Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  “Take care of this?” DeLuca said. “You can’t even shoot me yourself? What kind of pussy bullshit is that?” Koenig stopped in his tracks. DeLuca wasn’t exactly sure where he was going with this or what he was hoping to accomplish, beyond getting Koenig to do something stupid. He imagined Koenig had a high opinion of himself. Such high opinions were often a man’s weakest link. He also wanted to stall, on the off chance that something brilliant would occur to him. “But then I haven’t met a candy-assed rear-echelon motherfucker like you yet with half the balls he thought he had. You guys are great at sitting behind your plasma screens with your hot little mouses in your hands, clicking on what infantry platoons you want to send where or what village you want to target from six thousand miles away, but not one of you pissants ever had to kill a man with your own hands close enough to watch his eyes turn red or come within a hundred miles of being killed yourself. You know what the real soldiers call you? Playstation Generals. But don’t stay on my account—I know you’ve got beaver you need to hunt with RPGs.”

  Koenig turned and was about to say something, then thought better of it, nodding to Carr before walking to the front door and exiting.

  DeLuca turned to face Carr.

  “I don’t suppose if I told you you were under arrest, you’d put the gun down?” DeLuca said.

  Carr shook his head, still smiling confidently.

  “It looks like I’m going to have to wipe that smirk off your face myself then,” DeLuca said. He circled slowly to his left. Carr responded, evidently amused anew.

  “And how are you going to do that?” Carr said.

  “Well,” DeLuca said. “I could just let you kill me and hope that thirty or forty years of having a guilty conscience would destroy your soul. But that presupposes a level of self-reflection your generation tends to lack, so I guess I’ll just have to kick your ass the old-fashioned way.”

  “You’re going to kick my ass?” Carr said.

  “I’m going to try,” DeLuca said, still sizing up his opponent. “My boy Dan Sykes said you’re pretty good. And I know you’re not going to shoot me here because you don’t want to get blood on the general’s Persian rug, so why don’t you put the gun down and show me some of your jujitsu shit? But I gotta warn you—I did a little boxing in college. Come on, Lieutenant—don’t tell me you’re afraid of a man my age? And you know I’m right about the rug.”

  “Your boy Sykes lasted less than a minute,” Carr said, lowering the gun. “What makes you think you could do any better?”

  “I have something Dan Sykes didn’t have,” DeLuca said.

  “The wisdom that comes with age?” Carr offered.

  “No,” DeLuca said. “Backup.”

  He glanced over Carr’s shoulder. Carr refused to look.

  “Is this where you cleverly trick me into turning my head?” Carr said.

  “I don’t want to shoot you, son,” Ben Yutahay said from the doorway, where he leveled the Remington pump-action shotgun at the lieutenant, “but on the other hand, I don’t really care about the rug.”

  Carr turned his head, momentarily, but it was long enough for DeLuca to pick up a lamp with a heavy ceramic base, which he then broke across the back of Carr’s head. Carr fell where he stood.

  DeLuca heard the helicopter’s engines revving.

  He picked up Carr’s automatic, nodded a thank-you to Yutahay, then ran for the helipad, which was about a hundred yards off. There was no time to think, so he didn’t try. He squeezed off four quick rounds but knew the small sidearm wasn’t going to stop the helicopter, so he sprinted, knowing only that if Koenig went to ground, he was going to be much harder to find. He was thirty yards away as the chopper lifted from the pad. DeLuca ran harder and managed to grab hold of the portside runner, sprinting along with the helicopter until the engine revved even higher and he felt himself lifted from the ground, at which point he realized this was one of the stupider things he’d ever done. It was not his intention to fly, and he’d never cared much for helicopters, even when he was inside them (“fifty thousand rivets flying in loose formation,” a pilot friend had once called them), but when he realized he was twenty feet off the ground and rising, he decided it would be prudent to hang on.

  He threw a leg over the runner and wrapped his arms around the pylon. Koenig’s pilot tried to shake him off, banking sharply to the left, then to the right, while the ground below spun and whirled. The pilot pulled on the collective and the nose of the helicopter turned skyward. DeLuca felt his weight shift to the rear.

  The chopper pitched left, then right, then left again. When the helicopter suddenly dived, DeLuca felt his stomach turn inside out, but he managed to wrap his other leg around the runner to straddle it. They wheeled left and circled back to the house, picking up speed.

  Then a winch began to lower from the starboard port, a fat iron hook on the end of a half-inch-thick steel cable. At eight feet, it stopped.

  Koenig’s pilot banked sharply left, using the winch in an attempt to knock DeLuca from his perch. The first blow struck the strut, clanging loudly. The second missed by a wide margin, but then the hook whipped around and struck DeLuca in the ribs, breaking at least one of them, by DeLuca’s rough guess.

  He held on.

  The chopper banked left and dived. The earth spun. DeLuca saw the estate below him. His head swam and he felt dizzy. The hook swung back and momentarily wrapped around the runner’s pylon, pinching his right hand. He screamed as the pain shot the length of his arm. When the cable unwrapped, he tried to grab the hook and immobilize it, but as the chopper banked sharply right, he lost his balance.

  He fell.

  He grabbed hold of the cable to stop his fall. He tried to hang on to the runner with his feet, but the force was too much, and when the helicopter jerked again, his feet slipped.

  He spiraled below the helicopter, swinging free on the winch cable, his weight sliding him down the cable until he grabbed the hook with his right hand, his flesh torn and burning. He was spinning madly and couldn’t reach the hook with his left hand.

  The helicopter turned sharply. He swung out wide from centrifugal force. The pilot was lowering the cable. At the same time, the helicopter descended.

  He managed to grab the cable with his left hand, gaining purchase, but he was still spinning. He was bleeding, blood running down his right arm.

  He hung on.

  The helicopter rose, heading back toward the house.

  He spread-eagled his legs to stabilize his rotation.

  He saw the house below approaching. He saw Ben Yutahay standing in the driveway, the Mark 40 DeLuca had seen on the porch resting on Yutahay’s shoulder, aimed at the chopper.

  They were over the stables.

  They were over the pool.

  He wasn’t going to get a second chance.

  Timing was key. He estimated the chopper’s forward speed at thirty or forty miles an hour, but hanging from the bottom of a helicopter by a cable, it was difficult to be certain.

  He saw Yutahay fire. He saw the grenade snaking up from the ground.

  He let go.

  The grenade missed the helicopter, hissing over his head as he fell.

  He flew through the air, dropping from what he estimated to be a height of perhaps one hundred feet. He spread his arms and legs wide to slow his acceleration. Falling free. Soaring. It was almost pleasant. He recalled a parachute jump he’d made in Iraq, a night jump from a height of over six miles. Falling from the sky might not be a bad way to die.

  Maybe some other day.

  His timing was good. He braced himself, covering his face and turning sideways before slamming flat against the side of the inflated tennis court dome. The blow knocked the wind out of him, and he nearly blacked out, but the ripstop nylon held, collapsing under his weight and the force of the collision like an overinflated pole vault pad but cushioning his fall.

  As the dome sprang gently back into form, DeLuca slid down the side and hit the ground hard. H
e wanted to scream in pain—apparently the hook had struck him in the ankle, though he hadn’t noticed—but he had to regain his breath first.

  He limped around the end of the dome, which blocked his view.

  In the distance, the helicopter was changing its vector, rising and banking left, screaming off toward the airstrip. DeLuca watched as it climbed, helpless to stop it, the sound of its engines growing fainter and fainter.

  Ben Yutahay was at his side, putting his arm around DeLuca’s waist to support him.

  “Are you all right?” Yutahay asked.

  His ribs hurt if he inhaled too deeply—something was definitely cracked where the winch had struck him—and the palm of his right hand was a bloody mess, but other than that, he was no worse for wear.

  “I’m okay,” he told Yutahay. They watched as, a moment later, the white jet they’d seen parked on the landing strip screamed into the sky.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I shot at the helicopter, but I figured you for a goner anyway,” Yutahay said. “My artillery skills are a little rusty.”

  “I would have figured the same way. I’m only sorry you missed,” DeLuca said.

  He crossed to the door to the tennis court dome, testing the knob to discover the door was locked. Yutahay moved to his side, bidding DeLuca to stand back, lowering the sawed-off shotgun at the door, until he thought better and aimed ten feet to the left of the door before firing. The blast blew a six-foot hole in the fabric. The air that rushed out was cool.

  DeLuca ducked his head and entered first. Yutahay followed. DeLuca’d hoped to find a satellite dish array inside the dome, but instead found only a tennis court, red clay, air-conditioned, the surface strewn with bright green tennis balls.

  He found a towel and wrapped it around his hand, then went back outside. He looked at the house. A search was unlikely to turn up anything, given Koenig’s thoroughness. DeLuca would have given anything to have a look at the laptop he’d seen on Koenig’s desk.

  He felt Ben Yutahay’s hand on his shoulder as he stared off to the east. There was no sign of the helicopter anymore, no sound but the desert breeze.

  “What about Marvin?” DeLuca asked. “Any signs?”

  “Signs, yes,” Yutahay said. “I think I don’t want to agree with what they’re telling me.”

  “What are they telling you?” DeLuca said.

  “He stopped, about there,” Yutahay said, pointing to the front of the house. “I saw his boot heel but not his kickstand, so I don’t think he got off the bike. I think he was talking to someone at the house. Then he took off at a high speed, because you can see where his rear wheel fishtailed. He rode in that direction,” Yutahay said, pointing, “and then he turned right. I found one of those circles of glass in the sand where he veered, and another where he turned. I think he was running from somebody. Then the tracks of his dirt bike lead up to the edge of the cliff. I don’t think he knew it was coming because there’s no sign that he hit his brakes, and I think he must have been going maybe sixty to eighty miles an hour. There’s maybe a three-hundred-foot drop. I was going to climb down to see if I could find his bike or his remains when I sensed that you might be in trouble.”

  “We can send some men down there when we search the house. You can go with them if you’d like,” DeLuca said, even though he doubted they’d find anything.

  “Who do you think he was running from?” Yutahay said, looking DeLuca in the eye. “Can you tell me?”

  DeLuca wished he could.

  “I think Cheryl had an affair with Koenig. He wouldn’t let her end it. I think Marvin came here to tell Koenig to back off. He was in love with Cheryl Escavedo.”

  Yutahay looked as if he was about to break down, but only for a moment. He blinked once, then took a deep breath, steeling himself.

  “I’m glad that he was in love,” he said at last. “It would be a hard thing, to die without ever knowing that. I don’t think he ever loved his wife. He married her because she was pregnant, but I don’t think he ever loved her. Maybe it’s a good thing to know that you are going to die because of love. Do you think?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  DELUCA GOT HIS HAND ATTENDED TO AT THE Kirtland Base Hospital, telling the doctor he’d had a rope-climbing accident. He’d cracked his seventh rib with a torn costochondral joint and sustained a badly bruised medial malleolus in his right foot, for which the doctor prescribed Tylenol and rest. He could do the Tylenol part, but rest was out of the question, at least for now.

  He called a full briefing in the RV, with Colonel Oswald and General LeDoux split-screened on the plasma monitor. Oswald explained the reasons why the team had been only partially read on about Darkstar. Sykes seemed annoyed, judging by his body language, but the others accepted the explanation at face value. When Oswald was finished speaking, he asked if there were any questions.

  “I just don’t understand how it is that we don’t have the technology to find this thing,” Vasquez said. “I mean, we built it, right? It’s like a Klingon Bird of Prey or something.”

  “We built it to be invisible,” Oswald said. “To radar, infrared, opticals. We did a good job. And it only changes its signature when it fires, for a few seconds. We’d have to know exactly where to look, and exactly when to look. Other than that, this thing is a needle in a haystack as big as the sky.”

  “What about the danger of a matter/antimatter reaction,” DeLuca asked, touching on an element that Oswald had omitted from both this briefing and the previous one. If his team was going to be read on, then they were going to be read on all the way—no more bullshit. MacKenzie’s eyes widened as if she’d just seen a Kate Spade bag on sale for four dollars.

  Oswald looked uncomfortable, uncertain how to answer.

  “What Agent DeLuca is referring to,” General LeDoux said, “is a new kind of reactor powering the laser. Do you want me to get the hard science on this or would you settle for my own understanding?”

  “Yours will be fine,” DeLuca said.

  “My understanding is that the possibility is virtually nil,” LeDoux said. “At the same time, ‘virtually nil’ is not the same as ‘nil.’ What would actually happen in a cataclysmic detonation, since we can’t build an antimatter bomb small enough to test, is just theory. So far.”

  “So what do we do?” Sami asked. “I mean, why don’t we send the Third Army into Colorado and surround Cheyenne Mountain and say, ‘Come out with your fucking hands up’? Pardon my French. We don’t have the resources or something?”

  LeDoux shook his head.

  “You’re it. You are the resources,” he said. “I should tell you, people at the Pentagon have their jockey shorts twisted up around their ears, thinking that the knowledge of this has gone as far as it has. I’ve been arguing with them from the start about your need to know exactly what it is you’re dealing with, but the fight, as I understand it, goes all the way to the White House, where the feeling is that this is the biggest secret since Enigma. The op stays black, maximum discretion. I can get you all the toys you need, but as far as personnel goes, you’re it.”

  “But Sami still has a point,” Dan Sykes said. “You say Koenig’s been running this through NORAD. If he wrote the codes that let him do that, why can’t we unwrite the codes and reset the system? Or just pull the plug on Cheyenne? I mean, literally, take the cord out of the wall socket and watch all the lights go out and move everything to NORAD II for the time being?”

  “We can lock him out, or try to,” Oswald said, “but we can’t pull the plug, for obvious reasons. We can’t blind him without blinding ourselves. As far as NORAD II goes, General, why don’t you tell them?”

  “I was going to call you about this if you hadn’t called me first, David,” LeDoux said. “Sinkhole came online last night at 0200 hours. We had a team meet Koenig’s jet when it landed at Peterson but he wasn’t on it. If he’s at Sinkhole, we need to get him out. Unfortunately, Sinkhole is even more secure than Cheyenne, and all the access codes have be
en changed. It’s always been last resort, the deepest underground facility in the world and entirely self-contained. We can’t break in, at least not without drawing a whole lot of attention, and we can’t shut it down. Once again, this illustrates the weakness of a system designed to keep intruders out but which can apparently do very little once the firewalls are breached. Right now we can’t even communicate with it, but we’re assuming whoever is in there is going to pick up the phone eventually.”

  “And say what?” MacKenzie asked. “What does he want? That’s what I don’t get. His gig is blown—we know what he’s doing. I mean, we do, right? So what does he have left?”

  “We’re not sure what he wants,” LeDoux said. “Colonel?”

  “Department M-3 out of DOD’s PSYOPS is a watchdog unit that, since 1994, has run periodic evals on military personnel at the highest levels,” Oswald said. “Basically it’s a room full of Army shrinks who read reports and hopefully identify any psychological problems in leadership before they manifest themselves. They’re supposed to have access to everyone right up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but there’ve been some at that level who’ve resisted. It’s a good program, but it was originally Hillary Clinton’s idea, so you can imagine how well-received that was. At any rate, one of the doctors there has been trying to flag Koenig for years. Unfortunately, we didn’t listen to him. He thinks Koenig is certified paranoid-schizophrenic, possibly even to the point where he hears voices. But very special voices that tell him what to do and empower him. The doctor also thinks Koenig’s managed to surround himself with true believers, something like a personality cult, within STRATCOM.”

  “I was planning on talking to Lieutenant Carr, to see what he knows, after he gets over his headache,” DeLuca said. “I’ll brief you on what I find out.”