by Graham Brown
Possible other outcomes: < 1%
Kang considered the data. The most likely category, that the NRI party now had sufficient information to begin a generalized search, had been the second least likely category twenty-four hours before. He had watched with both concern and hope as it rose steadily in the rankings.
If the NRI party was truly out in the jungle somewhere, they were much closer to finding the next stone than he’d hoped. On the other hand, that was what he needed them to do eventually. And by leaving the metropolitan areas and entering the jungle they played into his hands. Out there Kang had ways of finding and tracking them that were not feasible in the crowded streets of urban civilization. And when he found them, he would deal with them away from the harsh light of any witnesses.
He turned to the project leader. “Prepare to launch the drones.”
CHAPTER 45
The plane was a Lake Renegade LA-250, an amphibious, single-engine aircraft that floated on a boatlike hull instead of pontoons with struts. They’d found it at a tourist trap called Sea & Air Tours, where for a hundred and fifty dollars vacationers could go up on a forty-minute ride and see the coastline. A few more dollars arranged for a two-hour trip and a landing at a secluded bay, where the passengers could have a romantic picnic on an uninhabited beach. The NRI team had no time for such luxuries.
After casing the dockside and the small building that acted as Sea & Air’s offices, Hawker had decided this was the plane they needed.
And then they’d waited until almost midnight, partly because they needed the dockside to be deserted but more importantly because they needed the stone to finish its energy wave and reenter the lull phase before they took off in a small aircraft.
This time Danielle had taken it in the car out into the hills. Again she had found a spot in the middle of nowhere, dug a deep hole, and placed the case containing the stone into it. It was not exactly glamorous duty, and as she dug, she waited for a federale to arrive and ask what the hell she was doing. It never happened.
Forty minutes later, she’d dug the stone out and driven back to where Hawker, McCarter, and Yuri waited.
“Anything happen?” McCarter asked.
“Nothing,” Danielle said. “Even the radio still works.”
It concerned her, actually. Perhaps the stone had blown a fuse when it had flashed the day before.
“What do you see?” she asked Yuri.
The child grinned sheepishly. “It is asleep,” he said.
From there they had ventured to the coast again, where Hawker had broken into the shedlike building and come out with a set of keys. A minute later he was in the aircraft, waving to Danielle to come aboard. She’d led McCarter and Yuri along the dock and they’d climbed inside, strapping themselves in and lowering the clamshell doors into place.
After starting the engine and taxiing the waddling craft away from the dock, Hawker had pushed the throttle to the wall. In thirty seconds they were airborne.
That had been two and a half hours ago. Since then they had flown along the dark line that McCarter had drawn, with Hawker insisting that he knew where he was going.
Danielle looked around. A large windscreen and big panoramic windows that curved up into the roof of the plane — designed to give the tourists the best views possible — gave the plane a spacious feel, especially with the wide-open sky and the stars twinkling in the distance.
As they droned along in the dark, Danielle began to relax. At least for the moment they had nothing to worry about. It seemed unlikely that there would be trouble up here. She didn’t consider it impossible, but at least it was highly doubtful.
And so she allowed her mind to rest, to stop worrying and planning and compensating, and mostly she just stared out the window at the stars.
She turned her attention from the beautiful night to the other passengers in the aircraft. It seemed there was some correlation between the insomnia and the times when the cycle peaked during the night. With the stone “sleeping” both McCarter and Yuri were finally sleeping themselves. She could even hear McCarter snoring over the intercom.
“Any way to turn that off?” she said into her microphone.
Hawker flicked a switch, restricting the intercom system to the two of them.
“Better?”
“Much.” She gazed out the window again. “I can see why you like flying so much.” She had always considered it just a mode of transportation, usually working on her laptop as the hours flew by.
“It’s quiet up here,” he said. “Especially at night.”
The Renegade had a 250-horsepower engine that was mounted above the cabin on a pylon. It was horrendously noisy, even through the protective headsets.
“You call this quiet?”
He nodded. “Up here there’s no one yapping at you to do this or explain that. No traffic, no horns, no jagged, random noises.”
He smiled to himself, apparently pleased with his reasoning. “Yeah,” he said. “To me this is quiet. And straightforward. Go from point A to point B and back again. Try not to get shot down while you’re doing it.”
She had to laugh. She guessed that qualified as quiet. “I’m sorry about the other night,” she said. Since their night on the balcony she had avoided looking him in the eye. That wasn’t her way.
“You mean ditching me to talk to Arnold Moore on the phone?”
“Yeah,” she said. “That and …” The words were hard to come by. She decided to be direct. That was her way.
“I wanted to kiss you,” she said. “I haven’t felt that close to anyone in a long time and I wanted to kiss you. It’s just that there’s someone in my life already. Someone back home, waiting for me. I think.”
For a second Hawker didn’t react. Perhaps the whole conversation seemed too absurd to him. People were trying to kill them even as a cataclysm of some kind loomed up ahead. And she was talking about her almost-fiancé, who maybe even wasn’t her friend anymore. This was why she hated relationships; somehow they always made her feel foolish.
And then she wondered if maybe he didn’t care. Maybe their almost-kiss had just been a way to pass some time. Like watching the storm and drinking the rum. His world was so different from hers. Was it foolish to even talk like this to someone who didn’t know where he would be next week, next month, next year? She was worried about home. He didn’t have one.
“Basically I’m supposed to be engaged right now,” she said in explanation. “I’m supposed to be home planning a wedding and wishing my dad was there to give me away.”
“Maybe you should be,” he said, finally. There was some pain in the statement, but sincerity, too.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Does he know what you do?”
“He was my first partner,” she said. Hawker raised an eyebrow.
“My second year in the NRI I got a field posting. Marcus was the guy they teamed me up with. He was a few years older, a lot less naïve, and just as ambitious.”
“Sounds like instant attraction,” he said.
“We kept it professional for about eight months,” she said, somewhat defensively.
He smiled. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. “This isn’t twenty questions.”
She wanted to. She thought it might clear the air, at least for her. “They always tell you it’s dangerous to mix business and pleasure, that it dulls your edge or makes you sloppy. But that wasn’t the case. There was a high from it, the work, the relationship, the partnership. If anything it made us sharper, made me feel invincible.”
“Fourth stage of tequila again?”
“Better,” she said.
“What happened?”
“I pushed like I always do,” she said. “And because he was the same as me, there was no voice of reason to hold us back. An operation we were on went bad. He took a bullet in one kidney and a second bullet in the leg. He rehabbed for almost a year and then when he was healthy enough to come back he decided not to.”
; “What about you?”
“Not a scratch on me.”
“Lucky as always.”
“I guess,” she said. “I took time off to help him get better. But back then, seeing me made him angry. A sort of reverse version of survivor’s guilt. Eventually he asked me to leave. To just go away and let him be. So I did.”
Hawker was silent, listening and scanning the instruments. “So when you quit the NRI, the two of you found each other again?”
She nodded. “Becoming a civilian was sort of disorienting: too much routine, not enough to worry about. It felt good to have someone to talk about it with. Things progressed from there.”
“So why wouldn’t he be waiting for you? I mean has he gone insane or something?”
She laughed. “I think I wrecked it by coming back. We started arguing, things got out of hand, and I decided to make the arguments as harsh as I could. He didn’t deserve that.”
She understood Marcus’s objections on an intellectual level. She was making a leap that he could not. But she still wanted his support and when it hadn’t been there, she had lashed out.
“I felt guilty about leaving,” she said. “But I’m painfully aware that I have avoided every opportunity to go back. I could have gone back after you rescued me. I could have gone after we found McCarter, slapped him in cuffs, and dragged his ass home.”
“But you didn’t want to.”
“Remember how you said I wouldn’t like ‘normal life’?”
“I was just talking. It didn’t mean anything.”
“I think in some ways you were right.”
“Look,” he said, “I don’t believe in trying to convince anyone to do anything. But assuming the world doesn’t blow up, this mission is going to end in a few days, and when it does, I’d get out of this madhouse if I were you.”
“You’re on his side?” she said, surprised.
Hawker shook his head. “I’m not talking about him, I’m talking about you. If you have a chance at something good in this life, something worth going home to most of the time — whether it’s him or someone else or just being home and safe and surrounded by friends — you should grab it and never let go.”
She stared at him in shock.
“I’m not saying go bake cookies,” he explained. “Run for Congress, like you said. Kick some ass up on Capitol Hill. God knows they could use someone like you.”
“It sounds like you’re saying ‘pretty good’ should be enough for me?” The words came out as if she were challenging him, but she hadn’t meant them to sound that way.
“I’m saying I’d settle for half decent and no one trying to kill me.”
“And what if I don’t want to settle at all?”
“Then maybe it’s not leaving that made you feel guilty,” he said. “Maybe it was wanting to leave in the first place.”
His words hit close to the mark, closer than she’d been able to get on her own. Prior to Moore’s call for help there’d been no reason for her to go anywhere, but in a way she’d already begun to feel trapped. Had she just run to the NRI to escape that? Based on some glamorous selective memory of how good life had been there? Maybe Hawker was right: Maybe she was throwing away a chance at happiness, whether it was with Marcus or someone else. She wasn’t sure, but suddenly she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“And what about you?” she asked, changing the subject. “Is there some gun-toting mercenary girl waiting for you out there?”
“Lots of them,” he said, as if it were an admission. “One in every port.”
She laughed, half hoping it was true. It sounded like a simpler arrangement “Good for you,” she said, as sincerely as he had earlier. “Now, how about telling me where we’re going?”
“Take a look out the window.”
Danielle turned and gazed through the curved glass. Beneath the plane she saw nothing but darkness; endless miles of unlit jungle and impassable terrain.
And then she caught sight of a flash. A fleeting glimpse of silver, as if someone had flipped over a giant mirror and then hidden it away.
She couldn’t say what it was. In fact she’d never seen anything like it before. It seemed to have come up through the trees.
She continued to stare into the darkness as the plane droned on, looking, searching. And finally she saw it again. This time it moved, traveling through the darkness like a snake in the grass. It slithered, disappeared, and then reappeared, traveling with a calm precision that exactly matched the movements of the plane.
It took another sighting for her to realize what it was. She looked up. The full moon had risen to a spot almost directly above them. Its light was being reflected off a narrow river below.
“You’ve seen this before,” she said.
“Not here,” he said. “But on one of those long, quiet flights we were talking about.”
“You get shot down on that one?”
“No. Not that time.”
“Maybe that’s a good sign.”
Hawker laughed. “Better wake up Sleeping Beauty back there. He wouldn’t want to miss this.”
Danielle woke up McCarter and showed him what Hawker had found. They followed the river, which coincided nicely with the line McCarter had drawn. It snaked across the jungle to a series of small lakes arranged in a kind of offset pattern. One lake was on their left with the next one on the right, and the next one back on the left again.
She saw at least a dozen of them. From the air, with the moonlight reflecting off their surfaces, they really did look like a set of divine footprints.
“Incredible,” McCarter said.
“Not too shabby,” Hawker admitted. “Now, if we can just find one big enough to land on, we won’t have to crash in the jungle.”
CHAPTER 46
Hawker’s statement provoked little alarm from either Danielle or McCarter, but as he stared down at the small lakes passing beneath them, Hawker began to sense a miscalculation on his part.
He’d guessed correctly that a small river winding through the jungle and a series of lakes or ponds would mark the silver path and the footsteps of the gods. He’d seen the same type of thing before in night flights over outlying terrain. If the moon was in the right place, its reflection would travel along the water as the aircraft moved, a silver marker leading the plane as if it were urging him to follow.
A brief look at McCarter’s map and the line he’d drawn showed it heading into the highlands where small streams joined together and meandered along. There were no major lakes depicted on the map, but Hawker knew that the terrain and its climate would mean intermittent lakes that came and went. With the rainy season having passed only a month before, Hawker guessed that some of the lakes would still be present, and when they’d been blocked from acquiring a helicopter, he’d figured that a float plane like the Renegade would do just fine.
This guess had turned out to be correct, but as Hawker studied the lakes in the moonlight he’d begun to worry that they were all too small.
He searched for forty minutes, flying in a zigzag pattern, looking for a larger body of water, but found none. As their fuel began to dwindle he knew they’d have to make do with the lakes they’d already seen.
He dropped the nose and swooped in over the two largest lakes. The first had a roughly circular shape, while the second was elongated and narrower. It offered more room to land but forced a crosswind landing and as Hawker flew its length with the landing lights on, he saw the remnants of drowned trees sticking out in places.
He pulled up and buzzed the first lake once again. They would have about a thousand feet to stop in, which wasn’t really enough, but at least he could make an approach into the wind.
“All right,” he said over the intercom. “Make sure your tray tables and seat backs are in the upright and locked position.”
Beside him Danielle checked her belt and put away the flashlight and the sectional map she’d been holding. McCarter woke Yuri and made sure he was strapped in whil
e Hawker climbed five hundred feet, reduced power, and put the flaps down to full.
The Renegade slowed noticeably and Hawker had to use a lot of pressure to keep the nose up.
“How’s our fuel?” Danielle asked.
“Just about gone,” he said.
“We have enough for a go-around at least, right?”
He looked at the gauges. He didn’t think so, but he didn’t say anything.
“What if get down there and there are more trees?” she asked.
That was a concern, but trying to climb out and do it again would be more dangerous. At this point they were committed to landing, regardless of what they saw at the last second.
“There’s an old pilots’ saying,” he told her. “If you’re making an emergency landing at night, you wait till you’re a hundred feet above the ground and then you turn your landing light on. If you don’t like what you see, you turn it back off again.”
“There better not be trees down there,” she said.
“Don’t worry, there won’t be,” he said, hoping it was true.
Hawker brought the Renegade in slowly, keeping the nose up and using a bit of power in a technique devised for a short-field landing. He could barely see over the nose and was yawing the craft to the right so he could look ahead through the side window.
At a hundred feet he began to see the tops of the trees. They were reaching up toward him and the plane was sinking faster than he’d planned.
He nudged the throttle forward and the engine noise increased but the aircraft was still descending. He was too low now. The treetops were blocking his view. He saw nothing but branches and fronds catching the light.
Where the hell is the lake?
They needed to be a little higher. He bumped the throttle forward and pulled back on the column. The nose came up a bit and then the engine sputtered.
It didn’t die, but it was running rough.
“Hawker,” Danielle said.
He pushed the mixture to full rich and pumped the throttle, hoping to dump a little more gas into the cylinders. The stall horn began to whine, an annoying whistle. The engine sputtered loudly, shaking the plane.