Primary Valor

by Jack Mars

  Luke looked at the pilot. He nearly laughed. The guy was wearing a white sleeveless T-shirt and bright red boxer briefs. That, and deck shoes with no socks.

  Luke took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. They were out.

  That wasn’t so bad.

  “What’s your name?” Luke said to the pilot.

  “I don’t know if I want to answer that.”

  Luke smiled. Fair enough.

  “Where’d you learn to fly?”

  “Eight years, United States Air Force.”

  Luke nodded. “Good man.”

  “Where am I flying this thing?”

  Luke shook his head. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. They could rendezvous with the SRT plane in Jamaica, he supposed. If things looked clear, maybe they could take this thing all the way back to the States.

  “I don’t know. Jamaica? How’s that sound?”

  “You mind telling me what’s going on? It’s not every day I get hijacked.”

  Luke nodded. There was no reason to hide anything from this guy. “My name is Luke Stone. I’m an agent with the FBI Special Response Team. The girl with me was kidnapped. What you just witnessed…”

  “She was not kidnapped,” said a voice behind him. “She was there voluntarily. You’re the one doing the kidnapping.”

  Luke looked back. Elaine Sayles was in one of the leather recliner seats, arms still behind her back. Her face was red and raw.

  “You’re bleeding on the furniture,” Luke said.

  The girl Charlotte smiled. She was seated well behind and away from Elaine. She was swimming in the pilot’s shirt, but the pants looked okay, rolled way up and cinched tight around her waist. It was good to see her smile. Maybe she was the resilient type. She would need to be. This was going to be a lot to process.

  “FBI, huh?” Elaine said. “After this fiasco, I promise you’ll be out of a job.”

  Luke nodded. As the adrenaline was wearing off, his shoulder was starting to throb. Pretty soon it was going to be a sharper pain, maybe even agony. He wasn’t looking forward to that.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “This job is for the birds.”

  “You’ll be in prison the rest of your life. I saw you murder four men in cold blood.”

  “Elaine,” Luke said. “If you can behave, I will cut your wrist ties. If you can’t behave, I’m going to consider you a risk to self and others, and leave you just the way you are. It’s your choice.”

  “Stone,” the pilot called. The change in his voice was palpable.

  Luke went back to the doorway. “What’s up?”

  “We got bogeys on radar, man. They just came off the mainland of Honduras, moving fast. We’re right on their nose.”

  Luke’s shoulders slumped. “Can we outrun them?”

  The pilot shook his head. “Not on your life. They are howling.”

  “What did you think would happen?” Elaine shouted. “Did you think you could just attack someone’s home, kidnap people, and nothing would happen to you?”

  “I’m the FBI, you idiot.”

  “I don’t care who you think you are.”

  The pilot glanced back at Luke. Luke saw it then, in the man’s eyes, all over his face: fear. The guy was afraid. He learned to fly in the Air Force. That didn’t mean he was a combat pilot.

  “Got any bright ideas, Stone? We’ll never make Jamaica, I can tell you that.”

  Luke patted his cargo pants. “I have another destination. It’s a small airfield in Honduras.”

  “Darwin owns Honduras. That’s no good.”

  Luke found the page and pulled it out. The paper was protected by some lightweight laminate. He handed it to the pilot.

  “This has the coordinates. It’s a tiny place, a speck on the map. It’s classified, run by American intelligence.”

  “Darwin owns American intelligence!”

  Luke shook his head. “No one owns American intelligence. It’s too big. Too many factions. These people are friendlies, as far as that goes. We just need to get there.”

  The man looked at the sheet. “Okay. Okay, it’s close. Changing heading. We are going to…”

  He glanced at the radar. The air seemed to go out of him.

  “Two more bogeys, closer, coming from the east. Seven miles and closing fast. I don’t even know where they came from. They must have been patrolling out over the water. We’re cooked, man. We are not going to make it.”

  “Steady,” Luke said.

  “Two behind us, two coming in from the east. We are cooked.”

  Luke shrugged. “They can escort us to the airfield if they want.”

  “I doubt it,” the pilot said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “One of them just fired a missile. It’s coming from our right. Six miles.” He turned back to Luke again. He looked like he was almost about to cry. “Better go buckle up. This is going to be awkward.”

  Luke felt something in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t despair. Call it disappointment. A deep, bitter, dark disappointment.

  “Can you evade it?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  Luke went back into the passenger cabin. Suddenly, before he could get to a seat, the plane lurched to the left. It banked hard and Luke tumbled to the floor. He landed on his wounded shoulder. A searing pain went through it, so much that he nearly passed out. He gritted his teeth.

  The plane was shuddering, it was banking so hard. The pilot whipped it around the other way, leveling, then banking hard to the right. Luke rolled over the other direction. Elaine, wrists tied behind her back, fell out of her chair. Now she was on the floor, five or six feet from Luke.

  “Heat seeking!” the pilot shouted. “I can’t shake it!”

  “Charlotte!” Luke shouted. “Put your seatbelt on!”

  The pilot went into a steep climb. Luke was pressed to the floor. He crawled like a worm to a seat and yanked himself up into it.

  He clipped his belt. At that second, the plane went into a steep drop, nose down. It was so sudden that Elaine flew off the floor and into the air. She screamed as she was thrown against the wall. Behind Luke, Charlotte also screamed.

  “Here it comes!” the pilot shouted.

  The plane banked hard to the left again.

  Ga-BOOOOM.

  An explosion rocked the plane. Bright light was everywhere at once, flashing through the windows. Luke was thrown forward, against his seatbelt. His head whipped around. For a second, he thought the plane had broken apart.

  The cabin lights were knocked out, and everything went dark. Weak green lights lit up along the floor. A red EXIT sign came on over the door.

  The turbulence was incredible. Was the pilot even alive?

  “Pilot!” Luke shouted.

  “Mayday!” the pilot screamed. “We have Mayday!”

  “Where are we?”

  “Land coming! We are over the beach. Losing altitude.”

  “Are we hit?”

  “I don’t know. We’re losing fuel. We lost an engine. Something’s—”

  The plane lurched, dropping altitude.

  “Oh God.”

  Luke unbuckled, stood, and stumbled to the cockpit door. The plane bucked and bounced. He shouldn’t be standing, but someone needed to steady this pilot.

  “How far to the airfield?” Luke said.

  The pilot checked his instruments. “Uh… thirty… thirty-five miles.”

  “Can you keep it up that long?”

  “No. We’re right above the treetops now.”

  Luke looked out through the cockpit window. It was impossible to see out there. The plane started to shudder again. It rode some turbulence.

  Instruments started to blink off. The entire panel was going dark.

  “Go sit down,” the pilot said. His voice had changed again. It sounded resigned. “I’ll hold it up as long as I can.”

  “Can I help you?”

  The pilot shook his head. “There’s nothing you can do.”r />
  Luke nodded. “Okay. Good luck.”

  “Good luck to you.”

  Luke worked his way back through the plane, swaying from side to side. Elaine was on the floor, twisted at an odd angle. She was not moving. The plane lurched again, dropped altitude. Luke was off his feet for a second.

  He went all the way to the back, as far as he could go. Charlotte was this far back, and he sat down beside her. The back of the plane was the safest place to be.

  The plane lurched and dropped again. It went up hard on its left side.

  The pilot screamed, a howl, no words.

  Luke looked at Charlotte. The girl was crying. He reached and took her hand.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. The words meant nothing. It was obviously not okay. It was anything but okay.

  He closed his eyes and sat back. An image of Becca and Gunner appeared before him. The plane bucked and shuddered. There was a loud BANG as it hit something. Then another BANG. And another.

  The pilot screamed again. The plane’s nose was up, way up.

  They dropped. Then everything changed. They were moving fast, the plane rattling, shaking. Luke couldn’t move at all. There was sound everywhere, the sound of metal ripping metal. It was LOUD, so LOUD he couldn’t hear the pilot screaming.

  The girl squeezed his hand.

  He turned to look but she wasn’t there. Luke could not see. All around him was total darkness.

  They dropped through… something. The plane was falling apart. They were still moving. Luke was thrown forward. It was so violent, his face hit his knees.

  Everything went black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  10:40 p.m. Central Standard Time (11:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

  Airbase Amistad

  Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve

  Honduras

  “Lock those coordinates,” Ed Newsam said.

  He was standing inside a corrugated aluminum shack in what amounted to a fenced in, glorified clearing in the middle of a vast wilderness, ten clicks north of Nicaragua.

  There was a man who sat inside this shack, monitoring an array of electronic equipment while smoking cigarettes. He took the smokes back to back. He had a lit one in his hand right now, and there was a pile of dead ones in a tin tray at his elbow.

  He had a pile of newspapers and magazines at his other elbow. Forbes, Fortune, Kiplinger’s, The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, he was managing his stock portfolio while listening to the chatter from communists in Nicaragua and drug traffickers everywhere else.

  The man said he worked for the “State Department.” He said it just like that. He put little crow’s feet around the words with his fingers. He wore civilian clothes. He had on a loose-fitting, button-down white shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, and sandals. His feet were big, almost grotesquely so. He was a little overweight and wore glasses. His glasses kept fogging up. It was steamy around here.

  The man hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. Either that, or he had made a point of not doing it. It was hard to say.

  Until a moment ago, he had been showing them the radar position of a small jet plane that had left Darwin King’s island. He had also been showing them the radar positions of fighter jets converging on the plane.

  There appeared to have been an attack. Now the first plane was gone, off radar, and the fighter jets were moving to the south at full speed.

  “I need to get in there,” Ed said.

  He looked back at Rachel and Jacob. They said nothing. Ed already knew what they were thinking. There was an old Black Hawk helicopter outside. If it could still take off, they could certainly fly it.

  “That’s a hairy place to get into,” the man said. “This whole area is hairy. Steep hills. Dense jungle. Illegal logging operations. You’ll find a bunch of clear cuts and burns out there. You can see them from the air. Insects… Jesus. They’re as big as your hand. The worst bugs I’ve ever seen. They give me nightmares. Hostile locals. Cocaine smugglers. The national police. The military. It’s hard to say who the worst of the bunch are. Suffice to say, if you run into anyone out there, it’s someone bad.”

  “Buddy,” Ed said. “Look at me a second, will you?”

  The guy had almost not even glanced at Ed the entire time he’d been here. They had landed twenty-five minutes ago, a mysterious beat up plane appearing out of nowhere, and Ed Newsam had climbed out of it, strapped with guns. The guy barely noticed. That’s how jaded he was. He’d been out here too long.

  Now he did look at Ed. His eyes went from the top of Ed’s head, down to his feet, and back up again.

  He nodded. “Okay. You’re as bad as they are. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I am worse than they will ever be.”

  The man shook his head. “Somehow I doubt that.”

  Ed gestured at the door. “I need that chopper out there.”

  The man shrugged. “If you can fly it, take it. It’s a piece of junk. And we’re in between pilots right now.”

  “We’ll fly it,” Rachel said.

  “Okay, but don’t hurt it. Junk or not, I’m going to need a helicopter, if only to say I have one. There’s a line of rain squalls coming across the country from the west. You should know that. When it rains here, it really rains, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I need some men,” Ed said. He was pressed for time, and this guy was talking way too much. “Men who have done helicopter drops into combat zones before.”

  The man turned all the way around in his chair and faced Ed. Ed normally sensed the way he intimidated people, and sometimes he used that to his advantage. He didn’t intimidate this man at all.

  “Absolutely not,” the man said.

  “Our people were aboard that airplane,” Ed said. “You’ve got soldiers out there. I need some.”

  It was true. There were four guard towers along the perimeter fencing. They were manned, two armed men to a tower. There was a cluster of Quonset huts set back from the runway, about a quarter mile from here. There were almost certainly more soldiers, currently off duty, in there.

  The man shook his head. “This is a listening station. It’s not a combat post. We don’t get attacked because the Hondurans, and the Nicaraguans, know better than to attack the United States. You know what kind of soldiers I get here? Since the wars started in Iraq and Afghanistan, I get National Guardsmen. The guys I have now are from Vermont. They’re an armory unit from Burlington. They man an armory. In Vermont. They also have a motor pool. None of them have seen combat, except one guy who is forty and was in Desert Storm fifteen years ago. He has high cholesterol. It runs in his family. He had a stent put in last August. Half of the kids don’t even believe in war, they’re just in this for the college tuition.”

  Ed stared at him.

  “Their orders are to hold the line around this patch of mud. Their orders don’t include jumping out of a helicopter at the site of a plane crash on a wet hillside in a Central American jungle in the middle of the night, potentially under enemy fire. Sorry, Charlie. I’m a civilian and I don’t have the power to modify their orders. Frankly, even if I could, I wouldn’t be all that interested in putting them in harm’s way.”

  He took a drag from his cigarette, then seemed to wave Ed, and Rachel, and Jacob, away. “But take the chopper, by all means.”

  He exhaled a long stream of smoke.

  “Just don’t hurt it, okay?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  10:50 p.m. Central Standard Time (11:50 p.m. Eastern Standard Time)

  La Sierra de San Simon (St. Simon’s Saw)

  Near Honduras

  The Caribbean Sea

  “I want them found,” Darwin King said. “Now. Tonight.”

  He sat on his private terrace, a strong vodka tonic in one hand, the telephone in the other. He stared down at the guttering remains of the cabana, which once housed the old hotel bar. A crew was out there, watering down what was left of it. Acrid smoke was still rising into the sky.

>   Honduran soldiers were everywhere, sweeping the property to see if there were any more intruders. They’d found two dead dogs in the dog run. They’d found a body washed up on the beach, along with a small inflatable motorboat.

  Now they were everywhere. Now they were finding things. Where were they an hour ago? They were supposed to have been on high alert.

  “Mr. King, our pilots describe the plane as breaking apart on impact,” a deep male voice on the phone said. The voice spoke English slowly and formally, carefully enunciating every syllable. It was the voice of someone who grew up speaking Spanish, then learned to speak English through years of schooling. It was also the voice of someone who thought it important to communicate clearly.

  “Do you understand?” the voice said. “The plane is in pieces in the deep wilderness. I believe your… people… are dead now.”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” Darwin said. “If they’re dead, I want to know that for a fact.”

  “My friend, the plane went down in an isolated region. There are mountains. The terrain is steep. The jungle is dense and forbidding. It is a difficult area to reach, it is raining there right now, it often rains, and the visibility is not good. It will be very difficult to send anyone there before daylight.”

  “General…” Darwin began. He did not want to hear anything from this man except agreement.

  “Darwin, please be reasonable.”

  Reasonable. That was a word that made alarms shriek in Darwin King’s mind. You did not become Darwin King by being reasonable. And you did not respond to a violent invasion, arson, murder, kidnapping, and theft by being reasonable.

  In his mind, Darwin could still see his dead bodyguards, bleeding out on the stone tiles of the second floor hallway. It was an affront so large, so impossible, that he almost couldn’t absorb the magnitude of it.

  “General, shut up! Just shut up. Okay? I don’t feel like I need to remind you who our mutual friends are. I don’t feel like I need to remind you of the things I know about you, about your brother, about the things you’ve both done. I don’t feel like I need to remind you of my reach, but I will. I will reach right into your home, if I want. I will destroy you, sir. I will destroy you in every possible way. I will take everything away from you. Your position. Your family. Your very life. Do you understand me?”