by Dale Brown
“What? Chandler called you? What did he say?”
“He said he was out at the research facility at Mather,” Wendy said. “He said someone better get out there right away or Helen was dead. He said there were twelve of Townsend’s men out there, going through the company’s computers.”
“Helen at Mather? We’ll get right on it-thanks, love.” Patrick turned to Briggs. “Get everyone on board, Hal, now. Chandler and Helen Kaddiri are out at the alert facility at Mather.” Hal radioed his tactical ground crews to return to the MV-22, then notified the cockpit to get ready for liftoff. “Jon, where’s the suit?”
“In the room over there,” said Masters, and brought Patrick over to where the body of Richard Faulkner lay. They stripped off the suit, hoisted the body on board the MV-22, and were airborne moments later.
Research and Development Facility
Sacramento-Mather Jetport,
Rancho Cordova, California
a few minutes later
“Ja, Herr Oberst! I understand. We will be airborne in fifteen minutes!” The senior officer hung up the secure cellular phone, then got on his handheld radio and ordered everyone to the helicopters and prepared to repel attackers. Then he dashed to the main administration offices and the room where Helen Kaddiri was being interrogated. She was still conscious, but barely, strapped to a chair with a hood placed over her head. She did not look as if she had been injured, but the lieutenant knew there were many ways of torturing a prisoner without leaving visible signs. The screen of the laptop computer on the desk beside her showed lines of error messages, indicating the unsuccessful attempts to gain access to the classified Sky Masters files.
“Get her to the helicopter!” the lieutenant ordered. “Take that computer too!” He drew his sidearm and headed across the corridor to the senior engineer’s office, where the renegade police captain Chandler was being held. His orders were explicit: to execute him immediately.
He unlocked the door and stopped in his tracks. On the desktop, lying faceup, was the body of Thomas Chandler, his hands still handcuffed behind his back, his eyes open and staring up at the ceiling. A streak of black-and-red crossed his neck, and a pool of red spread out across the desk. The dirty work had already been done for him, probably by the guard assigned to watch him-it was a violation of orders, since no one had given the order to kill Chandler until now, but the lieutenant wasn’t going to complain. He turned toward the admin section and brought his handheld radio to his lips…
Chandler brought the metal chair down on the German bastard’s head as hard as he could, and slammed it again and again until he was dead. The trick had worked. He had used a hidden handcuff key to get out of the handcuffs-he had several of them hidden on him and knew how to use them even with his hands behind his back. Then he had opened up the color ink-jet printer in the office and spread the ink on his neck and the desktop to make it look as if his throat had been slit.
He picked up the officer’s pistol and ran out. Through the engineering offices, a security door opened on an upsloping concrete ramp that led to the flight line, the same covered ramp that SAC bomber and tanker alert crews used to run to the flight line and their waiting planes. Chandler didn’t know what was going on, but it was sure as hell time to get out and he was damned if those Nazis were going to leave with a hostage.
The only way he could possibly redeem himself, he figured, and save himself from spending the next ten years in prison, was to start doing his job.
The German-speaking soldiers had left their posts and run to the flight line in front of the half-underground R amp; D facility, where two surplus UH-1 Huey helicopters were waiting for them, rotors turning. When Chandler emerged from the tunnel, he saw two guards no more than fifty feet away, half-carrying, half-dragging Kaddiri through the alleyway between two hangars toward the waiting helicopters. He took cover just inside the doors to the ramp, raised the pistol, aimed, and fired.
The soldier on the left cried out and fell, clutching his lower back. The other turned toward Chandler and opened fire with his submachine gun, but the shots went high and right. Chandler fired several rounds to throw off his aim, then threw himself back into the tunnel as bullets pinged off the outer security doors. Lying on his belly, he peeked out the doors. The soldier had propped up Helen, who looked semiconscious, using her as a shield while he checked his comrade.
“Helen! Kaddiri!” Chandler shouted, his gun poised to fire. “Get up! Now!” He was afraid she would be too weak to act, but she heard him and had enough strength to roll free of the soldier’s grasp. Chandler dropped the second soldier on his first shot.
He ran to her. “Come on!” he said. “I’m going to try to get you away!”
Heavy machine-gun fire rippled the ground not five feet away from them, shot from one of the helicopters on the flight line. Chandler fired two rounds toward the helicopter, picked Kaddiri up, and ran for the rear of one of the hangars. Placing her on the ground behind the hangar, he tried to make a run for one of the submachine guns dropped by the soldiers who had taken Kaddiri, but a burst of gunfire drove him back to cover. Two soldiers had dismounted from the helicopter and were headed straight for them. Chandler took aim and fired but his gun clicked empty. He threw it away, looped one of Kaddiri’s arms up over his shoulder, and ran down the ramp behind the hangars. It was their last, their only, chance.
“I’ve got one of the helicopters lined up!” the pilot of the MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-rotor aircraft called out on interphone. “Give me permission to shoot!”
“No!” Jon Masters shouted. “Helen might be in one of those choppers!”
“Put me right over the lead helicopter,” McLanahan radioed. “Target the second helicopter’s tail rotor with the cannon. Try to keep it on the ground, but don’t hit it!”
The MV-22 was flying about sixty miles an hour in helicopter mode as it swooped across the two parallel runways at Mather toward the R amp; D center. Patrick knew their altitude, about thirty feet above ground, and their speed. He relied on his experience as an Air Force bombardier for the rest.
As the MV-22 swept in on its targets, Patrick stepped out through the left crew door onto the left main landing gear sponson and steadied himself against the left weapon pylon. At just the right moment, he let go and flung himself out into space, jumping right down onto the spinning rotors of the first UH-1 Huey helicopters.
He looked like a doll tossed from a speeding car onto a busy freeway when he hit the rotor disk. He landed right-shoulder-first onto the left side of the rotor, but the BERP suit protected him from being sliced into hamburger. His body skipped across the rotor disk, hitting again on the blade tips just forward of the cockpit canopy before being thrown a hundred feet into the air.
The helicopter’s blades bounced like palm fronds in a hurricane. One blade snapped and flew off into space; the others dipped so low that they struck the ground and then the tail, snapping off the tail rotor. Unbalanced, the entire main-rotor assembly cracked off the hub and shattered. The transmission screamed into high rpm’s, then it too shattered and disintegrated. The transmission burst into a globe of shrapnel, shelling out the turbine engine with a huge explosion.
Patrick landed up against the steel post of one of the facility’s ballpark lights. He knew he was alive because the ferocity of the electrical surges through the suit had set his entire body on fire. He writhed in pain and tried to relax his muscles, let the energy move through him and dissipate; but the more he tried to relax, the harder the waves of electricity came.
It felt like hours before they stopped. He didn’t dare move at first, thinking he was sawed into pieces. The vision of those rotor blades rushing up to his face was imprinted on his eyeballs. But when he opened his eyes, he saw hangars, lights, and gray cloudy skies. He was alive.
He got to his feet and looked over the R amp; D facility flight line. Soldiers were streaming out both crew doors of the disabled Huey, some holding injured comrades. The MV-22 Pave Hammer tilt-
rotor was directly over the second one-it could fire straight down with its chin-mounted Chain Gun, but no one on board the Huey could shoot straight up because they’d be shooting through their own rotor disk. The second Huey’s tail rotor began to disintegrate as 20-millimeter rounds chewed it to pieces, and in seconds it was unflyable.
Soldiers began firing at the MV-22. “Hal! You’re taking ground fire!” Patrick shouted into his helmet radio. “Get out of there now!” As the MV-22 moved away, Patrick hit his thrusters, aiming straight at the soldiers firing on it. He plowed into them going full speed, knocking them over like an out-of-control truck.
Then he heard shouts of “Halt!” in German through his omnidirectional microphone-and cries of “Help!” in English. He hit his thrusters in the direction of the cries, jumping across the ramp behind the second hangar. He could see two soldiers chasing someone and recognized the running figure of Tom Chandler, carrying a woman down the fenceline behind the hangars. The soldiers had fired a warning shot in the air, but Chandler wasn’t stopping. One of them raced after him as the other knelt down and began to line up his shot.
Patrick hit his thrusters again but discovered they hadn’t recharged yet. He ran toward the kneeling soldier, shouting, “Chandler! Gun! Behind you!” with his electronically amplified voice. Chandler turned, pushed Kaddiri to the ground next to the fence, and raised a pistol. At last, a “Ready” indication. Patrick hit his thrusters and speared the kneeling soldier with his flying body just in time. The other soldier had thrown himself on the ground when he saw Chandler’s gun, trying to find cover.
Patrick got to his feet, made sure the one he had downed was out cold, and yelled “Stop!” at the second soldier. But he was too late. Chandler went down just as Patrick reached the guy and put him out of commission.
Patrick went over to Helen, lying where she had fallen when Chandler dropped. She looked semiconscious. “Helen! It’s Patrick! Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes. “Patrick?” she said groggily. “Patrick! I… I think I’m okay.” She turned her head toward Chandler. “He saved my life, the son of a bitch. How is he?”
Patrick checked him over. He had a bullet in his upper chest and left shoulder. “Not good,” he said. He tore off one of Chandler’s pant legs and stuffed the cloth into his chest wound to stop the bleeding. They heard the sirens of approaching police cars and fire trucks. “We’re going to have to get him out of here. And you need to be checked over too.”
The MV-22 had swooped over the R amp; D facility, firing at soldiers on the ground, but now it touched down on the ramp behind the second disabled Huey. Patrick carried Chandler out onto the ramp, with Helen hobbling beside him, just as the Sheriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol cars and county fire trucks roared up. The officers ran out, weapons drawn, and aimed at Patrick. “Put him down,” they ordered. “Hands in the air!”
“Hold on, hold on!” It was the commander of the Highway Patrol’s SWAT team, Thomas Conrad, who ran up, followed by Masters and Briggs. “Let him go, boys. He’s one of us.” Then he pointed to Chandler, still in Patrick’s arms. “But not that man. He’s under arrest. Get him to the hospital but keep an officer with him at all times. And this lady needs medical help too. But hold it just a sec…” Conrad went over to where Chandler was lying, withdrew something from his pocket, and put it in Patrick’s right hand. “Here,” he said. “You deserve this a hell of a lot more than he does.”
Patrick looked at it. It was Chandler’s gold captain’s badge.
Jon Masters was focused only on Helen. He took off his jacket and gently wrapped it around her. “Oh God, Helen,” he kept saying. “Are you all right? Oh Helen, I’m so sorry…”
“I’m okay, Jon, I really am,” she reassured him, smiling at him weakly. “I… I must look like hell, but I’m not really hurt.”
“You look beautiful to me,” he said. “But you’ve been through hell, and we need to get you to the hospital right away.” The paramedics moved him out of the way and helped Helen onto a gurney. As they began to wheel her to the ambulance, she reached out a hand and grabbed at his sleeve. “Don’t leave me, Jon,” she said.
He took her hand and walked beside her. “I won’t, Helen,” he said. “Never again.” He realized he was deliriously happy. “You crazy kid, you’re still in love with me.”
“Yes, you crazy kid,” she replied happily, “I’m in love with you.”
Research and Development Facility,
Sacramento-Mather Jetport
several hours later
Hal Briggs thought it was the weirdest sight he had ever seen. There sat Patrick McLanahan in the chair in his office at the R amp; D facility, taking sips of coffee and working on the computer-with a cord running from him to a wall outlet. Of course, he still had the BERP suit on. But weird was the word, like Patrick was some kind of futuristic half-man, half-machine, both parts getting refreshed at the same time.
It had been a very long day. After the shootout with Townsend’s men, the R amp; D facility had been overrun with sheriff’s deputies, then Highway Patrol investigators, then FBI and ATF officers. Since Townsend was so fond of using booby traps, the whole facility had to be evacuated while the place was searched. Then the interviews began, one agency after another gathering statements from all of them. Additional security units were on the way from Sky Masters, Inc.’s facilities in Las Vegas, San Diego, and Arkansas to secure the Sacramento facility, but until they arrived the place was being guarded by Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department deputies, augmented with National Guard troops.
“Out of the twelve soldiers that Chandler said were here,” Briggs said to Patrick, “we got seven, Sacramento County Sheriff’s got one, and Folsom police got another one. That leaves three unaccounted for. Not a bad day’s work.”
“It’s not them I’m worried about-it’s Townsend and Reingruber I’m after,” Patrick said, seated at his terminal. He was fingering Chandler’s seven-pointed gold star thoughtfully.
“Unfortunately, I think the only way we’re going to learn what he’s going to do next is to wait,” Briggs said. “He’s probably got a dozen more hideouts in the area that we don’t know about. He could be anywhere. If he were smart, he’d be long gone.”
“No,” Patrick said. “He’s after something here. This whole caper of his never made any sense. First he’s into armed robbery, but he only hit one place. Next he’s into drugs, but then he blows it all up. He raids this place, but it looks like this was just a target of opportunity. He’s an arms smuggler and dealer, not a drug dealer. What’s he doing here?”
“Nothing against your hometown, partner,” Briggs said, “but there ain’t a helluva lot here. You’ve got Intel, HP, Packard Bell, Aerojet, and a couple of other high-tech companies, and you’ve got the state capital. Except for a couple of bases outside of town, all of the military bases here are closed or will be closed soon. There’s nothing here.”
“Henri Cazaux was involved in some pretty elaborate schemes to cover his real objectives,” Patrick pointed out. “Maybe Townsend is doing the same thing.”
“But what? Cazaux was supposedly out to avenge himself on the United States and the US Air Force for screwing up his twisted little head when he was a kid,” Briggs said. “You think Townsend wants revenge on Sacramento? What for? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Makes as much sense as anything else he’s done,” McLanahan said. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t help us figure out what he’s going to do next or help us catch him.”
“Hey, I say let’s leave it up to the FBI now,” Briggs said. “My bosses at ISA are screaming their heads off, asking what the hell I’m doing flying support for the local yokels. No one has any sense of humor anymore.” Patrick kept flipping through computer records. “What are you doing there?”
“Just trying to figure out what Townsend’s men were looking at. They were obviously accessing all our Internet stuff, trying to find a way to access our company network,
looking for passwords, downloaded messages, journals, notes, that sort of thing. I should be able to backtrack and find out what they were looking at.”
“Say what?”
“They were looking for clues about where users stored their passwords,” Patrick explained. “Remember when you could look around the doorsills and inside desk drawers around any combination safe in the Air Force and find the combination to that safe? Guys had trouble remembering the combination, so they wrote it down near the safe itself.”
“Now, that’s stupid.”
“Stupid but commonplace,” Patrick said. “Computers can do the same thing, but they do it electronically. You just need to know where to look.”
“Can you see if they broke in to your system?”
“The security offices in Arkansas should be able to tell us that when they do a security audit,” Patrick said. He called up several Internet-access programs and browsers. “Judging by how much they hurt Helen, they weren’t able to get in.” He paused, lost in thought. “They were definitely looking at the engineers’ individual Internet-access applications, looking for stored passwords. The company prohibits storing passwords and our applications don’t allow it, but some guys get careless or lazy and program them in anyway, using macros.”
“You lost me, man,” Hal Briggs said. “That computer stuff is for the birds. Give me a gun and a chopper any day, and I’ll solve all the problems of the world.” But curiosity got the better of him, and he peeked over Patrick’s shoulder. “You got something?”
“Not about our network, but something else,” Patrick said. “This is an Internet browser program, for accessing articles on the World Wide Web-that’s the global network of computers, all linked together. Browsers save pages in files called caches, which allows the pages to load faster. You can look back through the cached pages and see what they were looking at. Pages accessed from secure sites aren’t cached, but articles accessed over nonsecure sites are. Look at this.”