by Brandt Legg
“Are you ready for tonight?” Gunner asked.
“I just made a pass,” the digital-filter said. “I think we’re good.”
“Excellent. Since this one isn’t on the list, and we’ve already hit this city once, I didn’t expect any trouble. But tomorrow night is a different story.”
“Do they know?”
“They definitely suspect we’re hitting targets from the list, but they aren’t certain. And even if they had the manpower, they can’t risk stacking troops or agents at all the companies because every alternative news site and watchdog groups in the world would work overtime trying to figure out what all the businesses have in common and why the government won’t tell us.”
“You’ve said that before, and I still think it’s a weak argument,” Powder said. “I mean, it seems like an awfully big risk.”
“For who?”
“For them and us.”
“Don’t worry,” Gunner said. “Only a few more before we can go to autopilot.”
“But I do worry. About. Every. Single. Detail.”
“I know, my friend. You’re a hero. One day the nation will understand and acknowledge the debt they owe you.”
“I hope not.”
Wen squinted into the smoke, looking back up toward the dam. “Do you see it?”
“I can hardly even see you,” Chase said, coughing. “How am I supposed to see a helicopter through this stuff?”
“It’s coming,” she said, turning back to him. “Sounds like a Black Hawk.”
“You can tell that from the sound? You really do have great ears. That’s not what originally attracted me to you, but I’m learning to appreciate them.”
“Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, introduced in 1979, four blade, twin-engine, military grade medium-lift helicopter. Utilized by the US Army. Sikorsky has also sold the Black Hawk to Japan and the Republic of Korea.”
“What do you see in me other than a gorgeous, smart, rich, handy man with incredibly soft lips?” He shot a winning smile at her, and then turned serious. “If we weren’t being pursued by ten or twenty men with machine guns and now a Black Hawk through a burning canyon, all your talk of ‘four blades’ and ‘medium lift’ might turn me on. But I’m more interested in finding a way out of this wilderness nightmare.” Burning debris, embers, and sparks continued whipping past in the erratic wind.
The sound of the spinning rotors and large blades of the Black Hawk slicing through the thick, smoky air took on an eerie, ominous weight, as if a giant mechanical monster was gobbling up villagers one after the other. Whop-whop-shuun-shuun, whop-whop-shuun-shuun, whop-whop . . .
“How’s your leg?” Wen yelled above the noise.
“Good enough.”
“Good enough to outrun bullets?” she asked. “Or should we get back in the river?”
“Is there a third choice?”
“Not a good one.”
“Let’s find a place to hide,” Chase said, picking up the pace to a painful jog. “One that’s not on fire.”
The air shifted into a different kind of swirl, pushing all the smoke and blowing fire remnants on top of them as the roar of the helicopter became deafening.
“Run!” Wen yelled as Chase dove for a marshy tangle of weeds by the river.
Thirty-Three
The next sounds Chase heard were the screeching of metal-on-metal, bursts of gunfire, and the desperate whine of a straining motor.
“They’re in trouble,” Wen yelled. “I Think they hit the power lines!”
Although they couldn’t see it, the helicopter was so close that each excruciating, sonic-grinding sound as the craft tangled into the dozens of high tension power lines crossing the river, part of the dam’s hydroelectric plant, gave them a clear idea of the catastrophe. Seconds later, when the helicopter crashed into the maze-like electric relay station, an explosion ignited yet another fire.
“Black Hawk down,” Chase said.
Tess had been put straight through to the president, but he, in turn, had to speak with the director of national intelligence, who then pursued his own chain of command. Thirty minutes later, it was the director who called her back.
“The president asked me to try to explain this rather strange situation to you,” the director began. “It seems that the crew you found on that dam have a classification that doesn’t exist.”
“That’s crazy,” Tess shot back.
“We don’t know who they are, but we will. It just may take some time.”
“Are you telling me that neither you, as the nation’s top intelligence official, nor the president of the United States, have security clearance to find out who a dozen dead men on a California dam were?”
“It appears that way, for the moment. It’s some kind of a glitch . . . maybe a former president or CIA director, somebody with full clearance, protected them for some reason. However, this is just a speed bump. I’ve got a team on it.”
Tess, filled with a sense of dread, didn’t like how the puzzle was coming together. Someone out there had procured the military’s most advanced explosive, possibly discovered the CIA’s most secret program, appeared to be working from a list so classified she could count on two hands the people who knew of its existence, and now a group of mercenaries who had been pursuing Chase Malone, were in the employ of someone with more clout than the president of the United States.
“We’ve got to know who these men were, and, more importantly, who ghosted them,” Tess said. “And we need to know yesterday, so I hope you’ve got more than a team on it.”
“The president said as much.”
“You find who’s shielding those men, and we’ll find the Fire Bomber.”
After the crash, Wen and Chase ventured inland, deciding it would be safer to make their way into what was left of the forest instead of sticking by the river, waiting for more choppers. Eventually, they happened upon an old logging road which, at one point, may have acted as a break-line for the fire.
“Hey, look,” Chase said excitedly. “My Leatherman survived the jump!”
“Oh, wonderful. We’re saved,” Wen deadpanned.
“Make fun if you want, but this multi-tool has saved me many times.”
“Shh, do you hear that?” Wen asked.
“Oh no . . . what do you hear now, incoming nuclear missiles?”
“No, it’s some sort of vehicle.”
Chase was about to ask her its make and model, but didn’t think she’d see the humor in it. There wasn’t anything funny about being trapped. One side of the logging road was still actively burning, the other was an open, smoldering moonscape where they would be easy targets. Running back the way they came offered nothing more than the prospect of delaying the inevitable. Chase wasn’t sure his injured leg could take that kind of pounding anyway. After everything they’d been through, it seemed anticlimactic and frustrating to be caught this way.
Wen tightened the straps on her pack, making sure the Antimatter Machine, or whatever remained of it, was still secure. Chase wondered if she had one last miracle escape in her, and knew she desperately missed her guns. Wen’s eyes continue to dart in all directions as the sound grew louder. He caught her looking at his leg and could see her calculating the odds about running back to the river. It was their only reasonable option. If they could outrun the truck and reach the water—both seemed highly unlikely to Chase—they might be able to get into the current and put enough distance between them and whoever would be shooting. But they both knew his leg wouldn’t hold up to that kind of strain.
None of that mattered now as the truck rumbled into sight. Wen’s tense demeanor relaxed a little as they both recognized the mint-green color of a US forest service truck.
“Hey, where did y’all come from?” the tired looking driver, his face covered in black sweat and grime, asked as they rolled to a stop.
“River,” Chase said pointing back over his shoulder.
The man looked at their wet clothes, more than likely n
oticing a few of the burned spots. “Well, it’s your lucky day. Get in back, you should be able to find some room.”
Chase craned around to look in the back of the pickup truck, filled with maybe ten or more people. They looked like mostly hikers and campers.
“Where are you headed?” Wen asked.
The Ranger shot her an impatient look. “I wasn’t making a request,” he said. “This area is under mandatory evacuation. You have to come with me.”
Chase knew Wen was thinking about doing a move on the Ranger and taking his truck. He put his arm on her shoulder and started guiding her to the back of the truck.
“Don’t worry,” said another Ranger, also riding in the back. “We’ll get you to a safe staging area. From there, the sheriff’s office is coordinating. They’re working on providing transportation to the Redding airport. That’s the regional shelter.”
Wen and Chase exchanged a quick glance, not believing their luck—a safe, free ride back to their plane. They climbed in. Finally, something had gone their way.
Thirty-Four
Lenny and Skrunch, in their blood-stained, dirty, rumpled clothes, didn’t talk much while her doctor friend patched both of them up. Not surprisingly, the doctor, one of those rich California suburban MDs whose patients never seem to have the type of injuries which Lenny and Skrunch displayed, didn’t say much to them either beyond what was medically necessary. Lenny noticed the man seemed nervous, but he’d already assessed that this guy wasn’t the type to give them any trouble, and certainly he didn’t do any paperwork.
Once they were back in her old Volkswagen, Skrunch filled Lenny in on the details of the Russian attack—how she’d been beat up by another guy at the same time they were grabbing Bull and using Lenny’s head for a sledgehammer.
He pressed Skrunch for how the Russians had gotten involved in the first place. She claimed they’d crossed paths when she hacked some information on a big real estate scam in Burbank. “Something about the information I’d stolen and sold had cost their clients over a hundred grand,” she said, checking her rearview mirror as she took a turn a little too fast. “And ever since they’ve been trying to get the money out of me, only they kept increasing the amounts required to make them go away.”
“Why didn’t you just give it to them?”
“Damn, you must have got brain damage when they hit you. I never did make a hundred large on that deal. That’s just what their clients supposedly lost.” She turned the car onto the freeway and headed south. “It’s all such a crazy, complicated mess. I don’t even know how they lost money, but it was like only a three-k score for me.”
“Did you tell them?”
She rolled her eyes. “These guys, as you can see, are not good listeners, and they can be totally persuasive about their position. Not at all reasonable, know what I mean?” She lit what he thought was a cigarette but turned out to be a joint. “I managed to scrape together six-k. Told Boris or whatever that’s all I could get. They took it, but they were back the next day. Kept roughing me up, threatening to take my computers, but I convinced them my computers were the only way I was going to be able to make enough money to pay them.” She checked the mirror. “I started pushing hard, did a bunch of jobs, had a big pay coming, and borrowed more money.” She took a swig from a small, beige, plastic flask. “Our doctor friend back there even gave me ten grand. Then I made a deal with the Ruskies, told them if I could get fifty grand, would that end it. They said yes.”
“And you believed them?” Lenny asked, as if she were an idiot.
“I had to.” She knocked the cherry off the joint, left the roach in the ashtray, then lit an actual cigarette. “I got nobody. Fifty was as big as I could go. A few days later I got Boris the money.”
“Impressive, but based on his visit this morning, I guess it didn’t work.”
She shook her head. “Nah. And it sucks, ‘cause I still owe a bunch of other people. But for a while, like two weeks, they disappeared. Then one day they woke me up, pushed me on the floor, kicked me around, hard. Told me they wanted the other fifty grand. I said I couldn’t. They said I did it once, I could do it twice. Gave me a week, or they’d cut off my hands.”
“Geeze,” Lenny said, wincing.
“Yeah, for real. But this time I was going to get all the money I could and get the hell out of town. I can do my work from anywhere.”
“Where do you go to get away from the Russian mob?”
She shook her head and inhaled her cigarette like it was oxygen. “Flip if I know.”
“When did we come in?”
Her stare lingered in the rearview. “My week is half over.”
Lenny reached for the cigarettes and lit one for himself.
Skrunch went on to tell him some of what he’d already heard from Bull—that Skrunch and she had worked the same hack a few years earlier, and been impressed by each other’s skills. Rather than compete, they split the job and went on to do seven or eight more jobs together before their connection faded as they got involved in different things.
“We’d occasionally flash each other online, or do a favor, but we hadn’t had much contact in the last year or so.”
“How do we save her?”
“If you can find a way to get to her stuff, I know I can find a buyer.”
“You can find somebody with half a million dollars?”
“No problem,” she said as a California Highway Patrol car passed them.
“You don’t even know what we have,” Lenny said.
“I don’t have to know to answer the question of can I get half a mil for it, ‘cause if Bull came all this way and was that worried about it, then it’s worth at least that much.” She took another long drag. “And once you tell me what it is, maybe we can even get more.”
A lot more, Lenny thought. But first we have to get it.
Tess’ plane landed in Albuquerque. She’d been planning on going to Los Angeles to meet with Chase, but now that he was more than likely dead, she’d decided to meet Flint in Taos. She’d tell him about Chase on the dance floor, a place where everything was easier, then she’d try to recruit him to come work for her at CISS. Flint had told her before he’d sworn off ‘agency’ work for good, but now that his client was dead, and with a chance to work on the biggest thing the CIA had ever done, maybe he’d reconsider.
“A new era,” she would tell him. “We are defining the next century.” He couldn’t say no to that, even if he could say no to her.
Thirty-Five
Damon and Ryker arrived in the area approximately fifteen minutes after the Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the electrical substation beneath the dam. They traced Tarsoni, the last surviving member of Cox’s ill-fated team, by using his phone’s GPS.
“Tell us exactly what happened,” Ryker said, still adjusting to the thick scent of smoke.
“We were on the dam,” Tarsoni began. “Chase and his girl had just offed themselves swan-diving over the edge, and then these pros, probably dark ops, CIA, dropped down off choppers, a couple of Black Hawks I think, and some kind of gunship, maybe a Viper.”
“And they just took you out?” Ryker asked. “No kind of warning or anything?”
“Nothing. We gave no provocation.”
“Who does that? They have communications? Or maybe they were blacked out with the smoke, lost their connection or something? What I’m getting at here, Tarsoni, is were they acting on their own and maybe saw a bunch of armed guys on the dam as a threat that they should eliminate before they got into a firefight, or were they being directed by someone in Washington? And, if that was the case, who, and why this place?”
“Damned if I know,” Tarsoni said as he climbed into the back of their SUV. “What’s with this damn fire, anyway?”
“It’s burning,” Damon said.
“We had to use bogus credentials to get in here and find you,” Ryker said. “Of course, initially we weren’t really looking for you, were we? Lucky we came along or you�
�d be cooked, or on your way to jail, a lot of explaining to do. Back to the point, these spooks see Malone and the woman jump before they took you out?”
“They couldn’t have. Those two went over the dam before we even heard the Blackhawks come in. And visibility was zilch, so no.”
“Boss will find out who they were working for,” Damon said as they began making their way back to the main highway.
“I don’t doubt that,” Ryker said. “Either way, Tarsoni, you’re on our team now, and we don’t screw up like Cox. Understand?” Ryker held eye contact with him in the rearview mirror until Tarsoni nodded. “Next time we get an assignment to take someone out, we kind of like to make sure we deliver a body as proof.”
“I was wearing a chest cam,” Tarsoni said. “I’m pretty sure it recorded them jumping.”
“Turns out you’re good for something after all. Let’s get that transmitted to Westfield and then dinner’s on me.”
Chase and Wen spent a couple hours at a staging area near Summit City, which was neither a summit nor a city. It was a frustrating time among a swarm of at least three hundred hikers, campers, boaters, nearby residents, and whomever happened to be in the vicinity when the firestorm raged through. The winds had begun to subside, but the air was still smoky. Chase tried repeatedly to beg, buy, or bribe a ride out sooner, but Wen finally stopped him as one of the smoke jumpers, or firefighters, with some apparent authority, began to question him a little too closely.
“Sorry, sir,” she said in her best sweet-little-girl voice. “He’s just exhausted.”
“We all are,” the irritable man growled before hurrying off to head back out to the lines.
Finally, it was their turn for transport. Unfortunately, after a bumpy, claustrophobic, thirty-minute ride, they found themselves parked at the Gold Hills Golf Club instead of the airport.