by K. W. Jeter
He pulled himself to the rear of the igloo. The copilot rolled on his back and tried to get off another shot, the gun wavering in his grip. But Cray was close enough now that he was able to bring his boot sharp into the side of the other man’s head. He reached down and pulled the copilot upright, then threw him toward the hull door.
The copilot’s shoulder struck the door hard enough to send it lifting higher, revealing more of the sky and clouds streaming outside. He clawed at the floor as his legs were dragged out through the opening. But another kick to the face from Cray, his own hands gripping tight onto the igloo, sent the copilot tumbling into air.
More of the thick black fluid streamed down Cray’s face and onto his neck, as the force tugging him toward the open hull door lessened, then ceased, the plane completely depressurized now. He reached past the igloo and pounded his fist against the control buttons on the side of the door. Nothing happened. The hull door remained open, the wiring of the controls ripped loosed by the bullet that had struck them.
Cray was barely able to stumble back up to the cockpit and dig out the emergency oxygen mask. He slapped it onto his face, breathing deep, filling his aching lungs. The black fluid leaked around the mask’s edges as he collapsed into the pilot’s seat.
Whatever shape he’d been hoping to be in when he got over the freeway in L.A. – his chances were a lot worse now.
SEVENTEEN
AT LEAST, that’s what I think went down aboard the plane. Impossible to know for sure what happened, but when it was all over, there was no trace of the copilot’s body in the plane’s wreckage. And it’s not just my overactive imagination at work – they put the same version in the movie.
But I was hardly thinking about it at the time. Even if I’d known there was some cargo jet flying toward us, Elton and I still had our own plans to worry about.
“You sure that’ll work?” I had my doubts concerning what he’d just laid out for me. “I don’t know . . .”
“Fine.” His voice came from the back of the panel truck, where he had already started getting busy. “Tell you what. Let’s go over the plan that you came up with, we’ll compare the two, then decide which is better. Oh, wait a minute; that’s right. You don’t have another plan.”
“I’m still thinking.” Holding onto the steering wheel, I looked around the driver’s seat at him. “If you’d just give me a minute or two –”
“Hey, don’t ask me for more time.” Various clattering noises sounded as he rummaged around the cargo area. “Lay on the horn and call one of the fun bunch over, ask ’em if they could all relax and take five while you pencil up some notes. I’m sure they’d be happy to accommodate your schedule.”
“All right, all right.” Once we got out of this mess, I’d deal with making sure he didn’t take over my job. “We’ll do it your way.”
Actually, at the moment I was more concerned about my brother Donnie. Getting him out of the bottle added a lot of complications to the plan. To his credit, Elton hadn’t suggested leaving Donnie out and just saving our own skins. Either that, or I’d sufficiently convinced him that I wasn’t going along with anything that went down that way.
“You keeping an eye out?”
“Yeah . . .” I gazed through the windshield, keeping track of the guys with the assault rifles slung at their sides. We didn’t want any of them catching on to what we were doing inside the panel truck. “Nearest one’s about six car lengths away.”
“Yeah, well, let’s hope he’s deaf, too. Here goes.”
I could hear the creaking noises of metal ripping apart, as Elton used the crow bar to pry open the cargo area’s rusted floor. Farther down the freeway lane, one of Richter’s thugs frowned as he looked across the car roofs, trying to locate the noise he’d just barely been able to detect.
The noise stopped after less than a minute. That’s how beat up and rickety the panel truck was – amazing that the thing hadn’t fallen to pieces around us as we’d been driving along. Reaching up, I angled the rearview mirror so I could see what Elton had managed to accomplish. A big triangular section of the floor’s sheet metal had been wedged up toward one side of the cargo area, exposing the truck’s drive shaft and the differential unit between the rear wheels. And more importantly, a big view of the concrete below us. Big enough for us to wiggle through, one at a time.
“How we doin’ up there?” Hunched over, Elton crawled to the other side of the cargo area, where he had shoved all the tools and welding equipment. “Any of ’em catching on?”
“Not so far.” I could faintly hear the whup-whup of the news copter circling overhead, as the night quiet settled over the freeway again. If the drivers of the cars around us had heard anything, they didn’t give any sign of it. They were all still frozen in place behind the steering wheels of their own vehicles, sweating it out, hoping that they wouldn’t be the next one whose number came up. “Now they’re talking.”
“Who is?”
“The guys guarding us.” Up ahead, I could see two of them, lighting up cigarettes and shooting the breeze. Like this was another day at work for them. Probably bitching about how long this whole process was taking. “I think you’re still good to go.”
“Good as it’s going to get, maybe.”
I watched him take one of the acetylene tanks and slide it through the hole in the cargo area floor and down to the concrete below. “What’s that for?” That puzzled me a bit. “I thought we were just going to light up the truck.”
“That’s just the diversion.” Reaching through the hole, Elton carefully set the tank down so it wouldn’t make a clunk. “Then we can really mess ’em up.”
I brought my gaze down from the mirror and checked to see that the guys who were supposed to be keeping watch on us were still engaged in their conversation. Then I looked back up and watched as Elton peeled the plastic bag from the racing gear and duct-taped its opening around the nozzle of the other acetylene tank. He twisted the tank’s valve open with a wrench, and the bag slowly began to inflate with the hissing gas.
“Okay –” Elton brought his face close between the front seats and looked over at me. “Soon as that bag’s full, you’re gonna have about five seconds to get your butt out of that seat, back here, and out that hole. Got it?”
“What if they see me? I mean, what if they see that I’m not here behind the wheel?”
“Trust me, sweetheart, that’s gonna be about the last thing those bastards ever see.”
I sat there listening to the ssss of the acetylene for what seemed like a clock-crawling hour, though I knew it was really only a few minutes. Sweating through the armpits of my jacket, I saw in the mirror the wobbly, blurrily transparent balloon of the plastic bag swell up behind me.
“Get ready,” came Elton’s voice. “Just about time to move . . .”
“They’re turning around.” I watched the guys with the assault rifles toss away their cigarette butts. One of them began strolling back down the lane toward the panel truck. “They’ll see me –”
“Can’t do anything about that now. Come on, let’s go!”
I scrambled out from behind the steering wheel, squeezing between the seat backs and into the rear of the truck. Holding my breath, I slipped past the tautening plastic bag and toward the hole that had been torn open in the floor’s sheet metal.
Elton had already told me what I needed to do soon as I was out. I was so much smaller, it would be easier for me than him. I ducked my head into the hole, squeezed my shoulders past the drive shaft, then kicked and squirmed until I was flat on my face and stomach against the concrete. I crawled past the other acetylene tank that Elton had lowered out, the hiss of the gas fading behind me as I emerged from under the rear bumper, heading for the next vehicle behind.
Soon as I got beneath it, I looked back down my length and saw Elton dragging himself through the hole in the panel truck floor. He kicked himself free of the hole’s edge, then tightened his fist around the handle of the screwdriver he
’d taken from the tools inside. With his face right up against the differential, there was barely room for him to move at all, but he managed to jab the screwdriver blade up against the truck’s gas tank. On the third try, he pierced the tank’s thin metal, and gasoline spurted out, down along his hand and forearm.
Ducking his head under the bumper, he crawled toward me, one hand clawing at the concrete, the other dragging along the second acetylene tank. I could see now that he had duct-taped the other empty plastic bag to the tank, along with the rest of the silvery tape roll. Soon as he was alongside, he shoved the tank farther away from us, toward the rear of the car we were flattened beneath. He dug a Bic lighter out of his shirt pocket. “Don’t look,” he told me. “Unless you’re really hoping to lose your eyebrows.”
I couldn’t help myself. I watched as he flicked the lighter on, then took a crumpled ball of paper from his jacket and held the flame to it.
The guy with the assault rifle must have smelled the leaking gasoline. I could see his booted feet as he came to the side of the panel truck and looked inside at the empty front seat –
Just as Elton flung the burning wad of paper toward the pool of gasoline spreading beneath the panel truck.
“Damn!”
The wad fell short of the wetly shimmering gasoline.
Elton squeezed his fist tight. “I should’ve wrapped it around something –”
Worse, right then the news copter came low overhead. The wash from its blades sent the burning wad tumbling away, trailing sparks as it rolled toward the side of the freeway.
“Okay –” His voice was a tense whisper as he looked over at me. “You know what to do next, right? The rest of the plan –”
“Yeah, but –”
Elton was already crawling away from me, back toward the panel truck. He ducked his head below its rear bumper, flattening his chest against the concrete so he could squeeze his shoulders underneath it. As the guy with the assault rifle stepped around the rear fender, Elton drew his legs up and out of view, before the other man could see him.
The lighter flame was bright enough that I could see a glimpse of Elton’s face, as he flicked it on.
And that was the last I saw of him.
† † †
“Jesus Christ!” The traffic reporter gazed wide-eyed at the fireball below the helicopter. “What the hell was that?”
It wasn’t as big as the one that had been set off when Richter and his crew first set up their bottle, the explosion sealing off the rear of the freeway section. But it was impressive enough that the pilot immediately took the copter higher up, banking away from the fire and smoke.
Looking out the side, Holton could see the figures with assault rifles in their hands, sprinting down between the rows of cars. A couple of the drivers had panicked and bolted from their vehicles. Their captors quickly caught up with them, slamming the butts of the weapons into the hostages’ stomach, then shoving them back into the cars.
Down below, in the police command post, the explosion had grabbed everyone’s attention as well. MacAvoy and the others could see the flames and smoke both by looking up toward the freeway and on the video monitor, as the news copter’s camera zoomed in on the panel truck’s burning wreckage.
“What the hell’s going on?” Glover checked his watch. “We haven’t even had a chance to talk to the sonuvabitch again –”
“Richter didn’t do that one,” said MacAvoy beside him. “Thermite grenades go off harder – you can feel them in your chest – like that first one they did. This was something else.”
“Captain –” The communications officer held the phone out to Glover. “We’ve got him on the line.”
Outside the jackknifed big rig, Richter shouted into his radio phone. “What do you think you’re doing?” His and Feldman’s faces were lit by the fire still burning farther away. “I told you – any funny stuff from you, and we’ll take out everybody up here –”
“Wasn’t ours,” came Glover’s reply. “We’re doing it how you told us to. You don’t see any of my people up there, do you?”
“All right –” Richter scanned down the lanes, to where his second-in-command Mozel was directing the rest of the crew. “If there’s a problem, we’ll take care of it. You just stay out of our way. Got it?” He hit the disconnect button and handed the radio phone back to Feldman, sitting at the bank of electronics.
† † †
Where I was, flat on my face beneath the next car behind, I was only dimly aware of the chaos going on in the freeway lanes around me. The shockwave from the explosion, when Elton had lit the acetylene bomb he’d improvised inside the panel truck, had hit me hard. It’d come straight into my face, rolling like a tidal surge below this car’s front bumper.
“Kimmie –”
That was weird. I heard a familiar voice, urgently whispering from somewhere in back of me.
“You gotta get out of there. They’ll find you –”
I shifted around so I could turn my head and look toward the next car behind me. Or try to look – my vision was only slowly returning, after having been temporarily blinded by the explosion’s glare. I was aware of the flickering light from the burning wreckage and a blurry shape underneath the next car, and that was about it.
“What’re you doing here?” There was so much shouting and boots running back and forth on the freeway, that nobody was likely to overhear me. “You’re supposed to be over there – stuck in that school bus –”
Because it was my brother Donnie’s voice I heard, calling to me. Or actually, that was what I thought I heard. There must’ve been some piece of debris from the explosion, that had come skittering across the concrete and clopped me in the head, so that I was imagining things. Because there was no way that Donnie could’ve been here.
“I got out –”
“Uh-huh,” I murmured. “Sure you did. Now you just go away, honey. All right? Because I have to close my eyes for a little while . . . I’m really tired . . .”
For a moment, as I was fading away again, I thought maybe I was having another one of my weird little head trips, where everything seemed unreal around me, like some bad movie. Which would’ve been my preference, as that would’ve meant that I actually hadn’t seen Elton go up in a ball of flaming shrapnel.
“Come on.” My brother’s voice grew more insistent. “There’s no time for that.”
I was aware of the blurry shape coming closer, just as if Donnie were there and crawling toward me. Hands grasped my ankle and tugged.
That was when I realized he really was there somehow. Because I knew how strong he’d gotten, with all those upper-body exercises he’d been doing on that weight equipment I’d bought him. All of a sudden, I could feel myself being dragged away from the car’s front bumper, my stomach and the side of my face scraping across the concrete.
I got with the program and pushed with my own hands, shoving myself backward. Between my efforts and Donnie’s tugging, we were soon both under the next car behind.
“What’re you doing here?” My vision had cleared enough that I could make out Donnie’s face, a couple of inches away from me. “I’m supposed to be rescuing you.”
“I didn’t even know you were here,” whispered Donnie. “I got this far, and the next thing I see is you and that other guy blowing stuff up.” His eyes widened. “That was cool!”
“Not as cool as you think.” I would’ve preferred it if Elton had managed to set off the panel truck without getting himself killed. “Actually . . . not cool at all.”
Because whatever happened next, to screw up these people’s plans, I was going to have to do it on my own.
EIGHTEEN
BUT AT LEAST I had a shot.
Which right now was more than some people were figuring they did.
MacAvoy stood outside the police command post, gazing at the burning wreckage up on the freeway.
“Colonel –” Glover came out from the tent and stood next to him. “There’s just
been another call.”
“From Richter?”
“No.” The police captain shook his head. “From the Pentagon. We’re coming under a lot of pressure. To get you out of here. No matter what Richter asks for. The top brass would really prefer it if you were off the scene.”
“I bet they would.” MacAvoy went on looking at the flames and smoke spiraling upward. “And they got good reason. It’s already a mess – and I’m not doing much to sort it out.” His shoulders slumped in defeat. “I’m an old man, Captain. I’m tired. I had a job to do, and a lot of younger men died while I was trying to do it. The brass didn’t have to push very hard to get me to quit.”
