Black Ops Bundle: Volume One

by Allan Leverone

  Shane heard a phht sound, followed in rapid succession by another, and Jimmy Roberts stumbled backward into view. He wavered unsteadily in the hallway before crumpling in a heap outside the office door. A spreading ring of crimson stained the front of Jimmy’s shirt, and he lay on the floor gasping for breath.

  Chaos erupted in the office. Chairs toppled over as everyone stood, jostling and banging into each other, some moving to help the injured man, others backing away from the door.

  A half-second later, a pair of large men filled the doorway, standing over the fallen Jimmy Roberts. They were dressed in suits remarkably similar to the ones worn by everyone in Hall’s office except Shane, and he had the absurd thought that maybe more investigators had arrived.

  Then he saw their handguns.

  The two investigators closest to the door saw the guns as well and they shoved backward, hard, plowing into Marty Hall, who had gotten up and rounded his desk at the sight of the injured Jimmy Roberts. He toppled directly into Shane, knocking him to the floor. Shane pushed immediately to his feet, still stunned by the suddenness of the onslaught. The men in the room were cursing and shouting.

  Shane looked toward the doorway and saw the intruder to the right scan the room. The man wore thick glasses and his eyes widened when he looked at Shane. He nudged his friend, gesturing in Shane’s direction with his gun, which was big and black and fitted with a sound suppressor on the business end.

  “Everybody sit down,” the man on the left said with an Eastern European accent. He was muscular, with a blocky head that seemed to melt directly into his shoulders. “No one needs to get hurt.”

  And Shane exploded. He knew he should do as he was told, slow things down, try to figure a way out of this, but Jimmy Roberts was his friend, they had started out as air traffic control trainees at Bangor on the very same day six years ago, had worked traffic together, gone drinking and fishing together, and double-dated with their wives, back before each man’s marriage had crumbled. Jimmy Roberts was his friend, and Jimmy Roberts was lying on the floor at the feet of these men, dying or already dead.

  “No one needs to get hurt?” he spat angrily. “It’s too late for that, wouldn’t you say? Or do you get a mulligan on your first victim? Do you only start counting after number one?”

  “Easy, Shane,” Marty Hall said softly.

  The man with the glasses snarled, “Shut up.”

  Shane realized he had taken two steps forward without thinking. He was lost in his rage and his grief and wanted nothing more than to get his hands on the man who had taken Jimmy down. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he was making a mistake, but at this exact moment, he just didn’t care.

  And in that instant, things went from bad to worse.

  The guy with the glasses was saying something about everyone calming down and shutting the fuck up, that they only wanted to talk to Shane Rowley—Shane thought, how the hell do they know my name?—and then they would go away and leave everyone alone, and that was when Paul Fiore, the lead NTSB investigator, leapt forward and let loose a roundhouse right, catching the guy doing the talking in the side of the head. The man went down like a sack of Aroostook County potatoes, and the room, which had gone silent, erupted in chaos again.

  The no-neck guy pivoted and fired. The slug caught Fiore in the face and his head exploded in a spray of blood, and everyone was screaming and scrambling for cover, trying to escape the hail of bullets as the guy continued shooting. The man Fiore had punched pushed himself up off the floor, shaking his head, as the square-headed guy began picking off investigators one by one, like shooting fish in a barrel, Shane thought. He dived behind Hall’s desk, banging heads with the facility manager.

  Hall was panting like he had just run the Boston Marathon. “What do we do now?” he wheezed.

  “Good question,” Shane said, trying desperately to think. He knew they had just seconds left before everyone in front of the desk would be dead and the men with the guns came for them.

  He looked around for something they could use as a weapon. The metal chairs were scattered around on the floor and Shane wondered how long he might survive if he charged the men using a chair as a makeshift shield. Not long, he thought. He squinted against the sunlight streaming in through the window behind Hall’s desk, making it almost impossible to see.

  The sun.

  Coming through the window.

  And Shane knew what to do.

  He told Hall, “I’ll go first, just in case there are still shards of glass sticking out of the window frame. My body should pull most of them out as I go through, but we’ll only have a second or two before the guys with the guns react. You gotta follow right behind me.”

  Hall said, “What are you talking about?” but there wasn’t time to explain. The gunshots were dying out and the screams were dying out, which meant the investigators were dying out. They were out of time. Shane lifted one of the metal chairs right beside the desk and took a deep breath, then stood quickly and heaved it through the picture window, then dived out the jagged opening right behind it, praying Hall had understood.

  He landed on the chair and felt a slash of pain as his elbow struck the metal seat. He rolled onto his back and looked expectantly up at the window, waiting for Marty Hall. The air traffic manager appeared at the window and grabbed hold of the frame, but he was moving much too slowly. He wasn’t going to make it.

  Shane screamed “Never mind climbing, just dive out! Dive, get out now!” He watched in horror as Hall began stuttering like a marionette, bullets peppering his body, slamming it down onto the window frame.

  “Goddammit!” Shane screamed in fear and frustration, watching as his boss slumped half-in and half-out of the window, bloody and unmoving.

  There was nothing he could do for Marty Hall, or for anyone inside the building. The slaughter had taken no more than a minute, although it had seemed much longer, and Shane knew he had just seconds left before the men with the guns appeared at the window and took him out, too.

  He rolled to his feet and started racing toward the parking lot. He would use the cars for cover and try to make his way to his Beetle. Maybe he could start it up and get down to the cop who had set up the roadblock at the access road. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a hell of a lot better than waiting around to die.

  Shane sprinted into the lot, half expecting to be shot in the back, and ran straight into a third man in a suit. The man was holding a gun fitted with a sound suppressor that looked identical to the ones carried by the two men inside the facility, and he placed it squarely against Shane’s forehead as he skidded to a stop.

  The man eyed him coldly and Shane knew he was going to die.

  25

  May 31, 1987

  9:10 a.m.

  Tracie jammed the accelerator to the floor and turned the stolen Datsun toward Bangor International Airport. The little car was built for fuel economy, not speed, and it reacted sluggishly.

  Tracie pounded the steering wheel in frustration, wishing she had commandeered a livelier car, but she hadn’t wanted to risk hot-wiring a vehicle equipped with an alarm system, and the ancient cream-colored Datsun, pocked with rust spots and plastered with bumper stickers, had seemed the safest choice.

  She had glanced around the apartment parking lot, trying not to be too obvious, and when she hadn’t been able to spot any observers, picked up a brick-sized rock and tossed it through the driver’s side window. Then she flipped the door lock, opened the door, and threw a blanket she had taken out of Shane’s apartment across the seat.

  From there it had taken less than thirty seconds to hot-wire the car—chalk up one for CIA training—and chug out of the parking lot. She guessed Bangor International was roughly a ten-minute ride from Shane’s apartment, and the woman broadcasting the live news report had said Shane was scheduled to be interviewed by the NTSB investigators at the ATC facility at nine. It was now shortly after nine. She hoped she wasn’t already too late.

 
Tracie knew the KGB had operatives working in many major U.S. cities. Assuming Boston was one of those cities, or even New York, the KGB’s agents could have driven up Interstate 95 overnight. They could be here right now. They could have seen, or learned about, the news report detailing Shane’s actions last night, as well as the NTSB’s intention to interview him today. They likely would even have learned where and when the interview was to take place. He would be a sitting duck.

  The entrance to Bangor International Airport loomed ahead on the left. Tracie wheeled the Datsun onto the access road, cutting across two lanes of oncoming traffic, serenaded by squealing brakes and honking horns. She ignored them and accelerated toward the control tower.

  Two-thirds of the way along the access road she could see a police cruiser slewed across the road, hazard lights flashing, no doubt to prevent the media and curious onlookers from gaining access to the control tower complex. Tracie suddenly realized she had no idea what she was going to say to the cop to avoid being turned away. She toyed with the idea of simply blowing past the cruiser, but the Datsun was so underpowered the idea was laughable. She would be overtaken by the powerful police vehicle before she ever got close to the facility.

  She would have to think of something. If worse came to worst she would pull her weapon on the officer and force her way in, and worry about the repercussions later. She slowed to a stop next to the cruiser. The cop was nowhere in sight. She suddenly got a very bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  She lifted herself up as high as she could in the driver’s seat and craned her neck, looking out the passenger side window into the cruiser. That was when she saw the officer. He was sprawled across the front seat, unmoving, blood staining his uniform shirt.

  Shit. Tracie put the gearshift into neutral and yanked on the emergency brake, then leapt out of the car and hurried to the cruiser. She pulled open the door and knelt, placed two fingers gently on the side of the cop’s neck. Felt for a pulse. Found none.

  He was dead. Shot multiple times at close range.

  The KGB was already here.

  Dammit.

  The cop’s body was still warm, so they hadn’t been here long. Tracie considered calling an ambulance and rejected the idea. The officer was dead and the wasted time might cost more lives.

  She cursed again and sprinted back to the Datsun. She slammed the door and gunned the car toward the control tower, racing along the decrepit access road, driving much too fast. The car bounced and jolted, slamming down into potholes so deep she was half afraid an axle might snap. She kept going.

  The car sped around a corner, and a couple of hundred yards away Tracie could see the control tower and FAA base building. She slowed slightly, trying to come up with some kind of action plan, when a side window in the base building shattered. The glass exploded outward as a metal folding chair flew through the window, followed a heartbeat later by a tumbling body. It looked like Shane Rowley.

  He dived through the window and landed on top of the chair, then rolled onto his back and looked up at the window. A second man appeared. The man was older, and as he tried to climb out, his body began to stutter as bullets ripped into him from behind, and then he slumped across the frame.

  Shane scrambled to his feet and ran along the narrow alleyway between the base building and the control tower. He burst into the parking lot and ran straight into a man holding a silenced handgun. The man was facing away from Tracie, but she could see him raise the gun and shove the barrel into Shane’s forehead.

  And she didn’t hesitate.

  She drove her foot to the floor and aimed the Datsun straight at the pair. The gunman didn’t seem to have heard the sound of the little car’s engine, or perhaps didn’t comprehend the significance. Shane was facing the vehicle and Tracie hoped he would understand her intent.

  The car leapt forward and the two men grew steadily larger in the windshield. The gunman seemed to be talking, asking Shane a question or maybe threatening him. Nothing in Shane’s demeanor gave away the fact that a speeding car was hurtling toward them. At the last moment Shane dived to the side, just as it seemed to occur to the man in the suit that something was wrong.

  Shane hit the pavement and rolled. He disappeared from sight as the Datsun plowed into the man with the gun, catching him in the side with a sickening thud. His body flew up and over the hood. He crashed into the windshield and then tumbled over the roof in an ungainly somersault.

  Tracie watched in the rearview mirror as the man dropped onto the pavement and lay still. She slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop just shy of a big vehicle with U.S. Government plates. Then she jammed the car into reverse and began backing up, one eye on the gunman, still crumpled in an unmoving heap in the middle of the parking lot, one eye searching for Shane.

  She spotted him crouched between two parked cars just as the base building’s front door crashed open and two more men exited the building at a dead run. The men wore suits similar to the downed gunman and each was holding a gun. They turned right and ran toward Tracie and their injured conspirator.

  And Shane.

  Tracie leaned across the front seat and shoved the passenger door open. “Get in here, now!” she screamed. She reached down and unsnapped her gun. The men were closing fast, shouting something unidentifiable.

  She leaned out the smashed window and twisted, pointing the gun in the general direction of the pursuers. She aimed above their heads and squeezed off two quick rounds. The two men hit the deck, flopping face-first to the pavement.

  Shane dived through the open passenger door, a sprawl of arms and legs, landing on the floor-mounted gear shift and unintentionally pushing the Datsun into neutral. By now the two men had risen from the pavement and were almost on top of them. Tracie jammed the car into first gear and popped the clutch and the little vehicle spun its wheels and then took off.

  One of the men had reached the driver’s side door and held doggedly to the door frame as he ran along beside, screaming at Tracie, trying to aim his gun. She jerked the wheel from side to side, zigzagging out of the parking lot, trying to break his grip. Finally the man tumbled away from the vehicle. He rolled into a grassy field next to the roadway.

  Shane was screaming, “What the hell’s going on here? What the hell’s going on here?”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Tracie answered, realizing she too was screaming. Her hands were shaking as adrenaline flooded her system. She lowered her voice and tried to calm down, to think clearly. “Right now,” she continued, “we have to get the hell out of here. We’ve got barely any head start and those guys know what vehicle we’re in. They’ll be right on our tail. If they have any kind of decent wheels at all, they’ll catch us in no time.”

  The Datsun screamed past the dead officer’s police cruiser, Tracie keeping the gas pedal pinned to the floor. There was nothing anyone could do for the cop, and slowing down for another look might just get them killed. They rocketed toward the phalanx of news vans and curious onlookers, the surprised faces growing rapidly larger in the cracked windshield.

  She glanced right and saw Shane making a visible effort to get himself under control. He had lifted into a sitting position and now buckled his seat belt—a smart move, under the circumstances. Tracie saw blood sprinkled across his face and clothing. He didn’t seem to notice. He took a deep breath and ran his bloody hands through his hair.

  Tracie blasted into the intersection of the airport access road and the cross street, barely slowing, somehow managing not to T-bone a passing car and kill them all. She turned right, toward Bangor proper and Interstate 95, risking a glance in the rearview mirror, certain the two men in the suits would be right on their tail, but they were alone. For now.

  When Shane spoke again, his voice had modulated, although it was shaking and he was panting as if he had just completed the Boston Marathon. “First off,” he said, “thank you for saving my life. I think I was down to my last couple of seconds on earth when you ran that guy down.
That was some quick thinking and some unbelievable driving on your part.”

  She shook her head and started to answer, but he interrupted. “Second,” he said, “what the hell have you gotten me into?”

  26

  May 31, 1987

  9:25 a.m.

  Interstate 95, north of Bangor, Maine

  I-95 buzzed beneath the tires of the Datsun, evergreen trees flashing past outside the windows, the empty terrain of northern Maine beautiful but monotonous. After leaving the airport and their attackers behind, Tracie had driven straight to the interstate, but rather than turning south, as Shane had expected her to, she had instead driven past that access ramp and headed north.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, confused.

  “Those goons know I have to get to D.C. as soon as possible. They’ll assume we high-tailed it in that direction. Once they get their act together and come after us, that’s the way they’ll go. If we’d gone south before changing vehicles, they’d have been on us before we knew what hit us. We’d be dead before we made it ten miles.”

  “But they didn’t even follow us out of the airport.”

  “Yes, they did. Trust me. The only reason they didn’t run us down before we even got off airport property is because they had to go back and toss the guy I ran over into the back of their car. They can’t afford to leave him there, and he’s injured, so that slowed them down. Once they hustled him into their car, though—and I guarantee it didn’t take very long—they started out after us. Going north instead of south will buy us a little time, give us a chance to catch our breath, acquire a new vehicle, and formulate some kind of plan.”

  Shane raised his eyebrows. “Acquire a new vehicle? Don’t you mean steal?”