Skystorm (Ryan Decker)

by Steven Konkoly

  “You plan on sticking around LA that long?” asked Decker.

  “I couldn’t think of a better gig,” said Brooklyn. “Or a nicer group of people to work with.”

  “I can’t tell if that last part was sarcastic,” said Decker, before downing the rest of his espresso.

  “I spent two months recovering with Pam, under the same roof,” said Brooklyn. “If the two of us can survive each other for that long, I think this is a good fit for me.”

  “Truer words have never been spoken,” said Decker.

  Harlow emerged from a hallway adjacent to the kitchen.

  “What did Pam do now?” she asked, heading for the coffee machine.

  “Nothing. We were just talking about Brooklyn spending some quality after-hours time with the team. She’s trying to get a leg up on the million hours it takes to get a private investigator’s license,” said Decker. “Cappuccino?”

  “Yes. Please,” she said, before giving Decker a quick kiss. “We can definitely work something out. It’s not like we have a shortage of work. We outsource a good portion of the surveillance and tracking as it is. Good to hear you’re hanging around. I was telling Decker it might be time to find Riley a new friend.”

  “Other than getting my knee blown apart at the very start of this, everything has worked out surprisingly well,” said Brooklyn. “And I truly enjoy Riley’s company. No need to change that up anytime soon.”

  “I get the strong sense that the feeling is mutual,” said Harlow.

  “It is,” said Decker.

  “I’ll talk to Pam about getting you started,” said Harlow. “She’s running that schedule.”

  “Thank you,” said Brooklyn. “Tell Riley I’ll be in the car. I didn’t mean to impose.”

  “You’re not imposing. She should be out any minute,” said Decker.

  On cue, Riley wandered into the kitchen and set her backpack on the island. Decker raised his eyebrows and stared at the pack long enough for Riley to get the hint.

  “Not sure what the big deal is,” said his daughter, moving it to the floor by her feet. “But whatever.”

  She wore that always slightly annoyed teenager look he’d come to know all too well over the past month.

  “You take that into the bathroom with you, right?” said Decker.

  “I hang it up on a hook.”

  Harlow shook her head—at Decker. Message received.

  “Fair enough. Just humor me and keep it off the countertops,” said Decker. “Can I make you something quick before you take off?”

  “That’s okay, Dad,” said Riley. “We’re grabbing bagels on the way to school.”

  For a moment Brooklyn looked a little surprised by the statement—but she recovered quickly. “I did promise to take her this week. We wanted to check out the new place in Westwood.”

  “If the bagels are good, can you grab a dozen sesame? We’re running a little low,” said Decker.

  “I’ll make it happen,” said Brooklyn.

  “I appreciate the effort,” he said, before giving his daughter a hug. “See you after school. Still up for lap swimming?”

  “Definitely. Can we go before dinner?”

  He turned to Harlow. “What time do you think we’ll be back?”

  “Your mom said dinner would be ready around seven thirty. That won’t give you much time for a swim,” said Harlow. “You can take an Uber back if it looks like things are running late at the office.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Decker, hugging Riley one more time. “See you around six? Maybe a little earlier.”

  “Perfect,” said Riley.

  “Take care of my baby,” said Decker.

  “Seriously, Dad?” said his daughter, shaking her head.

  “I got this,” said Brooklyn. “She’s in good hands.”

  “Oh my God, all of you are so embarrassing. Except Harlow,” said Riley.

  “I’m working on him,” said Harlow.

  “Please work harder, Harlow. He needs the help,” said Brooklyn.

  “Why do the women always gang up on me?” asked Decker.

  “Easy target,” replied Brooklyn, before glancing at Riley. “We need to go.”

  “Be right out. I need to say goodbye to Grandpa.”

  Once Riley stepped outside, Brooklyn turned to Decker. “She’s a really good kid. Tough as nails.”

  “Thank you,” said Decker, following up with a statement he felt oddly compelled to say out loud. “She’s been through a lot.”

  “She takes after someone else I know,” said Harlow, winking at him. “I better go say goodbye to your dad, too. I feel like I’ve been a little unavailable lately.”

  “He understands.”

  “Understands what?” said Harlow, eyeing him critically.

  “Nothing. No big deal. Trust me. Go make the old man feel good about himself,” said Decker. “I’ll tell you on the way to work.”

  “Sounds like something,” she said as she headed to the terrace.

  “It really isn’t,” muttered Decker, a little too loudly.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” said Harlow.

  “Judge of what?” asked Riley, who had just passed Harlow.

  “Nothing,” said Decker. “See you after school. Love you.”

  “Love you, too, Dad,” she said, grabbing her backpack.

  Decker swallowed hard as she walked away. Those four words always got to him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Quincy Rohm eased the Bombardier Challenger jet out of a wide turn onto the next leg of her surveillance run. The sleek twin-engine aircraft effortlessly settled on its new course—due west across the base of the Texas Panhandle. They’d be on this heading for roughly twenty minutes before she nudged the jet south several miles and brought them back over the search area.

  With close to eight thousand square miles to digitally catalog, they’d be at this for the rest of the day, crisscrossing these sparsely inhabited plains in search of an undocumented, active airfield. That’s all Rohm knew, and she suspected it was all anybody knew. Bernie had given her the search area coordinates, the same vague description of their surveillance target—and nothing more.

  Not that she required more to accomplish the mission. At nearly six thousand feet above the ground, they had little chance of spotting the airfield from the jet. Her job was to run a tight surveillance pattern over the colossal patch of land identified by their client, Senator Margaret Steele. The extensive digital and thermal imagery captured by the aircraft’s sensor suite would be downloaded and analyzed later.

  “Roll the cameras,” she said.

  “Rolling,” said Jake, the surveillance technician, over her headset.

  “Fun day,” said Geoff Hopkins, her copilot and the newest addition to Bernie’s team. “Back and forth, and back again.”

  She smirked. “Ninety-five percent of this job is mind-numbing. You get used to it.”

  “And the other five percent?” he asked, glancing across the cockpit at her.

  “You don’t want to know,” she said.

  “My guess is that the other five percent doesn’t involve this baby.”

  “Solid guess,” she said. “Bernie’s Vietnam-era bird is a shit magnet.”

  “Good to know,” said Hopkins. “I start training on that next—”

  A string of bright-orange flashes zipped skyward, just ahead of the Challenger’s nose. A fraction of a second later, before Rohm could fully process what she was seeing, the aircraft shuddered—and the cockpit exploded in a maelstrom of plastic and metal fragments.

  Rohm raised both arms at the same time—an instinctive move that saved her eyes from the shrapnel that peppered her elbows and forearms. When she lowered them a few moments later, a vast, uninterrupted sea of brown filled the window. The jet was headed straight for the ground. She immediately seized the yoke and started to pull the thirty-ton beast out of its terminal dive.

  “Could use some help here!” she said, struggling with
the barely responsive controls. “Dammit, Hopkins! I need—”

  She took her eyes off the rapidly approaching ground long enough to confirm that she was on her own. Her copilot’s head hung forward, vacant eyes staring at the gaping hole in his abdomen. Bright-red blood and dark chunks of gore covered his side of the cockpit.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  Rohm wrestled with the controls until she could see the horizon again, her narrow focus expanding as she came to grips with the situation. Altitude roughly two thousand feet—not as bad as I thought. Airspeed nearly cut in half—need to fix that pronto to get out of here. Dozens of audible cockpit alarms told her the Challenger was in bad shape—no shit.

  “Jake. Are you still with me?”

  Nothing from the back of the aircraft.

  “Jake!”

  “Still here. Barely,” he said. “I’m bleeding out.”

  “Hold on. I’m headed back,” she said, starting to unbuckle her five-point harness.

  “Don’t bother,” he said, sounding even weaker than before. “Seriously. I’m done.”

  She scanned the sky through the blood-splattered windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever had attacked them. Nothing but empty blue sky. She needed to know what they were up against right away. Whatever had hit them would be back, and the likelihood of surviving another attack hovered around zero. She had to do something.

  If they’d been hit by a propeller-driven aircraft, she’d hit the throttle and open the distance. Problem solved. Even at half speed, she could outrun anything spinning blades. Another jet changed things significantly. She’d be forced to climb to a higher altitude, where she would have more room to maneuver—if the Challenger could handle it. And that was a big if under the circumstances.

  “Any idea what hit us?” she said, flipping switches to silence the alarms.

  “Negative. All I can say for sure is that it came from below,” said Jake. “Heavy caliber. At least a twenty-millimeter gun. A dozen rounds tore through the cabin.”

  “Ground fire?”

  Rohm knew the answer before Jake responded. A twenty-millimeter antiaircraft gun would have little chance of accurately tearing into them moving this fast at six thousand feet. Had to be another aircraft.

  “Never mind. Dumb question,” she said. “What’s the status of our sensors?”

  “Screwed,” he said. “Everything is off-line.”

  “Can you get a message out to Bernie?”

  “I already tried. No joy,” said Jake.

  “Emergency beacon?”

  “I flipped the switch, but I can’t tell if it’s transmitting,” said Jake. “One way or the other, it should activate when we hit the ground.”

  He grunted a laugh over the headset.

  “Hang in there,” she said. “I’m getting us out of here.”

  She increased the Challenger’s speed, feeling for a problem with the jet’s airframe. That was all Rohm had to go on at this point. She had no idea what kind of damage the aircraft had sustained. A quick look at the instrument panel gave her more bad news. They were dumping fuel at an alarming rate, and the jet was losing altitude. She pulled back on the yoke, and the aircraft slowly leveled, but it fought her the entire time. Something was definitely wrong with at least one of the jet’s flaps.

  “Jake. You still with me?”

  No answer. Rohm flipped the autopilot switch and was rewarded with a little good news. The system appeared operational. She locked in the Challenger’s present flight profile and engaged the system, hoping for the best. The aircraft held its course and altitude while she disentangled from the seat harness. Satisfied that the jet wouldn’t dive while on autopilot, she slid between the cockpit seats and opened the door leading into the main cabin.

  Wind from several jagged holes buffeted the compartment, creating a vortex of loose papers that swirled around Jake’s wilted, motionless body. Still seated at the shattered electronics console, Jake was either already dead or most of the way there. Eyes closed, he lay with his left leg beneath him, detached just above the knee. The last of his blood pumped weakly onto the deck.

  “Jake?”

  No response. Definitely gone. She reached inside the cabin for her flight bag, finding the shredded nylon satchel flapping against the bulkhead separating the cabin from the cockpit. Her Sig Sauer pistol lay on the buckled deck below the bag, next to a smashed hunk of plastic she barely recognized as a satellite phone. Wonderful. She zipped the weapon into one of her cargo pockets, along with three spare magazines, before heading aft to retrieve one of the parachute rigs.

  With the free-fall rig strapped snugly to her torso, Rohm returned to the cockpit. Reaching between the seats, she disengaged the autopilot and pulled the blood-splattered throttle levers back gradually until the speed indicator read one hundred knots per hour. Any slower and the aircraft could stall. Any faster and her ill-advised jump from the cabin door could get ugly. The Challenger wasn’t designed for what she had in mind.

  Rohm engaged the autopilot and made her way back into the main cabin. She yanked the exit door lever to the “Open” position and kicked the staircase hatch out of the aircraft. Air rushed in, pushing her away from the door.

  The gust died down a few seconds later, allowing her to approach the opening and grip its edges. She peered through the hatch at the wing, making a quick calculation. She’d be lucky to clear that wing. Before she could process another thought, the cabin erupted in a deafening fury of shredded metal and shattered plastic. A tracer flashed past the door—close enough to touch.

  Rohm didn’t hesitate. She dived headfirst toward the ground, one hundred knots of air striking her like a bus the moment she cleared the hatch. Nothing was in her control right now. She’d either slip past the immovable aluminum wing or strike it at breakneck speed.

  Rohm bounced along the underside of the wing, suffering a few painful, glancing blows before streaking clear of the aircraft. Free as a bird—sort of. A few seconds later, after streamlining her body in a head-down position for maximum free-fall speed, a boxy-looking, single-propeller plane dived parallel with her, about a half mile away to the west. The flaming wreckage of the Challenger seemed to follow it down.

  “Shit,” she muttered, hoping the pilot hadn’t noticed her.

  There was nothing she could do about that right now. She needed to focus all her attention on the rapidly approaching ground. Free-falling from two thousand feet didn’t give her much time to play around. Maybe fifteen seconds. Half of which had already expired.

  She counted to five in her head, the rapidly approaching ground no doubt accelerating the pace. When Rohm reached five, she extended her arms and quickly achieved a neutral arched position. With her descent slowed enough to safely deploy the main parachute, she reached back with her right hand and threw the drogue chute away from her body. A moment later, the harness pulled excruciatingly tight across her torso, suspending her under the ram-air canopy, a mere few hundred feet above the flat, hardscrabble landscape.

  Rohm pulled the toggles to bleed as much air as possible from the rectangular canopy. She was still looking at close to thirty to forty seconds of extremely exposed descent time. If the pilot had somehow observed her parachute, she might not make it down in one piece. The aircraft dived toward a pillar of black smoke that she assumed to be the Challenger’s crash site. Hopefully, the pilot was too preoccupied with their handiwork to notice her dark-green parachute.

  Rohm executed a perfect flare landing, her feet lightly skimming the ground until she could walk under the canopy. After taking a few steps, she detached the risers from the harness and let the billowing parachute collapse to the ground behind her. A quick glance around identified a few hiding places within easy scramble distance. A craggy arroyo with signs of dry scrub and several jagged rock formations.

  She dragged the parachute into the shallow gulch and compacted it until she had a beachball-size jumble of dark-green nylon. Rohm jammed the silky material under a th
ick stand of dry brush, anchoring the canopy with several rocks to prevent a gust of wind from unfurling it and giving away her position. She scanned the western sky for the aircraft, finding it south of the crash site—flying away from the area.

  Rohm sat against the side of the riverbed and started taking deep breaths to calm herself. What the hell just happened? Less than three minutes ago, she had been flying carefree at six thousand feet. Now she was sitting on her bruised-up ass at sea level, shaking from an adrenaline overload—miles from the nearest town. Not exactly how she had expected the morning to go down.

  Now for the really fun part. An hours-long hike through this Texas wasteland to reach a phone. She absolutely had to get in touch with Bernie as soon as possible so he could warn Senator Steele.

  Her surveillance flight had obviously touched a very raw nerve somewhere.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Harlow took her eyes off the road long enough to gauge whether now was a good time to ask Decker what he had meant about his father “understanding.” Elbow out the car window. Contented, easygoing look on his face. No sign of stress at all, so she didn’t see any reason to hold back.

  “What was that little comment about your dad back at the house?”

  “It really was nothing,” said Decker. “He had asked me a little earlier if maybe they—specifically my mother—had said anything that might have bothered you.”

  “Because I’ve been sort of avoiding everyone lately?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. “But I dispelled that notion immediately. I told him you had just been pretending to be nice in the beginning so they’d accept you.”

  “You what?”

  “Just kidding,” said Decker. “I gave him a very abbreviated version of your family history.”

  “Great. Now they’ll really wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into with me.”

  “Abbreviated and devoid of unsavory details,” said Decker. “I just let him know that you more or less grew up in the opposite of our kind of family environment and that it’s going to take a little time for you to adjust to your new surroundings.”