Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  The rotor sound crescendoed at about the halfway point of their run for the woods, and Navarro really poured on the gas to get to the tree line before being spotted. With the carry handle for the AR-10 clutched in her right fist, and the spare mags in her left, Gail kept up step for step.

  With ten yards left, she would have sworn the chopper was immediately overhead. As if to confirm her worst fears, the voice of God said, “Federal agents. Stop where you are.”

  For an instant-no longer than the width of a heartbeat-Gail considered complying. Even Navarro slowed by half a stride. But this wasn’t right. She didn’t quite know why yet, but something about the scenario was wrong for an action by any federal law enforcement agency. “Keep going!” she yelled. “Go, go, go!”

  It was all Navarro needed. He picked up speed again.

  There’s no way to accurately track time in stressful conditions, but in the seconds that separated them from some measure of shelter, the hairs on the back of Gail’s neck went to full attention. Out of sheer instinct, she cut hard to her right, and then back to the left again to ruin any shooter’s aim.

  The first bullet didn’t arrive until after they’d crossed into the trees, and at that, it went two feet wide, drilling a pine between the two of them.

  Navarro dove to the ground for cover, and Gail was three strides past him before she realized what he’d done. “Bruce!” she yelled. They weren’t deeply enough into the woods yet for adequate cover. Two more rounds screamed in, way too close to him. The shooter was getting better.

  “Stay down!” Gail yelled. She took a knee behind a hardwood and brought her rifle to bear, trying her best to stay invisible as she searched the horizon for a target. The hammering sound of the rotors hadn’t lessened a bit, but it seemed to be coming from directly overhead. She didn’t have a clue what the shooters were up to, but she knew that if she couldn’t see them, then they couldn’t see her. “Bruce, get up now. Find cover.”

  Navarro reacted quickly, again surprising her with his lithe flexibility. He got his feet under him and more sprang than ran to a different tree. “What are they doing?”

  The rotor noise had stabilized, as if they’d parked the chopper in the air overhead.

  Directly overhead.

  “Oh, shit,” Gail breathed. “Run, Bruce!” she yelled. “We’ve got to move. Follow me.”

  She took off at a dead run, staying inside the tree line, but running parallel to the clearing, sprinting in the direction she thought they’d least likely anticipate.

  Inside ten seconds, the grenades started falling through the canopy of leaves. The explosions were not as loud as she expected them to be-no louder, really, than the flash-bangs she’d used during her HRT days-but the fragmentation damage was staggering, obliterating bushes and smaller trees, and stripping bark and leaves off the larger ones. She knew for a fact that she heard three explosions, but after that it was just a cacophony that reduced their abandoned hiding spot to a lifeless crater. She ignored the two hornet stings in the back of her right leg, which she knew had to be grenade fragments finding their mark.

  She drew to a stop behind another tree, the largest one she could find, and Navarro joined her. “Bombs?” he shouted, nearly hysterical. He’d lost his steely calm, and what had replaced it was not at all endearing.

  “Hand grenades,” she said. “I suspected they were going to drop something once they moved over the trees, where a sniper would have no shot. Then, when they went into a hover, I knew for sure. Are you okay?”

  “They threw hand grenades at me!”

  “Are you hurt?”

  Navarro shook his head, then grew concerned as his gaze shifted to Gail’s backside. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  “I’m hurting, too,” she said. “Seems only reasonable.” Now that they’d stopped running, she could feel the trails of blood running down the back of her right leg.

  “Are you okay?”

  “They dropped grenades on me!” Gail tried to match his incredulous tone, and succeeded in eliciting a chuckle. “I think I’m fine.”

  She forced herself not to look, deciding that as long as the pain was tolerable, and the flow was a trickle and not a gush, it was a minor wound. To look now and discover otherwise would help no one and change nothing. The bones were intact, and she was alive. In times like these, it pays to take things one step at a time.

  The chopper was moving again, circling around to hover over the clearing between the house and the tree line. It was a fairly old-style Bell Jet Ranger, popular among police forces in the 1990s, and it had no markings that showed it to be anything other than a private aircraft. The chopper pivoted in the air, bringing its port side parallel to the trees, its nose pointed directly at Gail and Navarro.

  She could see the pilots clearly through the windscreen-so clearly, in fact, that she wondered how they were not seen in return. Then she got it: they were surveying the damage they’d wrought.

  Navarro raised his rifle. “Let’s take them out.”

  “No!” Gail snapped. Her mind raced to review their options. This was their perfect moment of advantage. The aircraft was completely vulnerable. If they opened fire now, they could knock it out of the sky and neutralize the danger. Except they didn’t have cause. They were not in imminent danger, and every professional law enforcement officer knew that in the absence of immediate threat, deadly force could not be used. It was always a last resort. That’s the way things worked in an ordered, civilized society. There was always another way. Always a better option than killing, right up until the moment that those options proved impossible.

  A man with a rifle appeared in the Jet Ranger’s open side door. He raised the weapon to his shoulder and opened fire, blasting bullet after bullet into the smoldering, ravaged remains of what had been their hiding place.

  Fuck it.

  Gail brought her AR-10 to bear. “You take the pilots,” she said. “I’ll take the shooter.” Without waiting for an answer, she steadied her rifle against the trunk of her sheltering tree and lined up for a slam-dunk fifty-yard sure thing. She double-checked the firing selector to make sure it was set to single-fire, she corrected for the downwash of the rotors, squeezed the trigger and-

  Navarro opened up on full-auto, emptying his twenty-round magazine in less than two seconds, and filling the air with twenty deadly projectiles that hit nothing. Nothing! Jesus, how was that even possible?

  Gail’s shot went high and right, harmlessly shattering the window of the open sliding door.

  The pilot reacted instantly, pouring on power and pitch. The nose dipped dramatically-perilously, Gail thought-as the rotor blades dug deeply into the air and pulled the aircraft up and away with amazing speed. Buffeted by the downwash, she tried to react, shifting her aim to the cockpit, but she wasn’t fast enough. She fired three shots in their direction, but they were wasted. She was reasonably sure that she hit the chopper somewhere, but if she’d done any damage, it would have been from pure luck. As the aircraft pulled up and away, the pilot also slipped it sideways, a combat tactic that made even a relatively slow target like a chopper difficult to hit with ground fire. She considered firing again but decided against it. Chances of a kill shot had dropped to nothing, and even out here, all those bullets had to come down somewhere.

  To her right, Navarro finished reloading and shouldered his rifle again.

  Gail slapped the muzzle down. “What was that?” she yelled. “How do you miss something that big when it’s that close?”

  Navarro’s face glowed an unnatural red as he shouted back, “I was a little stressed, okay? I’ve never tried to shoot anything down before. What about you, Miss Expert? You didn’t do any better. I say we make a run for it.”

  “To where?”

  “To anywhere. You’ve got your truck, and I’ve got mine. We just get in and drive.”

  “Not with them in the air,” Gail said, rejecting the plan out of hand. “Any advantage we have is tied to our mobility. A car i
s dependent on roads, and roads bring predictability. That’s the last thing we need.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We wait to see what they’re going to do, and then react.”

  She led the way deeper into the woods, and then left, back toward their first hiding place. Drawing on her HRT counter-sniper training, she knew that that people on the move tend to stick to one direction, rarely doubling back.

  “Why are we going back this way?” Navarro asked.

  “Because we are,” she said. Sometimes the simplest answers were the best ones.

  They both paused and gasped in unison as they passed by the ravaged section of woods that had been ground zero for the grenade attack. The earth had been ripped open, and tree roots avulsed from the dark soil. Hundreds of white gashes showed the tearing force of the fragmentation explosives against the tree trunks. Looking at the damage made her leg hurt even more. It had gone from a searing sting to a dull vibrant ache. Almost without thinking, she dared to touch the fabric of her denim jeans, but regretted it when she saw her wet, red fingertips.

  “We’re not there yet,” she said, and she nudged Navarro on with a gentle push on his shoulder.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ll know it when we see it,” she lied. What she meant was, Anywhere but here.

  When the distance felt right, she turned to the left and moved to the tree line again. With great effort, she lowered herself to her left knee, and peered out from behind a sheltering oak. At first, it appeared that the chopper hadn’t moved. It just sat there, parked in the air over the distant forest, well out of range. Were they radioing someone for instructions? Awaiting reinforcements, perhaps?

  The thought of backup forces made her heart skip, but then she rejected the idea as unlikely. If they’d had more troops, they would have waited for them. No, whatever they decided to do, they would either do it alone, or they would do it another day.

  “Okay, I’ll come with you,” Navarro said, a propos of nothing. “I’ll testify.”

  Gail had almost forgotten he was there. “Yeah? Why the change of heart?”

  He chuckled wryly. “I’d say my cover’s kind of blown, wouldn’t you?”

  Gail didn’t respond. There was more, and he’d either share it or he wouldn’t, but that answer was too easy.

  “Nobody should have this kind of power,” he said. “Too much violence, all to cover up a murder.”

  Gail liked that. She acknowledged his decision with a nod.

  “So, do you think they found me by following you?” he asked.

  “Must have,” she admitted. “I don’t know how, but I guess that doesn’t matter now.”

  He pointed. “I think they’re coming back.”

  At first, she didn’t see it, but then she did: the chopper was definitely getting bigger. It was keeping out of range, but it was circling in closer. It seemed to be on a course that would take them to the front side of the house. “What are they doing?” she wondered aloud.

  “Maybe they’re just looking for us. You know, cruising around to see if we’re hiding out there.”

  Gail didn’t like it. “No, they have to know we’re still in the woods somewhere. If we’d crossed into the open, they’d have seen us.”

  “Even from that far away?”

  “A clear day like this, you can see amazing detail when you’re on the lookout for it.” So, what could they be up to in the front of the house? When the shooter reappeared in the doorway, she knew exactly what their plan was.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. “They’re going to take out my Jeep. Trap us here.”

  “But I have a truck of my own,” Navarro said.

  “Pray they don’t know that.”

  A plan blossomed in Gail’s mind. “Okay, Bruce, listen to me,” she said. She spoke so quickly that her words ran together. In the distance, the Jet Ranger began its run. “When I say, I want you to do exactly what you did before. I want you to point that rifle directly at the chopper and unload it on full automatic. Then I want you to curl up in a ball behind that tree and not even peek out until the shooting is over.”

  His jaw dropped. “What-”

  The door gunner started shooting at the front of the house.

  “When I say,” Gail reminded, and she sprinted ten strides farther to the right. Her leg screamed at her as she slid to a halt on her left hip, and she shouldered her AR-10. On the far side of the house, a column of smoke rolled skyward from the murdered Jeep.

  “Now!” she yelled.

  Her words had barely evaporated before Navarro unleashed another twenty-round string.

  This time, the pilot had been setting a trap, and he was ready for it. Again with amazing speed, it pivoted in the air and raced sixty yards closer, presenting a broadside target. The shooter opened up on Navarro’s hiding spot.

  And Gail opened up on the shooter. With the selector on full automatic this time, she fired two three-round bursts. The first nailed the door again, but it startled the shit out of the shooter. He pivoted on his knee and pointed his weapon directly at Gail’s muzzle flashes. Her second burst caught him as he was still moving. She noted the pink mist in the doorway, and was dimly aware of the man falling away from the chopper to the ground, but by then she’d shifted her target.

  From this angle, she could no longer see the Jet Ranger’s windscreen, but she could clearly see the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the cargo section, and she knew that the pilots’ seats were just on the opposite side. Even as the chopper’s nose dipped and attempted to race away, Gail pressed the foregrip tightly against the trunk of the tree, and she squeezed the trigger, unleashing all her remaining ammunition in a single uninterrupted blast.

  This time, not a single round was wasted. Fourteen, fifteen, whatever was left in the magazine plowed into the helicopter. The bird hesitated in midair, rocking slightly on its center axis as the pilots struggled to bring stability to the critically wounded bird.

  As the receiver locked open, Gail dropped out the spent magazine, slapped in a second, and slid the receiver home. She braced against the tree, instinctively held her breath, and opened up again, pouring more bullets into that bulkhead. Only five or six rounds into the second burst, it was over. The aircraft wobbled, then heeled over to its starboard side.

  Gail dove for cover, pressing herself into the dirt and covering her head with her arms. As if mere flesh and bones could protect her from the shrapnel of a disintegrating helicopter. The ground under her jumped at the impact, and an instant later, a searing wall of heat preceded a low-order explosion that was more a whump than a bang.

  She pressed deeper into the ground as something whistled through the air over her head and then sheared off the tops of trees, creating a rainstorm of leaves and branches.

  The heat bloomed painfully over the next three or four seconds, and then it retracted just as quickly. In Gail’s mind, she could almost see the roiling fireball tumbling over itself as rolled into the sky. When she dared to raise her head, that was exactly what she saw.

  That, and a world on fire. It had started with her truck, and then the helicopter; but when the chopper fell out of the sky, it clipped the roof of Navarro’s house, and now fire was consuming the building’s roof, traveling from the far end to the near.

  To her distant left, Navarro struggled to his feet, his rifle dangling from his hand. “Well,” he said. “Shit.” He turned to look at her. “Good thing I keep my keys in the truck, huh?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The rain started to fall the minute Evan Guinn and his escorts arrived at the big camp in the jungle. And when it fell, it fell like a house. No little drip, drip followed by a patter that gradually increased. This rainstorm was born as a gulley-washer. That’s what Father Dom called lots of rain. But even that dramatic description couldn’t touch this deluge. No gulley could contain this rain, so thick and heavy that you couldn’t see more than fifteen feet ahead. The flood of water turned the ground t
o an ankle-deep river of mud, and again, the boy was grateful not to be burdened with shoes.

  This camp was a lot like the one where he’d first awakened, but many times the size, with probably ten times the people, many of them carrying machine guns, and more than a few wearing soldiers’ uniforms. He saw more of those raised-floor huts, too, like the one where he’d awoke, but most had no walls. The roofs were made of weeds, but the sides were wide open. It was hard to know exactly how many there were through blinding rain, but he counted eight, and thought he could make out the outlines of several more.

  As he passed the first building, the soldiers who’d been escorting him peeled off and disappeared into the rain. Evan started to follow, but Oscar cupped the back of his neck with his palm and moved him forward. Under different circumstances, it would have been a nearly playful gesture.

  “Almost there,” Oscar said.

  The deeper they traveled into the camp, the barer the ground became, until finally, they entered what felt like the middle, where the mud was ankle deep. The trek ended at the base of a huge hut, at the bottom of a five-stair climb.

  At shoulder height, the hut buzzed with activity and stank of gasoline and rotten eggs. A dozen or so half-naked people, a few not much older than he, moved about at a frenzied pace, clearly in a hurry to finish something, but Evan had no idea what the something might be.

  Oscar nudged his shoulder, less playfully than last time. “Up,” he said. “You first.”

  “Where are we?”

  Oscar smiled, ignoring the water that cascaded from his nose and chin. “This is your new home.”

  Evan made a point of showing nothing. Shielding his eyes from the rain, he tilted his head to look up to the top of the stairs, and then climbed. He wasn’t sure it made sense, but the higher he got off the ground, the less the place stank of gasoline. He was grateful for that, because it was a smell that made his stomach uneasy.

  When he reached the top, the rain stopped falling, and he realized that he was under a roof. A second later, Oscar rejoined his side and craned his neck to look around, clearly searching for something or someone in particular. He made eye contact with a man on the far side of the enclosure and waved-a big wave, high over his head.