by Jon Land
Clang!
A bullet slammed into the steel railing on his right, and McCracken hit the floor with the cable pinned beneath him. The final gunman charged toward the stairs, M16 firing nonstop. Blaine pumped a quartet of shells into his armored midsection, and the force was sufficient to separate the gunman from his rifle and pitch him down the stairs he had just mounted. He slammed into the floor and crawled behind the nearest cover.
McCracken regained his feet and reeled the rest of the cable up from forty feet below. When the process of curling it like a garden hose was complete, he turned his attention to the enemy chopper.
Before Blaine could consider the matter any further, though, the police helicopter soared in directly over Cocowalk’s rear, not fifty feet above his head. Gunfire spit from within it in the enemy chopper’s direction. The enemy chopper flitted in the air briefly before swinging toward its adversary and surging forward. The police chopper rose slightly and the enemy followed suit, return fire pouring from the open side door.
The two helicopters converged on each other, swooping and swerving, like great birds of prey. Blaine watched as the civilian chopper rose over both of them and settled in the air, spotlight sweeping the sky beneath it. Confused at first, he quickly realized that the civilian chopper’s pilot was trying to blind his counterpart in the enemy helicopter with the beam. The ploy forced the pilot who had ferried the gunmen in to bank downward and slide back in McCracken’s direction.
Just what he needed!
As Blaine readied his looped-together cable, another grenade jetted out from within the enemy chopper. The grenade struck the police helicopter broadside and sent it spinning out of control, black smoke belched in its wake. The pilot managed to steady it into an uneasy descent that would hopefully hold long enough to find a parking lot or rooftop to try for a landing.
During the course of the battle Blaine had glimpsed the remaining captives of Cocowalk seize the opportunity to flee. Now, though, with nothing left to impede it, he knew the enemy chopper could simply move its attack to the streets where the endless sea of bodies would make equally inviting targets.
McCracken pulled his coiled mass of cable back behind him to gather momentum. The helicopter had begun to turn his way again when he tossed the cable outward. McCracken watched it unspool as it neared its target and then dove to the floor beneath the spill of the bullets pouring at him from within the chopper. From the corner of his eye he saw a section of the snakelike cable land upon the main rotor blade. In the next instant, the rest of the spool had been reeled into the rotor and swallowed in a blur. Control compromised, the chopper began wobbling and then fell into a severe list to the left. The pilot overcompensated and the helicopter turned nearly all the way onto its right side. It began spinning wildly, lifting into the air only to drop again as the coaxial cable wrapped itself ever tighter around the rotor blade.
The pilot fought desperately to regain control. He tried to bring the chopper into a rise, but the move spilled it all the way onto its side. The rotor sputtered, choked by the spool of cable. McCracken watched the chopper plunge toward an indoor parking garage behind Cocowalk and covered his head a moment before impact.
The chopper crashed into the top of the garage, caught fire but didn’t explode. Blaine’s eyes lingered on it briefly before turning back toward the shattered insides of the mall. Not a single shop or storefront was left whole. The glass and debris were everywhere, much of it layered atop the bodies the killers had left in their wake. Miami SWAT teams flooded the complex in a black wave. McCracken started to raise his arms to signal them toward him.
The last gunman he had shot lunged into his line of vision, diving for the M16 McCracken’s barrage had torn from him. The figure’s black ski mask was gone, allowing a mass of blond hair to slide down to its shoulders. A woman!
“Don’t!” Blaine yelled down, Beretta in hand once more and poised her way.
The woman’s hand grasped the M16 but didn’t right it. Alerted to the commotion, Miami police rushed to the fourth floor in combat fashion.
“Stop!” a voice screamed.
“Hands in the air!” followed another.
“Give it up,” Blaine called to the woman. “It’s over.”
“No!” she ranted, eyes darting between the gun and McCracken. “It’s just beginning. A revolution in the streets, starting tonight. We’re going to take this country back!”
“Who is? Who are you?”
“You can’t stop us! No one can stop us! You’ll see, everyone will see!”
“Drop the gun!” a Miami policeman yelled at McCracken. “Don’t move!”
A trio of police closed on the woman from separate angles.
Blaine dropped his pistol and showed his hands. “Don’t shoot her!” he screamed to the officers. “We need her a!—”
The woman’s eyes blazed. She started to bring the M16 up.
“No!” Blaine screamed.
The policemen’s fire tore into her, spinning the woman’s frame around and slamming it to the floor. Her legs kicked once and were still.
McCracken leaned over the railing. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Don’t move!” another policeman bellowed his way.
The spotlight from the civilian chopper caught McCracken in the midst of a dozen rifles thrust his way. A pair of officers thumped up the stairs toward him.
“On the floor!” one of them ordered. “Now!”
Blaine took one more look at the young woman’s corpse and then sank to his knees before spreading himself out over the floor. A foot jammed hard against the base of his neck. His hands were jerked behind him and a pair of cuffs snapped home.
“In case you didn’t notice,” he said out of the corner of his mouth that had been spared the tile, “I’m on your side.”
“You’re under arrest,” a cop’s voice told him.
CHAPTER 4
“Thanks for seeing me, Paul,” was Kristen Kurcell’s greeting as Paul Gathers emerged from his office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
“Don’t worry. I’m sure you can return the favor next time my department comes up for funding before your senator’s appropriations committee.”
He took her outstretched hand in both of his, and she nervously returned his grasp.
“You’re trembling,” he said and touched her shoulder.
Kristen shrugged. At five-foot-eight, Gathers was only an inch taller than she. They had met for the first time after he had called her following a Washington Magazine pictorial entitled “Women on the Hill.” Kristen had been one of those featured, thought by many who didn’t read the captions to be a professional model. It was no wonder. Tall and lean, she had maintained both her youthful vitality and her athletic lines. A full, easy smile highlighted a rosy complexion that made her look perpetually tanned. Her hair was an auburn composition of curls and waves that tumbled neatly beneath her shoulders, sometimes stubbornly slipping across her face until she pushed it away. One of the shots in the pictorial caught her doing just that, the one that Gathers had checked the caption under. Kristen’s beauty was more innocent than sultry. She needed little makeup and wore even less. Enough eye shadow only to help her big brown eyes not stand out on her face.
Gathers had called her at Senator Jordan’s office six months before on the pretext of needing some appropriations input. He confessed clumsily while they were still shaking hands at the restaurant. Despite that first meeting coming up just short of a disaster and her continued deflections of his persistent overtures, Kristen and Paul had become friends, sharing an occasional dinner or drink. In any case, he was the only FBI agent she knew well enough to contact directly. Gathers was a special agent with the counterterrorism division. He traveled frequently, but fortunately he was in on this Friday morning.
Gathers looked more stocky than the last time they had met, a man at best doomed to carefully watch his weight and at worst destined to see it stage a significant rise. He kept his kinky dark hair clos
ely trimmed.
“You bring the tape?” Gathers asked, letting his hand slide off her shoulder.
Kristen tapped her worn, soft leather briefcase.
Paul Gathers led her into his office. “No calls,” he said to his secretary before closing the door behind him.
“My brother’s the only family I’ve got left, Paul. There’s nobody else. If anything’s happened to him …”
“One step at a time, Kris. Sit down.”
Kristen rested her briefcase on one of the chairs set before Gathers’s desk. She withdrew the cassette tape and held it briefly before handing it to the agent.
Kristen had first heard the message herself ninety minutes earlier, having called home from the office at about ten A.M. to retrieve her messages. She had already spent three hectic hours checking memos and returning phone calls on what was turning out to be an especially busy Friday. The only conceivably pressing calls would have come from the senator, and since that was where she had been overnight, she might have gone the whole day without getting her messages.
The only one on the machine had been from her brother.
The phone in her office nearly dropped from her hand as the message wound to a close. She felt faint, cold briefly, and then hot all over. She stood up shaking, grabbed the edge of her desk to steady herself. Dazedly she walked into the outer office and stopped at the receptionist’s desk. The senator was at an important meeting and could not be disturbed. They had planned to meet immediately afterwards. That would have to wait now.
“Sally.”
The receptionist swung her way, startled. Kristen didn’t realize she had spoken so loudly.
“Could you tell the senator I had to go out for a while? Personal business. Something of an emergency.”
“Of course,” Sally said with honest concern. “Is everyone all right?”
“Yes. At least, I think so. It’s just that …”
The final sentence was still uncompleted when Kristen reached the door.
At her apartment just two blocks from the Russell Senate Building, she listened to her brother’s message three more times before calling Paul Gathers. Paul would help. Paul was a friend. Looking at him now as he lowered the tape toward the cassette player resting on his desk blotter made her feel more at ease. Maybe everything really was all right. Maybe she was overreacting.
Gathers popped open the top of the cassette player and slid the tape home. Then he hit PLAY. Kristen didn’t take a seat. Neither did Gathers. An instant later her brother’s voice filled the room.
“Kristen, are you there? Kristen, it’s David. If you’re there, please pick up. Pick up!”
His voice had risen to almost a shout by that point. A sound she thought was a deep breath followed as he settled himself.
“Okay, I’m in trouble, Kris, big trouble. You’re not gonna believe this, but about an hour ago I saw—”
The sound of something breaking or crashing cut off his words.
“No.”
A mutter.
“No!”
A shout.
Then nothing, save for two soft raps that sounded like someone tapping a knuckle against a window. Several seconds passed before the phone on the other end was hung up. The machine clicked off.
“5:13 A.M.,” droned the synthesized voice that chirped in at the end of every message.
Kristen turned her gaze from the tape player back to Paul Gathers. “I think those last sounds were gunshots,” she said after he had pressed STOP. “That’s what they were, weren’t they?”
“Sit down, Kris.”
“Tell me I’m wrong, Paul. Please tell me I’m wrong.”
He settled into his chair and Kristen sat down stiffly on the edge of the one before his desk. More of her frame was actually off the chair than on it.
Gathers leaned forward. “We have equipment that can enhance all the sounds, computers that can identify them. I’ll take this down to our lab boys. Let them have a go at it.”
“You don’t need them to find out where the call was placed from. You’ve got the exact time, the exchange it came into.”
“One step at a time.”
Kristen bounced back to her feet, ran a hand across her chin. “Don’t do this to me, Paul, not you.”
Gathers stood up and came round to the front of his desk. He grasped her near the shoulders and felt her trembling anew.
“You were out when this call came in.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You think it would have made a difference if you’d been home?”
She looked away. “At least I would have known where he was. Maybe he would’ve had enough time to tell me what he saw. I could have done something.”
“You are doing something. You came to me. Yes?” When Kristen didn’t answer, he squeezed her arm tighter. “Yes?”
She nodded passively. Then her eyes turned back briefly toward the tape player. “You heard his voice, Paul. He sounded so scared. I never heard David sound like that before.”
“This is your brother we’re talking about, right?”
“What do—”
“Answer me.”
“Yes.”
“The one who dropped out of college, the free spirit when measured against his eminently regimented sister. Two months ago, you told me he was driving cross-country in a jeep. Bugged the hell out of you.”
“So?”
“So maybe he’s still bugging. Maybe you’re forgetting about all the jokes you said he’s been playing on you since you were kids.”
“You think this is a joke? God, Paul, his voice.” She thrust a finger toward the tape player. “Listen to his voice!”
“I will, Kris, and so will the experts. But answer me this: does your answering machine keep any track of the number of callers who hang up before the beep sounds?”
“No, only those who leave a message.”
“Then it’s possible David called back again, perhaps even several times, and just didn’t want to leave another message.”
“No, he wouldn’t do that to me.”
He grimaced. “This is David we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Okay. Granted.”
“I remember you telling me he fancies himself a journalist.”
“I told him I could get him an internship up here when he said he was leaving school again.”
“Too much the crusader to take it, though.”
“That’s how he saw himself, yes.”
“Maybe he pissed the wrong people off, then. It happens. He’ll turn up, if he hasn’t already.” Gathers hesitated before going on, as if to choose his words carefully. “Would he have known where to reach you last night?”
“No,” Kristen said softly.
“Right.”
“Which is all the more reason why you’ve got to tell me where he called from. I’ve got to find out where he is.”
Gathers nodded, holding Kristen’s arm supportively. “You’ll be in your office this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
The agent’s eyes blanked a bit. “I’ll need a number where I can reach you after work.”
“I’ll be home.”
“Maybe you want to give me another number just in case. I’ve heard, well, what they’ve said about you and the senator.”
“You believe everything you hear, Paul?”
“Should I, Kris?”
“I’ll be home. Let’s leave it at that.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I have something.” He eased an arm over her shoulder. “Come on, I’ll walk you down.”
“As soon as you know anything.”
“We’ll find David, Kris. I promise.”
The cab taking her back to the Russell Senate Building got snarled in yet another protest march. Kristen had stopped keeping score of them all months ago, but as of late they had begun harping on a common theme. She rolled her window down to better hear the participants’ cadenced chant:
“Who do we ne
ed?”
“Sam Jack Dodd!”
“When do we need him?”
“Now!”
To a man and woman, all of the marchers carried mounted posters of Samuel Jackson Dodd, the charismatic billionaire who had captured the nation’s fancy in the wake of a disastrous first eighteen months for the new president. The gridlock that was supposed to end only tightened, and a slew of broken promises later his approval ratings had sunk into the high twenties. After a brief respite, the economy faltered again with no measures the administration enacted able to halt the slide. Internationally the President had stumbled and stammered his way through recent hard intelligence reports that Iran was now in possession of strategic nuclear weapons obtained from former Soviet republics who had collectively refused to sign the START II agreements.
But these storms his administration could have weathered and survived. Not so the pair of events in the space of a single week three months before that had brought about its unravelling. He had committed a large contingent of American ground troops to the peacekeeping force in Bosnia against a groundswell of public opinion that turned into a flood when a troop of three hundred U.S. soldiers walked into a massacre outside the city of Vitez. Just days later, national guardsmen called in to maintain order at a huge rally in Houston against American involvement panicked and fired into a crowd that suddenly surged their way. Eleven were killed, including three college and two high school students.
A second massacre, this time at home.
Never mind that Vitez only happened because the American convoy took a wrong turn. Never mind that pistols were found on the bodies of two of the dead in Houston. The country needed someone to blame and the President’s acceptance of responsibility and his stumbling apology made him the target of unprecedented anger and wrath. One political cartoon labeled him “Half-term Harry” and pictured him ducking through the back door of the White House (or the “Red” House, as it had come to be known) with bags packed, moving out. Another, perhaps more prophetic cartoon showed a figure in a Superman suit charging up the White House steps with a cheering throng behind him.