by Tom Clancy
“Come on, Sally, we’re late. Buckle up.” Cathy Ryan hated to be late. She restarted the engine. She hadn’t been this late in over a month, but she could still make it home before Jack if she hustled.
The rush hour was under way in earnest, but the Porsche was small, fast, and agile. In a minute from sitting in the parking lot she was doing sixty-five, weaving through traffic like a race driver at Daytona.
For all their preparation, Alex almost missed her. An eighteen-wheeler was laboring up the hill in the right lane when the distinctive shape of the Porsche appeared next to it. Alex floored the van and darted out onto the road, causing the semi to jam his brakes and horn at the same time. Alex didn’t look back. Miller got out of the right-front seat and went back to the window on the sliding door.
“Whooee, this lady’s in a hurry tonight!”
“Can you catch her?” Miller asked.
Alex just smiled. “Watch.”
“Damn, look at that Porsche!” Trooper First Class Sam Waverly was driving J-30, a State Police car coming off an afternoon of pursuit-radar work on U.S. Route 50. He and Larry Fontana of J-19 were heading back to the Annapolis police barracks off Rowe Boulevard after a long day’s work when they saw the green sports car take the entrance ramp off Ritchie Highway. Both troopers were driving about sixty-five miles per hour, a privilege that accrued only to police officers. Their cars were unmarked. This made them and their radar guns impossible to spot until it was too late. They usually worked in pairs, and took turns, with one working his radar gun and the other a quarter mile down the road to wave the speeders over for their tickets.
“Another one!” Fontana said over the radio. A van swerved into the highway’s left lane, forcing somebody in a Pontiac to jam on his brakes. “Let’s get ’em.” They were both young officers and while, contrary to legend, the State Police didn’t assign ticket quotas to its officers, everyone knew that one sure way to promotion was to write a lot of them. It also made the roads safer, and that was their mission as state troopers. Neither officer really enjoyed giving out traffic citations, but they enjoyed responding to major accidents far less.
“Okay, I got the Porsche.”
“You get all the fun,” Fontana noted. He’d gotten a quick look at the driver.
It was a lot harder than one might imagine. First they had to clock the speeding vehicles to establish how far over the limit they were going—the greater the speed, the greater the fine, of course—then they had to close and switch on their lights to pull them over. Both subject vehicles were two hundred yards ahead of the police cruisers now.
Cathy checked her clock again. She’d managed to cut nearly ten minutes off her trip time. Next she checked her rearview mirror for a police car. She didn’t want to get a ticket. There was nothing that looked like a cop car, only ordinary cars and trucks. She had to slow as the traffic became congested approaching the Severn River bridge. She debated getting over into the left lane, but decided against it. Sometimes it was hard to get back into the right lane in time to take the Route 2 exit. Beside her, Sally was craning her neck to see over the dash, as usual, and playing with the seat-belt buckle. Cathy didn’t say anything this time, but concentrated on the traffic as she eased off the pedal.
Miller slipped the door latch and moved the door an inch backward. Another man took hold of the door as he knelt and thumbed the safety forward on his weapon.
He couldn’t get her for speeding now, Trooper Waverly noted sourly. She’d slowed before he could establish her speed. He was a hundred yards back. Fontana could, however, ticket the van for improper lane-changing, and one out of two wasn’t bad. Waverly checked his mirror. J-19 was catching up, about to pull even with his J-30. There was something odd about the blue van, he saw ... like the side door wasn’t quite right.
“Now!” Alex called.
Cathy Ryan noted that a van was pulling up on her left side. She took a casual look in time to see the van’s door slide back. There was a man kneeling, holding something. There came a chilling moment of realization. She stomped her foot on the brake a fraction of a second before she saw the white flash.
“What!” Waverly saw a foot-long tongue of flame spit out from the side of the van. The windshield of the Porsche went cloudy and the car swerved sideways, straightened out, then slammed into the bridge’s concrete work at over fifty miles per hour. Instantly cars in both lanes slammed on their brakes. The van kept going.
“Larry, shots fired—shots fired from the van. The Porsche was hit!” Waverly flipped on his lights and stood on his brakes. The police car skidded right and nearly slid sideways into the wrecked Porsche. “Get the van, get the van!”
“I’m on him,” Fontana replied. He suddenly realized that the gout of flame he’d seen could only mean some kind of machine gun. “Holy shit,” he said to himself.
Waverly returned his attention to the Porsche. Steam poured from the rear engine compartment. “J-30, Annapolis, officer reports shots fired—looked like automatic weapons fire—and a PI accident westbound Route 50 on Severn River bridge. Appears to be serious PI. J-19 in pursuit of vehicle 2. Stand by.”
“Standing by,” the dispatcher acknowledged. What the hell ...
Waverly grabbed his fire extinguisher and ran the fifteen feet to the wreck. Glass and metal were scattered as far as he could see. The engine, thank God, wasn’t on fire. He checked the passenger compartment next.
“Oh, Jesus!” He ran back to his car. “J-30, Annapolis. Call fireboard, officer requests helicopter response. Serious PI, two victims, a white female adult and a white female child, repeat we have a serious PI accident westbound Route 50 east side of Severn River bridge. Officer requests helicopter response.”
“J-19, Annapolis,” Fontana called in next. “I am in pursuit of a dark van, with handicap tag number Henry Six-Seven-Seven-Two. I am westbound on Route 50 just west of the Severn River bridge. Shots fired from this vehicle. Officer requests assistance,” he said coolly. He decided against turning his lights on for the moment. Holy shit ...
“You get her?” Alex called back.
Miller was breathing heavily. He wasn’t sure—he wasn’t sure about his shots. The Porsche had slowed suddenly just as he squeezed the trigger, but he saw the car hit the bridge and spring up into the air like a toy. No way they could walk away from that sort of accident, he was sure of that.
“Yes.”
“Okay, let’s boogie.” Alex didn’t let his emotions interfere with his work. This job meant weapons and money for his movement. It was too bad about the woman and the kid, but it wasn’t his fault that they made the wrong kind of enemies.
The Annapolis dispatcher was already on his UHF radio to the State Police helicopter. Trooper-1, a Bell JetRanger-II was just lifting off from a refueling stop at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
“Roger that,” the helicopter pilot replied, turning south and twisting the throttle control to full power. The paramedic in the left seat leaned forward to change the transponder “squawk” setting from 1200 to 5101. This would inform air traffic controllers that the helicopter was on an emergency medivac mission.
“Trooper-1, J-30, we are en route to your position, ETA four minutes. ”
Waverly didn’t acknowledge. He and two civilians were prying the driver’s side window off the car with a tire iron. The driver and passenger were both unconscious, and there was blood all over the interior of the car. She was probably pretty, Waverly thought, looking at the driver, but her head was covered with glistening blood. The child lay like a broken doll, half on the seat, half on the floor. His stomach was a tight cold ball just below his pounding heart. Another dead kid, he thought. Please, God, not another one.
“Trooper-2, Annapolis,” came the next call to the dispatcher.
“Annapolis, Trooper-2, where are you?”
“We are over Mayo Beach, northbound. I copied your medivac call. I have the Governor and Attorney General aboard. Can we help, over.”
The dispatcher made a quick decision. Trooper-1 would be at the accident scene in three more minutes. J-19 needed backup in a hurry. This was real luck. Already he had six state vehicles converging on the area, plus three more from the Anne Arundel County Police station at Edgewater. “Trooper-2, contact J-19.”
“Trooper-2, J-19, please advise your location,” the radio squawked in Fontana’s car.
“Westbound Route 50, just passing Rowe Boulevard. I am in pursuit of a dark van with a handicap tag. J-30 and I observed automatic weapons fire from this vehicle, repeat automatic weapons fire. I need some help, people.”
It was easy to spot. The Sergeant flying Trooper-2 saw the other helicopter circling over the accident to the east, and Route 50 was nearly bare of cars from west of the accident to Rowe Boulevard. The police car and the van were on the back edge of the moving traffic.
“What gives?” the Governor asked from the back. The paramedic in the left-front seat filled them in as the pilot continued his visual search for ... there! Okay, sucker ...
“J-19, this is Trooper-2, I got you and the subject car visual.” The pilot dropped altitude to five hundred feet. “Trooper-2, Annapolis, I got ’em. Black, or maybe blue van westbound on 50, with an unmarked car in pursuit.”
Alex was wondering who the car was. It was unmarked, but a cheap-body car, with dull, monocolor paintwork. Uh-oh.
“That’s a cop behind us!” he shouted. One of Miller’s men looked out the window. Unmarked cars were nothing new where they came from.
“Get rid of him!” Alex snarled.
Fontana held at fifty yards from the van. This was far enough, he thought, to keep himself out of danger. The trooper was listening to continuous chatter on his radio as additional cars announced that they were inbound on the call. The distraction of the radio made him a second late on seeing the van’s door fly open. Fontana blanched and hit the brakes.
Miller handled this one too. The moment the door was open, he leveled his machine gun and loosed ten rounds at the police car. He saw it dip when the driver tried to panic-stop, swerve sideways in the road, and flip over. He was too excited even to smile, though inwardly he was awash with glee. The door came back shut as Alex changed lanes.
Fontana felt the bullet hit his chest before he realized that the car’s windshield was shattering around him. His right arm jerked down, turning the car too rapidly to the right. The locked-up rear wheels gave the car a broadside skid, a tire blew out, and the car flipped over. Fontana watched in fascination the world rotate around him as the car’s top crumpled. Like most policemen he never bothered with his seat belt, and he fell on his neck. The collapsing car top broke it. It didn’t matter. A car that had been following his crashed into the police cruiser, finishing the work begun by Miller’s submachine gun.
“Shit!” the pilot of Trooper-2 cursed. “Trooper-2, Annapolis, J-19 is wrecked with serious PI on 50 west of the Route 2 exit. Where the hell are the other cars!”
“Trooper-2, advise condition of J-19.”
“He’s dead, man—I’m on that fucking van! Where’s the goddamned backup!”
“Trooper-2, be advised we have eleven cars converging. We have a roadblock setting up now on 50 at South Haven Road. There are three cars westbound on 50 about half a mile back of you and two more eastbound approaching the exit to General’s Highway.”
“Roger that, I am on the van,” the pilot responded.
“Come on, Alex!” Miller shouted.
“Almost there, man,” the black man said, changing to the right lane exit. About a mile ahead he saw the blue and red flashing lights of two police cars coming east toward him, but there was no eastbound exit here. Tough luck, pigs. He didn’t feel very happy about doing the Porsche, but a dead cop was always something to feel good about. “Here we go!”
“Annapolis, Trooper-2,” the pilot called, “the subject van is turning north off of Route 50.” It took a moment to register. “Oh, no!” He gave a quick order. The eastbound police cars slowed, then darted across the grass median strip into the westbound lanes. These were clear, blocked by a second major accident, but the median was uneven. One car bogged down in the grass and mud while the other bounded up onto the pavement and ran the wrong way on the highway toward the exit.
Alex hit the traffic light exactly right, crossing West Street and heading north. His peripheral vision caught a county police car stuck in the rush-hour traffic on West Street two hundred yards to his right, despite his lights and siren. Too late, pig. He proceeded two hundred yards and turned left.
The Sergeant flying Trooper-2 started cursing, oblivious to the Governor and Attorney General in the back. As he watched, the van pulled into the hundred-acre parking lot that surrounded Annapolis Mall. The vehicle proceeded toward the inner ring of parking spaces as three cars turned off West Street in pursuit.
“Son of a bitch!” He pushed down on his collective control and dove at the parking lot.
Alex pulled into a handicap parking slot and stopped the van. His passengers were ready, and opened the doors as soon as the vehicle stopped. They walked slowly and normally to the entrance to the mall. The driver looked up in surprise when he heard the whine and flutter of the helicopter. It hovered at about a hundred feet. Alex made sure his hat was in place and waved as he went through the door.
The helicopter pilot looked at the paramedic in the left seat, whose hand was clenched in rage at his shoulder-holstered .357 revolver while the pilot needed both of his on the controls.
“They’re gone,” the paramedic said quietly over the intercom.
“What do you mean they’re gone!” the Attorney General demanded.
Below them, a county and a State Police car screeched to a halt outside the entrance. But inside those doors were about three thousand shoppers, and the police didn’t know what the suspects looked like. The officers stood there, guns drawn, not knowing what to do next.
Alex and his men were inside a public rest room. Two members of Alex’s organization were waiting there with shopping bags. Each man from the van got a new coat. They broke up into pairs and walked out into the shopping concourse, heading for an exit at the west end of the mall. They took their time. There was no reason to hurry.
“He waved at us,” the Governor said. “Do something!”
“What?” the pilot asked. “What do you want us to do? Who do we stop? They’re gone, they might as well be in California now.”
The Governor was slow to catch on, though faster than the Attorney General, who was still blubbering. What had begun as a routine political meeting in Salisbury, on Maryland’s eastern shore, had turned into an exciting pursuit, but one with a most unsatisfactory ending. He’d watched one of his state troopers killed right before his eyes, and neither he nor his people could do a single thing about it. The Governor swore, finally. The voters would have been shocked at his language.
Trooper-1 was sitting on the Severn River bridge, its rotor turning rapidly to stay above the concrete barriers. The paramedic, Trooper Waverly, and a motorist who turned out to be a volunteer fireman, were loading the two accident victims into Stokes litters for transport on the helicopter. The other motorist who had assisted was standing alone by the police car, over a puddle of his own vomit. A fire engine was pulling up to the scene, and two more state troopers were preparing to get traffic moving, once the helicopter took off. The highway was already backed up at least four miles. As they prepared to start directing traffic, they heard on their radios what had happened to J-19 and its driver. The police officers exchanged looks, but no words. They would come later.
As first officer on the scene, Waverly took the driver’s purse and started looking for identification. He had lots of forms to fill out, and people to notify. Inside the purse, he saw, was some kind of finger painting. He looked up as the little girl’s litter was loaded into the top rack of the helicopter’s passenger bay. The paramedic went in behind it, and less than thirty seconds later, Waverly’s face stung wit
h the impact of gravel, thrown up by the helicopter’s rotor. He watched it lift into the air, and whispered a prayer for the little girl who’d done a painting of something that looked like a blue cow. Back to work, he told himself. The purse had a red address book. He checked the driver’s license to get a name, then looked in the book under the same letter. Someone with the first name of Jack, but no last name written in, had a number designated “work.” It was probably her husband’s. Somebody had to call him.
“Baltimore Approach, this is Trooper-1 on a medivac inbound to Baltimore.”
“Trooper-1, roger, you are cleared for direct approach, come left to course three-four-seven and maintain current altitude,” the air controller at Baltimore-Washington International responded. The 5101 squawk number was clear on his scope, and medical emergencies had unconditional priority.
“Hopkins Emergency, this is Trooper-1, inbound with a white female child accident victim.”
“Trooper-1, Hopkins. Divert to University. We’re full up here.”
“Roger. University, Trooper-1, do you copy, over.”
“Trooper-1, this is University, we copy, and we’re ready for you. ”
“Roger, ETA five minutes. Out.”
“Gunny, this is Cummings at Gate Three,” the Sergeant called on the telephone.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Breckenridge asked.