Sycamore Bluff

by Jude Hardin

  “Are you questioning my orders, Airman?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re too fat, anyway. I’m going to see that you get signed up for some extra PT. What’s your name?”

  “Frasier, sir. Walter. Airman First Class.”

  “Great. Expect to hear from your section leader tomorrow.” Needleman turned to Buddy Holly. “And what’s your name?” he said.

  “Me, sir?”

  “No, the other four geeks standing there looking stupid. Of course, you. Who else would I be talking to?”

  “Howard, sir. Airman Leslie Howard. But I just got out of boot camp two weeks ago. I don’t know anything about—”

  “You don’t need to know anything about anything, except how to help these passengers pack their gear out when we land. Grab a helmet and join me up here in the cockpit.”

  Howard looked at Frazier. Frazier shrugged. He appeared to be dumbfounded. Large and soft and clueless. There was a shiny bead of saliva on the left corner of his mouth that looked like it might graduate to drool any second.

  “Why can’t you just help us carry our stuff?” Colt said to Needleman. Colt could see that Airman Leslie Howard’s hands were trembling. He felt sorry for the enlisted guys. Needleman was bullying them, and Colt hated bullies.

  “I can’t leave the bird unattended,” Needleman said. “I didn’t realize there was so much to carry, and there’s no point in you guys having to make three or four trips. Come on, Howard. You’ll be all right. Think of it as an adventure, son.”

  Howard momentarily removed his nerd glasses, donned a helmet, and shakily made his way to the cockpit.

  Frazier had been fiddling with the lid to a metal tool box, trying to look busy. “Am I dismissed, sir?” he asked.

  “Dismissed,” Needleman said. “Try not to tilt the copter over on your way out.”

  Needleman laughed at his own joke as he snapped the curtain shut. Frazier exited the copter, secured the door to the crew bay, trotted over to the flat gray pickup truck and sped off into the night.

  Colt settled back in his seat. He still wanted a drink, but the severe cravings he’d experienced earlier had passed. He was feeling sleepy now, thinking he might actually go to bed sober for once.

  He felt the rumble of the rotors as they picked up speed, and then a slight lurch in his stomach as the helicopter lifted off. A couple of minutes later, they were high in the sky.

  The lights from the Grissom Air Reserve Base twinkled past in a blur until there was nothing but blackness.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At 10,000 feet, Major Philip H. Needleman set the coordinates on the autopilot, unbuckled his safety harness, and flipped the toggle switch to isolate the transceiver in his helmet from everyone except Airman Leslie Howard. He made sure the curtain behind the cockpit was closed all the way. The canvas partition hadn’t come standard with the Huey, but this was the XO’s bird and he’d tricked it out a little.

  “Is this your first time on a helicopter?” Needleman asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I can do this, Needleman thought.

  Airman Howard stared through the windshield at the nothingness in front of them, his fists clinched and his lips quivering. He looked like he was about to cry.

  “Relax, kid,” Needleman said. “I’ve been doing this a while. Two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan. I have more flight hours than Carter has liver pills. This is just a little hop over to the western part of the state. I could do it blindfolded.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is that all you know how to say?”

  “No, sir. It’s just—”

  “Tell me about boot camp,” Needleman said. “Everyone has at least one good story. It usually involves the Gomer Pyle of the bunch, the nitwit who can’t even learn to tie his shoelaces right. Seems like there’s one in every company.”

  I can do this.

  Howard laughed. “There was a guy like that,” he said. “And believe it or not, it wasn’t me.”

  Airman Howard was starting to lighten up a little. Good. Needleman didn’t get a chance to talk to the enlisted people very often, but when he did, he was always fascinated with their stories. Some of them actually seemed to be content with their lives, which never ceased to amaze him. With the hands they’d been dealt, how could they possibly be anything but miserable?

  Not that Needleman had been born with a silver spoon. He’d gotten through college on grants and scholarships, and he had clawed his way up the ranks in the Air Force, competing with men and women who had come from the academy, some of whom had family legacies of military service dating back a century or more. Needleman had worked hard to get where he was. He felt that if he could do it, anyone could, and that most of the enlisted personnel were just too lazy to try.

  “Tell me about it,” he said to Howard. “Tell me about the guy in boot camp.”

  “His name was Friedman. Pronounced freed-man, but from day one the drill sergeant started calling him fried-man. And of course that was only the beginning. This guy was a real dork. He was short and fat, and he had black hair that always looked greasy and always had white flakes in it, and he smelled funny. Like pepperoni or something. He smelled like he worked in a pizza parlor. Unfortunately, this Friedman guy and I were assigned to bunk together, him on top and me on the bottom. He snored like a bear, and that smell. Having to bunk with him made boot camp ten times worse than it should have been.”

  “I bet you’re glad it’s over,” Needleman said.

  “Yes, sir. Anyway, on day five, we were having our first full personnel inspection, and Friedman’s stuff was just all screwed up. He couldn’t make his bed right, couldn’t fold his clothes right, and his boots looked like someone had tried to shine them with a Hershey bar. I kept trying to help him, but he just couldn’t get it. And he wasn’t stupid. He had a bachelor’s degree in political science. But he was really unorganized. It was like his brain wasn’t wired for pulling a sheet back exactly four inches or folding and stacking underwear to exact specifications. I kept telling him it wasn’t really about any of that stuff, that it was all about following orders and paying attention to detail, but he just couldn’t seem to get a handle on it. He seemed to think it was all a bunch of nonsense, a waste of time.”

  Needleman looked at his watch. “Sounds like you did what you could to help the guy,” he said.

  I can do this.

  “Yes, sir. So we were having our first personnel inspection, and the drill sergeant came in and saw what a mess Friedman’s bunk and locker were in, and he just lost it. I mean, he threw a fit. He yanked the sheets and the blanket off Friedman’s bed, took his pillow and kicked it like a football, picked up the locker unit—half of which was mine—and slammed it to the floor. Clothes went everywhere, and Sergeant Fox was cussing and shouting and stomping around like some kind of madman.”

  Needleman laughed. “And what was Friedman doing?”

  “We were just standing there at attention, you know, but Friedman had this little smirk on his face, like he was actually enjoying the tirade. Sergeant Fox made him do pushups, and then he told us to clean up the mess. The locker was in pieces, and the little latch where the lock went—”

  Before Howard had a chance to finish his sentence, Needleman reached over and grabbed him by the helmet with both hands and—with a quick and violent jerk—snapped his neck and killed him instantly.

  Again, Needleman proved that he could do anything, once he put his mind to it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Diana Dawkins was thinking about the botched training exercise that got her into this crummy assignment when the black curtain parted and Needleman crawled from the cockpit into the crew bay with her and Colt.

  Needleman had a gun.

  “I’m afraid there’s been a slight change of plans,” he said.

  If Needleman had been an experienced assassin, or if he’d been trained by Th
e Circle, or the CIA, or the Secret Service, or any number of government agencies around the world, he wouldn’t have said anything. He would have just aimed and fired, taking the lives of his targets before they had a chance to react. Two quick shots to their foreheads, and that would have been all she wrote.

  But Needleman was not an experienced assassin. He’d never been trained in the art of killing another human being face-to-face, so the two seconds that passed from the time he said I’m and plans were enough for Diana to unlatch her safety harness and lunge toward him, grabbing his right wrist with one hand and his throat with the other.

  The pistol discharged, blowing a hole the size of a quarter in the roof of the helicopter.

  Needleman grabbed Diana’s face with his free hand, squeezing, crushing, trying to push her away from him, but she maintained a tight grip on his throat and wrist. She held on for dear life, knowing that a single mistake, one little hiccup, would be fatal at this point.

  Needleman was gasping and wheezing, and his face was turning blue. His airway was almost completely occluded, yet somehow he remained conscious. Diana tried to jam a knee into his crotch, but she was too close and the angle was wrong and the blow didn’t hit home.

  Philip Needleman was stronger than Diana Dawkins, and he might have been able to overpower her if she’d been alone.

  But she wasn’t alone.

  Nicholas Colt immediately joined the struggle, and it was Colt who delivered the fatal blow with a crescent wrench to Needleman’s face.

  Suddenly, the ordeal was over. To Diana, the time had passed in super slow motion, but in reality only a few seconds had gone by. Life-threatening situations were always like that. Diana knew this from experience, and no amount of training could change it. She’d faced death before, many times, and it wasn’t something you ever got used to. It just wasn’t.

  “Get him off me,” she said.

  Colt pried the pistol from the dead man’s hand, and then he rolled the body aside. Diana scooted away. She felt like crying, or vomiting, but she did neither. They weren’t out of danger yet. They were ten thousand feet in the air, and she needed to keep her head on straight and get the bird safely to the ground.

  “What just happened?” Colt asked, trying to catch his breath.

  “I don’t know,” Diana said. “I’m trying to figure that out myself. One thing for sure, we just lost our pilot.”

  She climbed over Needleman’s body, crawling on her hands and knees, and took the vacant seat in the cockpit. Knowing that The Circle had sent two pistols and that Needleman would have commandeered both of them, she felt around and found the second one jammed in a crevice down by the foot controls. She picked it up and slid it into her waistband.

  Beside her was Airman Howard, slumped over against the starboard bulkhead, his expression frozen in a grimace and his head cocked at a very unnatural angle. Diana ripped the right side of the black curtain down and covered his face with it.

  “You know how to fly a helicopter?” Colt asked.

  “I don’t, but one of my aliases does.”

  Diana checked Needleman’s computerized flight plan. It was bogus. It showed them traveling south and then southwest, with a final destination of Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.

  “Are you going to take us back to Grissom?” Colt asked.

  “I don’t know. Get my cell phone out of his pocket for me?”

  Colt reached into Needleman’s flight jacket and retrieved the phones. He handed Diana’s to her.

  “Who are you calling?” he asked.

  “The Director.”

  Diana punched in the number, and The Director answered on the first ring. They exchanged code names, and code phrases, and then Diana said, “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Why aren’t you in Sycamore Bluff already?” The Director asked.

  “Our pilot just tried to kill us.”

  There was a pause, and then The Director said, “What happened?”

  Diana explained the situation. She told him every detail, including the part about Needleman taking the other pilot’s place, and about him ordering Airman Leslie Howard to join them on the flight at the last minute.

  “He was obviously trying to kill us,” Diana said. “But I don’t know how he thought he was going to get away with it.”

  “Here’s my guess,” The Director said. “He was going to claim that Airman Howard tried to highjack the aircraft. In Needleman’s version of the truth, Airman Howard would have shot you and Mr. Colt, but then Needleman, fearless combat veteran that he was, somehow wrestled the gun away from Howard and, unfortunately, broke his neck during the struggle. After everything was over, after you and Colt and Howard were dead, Needleman would fly back to Grissom, and there wouldn’t be any witnesses to dispute his story. Not a bad plan, actually. It probably would have worked, if there hadn’t been an agent from The Circle on board.”

  As usual, The Director had nailed it. His insights into human behavior, especially the criminal mind, were uncanny. Sometimes Diana wondered if the man was human.

  “Tell me what to do,” she said.

  “There’s something in Sycamore Bluff that Major Needleman didn’t want you to see, and it’s highly unlikely he was acting alone. We’ll launch a full-scale investigation on this end, but I want you to go ahead and land in Sycamore Bluff and proceed as planned.”

  “I don’t know how to get there,” Diana said. “It’s not on any of the maps, and the flight plan takes us over to Illinois.”

  “I’m going to give you the coordinates, but keep them to yourself. Don’t ever tell anyone, not even your partner.”

  “Okay.”

  The Director gave her the coordinates for Sycamore Bluff. Now that she knew exactly where the town was located, Needleman’s flight plan made a little more sense. He wouldn’t have had to deviate from it much, and then he could have landed at Scott, refueled, and headed back to Grissom, and nobody would have ever been the wiser.

  “When we get there, how are we going to explain the dead bodies on the helicopter?” Diana asked. “People tend to notice things like that.”

  “There’s a helicopter pad on the roof of the Town Hall building, and that’s where the welcoming crew will be expecting you to land. But you’re not going to land there. You’re going to land away from the development, on the bluff itself. You and Mr. Colt will have to hike into town from there. It’s only about a mile. Maybe a little more than a mile, but not much. Within the hour, we’ll fly another pilot in to get rid of the helicopter you’re in now, before anyone has a chance to see it. We’ll make it appear as though Needleman delivered you and Mr. Colt safely, and then crashed and burned on his return flight to Grissom.”

  “You’re a genius,” Diana said.

  “I know.”

  “FYI, there’s a bullet hole in the roof now. When you stage the crash, you’ll need to make that panel disappear.”

  “We’ll take care of it.”

  “So,” Diana said. “It looks like this assignment might not be so easy after all.”

  “Very true. But I’m confident you can handle it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “As you know, you’re phone won’t work once you land in Sycamore Bluff, and there’s no Internet service. But don’t hesitate to contact me over the short-wave if you need to. You know the frequency. And you know the schedule for the supply shuttle. Let me know if you need anything, and we’ll have it flown in.”

  Diana remembered from her briefing that the supply helicopter landed every seventy-two hours. The next one was due this morning at zero nine hundred.

  “I’ll let you know,” Diana said.

  She broke the connection, and then she took a couple of minutes to re-familiarize herself with the various switches and gauges in front of her and overhead. It had been a while since she’d flown a helicopter, and landing on a rocky cliff, near the woods, at night, would have been tricky even for someone who did it every day. She dialed in the coordinates The Dir
ector had given her.

  “What’s the verdict?” Colt asked.

  “Next stop, Sycamore Bluff.”

  She filled Colt in on what The Director had told her, everything except the geographic location of the town. She put her feet on the pedals, gripped the collective control, switched off the autopilot and followed the needle on the GPS.

  “Sounds like we need to be scouting for more than just terrorists and assassins,” Colt said. “Needleman was in on something, something he obviously didn’t want us to know about. Something worth killing us over. But what?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Diana said.

  She turned the landing light on and began her descent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The skids plunked down jarringly on a limestone shelf inside the U-shaped fence perimeter. Colt let out a sigh of relief when they finally settled on solid ground. The landing had been a little shaky, but he wasn’t complaining. If not for Diana Dawkins’ lightning fast reactions, and her skills as a helicopter pilot, Colt would have been a dead man by now. Then again, if it weren’t for Diana Dawkins, he never would have been in a situation like this in the first place.

  Diana cut the engine and switched on an overhead light.

  “We have a long walk through the woods,” she said. “A little over a mile. Grab a flashlight, and load what you can into your backpack. We’ll take our backpacks and our suitcases, but we’ll have to leave the rest.”

  “Where’s the extra ammo for the pistols?” Colt asked.

  “See that wooden crate back there?”

  “The one that says Welch’s Grape Jelly?”

  “Yeah. Want to carry it?”

  “No.”

  Colt didn’t want to carry the crate, but he had no intention of leaving all the extra ammunition behind. He climbed back and opened the box, grabbed a handful of shells, and tossed them into his backpack. He held one of the cartridges up and examined it, and then slid it into his right front pants pocket.

  “Is that a nine millimeter cartridge, or you just happy to see me?” Diana said.