Oath to Defend

by Scott Matthews

  Casey had to smile. “That should be worth the price of a ticket, seeing her in action.”

  “I agree. Good luck at Sunriver.”

  “Shallow men believe in luck, to quote Emerson,” Casey returned. “I believe in overwhelming firepower, which I just happen to have with me.”

  “Shock and awe it is, then. But if you think for a moment that Barak is with O’Neil, I’d better be the one delivering the firepower.”

  “Deal. I wouldn’t want you to miss the fun.”

  As Casey waited for Green to return, he thought about what it would mean if Barak were with O’Neil at Sunriver. From what he knew about Barak and what he’d seen the terrorist’s men try to pull off when they went after Drake’s father-in-law and Secretary Rallings, there was going to be one hell of a fight. If Barak and Drake met, one of them would die. He just had to make sure it wasn’t his friend.

  45

  It took all of ten minutes for Casey to drive north to the Sunriver Resort and follow River Road around to the airport. Three hundred yards southwest of the small airport terminal, he saw a cluster of large homes identified on his resort map as the Lone Eagle Landing.

  “This could be a problem, Mike,” Green said, looking up from the maps application on his iPhone. “The GPS coordinates Kevin gave you put the Escalade in a hangar house on the far side of this development.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Drive on around and you’ll see.”

  They drove past nine large resort homes until River Road swung around and turned north again behind the seven hangar homes with taxi access from the airport.

  “It’s the second house. Drive on past unless you want him to know we’re looking for him. He can see us from any of the windows off the deck on the second floor,” he pointed to the windows. “If the Escalade is in the garage, we won’t be able to see it. If he has a plane around the other side in the hangar, we can’t see that either. All we know for sure is OnStar says the Escalade is here. O’Neil doesn’t have to be, though, and neither does Barak.”

  Casey gave this some thought. “So let’s knock on the door and find out,” he finally said. “I’ll say I’m interested in renting the place. He’s supposed to return the Escalades the day after tomorrow, meaning his vacation’s over, so he might expect someone to be looking at the place.”

  The former L.A. cop wasn’t so sure. “Mike, without knowing more about O’Neil and what he’s doing here, we could start a war if he’s involved with Barak and we walk in on him. This isn’t the way I was trained to handle a situation like this. We need more information. Especially if there is a nuke stashed around here.”

  Casey had to agree. “You’re right,” he said. “I am rushing things. Drake and I used to watch targets for weeks. With the attempts on Drake and then Liz last night, though, we need to make something happen.”

  “Let’s just think it through. That’s all I’m saying.” After they drove past O’Neil’s hangar house and back toward the airport terminal, Casey had another plan. “Let’s drive out to the parking apron where the Relentless is tied down,” he proposed. “We can see the back side of his house from there. I’ll act like I’m going through a pre-flight inspection while you use your binoculars. It’s all we can do for now.”

  He drove on to the small terminal building, then out onto the asphalt parking apron, where he pulled up just south of his red and black Bell 525 and parked. Now Green had a clear view of the row of hangar houses three hundred yards away.

  “I’ll do a walk around,” he said. “Then I’m going to ask the service attendant about fuel. Maybe someone knows if O’Neil is here with a plane. I won’t be gone long.”

  He got out and slowly walked around the helicopter, carefully inspecting the doors and windows and running his hands along the seams of the panels. Although he didn’t take time to check fluid levels, he knelt down and looked for leaks, as was his habit. A pilot familiar with his own pre-flight routine would recognize the procedure. When he had walked all the way around and returned to the driver’s side of the Yukon, he pointed toward the service attendant and walked over to the Chevron fuel truck.

  “Hi,” he said as he approached the attendant. He glanced at the man’s name tag. “Ramon, I need to refuel the Relentless sometime today. Have you refueled a helicopter?”

  “Once. Don’t worry, though. I’ve been trained.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “A week. Guy that had this job had an accident. I transferred up here from California to take his place.” He looked past his potential customer at the helicopter. “That the new Bell Relentless? It’s a beauty.”

  “Flies even better than it looks,” Casey bragged. “Okay, refuel it when you have time. By the way, those hangar houses down there…people live there year round?”

  “A couple do. The others are rented out to vacationers who fly in.”

  “You know if there’s one available now?”

  “Guy down there just brought his Hawker 400 up for refueling. Said he was leaving tomorrow. Maybe his place will be available.”

  “Thanks. Any chance you remember his name? In case I run into him?”

  After flipping through the receipts on his clipboard, the service attendant said, “O’Neil. Timothy O’Neil.”

  With a nod, Casey walked back and climbed into his Yukon, repeating to himself the tail number for O’Neil’s Hawker, which he’d glimpsed on the refueling receipt. With his hands on the top of the steering wheel, he turned to watch Green searching for signs of O’Neil.

  “He’s here, Larry,” he said. “The refueling attendant just serviced his jet. He told the attendant he was leaving tomorrow.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Let’s go to Bend. With the GPS coordinates Kevin has for the two Escalades, we’ll know where they are. Drake can decide how he wants to handle this. He’s pretty good at putting things together, especially when he gets one of his hunches. I want to think he’s right this time and that O’Neil is working with Barak and Barak is involved with the missing nuke. Wrapping all that up in one neat package and sending it all to hell would make my day. Make my year.” He smiled. “It would also let Drake get on with his life.”

  “How would it do that?” Green asked.

  “He’s been having a tough time since his wife died a year ago. He was drinking too much and isolating himself out on his farm. Stopping Barak’s assassination attempt last month seems to have snapped him out of his funk. He won’t rest, though, until Barak’s dead. When that happens, he’ll be okay again.” Casey put the SUV in gear and drove down the row of parked airplanes toward the terminal and the road leading out of the Sunriver resort.

  46

  As Drake was helping Liz out of his Porsche in front of the clubhouse at the Pronghorn, he noticed her flinch a little as she turned her head to the right and reached for his hand.

  “How’s the head?” he asked.

  “It’s not my head,” she replied. “It’s my neck. I think it’s sore from holding still for so long while Ricardo picked the glass out of my face. It’s nothing a little time in the hot tub won’t cure.”

  “The tub’s all yours as soon as we get back. You sure you want to do this?”

  “What? Pass on the opportunity to threaten this guy with a cell in Gitmo for the rest of his life? I wouldn’t miss it.”

  “All right,” Drake said. “Let’s go find our boy.”

  He followed behind her a step or two as they made their way through the clubhouse and to the pool area outside. Most of the poolside chaise lounges and chairs were occupied. The men in several of them watched Liz carefully through the dark lenses of their sunglasses, while their wives watched them to see how long they would stare.

  Drake himself wasn’t immune to the effect Liz had on men. He hadn’t decided whether it was her natural beauty or her aura of confidence that caused it. She walked gracefully, with the light step of an athlete, the opposite of the stompin
g prance of a runway model, though it had much the same effect on the opposite sex. Her figure was full in the places it needed to be, and slender in the places where it didn’t. And her eyes looked straight into the eyes of everyone she met, taking a quick reading of that person’s intent and purpose and returning a small smile or a nod of her head. It wasn’t that she demanded attention, he knew. She just knew that she would receive it.

  She was looking around. “He’s not here,” she finally said. “Maybe he’s at the bar.”

  But the polo player wasn’t there either, and the bartender said he hadn’t seen him since last night. When they looked for him in the Trailhead Grill, they were told he had checked out.

  “A fellow met him for lunch,” the manager said, “and he left to check out shortly after. They left together,” he added.

  “What did the fellow look like?” Liz asked.

  “Young, maybe thirty, good looking and maybe Hispanic. He had a little color in his complexion, anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose you got his name,” Drake said.

  “Didn’t ask. Vazquez charged both of their lunches to his room tab.”

  After thanking the manager, they walked outside and stood facing each other in the warm sun.

  “Now what?” Liz asked.

  “Now we think.”

  “Maybe Mike’s learned something.”

  Drake pulled out his iPhone. “Let’s see.”

  Casey answered on the first ring. “I have an outside table waiting for you at the Bend Brewery looking out on Mirror Pond. Do you want me to order something for you so it’ll be ready when you get here?”

  “Are you already eating?”

  “I’m just sampling a few things while we wait for you.”

  “Did you find O’Neil?”

  “Indeed we did. He’s in one of the hangar houses at the Sunriver airport, a couple hundred yards south of where I parked the Relentless. He’s a pilot, has his own jet, and is planning on leaving tomorrow.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “That I don’t know. I wasn’t sure how you wanted to handle this, so we didn’t pay him a visit.”

  “Vazquez checked out before we got here, so we have nothing new on our end. Have you heard from Ricardo and Billy?”

  “Larry talked to Ricardo. They watched some Muslims sleeping outside the stables and then saying their morning prayers, but that’s about it. You want to keep them at the ranch?”

  “Vazquez is the key,” Drake said, “and we don’t know where he is. Tell your guys to meet us for lunch. We’ll spread out this afternoon and see if we can find our polo star. Liz and I will be there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  When they pulled into the parking lot of the Bend Brewery, they saw Casey and Green waving at them from a table on the riverside patio.

  “I have never met anyone as excited about food as your friend,” Liz said.

  Drake smiled. “He’s been like that as long as I’ve known him.”

  “How long have you known him?” she asked as they walked to the patio.

  “I met him in the army. We’ve been friends since then.”

  She glanced sideways at Drake, noticing the brevity of his answers. She already knew they were brothers in arms and that they had been together in several of the hell holes in the world. She had seen Drake’s Delta Force file, the one that wasn’t supposed to exist, and knew the broad details of missions he and Mike shouldn’t have survived. They were more than friends and probably always would be.

  “He’s a good man to have as a friend,” she said.

  “Yes, he is,” Drake said, letting her walk ahead of him through the scattering of tables on the patio.

  When they reached their table, Casey stood up. “You’re going to love the food here,” he said. “Larry likes the brewery fries, but you need to try some of this spicy bean dip.”

  Drake shook his head as he sat down. “If you like the dip, I know it’s going to be too spicy for me. Are Ricardo and Billy on their way?”

  “They had to crawl out with their gear, but they should be here before we finish the appetizers. Liz, what are you hungry for?” Casey asked.

  “Something cold I can hold against my cheek. Iced tea would be nice.”

  “I’ll try their IPA,” Drake told Casey.

  When Casey had ordered for them, Drake tried to focus his friend on the business at hand. “Were both of the Escalades at Sunriver?” he asked.

  “Just one at the hangar house. Kevin said the other one was on the road north of Bend headed toward Redmond.”

  “And we don’t know who’s driving that one, right?”

  “No clue.”

  “Is Kevin able to keep tracking the Escalades for us?”

  “For as long as we want, or until OnStar finds out they’re sharing information with us.”

  “Okay, let’s keep Kevin on this. If we can’t find Vazquez again, that’s the only lead we have right now.”

  Green turned to Liz. “Could you find out where O’Neil’s jet has been recently?” he asked. “It might tell us something about who’s traveling with him.”

  “I can probably do that,” she replied. “O’Neil can block the Federal Aviation Administration from officially tracking his jet’s flight. It’s a routine request that’s made to the National Business Aviation Association so corporate competitors don’t know where each other are going and who they’re seeing. But plane geeks track aircraft status messages sent to each other and to ground stations through ACARS. That’s the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System.” She smiled. “I think we have a plane geek or two at DHS I can call. Do you have the plane’s registration or tail number?”

  “Mike has it in the Yukon. I’ll get it for you after lunch.”

  “Do we have any idea where Vazquez is?” Casey asked.

  “No,” said Drake, “but my hunch is he’s going to turn up at Abazzano’s ranch, where his horses are. I’d like to ask Ricardo and Billy to go back out there after lunch unless they’ve already spotted him.”

  Green was still talking with Liz. “Is there anything new from your office on the nuke? I called a friend in Los Angeles this morning. He said from what he’s hearing at LAPD, they’ve called off the search.”

  “Your friend’s right,” she said. “Without something new to go on, NEST doesn’t know where else to look. I checked in this morning, and other than informants saying the cartels are bragging about being able to smuggle anything you want into the U.S., there’s nothing solid to follow up on. I told my secretary to tell Secretary Rallings that I’d had a minor accident and needed another day or so here. He wants me back in D.C. to coordinate a new approach to finding this thing. The White House is trying to keep everything quiet, but word is about to go public that someone smuggled a nuclear bomb into the country.”

  “Did you tell the Secretary that I think the bomb is here?” Drake asked her.

  “Adam, you know I couldn’t do that, and you know why. He trusts you. He’d send in the Army if you said he should. But where would you tell him to look? Besides, I think you have as good a chance as we have at finding some evidence if it’s here. And as soon as you do, he’s my first call.”

  “I think we have a better chance, too, but if it’s here and we blow this, there’ll be hell to pay. And you’ll be the one who pays the price. Not me.”

  She nodded. “I realize that. But I know that if I set off alarms, and the full might of the government comes swarming in here, we’d close this town down and accomplish nothing. Look, Bend is what, seventy-eight thousand? San Diego is a million, three hundred thousand, plus or minus, and we nearly caused a panic there.”

  “She’s right,” Green said. “I saw what a terrorist alert does to a place when I worked in Los Angeles. That’s why L.A. and New York City keep things quiet. There’s only one main highway in and out of Bend, and if people saw the army on the streets or FBI agents and black helicopters overhead, nothing would move. Highway 97 would become
a parking lot.”

  “Adam,” Liz said, “we’ll find the bomb if Vazquez is involved like we suspect. I trust you, but I don’t want to put this in the hands of all the agencies that would have to be involved. It would take weeks for them to investigate the possibility that a nuclear device was smuggled all the way to Oregon, let alone find the thing.”

  “Well then,” Drake said, “I guess we should have lunch and get back to work. I’d hate to make all those people work just to consider the possibility I might be right. Besides, here come Ricardo and Billy, and I know they’re going to be hungry.”

  47

  Saleem drove down the Wyler Ranch road fast enough to scare the blackbirds from the trees and raise a huge cloud of dust behind him. He didn’t care. He was tired of running errands for David Barak, tired of babysitting a plan that any fool could carry out with the demolition nuke his men had smuggled into the country and would deliver to the target. His name would never be linked to the thousands that would die. He would never be praised by his people as a holy warrior, never be extolled by the imam in his mosque.

  As he steered the black Cadillac Escalade off the ranch road and up the driveway to the Tuscan-style villa his Hollywood host had built to replace the original modest ranch house, his ego screamed at the insult he was being forced to endure.

  He hit the button on the overhead console to open the garage door and drove straight into the villa’s four-car garage. Without a word, he got out and walked around and opened the passenger door for Marco Vazquez.

  “We are alone,” he said to the polo player, “and there is no one to stop me if I decide to end your miserable, spoiled life. So do not test me. Get out and walk to that door over there and go down the stairs to the billiards and rec room. Entertain yourself until I come for you.” He stood back from the SUV and watched his captive turn in the seat and look at him before getting out.

  “I don’t know what you are planning,” Vazquez said, “but if any harm comes to me or my family, I will find you and I will kill you. That is a promise.”