by K. W. Jeter
“That makes sense.” Holton still looked dubious. “I suppose.”
“Good. Because here goes.”
Menard shoved the rudder stick forward, sending the copter into a dive. And the traffic reporter into a breathless scream.
† † †
If I’d known ahead of time what those guys in the news copter were up to, I might’ve tried to coordinate my plans with what they were doing –
If I’d actually had any plans, that is.
That was the little secret I’d kept from my brother Donnie. Other than sending him on his way, up to the front of the bottle with the acetylene tank and the rest of the improvised bomb-making gear, I hadn’t worked out the rest in any great detail. Basically, I was operating from one of the principles I’d learned from my old buddy Cole, back when he’d still been alive. Which was that it’s always a good idea to create as much chaos as possible. When all kinds of crazy, unexpected stuff is coming down on people’s heads, then you only need to be a couple of steps ahead of them in order to wind up on top.
There was one more of Cole’s basic principles stuck inside my head –
Get your hands on the hardware.
At the best of times, just being around ordinary civilians, I preferred having a major piece on me. Like my .357, that I’d stupidly left inside my shoulder bag. Which was still stuck inside my boss’s limo right now.
I suppose it’s a sign of how much I’m getting used to the way I’ve been making my living these days, that I felt pretty much naked without a gun on me. Even that bitsy little Ladysmith that I’d had strapped to my thigh would’ve been a comfort. Especially now, with all these majorly armed bulletheads walking around, keeping the lid on the hostages for their boss Richter. This setup really made me feel antsy. Even if just sitting tight and letting things play out had been a good idea – and I was pretty sure it wasn’t – I probably wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. Going for a gun – anybody’s gun – was about all I could think of.
And as I said before, that was about as much of a plan as I had. When my brother Donnie pulled off the assignment I’d given him – which he had damned well better, or else both he and I were toast – then there might be at least one of Richter’s crew close by, who would be sufficiently distracted by what was happening that I could get the drop on him from behind. Not that a person my size would be able to choke out somebody who probably outweighed me by a hundred pounds or so. But if I could come flying at him hard enough to make him drop the assault rifle he was carrying, and I could get my hands on it –
If nothing else, I’d feel a lot better. At least for a little while.
† † †
That was what I was thinking, right about when somebody else wasn’t feeling so good. In fact, he was feeling terrified.
“Jesus!” The traffic reporter braced himself as the freeway came rushing up at him. Any more scared and he would’ve wet himself.
They didn’t show that part – what was going on inside the news copter – in the movie that got made afterward. Instead, everybody got a nice dramatic long shot of the copter zooming down toward the freeway. Like it was all happening in some action flick, heavy on the stunts and special effects –
It looked real enough, though, to the people who were there watching it happen. One of the cops down on the surface street shouted to the men inside the command center tent. “Hey! Something’s happening –”
Both Glover and MacAvoy stuck their heads out and saw the news copter heading fast toward the bottle. “What the hell are they doing?”
“I don’t know,” said the colonel. “But whatever it is, Richter’s not going to like it.”
Which was something of an understatement.
Up on the freeway, Richter was already shouting at his crew. “Over there! There –” Outside the end of the jackknifed big rig, he pointed toward the limo. “Are you blind?”
Menard had been keeping an eye on the whole setup, waiting for the moment when all of Richter’s crew, prowling along the lanes with their assault rifles and keeping an eye on their bottled-up hostages, would be as far as possible from the limo. Which would give him at least a minute, maybe even a couple, to swoop in and nab the one he wanted.
After the power dive, he’d leveled off the copter so it shot straight along the roofs of the cars, just a few feet above the crew’s heads. They all ducked, a couple of them even diving flat on the concrete, as though they were just about to be decapitated by the copter’s landing skids.
Over at the big rig, Mozel raised his assault rifle and sighted straight at the cockpit. Richter saw what he was doing and knocked the rifle muzzle away. “Are you crazy? Get over there!”
Beneath the car I was hiding under, I could tell there was something going on. I heard the shouting and the noise of the rotor blades as the helicopter swooped down low, then boots pounded past the side of the car as Richter’s crew ran back from the rear of the bottle. A couple of seconds after they’d gone by, I wriggled over to the side of the car and peeked out, trying to see what all was happening now – and if it was anything big enough to help me with my plans, such as they were.
I couldn’t make out anything from under the edge of the car. There didn’t seem to be any of Richter’s crew around – whatever was taking up their attention, it had been enough to cause them to leave this end of the bottle unguarded. So now or never for me, whatever I was planning on – at least they probably wouldn’t be looking in my direction as I crawled out from under the car and got to my feet.
Which turned out to be the case. Standing in the middle of the lanes, I could see past the backs of the crew as they ran toward the yellow school bus and the limo close by it. The copter was already there, its landing skids clopping hard on top of the limo.
“Keep out of the way –” Up in the copter, the pilot reached past the traffic reporter and threw out the rope ladder. “We gotta move fast.”
The traffic reporter pushed himself back in his seat as far as he could. Looking out the open doorway, he could see the shiny black limo right underneath, its roof dented by the crunching impact of the copter. The updraft from the rotor blades swept dust and rubbish spiraling up from the freeway pavement, as a man’s face gazed up in wide-eyed amazement from the limo’s side window. Not too far away, a bunch of scary-looking men with assault rifles were running toward the spot.
The limo door flew open, and my boss Karsh scrambled out from the back seat. “I knew it!” His sharp-edged face was all lit up as he shouted to the copter. “I knew somebody’d come for me!”
“Grab the ladder!” The pilot leaned past the reporter to shout down at Karsh. “Time to go!”
Karsh got his arms all the way through the rope ladder dangling and swaying in front of him, hanging on as though his life depended on it – which it pretty much did. He got one foot up on the bottom rung as Menard started to raise the copter into the air. Just then, one of Richter’s guys reached the limo’s back fender, then launched himself in a flying dive, grabbing hold of Karsh’s waist and dragging him back down. That was the one named Tullis, who was supposed to have been guarding that spot all along – so he was motivated, probably figuring that Richter would ice him if one of the hostages managed to get away.
Both men were lifted up above the limo’s roof, the edge of the door scraping along Karsh’s spine as he kicked to free himself from the other’s grasp, the heel of one hand shoving hard against Tullis’ face.
From where I was, I could see all that happening – but what I couldn’t see was where my brother Donnie had gotten to. Crawling beneath the trapped cars, dragging the acetylene tank along behind him, he’d gotten as close to the jackknifed big rig and Richter’s command post as he could. That was what I’d told him to do – his fingertips were bloodied, and the elbows of his jacket scraped through, by the time he reached the front bumper of the car nearest the angled truck. From that hiding spot, there was an empty space of three or four yards, then the tall black tires of
the rig’s trailer.
All the excitement with the news copter swooping in gave Donnie a chance he wouldn’t have had otherwise. Peering out from beneath the car’s bumper, he could tell that nobody was paying attention to where he was. He saw Richter and Mozel’s backs turned toward him, as they shouted at the rest of the crew. Their voices, along with the other men’s and the beat of the copter’s rotor blades, were enough to cover up any sound that Donnie might make. He ducked his head under the bumper’s edge, digging in with his hands and scraped-raw elbows as he dragged the acetylene tank toward the big rig ahead of him.
With a last hard push, he got himself past the doubled wheels and underneath the rig’s trailer. He reached back and grabbed the straps I’d made from the duct tape, pulling the tank across the concrete, then along beside himself. He tore off the improvised harness, the edges of the silvery tape now frayed and dirty, then yanked out of his jacket the other bits and pieces I’d given him and got to work.
At the other side of the bottle, the pilot had lifted the copter farther into the air. Tullis’s legs dangled three or four yards above the limo’s roof as he fought to yank Karsh free. My boss dropped a couple feet lower as one of his arms was pulled from the rope ladder.
Menard hadn’t gone to this much trouble just to let his prize slip away. Yanking at the rudder, he swung the copter around in a tight circle. That brought the ladder, with the two men clinging to it, whipping about at close to a forty-five degree angle – and at the same level with the copter’s landing struts. Another tug at the rudder brought the curved end of one landing strut around, straight into Tullis’s chest. Blood burst through his clenched teeth as his hands let loose from Karsh’s waist. He fell, knocking over a couple more of Richter’s crew on the pavement below, then lay on his back, motionless. The pilot yanked the copter into a steep ascent as Karsh clung desperately to the rope ladder trailing beneath.
His girlfriend boiled out of the limo. “You sonuvabitch!” Alice screamed at the dangling figure, swiftly vanishing into the night sky. “What about me?”
All that action was my cue. For just a second, I watched the copter swoop away from the bottle, with my boss attached below. That was what everybody else was watching, too. I knew that wasn’t going to last more than another couple of seconds – I quickly scanned down between the lanes of trapped vehicles and spotted my target.
One of Richter’s crew, assault rifle slung low at his hip, was about a half-dozen yards away from me. He stood there, gazing up at the receding helicopter, so transfixed by the sight that he didn’t hear me running up behind him.
“Hey!” First I shouted, then I gave him my full martial arts skills –
Which basically consisted of skidding to a stop as he turned around, then kicking him in the crotch hard enough to lift him up on his toes. Even somebody as small as me can get that reaction, when you come out of the blue like that.
The bastard was enough of a professional, though, that he held on to his rifle as I grabbed for it. He even ripped off a burst, the bullets chewing up the concrete behind me – I could feel the heat of the shots in my hands as I yanked at the weapon’s barrel. The mistake the guy made was in tugging back from me – I went the other way, shoving the rifle butt into his stomach with enough force to expel what little breath he had left from when I’d kicked him. His hands let go so quickly that I wound up falling away from him and landing on my back –
With the rifle in my hands. A Tavor, not a Micro like the one Short carried, but a full-sized CTAR. I swung it around, getting my finger on the trigger and squeezing the grip inside my palm. Two shots snapped out, hitting him right at the base of the throat.
I didn’t see that happen, actually. I was too busy rubbing the corner of my brow, where the ejected casings had hit me, hard enough to sting. “Damn –” Just my luck to grab a weapon set up for a leftie.
There wasn’t time to switch it over for right-handed firing. I was already on the move again, even before the wide-eyed corpse collapsed on the concrete. Head down, I squeezed past the front grille of the car beside me and ran hunched over, down between the next two lanes over. The bursts of assault rifle fire would have caught the attention of what was left of Richter’s crew, no matter what was going on with the copter. That meant I had even less time to get up to the front of the bottle, where I needed to be.
Somebody else was moving fast right then. Clinging to the rope ladder, my boss Karsh sailed through the night sky, the glittering L.A. lights spread out below him. Sheer animal terror probably kept his arms and hands locked onto the rungs dangling below the news copter. If he slipped off, it was a long way down.
“Karsh!”
He heard his name being shouted through the rotor wash and the noise of the copter’s engine. Tilting his head back, he gaped at the pilot’s face above him.
“Remember me?” Keeping his hands on the controls, Menard leaned past the traffic reporter beside him and out the open doorway. “You do, don’t you?”
Karsh couldn’t say anything. And not just because his heart was pounding hysterically in his chest, from tearing through the air, suspended on a couple of nylon ropes with little metal rungs between them. But because he did remember. The last time he had seen the helicopter pilot, it’d been in a courtroom right here in Los Angeles, when the judge’s ruling had come down, and he’d been able to look past his own attorneys sitting at the table with him, smiling over at the guy he’d just shafted . . .
The problem for Karsh was that he was just now realizing that he’d made the same mistake that’d been made by my former boss McIntyre, the one that my buddy Cole and I had blown away. Yeah, you can be the boss, and you can throw somebody away when it’s convenient for you, and then you don’t even ever have to think about them again. They’re just gone, the same as the wadded-up paper in the trash can beside your big mahogany desk. That’s what being the boss is all about.
But sometimes the ones you throw away don’t just cease to exist. They’re still out there. And you might not be thinking about them anymore – but they’re thinking about you. And sometimes they come back. The way I’d come back for my old boss McIntyre, with that great big .357 that Cole had given me.
And the way that the copter pilot had come back for his old boss Karsh.
There might not be a lot of advantages to dangling a couple hundred feet up in the air, with your white-knuckled fists clinging to the skinny little ropes that are all that’s keeping you from winding up as a wet red blotch on the streets below – but there’s one definite that comes with a situation like that. It’s perfect for realizing just how screwed you are.
But that was Karsh’s problem, not mine. As much as I had come to dislike the guy – as I said before, I’m not the world’s most model employee, though usually I don’t really consider that’s my fault – I wasn’t really thinking about him at the moment. I could hear Richter’s crew shouting from a couple lanes over and behind me. They’d found the bleeding corpse of the guy I’d lifted the assault rifle from, the gun that I was cradling in my hands as I ran, head tucked down below the level of the windows in the cars around me. As the crew spread out along the freeway lanes, looking for whoever had just taken out their buddy, I could see up ahead of me the spot I was aiming for.
When I reached the last of the bottled-up cars, I dived flat on my stomach, stretching my arms out with the rifle. Along the Tavor’s barrel, I sighted under the rear trailer of the jackknifed big rig that Richter was using for his command post. I could see what he and the others were too preoccupied at the moment to have noticed – underneath the rig was a shimmering, blurrily transparent sphere, its top and bottom squashed between the trailer and the freeway pavement, filled taut with the gas from the nozzle of the acetylene tank to which the plastic bag had been duct-taped. Donnie had done his job –
But where was he now? I couldn’t catch any sight of him. I hoped it meant that after he’d finished assembling the improvised bomb, he’d had time to get out of t
here, crawling to some place where he’d be safe when the thing went up. Because if he was still caught under there when I ignited the bomb – then I wouldn’t be seeing him again.
Or at least not alive.
TWENTY-ONE
THE GREAT thing about life – What I’ve discovered is that there’s always somebody who’s got problems worse than yours.
Like my boss Karsh. Not that I was all torn up about whatever might’ve been happening to him, given that he had been planning on firing me. But when the news copter had swooped in and picked him up, he must have thought that all his worries were over – at least as far as getting out of Richter’s bottle was concerned. He probably figured that his loyal employees over at his production office had managed to get hold of the helicopter pilot and pay him enough – or promise to – that would make it worth his while to shoot past all those rifle-toting thugs and grab him, lightning raid-style. To find out he was wrong about the whole setup, that he was even more screwed now than he had been before, that must’ve been a gut-dropping realization. Before, he’d had a chance of just riding out the whole bottle scene – as long as the limo’s license plate number didn’t come up on that little handheld countdown device Richter was carrying around, everything would turn out fine. Now, he was hundreds of feet up in the air, dangling on a rope ladder as the copter accelerated toward the nearby office towers. There’s really nothing worse than being completely at the mercy of somebody who you know has every reason to hate your guts. And the copter pilot did – big time.
