Hard Target

by Alan Jacobson

  “I’m leaving him on the job. For now. You’ll have to deal with that.”

  “Your decision. You’re the boss.”

  Shepard shook his head. “You know I’d go to the end of the Earth for you, man. But some things I can’t protect you from.”

  Uzi’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need your protection. I can take care of myself.”

  Shepard rested two beefy elbows on his desk. “That’s never been an issue. But this is different. It’s not a criminal with a gun or a terrorist with a bomb... This is an enemy different from anything you’ve ever dealt with. The enemy’s your own unit, and they’re pissed as hell. They may never forgive you. You’ve gotta be prepared for that. That’s a lot to deal with, on top of, well...you know.”

  “Not like I’ll ever forget.”

  Shepard looked down. A moment of silence passed, then he asked, “And that brings me to why I wanted to meet with you. Whatever happened with that shrink?”

  Uzi let his eyes wander to the television screen. “Stupid talking heads. None of ’em predicted such a close election. Not one of them.”

  “You never saw her, did you?”

  Uzi tilted his head. “President Glendon Rusch. Has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “It’d be a good idea, especially because of what’s happened. The shrink can help. Your plate’s been full, and this Osborn thing’s only going to make it...fuller.”

  Uzi tore his gaze from the television. “Thanks for the cliché. And for the advice.”

  “Here’s the thing, Uzi. It’s not advice. Not this time. It’s mandatory. If you want to remain in Washington. If you don’t, then it’ll be up to your new ASAC to determine what should be done.”

  Uzi’s eyes widened. “Shep, don’t do this to me—”

  “Your macho side doesn’t want to spill your guts to a woman, fine. You want someone closer to home, fine. No excuses this time.”

  “Shep, please—”

  “You should be thanking me for circumventing an EAP,” Shepard said, referring to the FBI’s in-house Employee Assistance Program that required a counselor to talk with an agent before sending him to a psychiatrist. “Besides, you did it to yourself. I’m just trying to keep my people happy. And right now they’re not very happy. You need to get some help and I need to keep things under control. Control’s important right now. For your sake.”

  Uzi bit his lower lip.

  “I’ve got someone else for you to see.”

  “You’d really transfer me if I don’t see a shrink?”

  “And by see him, I mean actually go. Talk to him, work with him. For as long as he sees fit.”

  “What about what I think?”

  “I’ve cut you a lot of slack the past few years, Uzi. I’ve given you a lot of leeway in how you run your unit. Time’s come for you to do it my way.”

  Uzi looked away.

  “Way I see it, you ratted out Osborn because what he did struck too close to home. He reminds you of yourself. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Uzi stood up and leaned his palms on Shepard’s desk. “I don’t need this bullshit. Especially now.” His face had turned crimson and his eyes were wide. “I did what I did because it was right. DIOG says so,” he said, referring to the Bureau’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide. “So don’t be giving me any psychological mumbo jumbo explanation about how my actions had some deeper meaning.”

  The two men stared at each other for a long moment.

  “Sit. Down.”

  Uzi took his seat.

  “You want to stay in Washington?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thought so,” Shepard said. “You’ll be seeing Dr. Leonard Rudnick. You have an appointment with him tomorrow, eight o’clock.” He reached into his drawer and tossed a business card in Uzi’s direction.

  Uzi scraped it off the desk. “Twenty-three eleven M Street. Two blocks from my house.”

  “Incentive to keep your appointments. Besides, he’s a good man. You’ll like him.”

  Uzi snorted. “Right.”

  The buzz on the phone made Uzi jump. Shepard lifted the handset and listened, his eyes narrowing, a noticeable layer of perspiration breaking out across his forehead. “Thank you,” he whispered into the phone, then let the handset drop from his ear. His stunned gaze met Uzi’s.

  “What’s wrong?” Uzi asked.

  “Marine Two went down in a field forty miles from here.” The two men were silent as they absorbed the impact of the statement. After a few seconds of silence, Shepard got to his feet. “Chopper’s on its way to pick you up. Carolyn has the GPS coordinates. Get ’em and get out there. Now.”

  11:06 PM

  Paramedic Dell Gibbons and his partner had just returned from a three-car pileup on the interstate when the call came over the radio: a helicopter had crashed in a field just inside their patrol sector. Gibbons had to pee and his stomach was grumbling. But he shoved the rig into gear and headed off toward the nighttime countryside.

  The paramedics were followed by a fire truck, three “attack engines,” and a couple of water tenders, sirens screaming as they rumbled down the roadway.

  His partner leaned closer to the two-way radio that had spurted static a few seconds earlier. “Repeat?”

  “That’s Marine Two that went down,” the dispatcher said. “The veep’s chopper.”

  “The vice president?” Gibbons asked. “Holy shit.” He had the feeling he was about to enter a scene on par with the medics who had responded to the shooting of President John F. Kennedy. Well, almost on par. He felt a part of history. All the offhand remarks his mother had made about him not pursuing her dream of him becoming a doctor would be silenced forever. He would be one of the few who had responded to the scene when Vice President Rusch’s helicopter went down.

  But as he tooled along the highway, he realized that his mother’s silence would last but a moment. Then she would tell him he could have been the doctor called upon to treat the vice president instead of “just” the paramedic who had transported him to the hospital.

  “I read an article about these helicopters in some military magazine,” his partner said. “They got all kinds of special protection, lasers and shit like that. They can take enemy fire, even missiles, I think, and still keep flying.”

  “Yeah, well, this one ain’t still flying.”

  SEVEN MINUTES AFTER THE CALL, Gibbons and his partner were first on the scene, arriving seconds ahead of the county sheriff and the fire trucks. The medics quickly surveyed the carnage, keeping a distance from the flames that stretched high into the sky, fed by an abundant supply of spilled Jet A fuel. Though less flammable than gasoline, the high performance kerosene burned very hot. Explosion wasn’t merely possible, but likely.

  The firefighters jumped from their rigs and deployed their heavy inch-and-a-half hoses across the vast area of burning debris. In less than a minute, water was pumping onto the wreckage, followed seconds later by aqueous film forming foam designed to cap the fire and flammable liquids by suffocating them.

  In short order, they cleared a narrow path for Gibbons and his partner to begin their search for survivors. But before Gibbons could move ten feet, he saw something off to his right: a man on the ground, crawling, trying to get to his hands and knees, without much success...dangerously close to the tip of a swirl of violent flames.

  “Over there,” Gibbons yelled.

  He and his partner were upon the man in seconds. They made a quick assessment, determined he was safe to move, then grasped him by both armpits and rolled him onto an adjacent spine board. After securing him with straps, they dragged the survivor away from the fire’s blazing heat.

  Gibbons grabbed a pair of shears from his belt and cut through what remained of the man’s suit coat and dress shirt. “Sir, can you hear me?” he asked.

  A groan in response, a half-hearted movement of his left arm.

  “I’m a paramedic. We’re gonna take good care of you.”

&nbs
p; The man’s face was so badly burned Gibbons couldn’t tell if he was thirty or fifty. “Starting a central line,” Gibbons said.

  “A central line? We never do that in the—”

  “We’ve gotta infuse him now, no choice. We’ll dress the burns and get him the hell out of here. Medevac?”

  Seconds later, his partner lowered the two-way from his ear. “Three minutes.”

  Gibbons bit his lip as he worked, keeping his thoughts to himself. He was concerned about the extent of the burns covering the man’s face, hands, and feet.

  “Gib—I think I see someone else.”

  “Go,” Gibbons said. He watched as his partner ran off in the direction of what appeared to be another prone body crawling slowly across the devastated landscape.

  Gibbons finished establishing the IV, then noticed something shiny protruding from the partially burned suit coat he had cut away. He reached into the inside pocket and pulled out a blue and gold Waterman pen. It was thick and heavy, but well balanced. He rolled it between his fingers and saw something engraved on the barrel: “Vice President Glendon E. Rusch.”

  “Holy shit.” He glanced over his shoulder, saw that no one was watching, and slipped the pen into his shirt pocket. Just in case his mother did not believe him.

  11:39 PM

  The wreckage was still partially ablaze, though the army of firefighters had the situation contained. Uzi stepped from the FBI’s Black Hawk helicopter and ran toward the periphery of the crash site. He stopped at the outer border, taking in the carnage the way he’d been taught to view any crime scene: get the big picture first, then move inward for the details. He pulled a toothpick from his jacket pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and twirled it about with his lips and tongue.

  Emergency personnel continued to wander the area, though at this point Uzi surmised the rescue aspect had concluded and they were now engaged in recovery efforts.

  Uzi walked toward the concentration of investigators, which he estimated as numbering between fifty and sixty. The acrid stench of burning fuel mixed with smoldering electrical and mechanical parts flared his nostrils. He slid past a couple of workers who were placing klieg lights along the periphery, then knelt beside the first technician he came to, a woman in dark coveralls with “NTSB” written in white phosphorescent letters across her back.

  He flashed his Bureau credentials and nodded at the ground she was examining. “Special Agent Aaron Uzi,” he said, the toothpick bobbing on his lips. Years ago he got into the habit of truncating his last name during introductions, as most people botched it anyway. “I’m head of JTTF out of WFO,” Uzi said, referring to the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

  “Angela Bonacelli, Aviation Go Team,” she said. “Structures Specialist.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “I can tell you this A-triple-F makes it very hard to do my job.”

  “‘A’ what?”

  “The foam. Good thing is it smothers everything in its path and puts out the fire. Bad thing is, well, it smothers everything in its path. And you’re not supposed to disturb it or the fire’ll start up again.” She moved past a large piece of metal that was layered with foam and settled herself in a clearing beside loose dirt.

  “Other than that,” Uzi said, moving beside her.

  Bonacelli spoke without looking up, suddenly fascinated by what lay in front of her, flicking at the soil with a small brush. “Both choppers crashed. Marine Two and its escort. Two survivors, from what I hear. A Secret Service agent and the vice president.”

  “You mean president-elect.”

  As she sifted through the dirt, she said, “Yeah.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Wreckage is strewn over a very large area. Radar picked up pieces coming down ten miles from here.”

  “Ten miles? On a helicopter crash?”

  “First of all, we’ve got two choppers. We don’t know the sequence yet, but one could’ve gone down first, then the other. Leaves a much greater scatter pattern.” Bonacelli shrugged. “It’ll take a while before all the wreckage is sorted out.”

  “Still,” Uzi mused. “Ten miles. Doesn’t seem possible, unless...”

  “Unless there was an explosion of some sort.” Bonacelli nodded. “Disabling but not totally destructive. Debris falls, but the chopper stays aloft. Finally, she stalls or something else gives out, and she drops out of the sky.”

  “An explosion. Are you saying this was intentional?”

  “Whoa,” she said, holding her hands out in front of her. “I was just reporting the size of the debris field. My job is to gather evidence, Agent Uzi. In a case like this, someone else who gets paid a lot more than me determines what it all means.”

  “Theoretically. If there’s an explosion that’s not caused by a bomb, we’re talking either mechanical or structural failure, right?”

  “Right.” She looked out at the smoldering wreckage. “What a mess.” Almost to herself, she said, “How the hell could this have happened?”

  Uzi turned away. It was exactly what he was wondering. From what he knew, the executive fleet of helicopters was meticulously maintained. Parts were replaced on a set schedule, whether or not they were worn. The human factor, however, was always something that needed to be ruled out: pilot error, improperly installed equipment, acts of terror. Until they had more information, it was ill advised to jump to conclusions.

  But his mind was churning, nonetheless.

  Uzi’s tongue played with the toothpick as he glanced out over the field of burning embers and twisted metal. “Who’s here? FAA, Hazmat, you guys, Secret Service, Marines...” He continued scanning the on-scene personnel, guessing affiliation by their dress and body language.

  Bonacelli took a sample bag from her kit and scooped a trowel of dirt. “Defense Department, county sheriffs, and the executive branch medical team. I think that covers it.”

  “Shitload of people.”

  Uzi knew that in a crash scene such as this one, the National Transportation Safety Board ran the show until they determined cause. If it was accidental, the FBI left NTSB to finish their analysis. If it was a criminal act, the Bureau took over. In a case involving the executive branch, parallel investigations ran in the background: DOD, Secret Service, the Marines— They all did their own thing. All agencies were supposed to run their findings through the NTSB, but turf wars often compromised the process.

  Uzi’s thighs were beginning to ache. He stood gingerly from his crouch, his old football knee clunking when he straightened it. Bonacelli rose as well.

  “Who are your Powerplants and Systems Specialists?”

  “John Maguire and Clarice Canfield,” she said, twisting her torso to scan the milling bodies. “They’re out there somewhere.”

  Uzi’s glance followed hers and settled on a long-haired brunet in a business suit, walking slowly along the periphery. “Who’s that?” He wasn’t sure if he had said it aloud.

  “Haven’t the slightest. Not one of ours.”

  Uzi watched the woman take a few more steps, then turned back to Bonacelli. “Thanks. I’ll catch you a little later, in case there’s anything else you can tell me.” Without waiting for a response, he made his way toward the brunet. Her skirt ended halfway down her thighs, curiously short for a November evening in Virginia. Then again, she might’ve been dressed for a night out, then ordered to report to the accident scene. Whatever the reason, Uzi wasn’t complaining.

  But as quickly as the hormones shot into his bloodstream, the guilt followed, like a radioactive tag searching out its target tissue. How could he lust after another woman?

  He and Dena had been together since high school, from the moment he had first laid eyes on her cute ass. She always laughed when he told her that his first attraction to her involved her backside. In her mind, she had more intriguing features. But as Uzi had told her, you can never explain attraction. It’s either there or it’s not. And with Dena, it started with somethin
g physical—her behind—and quickly progressed to the most intangible of assets, her heart and soul.

  As the brunet slinked toward him, the thought that he was no longer married flashed in his mind. He was widowed. It was an important distinction, he told himself, though it was one he had not been able to settle deep within his core. Rational thoughts and logic almost always got lost inside the emotional baggage of guilt.

  As an internal war raged between his hormones and conscience, he found himself blocking the woman’s path. Without meeting his eyes, she shifted her hips and deftly slithered around him.

  “Have we met before?” He usually knew he was going to speak before words emerged from his mouth. In this case, something else had control over his body.

  The woman turned slowly and looked at him, her lustrous hair falling across the left portion of her face. He could only make out the white of her right eye, as it reflected the burning embers along the ground.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, stepping toward her. “Aaron Uziel.” He had used his full last name. Why? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. He suddenly felt hot, a layer of sweat blanketing his skin. He stood there facing her before awkwardly extending a hand.

  She took it in a firm handshake, then released it. “FBI?”

  His left hand found the FBI creds ID clipped to his coat. “Yeah, I’m here for the wreck. To investigate.” What the hell’s wrong with me? Of course I’m here to investigate.

  “Well, good luck,” she said.

  Before he could object, or say something to prevent her from walking away, she turned and moved off in the opposite direction. Her hips seemed to gyrate rhythmically.

  He shook his head, and an image of his beloved Dena popped into his mind.

  “Hey, G-man.”

  Uzi turned and had to hold up a hand against the blisteringly bright klieg light illuminating the area. Standing there was Special Agent Karen Vail, a profiler with the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.

  “Karen, what are you doing here?”

  “My ASAC said to get my ass over here ASAP. So I got my ass over here. Luckily the rest of me decided to come along for the ride.”