by Theo Cage
“You're not going to believe this,” said Brent.
Trent sighed into the phone’s microphone, a rush of anxiety turned digital in his ear. “Let me have it.”
“Rice has gone James Bond on our ass. His trailer just burst open - looks like explosive bolts knocked the sides down. And he lifted off with some high tech personal helicopter and disappeared into the night.”
“Where the hell did he get a chopper from?”
“And from what I saw, this was no ordinary bird. Something very advanced, stealth materials, light weight, and almost silent.”
“Did you get a direction?”
“Twenty feet in the air, the thing just disappeared. Just melted into the night. I couldn't even venture a guess. Although I stick with my original hunch. He's headed towards D.C.”
“Give me a location. I'll have a team there in a few hours. I want that truck and trailer dissected.”
“Send a team, Trent. But let's not get distracted. They won't find anything.”
“Have you talked to the bikers? Do we know why they were going to war with Rice?”
“They disappeared like cockroaches do when you turn on the lights. I have one of them though. When the leaders SUV crashed, a bunch of them hustled him away in a truck. They took him to the nearest ICU. In Missoula. I phoned. He arrived at the emergency about two hours ago. I'm headed there next.”
“Any idea why they would have a hate on for a black ops guy who hasn't worked for a decade?”
“None. But he killed at least five of them tonight. So I don't think they've kissed and made up quite yet.”
. . . . .
TRENT RAZER STUDIED THE PHOTO of the strange craft his brother took on his phone. Nothing more than a blur against a barely discernable smudge of tree tops.
Elmer Fudd had done it to them again. His tractor-trailer secreting some kind of experimental helicopter. Rice had flown to parts unknown.
“Stealth?” said his brother.
“Graphite construction. No heat signature. Silent.”
“What the… ? Where would he get that from?”
“We’re checking.”
“We’re looking stupider by the minute.”
“I’m not feeling stupid. I’m feeling like Kreegar’s not telling us everything.”
“Like what?”
“Rice is no church-mouse. He’s got access to capital, resources, maybe cash.”
“That’s a different case than the one we signed onto?”
“It’s more than that. It wouldn’t make sense for Kreegar to keep us in the dark. He wants this guy desperately.”
“So he doesn’t know.”
“Nope. He’s the stupid one.”
“We have to get smart fast.”
“Rice is not on his own. He has to have friends and relationships that Kreegar knows nothing about. That’s our way in. We don’t have to track him down. We need to track his friends down.”
CHAPTER 35
Whiskey Gulch, Montana
RICE WAS SURPRISED by how quickly the ZI9 ascended from the trailer platform, leaping up over the ribbon of Interstate that snaked through the heavy pine forest.
Over the last half hour, the night air had cleared, the stars now as sharp as crystals. Below, Rice could see clusters of Harleys, the moonlight reflecting off chrome and glossy paint. The bikers were rushing to their machines, lighting them up, yellow beams arcing through the surrounding tree line. They were turning their bikes back to the highway, probably in a last ditch attempt to follow him.
Rice veered away from the Interstate, taking a heading southeast, more to frustrate the bikers than anything else. He needed to keep a visual on the roadway. It was his only route marker, but he could navigate from a distance if he could achieve enough altitude.
His display screen glowed electric blue; he could see the spill of light paint his hand on the joystick. But the copter didn’t feel as light under his touch as it did when he tested the vehicle. It was wallowing, hesitating when it should be climbing. Despite the concern, he felt elated. It was a moonless night, perfect for his escape. The GPS system indicated a southeastern vector and there were no warning lights flashing.
But Rice could still feel a sluggishness in the controls - like the bird was burdened and struggling. His speed and climb rate were reduced as well. He tapped the display panel. Range was recalculating. Only seven hundred miles. The designers told him 1200. Something was wrong and it wasn't like he could pull up to an Exxon station and refuel. Had some biker scored a lucky shot? Damaged the fuel cells?
Rice commanded a team once that rescued a DIA case officer from militants in Syria. The operative now owned the company that built the Z19. He was happy to return the favor but Rice would still like to get the unit back in one piece. The stealth copter was worth twenty five million dollars.
Rice looked at the guidance screen. The highway below was still in visual range, cutting its way through the foothills, but very shortly he would have to resort to another tactic, take a direct route over Glacier National Park. Not a place you’d want to crash. And he would no longer have the luxury of following the highway for guidance in case he ran into trouble.
And he had another problem. Where to land? He didn't have enough fuel to last until daybreak. He was going to have to make a non-instrumental landing, in the wild, in the pitch darkness of a moonless night. On a flying machine he had only landed once in his entire life. And not very well.
CHAPTER 36
Bismarck, N.D.
BRITT JOHNSON LOVED THE STARS - how they looked down on her with a certain nonchalance, their impossible power and heat dimmed by unimaginable distance, until their glow was no more fierce than that of a firefly. She stood there on her back porch, watching, tired from a long day in the sun, trimming hedges, cutting grass, all the things her husband used to do, feeling not a breath of a breeze now.
Then out of the night sky something came into view, a machine so alien, it could have been a fragile prehistoric moth. The shape hesitated in the night sky above her backyard, hung there almost soundlessly, then folded in on itself and plummeted down into the pasture next to the storage shed.
There was an explosion of dry dirt and dust and fractional parts that formed a faint mushroom cloud of mist above the crash site, which slowly settled into the tall grass.
The whole sequence happened so fast it made her doubt her senses. But she could hear the faint whine of a motor where a motor shouldn’t be. She had sold every tractor, every fueled machine that came with the home the year she made the purchase. She wanted peace and quiet. But this sound drew her.
She stepped off the porch in her bare feet and followed the sound. About a hundred yards out, the shape of something man-made came into focus. The sides were dull grey, the body broken in half. There was wreckage, but no debris field. Some sort of amazing flying machine, in pieces, some fragments glowing in the dark.
She had never had any patience for talk of UFO’s. She was a practical woman, a trained nurse, had a subscription to Skeptical Enquirer magazine. Yet here it lay, an alien spacecraft, in her pasture. She crept up to it cautiously, avoiding stray bits of the machine lying in the Bromegrass. At this distance she could make out the remains of a cockpit, blue lights glowing dimly. And then… a human hand.
She moved faster now, her training kicking in. She touched the wrist and felt for a pulse. Weak and thready. That usually meant a loss of blood pressure. She moved her fingers up the arm, which was clearly male, feeling for signs of injury or bleeding. Then she found the source of the damage. A part of the ship had pierced the pilot’s side, his left, the fourth quadrant. Blood had filled his clothes and soaked the grass around the crash site. Her first thought was to call 911, but before she left him here, she needed to try and stop the bleeding.
She reached over in the dark. There was serious danger in removing objects from patient’s bodies. The stress it caused could push people into shock and cause death. She had also seen patien
ts where vital organs were damaged and removing the foreign object caused a fatal bleed-out in seconds. At this point she felt it was safer to leave the object in the pilot.
Moving him would also be a problem. What she could see of him led her to guess he weighed between 190-200 pounds - while she weighed less than 125 and hadn’t been to a gym in over 10 years. She didn’t think she could maneuver him out of the body of the ship and another hundred yards across the yard. But when she released him and stood, he moaned. She knelt down by his head.
“You’re hurt. I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“No… ” he murmured. “You can’t.”
“You need help. You might have internal bleeding.”
“If you call 911, I’ll be dead within the day anyway.”
“I can’t care for you. I need to call someone. I’ll only be a minute.”
“Anyone you call will only send a death squad. If that’s what you want.” Then his head fell over to the side and he was still. Death squad? Why would someone say “death squad?” Did he mean the police? Was he a fugitive from justice? In a flying machine like nothing she had ever seen before?
She stood, her heart racing. She knew she didn’t have a lot of time. She needed to staunch the bleeding. A former cow pasture was not an ideal operating room. She ran back to her house and found a flashlight in the back storage closet as well as several towels. As she passed her phone, she stopped for a second, feeling a stab of guilt. He could die right there in her backyard and she would be responsible. But the urgency in his voice was so compelling. She’d heard delirium before. These were not the ravings of someone in shock. He spoke carefully and deliberately, making every effort to have her understand he was not semi-conscious or in a dream state.
She rushed back to the downed craft and knelt by the pilot. She examined the remnant of the ship that had pierced his side. The object was about the thickness of a kitchen knife and was made of the same dark grey material as the ship. A support member or structural framing that had broken off in the crash? About six inches were protruding from his lower abdomen. Could be piercing his lower intestine, which could cause a massive infection. She felt his forehead. No fever yet, so no evidence of that.
She wrapped her hand around the piece of metal and heard the pilot groan. I’m hurting him, she realized. She had no way of knowing how deep the wound was and thought if she could move the object carefully, she could get a sense of how deeply it had penetrated. To her surprise the piece of material came away in her hand. Thank goodness. The puncture wound was less than an inch deep. That would mean some torn muscles in the abdominal wall, but no deep tissue or organ damage.
She was about to throw the object away when she noticed how surprisingly light it was. In fact, it almost had no weight at all. She examined the fragment under the illumination of the flashlight. The end was torn, not broken clean, and she could see tiny fibers picking up the light. This wasn’t metal. Probably graphite. Who makes flying machines out of graphite? If she didn’t know better she would think her patient had landed in her backyard in a time travel machine.
CHAPTER 37
Bismarck, N.D.
AT ONE POINT IN HER LIFE, somewhere in the distant innocent past, Addie would have been worrying herself sick over what she had just done. But tonight she felt almost nothing; a tug perhaps, like someone pulling on a stitch. The man who probably saved her life, with a name she didn’t believe, but let’s call him Rice anyway, was laying in the wreckage of some mystery machine and all she thought about was her own safety.
The woman from the farmhouse had found the ship, dressed in a nightgown of all things and bare feet, framed in a sky full of thousands of points of light. Then she spoke to the pilot and left quickly, Addie assumed, to get help.
Addie was confused and her head hurt and every star she focused on had a twin that floated just off to the right, blinking on and off. But she was alive and she couldn’t afford to be around when the authorities arrived. The police attention would attract Ruffino like a great white to a floundering seal. Rice would have to look after himself.
When the woman in the pajamas ran back to the house, Addie got up with some difficulty and sprinted to the edge of the woods. She looked back once, but it almost caused her to pass out so she just bee-lined for the protection of the tree line. Once out of the clearing she sat down next to a thick poplar tree and closed her eyes.
Rice may not be a great driver of eighteen-wheelers, but he sure knew how to fly that contraption they escaped in. She was certain they were done for, falling from that height. She had tucked herself down in the back storage areas just before take-off, hoping Rice wouldn’t notice. Once they took off, her stomach lurching every time they banked, she realized her extra weight might be causing a problem, could in fact be the reason the plane crashed. But they did make their escape in a pretty dramatic fashion and she figured Rice was just dazed.
Addie had faced some pretty frightening challenges in the past; being stuck in the middle of nowhere wasn’t an insurmountable problem. She still had lots of cash. She decided that waiting for help to arrive might not be a good idea. Who knew what agency would show up with squads of dudes in HAZMAT suits and FBI SWAT snipers, combing the area for clues? So best she got out now before sunup.
She got up, hugged the closest tree for a minute while her head cleared, and then moved further into the dark of the forest.
CHAPTER 38
Los Angeles, California
THEY WEREN’T POLITE. And they were far from gentle.
Razer’s men went into the rambling bungalow at three AM, easily disarmed the home alarm system, and took Scott Rice, Jeannie Rice and their two kids - one boy, one girl - and hustled them into a cargo van parked in the front drive.
Scott made a fuss and was rewarded with a broken nose. He held on to his two kids, crouched in the back of the van, blood running down the front of his face. Jeannie knew this was about the goddamn brother-in-law, Burroughs, vanished for ten years. But still haunting them daily. She was as tense as a pulled bowstring. Scott could see her fuming and was worried that she might say something that would endanger them all.
“We don’t know where Burroughs is. We never did. We want nothing to do with that spook,” she growled through tears.
“You’re a bargaining chip, Mrs. Rice. That’s all,” said one of the kidnappers. One was now in the driver’s seat, pulling out of the circular drive. The other two were crouched in the back. The bulkiest one, across from Jeannie, was holding a gun. Scott recognized a silencer on the end. To him, that meant they were serious. They were actually considering using the firearm.
“You could kill us all. He could care less,” said Scott.
“I think you underestimate your value. Did you know you have been under 24/7 surveillance by the government ever since your brother disappeared?”
“That was a waste,” said Scott, blinking. Who would have known that a broken nose could be this painful. But he tried to stay brave for his kids.
“But now that your brother is back on our radar, you have become valuable again.”
“He won’t bargain. You know that from his past,” said Scott.
They ignored the comment. The panel van was speeding down Sunset now, the streetlights flashing through the break in the curtains separating the driver from the hostages in the back. Scott was trying to think ahead. Where would they take them? Into the hills?
They came to a hard stop at a red light. Jeannie looked over at her children, her eyes wet, her jaw set. Then they all heard the sound of glass breaking. Nothing overly dramatic. Like the sound a fragile Christmas tree ornament might make falling from a bough. A fragile crystalline pop.
The two kidnappers in the back of the van looked at each other. One looked like he was about to call out to the driver, but stopped. They were both hunched now, on their knees, listening.
Then the van started to slowly roll forward and the men relaxed. But there was no acceleration. It felt to
Scott like the driver had simply taken his foot off the gas. They were just rolling through the empty intersection.
One of the men turned to the front and leaned over into the cab. Again the sound of ice shattering and the kidnapper fell forward, soundlessly. He lay there, a fine spray of glass falling on all of them like brittle snow. The entire Rice family, eyes wide, looked at the last surviving member of the extraction team. He was the same guy who broke Scott’s nose, a massive bear of a man.
“What now, asshole?” asked Scott. The vehicle had slowly rolled to the curb and stopped, the engine still running.
“Now I know why your brother never liked you,” he said. “You think these killers are you friends? I think we’re all fucked.” Then the big guy yelled, his free hand cupped around his month. “They all die in here if you come any closer!”
All they could hear was distant traffic on the freeway, a few long haul trucks plowing through the night. The blatt of their engines as they geared down for West Hollywood.
“Probably not a good idea to just sit here at this intersection,” said Scott, holding his head back to staunch the bleeding.
“Shut up,” said the bear guy. “I’m closer to shooting you than I’ve been all night.”
“No retort,” said Scott.
“What?”
“All we heard was the bullet go through the windshield, but no explosion. So whoever is shooting, is doing it from a long way away. They must be good.”
“I told you to shut up.”
“A sniper. A marksman,” said Scott.
The bear guy went quiet.
“And sooner or later someone is going to report a van sitting at the lights with the driver slumped over the steering wheel.”
Bear man waved his gun at Jeannie. “Make yourself useful. You’re going to drive us out of here.”