Hunters

by Whitley Strieber

  “Ever been to Phoenix?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going. Right now. Phoenix, Salt Lake, wherever we can get to fast.”

  He drove to shake a tail, but he doubted that it mattered. They’d have a box on the car, no question.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Driving fast. Hoping to live through the next few minutes.”

  “Is somebody following us? What’s happening?”

  He saw an underpass and headed for it. His chief concern was overhead surveillance.

  “Why weren’t we in this much danger an hour ago?”

  “I think that the tiger was meant to kill us. Me, at least. For whatever reason, it didn’t. Doing this guy was cleanup. He’d seen too much and heard too much. Now they’re probably frantic to get us. We’ve slipped through a few of their traps. No more. And we need to ditch this car right now. We’re taking a bus.”

  “No buses!”

  “A city bus like in Skokie. Couple of miles. So don’t bark at me.”

  “I don’t bark!”

  “We’re going to steal a car and find a small private airport and steal a plane.”

  “Come on.”

  “Or we’re done. Understand, even though we can’t see them, they are right on top of us and if we make a single wrong move we are dead. They haven’t been baiting us or playing with us. They’ve been trying hard to get to us, but we’ve had a lot of luck. That has to run out. Maybe already has.”

  “We shouldn’t have come to Vegas at all, then.”

  “We have a face. We have two names. It was worth it.”

  She fell silent, which was just as well, because he had to think.

  He saw what he needed, a restaurant. “We’re going in,” he said. He repeated, “Stay close.”

  It was a seafood place, Christie’s it was called, a low building looking like a mushroom in the middle of a sparsely occupied parking lot. A big neon trout danced in a pan on a tall sign near the building. They got out of the car into a faint scent of hot cooking oil. The sign buzzed and flickered.

  “May we help you?” the hostess asked as they crossed the plant-filled entrance hall. It was late, close to closing time. Her plastic smile could no longer conceal the exhaustion in her eyes. How many jobs did she work, he wondered.

  She guided them to a table amid a sea of tables. A waitress, Susan by her nametag, came and slid them menus.

  “Go toward the ladies’ room, the kitchen will be back there. Keep going through it, when you reach the parking lot, stay out of sight. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes in a vehicle.”

  Without a word, she got up and headed to the back. In a moment, he followed her. As he exited into the lot, he saw her standing in shadows near the restaurant’s Dumpsters. He wondered how close this thing was actually cut at this point. If he kept her with him, would that slow him down enough to make capture certain? He couldn’t forget the way she’d frozen at Brewster’s place. On the other hand, she’d had the presence of mind and ability to follow him into the tunnel.

  He decided that he didn’t care, he needed her. And it wasn’t just to work this case. He needed her for reasons he could not put into words. She had a right to live and be safe. He wanted to make sure that happened.

  He spotted a Ford about ten years old. He went to it and quickly popped the door lock, then entered it and worked under the dashboard, feeling along the wiring harness for the right leads.

  The car came to life and he drove around to Diana.

  “This isn’t a good idea, Flynn, I have to tell you.”

  “It’s the only idea. Everything else gets us killed.”

  “If we get caught, we’re car thieves. Nobody has our backs. Remember that.”

  “Use one of the throwaways to track down a small general aviation airport somewhere in the area, closed at night, big enough to have a few planes parked there.”

  “Searchlight Airport,” she said immediately. “Seventy miles south off Ninety-Five.”

  “You just happen to know this?”

  “It’s in New Vegas. The videogame.”

  “You play videogames?”

  “I play with videogames. Crack them. Fool around with them.”

  “There’ll be planes on this field? Flyable planes?”

  “I have no idea, but I know it’s there.”

  As they headed down Ninety-Three toward the turn onto Ninety-Five, he saw the Boulder City Municipal Airport. Plenty of planes, but it was also a busy facility, visibly active right now. The only way this was going to work was if they took a plane off an unmanned airport and stayed low and well outside of traffic patterns and radar coverage. Driving a hot car wasn’t going to work, because they were too likely to get stopped. If the Menard City Police had onboard computers that automatically ran every plate they saw, which they did, the Nevada State Police certainly did, not to mention the LVPD. A stolen plane, on the other hand, was even better than a stolen boat. It wasn’t expected. Homeland Security or not, there was little infrastructure to stop them. Plus, planes sat on general aviation fields for a long time. Until the pilot reported it, there wouldn’t even be anything in police files. Add to that the fact that they could manage some serious distance, and it was the best option, no question.

  Once they were on Ninety-Five traffic thinned out. Soon, the nearest vehicle was miles behind them. The only lights overhead were stars. Not that this meant much. If you had a silent helicopter and kept it below the radar ceiling, you could turn out the lights and the FAA would never know. But he had gained some confidence in his ability to lose them. Between Chicago and Vegas, he was now convinced that they’d been further behind them than he’d thought.

  Still, there were loose ends. There always were, and one of them was bothering him a good deal.

  “Let me ask you this, Diana. You’re aware of bioactive tracking devices?”

  “Sure. We put them in people like Rangers and pilots who’re flying into hostile territory. They’re injected under the skin. They’re the size of a grain of sand.”

  “Were you ever given one?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “But it could have been done without your knowledge?”

  “During a physical or something, maybe.”

  “How effective are they?”

  “The signal has to be picked up by a satellite. You need the codes. If you know what you’re doing, you can basically pick one up from anywhere in the world.”

  He did not like to hear that. “I don’t think an unknown cop like me would have one.”

  “You’re hardly unknown. First off, you’re part of a classified database that contains every detail on record about every US citizen with an IQ over 190. You’ve been in that database since you took that IQ test in high school And we watched you for three months before we brought you in.”

  “What the hell is a database like that used for?”

  “We watch for math skills and logic skills. The intelligence community eats geniuses like candy. We’re addicted to them.”

  “So now I know why you got recruited. But why not me? I’m reasonable at math.”

  “The Abby Room stopped any recruitment track you might have been on.”

  “I wanted to rescue my wife.”

  “It was evidence of obsessive behavior, the curse of the very bright.”

  “I am obsessive. Damn obsessive. And cursed, of course, or I wouldn’t be here doing this, I’d be in Menard and I’d still have Abby and be living the life I was born to live.”

  “If she hadn’t been kidnapped and you hadn’t gone off the deep end, you’d be working at NSA or someplace like that right now, and you’d be very happy and very well paid like I was. Like me and Steve were.” She fell silent.

  “You don’t have a Steve Room, but you think it’d be a good idea.”

  “I will have a Steve Room. I like the idea of the Abby Room. Comforting.”

  He thought about that. “The hell with it,” he said, �
��sometimes I hate the world. I hate life.”

  “Join the damn club.”

  He wished he had some way to definitely tell if either or both of them was trackable. “What frequencies do implants operate on?”

  “Ours are FM. High on the band.”

  “But addressable?”

  “If you know what you’re looking for, sure. An ordinary scanner held close to the body will pick up the signal.”

  “We’ll stop at a Radio Shack tomorrow.” He did not add, “if we live.” “Would we be able to remove them?”

  “Size of a grain of sand, usually lodged in deep tissue. We’d have to dig them out.”

  “Nice.”

  When they reached Searchlight, there was not much to see. A single casino, like a ship lost in a black ocean. Worse, they had to drive up and down the highway four times before they finally found the tiny, weathered sign that marked the airport.

  He turned onto what proved to be a dirt track.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No, it’s good. As long as there’s a plane, we’re good.”

  “An airworthy plane.”

  “A flyable plane.”

  He didn’t bother to tell her that it had been years since he’d flown anything. His license wasn’t even up to date. And he hated landings.

  There were no planes visible, but there was a large hangar.

  “I wish we had that thing we flew into Oregon. What was that?”

  “Provided. No idea except that it worked.”

  “It was a damn fine airplane.” He got out of the car and approached the old hangar. A lizard rushed out from under his feet as he shuffled through the sand.

  “It’s locked up tight,” she said.

  He didn’t bother to respond until he discovered that she was exactly right. The lock on the access door was a good one. Not only that, it was new.

  “Drugs are probably moving through here,” he said as he examined the mechanism. “This is going to need brute force.” He returned to the car, opened the trunk, and took out the tire iron.

  “What if it’s alarmed?”

  “It’ll be a bell or siren so who’s going to hear it?”

  “Maybe somebody lives nearby.”

  “It’s your airport, Diana, you tell me.”

  “Go to hell.”

  As he worked the tire iron into the doorjamb, he said, “Sorry, that was uncalled for.”

  “It was.”

  He gave the tire iron a shove, hard, with his whole body.

  He needed to be less harsh with her. She was out here for Steve the same way he was for Abby, and it was just as tough for her and it hurt just as much.

  The door sprang back on its hinges. Warm air came out, sweet with the scent of aviation fuel.

  “I was right,” he said.

  “About?”

  “It’s an active airport. There’s planes in here.” He stepped in. “Two of ’em.”

  They both shone their flashlights into the cave-like blackness, revealing the fuselage of an elderly single-engine plane, with another standing in the deeper shadows.

  “This one’s a Cessna 172,” he said. “No rear window, so it’s probably pushing fifty.”

  “Fifty what?”

  “Years old.”

  “And the other one?”

  “You don’t want to know. This is the one that might work. It can take us about seven hundred miles.”

  “Is there any gas?”

  “Oh, it’s ready to fly. They both are. These are drug planes. They move coke and hash, high-ticket stuff. Lightweight. They’ll have usable avionics. Though I wouldn’t try playing with an iPad while landing in a storm.”

  He went over to the plane and shone his light in. “There’s a Garmin GPS in the dash, which is good.”

  “It looks awfully run-down.”

  “It’s junk. They stick a Garmin in these things and spend nothing else. These planes go in all the time, or get impounded by the DEA. So they’re expendable. So are the pilots. Let’s get the hangar door opened.”

  He went over to the old wooden door and popped off the padlock with the tire iron. He handed the iron to her. “Keep this.”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “In case anybody shows up. Keep watch. Let me know if you see any lights. This is a drug stop, so there could be security. Silent alarm.” He got in the plane and switched on. The avionics lit up immediately and he began to not like this. He didn’t like things that were too easy. Always an angle somewhere, something not seen.

  An old plane is even easier to wire than a car, but it has to be done from under the cowling. He didn’t need to, however. He found the key in the glove compartment.

  The engine fired up immediately. This thing had been flown recently. It was probably scheduled to do so again, maybe even later tonight.

  He called to her, “We’re in good shape, get in.”

  She came over and clambered into the co-pilot’s seat. She strapped herself in.

  He throttled up until the plane rolled out onto the sand apron. Typical of the region, it was an east-west runway, sited to catch the prevailing winds. Not much of one, though, basically the desert floor denuded of weeds and cactus. He headed the plane into the wind. Once he took off, he’d turn east.

  There was a car on the highway, moving fast, maybe heading here. He ran up the engine. The plane began to move forward. There were no lights. He was just guesstimating the position of the runway.

  As they began to roll faster, plant life thudded against the wheels. The whole airframe shook. The speed crawled up, but not fast.

  “Is it going to take off?” Diana yelled over the squall of the engine.

  “I have no idea!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The drag of the sand slowed them down, and they kept trundling along, hitting cacti and slamming into tumbleweeds until it seemed as if they were going to go all the way to the Pacific without leaving the ground.

  “Make it take off!”

  “I’m trying!”

  He watched the speed creep up to fifty-five knots, then sixty, then hang there, remaining maddeningly fifteen knots under rotation speed.

  Without warning, the ground was gone, and he realized how this airport worked, which was really, really badly.

  “What’s happening?”

  “We just taxied over a cliff.”

  “Oh God!”

  “I agree.”

  The stall horn started bleating. His only choice was to drop the nose into absolute darkness and hope that the ground was farther away than he thought.

  “What’s going on now?”

  “We’re either gonna die or we aren’t.”

  The airspeed indicator shot up to sixty-five and he felt the wings begin to bite. At seventy, the stall horn stopped. At seventy-five, he pulled the stick back, rotating nicely into a clear night sky.

  “We’ve lived,” he shouted to her over the rising blare of the engine.

  “Barely.”

  “That would be true.”

  He’d taken off into the west and climbed to two thousand feet while getting the feel of the airplane. It had been a long time and he was more than unsure of himself. Worried that he might become disoriented, he kept his eyes on the instruments, not even glancing out the windshield. At least, at this hour and in this place, his chances of colliding with another airplane were too small to calculate.

  He kept climbing, heading west. Eastward there were mountains, and he wanted plenty of altitude before he approached them.

  At five thousand feet, he commenced a slow turn. Any higher, and he risked running into a monitored airway. He didn’t have any idea of what the established flight paths might be, or where they were. He didn’t want to blunder into approaches to larger airports, maybe at Bullhead City or Lake Havasu City.

  “Where are we? Why do we keep turning?”

  “We’re heading into mountains. I’m gaining altitude.”

  “Dear God.”

/>   “You’re a worse flyer than me.”

  He was actually relaxing a little, at least for the moment. Unless their pursuers were able to track them personally, this was going to prove a decisive blow to them. It wasn’t as good as getting behind them, but at least when he landed this airplane, he would know that they had lost him.

  The Garmin showed the highest peaks below them at thirty-five hundred feet, so they were safe here, and safe, also, from the DEA, the Border Patrol, and Homeland Security. DEA was interested in night flights by small aircraft, but their primary concerns were movement northward from the Mexican border and low-altitude flight.

  “Do we know if we’re dealing with any exotic technology?”

  “We know so little, Flynn. Almost nothing. For example, why did they send only one cop, and what are his capabilities? His limitations?”

  “One limitation we know.”

  “What?”

  “He got his ass killed.”

  She turned to the window. “I’ve thought that he might be the only good guy. Their Dalai Lama or whatever. And the rest of them are all … Christ, I don’t even want to think about it.”

  He hoped that she wasn’t going to add a morale problem to her difficulties with field skills. Low morale was as lethal as a gun.

  The tiny cabin shuddered, the engine howled, blue flames glowed in the exhausts. He kept them at cruise, a steady hundred and forty miles an hour. Two hours out, they were north of Seligman, Arizona, and he was not liking the feel of the air. To maintain his heading, he was having to crab the plane northward more and more. The wind was picking up. Worse, there was continuous lightning on the northern horizon, and it was getting more distinct.

  The plane bucked like a frightened horse, the creaking of the airframe audible even above the engine and wind noise.

  Diana was now slumped forward. Flynn knew what her problem was, but he didn’t see any airsickness bags.

  “If you can, feel in the seat pocket behind you. There might be a bag back there.”

  She did it and found one, and none too soon. In seconds, she was heaving into it. He opened the vents and cold air poured in, a mix of the scents of exhaust and desert night.

  The heavy weather was bearing down on them fast, but he couldn’t turn south, not and expect to thread through the higher mountains around Flagstaff. He needed to stay between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, basically, or he was going to crash this airplane.