something made him stop.
He knew the feeling, though he hadn’t felt it in years.
A supplier he’d known had called it getting your whiskers flicked. A kind of intuition maybe only criminals—or bad cops—could feel, sharpened by years of doing things they couldn’t afford to be caught doing. The slightest thing might trigger it: multiple cars tapping their brakes on the same stretch of road for no apparent reason, hinting at a police presence just out of sight.
As Travis stared forward along the side of the Black Hawk, something flicked his whiskers. Hard.
But he couldn’t place it. He swept his eyes around, and for some reason he kept coming back to the front right wheel, extending down and away from the side of the fuselage on a foot-long strut. There was nothing wrong with it, as far as he could tell. The tire and strut both seemed fine.
Shaw saw him looking. “What is it?”
Travis had no answer for him, and shook off the sensation. He hadn’t slept in over thirty hours—unless he counted the few minutes he’d been unconscious after getting knocked out—and had spent the last two of them wandering around a mass-murder scene. A little jumpiness should be expected.
“It’s nothing,” Travis said, and nodded ahead through the trees. “What you’re looking for isn’t far. Fifty steps past their camp, buried near the biggest tree in sight.”
He took another glance at the wheel, then passed through the group of men to take the lead—
—and stopped again.
He turned back to the
Black Hawk.
In the soft dirt on either side of the wheel was a footprint, each one facing outward—the prints a man would make if he were sitting right on the tire with his back against the side of the chopper, maybe holding onto the gun mount above it for balance.
Travis stared at it, part of him expecting the footprints to shift before his eyes. Then he became aware of Shaw standing beside him.
“Tell us,” Shaw said. “I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. Tell us what you’re thinking, right now.”
The guy sounded more than just serious. He sounded scared.
“Look at the prints beside the wheel,” Travis said.
Something like a second passed—enough time for Travis to imagine these men laughing when he was compelled to explain himself.
A second later, he understood that he was very wrong in that impression.
Shaw flinched—Travis was sure he saw it, though the movement was swallowed up by the blur that came next, as the man snapped his rifle up and opened fire, putting a burst of half a dozen shots through the side of the Black Hawk, a foot above the tire.
The bullets punched through the metal. No blood. No screams.
“Eyes open for a weapon, all sides!” Shaw yelled; already he was sprinting over the disturbed ground toward the chopper. The men around Travis shouldered their rifles, each choosing a direction. They did it instantly and without discussion, as if they’d drilled for this sort of thing. Travis suddenly felt sure they had. Even the pilots, also out of the chopper, had drawn sidearms and were scrutinizing the sparse trees around them.
Shaw vaulted into the Black Hawk’s troop bay and swept his rifle back and forth inside, in large but efficient strokes. He didn’t so much aim with it as feel with it, like a blind man whose life depended on finding his quarry. Travis’s eyes easily picked out the handholds the enemy could have used to pull himself into the chopper without touching the ground.
Shaw found nothing.
He returned to the door. His gaze fell to the dirt before it, and went cold. Travis saw why: the ground leading from the troop bay was saturated with their own footprints—so many they overlapped—leading off of the bare earth onto the grass. The enemy’s path could be any of them.
One of the men whispered, “Fuck . . .”
That single word, so drenched with fear while coming from someone so hardened, told Travis all he needed to know about the trouble they were in.
He had a second to think about that, and then the pilot took a bullet to the head. There was no sound of a gunshot—just the impact, like a heavy oak panel being split, and then the man was down, already gone. The others were shouting, training weapons and eyes in all directions. Travis saw Shaw jump from the chopper and run to his men, screaming for them to be quiet, and he saw the co-pilot staring around, scared shitless, as a terrible understanding came to him, and even as Travis made the connection himself, the man took the second shot right over his left eye, the entry wound facing Travis so directly that the bullet must have passed right over his shoulder, and now Shaw was looking at him and shouting, “Which way?” and Travis threw his arm out to point behind himself, and in the next instant the world was nothing but machine-gun fire.
They fanned out. Travis got behind them and watched the red tracer rounds carve a wedge of space against the valley wall sixty yards north.
Shaw screamed for them to get more space among themselves. He’d just finished saying it when a bullet hit his throat and came out the back of his neck, making a fist-sized crater. He dropped, his eyes wide and his hands pawing at his collar.
The men broke formation, running and firing at the same time. One of them stooped, grabbed Shaw’s rifle and threw it at Travis; he just managed to get his hands up and catch it.
Then he was running with them—the half that had split in this direction. Running for the encampment, and then through it, his mind only now getting around to what his body had already decided.
The tree stood out like an obelisk, easily twice the width of any other nearby. He pulled up short and swung past it, kicking aside the carpet of needles to expose the gouged surface where Paige had refilled the hole.
Somewhere a man screamed and went down hard as he ran. He lay crying for help, but after only a few seconds Travis heard him gargle as his windpipe filled with blood.
Travis dropped the rifle, fell to his knees beside the hole and attacked the dirt with his bare hands. It was soft, having been torn up and replaced only a day and a half earlier, but the going was—
Not fast enough. No way was it fast enough.
Because the killer knew it was buried here. Travis had given this location out loud, right outside the helicopter.
He heard another head shot, twenty feet to his left, and turned to see a body still plunging forward with its running momentum, but with the top of its skull missing. The shoulder hooked a tree trunk and the body twisted around it, falling in a tangle at the roots.
Travis dug faster, his ears suddenly keening with the rush of blood through his carotid arteries—why could he hear that now?
Then he understood: the shooting had stopped.
He quit digging and looked up.
They were all dead.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
His hands went to Shaw’s rifle again and lifted it. They were caked with clay; he could barely get his finger into the trigger well.
In the silence, only a soft breeze moved. The boughs of the smallest saplings rose and fell with it.
What had Shaw yelled? Eyes open for a weapon. Would the killer’s gun be visible?
Travis swept his gaze left to right, slowly, trying not to focus on any one thing. With no other sound or movement among the trees, maybe he’d see something.
Then he did see something—but not in front of him.
At the bottom edge of his vision: a shimmer of blue. Against all instinct to keep his eyes on his surroundings, Travis looked down. His last handful of dirt had exposed a dime-sized portion of the Whisper’s surface. The color swam across the face of the sphere. It looked like a little world, all ocean, all in twilight at the same time, somehow.
Something stirred in the trees.
He snapped his gaze up but saw no sign of movement. He couldn’t even be sure which way the sound had come from. He pivoted, still kneeling, but saw nothing on any side.
The killer was being careful, now that it was just the two of them, but there was no question of how this would end. The question was how many seconds of his life remained.
If you have to wake it up . . .
He took no hope from the idea. Whatever the Whisper did, how could it possibly help him in this situation? This was far beyond any danger Paige could have foreseen.
Ten seconds? Did he have even that much time left? Ten seconds on his knees in the dirt, wondering if he’d feel it when the bullet fragmented in his head?
It wasn’t much to lose.
He dropped his free hand from the rifle’s barrel guard, drew the cellophane key from his pocket and plunged it into the hole, mashing it against the Whisper as he pulled it free of the dirt.
Light flared from the thing, searing blue, so brilliant that even over the pulse of his own fear a new thought dominated: it was a star, somehow he was holding the heart of a star—
Then that thought was gone as well, like a scrap of paper in jet exhaust, and his mind filled with a voice more beautiful than the blue light, and he realized he knew it, though he hadn’t heard it in years: Emily Price, when she was seventeen and he was seventeen; Emily’s voice in the humid dark of the tree house in her parents’ yard, the night she’d told him it all felt right, that the moment was right—
But she wasn’t saying any of that now.
“Behind you,” she said, “two feet left of the double pine. He’s drawing. Go. GO.”
Travis spun, the rifle coming around in his right hand, stopping just before the twin pine that came up in a V from its roots, fifteen feet away.
He
heard a man gasp—surprise laced with anger—and in the same moment he saw the impossible: a silenced pistol slipping into view as if from a fold of nothingness.
Travis fired.
The heavy rifle gutted the air, the cyclic recoil maybe three times harder than the M16’s had been, pushing him off target almost immediately—but it didn’t matter. Even over the blast-chatter of the rifle he heard the killer scream, and the pistol went sideways, end over end in a pitched arc. A second later the lowest bough of the double pine bent violently downward; it seemed to pin itself to the ground.
Travis let go of the trigger. Silence. Then he heard the man crying and fighting to breathe.
Travis looked at the sphere in his hand. The blue light was strobing now, the rhythm matching his own accelerated pulse.
Emily’s voice cooed in his head, and he heard her giggle.
“Gave him a hurts donut, didn’t you? Gave him a whole box of them with sprinkles and cherry filling.”
Travis felt his logic slipping. He understood that the voice wasn’t Emily at all, that this thing had nothing to do with her, but even that understanding began to fade—by the second—as he held the thing. He felt the clarity of his thinking being washed out, like visual details lost in light glare.
It was time to let go of it. Let go fast, like Paige had said.
He opened his hand—
The rifle fell and clattered on the roots at his feet. It took him a full breath to realize his mistake.
“Sweetie, you don’t want to drop me, do you?”
Now that he thought about it, no, he really didn’t want to let her go.
Her? It.
“You can think of me as a girl if you like. It’s all the same to me. I haven’t even minded being called the wrong name all this time. I promise to tell you my real name someday. It’s a lot cooler than ‘Whisper.’ ”
With each passing moment—each heartbeat of the sphere—the voice soothed him more deeply. Soothed him and took him back there, to that night, to those few hours he’d long remembered as the best of his life.