Chapter 26
Brad Vickers was painfully aware that his less-than-stellar career as a S.T.A.R.S. member was pretty much over. He only became a cop because his father was a cop, which might not be the very worst reason to be a cop, but it was surely up there. He actually liked flying helicopters, which was a good thing, because as the chopper pilot for Alpha, he rarely engaged in actual combat. He was the backup, the rescue guy. He flew in, dropped people off, flew away again, and when the people wanted picked up, he would come back and get them. All the while keeping himself out of danger.
Whatever feelings of guilt or cowardice he felt were soothed by the fact that he was actually an important member of the team. They needed a chopper pilot. They needed a guy to fly back and forth, to be the rescue guy. So he got to do something he liked, he got to remain safe, and he got to do an important job. It was actually a pretty sweet deal.
Until tonight, that is. Tonight, his pretty sweet deal turned into a complete nightmare. And it wasn’t getting any better as time went on.
Currently, Brad was sitting in the helicopter about a mile and a half from the Bravo team’s crash site. He circled the site for a few minutes when everything went to hell, hoping that he would get a radio call telling him where to drop down and pick the team back up. But no radio call came. He waited for ten minutes, hovering a hundred feet in the air, waiting for someone to call him. But no one did.
They all carried walkie-talkies, so it didn’t make sense that they didn’t call. Unless, of course, they were all dead already, which Brad stubbornly refused to believe. He discovered the mansion when he circled around to look for them, which was a futile exercise because it was so dark. But the sight of the mansion filled him with a little hope. It wasn’t too far from the crash site. Maybe the team made it there okay. He wanted to land in the large back yard, but saw dark shapes running around underneath him and got scared.
The team still remained silent. Brad finally gave in and called them over the radio, but got no response. And when he tried to call headquarters to ask for guidance, he mysteriously could not reach them either.
He landed the helicopter in a clearing at the edge of a low cliff, far enough away from the crash site that he felt safe, but close enough that he would surely receive any radio calls. It also gave him a decent view of the area.
After he landed, he checked the radio to make sure it was functioning properly. It didn’t make sense that he couldn’t communicate with police headquarters. Almost immediately, he saw a fistful of wires under the console were cut clean through. He wasn’t an electrician, but it didn’t take a genius to see that he could not receive or send any messages at all. That explained a lot, but how in the world did the wires get cut?
Brad was completely unsure what to do. He was just the pilot, he never needed to make his own decisions the entire time he’d been on the force. If he couldn’t call anyone by radio, he needed to return to headquarters to tell them what happened. But he couldn’t just leave the team behind. They couldn’t call him by radio, but maybe they would signal him some other way?
Besides, if he went back to headquarters alone, they would surely ask exactly why he dropped the team off and flew away in the first place. Telling them the truth probably would not do wonders for his employment. Besides, what could they do even if he went back to tell them? None of the other officers working the night shift were trained for this kind of mission, and even if they managed to get a makeshift team together to come to Alpha’s rescue, it would take time. Time that they probably didn’t have.
And so he stayed put. The chopper had a limited amount of fuel, but every half hour he made a wide pass around the mansion and surrounding area, hoping to see something. Earlier, he thought he heard some gunshots, and flew immediately to the mansion, but there was no one outside when he got there. He was too worried about fuel to stay there long, so he flew back to the clearing and kept waiting.
But he didn’t know how much longer he could just wait. Eventually, he would have to make a decision and do something.