the Second Horseman (2006)

by Kyle Mills

  "Yo."

  "Hey. Got some bad news."

  "Shit. What?"

  "We, uh, crashed."

  "Tell me this is a bad connection and you didn't say crashed."

  "I said crashed."

  "Goddammit! What happened? Are you okay?"

  Daniel struggled to his feet and lifted the pilot over his shoulder, ignoring the sensation of his broken ribs slicing his insides. "I'm fine. A warning light went on and we had to set down. I made sure we went down hard."

  "Shit! Do you think it was a trick? Something they set up in case they got hijacked?"

  "I doubt it," Daniel said, choosing his footing in the loose soil carefully. "I told the pilot that if we went down I'd have to bash his head in and make it look like an accident to cover my ass."

  The brief silence over the phone wasn't entirely unexpected. "Oh, man. You didn't.

  "Relax. He's fine. I gave him the tranquilizer and banged him up a little. It'll look like he got knocked out in the crash. The point is, I think he believed me. I don't think he wanted to die, you know?"

  "Shit!" Brandon shouted again. "You're sure you're okay, though, right?"

  "I've had worse," Daniel said, though he wasn't certain it was true.

  "Okay. You've gotta make sure there aren't any tracks around the copter -- that everything looks natural. You probably don't have much time before someone shows up."

  "I'm on it."

  "Then can you maybe hole up under a rock a little ways away? We can send someone for you tonight."

  Daniel braced himself against a boulder and hopped off a two-foot drop, grimacing as the pilot's weight came down on his shoulder. He was pretty sure he had some internal bleeding. The question was whether or not Brandon needed to know that. There wasn't a whole lot he could do without jeopardizing the operation and he didn't need to be worrying about a wounded man on the field. "Yeah. No problem. Early tonight would be better, though, huh?"

  Chapter TWENTY-EIGHT

  "Goddammit!" Brandon shouted, kicking the dashboard repeatedly until he realized he was terrifying the already sweat-drenched driver.

  He stopped attacking the dash and instead tapped out a manic, but less threatening rhythm on his knees. Stupid helicopter. Now he had to deal with the possibility that this was some signal Scanlon didn't know about.

  "No!" he said out loud, causing the driver to flinch noticeably. "It happened, right? Nothing can be done. Nothing."

  Normally, something like this would have caused him to immediately fold up his tent and send everyone home. Not really an option under the circumstances. In fact, he hadn't even bothered to think about a way to abort safely. If they were driving into a SWAT team, then they were driving into a SWAT team. At least this time he'd go down with a little style.

  He shook his head violently. "Focus, dumb-ass!"

  The sun was still low on the horizon, causing distended shadows to grow from the rocks and shrubs lining the road. Beyond that, it was impossibly bright. Generally, he wasn't all that shot in the ass with working under a spotlight, but timing and logistics had dictated that this thing go down in broad daylight. The upside, though, had been that they'd be able to do the heavy lifting on a straight, flat section of asphalt.

  He stared out the windshield at the steep, twisting road in front of them for a few seconds and then rolled down the window to look back at the truck containing Catherine and his money.

  "Son of a bitch," he muttered, pulling his head back in and putting a hand on the driver's damp shoulder. "It's not you, Rob. I'm just in a little bit of a bad mood."

  "Okay."

  Brandon's earpiece crackled to life with the voice of one of his men. He wasn't sure which.

  "We've been notified that the helicopter had to make an emergency landing." The tone was that artificial calm all soldiers seemed to aspire to. There was nothing more unreliable than a man who didn't have the sense to know when to start panicking.

  "They're sending a replacement copter."

  "ETA?" Brandon said into his throat mike.

  "A little less than an hour."

  "Everybody get that?"

  He counted the responses.

  "How're you guys feeling about this road?"

  There was a short pause before one of the armored men riding with Catherine answered.

  "Is there any choice?"

  "No."

  "Then I guess we're feeling good about it."

  "Shit," Brandon muttered, pulling out a heavily annotated map and confirming what he already knew: There wasn't a straight section of road for thirty miles -- putting a bit of a damper on his plan to have Taylor pull up alongside the lead car and let him jump into the sunroof. The way his luck was going, they'd end up in a head-on. It looked like the steep, arcing hill just ahead was as good as it was going to get.

  "What's the slowest you'd ever go up that next hill?" he said, pointing.

  The driver swallowed hard. "I don't know. I ... I can't make more than thirty fully loaded. I'm not lying to you, there's just--

  "So if you cut it to, say, twenty for a few seconds, it wouldn't be weird."

  "No. There could be a slower vehicle on the road. Or a bad headwind."

  "Okay. That's what you're going to do. And I'm gonna jump out. We ne--"

  "Jump out? You can't jump out! What if your phone gets broke? What if the signal cuts off? What happens to me! I've got this bomb --"

  "Dude! Relax, okay? Just relax. Do I look stupid to you? There are backup transmitters. Remember -- if anything happens to you, I don't get my money. And I want my money. Right? That's the whole point."

  The driver fell silent and nodded, dislodging a drop of sweat from his nose.

  "I know it's hard, but you should try to enjoy this," Brandon said, opening his door and stepping out onto the running board. "You'll probably end up making a million bucks going on the talk show circuit. Think about it: You'll be rich and famous and I'll just be rich. You got the better end of the deal."

  The seat belt he was gripping slipped and he swung out over the asphalt, barely managing to get hold of the windowsill in time to keep from falling. A moment later, a gust slammed into the door, pinning him between it and the frame. When the wind finally relented, he threw himself back into the cab.

  "Okay, that's was scary. Let's try plan B."

  This time he kept the door closed and crawled through the window, feet first. At least he had something solid to hold, though finding the running board with his toe turned out to be more exciting than he'd expected. It took too long and too much adrenaline, but eventually he found himself standing in a relatively secure position outside the truck.

  "Brandon!" he heard Catherine say over the radio. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "I'm getting out!"

  He had to shout over the rush of the wind and grinding of gears as the truck began to slow. "Okay, guys! Back off as far as you can and open your rear window."

  "Roger."

  "Rob!" he yelled through the open window. "Take it down to twenty."

  "I'm at twenty."

  Brandon looked beneath him at the road rushing by at what seemed more like a hundred.

  "You sure?"

  "I can read a speedometer!"

  "Okay, okay. No need to freak out."

  No more time for procrastination. He took a deep breath and let go, twisting to face forward and trying to hit the ground running, hoping that he might be able to stay on his feet. Instead, he pitched forward, slamming shoulder-first into the asphalt and rolling uncontrollably through the gravel at the edge of the road. When he finally came to a stop, he just lay there trying to assess the damage. He hadn't ended up under the wheels of the semi, which was good. But he felt like he'd been beaten with a bat.

  He pushed himself to his feet and started a limping jog up the hill, craning his sore neck to see the white Taurus bearing down on him. By the time the car came alongside, he'd actually managed to increase his speed to a point that the burning in his
chest was almost as sharp as the pain in his shoulder.

  He reached out with his left hand and got hold of the sill of the open back window, but immediately began to stumble, his fingers slowly slipping.

  "Slow down! I can't --"

  An arm suddenly appeared from the passenger-side window and slammed painfully up between his legs, lifting him to the point that he could get his head in the window. He grabbed the edge of one of the seats as the pressure between his legs was replaced by a hand under his chin and another on the back of his head, pulling hard enough that he thought his neck would break.

  "Goddammit!" he whined as he slumped into the back seat, feet still sticking out the window. "You didn't have to do that!"

  Unsure what part of him hurt the worst, he curled into the fetal position and took turns holding his groin and rubbing his neck.

  The man in the passenger seat looked back at him, a deeply satisfied expression crossing his foundation-smoothed face. "Quit bitching and get your ass up. This is your fucking plan."

  "Hey, screw you, too." He wiped a trickle of blood from his lip, wincing at the daggerlike pain in his shoulder. Scanlon's gorilla was right, though. No time to feel sorry for himself.

  Brandon struggled into a sitting position and retrieved an elaborate video camera from the floorboard.

  "Look out," he said, purposely kneeing the man who had pulled him inside as he stood up through the open sunroof. It was still early, but the wind blasting him was already getting hot. He squinted at the two semis in front of them and reached down to pat the driver on the shoulder. "Okay! You're clear. Pull up between Catherine's truck and the decoy."

  Brandon jockeyed the camera into a more comfortable position as the car accelerated. Catherine gave him a quizzical look and mouthed "Are you all right?" as they passed.

  "Okay. Is everybody set?" he said into his throat mike.

  Affirmatives from everyone.

  "Okay, then. Let's go." He wedged his legs a little tighter against the seats below, stabilizing himself as they wound along the road's sharp corners and steep rises. "You've got about forty minutes until the replacement copter comes overhead."

  A moment later, a man in black body armor and helmet came through the truck's open passenger window, grabbing hold of the wind fairing and using it to pull himself gracefully on top of the cab. By the time the second man had completed the same well-practiced maneuver, his partner was already using a battery-powered drill to remove the bolts from the fairing. Brandon watched the whole thing through the movie camera propped on his uninjured shoulder.

  Their inability to control public access to the highway had demanded a little creativity. While the traffic was incredibly light -- particularly at dawn -- it wasn't nonexistent. And that made it likely that someone was going to drive by and see his men applying enormous stickers to the side of a moving truck. Not exactly something you ran into every day and possibly worthy of a quick call to the police.

  The answer had come to him while he was surfing channels on Catherine's TV. He'd landed on a game show where contestants risked their lives in all kinds of ill-conceived stunts for some meager prize or other. On that particular night, they had to ride a bike across a foot-wide plank suspended between two high-rises after eating live worms from a bucket of mud. Anyone who'd do that, he figured, wouldn't think twice about rappelling off the side of a moving vehicle.

  Brandon zoomed in on the second man, unidentifiable in his helmet, as he pushed the fairing bracket out of the way and replaced the bolts with eyehooks that he then clipped himself and his partner into. Both men were also connected by climbing harnesses to the ends of a single rope, most of which was contained in a black bag between them.

  "Come on, guys," Brandon said into his throat mike. "Let's pick it up. We've got to do this two minutes faster than your record, and these turns are gonna kill you."

  Of course, he was just talking to relieve his own nervousness. The men on that truck had done this over a hundred times in training and were undoubtedly moving no faster or slower than they could.

  The fairing came free and they threw it as far as they could off the side of the road, then climbed down between the cab and trailer.

  "Thirty minutes," Brandon said as they played out the rope between them and then flipped it up onto the trailer.

  "Careful, guys . . ."

  They evened out the rope so that they each had the same amount, undipped their safety lines and jumped out at precisely the same time. Brandon tensed as they swung away from the trailer and then slammed into its metal sides. When they were satisfied that they were stable, they began sliding the two massive sticker rolls from custom-made sheaths on their backs.

  "Car! We've got a car coming!" the man in the passenger seat below him yelled.

  "Everybody stay cool," Brandon said, making a bit more of a show of handling the camera. "This isn't a problem."

  The two men hanging from the sides of the truck acted as though they hadn't even heard the warning -- just like they were supposed to. One of them had already positioned the start of his decal and the other was struggling a bit as the truck came around a corner, causing him to arc out in the air.

  "Hold it steady, Cath," Brandon said.

  "You want to drive?" came the reply.

  Of course there was nothing she could do. The road wasn't straight.

  "Not for two hundred million dollars. You're doing great."

  He could hear the car approaching in the oncoming lane and he kept his eye glued to the camera's viewfinder while concentrating on his peripheral vision. The minivan slowed and moved as far as possible onto the dirt shoulder, its driver pointing at the men dangling from the truck as his two children pressed their faces to the glass in back. Everyone was smiling and talking a mile a minute. Perfect . . .

  Once the car was out of sight, Brandon lowered the camera and glanced at his watch. "You've got less than fifteen minutes!"

  "That's not helping!" one of them replied.

  "Sorry."

  They were swinging all over the place, despite Catherine's best efforts to take the apexes out of the curves. As one was pressed into the trailer, working furiously, the other hung helplessly in the air waiting for his turn.

  But it was working. They continued to make progress and the decals actually looked fairly straight from Brandon's angle.

  "Sorry, guys, but I've got to say it. Five minutes. The replacement helicopter is gonna come overhead in five minutes."

  He used the camera's zoom to scan the sky. Nothing yet, but he could feel the sweat starting to turn cold as it ran down his back. He had a sixth sense for these things. Time was running out.

  They were only a few feet from the back of the trailer, increasing their pace as the rolls got lighter. Just a few more minutes. That's all they needed.

  "Oh-oh," he said as a tiny dot appeared in the direction ofVegas. "I see it! Finish up!"

  The road in front of them swept right, bordering a deep, rocky valley. The oncoming lane looked clear, but it kept coming in and out of view, making it impossible to be sure.

  "Pull back," Brandon shouted at the driver below him. "Move into the left lane and bring me up next to the cab!"

  "What the hell are you talking about?" he said. "I can't see around these corn--"

  A gun appeared in the hands of the man in the passenger seat and a moment later they were coming alongside the cab of Catherine's truck.

  Brandon dropped the camera into the backseat and leaned out, grabbing the sill and trying to ignore the searing pain in his shoulder. The moment he had a grip, the car accelerated again, causing his legs to slide out of the sunroof and leaving him dangling from the truck's door, kicking for the running board. Catherine grabbed him by the back of his shirt with one hand and steered with the other.

  When he'd found his footing he glanced right and saw his man pull out a knife and cut the rope he was suspended from. They were probably going in excess of thirty miles an hour and both men hit the road
hard, rolling and skidding wildly along it. When they finally came to a stop, one jumped up immediately and began gathering the rope, while the other staggered toward the edge of the road, falling a few times before his partner caught up and wrapped an arm around his torso.

  "A little help?" Brandon said, jumping up and trying to pull himself through the window. This had always been part of the plan and they had gotten fairly good at working together to get him inside the cab. Unfortunately, his injured shoulder wasn't doing much for his athleticism, and the curves were straining Catherine's ability to drive with her knees.

  "Brandon! You're blocking me. I can't see!"

  He stopped about halfway through the window and checked the road ahead. "A little more to the left. Good. Hold it there." He pushed forward, jabbing her with knees and elbows, while she tried to maintain control.

  "Where's the copter?" he said, pulling his legs the rest of the way inside and dragging them across her on his way to the passenger seat.

  She looked in the side-view mirror, adjusting it upward to view the sky. "A ways back still."

  Brandon dialed Carl's number and pressed the phone to his ear.

  "Yeah."

  "Our men are down. Mile marker one ninety-two. The copter's a couple of miles behind us."

  "I'm on it."

  He stuffed the phone back in his pocket and leaned forward, looking at the vehicles in front of him. The decoy truck was continuing smoothly through the curves about a hundred yards in front of them, bracketed by the two chase cars. Their truck -- the one with the money -- now had a trailer proclaiming Budweiser to be Crisp, Clean, and Refreshing. That, combined with the missing wind fairing and Catherine's feminine arm hanging partway out the window, would make it completely unrecognizable. As long as they stayed close enough to the decoy truck and the chase cars to keep the GPSes happy, no one would be the wiser.