by K. W. Jeter
“What the hell are you doing?” Squashed back in his seat, Holton yelled at him. “Are you crazy?”
“That’s not your problem, pal.” Menard drew back from the open doorway and gave the traffic reporter a hard look. “You’re just along for the ride. Unless you don’t want to be, that is.”
“What . . . what’s that mean?”
“I can drop you off right here,” said the pilot. “Except I won’t be exactly pulling over to the curb. Understand?”
“Oh.” After a moment, the wide-eyed reporter slowly nodded. “Yeah . . . I understand.”
“Good. Now just sit back and shut up. I told you that there’d be a great story in all of this. Remember?”
Holton nodded again.
“Then that’s exactly what you’re going to get.” The pilot leaned across him and stuck his head out the copter’s doorway again. “Hey, Karsh!”
His terrified former boss, clinging desperately to the rope ladder, looked up at him.
“Just like old times, huh?” A crazy little light had come on inside the pilot’s eyes. “Why don’t we go back to your office? We used to have some great talks there. You still keep those single malts in the cabinet behind your desk?”
Karsh said nothing. He couldn’t – he was way beyond the point of being able to.
“Then let’s hit it.” With a grimly pleased expression on his face, Menard pulled himself back behind the controls. “Time for happy hour.”
The news copter angled forward, its tail rising behind as the main rotor tilted for maximum acceleration. Underneath, the rope ladder streamed nearly horizontal with its tethered human figure.
Right about then, there were other people wondering just what the pilot was doing. Over where the copter was heading, the office tower that held Karsh’s film production office on its top floor. One of the production assistants had managed to dig up a pair of binoculars, from the equipment used for scouting movie locations. Standing at the tall window overlooking the freeway out in the distance, the people in the office had been passing the binoculars back and forth, keeping an eye on the limo and whatever they could see happening with their boss.
Which hadn’t been much, at least until the news copter had swooped in and lifted Karsh out of the bottle.
“They’re heading this way –” The production assistant leaned closer to the window glass, adjusting the binoculars’ focus wheel as he peered through them. “Seriously –”
“Let me see.” One of the other people made a grab for the binoculars, but the production assistant held on to them.
“Jeez.” Shaking his head, he pulled his face back from the eyepieces. “I mean . . . they’re really coming in fast.”
This time, the other guy managed to wrestle the binoculars away from him. The secretaries and the rest of the staff clustered around his back as he aimed the binoculars toward the rapidly approaching copter.
“That’s weird –” The second guy’s brow creased as he gazed out the window. “They should be going higher by now – if they’re planning on landing on the roof.”
“Yeah, well . . .” The production assistant gave a little nervous laugh. “Maybe they’re not.”
The rest of the people in the office all looked around at each other. A second passed, then they all slowly stepped back from the window . . .
† † †
That’s all stuff you saw in the movie that got made. The whole business with Karsh and the helicopter pilot – that all happened right out in public, where everybody could see. So they pretty much had to leave it in. Hard to cover up something that went down with virtually the entire city as witnesses.
But as I said before, there was other stuff going on at the same time – the really important stuff. And there was no way in hell that was going into some cable-channel movie. When the government clamps down on stuff it doesn’t want people to know, it clamps down hard.
Which is why if you watched the movie, you never saw anything about what was going on with Cray in the freight airliner heading for L.A.
Right about the time that everybody’s attention was being distracted with what the news copter was doing, the plane wasn’t that far away. In the cockpit, Cray wasn’t doing too well. Slumped over in the pilot seat, with that bloodlike black fluid streaming from his nose and the corner of his mouth, he was just barely able to keep the plane on course. The HoBo substance was eating him up, from the inside out. If there was anything left of him by the time the plane reached the target, it wouldn’t even be human.
He had brought the plane far enough down in altitude that the depressurization of the interior no longer mattered. Out through the windshield, he thought he could see the massed glittering lights of L.A. – still way in the distance, but rapidly approaching.
And close enough for him to start taking care of the rest. Chest heaving, struggling to breathe, he reached down and opened up the equipment bag he’d brought with him. From inside it, he took out a small electronic device, nothing but a simple handmade metal box with a pushbutton and an unlit LED above it. He thumbed the button and waited.
Behind him, in the cargo area of the plane, the device’s trigger signal was caught by the receiver unit inside the modified freight igloo. The bolted struts holding the igloo close to the open hatchway creaked as the machinery inside stirred into motion. An articulated steel arm unfolded, revealing the hook at its end. Slowly, the arm cranked out through the doorway. The motor inside the igloo revved higher as massive springs stretched and tautened almost to the breaking point along the arm’s length. By the time the motor switched off, the arm extended nearly a dozen yards from the hatchway, the plane’s slipstream shearing past it.
Up in the cockpit, Cray saw the LED flash green on the device in his hand. Eyes half-lidded with fatigue, he dropped the device back into the bag beside the pilot seat. All the equipment was ready now. Hand trembling, he reached for the radio mike.
Down on the freeway, Feldman – Richter’s communications guy – leaned closer into the bank of electronic equipment outside the big rig. He cupped one side of his headphones tighter to his ear, listened, then signaled frantically to Richter.
“It’s Cray!” Feldman pulled off the headphones and held them out to Richter. “He’s in sight of the pickup point –”
Richter turned and squinted into the night sky. Just as he did, more gunfire erupted. The overhead lights exploded, raining broken glass down across the trapped cars. Both he and Feldman ducked, shielding their faces with their upraised arms.
That was me, actually, blowing out the lights that’d been set up by Richter’s crew. A last-minute addition to my cobbled-together plans. If I was going to be out in the open soon, I wanted these guys to have as little idea as possible of where I was and what I was doing.
With the lights gone, the freeway was a lot darker now. And louder, with the crew shouting back and forth to each other as they tried to figure out what was going on. There were still some police spotlights shining down from the roofs of the closest buildings, but the hard-edged shadows they cast gave me plenty of room to operate in.
The only thing I didn’t have now was more time. Rolling back onto my stomach with the assault rifle in my hands, I could see that the plastic bag underneath the big rig was straining to its limits from the acetylene gas hissing into it. It wouldn’t make much of a bomb if it just burst on its own.
I still had no idea if my brother Donnie had gotten to someplace safe. That was what I’d told him to do, once he’d finished setting up the bag and the acetylene tank under the big rig’s trailer. But anything could’ve happened to him, like his jacket snagging on something underneath the truck and him being unable to pull himself free, or crawling into some dead-end spot that he wouldn’t even been able to back himself out of in time.
Or maybe he’d just forgotten what I’d told him – wouldn’t have been the first time. Though given the circumstances, I was hoping that this was one of the times he’d actually paid attention to
his big sister.
All that went through my head in about a half-second, as I raised the rifle up to my eye and sighted underneath the big rig . . .
† † †
A half-second was about all my boss Karsh got, as the office tower came zooming toward him. He was so terrified by then that he didn’t have even the option of letting go, his hands frozen onto the rope ladder he was dangling on.
His employees inside the production office scattered, diving for cover behind the desks and other furniture. Glancing wide-eyed over her shoulder as she crouched near the wall, one of the secretaries saw Karsh hit the window. Shards of glass exploded through the office.
Up on top of the building, the news copter tumbled end-over-end. When its landing struts hit the roof’s edge, the traffic reporter dived out the open doorway, landing hard upon his shoulder. Dazed, he lifted his head. Just for a moment, he saw the pilot inside the copter, fighting the controls. Then the copter hit the building ventilation stacks and burst into flames. The reporter covered his head with his arms, cringing as the rotor blades tore loose and scythed across the roof.
He was lucky; none of the blades hit him. If one had, he would’ve been sliced in two. Amazed to be still alive, he lowered his arms again and watched as the pilot’s body charred black inside the burning wreckage.
There was another, smaller explosion as the flames reached the copter’s auxiliary fuel tank. The reporter ducked as he saw one of the cockpit seats, its upholstery smoldering, shoot overhead and behind him.
A quieter, slithering noise sounded close by. He looked over and saw the rope ladder being dragged over the roof’s edge by the copter seat it was still attached to.
Down below, Karsh lay face-down, just inside the shattered window. He was still alive as well – otherwise his blood wouldn’t have been leaking into the carpet so fast.
The secretary crept forward and reached a trembling hand toward him. “Mister Karsh?”
He raised an agonized face, bits of glass sparkling in his red wounds. For a moment, his eyes caught hers –
Then the seat from the helicopter fell past the window, the rope ladder trailing after it. Karsh’s arms were still looped through the rungs at the end of the ladder. The nylon cords went taut as the copter seat continued falling outside the building. Karsh’s eyes widened even further as he suddenly felt himself being dragged backward toward the window opening. His fingertips clawed through the shards scattered across the carpet –
One second and his bloodied face was just inches from the secretary’s hand. The next second, it was gone.
Kneeling at the edge of the window, with the others standing behind her, she watched her boss fall toward the hard street below.
Up above, the traffic reporter looked over the roof edge as Karsh’s figure dwindled away, arms outflung. When it was gone, the reporter sat heavily back down, his forearms draped across his knees.
“You were right . . .” He muttered the words as he looked over at what was left of the pilot inside the smoking wreck of the copter. “It’s a great story . . .”
There were others who saw Karsh falling. Over on the freeway, Richter’s gaze had been pulled away by the explosion of the copter on top of the office tower. Both he and everybody at the police command post below the freeway, MacAvoy and Glover included, were able to see my boss’s last living moments. The base of the office tower was obscured by the lower buildings around it, so at least they didn’t see him hit the ground.
But they weren’t even looking over in that direction when it happened. Because I had just squeezed the trigger of the assault rifle I was holding.
Let me tell you something about stuff you see in the movies all the time, but doesn’t actually happen. Unless you’re firing some kind of special incendiary tracer rounds – which I already knew this rifle wasn’t loaded with – you’re not going to ignite something just by firing a couple of bullets at it. Those movie scenes, where somebody pops a couple rounds at a car and it goes up in a great big fireball? That’s just special effects – it doesn’t happen in real life that way. So my just firing at the plastic bag swollen with acetylene underneath the big rig – all that would have accomplished would’ve been to puncture the bag and let the gas hiss out like a party balloon.
But firing at the trailer’s steel undercarriage, the axles and suspension and all that stuff? You get some nice sparks that way, from the bullet striking off all that metal.
Real nice sparks, big and hot enough to both pierce the taut plastic and ignite the gas inside it. When this acetylene bomb exploded, the shock wave knocked Richter sprawling onto his face. I had ducked my head down as soon as I’d gotten my shots off, laying both my hands across the rifle to shield myself, but I’d still felt the heat of the explosion sweep over my back. Looking up, I could see Richter scrabble onto one side, gazing up at the fireball that had ripped through the big rig’s trailer and torn open its roof.
Another explosion followed in a couple of seconds. The flames from the acetylene bomb must have reached the rig’s fuel tank. That blast was even bigger, enough to lift and topple over the rig, exposing its blackened undercarriage. I wriggled myself back under the nearest car, dragging the assault rifle with me, to avoid the metal shrapnel raining out of the sky.
As a general rule, you set off something like that and the chaos doesn’t stop as the explosion fades away. At least when there’s people involved, things just get worse. Which was fine for me and whatever plans I had – not so much for Richter, if he’d still been hoping to keep a lid on things. Right now, as far as all the drivers who’d been trapped in the bottle were concerned, the lid had just gone sky-high, along with major bits and pieces of the big rig Richter had been using for his command post.
From underneath the car, I heard screams and shouting all down the freeway lanes as just about everybody panicked and bolted from their vehicles. The car above me rocked a little bit as its driver threw open the door and scrambled out. Whatever thinking was going on inside those people’s heads at that point – which probably wasn’t much – it was probably along the lines that with as much gunfire and explosions as had gone off in the last few minutes, they were just as well off making a break for it as sitting there waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Crowd control’s a real issue when you’ve got this many hostages under your thumb – and the fireworks I’d arranged had just screwed Richter and his bunch on that point.
But he didn’t know it’d been me. As I watched from under the car’s front bumper, I saw Richter getting to his feet, already shouting into his radio phone.
“I told you, MacAvoy!” The phone trembled in Richter’s white-knuckled grasp. “I told you not to try anything stupid –”
I couldn’t hear the colonel’s reply then, but I found out later what he said, from down at the police command post: “It’s not our people, Richter. Must be a civilian –”
That was just about the last thing I would have wanted Richter to know. If he and what was left of his crew had gone on believing that the police SWAT teams were somehow responsible for the explosions, they might not start looking around for me.
MacAvoy made up for it with what he did next. Covering his phone’s mouthpiece with one hand, he shouted over to Glover. “Kill the lights!”
That took the captain by surprise. “What?”
“The spotlights!” MacAvoy waved his other hand toward the tops of the surrounding buildings. “Whoever’s up there screwing with Richter, he’ll have a better chance in the dark. Just kill them!”
Up on the freeway, everything I could see from under the car went black. A few yards away from me, Richter was just a silhouette now. Tucking the assault rifle under my arm, I lined up a shot at his head – but didn’t take it. Even if I eliminated him, there was still his second-in-command, that Mozel guy, and the rest of the crew to deal with. I’d be seriously outgunned if I revealed my position.
As I watched, Feldman came scrambling out of the back of the toppled-ov
er big rig trailer. A little bit of light from the dials on his electronic equipment glinted on the HoBo cylinder in his arms.
