Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air

by Dane Hartman

  Harry was about to answer when he heard a ragged chopping sound outside the car. He looked in the rear-view mirror, seeing only the rolling hills of South San Francisco. He had driven that far off the beaten path to make sure they weren’t followed. But now, a whipping, humming sound was filling the inside of the car from outside the open window.

  “Shit,” Callahan spat. “What is that?”

  Patterson turned to look out of her own window as the noise got so loud it made the dashboard vibrate. Harry saw the wind whipping up the loose dirt on the hilly roadway. He realized what was happening just as the big metal bird dropped out of the sky and onto the car’s roof.

  The helicopter smashed down on the auto’s roof with its landing struts. The worn vehicle’s roof was not strong enough to take that sort of punishment. It bent in the middle and cracked open, accompanied by Patterson’s scream.

  The car sank on its ancient shocks, sliding across the mostly dirt road. Harry practically had to spin the wheel to keep in control. Then he figured, why bother trying to keep on the road?

  “Hold on!” he warned her and whirled the wheel to the right. The heavy, tanklike auto pointed itself in that direction and took a dive. The helicopter swept by as the aged vehicle barreled down the grassy hill.

  Patterson was screaming as the car seemed to gather momentum. Harry started by tapping the brake, then stomping on it, finally slamming both feet on the pedal and keeping them there.

  “Get under the dashboard!” Harry demanded between his clamped teeth. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

  Just as she obeyed, the car hit a tip and took it like an Olympic ski jumper. The front smashed down, slamming Harry into the wheel, and then the back swept up, pushing his head into the ceiling.

  The damn thing was just too heavy to fly very far, and it landed on all four wheels as Harry locked his arms and pushed his legs straight. The hill had settled into a sloping decline, so Callahan tromped back down on the accelerator while looking out of the window for the Program’s eye-in-the-sky.

  It came sweeping from the passenger’s side, coming in so low it actually ripped the swinging radio antenna off the hood.

  “Fuck,” Harry muttered, ducking his head back in. “They mean business.” Reacting to his comment, Patterson started to crawl out from under the front section. “Stay down!” Harry commanded. “There’s no neighbors to wake out here.”

  Harry kept the gas pedal floored as the slope reached bottom and things began to move up again. He saw that they were rapidly coming to the top of another hill. And from the right, he heard the helicopter coming in to make another run.

  “Roll up your window,” he barked. “I don’t want to lose you.” Staying where she was, Patterson did as she was told and then pressed herself even harder into the cramped opening.

  Just as they reached the top of the hill, the whirlybird swept across again, this time leaving souvenirs. The window Patterson had just closed shattered, and bullets dug into the passenger seat where Patterson had been sitting.

  Harry spun the wheel to the left, but that was too much for the old car to take. The front jerked in the right direction, but the rear wheels skidded, tearing up huge hunks of grassy ground, and the car tottered on the crest of the hill for a moment before it started rolling.

  In that one second, Harry killed the engine and joined Patterson under the dashboard. The car rolled sideways all the way down the second hill. All the windows were broken, the ceiling was almost caved in, and the auto’s sides were badly battered.

  Callahan rose quickly behind the wheel and looked out to see a forest two hundred yards in front of them. He jammed the key in the ignition. Incredibly, the engine turned over.

  “You can’t kill the good ones with a stick,” Callahan marveled. His judgment of cars hadn’t failed him. After all, he had owned the one he sold to get this one for more than ten years.

  “To hell with the car, you’re trying to get us killed!” Patterson shouted.

  “Shut up,” Harry told her. “If we stop, they’ll do the job for me.” He set the car heading right for the woods, as the copter swept down behind them.

  Harry hit the ceiling with one fist until the cracked rear-view mirror was high enough for him to see plainly the flying machine behind them. Two men were in the clear, open cockpit. One was handling the controls and the other had a .308 calibre Mark V assault rifle in his mitts.

  Callahan wanted to swerve the car so they wouldn’t make such an easy target, but he needed speed to get to the trees. The copter had to veer off to avoid crashing into the branches. Now, if only he could get there before the gun’s bullets tore them up . . .

  He heard the lead thunking into the trunk and zipping into the back seat. He no longer had a choice. He swerved the car to the left, pulling it out of the line of fire.

  The bullets which would have punctured both of them dug into the ground, the speeding copter swept ahead, and the car scraped between two trees into the forest.

  “Okay, okay, we made it,” the woman cried. “Slow down.”

  “Forget it,” Callahan declared. “I’m not going to be boxed in here.” He continued to fight the wheel for supremacy as the car kept narrowly missing trees.

  “Boxed in?” Patterson echoed. “Boxed in? What are you talking about!”

  “Shut up and stay down,” Harry said quietly, intent on what he was doing. The dangerous edge in his hushed voice finally convinced Patterson to stay out of the way.

  The side-view mirror was smashed off by a tree as Harry squeezed the auto through. A branch reached through the passenger’s window and was broken off by a sudden turn. Harry saw moonlight up ahead and directed the seemingly armored vehicle toward it.

  He slammed on the brakes almost as soon as the car emerged from the other side of the woods. Patterson was thrown forward, and the wheels skidded at least ten feet.

  All Harry had seen when coming out of the trees was Daly City, a suburb of San Francisco, stretched out before him. That meant there were no more trees, no more hills, no more ground. They were just yards away from the edge of a cliff.

  Callahan slammed the vehicle into reverse, spun the wheel to the left, and drove between the lip of the cliff and the edge of the forest.

  “Listen,” he snarled. “You asked me what you could do against Carr, before. Well, I’m telling you now. You can stand and fight. Fight, God damn it.”

  The car burst into a clearing, but Callahan kept it close to the cliff’s edge. He heard the whirring blades and looked out his nonexistent windowpane. “Here they come now. Right on schedule.”

  As soon as he had spoken, Harry slammed on the brakes. The car lurched to a stop, but even before the rear tires had settled, Harry was struggling into the back seat. He pulled the seat’s back away, revealing the inside of the trunk. From the trunk he pulled a steel case, which he quickly unclipped.

  From the helicopter, the two Program men saw the car suddenly stop and Harry crawl out of the rear window opening. He stood half on the ceiling and half on the trunk of the battered car. He held his .44 above his head, and waved them on.

  Carr’s men looked at each other. Unable to communicate over the roar of the rotor blades, the man with the gun made a circling sign next to his ear with his first finger and then motioned for the pilot to swoop in for a final run.

  Callahan was right where they wanted him. With the copter in front and the cliff behind, there was nowhere to go. The .308 bullets would tear him in half. The helicopter dipped and came in low and fast.

  The gunman held his fire until he was sure he had Harry dead to rights. The cop kept waving his Magnum until it was impossible for the copter to swerve away.

  Then Harry threw down the .44, and pulled out the Mac submachine gun from under his jacket. He had had no problem fitting the seven-inch long weapon behind his back, and the Program men didn’t even see it before Harry had ripped the gun’s thirty-two nine-millimeter bullets across the front of their copter bubble.
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  Callahan let the slicing motion of his firing take him right off the car’s roof as the helicopter kept going, minus a live driver and copilot. Both men had had their middles perforated with lead.

  If they weren’t killed when Harry shot them, they died when the helicopter dipped, spun, and smashed into the side of the cliff. From there it dropped like a crushed bug to the rock-strewn ground.

  Harry threw the Mac into the back seat and jumped behind the wheel as if he were stunt driving for “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

  “What . . . what have you done?” Patterson stammered, coming out of her hiding place. “What happened?”

  Harry clucked in sympathy. “Another terrible aviation accident.”

  C H A P T E R

  T e n

  Harry stole a car near the Frisco–San Mateo line. Even with the Program’s eye-in-the-sky out of action, driving the nearly destroyed used car would be a dead giveaway. And when Harry thought of it as a dead giveaway, he meant “dead.”

  He just didn’t know whether the helicopter men had had a radio link with Carr, or how much they had said if they did. More “official” government cars filled with heavily-armed agents, just doing their duty, could be converging on the location that very minute.

  So Harry played it safe. He left their reject from the demolition derby in a driveway and stole a dark blue Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. It came with plush seats, an AM/FM radio, and Denise Patterson.

  “You can’t keep on doing this,” she pleaded with him. “It’s insane.”

  Callahan looked at her with sardonic disbelief. Her boss tests an unstable germ-warfare mixture in the subway, orders girls to be pushed onto the tracks, sends a killer copter after them, and she’s calling the cop insane?

  Patterson seemed to read his thoughts, because she quieted and looked at her hands on her lap for a moment before continuing: “What I mean is, you can’t fight the whole government.”

  Harry pulled the car into an alley between the Southern Freeway and Third Street. “I don’t think I am,” he said, stopping the car and pushing open the door with his foot. “Stay here,” he told the woman, before she could question him about the statement.

  Harry walked down the alley, around the corner, and into the one entrance of a corner building. He went up two flights of rickety, wooden stairs and pushed through a warped wooden door nailed to a straight metal one.

  On the other side of the obstruction was a plain but comfortably lived-in studio. There was a bed which looked as if it had been stolen off a military base, an ancient card table with four rusting chairs, an orange crate with an AM/FM/Ham radio on it, and an overstuffed sofa which looked like someone’s lumpy, sagging aunt.

  Lying across the sofa was a comatose figure with a bottle in his hand.

  “All right, Hux,” Harry called, clapping his hands. “The ride’s over. End of the line. Everybody out.”

  The BART drunk woke up, snorting. “Morning already?” he asked the ceiling.

  “Morning already,” Harry agreed, taking him by the arm. “The coast is clear. You can go back on the trains again.”

  “Hey, that’s great,” the drunk slurred, letting Harry get him to his feet. But then he looked around the room wistfully. “Too bad, though. Too bad. I’m going to miss this place.”

  “You’ll get over it,” Harry said, shoving a twenty-dollar bill into the bum’s hand. “Don’t come back, understand? Those kids who’re trying to kill you will come here.”

  “Shit,” Huxley spit. “Those kids, yeah. Don’t want that. Don’t you worry, Harry old pal, I won’t come back.”

  Callahan got him downstairs and to the next intersection. He flagged down a taxi and shoved Huxley into the back seat. Another twenty went to the driver.

  “Take him wherever he wants until ten runs out,” Callahan told him. For a ten-spot tip, the driver was willing.

  Harry went back to the Cutlass, suddenly experiencing a feeling of dread. He picked up speed as he rounded the corner of the alley, afraid Patterson might not be in the car anymore.

  She was, but he wasn’t much relieved. “You can’t fight him,” she contended as he led her to the hideout, carrying the metal weapons case and a thin vinyl case. “Do you have any idea what kind of power he wields? What kind of connections he has?”

  Harry nodded, pushing open the half-wood, half-metal door. “I’m learning more about that all the time.”

  “He can tap into any computer in the state and get anything he wants,” she declared, marveling at it as she remembered. “He can change anything on anyone . . .”

  Callahan remembered the report on Daley which the Commissioner supposedly had. He wondered how it had been produced, and where it came from. Harry brought the woman over to the bed and sat her down.

  “But remember something,” he said, cutting off her paranoid scenario. “He’s afraid of you. He’s afraid you’ll tell somebody about this.”

  “Of course he is.” Patterson waved Harry’s statement away. “He has every right to be.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Callahan countered. “It doesn’t make any sense. If the government is in on his Program, then all they have to do is deny any report. End of story. But what if Carr doesn’t want his superiors to know about this stuff?”

  A sudden growing awareness began to dawn across Patterson’s features. “You mean,” she said in amazement, “that he wants to take over the government?”

  Harry snorted. “I doubt it. But he knows damn well that if anybody responsible in power gets wind of what he’s doing, the whole Program goes right down the toilet.”

  Patterson suddenly saw the hope she had lost the moment her coffee mug had burst. “So all we have to do is get to the papers,” she marveled. “But won’t that make him want to kill me all the more?”

  “But he can’t do it then without creating suspicion. You’ll be alive while the government comes down hard on him.”

  Patterson began to perk up considerably. “So all we have to do is wait until morning . . .”

  “Bullshit,” Harry countered. “Papers don’t work on a nine-to-five shift. Let’s get this over with.”

  Just then, the vinyl attaché case rang. Patterson gave a little shriek before shoving her fist in her mouth. Harry looked at the case with annoyance. Well, at least the call-transferring device Kleinman had given him worked.

  Harry opened the case on the floor and pulled out the red, slim-line receiver. Any call that came in on Harry’s phone would be automatically transferred to this radio-controlled one. Even if there was a bug on the phone in Harry’s apartment, it wouldn’t pick up what he said on this one.

  “Yeah,” Harry said into the condenser mouthpiece.

  “Harry.” It was Bressler. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  Callahan thought about saying something like “Does that mean you hope you did?”, but he found he didn’t want to talk at all.

  “No,” he finally replied.

  The Lieutenant could take a hint. He got right to the point. “The Goldfarb warrants came in. Would you mind helping out tonight?”

  Harry couldn’t very well say no. He needed to be on the force’s good side if he wasn’t to become a “naked runner.” He needed all the friends and protection he could afford. They weren’t out of the Program’s shadow yet.

  “Why not?” Harry mused aloud. “It’s a night like any other, right?”

  “Right,” Bressler laughed self-consciously. “If you say so, Harry. When can you be here?”

  Callahan glanced at the girl. She was looking at the bed and pulling on her lower lip. “I’ve got to do some quick errands,” he told his boss. “Let me meet you.”

  He got all the information. Bressler himself wasn’t going to be in on it. Since the arrest was going to go down in North Beach, the control was going to the cops in that jurisdiction. Which was all the more reason Bressler wanted Harry in on it. If everything went well, then the North Beach precinct got the credit. If things screwed up, Bressler a
t Central Headquarters got the blame.

  After Harry hung the phone up in the attaché case, he turned to find Patterson curled up on the far end of the bed. She had her legs bent, her knees up to her face, and her arms hugging her calves.

  “Let’s go,” Harry said. “I’ll drop you off at the Herald.”

  “No,” the woman said.

  Harry took one step toward her.

  “Even if you force me to go, I won’t say anything,” she warned him.

  Harry stood his ground. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he asked slowly. He just couldn’t conceive of such stupidity.

  “No, you are!” she flared back. “Our work is too important. I can’t jeopardize it.”

  “It’s not your work anymore,” Harry reminded her.

  “Yes, it is,” she contended. “It’s all our work. If the Program succeeds, we no longer have anything to fear from anyone. It is they who have to fear us. We’re talking about total security.”

  “You’re talking total insanity,” Harry seethed. “What difference does it make whether you can destroy the world with bombs or germs?”

  “It’s you who’re nuts,” Patterson declared. “You can’t fight this. It’s bigger than just you or me or Dr. Carr. It’s the future of this entire country.”

  Harry stared at her desperate, proud, misguided face before choosing his words very carefully. “Fuck this country. I’m not going to stand around and wait to be killed for anything or anyone. You still think you can convince Carr that you’re one of the boys. Forget it. Even if you get to him and make him listen, he’ll smile and smile, and then you’ll be dead.”

  Harry heard the subway echo of Corporal George Daley in his mind. “You’re dead, I’m dead, we’re all dead . . .”

  Patterson’s harsh reply brought him back to reality. “No. I can convince him. The Program is more important.”

  Callahan gave up. He grabbed his cases and slid them out of the room with two angry throws. Pulling two Yale locks off of the boarded-up windowsills, he marched backward to the door.