by Lewis Perdue
Rather than throttle back as I expected, I hear her rev the engine faster and louder than ever. We climbed erratically into the predawn sky.
"We're close to the van. I can autorotate to it if we have enough altitude." The engine stuttered and roared according to no pattern, but her calm, matter-of-fact words dampened my desperation.
Rex tapped on my helmet. "There," he yelled into my ear, and pointed toward the white van he had "requisitioned" from the airport long-term parking lot and positioned among the trees beside a construction site.
Suddenly the engine choked, tried to restart, then died, leaving us with unpowered autorotation's lazy, low swooshing. Closing in ahead, the open-girdered arms and legs of the electrical pylons clutched at us like giant robots. Red flashing lights warned us away.
The low, sixty-cycle hum of electricity reached us before we spotted the wires.
"Jesus!" I yelled when I saw the light of first dawn frosting the huge cables. The helicopter might clear the wires, but not its dangling cargo. If the wires snagged us, certain death awaited everyone.
"Climb up to the skids," I yelled in Rex's ears.
We let go of each other and commenced all new erratic trajectories that unbalanced the helicopter further. Rex and I hauled up on the ropes for all we were worth as the wires grew closer.
Darryl Talmadge mumbled the Twenty-third Psalm. I remembered the words clearly from having recited them every day at the start of school in Itta Bena. Silently, I said them along with him as I strained to pull us up.
About the time we got to the part about the "valley of the shadow of death," I was fearing evil more than I ever had before. I thought of Jasmine, Camilla, and what life meant, and I climbed harder, faster.
On the other side, Rex had reached the skid and levered himself up.
Above me, Tyrone leaned out, hauling on my rope.
The wires reached for me. The hair on my body stood up from the electrical field around the wires. One spark and the avgas saturating the helicopter and my clothes would ignite.
I grabbed the skid as the loop of my rope, still draped below us, slid gently over the first wire. With Talmadge strapped to me, I could not pull myself up on the skid, and as our feet headed for the last wire, I swung our legs upward.
My cup ranneth over when we cleared the last wire.
Rex was up on the skid, but Talmadge and I were half on and off, ready to be crushed no matter how soft the landing. As the ground rushed up toward us, I slid us down the rope again. As we neared the ground, I unsnapped us from the rope, then I let go and rolled as soon as my feet touched the ground.
Suddenly, a muffled thump filled the silence as the first of the chopper's skids sank deep into the newly graded dirt. The chopper's momentum rolled it over. The powerless rotor dug once into the soft earth, then stopped.
I freed myself from Talmadge and rushed over to the chopper. Rex had already climbed out.
"Well, any landing you can walk away from is okay by me," he said as he stood up, his coveralls slick with the bright red clay.
"Word," Tyrone said.
My heart soared when Jasmine's head appeared. I rushed through the boot-sucking mud to help her climb down.
"Sorry about the landing."
"One of the best ever," I said, hugging her tight to me. Talmadge finished the Twenty-third Psalm. But before his "Amen" faded, three SWAT-clad men with Heckler & Koch MP5A submachine guns rushed from behind the white van.
CHAPTER 85
Dan Gabriel stood at parade rest amid a canyon of hand-polished, teak wine racks filled with a priceless anthology of the world's finest wines, including complete vertical collections of every top château in Bordeaux. Engraved brass tags marked each bottle with name and vintage.
Clark Braxton's domed wine cellar had been carved out of the conical volcanic extrusion by the same wine-cave contractor who made the vast barrel-aging caves at the base of the hill where Gabriel and Frank Harper had been imprisoned upon their arrival.
The wine-cellar walls had been left in the natural stone and the floor covered in marble. The room and racks, which stretched fifteen feet or more and had rolling ladders with shiny brass fittings, cost far more than the median $500,000 northern-California tract house—not counting the value of the wine.
Two interlocked nylon cable ties bound Gabriel's hands at the small of his back. He tried to ignore the chaffing on his wrists as he looked through an arch of tinted-glass doors, two pairs of half-inch-thick plate glass set like an air lock to avoid fluctuations in cellar temperature.
Massive redwood doors flanked the glass and framed a room beyond with a broad window opening out over the western periphery of Napa Valley. Through this narrow portal, Dan gazed at the jagged volcanic and quake-rift hills and tried to find his calm inner center that had been his salvation many times before.
In the distance, smoke drifted into the valley from a fire on a ridge hidden from view. The California heat had baked the humidity into single digits and made the entire state a tinderbox, as it did every year.
A C-130, painted brilliant international orange, came from the right and made a water drop. As the C-130 flew out of sight, Gabriel focused closer, on the room beyond the door. Braxton was there, out of sight somewhere to the left in a room dedicated to tasting new vintages of wines.
The guards who had brought Gabriel and Harper up the service elevator said Braxton would see them when he was finished tasting a new vintage sent to him by the owner of an ultrapricey wine-cult vineyard in Yountville.
Gabriel turned slowly. The two guards stood beyond his reach. Beyond them, Frank Harper snored in an antique chair his head resting on a polished oak table. A small pool of spittle collected on the polished table. In deference to his frail constitution, Harper remained unrestrained by anything other than his own physical deterioration.
At the back of the room sat a glistening, cylindrical glass elevator, which led up to the main villa level. On the opposite side of a massive stone column sat the shaft for the service elevator carefully concealed lest even its very idea offend the aesthetic sensibilities of those who would gather to appreciate what The Wine Speculator—the influential and oh-so-trendy magazine for wine snobs and wannabes—gushingly called "the most ethereally supreme collection of wines ever assembled in one place at any time in history. If General Clark Braxton's collection were books instead of wine, it would surpass the legendary library at Alexandria."
Braxton reveled in the influence he wielded.
As the C-130 flew back into sight, General Clark Braxton came through the far set of glass doors, then waited for those doors to close and the second set to open. One of the guards moved quickly to position himself between the General and Gabriel.
Braxton held a small digital sound recorder in his hand as he walked into the room and stopped inside the door a dim silhouette against the bright landscape beyond. Gabriel squinted, which, he surmised, was precisely what the General wanted.
The guard nearest Harper jerked the old man upright.
"Let the feebleminded old bastard sit." Braxton's voice ran thick with derision, annoyance, boredom.
Harper's face registered a collage of surprise, pain, and anger.
Braxton shook his head slowly. There was a click from the recorder in Braxton's hand. Gabriel heard his own voice and Harper's.
First came the conversation of Gabriel's phone call to the elderly doctor, then the kitchen conversation. Braxton's face grew deeper shadows until he snapped the recorder off with a flourish.
"Welcome to my 'damned Masada fortress,' as you put it," Braxton said. "Yes, Frank, I have worried about you for quite some time. I had hoped to be wrong about time and guilt loosening your lips, but I have never won a battle on hopes, just on caution and preparation.
"And you—" Braxton's eyes burned with anger as he stared at Dan Gabriel. "You of all people. I trusted you." Braxton's jaw muscles trembled as the General struggled for control.
"You are a traitor." Braxton steppe
d forward and spit liberally in Dan Gabriel's face. Gabriel grasped for his inner calm and focused on the cedarlike aromas of cabernet sauvignon subliming from the spit. Gabriel's control nearly deserted him when Braxton slapped his face, but a vision of the consequences, being manacled, surrounded by guards, restrained him.
"I was giving you the command of the most powerful military ever assembled in history," Braxton said. "You have pissed away a soldier's ultimate dream."
Braxton turned and made his way over to the wine racks. He ran his fingers lightly over one of the tags. "Patton nearly died the day this bottle was filled and sealed." He looked at Gabriel. "He was a real soldier."
The General turned again to the rack and moved farther down. His hand rested lovingly on another tag. He caressed the brass. "Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill a week or so after the grapes were harvested for this one.
"It shows how wrong I was." Braxton turned again to Gabriel. "I thought you were made of the right stuff to fill their shoes and more!" He shook his head. "I was so wrong, but you must now live with the consequences. You will not preside over the Xantaeus Era. We will use our new weapon preemptively to make sure no one challenges America's might again.
"We'll celebrate this the day after tomorrow," Braxton said "There will be quite a few people here, Dan. In addition to my Defense Therapeutics staff, there will be quite a few friends of yours from the Pentagon; I imagine they will be sad to learn what happened to you." Braxton smiled, then looked at Harper, "And you as well, you old fool. But tragedies happen in the pursuit of peace."
Harper nodded slowly. Then Gabriel caught a malevolent glint in the old physician's eyes.
"So, Clark." Harper managed a smile as he looked around at the massive assemblage of wine. "Why have you collected all this wine and in all these years I have never seen you drink any?"
Braxton offered Harper a superior smile. "Drink it?" He paused, then said louder, "Drink it! Any damn fool can drink it!" He raised his arm and made a complete circle. "It takes discipline, self-control, and the true appreciation of the wine not to drink it, but to have the wine, to possess it, to put it where it, by God, belongs! That's what separates the dilettante from the true collector." Braxton spoke now with a near religious fervor. "To select, acquire, and protect, and most of all to complete the collection, is the mark of greatness. For when the collection is complete, it deserves a reverence transcending material value."
"But do you appreciate it, enjoy it?" Harper persisted.
"You are more pathetic than I ever realized, Frank. When a man rises to my level, possession, not appreciation, counts."
Braxton walked over to Harper.
"And that, you little, broken-down quack, is something you will never comprehend in the few hours you have left to breathe."
Without another word or even a final glance at either man, Braxton strode past and disappeared up in the shiny, cylindrical glass elevator.
CHAPTER 86
I sat in the rearmost seat of the unmarked government van between Tyrone and Jasmine and held her hand. The van idled along the shoulder of the road near the end of the runway at Campbell Field outside Madison.
As we waited, a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza came in low, filled the van's windshield, and touched down. A radio up front crackled with traffic between the small control tower, the Beechcraft, and other airplanes approaching and ready to depart.
We all watched the Bonanza recede in the distance: Rex and Anita on either side of Talmadge in the seat ahead of me, then up front, the three government contractors who had snatched us more than six hours before.
They had changed into summer-weight civilian clothes that revealed highly fit former military men. The leader of the group, a retired Air Force colonel and fighter ace named Buddy Barner had turned to a second career in special ops when he had been assigned a desk to fly.
The interior of the van hung damp with the mustiness of drying mud caking the piles of combat garb jammed in back with the luggage and gear. The van's airconditioning labored against the hundred-degree heat and matching humidity outside and did little to diminish the mud's fetid dankness.
But no one was complaining about the smell because we had acquired the mud along with Talmadge's microfilm. Years ago when he was still an active hunting guide, Talmadge had sealed the microfilm inside a thick, plastic, river-rafting dry-bag enclosed in an airtight length of black plastic drainpipe with caps glued over both ends.
Talmadge had then buried the package deep in the muck beneath a series of fiftyfive-gallon oil drums used as a duck blind in the middle of a lot of nowhere. The "nowhere" in question, which had eluded the efforts of the U.S. government, was a bootsucking swamp approximately south of an abandoned railroad grade, about twelve miles southeast of the Choctaw Indian Reservation near Wiggins, and not far from where the Coffee Bogue Creek oozes into the Pearl River.
Talmadge hugged the bag on his lap and refused to let it go as he half-dozed beneath the sedatives Anita had given him to help control his seizures.
"Y'all don't worry 'bout me," Talmadge had told us hours ago. "These fits start with some Las Vegas lights in my head. But don't worry none. I'll give you fair warning. You hold me down for a bit and I'll go right to sleep."
Rather than risk a seizure, Anita and I had selected a sedative combination from among the selection our captors had brought. Talmadge lay totally buzzed. Every few minutes, he would chuckle and make a show of embracing the bag, and twice he had wept for his dead wife. Jasmine squeezed my hand in those moments, knowing that I was thinking about past and future, Camilla and her.
I think I knew Talmadge's pain, but could never be certain. Anguish—like everything about consciousness—remains a relentlessly personal drama, played out on an internal stage for just one person, an experience that can be deduced by others but never shared.
A faint turbine whine made its way above the air-conditioner fan and focused us all on the end of the runway.
Barner shook his head. They're still a couple of minutes out."
Moments later, a Citation, fanned out and landed gracefully with little smoke from the fires.
"So,"—Rex leaned toward Barner—"how did you find us? Really. Three old guys when the whole U.S. government is still chasing their tail?"
Barner looked at a thin man with salt-and-pepper hair who sat near the window. They had been stingy with information. Other than to tell us they represented neither Homeland Security nor law enforcement, they had said little.
"No harm," the thin man mumbled. He turned to Rex. "First of all, we had some leads from the folks in California and just asked the right questions, the right way, to the right people." He paused. "See, people actually like to talk to me. Which is more than you can say for the numb-nuts, Billy Joe Bad Ass Homeland Security goons." He paused. "And from what we learned, everything eventually pointed to you."
"Uh-huh, exactly," Rex said, "That's what worries me."
The thin man smiled. "You've left footprints. You're a family man now and you've started to forget about your other life. Some folks out there are a little better at remembering, especially when somebody like you materializes and wants to call in really stale IOUs. Some of those folks might seem dumb as a fence post, but they can still connect the headlines to a call from you."
"Who-"
The thin man shook his head. "No can say, podnuh. You need to remember: they did you a favor. They let us get to you first."
"Well," Rex grumbled.
"What he means is 'thank you'," Anita said to the thin man.
Rex opened his mouth to protest when the call sign we had been anticipating sounded loud and clear on the radio. Barner put the van in gear and headed for the airport's general aviation gate. He entered a combination on the keypad and waited for the chainlink gate to slide open.
As we drove toward the arranged spot on the apron, a small jet with the correct number and twin engines at the tail dropped quickly and landed at the very end of the run
way. An earsplitting blast of reverse thrust echoed through the airfield.
The jet, marked only by a civilian N number, taxied right up to the van. The jet's forward door opened as the aircraft rolled to a halt.
"Stay here," Barner told us as he and his two colleagues got out. The engines were still running as Barner climbed the stairs. Our van's rear doors opened then, and Barner's two men grabbed our bags and my laptop, then transferred them to the jet.
Seconds later, one of the men opened the van's sliding side door and motioned us aboard. They helped me carry Talmadge and settle him in. As soon as we were aboard, Barner introduced us to the two officers aboard, shook my hand, and disappeared.
CHAPTER 87
With an earsplitting whine, the jet leapt from the short runway and pressed me back into my seat. Beyond my window, the earth fell away and the green patchwork of trees and crops shrank to model-railroad scales. I followed this and said a prayer of thanksgiving for outrunning the hellhound again.
The man in the red polo shirt and khaki pants whom Barner had introduced as Brigadier General Jack Kilgore stood up and faced us a the engines throttled back and leveled us off above a scattering of cumulus.
"Sorry about the slingshot takeoff," Kilgore said. He had a John Wayne voice straight from Flying Leathernecks. "We needed an aircraft with enough range to fly here nonstop, and they tend to be bigger than what that small airfield usually accommodates."
He rested his arms on the seat backs in front of him for balance.
"As my friend Buddy Barner told you, I'm Jack Kilgore and I command Task Force 86M."
"I've heard of you," I said.
Kilgore smiled. And I've heard of you too, compadre."
Jasmine gave me an intense look.
"Sorry for interrupting."
"Not an issue." He cleared his throat. "You are probably wondering how in hell
you ended up here."
We all nodded.
"But, before I start, would anybody like something to eat?" We all nodded eagerly. "Thought so," he said as he made his way to a storage locker aft of the cockpit, pulled out a stack of white cardboard boxes, and passed them around." I
