“Yes.” There was fierce emotion in the man’s voice now.
“I tell you now what I told you then, Erasmus,” said Church, “no matter how far you’ve walked under the shadow of darkness you can always turn and go back.”
“It’s funny that you, of all people, should preach about redemption, Deacon. I may be a monster, but you’ve spilled an ocean of blood. What does that make you?”
Church looked out the window of the helicopter as it lifted from the roof of the Warehouse. “We both know exactly what I am,” he said.
“And we both know exactly what I am,” said Tull.
“Erasmus—”
“Goodbye, Deacon. If there is a God, maybe I’ll see you on the other side.”
There was a sudden white light so brilliant that everything was instantly washed to a blank canvas of nothingness.
The ten pigeon drones exploded at the same moment. Ten tiny versions of the Truman Engine detonating on different parts of the building. The shock wave blew outward at the speed of sound, blowing out windows ten blocks away. The fireball threw cars and boats a hundred yards into the bay. And the entire Warehouse leaped up into the air atop a fireball of superheated gases that drove upward like the fist of Satan, vaporizing thousands of tons of brick and steel, melting vehicles into pools of slag and splattering them for blocks.
The last thing Mr. Church saw before the blast buffeted his helicopter out of control was the tiny figure of Gus Dietrich on the roof near the helicopter, one hand lifted in a lighthearted salute. Then Gus, and the building, and everyone inside of it were gone.
Gone.
“Dios mío!” cried Rudy Sanchez, seemingly from far away.
Then the helicopter was tilting sideways, spilling the lifting air, sliding into the claws of gravity, and a fireball and the brown water both rushed toward it.
Chapter Eighty-three
Hadley and Meyers Real Estate
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:13 p.m.
The shock wave picked Tull up and flung him against the side of the real estate office. The trees in the parking lot bent over as if weeping, the windows imploded. Hundreds of car alarms began screaming.
Tull collapsed to the ground, dazed, flash-burned, blood pouring from his nose and ears.
And all the time he never stopped laughing.
Chapter Eighty-four
Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:14 p.m.
Even with all of the pain he had to be feeling, the Closer had enough control to understand. He was not being murdered in this moment. His ticket to a longer life was silence.
He clamped his teeth and lips shut to hold back the screams.
I bent close, my lips near his ear. The position, the closeness was an awful parody of intimacy.
“Who sent you?” I whispered.
His mouth remained shut.
I touched the point of the knife to the soft flesh below his eye. “Is it worth dying for?”
Nothing. But he tried to scare me to death with his he-man steely stare.
With the knife in place, I used my free hand to tear open his shirt. He wore the same kind of body armor I’d see on the Closers down in Wolf Trap. I tore open the Velcro straps and pulled it down. No dog tags underneath. In fact he had no ID anywhere.
I bent close and spoke very quietly to him. “Who are you working for? What’s your agency? What unit are you with?”
He said nothing.
“Who’s your commanding officer?”
Nothing.
“Listen to me, asshole, you’re hurt but you’re not over the line. We can change that real fast.”
Nothing. His eyes were bright with pain but he kept that glare going.
I am not a big fan of torture. Kind of don’t ever want to do it, but there are moments when your options are limited. Top calls them “L.A. nuke moments.” The logic goes this way: If you know for certain that there is a nuclear device about to detonate in L.A., killing millions of people, and you have in custody a terrorist who knows where that bomb is, which is the better moral choice — to stick by your guns and say “No, America does not believe in torture” or to ruin one guy’s day and save millions? It’s not a good choice, bad choice thing because they’re both bad choices. In that situation, you have to make the right choice, the smart choice, even if it’s one you may have trouble living with later.
Add to that the fact that the Warrior was running the show right now.
The man talked.
Not much, but enough.
He confirmed that they were here to collect Junie Flynn. Alive, if possible, but dead was within the mission parameters. He confirmed that I was to be terminated with extreme prejudice. When I asked him why, he said something really funky.
“They told us about you,” he said. “They told us that you’re trying to tear the whole thing down.”
“What thing?”
“Everything. The country, the Project. You’re out of control, Ledger, and they will stop you.”
“Wait — suddenly I’m the bad guy? You dickheads attacked us. You blew up a freaking lighthouse with missiles. How did I get to be the bad guy?”
He sneered at me. “We did what we had to do to protect the United States. Maybe we don’t wear the uniform anymore, but every goddamn one of us would die for this country.” Then he gave me a pitying, disgusted look. “They said you used to be a good guy, Ledger. What happened to you? How much did you sell your country for?”
I wanted to drop a flag on the play and sit down to reread the rulebook. He was making my speech. Okay, maybe it was a badly worded and needlessly clichéd version of my speech, but even so.
“They must have sold you a pretty amazing line of shit,” I told him. “You actually think I’m the bad guy?”
“We know you are, asshole. You and that crazy UFO broad want to see this country burn. You want to see Chinese troops marching up Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“Dude,” I said, “you lost me a couple of turns back. What the fuck are you talking about?”
And that’s when the silly son of a bitch made his move.
With slashed arms and a killer crouched over him and no genuine options, he went for it. He tried to buck me off while simultaneously twisting his hips and turning his face away.
I killed him for trying it.
It didn’t take much. He made his move, and I made mine.
Damn it.
I crouched over him, watching this man die. I don’t know if I have ever been more conflicted about killing an enemy combatant before. Inside my head the Modern Man was appalled at what I’d done. The Cop detested me for losing control of the moment and thereby silencing my only information source. The Warrior …
Oh, man, the Warrior was howling with red delight. He saw that blood pouring into the dirt and he wanted to roll in it like a dog. Like a werewolf.
This was a very bad place to be, a very dark place. My feet were at the edge of the abyss, and down there things howled up at me in a voice that was far too familiar, far too personal.
I staggered back in both mind and body, and I turned away.
The knife was in my hand. It was red with blood, but strangely there was not even a drop of it on my flesh. As if I had used an innocent hand to pick up a guilty weapon.
What a dreadful illusion that was. And I marveled at how many lies are sewn into the fabric of our awareness.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing who it was meant for. The dead men, the people in my life who might suddenly be in danger because of me, Junie? Or was it meant for myself? If you are a sane and moral person, then with every act of violence there is less of you. I know this to be true. I’ve been aware each time the scalpel of experience pares away a chunk of me. Rudy Sanchez is fond of the expression, “Violence always leaves a mark.”
As a therapist and an empathetic man I know he understands that, but Rudy’s experience is largely
that of an observer. The violence he’s seen has been from a distance. Not always, but mostly. When you are ankle deep in blood, however, the truth of that saying is both more profound and horribly understated.
These thoughts shambled through my brain as I quickly searched the pockets of the other dead men. I did not expect to find ID, of course. Instead I found other MPP pistols, knives, hand grenades, and a few small electronic gadgets I did not recognize. I crammed my pockets with the stuff, as much as I could carry. In the front pants pocket of the last man I’d killed I found a compact satellite phone that was no larger than a cell.
I flipped it open. Instead of offering me an open line, it immediately went to autoconnect. It was set to call only one line. Only two seconds passed before a voice said, “Condor One to Six, copy.”
I took a gamble.
“Copy, Condor One, go for Six.”
“Give me a location and a sit-rep?”
As I spoke I crunched a few dry leaves in my palm. Sounds like crappy reception. Great for disguising your voice. I also dropped parts of words to make it sound like the signal was fluctuating. My buddies and I used to do this at fast-food drive-throughs, too.
“—three klicks no — west of — lighthouse and—”
“We’re getting some heavy interference, Six. Adjust your squelch.”
I crumpled more leaves. “Negative, — ondor, — phone took — hit—”
“Give me a target status.”
“Have engaged — and terminated — hostile.”
“Six, I’m reading that you have engaged and terminated one hostile? Confirm.”
“—onfirm — d.”
There was a pause, then, “Initial or secondary target?”
Junie had to be the initial target. They could only have found out about me within the last few hours.
“Secondary — arget has — neutralized.”
“Do you have eyes on initial target?”
I made the fake static worse, but paused long enough to say, “—southeast—”
Then I switched off the phone. With any luck they’d shift their search.
But off in the distance, I heard a dog bark. Ghost.
And more helicopters coming.
To kill Junie and to kill me. And they thought I was the bad guy.
“Christ,” I breathed.
And ran.
Chapter Eighty-five
VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 12:18 p.m.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” asked Howard.
“Turn on the news and you tell me,” said Tull. He was shouting, still partially deafened from the blast.
“Where are you?”
“Aldo and I are driving, getting away from the blast zone.”
Howard closed his eyes for a moment, trying to imagine that blast. The TV would only show the aftereffects and he wished he could have actually seen it. Heard it. Been pushed around by it. His loins twitched at the thought of a blast like that. The blast, and all that it accomplished.
“Field Team Nine is still hunting Ledger and the Flynn woman,” said Tull. “Last report said that they’ve taken some heavy losses but they haven’t yet confirmed a kill.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Howard. “There’s enough firepower at Turkey Point to do the job. In the meantime, get out of Baltimore and come here.”
“There?”
“Yes, I think you deserve to be with Mr. Bones and me when we make our big announcement.”
“When?”
“Come now. We’ll make the call first thing in the morning.”
Howard disconnected the call.
“That was Tull?”
“Yes. Deacon is dead.”
Mr. Bones smiled. “You’re joking.”
“Let’s turn on the news and find out.”
They did and the big plasma screen on the wall showed them an aerial view of a blast crater gouged out of the warehouse district in Baltimore. A cargo ship lay on its side in the brown water and other warehouses were blazing. Firefighters aimed dozens of streams of high-pressure water at the buildings, trying to save some. Others, more fully involved, were left to burn. Of the DMS Warehouse, nothing at all remained. Not a stick, not an unbroken stone.
The banner beneath the image read, in huge red letters, TERROR STRIKES BALTIMORE.
“How appropriate,” said Howard. “Not terrorism. Terror.”
But Mr. Bones did not answer. He stared slack jawed at the devastation.
“Oh my God…,” he breathed.
“Tull used ten of the miniature Truman Engines.”
“All of that?” breathed Mr. Bones aghast. “Just ten of the little ones?”
“Yes,” said Howard, “and I can’t imagine anything more wonderful or more perfectly timed.”
“But … but … the air show has been canceled. How does this…?”
Howard dug a cell phone out of his pocket and tossed it to Mr. Bones.
“I think it’s time we made some phone calls.”
Chapter Eighty-six
Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:23 p.m.
The sky got very loud. Craning my head to look up as I ran, I could see both of the unmarked black helicopters up there. But the noise was bigger than that. There were other engine sounds, rotors with a different signature coming hard from the south.
I broke from cover into a clearing that circled a small pond. There was a mound of sandstone rising on one side of the pond and I scrambled up to get the best possible view. The two black helicopters were moving slowly, rising from a low-level search and moving through a climbing turn to face south. It took ten seconds before I could see the other chopper. What I wanted to see — needed to see — was a different kind of black helo. Also black, but with a higher gloss to the paint and the distinctive weapons array that marked it as a DMS bird. I wanted to see thin red lines around the doors and down the tail.
What I saw instead were two helicopters, neither of them Black Hawks, neither of them black. The first was a hulking HH-60J Jayhawk and its companion was a much smaller AgustaWestland AW109. Both were painted with the bright white and blood red of the Coast Guard. Both, I knew, would be armed. M240D belt-fed, gas-operated medium machine guns firing 7.62mm NATO ammunition.
Under any other circumstance, two Coast Guard choppers would be the Horsemen of the Apocalypse to anything troubling the shores of Maryland.
This was a different kind of day.
So far, it wasn’t a good day for the good guys.
The Black Hawks could have fought it out with their own machine guns, and they certainly had the edge. Kind of hard to pit the M240D against a minigun. The Guardsmen could spit out nine hundred rounds per minute. The minigun uses the same caliber of ammunition, but it blasts it out at a staggering six thousand rounds per minute.
But the Closers weren’t interested in a gunfight, not even with bigger guns.
There was a big, clunky gun mounted on the underbelly of the chopper. The distance was too great for me to make out details, but I knew that it would have four curved prongs instead of an open barrel. There was too much noise for me to hear the tok sound, but I saw a brief shimmer in the air as a focused beam of microwaves shot from the Closer’s bird and hit the first of the Coast Guard helicopters.
At first I thought that the shot had missed. Then suddenly the lead helo blew apart in a massive ball of intense red flame. It could not have been a full second later that the second helo exploded. It was so fast. So ugly. So thorough. Starbursts of flaming debris flew outward like the petals of some grotesque flower.
I screamed at the sky as the burning wreckage fell in strangely slow motion onto the rifling green treetops below.
I raised the stolen MPP in a foolish, wasteful, suicidal, and pointless attempt to strike back. My finger pulled the trigger. Tok! Tok!
And then something happened …
Something that seemed completely impossible.
As I fired at the closest Black Hawk — it exploded!
I gaped. It was impossible. At that distance, with the small gun I held — it was impossible. It was so freakishly absurd they wouldn’t have put it in a movie. Only as an afterimage did I see the arrow-straight trail of silver-black smoke.
I whirled to follow the back trail of the smoke to its source.
And there it was.
A gleaming black UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, the body detailed with lines of red the exact same color of blood. Men crowded the open bay door, hunched over the machine gun. I knew those faces. Even from here, I knew them.
I spoke one name.
“Top…”
You could almost see the other black helicopter freeze in midair in a WTF moment. Then the closer helo spun toward the DMS bird. Both helicopters were evenly matched for this kind of fight. However, there was a moment that echoed the confrontation between the black helos and the Coast Guard — a moment when this could have turned into a shooting match with machine guns.
But I knew Top. He had to have seen the two Coast Guard birds die. All those brave men, incinerated in an instant. Top’s son had been killed in Iraq in the first days of the war. His daughter had lost both legs when her Bradley rolled over an IED. “Fair” was never really part of the kind of war we were fighting. M3 and their killers had opened up on us with no declaration of war, no agreement of rules, no promise of quarter. They’d come like butchers onto the field. The death toll for today was already too high. Hector and the others aboard my chopper, the two Coast Guard crews.
Fair?
Fuck fair.
The DMS Black Hawk blew those sons of bitches out of the sky.
That’s fair.
Part Five
The Truman Engine
It was the darndest thing I’ve ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and it was about the size of the Moon. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing’s for sure, I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.
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