Looking at Joe, he attempted to measure the losses the man had endured against what he and Lucy risked losing this night—a life together they hadn’t yet begun to experience. Joe’s dream had died when his son came home in a coffin, and he’d been living the nightmare for years.
Reaching in his pocket, he pulled out Emily’s list. “You don’t have to do this, Joe.”
“I know.”
“Get in your car and drive north. Don’t use your lights until you’re out of Chaves County. Try your cell phone intermittently. I’ve written a number at the top of the page. Keep trying that number—no other. Don’t call the police. Don’t call the feds. Don’t call anyone but that number.”
“All right.”
“Tell the man who answers that the Falcon gave you the number. Read him the list. The list is the most important thing. He needs to alert the potential targets. Then give him Goodwin’s name. Tell him Lucy and I have gone to White Sands. Describe as best you can the route we’re taking.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. After you deliver the message, come back home, and stay here. If you see a UAV, do not get out of your car or roll your windows down. Keep all your vents closed.”
Joe nodded and put the paper in his pocket.
When Dean reached out to shake his hand, he looked embarrassed, but he shook it.
“No heroics—what you’re doing is sacrifice enough. This is not a suicide mission, Joe. Come back here and wait in case I need you for something else.”
“All right.” Joe stepped back, but not before Lucy reached out and hugged him.
“You have the map to White Sands I printed you?”
“Got it.”
“How will you get through their security?”
“We field rats have our ways.” Dean smiled back at Lucy. “We clear about the cell?”
“Keep it off until we near White Sands, then use it to monitor turns only.”
“Five second bursts, maximum,” Dean cautioned. “Goodwin’s power grid will still be up, and he’ll be tracking us.”
Lucy nodded. Then Dean started the Harley, Lucy slipped Emily’s cell phone into her pocket, and they roared off into the night.
They sped through the blackness, headlight once again on. The moon had climbed higher, and the road remained deserted.
Glancing at his watch, Dean saw the time had slipped past one. He pushed the throttle. They needed to be on the base before the morning guards rotated. Time remained his biggest concern. Until he checked his mirror and saw the UAV bearing down on them.
“Hold on,” he shouted.
He pointed toward the mirror, and Lucy saw it, too. She leaned in closer.
There wasn’t a chance they could outrun it, but he sure planned to try. Pushing the Harley seemed to do no good. The UAV closed the gap in seconds. They both watched as it loomed in the mirror.
Dean considered evasive maneuvers, but he didn’t want to drive the Harley across the desert floor in the dead of night. He had five more seconds to make up his mind, and then they would be crop dusted with the bio-agent, rendering his decision moot.
The speedometer topped out, and Dean readied himself to brake. With any luck, the UAV would overshoot them. They rocketed past a field, then an abandoned gas station with a single street lamp still burning near its defunct sign. He recognized it as their only hope.
He began applying the brakes, careful not to send them into a spin. Never taking his eyes off the mirrors, he watched the UAV overtake, then speed past them. Just as they slowed enough to allow him to turn the bike around and head back toward the station, a terrific whine filled his ears. At first he thought it was in his head—something left over from the speed and the sudden stop.
Then Lucy screamed, “Go!”
A magnificent explosion filled the night sky as the UAV burst into flames. The Harley shot forward and the road lit up as if it were high noon. He could make out the stripes dividing the lane on the road and saw the hairs on the back of his knuckles. He gunned the Harley around to the station’s back side.
By the time he’d cut the engine, darkness had once again claimed the night sky. They both sat there for a minute, and then Lucy swung off the bike, removed her helmet, and started walking toward the back door.
He had to jog to catch up with her. “Where are you going?”
She still had on the mask they’d worn under the bike helmets, but he had no problem understanding her. “To find Jerry.”
Ω
Lucy opened the door and stepped into the darkness.
As soon as she stepped inside, the scent of old auto parts and simpler times surrounded her. She’d grown up in the city but spent a month each summer with her aunt and uncle. Uncle Benny owned a small town filling station. She’d learned to run the register, pump gas, even change oil in the old model cars that frequented his place. The familiar odors reminded her again of the importance of what they were doing, for her family and for others.
It took several seconds for Lucy’s eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. Then she saw him sitting with his back against the wall, underneath the window which had been shattered. Propped beside him was a FIM-92 Stinger portable surface-to-air missile. Pieces of shattered glass crunched under her feet. Crouching down beside him, she started to remove her mask. Jerry and Dean stopped her at the same time.
“Better not, Lucy.” His voice was a whisper, but he offered her a ghost of a smile.
“How you doing, Jerry?” Lucy pulled on the gloves Dean slipped into her hands, then felt for Jerry’s pulse. It was weak and thready. The cuts on his face were superficial. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t lost much blood.
“I’m all right. Enjoyed blowing that demon out of the sky.”
“We owe you, man.” Dean knelt at Jerry’s other side. At Lucy’s signal, he helped move the big guy. They laid him down in the center of the room. Dean pulled a flashlight from their pack and flipped it on. Their shadows leapt onto the station’s wall.
Had it been six days since he’d appeared in their room looking for Angie? There was little left of him now, and Lucy didn’t know if it was the grief eating away at him, being on the run, or something far worse.
“Sorry about Felix Canyon, Lucy. I couldn’t let them get away with it. Guess I caught some of what came down there.”
She loosened his shirt and listened to his chest with the stethoscope from her bag.
“They’re operating from White Sands,” Jerry said.
“We know. We’re going in now,” Dean assured him.
Jerry licked his lips, and Lucy reached for her water bottle. Holding his head up, they managed to get a little down his throat before he started coughing.
“There’s a storage closet in the office. Under the bottom shelf you’ll find a pack. It has a pair of magnetic displacer cutters.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Inside. Guys on the inside. They’re scared. They know someone’s bad—”
The coughing wracked his body and Lucy wondered if it started this way each time.
“They don’t know who to report it to. Don’t know how high it goes. I tracked the UAVs to this side of the base. I wanted to go in, but their bio-crap caught up with me before I could. This was as far as I got.”
“We’ll take care of it,” Dean promised.
Jerry shifted his eyes to Lucy, locked them on her. His hand grasped hers and she had the irrational urge to strip the glove off, to allow him to feel her skin against his as he died.
“I knew you were on the right side, Lucy.”
She noted the red tinge begin at the base of his throat and knew he had ten, or at the most eleven minutes.
“Don’t cry, Lucy.”
They were Jerry’s last words. His hands went limp, but Lucy and Dean continued to hold them. They stayed with him as the horror Dean had seen before occurred again. There was no need for words. What could they have said? All they could offer him was the dignity of not dyi
ng alone. In the end, he bled out like all the others had. It took ten minutes and twenty-nine seconds.
Dean found an old jacket in the office. Watching him cover Jerry with it, Lucy felt herself begin to shake. She thought she had seen the worst that could happen to a man when her brother had come home, but this was worse than what Marcos had endured. She had seen a lot of death, dealt with terrible viruses for the past six years, but this was the first time she had stared into the face of hell.
Dean put his arms around her, helped her to the door of the station where she could feel the night air on her face. Then he went back into the office and found the cutters. He slipped them into the backpack with the rest of their gear.
“The sun will be up in another three hours. I know it’s hard to leave him, but we’re almost out of time here.”
Lucy nodded, said a final prayer for the dead, and followed Dean out into the night.
LUCY FOLLOWED DEAN back out to the Harley, climbed on behind him, donned her helmet, and gave him a thumbs-up when he asked if she was ready. But as they sped off toward White Sands, his question echoed in her mind.
Was she ready?
Had she ever been ready?
Blessed with an exceptional mind and good looks, she realized life had been easy up to this point. Had she chosen any other field, it would have been a breeze. What had happened to Marcos had changed everything. What was happening with Dean was changing it again.
She wasn’t supposed to fall in love right now. She wasn’t supposed to care so much about the man she now clung to as they sped through the desert night. Yet, she did. Watching Jerry die had acted like a lens, bringing much of her life into focus. They might not survive this evening. Many hadn’t.
If they did live to see tomorrow though, she would be foolish to walk away from a once in a lifetime love because he happened to be a stubborn, burned-out, older gringo. So what if he was exactly the kind of man she had vowed never to love? They had known each other less than a month. The statistical odds of their relationship succeeding were slim. Almost as slim as the odds of their living to see the sunrise.
She glanced again at the cell phone, then tugged on Dean’s left arm. He slowed the Harley, and pulled off the road. The map showed six more turns. They’d made it through four when they came to the perimeter fence.
It stood ten feet high. Electricity surged through it. Dean pulled the cutters out of their pack along with a small pouch. “The power grid shows up on their control panel. Any disruption will show the exact location, and those lights at the top will come on. If we didn’t get fried—which we would—the guards would be here in a matter of minutes.”
“You’re not making me feel any better about this, Dreiser.”
From the pouch, Dean removed what looked like clothespins. He clipped them to wires five feet up, then shifted down two feet and clipped along the same wires again.
“You rerouted the circuit,” Lucy said. Dean gave her the wolfish grin she had come to love.
“We’ll know if it doesn’t work on the first cut. The lights will come on. Either way, we go through. Agreed?”
“Of course.”
He took out the cutters.
“They look like gardening shears,” Lucy said softly.
“We’re lucky Jerry was able to snag a pair.” Dean snipped quickly.
Knowing there would be no going back, they left the Harley. It was too conspicuous to take through.
“Any idea how far we have to go?” Dean asked. He’d taken the pack from her, and they were moving on a southwest heading. With any luck the patrols wouldn’t find the cut wires until dawn.
“No more than two miles.”
“We’re a long way from central headquarters.”
“Is this near the first victim?”
“No. Remember it’s the largest military installation in the U.S.” He mimicked her tone exactly, and he also managed to sidestep her swing.
“We got lucky on the map and on finding Jerry.”
“Yeah. We would have found a way in though. We had to.” Dean reached for her hand and held it until they came in sight of the facility.
One guard manned the post outside. They dropped to the ground in the darkness and pulled out their binoculars.
“Looks like a concrete bunker.”
“Most bio-facilities are constructed of cement block.” Lucy looked for windows and found none. “If this base were attacked, no one wants the bugs to get out.”
“We don’t have bio-weapons programs,” Dean reminded her.
“This could be left over from when we did.”
“There’s one camera on this side, sweeping east to west,” Dean said. “And we’ll need that guard’s card to get in.”
“I could ask nicely.”
“Or I could shoot him.”
“He could be a good guy.”
“Could be, but it’s doubtful since he’s posted here.”
They remained on their stomachs for another ten minutes, watching for activity. There wasn’t any, and it soon became obvious the guard was bored and less than alert. Dean motioned for Lucy to slide back down the small hill they lay crouched against.
Unzipping their pack, he pulled out a rifle with a night scope and assembled it. Then he inserted two tranquilizer darts. He handed the rifle to Lucy.
“Give me three minutes to circle behind him, then use them both,” he said. “Wait until the camera has panned away to shoot. It’s on a two-minute sweep. Stay clear of the lens when you come down.”
She thought he would leave, but he touched her face, whispered, “I love you, Lucy.”
Before she could answer, he was gone, melting into the night faster than the falcon name he had earned.
She began counting, crawled back up the hill at two minutes, positioned herself, and had the guard in her scope at two forty-five.
Praying Dean hadn’t encountered any problems, she checked the camera, then fired at exactly three minutes. The dart found its mark. Before the guard hit the ground, she fired again. She watched through the scope as Dean appeared at the exact spot the man had fallen. He dragged the body into the shadows.
Lucy broke down the rifle, placed it into the pack, and pulled out her pistol. Then, she hurried to join Dean.
Ω
Dean confirmed both of Lucy’s shots were direct hits. Private Wilson would be out for at least six hours. If they weren’t back outside by then, it wouldn’t matter. Reaching around the man’s neck, he removed his keycard. By the time he shouldered Wilson’s rifle and pocketed his extra ammo, then made his way to the door, Lucy was standing underneath the camera.
Both had their weapons drawn. There was still no sign of additional guards, but since there had been a guard posted outside there would be men posted inside as well. Dean held the guard’s card up to the scanner. Lucy waited and opened the door on his signal. He went in first. The blast of air conditioning was a shock after the hours they had spent in the desert night.
Bright fluorescent lighting revealed a long corridor of closed doors. The entire layout resembled a cross between a military facility and a research laboratory. Dean pointed to monitors at each intersection of halls. They had no difficulty telling which way to go. They followed the bio-containment warning symbols through Zones One, Two, and Three. As they approached Zone Four, Lucy looked longingly at the scrubs, but Dean shook his head.
They didn’t have time.
In front of them a pair of double doors displayed a warning. Dean didn’t need to read the words. The bio-hazard symbol was the same one Lucy had pointed out to him in Roswell’s morgue.
In case visitors were slow learners, someone had placed a radiation symbol below on the opposite door. If the bugs didn’t get you, the radiation would.
Why couldn’t he be up against good old-fashioned bullets?
They slipped through the double doors like sand slides through an hourglass. A control booth stood three hundred feet due north. In it were three men, watching a rep
lay of a baseball game, volume set low. They were not wearing scrubs or masks, which Dean took as a very good sign. He handed Wilson’s rifle to Lucy and gave her the extra ammunition. He motioned for her to hold her current position, while he circled around from the east hall.
Four in the morning was the perfect time for an attack. The guards would be tired for having pulled late night duty. Dean crawled to within twenty feet and heard every word.
“I’ll be glad to get out of this rat hole.”
“Be grateful you’re in here and not in Roswell.”
“True. Nobody’s out looking at little green men now.”
“Nobody’s left.”
They all laughed, though uncomfortably so, as if they might be caught and have to explain what they found so funny.
One of the guards leaned forward and stared at the outside monitor, then turned the sound on the baseball game even lower.
“Where did Wilson go?”
“He came in for a leak about two minutes ago.”
“Why can’t he go outside like everyone else?”
“Go and check on him. Tell him to get back outside.”
The control booth was well-lit. Dean crouched in the darkness of the east corridor. From their conversation, Dean surmised the last speaker was the ranking officer, which was all he needed to know.
The first guard was pushing back from the television to go and find Wilson when Dean’s bullets slammed into him. He never knew what hit him.
The second guard swiveled toward the sound, then he too went down.
The officer reached for his weapon.
“Put your hands in the air,” Dean shouted. Adrenaline pumped through his veins, and his ears rang from the four shots he had fired.
The major froze.
“There’s also a rifle on you.”
The click of Lucy’s weapon sounded.
“Keep your hands in the air.”
Dean stepped into the control booth, over the guards’ bodies. He relieved the man of his weapon, then searched for his backup weapon. When he’d found and discarded it, he motioned for him to turn and walk toward the south side of the booth.
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