Third Degree: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  “You’re a goddamn liar!” screamed Ray.

  “Keep this channel clear!” Ellis ordered. “Doctor, no matter how justified you may feel, you just shot a duly appointed officer of the law. You have only one option. You must surrender. I’m giving you three minutes to walk out of your house with your hands held high in the air. You must walk out alone, unarmed, without any member of your family. Do you understand?”

  Shields didn’t reply.

  “Dr. Shields? Did you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “The clock starts now. I beg you to come out peacefully.”

  Shields said nothing else.

  “Hang up, Sandra,” Ellis said.

  “He already broke the connection.”

  Ellis looked at his watch. “Whoever’s on those thermal cams, tell me if it looks like they’re going into the panic room.”

  “The kids may be in there already,” said a voice. “But I think the adults are in the kitchen.”

  Ray Breen said, “I never seen no chickenshit like this in my life, Billy Ray. The son of a bitch killed one of our people, and you—”

  “Shut up and listen!” Ellis hollered like a quarterback silencing his linemen in a fourth-quarter huddle. “We’re not waiting three minutes! We’re going in one minute. Copy?”

  Danny wasn’t sure he had heard right until Ray Breen said, “I got you now. We’re ready.”

  “Black Six,” Ellis said, “if Shields gets within thirty feet of that panic room, we’re going in. Keep me posted.”

  Christ, Danny thought. Shields could be in there thinking about giving up, and he’ll still be thinking about it when Ray Breen blows his head off. Sheriff Ellis’s strategy was sound; giving an unbalanced man a real deadline could easily push him into executing his hostages. But Danny couldn’t shake the feeling that they hadn’t done all they could to talk Shields out of the house. Or was that simply his guilt talking? Was there any hope that Shields would surrender? The doctor believed he’d just defended himself against an intruder trying to murder him. He was deep into a siege mentality. He was also terminally ill. Did it even matter to Warren when or where he died?

  “Take us up another hundred feet,” Sheriff Ellis ordered.

  Danny started ascending. Where’s Laurel now? he wondered. What will she do when they blow the doors? Drop to the floor or stand there like a doe in the headlights while bullets spray through the house? Is there any chance she’ll try to protect her husband? Danny didn’t think so, but even the slightest prospect of this terrified him, because he was certain that Ray meant to kill Shields no matter what.

  “Thirty-five seconds,” Ellis said, his eyes on his wristwatch. “Stay ready, Ray. Everybody key off your watches. Thirty seconds . . .”

  A silver sheet of rain hit the windshield, and Danny fell through a black hole, straight into Afghanistan. Forty-two marines were trapped on a mountaintop in the worst storm the company’s Tajik adviser could remember. Taliban guerrillas commanded by mujahideen who’d fought the Russians twenty years earlier were scaling the rock walls like ants to finish off the Americans. It was only a sideshow to the battle raging at Tora Bora, but to the marines marooned on the mountain, it was the end of the world. An army Black Hawk had already been shot down as it hovered to fire a Hellfire missile into a cave mouth. An Air Force A-10 had held off the guerrillas for a while, but now even the Warthog had been grounded. When night fell, there would be no stopping the Taliban. They were already too close to the marines for artillery to knock them off the mountain, and the Spectre gunships in the theater were committed to Tora Bora. At any moment, Danny expected the marines to call in artillery on their own position, as Joe Adams had famously done on Hill 385 in Korea. Anything was better than being captured by Afghan tribesmen.

  Then a Delta Force officer volunteered to drop onto the mountain and set up a protective perimeter, if a helicopter pilot would try to airlift the trapped marines to safety. To do so would mean almost certain death. Danny didn’t want to die. He had no illusions about war. He was forty-three years old, and he hadn’t reached that age by volunteering for suicide missions. Yet he’d felt a voice rising up his throat, trying to volunteer him. Why? Was he trying to live up to the legacy of his father, the red-faced crop duster who’d fought in the Big One? He certainly had no faith in his immortality under fire. But at bottom, he realized, it was simpler than all that. If someone didn’t take a bird up there, those marines would die. Forty-two husbands, fathers, and sons. Fate had placed their lives in Danny’s hands. Of the two other pilots there that day, one had a son he’d never seen, and the other always had his eye on the main chance, which meant flying milk runs for rock stars, not dying in Afghanistan. So without thinking very much, Danny had raised his hand and said, “I’ll go.” The most meaningful reward he ever got in the military was the look in the Delta operator’s eyes after he volunteered. The look said, You are a crazy fuck, and you’re probably going to die, but, brother, you are One of Us.

  Danny landed on the mountaintop three times before they got him. He wrung performance out of that chopper that the engineers who’d designed it would never have believed. His Pave Low took more AK rounds than by any physical law it should have survived, and the blasting sand and water stripped off half the paint and all the decals by the end of the second run. But eventually the ship gave up the ghost. It took an RPG round to kill it. Danny’s door-gunner screamed a warning, and Danny jinked at the last second, but the hissing rocket clipped his tail rotor and the controls went gooey on him. He didn’t even remember the crash, only an absolute certainty that the end had come, and that it had come in a chopper, as he had always known it would. He thought of his father as he fell, with his beloved Pave Low windmilling in the air like Pete Townshend’s guitar arm. There was a bright flash in his head, then the face of a girl he’d loved in high school, and then . . . nothing.

  Only later did he learn that his crew were killed on impact. Danny was ejected, seat and all, through a hole the mountain ripped in the cockpit during the ship’s final spin. A piece of shrapnel tore through his left leg, and some Afghans fired a burst of AK rounds at him, connecting once in the same leg. And then a miracle occurred. Inspired by Danny’s desperate barnstorming, the pilot of one of the AC-130 gunships over Tora Bora threw away his regulation book, diverted to the besieged mountain, and rained hell and death down on the Afghans for ninety minutes straight. The Delta Force operators tied Danny to a stretcher they found in the wreckage of his chopper and carried him down the mountain, fighting a rearguard action all the way. The last six marines came with them. A hundred meters from the bottom, elements of the First Marine Division rushed up like a camouflaged tide and swept them back down to safety.

  They gave Danny and his dead crew a Mackay Trophy for that action, but the ceremony was hollow for him. He never again saw any of the marines he’d saved that day. He did receive a couple of letters, one from a wife in Kansas, thanking him for saving her husband. The jarhead had added a postscript himself at the bottom: Semper fi, buddy. You’re always welcome here. They put in a snapshot of their kid, too, a freckled girl standing in short rows of corn. Danny had only read the letter once, but he kept it in his top dresser drawer, to remind him that sometimes you just had to say “Fuck it” and do the right thing, no matter what it cost. If you did, you never knew what someone else might do to help you. Or what good might come of it.

  “Ten seconds!” Sheriff Ellis cried, his voice pitched high from the stress. “Take us down, Danny!”

  Danny loved Laurel; he hadn’t the slightest doubt about that. And he hated his wife, for using his son as a hostage. He had an obligation to Michael that nothing could remove, but didn’t he also have an obligation to Laurel? What if she was carrying his child? God forgive him, a healthy child who could speak and listen? Laurel had given him everything she had to offer and asked nothing in return. She’d simply trusted that he’d do the right thing by her. And that he had not done—

  �
�Five seconds,” said Sheriff Ellis. “This is Black Leader, we’re going to hover low and hit the spotlight. Everybody—”

  Danny twisted back the throttle and slammed down the collective, and the helicopter dropped like King Kong off the Empire State Building.

  “Shiiiiiiiitttt!” Ellis screamed, his face bone white with terror. “What’s happening?”

  “We lost the engine!” Danny shouted, intentionally throwing the ship out of trim. “Brace yourself!”

  Anything less than a crash might have left Ellis capable of issuing orders on the way down, so Danny had pulled an emergency autorotation, virtually killing the engine and causing a controlled crash in which only the energy stored in the still-whirling rotor blades could spare them from death. Red emergency lights lit up the instrument panel, and the whoop-whoop of the low rpm warning filled the cabin. He waited until the last possible instant to flare, then yanked up on the collective, certain that the primal terror scrambling the sheriff’s brain would prevent him from giving the go order. The Bell bounced hard on the front lawn, its rotor tips spinning bare inches from the brick front of the house.

  “What just happened?” Ray Breen shouted. “Are you guys okay?”

  “Holy Christ!” yelled Ellis, clutching his chest in terror.

  Danny unhooked his harness and scrambled out of the chopper onto wet grass. When the sheriff saw this, he assumed the ship was about to explode and tried to do the same, but Danny leaned back inside and yelled, “Give me ten minutes! Ten minutes alone with him! Stay on those mikes!”

  Comprehension dawned in Ellis’s eyes, followed by a blaze of anger, but Danny broke away and sprinted around the chopper to the front door of the house. He slammed into it with all his weight and started banging on it like a fugitive at a church door.

  “Open up! It’s Danny! Warren, it’s me! It’s Danny!”

  Over his shoulder he saw two alien figures in black body armor break cover and charge him. They’d closed to within twenty feet when the door fell away and someone yanked him inside.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Warren slammed the door and stared at Danny with wild eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Trying to save you!” Danny replied, panting from his exertions.

  He saw the gun in Warren’s hand, then Laurel over his shoulder, watching with terror in her eyes. Through her fear Danny saw the glow of gratitude. Warren looked nothing like the man Danny had taught to fly. High on his left shoulder, his shirt was stiff with clotted blood. He had the face of some soldiers Danny had seen, those who had been asked to do too much, or to witness too much, and had somehow found themselves still walking the earth after all their friends were dead.

  “Where’s your kids?” Danny asked, trying to orient himself from memory. The kitchen and den were a few yards behind Laurel; the hall to Danny’s right led to a guest room, then to a back door to Warren’s study. Behind Warren was the great room, which opened onto the study and the master suite.

  “Beth’s in the safe room,” Laurel answered, after her husband refused to. “I don’t know where Grant is.”

  “We need to get Grant in the safe room, too.”

  “Grant’s fine where he is,” said Warren.

  “No, he’s not. That three-minute deadline was bullshit. They were coming to get you when I set down on your front walk.”

  Warren processed this in silence.

  “I want to talk to you, but we need to get everybody into the hall first.”

  “Why?” Shields asked.

  “They have thermal imaging devices out there. They can see through the window blinds. But the hall walls will shield us.”

  Warren slowly shook his head.

  “It’s twenty feet!” Danny shouted, pointing to his right.

  Shields seemed to reconsider. “You go first.”

  Danny had hoped the doctor would lead the way, giving him a chance to grab Laurel and try for the front door. But if he’d tried that and failed, whatever trust he now enjoyed would be lost. He backed slowly down the hall, his eyes on Warren’s gun. His left heel slipped on something, then caught. He looked down and saw a dark, tacky stain on the floor. Blood. He’d seen whole slicks of it in the belly of his chopper. He figured the stuff on his shoe belonged to Kyle Auster.

  Shields wasn’t following him, he noted, and Laurel was still stuck behind her husband in the foyer. “Warren, if you stay where you are, they’ll blow down that door and toss in a flash-bang grenade. The C-4’s already in place.”

  Warren blinked twice, then came toward Danny, motioning for Laurel to follow him. He stopped after the hall walls closed around him. Danny held out his hand and beckoned Laurel forward. He could tell she wanted to run into his arms, but she moved slowly, as though Warren might decide to shoot her at any moment.

  “You two stay on opposite sides of me,” Warren said nervously.

  Laurel obeyed like a convict worried about a brutal guard.

  Warren kept his gun hand on Danny’s side, as though he expected Danny to make a play for the weapon.

  “I violated orders to come in here,” Danny said, trying to keep his voice under control. “So I hope you’ll listen to me. There’s a boy out there who shot twenty-seven people in Iraq. And that’s just what they recorded officially. He’s got a bullet chambered with your name on it.”

  Warren’s face didn’t change at all.

  “That’s welcome news to you, isn’t?” Danny said. “That’s what I realized when I was hovering over your house. That’s how you want to die.”

  The doctor’s right cheek twitched.

  “Warren?” Laurel said softly. “Is he right?”

  “I’m right,” Danny said, not taking his eyes from Warren’s face. “But you’re not going to get that surgical sniper’s bullet. You’re going to get Ray Breen and his weekend commandos blasting in here with grenades and submachine guns. And if anybody gets in the way, like Grant or Beth or Laurel, well, that’s just too bad. Do you hear me, Warren?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that how a good father checks out?”

  The cheek was twitching steadily now.

  “You know it’s not,” Danny pressed. “How a man dies is his own business, but he’s got no right to take anyone else with him.”

  “Grant and Beth can leave,” Warren said. “But not her.” He jabbed his pistol toward Laurel. “She stays till the end.”

  The end of what? Danny thought. The end of you, or of all of us?

  Behind Warren, Laurel put a shaking hand over her eyes. For an instant Danny wondered if she might smack her husband’s head or make a grab for the gun, but she was past that point now. She was barely functioning.

  “Let’s get those kids out of here,” Danny said.

  • • •

  “McDavitt’s a goddamn traitor!” Ray Breen shouted over the radio. “He’s telling Shields everything we got out here! Can’t you hear that mike signal? I can’t take any more of this shit!”

  Sheriff Ellis said, “Danny’s about to walk out of there with those kids, Ray. Keep this channel clear. I’m giving Danny the time he asked for.”

  Carl Sims lay on the wet grass behind his pecan tree and listened to the menagerie of voices on the radio net that linked the members of the Tactical Response Unit. Ray Breen was going to need a straitjacket or a horse sedative if he got any madder. Even if he didn’t, he was exactly the wrong person to send into a hostage situation. Carl had figured the sheriff would pull Ray off the TRU after his brother was shot; it just seemed like common sense. But this wasn’t the Marine Corps, and Carl wasn’t in command.

  He didn’t know why Major McDavitt had risked his life to charge into the house alone, but Carl was glad he had. Anything was better than sending Ray and his cowboys in there with grenades. Carl made sure the extra poncho he’d brought was keeping the rain off his rifle, then went back to studying the LCD on the thermal camera. He suspected that the major might have gone in to move Dr. Shields bac
k into his line of fire. If so, Carl didn’t plan on disappointing him. Any doubt about shooting the doctor had vanished. It was simple arithmetic now.

  One death was better than five.

  • • •

  “The kids, Doc,” Danny said again. “Where’s Grant?”

  Warren was staring at Danny with a strange new intensity. “What are you really doing here?”

  A shiver of fear raced along Danny’s shoulders. Warren’s hollow eyes seemed suddenly to hold the very knowledge that Danny would have given anything to keep from him. Had he somehow sensed the truth? Had physical proximity triggered some primitive sensory apparatus that could detect sexual chemistry between people?

  “Do you always have to be the hero?” Warren asked.

  “I’m no hero. I just care what happens to this family. I don’t want to see your pictures on the front of tomorrow’s Citizen over a story about a terrible tragedy. And I don’t want to listen to every asshole in town saying, ‘It just goes to show, doesn’t it? You never can tell.’ “

  Warren’s mouth smiled but his eyes remained disconnected from the movement.

  “So let’s get those kids out of here, huh?”

  The dead smile vanished.

  “The baby I’m carrying is yours, Warren,” Laurel said, averting her eyes from Danny. “I know it. That’s the one ray of hope in all the darkness you’ve been living with this past year.”

  Danny searched her face, but he saw no sign that she was lying. Maybe Shields had fathered the child.

  “I told you,” Warren said, “it can’t be mine.”

  “You said it was unlikely. Not impossible.”

  Shields looked at the floor, then at his gun. Laurel was playing a dangerous game.

  “Is it possible?” she asked softly. “Just possible?”

  “Maybe,” he whispered. “But if it is . . . I don’t even know if you could keep it. My cells are so screwed up now from the chemicals and hormones, the risk of birth defects would be so high—”