Sycamore Bluff

by Jude Hardin

“I see your point,” Needleman said. “So what do you want to do?”

  “They’re going to be landing here in a couple of hours. From here, they’ll be taking the Huey to Sycamore Bluff. Baker was scheduled to pilot the copter, but I’m going to take him off it and put you in his place.”

  “And?”

  “I want you to make sure that helicopter never reaches its destination.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cruising along in The Circle’s private jet at 30,000 feet, Colt tried to make his ears pop, but he couldn’t. The pressure was nagging him, and it was giving him a headache. He swallowed several times, to no avail.

  “Don’t they serve peanuts or anything on this flight?” he said. “And I could go for a cocktail. A shot of tequila with a beer chaser sounds good.”

  “We’ll eat when we get to Sycamore Bluff,” Diana said. “And I already told you about the alcohol. Sorry, but you’re going to have to be clean and sober for the duration.”

  That’s what she thought.

  “When I was traveling with the band, we always had plenty of food and drink on the airplane,” Colt said. “Anything we wanted. Seems like The Circle could at least afford a bag of chips and a Budweiser. This is ridiculous.”

  Diana didn’t answer. She was reading a bound government document titled The Sycamore Bluff Project, with the words TOP SECRET stamped on the cover in big red letters. She’d given Colt a copy, but he didn’t feel like reading it right now. His head felt like it was going to explode, for one thing. It felt like a balloon that someone had pumped too much helium into. He was in pain, and a little dizzy, and flying always brought back bad memories. The last thing he wanted to do right now was read a government publication about a town of human guinea pigs.

  He reclined and closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep, but he kept thinking about Juliet and the baby.

  “Are you awake?” Diana asked.

  “I’m awake.”

  “We’re almost there, and I just wanted to go over a few things with you.”

  Colt opened his eyes and raised his seat to the upright position.

  “In a minute,” he said. “First, I want to ask you some things.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you feel even the least bit responsible for what happened to my wife?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s in a coma because of an assignment you dragged me into. We saved the President of the United States, but my wife’s a vegetable now. What kind of tradeoff is that? It seems that The Circle would at least offer to pay her medical bills.”

  “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all there was to it, Nicholas. You know that. We had a job to do, and there was no way we could have known it was going to go down that way. If it makes you feel any better, I have talked to The Director about helping with her care, but he said no. He said there are casualties in nearly every mission we undertake, and that The Circle couldn’t possibly pay for all their expenses. He said that we have a budget, just like any other government agency, and that the budget is pretty tight these days. Those were his exact words. So what can I do? I am very sorry that your wife was injured, and I’m sorry she’s in a coma now, but there’s really nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing anyone can do about it. Maybe you should just be thankful that it looks like the baby is going to be okay.”

  Maybe you should just be thankful I don’t wring your neck, Colt thought.

  He took a deep breath. “I’ve been thinking about that too,” he said. “I’m going to be fifty-two years old soon. I don’t know if I even have the energy to raise a kid. Especially by myself. I’ve been thinking it might be better to give him up for adoption. I’ll be seventy by the time he graduates from high school.”

  “Only you can make that decision,” Di said. “But I bet no other parents would love him as much as you do. Have you picked out a name yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been putting it off. I feel like if I name him, it’ll cinch the deal. He’ll really be my child if I give him a name. I want to, you know? I want to raise him, and do a good job of it, and read him bedtime stories and take him places and throw the ball with him and teach him how to fish and swim and the whole nine yards, but I have to be realistic. Most guys my age have grandchildren already. I’m just not sure that having me for a dad would even be fair to him. Doesn’t everyone deserve young, beautiful, energetic parents?”

  Diana closed the publication she’d been reading and slid it into her backpack.

  “I understand you have a lot on your mind,” she said. “But we really do need to go over some things about this assignment. You said you were on board a hundred percent, and that’s the way I need you to be.”

  Colt felt like grabbing her face and slamming her skull against the bulkhead. He was mad at her, and he was mad at The Circle, and he was mad at the world. He needed a drink. That was one of the problems. The lack of alcohol in his bloodstream had him on edge.

  Realizing that the alcohol was a big part of the problem, he forced himself to settle down and maintain a calm demeanor. He had the whiskey in his suitcase, and he could have a drink as soon as they got to Sycamore Bluff. Maybe sooner. He thought he might try to sneak a swallow or two somewhere at Grissom. It was something to look forward to.

  “I’m with you,” he said. “I’ll try to forget about my troubles for a few days and focus on the work. And the money will definitely help. I appreciate the opportunity.”

  “That’s what I needed to hear,” Diana said. “Okay, let’s get down to business.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Major Philip Needleman was astonished by what Colonel Davidson seemed to be asking him to do.

  “Surely you’re not suggesting that I bail out with a parachute and let the bird crash with The Circle agents on board,” Needleman said.

  “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” Davidson said. “And that’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

  Needleman rose from his chair and started pacing in front of the colonel’s desk. Davidson had gotten him into this thing as a one-tenth partner with promises of extreme wealth and minimal risk. We have everything covered, Davidson had said. Nothing can go wrong.

  But something had gone wrong, hadn’t it? Something had gone terribly wrong. A man named Kyle Lofton had attacked a woman named Betsy Whittaker on Main Street in broad daylight. He’d basically chewed her head off. One minute, everything was fine. The next, Lofton had turned into a flesh-eating maniac. It was almost as though someone had flipped a switch.

  Colonel Davidson had insisted that the Kyle Lofton incident was a freak occurrence, a one-in-a-billion kind of thing, but to Needleman it brought everything they were doing into question. It worried him greatly that Kyle Lofton had gotten out of bed that morning cheerful as ever, that he had eaten a nice breakfast with his wife and had kissed her goodbye before heading off to work, that he had given no signal whatsoever that anything had gone haywire before gnawing into Betsy Whittaker’s throat. If something like that could happen to Kyle Lofton, it could happen to others. Maybe it wouldn’t, but there was always that chance.

  And that chance made it very hard for Major Philip H. Needleman to sleep at night.

  Now Colonel Davidson was suggesting that he crash a very expensive military helicopter and kill two federal agents. This was too much. Davidson had obviously lost his mind.

  “Think about what you’re asking me to do,” Needleman said. “Think about all the things that could go wrong.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the helicopter crashing into a populated area and killing hundreds of innocent civilians, for one.”

  “All you have to do is take it up to ten thousand feet, put it on auto-pilot, and aim it toward Lake Michigan. By the time it runs out of fuel and splashes into the drink, it’ll be fifty miles or more off the coast. It’ll sink like a stone with the agents inside, and that’ll be that.”

  “They’ll just send more ag
ents,” Needleman said.

  “Of course. But getting rid of those two will buy us the time we need to get everything squared away in Sycamore Bluff. I just found out about this little visit a few hours ago. If I’d been given fair notice, we could have—”

  “This is insane, Dave. You’re talking about intentionally crashing a multi-million dollar aircraft. And I have to tell you, I’m not thrilled about jumping out of it, either. Especially at night. I can just see myself skewered on a tree branch or something. And how am I going to explain parachuting out of that thing and letting it go adrift? I’ll lose my commission for sure, and I might end up spending the next twenty years in Leavenworth.”

  “I have all that covered. Along with some other things The Circle requested for their operatives, we stowed a pair of Ruger nine millimeter semi-automatic pistols on board, along with a pair of ankle holsters and some extra shells. You’re going to say that the agents highjacked the helicopter and forced you to jump.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Who knows? The thing is, they won’t be around to contradict your statement. There won’t be any witnesses, and you, Major Philip H. Needleman, decorated combat veteran, have a perfect military record, so you’ll be in the clear. And of course I’ll have your back from start to finish. Don’t worry. That part of it is going to be a piece of cake.”

  “I guess you’ll want me to pull the breakers on all the communications gear before bailing, so they won’t be able to call anyone over the radio.”

  “Absolutely. That goes without saying. And of course you’ll confiscate their cell phones before taking off, as we always do when transporting non-military personnel, citing base policy and FCC regulations.”

  Needleman continued pacing. He still couldn’t believe any of this was happening, that the executive officer of a United States Air Force installation was suggesting such lunacy. He kept hoping this was a nightmare, and that any second he would wake up safe in his bed at home. His heart was racing and he couldn’t seem to get enough air.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “Come on, Dave. Let’s think this through. There has to be a better way.”

  “We don’t have time to think anything through. Those agents are going to be here shortly. We simply can’t allow them to go into Sycamore Bluff tonight.”

  “What if I could arrange for a terrible accident there in town?” Needleman said. “Tonight, before they have a chance to see anything.”

  “Sit down,” Davidson said. “You’re making me nervous. What kind of accident are you talking about?”

  Needleman sat back down in the chair across from Davidson. He put his elbows on the desk and started kneading his eyebrows with his fingertips.

  “I could get one of our insiders to torch their house while they’re sleeping,” he said. “Those cheap little cracker boxes they built for the residents are like kindling. The agents won’t stand a chance. They’ll be roasted like pigs before they know what hit them.”

  “That’s no good,” Davidson said. “We’re trying to avoid attention, and that’ll just bring more of it. Bad idea, Phil. Sorry, but I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I think crashing the bird is the only way.”

  “It can’t be. It can’t be the only way. What if one of those operatives from The Circle knows how to fly? Have you thought about that? They’ll just land the Huey and notify the authorities, and then we’ll have an entirely new court martial to face. New criminal charges in addition to the ones we’ll be facing for our involvement in Sycamore Bluff.”

  “Neither of them has any flight experience,” Davidson said. “I checked.”

  Needleman covered his face with his hands and sat there shaking his head. If he went through with what Davidson was suggesting, this was going to be the worst night of his life. There had to be another way. There simply had to.

  And then, in a flash, it came to him. The perfect plan.

  And Colonel David A. Davidson wouldn’t even have to know about it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It was a few minutes past two o’clock in the morning when the private jet carrying Nicholas Colt and Diana Dawkins touched down at the Grissom Air Reserve Base.

  Back at the safe house, Colt had learned from a quick Google search that Grissom was approximately twelve miles north of Kokomo, Indiana, and that Kokomo was approximately fifty-one miles north of Indianapolis. Diana had told him to enjoy the computer while he could, because there was no Internet service of any kind in Sycamore Bluff. No cell phones, no Internet, no long distance calls from land lines. The only link to the outside world was a two-way radio, located in a locked room in the Town Hall building. A limited number of residents had access to it, and it was only to be used in cases of extreme emergency.

  Like the Kyle Lofton incident, for example.

  Colt watched out the window now as the plane taxied away from the runway and onto a tarmac where multiple types of aircraft were parked. A man outside with a pair of red-coned flashlights guided the pilot into a slot between two Air Force jets. KC-135 Stratotankers, Colt thought, remembering the designation from Grissom’s website.

  “Grab your suitcase,” Diana said. “Everything else we need has already been loaded into the helicopter. And get in character, Mr. Millington. As soon as we get to Sycamore Bluff, we’re husband and wife. Might as well start thinking that way now.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Millington. Hey, does this mean you’re going to cook my meals for me and do my laundry? I could get used to a deal like that.”

  “Keep dreaming. By the way, it’s about forty degrees colder here than it was in Jacksonville, so you might want to put your coat on.”

  Diana wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, a gray pullover and a navy pea coat. It was the first time Colt had seen her in anything but basic black. He shrugged into his jacket and followed her out of the hatch.

  They disembarked, the frigid air stinging Colt’s face and the whine of the jet engines assaulting his eardrums and pushing his headache a little deeper.

  A pair of Air Force officers stood at the bottom of the stairway. One of them was Colonel David A. Davidson, the executive officer of the base, and the other was Major Philip H. Needleman, the helicopter pilot who would be ferrying them to Sycamore Bluff.

  After introductions and handshakes all around, followed by a couple of minutes of small talk and best wishes from the XO, Nicholas Colt and Diana Dawkins joined Major Needleman in a Chrysler minivan with a flashing yellow light on top. Needleman took the front passenger’s seat, and Colt and Diana sat together on the bench seat behind him. The duty driver for the night, a chubby young enlisted woman dressed in work blues and reeking of cigarette smoke, drove them to the other side of the base where the UH-1 Iroquois was waiting. Colt had been around military types enough to know that they called this type of helicopter a Huey, the nickname derived from a previous model’s letter designation.

  Next to the copter, two men in camouflage fatigues stood at parade rest in front of a flat gray pickup truck. One of them was short and skinny and pale, with a pair of eyeglasses from the Buddy Holly collection. The other was freakishly tall, XXXL. Colt figured somewhere on that massive chassis was a metal plate that said Body by Krispy Kreme. He looked like the kind of guy who was clumsy, but powerful. Could have been an NFL linebacker, just happened to be an Air Force flunky.

  “If you have cell phones, I’ll need to take them now,” Needleman said.

  “Why do you need our phones?” Colt said.

  “Colonel Blankenbaker added the policy when he took over the command last year. FCC regulations state that cell phone use is prohibited aboard helicopters, so—”

  “We won’t use them,” Diana said. “We promise.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. Just following orders. I can’t allow you to board unless you give them up. I’ll return them as soon as we land.”

  Colt and Diana reluctantly handed over their phones. Needleman slipped them into one of the inside pockets of his jacket.

  “
Give me a minute,” he said.

  He opened the door and got out of the van and ran over to the helicopter. A couple of minutes later, a man wearing a flight suit identical to his climbed out of the copter and walked to the van and took Needleman’s place in the passenger’s seat.

  “I’ll need a ride back to the officer’s barracks,” the man said to the driver.

  “Can we board now?” Diana asked.

  “Affirmative,” the man said. “The enlisted guys standing by the truck over there will show you what you need to do. Have a safe trip.”

  Colt and Diana grabbed their backpacks and suitcases and exited the van. The men from the pickup truck helped them board the helicopter and get situated. Diana seemed to know what she was doing, and Colt followed her lead. They stowed their gear and strapped themselves into the high-backed steel and mesh fabric seats behind the cockpit, and they each donned a helmet equipped with a transceiver that allowed vocal communication over the noise of the rotors. A black curtain separated them from Needleman.

  “Have you ever been on a helicopter before?” Diana asked.

  “No,” Colt said. “I don’t like them. They’re not supposed to fly. They don’t have any wings.”

  “They’re perfectly safe. Trust me.”

  “Sure, Mrs. Millington. If I can’t trust my own wife, who can I trust? Speaking of wings, I’m getting really hungry now. I don’t suppose they serve dinner on this flight either, huh?”

  Diana just smiled and shook her head.

  As the enlisted men from the pickup truck tightened the straps securing the suitcases and other cargo, Needleman peeked out from behind the curtain and said, “I’m going to need one of you guys to fly with me. Who wants to volunteer?”

  Neither of them said anything at first. They just stood there and stared at Needleman with blank expressions, as if he’d asked which of them wanted to be castrated.

  Krispy Kreme finally spoke up. “The duty officer didn’t say anything about flying tonight, sir,” he said.