All the shooting had done some damage and not all of it would be visible. A small section of the control panel was cracked and dark. There was a faint smell of sour smoke in the air, with no obvious clue to its source. Some gauges indicated warning conditions, none immediately serious but a few that seemed to be gradually worsening.
“Get a load of this,” Bill McCord said, pointing to an area of the panel near the controls for the landing gear. There were two lights to indicate that the wheels had retracted safely into their wells. Only one of them was lit green.
“What does that mean?” Noah asked.
“I hope it means that bulb’s burnt out. If not, I guess we’ll find out what it means when we go to put her down.”
It was nearly as noisy as it had been before but the unusual steadiness of the flight gradually induced a calming effect that was almost eerie. Outside of the occasional bumpy air there was no sensation of movement. McCord had informed Noah that due to the added thrust of the tailwind they were traveling quite a bit faster than this particular plane could normally go, at least under its own power.
“I’m going to go back and check on the others,” Noah said.
“That’s okay, but don’t stay unsecured any longer than you have to. This is nice and smooth right now but it’ll get ugly again without any warning.”
As Noah unbuckled his seat belt Ellen Davenport popped her head into the cockpit. Despite the stress of the situation she was now in physician mode and appeared calm and in perfect control.
“Mr. McCord,” she said, “I understand you’ve had quite a workout up here. Noah told me you might not mind if I came up and checked you out.”
“She’s a doctor,” Noah said.
“Aw, don’t spoil it for me,” McCord said, and he gave Ellen a friendly wink. “Here I was thinking that was the most flattering thing I’d heard from a lady in twenty-five years.”
Noah left the two of them alone and walked down the aisle to sit next to Molly.
“Are you holding up okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Are we alone?”
“Yes.”
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Sure.”
She touched his face, again as though remembering the details of the sight of him with only the tips of her fingers, and then she pulled him close and held on tight.
“I’m scared,” she said softly.
At that moment there were any number of perfectly reasonable things to be afraid of, but he could tell by the way she’d spoken that she didn’t mean any of those.
Molly said no more and neither did he. They only held one another, and in that quiet togetherness there was an understanding that had no real use for words. She was afraid, and so was he. She was worried that maybe they weren’t doing the right thing after all, and so was he. But they both knew they were on the right side, without any doubt, and knowing that, maybe together they could find the strength to put their fears behind them.
After a time there was a gentle tap on his shoulder and he looked up.
“I need you up front,” Ellen said.
When they’d gone forward she stopped him after the last row of seats, near the array of medical equipment they’d seen earlier.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Now don’t panic.”
“I’ll do my best. What is it?”
“I think he may have had a heart attack,” Ellen said. “Come on, help me with this.”
She pulled a high-tech-looking electronic case from its clips on the cabin wall and handed it to him before searching out and gathering some other items from the cabinet beneath.
“What is this thing?” Noah asked.
“Among other things it’s an emergency defibrillator, but it can also show me what’s going on with his heart, and that’s the part I need. Come on.”
Bill McCord was still flying just as he’d been before, though Ellen had hooked him up with under-the-nose tubing fed from an oxygen tank she’d secured with duct tape to the armrest of his seat. There was no room for three in the cockpit, so Noah stood just outside, holding the now-activated device in his hands where the doctor could see its screen and reach its controls.
Ellen prepared two adhesive pads and applied one to the upper-right side of McCord’s chest and the other lower down and toward the left. She then connected the long thin wires and plugged them in, made some adjustments, and touched a button on the front of the unit.
She watched the display as the machine began to read and analyze the inputs and report its findings. As she looked up at Noah he could see there was bad news but when Ellen spoke her voice was calm.
“Bill, your heart is beating a little too slowly and I think we need to give it some help. You know what a pacemaker does, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what we need to do; we’re going to regulate your heartbeat. One of the functions of this machine is something called external pacing. Most pacemakers are implanted under the skin, but we’re going to accomplish that very same thing from the outside.”
“Okay.”
Ellen made her final checks and adjustments. “This can get very uncomfortable. I know you can handle it. Normally I’d give you a sedative and something for the pain but I can’t do that in this situation. Understand?”
“I understand. Let’s do it.”
She patted his shoulder, checked the attached pads again, and touched a switch on the machine.
“Do you feel that?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s just a little tickle, doesn’t hurt a bit.”
“That’s because it’s not doing its job quite yet.” Her eyes were on the display screen as she slowly turned a knob on the front panel. “I’m going to increase the current now until I find your capture threshold—that’s the point where your heart responds to the signal we’re sending. As I do that what you feel is going to get more intense.”
Bill McCord was as engrossed in his piloting as ever but his expression hardened bit by bit as the current advanced. At last the machine gave a tone and then began to beep softly at an even, steady rhythm and Ellen left the setting where it was. Without disturbing his grip on the yoke she took his pulse at the wrist as she counted off the necessary seconds on her watch.
“That’s good,” she said. “You’re doing great. Other than the jolts this machine’s giving out, you should be feeling better. Do you?”
McCord didn’t speak, but he glanced up at her and nodded. Despite the sharp and repeating irritation he must have been enduring, he did look much better already, from the strength of his posture to the color returning in his face.
“I’m going to stay up here with you and make sure you’re all right. What we need to do next is find the nearest place to land so we can get you to a hospital.”
Noah started to speak up but she shut him down with one sharp glance.
“Doctor,” Bill McCord said, “could I see you alone for one minute?” His voice was stressed by the treatment he was receiving, but there was also a good deal more vitality behind it than there’d been before.
“Of course,” Ellen said, and she took the device from Noah and excused him to the passenger compartment.
It was quite a while later when Ellen Davenport emerged from the cockpit and motioned for Noah to join her up there again, which he did.
“Mr. McCord feels very strongly,” she said, “that he can persevere with this flight all the way to the end. I did everything I could to convince him otherwise, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. So I made a deal with him. I’m going to stay up there with him, and if I see any change, anything in his condition that I don’t like, we’re going to find an airport and call ahead and be met by an ambulance for him.”
“Right behind that ambulance there’ll be more of the same kind of men we saw back in that hangar.”
“I know that.” She took a step into the narrow doorway, keeping half her attention on the monitor and lowering her voice so her patient wouldn’t hear. “Th
is man’s got third-degree AV block, probably brought on by a heart attack. I don’t even know how he stayed conscious through all this, and without that little battery-powered machine I’ve got plugged into a cigarette lighter? We’d all very likely be dead by now. I’m making the only choices I’ve got in a bad situation, Noah. This is just life support, and there’s no guarantee it’ll last very long. My obligation is to do what’s best for him, and if I make the call, that’s what we’re going to do.”
“You’re right,” Noah said, “of course you are. That’s the way it should be.”
“I’m glad you feel that way.” A moment or two passed, her expression softened a bit, and she went on. “He’s doing what he’s doing now because of Molly, you know,” Ellen said. “While I was up there rendering my clinical opinion all he was talking about were the things he’d heard from her and her mother over the years. He thinks we’re at some big turning point right now; he told me he was up here serving his country again, flying this one last mission, and that it was a lot more than the three of us he’d be letting down if he failed. I’d say it was the morphine talking, but I haven’t given him any.”
They flew through a brief patch of turbulence and when it evened out Ellen reached over to make a tiny adjustment to the defibrillator. When she seemed satisfied that things were stable again she turned back to Noah.
“Those people who’re after you and Molly—at least I see now why they’re so desperate to get rid of you,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“This vision she’s got for the country, it seems to be contagious.”
Later, as the flight proceeded, Noah and Molly sat close together and spoke about a subject they’d never had much time to cover before. They talked about their future, on the wild assumption that such a time would ever come.
Chapter 58
After hours of waiting to receive any encouraging news from the field, Warren Landers had finally begun to pace the floor.
He was learning that the position of leadership he’d so long coveted came with its own set of challenges, some of which he’d been unprepared to meet on such short notice.
At the moment his chief concern was this: while it’s easy enough to push a band of idealists toward an act of desperation, it’s much harder to predict precisely when and how they’ll make their move. He’d called in many valuable favors to prompt the current nationwide terror alert and was now feeling the significant personal and professional exposure of what he’d done. Having essentially promised an imminent attack, he so far had no such thing to deliver.
Earlier in the day his chosen patsies had been found through technological means and were quickly cornered at an airport in Colorado. So far, so good; to have killed them there would have been an outstanding win. Any number of frightening stories of their thwarted plans could have been constructed and fed to the waiting press, thereby stoking the climate of fear and putting everything right back on track for the desired declaration of a national emergency.
But no, they’d somehow escaped and the circumstances now demanded a media blackout until more was known. By the apparent condition of the old puddle-jumper they’d left in, they would be lucky to have limped fifty miles. Judging by the weather they’d flown into, that estimate might be high by half. The last reliable radar returns showed the fugitives falling from the sky like a stone but no crash site had yet been found.
If this all ended in a whimper, with the dangerous domestic terrorists Landers had himself reported being found tomorrow, stranded harmless and unarmed in a muddy cow pasture, the consequences would be dire. He’d promised a clear and present danger and now it must be found, or at least faked from some credible evidence. For his business partners, for his own standing and career, for the backroom political machines that were already poised to trumpet the long-awaited appearance of the mythical violent libertarian revolutionary—for many reasons he now needed a headline-worthy event.
A young man appeared at his door.
“Yes, what is it?” Landers asked.
“I think I know where these people are headed.”
“Show me.”
He’d brought a folding map with him and he spread it across the desk. It had a number of locations circled in black in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic and only one in red, farther west. “This hardware chain, you’d told us to send a team to all the stores and they didn’t find anything—”
“I know that.”
“Okay. But we missed something. They’ve shuttered a bunch of stores in the past ten years and we didn’t look at those, of course, but they’d taken one of them and turned it into a sort of clearinghouse for old inventory. They give all the merchandise there to the needy, disaster relief, and such.” He pointed to the red circle. “And that place is right here.”
Landers put on his reading glasses and bent close to the map.
Butler, Pennsylvania.
Of course.
“Do we have anyone in this area?”
“Only a few assets and they’re not that close. We moved almost everyone farther east. Should I reroute the units we’ve got nearby to this place?”
“No,” Landers said. “Now listen to me. Send whoever’s available to the front gate of location number seven of Garrison Archives. It’s outside of Butler. They can’t miss it: it looks like the entrance to Fort Knox built into the mouth of an old limestone mine. Tell them they’re to immediately lock that gate down tight.”
The young man was writing down these orders in detail. “We could get some help from local law enforcement and the DHS—”
“Absolutely not. This is all ours. It’s going to be a feather in Talion’s cap and we don’t need to muddy the waters with eyewitnesses. We’ll announce what’s happened when it’s over.”
“And what about that warehouse?”
“I’ll handle that myself.”
“It’s a six-hour trip from here by car, maybe more with the terror alert—”
“We’re not going to drive,” Landers said, “we’re going to fly. I want you to go and see that a helicopter gets prepped for combat if there’s not one ready in the arsenal now, and tap four good men to come with me. How long will that take?”
“I don’t know, maybe an hour.”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Landers enjoyed a cup of coffee while he waited, made a few necessary calls, wrote a note to update Aaron Doyle, and then brought up a recent satellite image of his objective. It was a big, open building, relatively isolated from any commercial or residential development, and it looked like there was only one road in or out.
Like shooting fish in a barrel.
“You’re ready to go, Mr. Landers.”
The young man who’d proven so valuable had returned to the doorway, far ahead of schedule and having done exactly as he was told. As Landers stood and put on his coat he looked the fellow over. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Rutherford, sir.”
“See me when I get back, Mr. Rutherford. This is good work you did, and I’m going to have a lot more for you in the future.”
“Thank you, sir.”
As he strapped himself in and went about starting the engines, Landers rechecked the route and thought it all through. There was bad weather coming in but with any luck they’d beat it, get the job done, and be home in time for a late dinner and a modest celebration.
He would have been more comfortable going in with greater force, but Talion was spread quite thin across the country. Most of the men and resources had been deployed to make a public show of strength for the company, making appearances at the many smaller incidents he’d spawned with the help of George Pierce. After today’s heroic crescendo there would be more to work with, and great new opportunities on the horizon.
And George Pierce was another matter. He’d been useful enough but he would no doubt be cooking up a mutiny before very long, and that would have to be dealt with swiftly. Putting
him down would be a great pleasure, though this and many other rewarding deeds would have to wait for a less eventful afternoon.
That old saw was true: there really is no rest for the wicked.
Warren Landers confirmed his final clearance with the tower. Shortly thereafter the last of the men boarded and stowed another long case of ammo for the M134 minigun mounted behind him. An assortment of gas canisters and satchel charges were already loaded.
Without further ado he lifted off into a high, rock-steady hover, and then he pitched the craft sharply forward and set them off with all available speed on his course toward western Pennsylvania.
Chapter 59
Hollis awoke with a start, sweaty and tense and even more weary than he’d been before he closed his eyes. His swollen arm had been killing him and he’d put his head in his hands for only a moment, he’d thought, but the clock on the wall said he’d been out for almost two hours.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
Young Tyler was at the table across the office, still monitoring the radio.
“No change,” he said. “They’re working in the back; the manager guy sent the rest of the employees home, like you said, and left us with the keys. I’m waiting to hear any news that comes in, but there’s nothing so far. I would have woken you up if there was any reason to. It seemed like you needed to sleep. Man, are you seriously okay? Because you look like a crap sandwich.”
“I’m fine,” Hollis said, though his voice didn’t sound it. “Who’s watching those water heaters?”
Tyler pointed to a nearby TV that showed six inset close-ups of the temperature readouts on the tanks. “Wireless home security system,” he said, “from aisle seventeen. Lana and I set it up over an hour ago. This place has got everything.”
Hollis stood and waited for his balance to settle. “That was good thinking,” he said. “You stay, I’m going to go and check on the others.”
When he rounded the last corner into the vehicle bay he could hardly believe his eyes.
The extra hours of unexpected waiting had been put to very good use by Cathy Merrick and her helpers. For the first time he saw the finished product stripped of all the masking tape and drop cloths.