A new bout of turbulence sliced the floor out from him. For a startled moment he found himself hanging weightless in the air, then the cabin changed aspect again and he sailed sideways toward the compartment, grabbed on to its frame and thus managed to avoid hugging the urn. The plane leveled out, which was more than could be said for Daniel’s stomach. He fought to ignore the nausea— did they carry barf bags in this crate?— and used the calm to pour two cups of coffee, straight-up and black, heading back aft PDQ before the next turbulence could strike and leave him with coffee scalds down both legs.
He dropped into the seat next to Jack, held out one of the cups. “Here. You look like you could use it,” he hollered over the roar of the engines.
“Thanks.” Jack took the cup, tried a sip, grimaced at the bitter brew. “You didn’t happen to come across a bottle of whisky back there, did you? This could do with a shot.”
“Are you suggesting there might be contraband on an Air Force flight, General?”
“You’ve got no idea.”
“Oh, I think I do. I’ve been hanging around you for long enough.” Daniel grinned.
“What’s that?” Jack tugged at a piece of paper peering from the pocket of Daniel’s jacket, pulled it out.
“Hey! Do you mind?”
“Not at all.” He unfolded it. “Smash Clearance Sale At Miller’s Orthopedic Shoe Emporium! All Sandals Must Go!? Those recon hikes can give you hammer toes, I suppose…”
Suppressing an Olympic-grade eye roll, Daniel resigned himself. “Turn it over.”
Jack did, scanned the article. “Kindred spirit?” he asked, looking up.
“That’s what old Stavros thought.”
“And you disagreed. Obviously, seeing as he missed the actual location of Atlantis by… ooh, about three million light years, give or take. So why are you carrying this around?”
Excellent question.
Gee, Jack, I just have this weird feeling about the so-called accident. Fancy hopping over to Greece to do some sleuthing?
Not damn likely.
The mysterious document he was supposed to translate was somehow connected, no doubt about that, but right now Daniel couldn’t begin to speculate on the how or why of it. A change of topic definitely was in order. He snatched the article from Jack’s fingers and stashed it away again. “I got hold of Sam just before we boarded,” he offered.
“Uhuh?”
“She’s been making some headway with the police. In the first instance, Reno PD gave her the usual spiel.”
“Missing person is over the age of eighteen and therefore not missing before forty-eight hours are up?”
“Yeah, that one. They weren’t going to do anything, aside from filling in forms in triplicate, so she contacted Agent Barrett, who contacted Reno PD and evinced a neighborly interest on the part of the NID. Surprising how fast the ball got rolling after that, Sam says.”
Jack frowned. “Barrett? I thought we were keeping a lid on this.”
“Barrett knows the score, Jack. He won’t go shouting it from the rooftops. Besides, he’s got a crush on Sam.”
Jack frowned harder. “Yeah. That too. So what, if anything, did Reno PD find out?”
“They managed to pin down the right waiter at the restaurant and got his statement. According to him, Cassie left with two guys who’d been sitting at a nearby table. Nobody knows who they were. They also picked up the check, by the way. Before you ask, they paid cash.”
“Of course they did.” Jack took another gulp of coffee, placed the cup between his feet, leaned back, and closed his eyes. “Get some sleep, Daniel. We’ll land in an hour, and you want to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so we can stomp on some toes when we get there.”
“We have a problem,” she said. “Jackson lived up to his reputation for not doing as he’s told. He went running to O’Neill.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. He and the Jaffa barged right into a meeting at the Pentagon.”
“Crap!”
Her thoughts precisely.
“Do you want us to get rid of the girl?” the operative asked.
“No. I’ve seen her file. She may prove useful in other ways. Where have you got her now?”
“At the safe house, still sedated.”
“Keep her that way, but it’ll be better if she’s out of the country. Take her to the site.”
“Fine. What about the problem?”
“They’re en route to Nellis. Neutralize them.”
“How?”
“It’s a big, empty desert out there. Be creative.”
“And the document?”
“We’ll retrieve it and make alternative arrangements for its translation.”
Chapter 9
The rattle in the rental car’s ventilation system had gotten worse, but for now Sam Carter clung to the distraction. Heat and dusty haze filled the rearview mirror and had long swallowed the structures of Nellis AFB and Area 51. Ahead stretched more heat and dust, with a seasoning of tumbleweed and rocks thrown in, and the highway back to Reno, Reno’s finest, and the case of a missing college student.
Much like the haze outside, you could have cut the tension inside the car with a knife. Even Daniel had fallen silent after the polite small talk had died a drawn-out, miserable death.
What the hell had she expected?
That the guys would arrive and everything would be alright somehow?
After all, back in the olden days SG-1 had saved the galaxy’s collective ass several times over, so they’d just wave their magic wand and hey, presto! Right?
Puerile. Pathetic. Pitiful.
Sam ran out of invective starting with a ‘P’.
In reality, the whole thing was just awkward, an object lesson in how a person should be careful what they wish for. Yes, true, her first, spontaneous reaction after Cassie’s disappearance had been that instinctive need to have her team around her. SG-1 had always been more than the sum of its parts, each one of them stronger because they were together.
But that belonged in the past. Done, dusted, good memory, over with. Daniel belonged on Atlantis, Teal’c on Dakara, General O’Neill at DC, and she… oh, good question. She’d come up with an answer eventually.
Her knuckles were going white. Perhaps she should stop trying to throttle the steering wheel. Perhaps she should pay a little more attention to the road.
Somewhat difficult when you got a two-star general next to you fiddling with the controls for the car radio and adding a waterfall of static to the rattle from the AC. Soothing. Really, really soothing. Fragments of a station would explode from the speakers at maximum volume, only to be swallowed up again by white noise. Such as now, for instance. Sam flinched, tightened her lips. She’d rather bite off her tongue than say something.
Five minutes on he found a station that came in clearly. Predictably, it was Country and Western of the most aggressive variety. Yeehaw!
“God give me strength,” she muttered under her breath.
“You say something, Carter?” He spared her a sidelong glance.
“No, sir.”
In the back, Daniel and Teal’c wisely kept their peace, and he proceeded to fiddle with a new set of controls, the passenger side rear mirror this time. It contributed a soft mechanical hum to the acoustic medley. That she could live with, Sam figured.
They were passing a long defunct truck stop when he asked conversationally, “You do realize we’ve got a tail?”
“What?” She checked the rearview mirror.
Nothing. For miles and miles and miles.
“Six o’clock high, Carter.”
She still couldn’t see anything, the roof of the car blocking her view, but Teal’c and Daniel had twisted around, scanned the sky.
“There is a low-flying helicopter behind us, Colonel Carter. It appears to be approaching.”
As if to prove Teal’c’s observation, the chopper suddenly dropped into view, skimming along less than six feet above t
he road and closing in fast.
“I’m guessing this isn’t Highway Patrol,” Daniel offered.
“Not unless they’ve come up with a whole new way of conducting traffic stops,” growled General O’Neill. “He’s packing missiles. Something you neglected to mention when you filled us in earlier, Carter?”
“Not that I’m aware, sir.”
If she’d had a tail, she’d have noticed, Sam was sure of it. On the other hand, there’d been plenty of opportunity to plant a tracking device on the rental for anyone who was interested.
She stared at the launcher rig, an ugly metal contraption protruding from the chopper’s belly like a set of fangs. The rig was moving, swiveling for the missiles to find their target. Not that the car would be hard to miss, especially if they had heat seekers. The only thing even remotely looking like cover had been—
“Hang on!” she shouted.
Without bothering to check whether her passengers followed that piece of advice, she yanked the wheel sharply to the left, hauled at the handbrake, and floored the gas. Tires screeching, engine howling in protest, the rental spun into a one-eighty, fishtailed for a second, and shot toward the chopper the instant Sam released the brake.
The first missile, launched a heartbeat after Sam had initiated the power slide, hissed over their heads and killed a bunch of tumbleweed somewhere behind them.
One down, three to go.
But it had been close. Too damn close.
The chopper was hovering in place, as if trying to decide what to do next. Sam hoped to hell it would decide to get out of the way, otherwise things would get very ugly very fast.
“Carter! You’re not going to play chicken with that!”
“‘Fraid so, sir!” If there ever was a time when she just wanted to scrunch her eyes shut…
The transparent bubble of the cockpit was looming in front of them, all but filling the windscreen. Sam could see the face of the pilot, not looking too happy. Same went for his pal in the copilot’s seat. Here was hoping these guys were only half as crazy as she. If the pilot had the stones to bring down the skids on the roof of the car…
Even as she thought it the chopper swung up and sideways into a turn.
“Chicken!” she crowed, unable to stop herself.
Jack O’Neill groaned. “Keep in mind that the bird is armed, Colonel.”
“And it’s coming back for seconds,” Daniel supplied from the backseat.
“I know! I know.”
The gas pedal was denting the floor already, and if she stomped down any harder, she’d probably kick it straight through the undercarriage. Unfortunately, all that was relative. The rental clunker was tuned to ferrying around Mitch Tourist and his blushing bride. Evasive driving? Not so much. The car was doing ninety, give or take, and Sam was under no illusion that it would be able to sustain that speed for any stretch of time. It wasn’t going to be enough.
It would damn well have to be!
Half a mile ahead the ramshackle buildings of the truck stop were slowly peeling themselves from a cloak of haze.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she coaxed.
In response the oil warning winked on in a festive shade of red.
“Crap!”
“You’ve got about two minutes till the engine seizes.”
“I know! Sir.”
“Incoming,” Teal’c announced calmly.
“Crap!”
“You already said that, Carter.”
In the rearview mirror she watched the missile homing in like a pissed-off hornet. At the last possible moment she swerved right, ploughing furrows into the shoulder, spraying gravel, raising enough dust to momentarily obscure the chopper. The steering went sluggish for a second, came back— praise be!— just as the missile struck the road less than three feet behind the trunk. The entire rear end of the car skipped into the air, pushed sideways by the detonation, and crashed back down with a bone-jarring impact. The only reason why they hadn’t flipped was that they’d been speeding away from the blast.
As a bonus, that chronic rattle in the AC was gone. And so, Sam realized a moment later, was the left rear tire, either blown out by the explosion or sliced by a piece of rock. The car was pulling left, badly, and she could hear the shriek of metal rims on asphalt. On the upside, left was where she wanted to go. The turnoff for the truck stop was coming up fast.
“Sam! He’s closing in again.”
“I see him, Daniel!”
Why couldn’t the bastard have been blinded by that dust cloud and driven his chopper into the ground?
“Hold tight!” she warned and shot left, across the highway and into the turnoff.
The timing was perfect. The third missile sailed past them, detonated harmlessly a bit further along the road. To make up for it, the radiator had started boiling, sending fluffy clouds of steam out from under the hood. Though that didn’t matter much now. For better or worse, this was it.
The truck stop consisted of two structures, a gas station and a diner beside it. Both were boarded up and neither looked too sturdy, but she couldn’t worry about that now. They’d just have to take their chances.
And what else was new?
Main thing was, the old gas pumps were still there. And maybe, just maybe, there actually was fuel left in the underground tanks. Even fumes would do…
“Unbuckle and get ready to jump as soon as we’re around the corner!” she shouted, squealing past the pumps.
Between the station and the diner was a narrow alley. A smidge of cover and, more importantly, they’d be out of sight from the chopper. With a little luck the pilot and his pal would never realize that someone had gotten out of the car. Sam swung into the alley, clipping the corner of the building, shaking loose a shower of brittle siding.
“Now!”
That’s why she liked that team thing so much.
The guys knew better than to ask questions. They jumped.
She slammed the car into reverse, scaring a scream from the transmission, and tore back out and right alongside the pumps. The engine died just as the chopper was closing in for the kill. She was committed now, Sam guessed.
“Here goes,” she whispered, flung herself out of the car, and started running.
The air was a swirling beige mass of sand and debris, whipped into turmoil by the rotor blades. Noise beat at her from all sides, almost enough to make her stop and turn and check for its source or a landmark. Precisely the thing she couldn’t afford to do. Every inch of distance counted.
Then a hiss, she thought, thin and faint over the rest of the din.
Don’t look now!
The final missile hit the car, and the initial explosion slammed into her back, a giant, hot hammer that tore her off her feet and catapulted her forward in a mad tumble. Sam landed on her shoulder, spraining something, and scuttled on, like a beetle on hands and knees, ears ringing, only guessing at where she was headed. The fall had scrambled her sense of direction.
Any second now. If it was going to happen, it would happen any second now. And she wasn’t going to make it.
She squinted ahead, eyes raw with dust, still trying to regain her bearings. The beige swirliness in front of her congealed to a dark core. A dark, O’Neill-shaped core, making straight for her.
No. No, no, no!
“Get back, sir! Dammit, take cover!” Her voice was a rasp, gritted with sand, and she wasn’t sure he’d heard her.
And even if he had, it wouldn’t have made a difference, would it?
The sudden realization that nothing fundamental had changed struck Sam as hilarious. She was giggling when a strong hand grabbed the collar of her jacket, yanked her to her feet, and hauled her away like a sack of potatoes, outsized and unwieldy. Ten meters, twenty.
They almost made it.
She could actually see the dim outline of a building when the underground tanks went up in a violent storm of pressure and flame and deafening noise. By comparison, the first explosion had been a damp p
op. Alongside metal shrapnel, ancient soda cans, and one US Air Force general, Sam felt herself sailing through the air. She hit the side of the building, the impact oddly painless as the wall simply collapsed away from her under the onslaught of the blast wave.
Touchdown was a different matter. She dived, head over heels, onto a waste heap of shredded timber, siding, tarpaper, glass, and broken furniture, with Jack O’Neill landing right on top of her, swearing a blue streak all the way through.
Finally, after what seemed like eons but in reality could only have been seconds, the dust settled and the noise died down, leaving only the rabid crackle of fire where the car and the pumps and the tank had been. High above, a vulture shrieked its displeasure at the uproar or, possibly, at the signs of life.
Sorry, pal, no lunch for you. Yet.
Jack was about to run the usual damage inventory on his anatomy when the ground moved under him. So to speak.
“Sir? Would you mind getting off of me?” Carter sounded a little compressed. But she sounded, which could only be good news.
Bracing himself for an unspecified number of aches and twinges that were guaranteed to flare up at the merest sign of motion, he rolled off her and into something unexpectedly fluffy. Dingy, but fluffy. Insulation? Hardly. Probably the intestines of a sofa. Either way, Jack wasn’t going to quibble with any break the universe was willing to hand him right now.
Next to him, Carter sat up, blinking hard and spitting out a mouthful of dirt. “You okay, sir?”
“Possibly.” He pushed himself up to sit, registering that only half the expected aches and twinges had actually materialized. This day was just getting better and better. “What the hell happened?”
STARGATE SG-1: Transitions Page 6
