“Exactly.” Nick handed helmets to Kate and Jake. “These are equipped with radio and microphones, so we can keep in contact with each other while we’re in the air.” He waited for Kate and Jake to put them on and adjust their microphones. “On the count of three, all we have to do is run down this platform and jump off the cliff.”
“Outstanding,” Jake said. “Three.” He bolted forward, inflating the canopy behind him as he ran. Nick and Kate watched as he launched himself off the platform and sailed into the night.
Seconds later, Nick and Kate were airborne as well, following behind Jake as he soared down the mountain and over the valley. “Passing on your right,” Nick said into his helmet microphone as he pressed down on the speed bar and flew past Jake.
Kate watched as they sailed past little farms far below. “I can see the highway and the canyon. Neklan’s farm should be dead ahead.”
Nick pulled on one of the brake handles, and the paraglider shifted direction, cutting through the wind and soaring toward Shotover Gorge. “Let’s fly along the gorge and approach the house from the rear,” he said into the helmet microphone. “Most of the security is probably focused on the front.”
Kate looked down as they raced above the canyon tracing along the Shotover River. “There’s the estate. Let’s land in the middle of the vineyard. I think we’ll be able to hide in the grapevines.”
“Roger that,” Jake said into the helmet microphone. “I’m right behind you. I’m starting to get the hang of this thing.”
Nick began his descent, picking up speed as he went. “Landing is the tricky part. You want to be facing into the wind and start tapping on the brakes once you’re around fifteen feet off the ground. Then, gently increase the pressure as you get closer to your landing. Don’t go too hard too early, or you’ll stall out and fall.”
“No problem,” Jake said. “I’ll be sure to take it easy.”
“Perfect. Just make sure the brakes are at one hundred percent once you touch down or you’ll be dragged along the ground.”
Kate watched as they passed over Neklan’s property boundary. The area immediately around the house was surrounded by floodlights and lit up like a Christmas tree. Beneath her, at least a dozen men patrolled the grounds, some with dogs and all of them carrying assault rifles.
“The bartender wasn’t kidding when he said Neklan was paranoid,” she said to Nick as they passed silently over the guards’ heads and drifted toward the vineyard. “He’s got an army down there.”
“Just as long as he doesn’t have an air force.”
A small quadcopter aerial drone with a twenty-megapixel camera mounted to its bottom sped past Nick and Kate.
“I guess I spoke too soon,” Nick said. “I don’t think it saw us, but we’re going to have to get down quickly before it makes a second pass.”
“How quickly?”
“You don’t want to know.” Nick flew over the vineyard, pulled hard on one of the brakes, and shifted his entire body weight to that side. “Get ready. You’re going to feel some g-force. It can be disorienting.”
The glider turned sharply and began a steep downward corkscrew, with the entire canopy pointing directly at the earth. Kate braced herself as the centrifugal force racked her body.
“Hang on,” Nick said. “We’re almost there.” He released the brake, taking the glider out of its death spiral and touching down on the ground.
Kate jumped out of the harness and helped stash the glider canopy out of sight inside a nearby irrigation cistern.
“That was incredible,” she said. “Almost as good as free-falling. Maybe better.” She looked around. Jake was nowhere to be seen. “Are you there, Dad?” she said into the helmet microphone.
Kate waited for a moment, listening to the static on the other end. “He’s not answering,” she said to Nick. “Dad, are you okay?” Ten seconds later, her helmet radio crackled to life. “I’m down, but I totaled the paraglider and had to land at the far end of the vineyard in order to stay away from the drones. I’m probably about half a klick away from your position.”
“We’ll wait for you.”
“Great. I’ll hide the remains of the glider, and come to you. Give me five minutes.”
Nick picked a handful of grapes, popped one in his mouth, and looked around at the row after row of trellises filled with vines. “This place is state-of-the-art. He must have spent a fortune on some of these upgrades.”
A puff of fire shot out of a series of four-foot metal stakes planted in the ground every ten feet along the entire row, illuminating the vineyard for a split second.
“Propane torches,” Kate said. “I imagine they’re used to prevent frost from damaging the grapes.”
“Yeah, it looks like Neklan opted for the high-tech approach. I tinkered with developing a vineyard on my property in France, and I looked into propane. It’s expensive to run the lines up and down the rows, but one flip of a switch is all that’s needed to save a harvest. And it cuts down on farm labor.” Nick pointed at a giant twenty-foot-tall fan poking above an adjacent row of vines. “The propane lines also power those wind machines, which circulate the heat and keep the heavier cold air from settling down on the plants.”
Jake pushed his way past an adjacent trellis and stepped into Nick and Kate’s row, carrying the duffel bag. His clothes were in tatters, and he had a nasty-looking road rash on his right hip where he’d been dragged along the ground during the landing.
“You look pretty banged up. Are you okay?” Kate asked.
“Never better.” Jake dropped the duffel on the ground and smiled. “This is turning out to be the best vacation I’ve ever had.” He opened the duffel and grabbed a couple of fifty-caliber Desert Eagle Mark XIX Action Express semiautomatic handguns before handing the bag to Kate. “I’m calling dibs on these babies. I like to be prepared.”
Nick looked at the guns. “For what? A Sherman tank?”
“You never know,” Jake said. “My motto is ‘Go big or go home.’”
Kate removed a Glock, a stun gun, some extra magazines of ammo, and a couple of flash grenades, then sorted through the rest of the bag, examining the contents. “Where is all the C4 plastic explosive?”
Jake turned around and patted a fanny pack mounted to his rear. “Got this for Christmas from your sister last year. At first I thought it was ridiculous, but it’s perfect for holding my explosives. It even has a separate zippered compartment for the detonators.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be for holding your blood pressure meds and healthy snacks to regulate your blood sugar level?”
Jake blew out a raspberry. “I threw all that crap away.”
Kate looked through the vineyard at Neklan’s mansion a quarter mile away. “We have to figure out how we’re going to get past the guards and dogs.”
Nick looked at Jake. “We need a distraction.”
“Lucky for you, that’s my specialty. How big a distraction?”
“The biggest.”
Jake smiled. Another puff of fire shot out of the torches lining the vineyard. “I just might have a couple ideas.”
21
Nick and Kate hid at the edge of the vineyard and studied an eight-foot-tall cement enclosure a hundred feet away. A lone gunman leaned against the structure, rubbing his neck to stay awake and looking at his watch every couple of minutes.
“I’m guessing that guarding the vineyard’s mechanical pad isn’t a plum assignment. He looks like he’s just killing time until his shift is done,” Nick whispered.
The guard stretched, put down his gun, looked around, walked over to a tree, and unzipped his pants.
“Big mistake,” Kate said. “If I were him, I would have held it.”
Jake emerged from the shadows just behind the guard, encircled the man’s neck with his right arm, and grasped his own left biceps with his right h
and.
“He’s got that poor schmuck in a rear naked chokehold,” Kate said. “In a few seconds, his brain won’t be getting any blood, and then it’s game over.”
Jake brought his elbows together, applying pressure to the guard’s neck from both sides. After a few seconds of struggling, the gunman went limp and Jake lowered the unconscious man to the ground before dragging him behind the walled mechanical pad.
“It’s like watching Michelangelo at work,” Nick said, “if Michelangelo was an MMA fighter instead of a painter.”
Jake poked his head out of the enclosure, gave Nick and Kate a thumbs-up, and motioned them to join him in the enclosure.
Nick scanned the area. “Looks like the coast is clear. Let’s go see what he found.”
Nick and Kate sprinted out of the vineyard and over to the pad and snuck inside. A dozen five-thousand-gallon tanks of propane filled the space, leaving not a lot of extra room for the three of them to stand. Mounted to the wall was a network of valves and control panels for adjusting the rate and flow of propane to the equipment in the vineyard.
“Did you time me?” Jake asked Kate. He nudged the sleeping guard with his foot. “How many seconds until Tweedledum hit the floor?”
“Seven. Maybe eight.”
Jake looked a little disappointed. “I guess I’m out of practice. That’s what happens when you retire. You get soft.”
“You probably have jet lag,” Nick said. “In a day or two, you’ll be strangling bad guys like a champ. I’ll bet you even set a personal best.”
“I like this guy,” Jake said, pointing to Nick. He removed what looked like blobs of modeling clay from his fanny pack and plopped them on top of all the tanks, one by one.
Kate raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to blow up the propane tanks?”
Jake shook his head as he set blasting caps in each of the blobs of C4. “What do you think this is? Amateur hour? I thought you wanted a big distraction.”
Kate looked at Nick. “Bigger than sixty thousand gallons of propane going up in flames?”
Jake turned all the valves to one hundred percent and adjusted the flow rate to “Maximum” on the control panel. A loud hiss of propane filled the air as it was pumped out of the tanks, through the pipes, and into the fields. “Any idiot can blow up a propane tank. I’m going to blow up a vineyard.”
“I guess that should get their attention,” Nick said. “It’s not every day that a vineyard explodes.”
Jake removed a remote control from his fanny pack. “We should probably vamoose. We don’t want to be anywhere near here when we send an electrical signal to the blasting caps.”
Nick and Kate grabbed the unconscious guard and dragged him behind a rock wall a football field away from the equipment pad. Jake joined them thirty seconds later. “I checked all the charges. We’re good to go.”
Jake handed Kate what looked like a garage remote that had been customized with a single red button in the center labeled “Krakatoa.” “It’s my lucky detonator. I was going to pass it down to you on your wedding day, but this seems like the right time.”
“Boom,” Kate said and pressed the red button. A second later, the mechanical pad exploded in a giant fireball. “Good gravy,” she yelled over the noise. “They can probably see that from outer space.”
Nick looked down. “Do you feel that? The ground’s rumbling like an earthquake.”
Seconds later the torches in the vineyard began exploding in series, one after another, sending flames in all directions and turning the metal poles into giant propane-powered flamethrowers.
“Holy moly,” Nick said as the entire vineyard instantaneously caught fire. “I swear I’ve seen some crazy stuff, but it doesn’t get any crazier than this.”
Kate watched as one of the giant propane-powered fans groaned, followed by another and another. “Ooh. That can’t be good,” she said.
The groaning stopped and only the roar of the fire could be heard. A millisecond later, the wind machines exploded, hurling giant razor-sharp fan blades in every direction, some at least a hundred feet into the air. They reached the top of their trajectories and plummeted back to earth.
Jake grinned as it rained giant fan blades throughout the vineyard. One embedded itself into the earth just behind Neklan’s mansion, sending the guards scrambling for cover. “This is turning out even better than I imagined. I’ve still got it.”
Half the guards had run into the fields to fight the inferno. The other half, joined by an assortment of cooks and housekeepers, were frozen in place, staring glassy eyed at the spectacle with open mouths.
“What do you think?” Kate asked Nick.
“I think an entire marching band could waltz in the front door and not be noticed.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “It’s been a fun evening so far. I really don’t want to ruin it by getting shot.”
Nick snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. Zombies.”
“What?”
“The key to getting past a horde of zombies is to act like a zombie so they think you’re one of them.”
“So, basically, your plan is that we should wander around Neklan’s backyard like a couple of disoriented morons in hopes that it will fool the other disoriented morons into ignoring us while we walk into the house and steal their boss?”
“It’s not the stupidest idea,” Jake said. “There are so many people milling around out there, we just might blend in.” He held up one of his guns. “And if it doesn’t work, I still have my Desert Eagles.”
Nick mussed Kate’s hair and smeared some dirt on her face. “Try to look befuddled.” He undid the top button on her shirt. “There, now you’re perfect.”
Kate glanced at her cleavage. “How is that going to help me look befuddled?”
Nick looked down at Kate. “It’s not. That’s to help befuddle me.”
“Good grief.” Kate buttoned her shirt and took in the chaotic scene. “What if the zombies don’t buy it?”
“They usually eat your brains, but you never can tell with zombies,” Nick said.
“Whatever. Let’s do it.”
Nick, Kate, and Jake left their hiding spot behind the rock wall and meandered around the yard, making a slow, indirect path toward the house. They stopped every so often to look bewildered. Between the fire raging in the vineyard and the propeller blades littering the grounds, no one was paying attention to them as they skirted the perimeter, looking for an entrance to the house.
“There’s our way in,” Nick said, pointing to an open door.
Kate stepped inside, gun drawn. “It’s a commercial kitchen, but it’s deserted. Everyone must be outside watching the fire.”
A pastry chef walked out of an adjacent room carrying a small tray of croissants and stopped in his tracks. He looked from Nick to Kate to Jake. “Who are you? You’re not supposed to be here.”
“We’re the health inspectors,” Nick said. “We’re investigating a complaint that your croissants aren’t big and buttery enough.” He snatched a croissant off the tray and took a bite. “Oh man, this is good.” He handed it to Kate. “You’ll want in on this.”
Kate pushed the rest of it into her mouth. “Okay, we’ll let you off with a warning this time,” she said to the chef. She took a second croissant from the stunned man and stuffed it into her pocket. “I’m confiscating this, though, for testing down at the lab. By the way, you wouldn’t happen to know where we can find Viktor Neklan?”
“He’s in his bedroom, waiting for his croissants. It’s on the second floor, overlooking the vineyard.” He looked at Kate’s gun. “Look, I’m just the pastry chef. Personally, I can’t stand the guy. He rings me at all hours of the night.” The chef pantomimed answering a cellphone. “Stuart, send me up a sandwich with no crusts. Stuart, send me up an ice cream sundae with two cherries. Stuart, send me up a
basket of croissants heated to 102 degrees.”
The chef pointed at a small door in the corner of the room. “Once the dumbwaiter was broken and he docked me two weeks’ pay because his food was late.”
“Interesting.” Nick walked over to the dumbwaiter and looked inside. “How many people do you think we could fit in there?”
Kate looked over Nick’s shoulder while Jake kept an eye on the chef. “Somewhere between zero and none.”
“It leads directly to Viktor Neklan’s bedroom. We won’t have to risk running into any of his goons.”
“I’m not even trying to stuff myself into that death trap,” Kate said. “What’s plan B?”
Nick took a couple of double-breasted white chef’s jackets and a couple of white pleated hats off a nearby coatrack and handed one to Kate. “We disguise ourselves as master chefs, and bring Mr. Neklan his croissants.”
Kate put on the coat and hat. “How do I look?”
“Like an FBI agent in a chef’s coat. How do I look?”
“Like a criminal in a white hat.”
Nick grabbed the tray of croissants and placed it on top of a food trolley, along with an assortment of jellies and a little flower in a vase. “What are you doing?” Kate asked.
Nick adjusted the vase. “Just because we’re ruthless kidnappers doesn’t mean we can’t take a little pride in our presentation.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “I’m sure he’ll be very impressed. Just before I stun-gun his ass and stuff him under the food cart.”
Jake escorted Stuart out the back door, told him to run like the wind and not look back. “What should I do now?” Jake asked Kate.
“Wait here and keep a lookout,” Kate said to Jake. “And, don’t blow anything else up.”
Jake shrugged. “No problem. I’m all out of C4 anyway.”
Nick and Kate pushed the cart through the kitchen and out into the hallway. Dim pathway lights led them through the warren of passageways toward the main living area. “I’m guessing that most of Neklan’s security is focused on the outside grounds,” Kate said. “He never expected anyone to actually break into his house.”
The Big Kahuna Page 18