The Holy Grail (Sam Reilly Book 13)

by Christopher Cartwright

  Chapter Sixteen

  The VIP VH-60 Black Hawks of the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion’s Executive Flight Detachment raced across the Shenandoah Valley.

  In the executive seats at the rear Tom Bower sat next to the Secretary of Defense. He took in a long, slow breath.

  The Secretary of Defense was on her cell phone, speaking to the commander of the F16 squadron out at Joint Airforce Base Andrews, telling him that the F16s were to locate and maintain a visual of the JetRanger and nothing more.

  Her voice was raised above the whir of the Black Hawk’s rotor blades.

  Three simultaneous blasts lit up the velvety black sky.

  Tom’s heart raced with disbelief. He didn’t need to look out the helicopter’s window. He’d flown helicopters in Afghanistan in 2003. He knew that sound well. It was an AIM-120 AMRAAM –Advanced Medium Range Air to Air Missile – being fired.

  Nor did he have to check and see if they hit their target.

  The AIM-120 AMRAAM was a high-supersonic, all weather, Beyond Visual Range, fire-and-forget air-to-air missile. It used a high-explosive warhead and relied entirely on active radar homing for the final stages of flight, meaning if the pilot pulled the trigger, it was going to reach its intended target.

  That target, in this case, was a JetRanger with Sam Reilly on board.

  No chance it would miss and impossible to believe that anyone would survive when it did.

  In a dark and deadly-sounding voice, the Secretary said, “What the unholy fuck were they thinking? I ordered them not to fire!”

  Nobody in the helicopter dared respond.

  Tom licked his lips. The helicopter flew closer to the wreckage site. A ball of smoke still hung in the air. More rose from the ground where the helicopter had crashed.

  Tom chewed on his lip as the helicopter circled around a second time.

  “Take it down,” the Secretary said.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere you can.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The pilot circled the wreckage, before heading off to the north in search of a landing site.

  Tom shook his head. He was going to have to break the news to Sam’s parents. His eyes turned to the Secretary. If her look was any indication, heads were going to roll.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Shenandoah National Park

  Sam recognized the white-top of the converted VH-60 Black Hawks of the Army’s 12th Aviation Battalion’s Executive Flight Detachment as it circled above the crash site nearly two hundred feet away. He tried to take a deep breath, but his chest hurt where multiple thick branches had clashed and almost certainly fractured his ribs on his way down. It was the dense foliage of the forest that had reduced the speed of his fall to somewhere within the vicinity of survivability. He exhaled slowly, gritted his teeth, and shuffled his back up against the trunk of a large poplar tree.

  The blaze from the downed helicopter sent a soft glow radiating across the fuselage of the VIP helicopter. Sam’s eyes were swimming, but he could make out the vibrant sky blue of the DoD seal on the side of the bird.

  Was the Secretary of Defense on board?

  His eyes narrowed.

  Did she order the F16 pilots to shoot him down?

  He shook his head. There would be time to find out what happened and why, but right now he needed to conserve his strength and energy in order to escape.

  Sam’s eyes tracked the VIP helicopter as it flew overhead without stopping and continued farther along and into the valley. He expelled a deep breath of air. It was impossible for anyone above to spot him through the forest’s dense canopy. He shook his head. Someone had tried to kill Ben Gellie. That wasn’t a warning shot. Those pilots were ordered to hunt Ben down and take him out. There was no attempt to get him to land the helicopter and surrender. No negotiations. Just cold-blooded murder. His bloodied lips curled upward into a determined grin as the realization struck him every bit as hard as the branches – someone had tried to kill him.

  They knew that he was on board the JetRanger. His own people knew that he’d been taken hostage and that he was piloting the helicopter. They were flying over Shenandoah National Park, away from any populated region, which meant there was no risk of direct terrorist threat. No reason why the F16 Fighting Falcon pilots couldn’t attempt to force them to land. But there weren’t any communications…

  They had just tried to kill him!

  Sam tried to blink away the blur of disorientation.

  Why had someone from the Pentagon ordered his death?

  The skies were now empty of any aircraft, leaving him to the silence of the forest. Scattered among the chirping crickets was a distinct glow up ahead where the crackling of fire from the downed helicopter was threatening to start a wildfire.

  If the blaze took hold, it could engulf the forest and race up the valley faster than he or Ben could possibly outrun. They needed to get moving – quickly.

  His eyes raked the ground, searching for any signs of his captor, turning skyward before settling on a dense section of foliage in the canopy high above to the south where something moved. It could have been an owl or a squirrel. He couldn’t be sure.

  “Ben?” he said, more remembering the fact of his existence than trying to find the guy.

  There was no reply.

  Sam stood up, grimacing as blood rushed through his aching legs. It hurt but he could bear weight and all his limbs responded to his instructions. He might still have damage to his internal organs and for all he knew, he was bleeding to death internally, but at least his spine was intact.

  The fire crackled in the distance.

  It was starting to take hold on the nearby poplar trees. Whatever injuries Sam had could wait. If they didn’t get out of there soon, those injuries would be the least of his problems.

  He cupped his hands and shouted, “Ben! Are you alive?”

  “Up here!” Ben’s voice came back.

  Sam stared at him through squinted eyes, his brow furrowed. Ben was stuck approximately 25 feet in the air on the upper branches of a birch tree.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine,” Ben replied with a rueful grin. “First they lock me up for donating blood and tell me I’m America’s terrorist suspect number one. Then, when I escape and take you hostage, they shoot us down without so much as a warning shot! At your suggestion, I just jumped out of a moving helicopter, fifty feet off the ground!”

  Sam grinned. “You’re welcome.”

  Ben wasn’t finished yet. “Now, the fall that was supposed to kill me, leaves me stranded up here to take another gamble with my life. So how do you think I feel?”

  Sam ignored the question. “Can you move?”

  “I’m twenty-five feet off the ground. What do you think?”

  “The fire at the crash site is starting to ignite the forest,” Sam said. “It’s struggling to take hold this early in the spring, but it won’t be long – and when it does, we’ll have no chance to outrun it. So, I think you’re going to have to work out a way to get down!”

  Ben’s gaze snapped round toward the rising conflagration. He cursed. “All right, all right! I’m going to try to see if I can reach that branch over there.”

  Sam ran his eyes across the lower branches of the birch tree. There weren’t many. It looked like the lower half of the tree had been intentionally stripped of its branches years ago, either by bears or National Parks Rangers in an attempt to clear the canopy and make way for some of the other nearby trees to grow.

  Either way, it looked like there was a lot of empty air between Ben and the ground.

  “What branch?” Sam asked.

  Ben didn’t reply.

  Instead, he bent his legs, gritted his teeth, and set his eyes on the fork of a nearby poplar tree. It looked like seven or eight feet. A distance difficult to make with a run up, but almost certainly impossible from standstill.

  You’ve got to be kidding me!

  “You sure you want to go for
that one?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Ben replied. Then, glancing at the blaze from the nearby wreckage of the helicopter, he said, “It looks like I’m going to have to anyway.”

  “What if you try…”

  Sam stopped midsentence.

  Ben launched himself toward the poplar tree. His right hand connected on the fork of the tree where a straggling offshoot took his weight for a split second, before snapping.

  Ben swore and a moment later he was free falling toward the ground – landing on top of a pair of juvenile conifer trees.

  Sam raced over to meet him. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, fine. We should be dead,” Ben complained, as he opened his eyes, patted himself down, confirming that he was mostly uninjured, and stood up. “They just shot us out of the sky!”

  “Hey, you don’t look hurt,” Sam pointed out. “Let’s get going.”

  Ben glanced at the thick forest. “Where?”

  “West. It won’t take more than a couple days for the investigation team to reach here. Then it won’t take long, a day or two at best, before they realize the wreckage is distinctly missing any bodies.”

  “And when that happens, they’re going to double up on their search effort,” replied Ben.

  “Which means, we have two days to get as far away from here as possible.”

  Behind them, the blaze of the wrecked helicopter finally overcame the nearby trees, which now started to crackle as the flames engulfed them on its eager attempt to race to the crest of the nearby mountain.

  Sam yelled, “Run!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ben’s head snapped round, his eyes darting toward the ominous glow that threatened to engulf them. The thick forest was in the process of becoming a cinder box, burning out of control. Ideally, they needed to get below the fire, but already it was spreading laterally along the steep slope. It was too late; they needed to reach the crest before the fire overwhelmed them.

  Sam was already off running up hill at full speed.

  Ben didn’t need any further encouragement. He climbed the steep hill at a pace that would have made his old football coach proud.

  The helicopter had been shot down more than two thirds of the way to the top of the ridgeline. The dense Shenandoah Forest thinned toward the crest, making it easier to scramble their way through, rather than fighting their way through the dense undergrowth of the lower sections of the mountain.

  Behind him the inferno raged.

  Its fire burned greedily through the highly flammable foliage of the conifer trees, ripping through the new rosebuds of the poplar trees, and dancing between the undergrowth of the chestnut trees. The heated air raced upward, sending a torrent of fiery wind their way.

  Ben breathed the hot air through his throbbing lungs, the muscles of his legs burned and his chest pounded.

  He caught up with Sam and quickly outpaced him.

  The ridgeline was now within sight, less than a hundred feet above them. The gradient increased to seventy-five and then eighty degrees and he found himself clinging to the straggling trees for support as he dug the balls of his feet deep into the soft soil and climbed.

  In the dark, the final twenty feet to the summit looked like an ominous wall of darkness, an impossible silhouette to overcome. He couldn’t see how they were going to summit the last twenty or so feet, which appeared to be more like an open rockface, but it didn’t matter. The fire was lapping at their toes and would overcome them any minute. There was no option of turning back now; they would just have to find a way to reach the top.

  A shallow stream ran from the nearby peak forming the base of a small waterfall with the runoff of the last of the melting snow from winter. The misting water now bombarded the wildfire, clashing with it head on, instantly turning to steam with a sibilant hiss.

  The ground above him became difficult to visualize.

  Blood pounded in the back of his head and Death teased at his heels, but still Ben ran onward, placing one hand in front of the other as he scrambled up the near vertical slope.

  His hand reached the vertical granite outcrop.

  He tried to grip it and climb, but the misting waterfall made the stone wet and slippery. No matter which way he positioned his hands, he couldn’t quite get enough perch to climb.

  Ben swore. “We’re trapped!”

  “Keep moving to your right!” Sam replied. “There’s a cave!”

  Ben couldn’t see it, but he kept moving anyway. It wasn’t like he had another choice. He was wedged between an unassailable vertical cliff and a raging fire.

  Keeping his left hand on the rocky wall, he kept moving to the right, until he disappeared into a fissure in the rock.

  The flame lit up the entire rockface like a spotlight, leaving an empty void where the rock opened into a deep crevasse.

  His eyes frantically searched his surroundings for another way out, but came up short. They were now trapped.

  Sam shouted, “Into the cave!”

  “I don’t think I can fit…”

  “You don’t have a choice!”

  Ben squeezed into the narrow fissure, feeling with his hands and feet as he shuffled deeper. With his head turned to the side, he maneuvered his body blindly inside.

  “Quick!” Sam shouted, following him in.

  Ben felt the searing heat of the fire front run to greet them. He held his breath, as though that might protect his lungs, closed his eyes, and took another step deeper.

  But his feet didn’t find their footings.

  Instead, they found nothing but an empty void.

  Ben screamed…

  As he slipped, free falling, deep into the rocky abyss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – Pentagon

  The Secretary of Defense stormed along the hallway toward the office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  A junior aide tried to stop her. “I’m sorry, Madam Secretary, General Painter is in a meeting.”

  “Let me see him – now!” Her words were barked out with the authority of her position.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am…”

  She ignored the military aide and opened the door. “Who the hell authorized your F16s to shoot down a helicopter carrying Sam Reilly?”

  The President stood up. “That would be me.”

  She felt deflated. “For God’s sake, why, Mr. President?”

  “We have DNA confirmation that Ben’s parents were John and Jenny Gellie.”

  The Secretary of Defense pursed her lips, feeling the crushing weight of what she now realized was about to come next. “And?”

  “The very same ones who were involved in the Bolshoi Zayatsky incident…”

  She paused, remaining silent.

  “Did you hear what I said, Madam Secretary?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  His blue eyes smiled triumphantly. “Madam Secretary?”

  “Are you certain it’s him?”

  “We have his DNA. It’s a match.” The President raised an eyebrow slightly. “Now what do you say?”

  The Secretary expelled a deep breath. “Thank God you killed them before he got away.”

  “I’m glad we’re in agreement.”

  She said, “I want people there now to retrieve the body.”

  “They’re on their way, but…” his eyes turned downward.

  “What?”

  “The crash caused a forest fire. I’m afraid the entire place is ablaze. We might need to wait a day or two until the fire passes before our team can reach the helicopter.”

  “Just make sure someone’s there the second that fire stops burning… I want DNA proof the bastard’s dead!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Shenandoah Mountain

  Sam reached for Ben’s outstretched hand.

  Their fingers locked on each other’s forearms. A gust of wind blew a series of red hot embers into the rocky fissure. Sam swore as a few spar
ks embedded onto his back. He shifted his footing to dip down and brace for the incoming barrage of heat. His left foot slipped. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to unbalance him.

  Ben tightened his grip and a moment later, Sam slipped into the deep chasm of the void below.

  The rocky crevasse angled eighty-five degrees downward. It was formed by two giant stone walls placed at an angle, some two feet apart, and less than a dozen feet wide to form a massive slide. Sam frantically swung his arms outward trying to find something to perch his hands and grip to arrest his fall. His fingertips connected to the smooth wall of stone, slipping freely.

  Sam bent his knees and tried pushing upward to form a wedge between the two rocky structures. He was dealing in seconds and microseconds to stop his descent, before speed and momentum would make it impossible.

  Those seconds passed and Sam kept sliding.

  His speed raced toward a lethal velocity.

  Sam bent his knees slightly and angled his toes outward, ready to absorb the violent end to his downward progression.

  Seconds went by.

  For every one of them, he knew his speed was becoming closer to terminal.

  By the fourth second the ground on his back disappeared completely and for another millisecond he was free-falling into a great expanse of a pitch-black void.

  His toes were the first to strike the icy cold water, followed immediately by his entire body and head. Sam heard the whoosh of water rushing over his body, followed by the emphatic thumping of his heart in the back of his ears.

  Sam’s feet hit the rocky bottom without warning.

  His bent knees took the worst of the jarring impact and a moment later he straightened them again, pushing up from the rocky riverbed.

  He kicked hard and prayed he was swimming in the right direction. In the darkness it was hard to orient himself to the water’s surface. His lungs started to burn and his legs stung with exertion as lactic acid built up.

  An instant later his head broke the icy surface of the alpine, subterranean river.

  He took in a deep gulp of fresh air.

  The icy water stung him all over. But at least he could still move everything, which meant that he couldn’t be that badly injured. It was the cold that would get to them. They would freeze to death if they didn’t find a way out soon and get dry and warm.