Hanchett sank to her knees behind the vehicle, methodically turning the sand piled up over the back bumper until she paused, brushed at something before her and called out, "The plates match those of the other truck, sir."
Cundieffe peered into the cabin through the shot-up rear windscreen. The entire back wall of the cabin was like a screen door, or the top of a salt-shaker, the headrests virtually atomized, but there was no blood. His understanding of forensics in extreme climes such as this were woefully deficient, but he knew enough to expect that no one operating this truck could have survived such an onslaught without shedding a single drop of blood. The tumulus of soil on the seats and in the footwells was still damp from the rains, but he could see the instrument panels inside. They were covered in dirt, but unbroken. Cundieffe closed his eyes and calculated, variables shunting into orderly columns, wild cards shuffled to the side for later consideration. He was left with very little to go on. Something had soaked up the hail of deadly lead that had penetrated this truck, but had not bled. Someone had taken this truck, which matched Storch's in every respect, and committed mass murder in his name. And that's when he'd begun running. The apocryphal raid had only sent him into hiding. It hadn't been enough, though, so this had been arranged. What did Storch know, that he merited such an elaborate ruse? What was Storch, that someone was using him so? And for what?
Out here, Cundieffe held his eyes closed and discovered what a disquieting sensation true silence was. All the background sounds that Cundieffe had always taken for granted as the humming of the world simply existing, were stilled here. The numbing music of air conditioners, appliances, traffic, power lines, the oceanic hush of millions of humans breathing, was painfully absent. The noise of a man's mind could run amok here, spreading to fill the silence like the frantically proliferating foliage, exploding in a riot of impossible color before drying out and going the way of the shadows at noon in this godforsaken place.
His cell phone trilled in his breast pocket. He took it out and flipped it open, still gazing into the dank cabin of the wreck.
"Special Agent Cundieffe here. Talk to me."
"Agent Simpson, sir, in Tango Delta. Sir, there's been a report—a sighting!"
"What? Of what?"
"The choppers! They're in the air again! They just crossed highway 190 on a northbound bearing—" clattering, hot sounds burning out the signal, Simpson's voice, muted, shouting, "Give that back!" a long, low whistle, and dead air.
"Good lord! Hanchett, we've got to get back to the chopper, now!"
She stood and looked at him. "What is it?"
"They're in the air! Whatever's going to happen, is going to happen now!" They both scrambled around the shifting wall of the basin, and were halfway around when Cundieffe heard it.
He looked up and his hand went for his sidearm. He almost expected to see them passing directly overhead—the two black sharks of the sky that had bedeviled the combined brains and might of the United States government for a week. That they were within earshot at all was astounding but—no it was only one chopper. It did pass overhead, though, and as it banked, he felt sure he could see the Delta Force lieutenant inside his chopper, waving to him before they passed out of sight over the far wall.
Then the silence came roaring back in.
32
The rain had stopped as quickly as it had begun, but the cloud cover would be stalled over the eastern half of the state until the high evening winds of twilight caused by the desert's massive convection cells swept them away.
They flew at dusk.
Clinging to the open ground, ducking under powerlines and snaking into canyons and the shadows of mountains at over one hundred miles per hour, they left no ripple on radar screens, left only pictures of clouds for the satellites, and if their shadows happened to fall across the hood of a semi or a station wagon on highway 190 as they skulked out of the Argus Mountains and into the Inyos, they were five miles of trackless wilderness away by the time the driver shaded his eyes to look. Like sharks on a blood trail, they traced the path of least habitation over one hundred and fifty miles of California, from Baker to the Owens Valley.
Only a little boy saw them. Riding a two-stroke dirtbike outside of Independence without a helmet or his parents' permission, he'd managed to total the bike and break his leg in three places in a dried-up tributary of the Owens River. As he lay screaming in the fine powdered sediment of the dead riverbed, he'd fallen silent as the sound of the cicadas in the trees on the unreachable bank thickened and became the susurrant roar of a helicopter. He was going to be rescued, just like in the Vietnam movies, he was going to be evacced to an aid station, and his parents would be so frightened and awestruck by his ordeal that they'd forget all about his reckless adventure and buy him a new bike.
Then they'd burst out of the trees and flashed overhead as they came to an almost complete stop, banked on the angle of the Owens riverbed, and vanished. There were two of them, and there was no mistaking them for Life Flight.
He'd seen these choppers in the movies, too, in Rambo, and Apocalypse Now. One was Russian, the other American, but both were black and unmarked, their matte hulls reflecting none of the dying golden light of the sunset. Big silver cables were wrapped around the bodies of both helicopters, like they were held together with duct tape. But what he would remember most vividly, though it was long gone before its image was a ghost on his retina, was the man sitting in the open doorway of the American chopper, wearing a tricked-out Army-green spacesuit and holding some kind of space helmet on his knee and a badass rifle between his legs. He was bent over as if in intense concentration, but as they passed overhead, he heaved violently and threw up.
Sgt. Storch wiped his mouth and backed out of the punishing rush of balmy evening air flowing along the body of the Black Hawk. The crewman observing the terrain gave Storch a hand finding his bench.
In his old unit, losing your lunch before a mission would've provoked a storm of jeers and contempt and a score of derisive nicknames, but everyone onboard was otherwise preoccupied—checking weapons and suit seals, pecking at laptop computers, praying. There was none of the boisterous bullpen chatter that solid soldiers used to keep nerves at bay, but the silence in the cabin was a sign of the web of tension that radiated out from the two commanders on the front benches, just behind the flight deck. The freefall inertia of the helicopter was only half of the reason Storch had to put a racing stripe on the chopper's hull. He had only to look around to see how far he was from the real Army.
Major Bangs worked furiously to secure extra fuel pods to the barrel of some kind of flamethrower, then wrapped them in fireproof tape before handing it off to one of his men and starting another. He did not spare a second to look at his men, hadn't spoken a word since they boarded. His concern for the safety of his men was scary in its fierce intensity, and Storch hadn't yet decided whether it was genuine, or just a symptom of his insanity. He looked sure enough that Storch would follow him, but only if the alternative was jumping off the helicopter in mid-flight. The pep talk he'd given Storch yesterday came up unbidden in his mind. I'm afraid—
The other commander was a surprise, and not a pleasant one. Dr. Wittrock tapped at a laptop, its blue-white screen making his face a cadaverous white island in the murky red sea of the cabin lights. Periodically, he fiddled with the cable connecting his computer with one of the drives in the pizza-rack of nav and radar deflection systems beside the co-pilot's station. He wore an olive drab flight suit, a gashelmet and black jumpboots, but they only accentuated his frail, stooped physique. A mission with two commanders is a doomed mission, Storch thought, and with a civilian in charge—no, a scientist…
Although everyone around him worked as if they'd been drilling the Mission for years, he'd felt a reek of mickeymouse desperation penetrating to the core of its execution from the moment they'd awakened him this morning. That, at least, had been like the real Army.
Fingers clamping both his earlobes, jolting h
im with pain and the rush of blood goosed into his brain. Diebenkorn's face in his, eyes intent, like he'd been watching him sleep.
"Would you be ready if it was now?"
"What—where—" His head swam up out of dream-logic, tried to roll back over, saying, this is just another dream, but Diebenkorn's eyes said, no. "I'm awake," he mumbled. "I'm good."
"Good. Because it's now. Get your shit together." And he'd left the room, the door standing open to the flurry of running soldiers. As he disappeared, he holstered a pistol that Storch hadn't noticed hovering beside his temple. Were they being raided? No alarms, no gunfire. It's now.
What the fuck? He'd had only the vaguest idea of what the Mission was, knew only that the operation was imminent and that he had a part in it. There'd been no briefing, no review of plans like in Desert Storm, when they'd holed up in a remote tent at the edge of Bedrock for twenty-four hours before setting foot on the chopper. He supposed he understood the reasons for it: this operation would be contingent on any number of factors, from meteorology to the military, and probably had to be thrown together at a moment's notice. Also, Bangs had to know how Storch was trained. He'd know that Storch would meticulously plot and internalize his part of the Mission, so that the execution would be like another episode of a recurring dream. He'd need to shake every detail for oversights that could jeopardize his life in the field, and reject elements that didn't fit. He'd want to walk away from a plan that would mean certain death. Thus, the wake-up stunt.
He'd dressed and fallen into the flow of men towards the motor pool, where he'd stopped short and marveled at what he saw. The choppers were untarped and dressed out for take-off, only their rotor-blades furled in the massive space. Two crewmen unfolded out the rotor assembly of the Hind; presumably, they'd open up the Black Hawk after the Hind had taken off. Which would be easy, because the ceiling was gone; a brown mesh tarpaulin stretched over the yawning space above, but Storch could make out flecks of gray, cloudy sky through it.
Every outward inch of both helicopters was covered in a dull black surface that looked like foam rubber, inlaid with networks of heavy silver cable. Storch guessed it was Stealth technology, something the Mission scientists had helped the government develop and then stolen back.
Then he'd noticed the bomb racks under both choppers, and wondered if they'd get off the ground at all. The Black Hawk had over a dozen fat, barrel-shaped bombs and as many short-range missiles in a jungle-gym of a multitiered rig stretching out from the landing gear, and the Hind carried half again as large a payload, with missiles even hanging from secondary stabilizer wings above the loading doors. Surely they didn't intend to carry troops, too?
Finally, he'd noticed Medina standing beside the door, waiting patiently to be noticed. He handed Storch a bundle of heavy vinyl and a helmet. It looked like a GI spacesuit, and came with a Kevlar flak-vest and thigh-pads. It was the kind of fantasy protective gear the Pentagon might've issued in Desert Storm if they'd been intelligent and responsible fiscal planners and genuinely concerned for the welfare of their men. "Put this on," Medina said, "and get on the Black Hawk."
Storch pointed at the Hind. "That's a Russian chopper."
"No shit," Medina replied. "Bought it off the Cubans. Carries more freight and firepower than anything we make."
"What about the briefing?" Storch asked without much hope.
Medina chuckled. "You missed it. It was a month ago. We'll fill you in, in the air."
"This is bullshit," Storch growled.
"Yeah, so? Just stay close to somebody who has the evac plan and the safehouse list memorized, and you'll be good."
Storch joined the milling group of eleven soldiers in their MOPP suits, checking out weapons from the armory adjacent to the motor pool. Another cause for slack-jawed staring. Their arsenal was as far past the Army's standard issue as the Army was above Turkish bandits. The infantry standard was a modified Pancor jackhammer, an automatic shotgun. About half were fitted with a beltfeed option, but Storch gave this up after inspecting the triple beltfeed and the curiously color-coded shells in each. He took a jackhammer, but slung an MP5 over his shoulder for the security of the familiar. There were flamethrowers with wide-gauge nozzles that seemed rigged to throw incendiary gel instead of liquid fuel, maybe even napalm. He reminded himself to stay the hell away from anyone with one of those.
Major Bangs had come in with Dr. Wittrock, and the men fell into formation without prompting. Storch noticed that they stood in two groups of four and a threesome. Storch drifted towards the three and stood with Medina, Draper and a wiry Texan named Tarnell, who favored him with a crooked smile before turning away. Against his natural and justifiable caution, Storch had immediately come to like Tarnell and supposed everybody else did the same. He was the kind of open, naturally charming soldier a unit needed to be more than just a gang of goons with guns. Whatever they were going to do, whoever they were going to do it to, if Tarnell was in his team, it couldn't be as bad as everybody feared. Of course, everybody else here was crazy…
Bangs signaled wordlessly for the floor. "It's now," he said, and the gravity of the words made every soldier stand a little taller under the crushing weight of their gear, as if the enemy were right outside. "Remember the briefings and follow the Mission protocols, but don't be robots. Expect extremely unconventional resistance, and be prepared for every contingency we discussed. This is our Mission. For whatever reason each of you has that says so, this has to be done. And we will do it. Now." He turned and started to get onboard, but Wittrock clamped his wrist and whispered agitatedly in his ear. Bangs turned and hissed something back that made Wittrock wince, then look in Storch's direction. "I want to take this up with Armitage," Wittrock announced loudly. "Now."
Bangs grabbed him more roughly than he needed to and waved Storch over. "Sergeant Storch. Apologies for cutting you out of the final briefings, but you looked like you needed the sleep, and somebody thought you were a security risk. You're on the D Team, with me. Your mission objective is twofold, thus the extra man, but your primary task is to protect this man," he said, pointing his finger in Wittrock's face. "If I think you're a risk, I'll take you out myself. Same goes for the other three, and you'll never see it coming. Will I have to put you down?"
Storch looked Wittrock over. The man clearly disliked and mistrusted him, but if he was going, he was important. Storch was going to free up a man for the other teams, which would probably comprise some sort of assault force. "You won't have any trouble from me, sir."
"Do you want to spend the night in storytime with Dr. Armitage, or do you want to do this thing?" Bangs asked, and Wittrock seemed to deflate. They got on the chopper.
They'd waited only five minutes after the tarp was rolled back and the Hind took off. The crew worked frantically on their rotors, then climbed down and in even as the pilot fired up the stack of computers behind his chair. Then the motor pool and the underground complex dropped away, and the desert horizon unfurled around them, a featureless brown plane sandwiched against a gray one, the buffer of setting sun melting away to the west. Storch recognized the place immediately. It was a junkyard that used to be a drive-in, just outside of Baker. He'd been here several times— with Harley Pettigrew, poking around amongst the totaled auto skeletons while Harley haggled with the "manager." He wondered how much else in the last eight years had been nothing like it seemed, passing unnoticed by his dulled, hermit's eyes.
In the hour-long flight, Medina had taken it upon himself to fill Storch in on the rough outlines of the mission, and it'd been then, with the sickening dip and sway of the helicopter, the enervating red dimness of the cabin, the stink of gun oil, sweat, fuel and napalm, and the clear understanding of what they were about to do laid out before him, that he'd felt the urge to vomit.
He sat back now and tried to break the Mission down into a piece he could swallow. He was going to protect a man, a package of vital strategic value, nothing more. That was his job, and he could do it, the res
t of it was somebody else's job, he just had to guard the scientist.
Draper nudged him, leaned in close to whisper in his ear. "Sorry about before," he said. "At the truckstop."
"'Salright," Storch said, wanting to be left alone.
"I didn't want to grease you, buddy," Draper went on. "I was just following orders. From that asshole." and he pointed at Wittrock. The physicist never looked up from his computer.
Outside, the rolling Inyo Mountains dropped away and the drained dust-plain of the Owens Valley opened out beneath them. On the northern horizon, about five miles off, Storch glimpsed the feeble glow of a town, maybe Big Pine, maybe Independence. The helicopter bore due west as it came out of the mountains; the side-door spotter shouted into his headset that he had a visual mark on Highway 395, and Major Bangs called five minutes to target. The soldiers stood and secured their gear, bunched together into their three-man teams.
Storch stood between Medina and Draper with his eyes closed, and tried to find a quiet place. In all the violence and panic and confusion of the last week, the only bright, silent center he could grasp was yesterday, when he'd lain in the sickbay, and the pretty nurse, who looked more like an Indian than a Mexican, and had a mean mouth but soft eyes, had watched him. Probably, she thought he was asleep, and Storch wasn't about to disabuse her of it, if it meant she'd start up talking again, or worse, go away. Where any other person in the world might've creeped him out by lurking over him in a position of weakness, it had made him feel warm and safe, like he could go to sleep for real and not have the Hostage Show dream, or wake up to the Headache. It wasn't that Storch was some kind of lonely bedwetter who yearned for human contact but couldn't deal with it while conscious—rather, he'd felt he could stand her looking at him for so long because he could see through his slitted eyes that she was really trying to see him. He wondered if he could get her to shut up and look at him like that when he was really awake, after all this. After. That's funny, Storch.
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